Real Life Rock (26 page)

4
Prince, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” (Paisley Park)
But in the last minute he takes the place of Duane Allman.

5
Mekons,
New York
(ROIR)
Proof that “Hard To Be Human” is their best moment on stage.

6
Jonathan King, “He's So Fine” (Rhino)
Proof that
all
of George Harrison's songs were written by one Ronald Mack.

7
Prince Buster,
Judge Dread
(Melo-disc)
The only LP I've ever found with all three parts of the Coasters cum-rock-steady saga of the Ethiopian judge who knows how to dance.

8
The Johnnys,
Highlights of a Dangerous Life
(Enigma)
Australian cowboy rock with a better beat than the Beat Farmers.

9
Foreigner,
Inside Information
(Atlantic)
What the hell—there's a hit here somewhere.

10
Artemy Troitsky,
Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia
(Omnibus Press)
As a history of an imitation and a paean to
glasnost
, this survey by the Soviet Union's top rock networker can only be prelude. The prehistory is full of mystery and wonder: early bootlegs of Western pop cut “on ribs” (used X-ray plates), tales of the late '40s
stilyagi
(“stylists,” USSR approximations of zoot-suiters and Teddy Boys), or Leningrad fan Kolya Vasin's discovery of “meaning in life”: “A friend came to me and asked if I'd heard about the new sensation, the Beatles, and put on a tape recorded from a BBC broadcast. It was something heavenly, I felt blissful and invincible. I understood that everything other than the Beatles had been oppression.” Kim Philby, eat your heart out.

MARCH
1, 1988

1
James Burton & Bruce Springsteen, “Oh, Pretty Woman,” from
Roy Orbison and Friends: An Evening in Black and White
(Cinemax, or MTV clip)
What you don't get anymore: two guitarists trading a riff, making it into a phrase, and then, taking all the time in the world, writing a book. The moment was so invisibly sustained, suspended even out of the time of the song, that when MTV followed with Pink Floyd's “On the Turning Away,” and David Gilmour stood still and played an endless, stately, perfectly generic late-'60s cosmic solo, even that sounded inspired.

2
Terence Trent D'Arby, “Wonderful World” (Columbia 12-inch)
There are only three kinds of rock fans: those who think Sam Cooke's “A Change Is Gonna Come” is better than his “Wonderful World,” those who think the opposite, and those who can't decide. D'Arby must fall in the latter camp. The complexity of his own music can be traced back to the consciousness of “Change,” but so far that complexity exposes too much self-consciousness—”Wishing Well,” the A-side of this disc, dies when you start hearing how many times he had to rehearse his laughter. The easy melody of “Wonderful World” gives D'Arby a chance to be a soul singer, not just a genius. When he covers the verse Paul Simon added to Cooke's version, “Don't know much about the Middle Ages/Look at the pictures I just turn the pages,” he lets you see him squirming at his school-room desk, confused, wishing he did know about the Middle Ages—which, off the record, D'Arby surely does.

3
Larks,
When I Leave These Prison Walls
(Apollo reissue, 1950–54)
Very smooth, professional, almost supper-club doo-wop; when a blues sensibility surfaces, it's a shock.

4
Peter Sloterdijk, “Dada Chaotology” from
Critique of Cynical Reason
(Minnesota paperback)
“A subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century—from Dada to the punk movement,” says the 40-year-old author of this hit West German study of “enlightened false consciousness” (what's left when revolutionary consciousness goes to sleep). Dada/punk is an old argument, but it has force here. That's because, working with documents previously innocent of English translation, Sloterdijk is talking about Berlin dada, less an art movement than a free speech movement—an explosion of spleen that produced a language so cruel and self-contradictory (“We were for the war and today Dadaism is still for war,” draft-dodger Richard Huelsenbeck announced in early 1918) it burned off all irony, leaving behind nothing but words that dared the listener to believe they meant what they said. Sloterdijk is one of the first to try.