The Test Tube and the Scale

The world I was born into in 1966, the world that gave rock and roll its temporary home, began sometime in the early days of August, 1945. It was a period of epic cruelty, culminating in the twin blasts of nuclear energy that signaled the start of yet another gory wave of American triumphalism. Mankind had entered into the twentieth century bloody and death-obsessed, hurtling now towards annihilation at speeds inconceivable to preceding generations. Musical tempos favored by American jazz artists—many of whom had either direct or indirect knowledge of the modern savagery—echoed the chaotic urgency of industry and resonated with pop audiences who were now teaching themselves how to live within the shadow of the threat of world destruction; but a new aggression, less refined, openly sexual, and cathartic, would soon find its way into music. This aggression, steeped in multi-generational years of indigent survival and preternatural strength, transitioned out of the musical tradition that ...

  In 1993, just one year before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Gumball from New York City released its second single for Columbia Records. About a carload of musicians en route to a gig and pulled over for reckless driving, Accelerator is definitive American car radio rock and roll, and a blast of physics, its momentum pulling the listener in with centrifugal strength. Accelerator failed to connect with a mass audience, which had already pledged its attention—not undeservedly—to grunge. On commercial radio, an insidious trend that began long ago was showing signs of having created terminal spoil. Rock and roll’s principle binding agents, rhythm & blues and country & western, had been segregated into competing subgroups by moneyed interests motivated by market segmentation. By the time of grunge rock’s charts success, rock and roll had undergone so many iterations since its mid-century beginnings that a threadbare effect —of the kind Plato warned in his critique of the copy—was now ...

  In 2004, fin de siecle irony revealed itself the engine within punk conventionalism when a quintet of blisteringly talented Swedish boys donned matching outfits to record this comically vivid dispatch from the teen apocalypse, warning of the horrors of conformity. The Hives had a minor mainstream success combining their votary’s grasp of retro, mid-sixties garage rock intensity with high gloss, high dollar production values. But, at the turn of the century, their intended demographic, stoned on video games and drug regimens from both the white and black markets, largely ignored the band of Northern European dandies, preferring instead the radio dedicated Green Day and Foo Fighters. Of the three acts, with either direct or indirect ties to punk, only the Hives effectively managed to avoid appealing to mass audience sentimentality by their deft use of tempo, brevity, and shock. Never in a hurry to rid themselves of their influences’ long shadows, the band sped through their best ma...

  The Indian film composer Vijaya Anand takes all the giddy highs of new wave—the synthesized blips and dancefloor tempos, the dispassionately sung vocals—and in one 45 rpm single casually dismantles its signature cool detachment with the bravura, life affirming titular declaration. New wave sprung, fully formed, from the wildly experimental, polylingual hotbed of post-punk; it’s post-punk in mass marketable form. And, though dancing was sometimes considered as little more than a theory of post-punk, in new wave it was praxis. New wave dancing was a tribal practice; an assertion of, and a claim to, identity. With Dancing Is Beautiful, Anand pays tribute to its essential role in new wave’s brief history, but also manages to place it in a broader, humanist context. Dancing, Anand says, is beauty itself. From the 1992 Luaka Bop compilation Asia Classics Vol. 1: The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand: Dance Raja Dance. April 13 021

  When the Hilltop label released A-11 in 1965, racial segregation was so inseparable from the reality of life in the United States that it’s not impossible to now enjoy the record’s sensual dynamic with full cognizance and appreciation of its roots in Jim Crow demographics. Is it thrillingly perverse to untether your imagination from politesse and allow it to wander into the mind of a 1960s white supremacist? Did my first generation American uncles—whose parents immigrated, maybe illegally, to this country from Mexico—fight in the Pacific theater to win their queer nephew the right to fantasize over the same sex bodies of neo-fascists in tight denim jeans and western boots, leaning menacingly against a phantom jukebox inside of a smoky, mid-sixties, whites-only Tennessee honky tonk; according to mythology, so did American bigots fight for all queer white boys and boys of color to dream of one day licking men's boots. Listening to A-11 with twenty-first century ears you do get the ...