10. Bo Diddley – complete discography (“deal with it”)
Photograph courtesy of Masao Nakagami/CC-BY-SA-3.0
Bo Diddley without a doubt, crystallised rock & roll to a pinpoint. He invented a monolithic sound, and that’s why it’s impossible to say just his first album. The song to hear on that album is ‘Bo Diddley’ – it’s just bom-be-bom-be-bom bom bom, it’s just this one chord. Bo Diddley is as much of a minimalist as Terry Riley or Steve Reich. He’s also the ultimate antidepressant for the world. He was an entertainer, he was absolutely endearing in every way… I just don’t know how you could play somebody Bo Diddley and, unless their heart is just made of ice, I don’t understand how they could not feel moved by the rhythm and the primitive feedback and just… every string on his guitar was some kind of channel into a different cosmos. I think of Bo Diddley in very cosmic terms, I think of him as one of the great human thinkers of all time, like a Greek philosopher, almost mythological. But also Southern – from McComb, Mississippi – and relatable! If I had to pick an ultimate hero, it would probably be Bo Diddley. And he started as a violinist. My friend Cole [Alexander] from Black Lips described seeing Bo Diddley when he was a kid, at a festival or something. When he was a child, a dumb child. He told me Bo Diddley said, "I’m known for rock & roll, but I’m also a classical musician", and then he just pulled out his violin and started playing Stravinsky or something. Bo Diddley: the ultimate anti-intellectual artist.
