The 1956 lyric Paul Simon calls the smartest ever written in a rock song
There’s a verse in the Simon and Garfunkel track, ‘Kathy’s Song‘, where Paul Simon sings, “I don’t know why I spend my time writing songs I can’t believe with words that tear and strain to rhyme”.
Yet, the words feel so immaculate and meaningful that it actually feels like he’s showing off. A few years back, internet parlance might have called it ‘a humble brag’. Simon might say he’s straining to rhyme, but his words fold more neatly into the melody than the tightest tuck that a hotel cleaner has ever managed when making your dishevelled bed.
But Simon is a folk songwriter, and that’s different from rock ‘n’ roll. Lou Reed made that perfectly clear when he explained to Joe Smith in 1987, “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book, and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song, I thought.”
Yet, surely part of the joy of rock ‘n’ roll lies in its liberated irreverence? There’s a lot of seriousness in the world that we can’t ignore, so when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, there’s a case to be made that pointed simplicity and fun have more than a marginal place on the lyric sheet of the genre.
Or at least Simon clearly thought as much when he was asked the following question by Musician magazine, “Blessed with the hindsights of adulthood, what’s the smartest thing you ever heard anybody in rock ‘n’ roll say?” To which he replied after an apparently lengthy pause, “‘Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.’ That’s smart.”
If you think he’s taking the piss, then you’d be wrong. Gene Vincent’s ostensible nonsense changed the world. John Lennon and Paul McCartney adored it so much that Macca said the song would stay with them “forever”. It was evocative, fun, sounded youthful, and in its inextricable recognition of all of that, it was pretty smart, too. Vincent saw a stilted word and figured a bit of lucid absurdity was an intelligent response.
Therein lies the irony of rock ‘n’ roll: being throwaway is par for the course, so the smartest lyric isn’t necessarily the one that says the most, but rather the one that instinctively understands the form. Vincent showed that and then some, capturing rock ‘n’ roll’s beautiful daftness before it was even really a thing back in black and white ‘56.
Sometimes melody and attitude speaks for itself, as Simon said of his own bout of deploying a nonlexical vocable when discussing his ‘69 track, ‘The Boxer’, he just wrote “lie-la-lie” as a melodic placeholder because he didn’t “have any words”. Explaining, “But it’s not a failure of songwriting, because people like that and they put enough meaning into it.”
The same can be said about “be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby”. If the Fab Four found it thrilling enough to attach meaning to it, then that’s good enough for me. Clearly, it’s good enough for the rhymin’ Paul Simon, too.
It had sold over two million copies by the spring of ‘57 as well, so evidently the public thought it was clever enough to splash a bit of precious cash on as well. Nice one, Gene!
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