RSSTownship Jive Conquers the World
Over at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, where anaccounting firm more reputable than Dean & Poobah is totting up theGrammies even as I write, the year ends October 1, to give theelectoral machinery time to rumble into action. Here at theVoice, where small is still sometimes beautiful, the yearbegins whenever the voters tell us it did and ends the natural way, onDecember 31. Yet by October 1 I knew damn well who was going to winthe 13th or 14th Annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, and though Isuffered a few doubts when Peter Gabriel snuck in first in theL.A. Times, my confidence returned as I glanced over the earlyreturns.Graceland for sure--in a small landslide,actually. And if Simon & Phiri--to let Simon's guitarist andbandleader, Ray Phiri, stand in for the black South African backingmusicians whose beat is the backbone of the star's triumph--take theGrammies as well, which I predict they will, they earned it.
Many indicators fed my hunch, small competition and instant buzzprominent among them, but what convinced me was my direct experienceof the music: opposed though I am to universalist humanism, this is apretty damn universal record. Within the democratic bounds of popaccessibility, its bicultural synthesis is striking, engaging, andunprecedented--sprightly yet spunky, fresh yet friendly, so strange,so sweet, so willful, so plainly beautiful. Not that I expected theuniverse to agree--tastes differ, many dissent from Simon's refinedliterary liberalism, wimpophobes have hated his guts for years, andthe electorate now includes a smattering of convinced pigfuckers whothink Hüsker Dü is Julio Iglesias in disguise. Yet even sworn enemieswere stopped short at least momentarily by the drive and lilt and swayof Simon's South African band, and many neutrals were won over to hisManhattan lyrics.Graceland's victory didn't approach thedimensions ofBorn in the U.S.A.'s, orThriller's orLondon Calling's. But by Pazz & Jop as well as NARASstandards--by the standards of any respecters of critical consensusoutside the Elvis Costello Fan Club--Simon had made what sounded likethe album of the year. This was certifiable township jive, to use oneof the Soweto beat's many overlapping nicknames. But it wascosmopolitan in a New York way.
Imagine my consternation, then, when I ransacked the ballots in searchof quotable tributes to this ear food and found almost nothing but dimpolitical disputation. Not that this was altogether surprising. Thefact of apartheid is intrinsic toGraceland's aestheticinterest, especially for the P&J electorate, which leans moreprecipitously to the left than any comparable sampling of film or bookor dance or art or (God knows) classical music reviewers. Yet at thesame time rock critics are almost pathologically impatient withpolitical orthodoxy. So maybe the recent flurry of controversy--inwhich Simon was blitzed by hostile questions at Howard University andcriticized by the chairman of the UN's apartheid subcommittee--gottheir goat. Or maybe it was just Dave Marsh, who declared Simon anopponent of the South African revolution inRock & RollConfidential. Maybe it was even yours truly the Dean, whose moremoderate censure of Simon's political performance has come under firefrom universalist humanists. Still, I'd hoped for a higher level ofdiscussion. Certainly the music that occasioned all the hot air wouldget its due. And just maybe the political horror that the music wastoo fucking transcendent to illuminate directly would gain newresonances as a result.
No way. You can bet the outnumbered naysayers proved somewhat smarterthan Simon's aggressively defensive champions, but you can also betthat a bilious "beneath contempt" isn't going to get us much furtherthan a blithe "Simon's intentions seem to have been noble": if it'strue that nobility is too rare a thing to waste on intentions, it'salso true that you can't get much lower than some people'scontempt. What I missed on both sides was some rudimentary grasp ofthe South African realityGraceland is supposed to trivializeand exploit or extend and enrich. Musically, the oldbridge-between-cultures line is supported by the 10th-place finish ofwhat has now been my own favorite current record for about a year, theEarthworks-via-Shanachie mbaqanga compilationThe IndestructibleBeat of Soweto. In 1985, withGraceland yet unborn,Indestructible was showing up on UK critics polls, and it wouldcertainly have placed here as well, but without Simon's album--and theaccompanying press coverage, a phenomenon in itself--it sure wouldn'thave gone neck-and-neck to the finish line with R.E.M. and PeterGabriel. (Only with the last ballot didBlood and Chocolatesneak into a virtual tie withIndestructible--and Springsteenovertake Run-D.M.C. Craig Zeller has broken my heart before. He maynot vote next year unless he changes his name to Muhammad Ali.)
Nevertheless, I'd be more inclined to see in the pleasing anomaly ofIndestructible's showing irrefutable evidence of the universallanguage in action, of a link to black South Africa stronger than mereanalysis could ever achieve, if just one of the indignant defenses ofPaul Simon's virtue had indicated that apartheid isn't just theAfrikaans word for segregation. It's a system, damn it, a politicalsystem; like the bicultural music that nobody pro or con describedvery satisfactorily, either (though once again the cons made theirpoints more cleverly), it has specific attributes. Its strategy is toreserve for whites the economic and psychological advantages ofsegregation while fobbing itself off with a rhetoric of racialequality and cooperation. As far as Pretoria is concerned,Graceland is for the most part quite consonant with suchrhetoric. Which is why, Bruce McClelland, it's naïve at best to claimthat "Graceland isinherently political andinherently anti-apartheid." Right now, nobody can knowthat--not me, not you, not Botha, not Simon. God don't love noignorant, boy.
Okay, I'll stop. I'm writing about a poll, and though Simon isemblematic enough to warrant all this attention and more, it's contexttime. Perhaps I've procrastinated because 1986 didn't seem to add muchnews value to the critics' by now traditional dour view of popularmusic's immediate past and uncharted future. Wrap-up pieces made muchof the nostalgia factor in a year when MTV engineered a Monkeesrevival, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hosted a reissue boom, andnumerous same old songs returned to the hit parade, most spectacularly"Stand by Me," back among the living in Ben E. King'squarter-century-old version. In fact, several respondents thought itamusing to point out the aptness of the late-night typo in which Ineglected to change the "1985" of our previous letter of invitation tothe "1986" of this year's model. But both poll and biz showed 365 daysworth of historical movement by me, and while the nostalgia thesis hasthe look of a desperate stab at a headline--it's a rare year when thepop merchants aren't systematically sentimentalizing the past--itmight be adapted to our purposes.
Lefty that I am, I often focus these ruminations on how the pop of thepresent relates to past and future, and in general my conclusions arefairly clear-cut: future good, past bad. Thus I've always beensuspicious (right, Rob Tannenbaum, with exceptions) of roots moves andcritical (also with exceptions) of rock conservatism from Springsteento Fogerty and Stones to Smithereens. Middle-aged professional that Iam, I'm also a respecter of history--I love the old stuff going backway before 1955, and believe absolutely that aging (and even young)rockers can do exciting work in styles that are no longer modish orcommercial. But in general I've reserved my sharpest enthusiasms formusic that breaks new ground within the aforementioned bounds ofdemocratic accessibility, a parameter I interpret more liberally thanthe most progressive bizzer and nowhere near radically enough to suityour average pigfucker. And what strikes me as I ponder both my listand the critics' choices is that such distinctions seem to be fallingapart. In fact, I descry only four unequivocally "progressive" artistsin the P&J top 40, three of whom I don't like much. There's oldprog Peter Gabriel, who broke pop with an Otis Redding rip, youngprogs Throwing Muses, whose singularity is indistinguishable fromtheir awfulness, and two artists whose explorations are rhythmic, asso many of the most significant rock and roll explorations always havebeen: Janet Jackson a/k/a Janet Jam-Lewis (whom I'm developing a tastefor, actually) and young reliables Run-D.M.C.
Everywhere else, either the past is a live issue or the future aquiescent one. Among the half dozen or so artists doing strong work inestablished personal styles (including Elvis C., Hüsker Dü, Ornette,the Smiths, Robyn Hitchcock), only the Minutemen's album holds out anyvivid promise of significant future movement, and they're now goneforever. Anyway, Elvis C. scored higher with a roots move, and inaddition he produced the Pogues, the most coruscating of anunprecedented explosion of folkies--at least two of whom, Billy Braggand Timbuk 3, chafe conspicuously at folk's musical limitations. Inaddition we have a new wave band going folkloric (and downhill)(Talking Heads), a nuevo folk-rock band going pop (R.E.M.), and a newwave band going nuevo folk-rock (the Feelies). We have the biggest andbest blues album in the history of the poll. We have mbaqanga, afolk-based style, and mbaqanga-rock, a roots move in cunningprogressive disguise. We have two or three countryneotraditionalists. We have unabashed homages to torch singing (AnitaBaker),Sgt. Pepper (XTC),Sgt. Pepper plus Sly Stone(Prince), metal (Bad Brains), AOR (David & David), Spector/Ramones(Jesus and Mary), roots-era Clash (Screaming Blue Messiahs), and BruceSpringsteen (Bruce Springsteen). We have an overrated record by a NewZealander from El Lay and a sloppy record by some North Countryanarchists who love American music and not America. We have theimpressively eclectic unestablished punk-rock of That Petrol Emotion(barely beating out the avant-gone-neoclassicist Ellington homage ofthe World Saxophone Quartet). We have debuts by the nuevo retroBodeans and the nuevo retro Smithereens. And we have debuts by SonicYouth and the Beastie Boys.
I trust you understand that I'm having fun with these swiftcharacterizations--a few of the artists I've summed up so cavalierly,like Simon and Prince and Bad Brains, are recombining at such afurious clip that their homages qualify as syntheses if not somethingaltogether new, and many of the others are self-starters perfectlycapable of counting their winnings and moving on. Nevertheless, onlySonic Youth and the Beastie Boys, both spawned around the corner fromDean & Poobah on the Lower East Side, would seem blatantexceptions to the prevailing future's-so-dull-I-gotta-look-backmood--and in typical blatant fashion, both spit in the eye of any suchhistorical or personal consistency. I'm accused of mistreating SonicYouth, the old farts of pigfuckerdom, who made their surprisinglybelated (and at 29, modest) P&J debut with a third (fifth?) albumthat certainly deserved to finish higher thanTrue Stories orPeter Case, while overpraising the sixth-ranked Beasties, thewhite motherfuckers of metal-rap, as rock and roll future. Actually, Idon't see where the Beasties can go from here and do see that SonicYouth could wind up almost anywhere. But what I'm almost certain of isthis--that any future progress either achieves will partake of thatannoying Lower East Side sensibility known as postmodernism.
Like you, I hope, I've made a principle of resisting this hotsy-totsyand all but meaningless term, only recently settling on a definitionthat tickles my rock and roll chauvinism. My postmodern has not muchuse for the decrepit modernist edifice that is high art, but that goeswithout saying. What's crucial is the way it simultaneously undercutsits own seriousness and reconstitutes history by taking as primarymaterial every piece of pop junk that ever existed. This tactic willrecall for rock and rollers of a certain age the pop irony weperceived in the way the Beatles dragged "Please Mr. Postman" throughthe guitars until it hollered uncle, as well as the multifariousrecontextualizations of the New York Dolls or the Ramones' andBlondie's congruent visual and aural images. My postmodern is the sameonly more so, often too much more so--too campy, too junky, toopop. Like rock and roll three decades on, it finds historyinescapable, so inescapable that its only recourse is to seize andtwist it into some shape that can pass for "new." When Sonic/CicconeYouth tops "Papa Don't Preach" et al. on our singles chart by samplingbits of the Madonna "original" right onto "Into the Groovey," when theBeasties and Rick Rubin (especially Rick Rubin) hook up theirdef-forever electrobeats with literal Jimmy Page and Angus Wilsonlicks as well as a line stolen from sucker-ass Schoolly-D, ordinarynotions of retro and progressive and their reassuring Hegeliansynthesis, historically conscious, seem, well, dated. If these twobands represent the wave of whatever usable future the 1986 pollpoints to, most likely as precursors, roots will presently shrivel upand history start stretching back from when it had oughter, about 15minutes ago. And that can't be all bad, can it?
Needless to say, this somewhat narrow and abstract speculation won'tadd much glow to most voters' memories of 1986, and I understandwhy--I found the year depressing myself. The barrenness of theordinary flush fall release climaxed a series of alarming flops fromold hands and young hopefuls alike.Get Close was 82nd, andwhile Chrissie Hynde has come back from follow-up jinx before, thistime I have more faith in Cyndi Lauper, who made just one ballot afterfinishing 11th in 1984. George Clinton was 121st, and neither TinaTurner, fifth in 1984, nor Aretha Franklin, ninth last year, garnereda mention. Astonishingly, neither did John Fogerty, though I suspectEye of the Zombie would have done respectably if 1985's10th-placeCenterfield hadn't already taken the edge off thecosmic Creedence craving. After three straight albums in the top 10,Lou Reed was fortunate to place 106th, while Iggy Pop's Bowie-produced"comeback" finished an even more generous 102nd. The Golden Palominosgot five mentions, Jason and the Scorchers four, Lone Justice two,Let's Active one. Sade added five points to the 56th-place 1985 finishof her late-release follow-upPromise.
And though by now my trusty A/A minus total has risen comfortably above1985's bare 49, I did have to sweat my top 10 once infatuations withKing of America andPsychocandy flagged. Last year likemost years I would have been happy to give some points to my number13, Linton Kwesi Johnson's live double (a December release that topped1986 reggae albums at 51); this year 10th-ranked New Order (relegatedto a fickle 92nd by their doom and/or novelty-hooked support group)would have been more at home around 13. But in the end theself-censorship movement--the warning stickers, interviews lauding"subtlety" that sounded like farina, and craven, faux-hipcondemnations of psychotropic indulgences that faux-hip lifestyles hadonce cravenly endorsed--sharpened my hunger for the deliberatelyoffensive, preferably within the aforementioned parameters andespecially after those three jerks from Stuyvesant rubbed my face init. Thus I found that the Rolling Stones' hardass farewell, whichearned notes of censure from PMRC bluenoses and finished a fickle 52ndwith the voters, and Motorhead's 55th-place return to the front, inwhich Bill Laswell added craft and speed to the old Edward Shilsnightmare of "brutal culture," hung tougher as a countdownapproached. I can live with my final selection, and I will.
Many voters complained of top-10 dearth, but then, some always do, andthe statistics were ambiguous. Prorated, the top 10's cumulative pointsupport was slightly stronger than in 1985. And when I let mycalculator do the walking down to Timbuk 3 at 34, where the patternreverses, I find points running almost 10 percent ahead of 1985. Now,this could indicate intense critical enthusiasm for the toprecords. But it could also indicate that down below 34 the votersfound bubkes, at least bubkes in common, and that's how the also-ransmake it look. AfterWSQ Plays Duke, 42-50 went Big Black (youngfarts of pigfuckerdom), Madonna (whose frontlash failed tomaterialize), Phil Alvin, Bangles, Christmas, Van Morrison, theWoodentops'Giant, the 3 Johns'The World by Storm(Live in Chicago was 92nd), and Marti Jones--which I'd breakdown as three pros (Bangles included), two biz hopefuls (Alvinincluded), two marginal Brits, two Amerindies, and one jazz. Afterthat Brits fade and Amerindies come on for a 41st to 100th place totalthat goes something like: pros 14, hopefuls 9, marginal Brits 6, jazz3, black 3, country 1, miscellaneous 3 (LKJ, John Zorn, and AstorPiazzola), Australindies 3, and Amerindies--get this--19.
That's right--about a third of the also-rans were by American bands onindependent labels (Georgia Satellites and Rainmakers counted ashopefuls): Big Black, Christmas, Bottle Caps, Leaving Trains, ViolentFemmes (on Warner/Slash, but they operate like an indie and four oftheir five votes came from Wisconsin), Lyres, Camper Van Beethoven(II and III), Cramps, Camper Van again, Dumptruck (30 pointsfrom co-leader Seth Tiven's cheaty big brother Jon), Soul Asylum(Made to Be Broken), R&B Cadets, Swans, Golden Palominos,Fire Town (14 points from co-leader Phil Davis's proud alter ego PhilDavis), Mofungo, Moving Targets, Butthole Surfers, Die Kreuzen. Now,this is a varied bunch of records; four made my top 58, several moreplease me, and others could yet do either. But while Robert Palmer andyour nearby college-radio PD may see our result as some sort ofconsummation, I see it as localism and special interest out ofcontrol. In 1985, there was a healthier breakdown: pros and hopefulsabout the same, Amerindies down to 13, Brits up to 10, andblack--meaning anything from Kid Creole to Whitney Houston--way up to11.
U.S.-versus-UK-wise, I think the critics have fallen into lazyhabits--Amerindie boosterism is as rife now as Anglophilia was as thedecade began. Counting the Go-Betweens as Australian, I put threeBrits on my 1985 list. This year I have 11, not just world-citizenStones and mid-Atlantic Elvis C. and old pro Motorhead, but marginalsand eccentrics from Jon Langford's two best bands (with a third on myEP list) to the leftish punk of New Model Army to the lefty pop of theHousemartins to the studio pop of XTC to the studio miscellaneous ofthe Art of Noise. And while it would be overexcitable to read a trendinto every blip, I think this apparently anomalous upswing makessense.
With all exceptions and amalgams granted, let's divide the Amerindiesinto subgroups labeled pop, roots, and pigfucker. Now, I'm not surewhy the best roots band extant hails from Leeds, England, rather thanthe good old U.S.A., though geographical distance--good for a measureof (shall we call it?) postmodernist irony, and thus covering theinevitable chops shortfall just as it did in the Beatles' day--isn'thurting one bit. The pigfuckers could wind up mucking about anywhere,and they're welcome to their wallow as long as they don't blame theuniverse for not joining in. But if you're going to truck with popvalues--which often means no longer modish/commercial biz values, withmany roots types and by now some pigfuckers feeling the urge--you'rebetter off doing it right. Because commercial corruption was the greatBrit disease a few years ago, its biz is now generating marginalia bythe carload. It's also providing a context in which young bands cancop a little attitude from garagelands on both sides of the Atlantic,then bring it into the studio for the processing increasingly refinedmusical concepts demand.
In its sorry way the EP situation illustrates the Amerindiedilemma. For the second straight year, Alex Chilton strode like acolossus over this godforsaken category, which was infiltrated asusual by album artists on holiday and major-label turkeys--EcholessBunnyman, crumbled colossus Tommy Keene. (Keene's debut album got twomentions. He gained undisputed possession of 10th place--breaking aglorious tie with Live Skull, Sonic Youth, Wire, and the Mekons--afterreceiving the sole EP vote of Craig Zeller, who claimed the catchytitle number made him "deliriously happy after 101 consecutivespins.") As a source of Amerindie bands, which was how the competitionwas conceived back when that was still a worthy cause, the list isstronger than 1985's: Uzi dead, but Scruffy the Cat (Dollsy Bostonpop) and Balancing Act (artful L.A. folk-rock) have evident talent,and pigfuckersymps insist I'll understand Das Damen when I catch theiract. Perked up by Brits once again (though the Shop Assistants' debutalbum is already out in the hall), I'm actively enthusiastic about myown list as well. The tough verve ofLand of Sugar's whiteDayton funk almost equals that of DFX2'sEmotion, one of mymost played records of the '80s--by San Diego Stonesers you neverheard of who were never heard from again, possibly because theydeserved no better. Which is the problem with EPs--they're marginal bynature. Who outside of northwest Pennsylvania will make anything ofthe New Dylans' copious if callow songwriting skills? Is MimiSchneider's Iowa folk trio the Stouthearted going to interest ageneral audience in rural displacement? Does the world want Berkeley'sFearless Iranians From Hell to scrawl another Khomeini cartoon? Thesedays, Amerindie bands of potential cut albums when the B-sides oftheir singles still suck. EPs are sports and hybrids, signs ofsurprising life rarely capable of procreation.
If I can accuse the voters of stroking the Amerindies, though, I can'taccuse them of unfairness to that catchall called black. Pace Ron Wynnas usual, it was a terrible year for black popular music. Granted, mycritical perspective, despite what a few pophead and pigfuckerignorami believe--biases this judgment. Granted too that Pazz &Jop's black turnout--13 out of a carefully updated invite of 34(approximately, since I haven't color-coded all of our 380 names)--wasthe most embarrassing of the decade. As Nelson George tells me, thismust in part reflect the alienation of black music writers from thePazz & Jop consensus--rock critics' weakness for the rough,grotesque, and outrageous offends many of them. But George himselfreturned to 1985 for Sade and L.L. Cool J, and not a single voterstrolled out to left field with him to shake hands with AlexanderO'Neal, Paul Laurence, or Full Force. I mean, what would the blackcaucus have settled on? James Brown's Dan Hartman job, catapulted to89th by Jeffrey Morgan's 30 points? Irma Thomas's folk-indie GladysKnight homage, which got the same points and two more mentions? DougE. Fresh, tied for 100th with the third-place rap album? Bobby Womack,Steve Arrington, the misguided youth of Fishbone, all also-rans lastyear?
I don't think this is a blip, either. Sure Stevie Wonder and Al Greenand (let us not forget) Michael Jackson will get their share of votesnext time they show their voices. Sure the electorate hears blackartists even more passively and trendily than it does white artists(if five voters go for Iggy Pop, the sorely underrated Tina Turnermerits equal consideration). And sure crossover will continue to throwup the occasional divertissement. But for all their overstatement,Wynn's annual anti-crossover diatribes did come true this year, withgreat lover Whitney Houston leading thenot-here-nor-there-nor-anywhere LaBelle-Khan-Osborne-DeBarge parade(which totalled one mention, LaBelle's). Only thing is, Wynn's rootsfuturism isn't the solution--it's not hostile enough to the past,encouraging the kind of up-to-date tip of the hat to the verities thathas turned the respectable AOR of Stevie Winwood and Eric Clapton intoa morass. I prefer the more radical thesis of the Black RockCoalition, which includes old P&J hand Greg Tate and multithreatnewcomer Vernon Reid (the first voter since Lenny Kaye to have playedon a charting album, Ronald Shannon Jackson'sMandance in1982). I also agree that with crossover's somewhat exaggeratedcritical disrepute having no effect on its profitability, bankrollingsome mix of Clinton, Hendrix, Ornette, and the Clash isn't going to beeasy--especially if it's rough, grotesque, or outrageous.
What can it mean, do you think, that the one place black artists madeout was in the newly instituted reissue category? This was the lovechild of Assigning Poobah Doug Simmons, and I warned him it would be amess, favoring the majors-come-lately who've discovered a cheap way tofeel virtuous over the importers and indies who have kept archivalmusic alive, pitting the Police best-of againstreview-copies-by-written-request-if-you're-lucky anthologies againstmusic that comes shrink-wrapped by the carton instead of the disc. Wesandbagged best-ofs by specifying a pre-1970 cutoff date, which giventhe defiant support forGumbo andThe Modern Lovers andTerminal Tower--not one a best-of--probably wasn't fair. Butindeed, the 14-disc Atlantic r&b box came in third, and I supposeit would have won if the average rock critic could afford to buythe sucker. Only two indies placed, one with a box by the romanticallydead Nick Drake, the sole white finisher. And I like the resultsanyway.
I like the way the indie Nevilles beat out RCA's overdue,well-publicized, and slightly disappointing Sam Cooke set. I like thebeginner's guide to MCA's daunting Chess reissue. I like seeing DukeEllington's name somewhere on our charts even though my personal ruleagainst straight jazz records prevented me from placingMoneyJungle right behindIt Will Stand. I like knowing thatPolyGram's complete Hank Williams series would have come in second ifwe'd added the votes for all four extant volumes together. And maybemost of all I like James Brown up there at number four, where he canremind a few popheads and pigfuckers that obituaries for black musicare invariably premature. No comparable electorate would haveacknowledged the existence of Brown's dance groove in 1970. So if someequivalent happened in 1986, it's still waiting for the critics tofind it.
Not that I'm about to lead you there. You'd never suspect black musicwas in trouble to look at the first three singles on our list,crossover moves so daring and astute that without a hint of wimp-outthey obliterated the competition both commercially andcritically. "Walk This Way" broke Run-D.M.C. CHR (though not AOR,further proof that the format refuses to challenge its market'spresumed racism). "Word Up" was the most undeniable funk single ever,and "Kiss" reestablished Prince's repute as a powerhouse innovator--atyear's end it was one of two gold singles released in 1986. But afterthat we have Janet Jam-Lewis, James Brown-Hartman, and a rap noveltyby a now broken group. And though I was rooting for Gwen Guthrie(early-year releases are always forgotten by some voters) andrecommend Mixmaster Gee's metal manipulation, I can't claim to haveheard tell of much else--go go went went, house is a local discorevival, and while I've written down the titles of some word-of-mouthrap obscurities, the great ones rarely remain that obscure.
By acclamation and any normal standard, the oft-maligned (andoft-wrong) Chuck Eddy was on the one when he charged in November thatCHR had deliquesced into pap, mulch, and worse. My own singles choicesare partial because it's been years since I had ear time for radio andI no longer club much. I would have been delighted to vote forMotorhead's "Deaf Forever," Simply Red's "Money'$ Too Tight (ToMention)," Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble," or God knows JessieHill's "Ooh Poo Pah Doo," each of which meant more to me than anythingbelow "Word Up" on my list, if I'd experienced them as singles. Idoubt radio would have been much help, though--I discovered both AC/DCand Karen Finley in 45 'tween-set minutes at the Beasties' Ritz show,but in three weeks of vacation came across nothing more compelling onmy car radio than Jermaine Stewart and "On My Own," the year's othergold single. Which remarkable statistic may point to what's wrong, solet me emphasize: nobodybuys singles anymore. Just becausealbums are now designed to contain two or more CHR-compatible hits,those hits aren't singles as we've traditionally understood theconcept. They're not objects to be consumed, aural fetishes we cancherish into the ground and then call back to life in a day or adecade. They're promotional devices, not all that different from,well, videos.
Our poll is intended to resist such promotional function, and in bothcategories the critics did their bit. Gabriel & Johnson earnedtheir video landslide, and though I dislike the song so much I couldnever get properly worked up about the ad for it, the aural"Sledgehammer" did well enough to indicate no inconsistency. Thevoters generously acknowledged Madonna's overarching cinematic métierand David Byrne's only cinematic gift. And the political foretextsthat become permissible as Reaganism's media clout deteriorates arehailed with Bruce's shamelessly (and instructively didactic) "War,"and, more tellingly, with the nasty anti-Reaganism of a band mentionedon one album and zero singles ballots--Genesis, whose all-powerfulleader took a vague "protest" and turned it into near slander anddeliberate offense. The singles chart, meanwhile, singles outmisleading promotional devices. In addition to Madonna and thePretenders, beware of Stevie Winwood (eighth, album 57th),P.I.L. (ninth, album tied for 87th), two CHR-compatible Bangles tunesthey didn't write, the most tossed-off and convincing thing TalkingHeads did all year, and de facto one-offs by the Pet Shop Boys (whodeserve better), the Robert Palmer who sings (who deserves worse), andBruce Hornsby (who's just deserving enough).
In the comments headed "Alternative Formats," you'll find a dissentingand indeed abnormal standard applied to these issues--that of rockcriticism's great dissenter, proud crank, and undeconstructedpostmodernist Greil Marcus. My friend in California and I disagreemore than we agree, at least about music, and I somehow doubt that hisdaily dose of kilohertz would convert me to his philosophy of art--ifI spent that much time in my car I'd install a tape deck. But where myslightly kooky and definitely doomed attempt to give every halfwaypromising record a fair hearing submits to the modernist assumptionthat music is created and perceived by individuals, Marcus'sdial-spinning honors music as social fact, and especially given hiselitist tendencies I admire how persistently he subjects himself toother people's musical will. It's one more variation on a theme of hiscriticism, which often focuses on moments when intense individualexpression is so difficult to distinguish from random outpouring thatit comes across as the world calling--that is, when what some call thebourgeois subject approaches the verge of realization and/ordisintegration.
I'm aware that such talk strikes many as bullshit; it often strikes meas bullshit, too. But only orthodox know-nothings think it'scompletely off the wall, and I bring it up partly to remind everyonethat there are far more abstruse and radical ways to conceive rock androll than anything hinted at in this year-in-review. The fun I hadwith postmodernism, for instance, was an easy way out of a thorny,multifaceted problem, one rock and rollers are stuck with as surely aslegit artistic types--what to do with your tradition of the new whenit gets old. In fact, Simon Frith, who chooses his words quietly andwith care, described none other than Paul Simon as "a lonely, richAmerican in the fragmented world of postmodernity" just a few monthsago in these pages. And while that may make our pollwinner sound alittle hipper than he is, it's accurate. In fact, substitute"loquacious, embittered Englishman" and "urbane blackneotraditionalist" and you'd be describing our two runners-up, each ofwhom confronts the paradoxes of progress at least as stalwartly as thechamp.
Each pulled off a coup as big as a landslide, too. After years ofhumdrum domination and a slight slip, Elvis Costello fell right offthe chart with the aptly titledGoodbye Cruel World in 1984, sohis double return to the top 10 (with more total points thanGraceland) turns a comeback into a triumph. And Robert Cray'sStrong Persuader is the poll's all-time sleeper. I mean, bluesis for aging hippies who drink too much, right? Yet despite ChuckEddy's paternalistic surmise that Cray is a "white-man-in-disguise,"he attracted half our black critics as well as 48 of our white boys(though only four of our 30 women) to pile up just two fewer mentionsthanKing of America and nine more than Springsteen. Talk aboutexciting work in supposedly outmoded styles--this record had to knockdown a lot of preconceptions to break through so huge.
Of course, the preconceptions weren't formal--that is, what thecritics already knew prepared them for Cray's steady beat and terseeloquence. With Costello abandoning his band for the T-Bone Crew onthe bigger of his two entries (which in the end I find softer, achronic weakness of roots moves), they're as different as two Costellorecords can be, but both also fall comfortably within those old popparameters. And yet Costello--who ranks with the Mekons, JohnRotten-Lydon, Lora Logic, and Rosanne Cash in Marcus's postpunkpantheon--has always strained at assumed limits. His wordplay is soobsessive that Costello-the-subject disappears into it, and thejuggled readymades of his music--Blood and Chocolate makes"Subterranean Homesick Blues" sound as primal as "Honky Tonk"--workthe same kind of nasty deconstructive pranks on linear notions ofhistory. Personally, I pay him back for his cold cool by remaining anadmiring nonfan, but there's no question that he confounds past andfuture and expressed and found as defiantly as any pigfucker. Craydoesn't deal consciously with such issues, but within soul-blues'sparameters he achieves a cool so unprecedented it's beyondmodern--which isn't to say he ain't hot. I was dismayed at first tolearn that Dave Marsh dismissed his album as not-blues and Ron Wynnpreferred Anita Baker and James Brown-Hartman, but upon reflection I'mencouraged that Cray makes conservatives uneasy--in a world where theyoung can do exciting work in unmodish forms, I wouldn't want toexcept postmodern blues.
No matter what he or she thinks of hotsy-totsy terminology, anyone whoreads rock criticism lives "in the fragmented world of postmodernity."Compulsively novel yet yoked to its roots, rock and roll is a goodmatch for this world, and in their useful if ultimately unsatisfyingways, Elvis C. and Robert Cray and Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys(and Janet Jan-Lewis and the Pogues, but not, I'll warrant, SteveWinwood or the Smithereens) try to help us live in that world. Whatattracted me toGraceland from the start was that in itsdetails and its defining bifurcation and its significant groove ittackled this problem in a rock and roll way. As Dave Marsh has pointedout,Graceland's limitations are summed up in its final line,"That's why we must learn to live alone"--because there's no mustabout it. Simon has said that one reasonGraceland neverconfronts politics directly is that political art doesn'tlast. Putting aside the always dubious equation of durability andquality, that's a hoary modernist myth, proof of modernism'ssubmission to what some call the bourgeois subject. However dim theiranalysis, the way our critics intersperse the personal and thepolitical in their annual choices reflects not trendiness but aninevitable evolution of sensibility, because the truth of this myth isdrying up before our collective ears. Although ultimate satisfactionmay be a dying myth itself and is certainly too much to expect of thisfragmented world, today's partial solutions are promises. They leaveroom to hope that the divisionsGraceland adduces and arousesand fails to address can someday be part of our past--but not that thetranscendent power of music alone can make them history.
Village Voice, Mar. 3, 1987
 | 1985 | Critics Poll |Dean's List | 1987 |  |