1 Song A Day: Jerry Lee Lewis - 'Great Balls Of Fire' (Live At The Star Club, Hamburg)
The other day, @1songday tweeted that they were sad nobody had written about ‘Great Balls of Fire’ on their site yet. I decided I could rectify that.
Excerpt:
So what would be the closest 2010s equivalent of ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ be? The equivalent would have to be a) by a white person from the South of the USA; b) a style of music that adults find distasteful; c) which is loud and energetic; d) which has a sort of ‘fuck you’ attitude; e) and which is massively popular. So if you want to understand Jerry Lee Lewis, think of him as Ke$ha.
Let’s put those baby boomer music writers canonising Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee into a modern context: imagine someone in 2022 writing a history of pop music that says it all started with Dr Luke and Lady Gaga. By 2022, musicians who are currently teenage fans of Lady Gaga will be in their twenties. Perhaps they will take her musical style and put their own spins on it in order to say the things they have to say about their own lives. I mean, that’s what happened with Bob Dylan and the Beatles and all those baby boomer bands; they all heard Elvis as teens, and it changed their lives – and then they used that music as a basis for saying things about what it was like to be young in 1965.
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