The Test Tube and the Scale

  Romance is a theater of heightened expectations, a stylized game of co-conspirators in which reality is often referred to, but only inasmuch as it advances a fantasy of selves. The object of romance isn’t love itself, but its simulacrum; the fantasy that when life turns its glum and silent face to us, we’ll outrun it and never surrender to boredom. The songwriter who most clearly understood the sound of post-war America’s infatuation with pop romanticism, capturing its moods and textures, was Burt Bacharach. His songwriting talent was to wed ersatz sophistication to accessible song forms, a combination that made the experience of heartbreak feel so contemporary, so modern, it still recalls those cartoon Roy Lichtenstein ingenues in startling color and Ben-day dotted emotional torment. He also relocated a song’s point of tension from overt sentiment to that perfect moment when romance tips into eroticism. Where most songwriters from previous generations went in search of the timel...

A theme of experiencing alienation madness from the isolating effects of modern technology as expressed by a group of musicians enjoying global success may ring hollow but, as realized on Radiohead’s Airbag, the concept works, drolly reimagined as a fantasy rebirth into twenty-first century consumer culture. Like Roger Waters, Thom Yorke’s voice carries the unmitigated strain of modern living, and, like Waters, he risks self-parody every time he opens his mouth to sing. But on Airbag he’s aware of the power of his voice to convey genuine desperation, finding cathartic relief in the refrain, “In an interstellar blast I am born again.” Unambiguous and inflammatory, it’s a pronouncement descended from the White Album’s infamous “When you talk about destruction…count me out…in…”, and evokes the Red Army Faction’s messianic commitment to extremism, Ted Kaczynski’s gnomic distress, and the bewildering monotony of today’s internet conspiracy savant, practicing public violence and struggling t...

If the concentration of world wide wealth in the hands of a quantifiable few weren’t enough to convince you that the rest of us are now a living culture awash in the trickle down detritus of ruling class castoffs, then Air Conditioning, Sleaford Mod’s empirical broadside describing this culture, should be. While they’re not the Clash, the duo functions as a dynamic set of eyes and tongues, reporting on a local, and thereby global, ugliness without any musical fussiness to lessen the urgency of their dispatch (what they do share with the Clash), only occasionally acknowledging the beat and at times veering off into an argot they don’t even care translates well or not. Appropriately enough for an act performing from within a real-time apocalypse, Air Conditioning is all panicked tempo, and dispels the fallacy, like the literature of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, that the world will conveniently end all at once on some unspecified future time and date. The world is ending right now,...

  Back in 1978, when Van Halen released its debut record, I learned that though fights can often be avoided, the brutality implicit in violence is a pet of circumstance, and roams unleashed. For the three years that I attended middle school, students from the Worth Heights barrio where I grew up, together with neighboring Hubbard Heights and Carter Park students, were antagonists in yearly school wide clashes with students from differing social demographics. I forget the chronology but the respective clashes involved Mexican nationals one year, blacks the next and, finally, whites—known then as “ropers.” These racist engagements were intensely short-lived, usually beginning around the start of the school year with insults exchanged in the hallways between classes or an isolated fist fight at the outdoor, all-asphalt tether ball courts. By the end of the week tensions had grown unbearably disruptive, often with skirmishes erupting randomly, spontaneously, throughout the Friday morni...

  Of the many uses for religion sought out by American Christians within their myriad faiths, the least talked about may be fear. Americans promulgate the claim that moral value systems give our lives meaning and purpose without bothering to ask if these values are at core a mass reconfiguring of social and supernatural fears handed down to us from preceding generations. Americans are possessed by fear, in all its insidious forms, often practicing religion in order to intensify it, give it the monstrous dimensions of drug use or madness. It’s also become the work of the twenty-first century church in this country to help transmogrify the soul-hardened quality of fear into anger, with the intent of remaking it, under influence of those twin pillars of bourgeois virtue pride and self-importance, into a socially viable form of civic rectitude and political advancement. What then of that breed of true believer who rejects the politesse of contemporary living in favor of the radioactive...

  I entered high school in the fall of 1980 when I was fourteen. Emotional Rescue, a record I still think of highly, was number one on the charts. I had just broken with a group of friends so I entered my final years of schooling awkwardly alone. I can remember getting to school that first week before first bell without an idea of what to do with myself before classes started. Eventually I found     a second floor spot opposite a flight of stairs, near the school office where I could passively await first period. Along with a few stand alone students, I held up a bit of wall, just as I would many years later in gay bars in Fort Worth and Dallas, silently cruising with a beer bottle in my right hand. From that second story spot on the wall I watched as the coaches climbed the steps from the ground floor where they’d entered the school after parking their cars on the street out by the football field house. On their way to the office, they made a solemn entrance, practicing ...

  Germany in the twentieth century was the site of Nazism, the Berlin Wall, and Baader Meinhof terrorist attacks. It is fixed in my imagination, like the States and Great Britain, as a locus of extreme behavior and therefore difficult to imagine as a place without punk rock antecedents. Barbed wire and the Stasi. Arbeit Macht Frei. And, as an old English philosopher once reminded us, “cheap dialogue. Cheap essential scenery.” Compared to the miscreant youth who helped to inaugurate America’s nascent punk scene, most of whom were charmed with the cultivated sexy allure of street delinquency and glamor, the German stars behind krautrock were endowed instead with intellectual charisma, the ascetic glow of visionaries freshly emerged from their     sequestered cells after rigorous study and impassioned syllogistic debate. The last track of Neu’s legendary first three records, After Eight is equal parts New York Dolls outtake and Universtät dialectic. It signifies so strongly ...

  Two years prior to the Biafran surrender that ended the Nigerian Civil War, a report entitled “Industrial Survey Nigeria 1968” disclosed the sobering statistic that 70% of the nation’s 625 largest manufacturing businesses were owned by non-Nigerians. In addition, less than 6% of Nigerians controlled fixed foreign assets, while Britain controlled 56% and the US 20%. In an effort to take back their economy the west African country issued the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree and took other assorted measures that became known as “Indigenization” and “Nigerianization.” A year later, at Ginger Baker’s recently constructed Batakota Studios in Lagos, Orlando Julius and an assortment of musicians recorded the material that would become the legendary LP Orlando Julius and the Afro Sounders. Julius was already well known in Nigeria first as a saxophonist on the colonialist-friendly Highlife scene, then, along with the great Fela Kuti, as reinvented Afrobeat master. Anthemic, horn drive...

  A paper insert included with the 1976 Patti Smith LP Radio Ethiopia lists a dedication to the Queen of Sheba, and a photograph of Smith wearing a Rastafari T-shirt bearing a depiction of the Lion of Judah. It’s a striking image, suggesting a cultural connection between the recently murdered Emperor of Ethiopia—who claimed lineage to King Solomon—and Rimbaud, who famously fled to Ethiopia after abandoning poetry, and to whom Radio Ethiopia is also dedicated, and on whose behalf Smith claims a lineage to rock and roll. Looking back, what at first glance appears to be a trite conceit actually bears some idiosyncratic logic; bringing together the poet who advocated the “derangement of the senses” and a god who counted marijuana among his earthly, religious sacraments. Backed by the Soul Syndicate for producer Keith Hudson, Delroy Wilson embarks inward for a journey east to Africa, to Zion, capital city, existential home of reggae. Earl Smith’s guitar and the rhythm section of George ...

  In 1976, Ofege released its second album, The Last of the Origins, after having formed earlier that decade, all band members still in their teens at St Gregory’s College in Lagos. Taken from that second album, Adieu is both loose and tightly wound, the work of serious young men with a talent for rhythm and dense sonic texture. It’s an accomplished music that easily recalls the furious control of Santana’s debut record. Music played at this level of rhythmic virtuosity establishes such a direct, visceral connection with the listener that the effect can be erotic. It’s remarkable that Ofege’s band members began playing together at that age when our carnal instincts are still fresh and we’re learning to personalize our desires until they become intrinsic. On The Way Young Lovers Do, Van Morrison romanticized the intensity of young passion, giving it a poetic vocabulary that still quakes the ground of anyone who hears it, destabilizing what we only thought we knew about ourselves. Ad...