The Test Tube and the Scale

  The two most beautifully photographed faces of the twentieth century belonged to Billie Holiday and Jimi Hendrix. Both faces project an image of composed, preternatural calm, transcending artistic confidence, and articulating some nascent form of the language of glamour and modern celebrity. Aristocratic and modishly flawed, theirs is an unblemished beauty from the last century before the normalization of     technologically modified     human form. Another striking example of physical beauty enhanced by natural aging processes is the photographed face of Chuck Berry. Pronounced cheekbones, dark eyes animated by a restless intelligence, and a miscreant’s grin that, with skeleton key ease, deciphers the peculiar levity of his genius; these are the slyly bedeviled features that disclose the working apparatus of mid-century’s most playful imagination. Berry shares with Paul Newman an all-American countenance that reads like a map of masculine intrigue; in Newman’...

  As improbable as a musical utopia scored for a blaxploitation film about street life in Oakland sounds, the conceit is in keeping with the fantasies disseminated by the movie genre. Like the mafioso or serial killer, a collective image of the pimp looms in our imagination: surrealist avatar of fantasies of control and submission, entrepreneurial ruthlessness and sociopathy. Either lampooned or absurdly romanticized, the pimp was culturally denied a complexly honest, large screen characterization until Morgan Freeman’s pitilessly unsentimental portrayal of Leo Smalls in Jerry Schaztberg’s Street Smart, from 1987. What Freeman’s performance does is to lay bare the fallacy at the heart of blaxploitation mythology, namely, that poverty is the tragic motor that drives the characters’ most basic choices, leaving only a residual masculine pathos which the creators of fiction have attempted to dramatize in freakishly garish baroque styles (it’s similar to the shallow emotional terrain th...

  Public Enemy’s incendiary manifesto is both polemic and cultural outlaw agitprop. Uneven, with a near meaningless fourth verse that begs for excision, Bring The Noise generates the kind of studio excitement that portends a major cultural shift. Tailoring a new aesthetic, Public Enemy dispenses altogether with the agrarian based folk blues and country that had flowed through rock and roll like a lymph since the time of Elvis and Chuck Berry. What remained for Public Enemy to work with was the power of rock and roll’s amplification, a force commensurate with the band’s creative potential. While other acts—The Who, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols—prior to Public Enemy’s success had harnessed the thew of volume, they were simply acting well within the recognizable constraints of hard rock; those acts were the great disrupters of a commercial audience’s expectations and assumptions, elevating the form beyond recognized cultural borders. Public Enemy, however, assaulted a mass paradigm, cau...