The Test Tube and the Scale

  Lucinda Williams’ singing voice is so personally crafted an instrument of feeling and intensity that on record it evokes the semi-populated backroads of rural loneliness. Like Tom Petty, another idiosyncratic   Southern vocalist with a keenly felt instinct for the short form narrative, she’s too impatient with strident feelings to immerse herself in them like Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison to give them their proper shape and color. Williams fights her way out of bitterness, and shows us the eroticism behind the struggle. On Can’t Let Go, from the 1998 breakthrough LP Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Williams, in response to a recent, one-sided breakup, turns sexual desire into an open outpouring of frustration and dread. Her talent for tying together disparate feelings for the purpose of creating a cogent reality which she then proceeds to detonate in studio realtime, and in song form, is not to dazzle us but to reinvigorate the vernacular along its incautious descent into homogeneous glo

  Near the end of Lovers Of Today, the Pretenders ballad about surviving   love’s tendency to wound and scar, you hear Chrissie Hynde singing—forcing herself to be heard above the silence of the song’s fade out—“I’ll never feel like a man in a man’s world.” The gender distinction is crucial because it allows us to see, with poetic clarity, how our sexual natures, chameleonic and evasive to begin with, are often the final components we look     to replace when repairing the disarrayed ego following a period of emotional tumult. We first heard Kim Deal as the voice of voyeurism back in 1988, watching “him walk her every day into a shady place;” possibly, following the dream logic of the rock and roll experience, the same shade where much of the sexual drama of Cannonball, five years on, unfolds. I like imagining that the Lovely Legs of Gigantic is the very same Last Splash of Cannonball; that is, the woman being watched on the Pixies’ debut LP is the same woman who no longer has to wish

  After experimentation with conventional song forms became a commercially viable practice of making records sometime in the nineteen sixties, the trend quickly became a recording norm across genres. It proved especially fecund in the rapidly metamorphosing rhythm and blues market. American artists were in a fever of innovation, from Sly Stone in California to James Brown in Ohio, from the in-house songwriting staff at Stax in Memphis to the wildly talented bon vivants of Hitsville USA. This was the creative dynamic whose combined genius fused rock and roll’s rhythmic aggression to the manifest eroticism of urban, electric blues, and polished their product with the high sheen appeal of marketable pop sensibilities. Radio listeners and record buyers would soon find themselves transfixed by a radicalized form of rhythm and blues. Another prime mover in Detroit was George Clinton, who, with     Funkadelic, recorded their third album Maggot Brain in Motor City’s United Sound Systems. What’

  Similar in tone to the Neil Young elegy My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue), Edwyn Collins’ seething harangue begins on a note of sadness. Whereas Young cast his vision of modern inertia across an all-encompassing scope, Collins’ focus is smaller, and he works to reduce his subject even lesser by denunciatory, cathartic means. The sadness, it turns out, was only a hint of smoldering rage. Collins’ target is the rock and roll poseur in his natural habitat, Glastonbury, maybe, or Coachella; Reading or Bonnaroo. Collins’ recitation of his indictment is spellbinding; you’re drawn in by his assurances as a performer, despite them sometimes failing him in his effort to make lyrical points; what the hell is a “Zimmerframe”? The song’s greatest pleasure comes from its most obvious contradiction; Collins neatly tailors his musical backing track to his vocal, seamlessly using FM radio rock song conventions which give the record a tonal impersonality similar to what you hear on, say, Animals-era