Real Life Rock (241 page)

MAY
2006

1
Dana Spiotta,
Eat the Document
(Scribner)
In 1972 a bombing meant as a protest against the Vietnam War goes wrong; a young woman and a young man go underground. Twenty-six years later they turn up under new names in the same town; inevitably they will meet. But in the meantime the most interesting character in this pitch-perfect novel—with references to Shulamith Firestone and Dock Boggs tossed off so lightly that even if the names mean nothing, they help create the frame of fictional reference and make their own sense—is the woman's teenage son. It's 1998; he's obsessed with
Smile
bootlegs composed entirely of “10, 15, 20 takes that are nearly identical to each other.” This is a portrait of how smart a 15-year-old can be: “You are in the recording studio when they made this album. You are there with all the failures, the intense perfectionism, the frustration of trying to realize in the world the sounds you hear in your head.” The lines don't come off the page as a metaphor for the story the novel tells; the boy's voice is too intense for it not to claim his own story.

2
The Fever,
In the City of Sleep
(Kemado)
Geremy Jasper's pretentiousness is his strength; he'll try anything. What makes the music move is the strangeness filtered into familiar landscapes. In “Eyes on the Road,” it's 4
A.M
. somewhere in New Jersey. The police-radio voice-over is funny, and so present you feel yourself looking over your shoulder to see if you hit someone back there. Keep your eyes on this road and soon enough you'll be seeing eyes on the road as well.

3
Rosanne Cash,
Black Cadillac
(Capitol)
One after the other she lost a stepmother, a father, and a mother. She sings as if she never got a chance to settle anything with any of them, so instead of crying at the funerals on this album, she says inappropriate things. On “The World Unseen,” she moves slowly, as if from room to room in an empty house, all the action in her hesitation. “I will look for you between the grooves of songs we sing,” she says, and finally the other mourners begin to relax. Then, with a deepening of her voice so unmistakable the people around her can see her shut the door, she walks away, rewriting Lead Belly's “Goodnight, Irene” in her head. She'll look for them, all right: “in morphine and in dreams.”

4
Honda, “This Is What a Honda Feels Like” commercial
In a parking garage, a conductor assembles a chorus to outdo the Human Beatbox and the Human Orchestra. With nothing but their mouths they start the car, drive through a tunnel, around turns, over cobblestones. They close the sunroof with the newest new-car sound you've ever heard. But the sexiest moment comes when they turn on the windshield wipers.

5–8
The 48th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, February 8)
Best Smarm: John Legend, who will be a Grammy hero for decades. Best Legend: Sly Stone, who in a gold lamé topcoat and a blond Mohawk looked like a cross between Wesley Snipes in
Blade
and a sea monster. Best Monstrosity: as a concrete sign of emotion, post-Mariah Carey melisma is a sign of insincerity; what is meant to appear as a loss of control is its imposition; a woman projecting autonomy is practicing a pimp aesthetic. There was Kelly Clarkson, Mary J. Blige, Christina Aguilera—but what the hell, let's give the prize to Joss Stone. Best Dressed: Keith Urban, head-to-toe in Nicole Kidman.

9
The Raveonettes, “Twilight” and “Somewhere in Texas” from
Pretty in Black
(Columbia)
Western ballads that would have been perfect for the soundtrack to
Kill Bill: Vol. 2
—a queer combination of serenity and menace.

10
The Fiery Furnaces,
Bitter Tea
(Fat Possum)
For their fourth album, the most interesting and perplexing of all the two-person male-female bands offers a funny-noises record. There are squeaks and scratches, Beach Boys effects, and between-the-wars cabaret. When Eleanor Fried-berger's vocals are run backward, she sounds Russian, when brother Matthew's are, he sounds Hungarian. And nothing is lost: when the singing goes back in the right direction, the feeling of not caring how you got where you are is so musical, you may not even notice the change. But most of the time the feeling is that of a smart kid with a chemistry set—or a three-CD
Smile
bootleg—experimenting on his sister, who knows more than he does. Best song: “Benton Harbor Blues,” a rewrite of “96 Tears.”

JUNE
2006

1
Sarah Bernhardt,
L'Aiglon
,
from
In Performance
(no label)
At the Jewish Museum in New York, near the end of the exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama,” which closed April 2, there was, after rooms of posters, costumes, books, photographs, and silent film clips, a listening station. What you heard was four minutes from Rostand's
L'Aiglon
, starring Bernhardt (1844–1923) as the son of Napoleon, recorded for Edison in 1910—or rather what you heard was a wire being drawn through a body as its voice refused death:
Not yet
,
not yet
, Bernhardt seems to say,
not until I have said what I have to say, and what I have to say is, Why? Why?
I played it over and over; I couldn't believe I would have to walk out of the building and never hear it again. In the museum gift shop, they were sold out of almost everything, including “Who Do You Think You Are, Sarah Bernhardt?” T-shirts. But they still had copies of this CD.

2
Frank Black,
Honeycomb
(Back Porch)
The Pixies' singer; he recorded in Nashville, but he made a Memphis album—with, among many more Bluff City musicians, Reggie Young, guitarist on Dusty Springfield's “Son of a Preacher Man.” A highlight is “Song of the Shrimp,” one of the most reviled Elvis movie songs, which with a laconically inebriated voice Black turns into a surreal folk ballad on the order of “Froggy Went A-Courtin'.” Before that comes “Go Find Your Saint,” with a rough voice riding a melody so sweet the singer's dirty coat seems to shine, and before that, with Black's voice high and slipping, is the most defenseless version of “Dark End of the Street” ever made.