Real Life Rock (312 page)

“Boomers have been boring every generation younger than they are for decades with their constant babble about Woodstock, Vietnam, flower power. They have, subtly or overtly, let every subsequent generation know that its music, books, movies and life experiences are inferior,” Genzlinger writes. “The younger generations have choked this down quietly, biding their time. As these generations take over the making of television and become the desirable demographic for advertisers, boomerage characters are paying the price, and older-than-boomer ones are also being swept up in the retaliation frenzy, a sort of collateral damage. It's open season on anyone 55 and above.

“This is the ultimate revenge. Because while someday everything this older cohort holds dear will have been forgotten or undone by revisionist historians, television portrayals will live forever on DVDs and in cyberspace. A century from now, youngsters in history class will sum up the lives
of everyone who had gray or graying hair in the second decade of the 21st century with: ‘Oh, yeah; those were the people who were obsessed with their bowels and couldn't work a smartphone.' Then, after a pause, they'll add, ‘Kind of sad, really.' ”

Or, as Howard Hampton reported a week after Genzlinger's piece appeared, “I came upon a listing for Jon Anderson, formerly of Yes, playing a solo gig in Miami Beach—the early show, being 6 p.m. Immediately the
Seinfeld
episode came to mind: Jerry goes to dinner with his parents in Boca at 4:30 so they can get the ‘Early Bird Special.' That's apparently where all the old Yes fans have retired . . . Pre-concert dinner with the Seinfelds and Costanzas: Frank Costanza: ‘I'm tellin' ya, damn it, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was the
BEST THING THEY EVER DID!!
' Morty Seinfeld: ‘Get outta here, you're crazy,
Tales of Topographic Oceans
still rules!' ”

4
Angels in America, “The Corpse,” from
Split Cassette
with Weyes Blood (Northern Spy)
Scary, beautiful, with the mood pushed by the tinny sound of a woman laughing only seconds in, then electronically lowered male and female voices: the dreams of the undead. It goes on for nearly seven minutes, words taking shape only occasionally. Odd, decaying sounds trace melodies in washes of echo and distortion. Until a trackable rhythm—which in this context might as well be from a Disney cartoon—takes over after five minutes, you float on this music. At least one person has heard it as a perfect soundtrack to Michael Lesy's
Wisconsin Death Trip
; for me it's playing behind Charlotte Gains-bourg stamping naked through the blasted landscapes of Lars von Trier's
Antichrist
.

5
Lady Gaga, “Do What U Want” with R. Kelly, from
Artpop
(Streamline/Inter-scope Records)
Not as fierce on record as on
Saturday Night Live
last November—less abandoned, with less of a sense of drowning in pleasure, the pleasure you could see in her face of having made it to the top and knowing she belongs there, plus there's no aural equivalent of watching Gaga and Kelly acknowledging each other as equal sex gods—but this may echo on the radio, in the ether, for a long time.

6–7
Vania Heymann/Interlude, “Like a Rolling Stone” video (
bobdylan.com
) and Øyvind Mund of
Gylne Tider
,
“Let It Be” video (
sabotagetimes.com
)
Jay Lustig of New Jersey's
Star-Ledger
got it right on the Dylan production: “A concept right out of ‘The Twilight Zone.' You're watching TV, but no matter what channel you turn to—a news show, a cooking show—whenever someone speaks, all you hear is Dylan singing ‘Like a Rolling Stone.' ” There's something faintly repulsive about it, something inhuman, something that would never occur in real life, like synchronized swimming. But the “Let It Be” video, a Norwegian tribute to '80s and '90s TV stars mouthing various renditions of the Beatles song as they're gathered on some computerized beach—what seems like scores of them, starting off, in some semblance of rationality, with the likes of Roger Moore, Jason Alexander, Josie Bissett, Corbin Bernsen, and George Wendt, then edging into the less-likely with a hideously mugging Katarina Witt, then going straight over the cliff with a demure Tonya Harding, identified as “Skater in Trouble” and wearing a T-shirt reading
CAN YOU SEE ME NOW
—is a horror of a very different order. At nearly six minutes it's an invitation to suicide: what other rational response is there to watching Philip Michael Thomas as the most embarrassing air-guitarist in creation? Or Judd Nelson doing nothing at all? Or Peter Falk brought back from the dead to stand on the beach with Kathleen Turner, Sheryl Lee, and Daryl Hannah, none of whom should ever have had to sink so low?

8
Cat Power, Masonic Temple, Brooklyn (November 14, 2013)
Eric Dean Wilson writes from New York: “It was a raw-nerve performance. Everything suggested a ritual undoing of the 2012
Sun
album and its tour, which left Cat Power—aka Chan Marshall—awash in an electronic, beat-driven sound. Here she bounced between what she called a Craigslist-buy guitar and
a candlelit piano, and the shuffle caught the atmosphere of the night: halfway between a basement and a chapel. She flowed from song to song without any intentional break, except to adjust the monitor levels, which never satisfy her, or to ask the audience whether they worked in education. The audience clapped wildly at that, but Marshall insisted: ‘I'm not talking about parents who have children—is anyone in education?' A few people laughed. When she didn't get an answer she picked up without any further comment, playing the neck of her guitar with one hand so it appeared to hover in midair while she crooned. She rambled broken anecdotes with no beginning or end, and suddenly spun herself and the audience into a trance. Without announcing her final song, she muttered a few unintelligible words, bowed, and was walking offstage before anyone realized it was over.”

9
David Cantwell,
Merle Haggard: The Running Kind
(University of Texas Press)
A clear, unflinchingly critical hearing of the songs—that is, in Cantwell's pages they are creative acts, not real, disguised, or fake autobiography—and that lets the songs go anywhere: a subtle yet flesh-and-blood class analysis, an argument against the authenticity argument, and when the focus is precisely on how a song felt its way into its own skin, its own body, you always want more. “The recording Merle and his Strangers made of ‘Hungry Eyes,' ” Cantwell writes, “is a musical adjunct to, and the artistic equal of, ‘Migrant Mother,' the photograph that Dorothea Lange took of Florence Thompson in 1936. The women in both works, Lange's ‘Migrant Mother' and Haggard's ‘Mama,' document an internal war between pride and inferiority, dignity and shame.” If Cantwell often can't get music onto the page, he can make you need to hear every song he writes about.

10
Sundown Songs,
Like a Jazz Band in Nashville
(Sundown Songs, 2008)
This is a New Orleans street band that may or may not still exist: the flood song “Here It Comes,” from their 2009 album
Far from Home
, might be their truest testament. But the earlier album cuts more deeply. With irresistibly pretty acoustic guitar playing throughout, and sometimes a clumsy, strummed guitar that's just as evocative, it calls up an Old West people carry with them after the Old West is gone: “Let Em Talk” has the feeling of Butch Cassidy in a Wyoming bar sometime in the 1920s, or Neal Cassady in a bar in San Pedro in the 1990s, trying to get people to believe he's who he says he is. “I've stained the world, in ten thousand ways. / I've stained up your sofa, for ten thousand days,” the guy testifies, holding himself up with both hands, as if that's enough work for anyone.

Thanks to Ashawnta Jackson,
Anna Witiuk, Ari Spool, and Luke Wiget