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Thursday, August 07, 2008
I WALK BY YOUR HOUSE
The Individuals
Plexus : 1982
Available on: Fields/Aqua Marine
Bar/None: 2008
[Buy It]
SHAME, SHAME
Sloan
Twice Removed
DGC : 1994
[Buy It]
FOR SHAME OF DOING WRONG
Richard and Linda Thompson
Pour Down Like Silver
Hannibal : 1975
[Buy It]
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME
The Harmonettes
Til Dalight
CES : 1975
Available on: Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up
Numero Group: 2006
[Buy It]
ASHAMED
Black Merda
Chess : 1967
Available on: The Folks From Mother’s Mixer
Funky Delicacies: 2005
[Buy It]
IT'S A SHAME
Alton Ellis
Studio One : c. 1975
Available on: Studio One Funk
Soul Jazz : 2004
[Buy It]
SHAME
Lewis Taylor
Stoned
Hacktone Records: 2005
[Buy It]
I was fifteen and in love with a girl who couldn't have cared less. She offered me a cough drop and I swooned. I folded the wrapper in quarters and kept it for years. We'd been thrown together at my high school for the performing arts: I'd written a one-act play and she'd been chosen to direct it. Which meant hours, weeks, months of stammering torture, of suppressing any evidence of feelings I didn't want to have insofar as they simply weren't cool. I wasn't cool either, though I think I feigned it successfully. If nothing else, I had the best record collection of anyone I knew. This grotesque bit of overcompensation--it was mix-tape heaven, the mother of all audio love letters--was itself embarrassing. Sure, I had some fabulous Bowie bootleg no one else knew existed, but it was always with a vague sense of shame I dropped the needle for my friends, since owning the record in the first place meant I'd spent sweaty-palmed afternoons prowling for vinyl all by myself. Time I might've spent otherwise, had I been socially able. Certain songs, however, mitigated this. I may have been a glam-rock obsessive, may have papered my walls with pictures of Eno and Bowie and the New York Dolls--anodyne androgynes who didn't need to own up to anything, least of all their true sexuality--but when I heard The Individuals' "I Walk By Your House," I recognized a kindred expression immediately. Those flatted harmonies, glottal monologue in the middle ("sneak out the backdoor...run down the block"), that morse-code guitar solo in the middle that says what the singer's too tongue-tied to. I dropped it on a tape, for that girl and later for others. If there's a less cool record in my collection, one that gives cleaner articulation of that particular hopelessness that makes one feel most alive, I'm not sure what it is.
Of course, the older I got, the more I craved records that would out me in just this way. I lost (or at least tempered) my interest in glam and turned to punk rock instead, what was too heated to be cool, and then to soul music, wherein cool was largely beside the point. Sure, there was Wicked Pickett and the thick mantling of titles that lay upon Soul Brother Number One's Atlas-sized shoulders--pop music was never any cooler than that, really--but even these men ended up, sometimes all too literally, on their knees. So maybe rock-n-roll's true function was to encode embarrassment, that feeling I've seen described (in Anatole Broyard's excellent Kafka Was The Rage) as "a radiance that does not know what to do with itself." I don't know much from radiance, but I've spent all too much of my life feeling ashamed of one thing and the next, from the expected stuff--social and sexual ineptitudes--to the very things that have attempted to remedy those conditions: literacy, record collecting, film snobbery (really, why any of these things appeared even for an instant as possible social promotions is beyond me)...it's been one hideous embarrassment after another. Far worse than knowing too little, the pain of knowing too much. Once, the telephone rang and on the other end was a producer from Comedy Central, wanting to know if I'd be willing to audition as a regular for a show they were putting together, which he described in the wooly summer of 2001 as "Iron Chef for trivia enthusiasts...We understand you know quite a bit about music." I winced as he served up the evidence: my high score on the recently-administered Rhino Musical Aptitude Test, that Woodstock for record snobs that used to happen in the parking lot of Tower Records on Sunset. "What's the show called?" I asked him. "Beat the Geek," he said. I hung up the phone on the spot.
Hence a cluster of songs about--or somehow enclosing--shame, that most rock-n-roll emotion, the one I spent my early life avoiding but which I have come (somehow, almost) to seek out actively, since it suggests I am near something worthwhile. Even those old Bowie records (and how I loved the most lunar, the chilliest of them best: Low, and so on) are dear for evoking so thoroughly an adolescent terror. A heterogenous grouping of songs to be sure--gawky Nova Scotian power pop, tropical disco and various stops in between--but I like to think these are all clued in along the same lines: naked we're born and naked we feel, with only a wrapper-sized fig leaf to hide behind. We mightn't need it anyway.Labels: funk, Matthew, power-pop, reggae
posted by Matthew
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