The Test Tube and the Scale

  Deciphering your way through the emotive tension of a Bob Mould lyric is to pick your way through the ambiguities and rough certainties of failed relationships. He surveils comportment between unhappy couples as obsessively as Elvis Costello, but lyrically he’s oblique, guardedly, arduously, marshaling his instincts around a resolute and deeply personal ethics. Mould’s reputation as a solo artist and founding member of Hüsker Dü and Sugar looms large over alternative rock. Like Neil Young, he’s a committed moralist whose popular image is radiant with the vicious hum of his generation’s rejection of a values system. Workbook, released in 1989, only two years after Hüsker Dü’s final record together, declared a clean break with the monorhythmic punk style of his former band; almost every track sounds like an unacknowledged rock classic. By 1990, however, it was clear that, with the release of Black Sheets of Rain, he had once more grown impatient, this time with conventional song st...

  Is there anything sexier than a masculine baritone unafraid to reveal his vulnerability by the sweetly sung admission that he’s lost absolutely everything? It’s an experience tantamount to having a crush whisper secrecies into your ear; it’s not only intimate, but under the right circumstances, flirtatious, too. Chuck Jackson is a marvelously expressive singer, similar in tone to Levi Stubbs, and, although Jackson was clearly working within a recording studio dynamic not shared by the Motown model, both that label and Wand were looking to capture the same middle class AM radio listenership dollars. What’s remarkable about Jackson’s recording of Any Day Now—and, to a lesser extent, Elvis’ recording, released seven years later—is how both versions adhere to oddball, outdated pop arrangements that nevertheless manage to land just this side of irresistible kitsch. For middle class listeners like myself who grew up venerating the post-modern impulse in pop culture, kitsch travels acro...

  The pace at which Another Man’s Thing opens is immediate, unrelenting. Like a herald it announces, almost from the very start, the arrival of an authority not only of the groove but of conscience, too. The densely compressed polyrhythms over which Joe King Cologbo shouts each verse play so fast that the guitarist’s virtuosity quickly becomes an auxiliary voice, the galvanizing contemporary model of communicative freedom. The song is sublime; it easily pushes itself and the listener beyond excitement into a state of urgency, the possessed voice of controlled panic. Imagine instead of lower Manhattan Talking Heads were describing a literal life during wartime somewhere out in west Africa. Cologbo was living and working in Ghana, apart from his family, when the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. When he returned home following the Biafran surrender, and after having been reunited with his family in Ghana, he discovered that, save his family and a relationship with Fela Kuti, he’d...

  The B-side of the signature Alternative TV single Action Time Vision is a live blues called Another Coke. Sniffing Glue fanzine creator Mark Perry executes with spleen and vigor an inspired stream of consciousness screed about the disgust of living in a commodified world filled with corruption. Very little escapes his attention, but the song’s focus is specifically on commodifying the details of one’s life for sale. According to Perry, the process begins at a very young age, when you’re taught to convert your desires into flattery and seduction and, ultimately, the act of sex itself. We’re conditioned then, by our corrupt world, to reduce the experience into a relatable meaning—preferably rich in “depth”—that some of us will then convert into purchasable literature, with the intention of selling it on the open market like so much “health food restaurant apple juice.” What really counts about Another Coke is the live performance tension created by the group and Perry, and which ca...

Of all the kinks that made the nineteen seventies so garishly memorable, the commercialization of young girls in distress may be the one remembered as genuinely disturbing. The spectacle of Linda Blair’s appearance in The Exorcist revealed that not only were movie audiences ready to break with the past for a more intensified experience of fictional horror, but also that, nationwide, ticket buyers were willing to endure queues of cumulative miles to see the torture of a privileged, twelve year old white child. The Exorcist, and its slew of imitations, was soon followed by the major studio releases of Carrie and The Fury, Brian de Palma’s tour de force depictions of psychic energy, both of which feature teenage girls in trouble who turn the tables on their malefactors. Finally came Halloween, a movie so popular and influential it birthed a commercial genre. Broadcast television offered comparative programming. Another controversial role for Linda Blair came in 1974 in Born Innocent, in w...

  Writing about Richard Thompson’s 1972 debut solo record, Henry the Human Fly, for his Album Consumer Guide, Robert Christgau tells us, “Thompson intensifies the common-folk sympathies of the best English folk-rockers into militant class consciousness.” It’s a useful observation if only because it reminds us of two things at once; that The Angels Took My Racehorse Away has more in common with Hank Williams than it does Eric Clapton, and that country music, far from being the contemporary roost for bourgeois arrivistes that it’s now become, was at one time the popular voice for the working poor, foreign and domestic. The song kicks off with the wild fluttering of the wings of angels; accordion and fiddle by John Kirkpatrick and Barry Drunsfield, respectively, and what follows is the uptempo narrative of the loss of a great, beloved beast and good fortune. A large part of what gives this song durability is of course Thompson’s brilliant guitar play, but also the depth of emotion he ...