1955: Tutti Frutti by Little Richard
Are you ready? Here we go. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom!
Listen, we can argue about who is pop’s greatest lyricist. You can bid Dylan and I might raise you a Smokey Robinson. You can see me with a Costello and I’ll try and match you with Morrissey. But when it comes down to it, I wonder if Little Richard’s opening gambit to Tutti Frutti has ever been topped. who needs sense when you’ve got noise. And what noise. Part nonsense, part glossolalia, it explodes into life, this magnetic, barbaric, comic yawp, juicy with all the energy and erotic promise of rock ’n’ roll.
The rest of the song ain’t bad either.
What must have it sounded like in 1955? It’s difficult for those of us who came along after the fifties to quite square the shorthand narrative of that decade in the US - a time of suburban conformism in America, when McCarthyites went on search-and-destroy missions for those they perceived as “other” (the shorthand they used was communists) - with the arrival of rock ’n’ roll. In that context Little Richard must have seemed like he’d just arrived from outer space. That hair teased into a towering pompadour. The pencil moustache. The wild-eyed weirdness of the man. And then you listen to the music and you hear something far more primal than Bill Haley could ever have managed. What else could this be but an alien invasion?
Little Richard represents the beginning of a strain of pop art that is all about theatricality, about image and a kind of promiscuous, lubricious pleasure in pop you can project forward through Bowie and Prince to Lady Gaga if you’re so minded. It is (Gaga apart perhaps) the strain of pop I love most (take that as a hint).
Of all the songs I’ve written about so far Tutti Frutti is the first one I’ve unconditionally loved. It’s a sugar rush of a record, all sticky with immediate pleasures.
And yes partly it’s about sex. Little Richard is, to take an idea from the best SF film of the decade, Forbidden Planet, effectively one of the monsters from America’s Id. As Greil Marcus once pointed out: “Little Richard may have come from a very conservative church background but he was a raving queen. He was desperately trying to find an outlet for his homosexuality and his sense of style and his wish to strut in public.”
Richard Penniman found that outlet in rock ’n’ roll. Tutti Frutti itself, of course, is a toned down version of the far more ribald original. When he recorded it in New Orleans in September 1955 Dorothy LaBostrie was hired to clean up the lyrics.
Maybe that made it a better record. Because in the end Tutti Frutti is about more than just sex. It’s about the erotic charge of being young. If Tutti Frutti is hot for anything, it’s hot for life.
Like the man said, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom!
Other Contenders
In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Frank Sinatra
Cry Me A River, Julie London
I’m a Man, Bo Diddley
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