The Test Tube and the Scale

Are the dominant musical instruments—rhythm section and steel guitar—on this early nineteen sixties track a signal of withdrawal from or a commitment to reality? Believing It Yourself is pop simplicity perfect with a honky tonk-swing dynamism that charges it with dancefloor vigor. The intimacy of a country artist from honky tonk’s golden age connecting with his working class demographic strengthens the potency of the poetry’s muscle until it’s alive with an almost physical robustness that a few of us want to experience again and again. Typically, honky tonk music is made by and for physical laborers, and its relation to its listenership is one of human kinesis, its rhythms purposed specifically for dancing or sex. Only those bound inextricably to the demands of work, who know intimately the total sum of its exacting toll, can be said to know, through music, its most effective escape. If it’s through a sensory engagement with humanity that we’re first acquainted with the values of sympa...

Rock and roll’s first wave in the nineteen-fifties was about the shockingly fast process of transforming the dangerous, animal energy of post-war, atomic age youth into a marketable cultural expression. A decade later, artists practicing rock and roll began romanticizing and idealizing that energy, as well as ambitiously expanding rock’s musical vocabulary, until the nineteen-seventies, when a new generation of punks, influenced by Iggy and the Stooges, and by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, began the next logical process of critical analysis of that energy for social meaning and context. This was a time so fecund with prodigious talents that it’s now split into two periods, punk and post-punk, with some artists whose careers occupy both camps. Howard Devoto, co-founder of both Buzzcocks and Magazine, records with fiendish clarity the tensions and resentments that simmer just beneath the surface of our relationships. Gifted with a modern, literary sensibility, it was Devoto who au...

  Employees at Sound Warehouse began playing the Smashing Pumpkins’ debut record, Gish, in heavy in-store rotation upon its release in 1991. It resonated with my peers in a similar way that, contemporaneously, records by Jane’s Addiction and Depeche Mode had also. That is, it jettisoned qualities like sophistication and subtlety and irony, and instead connected with its listenership viscerally, like hard drugs do, or rough sex. It was naively pretentious and, like so much of the music of that time, rudely cool. This resolute indifference was Smashing Pumpkins’ marketable strength, and they were unselfconscious about appearing dim-witted. It isn’t that their music isn’t intelligent, but it’s intelligence hollowed out, then stuffed with more intelligence until all you’re responding to is a formal density without any artistic impulse or spontaneity. Enjoying this music is like admiring an automobile factory or a construction site. Or those bodybuilders so packed with proteins that the...

  In the modern era, the fantasy of summer as idyllic utopia began with Gershwin, “when the living is easy.” Summertime’s mood is one of languor, a condition not so much of the moment as it is of the animal soul. It’s only a minor exaggeration to surmise that all of our mental crises, our fits of mania and insolence, can be traced to the shared delusion that we are capable of outpacing languor’s preferred tempo. As J.G. Ballard once noted,“All my own fiction could be regarded as an attempt to escape from time—or, more exactly, from linear time, as it seems to me . . . the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives are intelligible only in non-linear terms.” All art endeavors to represent our reality of non-linear time, and any artist forced into outsider status because of a culture too bigoted to properly market what has never before been marketed knows more than anybody else about that reality. The venture of pop music into radical expression of non-linear time co...