Real Life Rock (139 page)

As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say to his partner in the
Mad
magazine
Dragged Net
parodies, “How's your mom, Ed?” Coleman Silk, in Philip Roth's new novel, a 71-year-old classics professor, can explain. Banished from the college he once transformed, he's caught up in a transforming affair with a 34-year-old janitor. Now every Saturday night he tunes in the local Big Band show and, he says, “ Everything stoical within me unclenches and the wish not to die, never to die, is almost too great to bear. And all this from listening to Vaughn Monroe.” He goes on: “Let anyone born in 1926 try to stay alone at home on a Saturday night in 1998 and listen to Dick Haymes singing ‘Those Little White Lies.' Just have them do that, and then tell me afterwards if they have not understood at last the celebrated doctrine of the catharsis effected by tragedy.” Who do you trust, a real-life critic or an imaginary professor? One whose true demand on art is that it offer not ideas but arguments, or one who believes that music
less contains ideas than finds them in those who hear it, and then says what those ideas are worth?

8
Melvins, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Ramblin' Man,” from
The Crybaby
(Ipecac)
Buzz Osborne of the Melvins was Kurt Cobain's first mentor in punk, so he has as much right as Tori Amos to cover Cobain's best song. Hey, it's a free country, so he even has a right to ask '70s flesh-crawlingly rockbottom teen idol Leif Garrett to sing it on the Melvins' guest stars album. Fruit of perhaps the most perverse singer-to-song match since Bert Parks sang Bob Dylan's “Maggie's Farm” in
The Freshman
(and he was
great
), the track begins so pristinely, with such punch, it suggests a terrible possibility. What if Garrett, currently heading a band called Godspeed and looking like the sort of person who'd paper his walls with pictures of the sort of person he used to look like, rises to the occasion? What if he's
good?
The world remains on its axis; Garrett is completely effete. You can hear all the words, and without Cobain's mumbles, his swallowed lyrics, the fear of being understood, there is no music. Then Hank Williams III takes his grandfather's spookiest tune. The hesitation in the way the melody opens up—the curling finger, then the fading smoke, of the first notes on the steel guitar—make it Williams' most clovenhoofed. The band never pushes the song, and never loses it, but after two verses the young singer falls behind, which only makes the drama more believable.

9
Common,
Like Water for Chocolate
(MCA)
If the cover art—a 1956 Gordon Parks photo of a young black woman in Alabama, dressed for church, drinking from a “Colored Only” water fountain—is the music, and the record's title the words, nothing on the record itself comes close. I don't know what would, though.

10
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band,
Land of Hope and Dreams
(Crystal Cat bootleg, Barcelona, April 11, 1999)
It's stirring to hear the old sanctified train that don't carry no gamblers turn into a train that carries whoever most needs a ride: “Losers and winners, whores and gamblers, brokenhearted, souls departed.” And it's stirring to hear them all lift their glasses together and sing their own song. Caveat emptor: the fans in Barcelona couldn't clap on the beat to save their city from Franco.

MAY
1, 2000

1
American Psycho
,
directed by Mary Harron (Lions Gate)
This really is Katrina Leskanich's moment. In 1985 with Katrina and the Waves she scrubbed the airwaves clean with the horrifyingly bright “Walking on Sunshine.” (“Soon to be a major floorwax commercial,” one reviewer wrote at the time.) Now the gruesome thing is leaking out of Patrick Bateman's headphones as he heads into his office, serves as a hideous wake-up call in
High Fidelity
, and chirps from your TV in incessant ads for Claritin allergy pills while fresh-faced folk frolic on the grass and little kids pick up the chorus. No wonder everybody has to die.

2
Sleater-Kinney, “Is It a Lie,” from
All Hands on the Bad One
(Kill Rock Stars)
With guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker now joined by drummer Janet Weiss as singers, the music of the band no other group is even chasing is easier to hear and harder to keep up with, especially on this trickily constructed death song—which despite its description of a traffic accident might one day fold into the tradition of 19th-century murder ballads like “Omie Wise” or “Banks of the Ohio.” The piece is all questions, and when “Was it a lie?” is asked for the last time, a plain tone exchanged for a who-cares fade, it's not a single person but a whole way of life that seems to have been run down. It's a mystery, but perhaps nothing compared to the one in the cover photo, which looks like documentation of a performance-art piece staged in a union-hall-cum-nightclub circa 1943—or the one in the leading guitar figure on the last cut, “The Swimmer,” which is much closer to David Lynch's
Twin Peaks
than John Cheever's river of pools. The meaning of the glamorous photos in the
booklet or Brett Vapnek's sparking video for “You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun” is not mysterious: good clothes can make you happy.

3
Green Velvet,
Green Velvet
(F-111)
Techno, very playful, very accessible, very funny when dubbed with dank, deadpan monologues and the multivoiced “Answering Machine,” where any number of people, all of whom I like to think are DJ Curtis Jones (otherwise known as Cajamere or Green Velvet), helpfully call up to inform the guy screaming “I! Don't! Need! This! Shit!” that, for example, “I hate to do this over the phone, but I sort of can't do it in person, I want to thank you for the engagement ring, I know you probably gave it to me after I told you I'm pregnant and stuff . . . but the baby's not yours, so you don't have to worry about it, I'll always love you.”

4
White Town, “Duplicate,” from
Peek & Poke
(Parasol)
A man surrounded by two women floats through what could be Human League's “Don't You Want Me Baby” with all the fear, fury and self-hatred removed. At under four minutes it's over far too soon, as if music-maker Jyoti Mishra didn't trust himself. “Inspired by,” among others, Monkee Michael Nesmith, late physicist Richard Feynman, preening role model bell hooks and onetime silent movie actor Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

5
Hanson,
This Time Around
(Island)
Fine: nothing as catchy as “MMMBop,” but eager, jumping, edging up to the territory marked out by the Indigo Girls' “Shame On You.”