Posts

Cannonball. The Breeders. 1993. 4AD/Elektra.

  Near the end of Lovers Of Today, the Pretenders ballad about surviving   love’s tendency to wound and scar, you hear Chrissie Hynde singing—forcing herself to be heard above the silence of the song’s fade out—“I’ll never feel like a man in a man’s world.” The gender distinction is crucial because it allows us to see, with poetic clarity, how our sexual natures, chameleonic and evasive to begin with, are often the final components we look     to replace when repairing the disarrayed ego following a period of emotional tumult. We first heard Kim Deal as the voice of voyeurism back in 1988, watching “him walk her every day into a shady place;” possibly, following the dream logic of the rock and roll experience, the same shade where much of the sexual drama of Cannonball, five years on, unfolds. I like imagining that the Lovely Legs of Gigantic is the very same Last Splash of Cannonball; that is, the woman being watched on the Pixies’ debut LP is the same woman who no longer has to wish

Can You Get To That. Funkadelic. 1971. Westbound.

  After experimentation with conventional song forms became a commercially viable practice of making records sometime in the nineteen sixties, the trend quickly became a recording norm across genres. It proved especially fecund in the rapidly metamorphosing rhythm and blues market. American artists were in a fever of innovation, from Sly Stone in California to James Brown in Ohio, from the in-house songwriting staff at Stax in Memphis to the wildly talented bon vivants of Hitsville USA. This was the creative dynamic whose combined genius fused rock and roll’s rhythmic aggression to the manifest eroticism of urban, electric blues, and polished their product with the high sheen appeal of marketable pop sensibilities. Radio listeners and record buyers would soon find themselves transfixed by a radicalized form of rhythm and blues. Another prime mover in Detroit was George Clinton, who, with     Funkadelic, recorded their third album Maggot Brain in Motor City’s United Sound Systems. What’

The Campaign For Real Rock. Edwyn Collins. 1994. Setanta.

  Similar in tone to the Neil Young elegy My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue), Edwyn Collins’ seething harangue begins on a note of sadness. Whereas Young cast his vision of modern inertia across an all-encompassing scope, Collins’ focus is smaller, and he works to reduce his subject even lesser by denunciatory, cathartic means. The sadness, it turns out, was only a hint of smoldering rage. Collins’ target is the rock and roll poseur in his natural habitat, Glastonbury, maybe, or Coachella; Reading or Bonnaroo. Collins’ recitation of his indictment is spellbinding; you’re drawn in by his assurances as a performer, despite them sometimes failing him in his effort to make lyrical points; what the hell is a “Zimmerframe”? The song’s greatest pleasure comes from its most obvious contradiction; Collins neatly tailors his musical backing track to his vocal, seamlessly using FM radio rock song conventions which give the record a tonal impersonality similar to what you hear on, say, Animals-era

O Caminho Do Bem. Tim Maia. 1975. Seroma Discos.

  Translated into English as The Pathway to Good, Tim Maia’s paradisiacal hymn to Brazil’s UFO cult Rational Culture is a richly textured evocation of after hours disco mythology: the cavernesque darkness of the air conditioned interior, the early morning gravitational fatigue just before your second wind kicks in, the quaalude induced, rollercoaster rhythms of drug comfort. The music itself, though of secondary concern in the disco experience, inevitably proves to be of grave consequence if only because our expectations, contrary to intelligence gathered from previous disco excursions, are set unreasonably high during sobriety. Not for nothing did Morrissey once exhort the record buying public to hang the DJ. Hang the blessed DJ. Yet disco was the site where strangers became family; not the loving strangers with whom you shared address and DNA but the dysfunctional one who knew to give you the proper space to self-isolate while disassociating. In translation from the Portuguese, Maia’

(I Love It When You) Call Me Names. Joan Armatrading. 1983. A&M.

  Sung by a “short, short man” to the “big woman” he’s sharing a love affair with, Joan Armatrading’s album opener from 1983 is passion set ablaze with its lyrical depiction of the fetishization of physical abuse, such that it tests the limits of contemporary convention. Today’s culture urges musical audiences to consider lyrical content from empathic perspectives that lean from critical appreciation towards emotional assessments antithetical to rock and roll era shibboleths, including the unruly subject of the full, robust spectrum of sexual desire. For (I Love It When You) Call Me Names, Armatrading crafted a traditional pop structure that shifts the listener’s emotional responses across its three compositional features. There are the grisly details of the affair that occupy the aggressive expository verses, the core elation that defines the relationship heard in the exultant chorus, and finally, the view of the couple’s dynamic seen from outside their lives together. The song challe

California Über Alles. Dead Kennedys. 1979. Alternative Tentacles.

  One of the means of expressing resistance to the imposition of mass homogeneity upon a populace by a governmental head or body is the use of satire. It’s a tricky art form to deploy, and our culture is littered with countless examples—including some sacred cows—of failed attempts to execute it. But when satire connects with its intended     target, the results are revelatory, offering clear-eyed perspectives on the machinations of social and cultural institutions, and their insidious, often overlooked, associations. Jello Biafra’s and John Greenway’s lyric for California Über Alles is an absurdist imagining of the American fixation on health and self-improvement as further propagation of governmental control over its citizenry, with some of the funniest lines ever heard on an American record. It may be impossible to hear California Über Alles without thinking of some of the wickedly influential comics who came before Dead Kennedys: Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Prime Time Playe

California Dreaming. Bobby Womack. 1969. Mint.

  Today, if someone needs to be reminded of the feeling of blithe, middle class harmlessness during the nineteen-sixties, in the time of the fight for civil rights, simply cue the music of The Mamas and the Papas. The further we move from the quartet’s historical point of origin, the more it becomes clear that its innocuous style made it the ideal group to have become a cultural place marker for a pop audience of maladroits obsessed with nostalgia. Recorded two years after the Mamas and the Papas charted with their version of California Dreaming, Bobby Womack’s rendition     eschews the overly familiar group harmonies of the original, reducing the vantage point of the lyric from a choral to a solo perspective. This move to the personal gives Womack, along with his producer, Chips Moman, and his backing band, the Memphis Boys, the opportunity to invigorate the record with a more nuanced and intimate arrangement. Commensurate with the Womack record’s theme of having to endure one’s bad d