The Test Tube and the Scale

  The two most beautifully photographed faces of the twentieth century belonged to Billie Holiday and Jimi Hendrix. Both faces project an image of composed, preternatural calm, transcending artistic confidence, and articulating some nascent form of the language of glamour and modern celebrity. Aristocratic and modishly flawed, theirs is an unblemished beauty from the last century before the normalization of     technologically modified     human form. Another striking example of physical beauty enhanced by natural aging processes is the photographed face of Chuck Berry. Pronounced cheekbones, dark eyes animated by a restless intelligence, and a miscreant’s grin that, with skeleton key ease, deciphers the peculiar levity of his genius; these are the slyly bedeviled features that disclose the working apparatus of mid-century’s most playful imagination. Berry shares with Paul Newman an all-American countenance that reads like a map of masculine intrigue; in Newman’...

  As improbable as a musical utopia scored for a blaxploitation film about street life in Oakland sounds, the conceit is in keeping with the fantasies disseminated by the movie genre. Like the mafioso or serial killer, a collective image of the pimp looms in our imagination: surrealist avatar of fantasies of control and submission, entrepreneurial ruthlessness and sociopathy. Either lampooned or absurdly romanticized, the pimp was culturally denied a complexly honest, large screen characterization until Morgan Freeman’s pitilessly unsentimental portrayal of Leo Smalls in Jerry Schaztberg’s Street Smart, from 1987. What Freeman’s performance does is to lay bare the fallacy at the heart of blaxploitation mythology, namely, that poverty is the tragic motor that drives the characters’ most basic choices, leaving only a residual masculine pathos which the creators of fiction have attempted to dramatize in freakishly garish baroque styles (it’s similar to the shallow emotional terrain th...

  Public Enemy’s incendiary manifesto is both polemic and cultural outlaw agitprop. Uneven, with a near meaningless fourth verse that begs for excision, Bring The Noise generates the kind of studio excitement that portends a major cultural shift. Tailoring a new aesthetic, Public Enemy dispenses altogether with the agrarian based folk blues and country that had flowed through rock and roll like a lymph since the time of Elvis and Chuck Berry. What remained for Public Enemy to work with was the power of rock and roll’s amplification, a force commensurate with the band’s creative potential. While other acts—The Who, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols—prior to Public Enemy’s success had harnessed the thew of volume, they were simply acting well within the recognizable constraints of hard rock; those acts were the great disrupters of a commercial audience’s expectations and assumptions, elevating the form beyond recognized cultural borders. Public Enemy, however, assaulted a mass paradigm, cau...

  In 1981, when I turned fifteen years old, I was impatient and anxious about the music I wanted to listen to. Falling apart in high school, I was not unlike teenagers everywhere, responding to the chaotic demands of their changing body. It was pre-Obergefell America, and the nineteen eighties was taking its time reaching the Fort Worth barrio where I still lived with my parents. Homosexuality had opened in my mind like a book whose pages I gazed at intensely before I was even enrolled in school but now that adolescence was on me with its inextinguishable fever I had to figure out—all queers do who aren’t spontaneously gifted with revelatory style—how to shift it from my imagination into the light of reality, and if I wanted to. Only two years before, a minority of Americans had felt the chill of Diskonacht, a thinly veiled auto da effigy of blacks and gays held at an inner city baseball stadium. Ostensibly a mass celebration of disco sucks hysteria, the organized immolation of dis...

  Questions of the efficacy of leadership come to light on this debut album opener from fIREHOSE. A rhetorical critique of military hierarchy, Brave Captain assaults the air around you with Gang Of Four inspired guitar and rhythmic intensity. Co-founded by the surviving members of San Pedro stalwarts Minutemen, George Hurley and Mike Watt, along with guitarist/vocalist Ed Crawford, fIREHOSE continues the duo’s American complacency resistance, specifically its inevitable, lamentable hold on popular music. Disinformation among the top tiers of national leadership made it possible for the Lt. Colonel to illegally sell arms to the Islamic paramilitary group with Israel acting as intermediary while the Commander in Chief, high on post surgical recovery drugs, dozed consciously in a hospital bed as the National Security Advisor fed him meaningless details concerning the operation. Urgency was a hallmark of Minutemen’s deliberately messy, signature sound, propelled forward by a trio whose...

Of the many things you can count Boys Don’t Cry, perfect rock and roll single is arguably the easiest to name. An indefatigable crowd pleaser, Boys Don’t Cry captures a defining moment in the build up to the original English new wave. Like the Cars’ My Best Friend’s Girl, released a year before the Cure’s great single, Boys Don’t Cry’s unifying pop exuberance closed a door on the nineteen seventies musical experience by imposing a sense of intimacy on the recording that was in keeping with the punk era’s stated determination to eradicate the impersonality of the stadium rock experience. For a better, contrasting example of the major difference between the two camps’ aesthetics think of the far reaching tone of the Chris Thomas-produced, Stooges/Alice Cooper-influenced Never Mind the Bullocks compared to the fearless hermeticism of the next three PiL records. Robert Smith similarly enjoys the vacillation from pop harmony to its studio produced discordance, often losing artistic focu...

  An explosive declaration of sexual desire. The vocalist, Shirley Owens, doesn’t surrender control of the lyric to passion, but instead projects strength as she recounts, with obvious pleasure, the memory of her experience with the titular sex. From the rhythmic clangor that opens the song to the exclamatory backing vocals that unanimously voice accordance with the lyric sentiment Boys boldly announces the emergence of the second wave of American teen independence, this time around eclipsing the era of race music and introducing the commercial crossover    potential of Jerry Wexler’s rhythm and blues. Boys is all vitality; there isn’t a musical note wasted. In jukeboxes from New Jersey to Hamburg, this remarkably perfect B-side exported the incandescent beauty of young sexual energy to a world awaiting liberation.