Word: diddley
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Sheryl Crow's Soak Up the Sun wants very badly to be your classic rock song of the summer. The title is begging for it, but the lyrics--"I don't have digital/ I don't have diddley squat"--are as empty as a high school yearbook quote, and the chorus sounds like an orange-juice jingle. But who doesn't go around singing the occasional orange-juice jingle...
...happened, history was with the guitar; Elvis and Buddy Holly, B.B. King and Bo Diddley, The Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, ad infinitum ad gloriam, closed that case. And Jerry Lee would be the definitive piano rocker in part because he was, in the music's infancy, one of its last. (The saxophone, primal ax of early rock, also went nearly extinct.) He worked under another disadvantage: A pianist, unlike a guitarist, couldn't take his instrument to a gig; at least back then he didn't. Janes ascribes some of Lewis' extreme behavior...
...that created it. Without black work gangs to clear the thickly wooded Delta plain and sharecroppers to pick the cotton, there would have been no plantation economy; without African Americans to sing the work songs and field chants and slide their knife blades and bottlenecks across the strings of diddley bows and mail-order guitars, there would be no Delta blues. And without the blues, there would be no rock 'n' roll to conquer the world and help sell all those burgers and jeans and Fords and Chevys. The poorest, most oppressed people in America created its richest cultural legacy...
...series "The Sopranos" is like a friend's mix tape. Similar to those perfect-for-driving staples, the album is a hodgepodge of tracks assembled for their self-conscious hipness or relevance to the show. Where else would you find Van Morrison buddying up to Los Lobos or Bo Diddley rubbing elbows with Bruce Springsteen? In the quirky gangster world created by producer David Chase, baby...
...with any of your buddy's selections, there are bound to be some agreements and disappointments. Diddley doing his classic blues tune "I'm a Man" really can't fail under any circumstances, and Eric Clapton's blistering guitar work on Cream's "I Feel Free" succeeds in any decade, while Frank Sinatra could croon names from the phone book and still make it sound mellifluous. Unfortunately, the producers have tried to put cast member Little Steven onto one selection, "Inside of Me", and he sounds like a poor man's Bob Dylan (who incidentally appears on "Gotta Serve Somebody...