Real Life Rock (94 page)

7
Coup,
Kill My Landlord
(Wild Pitch/EMI)
This non-gangsta Oakland rap trio—Boots, E Roc, Pam the Funkstress—is determinedly local. They don't care if when they mention “Moby D.” you don't know they're referring to the Alameda County courthouse. They're conversationalists, not braggarts; moody, not melodramatic. But they play with irony both as a weapon and for fun. It's unnerving to realize the old Vietnam War chant “Hey, hey, how many kids did you kill today?” now refers not to LBJ but to a neighborhood shooter. And it's hilarious when a white reporter calls Boots for a comment on L.A.'s “tragic riots”: “Not a riot, a rebellion,” Boots snaps. “Well,” says the reporter, “the, uh, tragic rebellion . . .”

8
Lisa Rebecca Gubernick,
Get Hot or Go Home—Trisha Yearwood: The Making of a Nashville Star
(Morrow)
A solid account of a newcomer's attempt to turn a successful debut album into a career. Gubernick, a
Forbes
editor, plays fly on the wall with barely a hint of condescension or cynicism, but her story could have used a bit more of the latter. The people in her pages are theme-park nice, and not unbelievably so; the goals they struggle for so efficiently with such a clear sense of what the rules are, seem benign, pinched, and wholly self-referential. Gubernick's description of Nash-ville's Fan Fair, where stars sit in booths for five days signing autographs, as a “country-music petting zoo” stands out—for once, Lisa the fly turns back into a human being. The line strikes a discord, and it makes you wonder: did the presence of a New York reporter throughout the conception and recording of Yearwood's second album have no effect at all on the way the principals thought, spoke, acted?

9
Jim Pollack, Nairobi Sailcat, Carrie Weiland,
Slide to the Rhythm
(Fitness Innovations/Dynamix Music Services)
An aerobics tape, 126 B.P.M., with every other of the 12 tracks building off a riff so suggestive, so determined, you can't think about anything but the rhythmic truth it's about to reveal before the following track sweeps it away.

10
Betsy Bowden, English 393, fall 1993 (Rutgers at Camden)
Bowden, a Chaucer scholar who describes herself as “world famous among a very tiny group of people who truly care about obscene puns in 12th-century Latin,” invented a Literature of Travel course to assuage her guilt over making full professor. Starting in 400
B.C
. with Xenophon's
Anabasis
, she covered, among other highlights,
The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels,
Twain's
Innocents Abroad
, and Steinbeck's
Harvest Gypsies
and
The Grapes of Wrath
, all arranged “such that the whole of Western literary culture culminates in Dylan's
Highway 61 Revisited
.” “On the last day of class, thus,” Bowden wrote to friends last Christmas, “I was teaching the Nun's Priest Tale and ‘Desolation Row,' and watching the Medieval Lit class put on the Second Shepherd's Play in Middle English. I more or less feel as if this is what I ought to be doing when I grow up.”

MARCH
1994

1
Heavens to Betsy,
Calculated
(Kill Rock Stars)
This two-woman band (voice, guitar, bass, drums, or less) has been making extremist music about girlhood on stray singles and compilation-album cuts since
1991. For the first half of their own album they could be imitating themselves—looking for a subject, for a metaphor to burn the riot grrrl ideology out of singer Corin's throat. But with the instrumental “Intermission,” everything hurts, and every note rings true, especially on “Donating My Body to Science,” which may be the coolest metaphor for sex in the history of riot grrrl, not to mention the history of Western civilization.

2
Billy Ray Cyrus, “When I'm Gone,” from
It Won't Be the Last
(Mercury)
A completely convincing back-from-the-dead rewrite of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” apparently Boris Yeltsin's favorite Elvis song. Will Boris cover this one? Has he already?

3
John Zorn, “Never Again,” from
Kristallnacht
(Eva)
For almost three minutes the sound of breaking glass is like a waterfall: that fast, that implacable. Then just the footsteps of someone running away; then Hebrew chanting; then a sort of Austro-Hungarian salon ensemble, discreetly summoning the dead soul of Central Europe. Despite the distant echoes, the true subject of this nearly 12-minute piece, recorded on 9 November 1992, seems as much the Germany of the present day as of 9 November 1938, when Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish shopkeepers all over the country. When the breaking glass comes back, and with it a mob unafraid of its own voice, you're sure of it. “Contains high frequency extremes, at the limits of human hearing & beyond, which may cause nausea, headaches & ringing in the ears,” Zorn warns. “Prolonged or repeated listening is not advisable.” Tell it to the thugs.

4
Alison Krauss & Union Station, “Baby, Now That I've Found You,” at the Grand Ole Opry (TNN, 27 November 1993)
A friend sent me a barely audible tape—Krauss' shimmering, preternaturally delicate warble of a 1967 hit by the Foundations, a not-forgotten British/Caribbean pop group. Their interracial arms now reach from the Sex Pistols (who began rehearsing with the Foundations' “Build Me Up Buttercup”) to the quiet queen of bluegrass, singing like extra virgin olive oil pours in sunlight. Miss Krauss, meet Mr. Rotten. Oh, you've already met?

5–6
Bob Dylan, notes to
World Gone Wrong
(Columbia) & Mike Kelley:
Winter's Stillness #1
Reading Dylan as he explicates his album's old blues and Appalachian folk songs (on the ancient “Love Henry”: “Henry-modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his ‘psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligensia, disarming the people, an infantile sensualist”), two thoughts struck me. First, by abandoning liner notes after his 1965
Highway 61 Revisited
, Dylan invented rock criticism, or anyway called it into being, simply by making a vacuum for it to fill. Second, even today no critic would dare make half as much of a song as Dylan always has when he's taken to putting them into other words.