Real Life Rock (50 page)

7
Associated Press, worst news of the month (January 9)
“Don Henley and Glenn Frey have settled their decade-old feud and will reunite the Eagles . . .”

8
Andrew Goodwin, worst news of the month before
(
East Bay Express
,
December 29)
Rock critic Goodwin reports on a conversation with
Nightline
correspondent James Walker, in Berkeley to research a show about bigotry in popular music: “Walker's next stop is L.A., where he will interview NWA. Walker wants to know if NWA's members speak English.”

9
Los Angeles Times,
news story (January 10)
“Designers of Richard Nixon's presidential library say that visitors will be able to question the former president and get an answer from his own lips—through the miracle of video. With the latest in computer wizardry and more than 400 video clips, the questioner will touch a screen and get an answer from Nixon's video image. ‘It's as if by some form of fortune, you actually meet the president,' said designer Alex Cranstoun”—no doubt a fan of the Firesign Theater's 1971
We're All Bozos on This Bus
, which featured the same psuedo-Nixon, and also detailed how to blow its fuse.

10
Warner Bros., radio ad (January)
For Laurie Anderson's
Strange Angels
: “It has music you can listen to.” What'll they think of next?

MARCH
6, 1990

1
Laurie Anderson,
Strange Angels
(Warner Bros.)
Julee Cruise armed. Or David Lynch's next movie.

2
Wim Wenders,
Emotion Pictures—Reflections on the Cinema
,
translated from the German by Sean Whiteside with Michael Hofman (Faber & Faber)
Between 1968 and '71 the German director was a film student, and also a critic, tossing out pieces on rock as film and film as rock (“The 10th Kinks LP—The 51st Alfred Hitchcock Film—The 4th Creedence Clearwater LP—The 3rd Harvey Mandel LP”); free-associating between records and movies, in almost every case essaying a page or two of nothing on his way to the image he's looking for (on rock cinema, “A Non-Existent Genre”: a “close-up of a screaming girl is really only a reverse angle of a cameraman screaming with disgust”). The book ends with later, more conventional, and very angry articles, and with “The American Dream,” an endless 1984 poem. After 10 pages or so, if you last that long, its insistent banality begins to work as a set-up for occasional moments of vehement clarity (“The more impossible and unthinkable wars become/ . . . the more evident world-wide entertainment will appear/as the ‘continuation of politics by other means' ”); farther on is as heartbreaking an account of the liberating effects of early rock 'n' roll as one will ever read.

3
Sinéad O'Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U” (Chrysalis 12-inch)
The principal difference between O'Connor's immersion in this Prince tune and classic '60s deep soul ballads is that this runs five minutes and they didn't go past three.

4
B-52's, “Roam” (Reprise)
A good sound, thanks mainly to the absence of Fred Schneider's smirking anti-singing, plus a double entendre on “around the world” worthy of ZZ Top, or Bullmoose Jackson's 1952 “Big Ten Inch (Record of the Blues).” But if the song is suggestive it's in terms of the video you automatically run in your head. The group settled for cutting the performance in half with a cheap travelogue of exotic places; that's why they'll never be more than a decent joke.

5
Mötley Crüe, “Kickstart My Heart” video and Paula Abdul: “Opposites Attract” video
Two proofs that the current ruling MTV aesthetic is nearly indistinguishable from soft-core porn: action shots (Mötley Crüe's stage moves, Abdul's all-promising grin) so brief they verge on the subliminal, so out of reach the only feeling they leave behind is frustration.

6
Electric Eels,
Having a Philosophical Investigation With the Electric Eels
(unreleased recordings from 1975, Tinnitus)
As in
Having a Rave Up With the Yardbirds
; on “Agitated” and “Jaguar Ride,” these progenitors of Cleveland's Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu almost do.