Rock and roll began to emerge shortly after the Second World War somewhere in the mashup of cultures and peoples that comprise the American South. It is a hybrid form whose mixed heritage is marked by poor blacks singing Delta blues, hillbilly descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants, working-class factory heroes, Christian country folk, and urban teens crooning a cappella on street corners. Its journey of 70 or so years has taken it from the margins of society to the center of today’s multi-billion dollar global music industry. Its course can be charted by examining a select handful of the hundreds of luminaries who have risen, burned brightly, and sometimes crashed onto rock’s firmament. For this particular illustration, I have chosen three, as well as a signature song performed by each: Janis Joplin and her version of Gershwin’s “Summertime”, Bruce Springsteen and his iconic hit “Thunder Road”, and Gotye and his single “Eyes Wide Open”.
Janis Joplin
Growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, in the 1940s and 50s, Janis Joplin was not well liked. She had acne and a penchant for hanging around with outcasts, some of them black, which meant she was commonly referred to as a “ni**er-lover,” not only by students but by adults in the town as well. Her parents required her to attend church, where she sang in the choir. In her free time she listened with her black friends to what whites called “race music,” developing an admiration for blues singers Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, and Billie Holiday (Janis Joplin Official Site n.p.). One night, in a bar during her stint at the University of Texas in Austin, she dropped her voice in imitation of Lead Belly and found her signature sound (Friedlander 64). She began performing in local cafes and learned to play the autoharp. Always unconventional, she dropped out of school in 1962 and headed to San Francisco, where she got in on the ground floor of the psychedelic rock scene that flourished there during the mid-60s.
a. Musical Style and Influence
Joplin’s voice had the grit and melancholy for blues, coupled with the range and strength that allowed her to be heard over full volume rock instrumentation. With her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, she pushed the traditions of both blues and rock beyond their typical boundaries to incorporate country elements like slide guitar and horn solos from jazz. The style of her second group, the Kozmic Blues Band, was heavily influenced by Otis Redding and the other R&B acts that recorded on Stax Records.
Even today, Joplin’s influence continues to be felt across the music world. Florence Welch of the group, Florence and the Machine, has named her an important influence. Stevie Nicks, the lead singer of Fleetwood Mac, who also was influenced by Joplin, characterized her style as “R & B with a dangerous, sexy, rock and roll edge” (Friedman 207).
b. Cultural Impact
In terms of cultural impact, Joplin and her bandmates were a major force in bringing R&B influences to rock, as well as making it a bit easier for blacks to be recognized for their own work, rather than being pushed out of the spotlight when some less talented white kid did a cover of their song (Janis Joplin Official Site n.p.). Joplin defied nearly all of the conventional expectations for female singers. She drank, swore, used drugs and expressed her sexuality. This daring, the notoriety it generated, and the success it made possible, permitted the women who came after Joplin to expand the range of songs they could sing and the lyrics they could write. The wild unconventionality of Joplin made other, less extreme female rebels seem acceptable by comparison.
Joplin also made an impact on fashion. She was one of the first celebrities, male or female, to sport tattoos and to put neon-colored streaks in hair that she allowed to be naturally frizzy (Friedman 58). She wore multi-layered, vintage clothing along with heaps of accessories, including jewelry, scarves, and a boa. Her classic Porsche was custom painted with psychedelic colors. To this day she remains a top-selling musician in the United States.
c. “Summertime”
Written in 1934 by George and Ira Gershwin for the opera Porgy and Bess, “Summertime” was originally performed as a rather unremarkable lullaby. In the hands of Joplin and the two guitarists in Big Brother and the Holding Company, Sam Andrew and James Gurley, it becomes a stirring blues musing on misfortune, with the promise of eventual triumph.
The arrangement opens with Andrew’s lead guitar picking out the melody, putting just a bit of vibrato on each, clear note. Then the percussion comes in, with single, rhythmic strikes a full second or so apart. Then the second guitar enters with the bass line, a slow series of notes in counterpoint to the lead. All of these build to Joplin’s high-pitched opening note, which slides even higher in a slow rise from the first syllable, “sum-“, to the second, “mer-“, to the final syllable, “time,” which is held and slowly repeated three times— “time,” “time,” “time.” The vocal line continues, still in the same, high-pitched whine, “and the livin’ zz easy,” with a slow, drawn out note on “easy” that doesn’t feel easy at all, but more like paralysis.
The vocal throughout the entire song slides along like something thick and sticky in the heat. This holds true for the guitars too, with the lead done in high notes and the bass line slowly pushing the action along. You can feel summer in this piece—the enervating heat, and something underneath that is darker, like a feeling of being trapped, of nodding off when you know you should really be up and out of this place. But you’re just too weak to move.
2. Bruce Springsteen
Bruce was born in 1949, a few years after Joplin, but a world away. He grew up in Freehold, New Jersey in a working class family whose father seldom worked. A loner, he loved playing guitar from the age of seven. At 16 his secretary mother took out a $65 loan to buy him a Kent guitar and from then on he played neighborhood cafes and, when he was older, bars along the Jersey shore near the 1950s low-end resort town of Asbury Park (Coles 102). His experience as a lower middle class white boy is reflected throughout his music and he is beloved by many for honoring the blue collar lives of the parents of the Baby Boom generation.
Springsteen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999. Throughout his career he has had 11 albums enter the chart at number one (BruceSpringsteen.net n.p.).
a. Musical Style and Influence
Springsteen has served as an inspiration for many young musicians of the same class and background, including Eric Church, who recently had a hit single with his song, “Springsteen,” which recalls Church’s own adolescence lived to the music of Bruce and his E Street Band. Springsteen’s all-acoustic album, Nebraska, while not a mega-hit, was well-regarded by critics and other musicians. Bono has said that it was a major inspiration for U2’s Joshua Tree LP.
b. Cultural Impact
On July 19, 1988, Springsteen and his band played a concert in East Germany at the request of the youth division of the Communist Party. The thinking was that giving the country’s young people a taste of Western pop culture would placate them, but some experts believe just the opposite happened. The concert may have motivated youth to come together to oppose the government. One German music critic called it “the most important rock concert, ever, anywhere.” That’s because shortly thereafter masses of East Germans, most of them young people, tore down the Berlin Wall.
In 1994, Springsteen won an Academy Award for his song, “Streets of Philadelphia,” which he wrote for the soundtrack of the movie, Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks as a gay man who dies from HIV/AIDS. Some believe that Springsteen’s support for the film helped to gain greater social acceptance for people with AIDS. Along similar lines, Springsteen recently generated a great deal of publicity when he cancelled his concert in North Carolina to protest that state’s anti-transgender legislation. His support for progressive causes continues to make a difference for many people and groups that remain marginalized in the US and other nations of the world.
c. “Thunder Road”
The song, “Thunder Road,” from the 1975 Born to Run album, has become a classic rock staple. It tells the story of a young man cajoling his girlfriend, Mary, to leave town with him before they find themselves burdened with responsibilities and stuck with a life like their parents.
The song opens with Springsteen blowing a plaintive harmonica over E Street Band member Roy Bittan’s piano. The harmonica ends and over some stunning runs of the piano we hear Springsteen’s voice, “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves” As he sings these words, the piano repeats the same three note sequence four times, making the music “wave” just as Mary’s dress does. Springsteen’s vocal continues,” Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays” He then mentions one of his influencers, Roy Orbison, “Oh, Orbison sang for the lonely. Hey, that’s me and I want you only.” The piano notes ring clear and the momentum builds until the guitars come in and the rhythm starts chugging along, driving the song and the urgency of the singer’s pleas to Mary.
The story focuses on the car that the young man is driving, and the rhythm, the banging piano, and guitar bass line evoke the feel of driving fast along a highway. Listeners can feel the sense of escape and possibility that the night provides, and when Springsteen sings, “these two lanes can take us anywhere” you know that wherever it is, the singer believes that place will be better.
3. Gotye
Born in Belgium in 1980, Wouter Andre DeBacker is of Dutch Walloon ancestry. He styles himself Gotye because that is the phonetic spelling of the French cognate of his name—Gautier. In English that same name is Walter, so he is called Wally by his friends in Australia, where he was raised and still resides (Gotye Biography, MTV n.p.). He has had a passion for music, indeed for sound itself, since he was a very young child. He plays drums and keyboards well and also has some abilities on a range of other instruments such as the the bass guitar and a vintage Lowrey Cotillion organ that he bought for $100 in a junk shop (Goyte.com n.p.).
a. Musical Style and Influence
Gotye likes to sample old recordings and combine them with random sounds to create unique musical pieces. He has a penchant for using ordinary objects to generate various sounds that are not music, per se. That is, until he mixes these sounds with instruments and samples — some of which are painstakingly taken note by note and recombined in his studio-barn, located on his parents’ farm in rural Victoria. His interest in sampling began when an elderly neighbor heard him playing piano and gave him a large vinyl LP collection that had belonged to the neighbor’s recently deceased wife (Gotye.com n.p.). Gotye’s voice is described by critics as reminiscent of Peter Gabriel (Goyte Biography, MTV, n.p.).
Gotye writes songs with his longtime friend, Kris Schroeder, a member of Gotye’s band, The Basics. A veteran of the Melbourne indie rock scene, Gotye and The Basics received a Grammy in 2013 for Best Alternate Music Album for Making Mirrors (Goyte Biography, MTV, n.p.). Gotye is a good example of the way rock and roll has spread throughout the world, blending with local tastes and traditions to create new forms and sub-genres in the World Music category.
b. Cultural Impact
Since Gotye is still young and early in his career, he has not had as much impact on the larger culture as have Joplin and Springsteen. A few of his songs have been covered and remixed, however, particularly one called “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which is on the Making Mirrors album and features New Zealand pop star, Kimba. That song has a ska-like rhythm and a call-and-response structure that is reminiscent of African music and the chants of some indigenous people of Australia. Gotye has promoted the idea that the line between sound and music is blurred, and that has encouraged other young musicians to experiment with unusual implements and to push the boundaries of what is considered melodic. He is the product of a cultural melange, including Dutch, French, English, and Australian, which makes him more a citizen of the world than of a single country.
c. “Eyes Wide Open”
This song was released in 2010 as a digital single and again in 2012 on Making Mirrors. The song’s producers and Gotye thought this would be the hit single, but it was surpassed by “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Nevertheless, “Eyes Wide Open” is the more interesting song musically, chiefly because of its unusual, driving bass line.
The piece has a hoofbeat-like rhythm that runs throughout the entire song. It gives the song an inexorable feeling, like fate is pulling the listener to her destiny and there is nothing that she can do about it. Over the driving bass the first lyric we hear is Gotye’s high-pitched voice, singing, “So this is the end of the story,” which sets the tone. We know this song is going to be about a breakup, and probably a bad one. The repetition, seemingly endless, tells us that there is no way out.
Like the bass line, the main lyric is repetitive: “We walk the plank with our eyes wide open.” It is a sophisticated take on the old, far more romantic idea that “fools rush in” only in Gotye’s universe we don’t rush in to love so much as allow ourselves to be drawn in, even though we know it probably won’t end well. None of this is actually said. The bass line tells us that all is futile. Gotye’s voice is naturally high and on this song he occasionally lets it slide into falsetto.
Gotye got the main sound for the bass line underpinning of “Eyes Wide Open” from a massive “musical” fence erected in the Queensland outback. He and some friends were driving around Australia in an old van when they came upon this fence, a local attraction apparently, that someone built outside of a town called Winton. Gotye describes it as “five massive metal strings attached to fence posts and connected to a wooden resonant chamber. It goes,” he said, “‘boing’ and ‘thwack’ in a remarkably pleasing manner” (Goyte.com n.p.). He saw a piece of plastic pipe laying about, picked it up, and began banging the strings. Since he always carries a recorder on his travels, he was able to record the sounds and mix them along with some percussion into the tune’s unique bass line when he returned to his studio.
“Eyes Wide Open” has a haunting quality that echoes in a listener’s head long after its three short minutes are up. It may not have been the hit, but it is the better song.
4. Conclusion
“So this is the end of the story,” to steal the line from Gotye. Rock and roll grew up and out of America’s South, spread to the cities, bred with multiple other forms, and recombined like DNA. In doing so, it became a different creature, but with the same charm of its ancestors. It’s corporate, but still played in garages and tenement yards, cafes and townships, suburbs and outbacks, the world over. It influences customs, fashion, values, politics, and people’s life choices. It builds bridges. Sometimes it even tears down walls.
Works Cited
Coles, Robert. Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing. New York:
Random House, 2005. Print.
BruceSpringsteen.net Web. 5 May 2016.
Friedlander, Paul. Rock and Roll: A Social History Boulder, Co: Westview Press 1996. Print.
Friedman, Myra. Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin. New York: Crown, 1992. Print.
Gotye Biography 2015 MTV. Web. 5 May 2016.
Gotye.com. Web. 5 May 2016.
Janis Joplin Official Site. 2016. Web. 5 May 2016.
