Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus Page B

effort, where “Paul Simon’s next album promises to be another eclectic trendsetter. The multi-Grammy winner is recording an album in faraway Minneapolis with a local musician named ‘Prince’ who plays what the natives refer to as ‘funk.’ Says Simon, ‘I heard a tape of this wonderfully joyous music at Sting’s. . . . He said it was simply titled 1999, and I went crazy trying to track down the artist. . .’ ”
    8 Culturcide, “Industrial Band,” from
Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-revolutionary America
(no label) Citing Lautréamont on the necessity of plagiarism, these Houston illegals bent on the exposure of pop as a false consciousness machine play other people’s hit records and sing their own words over them. They can’t get here from there—can’t get off the records and into the social milieu they want to talk about—but that leaves one small classic, which underneath is still Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band”: “Now, these fine ladies, they had a plan/They was out to meet the boys in the band/They said, ‘C’mon, dudes, let’s have sex!’/But we just talked about child abuse and Hitler’s SS . . .”
    9 Wim Mertens,
Educes Me
(Crepuscule, Belgium) On a day so bad it seemed every other person I saw deserved to die, I walked into a record store that was playing this piano-and-incomprehensible-vocal item by the man who also works as Soft Verdict. It sounded like 17th century cathedral music, composed after the mass had been celebrated and everyone had gone home—though it turns out the melodies are cheap pop spun into a web of preciosity. It calmed me down like cold medicine kicking in.
    10 Elvis Costello, “I Want You” (San Jose Civic Auditorium, April 16) Quietly diseased on disc, performed solo this is a horror movie that doesn’t need special effects:
The Servant
, maybe, or
M
. The words, “I want you” alternate every other line with collapsing scenes of torture, flagellation, remorse, bloody glee; at first you’re convinced it’s all happening in the singer’s mind, next that it’s happening in the flesh. “I want you/And when I
wake up
,” Costello sang, just as he does on
Blood and Chocolate
—and then he pulled the string. Hanging onto the end of it were Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, who came tumbling into the song like new victims: “—and put on my
makeup
/I say a little prayer for you/Because I
want
you . . .”
    JUNE 2, 1987
    1 The Mad Peck,
Mad Peck Studios—A Twenty-Year Retrospective
(Doubleday) The adventures of a band of comic-strip rock critics whose watchword is “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t headed straight to cut-out heaven” (typical subjects include Donny Iris, the
Idolmaker
soundtrack, and the second Human Sexual Response LP), this picks up where Richard Meltzer’s
The Aesthetics
of Rock
left off. Best concept: the “Inflatable Meat Loaf Love Doll.” Best plot: faced with sky-rocketing doo-wop prices, a former member of the Five Royal-Keys hijacks a plane to come up with the money to buy a copy of his own 45.
    2 Suzanne Vega, “Luka” (A&M) Despite her insufferable recitations and her coy way with words (tunes published by Waifersongs, Ltd.), this woman isn’t merely a wilting flower to be pressed between pages of Tennyson. She’s also a natural hit-maker, Janis Ian ’87, and “Luka” does for wife-beating what “Society’s Child” did for racism. Better, Vega can make her singing seem like real talk: skirting a good melody and ignoring a bell-ringing guitar solo, her phrasing is so naturalistic it sounds as eerie as the female vocal in Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.”
    3 Elko Ishioka and Arata Isozakl, “Performance” installation,
Tokyo: Form and Spirit
(San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)