Van McCoy's Birthday Random Ten


 


1. Enya - Oíche Chiúin (Silent Night)
2. Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road
3. U96 - Venus In Chains
4. Tori Amos - Amber Waves
5. Carlos Santana & Wayne Shorter - Spiritual
6. Steve Coleman and Five Elements - Ascending Numeration
7. It's A Beautiful Day - A Hot Summer Day
8. R.E.M. - Be Mine
9. Tempest - The Barrow Man
10. June Tabor - I will put my ship in order

And going up to 11: King Curtis - Memphis Soul Stew

Hey, be nice to me: I'm 55..
There's nothing really adventuresome here--nothing that I can sit here and teach y'all. Furthermore, it really take someone in their fifties to have It's A Beautiful Day on their iPod.--good though it is. June Tabor does classify as a hidden treasure--and so does Steve Coleman, though he's shown up in A Random Ten before.
But it's a fair cop: all this music moves me. (well, maybe not the U96--90's dance stuff with sitar samples. Fun, though drum loops of that period make me itch after too long.) But the rest, yes.
I prefer the earnest to the sardonic every time, just as I prefer the elaborate to the stripped down, and purity is a bad idea. We're more familiar with pure sine waves than we ever did when I was a sprout--but we know that pure wave form as the annoying beep of every sound chip that grabs our attention with ugly little pincers.
Beyond the extremes, of course, those are slippery treacherous criteria: what's complex can look awfully simple, depending on how you angle the calipers. June Tabor's song is just her with an unobtrusive string accompaniment--but her voice is as fiercely modulated, compressed, enlarged, teasing with speech and then wonderfully, beautifully on the note, until it fills the whole space around the song.
Some of this is shaped by my 55 years: I was already in grad school when Born To Run came out, and was writing for Marvel Comics when to the south of me Television and Richard Hell were playing their flayed version of rock and roll. Although I bought there records from a little shop in the West Village and accepted their roar the way I had accepted Hendrix's years ago, it wasn't part of me, and I didn't grow up with the Clash as my signpost out of my skin in adolescence.I embraced Johnny Rotten the way I embraced Thomas Mapfumo, as a good new thing rather than howling salvation.
And so I marveled at Bruce's wall of sound, where harmonica became saxophone and pounding high piano was doubled by something that sounded like glockenspiel, through which his ultra dense image-in-every-line poetry evoked a Jersey teenage fire that I probably could have seen if I climbed up on the roof of my Westchester house; if I'd been younger it would have been a stab through my heart and the Springsteen screen door girl the dream that screwed up my heart.
The one thing I'm at least not guilty of is being locked into the music of my high school and college days. No, instead I've managed to keep latching on to the same things that infuriate critics of the ironic persuasion in generation after generation--I mean, REM and Tori Amos, can you believe it? Only my immunity to Morrissey probably keeps me from being confined to Hopeless Weiner Hell in a smoked-glass coffin with a thorned rose between my teeth.
Fortunately a 55 year old gains absolutely nothing by exhibiting traces of hip--or of finely honed and filed-on-the-bias taste, for that matter. Just set down a nice big bowl of that stew, Curtis, and watch me do justice to it.

Posted: Saturday - January 05, 2008 at 12:11 AM        

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