The Test Tube and the Scale

  Today, if someone needs to be reminded of the feeling of blithe, middle class harmlessness during the nineteen-sixties, in the time of the fight for civil rights, simply cue the music of The Mamas and the Papas. The further we move from the quartet’s historical point of origin, the more it becomes clear that its innocuous style made it the ideal group to have become a cultural place marker for a pop audience of maladroits obsessed with nostalgia. Recorded two years after the Mamas and the Papas charted with their version of California Dreaming, Bobby Womack’s rendition     eschews the overly familiar group harmonies of the original, reducing the vantage point of the lyric from a choral to a solo perspective. This move to the personal gives Womack, along with his producer, Chips Moman, and his backing band, the Memphis Boys, the opportunity to invigorate the record with a more nuanced and intimate arrangement. Commensurate with the Womack record’s theme of having to endu...

  Human sensuality, so intrinsic to the routine of modern experience that to not take the function of our senses for granted would task us with immeasurable complications. Enforced separation from, or mutilation to, one’s sensory organs is a common authoritarian   governmental tactic, and is, without having to venture too wild a guess, happening even now. On June 14, 1971, Stuart Angel,     member of the urban guerrilla group MR-8, was arrested by officers of the Air Force Information Center and tortured, his mouth forcibly attached to a jeep’s exhaust pipe and his body dragged across a base courtyard. When Chico Buarque sings Calice’s penultimate line in Portuguese—“I want to smell diesel smoke”—memorializing the resistance fighter’s horrific death, he’s already recounted in Baudelairian detail—“Being very fat, the pig no longer walks. After being used a lot, the knife no longer cuts.”—the nightmare of life during a military dictatorship. As if to stress what is los...

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, a...

  A George Hurrell photograph of the artist looks out from the cover of his debut record, Law And Order. Buckingham has never looked better. Gone are the Dionysian locks from that time he helped control American radio and outdoor stadium events in the late nineteen-seventies. He’s tastefully shorn and shaved, suggesting an artistic pivot from the recording studio conventionality of Fleetwood Mac’s highly successful mid-seventies career, towards the boldly stylized experimentation of Tusk. Bwana begins with some nocturnal fauna noise at a jungle locale far from the relative familiarity of Fleetwood Mac’s home base, Los Angeles. A rhythmic intro then fades in, bringing a frenetic energy that is equal parts drug-induced celebrity paranoia, nervous excitement, and pop sangfroid. Bwana isn’t extraordinarily foreign territory for Buckingham; he ventured into similarly arranged eccentricity on Tusk, but here he sounds as though in a struggle to liberate himself from the dictates of band m...

  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...