Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Heavenly, P.U.N.K. Girl (K Records) A five-song ep that’s stronger than last year’s lp Le Jardin de Heavenly, and more playful: you can imagine Emma Thompson fronting this English band, even if you know it’s sweet-voiced Amelia Fletcher, joined by three men and one Cathy Rogers on vocals. Heavenly’s idea of play, though, is to pull the rug out from under you. “Hearts and Crosses” starts off in a lacy virgin’s bedroom, and the air is filled with flowers, angels, fantasies of true love (“How would it feel to hold him for real? To whisper ‘I love you’ and lean on his shoulder?”). The tone is sunny, confident, friendly, cool—like the Jamies’ 1958 hit “Summertime, Summertime.” This is classic pop, you’ve heard it forever—but never, it seems in the moment, with such convincing delicacy. Then the tune breaks, and there’s a flat, spoken, rhymed narrative about date rape. It’s rough: “He bit her hard but never kissed her.” Fletcher’s voice never rises and when the tune comes back the tone hasn’t altered a bit from the opening—just the story, which is now about ruin, not betrayal so much as memories that can’t be erased.

  3 Garth Brooks, “That Summer” (Liberty) Carefully written, arranged to highlight peaks and valleys, this country hit is recognizable in an instant even if you’ve only heard half of it once before. And as an entry in the hoary boy-loses-virginity-to-older-woman genre it doesn’t hedge on passion: the singer doesn’t learn how to be a man, he finds out there are things that can never be taken back. “I have rarely held another/When I haven’t seen her face” is the sort of confession the genre took shape to suppress.

  4 Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion, translated from the French by Tanya Leslie (Four Walls Eight Windows) In 1974, after Alek-sander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize and was deported from the Soviet Union, Punch writer Alan Coren warned that despite the great man’s popularity with Paris’ revisionist intelligentsia, he would be unlikely to find a warm welcome in France. Reason: he had never written a novel that was (a) five million words long or (b) five thousand words long. Ernaux’s tale of a grown-up, all-consuming love affair (all-consuming from the female narrator’s point of view, anyway) comes in at the low end of the scale: about eight thousand words. Yet in the short time she demands of a reader Ernaux can leave you as drained as an early Godard movie, and she shapes her story with Barthes-like notes sharp enough to start you thinking through the novels in your own life. As when the narrator speaks of “the cultural standards governing emotion which have influenced me since childhood (Gone with the Wind, Phèdre or the songs of Edith Piaf are just as decisive as the Oedipus complex).”

  5 John Heartfield, “Photomontages” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 8 August, moving to Los Angeles County Museum, 7 October–2 January 1994) “This makes me nervous,” a friend said as we walked through a show dominated by Heartfield’s late-’20–’30s antifascist agitprop, most of it made in Berlin, some of it made in Prague, in exile. It wasn’t hard to know what she meant. As Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels appeared in Heartfield’s collages—shouting and preening, mocked and tossing off mockery like spittle—they were not art subjects, not then and not now. They escaped the museum just like that. This was real speech about real things that actually happened—or that, because of Heart-field’s power, were actually happening. The pictures weren’t safe and the past wasn’t buried.

  6 Steve “Scarface” Williams, sound supervisor for Menace II Society, directed by the Hughes Brothers (New Line Cinema) Here and there in this film about not growing up in black Los Angeles, the sound made by ordinary movements—a car pulling up to a curb, a door closing, words coming out of a father’s mouth after he shoots a friend—is amplified all out of proportion to what’s on the screen. The sound isn’t merely loud, but slowed down, thickened, and inflated, as if it’s coming from somewhere else, from some off-screen prophet-beast whose threats and warnings don’t suffer language. The unnaturalness of the effect takes you right out of the movie, and what’s dramatized is the unnaturalness of the social order the movie is about.

  7 George Michael and Queen, “Somebody to Love,” from Five Live (Hollywood) Recorded at the Freddie Mercury tribute in April 1992, and as complete a validation of professionalism as you’d ever want to hear: going strictly by the book, Michael rings glory out of every note.

  8 Shaver, Tramp on Your Street (Zoo/Praxis) A drifter’s record—as Billy Joe Shaver appears on the cover, weathered and road-beaten, with long, stringy gray hair, he’s the tramp you see every day. Then he starts singing, taking the old outlaw-country voice away from its clichés; guitarist and son Eddy Shaver brings the songs as close to rock ’n’ roll as he can without crossing over. The music is ambitious social realism under a rainbow of religion—in the end, no more than muscle and heart.

  9 Pet Shop Boys, Very (EMI) Though Chris Lowe’s airy, bohemian dance rhythms again seem to suggest a salon more than a disco (nothing wrong with that), there’s a difference in Neil Tennant’s voice, and in the cadences he builds his words around. His naïveté—the assumed, artificial, self-protecting naïveté of someone who could too easily have given himself over to cynicism—is gone. Tennant no longer pretends to be surprised by things he ought to understand; at 39, he sounds tested.

  10 Dan Graham, Rock My Religion—Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, ed. Brian Wallis (MIT) This handsome compendium of essays, attempts at collage narrative, and bonnes pensées is rooted almost wholly in the obvious. Scattering bits of wisdom from Walter Benjamin or the Frankfurt School like alms to the poor, Graham digs for signs of life in commodity culture, finds them in rock ’n’ roll, punk, and cinema, and trumpets his discoveries like the first white man pressing into the Dark Continent. Mixing blunt historical solecisms (the Puritans believed “the only possible way to overcome this Original Sin was through hard work”—sorry, it was predestination) with what might be called gestural criticism (faced with a subject, you wave at it), Graham seems committed to establishing one truth beyond doubt: he’s hip.

  NOVEMBER 1993

  1 Otis Spann, “Hotel Lorraine” and “Blues for Martin Luther King,” from the anthology Rare Chicago Blues, 1962–1968 (Bullseye Blues/Rounder) “On the fourth of April/In the year nineteen and sixty-eight/Yes! On the fourth of April . . .” It’s the next day, in a storefront church on 43rd Street in Chicago, the day after Martin Luther King was shot. Outside, the riots are beginning: “The world was all up in flames.” Accompanied only by drummer S. P. Leary and some shouting from Muddy Waters, blues pianist Otis Spann is bringing the day into focus. He pulls his words out of the air; his piano opens “Hotel Lorraine” with the same unanswerable sense of foreboding he and others had found ten years before in Little Walter’s “Blue and Lonesome.” God is judging us as we speak, the sound says—so speak truly.

  “Blues for Martin Luther King” was issued as a single on the Cry label, with profits going to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; “Hotel Lorraine” remained unreleased until it appeared on a little-heard blues collection in 1977, seven years after Spann’s death, at age 40. His voice is now desperate, now stoic; his piano traces familiar blues runs with such passion it’s as if the blues came into being exactly in anticipation of the need to answer to this event. For this is no representation, not even a version: this is the event itself, a voice in a room made of walls that may not last the day. A quarter-century later, the performances reach out of the past like the hand that comes out of the ground at the end of Carrie.

  2 Pearl Jam, “Crazy Mary,” on Sweet Relief—A Benefit for Victoria Williams (Chaos/Columbia) Singer-songwriter Williams has MS and no health insurance. Thus this tribute album, featuring more or less neo-folk-rock folk from the Waterboys to Michelle Shocked to Evan Dando to Matthew Sweet, and like a lot of the singers, Williams’ songs have a fussiness about them—they’re self-conscious, self-referential, often calling attention to themselves. That’s as true of “Tarbelly and Featherfoot” (done here by Lou Reed) as of “Crazy Mary,” which comes on like a college-class short story inspired by Win
esburg, Ohio. But when Eddie Vedder wraps his voice around the chorus—the more melody this guy has to work with the tougher he gets—an ominousness rises out of the piece, and it begins to suggest something altogether more vulgar, and deeper: the last page of “The Lottery,” maybe.

  3 J. T. Brown, saxophone solo on Elmore James’ “Madison Blues,” on the anthology Blues Masters, Volume 6: Blues Originals (Rhino) It’s Chicago again, 1960, and Brown is barely in the band—his long, lazy notes float so freely on clouds of happiness and pleasure he’s barely on the record.

  4 Adam Green, What Were You in a Previous Life? (Thunder’s Mouth Press) Cartoons kin to Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” strip, but less detailed, more blank (“Yet Another Cartoon That Fails to Address Class Struggle”), with pretty much three stock characters: office-worker male, office-worker female, plus cat as living non sequitur. You have to be there.

  5 Lisa Germano, Happiness (Capitol) A lot of melody, a lot of dissonance—the fiddle player in John Mellencamp’s band gets her own thick, sensuous sound, drawing out her vocals with a tone that falls somewhere between sleep, a drawl, and a drunk. Having lowered expectations, she produces surprises all over the place: her “Sycophant” is the return of the Raincoats (whose post-punk gem Odyshape will be reissued next year on DGC), and her cover of “These Boots are Made for Walkin’ ” is better than Amy Tan’s.

  6 Moby Grape, “Big,” on Vintage—The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia Legacy reissue, 1968) Compiler Bob Irwin has done a magnificent job reconstructing the leavings of this doomed band, which in the great days of the San Francisco Sound shared little with the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, or the Quicksilver Messenger Service other than a couple of stages and a certain feel for the Old West—though by looking at people on the streets of the Haight in 1967 you couldn’t tell if their Old West came from the Gold Rush or Have Gun, Will Travel. Well, you can tell now, listening to this previously unheard, broken ramble: they go right back to the days of ’49 and don’t even try to make it home.

  7–8 Hanif Kureishl, writer and director, London Kills Me (New Line Cinema Home Video) and Cornershop, Elvis Sex-Change (W111JA ep) Screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette) and novelist (The Buddha of Suburbia) Kureishi released his first film last year—the tale of a loose band of misfits a couple of hours away from homelessness and a few days away from suicide. London Kills Me was mercilessly savaged by British critics, but it’s hard to see why: not only is each character distinct, he or she makes claims on your attention at different times, and by the end of the movie the guy who at first seemed too stupid to bother with is more interesting than anybody else. A poor neighborhood where the mix of food smells is as confusing as the mix of languages on the street is captured with affection and a keen sense of the place as a dead end; the film almost asks you to feel superior to both its people and its milieu, but never does so itself, whether you do or not. Cornershop’s songs (including “Hanif Kureishi Scene”) are the tunes the people in London Kills Me would come up with if they weren’t too busy getting lost in Billy Liar or trying to escape from it. They’re all blocked gestures and creative exhaustion, stumbling stabs at anger or love. It’s music completely defined by its limits, and touching for just that quality.

  9 Cannanes, “Frightening Thing” (K Records) Sunny, guiltless girl-boy punk from Australia, with good teenage advice on the sleeve and an even better instruction on the label: “PLAY LOUD & LEAVE THE ROOM.”

  10 Firesign Theater, Shoes for Industry!—The Best of the Firesign Theater (Columbia Legacy reissue, 1967–75) If you’ve lost your old lps by the best comedy group in the history of the phonograph record, this is a road back to a rather more convincing account of ’60s liberation than can be found in books. If you’ve never heard the most effective surrealists in the history of Dada, this is the place to start. But Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Phil Proctor, and Phil Austin are still around—why did they ever stop? “Our best albums,” Bergman told Steve Simels, who wrote the notes to this set, “had a theme underneath them—the War. And when the War was over, we lost our theme.” “There was something about the Eighties—the anti-surrealist politics of the Eighties—that was wrong for the Firesign Theater,” says Ossman. The group promises a new record, The Illusion of Unity, in 1994: “Sure enough,” Bergman says, “when we kicked the fascists out of office it was time for the Firesign Theater to come back.” If the record is any good the return of the Firesign Theater won’t make up for all of Bill Clinton’s failings, but it’ll make up for some of them.

  DECEMBER 1993

  1 Lee Smith, The Devil’s Dream (Ballantine) “One time years back, when she was sitting on the porch hooking a rug and singing one of these mournful old hymns, as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, ‘Aunt Dot, how come you to sing that old song? How come you don’t sing something pretty?’ For he knew full well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and how many songs she knew. She turned to look at him, pursing her mouth, and said, ‘Honey, they is pretty singing, and then they is true singing.’ ” The Devil’s Dream is about true singing. It’s a spell-caster of a novel, with a family ghost wending its way from the 1830s into the present, from a hollow in Virginia to Nashville, from a young woman destroyed by God’s curse on her fiddle to her great-great-great-granddaughter with a Ph.D. in deconstruction from Duke. Along the way the ghost makes country music history, tossing up a rockabilly singer (“that dark dangerous look the women like, that’s what Johnny’s going for, kind of a cross between Porter Wagoner and an undertaker”), expecting no peace and finding none. Always, whatever music is found is framed by “The Cuckoo Song,” an ancient, mystical tune about not being at home in the world, and “Blackjack Davey,” an even older fable about a wife and mother who abandons her home to fuck a faithless lover—and the lives of Smith’s men and women are framed by these songs, too. They can’t get out of them—not because they are weak, or uneducated, or trapped in the prison of fundamentalist religion, but because the songs are so deep.

  2 PJ Harvey, 4-Track Demos (Island) There’s more freedom on these one-woman overdubs than on Harvey’s group albums—more freedom as wish and realization, on guitar and in the voice. What sounded like contrived effects on Dry and especially Rid of Me are events here. “Oh, she fucked my memory,” Harvey sings on the demo for “Yuri-G”; I can’t make out what she’s saying on the Rid of Me version, but it isn’t that.

  3 Muddy Waters, licensed music in TV ads for Timberland waterproof clothing (W L. Gore & Associates, Newark, Delaware) Beginning in a simple verbal/visual pun, these spots—people slogging through mud and rain while the late Chicago bluesman thunders on like a South Side Jeremiah—are weirdly unstable. It’s media shock: you’re not prepared for something this powerful in a television commercial. Uncontextualized, or miscontextualized, the music may for a fleeting moment seem stronger here than it ever has elsewhere. What were they selling again?

  4–5 Ted Levin and Ankica Petrović (recording, compilation, annotation): Bosnia—echoes from an endangered world—Music and Chant of the Bosnian Muslims (Smithsonian Folkways) and Ammiel Alcalay et al., Lusitania no. 5 (Fall 1993)— For/Za Sarajevo At the Miss Besieged Sarajevo pageant last May, it wasn’t traditional Bosnian music that was played but “Eve of Destruction.” On Bosnia, an anthology of 1984–85 field recordings plus a few popularized folk numbers, you don’t hear desperation; most intensely you hear serenity (“Ezan,” a Muslim call to prayer) or strength. PJ Harvey fans will have no problem with “Ganga: Odkad seke nismo zapjevale” (How long we sisters haven’t sung), even if, in Ankica Petrović’s words, “Urban dwellers tend to dismiss ganga as simply unorganized (or disorganized) sound.” Here three women from the village of Podora+ac in northern Herzegovina fill Levin and Petrović’s tape less with voices than with hearts, lungs, stomachs—whole bodies. In Herzegovinian fact or Appalachian-American analogy, this is mountain music: melisma and flattened tones twist themes until the individual and the community, th
e present and the past, are both complete and indistinguishable. As Petrović writes, “Singers and their active listeners achieve maximal harmony through dissonance.”

  Though Serbs and Croats as well as Muslims practice ganga, Petrović’s comment is obviously no metaphor for politics, and the Bosnia collection doesn’t work as background music to For/Za Sarajevo, a living tombstone of essays and classic texts running in both English and Serbo-Croatian. The CD is from what was a country, the journal number is a cemetery map. There are no atrocity photos, just a few pictures of people, artworks, objects, architecture. Entries open with an almost biblical incantation from Me+a Selimović’s 1966 The Dervish and Death (“I begin this, my story, for naught—with no benefit to myself nor to others, from a need that is stronger than profit or reason, that my record remain”) and move toward Tomaž-Mastnak’s enraged, incisive “A Journal of the Plague Years: Notes on European Anti-Nationalism,” where the legacy of fascism meets the unfinished business of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, on Muslims: “It is not enough to humiliate them, they should be destroyed”). “I would not call this a conspiracy,” Mastnak says of Europe’s acquiescence in the Bosnian genocide. “It is more like a dream coming true.”

  “DON’T LET THEM KILL Us,” read the banner, in English, carried by the 13 swimsuited contestants in the Miss Besieged Sarajevo contest. In a way, you can find them all in the most striking art in For/Za Sarajevo, Mustafa Skopljak’s 1993 Sarajevo 91’ 92’ 93’ 94’, from the OBALA Gallery’s Witness of Existence project. Little terracotta faces with odd expressions are placed in holes on a bed of dirt; it’s a graveyard, but all the graves are open and everybody, from whatever century or religion, is still alive and looking right at you.

  6–8 Mekons, “Millionaire” and I ♥ Mekons (both Quarterstick) and The Mekons Story, 1977–1982 (Feel Good All Over reissue) I ♥ Mekons, which has been wandering in the desert of the music business since at least 1991, is muscular, confident, anguished—perhaps just right for a group that currently rotates on a Chicago–New York–London axis. Yet “Millionaire” (with three live tracks appended) all but floats over the rest of the music, Sally Timms’ rich country vocal so soulful and Tom Greenhalgh’s guitar such an upheaval the tune deserves its own disc. As for The Mekons Story (originally led by the pretitle it falleth like the gentle rain from heaven), it’s a strange assemblage of scraps and shouts, broken promises and drunken regret: a stirring would-be suicide note from a time, now more than ten years gone, when the already-old band first tried to give up the ghost.