Brown Eyed Handsome Man - Chuck Berry

If you just think of Chuck Berry as the guitar guy who did the duck walk, you're selling this great pop poet/rapper extremely short. I've never heard a Chuck Berry song that didn't have great lyrics and great lyrics that are unlike those of any other songwriter in his time (which includes the present). His great lyric vignettes are delivered so seamlessly on the wings of such catchy little R&B melodies that many will never notice the craft delivered in each Berry number. Choosing one to write about is terribly difficult.
"Brown Eyed Handsome Man," originally released as the B-side to his great "Too Much Monkey Business," is very much a black power song. If you replace "eyed" in the title with "skinned" you have the forerunner to James Brown's "I'm Black and I'm Proud." Unlike Brown's anthem however, the Berry story is a satirical history lesson. Each verse is a different example of a brown eyed character that a woman (often a white woman) couldn't help but be in love with. From the first line of the first verse you have pure social commentary/ satire... "Arrested on charges of unemployment he was sitting in the witness stand". But what the men who would wrongly put away this unemployed dark fellow don't know, "the little girl's understand" as Willie Dixon would say. "The Judges wife told the district attorney you better free that brown eyed man. If you want you're job you better free that brown eyed man."
Chuck Berry was one of Bob Dylan's heroes and there's a very audible similarity between Berry's informally smart, wise cracking outsider commentator and those that would narrate Dylan's most famous mid sixties songs. Long before Dylan's hobos were getting "a date with Botticelli's niece", Berry's joker gives us an art history lesson...

Marlo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrastlin' match
to win a brown eyed handsome man
she fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man

The chord changes that guide the song are simple I's and IV's and V's. But they're put together unlike any other Chess Rhythm & Blues number of the 50's. The song's feel borrows as much from C&W as it does from R&B. This was something very particular to Chuck Berry and his work on a predominantly blues oriented label in the 50's. This song would be great art if were written today. In 1956 it was the work of a cutting edge commentator. How many songwriters managed to have fun, make people dance and innovate both pop music and guitar playing while telling a story at once so comic and so biting that few will even pick up on it 50+ years later?

Milty on the Magi

I agree with CB about what it is the strongest part of this song although I'm not sure about the "checkpoint" lyric, just the choice of the word "checkpoint" itself really. I am thoroughly crazy about the rest of the lines that CB quoted. The internal rhyme and word choices are exquisite and the lyrics ride seamlessly on a pretty melody. I also love the melodic turns of the chorus of this song; familiar yet uneasy, unpredictable, looming, like the situation they portray. Lyrically, I really like how the story ends where it starts, altered slightly. The same situation is now mournful. The hope and joy are infused with hard, cold realities and yet still a hope that light will shine through the darkness lingers.

Song of the Magi - Anais Mitchell

Typically, I am skeptical (if not downright ornery) about making political statements with songs. Even the masters of the form (Difranco, Dylan, Prine) rarely slip one by me without a scoff or two. But here, Anais Mitchell has distilled the meaning from a massively complex political/religious war and made from it a succinct, understandable, moving story.

The song opens with a pretty but unsettling chord progression, and we find ourselves wandering through Bethlehem at Jesus' birth. It's a freezing night in the desert, and we're carrying our gifts to the celebration. Anais' voice, also, is pretty and unsettling; she is courageously emotive and impeccably intoned, with a voice from a Grimm's fairy tale, at once a child and a crone.

As the story continues, Mitchell leads us to a much darker scene. She gives us only the necessary details, and we follow each line eagerly, with equal amounts of reverence and terror. In the second verse, she carries us from this peaceful, joyful biblical scene to modern day Bethlehem, a city embroiled in seemingly endless war.

welcome home my child/your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town/welcome to the brawl
life ain't fair my child/put your hands in the air my child
slowly now, single file/up against the wall

These last lines are my favorite by far. I am floored by Mitchell's ability, in the space of a single verse, to shift the plot so seamlessly to the same city 2000 years in the future - and in doing so, illuminate the tragedy of both stories. Suddenly, in our minds eye, Jesus is a Palestinian youth, born into a vicious cycle of war. Though she never mentions it, we're asking ourselves: would a modern-day Prince of Peace surmount such odds, or would he be swallowed up in a sea of statistics, just another gun-toting teen, or victim to a suicide bomb?

But she's followed us here to this winter desert, in the midst of a war, bundled in our warmest coats, and she meets us with a prayer: open wide the gates of hope, and let us through.