1956 Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers: Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? Now there's a question, though it's one usually asked whenever you've fallen out of love rather than in. Or I suppose to be more accurate, when you've been kicked out of it unexpectedly. This is not something I had a great deal of experience of when I was thirteen. At that age my biggest loves were AC/DC and my bike; girls and romance were an uncharted territory that just didn't blip on my radar.

Frankie Lymon was thirteen when he recorded this song and, based on its evidence, he knew a thing or two about love. Lymon invests his vocal with a rasp of heartache that manages to convince it was born out of bitter experience far beyond his years.* Wild, untrained, rubbed raw and on the verge of breaking maybe, but never childish, childlike or rooted in teen angst. For the sake of contrast, Michael Jackson was two years younger when he sang 'I Want You Back', but he sounded it too and his cheery shout combined with the Jackson 5's funky stomp created a top drawer pop song buffed to a high sheen, something that 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? could never be accused of being.

A 'boyband' they may have been, but 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'? offers up precious few smooth edge, and as familiar as I am with the song itself actually listening Lymon again for the first time in years catches me out with it's primal raggedness which, on reflection, makes 'Why Do Fools' sound like 'I Want You Back' dragged through the mud and left out in the rain. In 1956, the song stood at a neat intersection where street doo wop, stinging r&b licks and a solid rock and roll backbeat collide, yet what could have been a car crash of disconnected sound instead transforms effortlessly into a rule breaking abrasive chunk of angst driven ever forward by Lymon's wide eyed vocal that pulls off the trick of sounding both heartbroken but also glad of the opportunity and experience - Frankie knows it's better to have loved and lost and he constantly boots the song and the listener up the arse with his yelling so that we don't feel sorry for him. Not here anyway, but there's a great deal of pity to be derived from the fact that he would die a penniless heroin addict at the age of just twenty five. A fact that always takes the edge off the upbeat of this for me, but it remains a glorious milestone in the history of popular music that showed the possibilities of cross genre pollination to excite and innovate.

* I think my closest point of reference would be the just turned seventeen Alex Chilton growling through 'The Letter' with The Box Tops while sounding like he'd just turned into a fifty year old black man.