The Test Tube and the Scale

The film scores of Ennio Morricone are rich with a sense of destiny. Their sensuous details come at us ornately, baroquely, packaged with the falling domino assuredness of inevitability. Invariably, there are key moments in the films that Morricone scores when some terrible plot point befalls a character and the filmmakers will cue the Morricone score as if saying, “See! We told you so.” Fate, that grandiloquent fiction created by man to further rhapsodize his self-importance, had, in Morricone, found its songsmith. John Zorn’s starkly majestic Morricone tribute record The Big Gundown is made up of a series of juxtaposed random sound motifs associated with the history of cinema soundtracks. Its aim is to restore modernism as a cultural touchstone, a stabilizing power of shared associations based not so much in the language of film music as it is in our memory of the language of film music. Alternating between nonverbal and non-English recordings of the human voice and various forms of ...

   An infectious, perverse joy brightens Sister O. M. Terrell’s record of Pentecostal admonishment from 1953. Tickled by our human failing to observe even the simplest precepts of Christian dogma, Terrell sings with an otherworldly exuberance that fails to qualify as symptomatic of a full blown psychosis if only because the spirit of Christian fundamentalism at the heart of her performance still contains an iota of hope for the possiblity of human salvation. Accompanying herself with solo acoustic guitar, Terrell creates a rhythmic blues frenzy fashioned to celebrate the eternal damnation of souls who’ve chosen to live in exile from God’s supposed saving grace. A member of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, Terrell had been practicing entire sanctification—the belief in a form of spiritual perfection achieved through the renunciation of one’s carnal instinct—since her conversion into the Holiness Movement at age eleven after a tent revival meeting in Atlanta in 1922. Thirty on...

  The resurgence in popularity clinched by the Kinks in the nineteen-eighties was a gift to the record buying public we largely have consumers of media to thank for. It began with me in the summer of 1980, when I was collecting singles, and Arista released Lola/Celluloid Heroes from the double live LP, One For The Road. My introduction to Celluloid Heroes was an engrossing experience that called for the record’s repeated plays. What I found remarkable about the song, apart from the diaphanous beauty of Ray Davies’ delicate singing voice, is his gift for lyrical beauty, simultaneously mythologizing the old Hollywood guard beyond our reach while rendering it like a menagerie of flayed animals in its desperate humanity. The following year Arista released Give The People What They Want, which featured the radio success Destroyer, whose themes of mental stress and paranoia resonated Stateside during the first Reagan administration. The second single from that LP, the group’s nineteenth ...

  A few years ago I used to love watching a friend of mine working at her job as a karaoke hostess at a dive bar on the east side of Fort Worth. When singing, she’d sometimes lower her head slightly and, eyes closed, turn her face to the right, as if the note she was summoning was somewhere off in that direction. She’d then use her body to subtly mime a forward rocking motion and boom! Like a detonated projectile, the note was delivered. Written by Bettye Crutcher, the first female songwriter on staff at Stax Records, Better Get A Move On is the lead track off Louise McCord’s 1972 record, A Tribute To Mahalia Jackson, released on the Stax imprint Gospel Truth Records. It’s a deliciously tense R&B number about the perils of ignoring self-awareness, and McCord’s cautionary performance is haughty, authoritative, and sexy. You feel the fullness of her body behind every word of the lyric. The rich sensuality of her performance, and its shared pleasures—hers in giving it, ours in rec...

  March 27, 2023 marked the day of the 129th mass shooting of the year in the United States. On that Monday, American historian and professor of history at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote on her daily Facebook blog, “Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today's Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.” We are a nation of fetishists and totemicists, endowing killing objects with sentimental, romantic projections of our wildest fantasies of American identity. Our chaotic conception of Christianity reaches us from across an Old World European distillation of biases and hatreds that hav...