The Test Tube and the Scale

  Sunday nights at eleven I set my radio dial to 98 FM, KZEW, and waited for radio programmer George Gimarc to queue the instrumental mix of the B-52s’ Runnin’ Around that served as introduction to his two hour show, the Rock and Roll Alternative. I listened regularly to the Gimarc show, looking agog with a teenager’s quarter-focus at how the new artists either embraced or eschewed tradition; the quality of the artistic imagination in revolt my second favorite adolescent curiosity. Looking back at that time—the early to mid-eighties when I was a high school student—it’s apparent now that I was using the spell cast by late twentieth century American media to absorb, in a whirlwind, as much of contemporary culture as I could withstand in order to continue building upon the foundation of identity begun years before with my first memories. What I learned during this period that I spent immersed in the Western pop new wave was how large the sense of anxiety that loomed within our cultur...

Self incrimination in popular song is the comedy of introspection. It differs from the confession only inasmuch as where the latter is a process of disburdenment, the incrimination of self is cumulative, acquiring personal facts that serve as evidence of the artist’s wrongdoing. Songwriters who practice this delicate art are balanced mercurially over a surplus of pity on one side and obsessive indulgence on the other. Leonard Cohen, already a published poet and novelist when he began his recording career in 1967, tells us the secret of this performative dance, saying, “I saw a young man   leaning on his wooden crutch. And he called out to me, ‘Don’t ask for so much.’ And a young woman leaning in her darkened door. She cried out to me, ‘Hey, why not ask for more?’” When Johnny Cash puts these words into his mouth they acquire a remedial American authority that not only predates the commercial rock and roll era, but that also elevates Cohen’s great ballad of personal failings and str...

  Dreamlike and languid, Ted Hawkins’ masterful cover of the Jesse Winchester ballad is paced with the slow and dazed mid-summer eroticism of the season of heat. Like Otis Redding before him, Hawkins sang from deep inside his torso but on record he’s more relaxed than Redding, languorous as the calm Gulf waters he’s singing about it. Hawkins was a modern troubadour, mixing soul, blues, and country folk without making an ostentatious fuss about his influences. In the great folk tradition—Hawkins’ formidable talent easily transcended genre; Robert Christgau called him “an American original”—Hawkins and his voice had the power to unify. After DGC released his breakthrough major label     record, The Next Hundred Years, store employees at Sound Warehouse kept it in heavy in-store rotation. We were a disparate group of the record’s fans, and a large part of its appeal was that a sense of justice had been gained, Hawkins’ great talent having been at last vindicated. Without kno...

Nick Cave called him “the black unicorn,” a description that explains his mythic stature. His name evokes the image of an American jazz revolutionary who made Cool an ethos. He was pimp and genius, junkie and boxer, beatifically handsome, and his speaking voice is what the devil tempting Jesus on the mountain with the spoils of earthly glory must have sounded like. But for Billy Boy, recorded for the LP Milestones, his second record for Columbia after he had been signed by legendary record label and production pioneer George Avakian, Miles Davis reduced his sextet to a percussive trio. Red Garland, piano, Philly Joe Jones, drums, and Paul Chambers, double bass, all swing with a bop relentlessness that had already become stylistically passé for Davis. His absence from the record confirms this. For Milestones he’d assembled a group of artists who were each in a period of artistic transitioning. Like an antenna he instinctively understood the value of the energy this gave them, and how it...

  Mythology—that baroque antecedent of perspective—triangulates with beauty and morality as points for understanding the way we live now. Laurie Anderson approaches her subject—the inscrutability of modern culture, and its alienating effects—with an earnestness both playful—“You know, I think we should put some mountains here, otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?” she asks, mapping the vast landscape of our strange and artificial country—and solemn. The two intonations are lifted directly from the commercial world of pop, whose conventions Anderson shrewdly exploits with an intensely cool tenderness that gives her performance the added air of ritual mystery. In Big Science’s inspired pairing of normality and the sinister as the prevailing dispositions of the national consciousness, it echoes Talking Heads’ great album closer The Big Country. But the similarity ends there. What Talking Heads achieved, the band’s unequivocal success, took place within the rock and...