The Test Tube and the Scale

The great, impassioned project of girl group pop romanticism was the reduction in scope of of the extraordinary body of work from the preceding generation, the big band/swing era, whose typically elevated forms of expression brought us an aristocracy of twentieth century American pop. It was a time of serious economic and social deprivation, when work was considered such an essential tool of survival that, conversely, self consideration and -contemplation were often thought of as unaffordable luxuries. The music reflected this line of thinking; it evokes luxury and glamor, creating a fantasy of over abundance and wealth that still persists today, albeit to a hip-hop soundtrack. World War II, however, shrank the globe, and when the men who fought it returned to the States, the music they came home to was tense with the gradually decreasing gap between rural and urban experience. New York City’s The Cake, along with famed LA production duo Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, conjure the spir...

The spell of good will cast by a certain kind of pop music is intensely short lived, and what is likely to remain of it, in trace form, is an iota of memory of having experienced the pleasure of fevered extremes. Executed with such an assured lightness of touch, Baby, I Could Be So Good At Loving You achieves a kind of commercial triumph by bringing together two popular genres—R&B and easy listening—without insult to either one. The group vocalist, Floyd Butler, shows us, with an astute and relaxed sophistication, just how far to pitch the voice of AM radio seduction without it tipping into a mimicry of overt sexuality. His performance follows in the tradition of the great sixties master stylists Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Mathis, artists who not only expanded the pop lexicon with jazz and Broadway musical influences, but who also, through artistic dynamism, helped establish a vibrant new paradigm of beauty and style, and whose pop art even manages to sidle into ...

  Of all the worlds of artificiality and simulacra that commercial radio has asked us to inhabit, it’s the ones created by Hall and Oates that are probably least offensive of all. The dominant odor there is an admixture of bar soap, open bottles of Zima, and worn female designer gym socks. Questions of health and hygiene arise because, of Hall’s many talents, the strength to cultivate an audience is the one most obviously always at work. What makes a Daryl Hall record so enjoyable—especially those he made with John Oates—is the lack of concentration required of the listener for them to work. Which does not make them disposable. Like the songs of Barry Gibb and Earth, Wind and Fire, the best Hall and Oates work connects with you at a level where matters of grave importance happily do not intrude, and it becomes some of your favorite songs; if asked to choose which one we love most, it’s virtually impossible to answer. Sara Smile? I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)? There’s a lot of amb...

  Just as Bob Dylan once recalibrated the rules of English folk romanticism to accommodate his definitive, wickedly surreal vision of media over-saturation in the age of American exceptionalism for 1965’s Desolation Row, Nick Cave now calls roll on twenty first century western archetypes whose lives coalesce around the crisis of a shared, distressing complaint. Compared with the dreamlike proceedings of the Dylan record, Cave sees the nightmare in our quotidian lives and frames it in eschatological detail. Released in 2003, when the conflagration that was rock and roll had already been reduced to a pile of smoldering embers, the Bad Seeds drench the mess in kerosene and kick it flying. The record’s co-producers, Nick Launay and the band, emphasize the riotous interplay among band mates, investing the quarter-hour long pop epic with a sense of careening motion, Martyn P Casey’s authoritative, redoubtable basslines guiding the song across rapidly shifting tectonics as the twin guitar...