Real Life Rock (106 page)

3
Mazzy Star, “Halah” (Capitol)
Escaping from the 1990
She Hangs Brightly
album, an unlikely FM hit, and also weird—cool trash on the order of Joanie Sommers' 1962 “Johnny Get Angry,” and it may hold up as well. Languorously negotiating the sand dunes of the verses, Hope Sandoval sounds like Elizabeth Wurtzel looks on the jacket of
Prozac Nation
(“a Playboy bunny as St. Sebastian,” a friend put it), but on the tag-lines (“Baby won't you change your mind,” which finally turns into “Baby I wish I was dead”) she sounds like Julie Delpy looks anywhere.

4
Jerry Lee Lewis, interviewed on
The History of Rock 'n' Roll
(Time-Life Video & Television, 11 March)
For his fabulous impression of William Burroughs.

5
Sleater-Kinney, Kaia, Eileen Myles, Tattle Tale, Ruby Falls, Azalia Snail,
Move Into the Villa Villakula
(Villa Villakula)
Stumbles and bruised knees (punctuated by singer-songwriter Kaia finding the right riff in “Off,” or the New York combo Ruby Falls investigating a small mystery in “Spanish Olive”) cover most of this compilation, but Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker, formerly of Heavens to Betsy, may have the most distinctive, demanding voice in pop music today, and once you've learned to hear it, every
inflection, every silence, tells secrets and wrestles demons. As she muses over the words “When I hear that old song . . . ,” you realize the old song is the song she's singing, but she's already put more than a feeling into Boston's “More Than a Feeling”—try theory, history, fortune-telling.

6
Red Krayola,
The Red Krayola
(Drag City)
Leader Mayo Thompson remains as dour as ever—this is a man who once called an album
The Parable of Arable Land
. But the beat is often so odd, and so impossible to shake, that you might find yourself trying to keep time well after a song is over, even into the next track, which really confuses things.

7
Fakes,
Real Fiction
(Chainsaw)
An artfully crude rock opera about child abuse, orchestrated by Kathleen Hanna but whip-cracked three times by the is-it-real-or-is-it-recovered-memory testimony of Billie Strain (“Held”), Sue Fox (“Burnt Girl”), and Angie (“Secret Weapon”), not to mention Phyllis, credited as the Voice of Reason. “Why do the indie boys like women who sing like angels or children?” asks a jacket note; these women sound like people you hear talking on the street, every day.

8
Bush, “Everything Zen,” from
Sixteen Stone
(Trauma)
Inflamed. Less ugly and less elegant than Nine Inch Nails, but more convincing.

9
Shawn Colvin, “Viva Las Vegas,” on
Till the Night Is Gone—A Tribute to Doc Pomus
(Forward/Rhino)
Sheryl Crow really is everywhere: as if she can't help herself, Colvin turns “Viva Las Vegas” into “Leaving Las Vegas.” And comes out ahead of the song.

10
Guy Debord,
Mémoires
(Les Belles Lettres, Paris)
When Debord shot himself last November 30, he had completed the return to print of almost all his published work, including this legendary book: a collage of commonplace illustrations and text fragments, none containing a word Debord had written, all overpainted by Asger Jorn in bright colors, the result being an accurate and poetic account of Debord's life in Paris in 1952 and 1953: a time and a place, as he wrote elsewhere, “where the negative held court.” The drifting streaks of paint, the looming fields of white space, the half-sentences chasing their missing endings and being forced to settle for yet another sentence's beginning—the pleasure of nostalgia was already there in 1958, when the book first appeared, and it is present now, along with the cold wit that led Debord to disguise an altogether readable book as an unreadable antibook. “ ‘I wanted to speak the language of my century,' ” Debord quoted the last line of
Mémoires
in his 1993 introduction to this 2,300-copy reissue, not quite quoting himself. “I wasn't so concerned with being heard.”

SUMMER
1995

1
K. McCarty, “Walking the Cow,” on
Dead Dog's Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston
(Bar None)
Late of Austin's Glass Eye, Kathy McCarty here dedicates herself to a whole album's worth of compositions by the Austin
idiot sacré
. Most often the oddity of the tunes falls short of their length, but McCarty's breathless dive into “Walking the Cow” comes without warning, and for its 3 minutes 13 seconds no warning could catch her. The singer has escaped from the asylum. She has you by the throat, and the only thing more crazy than her eyes is her reasonableness. You can't even croak back, but her voice is full, her madness audible only in the farthest curves of a bending phrase; a true rock 'n' roll string section raises a wall of sound and puts your back up against it.
You don't know me, but right now we have to walk the cow. You do understand this, don't you?
If you don't understand this, you do understand that the singer has only a second to get her words out before she forgets what they mean.