Detail from a magazine advertisement, 1964
R.E.M., live performance of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”
I can’t figure out what 1995 show this recording is from—it was briefly a staple of their live performance. But it doesn’t really matter, this is the killer take that, had they heard it, they should’ve put out on the promo 45.
The Chris Isaak song, according to Wikipedia, only became a hit after a David Lynch-obsessed DJ in Atlanta got into it through Lynch’s Wild At Heart. The Roy Orbison mode, which Lynch dipped into regularly, you would think would be a bit foreign for chronic mumbler Michael Stipe but he shows himself to be at least equally capable as Isaak in crooning the shit out of it.
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 of a photograph in Life magazine, 1958
Tom Ewing writes in the Guardian of listening to Nevermind for the first time, in 2011.
We crave surprise: could there possibly be any left in Nevermind? A little, as it turned out. When I played it — finally! — what jumped out was Krist Novoselic’s bass sound and its constant malignant gravity, sucking songs down even as it keeps them brisk. It sounds, as it happens, very much like how I thought “swamp rock” might. I knew to expect a blend of ugliness and pop crispness, but I had to hear Nevermind to realise how little the two resolve, making the album sound alienated even from itself. I had some prejudices confirmed, too — the zombie lurch of Cobain’s singing is comfortably the weirdest thing about the record, and it seems a gloriously uncanny twist of rock history that it became so imitated. But I still can’t actually stand hearing it.