Real Life Rock (309 page)

9
Lady Gaga, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Gay Pride Rally (New York, July 28, YouTube)
Two days after the Supreme Court struck down the central section of the Defense of Marriage Act in
United States v. Windsor
, Lady Gaga appeared as an American version of Marianne, cool as an iceberg in a flaring black dress, holding a small rainbow flag. “My LGBT fans and friends always said to me, I knew Lady Gaga
when
. Well,” she said, gesturing at the crowd, “look who the star is now! Now I get to say that I knew
you
when. Now I get to say I knew you when you suffered. When you felt unequal. When you felt there was nothing to look forward to. I knew you then—and I knew you when, but I really know you now.” Then she sang ten Super Bowls' and four Inaugurations' worth of the national anthem a cappella, with all of the blessings of the song in the full, clear tone of her voice and all of the war the song now celebrates in the ferocity in her face.

10
Ruby Ray,
From the Edge of the World: California Punk, 1977–81
(Superior Viaduct)
Some of Ray's photographs are typical musicians' poses that anyone could have caught. But slowly the apocalyptic tinge in the title begins to pay off. Faces darken. Suspicion rises off of them like steam from the ground. There's a sense of calm, and you can begin to feel as if you were watching a movie with the sound turned off, which in turn gives the impression that everything is happening in slow motion. A picture of Mick Jones of the Clash, leaping across a San Francisco stage in a posture of pure rock cliché, momentarily breaks the mood, because he's acting like a star, his movement choreographed by people he's never met, and in the best pictures here that's not even a possibility: as in
Greg In-graham (The Avengers)
, you see people doing what they can to be insolent and free in a low-ceilinged room made of grime, heat, glare, and a queer sort of anonymous urgency most of all.

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2013

1–2
Radio Silence: Literature and Rock and Roll,
issues 1 and 2, edited by Dan Stone
Published in the form of a literary quarterly, but with a design that promises both seriousness and surprise, this Bay Area journal is something people have been waiting for for fifty years: writing in, through, beside, around, and about music, where the first criterion is writing. There is Fitzgerald sharing pages with Geoff Dyer. There's Ted Gioia trying to bury the myth of Robert
Johnson selling his soul to the devil and finding that it can't be done; there is Jim White trying to explain to an old man that a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel isn't real, only to find Suttree's ghost tapping him on the back. There is Rick Moody, who apparently never met a question he didn't already know the answer to. But favorites or their opposites are not the point. What it is is a radical overturning of the whole notion of what music is, what it's for, where you find it, where it goes, and one issue contains not a hint of what another one might have to offer.

3
A mother takes her five-year-old daughter to see “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as related by Deborah Freedman (New York, August 14)
Daphna Mor: “This fashion breaks the rules. They did things that other people thought were ugly, provocative—” Alona Mor Freedman: “I like acupuncture fashion!” Daphna: “It is not acupuncture, it is punk.” Alona [
excited that she is wearing tights and a pink shirt herself, and pointing to a contemporary dress inspired by punk
]: “Ima, this is not acupuncture—it is too pretty.” Daphna: “I know! This one is not real punk, and anyway—it is not acupuncture, it is punk. Acupuncture is what your uncle does with the needles.” Alona: “Ah, they didn't use needles in punk?” Daphna: “They did, but a different kind . . .”

4
Typhoon,
White Lighter
(Roll Call Records)
This massed and layered music from Portland, Oregon—eleven band members are named—isn't going to reveal itself quickly. Moodily considering the fate of the universe, Kyle Morton sings with unlimited self-importance—“Every star is a possible death,” he announces at the start of one number, and then, singing sometimes from behind where the song seems to be, from one state over, from years before it was written, he turns a tone that at first felt pompous into pure urgency. The music might be taking place in the sky—and then, near the end of a song, female voices come in and pull the rug out from under the whole edifice. The big voice is replaced by a little one—high voices, sometimes unnaturally high, Betty Boop after she's seen it all and is ready to tell at least some of what she knows. And then the record begins to speak in its own tongues. There's a banjo passage in “Possible Deaths” that can stop you cold with its embodiment of regret; doo-wop chords at the beginning of “Prosthetic Love” that promise a sweetness the song turns away from as soon as you feel its pull. Again and again, there's a sense of something missing, something withheld. You're almost there, you can practically touch it, and then you're not sure that what you heard was there at all. “The Lake” might be the most compelling number; certainly it's the loveliest. But it only suggests how bottomless the pools at the heart of these songs are.

5
Aimee Bender, “Americca,” from
The Color Master
(Doubleday)
A story about a household where gifts arrive out of nowhere—“We've been backwards robbed,” says one daughter. With an ending set precisely to the rhythm of “Ode to Billie Joe.”

6
Hugh Laurie on
The Colbert Report
(Comedy Central, August 5)
It began with Stephen Colbert taunting Laurie about his professed love for the blues as opposed to the more-appropriate, for an Englishman, Gilbert and Sullivan: “Do you have to live the blues to play the blues—'cause I always heard [
in a growly whisper
]
You gotta live the blues—to play the blues!
” Laurie: “Well, obviously I'm going to say, nooooo, because that's the sort of position I'm in.” Colbert: “You're an international star, who was until last year the highest paid man in a drama. OK? That's not exactly sharecropping.” Laurie: “No, you're absolutely right. I was handsomely compensated.” Colbert: “And a handsome man as well.” Laurie: “Well, thank you for that. But here's what I would say. My point is that to me this music—I would hate for this music to be just put in a box of a sort of sociological category of American folk music that is only—it only has meaning because of the experience and the period from which it grew. I think of this music as high art, as high as some bloke singing
Don Giovanni
down the road.”

7
Walter Mosley,
Little Green
(Doubleday)
It's 1967 in Los Angeles and Easy Rawlins is looking for a young black man who has gotten mixed up with hippies and acid. In a commune he meets a runaway who sleeps outside a window and calls herself Coco. She doesn't seem to notice or care that he's black. She doesn't seem to notice or care that she's naked. The detective listens to her talk, watches as she smiles, and for the first time in the ten novels that have tracked Rawlins's secretive life from just after the Second World War to now, he is face-to-face with something he wasn't prepared for, and doesn't understand. It's a queasily thrilling tale as it unfolds: he believes, at least for a moment, that he is glimpsing the fresh green breast of a new world, and, for a moment, so do you.