The Test Tube and the Scale

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marsha

  Well before cool became the much coveted, and universally recognized, style signifying teenage alienation, sociopathy, and pretense, it was a coping attitude adopted by individuals who were forced to bear the brunt of irony’s cruelest truths. Cool is the immeasurable distance an individual puts between himself and his interior life to mask the true temperature of his intelligence. Mose Allison, a white pianist marketed to American blues and jazz audiences from the mid-fifties onwards, endured more than his share of irony throughout his career, and projected so much cool that the Who made his best composition world famous and the Clash scratched his name onto the Sandinista! lyric sheet. The irony of two of England’s most powerful exponents of hard rock separating themselves temporarily from the root of their crafts to lend their singular sense of urgency to this country’s most polished purveyor of cool is only one example of how irony’s slow drip found its way into pop marketability.

  Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbooks series is comparable to an extensive travelogue across the United States’ romantic fantasy of itself. The music, of course, dazzles; taken as a whole, the abundance of creative achievement stuns the imagination. Analogous to the beauty of refined intellectual articulation, the clarity of Fitzgerald’s singing voice flawlessly restates the collective jumble of emotions unloosed by American modernity’s most complex cultural imperatives by a process of distillation and reassembly that we typically associate with the subconscious and dreams. Delicacy and humor were the stardust of her art, and under its spell it’s possible to reassess such failures of the imagination as our tendency to collapse beneath the stress of heartbreak. Unlike her closest musical peers, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose best work challenges us into new, pioneering modes of endurance as they effortlessly practice contortions of emotional duress, Fitzgerald’s is the art of charm and

  Sometime in the late seventies I glanced up from my current musical interest, disco, and caught sight of the hirsute-faced Texan who wore his long hair parted down the center, in twin braids. He was Willie Nelson, sprung into national fame as though fully formed from the head of Roy Acuff.     A master of musical understatement, Nelson also synthesizes pop forms with the inspired fluency of a professional craftsman.  After helping to establish Outlaw Country—the great synthesis of rock and roll and honky tonk—the man who wrote Crazy for one of the finest Pop sensibilities of the late twentieth century, Patsy Cline, Nelson began a progressive move towards commercial respectability for his first record on Columbia Records, the breakthrough Red Headed Stranger. His Blue Eyes, from that LP, shares with Acuff’s version a core of performative sadness as its foremost arresting quality. Both songs blow right past the limitations of genre conventions but only the Acuff version can make a disc

  For their cover of Tom Waits’ Blind Love, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band recreate a version of country music both satisfyingly ersatz and authentic. Its authenticity comes courtesy of Seger’s remarkable ear for American music, its nuances and boldness, its ability to measure the breadth of your expectations against its capacity to surprise and excite. Seger’s choice of styles—replacing Waits’ idiosyncratic studio arrangements with familiar recording studio conventions—not only reconfirms Waits’ stature as American songwriter but also weds to traditional country a contemporary rock sensibility that makes commercial sense without deadening the vitality of either genre. In Cocteau’s great film, Orpheus, from 1950, we see the title character, portrayed by Jean Marais, fastidiously working the control knob of a car radio (the Rolls Royce lent to him by a suborder of Death, played by the steel-eyed and beautiful María Casarès) that secretly, mysteriously, broadcasts the poetry that w