The Test Tube and the Scale

  Writing in 1973, Susan Sontag observed, “Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past….” The same should be said about recorded music. I’m not under the impression that there was more evidence of madness in our country a century ago than there is today, I only assume it has a different…quality. Time has made it surreal, by which I mean that when I consider a case of madness today it’s always as a theoretically manageable medical condition. For obvious reasons, it’s impossible to think of the past in this same way. What keeps me returning to this version of the 1878 Elijah Hoffman hymn is the tone of near hysteria I hear in Da Costa Woltz’s singing voice, delivered without irony. It...

  In the process of desentimentalizing the theme of home for an astute pop audience, Outkast distills the dynamics of Atlanta’s black market economy into era-defining, self-mythologizing lyric rock, similar in tone to Let It Bleed and 1999. Like those masterworks, Aquemini cuts through basic assumptions of the limitations of the western pop experience. Without any formal innovations, the Georgia duo explicate their local reality in a vividly blunt language that broadens your understanding of humor, empathy, and violence, redefining their place in the pop vernacular in the age of the Contract With America and active mass shootings. Inasmuch as both language and economy are models of expression, twin variants within cultures—in this case, hip hop and late stage capitalism—whose rules are in constant flux and, increasingly, beyond the reach of the average man, Aquemini is terminal prophecy, looking forward critically to who we’ve become in the new century, when a person’s worth is mea...

  The good news is that the Australian recording artist Kevin Parker—who releases records under the name Tame Impala—is as adept at reinterpreting twentieth century pop music for a twenty-first century listenership as any artist has been since the Beatles went about refining the art form roughly sixty years ago. Apocalypse Dreams is about entropy of the will and the attempt, though futile, to impose transcendence onto a string of disappointments that has eaten its way into, and has come to dominate, a life. The record’s production shimmers with a brilliance suggestive of what could be a pop style typical of our technology-pervasive age. There’s little commitment to emotional expression in Parker’s singing voice. Nor does he fully disengage by way of cool; his talent falls somewhere in between. A gift for melody, and of pop sensibilities, allows you to register the tension of the lyric, and a comic twist in the final verse elevates the material into shared company with Blondie’s Ato...

  Before disco even began to develop, before Giorgio Moroder and programmable beats, men were leaving their hometowns for urban locales hoping to redefine, for themselves and for the culture at large, what their childhoods had taught them about the masculine dynamic. Queer men pre-Obergefell were always made to negotiate the labyrinth of introspection with an actor’s intensity, often in madness-inducing solitude. Then, in the nineteen-seventies, amid bi-coastal struggles to unify a jumbled complex of disparate personalities and sensibilities into an allied consolidation worthy of representational power, a friend—to what would become known as the gay community—emerged, one who had ostensibly been present all along. The cover artwork for Donald Fagan’s 1982 solo record The Nightfly pictures an idealized image of the disc jockey alone with his deck, the narrative of his playlists his sole connection to the outside world. But solitude is not a heroic American virtue. It was the late ni...

  Deciphering your way through the emotive tension of a Bob Mould lyric is to pick your way through the ambiguities and rough certainties of failed relationships. He surveils comportment between unhappy couples as obsessively as Elvis Costello, but lyrically he’s oblique, guardedly, arduously, marshaling his instincts around a resolute and deeply personal ethics. Mould’s reputation as a solo artist and founding member of Hüsker Dü and Sugar looms large over alternative rock. Like Neil Young, he’s a committed moralist whose popular image is radiant with the vicious hum of his generation’s rejection of a values system. Workbook, released in 1989, only two years after Hüsker Dü’s final record together, declared a clean break with the monorhythmic punk style of his former band; almost every track sounds like an unacknowledged rock classic. By 1990, however, it was clear that, with the release of Black Sheets of Rain, he had once more grown impatient, this time with conventional song st...

  Is there anything sexier than a masculine baritone unafraid to reveal his vulnerability by the sweetly sung admission that he’s lost absolutely everything? It’s an experience tantamount to having a crush whisper secrecies into your ear; it’s not only intimate, but under the right circumstances, flirtatious, too. Chuck Jackson is a marvelously expressive singer, similar in tone to Levi Stubbs, and, although Jackson was clearly working within a recording studio dynamic not shared by the Motown model, both that label and Wand were looking to capture the same middle class AM radio listenership dollars. What’s remarkable about Jackson’s recording of Any Day Now—and, to a lesser extent, Elvis’ recording, released seven years later—is how both versions adhere to oddball, outdated pop arrangements that nevertheless manage to land just this side of irresistible kitsch. For middle class listeners like myself who grew up venerating the post-modern impulse in pop culture, kitsch travels acro...

  The pace at which Another Man’s Thing opens is immediate, unrelenting. Like a herald it announces, almost from the very start, the arrival of an authority not only of the groove but of conscience, too. The densely compressed polyrhythms over which Joe King Cologbo shouts each verse play so fast that the guitarist’s virtuosity quickly becomes an auxiliary voice, the galvanizing contemporary model of communicative freedom. The song is sublime; it easily pushes itself and the listener beyond excitement into a state of urgency, the possessed voice of controlled panic. Imagine instead of lower Manhattan Talking Heads were describing a literal life during wartime somewhere out in west Africa. Cologbo was living and working in Ghana, apart from his family, when the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. When he returned home following the Biafran surrender, and after having been reunited with his family in Ghana, he discovered that, save his family and a relationship with Fela Kuti, he’d...