Real Life Rock (105 page)

For Reeve, this memory, as metaphor, can give meaning to any incident of sex or history, or can take away whatever meaning he might have found in such incidents: can find them wanting. And this is the meaning of his life. It's a terrible paradox, the essential paradox of art and criticism, and I have never seen it rendered with such flesh and spirit, in such a good story.

3
PJ Harvey,
To Bring You My Love
(Island)
On her best album she rides a broomstick she hasn't used before: a thick, heavy, pansexual voice. On “I Think I'm a Mother” it can feel like a man's. The music is forbidding—
dare you enter these portals?
—but while the sound is never transparent, sometimes Harvey seems to sing through herself, and then the sound is opaque, almost open, ivory.

4
Martin Scorsese,
Who's That Knocking at My Door?
(1968, Warner Home Video)
First feature for both Scorsese and Harvey Keitel, and the most violent sequences are typically shot silent but scored with a song—the Channels' slow doo-wop “The Closer You Are,” say. At first this seems to make no sense: what's on the screen is a rape, physically vicious but emotionally even more so. It's as if the woman is against all reason holding onto the perfect promises the Channels made, that she thought the guy with her made—until, finally, long before the rape is over, she lets those promises go. Then, on the soundtrack, the song begins to break up, to shred.

5
Team Dresch,
Personal Best
(Chainsaw/Candy Ass)
Fast, prickly, with screams ambushing lilts and an ineradicable feel for the beat in tunes that seem made to disguise it. A press release brags that this female four-piece “only play all ages shows and queer bars,” but they could play anywhere they want.

6
Little Axe,
The Wolf That House Built
(Okeh/Epic)
Little Axe is a group led by singer/guitarist Skip McDonald, Wolf is Chester Burnett, house is the music, and too often in this collage all is indistinct. There are small moments of sampled vision: the surging rhythm that begins with a brakeman announcing “All aboard, all aboard,” which itself kicks up the riff Robert Johnson used to open “Preaching Blues,” which never sounded so cool as it does here.

7
Pocket Fisherman,
Future Gods of Rock
(Sector 2)
The bassist quit for a group called Jesus Christ Superfly. He was smart.

8
Clinton Bottling Works, “ClinTonic” (ca. 1870–1935, on display at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, N.Y.C.)
Raspberry soda bottle discovered at the site in 1993. Shouldn't this be in the White House? Maybe there's a drop left.

9
Birney Imes,
Whispering Pines
(Mississippi)
Color photographs of a Mississippi bar—often, shots of mementos stored in cigar boxes, with one item sneaking out, a yellowed news clipping, likely from the late '50s, possibly from the early '60s: “Singer Charged in Mississippi—Negro Rock and Roll Star Denies He Asked For Date From Girl.” “Charles ‘Chuck' Berry” has been “jailed without bond” and transferred from the police station to the county jail “for his own safety”; a “20-year-old girl” is “near hysteria” after the incident; the dateline is Meridian, from where, in June 1964, came the news of the disappearance of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and later the news of the discovery of their bodies.

10
Alison Krauss & Union Station, “Two Highways,” from
Two Highways
(Rounder, 1989)
Her most luminous recording. I think.

APRIL
1995

1
Nicole Eisenman,
Alive with Pleasure
,
1992–94, installation, “In a Different Light” (University Art Museum, Berkeley, through April 9)
In this big wall assemblage of ads, doll parts, and Eisenman's own cartoons, the famous 16th-century image of a naked Diana Poitiers pinching her sister's nipple stands out, mainly because Eisenman has printed “slut” on D. P.'s chest, thus introducing
I'École de Fontainebleu
to riot grrrl. “Early on,” Simon Reynolds and Joy Press write in their new
The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll
(Harvard), “some daubed slogans and words with lipstick on their bodies,” and they quote Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill: “When you take off your shirt [onstage] the guys think, ‘Oh, what a slut' and it's really funny because they think that and then they look at you and it says it.” All of which is probably subsumed by the
Beavis and Butt-head
episode where the boys are watching Sheena Easton's video for “Sugar Walls.” “She did Prince,” Butthead says. “And she dresses like a slut.” “Prince makes all his women dress like sluts,” Beavis says. “That's why I like him,” Butt-head says. “He has a vision.”

2
Mike Seeger,
Third Annual Farewell Reunion
(Rounder)
A long day's Appalachian picnic, with Seeger gathering 23 performances by fiddlers, banjoists, mouth-bow players, and singers he's worked with from the '50s to now—siblings Pete and Peggy Seeger, Bob Dylan, Jimmie Driftwood, Jean Ritchie, many more. The best music is mountain air, the weather shifting in an instant but never really changing, and in its cleanest moments—“Oldtime Sally Ann,” with the late Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Paul Brown on banjo, and Seeger on guitar—pointing toward paradise on earth. “I strive for really traditional-feeling sounds,” Seeger writes, “some of which may have never previously existed.”