The Test Tube and the Scale

  The subjective experience of perfection in popular music only came about with the introduction of the 45 rpm single in 1949 by RCA Victor. We’re told from a young age that there isn’t anything that is perfect so when we are witness to perfection, we’re dazzled and captivated, and, developed world capitalists that we are, we must somehow possess it. Produced by Bob Ferguson, Connie Smith’s Burning A Hole In My Mind isn’t only a minor Nashville Sound masterpiece, but, it, like any perfect work, pushes against genre conventions while simultaneously capturing the mood of the era with Smith’s genuine feel for expressing mid-60s ersatz sophistication in the manner of her pop romantic peers Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, Sandie Shaw. Though Smith doesn’t sing with the dynamism of those stalwarts, the strength of her vocal charm is readily apparent; perfection isn’t the absence of flaws, but their organization into a cohesive narrative. One crucial element holding this perfection in ...

  While Babylon is aflame in an endless cycle of disrepair and repair, the indefatigable Natty Dread is tireless in the effort to slow acceleration of the operational speed of global power structures. The tension generated between individual members of both camps—those who are able to negotiate the requisite speeds of our merciless technological age with daredevil, sociopathic finesse and those who instinctively recoil from it—is now so much a part of our global soil that it’s soaked into rock and roll at a cellular level with all the contaminative effect of a radioactive isotope. Like American blues and jazz, reggae is a critique of modern tension from the perspective of historical injustice. What the three disciplines also share is an origin by marginalized personalities motivated by social straits to create a rhythmic aesthetic grounded in a commercially viable and provocatively humanist sensuality that wouldn’t only sell records but also underscore its lyrical urgency. The Jama...

  Like Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife or Sinatra’s Summer Wind, Louis Prima’s Buona Sera’s appeal resonates with both the music audience for which it was first marketed as well as with the     generations that came afterwards, who hear in its pop arrangement wisps of an artistic tradition going back to the progenitor of modern American pop music, Louis Armstrong. A native of New Orleans and the son of Italian immigrants, Prima was keenly aware of the primal significance that mongrelization played in the creation of the live, aboriginal music he heard played in the venues he frequented growing up. “Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history,” said Salman Rushdie; “perhaps we all are…(the soul of democracy hinges precariously on that ‘perhaps’).” So it goes with music, our music. If miscegenation for the advancement of love and the civic betterment of a nation is the truest realization of a living democracy, then the admixture of pop genres is the music tha...

  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...