Real Life Rock (98 page)

3
Richard Thompson, “You'll Never Walk Alone,” live on
Fresh Air
(National Public Radio, 13 April)
“In England it's a football song,” he said, after singing his heart out.

4
Lewis Nordan,
Wolf Whistle
(Algonquin)
A novel based on the 1955 Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till—but here, amateur bluesmen getting drunk in the morning and lining out old Robert Johnson songs recede in the face of Moby Dick rising out of dry land. Dead, Emmett Till turns into Pip the cabin boy, comes back to life “dressed in a heavy garment of fish and turtles,” then dies for good; entering a courtroom to testify before an all-white jury, a black witness sees the whiteness of the whale—as Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651,
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil
.

5
Iris Dement,
My Life
(Warner Bros.)
In DeMent's voice you can hear bluegrass,
old-time country music, and the physical and moral tiredness of some of the people Bobbie Ann Mason writes about. In her own songs you can't always tell if DeMent is parodying clichés, exploiting them, or caught by them, but then she takes something extra from a too-familiar image, or dances over a line anyone could have produced, and she's gone.

6
Hole, “Credit in the Straight World,” from
Live Through This
(DGC)
Good luck.

7
Red Alert,
DJ Red Alert's Propmaster Dancehall Show
(Epic Street)
A compilation of delirious, irresistible tracks—the collection all but drowns in its own fluids with Patra's “Love All the Men”—pretending it's the best radio show in the world, heading your way from KISS-FM, New York. Too bad it's not.

8
Jonathan Coe,
What a Carve Up!
(Viking, UK)
In this black comedy about the evil of Thatcherism, so extreme even Elvis Costello might be caught up short, cutbacks in funding for the Underground lead to hideously overcrowded cars and disastrous service failures. A train stops dead in a tunnel; then the lights go out. The air turns unbreathable. “I could sense fear, now, fear all around me whereas before there had only been boredom and discomfort,” the narrator says. “There was desperation in the air, and before it proved contagious I decided to beat a retreat, as far as possible, into the privacy of my own mind. To start with, I tried telling myself that the situation could be worse: but there were surprisingly few scenarios which bore this out—a rat on the loose in the carriage, perhaps, or a busker spontaneously . . . treating us all to a few rousing choruses of ‘Imagine.' No, I would have to try harder than that . . .”

9
NKOTB,
Face the Music
(Columbia)
The presentation is all shame and guilt—for more than ten years, NKOTB were New Kids on the Block. They aren't giving the money back, but Danny Wood now looks exactly like Erik Menendez.

10
Pearl Jam, on
Saturday Night Live
(NBC, 16 April)
On April 8, the day Kurt Cobain's suicide was announced, there seemed to be as much Pearl Jam on the radio as Nirvana; given the solemnity always present in Eddie Vedder's singing, every song sounded like a eulogy. Still, that was no preparation for the wake the band staged little more than a week later. On a program that takes Nirvana's audience as a given, but which over the course of two shows had found no way even to mention Cobain's death, Pearl Jam began with the unreleased “Not for You.” It was an extraordinary number—led by the most rudimentary up-and-down guitar riff by Vedder, and only for a moment raised into the realm of myth by a modal passage from guitarist Stone Gossard—a song at once ordinary and mysterious, elemental and twisted, quiet and full of alarms, elegiac and damning. Later the group moved on to “Rearview-mirror,” then closed, after another break for moronic skits, with “Daughter.” Pointedly pulling back his jacket to display a
K
on his T-shirt, Vedder ended the tune with a few lines from Neil Young's
Rust Never Sleeps
—the album Cobain quoted in the suicide note his widow, Courtney Love, had publically denounced as “like a letter to the fuckin editor.”

She was right. One of the horrors of the event, a small horror, maybe, but a horror nonetheless, was that a man who could speak so freely in his own songs could not in the end find his own words, or make someone else's words (“It's better to burn out than to fade away”) sound like his own. Yet when Vedder sang, as if the thought or the quote had just occurred to him, “Hey, hey, my, my, rock and roll can never die” (the line has carried unpleasant ironies since Young first offered it; once again, as always, it had to fight off an audience's idiot whoops), Vedder could not have appeared more completely himself: a fan surprised to find himself on a stage but ready to push his chance to the limit.

SEPTEMBER
1994

1
Walter Hill, director,
Streets of Fire
(1984; A&E cable, MCA video)
I caught the last 20 minutes of this urban never-never-land rock fable on A&E one afternoon (cast: Diane Lane, Michael Paré, Willem Dafoe, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Lee Ving, Bill Paxton, Ed Begley, Jr., the Blasters, Robert Townsend), waited out the plot for the final musical number, and had my memories of the film dissolved by the wonder of what goes on. There's tremendous unreality to the sound and staging of “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”—it's thrilling, but in a prickly, disturbing way. Music videos have never come within centuries of what Hill (and Jeffrey Hornaday, the choreographer) does here with every gesture. Contradictions are the medium: singer Lane's dress is at once tight and hanging on her like a piece of paper, slit all the way down in back—she's not thin. The perfection of every move, every cut, is scary, and the sense that this isn't happening is overpowering: it's as if this is no performance but a transmission to the stage, by unknown technology, of your deepest performance fantasies. The audience waves its arms, and you peer through them: at the way the drummer, shot from below, makes the beat, the way the guitarist frames Lane with his back to her, his zoot suit touching her skin, the way the black vocal quartet enters the ensemble, strolling and strutting as if they've been called forth to walk it like she talks it.