Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus

“Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” from
More Rock ’n’ Roll Rarities From the Golden Age of Chess Records
(Chess/MCA reissue, 1956) In Richard Meltzer’s
The Aesthetics of Rock
(first published in 1970, soon to be reissued by Da Capo), one can read that “Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’ predicts in 1957 the later outbreak of African nationalism, ‘It’s way too early for the
congo
/So keep a-rockin’ that piano.’” This sort of absurdist connection is a good part of what listening to rock ’n’ roll is all about: the immediacy of the music transposing itself into an epistemology of simultaneity. Still, reading Meltzer, you automatically think: Berry must have meant “the
conga
,” the dance, meaning “too early” as too-early-in-the-evening-for-such-a-stomp. Here, with the original demo of “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” one discovers that Berry did say, did mean, “conga”—which is to say that one must base a whole way of understanding rock ’n’ roll on a slip of the tongue.
    APRIL 7, 1987
    1 Lonnie Mack, “Why,” from
The Wham of That Memphis Man!
(Alligator reissue, 1963) This tune offers a false choice: listening to the most stately ballad in the annals of white blues, or listening to a man kill himself. The choice is false because in the last verse you don’t get to choose.
    2 Tina Turner, “What You Get Is What You See” (Capitol) Not the track from the conformist
Break Every Rule
. Here, producer Terry Brittan takes a melody with the fervor of Graham Parker’s “Nobody Hurts You,” orchestrates it with the guitar-hero momentum of Dire Straits’ “Expresso Love,” explodes it with the kinetic release of the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered,” then challenges the singer to beat the band.
    3 Pussy Galore,
Pussy Gold 5000
(Buy Our Records EP) I hate the way language is corrupted by people who use born-dead neologisms as if they were alive, as if they were more than shortcuts for dopes too lazy or hip to say what they mean, as with “take,” putatively a noun signifying one’s perspective on a given phenomenon, the pervasive employment of the word hiding its reduction of all perspective to an effete glance, as if nothing were worth more, as in “Holden Caulfield’s takes on the world” (
Voice
, March 17), or “Marx’s take on political economy” (my paranoid fantasy, until I saw a version of it in these pages), or, youknow, Noah’s take on the Flood: “Big, isn’t it?” Fuck off and die, cretins.
    4 Mickey Rourke,
Angel Heart
(Tri-Star) Mouthing Bob Seger’s “Feel Like a Number,” Rourke came up with the only emotionally credible moments in
Body Heat
; he’s had lead roles ever since, but this is the first time he’s sustained the nervous, slimy, nihilistic tension of that performance for a whole movie.
    5 Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Scrap-heap,” from
Track Rehearsals 1977
(KO bootleg EP, UK) They swallowed a lot of what made a difference in the Sex Pistols’ England; save for “Nicotine Stain” on
The Scream
, their first album, this is the only piece they were able to spit out.
    6 Elvis Costello, aka Various Artists, “Blue Chair” from
Out of Our Idiot
(Demon, UK) A blur on
Blood and Chocolate
, this version is pure pop craft. It’s in the lift of the chorus—which, every time it comes around, seems to come out of nowhere.
    7 Richard Krawlec,
Time Sharing
(Penguin) In this sickeningly convincing novel about a white couple so economically marginal they have become almost socially illiterate, when the woman turns on her transistor, “She swore she knew the words to the ads better than she knew the songs”—but so do most of us, and thus for a moment this fact makes easy sense. What doesn’t make easy sense is a larger