Real Life Rock (268 page)

6
DeSoto Rust, “Calgary,” from
Highway Gothic
(
DeSotoRust.com
)
There's nothing Gothic here, just the thirty-seven-thousandth ride down the American road, not a line escaping its cliché or even trying to. You can imagine Philadelphian Ray Hunter gargling dust to get the right sound in his throat. And somewhere inside the play between Dave Reeve's drums and David Otwell and Steve Savage's guitars, there's the kind of satisfaction you can only get if you're behind the wheel, alone, for a moment forgetting where you are, maybe because Marshall Tucker's “Can't You See” is on the radio.

7
Absolut Vodka, The Rock Edition (Absolut Spirits Co.)
More like the Black Metal Edition—except that with the zipper on the side, the thick studded black casing looks less like a guitarist's wrist guard than a sex slave's S&M mask.

8
Georgia O'Keeffe, “Abstraction” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17, 2009–January 17, 2010)
Anyone can be forgiven for thinking, but I've
seen
Georgia O'Keeffe; the work in this great show has been hidden behind the flowers and skulls. This is bedrock, as much painted by the American landscape as it is about it.
Wave, Night
(1928: desert, a lake bed in the foreground, at the top, in the middle, a
single white spotlight, which only barely illuminates the shadow of a road reaching diagonally from middle-right down to far-left) is as much an anticipation of Robert Frank's highway pictures in
The Americans
as the 1919
Abstraction
is of Batman's Gotham City—or as the very early charcoal drawing
Train at Night in the Desert
(1916: clouds billowing up at either side, almost black on the left, gray at the right, the train in the center, but in a way that while a sense of movement is undeniable the train is itself a cloud) is of Elvis Presley's “Mystery Train.”

9
Kevin Bradley,
Robert Johnson
(Chelsea Market, New York City, December 16, 2009)
One of a series of letterpress posters on the walls of the meandering hallways, this stood out: for the backlit eyes, the filed teeth, and the caption: “They say he sold his soul, but he tricked Saten by putting his soul in his music.”

10
Pirate Radio,
directed by Richard Curtis (Universal Pictures)
Set in the mid'60s, this movie about illicit rock 'n' roll broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea into bedrooms and offices all across the UK lines up
Don't Knock the Rock
(1956),
Animal House
(1978),
American Hot Wax
(1978),
Pump Up the Volume
(1990),
Titanic
(1997), and finally
Dunkirk
(1958), and plays them like a xylophone. It sounds wonderful, it's hilarious, and it features Rhys Ifans as the coolest DJ in screen history. But when the ship begins to sink and the thousands of LPs and 45s in the station library are swept away (never mind what Walter Benjamin said about the artistic products of mechanical reproduction lacking the aura of art—as they're carried off by thousands of pounds of water, these records
are
aura), a deeper analogue appears. That's Tom Stoppard's 2006 play
Rock 'n' Roll,
for the horrible scene when the Czech hero discovers that the secret police have smashed his albums, every one.

MAY
2010

1
Ellyn Maybe,
Rodeo for the Sheepish
(Hen House Studios)
I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it's music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe's inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana's
Oh well whatever never mind
as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.

2
Train, “Hey, Soul Sister” (Sony)
A perfect fan's letter, with the high, light sound of someone madly in love with the idea of being in love. You can see the singer dancing in circles in his bedroom, waving his arms in the air. Could the soul sister who inspired this record make one half as good?

3
Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance” (Inter-scope)
When she turns
Love
into
Lahv, lahv, lahv,
as if she could care less, the inhuman edge of this semiological construct—the performer, not the song—can open up a hole in your soul. When it feels as if Kiki and Herb are smiling down at her from the heights of their “Total Eclipse of the Heart” she's Robert Plant, lost in communion with the ancestors, like Medusa or Gene Vincent.

4
Keri Hilson, “Knock You Down,” featuring Kanye West and Ne-Yo (Interscope)
The swirl.