Real Life Rock (261 page)

5
Liechtenstein,
Survival Strategies in a Modern World
(Slumberland)
Three young women from Sweden take less than twenty-three minutes to skip from Liliput grinning through their punk songs in Zurich in the 1980s, to the Teddy Bears mouthing doo-wop in Los Angeles in 1958, for that matter picking up next-door neighbor Jorgen Ingmann in Copenhagen in 1961 before they're in the air. You never miss when you kick it off with “Apache” guitar.

6
Andrew Britton,
Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton,
edited by Barry Keith Grant (Wayne State University Press)
Britton (1952–94) was a critic who took nothing at face value and nothing for granted. Writing in the British and Canadian journals
Movie
and
CineAction
, he interrogated pictures under a third-degree light, but as if he were Philip Marlowe and the movies were cops, and sometimes it seemed like a put-up job. But not in the 1986 “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment,” nearly sixty pages that will leave you feeling as if you've just read a movie version of the Justice Department's report on torture under George W. Bush—and as if the era the essay describes has not even begun to end.

7–8
The Kills,
Keep on Your Mean Side
(Domino) and Dead Weather,
Horehound
(Third Man)
Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince had so much fun trying to live up to their name on the Kills' 2003 debut album—and, on this reissue, with numbers from the EP
Fried My Little Brains
and elsewhere, including their graveyard version of Dock Boggs's “Sugar Baby”—it didn't always sound like an act. But they never caught up with themselves, and now Mosshart's singing with the White Stripes' Jack White in Dead Weather, where it sounds as if nobody ever leaves the house.

9
Andrei Codrescu,
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
(Princeton)
Marked by a gigantic, repeating error—the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where dada was discovered, opened in 1916, not 1915—this is a book of endless riches and complexity. Cutting wit is everywhere: “In Germany, antiwar demonstrations by tens of thousands of people gave way to tens of thousands of corpses who had obviously changed their minds.” No good writer can resist the language of the dada manifesto—though maybe it's more a gesture, a certain James Dean slouch, than a language—and Codrescu doesn't try. In an age when bad writers are afraid most of all of their own voices, then putting every word that might mean anything at all in self-protecting scare quotes, “No art in its right! Mind (i.e., for sale) can possibly
mean
what it says. Therefore, Dada is not art,” is a first step toward a cure. But “Dada is a tool for removing parentheses and removing the world from between quotes with the forceps of inspiration” slams the door so hard it opens onto a country where people are not afraid. The whole affair is rooted in an apocryphal chess game between founder of dada Tristan Tzara and founder of communism V. I. Lenin, and two more-than-open questions: Who won? And is the game over?

10
Bob Dylan, video for “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” (YouTube)
A montage of photos from Bruce Davidson's 1959 series “Brooklyn Gang”—Larry Clark's
Tulsa
as made suitable for
Vogue
—with the Jokers getting tattoos, hanging around, taking their shirts off, going to Coney Island, trying to look as if they don't care. Near the end a woman with lank black hair and black eye-makeup comes into the story. She carries experience the boys don't, desires they couldn't fathom, but she has nowhere else to go and so she's here. She's a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse, and you miss her more than ever.

SEPTEMBER
2009

1
Fiery Furnaces,
I'm Going Away
(Thrill Jockey)
Musicality in speech is a common theme; the peculiar delight in the Fiery Furnaces' eighth album in their six years is the realism of speech in their songs. The music is a given, so if you catch, say, the way Eleanor Friedberger turns her words, “Well, I thought I was thinking, but apparently not,” whatever context the words might inhabit in their narrative drops away, and you might be transported to a city street and enveloped by the feeling not of listening to a performance but of hearing a woman on her cell phone as she strides past you, with precisely the intensity and surprise of a smell taking you back to a face or a voice you haven't thought of for years.

2
Robert Cantwell, “A Harvest of Illth,” in
If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture
(University of Illinois Press)
Cantwell is a subtle writer, and his collection of essays on the transformation of everyday life by art that resists disappearing back into the ordinary and the predictable is full of paradox (“The disc renders the performance silent, as the photo renders its subject invisible, each not merely representing, but replacing the other”). But in “A Harvest of Illith”—John Ruskin's word for a form of wealth that “as it leads away from life, it is unvaluable or malignant,” here naming Mississippi blues 78s made in the '20s and '30s as accumulated by a few young men in the '40s and '50s—Cantwell finds his way into a kind of frenzy. If Beale Street could talk it might say this: “Like a bus driver caught in a skid”—imagine a tourist
bus, with the driver on his intercom, “That's where they had the Palace Amateur Nights, they say Elvis sang there before anyone knew his name,
Oh shit, hold on!
”—“the Delta blues thrusts the musician into a swiftly proliferating emergency that tests not only his competence as a musician but his grasp of the whole nature of his body and his instrument in the midst of the wider context of natural laws of which he and it are parts.”

3–4
David Thomson, “After Citizen Kane—A New Socratic dialogue”
(
McSweeney's
31) and Adam Lambert, “A Change Is Gonna Come”
(
American Idol
final, Fox, May 19)
Thomson has Susan Sontag trying to get Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Hemingway to vote against
Citizen Kane
in the 2012
Sight & Sound
poll on the greatest movies ever made. “I always vote on
American Idol,
” says Woolf. Would she have voted for Adam Lambert, who for the season's final face-off placed his bet on Sam Cooke's civil rights anthem, the greatest soul record ever made? Ken Tucker of
Fresh Air
has compared what Lambert does to other people's songs to the outrageous and inspired operations David Bowie performed on the likes of British Invasion hits on
Pin Ups;
he played Lambert's version of “Burning Love” to prove his point, and it did. But this night Lambert began as if soul music were a picture in a magazine; every note and gesture was a referent to a referent that the picture had rendered invisible. So much alienation was built into the performance, where according to
Idol
precepts all emotions are absorbed into
I want,
that Lambert became his own impersonator. After thirty seconds of hitting notes (“Not singing, or vocalizing,” said a friend. “Vocaling”), he screamed, to show that he could really hit a note, and the performance went to a rank hysteria, which was meant to stand for actually hearing one's own words, for being moved by what one was singing about. And then the coup de grâce, as Lambert turned a song about a change that had to come because it would affect a whole people, a whole country, perhaps even the whole world, into a pitch for votes, magically replacing a common history with solipsism.
“I know my change is gonna come!”
he sang, leaving Cooke's inescapably shared “a change is gonna come” in the dust—making the song his own, the ultimate
Idol
praise phrase, in the most absolute way, erasing everyone, dead or alive, that the song truly contained. The judges were beside themselves. Lambert lost to Kris Allen, in the word of the day Pat Boone to Lambert's Elvis, but he will be closing his act with “My change is gonna come” until Sam Cooke returns in the common imagination to claim it, and for Lambert the song will fall away from him and he will be the last to know. Up in heaven, trying to negate eternity, probably Virginia Woolf would have voted for him: “That show can cheer me up sometimes better than a Cornish cream tea.”