The Test Tube and the Scale

  First I fell in love with playing records then with the radio. I remember alternating between a pair of album rock stations, isolated from the rest of the world, on summer afternoons then again at night after everyone had gone to bed. This had to be the mid seventies because Born To Run was in heavy rotation, playing so much of the time. The song sounded old, from another generation, and I heard it so often that I eventually thought that it was going through a commercial revival, something to do with American Graffiti, maybe. Two other songs that I can remember receiving a lot of airplay around this time were Help Me by Joni Mitchell (Warner Bros 1974) and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams (Warner Bros 1977). I fixated on those two because I had an older sister who was just then transitioning into adulthood and I was convinced that, deeply embedded within the lyric of both songs, were clues that I could one day decipher for help in developing the proper codes for a personal conduct and styl...

  Luke Gaines’ weirdly erotic look at Baader-Meinhof from the inside is appropriately claustrophobic, and, in tone, conspiratorial, drawing us in by means of Gaines’ keenly deployed pop acumen. His over stylized vocal delivery might prove for some listeners an affectation too far but it’s not the first time a rock and roller squeezed notes out of the side of his face in the effort to feign tough guy romanticism. The hint of cultism suggested by the group’s terrorist cell history gives a feeling of existential discomfort that, together with the song’s flamboyant disco rhythmic texture, is akin to feeling trapped in an after hours nightclub after having ingested too much of the wrong drug, then compulsively, repeatedly, replaying the     song.

   Rhythmic intensity, coupled     with rural blues, gives truth to the illusion that poverty is a mountainous stillness; it’s an adjunct of political will, and it moves with the snail’s pace, dim-wittedness of a Texas politician plotting his next gerrymandered district. The dense concentration of human will impounded in the plague cloud of poverty generates so much energy that, inevitably, sparks fly from its vast array of aggregate cultures; the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks, favelas, the South African townships. You can hear that mysterious power come to life in the brilliant guitar riff that opens Awungilobolele, the lead track from 1985’s great Earthworks compilation record, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The alarming, arresting quality of that riff, especially as it transitions into the groove that becomes the song’s central motif, binds you at once to the unifying majesty of great pop art; the belief that the human soul is a jukebox and, if yours is prop...

  If you can recall with any degree of clarity Courtney Love’s televised appearances during the heights of her popularity in the nineties, it might be with a shudder of embarrassment. Love was determinedly messy and her every move, though apparently spontaneous, was itself a calculated provocation. She seemed always in the business of wresting celebrity from its media managers—the journalists, the photographers, the interviewers from MTV—and, consistently, she deliberately made herself appear uncool before them.       Her restlessness made a lot of people uncomfortable, as if unpredictability made her more dangerous than, say, Howard Stern. In January, 1998, female sexuality and the male power dynamic reached an exploitative nadir in the States when, in a television speech, President Bill Clinton spoke the now infamous line, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Nine months later, Hole released Celebrity Skin, its third record. The third single from that...

  According to common rock lore it was at Altamont where the short lived American fantasy known as the Summer of Love met its day-long, ignominious end. Six months earlier, in a rented house in Belgravia, London, Judy Garland’s dead body was found in her bathroom, unofficially bringing to an end that period of golden age American show business when fame was still new, and quietly, busily, transitioning into cultural mythology. Mid-century, solo vocalists from Garland to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, were, through dramatic execution of the American songbook, introducing into popular performance the erotic immediacy of narcissistic allure and glamor. When Capitol Records released Autumn Leaves in 1955, Cole was already a two-decade practicing veteran of his craft, and, after only three words of the song’s introductory verse, you hear yourself led into the quintessence of high pop romanticism by a pair of masters. The Nelson Riddle orchestral arrangement...