Real Life Rock (138 page)

9
Rosie and the Originals,
The Best of Rosie and the Originals
(Ace)
For the 1960 “Angel Baby”; a lovely, previously unreleased cover of the Students' 1958 “I'm So Young” (“Can't marry no one”); and a study of how a group with one perfect moment in it tries to stave off the inevitable.

10
Ass Ponys, “Swallow You Down,” from
Some Stupid with Flare Gun
(Checkered Past)
This is what the Twin Cities Twin-Tone sound of the 1980s was for—the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Soul Asylum and Babes in Toyland using guitars to render ordinary stuff heroic, tragic, a thrill—but now it's 20 years later in Ohio and the guys in the band are promising a suicidal friend they won't walk away, not ever. They build the music until it's too good to let loose, so they let it sweep them up, riding a sunny, rising melody for “I won't let them swallow”—and then crashing hard for “you down,” paying off the loan the first five words took out on a pledge easier to make than to keep. This is what it's all for.

APRIL
17, 2000

1
Marah,
Kids from Philly
(E Squared/Artemis)
I haven't heard a band sing so convincingly from the inside of a bad neighborhood since the Youngbloods' “Four in the Morning,” and that was a long time ago. Marah works with a small, tight sound, as if they have nothing they can afford to waste, but they're far-seeing. Their best pieces seem at once cramped—as cramped as the room the singer rents—and infinitely expansive: you have no idea how far the songs will go before they'll let go of you. For a moment you might wonder why the Vietnam tune “Roundeye Blues” begins with castanets and a radio-familiar three-stroke drum pattern, but after that you're too caught up in the story to care. The sudden density of the music and the cruelty of the ideas inside it shoot up on the chorus, burning off the romanticism of some young guy's war fantasy. “Don't smoke the Bible,” the singer warns. The last verse ends with a stinger; it's so harsh, so unpolished, you can't accept it as the last word. You want the story to go on. But by then the singer is trailing away, musing over the Ronettes' “Be My Baby,” and you find out what those castanets and that drum pattern were for.

2
Down and Out—The Sad Soul of the Black South
(Trikont)
This extraordinarily sophisticated anthology focuses on obscure singers and strange records. It begins with George Perkins and the Silver Stars' 1971 “Crying in the Streets,” a purposeful negation of Martha and the Vandellas' 1964 “Dancing in the Street” and a eulogy for the Civil Rights Movement. “I see somebody marching,” Perkins cries, but he doesn't; he's crying in the street because all he sees are ghosts. Then there is Bill Brandon's “Rainbow Road,” a generic voice telling a generic tale, but with such pathos it seems that without the existence of a genre, which allows men and women to disappear into anonymity, some would never have the nerve to speak at all. And there is Dicky Williams' “In The Same Motel,” an adult version of the Rays' 1957 “Silhouettes,” where a guy comes home from work and behind the shade of his big picture window sees his wife kissing another man—except it isn't her, because he lives in one of the new subdivisions where all the streets and houses look the same and he's “on the wrong block.” This time the guy's out of town in a motel with thin walls; he's just settling down for a lonely night on the road when he picks up the sounds the man and woman in the next room are making. “Oh,” he says in a way you wish he wouldn't, “I got so tired of hearing my woman scream.” “I am a forgotten lover/That is, if you have time to hear,” Virgil Griffin and the Rhythm Kings sing so modestly from Greensville, Miss., speaking not only for everyone here but for the genre itself.

3
Sinners and Saints (1926–1931)
(Document)
Early commercial recordings of
pre-blues song survivals, from the T.C.I. Section Crew's very smooth railroad-gang number “Track Linin' ”—a cappella gospel in form, a day's first cup of coffee and train whistles inside of it—to the Nugrape Twins' odes to a drink that will make you a better person and bring you closer to God.

4
Sarah Dougher,
The Walls Ablaze
(Mr. Lady)
Organist for the cheapo-punk trio Cadallaca, Dougher sings and plays out of doubt here, dropping hints all over the place that happy endings are elsewhere. The women in her songs might be kin to the character Samantha Morton plays in
Jesus' Son
, all brains and fatalism, contemptuous of the obligation to explain herself even as she does exactly that.

5
Down to the Promised Land—5 Years of Bloodshot Records
(Bloodshot
) There are more gems among these 40 previously unheard tracks by bands on or about the Chicago country label than the Handsome Family's cover of Bill Monroe's “I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling,” Rico Bell and the Snakehandlers' bitter “Money to Burn” or Hazeldine's dark, damned “Unforgiven.” That's merely all I've found so far. But if there's anything better than Amy Nelson and Eddie Spaghetti of the Seersuckers mooning about what they did on the floor I'll be surprised.

6–7
J. Bottum, “The Soundtracking of America” (Atlantic Monthly, March) & Philip Roth,
The Human Stain
(Houghton Mifflin)
There are many reactionary propositions in critic J. Bottum's manifesto—notably the idea that there was once a common “belief in the intellectual coherence of human beings and the world,” that “ Music used to have a purpose: to express and, indeed, to perpetuate this shared sense of coherence.” Now, that coherence is lost and music has no purpose. It is empty, nothing more than a soundtrack, interference, static, aural caffeine.

What this actually means is that once upon a time only certain people needed to be taken into account as “ human beings and the world”—
that's
what's gone. Any future shared sense of coherence will have to be based on something more than the hegemony of a single, and singly gendered, ethnic group. But Bottum doesn't hear it this way. He hears only the emptiness of music as such, the muteness, and with the great goal of social coherence—or, in reality, social domination—missing, he hears the danger of music. Bottum hears it as an irrational art form; it cannot contain ideas. It grants false but overwhelming credence to sentiments of utter vapidity and banality: “Even in, say, Vivaldi's ‘Four Seasons'—in, that is, a deliberate effort to make music express something rational—the ideas it takes 45 minutes to convey amount to little more than winter is cold and summer is hot.” Music convinces us we know what we don't, understand what we've never thought about. Worst of all—my characterization of Bottum's thesis, not his—music makes ordinary people feel heroic, as if they can do anything and be anyone. But it's all a lie: “What can a genuinely tragic folk song tell us, except that we no longer know what to make of tragedy?”