The Test Tube and the Scale

  In 1981, when I turned fifteen years old, I was impatient and anxious about the music I wanted to listen to. Falling apart in high school, I was not unlike teenagers everywhere, responding to the chaotic demands of their changing body. It was pre-Obergefell America, and the nineteen eighties was taking its time reaching the Fort Worth barrio where I still lived with my parents. Homosexuality had opened in my mind like a book whose pages I gazed at intensely before I was even enrolled in school but now that adolescence was on me with its inextinguishable fever I had to figure out—all queers do who aren’t spontaneously gifted with revelatory style—how to shift it from my imagination into the light of reality, and if I wanted to. Only two years before, a minority of Americans had felt the chill of Diskonacht, a thinly veiled auto da effigy of blacks and gays held at an inner city baseball stadium. Ostensibly a mass celebration of disco sucks hysteria, the organized immolation of dis...

  Questions of the efficacy of leadership come to light on this debut album opener from fIREHOSE. A rhetorical critique of military hierarchy, Brave Captain assaults the air around you with Gang Of Four inspired guitar and rhythmic intensity. Co-founded by the surviving members of San Pedro stalwarts Minutemen, George Hurley and Mike Watt, along with guitarist/vocalist Ed Crawford, fIREHOSE continues the duo’s American complacency resistance, specifically its inevitable, lamentable hold on popular music. Disinformation among the top tiers of national leadership made it possible for the Lt. Colonel to illegally sell arms to the Islamic paramilitary group with Israel acting as intermediary while the Commander in Chief, high on post surgical recovery drugs, dozed consciously in a hospital bed as the National Security Advisor fed him meaningless details concerning the operation. Urgency was a hallmark of Minutemen’s deliberately messy, signature sound, propelled forward by a trio whose...

Of the many things you can count Boys Don’t Cry, perfect rock and roll single is arguably the easiest to name. An indefatigable crowd pleaser, Boys Don’t Cry captures a defining moment in the build up to the original English new wave. Like the Cars’ My Best Friend’s Girl, released a year before the Cure’s great single, Boys Don’t Cry’s unifying pop exuberance closed a door on the nineteen seventies musical experience by imposing a sense of intimacy on the recording that was in keeping with the punk era’s stated determination to eradicate the impersonality of the stadium rock experience. For a better, contrasting example of the major difference between the two camps’ aesthetics think of the far reaching tone of the Chris Thomas-produced, Stooges/Alice Cooper-influenced Never Mind the Bullocks compared to the fearless hermeticism of the next three PiL records. Robert Smith similarly enjoys the vacillation from pop harmony to its studio produced discordance, often losing artistic focu...

  An explosive declaration of sexual desire. The vocalist, Shirley Owens, doesn’t surrender control of the lyric to passion, but instead projects strength as she recounts, with obvious pleasure, the memory of her experience with the titular sex. From the rhythmic clangor that opens the song to the exclamatory backing vocals that unanimously voice accordance with the lyric sentiment Boys boldly announces the emergence of the second wave of American teen independence, this time around eclipsing the era of race music and introducing the commercial crossover    potential of Jerry Wexler’s rhythm and blues. Boys is all vitality; there isn’t a musical note wasted. In jukeboxes from New Jersey to Hamburg, this remarkably perfect B-side exported the incandescent beauty of young sexual energy to a world awaiting liberation.

  All play is a form of seduction that tends towards congress. It is fearless, an open declaration of the will to power. We play to sharpen our instincts, exercise our strengths and for the briefest taste of invigoration. 20th century American jazz artists were among the eloquent, sublime practitioners of an intensive examination of the rules of creative play as those rules passed through the oppressive system of economic and social segregation. Like today’s hip-hop, ideas and newly minted forms passed through artistic communities like fiery exhalations, refashioned by the bold cast of individual personality. Blossom Dearie worked her way through this inspired process with a distinctly American élan that blurred the lines between sophistication and skylarking. Boum, from My Gentleman Friend, her third record for Verve, released in 1959, is a buoyant recitation, in French, of those natural elements with which our thundering hearts are in resonance when we’re in young love. Dearie’s ...