Real Life Rock (87 page)

6–7
Sonic Youth, “Ça Plane pour Moi,” on
Freedom of Choice—Yesterday's New Wave Hits as Performed by Today's Stars
(Caroline) and Dave Markey, director:
1991: The Year Punk Broke
(DGC Home Video)
The bigger Sonic Youth have gotten the lower they've stooped—which is to say they'll still pump out a track for fun or the betterment of humanity as readily as a nowhere band that only wants to get its name in print. “Ça Plane pour Moi,” by one Plastic Bertrand, was a near embarrassment in 1977—proof, from Belgium of all places, that a merging of punk and the Beach Boys might produce no contradictions whatsoever. On
Freedom of Choice
(all proceeds to Planned Parenthood) Thurston Moore rides the joke hard enough to prove that “guilty pleasure” is an oxymoron.
1991
is, offstage anyway, an embarrassing handheld
Don't Look Back
imitation covering Sonic Youth on tour in Europe, with then-smaller-fry (Nirvana, etc.) in tow. Onstage it's the strongest documentation of how hard Sonic Youth can push their own music you can get without breaking the law.

8–9
Quentin Tarantino, director,
Reservoir Dogs
(Miramax) and Abel Ferrara, director,
Bad Lieutenant
(Aries Film)
Evidence that pop tunes say far more as part of a film's soundtrack than in their own videos is all over these movies. In
Bad Lieutenant
, a dark-night-of-Harvey Keitel's-soul number that's about as liberating as a sermon on homosexuality by John Cardinal O'Connor, the only moments that don't seem like a total crock come when Schoolly D's “Signifying Rapper” and Johnny Ace's “Pledging My Love” are playing—with Keitel slow death-dancing to the latter, just as he did almost 20 years before in
Mean Streets
. In
Reservoir Dogs
, a
truly cruel picture where the shocks in the action hurt the viewer, the most perverse theme has to do with what the characters are listening to and talking about as their dishonor-among-thieves roundelay breaks up: a horrible, kind-of-catchy “Sound of the Seventies” retrospective on the local classic-rock station, with Stephen Wright in a perfect impersonation of what a classic laid-back '70s DJ would sound like after two decades of Quaaludes. “Stuck in the Middle with You,” by Stealers Wheel, the Village People's “Y.M.C.A.,” and more, more, to the point where you dread what song might be up next as much as what atrocity you might have to watch, which brings us to—

10
Billy Ray Cyrus, “Achy Breaky Heart (Dance Mix)” (Mercury)
Yes, he might be a walking score in some future edition of Trivial Pursuit, he may never have another mass hit, but he's not going to be forgotten anymore than the world has yet escaped the specter Debby Boone raised with “You Light Up My Life,” which in 1977 was number one for ten weeks. There is an elemental stupidity in “Achy Breaky Heart,” a phrase so dumb it's humiliating to say out loud; in the dance mix, over 7 minutes long but it might as well be 17 or 70, with some guy hee-hawing in the background over and over, as if to say “
WE FOOLED YOU! AND WE'RE DOING IT AGAIN
!,” stupidity becomes a sort of blessedness, a form of pop grace. Like Sheb Wooley (“The Purple People Eater,” number one for six weeks in 1958) or Ross Bagdasarian (as the Chipmunks, with “The Chipmunk Song,” number one for four weeks in that same weird year) before him, for as long as his song lasts—
as long as he wants
—Billy Ray Cyrus can get away with anything.

SUMMER
1993

1
Andre Braugher, in
Homicide—Life on the Street
“Three Men and Adena” (NBC, March 3)
For decades now, scripts of one version or another of “The Robert Johnson Story” have bounced around Hollywood (though the closest anyone's gotten to an actual movie was John Fusco's putrid
Crossroads
, shot in 1986 by Walter Hill). Every conceivable black actor or singer has been mentioned for the role of the '30s Mississippi bluesman, but the search can stop now. It's not only that Andre Braugher, playing a Baltimore homicide detective, looks enough like Johnson to be his son. It's not that when Johnson's trail (cold since his death in 1938) was finally picked up in the '70s it led to Maryland, where Johnson's sister lived—thus making it possible that Braugher's detective could be, in character, Johnson's great-nephew. (I know he says he's from New York in this episode; that's just to confuse the suspect.) As an actor, Braugher draws on the qualities of restraint, thoughtfulness, and jeopardy that animate Johnson's greatest songs. Were “Come On in My Kitchen” playing on the soundtrack as Braugher tries to lead the suspect into a trap, no one would notice that the dates of the recording and the drama were 57 years apart.

2
Joe Dante, director, Charlie Haas, writer,
Matinee
(Universal Home Video)
With John Goodman having a great time impersonating '50s/'60s movie shlockmeister William Castle opening a new horror flick in South Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis (it's “
Mant
—Half Man, Half Ant”; bits are featured in
Matinee
proper, but the video will include the complete, 20-minute version shot for continuity), you get A-bomb radiation coming at you from both sides. The movie's tremendous fun. What's most interesting, though, are the tendrils of alien culture nibbling at the corners of the frame. A Beat couple arguing about the First Amendment, their Ban the Bomb daughter busting up a high school air raid drill, a clean-cut kid with a secret Lenny Bruce record, a J.D. with a D.A. and a switchblade he'll hold to your neck to make you listen to his poetry, and the weird question that hangs in the air, “Where are the Negro kids?”—in every case, portents of a culture, in both senses of the word, that the all-white world of Key West can't completely stop. But if this is subversion, where is rock 'n' roll? Back home in the bungalow,
just keeping time (it's the Tokens, doing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”)—no more threatening than a metronome.

3
Bobby Bland,
I Pity the Fool—The Duke Recordings, Vol One
(MCA 2-CD reissue, 1952–60)
The coolest blues singer who ever was, and one of the deepest.

4
Melodians,
Swing and Dine
(Heartbeat reissue, 1967–75)
Jamaica's finest: a floating sound, kicking off with a tune about Expo '67, a search for a smile, but with an undertone of regret over something far too great to put into words.

5
Rosanne Cash,
The Wheel
(Columbia)
In the last few years it's been incumbent upon female singers even one step away from punk to expose themselves if they want serious sales action. Posing in a bra will do, but a discreetly naked chest is better: witness Melissa Etheridge, Sade, and now Rosanne Cash, the Jennifer Jason Leigh of pop music—a supremely talented, dedicated artist who knows what trouble is worth. Why we need proof—as opposed to an until-proven-otherwise assumption—that a given singer has breasts is unclear, unless what's really going on is a need for proof that any female singer can be made to whore for her label or her listeners. Presumably it's working for Cash:
Entertainment Weekly
splashed
The Wheel
's insert pic—Cash flat on her back, roses on her breasts, come-hither smile on her lips—over a full page.