#597 Chuck Berry - Is On Top

Berry's 3rd album is basically a collection of his early singles, and it all comes together as a defiantly slapdash slash of rock and roll, doublefast tempos and missed guitar notes and strained vocals lending liveliness and life. There's also plenty of originality, particularly on the slithering menace of Jo Jo Gun, the pre-punk swagger of Anthony Boy, and the proto-surf rumble of Blues for Hawiians.

Also, easily forgotten is the fact that Johnny B. Goode is actually a crackerjack fucking track.

An aside about race: before this early rock and roll kick I was well aware of Elvis and other white rockers' leveraging of black artists' methods, but never gave much thought to other racial currents' effects on the music of the era. In particular, I'd never considered that Berry had overtly built upon country and folk, primarily white styles of music. As allmusic puts it, nothing got Berry's black audiences going like "the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music". Berry himself noted "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it." This is not to take away, in the least, from Berry's considerable talent, originality and influence, but it's another fascinating reminder of the complex racial, cultural, economic, and musical backanforths that combined to make rock what it is today.

Oh right 4/5