Real Life Rock (242 page)

3
The Wallflowers, “God Says Nothing Back” from
Rebel, Sweetheart
(Interscope)
Occasionally this single resurfaces on the radio out of the murk of last year, and everything around it feels cheap. With a stoic backbeat and Jakob Dylan's fatalistic way of biting off his words, this is the sound of someone thinking—about insignificance, in the pop world, in the real world.

4
Cindy Bullens,
Dream #29
(Let's Play/ Blue Lobster)
In 1978, at 23, she made “High School History”: If you pull out all the stops you can do stuff in high school they'll be talking about for years, but they stopped talking years ago. Now she's in her early fifties—and on an album about self-delusion, divorce, and pulling out all the stops, she concedes nothing.

5
IBM Commercial, “What Makes You Special?”
You see armies of determined men and women in suits like armor, in crowded elevators, marching down corridors, every one of them mouthing the Kinks' absolutely ferocious 1966 “I'm Not Like Everybody Else”—and, my God, for an instant nobody is.

6
Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
Show Your Bones
(Interscope)
All you read about them is how soon they'll be huge. The music is judged according to whether or not it will make that happen, and despite the fact that Karen O has a voice as human as it is urgent, she
seems to judge herself on the same terms. Better than all that here: “Cheated Hearts”; the “Telstar” guitar solos in “Turn Into.”

7
Amazon.com
, editorial reviews
“Who writes this stuff?” asks my friend Steve Weinstein, passing this on, typos and all: “Jewel is about to deliver her most personal and autobiographical record so far—
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland
. Not content to relegate herself to a traditional music areana, or to be typecase, Jewel has established herself as a culturally significant and relevant brand.”

8
Prince,
3121
(Universal)
His version of “The
Playboy
Philosophy,” circa 1962.

9
Derek McCulloch & Shepherd Hendrix,
Stagger Lee
(Image Comics)
On Christmas night 1895, in Bill Curtis's saloon in St. Louis, “Stag” Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons; by the time Shelton died in prison in 1912, he was more legend than flesh. In this blazing graphic novel—part folklore, part love story, part thrilling
Law & Order
episode with a deadpan denouement—Shelton hears a guitarist in the next cell playing the “Stackalee” song: “That song about me.” No, says the singer: “I think Stackalee from Memphis.” There are endless subtleties here—taken from the historical record when it's there, invented with the lightest touch when it's not—and, somehow, no resolution at all. Not after more than a hundred years, thousands of singers, and likely thousands more to come.

10
Devin McKinney a.k.a. Declan MacManus,
Popwithashotgun.blogspot.com
, March 21
Too perfect: “I had a vision after watching
The Sopranos
the other night that the last show would end with Tony dying in Carmela's arms, and that the last song of all would be ‘Poor Side of Town,' by Johnny Rivers.”

JULY
2006

1
Kanye West, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (April 29)
Solidifying his position as One of the Best People on the Planet, he switched from singer to DJ and announced he was going to play “one of my favorite songs”: a-ha's “Take on Me,” the most deliriously irresistible hit of 1985. Doing either the “Carlton dance” or the “Molly Fucking Ringwald,” as uploads on youtube described his moves, West high-stepped across the stage while the crowd sang the song en masse, going up all the way—and it's a long way—for the impossible high notes that dissolve the chorus into air.

2
KT Tunstall, “Other Side of the World,” from
Eye to the Telescope
(Relentless/Virgin)
It's all about Tunstall's seemingly endless drift through the second word in “You're on the other side of the world to me.” In that moment this woman from Scotland could be the great Bermudan-Canadian singer Heather Nova, and not in the world at all.