The Test Tube and the Scale

The cover artwork for the 1957 Blue Note record Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2, shows a now iconic photograph printed in blue ink of the young saxophonist standing alongside his musical instrument. Rollins is posed gazing upwards, the expression on his face one of bemused expectation; the face of mid-century American genius at work. Because of their overt commercialism, record cover artwork often signifies. Its language is almost always erotic, with at least a hint of some form of danger, and, at its very best, is an abbreviated pictorial commentary on contemporaneous commercial aesthetics. The Rollins cover, for instance, is a master class on artistic and hipster hubris, a single image critique of the merging vectors of class dynamics and sexuality in post-war advertising graphics, and a history and genesis of jazz as transgressive cultural dialectic. The abundance of signifiers must have prompted someone in the art department at A&M Records to appropriate the image for the English singer-...

  For his 1979 record Armed Forces Elvis Costello applied metaphors then associated with machinations from the worlds of politics, big business, and the military—institutions where authoritative control is practiced ruthlessly—to the working dynamics of personal relationships for a series of songs that became one of the most dazzling LPs of his—or anyone else’s—career. That same year Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers employed a similar method to Barbed Wire Love from their debut record Inflammable Material, only in their case the metaphors were lifted directly from their experience of neighborhood warfare, Northern Ireland’s The Troubles, and its real world life during wartime. No Man’s Land, rubble, bomb site, barbed wire, Armalite, booby traps, device…the lyric reads like a terrorist’s shopping list, and the resulting effect is a harrowing microscoping of the conflicts’ myriad, clashing realities. Attempting to bring events from The Troubles into clarifying focus, I try imagining my...

  Before his death in 2010, Alex Chiton’s artistic career passed through multiple phases—teen luminary, pop craftsman, studio producer, master archivist of American song—each one underpinning his mythic pop status. While living in New York City after the dissolution of Big Star Chilton recorded and released the single Bangkok, one of the States’ most under appreciated, sexually provocative numbers from that or any other era. Compared with 1978’s other paean to big city sexuality, Chilton bests the cooly seductive, coke fueled bluster of Jagger’s Miss You performance by baring his sexual audacity and fearlessly expressing the bravura wantonness of the sex act. There’s so much vulnerability in the timbre of Chilton’s singing voice that when he turns it inside out, stripping it of its emotive appeal, as he does on Bangkok, he sounds aggressively masochistic. It isn’t a hypnotic performance; it’s too incendiary for that. Descended from vocalists like Gene Vincent, Esquerita, and Eddie ...

  Memory, despite the quiet it projects in moments of recall, is just another form of hyperbole, which accounts for the notoriously unreliability of its character. A faulty memory explains why even the most desperately honest among us was born to lie. I remember being a part of that generation of record store employees who, in the nineties, were the last wave of retail workforce from vinyl’s original era. Though I was subsisting on an income level somewhere between poverty and beggary, and though I was self-medicating with the frequency and the ferocity of a condemned man, and though my clothes almost always reeked of stale cigarettes, I felt nevertheless that, punching the clock at Sound Warehouse, I had been admitted into a rarified world of privilege. No one questions the authenticity of a boy passing from his teens into young adulthood proclaiming himself local faux royalty because an excess of physical stamina has granted him the prerogative; I seized control of my interior te...