Real Life Rock Top 10

By Greil Marcus

Apr 8, 2002 | 1) Cassandra Wilson, "Belly of the Sun" (Blue Note)

The great jazz singer recorded this album in a converted shack in her native Mississippi, not, as music business rumors have it, in a grave where a blues singer whose name no one can remember was buried before he was temporarily exhumed to allow for Wilson's makeshift studio. The extraordinary range of material includes, along with Wilson's own compositions, covers of songs made famous by the Band, Fred McDowell, Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson. Wilson's way with these numbers recalls nothing so much as Narcissus, gazing into a pool of water and falling in love with his reflection, and the result is the same: falling in.

2) Heather Nova, "South" (V2)

Seven years on from the still unsettlingly frank "Walk This World," there's a breathy shiver in Nova's voice, which otherwise is smooth enough for TV commercials, that shoots her into realms of uncertainty. The story she acts out is that of a woman who has constructed a life of propriety solely to allow her fantasies to take on flesh. As you pass her on the street, she knows you can't tell. Electricity comes off of her in waves, but you can't be sure she's where it's coming from. So you play the album again.

3) Puta-pons, "Return to Zero" (Vinahyde)

By way of Chicago in 2000, return to Liliput, anyway -- which in punk terms (Zurich noise, 1978-83) may amount to the same thing. Except on the stunningly fast ride of Shelly Kurzynski Villaseñor's guitar solo in "(You Need a) Shot in the Arm," which delivers it.

4/5) Eva Hesse, "Untitled 1970," in "Eva Hesse" (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through May 19; Weisbaden Museum, Germany, June 15-Oct. 13) and "Eva Hesse," edited by Elisabeth Sussman (SFMOMA/Yale)

Also known as "Seven Poles," this work, coming at the very end of the exhibition, and of the German-American sculptor's short life, speaks in many voices. Seeming to bulge and swell, the yellowed, L-shaped wire-polyethylene-fiberglass constructions vary in height from 6 to 9 feet; they might have been inspired, Robin Clark writes in the catalog, by Olmec figurines or Jackson Pollock's 1952 "Blue Poles." As Elisabeth Sussman arranged it for the exhibition, working from photos of the piece in Hesse's studio, but not academically, allowing the poles their implicit freedom to move, the feet of most of the poles turn toward each other, and the thing looks like a version of Stonehenge, made out of Martians. Even as it played with eternity, it was laughing at itself.

Next Page: Neil Young, Rocket From the Tombs, Bruce Conner

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