The Test Tube and the Scale

Alongside the understated pop pleasures of this pre-9/11 track from the third Papas Fritas record, Buildings and Grounds, runs a current of genuine excitement as drummer and vocalist Shivika Asthana gropes her way towards the voice of feminine maturity and power. Emptying her studio performance of any trace of humor or sympathy, Asthana connects so directly with her record audience that though the strength of her delivery registers delicately—just above a whisper—it’s enough to carry in its young timbre the slightest wisp of resentment and menace. The sustained eroticism of her performance is trancelike, challenging you to break its spell. Beside You’s musical accompaniment is a quietly dramatic, rhythmic commentary on the lyric’s theme of a young couple broken in half by the inability to communicate beyond the folly of mixed signals. Its tempo is the quickened pulse, the anxious bewilderment of inexperience and the obdurate self-confinement in one own’s head for so long a period of ti...

I remember the time and place where I was when I finally realized that our world was falling apart faster than we could rebuild it. I was seven years old, seated in the front room of the Rosales house, three doors down east of where my parents lived. Surely there was someone from the Rosales family in that room with me that morning, although I can’t say who; my friend David, or his younger brother Daniel, the talented sketch artist. The room was small and rectangular; the front door and the TV at the north end, and a curtained doorway opening into the rest of the house opposite. The light coming into the room from outdoors was diluted by heavy window coverings hung up on a piece of the western exterior wall across from the couch where I sat. The darkness itself, in the failed completeness of its shade and shadow, seemed to carry some disquieting, essential truth about the Rosales family that it would not fully articulate but only left unexpressed in the humorless commentary made by the...

  The difficulty in writing about a personality like Michael Jackson comes in having to choose which one of the performer’s multi-parsed personas to write about. The problem is then compounded by the uncomfortable certainty that Jackson, the wealthy celebrity who continued to produce recorded music, outlived Jackson, the talented vocalist with a gift for challenging himself in the recording studio to produce music that was superior to the product that preceded it. Beginning with Bad, the first record to chronologically succeed the global sales phenomenon of Thriller, Jackson’s recorded output became less and less interesting even as, perversely, his public persona became increasingly weirder. Shortly before his thirtieth birthday, on July 16, 1988, Jackson and Diana, Princess of Wales, forged a cultural merger at Wembley Stadium witnessed by a sold out crowd of 72,000, that went on to become the friendship model for social media contacts to come. So as not to be confused with a con...

In our current time, as the conceit of self-empowerment is being proselytized with the fervor of a religious doctrine, it’s almost refreshing to be reminded of the theme of vulnerability. Produced by Marvin Gaye, The Bells is about those crises of anxiety and paranoia that can attack and annihilate reason when you find yourself so infatuated with someone that you begin to question or doubt that person’s depth of feeling for you. The record exudes a pathos that’s wildly expressive. The two lead vocalists, Henry Dixon and C.P. Spencer, push their voices wonderfully to stylized extremes in order to capture a sense of an overburdened lover’s intensity of feeling. Gaye then mixes in a chorus of    backing vocals that sound like a throwback to the great vocal stylists of the doo wop fifties. The kaleidoscoping harmonies are a virtuoso rendering of the routine alternating cycle of adult love’s comfort and worry. I wish there existed video footage of Gaye exhorting his studio mentees ...