The Test Tube and the Scale

  The excitement begins almost at once. An introductory guitar lick followed by the authoritative voice of the Ghost of History Present, also known by his stage name, New York genius Tuli Kupferberg. Equal parts reportage, cultural unmasking, and satirical agitprop—all of it definitively rock and roll—the Fugs’ CIA Man generates excitement by shrinking the distance between audience and performers, the Fugs’ instinct for spontaneity connecting us with inspired creative thought processes rooted in the traditions of high and low cultural Jewish modernity. Before the academic and literary acknowledgment of the voice of multiculturalism, post-modernism drew attention to the artistic potential for restating twentieth century modernist ideas in audio, video, and written languages appropriated from popular culture. This, along with Kupferberg’s personal history of lower east side radical bohemianism and political left wing activism, shaped the sensibility that emerges from CIA Man. Both Ku...

  Released twenty eight years ago, Christiansands still hisses with visionary acuity in its account of the fluid interchangeability of identity around the time that social destabilization became a norm. Using whispered intimacy as the subcultural voice of the coming rampant pathologies—incel active shooter, suicide jihadist, cartel drug mule—Tricky sets a furtively disquieting mood to play upon his contemporary listenership’s heightened awareness of emotional     manipulation and compartmentalism. Christiansands is one of those epochal recordings like Sign O’ the Times or Nirvana’s Polly that isolates with chilling accuracy the tipping point at which violence segregates its desperate antagonist from the relative anonymous security of the common human milieu before turning his virulent ire on an unsuspecting public. Starting with a boy-meets-girl metaphor—the girl sung by the incomparable Martina Topley-Bird—the record deliberately paces itself to give the listener enough ...

  Written by Nashville stalwart Harlan Howard in 1967, Choking Kind appeared that year as an RCA issued single by Waylon Jennings. Two years and a clutch of     distinct variations later, the song shows up on Mavis Staples’ eponymously titled debut record on Volt. From a twenty first century perspective, the two recordings play out like a genre exercise in bias confirmation, fulfilling long held expectations that surround country and western’s idealization of the status quo, its tendency to court market success by often—but not always—reimagining verisimilitude through a personal lens of stasis. In 2024, we call this style conservatism. Mavis Staples’ artistry is kinetic. Her singing voice, like Jennings’, has the power to connect viscerally with an audience without overwhelming you. The major difference between versions is vocal narration. By means of tempo and voice control, Jennings reduces the action of the world around him to a couple’s personal drama, allowing the p...