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Column by John Leland
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When I was a kid, I felt that one of the boldest things about rock 'n' roll was its contempt for the word, the way it buried lyrics under mounds of noise (and I mean the Beatles and Tommy James and the Cowsills here, not the Stooges). My parents heard this too, but were not as excited by it. Since then, I've felt a certain softness, compromise, in music that put words out front, as if the calculated order of the words tempered the chaos. People like Dylan, Captain Beefheart, or Talking Heads got around this with a kind of literary chaos. But Spoonie Gee was the first really to conquer it; leaping unpredictably from subject to subject, he offered thematic chaos. And as much as I admire the insights of "Stop the Violence," the most radical thing about the rap seems not to be the themes but the chaotic logic that binds them.
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