The Test Tube and the Scale

  Punk rock is class deprivation made audible. Conceived in opposition to the mega budget brokerage house that Rock was said to have become, punk was, ironically, offered major label legitimacy from almost its very inception. Yet the rich, and the inequity of its economic machine, wasn’t all that fell under punk scrutiny and its critical eye. Bourgeois values often came under punk attack, as did the hackneyed conventions of romantic love. Recorded for Swell Maps’ 1979 debut LP, A Trip To Marineville, Blam!! lampoons the gesture of reciprocity upon which so many sentimental relationships triumph or fail. Structured to impart the tonic of equilibrium to love’s lifelong companionship project the reciprocal is a feat of generosity without—in theory—physical or emotional boundaries. But what if a romantic     relationship were exposed to the destabilizing machinations of sociopathy or psychosis? Would the balance still hold? Blam!! suggests it would, only tortuously so. “I tri...

Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 video document of Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of England, features a musical exchange between Dylan and Donovan, who’ve only just recently met. Much has been written of the filmed encounter, with a clear consensus declaring Dylan the obvious winner, as if the two had been filmed sparring. Yet what we’re watching is little more than a demonstration of musical traditions, albeit one of them by an artist who clearly understood how traditions can be manipulated and exploited by the steadfast refusal to enslave yourself to their often unstated rules. Over the course of the next two years a similar meeting was made possible by two recordings, the first by Townes Van Zandt in a Nashville recording studio in 1966, followed by the second recording, the release of Dylan’s eighth studio LP, John Wesley Harding, in 1967, also recorded in Nashville. Van Zandt’s record is an exhilarating blues that employs standard rhetorical tropes—“Got a black widow sp...

  Implicit in the recent social slogan “The Future Is Female,” comes this note of prohibitive resignation, “Because there’s no room for her in the present.” Rock and roll fucks with that specious presumption by addressing the present in as nakedly raucous a voice as allowed by current recording standards. Living now, we’re privileged to witness the public emergence of a collective voice restructuring the female image across the media board. Questioning the accuracies at the heart of this narrative as it takes shape and reshapes itself along its evolutionary trajectory actively invigorates the project of social female empowerment. The vocalist Karen O’s performance on Black Tongue is so dynamic a discursive critique of this shift in attitudes that it cunningly both blurs and refines gender distinctions but, given its place in rock and roll history, that’s not so unusual. Black Tongue is about a form of aggression that draws attention to itself in most relationships; a taste for viol...

  Rock and roll is always best enjoyed when you’re young. A conglomerate of dazzling illusions marketed to appeal specifically to the demands of your individual personality, rock and roll was at its most effective when used at those times you most desperately needed an escape out of reality. Youth is the narrative-without-end of that escape.     When we’re young, decamping from the routine is a norm that we hardly tire of subjecting to fanciful     elaboration. Sex and drugs, of course, are the well known pursuits of an adolescent and young adult imagination, but so are petty crime, fashion, paleontology, and television. Inasmuch as we are the consciousness-stricken reliquaries of our own death, it’s the young who’ve taken it upon themselves to cyclically     redefine the style of this grim predicament, sometimes with A-side gladiatorial panache. Beastie Boys worked in a tradition that went back to rock and roll’s very inception, at Little Richard’s un...