There’s a terrific review of two recent David Bowie biographies by Thomas Jones in the new London Review of Books. Jones is unusually fluent with musical particularities as well as the complex interworkings of pose and culture, of performance as an aspect of the artist’s self-presentation and as a construct built out of the components of its musical idiom. For example, he glosses part of Paul Trynka’s biography Starman:
Trynka doesn’t often go into details about the music, which is perhaps just as well. In his discussion of ‘Starman’ he talks about its ‘opening minor chords’ when they’re nothing of the kind, and says that ‘the key changes from minor to major’ at the chorus. But there’s no key change, and it’s important that there isn’t: the effect Trynka’s hearing, the sense of ‘release’ and ‘climax’ he gets when the chorus kicks in, would be lost if there were. What happens is that for the first time, the melody hits the tonic; Bowie gets through 15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ he hits two of them, an octave apart. The octave leap is, as Trynka says, ‘an ancient Tin Pan Alley songwriter’s trick’, and the steal doesn’t stop there: the melody of the chorus is ‘lifted openly, outrageously’ from Judy Garland. Bowie privately called the song ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, and before long was singing Yip Harburg’s lyrics as well as Harold Arlen’s tune in live performances of ‘Starman’.
In creating Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was acknowledging that it was no longer possible, if it ever had been, to make ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ rock’n’roll, especially if you were a skinny white boy from Bromley. Since all pop music was imitation of one kind or another, and since there was little point in producing another collage of obvious pastiches, however accomplished, the only way forward after Hunky Dory was to invent a new idol, an amalgam of all his heroes (including Iggy Pop and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, both of whom he’d first heard on a trip to America to promote The Man Who Sold the World in 1971), the ultimate fantasy rock god. Obviously he couldn’t himself be that impossible figure, but he could pretend to be him, act the part as it might be played on a music-hall stage, and in the process become something else, something more interesting and possibly even something new – synthetic not only in the sense of ‘inauthentic’ but in a dialectical sense, too. Ziggy Stardust is an archetype of the popstar that has yet, as the cover of French Vogue attests, to be superseded.
The always delightful Robert Wyatt discusses his motive for covering the Monkees, in an interview with Pitchfork:
I didn’t like the fact that hierarchies had developed between what people thought was “serious” rock music and pop music—that was all rubbish. I was very uncomfortable with that. That was exactly the kind of situation I thought our generation had got rid of. I’ve always admired pop music, because I think it’s the modern post-industrial folk music. Everybody can join in, you don’t have to be a specialist. You can sing along with it. But there’s not much room in pop music for all the things I want to do. It’s a bit like food: I like all kinds of interesting food, but in the end, I can just sit down with an egg sandwich and really feel great.
Hold on to your hats, it’s a new issue of Terminal Boredom: in two installations: A-M and N-Z. Rich Kroeniss chimes in on the new Personal & The Pizzas single:
Personal & The Pizzas “Dead Meat vs. Joanie” 7” The Total Punk offshoot label of the Floridas Dying empire debuts with the latest two song lunch from Personal & The Pizzas (or Pizza, as there seems to be only one other band member here), and it starts with a Stiv-solo style leather jacket power-punker called “Dead Meat” that I think has a motorcycle chain solo on it. Tough as grease. “Joanie” mashes together “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Swallow My Pride” (and maybe a dozen other Ramones cuts) with a ballsy little fuzz guitar thing for an ode to eating out and Happy Days perhaps (insert garage Fonzie gag here, harhar). Total ‘End of the Century’ vibes. Scum stats: 600 pressed, hand stamped and totally punk. “Peter Davis = dead meat”?! (RK)
Also includes reviews of Pygmy Shrews, Sic Alps, Nobunny, X-Ray Eyeballs, Thee Oh Sees, a new release of 1995 demos by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and lots of other indie gutter snipes. Go get em.
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.”
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.
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.
