The Test Tube and the Scale

  The broad range of musical styles typified by the Peter Gabriel songbook suggests a  serious pop artist with a keen curiosity and creative intelligence always at work. Like the David Bowie catalog, Gabriel’s studio output vacillates from material with broad commercial appeal to art rock experimentation. He was a fixed and always welcome presence on FM American radio before the video generation made him a global superstar, as if by some freak-inspired unanimity it had been decreed that what our young, drug and alcohol soaked imaginations needed was his personal, always elegantly narrated nightmares. Released in 2010, Scratch My Back is Gabriel’s dual artist project that had him covering a variety of songs by artists who then each recorded a Peter Gabriel song. For The Magnetic Fields’ The Book of Love, from their majestic 1999 tour de force 69 Love Songs, Gabriel turns his vocal maturity into a studio tool as effective as any electronic or acoustic device for adding a layer o...

  A modicum of sadness is built into BeauSoleil’s rendition of the Lawrence Walker ballad Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. It’s the emotional center point around which the song revolves, illuminating the record’s good faith by fixing the listener’s attention on the band’s collaborative dynamic, the process by which they draw poignancy from each instrumental performance. Every pop record is an implied contractual agreement between artist and listener, with listener consenting to his role as subjective recipient of the commercial audio product. The basic nature of this role is subject to change over a period of time as the listener’s relationship with the record changes, given, but not limited, to issues of personality maturity. Typically, the consumer role will fall into one of two camps: either the faceless, one-of-millions mass audience whose pop experience is often social or the cogent individual whose expectations of the pop experience are more personal and long lasting. The most sig...

  Mystery is one of those ephemeral and lawless qualities of expression that draws you into a pop song, revealing surprising dimensions that keep you coming back to it for unexpected returns. The commercial disposability of the 45 rpm single’s microcosmic nature suggests an essence too narrow to properly situate mystery and all of its radical properties. Yet there it is, discernible in song after song, transparent or opaque, and eased into place by the force of artistic personality.     From start to finish, William Onyeabor’s Body and Soul is textured with adroit nineteen-seventies discotheque keyboard virtuosity, and the foreign spelling distinction is crucial; Onyeabor, following the dictum of Body and Soul’s lyric, “When I play my kind of music, I’m playing for your body and soul,” keeps the dance tempo suspended somewhere between disco’s refined finesse and funk’s sly instability. That resulting tension is then subsumed by the rhythm section which goes on to sustain ...

  Maybe the first thing you notice about the lyric for Bob Lind is that it’s an entertainingly accurate narrative detailing the psychological desperation following a breakup. You also notice what a great time the vocalist Jarvis Cocker is having recounting the experience, imparting to the sense of desperation a heady feeling of momentum, as if the process of recovery were actually a race to see how fast you can once again acquire love. Cocker also subjects himself to, in his finely controlled surrender to lyricism, a good deal of self-appraisal, of the kind typically associated with what has come to be called accountability. Other songwriters who have practiced this poetry of self-critique are Jason Lytle, Paul Westerberg, and James Murphy, all of whom are determined to hold themselves accountable, but only to the extent that accountability transforms the sin of self-involvement into an ironic, glamorous form of self-annihilation, always a welcome topic in rock and roll. What’s als...

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music ...

  Well before cool became the much coveted, and universally recognized, style signifying teenage alienation, sociopathy, and pretense, it was a coping attitude adopted by individuals who were forced to bear the brunt of irony’s cruelest truths. Cool is the immeasurable distance an individual puts between himself and his interior life to mask the true temperature of his intelligence. Mose Allison, a white pianist marketed to American blues and jazz audiences from the mid-fifties onwards, endured more than his share of irony throughout his career, and projected so much cool that the Who made his best composition world famous and the Clash scratched his name onto the Sandinista! lyric sheet. The irony of two of England’s most powerful exponents of hard rock separating themselves temporarily from the root of their crafts to lend their singular sense of urgency to this country’s most polished purveyor of cool is only one example of how irony’s slow drip found its way into pop marketabil...

  Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbooks series is comparable to an extensive travelogue across the United States’ romantic fantasy of itself. The music, of course, dazzles; taken as a whole, the abundance of creative achievement stuns the imagination. Analogous to the beauty of refined intellectual articulation, the clarity of Fitzgerald’s singing voice flawlessly restates the collective jumble of emotions unloosed by American modernity’s most complex cultural imperatives by a process of distillation and reassembly that we typically associate with the subconscious and dreams. Delicacy and humor were the stardust of her art, and under its spell it’s possible to reassess such failures of the imagination as our tendency to collapse beneath the stress of heartbreak. Unlike her closest musical peers, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose best work challenges us into new, pioneering modes of endurance as they effortlessly practice contortions of emotional duress, Fitzgerald’s is the art of charm...