Friday August 20, 2004

10 Years After

Wednesday was my 35th birthday. While I usually avoid retrospection of any kind, I realized — as I was hunting down a copy of the new GQ to see how an item I’d written turned out — that it’s been exactly ten years since I first got paid for writing something. My first record review appeared in The Memphis Flyer on my 25th birthday. It was a CD by Kiwi-core band Bailter Space. I couldn’t conjure up an aural image of what it sounded like if I tried. It was less than 200 words and I got paid 10 dollars — plus I got to keep the CD, which I lost, sold or gave away long ago. Later that night, I got kicked out of Memphis’ semi-famous Antenna Club and had an unopened beer can (justly) thrown into my nose, from point blank range, by the owner.

This year’s celebration was much more, well, civilized. We went to see the Three Terrors show at the Angel Orensanz church on the Lower East Side. T3T is of course Stephin Merritt and 69 Love Songs guest vocalists LD Beghtol (who wrote about art in Memphis when I was writing about music) and Dudley Klute, singing cover tunes — this time all about New York. The set list was fantastic — ranging from Nico’s “Chelsea Girls” to a 19th Century fallen Bowery girl ballad; from a Kurt Weil-inspired rendition of “Jenny From the Block” to a cover of “Walk on the Wild Side” in which the “colored girls” beeped like Laurie Anderson on “Oh, Superman.”

Maybe it’s just the burned out music critic in me, but I like how Merritt, the Terrors and their allies have gotten back to a pre-rock understanding of what popular music is. Artist and repetoire used to be two different things after all, and one reason is that there are far fewer competent songwriters around than there are competent interpreters — and there really aren’t many of those. Rock has painted itself into a corner with a demand for “authenticity” that requires unremarkable performers to condense their unremarkable lives into unremarkable songs and then act as if their lives and their songs were “true” or “real” in some important way. I think of the condescension with which Laurence Olivier reportedly treated Dustin Hoffman’s method-inspired preparations for Marathon Man. “Why don’t you just try acting,” Sir Laurence supposedly mused.

“Keeping it real,” however, seems to be an American requirement. James Dean isn’t an icon because he was adept at acting like a troubled youth, but because he was a troubled youth. Same with Marilyn Monroe. Can you imagine how little sway William S. Burroughs would have over the popular imagination if he hadn’t actually been a junky?

But the requirement that art, and especially music, be true to life (not “Life,” but an individual life) and vice versa secretly denies what art is — a craft, a trick, a cathartic illusion. The Terrors brought that home by breathing new life into both the familiar and the forgotten — uncovering the Life (with a capital “L”) in all of it. And, when it was over, I left under my own power, without even being asked.