Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4 Kim Baxter, The Tale of Me and You (kimbaxtermusic.com) Baxter was the most noticeable voice in the wonderful Portland punk quartet All Girl Summer Fun Band. They never pushed too hard. On her first album under her own name, Baxter does. “Oval Frame” is Nirvana with radio distortion around the sides. “Arc de Triomphe,” not that far from Freddy Cannon’s “Palisades Park,” is a celebration of an I’ll-do-anything-for-you love that you know won’t last, except in memory.

  5 Jacob Mikanowski of State College, Pennsylvania, writes in on the Penn State scandal “State College is a bucolic, tranquil town. The ‘Happy Valley’ nickname isn’t a joke. I saw the Red Riding movies last year, and I thought they were well made but that the overarching premise—that there was a conspiracy to protect a child sex ring in a North English town—was basically preposterous. But when the story broke in November, it was like going to bed in Mayberry and waking up in Twin Peaks.”

  6 David Byrne, How Music Works (McSweeney’s) A complex musical autobiography and investigation into the question of how music talks—with an opening scene on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in the early 1970s, when Byrne and his Rhode Island School of Design classmate Mark Kehoe, busking their way around the country—Kehoe on accordion and Byrne on ukulele and violin—tried to get people to pay attention to “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Glory of Love”—“as well as our arrangements of more contemporary fare, like ‘96 Tears’ ” And that really does tell you all you need to know about what Talking Heads was aiming for all along.

  7 Cathi Unsworth, Weirdo (Serpent’s Tail) A London private detective arrives in a seedy British town to reopen a twenty-year-old high-school murder mystery. Half of the story is told in flashbacks, and it’s the story he doesn’t discover: a swamp of sexual degradation, a few people of decency, and a clue that turns on the cover of the second Echo and the Bunnymen album.

  8 James Luther Dickinson and the North Mississippi Allstars, I’m Just Dead I’m Not Gone (Merless) “When I leave here, just hang crepe on your door,” Frank Hutchison of West Virginia sang in 1928 in “Worried Blues.” “I won’t be dead, just won’t be here no more.” Dickinson, a storied bandleader and producer, died in 2009—“Three hundred pounds of barbeque,” as one of his friends lovingly said at the time. All that’s missing from the spooky show he recorded in Memphis in 2006—with humor in every performance, resentment and regret coming up behind it, especially in a harrowing, last-will-and-testament version of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Codine”—is a cover of the Hutchison song, with his “won’t be dead” turned on its head.

  9 Pussy Riot, “Punk Prayer,” Cathedral of Christ the Savior (Moscow) One day in February, several Russian women—reenacting both Johnny Rotten’s “I am an antichrist” in “Anarchy in the U.K.” and the action of one Michel Mourre, who, in 1950, dressed as a Dominican monk with his head in a Dominican tonsure, in Notre Dame in Paris, stepped up during a break during Easter High Mass to deliver an address on the death of God—momentarily seized a church. They were dressed in bright red-and-pink shifts, blue leggings, and yellow, mauve, orange, and turquoise-colored balaclavas. They genuflected, stood up, began to stomp and prance. They shouted, shrieked—attacking Vladimir Putin, attacking the Church, crossing themselves as they were pulled off by guards—and from the sound they made, clipped, sharp, harsh, joyful, the sound of people feeling, if only for a minute, completely free. Singing in Russian, they could have been the all-women Zurich punk band Kleenex (a.k.a. Liliput), singing in Swiss-German more than thirty years ago.

  Charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, Pussy Riot members Yekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alekhina, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were held in prison until August 17, when, after attending their trial while confined in a box, they were found guilty and sentenced to two years in a penal colony; Tolokonnikova’s defiant closing statement will be read in public squares and tiny apartments all over the world for years to come. But that’s not enough. When the Plastic People of the Universe were mercilessly harassed and its members jailed under the Soviet puppet regime in Czechoslovakia, people smuggled their music out on homemade LPs. Today for Pussy Riot, you can go right to YouTube—but for a lot of reasons, something more tangible, an object, a physical fact, is called for. Kill Rock Stars, which reissued Kleenex and Liliput, not to mention their labelmates and punk comrades Essential Logic and Delta 5, has destiny waiting. Download their performance from the cathedral, put it on a CD, and send it out into the world.

  10 Posting, Hammersmith, London (Jubilee Week) In the early 1970s, Jamie Reid, by 1976 the designer for the Sex Pistols, put up little pink stickers in London supermarkets: OFFICIAL WARNING—CLOSING DOWN SALE, they read. LAST DAYS BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST—THIS STORE WILL BE CLOSING SOON OWING TO THE PENDING COLLAPSE OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM AND THE WORLDWIDE EXHAUSTION OF RAW MATERIALS. “God save the Queen / the fascist regime,” Johnny Rotten sang in 1977: “Your future dream is a shopping scheme.” Thirty-five years later, Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, now directing the opening and closing ceremonies for the London Olympics, included the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” But on a wall in London two months before, there was a better homage: either an ironic celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, or just another ad. Or the Sex Pistols’ latest trick: a poster screaming “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN AND HER SHOPPING REGIME,” promising a “free draw” for a £500 diamond. With graphics precisely mimicking Reid’s mimicking of signs just like this one.

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012

  1 Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, written and directed by David Cronenberg (Alfama Films/Prospero Pictures) This slight figure, in ill-fitting clothes, no matter how expensive they might be—he’s supposed to be a financial titan, or monster, twenty-eight and worth far more billions than that, about to embark on a journey of systematically destroying everything he has. Can he carry a whole movie? It doesn’t look like it. But as the film goes on, his face becomes at once more expressive and withdraws more completely into itself, and an Elvis ghost emerges around the smudged eyes, to the point that you half expect someone, maybe the cream-pie guerrilla, to say, “Hey, you’re the Elvis of money!” But then the sun goes down, Pattinson sits across the table from his nemesis, and as his eyes go glassy—not blank, but a milky pool with no refection—you could be watching The Manchurian Candidate, with Laurence Harvey sitting across from Frank Sinatra as red queens cover the table between them and Harvey remembers what he’s done. Except for Keira Knightley, Cronenberg’s last picture, A Dangerous Method, seemed cast on autopilot, with Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung; this, from Juliette Binoche’s bouncing art dealer to Paul Giamatti reaching all the way down into his bag of losers, is displacing from the first moment to the last.

  2 Cat Power, Sun (Matador) There’s always been an acrid, suspicious edge behind Cat Power’s tone of voice; except with other people’s songs, where she might drift, get lost, and not care, she doesn’t let herself go. What’s new here, as the songs, which are indistinctly outlined, slowly take shape, is what I can only call womanliness: a certain warmth, an undeniable lack of fear.

  3 Matthew Friedberger, Matricidal Sons of Bitches (Thrill Jockey) This is the other half of Fiery Furnaces’ twelfth solo album, and the fifth this year. (“I’m supposed to make two records this fall,” the one-man orchestra Friedberger writes, “one home made one and one ‘proper’ studio one—I think of those as being from 2012. But they won’t be out till next year. In other words, I’m confused by this.”) And that’s not even counting the “ Table” series, which is said to include one album for each of the 118 elements in the Periodic Table. For the meantime, this is described as being inspired by Hollywood’s Poverty Row, the no-budget fly-by-night letterhead studios that churned out countless B to Z pictures in the 1930s and ’40s. You get a feel for the people hanging around the lots in Nathanael West’s 1939 The Day of the Locust; you can see what the style (form?) (junk heap?) produced at its most intense in Edgar G.
Ulmer’s 1945 Detour. There’s an undertow implicit in both the idea and the fact of Poverty Row, a sense of just-shoot-me surrender, people pressing on to the next shot because it would be too much trouble to stop, and Friedberger catches that, as a kind of memory still present around the edges of even today’s most glamorous movies, as in the scene in Mulholland Dr. where Naomi Watts hires her hit man. There are forty-five tracks here; go to “I’m Sure It’s . . . for the Best,” number ten, and “Disappointed Dads,” number twenty-four, first.

  4 Beloved (Les Bien-Aimés), directed by Christophe Honoré (IFC) Frenchwoman walks into a London bar and hears a band playing a bloodless version of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” but it moves her—and then she sees the drummer, who moves her more. A year later, after she finds him in another bar with another combo, they head out to the street, singing at each other: “Qui aimes-tu?” “Qui aimes-tu?” The song has turned into a little French street ballad—with an urgency all over it that the bar band never imagined.

  5 Mary Davis reports from Manhattan (August 16) “ ‘Is there a concert here tonight?’ That was the first question I overheard as I joined the long line for entry to the free event in Liberty Hall at the Ace Hotel, which was explicitly not a concert, but a ‘Reading of the Letters, Poetry, Lyrics, and Trial Statements of the Jailed Members of Pussy Riot’—held the night before Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to two years in prison.

  “The mostly young and stylish crowd seemed attentive as the speakers—poet Eileen Myles, actress Chloe Sevigny, artist K8 Hardy, musician Johanna Fateman, and performance artists Justin Vivian Bond and Karen Finley—took to the spare stage without introduction to read statements and transcripts from the trial, and letters written by the band members to Patriarch Kirill and Prime Minister Medvedev. As the evening wore on, a gaggle of waifish young women wearing trendy shorts, airy blouses, and high heels—models?—appeared in the front of the house, where they whispered among themselves, checked out the room, then slipped away as a group. Meanwhile, Sevigny calmly read Alekhina’s March 5 prison letter: ‘It’s so cold in the cell our noses get red and our feet are ice cold . . . we sleep in our street clothes.’ Myles seemed emotional as she recited the rousing letter the band wrote to Patriarch Karill: ‘What troubles us is that the very shrine you consider so defiled is so inseparably linked to Putin . . . In the prayer in question we express our grief, shared with million of Christians, that you allowed the church to become involved in a dirty political campaign.’ Finley’s fiery reading of Alekhina’s closing statement honed the message: ‘The church loves only those children who believe in Putin. . . . I never thought the Russian Orthodox Church’s role was to call for faith in any president. I thought its role was to call for faith in God.’

  “Such clarity was not a hallmark of the band’s statements, which tended toward exaggeration and self-aggrandizement: should the reference points for Pussy Riot be Brodsky, Kafka, Debord, Solzhenitsyn? Maybe that was the intention: the formal but über-hip setting heightened the sense that the event itself was an extended Pussy Riot provocation, simultaneously earnest and ironic—a dual sensibility likewise suggested by the colorful CBGB/FREE PUSSY RIOT T-shirts sported by many in the audience. The show trial may have been in Russia, but there was a spectacle in Liberty Hall.”

  6 Randy Newman, “I’m Dreaming” (Nonesuch/YouTube) No matter what happens, Mitt Romney will not fall below 45 percent in the election because 45 percent of the electorate cannot abide a black president. “I think there are a lot of people who find it jarring to have a black man in the White House and they want him out,” Randy Newman said of his new song, his little intervention, or witnessing, partly sung to the tune of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” this time “of a white president.” “You won’t get anyone, and I do mean anyone, to admit it.” The performance is quiet, cool, unashamed, the singer disappearing into his character, until he might suck you in, too, whoever you are.

  7 David Segal, “You Had to Be There: Amid the Wonder, Some Wondering,” Olympics wrap-up, the New York Times (August 13) “WORST MUSICAL CLICHÉ: The theme to ‘Chariots of Fire’ played time and time again during medal ceremonies. MOST WELCOME MUSICAL SURPRISE: Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ played in the Olympic Stadium during track and field events.” Especially the Draw-and-Quarter.

  8 Bumper sticker, Berkeley, August 18 “FORGET WORLD PEACE—VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL.” Just above it: a version of the Shepard Fairey Obama HOPE poster with a face that could have been Herbert Hoover’s.

  9 Bob Dylan, Tempest (Columbia), and at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, New York (September 4) On the surface of this album and far beneath it, a rewriting is going on—a rewriting of what, in his book Chronicles, Dylan called “a parallel universe . . . a culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors.” In the most intense and ambitious songs here, Dylan takes the folk standards “Barbara Allen,” “The Titanic,” “Black Jack Davy,” “Matty Groves,” and more, and guides them to places they have never been—places, you can imagine, the songs always knew were there, but that they couldn’t reach. “In Charlotte Town, not far from here,” Dylan began his performance of “Barbara Allen” at the Gaslight Café in New York in 1962, changing the usual “Scarlet Town”; the eight minutes it took him to say what the song said then are matched now by the seven minutes of “Scarlet Town.” Here, fifty or five hundred years later, the suicides of Sweet William and Barbara Allen have left a curse on the town, a kind of ugly, alluring gravity, each step lifting a leg of a thousand pounds, a force, a specter one can neither accept nor reject—and you don’t want to get to the end of it any more than the singer does. “The streets have names / that you can’t pronounce,” Dylan sings in a slow, considered manner, as if to get you to believe it, to weigh the fact as he does; is it that as soon as you learn how to pronounce the name of a street, it changes? The lines may be as ominous and intriguing as any Dylan has ever sung—and while I fully expect someone to trumpet the discovery that they were taken from Sherwood Anderson, Tacitus, or the sixth-century C.E. Arabian poet Imru’ al-Qays, if not Carl Barks, in this music they sound like a gong.

  At the Capitol Theatre, Dylan did not play any songs from Tempest—which had gone up on iTunes that day, a week in advance of the album’s official release—but he offered music that was just as new, if nothing like so old. With the acoustics of the less-than-two-thousand-seat hall shockingly bright—inside the storm of texting, flashbulbs, filming, phone calls, and constant chatter, you could hear every note of Dylan’s piano, follow every curling riff on Charlie Sexton’s lead guitar—the most effective performances were sly, insistent, rough, syncopated, harsh, and even scary: “Highway 61 Revisited,” “High Water (For Charley Patton),” and “All Along the Watch-tower” were sent out in staccato bursts, with stinging, isolated rockabilly notes that were like flashbulbs in the sound. The most carefully written passages in the songs seemed to bring out the most in Dylan as a pure singer, alive to the way a word might call for a hesitation, a moment of doubt, a dive forward. Just as often he put the pressure not on words but on syllables, each one carrying an exclamation point, which suspended the ideas or dramas in the songs—the sardonic dread and idealistic cynicism in “All Along the Watchtower,” the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew at the bar in “High Water”—even as the pace picked up with every chorus. Finally, the whole show was a matter of cadence—with “All Along the Watchtower” moving from! ! ! to a kind of slow, doubting abstraction, the song dissolving into the miasma of a noir film like In a Lonely Place, where no one could tell who to be afraid of. Dylan has played this song at the end of shows for years; this was the best performance of it I’ve ever heard.

  10 2 Days
in New York, directed by Julie Delpy, written by Delpy, Alexia Landeau, and Alexandre Nahon (Magnolia) Chris Rock’s Mingus to Julie Delpy’s Marion: “He’s mildly schizophrenic? What’s mildly schizophrenic? He hears nice voices? He would have killed Ringo and not John?”

  JANUARY 2013

  1 Favorite election film: “You Don’t Own Me” PSA (YouTube) “I’m Lesley Gore,” says the sixty-six-year-old onetime pop star, “and I approve this message.” It’s powerful to see dozens of women and girls lipsynching to the song that, so long after its moment on the charts (produced by Quincy Jones, #2 in 1964), has become such a touchstone—here, for abortion rights. As there is in the final-judgment almost–Law & Order bang! bang! of the music, there’s a sense of menace in the pacing of the quick but somehow hesitating cuts from one woman, duo, or trio to the next—directed by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Maximilla Lukacs, the little movie has the feel of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. With the men in the “Top Comments” section hitting back (“Who would want to make love to the unlovable women hating men that open their big yaps on here?”), the spot, which is sure to be back, or remade, for all foreseeable elections to come, was an election in and of itself.

  2 Corner Laughers, “(Now That I Have You I’m) Bored” from Poppy Seeds (Mystery Lawn Music) Led by singer and ukulele player Karla Kane, this San Francisco combo has its feet in the pool of the Smiley Smile Beach Boys—the supposedly throw-away music (“Vegetables,” “She’s Goin’ Bald”) they made after they gave up on Brian Wilson’s Smile masterpiece. It’s sometimes sun-blindingly bright, never less than sweet. It may not wear any better than the singles of another San Francisco band, the long-forgotten Sopwith Camel of “Hello, Hello” fame. But for bringing new life to the dying art of parenthetical titling, this song would make my chart anyway.