The Adventures of Nik Rainey
Semi-Hemi-Demi-Professional Critic
Episode Two: "Use Your Allusion"
by Nik Rainey
Intro: Next Exposition, Please
I've been hanging in a state of languid flux for weeks now - what the Catholics used to call "Limbo" before they closed it down, claiming all the bending backwards was too hard on their backs. Whatever sense of purpose being a music critic once held for me was lost, elusive, and as hard to grasp as a greased supermodel. All my efforts to expunge the worthless and overwrought parts of my syntactical psyche had merely left me hoarse, confused, and with paper cuts the size of the Marinas Trench from trying to speed-read my thesaurus in search of the fabled Lost Synonym for "Throbbing Bassline." My pseudonym wasn't much help - he pretended to indulge my misdirected soul-searchings for a few pages, then dropped me like a hot potato salad in the lobby of who he claimed was one of the world's foremost authorities on critics' block before ellipsing into oblivion in the back seat of a newspaper taxi with the crossword puzzle already done, incorrectly and in indelible ink, no less. Truthfully, that's not exactly what happened, but I don't care and I haven't seen Jimmy crack corn in some time, although his half-brother Marty has been spotted around town breaking peas. Oh, Christ... get me out of this intro, somebody...
Three: Autonomy, Can You Hear Me?
Doctor Wilhelm "Shiv" McAqueaque added a fresh pinch of Borkum Riff to his pipe and pensively touched the flame of his blowtorch to the bowl. "So, tell me," he said in a dubious Austrian accent between puffs, "have you been hearing voices?" "Yeah, sure, all the time," I replied, gesturing as emphatically as I was capable of doing through the restraints. "Voices, melody lines, drum patterns - the way mathematicians have theorems and equations spinning around in their minds, I had my record collection on constant replay in my head."
"And was this... bothersome to you?"
"No, not particularly. It caused certain difficulties socially, I'll admit - once a couple of my neighbors thought I was having an epileptic fit when I was actually just air-drumming a Keith Moon solo. They were real apologetic about it - they let me keep the ruler they shoved in my mouth - but they kept a respectful distance after that. But otherwise, no, it was actually quite enjoyable for the most part, and it really kept the wear and tear on my phonograph cartridge down to a minimum. But a few weeks ago, it started taking kind of a creepy turn. Every time I looked at the stack of CDs my editor gave me to review, a single line from Pere Ubu's 'Heart of Darkness' kept playing over and over in my brain like a lock-groove mantra: 'And I don't see anything that I want... and I don't see anything that I want...' That went on for several days."
"Mmm, yes, Crocusbehemoth Melancholia. Not a very popular ailment, though it has rather a substantial following in the U.K. Judging by your still-lanky frame and relatively deep voice, you were able to put a stop to it."
"It kept getting worse," I sighed. "Three days of David Byrne singing 'hit me in the face... hit me in the face...' You wouldn't know where he's living these days, would you? 'Cause I've been thinking of taking him up on it."
"Er, heh-heh, no, I..."
"It was when my brain decided to go into an eighties marathon that I really started to lose it. 'N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nineteen, nineteen...' I started having these messianic delusions - no, I felt superior to that in a way. I mean, Jesus had, what, forty days in the desert? Lions, serpents, all that? Give him a week of 'One Night In Bangkok' and the second Frankie Goes to Hollywood album and he'd've forsaken his calling and signed on as Satan's personal assistant before it was through. Eventually, I blew my gasket entirely. I'm almost ashamed to admit this..."
"Please. I'm familiar with all manner of music-related mental maladies. Nothing can shock me at this point."
"Well, all right... I've been singing 'Escalator of Life' to myself for the past four days."
The pipe dropped out of his mouth and set the lap of his Sometimes a Bugle is Just a Bugle Boy jeans afire, but his expression, to his credit, remained the same but for a slight facial tic that made it look as if his cheekbones were doing the Wave. "Hmm, Mal de Faux Nouvelle Vague. It would appear you came here just in time. Another week or so and you'd be evincing an insatiable craving for inch-wide ties and checkerboard shirts. If you were an ordinary music fan, I'd simply tell you to take 2 Live Crew and call me in the morning. The aesthetic shock would ordinarily be enough to cleanse your value system and give you the chance to begin anew. But you are a music critic, after all - conditioned to find manifestoes in Blue Öyster Cult lyrics, given to drawing comparisons between the works of Yeats and the Spin Doctors, and so on. Unable to appreciate anything at face value or even at list price, your pleasure center is gnarled up and twisted, perhaps inextricably, with the parts of your brain that govern your vocabulary and your sense, such as it is, of reason. Rock 'n' roll is designed to appeal to the more instinctual parts of the brain, the more animalistic and bestial regions. Criticism attempts to apply a patina of reason, establishing an order to things. Not only is rock 'n' roll unsuited to this kind of thought, but the same can be said for rock 'n' roll fans as well after they've had their brains flattened by the stuff for long enough. Let me put it this way - put a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, and eventually one of them will have written the complete works of Shakespeare. But put fifty monkeys at fifty PowerMacs for two weeks, and at least ten of them will be able to give you five reasons why the latest Bob Dylan album is his best since Blood on the Tracks."
"Gosh."
"You see, my studies have borne out that all rock 'journalists,' if I may use the impolitic term, go through five distinct stages of development as laid out by the great psychoanalyst and roadie Dr. Sigmund Osterberg, or 'Siggy Pop' to his friends: the Aural, where the love of pure sound is first formed; the Oral, where you can't stop babbling your opinions of music, quoting lyrics, and spouting torrents of infinitesimally interesting rock trivia to everyone you know; the Anal-Cerebral, where you first decide that everyone you know has their head up their ass when it comes to musical taste and start writing about it in order to re-educate them; the Nasal, where you either turn up your nose at the very same trends and styles you once praised at length or purchase a lot of Pete Townshend's solo albums; and the Ural, where you become completely disillusioned, give up rock music and listen only to Russian folk songs. From what you've described, it seems you are caught in a kind of limbo between the last two stages, resulting in high levels of stress, an intangible sense of loss and despair, and the feeling that your leather jacket doesn't fit as well as it used to. Many analysts would be deeply concerned by this state of mind; I, on the other hand, find it incredibly amusing. In fact, behind my patrician façade and impassive demeanor, I am inwardly rolling on the floor, laughing hysterically, and my inner child is sticking his tongue out at you and calling you a 'stupid-head'."
"That's fine, Doctor," I said, "but can it be cured? Is there anything you can do to take this malaise away? Intensive counseling? Drugs? Corrective surgery? Drugs? Heavy medication? What about drugs?"
"It occurs to me that drugs may possibly be a consideration in your therapy. I've done extensive testing on the effects of certain psychoactive pharmaceuticals on a variety of writers and musicians, but the only positive effect that we've discovered is that constant doses of Prozac have discouraged Axl Rose from writing any new songs over the last eight years. You can read about it in my article, 'GlaxoWellcome to the Jungle,' which will be published simultaneously in the next issues of The American Psychiatric Association Journal and Motorbooty."
"So, if not drugs, what?"
"A far more beneficial way to relieve you of your stress, and an additional three hundred dollars, may be a little retrogression therapy. I'll induce a hypnotic state and, using these compilations, reissues, and vintage recordings I conveniently happen to have in my desk, try and drill through the crust of your neurosis and dredge up any suppressed memories, which may help you make a breakthrough, or, at the very least, give me something amusing to talk about at my next dinner party."
"Isn't that a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality?"
"Oh, you've heard of that... well, technically no. Not if I talk with my mouth full." He produced a watch from his pocket and set it in motion in front of my eyes. "You are very relaxed... your eyelids are beginning to feel heavy... you are getting sleepy and disinclined to pursue any form of litigation..."
"Um, excuse me. I'm not an expert in psychology or anything, but don't you think a pocket watch might serve your purposes better than that promotional In the Company of Men wristwatch from McDonald's?"
"Jason H. Priestley!" He flung the watch aside. "Maybe after this I'll send you to a proctologist to fix that smart ass of yours. Fine, I'll put you under using the Gary Busey Method." He plucked the solid-gold phallic symbol paperweight off his desk. "Count backwards from one."
"Wuh-" KLUNK!
"All right... can you hear me?"
"Pick me, Monty, pick me, I'm dressed like the Politburo."
"Good... now I'm going to play the first disc. Be honest; give me the first thing that comes into your head."
"Aside from the blood, you mean?"
 "Yes, as long as it isn't potentially libelous or offensive to our advertisers. All right, then... the first one is Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company Live at Winterland '68 (Columbia/Legacy). You like Joplin?"
"I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never joppled!"
"I am still holding the paperweight, you know."
"Okay, okay, no need to double the dose. Yes, I used to like her quite a bit. Your standard doomed white blues mama, the hands-down winner of the competition between her and Jim Morrison to see who can blow their voice out to a fine wheezy rasp first - hell, what's not to like? Vulnerability crossed with a paint-peeling wail, a rare distaff stone on the Texan misfit trail somewhere between Roky Erickson and Ross Perot... this kinda stuff's in short supply today, I'll tell you whut."
"Explain."
"Well, try and imagine her on one of those trendy all-chick package tours. Two measures of 'Piece of My Heart' and Meredith Brooks'd be reduced to bone meal. They'd be calling Ethan Hawke in to identify Lisa Loeb's glasses. By the second encore, all that'd be left of Pierced Labia Nation would be a smoldering hank of close-cropped hair and a charred Birkenstock."
"And you're sure this isn't residual sixties nostalgia on your part? Some rose-colored reminiscence of how good things were when you were still a gamete?"
"Well, I do still think the Summer of Love was best experienced without a fully-formed spinal column... but let me finish. Listening to Janis and the best backing band she ever had - and please let's not think of Big Brother in any other terms; the overlong vocal turns by the guitar and bass players serve exactly the same function as allowing Ray Manzarek to butcher the blues on the Doors' live albums, that is, as embarrassing-white-guy sorbet in between courses - at the peak of their abilities certainly has its appeal, not to mention the thrill of hearing a Gershwin song ("Summertime") with a little strychnine in its teeth. But it's like both Thomas Wolfe and my mother said: You can't go home again. It's hard to listen to this stuff without having it tainted with the knowledge of what was soon to come."
"Her lapses into drunkenness, depression, and drug abuse? The subsequent death of the sixties dream?"
"No, Leonard Cohen. You've heard 'Chelsea Hotel No. 2,' right? That line about what she did to him on the unmade bed while the limousine waited in the street? First of all, I have it on good authority it was double-parked; secondly... ewwwww! Cohen's a genius and all, but gawd, no wonder she drank so much! It's gonna take a lotta Southern Comfort to wash that depressive Canadian singer-songwriter paste off your palate! Forget heroin, Jack - that shit's the real killer! I mean, what's Rebecca DeMornay done lately? Hah? And don't think Columbia will let you forget it, either - a little subliminal advertising for big Len's new album four or five years from now, perhaps - why else would the one song that appears twice on the album be 'Down on Me,' hmmm? Another entendre over here, barkeep! And make it a double!"
 "Okay..." Dr. McAqueaque said with more forced jollity than the first three rows at an industry screening of A Night at the Roxbury. "I think we can, ah, move on. Dead Sixties Icon No. 2 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience, BBC Sessions (Experience/MCA). Speak honestly; just keep the Plaster Casters out of this, if you don't mind."
"No problem... What can I say, really, about the most popular enigma rock 'n' roll ever had? I listen to this and my mind is filled with unanswerable questions."
"You mean like, 'What artistic paths would he have taken had he lived?'"
"Christ, no, I can tell you that. In my trance-like state, it's very clear: he would have continued with his funk-blues leanings for a year or two, with steadily diminishing slight returns, then bottom out with a disastrous appearance at the Isle of Langerhans rock festival in '72 during which he fires his band onstage - no, I'm misreading, he sets fire to his band onstage; he didn't have the eye-hand coordination with the lighter fluid bottle that he once had - then alienates his audience with his three-hour version of the United Arab Emirates national anthem, 'We've Got All The Oil, Nyah Nyah.' After that, his career is finished; he's reduced to recording rewritten versions of his greatest hits for various ad campaigns. 'The Wind Cries Pepsi,' 'White Castle Magic,' 'Sunny D-pression,' and so on. He falls further and further into disgrace until his sudden death on the set of his half-hour infomercial for Afrogaine, the controversial hair-replacement treatment for groovy spades."
"Some things are better left 'what-if'ed, it would seem. So what are the unanswerable questions?"
"One: Should you kiss the sky on your first date? Two: Who the hell actually wrote 'Hey Joe?' Two a: Where you goin' with that unclaimed royalty check in your hand? Three: How did a Black guy from Seattle track down the only two pale English guys with higher, kinkier hair than himself? Did he take out a classified in the Melody Maker or something? And four: There are Black guys in Seattle? Where?"
"It's at this point that I'd like to state to our readership that the opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of any of the supporting or expository characters in it. Also, reproduction by mechanical means without the express written permission of Major League Baseball is probably pretty painful. Okay, resume your spiel."
"Okay, so the ambiguities remain the same. But I think it's the mark of a truly seminal artist that, even thirty years after his death, you discover something new about him with every newly-bronzed vault-scraping from the archives. We know the man revolutionized the way people approached the electric guitar, opened up new vistas of sonic exploration, and made the guy who patented the wah-wah pedal a wealthy man - but, as the last five tracks on the disc show, he was a crucial innovator in another way as well: he set the bar for musicians to hijack live TV appearances. It sounds rather benign now, but his derailing of the Lulu Show by playing whatever he felt like playing was the standard-bearer for many artists to follow: the Sex Pistols cursing on afternoon TV, Elvis Costello switching songs two lines into 'Less Than Zero' on Saturday Night Live, John Lydon stonewalling Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show, Sinéad O'Connor ripping up the Pope's picture on SNL... and, uh... Liam Gallagher throwing a beer can up in the air and using the phrase 'up yer bum' on the MTV Video Music Awards..."
"Clear!" WHOOMP! "Oh, Lord, you had me frightened there for a moment. Thank God for Val-U-Shok portable defibrillators (generous sponsor of this column inch). Still... I think we're starting to make some progress as to the root of your disillusionment. Ordinarily, I'd proceed from your formative stages to your preadolescence, but to be quite honest, what you'd have to say about Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco Family's Greatest Hit Repeated Twenty-Three Times To Fill a CD would likely do more harm than good. For me, anyway. Let's move into stiller if more murky waters - Bauhaus' Crackle (Beggars Banquet)."
I exhaled painfully if somewhat typically: sounds like a sigh, feels like a death rattle. "You're really dredging up some hurtful stuff, aren't you? I thought I had safely moved that skeleton to the back of my closet next to my rainbow Mork suspenders, at least in the two issues since I last pontificated about them at length... but fine, you're the sadist."
"Doctor.""There's a distinction?... All right, then. Bauhaus always appealed to me, as I think they did to those of us who carefully cultivated our depression to keep us skinny, because they were a clean wallow in the sea of morbidity, a meticulously-choreographed soft-focus misery. Remember The Hunger? That Chanel No. 5 ad masquerading as a vampire flick they appeared in the first five minutes of? No more perfect metaphor exists for the Bauhaus experience - a gauzy, Tony Scott-directed journey through a netherworld full of vampires who don't bite because it'd stain their teeth and they'd have to reaccessorize."
"But my records show you have every record they've ever released."
"True, and it's plagued me for years. I could have written it off as a childish affectation and thrown it over for the works of those who actually had the gumption to off themselves and thus moot the possibility of a solo career or a reunion tour, start reading The Trial again where I left off twelve years ago and admit that the only thing truly Kafkaesque about these gloom-waifs is Peter Murphy's cheekbones, resist the dark pull of digitally-remastered versions of songs I already have in four or five other configurations... and yet I cannot. I am compelled to return to their well-furnished lair, supping on the decorous decadence, again and again and again."
"And why do you think that is?"
I lapsed into a pregnant pause, which abruptly miscarried: "Because, far from being unduly bleak and forbidding, Bauhaus was inclusive, their cold blood a warm sacrament for the scrabbling weevils crawling over the teenage underbelly. Forget roots, credibility, authenticity - how much phonier can you get than second-hand Bowie ? - Bauhaus reveled in their ersatzity and beckoned you to join them. 'Come with us,' they said, 'we may wear the po-faced masks of the aloof artiste, but it's just because goony grins don't look as good in moody black-and-white sleeve photos. You could write lyrics as overreaching and inane as ours, you could play three notes on a single bass string for nine-plus minutes, you can walk around in blind bluesman shades to hide those beady little eyes of yours, you could surely think of better ways to show off your light-hearted side than dressing up in papier-maché bee costumes... it's all within your reach, every last insecure, posing one of you.' When they sing 'We love our audience' in 'Spirit,' it's a 'Gabba Gabba Hey' to every suburban lumpenprole who looks more like Dee Dee Myers than Dee Dee Ramone in a leather jacket... and it kills me that it still hits me that way! Where is the sophistication that all those Table of the Elements and Atavistic releases were supposed to bestow upon me? Why must I seek just intonation and microtonalism only to find myself bopping to the post-punk equivalent of 'The Monster Mash'? Oh, depth, where is thy sting?"
Dr. MacAqueaque daubed at his forehead with a damp case history. "Good lord," he whispered. "I can only thank whatever deity's left after the recent downsizing that there wasn't a Dead or Alive record in the stack somewhere. I'm not licensed to deal with that level of trauma. Let us move a few years ahead and a couple of steps to the side, to that musical soft shoulder known as the late eighties and early nineties. You look like you could use the rest."
"And I'll get it, too. Those years were like the federally-imposed period of narcolepsy required to soften us up for the next sneak attack. If 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was the 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' of its day, then there were a hell of a lot of Frankie Avalons laying in Nirvana's wake. I can still hear it, that nauseating mantra I'd hear at social events and mass drug binges, that call of the calculatedly disenfranchised misfit that still sometimes screeches out at me in the middle of the night..."
"And that would be...?"
"'The Cuuuurrre! You got any Cuuuuurrrrre? Play something by the Keeeeee-uuuuurrrrrre!' I'm so grateful Kurt came along and hosed the bodies off that sidewalk, lemme tell ya. Hope St. Peter weighted that appropriately and let him slide on the whole suicide thing. But on balance, I can understand why the kids so desperately grasped at Robert Smith's love handles. What passed for musical milestones from '87 to '91 or so looked more like premature grave markers. Forget the F. Scotts and Mrs. Parkers of old - ours was the true Lost Generation, coming of age in an era with very few defining moments. Don't hear people ask 'Where were you when the first Jesus Jones album was released?' too often, do ya? Not too many black armbands and silent vigils in the park when Gene Loves Jezebel packed it in. Nobody trampled to death when the kids rushed the stage to be nearer Inspiral Carpets. So what's this vaguely-groovy-in-a-bandy-legged-Limey-fashion analgesic-rock you've got in the background?"
 "That would be The Charlatans U.K., Melting Pot (Beggars Banquet)."
"Ah, yes, a seventy-five-minute stroll down Hazy Recollection Lane. The stuff of Electric Lucozade Acid Tests U.K.-wide. From the evidence here, it looks like they managed to sustain a decent career over there - not saying much for a country that forces its citizens to buy another copy of Definitely Maybe every few months as a show of civic pride, but still - even though, of all these songs, the only one I know is, uh..."
"'The Only One I Know'?"
"Thank you. This certainly isn't bad, mind you, just amiably faceless like most of that... I forget, were these blokes part of the Madchester scene? Or was it one of the regional offshoots, Daftford or Wiggedstershire or Maladroitwich or something?... Doesn't matter. As I move through the disc, I dunno, I start getting wistful in spite of, maybe even because this band and all like them really added next to nothing to rock history. They may have carried on well into the nineties, far past their moment of microglory to the point that the lead singer's inquiries of 'Can you feel it in your soul?' and similar pseudo-anthemic phrases have a knowing sadness to them, as if they realized that people were barely feeling it in their ears by then, but they're of a piece with their time, that brief but shining moment when English groups forgot to be over-ambitious. A breather between apocalyptic concept albums, half-baked literary referentialism, and blues against the Empire. When music meant something by signifying nothing - just a vehicle for getting fucked up on champagne, paracetamol, and Tizer cocktails. Whatever gets you through your O-levels. I'm running low on Anglophilic minutiae here; do you think we can move on?"
 "Fine, then -The Sugarcubes, The Great Crossover Potential (Elektra)."
"Well, you know we were getting desperate for leper messiahs when we started looking for them in Reykjavik. We love our noble savages, don't we? So much so that when the bayou dried up and the dole queue thinned out, we start combing dojos or even, in extreme cases like this, alighting on far-flung islands even the Norsemen wouldn't touch and picking out elfin eccentrics with page-long surnames and first names that sound like a piece of salt beef being dropped into a vat of paraffin. Björk! But we're a fickle lot, aren't we, or maybe we're just lazy - stamping our feet, pleading and cajoling at first: 'Mommy, Mommy, I want that Icelandic pop group for Christmas!' But once we get it, we realize it's too much work - having to clean up all that messy imagery all the time, can't get that tuneless Fred Schneider-type to quit yapping, and all your stuffed animals start chasing after the lead singer - until, even though they keep doing the same stuff that endeared them to you in the first place, the novelty wears off and you wind up putting the whole litter to sleep, except for the smallest, cutest one, which you relegate to a corner, smile at occasionally when it does funny tricks with your newer, trendier acquisitions - 'isn't that cute, she's trying to get my hip-hop and my old Broadway show tunes to mate' - but mostly just keep around as a prestige item to impress your friends before you head off to the mall to buy whatever new, disposable American-made item is getting used once then thrown away the following week. Not the happiest state of affairs, but as long as you keep that busted Third Eye Blind away from the almond-eyed nymph in the corner, it's a circumstance you can live with. Anyway, I get the impression they came along at the right time - I doubt they'd get away with something like 'Birthday' in our current climate."
"Because of the pedophilic implications, you mean?"
"No, because of that 'they're smoking cigars' line. Have sex with minors and sew butterflies in their knickers if you must, but for heaven's sake, don't teach them to smoke!"
"All right, we're just about out of space - I mean, time. Here is the last CD in the stack, Morrissey, My Early Burglary Years (Reprise). May God have mercy on our souls."
"Jesus. Rarely has a record label been so aptly named. Another collection of stray singles tracks, album scrapings and suchlike from the Mancunian mope-meat? Who'da thunk that when he railed against record company repackagings on the last Smiths album - 'double pack with a photograph, extra track and a tacky badge' - it was less bitter satire than a statement of intent? How much longer will his dwindling cult put up with this cynical reconfiguration of songs that all of them already purchased before the light finally goes out? Does this not qualify as the rankest sort of exploitation? Has Mr. Shelfhair no sense of decency or shame? Do you, um, have an extra copy of this?"
"Okay, I think I've heard enough. I don't often do this - as a member of the psychiatric profession, actual curative measures that necessitate the cessation of payment are frowned upon - but it's pretty obvious to me what the root of your problem is and how it can be solved, simply and efficaciously. All you need to do is..."
"Sudden if predictable interruption!"
"Exclamation!" Dr. McAqueaque leapt up from his chair. "What's that?"
"I'm not sure, but I think it's what the Latins call culminatus interruptus. The classic means of delaying gratification, practiced most famously by Norman Mailer at the end of Harlot's Ghost. It's a great way of setting up your readers to expect great things at the end of some overlong piece of ponderosa only to frustrate and infuriate them, often in as few as three words."
"Hmmm, intriguing. And what might those three words be?"
To be continued.
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