The Test Tube and the Scale

  Translated into English as The Pathway to Good, Tim Maia’s paradisiacal hymn to Brazil’s UFO cult Rational Culture is a richly textured evocation of after hours disco mythology: the cavernesque darkness of the air conditioned interior, the early morning gravitational fatigue just before your second wind kicks in, the quaalude induced, rollercoaster rhythms of drug comfort. The music itself, though of secondary concern in the disco experience, inevitably proves to be of grave consequence if only because our expectations, contrary to intelligence gathered from previous disco excursions, are set unreasonably high during sobriety. Not for nothing did Morrissey once exhort the record buying public to hang the DJ. Hang the blessed DJ. Yet disco was the site where strangers became family; not the loving strangers with whom you shared address and DNA but the dysfunctional one who knew to give you the proper space to self-isolate while disassociating. In translation from the Portuguese, M...

  Sung by a “short, short man” to the “big woman” he’s sharing a love affair with, Joan Armatrading’s album opener from 1983 is passion set ablaze with its lyrical depiction of the fetishization of physical abuse, such that it tests the limits of contemporary convention. Today’s culture urges musical audiences to consider lyrical content from empathic perspectives that lean from critical appreciation towards emotional assessments antithetical to rock and roll era shibboleths, including the unruly subject of the full, robust spectrum of sexual desire. For (I Love It When You) Call Me Names, Armatrading crafted a traditional pop structure that shifts the listener’s emotional responses across its three compositional features. There are the grisly details of the affair that occupy the aggressive expository verses, the core elation that defines the relationship heard in the exultant chorus, and finally, the view of the couple’s dynamic seen from outside their lives together. The song ch...

  One of the means of expressing resistance to the imposition of mass homogeneity upon a populace by a governmental head or body is the use of satire. It’s a tricky art form to deploy, and our culture is littered with countless examples—including some sacred cows—of failed attempts to execute it. But when satire connects with its intended     target, the results are revelatory, offering clear-eyed perspectives on the machinations of social and cultural institutions, and their insidious, often overlooked, associations. Jello Biafra’s and John Greenway’s lyric for California Über Alles is an absurdist imagining of the American fixation on health and self-improvement as further propagation of governmental control over its citizenry, with some of the funniest lines ever heard on an American record. It may be impossible to hear California Über Alles without thinking of some of the wickedly influential comics who came before Dead Kennedys: Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Pr...