Real Life Rock (68 page)

10
Mekons,
The Curse of the Mekons
(Blast First, U.K.) and Wallace Shawn,
The Fever
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Their 14 years as a transhistorical punk band have become the Mekons' subject, but not in terms of career. Rather the Mekons' subject is their quarrel with history, and their growing conviction that it means to leave them behind; Sally Timms, so quietly soulful she can make Rosanne Cash seem strident, sometimes makes this story feel fated, but it always hurts. In Wallace Shawn's one-person perform-anywhere play, the subject is the impossibility of escaping from history, and there is no relief, no humor. There is simply the scream of a bourgeois sorcerer (to quote Marx, and the Mekons quoting Marshall Berman quoting Marx) who cannot get free of his magic, cannot break the contract that ties his comfort to torture, his priceless individuality to the facelessness of the poor, who must be made to “understand that the dreamers, the idealists, the ones who say that they love the poor, will all become vicious killers in the end, and the ones who claim they can create something better will always end up by creating something worse. The poor must understand these essential lessons, chapters from history. And if they don't understand them, they must all be taken out and shot.”

The Mekons are always exuberant, whistling in the dark, but this is tough stuff, no fun, sleepless nights: to be left behind by history is to have never existed at all. “Funeral,” about the collapse of Marxism—which on
The Curse of the Mekons
means any resistance to capitalism as the measure of all things—is “a dinosaur's confession”: “This funeral is for the wrong corpse.” Shawn's nameless tourist enjoying his cheap holiday in other people's misery has a ticket to the funeral, but he doesn't want to go: “Cowards who sit in lecture halls or the halls of state denouncing the crimes of the revolutionaries are not as admirable as the farmers and nuns who ran so swiftly into the wind.” Listen as you read, read as you listen, and you might be back in Bob Dylan's “Memphis Blues Again”: “Now people just get uglier/And I have no sense of time.”

OCTOBER
1991

1
Ice Cube, as Dough Boy in
Boyz N the Hood
,
directed by John Singleton (Columbia Pictures)
On the covers of
Amerikkka's Most Wanted
and
Kill at Will
, Ice Cube flaunts a death stare—sort of daring you to buy his records, it can seem. But his eyes contain almost all of the credibility in this very Hollywoodish low-budget film-from-the-heart about a black L.A. neighborhood. Plainly the most intelligent character in the movie, Dough Boy has less of a chance than any other to do anything with his life but wait for it to end. In his face, from shot to shot, scene to scene, is the dilemma of what it means to act in a world where you've consciously given yourself over to a fate that no one around you has even imagined that—unlike the football player or the studious kids—
you
could ever escape. And there's worse than that in Ice Cube's eyes: the wish to take at least some of the blame off himself, and the knowledge that he can't, because no one would listen to talk like that from a man with eyes like his.

2
Robbie Robertson,
Storyville
(Geffen)
As point-man for the Band—guitarist, songwriter, spokesman—Robertson rarely sang. When he released his first solo album, in 1987, it came draped in curtains of overproduction, themes so elaborated and vocals so disguised it was hard to discern an actual human being behind any of it. But this clean, cool record—vaguely set in New
Orleans and cut with such Crescent City flyers as the Meters, Aaron Neville, the Rebirth Brass Band, Chief Bo Dollis of the Wild Magnolias, plus subtle contributions from Band keyboardist Garth Hudson—is alive. Horns carry melody, but lightly; the sound is full of room. Robertson's voice is smoked, airy, pinched, ranging from a whisper to a rasp, but most of all it is unprotected. Very quickly, you can understand the story the voice is telling: a story too spectral for plot or anecdote, let alone any kind of shout. There's no travelogue in the lyrics, no dead references to gumbo or second-line; the music kicks off with a “Night Parade” and follows it.

3
Muzak, in Virginia Cleaners (Berkeley, June 24)
The—yes, I think “strains” is the only word—were distantly familiar, teasing. The tune got better by the second, then better than that. It turned out to be “Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love),” perhaps the only Top 40 record that makes the Kingsmen's “Louie Louie” seem elegant and Bob Dylan's “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” sober—and even beneath Muzak's polka accordions and the huffing, middle-aged beat, you could hear the Swingin' Medallions, way back in '66, somewhere in South Carolina, laughing at history and time.

4
Charlie Feathers,
Charlie Feathers
(Elektra Nonesuch)
Feathers hung around Sun Records in Memphis the same time Elvis did, and has claimed ever since that, in essence,
he
is Elvis; scores of records on more than a score of tiny labels have not proved his case. In fact he is a quirky, sometimes doggedly weird rockabilly survival, now lapsing into birdcalls and animal noises, now pumping his legend, and then (as, here, on “A Long Time Ago”) shifting without warning into a reverie—loose, spooky, wailing, and more than anything emotionally
unclear
—of the way things never were, of the man he never was. In moments like this there's nobody like him.

5
Chin-Chin, “Stop! Your Crying”/“Revolution”/“Cry in Vain” (Farmer Records, Zurich, Switzerland, 1986)
Three Swiss women who sound like a whole batallion of Lesley Gores. The spirit of Lilliput lives, as it does also on.

6
UnknownmiX, “Sincerely”/“Habibi” (RecRec Vertrieb, Zurich, Switzerland)
Two women and two men who program their 7-inch like an “Oldies but Goodies” LP: a “Rockin' Side,” all chirps and gulps, and a “Dreamy Side,” dark, Catholic, guilty, and forgiven.

7
Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell,
The Worst Rock-and-Roll Records of All Time
(Citadel)
A book that recognizes it's as much fun to hate certain records and performers as it is to love others (or the same ones), and that insensate bigotry is the most fun of all. A lot of pages here get by on mere glee (on the 1984 Michael Jackson-Mick Jagger duet, “State of Shock”: “it seems as if the song takes longer to listen to than it did to record”), but there's also rage, even paranoia—which can be even more satisfying than bigotry. On Bryan Adams' 1985 “Summer of '69”: “The sixties nostalgia that sprung up in the mid-eighties was a fraud by industry leaders who refused to divulge to a new generation that the unmatchable music was inextricable from the horrible events that split this country in two as nothing had since the Civil War. Instead, culturally uneducated kids were made to hear songs like Martha and the Vandellas' ‘Dancing in the Street' . . . as no more than party ditties. It's this imagined sixties—one without Vietnam, one without James Earl Ray, one without Altamont—that ‘Summer of '69' memorializes.” Yeah, but I still like it.