Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Kanye West at 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief (New York, Madison Square Garden, December 12, 2012) Emerging from a sea of sludge—the critic and musician Tom Kipp’s term for the way rote rock riffs and gestures, in this case uncountable raised arms, brandished guitars, and drawn-out finales, can accumulate until the entire form can seem like the aesthetic equivalent of landfill—the only hip-hop performer to have been called a “jackass” by President Obama and coincidentally the only hip-hop performer on the bill broke the night open. First high-stepping, then bending low and all but tiptoeing, he made a drama of assault and stealth, upending the parade of stars for twenty solid minutes, raging through parts of twelve songs—from “Clique” and “Jesus Walks” to his lines in Jay-Z’s “Run This Town” and Rihanna’s “Diamonds”—he brought down the storm everybody else was only talking about. Suddenly, there was a doubling, art and jeopardy facing off as enemies and leaving arm in arm.

  3 George Bellows, Preaching (Billy Sunday), in “George Bellows” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 15, 2012–February 18, 2013; Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 16–June 9, 2013) Bellows is best known for his 1909 boxing painting Stag at Sharkey’s, where the bodies of the two fighters seem to stretch beyond themselves. This 1915 pen-and-ink drawing is even more extreme. The evangelist Billy Sunday started out as a major-league outfielder, and you can see that here. Addressing a huge crowd in an enormous hall—the high roof supported by wooden pillars that look like trees, giving the impression of a camp meeting, though person to person the well-dressed crowd is appreciative, ecstatic, stony-faced, despairing—Sunday stands on top of a jerry-built pine platform, his legs spread, his right arm shooting out, his index finger pointing like a knife, his left arm cocked with his hand in a tight fist, his body so tensed it’s as if he’s physically daring the whole world to doubt a word he’s saying. The picture is thrilling, frightening: an unparalleled portrait of American movement. And seated at Sunday’s feet on the platform are four clerks, carefully writing down his words, or entering figures.

  4 Adam Gold, “Q&A: T Bone Burnett on ‘Nashville,’ Elton John’s Comeback and Retiring as a Producer,” Rollingstone.com (December 18, 2012) “Listen, the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world.”

  5 Simone Jackson, “The Cuckoo,” in Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnold (Ecosse/Film4) Playing the servant Nelly, Simone, cooing to Hindley’s baby, sounds like the ’60s British folk singer Anne Briggs. Other folk tunes float through the film: “The Cruel Mother,” “I Once Loved a Lass,” “Barbara Allen.” “In the most extraordinary way,” the critic Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian, “Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer of interpretation, superimposed on a classic’s frills and those of all the other remembered versions, but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book, something on which the book might have been based, a raw, semi-articulate series of events, later polished and refined as a literary gemstone. That is an illusion, of course, but a convincing and thrilling one”—or not an illusion. The movie itself is like a folk ballad whose origins can’t be traced, a ballad for which there’s no original, and thus no copy.

  6 Son of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys (Anti-) The New York producer Hal Willner is again drawing on his wide circle of rock legends, actors, and moderately obscure downtown Manhattan musicians. There are duds, mostly from the big names—Iggy Pop trying to be hipper than the songs he’s declaiming, Patti Smith and Johnny Depp making Real Art out of Old Folk Song. There are shots in the dark no one but Willner could have thought of, let alone pulled off: Macy Gray scratching her way through “Off to the Sea Once More,” so believable you can see her on deck with a peg for a leg, Anjelica Huston stepping through “Missus McGraw” as if it were a garden, Tom Waits with Keith Richards letting the melody of “Shenandoah” crawl out of his encrusted throat, Tim Robbins with Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs embracing “Marianne,” Robin Holcomb and Jessica Kenny’s subtle, faraway “Ye Mariners All,” the Americans—a New York foursome, led by Patrick Ferris, whose deep voice doesn’t sound like Richard Manuel’s but feels like it—on “Sweet and Low,” a small essay on the way a regretful mind doubles back on itself forever.

  The glowing coal at the heart of all this—there are thirty-six performances—is the New York singer Shilpa Ray, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, on seven minutes of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny.” Everyone has done this, from Lotte Lenya in The Threepenny Opera to Nina Simone to Bob Dylan rewriting it as “When the Ship Comes In” to Nicole Kidman using it to massacre the population of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. As the song’s scullery maid, Ray rushes into the piece as if her broom will be her ride when the song is over. Behind her, a sound somewhere between an accordion and a church organ sweeps up the music and holds it as one note. She’s enraged, contemplative, funny, wistful, throwing you back, lost in fantasy: “This whole fuckin’ place will be down to the ground.” Growling, she could be a female hobo who’s drunk too much Sterno; letting her voice smooth itself out over a string of words, she’s a schoolteacher giving her third-grade class a music lesson. The kids sing along, and then their parents call up the principal and want to know where their children learned this song about “Kill them now or kill them later.”

  7 The Acting Company, Of Mice and Men, written by John Steinbeck, directed by Ian Belknap, Baruch Performing Arts Center (New York, December 7, 2012, on tour March/ April) With Bob Dylan’s defeated, fatalistic, dream-in-the-past 1961 version of “This Land Is Your Land” as exit music, just after Lennie (Christopher Michael McFarland) can finally see the land he and George (Joseph Midyett) will own, just before George shoots him in the back of the head. What makes this version of the song so different from any other, so jarring and hard to take, is put across in Dylan’s understated, hard cadence, in the way each line of the song is sung as a single, complete sentence, isolated from any other, so that they are pieces of an idea calling out to each other, each in its own exile, long since scattered, ideas that will never connect again: This land is your land. This land is my land. From California, to the New York Island. From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters. This land was made for you and me. It reaches the heart as “This land is not your land, this land is not my land, and it never was.”

  8 The Babies, Our House on the Hill (Woodsist) In this Brooklyn combo, Cassie Ramone’s acrid voice, full of thought, comes in behind Kevin Morby’s complacent leads as a dose of realism, not an attitude. When she takes a verse, especially on the duet “Slow Walkin,” it’s as if you’ve just passed her going the other way on the street, caught a snatch of conversation, and turned your head—Who was that talking?—half-recognizing the voice but unable give it a name.

  9 Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Barclays Center (Brooklyn, December 3, 2012) From passage to passage in a single song, they were Paul Bunyan, purposeful and determined, felling whole forests with a single swing of his ax, then Frankenstein’s monster, plummeting forward with the thrill of pure destruction. Some people might say it’s the same thing.

  10 Barrett Strong, “Money (That’s What I Want)” (Tamla, 1959), in Killing Them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Weinstein Company) You can watch the whole final sequence on YouTube: it’s November 4, 2008, and Brad Pitt’s hitman walks into a bar to meet mob fixer Richard Jenkins to collect for the three people he’s killed. Jenkins is trying to stiff Pitt on the price; on the TV above them, Barack Obama is giving his victory speech. “We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states,” he says. “We are, and always will be, the United States of America.” “Next he’ll be telling us we’re a community, one people,” Pitt says—he hasn’t been this convincing since True Romance. “In this country,” Obama says, “we rise or fall as one n
ation, as one people.” “This guy wants to tell me we’re living in a community?” Pitt says, after shredding Thomas Jefferson as “a rich wine snob . . . who allowed his own children live in slavery.” “Don’t make me laugh.” With the scene picking up momentum, force, his voice quiets: “I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fuckin’ pay me.” And then a black screen and Barrett Strong’s ferocious song, written by Berry Gordy, his first hit, and his last word.

  Thanks to Genevieve Yue

  MAY 2013

  1 Django Unchained—Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Republic) Quentin Tarantino’s soundtrack albums are as rich as his movies—with the two Kill Bill discs, more so. This is a swamp where hip-hop, Jim Croce, dialogue going on just long enough, spaghetti western classics, and John Legend all rise to the surface, one head bobbing up as another one sinks out of sight. The album creates its own drama, and as you listen, music that in the theater you only heard in snatches or didn’t register at all reshapes the story. But Anthony Hamilton and Elayna Boynton’s “Freedom” is the fire on the water. It’s ominous, menacing, stirring—so much so that it’s almost corny. And then the music seems to swoon over itself: time is coming to a stop, and every note seems so rich, so full of suggestion, portent, danger, and desire that you are willing time not to move, because you don’t want the moment to get away, even if the song promises that the next moment will hit even harder. The performance is at once a functional piece of movie music and a soul classic that, somewhere back in the ’70s, when Isaac Hayes first recorded with Sojourner Truth, got lost in a time warp.

  2 Girls, “It’s About Time,” directed by Lena Dunham, written by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner (HBO, January 13) Speaking of time warps, or the way that in culture time is a Möbius strip: Dunham’s Hannah and Andrew Rannells’s Elijah are kicking around ideas for a theme party. “OK,” says Hannah, “so it’s like the Manson family before they committed any murders? And Squeaky Fromme was just like the Mary of a Peter, Paul and Mary?”

  3 Christian Marclay, The Clock (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through June 2) Speaking of Möbius strips, you start out watching this twenty-four-hour compilation of film clips as a game, identifying the movies—you walk into the screening room at 5:15 p.m., whatever’s happening on the screen is happening at 5:15 p.m. You relax into the jokes in the scenes, into the punning cuts. Then you realize, especially as the clocks approach the hour, no matter what the hour is, that all of the pieces are actually going somewhere: toward suspense as a cinematic value that overrides all others. Marclay goes back and forth between shots of a woman waiting in line with mounting anxiety and a spaghetti western, and it’s the shots of the woman where the suspense is at its most intense, even if in the western somebody dies. Ralph Meeker carefully opens a door in Kiss Me Deadly and from another film Ingrid Bergman turns her head in shock.

  4 Kelly Clarkson, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” at the Inauguration (January 21) Speaking of shock, she had to follow Aretha Franklin, who performed the song at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and Clarkson didn’t shame herself. As she slowly turned the song toward a bigger and bigger presence, she was both a star and self-effacing, heroic and modest. Moving into the forgotten third verse, then the fourth, she made the country look up, saying, There is so much we don’t know, there is so much to remember.

  5 Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison, Cheater’s Game (Thirty Tigers) Speaking of Kellys, as a country singer Willis seems to look at the form—the genre, the style, the radio stations, the industry—from a long way off, something she remembers, and misses, but knows her music would be dead if she ever went back to what country music is supposed to be. So she slides on the melodies that drift out of what she remembers, bends to the words, and the feeling that comes out of the songs is like what you feel when you bend a sapling right up to the point where it breaks.

  6 Eddie Money for Geico (YouTube) Speaking of bending till it breaks, a horror movie: four nice people are seated in a travel agency office and in comes travel agent Eddie Money, looking like a sixty-year-old woman carrying a hangover that’s already lasted since 1978. “I’ve got—two tickets to paradise,” he sings. “Whoa-ah, whoa.”

  7 George Packer, “Loose Thoughts on Youth and Age,” the New Yorker online (February 8) Speaking of paradise, there are certain people who, in respectable circles—such as the New York Times—are beyond criticism: Patti Smith, Christopher Hitchens, Nora Ephron, Susan Sontag, among others. Packer might have found another. “American culture belongs to the young, and, for that reason, it isn’t really mine any more,” he wrote; he’s fifty-two. “My favorite album of 2012 was Neil Young’s ‘Psychedelic Pill,’ featuring a twenty-seven-minute meditation, ‘Driftin’ Back,’ about the deterioration of musical sound due to digital technology. Yet, I still live in the culture, experience it, react to it. For example, during the Super Bowl halftime show a friend and I exchanged e-mails (not texts, though they’ve been making serious inroads on my phone) about Beyoncé’s performance. We agreed that it left us a bit cold—a highly polished combination of corporate marketing and pole dancing. But I instinctively sensed the danger in going public with this view, on, say, my Twitter feed (if I had one).”

  8 The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (Yazoo) Speaking of the deterioration of musical sound due to digital technology, in the notes to this joyous celebration of Record Collecting OCD—a set of ultra-rare blues and country records from the 1920s and ’30s—there’s a story about one of the pioneers, Harry Smith, who in 1952 turned his twenty thousand 78s into the eighty-four-track anthology American Folk Music and set the stage for countless performers to come. “I would hear from Harry when he was short of money, and I would buy some records from his collection,” the collector Pete Kaufman writes of a man who was perhaps more of a trickster than anything else. “Finally I heard from Harry and he was down to his last nine most prized records in his collection, and he offered to sell them to me for $50. We met at a bar in the East Village and exchanged money for records. Harry was drinking a beer. He asked the waiter how much it would cost if he dropped the mug on the floor. The waiter said five dollars and Harry dropped the mug on the floor and Harry gave the waiter five dollars from the money I’d given him. Then he lit a match and burned a twenty-dollar bill.”

  9 B. F. Shelton, “Oh Molly Dear,” from The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (Yazoo) Speaking of The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, there has always been something terribly creepy about the Appalachian standard “East Virginia,” which begins, “I was born / in East Virigina. / North Carolina / I did roam. / There I courted a fair young maiden. / What was her name / I did not know.” It’s that missing name: it turns the song into a stalker’s confession. Or worse: maybe only barely below the surface, it’s a murder ballad. Except that in this version, recorded at the Bristol Sessions at the Virginia-Tennessee border in 1927, there’s no maybe, and so convincingly it’s a secret you might rather not have been told.

  10 Christophe Gowans, “The Record Books” (ceegworld.com/the-record-books) Speaking of untold secrets, “If best-selling albums had been books instead,” reads a tag line to this site, and then you see, say, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation: an elegant book jacket where the art seems to suggest a British judge in a white wig looming like weather over a tiny skiff. But the true action is in the little book-catalog summaries: here, “60s radical thinker Kenton ‘Sonic’ Youth’s polemic about the refusal to embrace the tide of West Coast philosophies in his native country, Papua New Guinea.” And then you can’t stop. Blood on the Tracks returns as a twenty-five-cent ’50s romance thriller, New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies as a business manual, Abbey Road as a Penguin Classics reprint of a minor novel by Graham Greene, and, perfectly, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks looking like a mildewed tract found in the basement of some foreclosed country manse: “This appears to be either a learned book of astrology or a misinf
ormed book of astronomy, written in an impenetrable ancient Dutch dialect. There are many amendments and corrections—in a rough hand—peppered with large quantities of swearwords still in use today. Peculiar.”

  JUNE 2013

  1 Blind Lemon Jefferson in Lore, directed by Cate Shortland, written by Short-land and Robin Mukherjee (2012, Music Box Films) Germany, 1945, immediately after the surrender: the older sister in a Nazi family tries to lead her siblings to safety. At an American checkpoint, a scratchy old song that in the next years will be recorded by Carl Perkins and then the Beatles is playing on a portable phonograph; the sound rises, then seems to fragment in the air. It’s “Matchbox Blues,” from 1927. Whatever the idea behind its use in the film—literally, working as a refugee song: “Standing here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes”—it waits on the screen as a harbinger of the postwar world these children will be entering. The sound is archaic, the specter is modern.