Just like ringing a bell
On equality and exceptional talent
I think about Chuck Berry's song 'Johnny B. Goode' a lot. Not the guitar playing or the awful scene from Back to the Future where the Michael J. Fox character writes the song. I think about the lyrics, because they capture something crucial for me about exceptional talent and the ways we try to make sense of its existence. This happens in part through one of my all-time favourite metaphors:
Deep down in Louisiana close to New OrleansÂ
Way back up in the woods among the evergreensÂ
There stood a log cabin made of earth and woodÂ
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. GoodeÂ
Who never ever learned to read or write so wellÂ
But he could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell
Just like ringing a bell. If there's a better encapsulation of what mastery looks and feels like, I haven't heard it. And, as the phrase hits our ears, we don't just witness Johnny's mastery from the outside. The rightness of the rhyme coming together, the sense of lift-off from the guitar as we head into the chorus—together they convey something of the pure fucking delight of having this level of skill and being 100% in pocket with it. For a moment, we get to share in the pleasure of being as good as Johnny.
Then there's the fact that the song is written by a groundbreaking guitarist and songwriter, who is in the process of inventing a genre that will remake the history of music from the ground up. Berry knows how it feels to be able to do something remarkable, and he uses that skill to let us share in the experience as it's happening. It's a perfect synergy of form and content. And you don't have to have noticed any of this consciously to feel that perfection in your bones.
There's another, much more negative take on this kind of talent story, and it has to do with critiques of American meritocracy and equality. It's a story that says everyone has an equal chance, so it's only talent and hard work that sets some people apart. And, when it comes to talent, you're either born with it or not.
This kind of story can excuse all kinds of social failures, which is in part why as a culture we especially love the kind of talent story Berry tells. If a little country boy can wind up with his name in lights, based on sheer talent, then it seems as if the system must be working. Such romantic tales of rocket-paced upward mobility also let us off the hook when it comes to things like Johnny's lack of skills in other, crucial areas. Maybe if there was more parity in the public education system he'd be able to read and write well, too—but, whatever, he's got that guitar thing so he's probably fine. In this account, exceptional talent proves the rule that meritocracy is functioning as it should.
Because celebrating the exceptions can be a way of hiding an uneven playing field, the progressive take on extraordinary talent has usually focused on creating a more level terrain, including by exploring whether exceptional skill might be more nature than nurture. And there's increasing evidence for this view. One large, longitudinal study followed kids who were learning a musical instrument from their first lesson until the end of high school.1 What turned out to be most predictive of becoming a professional-quality musician was not their starting skill level, their ear, or even whether their parents were professional musicians. It was how long they thought they'd play the instrument. The kids who reached the elite level predicted that they’d play forever. So the vast majority of kids thought something like, I guess I'll learn cello for a few years, and a handful thought, Welp, I'm a cellist now. And in both cases, those thoughts eventually made themselves true.
But this account doesn't so much eradicate the exceptionality issue as kick the can of causality down the road. As in: why exactly did some kids identify with their instrument in that way, while others didn't? For some reason, a few of the kids had that option or desire or impulse to see themselves as a musician.
To put it in terms of the song: we could have enrolled every kid in Berry's St. Louis neighborhood into the best music school in the world, and we wouldn't have gotten a school full of Berrys. The research says we would have seen more high-level talent emerge, in part because some of those kids would have identified as guitarists and created the results that come from that thought. We for sure would have changed all the kids' lives in profound ways— not necessarily all good—even if the guitar didn't become central to their futures. But we wouldn't have eliminated the issue of outliers. We can make a generation of guitarists, but not a generation of people for whom it's just like ringing a bell. Sort of like the way that most people in the global north learn the complex skill of driving reasonably well, but only some of us wind up in Formula 1.
I have a lot more sympathy with the progressive take that asks us to see the blindspots in our perceived meritocracy, but I don't think we can explain extraordinary talent by explaining it away, which is ultimately, how both progressive and conservative angles on the exceptional function. In a society founded at least formally on the principle of equality for all (white men), it makes sense that the idea of extraordinary skills would create the kind cognitive dissonance that the human brain prefers to avoid. The conservative take manages this dissonance by insisting that we all have an equal chance of making it big, while the progressive version opts for saying we all have an equal chance of being talented, provided the playing field is level. Both focus on what is true of us all, in order to sidestep the challenge to universality posed by the unequal distribution of extraordinary talent. When we want things to be equal, it's hard to know what to do with the fact that 'exceptional' is an inherently comparative measure.
That fact is at the heart of 'Johnny B. Good', at every level, from its revolutionary guitar playing to its narrative structure. Even the bell metaphor rests on the comparative quality of exceptionality: it works by imagining how simple an instrument would need to be before the rest of us would have Johnny's level of skill. The song insists on the reality of once-in-a-generation talent at the same time as Berry delivers it to us, with bows on. In the process, I think the song offers an answer to the question of extraordinary skill more powerful than both the standard progressive or conservative takes. It has to do with the role of Johnny's audience, and the decision to make them the main voices we hear in the song.
From the start, Berry frames Johnny's story in a register that frames the idea of exceptionality in a specific way. Consider:
'Way back up in the woods among the evergreens/There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood' ('Johnny Be Goode')
'Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children'. ('Hansel and Gretel', Grimm’s Fairytales)
'There was once upon a time a fisherman who lived with his wife in a pig-stye close by the sea'. ('The Fisherman and His Wife', Grimm’s Fairytales)
Johnny's story may not start with 'Once upon a time,' but it doesn't need to. The phrasing, the remote setting, and the location in a generalised past already put us squarely in the narrative universe of folktales, fairytales and myth.Â
This is crucial, because that universe contains different and much older rules than those of liberal democracy when it comes to people with extraordinary skills. Rather than having their existence explained away, such figures take centre stage in mythic stories as the Chosen One, who is anointed by some force with special abilities, which means they have a special role to play in the world.
It's clear that Berry understood precisely how powerful this kind of talent story is, because when the song took off he presented it as autobiographical when it wasn't. Berry grew up in a segregated Black neighbourhood in St. Louis in the years of the Great Migration, when masses of Black people fled violence in the south for factory jobs in the north. He would likely have known many adults who had the kind of rural Southern origins that Johnny does, but Berry wasn't one of them. His father was a deacon in the church, and Berry sang in the choir from the age of six. When he performed in a high-school talent show, he was the singer and his friend the guitarist. It was only after that show that Berry decided to learn guitar. (Or: that he took on the identity of guitarist.) By replacing this more urban and roundabout musical trajectory with Johnny's once-upon-a-time tale of fabled, from-nowhere talent, Berry links his abilities to the Chosen One structure. He creates his own, near-magical origin story, and then performs it with the kind of skill that makes the story seem true.
It might seem as if the Chosen-One frame would only amplify the cognitive dissonance around exceptionality. But such stories lean so hard on the idea of extraordinary skill that the dissonance disappears, because the skills in question have been relocated to an entirely different register. The whole point of Chosen One stories is not everyone is chosen.2 Not everyone is Johnny because not everyone has been anointed by the hand of fate or the will of God or the incalculable mystery of the universe. Why does Johnny get to be this skilled when everyone else isn't? For the same reason one ragamuffin kid from a nowhere village goes on a quest and saves the kingdom, and the rest of us stay back in the village threshing the wheat. In the Chosen One narrative, the reasons for exceptionality unfold in a realm beyond human conniving, which means for our purposes the exceptional just is.
As those left-behind, labouring villagers will probably have suggested, Chosen One stories aren't without their own questionable effects, both political and personal. We can see one such effect in the breathless adulation that characterises a lot of writing on Toni Morrison or Yo-Yo Ma or anyone else at that level of skill. This perspective can turn those who are that good into a kind of Other, someone who inhabits a separate, quasi-magical category—which means we no longer have to worry about why they can do things we can't. And it makes sense that we would still be drawn to this kind of explanation. What someone like Morrison or Ma can do does often seem other-worldly. And we have millennia of Chosen One stories behind us providing a handy narrative frame for exactly that sort of magical-seeming difference.
But there's a quality to Berry's lyrics that is missing from those journalistic accounts, which comes from the song's focus on the people around Johnny. Despite being ostensibly autobiographical, the story isn't told by Johnny, and Johnny never speaks in it. Instead, we hear from the people who experience Johnny's playing. Here's the second verse:
He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade
Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made
The people passing by they would stop and say
"Oh my what that little country boy could play!"
Johnny doesn't just play in the engineers' hearing. He plays with their rhythm. His playing speaks to the social world around him, in both senses. He creates his music while embedded in that world and mirrors it in the form of what he creates. Although his skills can’t be divided among others, they’re focused on and shared with his listeners in another way. Johnny’s skills may be in him, but they're for those who hear his playing. That’s why his name doubles as a command, and why the entire chorus amounts to a set of marching orders, voiced by the audience that eggs him on. Go, go, go. Go go go. Johnny, be good. As in: yes, go on and be that fucking good.
As in Chosen One stories, Johnny’s exceptional status means he has a job to do. This job is what makes the Chosen One's destiny different from the rest of the villagers. But that destiny doesn't eradicate the connection between that person and the villagers left behind. It defines that connection. The Chosen One's quest is always for the village, because it is a part of and exemplar of the wider world threatened by the dragon or the evil lord or what-have-you. In a way that predates democratic election, the Chosen One is a representative of the people. The reason they have to go—leave on their quest, follow where their talent leads—is because laying around letting your annointedness rot isn’t equality. It's dereliction.
There are a lot of reasons why Berry might have envisioned Johnny and his audience in this way, some of which have to do with the specific history of Black people in America. From W.E.B. Dubois to Zora Neale Hurston and Kendrick Lamarr, there's a long and storied history of Black artists and intellectuals wrestling with what it means to be seen as an exception.3 Then there are the Christian echoes in the Chosen One story, and the specific function of music in religious settings and in the Black church in particular. When you develop your musical skills in church, your learning and performing necessarily serve a larger, community purpose. Your skills make you able to serve that purpose in a particular way, but you are not the purpose.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting this is how Berry saw himself or his skills. I'm suggesting that this is how the song asks us to see Johnny. The fact that Johnny is exceptional means he has an exceptional function in his social world. Like 'Smith' or 'Cooper', Johnny's last name tells us that function: his role is to Be Good at this one thing, to show up with his exceptional skills and go. Notably, these orders are forceful and directed without being specific. It's not 'Make things that please us' or 'Play that one song I like’. It's not about satisfying the audience in a particular way or chasing their taste. The instructions are just: go ahead and be good at this thing. Take your skills and use them to the furthest degree.
I definitely don't purport to have Berry's level of skill at anything, but I'm not sure that matters in terms of the applicability of this message. Every time I listen to the song, it's a reminder that being comparatively good at anything amounts to a set of marching orders. And following those orders has the tendency to make the origin of talent feel more or less irrelevant, because knowing the answer wouldn't change the job at hand. As a plan of action, the orders are not always easy to follow, but they are unmistakably clear. Go, go, go. Go, go, go. Be as good as you can.
I initially planned to end this essay here, but then looking up a detail led me to Berry's history of sexual violence, which I'd somehow managed not to learn about until that moment. It was grim to notice that I wasn't remotely surprised. There is such a long line of male musicians who have leveraged fame for sexual access to girls as young as 12 and 13, and if you've heard of R. Kelly you know that this behaviour is not some bygone artefact of old-time social mores. In Berry's case, he apparently brought a 14-year-old girl to work in his restaurant in order to have sex with her, and then he fired her afterward. He also assaulted an adult woman, who he beat severely enough to knock out teeth.
I have no interest in writing yet another think piece about whether we can separate the art from the artist. I don't have any declarations about how the world should navigate this issue. For what it's worth, though, I'll share what led me to publish rather than delete this essay. In general, I don't avoid work that I can productively learn from and think with, even if the creator has a history like Berry's—provided my engaging with it doesn't contribute to the pain of the victims. For me, cordoning off some art in that way feels too much like the advice given to women to stay inside at night to avoid being attacked. What both have in common is the shrinking of women's worlds as a response to acts committed against them. And I don't want women's access to our full aesthetic legacy as human beings to be yet another casualty of this dynamic. But I also don't expect everyone else to feel this way. If you don't want to engage with words by or about a guy who knocks women's teeth out, I think that's also a great decision.
For me, deciding to engage with the work of someone with this history requires considering whether it would perpetuate the harm originally done. So I wouldn't be comfortable publishing something like this piece if the victims involved were most likely still alive. I can only imagine the pain of watching the person who violated you celebrated by the entire world, as if what happened to you was inconsequential. I don't want to add to that pain.
But I think it’s important to acknowledge the overlap between Chosen One stories and the things that Berry did. In this essay, I've argued that 'Johnny B. Good' models a way that exceptional talent can be reconciled with a commitment to equality, by understanding that talent as responsibility. But it's also possible to experience chosen-ness as an exemption from all responsibility. To think that you should always get what you want, because you're in a category of one. This is anointment as entitlement, and it's arguably way more common in our world than anointment as responsibility. Especially among the kind of talented men who use fame to avoid hearing or heeding the word 'no.'
Both versions of anointment can be seen in Berry's story. In ‘Johnny B. Goode’ he perfectly captured exceptional talent as a kind of responsibility to others. And he used his talents in part as a licence to do what he wanted. Since reading about that history, I've thought a lot about whether I still believe there is something useful in the Chosen One frame. As in: maybe the idea of talent as anointment is inherently a bad one, and we should resist the pull of those ancient narrative structures.Â
But I keep returning to the fact that we can't explain exceptionality by explaining it away. We can't make Johnny and the engineers the same by wishing it to be so, or by making them all practise the same number of hours a day. For whatever reason, some people learn to do remarkable things that the vast majority of us can’t. Those people are going to stand out. They will seem touched by something beyond our ken.Â
That being the case, I choose to believe the story that says: talent doesn't give anyone a free pass. It gives us a job to do. Anointment is an assignment. Obviously it’s not an assignment anyone is bound to accept, and plenty of people choose entitlement over responsibility. But I think they’re missing out, for reasons that ‘Johnny B. Goode’ showcases better than any other work I know. The song is filled to the brim with the sharp joy and boundless energy and sense of glorious fucking rightness that comes with accepting one’s assignment. And you don’t need to be a once-in-a-generation talent to feel it. What you do need—as the lyrics also show—is the knowledge that while the assignment is uniquely yours, it’s never about you.Â
This piece is the first entry in ‘Talent Songs’, a series on songs that in some way wrestle with the idea and results of exceptional skill. If you have a suggestion for a talent song, drop it in the comments.
For an excellent account of this study and of talent as learned, see The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. In addition to being a great overview of the research, it’s also an amazing read. Highly recommended.
For a clever and enjoyable critique of this narrative logic, see China Mieville’s YA novel Un Lun Dun. Mieville presents the trope as reducing our sense of agency and ability to create change in the world—as well as reinforcing the idea that particular types of people get anointed.
Lamarr’s To Pimp a Butterfly is an extended and brilliant exploration of what it means to be chosen as an exception, who that chosenness really serves, and what kind of responsibilities that confers.