Real Life Rock (263 page)

5
Charles Taylor writes in on seeing Sonic Youth for the first time (United Palace Theater, New York City, July 3)
“How do you explain the difference between volume that is pulverizing and volume that's liberating? At one point during the first encore, Kim Gordon, who was wearing a silver sheath dress, was doing her go-go-dancer moves and looked as if she was actually surfing the waves of sound. Visually and in attitude, she's the steady center of that band. At times, she and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and Mark Ibold would form a loose circle, facing each other, and they had the deadly precision of a group of hired killers in a Leone western. And the music seemed to me perfectly pitched between songs and guitar freak-outs, the latter of which never—never—lost discipline or structure. Maybe only Neil Young has that sense of physical expansiveness at his most slashing.

“Part of what moved me, and this may sound trivial, was that for the first time in memory I was at a rock show watching people older than myself, and people not playing at anything, not posing, but doing what they love without feeling they have to resort to rock-star clichés of bad behavior to do it. Did you see Gordon in
Last Days
? I hated that movie. I thought it treated Kurt Cobain the way generations of college girls have treated Sylvia Plath (though there it fits): as the fetish object at the center of a death trip. When Gordon walks in, she shows the entire movie for the lie it is. Here's someone who is as rock and roll as rock and roll can be, and she's not self-destructive or frantic or foolish. She's an adult. That's why I loved her as the gangster snapping off orders in Cantonese in
Boarding Gate
. She is such a cool, self-possessed professional. Jean-Pierre Melville would have adored her.”

6
Fiery Furnaces press release (Thrill Jockey Records, July)
On the follow-up to the summer's
I'm Going Away:
“The band is very optimistic—despite or because of it all—and will continue its ‘Democ-Rock' efforts by releasing a fully-fledged ‘Derocmacy in America' limited edition vinyl box-set. It might be called something like
Your Cashier Today Was ACM CASHIER 96
. . . .” Misreading “Derocmacy” as “Deromacy,” I asked Furnace Matthew Fried-berger if it was a typo, and if so, or not, what it meant. His reply: “It's meant to be the equally idiolect-ed ‘Derocmacy.' ‘Roc' as in ‘Rock'. . . . But that's neither here nor there. And maybe ‘Deromacy' is one of those fruitful sort of typos. It might therefore have—unknowingly—been derived from ‘derivo'—meaning the derive or divert. So ‘Deromacy' might refer to an imagined, or real, Diversionary Republic.—Or from ‘derogo'—the Derogatory or Critical Republic.—Or from ‘derosus,' which apparently means ‘gnawed away'—so, the Eaten-Away Republic.

“ ‘Derocmacy' has to do with the ‘Democ-Rock' thing, which started as a lark on our tour last year during the primaries. We had people vote on what we'd play and held a ‘caucus' to determine what our next album would be. And I was to write
songs, or put together songs, based on or determined by whatever printed ephemera fans had on them and put down on the stage (along with their song-votes). Receipts, mainly (So the cashier number on a receipt would provide the intervals for the tune, and so on). The slogan was ‘Make the details of your life the sound track to your life.' ”

7–10
Megan Pugh, “Who's Bad? How the King of Pop changed the course of American dance by transforming its past”
(
FLYP,
July 3). Michael Thomas, “I Was Not Michael Jackson”
(
New York Times,
June 28). Bob Herbert, “Behind the Façade”
(
New York Times,
July 4). Bill Wyman, “The Tragedy of Michael Jackson”
(
Wall Street Journal,
July 15)
These are a few of the few pieces on Michael Jackson's death where writers had the heart or the nerve to dig out from under the endless stream of cant about the “sound track of my life” and “his gift to the world” and “now perhaps he can rest in peace.” In a scintillatingly linked essay on the website
FLYP,
Pugh set the scene with the spontaneous explosion of dance, not merely speech, that first greeted the news (“Fourteen-hundred prison inmates in the Philippines performed a massive, synchronized dance tribute in bright orange jumpsuits,” as you watch), and then moved out to trace Jackson's debt to (and, clearly, study of) Bill Robinson, the nineteenth-century moonwalker Billy Kershands, Gene Kelly, and more, not diminishing Jackson's work but allowing it to take on its full dimensions by expanding its context. Thomas, author of the novel
Man Gone Down,
a perfectly conventional realistic novel that can at times make you feel as if you're reading
Ulysses
or
Invisible Man,
begins as harshly as he can, hearing the news on the radio, thinking about how he'd already left not only Jackson but his own brother behind: “He knows I don't care about him.” He goes back to the 1970s and the Cousin 5, the living-room singing group he, his brother, his sister, and his two cousins formed in thrill and homage, and proceeds to twist his heart and yours. Herbert writes about a man who bought the world: about meeting Jackson in the mid-1980s, when he carried Emmanuel Lewis around “almost as a pet”—with Lewis, “probably 13 at the time, but he looked much younger, maybe 7 or 8,” a symbolic stand-in for the children in Jackson's bed. Wyman presented Jackson as a man sustained only by his fame—sustained in the sense of Jackson himself feeding off his own renown. Wyman did not shy away from the hideousness of the face Jackson presented to the world, and not the face he got with plastic surgery: rather how, after inventing the previously unknown throne of the King of Pop and awarding himself the crown, “he developed a fondness for walking around in front of a large band of what seemed to be Central American military personnel; this was in the '80s, the era of Salvadoran juntas and assassinations of priests and nuns. One album,
HIStory,
featured an enormous Soviet-style Jackson statue on the cover. Replicas of it were set up when he made public appearances.”

Unlike the thugs he liked to dress up as, Jackson didn't have people killed. He enacted a complex drama that implicated millions of people in labyrinthine ways. With the avalanche of biographies and biopics to come, it will be hard to see even the curtain behind which that drama took place, but gathering these pieces and others as tough-minded in one place would be a first step.

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2009

1
Mike Seeger, 1933–2009
August was a wipeout in American music: the rockabilly original Billy Lee Riley, dead at seventy-five on the second; the punk flash Willy DeVille at fifty-eight on the sixth; the electric guitar pioneer Les Paul at ninety-four on the thirteenth; the Memphis termite Jim Dickinson, a.k.a. leader of Mudboy and the Neutrons, at sixty-seven on the fifteenth; Ellie Greenwich, cowriter of “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” and “Leader of the Pack,” at sixty-eight on the twenty-sixth. But the cruelest note may
have been struck with Mike Seeger, the folklorist, producer, filmmaker, and scholar-on-his-feet, dead at seventy-five on the seventh. He died beloved and respected, but also bitter—over the fact that as a singer and player in his own right, those whom Bob Dylan once called the folk police never accepted him as a peer of those he helped rescue from obscurity and bring into the light: Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, and countless more—great artists who themselves had no trouble accepting him at all.

2
Drones, Bell House (Brooklyn, September 9)
Having flown in that day from Australia, complaining of jet lag and offering to share bronchitis with the sparse crowd, they threw out one ferocious song after another. “Sitting on the edge of the bed crying,” Gareth Liddiard sang over and over, with storms of noise whirling around his head, the words muttered, chanted, shouted, whispered, until the piece seemed less about a broken heart than the human condition. Guitarist Dan Luscombe said they'd be doing songs from their 2005 album . . .
Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By
. It was a prosaic promise: the embattled
us
the band enacts against the empowered
them
waiting outside the club that was itself the shelter from the storm the Drones were dramatizing. But it didn't come off that way. The music was so strong, so full of loose wires twisting through the air in a spastic dance, that you could imagine that yes, you were the “you” in “your enemies”—and that Liddiard, Luscombe, bassist Fiona Kitschin, and drummer Michael Noga were your enemies, and that as they floated by this was the song they sang.

3
Mad Men
,
“My Old Kentucky Home” (AMC, August 30)
It's the wedding party for Roger Sterling of Sterling Cooper, the white-haired dandy who's dumped his wife for a secretary, now offering the guests his rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home”—in blackface. It's 1963, the height of the Civil Rights movement; the refusal of the history that's being made elsewhere in America magnifies the gruesomeness of the act. It can stay in your mind like an overheard insult: the presumption that the subjects of Sterling's performance will be excluded from its audience, unless they're maids or houseboys, in which case they're invisible anyway.