The Test Tube and the Scale

  Writing in 1973, Susan Sontag observed, “Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past….” The same should be said about recorded music. I’m not under the impression that there was more evidence of madness in our country a century ago than there is today, I only assume it has a different…quality. Time has made it surreal, by which I mean that when I consider a case of madness today it’s always as a theoretically manageable medical condition. For obvious reasons, it’s impossible to think of the past in this same way. What keeps me returning to this version of the 1878 Elijah Hoffman hymn is the tone of near hysteria I hear in Da Costa Woltz’s singing voice, delivered without irony. It...

  In the process of desentimentalizing the theme of home for an astute pop audience, Outkast distills the dynamics of Atlanta’s black market economy into era-defining, self-mythologizing lyric rock, similar in tone to Let It Bleed and 1999. Like those masterworks, Aquemini cuts through basic assumptions of the limitations of the western pop experience. Without any formal innovations, the Georgia duo explicate their local reality in a vividly blunt language that broadens your understanding of humor, empathy, and violence, redefining their place in the pop vernacular in the age of the Contract With America and active mass shootings. Inasmuch as both language and economy are models of expression, twin variants within cultures—in this case, hip hop and late stage capitalism—whose rules are in constant flux and, increasingly, beyond the reach of the average man, Aquemini is terminal prophecy, looking forward critically to who we’ve become in the new century, when a person’s worth is mea...

  The good news is that the Australian recording artist Kevin Parker—who releases records under the name Tame Impala—is as adept at reinterpreting twentieth century pop music for a twenty-first century listenership as any artist has been since the Beatles went about refining the art form roughly sixty years ago. Apocalypse Dreams is about entropy of the will and the attempt, though futile, to impose transcendence onto a string of disappointments that has eaten its way into, and has come to dominate, a life. The record’s production shimmers with a brilliance suggestive of what could be a pop style typical of our technology-pervasive age. There’s little commitment to emotional expression in Parker’s singing voice. Nor does he fully disengage by way of cool; his talent falls somewhere in between. A gift for melody, and of pop sensibilities, allows you to register the tension of the lyric, and a comic twist in the final verse elevates the material into shared company with Blondie’s Ato...

  Before disco even began to develop, before Giorgio Moroder and programmable beats, men were leaving their hometowns for urban locales hoping to redefine, for themselves and for the culture at large, what their childhoods had taught them about the masculine dynamic. Queer men pre-Obergefell were always made to negotiate the labyrinth of introspection with an actor’s intensity, often in madness-inducing solitude. Then, in the nineteen-seventies, amid bi-coastal struggles to unify a jumbled complex of disparate personalities and sensibilities into an allied consolidation worthy of representational power, a friend—to what would become known as the gay community—emerged, one who had ostensibly been present all along. The cover artwork for Donald Fagan’s 1982 solo record The Nightfly pictures an idealized image of the disc jockey alone with his deck, the narrative of his playlists his sole connection to the outside world. But solitude is not a heroic American virtue. It was the late ni...