by Greil Marcus
FEBRUARY 1993
1 Jonathan Richman, I, Jonathan (Rounder) Good news: from the premier regressive in pop music, his best album since the ’77 Rock ’n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers. The sound is living room pristine, the technique a wave at second-rank ’50s rockabilly and particularly unaccomplished ’20s country blues, and the instrumentation is extant, barely: that is, Richman and friends can make a guitar, tambourine, and handclaps feel like a whole band. Material includes a rediscovery of surf music (“Grunion Run”), a rewrite of “Gypsy Woman” into “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar” (“Well, the first bar, things were stop and stare/But in this bar, things were laissez-faire”—he pronounces it two different ways, both correct), a heartwarming tribute to the Velvet Underground (“America at its best”—now that Richman’s transcended his influences he can wallow in them), and the hysterical “Rooming House on Venice Beach.” Starting with a normal beat, Rich-man is soon falling over himself with the gross hippieness of the place; he sings as if he still can’t believe he was ever there. “The ancient world was at my reach,” he chants, but he means people who were ’60s relics long about, oh, 1970: “The ancient drunk guys/Passing the cup,” or “The weirdo weird guys/Passing the hat.” As social history this ranks with the fabled “Dodge Veg-O-Matic,” the Modern Lovers’ number about the worst car ever made. Bad news: title is sort of dumb.
2 Bob Dylan, Good As I Been to You (Columbia) Solo versions of very old ballads and prewar blues standards—“other people’s songs,” but these songs are as much Dylan’s as anyone else’s, and he sings them with an authority equal to that he brought to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in 1962. The authority is not the same, though; there’s more freedom in it now. “Little Maggie” is always played for its melody, but Dylan goes for its drama, the drama of a weak, scared man in love with an unfaithful drunk. The music is cut up, stretched, snapped back: each line opens with a stop, and at its end just fades out. The more historical numbers—18th-and 19th-century tales of, to be blunt, imperialist class war and primitive capitalist exploitation—are personalized, Dylan inhabiting the first-person narratives as if he lived them twice. It’s only after a time, when the melancholy and bitterness seem too great for one voice, that you hear them as history, as more than one man’s plight. Finally all of the story is shared, the singer only its mouthpiece, medium for private miseries within the great sweep of disaster; these songs are yours as much as anyone else’s. As for the guile, the slyness, the pleasing cynicism in the singer’s voice—he gets to keep that.
3 Bikini Kill, Bikini Kill (Kill Rock Stars 12″ e.p.) Singer Kathleen Hanna on her influences: “Fourteen women in Montreal.” This disc—the first generally available release from this hard, cruelly funny band—offers five rumbling tales of sex and violence, plus the live “Thurston Hearts The Who,” in which roiling noise accompanies the onstage reading of a review Bikini Kill didn’t like. Sounds stupid, but it’s like a house burning down.
4 Gabriel Yared, music in The Lover, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud (MGM) In the sex scenes, which are severe and modest, avoiding both high theater and porn pomp, Yared’s synthesized soundtrack produces depth: the epic passion Annaud can’t show. The music is mechanical, slowed down—Clash of the Titans stuff.
5 Dada, “Dizz Knee Land” (I.R.S.) “I just ran away from home,” begins a laconic, bored voice. “Now I’m going to Disneyland . . .” It seems little remembered that when Ronald Reagan left the White House, he had it in mind to set a plant in the crowd of reporters lined up to shout at him as he boarded the helicopter. “What are you going to do now?” the plant was supposed to yell, and of course Reagan would flash the grin: “I’m going to Disneyland.” Hey, it was an easy 50 grand—but killjoys like James Baker squelched the move as “unpresidential,” not understanding that Ronald Reagan took power from the great cliché, hiding in its light.
Well, it’s an old story. It almost hides the true horror of the “I’m Going to Disneyland” buy, as the likes of Joe Montana rush off the field after winning a national championship, all pumped up to say the right thing when the plant gives out with “Whaddaya gonna do now?” The horror is in the way Disney now nails down rights to what had previously been understood as subjective responses to unrepeatable moments. The little exchange of set phrases, accompanied by the exchange of a large but not that large amount of money (the real payoff is in being selected to say the magic words), signals the ability of a corporation to completely commodify individual emotion—to destroy, symbolically, any realm of privacy.
Dada, an L.A. trio whose sound is as dulled as its singer’s tone, forces the Disney conspiracy to accept the subjectivity it means to deny. The song turns “Disneyland” (the “Dizz Knee Land” titling obviously meant to protect Dada from Disney’s notorious trademark cops) into a perfect blank: the place you go when you can’t think of anything else to do, when you haven’t got the energy to choose one road over another. “I just crashed my car again/ Now I’m. . . .” “I just robbed a grocery store. . . .” “I just tossed a fifth of gin. . . .” The song was released late in 1992, and by now people ought to be singing it on Main Street.
6 Television fairy, serendipitous Beatle night, U.S. TV, 4 December 1992 If you ever get the feeling that there is a momentum, or inertia, in our more or less official cultural industries to fix a single point of reference, this evening—or rather simply a single 10–11 P.M. slot—would have done for proof. On CNN, Larry King: “Good lineup next week—Mark David Chapman, who assassinated John Lennon 12 years ago, is with us next week!” But switch to ABC, to Barbara Walters and 20/20, and Chapman was already there, his devil-made-me-do-it responses intercut with home movies of John and Yoko mugging and trying to look gay. Click to NBC, and there’s Linda Mc-Cartney, explaining that fans resent her even now for taking their Paul away and, my god, enough of that, zip zip zip and here’s the Disney Channel, “The Making of Sgt. Pepper.” It was enough to make you wish the Beatles had never been—but the next night Disney was running A Hard Day’s Night. In that magical scene when the foursome escape their evil manager and settle in at a nightclub, with the dark mood of “Don’t Bother Me” in the background, you got to see Ringo and the tall, beaky blond guy invent the Pogo, and for an instant there was a sense that all was right with the world: that Barbara Walters and Larry King would end up in the same hell as Mark Chapman.
7 Nirvana, “In Bloom” video, dir. Kevin Kerslake (DGC) For a tune about people who don’t understand what they’re listening to, three early-’60s nerds appear on some local imitation Ed Sullivan Show. (The costumes are fabulous: drummer David Grohl’s short-hair wig looks like it’s made out of carpet remnant.) As they dribble out the song, they change into pinheads in dresses, trashing the set and the music, then back again. It’s geeks to freaks—Tod Browning’s Freaks. As Kurt Cobain writes in the notes to Incesticide (DGC), a collection of fugitive Nirvana recordings, “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
8 Kathleen H., “Rockstar” (Kill Rock Stars Wordcore) A woman in the audience hears Prince’s “Sister” and goes home to make a spoken-word 45 about the same story—incest from her side. Her boyfriend, listening, throws up.
9 Hal Hartley, writer, director, coproducer, Simple Men (Fine Line Features) In a roadhouse, three people high-step to Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” as two others appear to waltz to it. Then a cut to the next scene: hours later, everybody drunk and delving into the Madonna mystery, weighty issues of control, gender, domination, how to avoid passing out (“Hey,” one person says, “I thought we were talking about music”), until finally it is resolved that, yes, Madonna is the owner and producer of her own self, product, image, body, signifier, and then a killjoy asks, “What about the audience?” Answer: “Well, what about it?”
10 Bob Dylan, “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” on
Good As I Been to You If it seems as if this little children’s ditty doesn’t fit with the accounts of betrayal and loss that make up the rest of the album, listen again. Especially to the last two verses, when the wedding party ends in the massacre of the bride and groom.
MARCH 1993
1 Sarah Shankman, The King Is Dead (Pocket Books) Set in Tupelo in the midst of an international barbecue cook-off, this entrancing murder mystery—a combination of Carl Hiaasen’s Double Whammy and Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys—is Shankman’s fifth featuring amateur sleuth Sam (Samantha) Adams, and the first in which the prose isn’t held back by tedious plotting. A web of full-blown Southern characters trailing hazy pasts moves the story on with slap-back dialogue (“ ‘Do you think y’all are related?’ ‘Only if you think sleeping with the same man makes women kin’ ”); Sam Adams, functioning less as private eye than as catalyst, stays out of the way and lets a biting, felt critique of the Southern class system emerge alongside a progressively creepy Jesse Garon Presley impersonator. Like Bobbie Ann Mason or Jill McCorkle with a more convincing sense of humor, or anyway less to worry about, Shankman communicates a joy in making words dance on the page that’s rare in the best fiction: “The second bullet flew like a little bird right into Obie’s open mouth and out the back of his head.” This is a book of pleasures; it only made me nervous when I realized the pages were running out.
2 Eleventh Dream Day, El Moodio (Atlantic) Singer/drummer Janet Beveridge Bean throws bar talk in your face like cold water with “Making Like a Rug” (you lie), domestic quarrels fade as windows open onto the trouble in the streets outside, and on “Rubber Band,” singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo asks the musical question, How far can a phrase be stretched before every trace of the meaning it began with is gone?, and doesn’t answer it.
3 Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Bill Clinton, James Ingram, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, children’s choruses, adult choruses, and more, more, more, “We Are the World,” An American Reunion (HBO, January 17) It may be that behind the great good feeling of this performance lies only propaganda, a fabulous sheen of communitarian self-recognition disguising a new government that means to leave the country as it found it. But as John F. Kennedy proved against his own will, or for that matter his thoughtlessness, false promises can be taken up by those who only hear the tune and don’t care about the copyright. If, as Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen puts it, “The sound of Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did,” then the same can be said of the sound of Kennedy’s voice and his political acts. The same may prove true of Bill Clinton’s demeanor and his political instinct—as opposed to his personal instinct—to pull back at the first sign of trouble. The double-hearted rule but do not govern; desires have been loosed in the air and there’s no telling where they’ll light.
4 Peter Blegvad, Roman Bunka, Holger Czukay, Raymond Federman, John Greaves, Jon Sass, Stefan Schwerdtfeger, with special appearances by Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter, and produced by Herbert Kapfer and Regina Moths, dr. huelsenbeck’s mentale heilmethode (Rough Trade Rec, Germany) A free-swinging, altogether unpredictable tribute to the Cabaret Voltaire Dadaist and New York psychoanalyst, this radio-play version of Huelsenbeck’s “psychological salvation system” explodes all over the place: in the six-and-a-half-minute Berlin Dada donny-brook “röhrenhose rokoko-neger-rhythmus,” in the weird “hottentotten-kral new york,” in the ghostly occasional samples from lectures and interviews by Huelsenbeck himself, and especially with American Peter Blegvad’s rendition of the old Dada hit “Ende der Welt,” which is here performed in English, as a blues. Huelsenbeck, who always thought his act was “Negro poetry,” a kind of German ragtime, would be—well, who knows what he’d be?
5 Social Distortion, “Cold Feelings” (Epic) The subjectivity—the passion and flair—in this well-scarred L.A. punk combo’s songs is easy to miss, because the thrash ’n’ burn sound and Mike Ness’ flagellant vocals—he might as well have “Born to Lose” tattooed on the inside of his throat—are so utterly generic. Every tune begins with a promise that you’ve heard it all before. But there’s a weariness here, a fury reduced to a twitch, that puts you in touch with a particular person, the singer, not someone you’d meet anywhere else. Ness throws his words over his shoulder as if that way he could actually get rid of what they say; the band throws them back. “Try to separate my body from my mind,” he says, having long since seen through the paradox and still not caring that what he wants can’t be done. He keeps saying it, and after a minute or two everything our nation’s film critics say happens in Bad Lieutenant happens here. Not only do you look all the way into someone else’s broken mirror, you care what you see.
6 On the Wall, Inc., Scream giant inflatable Yes, 50 multicolored vinyl inches of Edvard Munch’s all-time chart topper, “The timeless work of art that sums up all the stress, tension, frustration, and just plain AUUGGHH! that we all feel now and then.” If you hate Jeff Koons this’ll have you sweating blood, but I imagine some people take theirs to bed with them.
7 Jimi Hendrix, “Star Spangled Banner,” in a TV public service announcement for Children Now/California (KTVU, Oakland, December 18) The shattered Woodstock instrumental, running under a black and white, documentary-style montage of children writhing on the floor in gas-station bathrooms, picking through dumpsters, smiling, huddling together, looking scared, as if they were listening to the dead man: “He’s playing our song!” An obvious idea, with a complete follow-through.
8 Bob Dylan, “Chimes of Freedom,” An American Reunion (HBO, January 17) Yeah, he sounded terrible, but did you see that jacket? Purple, with black appliqué? On a night when Michael Jackson looked less human than the Mickey Mouse-men in Disneyland commercials, Dylan looked like he’d just bought a Nashville haberdashery.
9 David Lynch, director, Twin Peaks—Fire Walk with Me (New Line Home Video) Though nobody needed the subtitled dwarf, this much-maligned film is a lot tougher than Wild at Heart, and also probably the greatest teen-jeopardy flick ever made. It opens on the corpse of Teresa Banks, the fiend’s first victim, then focuses on the surprise and despair around her mouth, frozen by rigor mortis; the movie sheds its conceits when Laura Palmer, in a heedlessly extremist performance by Sheryl Lee, finds the same expression in life. Now the most ordinary situation is the worst: Laura’s father taunting her at the dinner table because she hasn’t washed her hands. You know he’ll get rid of the dirt by the end, and in this sudden moment so does Laura. The disbelief in her face as he rails at her is awful, but not as bad as the belief that replaces it.
The composition of many shots is arty, the efficient production of effects that mostly call attention to themselves; the composition of others is so fine they all but leave the picture. Near the beginning, the FBI agent played by Chris Isaak stands in a trailer park, his feet on wet ground, a trenchcoat on his shoulders, mountains in the background: a last moment of contemplation and puzzlement before he disappears from the film like Bulkington from Moby-Dick. I rewound the tape, hit the pause button, and stared into a perfect picture of the loneliness, the possibility of abandonment, implicit in American open spaces—where, as Lynch says here, anything can happen, and will.
10 Calvin Klein underwear ads, with Kate Moss, In her uncanny impersonation of a brain-dead tadpole, you can see her future: supermodel for legal euthanasia. “WOULD YOU WANT YOUR CHILD TO LIVE LIKE THIS?”
APRIL 1993
1 Popinjays, Flying Down to Mono Valley (Epic/One Little Indian) A snazzier, more expert Fastbacks goes to the circus, where the women run the trapezes like hopscotch squares, get harmonies selling popcorn and hot dogs in the stands, and make a quick exit: who were those girls, anyway? In this case, Wendy Robinson and Polly Hancock of London.
2 Elizabeth Armstrong & Joan Roth-fuss, curators, and Janet Jenkins, editor, “In the Spirit of Fluxus,” exhibition (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, until June 6, and
traveling in the U.S. and Europe until January 1995) and catalogue The best art out of Fluxus—a sort of ur-’60s conspiracy of minimalist careerists—was gestural: the discovery and performance of severe and extended gestures of (supposedly) enormous symbolic and (absolutely) no practical significance. It was the performance of life as a joke we play on ourselves. At the time, Fluxus struck me as an exercise in pose, the worst sort of bohemian condescension: a bet that the audience wouldn’t get the joke. But in the Walker, among various not-overworried reconstructions of Fluxus sites and events (the founding performances of Nam June Paik and others at Wiesbaden in 1962; the week Ben Vautier spent in the window of a London art gallery in the same year), the feeling was stirring. You could catch the desire of disparate people from all over the world to do things that had never been done before, no matter how dumb they might appear at first, or ever after.
That spirit gets codified and ossified as the exhibit moves on from its first rooms; then it breaks out again in odd places. When you reach the Flux-Labyrinth, a full-size recreation of the fun-house-as-punishment contraption Larry Miller and the late George Maciunas built in Berlin in 1976 (Miller was at the Walker fine-tuning the monster), the spirit the Flux folk might have loved best is passed on, especially when you’re stuck in the room with the piano. As Kristine Stiles puts it in her fine catalogue essay, “Between Water and Stone,” the “ostensible inability to do or to get things right is the source of amusement and release.”
3 Arthur Flowers, Another Good Loving Blues, a novel (Viking) In Mississippi, in 1918, Luke Bodeen, a bluesman, meets Melvira Dupree, a conjure woman. She seeks the mother who abandoned her, he seeks the “ ‘blues that will still be here touching folk long after I’m dead and gone,’ ” and together they seek each other. There’s a great sweep of history in this peaceful, steady-rolling tale: as Dupree struggles with the modern disbelief that saps her powers, Bodeen can remember a time, right about the turn of the century, “when there wasn’t no such thing as the blues,” and he can remember when he first picked up hints of the new sound, as a riverboat piano man hired onto the Stacker Lee. Flowers never overplays a scene, not when Bodeen ends up a begging drunk in a public park, bereft of the dignity and moral purpose he’d discovered in the blues, and not when Dupree puts the hex on. “ ‘St. Louie Slick Miz Melvira. A lowlife pimp and gambling man,’ ” says the mother of a girl seduced into prostitution. “ ‘Hurt him before he hurt our baby.’ ” Dupree finds him in a barbershop. “ ‘St. Louie Slick?’ ” she asks.