The Test Tube and the Scale

The great, impassioned project of girl group pop romanticism was the reduction in scope of of the extraordinary body of work from the preceding generation, the big band/swing era, whose typically elevated forms of expression brought us an aristocracy of twentieth century American pop. It was a time of serious economic and social deprivation, when work was considered such an essential tool of survival that, conversely, self consideration and -contemplation were often thought of as unaffordable luxuries. The music reflected this line of thinking; it evokes luxury and glamor, creating a fantasy of over abundance and wealth that still persists today, albeit to a hip-hop soundtrack. World War II, however, shrank the globe, and when the men who fought it returned to the States, the music they came home to was tense with the gradually decreasing gap between rural and urban experience. New York City’s The Cake, along with famed LA production duo Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, conjure the spir...

The spell of good will cast by a certain kind of pop music is intensely short lived, and what is likely to remain of it, in trace form, is an iota of memory of having experienced the pleasure of fevered extremes. Executed with such an assured lightness of touch, Baby, I Could Be So Good At Loving You achieves a kind of commercial triumph by bringing together two popular genres—R&B and easy listening—without insult to either one. The group vocalist, Floyd Butler, shows us, with an astute and relaxed sophistication, just how far to pitch the voice of AM radio seduction without it tipping into a mimicry of overt sexuality. His performance follows in the tradition of the great sixties master stylists Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Mathis, artists who not only expanded the pop lexicon with jazz and Broadway musical influences, but who also, through artistic dynamism, helped establish a vibrant new paradigm of beauty and style, and whose pop art even manages to sidle into ...

  Of all the worlds of artificiality and simulacra that commercial radio has asked us to inhabit, it’s the ones created by Hall and Oates that are probably least offensive of all. The dominant odor there is an admixture of bar soap, open bottles of Zima, and worn female designer gym socks. Questions of health and hygiene arise because, of Hall’s many talents, the strength to cultivate an audience is the one most obviously always at work. What makes a Daryl Hall record so enjoyable—especially those he made with John Oates—is the lack of concentration required of the listener for them to work. Which does not make them disposable. Like the songs of Barry Gibb and Earth, Wind and Fire, the best Hall and Oates work connects with you at a level where matters of grave importance happily do not intrude, and it becomes some of your favorite songs; if asked to choose which one we love most, it’s virtually impossible to answer. Sara Smile? I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)? There’s a lot of amb...

  Just as Bob Dylan once recalibrated the rules of English folk romanticism to accommodate his definitive, wickedly surreal vision of media over-saturation in the age of American exceptionalism for 1965’s Desolation Row, Nick Cave now calls roll on twenty first century western archetypes whose lives coalesce around the crisis of a shared, distressing complaint. Compared with the dreamlike proceedings of the Dylan record, Cave sees the nightmare in our quotidian lives and frames it in eschatological detail. Released in 2003, when the conflagration that was rock and roll had already been reduced to a pile of smoldering embers, the Bad Seeds drench the mess in kerosene and kick it flying. The record’s co-producers, Nick Launay and the band, emphasize the riotous interplay among band mates, investing the quarter-hour long pop epic with a sense of careening motion, Martyn P Casey’s authoritative, redoubtable basslines guiding the song across rapidly shifting tectonics as the twin guitar...

  First I fell in love with playing records then with the radio. I remember alternating between a pair of album rock stations, isolated from the rest of the world, on summer afternoons then again at night after everyone had gone to bed. This had to be the mid seventies because Born To Run was in heavy rotation, playing so much of the time. The song sounded old, from another generation, and I heard it so often that I eventually thought that it was going through a commercial revival, something to do with American Graffiti, maybe. Two other songs that I can remember receiving a lot of airplay around this time were Help Me by Joni Mitchell (Warner Bros 1974) and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams (Warner Bros 1977). I fixated on those two because I had an older sister who was just then transitioning into adulthood and I was convinced that, deeply embedded within the lyric of both songs, were clues that I could one day decipher for help in developing the proper codes for a personal conduct and styl...

  Luke Gaines’ weirdly erotic look at Baader-Meinhof from the inside is appropriately claustrophobic, and, in tone, conspiratorial, drawing us in by means of Gaines’ keenly deployed pop acumen. His over stylized vocal delivery might prove for some listeners an affectation too far but it’s not the first time a rock and roller squeezed notes out of the side of his face in the effort to feign tough guy romanticism. The hint of cultism suggested by the group’s terrorist cell history gives a feeling of existential discomfort that, together with the song’s flamboyant disco rhythmic texture, is akin to feeling trapped in an after hours nightclub after having ingested too much of the wrong drug, then compulsively, repeatedly, replaying the     song.

   Rhythmic intensity, coupled     with rural blues, gives truth to the illusion that poverty is a mountainous stillness; it’s an adjunct of political will, and it moves with the snail’s pace, dim-wittedness of a Texas politician plotting his next gerrymandered district. The dense concentration of human will impounded in the plague cloud of poverty generates so much energy that, inevitably, sparks fly from its vast array of aggregate cultures; the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks, favelas, the South African townships. You can hear that mysterious power come to life in the brilliant guitar riff that opens Awungilobolele, the lead track from 1985’s great Earthworks compilation record, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The alarming, arresting quality of that riff, especially as it transitions into the groove that becomes the song’s central motif, binds you at once to the unifying majesty of great pop art; the belief that the human soul is a jukebox and, if yours is prop...