Real Life Rock (59 page)

3
Simon Reynolds,
Blissed Out—The Raptures of Rock
(Serpent's Tall)
Drunk on good French wine (mouth-filling Bataille red, astringent Kristeva white), a self-described “acolyte of obliteration” and “sucker-ass liberal” claims the pop present of A. R. Kane and Metallica over what anyone else cares to make of its past or future. “ ‘Bliss' and ‘noise' are the same thing,” this young British critic insists, as he grasps contradictions with both hands: “To embrace both decency and pop . . . to be a socialist by day and a hip hopper by night after a hard day's campaigning, are quite feasible options, but only in a rotten, free-market society such as our own.” Thus Reynold's credo, “Pop or a better world. The choice is yours!”—a good joke when he first flips it at you, a true riddle by the time you close his book.

4
Danzig,
Danzig II—Lucifuge
(Def American)
What might happen if Jim Morrison reappeared fronting a mean, very efficient hard rock band: all those years in the grave would have turned his psychedelic shamanism into satanism, at least as a convincing career move. They would have also left him more ordinary, more passionate, and shameless, finally ready to admit how much he admires Gene Pitney.

5
Bob Dylan, “10,000 Men,” from
Under the Red Sky
(Columbia)
His voice seems to drift away from him, all the way back to the way he sang “Trail of the Buffalo” 29 years ago, which may be where he left it.

6
Sidra Stich, curator, “Anxious Visions—Surrealist Art” (University Art Museum, Berkeley, through December 30; catalogue by Stich and others, Abbeville Press)
Stressing the realism in Surrealism, arguing for its objects as versions of experience directly lived—the cataclysm of World War I and the political chaos of the next two decades—the show uses blowups of contemporaneous news photos as a frame. Most striking is “The Union of Bashed Faces,” ten formally dressed, hideously disfigured French veterans: “what,” Stich says, “the surrealists saw when they walked down the street” (and what, had this show been up 12 years ago, we would have seen—on punk flyers). Reflected off this item, the likes of Dora Marr's uncanny photograph
Père Ubu
(1936: a fetal armadillo that looks a thousand years old) don't seem precious, or in any manner fantastic. They seem most of all unfrivolous.

7
Boogie Down Productions,
Edutainment
(RCA)
Hip-hop as lecture, thin and echoing—a great lecture, sometimes, as with “Love's Gonna Get 'Cha (Material Love),” a dope-dealer parable that with its tinny toy-Uzi sound effects falls not far short of the empathy and fright of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's “The Message.”

8
Anonymous,
Fascist
—“Life Affirmation” issue
A Xeroxed collage journal, highlighted by an Archie comic with new speech balloons, wherein meliorist Veronica and CIA plant Archie outpoint commie
dupe Betty in a dispute over Gramsci's concept of hegemony, then call for violins to be dubbed in on every Replacements lp.

9
Spoc, “I Fought the Law” (wedding in Corunna, MI, 21 September, as reported by the AP)
The groom was a major drug buyer fronting for a crime boss, or so the guests, all of them dealers, had been led to believe; when the band—COPS spelled backward—broke into the old Bobby Fuller Four hit, the bride pulled a gun from under her gown, and she and the rest of the wedding party busted everybody else. Whether it was a fitting homage to Fuller may depend on whether you believe his death in 1966 was due to accidental asphyxiation or, as rumor had it, gasoline poured down his throat.

10
Great Balls of Fire, Inc., Nampa, ID, Great Balls of Fire
^®
Strike a match to one of these little gray spheres (six per box) and your charcoal or firewood starts up slow and steady, no flare, no smell. In a year or so they'll have figured out how to make the things play the song while they burn.

JANUARY
1991

1
Susan McClary, “Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly,” in
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
(University of Minnesota Press)
McClary, a professor in the School of Music at the University of Minnesota, writes that her certification as a guardian of the highest and purest of Western art traditions demanded only a single sacrifice: “that I never ask what any of it means.” Thus McClary moves from female characters in 17th-century opera to Laurie Anderson as an apostate, but also as a teacher who's found her own voice, a critic empowered by feminist theory and the thrill of fandom. “The strategies of Madonna's songs are those of one who has radically conflicting subject positions—one who has been taught to cheer for resolutions in cultural narratives, but who also realizes that she is of the sort that typically gets purged for the sake of that resolution”—this is the ordinary language version of McClary's formal, precisely musicological reading of the uncanny reversals and suspensions in Madonna's “Live to Tell,” a reading as intense and lucid as the record itself.