Real Life Rock (79 page)

9
Jim Dickinson, liner notes to Howlin' Wolf,
Memphis Days—The Definitive Edition
,
vol. 2 (Bear Family, Germany)
Releases and outtakes from 1951–52, ranging from the breathtaking to the merely heroic. Memphian Dickinson, who likes to talk about his town's culture as a Dada subspecies, nails the legend of the man who, when born of woman, was just Chester Burnett: “He was a primitive-modernist . . . [whose] contribution to the blues goes beyond musical phrases. The ‘idea' of Howlin' Wolf makes blues history somehow deeper and richer.”

10
New York Times,
“A Scholar Finds Huck Finn's Voice in Twain's Writing about a Black Youth,” re Professor Shelley Fisher Fiskin's
Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices
,
Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1993 (July 7)
While it's tempting to claim Twain as the founder of rock 'n' roll, or the first good white blues singer (or anyway the inspiration for Polk Miller), I doubt that Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., were surprised by Fiskin's thesis that the voice of Huckleberry Finn was rooted in that of a black person (Twain: “the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across”). Sorry, but given the setting Twain chose and his commitment to vernacular realism, how, at least to a good degree, could it
not
have been? (As George Carlin used to say, lock five kids from Harlem and five from Scarsdale in a room for a week and see who comes out talking like who.) But Reed, et al., would probably not be surprised that the Fiskin newsbreak has already produced the sort of happy talk to which no American racial paradox is immune: the argument that black people (or anyone else) need no longer be troubled by Huck's use of the word “nigger” in reference to Jim, since now it's really two brothers getting down.

OCTOBER
1992

1
Heavens to Betsy, “My Red Self,” on
Kill Rock Stars
(Kill Rock Stars) and “Baby's Gone,” on
Throw: The Yoyo Studio Compilation
(Yoyo Recordings)
The two stray tracks on various artists' anthologies by this Olympia combo (Corin Tucker, guitar and vocals, Tracy Sawyer, bass and occasional drums) are as fierce—as unforgiving, and as unforgiven—as anything I've heard in ages. These songs sound anonymous, almost found; appearing alongside tracks by the likes of Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Unwound, Mecca Normal, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch, and Kreviss, the music simply seems part of an ordinary rock 'n' roll conversation, at least in Olympia. (“The birthplace of rock,” it says on the back of the
Kill Rock Stars
CD, as if rock 'n' roll could be born anywhere, again and again, as if for the first time, and of course it can.)

“My Red Self,” about menstruation, is modest and strong; “Baby's Gone” is riveting. A single, naked fuzztone makes a backdrop for what you might call testifying, if you can merge the old meaning of testifying in church with testifying in court. The same absolute need to be heard that drives the Mekon's voice-and-stamping-foot “The Building” powers this performance, which doesn't seem minimalist in any way; rather,
it gets bigger as it goes on, until, near the end (“I did what you told me to/Now I'm dead”), it seems to try to explode but can't. The pressure is enormous, and passed on straight.

2
Heavenly, “She Says”/“Escort Crash on Marston Street” (K Records)
A four-person band from Oxford, England, led by singer Amelia Fletcher, late of Talulah Gosh and still playing with the sweetest, most barbed warble in pop: her heaven is not for the innocent. An album,
Le Jardin de Heavenly
, is due, but for the moment this single spins on and on.

3–4
Walter Mosley,
White Butterfly
(Norton) and John Lee Hooker: “This Land Is Nobody's Land,” from
More Real Folk Blues—The Missing Album
(Chess/MCA)
In Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries—
White Butterfly
, set in 1956 and the third in the series, is the most effective so far—what's at stake is the unwritten history of postwar Los Angeles. Mosley, a man in his 30s writing in the voice of a retired black detective who would now be past 70, is writing this history from the inside out: from inside Watts. First appearing in the '40s, Easy Rawlins is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as private eye; his skin and shuffle may be cover, but the wariness of his movements carries a greater charge than any scene of violence. Pages can curl with tension even when nothing is happening. Mosley isn't much of a plotter, or even a storyteller; the books work in moods that shift like weather, on the glacial but certain apprehension of a society changing, though not in any direction anyone can control, or that anyone is necessarily going to like. Perhaps more than in the most extreme and Afrocentric rap, white people are foreigners in these books, and in Rawlins' L.A., and black people are exiles. “This land is no one's land,” John Lee Hooker sang in 1966, a year after the Watts riots—the tune was a slow, improvised blues, a blunt reply to Woody Guthrie, and it remained unreleased until 1991—“This land/Is your burying ground.” Easy Rawlins' next appearance should place him in just about that year, if not that territory.

5
Steely & Clevie,
Play Studio One Vintage
(Heartbeat)
Classic late-'60s reggae, cut last year by the leading dance-hall producers and rhythm section, backing Theophilus Beckford, Alton Ellis, the Clarendonians, and more. The music is all definition, like a perfect black and white print of a '40s film noir following the dead video color of the nightly news.

6
Sonic Youth,
Dirty
(DGC)
I like the way Thurston Moore snaps “I believe Anita Hill/That judge'll rot in hell” on “Youth Against Fascism.” It's so peremptory. It's so convincing.

7
Tori Amos,
Little Earthquakes
and
Crucify
(Atlantic)
In a year or so, Amos' attempt to find her own voice somewhere between those of Donovan and Kate Bush may sound impossibly arch and contrived; her version of Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” on the
Crucify
EP, already does. But that's also what's compelling about it. Breathy, precious, arty, and cool, Amos can get under your skin, and then rip.