Sunday, May 11, 2008
Why Patrick Bateman killed, the meeting of Sleater-Kinney and more.
May 1, 2000 | May 1, 2000
1) "American Psycho," directed by Mary Harron (Lions Gate)
This really is Katrina Leskanich's moment. In 1985 with Katrina and the Waves she scrubbed the airwaves clean with the horrifyingly bright "Walking on Sunshine." ("Soon to be a major floor-wax commercial," one reviewer wrote at the time.) Now the gruesome thing is leaking out of Patrick Bateman's headphones as he heads into his office, serves as a hideous wake-up call in "High Fidelity" and chirps from your TV in incessant ads for Claritin allergy pills while fresh-faced folk frolic on the grass and little kids pick up the chorus. No wonder everybody has to die.
2) Sleater-Kinney "Is It a Lie" from "All Hands on the Bad One" (Kill Rock Stars)
With guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker now joined by drummer Janet Weiss as singers, the music of the band no other group is even chasing is easier to hear and harder to keep up with, especially on this trickily constructed death song -- which despite its description of a traffic accident might one day fold into the tradition of 19th-century murder ballads like "Omie Wise" or "Banks of the Ohio." The piece is all questions, and when "Was it a lie?" is asked for the last time, a plain tone exchanged for a who-cares fade, it's not a single person but a whole way of life that seems to have been run down. It's a mystery, but perhaps nothing compared to the one in the cover photo, which looks like documentation of a performance-art piece staged in a union-hall-cum-nightclub circa 1943 -- or the one in the leading guitar figure on the last cut, "The Swimmer," which is much closer to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" than John Cheever's river of pools. The meaning of the glamorous photos in the booklet or Brett Vapnek's sparking video for "You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun" is not mysterious: Good clothes can make you happy.
3) Green Velvet "Green Velvet" (F-111)
Techno, very playful, very accessible, very funny when dubbed with dank, deadpan monologues and the multivoiced "Answering Machine," where any number of people, all of whom I like to think are DJ Curtis Jones (otherwise known as Cajamere or Green Velvet), helpfully call up to inform the guy screaming "I! Don't! Need! This! Shit!" that, for example, "I hate to do this over the phone, but I sort of can't do it in person, I want to thank you for the engagement ring, I know you probably gave it to me after I told you I'm pregnant and stuff ... but the baby's not yours, so you don't have to worry about it, I'll always love you."
4) White Town "Duplicate" from "Peek & Poke" (Parasol)
A man surrounded by two women floats through what could be Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby" with all the fear, fury and self-hatred removed. At under four minutes it's over far too soon, as if music-maker Jyoti Mishra didn't trust himself. "Inspired by," among others, Monkee Michael Nesmith, late physicist Richard Feynman, preening role model bell hooks and onetime silent movie actor Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
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