The Test Tube and the Scale

  Translated into English as The Pathway to Good, Tim Maia’s paradisiacal hymn to Brazil’s UFO cult Rational Culture is a richly textured evocation of after hours disco mythology: the cavernesque darkness of the air conditioned interior, the early morning gravitational fatigue just before your second wind kicks in, the quaalude induced, rollercoaster rhythms of drug comfort. The music itself, though of secondary concern in the disco experience, inevitably proves to be of grave consequence if only because our expectations, contrary to intelligence gathered from previous disco excursions, are set unreasonably high during sobriety. Not for nothing did Morrissey once exhort the record buying public to hang the DJ. Hang the blessed DJ. Yet disco was the site where strangers became family; not the loving strangers with whom you shared address and DNA but the dysfunctional one who knew to give you the proper space to self-isolate while disassociating. In translation from the Portuguese, M...

  Sung by a “short, short man” to the “big woman” he’s sharing a love affair with, Joan Armatrading’s album opener from 1983 is passion set ablaze with its lyrical depiction of the fetishization of physical abuse, such that it tests the limits of contemporary convention. Today’s culture urges musical audiences to consider lyrical content from empathic perspectives that lean from critical appreciation towards emotional assessments antithetical to rock and roll era shibboleths, including the unruly subject of the full, robust spectrum of sexual desire. For (I Love It When You) Call Me Names, Armatrading crafted a traditional pop structure that shifts the listener’s emotional responses across its three compositional features. There are the grisly details of the affair that occupy the aggressive expository verses, the core elation that defines the relationship heard in the exultant chorus, and finally, the view of the couple’s dynamic seen from outside their lives together. The song ch...

  One of the means of expressing resistance to the imposition of mass homogeneity upon a populace by a governmental head or body is the use of satire. It’s a tricky art form to deploy, and our culture is littered with countless examples—including some sacred cows—of failed attempts to execute it. But when satire connects with its intended     target, the results are revelatory, offering clear-eyed perspectives on the machinations of social and cultural institutions, and their insidious, often overlooked, associations. Jello Biafra’s and John Greenway’s lyric for California Über Alles is an absurdist imagining of the American fixation on health and self-improvement as further propagation of governmental control over its citizenry, with some of the funniest lines ever heard on an American record. It may be impossible to hear California Über Alles without thinking of some of the wickedly influential comics who came before Dead Kennedys: Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Pr...

  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...