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Credit: Far Out \/ Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times<\/p>\n
Tue 30 June 2026 4:00, UK <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a verse in the Simon and Garfunkel track, \u2018Kathy\u2019s Song\u2018, where Paul Simon<\/a> sings, \u201cI don\u2019t know why I spend my time writing songs I can\u2019t believe with words that tear and strain to rhyme\u201d.<\/p>\n Yet, the words feel so immaculate and meaningful that it actually feels like he\u2019s showing off. A few years back, internet parlance might have called it \u2018a humble brag\u2019. Simon might say he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But Simon is a folk songwriter, and that\u2019s different from rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. Lou Reed made that perfectly clear<\/a> when he explained to Joe Smith in 1987, \u201cYou don\u2019t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock \u2018n\u2019 roll record. I mean, for what? It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, surely part of the joy of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll lies in its liberated irreverence? There\u2019s a lot of seriousness in the world that we can\u2019t ignore, so when it comes to rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, there\u2019s a case to be made that pointed simplicity and fun have more than a marginal place on the lyric sheet of the genre.<\/p>\n Or at least Simon clearly thought as much when he was asked the following question by Musician magazine, \u201cBlessed with the hindsights of adulthood, what\u2019s the smartest thing you ever heard anybody in rock \u2018n\u2019 roll say?\u201d To which he replied after an apparently lengthy pause, \u201c\u2018Be-bop-a-lula, she\u2019s my baby.\u2019 That\u2019s smart.\u201d<\/p>\n If you think he\u2019s taking the piss, then you\u2019d be wrong. Gene Vincent\u2019s ostensible nonsense changed the world. John Lennon and Paul McCartney adored it so much that Macca said the song would stay with them \u201cforever\u201d<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n Therein lies the irony of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll: being throwaway is par for the course, so the smartest lyric isn\u2019t necessarily the one that says the most, but rather the one that instinctively understands the form. Vincent showed that and then some, capturing rock \u2018n\u2019 roll\u2019s beautiful daftness before it was even really a thing back in black and white \u201856.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n Sometimes melody and attitude speaks for itself, as Simon said of his own bout of deploying a nonlexical vocable when discussing his \u201869 track, \u2018The Boxer\u2019, he just wrote \u201clie-la-lie\u201d as a melodic placeholder<\/a> because he didn\u2019t \u201chave any words\u201d. Explaining, \u201cBut it\u2019s not a failure of songwriting, because people like that and they put enough meaning into it.\u201d<\/p>\n The same can be said about \u201cbe-bop-a-lula, she\u2019s my baby\u201d. If the Fab Four found it thrilling enough to attach meaning to it, then that\u2019s good enough for me. Clearly, it\u2019s good enough for the rhymin\u2019 Paul Simon, too.<\/p>\n It had sold over two million copies by the spring of \u201857 as well, so evidently the public thought it was clever enough to splash a bit of precious cash on as well. Nice one, Gene!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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