Detail from a magazine advertisement, 1964
Wham!, “Last Christmas” (1984)
At the Ply Christmas party, this just plays on repeat as everyone drowns in whipped cream eggnog. Close attention to the acting in the wine sequence is well rewarded. Next year I’m going to make a special point of booking that ski resort double-date well in advance.
Johnny Kemp, “Just Got Paid” (1988, US #10)
Yesterday afternoon I tuned in to the reliably old school Kiss FM and caught the apex of its new jack swing segment. The DJ billed the set as a celebration of “homegrown artists,” underscoring the extent to which that particular sound became synonymous with black New York in the early nineties. The culture of new jack swing, with its aura of sophistication, seemed to augur the sort of bustling buppie urban life that awaited middle-class youngsters like me. That was our vision of adulthood.
The triumph of hip-hop, among other things,1 changed all that. Donnie Simpson went out and Joe Clair came in, though that’s a crude way to put it. New jack swing was, I suppose, the last great iteration of a certain kind of black urbanity. Its visual aesthetics were rooted largely in mid-century jazz and R&B culture—baggy, bright-colored suits, wavy or processed hair, goatees, horn-rimmed glasses, etc. The music itself combined smooth vocal arrangements and sunny keyboard vamps with funk breaks or loud, drum machine beats. Today it sounds surprisingly sprightly. In my mind, it also remains freighted with notions of what was or could have been, for the version of black city life to which new jack swing supposedly formed a sonic backdrop disappeared, by all accounts, a long time ago. The ideal, needless to say, lives on for some.
A few years ago I ran into Johnny Kemp at a house party in Hamilton Heights. I learned that he still performs in clubs and lounges uptown. New York is funny that way.
1. Crack cocaine, mostly.
Detail from an advertisement for a film, 1985
Sometimes I wonder what the eighties would have looked like, had the Boss been more like Prince. That’s not to say I wish he were more pop-star-ish, or a guitar wizard. But I think of him, like Prince, as was one of those pop-auteurs who appeared in 1970s swaddling and then went on to build interior worlds from virtually no preexisting parts (or from among the wreckage of the exhausted pop-rock idiom). For each, the central imagery and motive force remains so consistent across songs that, well on the way through a record, you can start to imagine living there. (If I weren’t already an obvious mark for “Dancing In The Dark,” the last verse always gets me with the detail that the struggling working-class speaker is struggling to write a book.)
For Bruce and Prince—and unlike someone like Bowie—this world remained essentially personal, and in each song’s narrative voice there is a mixture of isolated dramatic invention and a recurring, strengthening emotional arc. And I guess I imagine that if Springsteen had, like Prince, completely played, arranged, and produced his own work then the strength of that musical interiority would have been even greater. (I have to admit I can’t understand what the E Street Band is going for much of the time.) But I guess that’s a fatuous wish, since what he did record is already so good.
In “I’m Goin’ Down” (the sixth of seven singles from Born in the U.S.A.) Springsteen’s vision is more than usually a direct product of the vocal performance, which is one of his most relentlessly focused, refusing to wander, and perhaps for that reason makes the sax solo actually welcome.
The flip side (which on my copy includes a sprawling note in bubbly handwriting dotted with hearts and hoping “the same thing won’t happen in cross-country next year”) is this slight but—I think, lovely—B-side from those sessions, “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.”
Detail from an advertisement for financial services, 1992
This is my fucking anthem. Roky Erickson blasts through self-deception in a way so complete it could only be conceived by a schizophrenic. Unlike Syd Barrett, the other familiar martyr to psychedelia, his world did not crack gradually, in a musical way—it was already cracked all over. The metaphorical mode of his lyrics described from the start (when they were most fluid) the messy inner workings of the psyche. And even through the most drug-drenched stretches of his career, the music remained peculiarly grounded.
“Bloody Hammer” is one of the few self-eviscerating metal jams that, for me, actually makes convincing the gruesome vocabulary of its lyrics. The 1980 lead guitar and a wandering vocal repeatedly find themselves confronting mass-delusion, self-enforced with the “Bloody Hammer.” For everyone, the coping mechanism is to “hammer their mind out,” but Roky is the “special one”—and the B-movie set decor is a twisted (but ultimately true) world that he must confront, as one who refuses to “have the bloody hammer.” Roky was subjected to electroshock therapy in late 1960s by the government of his native Texas for drug convictions and presumably the alien quality of his unshakeable world-view. But before that he was already singing songs like 1966’s “Monkey Island” (written by fellow keep-Austin-weirdo Powell St. John) which stresses his fundamental estrangement from the conventional world.
Though the lyric is considerably less fractured than “Bloody Hammer,” it has the same radical self-conception that made Roky the outsider’s outsider. And disturbingly predicts his ordeal at the mental hospital with lines like “Well there’s one thing about these monkeys, baby / They don’t know I’m around / But that’s pretty good, ‘cause if they knew / They’ll probably come and put me down.”
Captain Beefheart sketched a plausible, genre-crazed parody of culture, as the homelessness-exploitation artist. But Roky redefined the parameters. He didn’t strip mine his difference for its surface appeal; he could do nothing but sing in its native tongue.
The Clean, “Odditty.” Live at the Rumba Bar, Auckland, 15 May 1982.
In honor of the 30th birthday of the groundbreaking New Zealand indie label, here are some highlights from the incredible show they put together in Auckland only a year into their endeavor:
A very early incarnation of the Tall Dwarfs backed by The Clean (wearing paper bags).
The Clean doing “Two Fat Sisters,” — prompting one YouTube user to declare them “New Zealand’s Velvet Underground.”
The Chills doing the very cut of “Flamethrower” that was pressed to vinyl (though the sound is not the same) and
A rowdy version of The Chills’ “Bite,” guest-starring a large part of the Nun roster.