Real Life Rock (185 page)

6
“Give Me Your Hump!”—The Unspeakable Terry Southern Record
(Koch/ Paris)
It was a great idea, readings from the works of the late black humorist—author of
Candy
,
The Magic Christian
,
Blue Movie
and “You're Too Hip, Baby,” the perfect short story about a white man on the Paris jazz scene in the 1950s—and the result is a dead fish. What comes off the page as unlikely, unstoppable—No, he isn't going to go
farther
, is he?—seems smugly obvious coming out of anyone's mouth. Marianne Faithfull, Michael O'Donoghue, Allen Ginsberg, Southern himself: they're too hip.

7
A friend who works in theater writes:
“I just finished teaching a class as a ‘guest artist' at the local hoity-toity private school, which is trying to fashion itself into an arts magnet. I asked the students to pick a question they wanted to explore, and they picked (drumroll) ‘What is love?' and I thought Oh God no. They are so completely surrounded by money and the ‘correct' answers and the giant stick that their whole world has up its ass. It's hard to feel sorry for them, but still there's a lot of pressure to be perfect or they will not be ‘invited back'—and the school has had a rash of suicides. Two of my students were on suicide watch and had to leave rehearsal early every day to go to counseling. The students spent three-quarters of the class trying to do things ‘right' and giving very safe answers and doing safe things and they're all incredibly bright—maniacally so.

“They each came up with 10 things they always wanted to do on stage. As soon as the lists were made they asked ‘We're not really going to do this, are we?' but you could immediately see them thinking ‘Oh my God, we actually could do this stuff.' They ended up smashing guitars and screaming the lyrics to ‘Wish You Were Here' and banging the gazillion dollar baby grand for all they were worth. Dogs were coming on stage running all over, one kid tried unsuccessfully to vomit, and at the end they had a giant food fight with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and just generally acted their age as hard as they could. The audience was all dressed in fancy black dresses and suits and after the curtain call the students spontaneously charged into the audience and started sliming them with peanut butter and jelly. It was god-awful, but they made a little Cabaret Voltaire for themselves and I got to watch them let themselves be 15 for half an hour.

“It's sad to know that's probably the extent of it. They wouldn't wash the peanut butter off—they were still running around all slimy when I left half an hour later. I'm pretty sure I'm ‘not invited back.' ”

8
David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti,
Mulholland Dr.
(BMG/Milan)
This is not like the movie. There is no imperative to keep you interested, entertained or following the story. Rather there is so much silence on this soundtrack album, or waiting, that you can forget you are listening to anything, so that when the sound comes back—creeps back, usually—you don't know where you are. In the movie you always know right where you are—Hollywood, which, as one viewer put it, signifies the real message of the movie: Stay away.

9
Bertha Lee, “Mind Reader Blues” (1934), from
Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton
(Revenant, 1929–34)
This amazing set—a tribute both to records as repositories of national memory and to records as fetish objects—is just what it says it is. Patton, the central progenitor of Mississippi Delta blues, recorded in Wisconsin and New York in six different sessions, under different names, in different styles, traveling and performing with different compatriots; the seven CDs here, presented in the form of an album of 78s, with the equivalent of two full-length books, collections of original advertisements and record labels and much, much more, present the full results of each recording session, whether by Patton or others, so that in fact not only the will of a single performer but the air he breathed is captured whole.

Part of that air is the very last performance from Patton's last session, from his wife Bertha Lee. You stick the word “blues” onto the right phrase and it's as if you've never heard the phrase before, and that's
what happens here (Mike Watt of the Minutemen: “A good title is worth a thousand lyrics”). A woman with an undistinguished voice and an ordinary sense of timing starts out with the claim that she can read her man's mind; she proceeds to do it with no more emotion than you'd expect her to use on the dishes—maybe less. “Baby, I can see / Just what's on your mind”—what spouse can't do that? But you don't live every minute of the day with that kind of knowledge—or do you? “Well, I'm worried now / But I won't be worried long,” Lee ends her song; usually the words mean the singer's life is about to end. It's only death that takes care away. But in this moment it isn't her trouble that's on her mind.

10
Street scene, Canal & Bourbon streets, New Orleans (Nov. 3)
Next to a mailbox, a young woman with a baby on her hip was wearing a black T-shirt with a homemade “
EVIL
” spelled out in silver sequins; a middle-aged woman with three young children was shaking a white bucket and chanting “Help our church, please help our church”; a huge man walked by in a black-and-silver T-shirt with “Good/Evil” running over a picture of a man in a cowl; on the back of the mailbox, under the headline “
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE
,” was a poster picturing a young Hispanic/Indian woman with a baby at her breast and a rifle on her back, the logo “Crimethinc.” and a text: “The greatest illusionist spectacle in the world no longer enchants us. We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle. Here and now. And for the first time, life will triumph over death.” Looming over it all, a billboard: “
LARRY FLYNT'S HUSTLER CLUB. TWO GIRLS FOR EVERY GUY
.”

NOVEMBER
26, 2001

1
Strokes,
Is This It
(RCA)
Fast, expert, hanging-out sounds from a young New York five-piece with a guru—not the so-named older guy with the comb-over pictured with the band on the insert, but, wow, Lou Reed. Julian Casablanca's vocals may be filtered so that their tinny sound matches the group's skinny-tie beat, but that doesn't save the Strokes' “Modern Age” from dissolving back into the Velvet Underground's “Beginning to See the Light”—and “Modern Age” is the best thing here. The cover of the import version offers a white woman's naked ass cupped by a black gloved hand: “
So
1983,” said one disappointed fan.

2
Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
(Shifty)
As slick as the Strokes are, this ill-named New York trio (can you imagine yourself saying, “Hey, let's go see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs”? It's like saying “Let's go see Who's on First”) are abrasive. They're so heedlessly tough that the arty touches at the end of “Miles Away” can seem like a relief, a promise that the music is an effect, not reality. But the first four songs on this EP are as good as they have to be; they might be a way of your getting used to Karen O's small, pressured voice, until with “Our Time” you're ready to actually listen to her. Announcing “I—may be dead, honey,” over a stop-time orchestration of the band's single-guitar and drums wall of sound, O could be Melissa Swingle of Trailer Bride as easily as she calls up Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las: you don't question for a second that she knows what she means. Her voice curls, like a finger beckoning you into the music. “It's the year to be hated,” she says, then leading a chant: “
OUR TIME
! It's our time!
OUR TIME
! To—be—hated—” The music rises like a flag blowing. “C'mon, kids,” O says—and there is nothing so modest, so defiant, so hopeless, so much of a smile, short of the Who's “The Kids Are Alright.” But this song has its own place and time, even if it didn't make its time, but fell into it—even if 19 men came from elsewhere and destroyed thousands to make the song's time. Three musicians standing up to attest with the crowd they gather around themselves that they're ready to be hated, that they've waited all their lives for the chance—I can't believe people in New York aren't singing this on the street.