Real Life Rock (40 page)

7
Tone-Loc, “Funky Cold Medina,” on
Loc-ed After Dark
(Delicious Vinyl/Island)
There's more to this L.A. rapper than “Wild Thing.” His timbre is odd, and it can tell a story.

8
Bobbie Ann Mason,
Love Life—Stories
(Harper & Row)
Tales of mall-dwellers, in which changing channels is only apparently the primary social experience of our time.

9
Johnny O, “Fantasy Girl” (Micmac 12-inch)
Dream lover, where are you?

10
Jerry Garcia, guitar on “Slow Train,” on
Dylan and the Dead
(Columbia)
This is a horrible album. When “All Along the Watchtower” starts, even though the backing is country-thin (listen to what the Band did with it on
Before the Flood
), you think the melody is so dramatic nothing could break it; then Dylan, sounding too much like Elvis in his final “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” does the impossible. But there's an uncanny splendor in Garcia's rote “Slow Train” break; I know I'll never play the record
again to hear it, and smile every time the radio gives it back.

APRIL
18, 1989

1
Gérard de Thame, video for Tanita Tikaram's “Twist in My Sobriety” (Warner Bros)
On record, the number is an elliptical folkie conceit, and the seductiveness of the piece dries up before it's over. The video makes the song rich, confusing, scary. In a green-yellow wash over black-and-white footage of Mayan peasants smiling (Guatemalan peasants? Mexican? Hollywood extras?), or standing in mud—the mud crusting around their feet like leprosy—or staring straight ahead as if the only thing to do about death squads is wait for them, a view from the inside of a battered worker's car focuses on a revolver dangling from the rearview mirror. “Twist in My Sobriety,” Tikaram sings again and again—what does it mean? A break with the monotony of ordinary life, she says in an interview, which doesn't speak for the people you're watching. Or does it? The phrase rises out of the video, malevolent and impenetrable, on MTV destroying everything around it, except for Metallica's “One.”

2
Guadalcanal Diary, “Always Saturday” (Elektra)
“I want to live where it's always the same … I wish I lived in a shopping mall”; it's the Beach Boys in hell, “I Get Around” as “I Don't Wanna Get Around.” “So many choices, it's not fair/I hop in the car, and I just sit/There.” The melody snaps, the performance seems to have no real stops in it, the sound is irresistible; you resist the message before you've quite grasped it. The strategy is old, and it will never wear out: take a negative idea and put it across with all the positive energy you can.

3
Janice Benally, Harman Yellowman, Toby Topaha, et al., “I Think We're Alone Now,” theme from
Have You Ever Seen a Rainbow at Midnight?
,
video on Navajo children's art by Bruce Huck (Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, New Mexico)
The kids in Huck's class made good art; what I can't get out of my mind are the harmonies they put on the old Tiffany song.

4
Joe Grushecky and the House-rockers,
Rock and Real
(Rounder CD)
Bleeding-heart, guitar-led small-combo rock from the man whose Iron City House-rockers made the best mainstream rock 'n' roll of the early '80s with
Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive
. This isn't on that level, but “Freedom's Heart” and “How Long” (with the only good lyrics anyone's produced on the Iran-contra crimes) say the next one might be. For there to be a next one a few people will have to buy this one.

5
Monotones, “Book of Love” on
The Newlywed Game
(Barris Entertainment)
Intro: in a montage of ancient photos of justmarrieds, the lips of the frozen brides and grooms mouth the song like a Terry Gilliam
Monty Python
mock-up.

6
Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, “
SEE THE REVOLUTIONARY WORKS OF A '60S RADICAL
” (ad copy for
Courbet Reconsidered
)
“He was a firebrand, assailed by critics as an upstart in muddy boots. He was a rebel who challenged the preconceptions of the '50s establishment, leading his radical movement into the '60s. The 1860s.”