Real Life Rock (88 page)

You wouldn't deduce such a move from the music. As a singer, Cash retains a dignity that seems located more in her songs than in any persona; her fervor is undiminished. The title track, a mostly elegant composition, opens without warning into realms of delirium. Still, despite the slow, smoky “Seventh Avenue” and the off-the-beat realism of “The Truth About You,” as the disc plays you can feel Cash holding more and more of herself back. By the time she reaches the last cut, “If There's a God on My Side,” the music doesn't end, it just stops.

6
Basehead,
Not in Kansas Anymore
(Imägo)
As on the 1992
Play with Toys
, Michael Ivey redefines hip-hop philosophy, placing above all others the question of whether it's worth getting to one's feet and leaving one's apartment—and if it is,
why
. After an opening in a C&W club where Basehead, presumably booked by mistake, introduces its first number as “a song about the problems that the white male has to face in America today” (the song consists of about two seconds of fuzztone), Ivey meanders, drifts, and complains about sex, police harassment, racism, oblivion, girlfriends, boredom, and drive-by shootings, until each sounds most of all not fun and he sounds like someone you'd love spending time with. Who knows, maybe the whole thing's one long personals ad. So you play the record again, maybe wondering about the empty dog-muzzle on the cover. That is, if it's for Toto, where's the dog? But by then you can already feel the bite.

7
Bob Dylan, on Guns N' Roses' cover of his “Knocking on Heaven's Door,” in
The Telegraph
42 (Summer 1992)
“Guns N' Roses is OK, Slash is OK, but there's something about their version of that song that reminds me of the movie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. I always wonder who's been transformed into some sort of clone, and who's stayed true to himself. And I never seem to have an answer.”

8
Ishmael Reed,
Japanese by Spring
(Atheneum)
A bitter, hilarious novel about multiculturalism, where a Japanese concern buys the failing Jack London College in California in order to, among other things, change Ethnic Studies to “Barbarian Studies,” and one Chappie Puttbutt, a would-be Clarence Thomas who's just been turned down for tenure despite years of kissing white ass, suddenly finds himself fronting the show. Reed himself enters in the last pages to settle a few scores; like a retired gunslinger forced to take on some rough business before the big church social, he finds himself wondering if there was “no end to the sacrifices he would be called on to make on behalf of Western civilization.” Given that this self-described “mongrel” (“African, French, Irish, Cherokee”) has
made it his mission not so much to change that civilization as to lead others to see it for the crazy quilt it already is, the answer would have to be no. Reviewers would love Reed to keep to his supposed place as an African-American novelist, but it isn't his place and he's never stopped there long enough to do more than kick down the fences around the plot. He's an all-American writer now moving into world beat, and there's no telling what story he'll tell next, though I'd love to see him send Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to Haiti. The way things are going, that may be the only way Aristide'll get there.

9
Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, Davies Hall, San Francisco (March 15)
I had to drag myself back to
The Juliet Letters
(Warner Bros.), Costello's song cycle with the UK's version of our Kronos Quartet, and the live version revealed why: the Brodskys are not exciting. The songs disappear into predictable arrangements and bland orchestrations. But onstage, surrounded by a crowd alternately polite and hysterical—almost a Randy Newman crowd in its self-congratulatory enthusiasm—Costello the singer took over. He'd never given himself so much range; he'd never been more musically playful. On the encores, the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows” sounded just right next to Kurt Weill's “Lost in the Stars.”

10
Rosey Golds, “Reader, I Married Him—Priscilla as Gothic Heroine,” in
Perfect Beat
2 no 1
You got it—Priscilla Presley is Jane Eyre, but is Mrs. Rochester Gladys or Elvis? Originally delivered as a breathless talk in Sydney last year, Golds' essay ranges over the whole corpus of the genre for metaphors and familiars (Col. Parker turns up as Dr. Frankenstein), but from start to finish it soars with the extremism, the passion and fear, the corny apocalypse, of your favorite Gothic novel. Happy ending, too. Sort of.

OCTOBER
1993

1
REM video, conceived by Michael Stipe, directed by Peter Care, “Man on the Moon” (Warner Bros.)
This is the best video I've seen since Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—though formally there's nothing unusual about it, just the standard pillaging of the last forty years of American independent cinema. The piece starts off with Michael Stipe striding across a western desert in a cowboy hat, lip-syncing his song about illusion and reality, identity as fact or choice, and the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who at times thought he was a professional wrestler or Elvis Presley. In black and white, split screens, grainy textures, overlit figures, double exposures, fades even within frames, and of course super-fast cutting are used smartly. Not even the way the design matches words to images (when Stipe sings about an asp, you see a snake: when he mentions “Mr. Darwin,” you see the pages of a human-evolution textbook flipping) is oppressive. A terrific feeling of empathy, of loss and regret, grows in the piece. The second time Kaufman rises up, like a ghost in the mix, in his Elvis outfit, you know Stipe loved the man.

Stipe hitches a ride on a truck, which drops him, at dusk, at the Easy-Rest Diner (the lyrics say “truck stop”). The way Peter Care brings Stipe to the door is pure Bruce Conner: flashes are piled onto flashes—seemingly hundreds of cuts to move a man a few steps—and it's as quietly thrilling here as it was in 1967, when Conner took you into Jay DeFeo's studio with his film
The White Rose
. Stipe sits down at the bar and signals for a beer. The expression on his face as he does so (his modesty, his happiness to be in this place) is striking, but no setup for what happens next. The camera begins to move around the bar, picking up old people, young people, men, women, pool players, drinkers, people just standing around in this nameless western place: where they're from. And every one of them is lip-syncing the words to “Man on the Moon.”

There's nothing new about this device: as a trick of self-glorification (“I'd like to teach the world to sing—my song”) it's as old as MTV. It was used perhaps most famously,
and certainly most obnoxiously, by Talking Heads in “Wild, Wild Life,” where a bunch of small-town types in David Byrne's vanity film
True Stories
were trotted onto a stage to mouth snatches of the tune like contestants on
The Gong Show
. “Man on the Moon” takes place in a different world. Face to face, line by line, what you're seeing and hearing comes across as ordinary conversation: somehow it seems as likely that the weathered old man in the cowboy hat would be saying “Man on the Moon” as “Gimme another one, Joe.” The tableau expands—begins to construct itself as a feeling, something shared, the way a song on a jukebox can change a room—and suddenly you realize you don't want this to end. You begin to worry that it will—even though you're not sensing the song nearing its end, you're simply drawn into the bar, this intimate place, part of it.

The cuts are not so fast now. You get to know the faces, the people. The warmth in the room is as physical as the sensation of a cold lifting. The room seems to be swirling, though it's not, there are no more special effects; by this point it's emotion that's moving too fast to keep up with. And then in the midst of this fine conversation, this magical invocation of community in its smallest, most everyday dimensions, the camera gives up a second or two to a blonde woman, smiling to the person she's talking to—not at the camera. The knowledge in that smile, a knowledge that's superior to nothing, that assumes everyone in the room knows what she knows: the pleasure and confirmation as the woman puts her lips around “They put a man on the moon”—it's as perfect a moment as you'll find anywhere, though for you, watching this video, the moment will be somebody else saying the same thing.