Real Life Rock (277 page)

Then he's floating through the verses again, back in the story: “He made fiddle pegs from her long finger bones.” You can hear her breathing in the background, as if she's not dead, as if she can feel herself being cut up, like Uma Thurman buried alive in
Kill Bill
. The tone never changes. Does the singer believe any of it, now? Is he just playing with the story, which he heard just yesterday? The woman behind him believes it.

The production is very formally avant-garde, yet somehow implied by the song itself—a version of the song the song itself wanted to hear. And that is true folk music if anything is.

9
Gang of Four,
Content
(Yep Roc)
Just as
The King's Speech
is an action-packed thriller about speech therapy, the Gang of Four's 1979 debut album
Entertainment!
was an action-packed thriller about false consciousness and commodity fetishism. There was resistance—a strangled
no
inside almost every moment of panic.

The feeling on
Content,
the first album of new songs in sixteen years by singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, with bassist Thomas McNeice and drummer Mark Heaney as new members, is that of a kind of frantic longing. It's the metallic sound of people caught in the trap of modern capitalism—wanting what they can't have and, worse, what they don't even want, people consumed by a sense of a loss every time an ad appears or a purchase goes into the computer. It's a music of confusion, until the tone shifts with “A Fruit Fly in the Beehive,” where the person running through his own nightmares wakes up, the dream still in front of his eyes, and begins to think, and the result is a moment of calm surrounded by a sense of jeopardy. Gill counts off the rhythm circling each line, each idea.

10
U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, concession speech (November 2, 2010)
Feingold came into the Senate in 1992 with Elvis at his back—to counter negative ads against him in the Democratic primary, he ran a don't-believe-everything-you-read spot with the banner headline
ELVIS ENDORSES FEINGOLD
. The next day everyone in the state knew who he was, and that he had a sense of humor. He went out with the same flair. “So—so—so, to all of you,” he said finally. “In the words of, who else, Bob Dylan: ‘But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free / I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me.' ” He quoted Dylan's “Mississippi” as if the words were old and familiar, from Wordsworth, maybe; it was all in the lift, the barest hint of surprise, he gave to “not weary”—something Dylan, for all the times he recorded the song (for
Time Out of Mind
in 1997, for
Love and Theft
in 2001), never found. “So,” Feingold said finally, “it's on to the next fight. It's on to the next battle. It's on to 2012! And—
and!
—it is on to our next adventure.
Forward!
”

Thanks to Ken Tucker and Ben DeMott

FEBRUARY
2011

1
Jeffrey Foucault,
Cold Satellite
(JeffreyFoucault . com)
A collaboration with the poet Lisa Olstein, who wrote the words for
Foucault's drawl—a drawl that sometimes grows a tail so long it curls around itself, with a country feel that puts the people who live in the Nashville charts to shame. Then a deep-ditch electric guitar takes a country song into the blues, and lets it go back where it came from. Nothing is pressed, to the point that sometimes the way the voice pulls away from a word or a guitar from a phrase is its own kind of preciousness—but not in “Twice I Left Her,” which shifts the music into a more resolute kind of quiet, a bigger emptiness in a single room. An acoustic guitar figure comes up against drums buried far away, like a memory. The story creeps out, and stops well short of its end, though you can glimpse it. Foucault drifts over the words so lightly that they seem to fade as they're sung, and you might stop trying to hear them as words, let them come as sounds.

2
Cee Lo Green, “Fuck You,” from
The Lady Killer
(Elektra)
The emotions in these three minutes and forty-two seconds are so wonderfully scrambled—I hate you, I hate your money, I hate her for loving your money, I love her anyway, you can keep your money, just let me have her back, but following you both around all over town is better than staying home and hating myself—that every time the singer gets to the chorus, you can imagine that he's never felt better in his life.

3
Gary Kamiya,
Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler
(Simon & Schuster)
From the new Pulp History series, Kamiya's startlingly immediate text plus documentary photos, maps, and blazing war-comics illustrations by Jeffrey Smith. With crisscrossing stories from Norway, Paris, and London, the tension, the excitement, and the glamour build until you feel like you're trapped inside of every good antifascist movie ever made. Until the end, in a torture chamber in Dachau, when you are trapped by history.

4
KT Tunstall, “Uummannaq Song,” from
Tiger Suit
(Virgin)
“Hold your fire—I'm coming out and I'll tell you the truth”: in the front, her voice is pop, singing harmlessly defiant lines, reaching for a hit and a spread in
GQ
. But in the back, her shouts are pulling in another direction, where she's running for her life even though she's the last person on Earth.

5
Paul Auster,
Sunset Park
(Henry Holt)
Moving through this tale of Brooklyn squatters are the themes Auster has been pursuing since his first novel,
City of Glass,
appeared in 1985: the way a ghost can come out of nowhere and leave everything changed. Life is a field of unlikelihood: “That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.” That is philosophy, but in real life lives actually lived can become so spectral they disappear back into the not-lived. Unlikelihood turns into forgetting and facts into fables, as with a character catching the news of the death of a pitcher who, on the mound in 1976, talked to baseballs before throwing them past baffled hitters: “First Herb Score, and now Mark Fidrych, the two cursed geniuses who dazzled the country for a few days, a few months, and then vanished from sight.”

6
Rod Stewart,
Once in a Blue Moon: The Lost Album
(Rhino)
From 1992. For his covers of Stevie Nicks's “Stand Back,” the Contours' “First I Look at the Purse,” and more—but especially for “Shotgun Wedding.” Stewart's hero Sam Cooke didn't do this? Why
not?
Yes, he was already dead when Roy C wrote it, but for a song this right he could have climbed out of the grave.