The reason Billy Idol hasn’t made a deeper impression on me is that he’s just so damn silly. With the peroxide habit and the leather outfits and the way he always makes that same face in every picture. He’s like a cartoon character. Which I’m pretty sure is the whole idea, and which didn’t stop him from making some of the best songs of the 80′s. Like this one, with its silly, silly video. Classic. I remember, about three jobs ago, I worked at a joint where Sunday brunch was a big event. Sunday brunch meant a nine hour shift slinging eggs and coffee to hundreds of hungover college students. It was torture. But it was redeemed by a regular ritual. We’d lock the front door, pop Vital Idol in the cd player, crank the volume to 11 and spent a few minutes just dancing away the stress. Golden moments.
Some critics would say that by 1973 The Rolling Stones had taken the whole creepy Satanic thing into the realm of self-parody. As in ‘Mick, you’re thirty years old, why are you still trysting in graveyards with the devil?’ It’s not so much a matter of how seriously they took themselves, but how seriously others took them. As evidenced by his newfound proclivity towards gold lamé jumpsuits, Jagger took to glam rock like a fish to water. He was halfway there already, so for him it was just an excuse to wear even more makeup. Besides an attraction to cosmetics and sparkly things, the camp factor was a good fit too. Lots of folks in the sixties seriously viewed the Stones as depraved and Satanic, or before that, as depraved and delinquent. Depraved they may have been (there’s a reason members of their inner circle kept dropping dead) but there was always an element of camp in Mick Jagger’s presentation of himself as the proverbial ‘man of wealth and taste’. The ‘bad boys’ image, in the first place, was always a bit of a joke – they knew they weren’t really bad boys. And later, when it really seemed like they might be socially acquainted with Lucifer, they knew it certainly wasn’t on equal terms. After enough people had dropped dead, and it started to seem scary to some, it only made sense that they’d drop the pretense of being serious and continue delivering the same message but in an all-out camp way, complete with gold lamé. Inevitably, critics thought they’d gone soft, not playing up to their full potential, etc. Unfair, because Goat’s Head Soup, for one, was as good as anything that came before it.
David Byrne really knows how to pick unexpected and wonderful collaborators. He also has a knack for taking a quirky idea and running with it. This year he put out, in tandem with Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love, a concept album about Imelda Marcos. To simply write and produce a twenty-two song biography of the Philippines’ former first lady would have been an oddball accomplishment enough. But our auteurs added extra icing on the cake, corralling a fresh singer to bring a special touch to each track. The result is some of the best work from everyone involved. My only quibble is to say that some of the singers, while each does an admirable job, do have rather similar vocal styles. It may be that I’m not very familiar with the work of, for example, Sia, Martha Wainwright or Allison Moorer, and if I was more familiar with them they would not sound so much alike to me. The choice of vocalists may have been pragmatic – the similarities between them lend the album a sense of continuity that would be lacking if the maestros had chosen performers with more, shall we say, distinctive voices. Needless to say, one of the standouts is Sharon Jones, a lady with a bigger voice and a more muscular vocal style than anyone else present. Most of the other singers have soft, high-pitched voices and perform in a very ‘girlie’ style, and most of them come from a singer-songwriter/piano ballad/folkie stylistic background. There’s Tori Amos, the mother of the ‘piano-pounding virago’ stereotype, for example, and Nellie McKay, inventor of her own particular jazz-pop idiom. Sharon Jones is famous for leading a revival of old school R’n'B. Her charismatic stage presence, powerful vocals, her great rapport with her band The Dap-Kings, and her eye for material has led some to call her “The female James Brown,” very high praise indeed. So it’s no surprise that her contribution to Here Lies Love is a powerhouse. Incidentally, this song is about the time Imelda Marcos (herself a music lover and talented singer) spent as a habitué of Studio 54, where she rubbed shoulders with many of the glamorous people shown in the video below.
Isn’t this the cutest video ever? Yes, yes it’s not the best version of Dancing in the Street – that would be Martha and Vandellas’ original. Yes, yes it would be better titled Dancing in the Hideous 80′s Clothes. But, baby, ain’t we got love? It always makes me laugh a little when I see how much fun those two appear to be having. They’re absolutely having a blast together. I wish I remembered the writer who described them as “two old queens camping it up in their pajamas.” Because that’s so right. It’s plenty camp, and those are definitely pajamas. If anyone still spends time wondering if Bowie and Jagger had a less than Platonic relationship – stop that! It’s disrespectful! But do admit, they have some nice chemistry together. So sweet!
Oooh, I remember being so excited when Goddess In the Doorway was all set to come out. That was in late 2001, when I still had a bottomless supply of turbocharged enthusiasm for things like new albums coming out. Because Mick Jagger and that band of his don’t keep themselves as busy as they used to, and I did come on the tail end of their career, it was an unusual event to have something new to anticipate. I recall there was a listening booth at our friendly local Wal-Mart (upscale me, I know) with ten second snippets of three tracks. That was tantalizing. That was something I visited a lot. I still have the little “Coming Soon!” placard I stole from that selfsame Wal-Mart. It’s hanging over my bathroom sink, for inspiration – it shows Mick’s bum in nice trousers. You can guess what I wanted for Christmas that year. The awesome part is, I did get it for Christmas, and I was thrilled with it and still am. It’s a fucking really good album.
Have you heard me complain there’s not enough Asian faces in the fashion pages? There’s not many but there’s a few and Devon Aoki is among the most iconic. Devon is the Japanese-American heiress of the Benihana restaurant fortune. She was discovered, appropriately, I think, at some kind of hair metal concert. She was never mainstream, but she’s sure memorable. She always did a lot of cutting edge work, very haute couture and very avantgarde. Which she’s perfect for. She has an eerily doll-like face. She almost never smiles. In fact, she seems to have a bad attitude. To me, something in her glower says high fashion nihilism. Now many other supermodels do you know of whose signature look is ‘creepy child ghost from Ringu’? Not too many. Also, she’s made a few movies. View her, along with Kate Moss in Primal Scream’s Kowalski video.
A lesson in the refined and sophisticated art of video. What makes this an iconic video for the original MTV generation? Besides the coincidental fact that video girl Courteney Cox grew up to be a big, big star. In the days before every video had to be a magnum opus, simplicity itself ruled. (Not gonna say anything about video auteurs being the next big thing – this one’s by Brian DePalma.) Just show your star doing something he does really well. In this case; pumping his fist in front of a stadium-load of fans, making mom jeans look hot, and exploring the inner ennui of the working man. Oh, and it helps to have a badass song, this one being one of his most. On an unrelated note, I think Bruce Springsteen’s most badass songs area this one, Cover Me, and Born To Run. The biggest, famousest, most popularest hits. I always get annoyed with sunday-driver fans who think the radio hits are the be all and end all of an act’s oeuvre. And here I am; “Whoo! Dancing In the Dark rocks! Wait, what? Springsteen has other songs too?” In my slim defense, I own four Bruce Springsteen albums and listen to them at a rate of about one a year. I find the album tracks rather depressing. They all seem to be about being poor, pissed off and pissed drunk. And heartbroken in the heartland. That sort of thing. What a downer. At least you can’t argue with that brass section.
The cover art of Houses of the Holy. It is in no way creepy. Putting a horde of naked children on your album cover is not skeevy at all, oh no. All I can say is that standards must have been very different in 1973. I don’t know of any controversy this cover image caused upon release. I would imagine anyone today wanting to release a cover featuring children’s behinds would be taken through the wringer by the moral media. It is, of course, very artistic and beautiful, and it’s a clever reference to a novel by Arthur C. Clarke. The surreal quality of the color and the setting (Giant’s Causeway) effectively eliminates any scent of perversion from the image. In the past I’ve wondered if the children were supposed to be boys or girls; they are very androgynous. As it turns out, the child models were a boy and a girl, and their pictures were superimposed to create the illusion of multitudes. The boy half of the duo grew up to be a food presenter for the BBC. Interesting.
I think this song is about lust. Maybe I’m gutterminded but I’ve always thought so. Now, obviously, desire is one the most popular subjects for songwriters, right up there with love and slightly above chemical intoxicants and cars. While there isn’t a singer alive who hasn’t sang at some point about their ongoing quest to ‘get some’, very few are able to do so in a dignified manner. The overwhelming majority of songs are about sex and the majority of those songs rely on metaphors of the log/fireplace variety. That doesn’t mean they’re bad songs, necessarily, or that everyone should always be trying to write highmindedly about the laughable business of getting laid. It does remain, though – there’s not too many songs dealing with desire in a way that is emotionally convincing. Of those, an awful lot are about rejection, misery and self-loathing. That makes for a very few songs about desire that make desire itself seem like a desirable thing, let alone a spiritually edifying one. Of those, a disproportionate number is by Leonard Cohen. To whit, there are very very few songs about lust, sex and desire that are not silly, or sleazy, or stupid, or depressing and are not written by Leonard Cohen. Of those, a very minute number are written and performed by women. Taking a moment, let me say there’s plenty of good sex songs by women, but too many of them fall into the self-loathing/depressing category. As far as songs about sex, by women, that are empowering, poetic, non-cheezy, emotionally realistic, and, you know, good…I think it’s mostly just this one. On the other hand, I could be completely off base in my interpretation anyway. It could well be about picking dandelions in the park with Mapplethorpe for all I know.
Dancing Barefoot
she is benediction
she is addicted to thee
she is the root connection
she is connecting with he
here I go and I don’t know why
I fell so ceaselessly
could it be he’s taking over me…
I’m dancing barefoot
heading for a spin
some strange music draws me in
makes me come on like some heroin/e
she is sublimation
she is the essence of thee
she is concentrating on
he, who is chosen by she
here I go and I don’t know why
I spin so ceaselessly,
could it be he’s taking over me…
[chorus]
she is re-creation
she, intoxicated by thee
she has the slow sensation that
he is levitating with she …
here I go and I don’t know why,
I spin so ceaselessly,
’til I lose my sense of gravity…
[chorus]
(oh god I fell for you …)
the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming?
why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women.
Fat french bulldog = ultimate accessory for a fat hipster. Or a skinny one. Or anybody, really, at all.
But seriously. The new LCD Soundsystem album has really made my summer. It feels right for when you’re getting dressed for the evening and you want to feel cool. Also good for work. I was hoping to see them play this year’s ACL, but the schedule is officially out and it’s not looking good. Unfortunately, LCD is in the same time slot as Gogol Bordello. Hmmm, moderately liked band I’ve never seen before or obsessively loved band I’ve seen three times already? No brainer! Sorry, LCD Soundsystem. It’s no competition. Lamely enough, Monsters Of Folk are also overlapping in the same time slot. All of which means that I’ll be camping out in front of the AMC stage all day waiting for Gogol Bordello to come on, and then stay for M.I.A.’s set on the same stage. At least this year I have enough cash to buy beer.
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