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POP!: That awful sound…

To understand how “Bang Bang” works as a murder ballad rooted in the folk tradition, it’s important to take those pop chart battles seriously. By 1966, Bob Dylan had almost single-handedly split the folk revival movement into two with his foray into folk-rock. As a result, all three of his albums in 1965 and 1966 made it onto Billboard’s Top Ten. His popular success inspired a host of others to follow in his steps. The Mamas and the Papas, whose “California Dreaming” gave “Ballad of the Green Berets” its only real competition for the top spot on the charts, represented a variation of a new folk-rock sound that came to be associated with Los Angeles. This West Coast sound picked up attributes from the1950s teeny-bop music and Hollywood entertainment industries – slick productions, accessible lyrics and topics, vocal harmonies, made-for-TV costumes, and sometimes even danceable beats. In other words, attributes that were sellable.

“From a purely commercial perspective the folk revival (albeit diminished), lasted into the late 1960s,” Kip Lornell explains in Exploring American Folk Music. “It helped to create some hybrids, such as the folk/rock of the Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, who reached across the United States with their blend brewed at clubs like Ash Grove in Los Angeles…on the West Coast, folk/rock was smoothed out yet more and popularized.” It was Sonny and Cher who surfed this commercial wave most adeptly. (You can also listen to Pete Seeger talking about the relationship between folk and pop music here.)

It’s a little embarrassing to love “Bang Bang” as much as I do. When we first launched this blog, I had an initial short list of the songs about which I wanted to write. “Bang Bang” was on top. But I was hesitant. I love the song, but it felt a bit silly, a guilty pleasure, to take it seriously as a murder ballad. This review typifies the kind of ambivalence one is apparently supposed to feel about it:

On Cher’s second solo record, 1966’s “The Sonny Side of Cher,” Sonny Bono tinkers with the folk-rock formula that had made her previous album such a delight and ruins everything, leaving the album as nothing more than a chuckle-inducing curiosity, just the kind of silly record casual listeners might expect from the duo…for some reason Bono thought it would be a good idea to graft his Spectorized folk-rock sound onto pop tunes like “It’s Not Unusual,” “Our Day Will Come,” and “The Girl from Ipanema”…and it just doesn’t work. The only track that has any real zest is the Bono-written novelty “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” the kind of dramatic song Cher could knock out in her sleep but also a song with no real heart. The album is doomed by its lack of heart and inability to rise above the formulaic. (Source)

But for me, this “inability to rise above the formulaic” was part of the point. The attributes that made “Bang Bang” so popular – and therefore silly – are also the attributes that allowed it to tell a powerful story to even the youngest and least sophisticated among those who heard it. The song’s power for me as a young girl was its easily cracked secret code: it sounded like a harmless song about a broken heart, but I knew it was a story about something terrible and unjust.

Whereas “Ballad of the Green Beret” is sung by a specific extraordinary American man about another specific extraordinary American man, and spins a tale about the extraordinary heights to which all red-blooded American men can aspire, “Bang Bang” is a song about a figure we might call the American Everywoman. This is a woman who just can’t win and who is often deeply, and sometimes very violently, wronged. A lot of women could probably relate. As James Brown also crooned in one of his own Top Ten hits in 1966, using language that Rolling Stone described as “biblically chauvinistic,” it’s not just a man’s world, or even a man’s man’s world. It’s a man’s man’s man’s world:

Considered in this context, “Bang Bang” not only describes a childhood game, it also works like one. It’s similar to a nursery rhyme, a spoonful-of-sugar method for delivering an otherwise nasty dose of reality. (We’ve looked at how this works on this blog before – here and here, for example). Vanilla Fudge picked up on this right away in their truly spectacular 1967 cover, which introduced the song with a psychedelic stream of nursery rhymes:

There’s also a distinct “Bohemian Rhapsody” feel to this cover, perhaps for the same reasons that Ken discussed in relation to that song a few weeks ago. (See his discussion of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and child’s play here.)

“When things are not right it is going to come out in song,” wrote Josh Dunson in the September 1965 issue of Broadside devoted to the tense relationship between war and music; between folk, rock, pop, and soul music; and between generations in the 1960s:

Rock and roll, i.e, the best of the pop music Top 40 discs, constitutes the contemporary folk music of America, but more than that, it constitutes the contemporary folk-music of the world’s teenagers […] The youth will have their way, as history has shown. And right now, youth is busily turning the juke boxes and the 45 rpm discs and the LPs of the popular music business into a kind of protest.

In 1966, Cher was just 19 turning 20. Appealing to the teen crowd was part of her act and part of her power to force an issue to the surface. “Her schtick as a near dominatrix over husband Sonny may have been a put-on in 1965,” as one writer put it, “but Cher continued to force issues as she grew, not only with her stage costumes, but with her song selection as well.” She was a woman a mission to “advance feminine rebellion.”

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