The Test Tube and the Scale

  If, out of the great American R&B record labels, Motown represented the hope-filled, sanguine possibilities of racial integration, and Stax the inner strength of black—and thus, human—consciousness, then Philadelphia International Records conveyed a fantasy of our easy surrender to sensual imperatives against an urban backdrop. Before the label could find its voice, however, there came a brief period of emulation of commercially proven models, and the mid-late sixties model for intersex, R&B duets was Motown’s Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Ersatz beauty is a common enough occurrence in rock and roll, so when it appears to us without guise, it’s as a sui generis aberration, and we never fully recover from its initial shock. The harmonies of Gaye and Terrell, though ubiquitous in the collective memory, have never been normalized to the extent that their appearance inspires fatigue in the manner of some overly familiar Motown mainstays. In a similar style, Bunny Sigler and ...

The death of childhood innocence is a necessary requisite for initiation into the rock and roll experience. Our passage into adolescence, marked by the hormonal flush, advances another tick on the global death clock, and an unidentifiable terror somewhere in the glandular regions of the earth’s core is released, sending an orgasmic shiver along the spine of children learning for the first time the excitement of self, the gift of our destructive inner power, the imagination. The Goodees, a Memphis girl group trio, released their single Condition Red after winning a local talent contest held by Stax as part of the inauguration of their offshoot label Hip in 1967. Condition Red is a slightly less melodramatic reworking of the Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack, the great mid-sixties ballad of a young motorcyclist’s final ride, memorialized by his girlfriend Betty, whose parents martyrized Jimmy after forbidding her to see him. The concept of teenage rebellion, the pivot around which girl gro...

Flamboyance is a stylized form of provocation that presents itself as one of beauty’s many proxies, intimidating and surreal. Affording her customary, invaluable perspective, Flannery O’Connor was quoted, saying, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one…it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” The same, obviously, can be said about the freak’s place in rock and roll. Our most flamboyant performers—from Jerry Lee Lewis and Janis Joplin to Ozzy Osbourne and Prince—often went to veritably comic lengths to reflect the grotesquerie of our passions, parodying our struggles with expression, and, most importantly, eradicating our fantasies of self-importance, replaced on the rock and roll stage with unadorned humanity, the essence of which remains with us despite the prevalence of    less talented ...

When Donald Trump announced, “There are only two genders,” on the occasion of his second inauguration into the Office of the US Presidency, he was only validating a long held bias in this country against nonconformists, championing a form of bigotry that, when joined to levers of official power, typifies rejection of personal freedoms by ceding essential human rights to the state. When Jackie Shane sang, “I’m coming down with a heartache,” she was ceding nothing, merely acknowledging what many of us already know to be true; with freedoms come the cost of loss and failure, often paid for with inordinately intense periods of stress and frustration, or, as Shane puts it, “I ain’t sick but I got a fever/blood pressure’s runnin’ high/pulse ain’t right/I can’t sleep at night….” Comin’ Down’s tone is impenitent, a defiance so deeply ingrained within the rhythm and blues/gospel experience that we sometimes forget how closely enjoined it is to marginalization, that chillingly segregationist dyn...

Writing about Walter Benjamin in 1978, Susan Sontag describes the great German essayist as “a collector, weighed down by things; that is, passions.” Expanding upon his interests, she notes his fondness for the miniature; “To miniaturize is to make portable—the ideal form for the wanderer, or a refugee.” In this same way, we come to understand the obsessions of the 21st century’s vinyl fetishists, those happy collectors whose unstated aim is to collect the world by owning its immense and varied songbook. Taking possession of the world in this way—from the seat of the imagination, powerlessly, without danger of causing anyone any harm—is to understand the broad contours of human behavior by arranging our verisimilitudes within intelligible formats; playlists. Whether by the LP deep cut, the 45 single, or the densely compressed MP3 file, putting world history into your pocket and carrying it with you to the beach to celebrate it, or making a Kabbalah of it with your friends, procuring evi...

  The details about rural life that John Prine lyricizes in his best work don’t have the gale force impact of experience distilled through language that makes the reading of poetry such an imaginative tour de force; instead, they’re filtered through the stylized singing voice of American pop, with its concentration on the commercial potential of our full bodied sensuality. The boldness of Prine’s songwriting vision required him to follow with temerity his songs’ characters to the no man’s land between genres, far from the stifling immobility at the center of genre conventionality. Like Hank Williams and Gram Parsons, Prine’s abiding interest was the duress of tension on the working class imagination as it struggled to cope with 20th century capitalism’s enforced integration of rural American societies into the larger, national fabric, threatening—among so much else—flourishing regional musical expression in the process. Taken from Prine’s fourth studio record, Common Sense, Come Ba...