The Test Tube and the Scale

  The subjective experience of perfection in popular music only came about with the introduction of the 45 rpm single in 1949 by RCA Victor. We’re told from a young age that there isn’t anything that is perfect so when we are witness to perfection, we’re dazzled and captivated, and, developed world capitalists that we are, we must somehow possess it. Produced by Bob Ferguson, Connie Smith’s Burning A Hole In My Mind isn’t only a minor Nashville Sound masterpiece, but, it, like any perfect work, pushes against genre conventions while simultaneously capturing the mood of the era with Smith’s genuine feel for expressing mid-60s ersatz sophistication in the manner of her pop romantic peers Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, Sandie Shaw. Though Smith doesn’t sing with the dynamism of those stalwarts, the strength of her vocal charm is readily apparent; perfection isn’t the absence of flaws, but their organization into a cohesive narrative. One crucial element holding this perfection in ...

  While Babylon is aflame in an endless cycle of disrepair and repair, the indefatigable Natty Dread is tireless in the effort to slow acceleration of the operational speed of global power structures. The tension generated between individual members of both camps—those who are able to negotiate the requisite speeds of our merciless technological age with daredevil, sociopathic finesse and those who instinctively recoil from it—is now so much a part of our global soil that it’s soaked into rock and roll at a cellular level with all the contaminative effect of a radioactive isotope. Like American blues and jazz, reggae is a critique of modern tension from the perspective of historical injustice. What the three disciplines also share is an origin by marginalized personalities motivated by social straits to create a rhythmic aesthetic grounded in a commercially viable and provocatively humanist sensuality that wouldn’t only sell records but also underscore its lyrical urgency. The Jama...

  Like Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife or Sinatra’s Summer Wind, Louis Prima’s Buona Sera’s appeal resonates with both the music audience for which it was first marketed as well as with the     generations that came afterwards, who hear in its pop arrangement wisps of an artistic tradition going back to the progenitor of modern American pop music, Louis Armstrong. A native of New Orleans and the son of Italian immigrants, Prima was keenly aware of the primal significance that mongrelization played in the creation of the live, aboriginal music he heard played in the venues he frequented growing up. “Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history,” said Salman Rushdie; “perhaps we all are…(the soul of democracy hinges precariously on that ‘perhaps’).” So it goes with music, our music. If miscegenation for the advancement of love and the civic betterment of a nation is the truest realization of a living democracy, then the admixture of pop genres is the music tha...