Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Nov 26, 2001 |
1) Strokes, "Is This It" (RCA)
Fast, expert, hanging-out sounds from a young New York five-piece with a guru -- not the so-named older guy with the comb-over pictured with the band on the insert, but, wow, Lou Reed. Julian Casablanca's vocals may be filtered so that their tinny sound matches the group's skinny-tie beat, but that doesn't save the Strokes' "Modern Age" from dissolving back into the Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See the Light" -- and "Modern Age" is the best thing here. The cover of the import version offers a white woman's naked ass cupped by a black gloved hand: "So 1983," said one disappointed fan.
2) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" (Shifty)
As slick as the Strokes are, this ill-named New York trio (can you imagine yourself saying, "Hey, let's go see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs"? It's like saying "Let's go see Who's on First") are abrasive. They're so heedlessly tough that the arty touches at the end of "Miles Away" can seem like a relief, a promise that the music is an effect, not reality. But the first four songs on this EP are as good as they have to be; they might be a way of your getting used to Karen O's small, pressured voice, until with "Our Time" you're ready to actually listen to her. Announcing "I -- may be dead, honey," over a stop-time orchestration of the band's single-guitar and drums wall of sound, O could be Melissa Swingle of Trailer Bride as easily as she calls up Mary Weiss of the Shangri-las: you don't question for a second that she knows what she means. Her voice curls, like a finger beckoning you into the music. "It's the year to be hated," she says, then leading a chant: "OUR TIME! It's our time! OUR TIME! To -- be -- hated -- " The music rises like a flag blowing. "C'mon, kids," O says -- and there is nothing so modest, so defiant, so hopeless, so much of a smile, short of the Who's "The Kids Are Alright." But this song has its own place and time, even if it didn't make its time, but fell into it -- even if 19 men came from elsewhere and destroyed thousands to make the song's time. Three musicians standing up to attest with the crowd they gather around themselves that they're ready to be hated, that they've waited all their lives for the chance -- I can't believe people in New York aren't singing this on the street.
It was Connie Nisinger, a high school librarian in the Midwest, who decided that this interesting site needed a picture of the final resting place of Billy Lyons, shot dead in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895, his corpse kicked through time ever after in the countless versions of "Stag-o-lee," "Stacker Lee" and "Stagger Lee." Click "Search by name," type in "William Lyons," and there is Lyons' plot in St. Peter's Cemetery in St. Louis, sec. 5, lot 289. The site allows you to "Leave flowers and a note for this person": keep clicking and you can leave a cigar or a beer instead. Advertising bars include "Contact Your High School Classmates" -- to find their graves?
4) Hanif Kureishi, "Gabriel's Gift" (Scribner)
Screenwriter for the socially commonplace and artistically unique London romances "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid," writer and director of the stupidly dismissed "London Kills Me," author of "The Buddha of Suburbia," "The Black Album" and "Intimacy," Kureishi is a born storyteller, but he is not a natural novelist. On the page, his dialogue can seem perfunctory, looking for another medium, a way from one place to another, not what a person would say: "'Talent might be a gift but it has to be cultivated. The imagination is like a fire or a furnace; it has to be stoked, fed and attended to.'" The man talking, speaking to a teenage boy, is a great rock star from the 1970s, still worshipped; far more alive on the page than the star or the boy -- or dead on the page, which here amounts to the same thing -- is Rex, the boy's father, who once played with the star. Save for his moments in that man's sun, he has been a nobody, and he has stoked, fed and attended to his failure until, after nearly 30 years, he can almost live off of it.
There are thousands upon thousands of middle-aged men like Rex, each one the butt of every musician joke, their delusions of glamour inseparable from their resentment of almost everyone they meet, men for whom aging means only helpless self-parody. Yet while Kureishi's version contains them all, gives off the smell of fear they carry, Rex is not only a version, a type or a joke. Even though you may not want to, you can see him, imagine the way he talks, the way he moves, and even if you know too many people whose lives he is living out, he doesn't look or move like they do. In that sense Kureishi, if not a natural novelist, is a real one.
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