The Test Tube and the Scale

Almost midway into Damaged Goods, from Gang of Four’s debut record Entertainment!, Andy Gill’s serrated guitar goes silent, making room for this banner headline advertising romantic idealism, “Heated couplings in the sun,” quickly followed by the caveat emptor, “or is that untrue?” For their cover version of Damaged Goods, the Hotrats do something similar, but the breaks between verses and instrumentation aren’t as starkly drawn as they are on the original version. Comprised of Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey of Supergrass, the Hotrats released the covers LP Turn Ons in 2010.    Made up of mostly quintessential British rock numbers, and three Americans, the Hotrats distills the pop essence of each chosen song, revealing, unsurprisingly, a commonality of craft—a shared musical language—that’s been in widespread play since at least the time of the British Invasion. The democratization of Damaged Goods makes hearing the song’s double meanings difficult because its multivalent perspe...

  Have we ever really caught up with Talking Heads? Remain In Light, and its delphic sibling, Speaking In Tongues, have been narrating a dual adventure in world and American myth and prophecy since, respectively, 1980 and 1983. Both records are a layered profusion of ideas that by design resist self-referring cohesion; instead of making a direct appeal to listeners’ emotions, the songs invite objectivity and skepticism, those blunt instruments of intelligence that interpret reality’s countless details. Because global concepts are in an unstoppable state of flux, always changing, the songs themselves are always changing, too, not simply because individual listeners have matured or declined into new perspectives but because the facts of the world are irremediably altered with each passing moment, thus regenerating context and resonance. Late on Remain In Light’s second side, David Byrne recites the lyric, “He has the knowledge of the wind to guide him on,” a reiteration of the side o...

  The most memorable erotic pop tunes—Monkey Man, Sister Ray, Dr Feelgood, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You—close the door on reality, confining the listener within narrowly descriptive     bounds from which only     the breathlessness of succor will issue. In 1977, Donna Summer gave us I Feel Love; four years later, Joan Jett released her cover version of Crimson and Clover. Both records portray the sexual power of surrender; Summer, by assigning it the values of longevity and ecstasy, then demonstrating in real time how its application on a public, dance floor setting could confuse the hierarchies of privileged and marginalized classes in a contradictory age of hedonism and fiercely     contested social and cultural oppression. Jett, likewise, gives herself over to studio performance without holding anything back; her delivery is all surrender, but she also signals a form of seductive aggression, asserting that eroticism may be the ultimate point to Crimson ...

  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...