Real Life Rock (311 page)

5
Body/Head,
Coming Apart
(Matador)
From singer Kim Gordon, late of Sonic Youth, and guitarist Bill Nace, this is a fierce, sustained fun-house ride with the lights off. Over long stretches, sheets of noise fuse like concrete and then, as a rhythm builds or a melody opens before it disappears, they begin to crack. The music is all undertow. With the folk song “Black Is the Color (Of My True Love's Hair)” emerging at the end of more than thirteen minutes of “Black,” you're somewhere in one of the Doors' half-improvised onstage versions of “The End” and Gordon's own harrowing “Shaking Hell,” from Sonic Youth's first album,
Confusion Is Sex
. And you're not ready to leave.

6
The Clash,
Sound System
(Sony Legacy)
A box set packaged as a facsimile of the boom boxes people used to carry on their shoulders in the '80s, the monster contains the first five Clash albums, obscurities and rarities and B-sides, fanzines and posters and buttons, film clips and outtakes, early sessions and DVD footage of interviews and performances and videos. But not “This Is England,” from
Cut the Crap
, the last Clash album, in 1985, because that album, made after Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon kicked Mick Jones and Topper Headon out of the band, isn't supposed to exist, even if “This Is England” is the band's ethos, its mission, its triumph, and a confession of its failure: its “Streets of Laredo,” its “I'm shot in the breast and I know I must die.”

7
The Libertines, “Don't Look Back Into the Sun” (2006), as crawl music for
Kill Your Darlings
,
directed by John Krokidas (Killer Films)
Running under the credits—and finally, a feeling of release. Release from the claustrophobia of the tiny little world created by Daniel Radcliffe's Allen Ginsberg, Dane DeHaan's Lucien Carr, Michael C. Hall's David Kammerer (a weird cross between his Dexter and David Fisher, his
Six Feet Under
character), Jack Huston's Jack Kerouac, and, most quietly and most deeply, as if playing out his own, almost-silent film within a film, Ben Foster's William Burroughs.

8
Neko Case,
The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You
(Anti-)
With Case's cool, clear tone—never a burr, a break, a hesitation—
fucking
as an adjective at first seems out of place. Until it comes up again, and you hear it as Case, on her solo albums so often swaddled in overwriting and decorative arrangements, singing in her own voice: her own tired, fed-up voice, the voice of someone who refuses to quit.

9
Jay Z,
Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film
,
directed by Mark Romanek (HBO/YouTube)
Not counting exit footage and credits, this six-minute movie, made from a six-hour performance at the Pace Gallery in New York, and most notable for Jay Z's dances with groupie-for-a-day Marina Abramović—not to mention an eclectic crowd of painters, gallery owners, impresarios, actors, schoolchildren, and film directors, all clearly having a great time—answered the question of what hip-hop, celebrity, and contemporary art have in common: they're forms of money. You get the feeling all of the people here could walk out of the gallery and into any other
place and buy whatever they want with the currency of their mere existence.

10
Lou Reed, “Street Hassle” (1978), processional at a wedding in Beacon, New York (October 12)
The cellos and violas never sounded more glamorous, never sounded like more of a portent, but the setting didn't immediately match the music: could this actually be what it sounded like? Were they really going to walk down the aisle to
that
? A DJ faded down the song before the second verse, where a woman OD's and the rest of the people at the party throw her body out the door, after which Reed delivers a soliloquy for which he ought to be remembered as much as for anything else: “You know, some people got no choice / and they can never find a voice / to talk with that they can even call their own. / So the first thing that they see / that allows them the right to be, / why, they follow it. You know, it's called—bad luck.” RIP, 1942–2013.

FEBRUARY
2014

1
Lana Del Rey, “Young and Beautiful,” in
The Great Gatsby
,
directed by Baz Luhrmann (Warner Bros.)
I've seen this deeply empathetic translation of the novel—where you absolutely believe that people in the '20s were going wild for hip-hop: what
else
would they be dancing to?—every chance I've had (Paris, Berkeley, airplane), and I expect to be going back to it for years. I always see and hear something new, as with this song—gorgeous, but also acrid, like a rotting flower—or less the song itself, maybe, than the way it's threaded through the film, fading deeper into the background each time it surfaces, but never less than indelible, recasting whatever scene it inhabits, moving the characters closer to death each time.

2
Finney Mo and His West Dallas Boys live at the River Club in Dallas, 1976 (“Finney Mo / River Club 2,” YouTube)
He had the noticeable “Shake That Thing” in Texas in 1963, but this underwater performance from 1976 is worlds away from any sort of conventional rock 'n' roll or R&B—it sounds like a secret tape Van Morrison kept as a magic lantern to rub when the spirit left him. The musicians slither along the riverbed; Finney rises every minute or so to call out what sounds like “blind robber blind” over and over. You realize there's going to be no story, except that the story—someone going nowhere, forever—is completely present in the slow scratching on the guitar, the thin, unspectacular sound of the saxophone. Does he really shout “Stackerlee!” at the end? The ordinariness of the life that's been described would be the real hell for the old legend.

3
Neil Genzlinger, “Kids These Days: They're All Older Than 50”
(
New York Times
,
November 20, 2013)
On a wave of unfunny sitcoms based on putative adults acting like sniggering thirteen-year-olds (
The Millers
;
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
;
The Crazy Ones
;
Mom
;
Dads
;
Back in the Game
;
2 Broke Girls
;
The New Normal
): “Could it be payback for years of baby boomer boasting and self-glorification?