by Greil Marcus
2 Primitives, “Crash” (RCA) A review of the band’s album compared it favorably to a Peanut Butter Conspiracy LP—any one of which is a good bet for the worst psychedelic LP of the ’60s—and that’s what the Primitives Lovely is like. But their single, just now getting U.S. airplay after a few months floating around the margins, is the single of the year, guaranteed to sound as loud in 2005 as it would have in 1956.
3 Brian Wilson, “Goodnight, Irene,” from Folkways: A Vision Shared—A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly (Columbia) Irene becomes a California girl. This is what post-postmodernist critics would call “the music of transgression,” if they could understand you can transgress to the right as well as to the left.
4 Book of Love, “Lullaby,” from Lullaby (Sire) A tune to dream to—too good for sleep.
5 John Mellencamp, “Rave On,” from Cocktail (Elektra soundtrack) A lot of Mellen-camp falls between the tracks: acoustic B-sides, his grandmother warbling on Scarecrow, the heavenly “Colored Lights” he wrote and produced for the Blasters, and now this straight shot at Buddy Holly on an album filled up by hip, lousy artists.
6 Philip Roth, The Facts (Farrar Straus) There was more rock ’n’ roll in Lyndon Johnson than in Bobby Kennedy; in this autobiography Roth, who in 1962 fashioned perhaps the most perfect integration of a rock song (“Earth Angel”) into fiction (Letting Go), names Johnson the muse behind Portnoy’s Complaint. As a book, The Facts is trivial; this claim is not.
7 Aroma Disc, (Romance Division of Environmental Fragrance Technologies) Lester Bangs once predicted rock would someday be no more than room spray; he couldn’t have imagined records playing (on your special Aroma Disc Player) “Oriental Mystery,” “Seduction,” “Gourmet,” “Candlelight Dinner,” and “After Dinner Mint.” But this isn’t rock. Where’s “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box,” “Burn On,” “Incense and Peppermints,” “Hair Pie: Bake 1,” or “Cold Sweat”? Not that it would make any difference.
8 Joe Strummer, “The Return of Smokin’ Joe,” interview by Matthew Colin in Cut (July) “I wish we hadn’t taken it so seriously… . It said, ‘Let’s sweep away everything and start again,’ but after a few years when all the old buzzards came back, it obviously hadn’t swept away anything. It was a hiccup rather than a complete change.” “Didn’t you realise that was inevitable all along,” says the recuperative voice of the interviewer. “Well, I should have. I’d seen all that before when I was taking my O levels, all that Vietnam protest stuff and Paris raging in ’68 … then again, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into it without being so completely fanatical.” The key word here is not “fanatical,” it’s “we.”
9 Pat Benatar, “All Fired Up” (Chrysalis) In the sound and feel the record’s reaching for, it’s a lot like Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power,” and there’s nothing to that record but its reach. But “All Fired Up” is twice as convincing, many times more exciting, and Benatar hasn’t had a hit for years. How come no one’s raving about her comeback?
10 Albert Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon (Morrow) Imagine it’s all true; a lot of it is. Then connect the music to the truth. There you have a paradox, which the author doesn’t want you to solve.
OCTOBER 4, 1988
1 Randy Newman, “Dixie Flyer” and “New Orleans Wins the War” from Land of Dreams (Reprise) Whether or not these songs are simple autobiography, they’re presented as such, and for a man who’s always sung as a character actor, it’s a shock. As the tunes roll easily on a piano that communicates socially, that sets a mood of shopping, banter, strolling, a mood so commonplace it validates every personal detail, Newman is singing about being Jewish in a gentile world, about late ’40s racism as a natural fact, about the skewed, impossible, utterly concrete memories of childhood: his father coming back from the war to tell the people of New Orleans they’d won, and so sparking a citywide celebration—in 1948. “Maybe they’d heard it, maybe not,” Newman remembers. “Probably they’d heard about it, just forgot”—and the way he sings the last two words of each line is as profound as anything in “Sail Away.”
2 White of the Eye (dir. Donald Cammell, Paramount video) For Cathy Moriarty, who uses obscenity with more conviction than anyone else in the movies.
3 Midnight Oil, “The Dead Heart” (Columbia) The title plays against the singsong: “We carry in our hearts the true country/And that cannot be stolen.” In other words, the country (in their case, Australia, and it doesn’t matter that they’re singing as Aborigines; in your case, as you listen, your country) is up for grabs. This band is not kidding—not, like others on the charts, making political music out of populist pieties. They’re in the game for the wisdom their music can be made to give up.
4 The Sun “STATUE OF ELVIS FOUND ON MARS—Satellite Beams Back ‘All Shook Up’” (September 20) Let’s see Doonesbury and Bloom County top that.
5 Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure—Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Routledge) Eighties daily journalism and the footnoted scholarship it provoked: a collection in which each piece is engaged in a conversation with every other.
6 Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley’s Beach Party (Chess reissue, 1963, Japan) Recorded live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when it cost a buck or two to get in. It costs $20 now, but if you were there, or ever wished you were, it might be worth it.
7 David Lindley & El Rayo-X, Very Greasy (Elektra) Even the bad covers (“Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Werewolves of London”) echo the misanthropic wit (in the singing) and the love of the world (the guitar playing) that made Lindley’s 1981 El Rayo-X as personal in its way as Astral Weeks. Don’t wait for the next one, David—the feeling is back, the momentum is there.
8 Four Tops, “Reach Out I’ll Be There (Remix)” (Motown ’88/’66 12-inch) First, a remarkable atrocity: no crisp drum machine, no sharp synth sound, just poorly oiled disco machinery plugging on to nowhere, forever, a now-defeated Levi Stubbs reaching out to—his old song, maybe. But then, no doubt as a sop to moldy figs unhip to what the new breed breed, is the song as it hit number one 22 years ago, and in an instant, before the singing even begins, there’s tension, drama, suspense. “I’m horny already,” the woman next to me said.
9 Gary Stewart, Brand New (Hightone) Drunk again, as he says, but the old stuff is fine, and what’s new is “Lucretia,” which owes more to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell” than to anything by George Jones or Jerry Lee Lewis.
10 Sut Jhally and Ian Angus, “Introduction” to Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (Routledge) The editors of this wishfully “interventionist” academic anthology of no one’s best work tip their hand straight off: dedication to Joe Hill, “genius of cultural politics,” “Murdered by the Authorities of the State of Utah”; acknowledgement note re the “fruitful experience of collaborative work, which is at the very heart of socialist practice” (fascists always work alone, that’s why they never get anywhere); the “alternate sphere” of cultural politics defined as “the ‘sixties’ tradition of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, the Weavers, Pete Seeger”—you know, all those people who later formed the Rolling Stones. But it’s the discussion of Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon, “the two most important figures in mainstream culture, from a left perspective”—thank you—“in the last twenty years,” that rings the bell: though Springsteen allowed people to misinterpret “Born in the U.S.A.,” Lennon “suffered from: no such ambiguity”—“there being no possible misunderstanding of his art.” Forget that when there is no possibility of misunderstanding, there is no art—the privileging of Lennon leads straight to a bemoaning of the fact that “in the postmodern context,” even Lennon’s “Revolution” can be turned into a commercial and stripped of its revolutionary message, which of course it never had, since the song was against revolution, not for it. Well, socialist realists never did know what to make of rock ’n’ roll (“it is too early, or too late, to throw out Pete Seeger,” Jhally and Angus say, summing up), though rock ’n’ roll has always known what to make
of them.
NOVEMBER 1, 1988
1 Shinehead, Unity (Elektra) As a Jamaican toaster in a hip-hop milieu he’s a motormouth, and as a motormouth he’s a Porsche: words tumble by so fast it’s a thrill not to keep up. He’s also a joker, he wants to know what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding, and as a ballad singer (“Golden Touch”), he’s Shep and the Limelights.
2 Quartzlock, “No Regrets” (Reflection/Pinnacle 12-inch, UK) Aerobic disco, with a thick, exuberant sound—and a showcase for an unnamed female singer. She might be Tina Turner recording for Motown in 1966: her voice is all pleasure, warmth, knowledge.
3 King Butcher, “Spud-U-Like” (King 12-inch) Jon King (late of Gang of Four) resurfaces with new partner Phil Butcher and a cutting, expert noise based on “One Potato, Two Potato.” Songs should follow.
4 Nigel Fountain, Underground—The London Alternative Press, 1966–74 (Comedia/Routledge) and Jonathon Green: Days in the Life—Voices From the English Underground, 1961–1971 (Heinemann, London) Two good books—Green’s a long, hundred-headed oral history set without commentary in the manner of Edie, Fountain’s a conventional narrative. The adventure and cruelty of the time come through, especially in Green, but what’s odd is the unity of the story. “[It was] as if we had rubber bands stretched all over England and we could just pull one,” Spike Hawkins says in Green of the first stirrings of new culture—yet both books are fundamentally about the same small group of people, the same few legendary scenes, events, pranks, and disasters. The books make it plain how much a small group of people can do—or how small the U.K. really is.
5 Keith Richards, Saturday Night Live (NBC, October 8) Mesmerizing, the way tricky melodies slowly crept out of the blur of rhythm and rasp; as for Talk Is Cheap (Virgin), a few numbers suggest a tune you heard on the radio once, 10 years ago, forgot the next day, and spent the next decade trying to remember.
6 Michael Cormany, Lost Daughter, a detective novel (Lyle Stuart) New twist on generically requisite cop/dick banter: “He picked at the cassettes on the seat between us. ‘Replacements? Hüsker Dü?’ He pronounced it Husker instead of Hoosker. I let it go.”
7 Abiezer Coppe, Selected Writings (Aporia Press, London) Coppe was a Ranter preacher who with the fantastic A Fiery Flying Roll (1649) defined the limits of heresy during the English Revolution; the still-shocking tones of his blasphemies precisely capture the mood Johnny Rotten brought to bear in “Anarchy in the U.K.”—which is why Coppe is now back in print.
8 Susan Sontag, Time profile (October 24) Preview of the coming cultural inquistion: “As for equating high and popular culture, she explains: ‘I made a few jolly references to things in popular culture that I enjoyed. I said, for instance, one could enjoy both Jasper Johns and the Supremes. It isn’t as if I wrote an essay on the Supremes.’”
9 Cellos, Rang Tang Ding Dong (Apollo/Relic reissue, 1957–58) Remembered only for their Mr. Bass-man-goes-to-Heaven classic, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman)”—and arcanely notable because the young engineer who discovered them, one Lewis Merenstein, went on to produce Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Who says there’re no second acts in American lives?
10 Julie Burchill, “Burchill on Thatcher” (The Face, September) In this short, sharp celebration (“there is really no alternative”) of the Führerprinzip (sorry, Julie—it means leadership as the first principle of national life, which is exactly what you’re talking about), the former punk critic and present-day media icon comes up with a snappy line: “Voting for [Thatcher] was like buying a Vera Lynn LP, getting it home and finding ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ inside the red, white and blue sleeve.” Except that one was singing about liberation, one about domination; one offering the paradoxes of “Bodies,” the other the straight lines of Section 28. With the chant of “10 MORE YEARS!” rising, Burchill has her bread buttered.
NOVEMBER 29, 1988
1 Randy Newman, “It’s Money That Matters” (Reprise) Every review of Newman’s Land of Dreams has made a point of dismissing this track as a rewrite of the ’83 “It’s Money That I Love.” But at No. 70 with a small caliber bullet it’s a radio natural—and it’s a thrill to hear Newman working in an entirely commercial musical context, his voice mixed down, the harsh guitar guiding the car through traffic, the big beat always demanding more volume. In this context, and in the context of this historical moment, the song reveals itself: it’s nothing like the other one. That was a joke, and this is not. This is painful, a no, a dead horse come to life and prancing: a protest song.
2 Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones, “Kiss” (Polydor/China 12-inch) First Duane Eddy, now this—who’s next, Connie Francis? Weighting the tempo with his own bulk, Jones comes up with a bullish, completely convincing performance, especially when he announces “Think I’d better dance, now” as if he’s just remembered he’s always wanted to be James Brown.
3 Daniel Johnston, Hi, How Are You—The Unfinished Album, Sept 83 (Homestead) Originally launched into the ether as one of Austin songwriter Johnston’s various homemade cassettes, 10 years ago this would have sounded almost obvious. “Suddenly we could do anything,” the motto of Streets, the first U.K. collection of punk singles, meant that suddenly you could hear anything; now the insistent individuality of Johnston’s half-songs, orchestrated through found noise and found cadences, communicates weirdness, not speech, privacy, not a public space. Someone actually made this, with the idea that someone else would actually listen to it? When I try to picture the singer all I see is the puff-cheeked woman who lives in the radiator in Eraser-head.
4 Five Satins, “In the Still of the Nite,” in Dead Ringers, dir. David Cronenberg (Fox Pictures) In the shiny, ultrasuede apartment shared by the twin gynecologists Jeremy Irons plays, the one currently clinging to sanity puts a record on their $10,000 stereo; the other rises, and together they drape themselves around the first man’s girlfriend. The pristine clarity of the sound and the desire it carries nearly makes the scene a match for the black hole “In Dreams” digs in Blue Velvet—the tune throws the whole movie off kilter, raising the specter of a life neither man has ever touched.
5 Richard Thompson, “Turning of the Tide,” on Amnesia (Capitol) Just a run-through, an attempt to teach the number to the band, and it opens up a sense of fate and dread everything else here seems to cover up with good humor and fast fingers. By the way, what’s Christopher Reeve doing on the sleeve?
6 Pet Shop Boys, “Always On My Mind,” on Introspection (Manhattan) A nine-minute remake of their worldwide smash remake of the old Elvis hit—this time done as Elvis would have done it in Las Vegas, the orchestra up there sawing away, the female chorus washing up through the strings. It’s all in place, except for the disruption of the drum machine and the wrong singer, who for a spoken passage has his thin voice twisted from near-Chipmunks levels down to 16 rpm bass, and then comes back as a real person full of bile and revenge. Neat.
7 Lloyd Bentsen, Springsteen quote, campaign speech (November 7) “No retreat, baby, no surrender,” he said. Credit him for not backing off from “baby.”
8 Eskimo, song title (unrecorded) As in “An Historical Perspective, or, Neil Sedaka Never Instituted Fascist Policies.” Which is right up there with “Neil Sedaka, Horseman of the Apocalypse,” a chapter title in Richard Meltzer’s Gulcher.
9 Traveling Wilburys, Volume One (Wilbury/Warner Bros.) A/k/a Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Bob Dylan, and not bad, even if the Masked Marauders (Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Chuck Berry) had more fun with the concept—Dylan’s “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” is the first piece he’s cut in ages that sounds as if he’s having fun with words and music.
10 John Carpenter, They Live (Universal Pictures) As critic Michael Covino put it, an E.C. comics version of The Society of the Spectacle.
DECEMBER 27, 1988
1 Cowboy Junkies, The Trinity Session (RCA) Don’t be fooled by the punk name or the “Sweet Jane” cover�
��or for that matter the “Sweet Jane” endorsement by Lou Reed. Margo Timmins has the pristine voice of so many early ’60s Joan Baez imitators, a timbre wholly uncorrupted by personality. Beginning with an insufferable a cappella reading of the traditional ballad “Mining for Gold,” she turns the wretched of the earth into art (to borrow a phrase from Alice Walker): in the matrix of Timmins’s sensibility that’s all the redemption the wretched need. The folk-music revival has got to be stopped before all ambitious pop music dissolves into a contemplation of its own piety. There’s no better place for it to stop than here.
2 Johnny Winter, “Stranger Blues,” from The Winter of ’88 (MCA) The Elmore James tune, and an overdue reminder that the ’69 Second Winter remains one of the most exciting claims anyone has made on the rock tradition. With drums and bass behind him, Winter jumps his sinewy, snaking lines across the piece, refusing, as he did on Second Winter, both Clapton elegance and Hendrix grandeur. What you hear is smash, twist, high-stepping, every riff cutting itself short and then leaping forward. The pleasure is in the tension: knowing everything will turn out alright, as the guitarist scares you into sensing it just might not.