More Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

May 23, 2018

1 ■ Jennifer Castle, Angels of Death (Paradise of Bachelors) You might bet against the notion of anyone other than Lana Del Rey calling an album Angels of Death and not drowning in her own pretentiousness. With the Toronto singer Castle, you’d lose. The first song is last night’s dream you can’t remember; Castle remembers it for you, and as the songs roll on she stays on that path. The action is all in the interstices between the melody and the cadence, the voice and the instrumentation. The melody seems called up by the cadence, the instrumentation feels like a reflection of the voice, and you can find yourself listening for those tiny lifts, the suspensions in the songs replacing the songs themselves.

2 ■ “The King of the Delta Blues,” Timeless (NBC, Season 2, Episode 6, April 22) In this time-travel series, the bad guys go back to 1936 to kill Robert Johnson “to prevent the birth of rock ’n’ roll music and eventually the counterculture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the fall of Nixon, and the end of the Vietnam War.” The good guys go back to stop them, presumably to allow the birth of rock ’n’ roll and end the Vietnam War. Johnson, as played by Kamahl Naiqui, seems absolutely convinced.

3 ■ Jackie Fuchs, at “What Difference Does It Make? Music and Gender,” MoPop Pop Conference 2018 (Seattle, April 26) The former bassist Jackie Fox, on how being raped as a member of the Runaways led her to become an entertainment lawyer working with women in the music business: “It’s a lot easier to stand up for someone else than to stand up for yourself.” Harvard Law, she said of her alma mater, “turns out 600 lawyers a year: ‘Next!’ And there were so few female musicians in the Seventies—I wish I had known how much power I actually had.”

4 ■ Les démons, window in the Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil (Montreuil, France) From floor to ceiling: silk-screened on the glass, Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in 1956 near the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, evanescent pods over their heads, are running right at you, so physically present you want to reach into the glass and pull them over to the other side. And they’re there forever.

5 ■ Jose Cuervo, “Last Days,” directed by Ringan Ledwidge (CP+B) In some southwestern bar, the radio announces the end of civilization. Some people flee; one man cues up Elvis’s “It’s Now or Never” on the jukebox. He begins to dance, a woman joins him, the roof blows off, and as the bartender pours a shot and then leans back, singing along with indescribable pleasure, you might wonder why the song never sounded as good as it does here.

6 ■ Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room (Scribner) Kushner’s celebrated last novel, The Flamethrowers, was so relentlessly brilliant I couldn’t finish it. I got the point: Kushner is brilliant. This book, about a former sex worker and convicted murderer serving double life sentences in California, is quiet, deliberate, slow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.