The Test Tube and the Scale

  Some of the sexiest American singles released between the years 1976-1980 were by Heart, the Wilson sisters led rock quintet from the Pacific Northwest. The storytelling magnetism of those     environs, and its deleterious effect upon a tightly woven group of inhabitants, has been explicated with surrealist, mythic precision by David Lynch and Mark Frost in their television and film epic Twin Peaks. It’s true that Heart’s musical output goes nowhere near the empyrean heights and depths of Twin Peaks but an intensely experienced female sexuality—both transgressive and redemptive—informs both bodies of work. Heart’s breakthrough debut record, Dreamboat Annie, was a startling success, released     in the celebratory year that America commemorated   its bicentennial anniversary. Having just written the final chapters on the Vietnam War and Watergate crises, and a full three years before the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, the country attempted to foster a rare ...

  Put simply, new wave was pop mass marketing geared to excite our tribal instinct for social integration. Post punk was the struggle to share cultural evidence of what remained of humanity, as Neil Young once put it, after the gold rush. Musical groups with the creative power to bring both styles together typically did so because of aesthetic inspiration; you hear in their spirited material the suggestion of spontaneity under direct pressure of an intensely held concentration. You may hear little in the way of     overtly commercial considerations but for an organic detonation of feeling that emerges from the admixture, broadening the scope of the material and, if luck holds, finding a larger audience for it.     Pylon’s Crazy, from 1983, was released at a time when the post punk music making apparatus—musicians, studio techs, listenership—began taking seriously the role of college radio in determining the course of what was fast becoming a consolidated, viable...

  All momentum and no complaint, Crash sets its musical tempo analogous to sexual desire’s irresistible pleasure, the all consuming pulse of its ravenous persistence. It’s a musical tension similar to what Chrissie Hynde proclaimed was so painful on the Pretenders’ great track The Wait, that liminal space between fulfillment and all of its myriad opposites. Expressed with new wave radio acumen, Crash is major label popcraft practiced with girl group brio, a declaration of sexual independence so direct and immediate that you find your senses responding to its powers long before you can decode its lyric. The Primitives’ vocalist, who sometimes goes by the name Tracy Tracy, issues her warnings and calls for moderation in a wonderfully controlled tone that suggests a refusal to surrender, an icily sober resistance to the seductive demands of lust. The obverse aesthetic is the late seventies model exemplified by Blondie’s Deborah Harry, whose visage alone is enough to conjure our playfu...

  From the time of Liberace’s postwar popularity, the piano has come to play multi-faceted roles in popular music. From an instrument of grossly simplistic, kitsch derived, populist entertainment—Liberace, Roger Williams, Floyd Cramer—to a stationary force of rhythmic bombast—Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis—the piano has gratifyingly served the human impulse to express our emotional venture in exalted musical terms. Somewhere between both poles falls a quartet of commercially successful masters—Billy Joel, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Stevie Wonder—whose talents for audience engagement helps explain the likable proficiency of the bulk of their songwriting output. Could It Be Magic opens the second side of Barry Manilow’s debut record, and your feelings about the song could be wholly dependent upon your feelings for camp. I’m tempted to say that Could It Be Magic is easy listening’s Stairway To Heaven, but not even Robert Plant is shameless enough a lyricist to conceptualize the metap...

  A small and tan box radio sat atop my mother’s refrigerator in the small kitchen that sat on the western side of the house she shared with my father. It was the one object in that kitchen from which all domestic energy on that houseside discreetly emanated, a sort of low frequency buzz field that held either our direct or ambient attention. Anyone living inside that house was affected by this strange totem in intensely different ways, but I can only speak for myself when I share the memory of how it acted as a kind of lymph for my rapidly emerging pre-teen sexuality, becoming a more integral part of my childhood than the crucifix, its counter totem in that grossly supernatural household. I was radicalized by American radio in the nineteen seventies—a late century, late millennial epoch in which American cultural history summoned from its own unsettling past a Dionysian energy that culminated in a unifying national renaissance we’re likely never to experience again. Our house was ...

  What begins as a critique of Western imperialism becomes, in an epiphanic flash, a disclosure of empathy. Conquistador generates real listener excitement from its outset, a four beat introduction leading to Gary Brooker’s interrogative vocal, the sort of imploring probe we apply to all historical documentation as it begins revealing its sonorous evidence of real time narratives. Keith Reid’s lyric opens with an unnamed narrator’s first glimpse of the titular war monument, along with the biased observation, “like some angel’s hallowed brow, you reek of purity.” The line suggests a candidly modern skepticism of archaic European explorers’ destiny, a humanist perspective of the pompous colonialist ideal. Together with Robin Trower’s rhythm guitar and Brooker’s piano, staccato rhythm propels the narrator’s tale as it drifts from the present to the distant past and back again, a through line from the conqueror’s quixotic mission-oriented drive to the narrator’s steely, clear-eyed hist...