Real life rock

ArtForum, Oct, 1993 by Greil Marcus

1 Michael Stipe, directed by Peter Care: "Man on the Moon" (Warner Bros.). This is the best video I've seen since Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"--though formally there's nothing unusual about it, just the standard pillaging of the last forty years of American independent cinema. The piece starts off with Michael Stipe striding across a western desert in a cowboy hat, lip-syncing his song about illusion and reality, identity as fact or choice, and the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who at times thought he was a professional wrestler or Elvis Presley. In black and white, split screens, grainy textures, overlit figures, double exposures, fades even within frames, and of course super-fast cutting are used smartly. Not even the way the design matches words to images (when Stipe sings about an asp, you see a snake; when he mentions "Mr. Darwin," you see the pages of a human-evolution textbook flipping) is oppressive. A terrific feeling of empathy, of loss and regret, grows in the piece. The second time Kaufman rises up, like a ghost in the mix, in his Elvis outfit, you know Stipe loved the man.

Stipe hitches a ride on a truck, which drops him, at dusk, at the Easy-Rest Diner (the lyrics say "truck stop"). The way Peter Care brings Stipe to the door is pure Bruce Conner: flashes are piled onto flashes--seemingly hundreds of cuts to move a man a few steps--and it's as quietly thrilling here as it was in 1967, when Conner took you into Jay DeFeo's studio with his film The White Rose. Stipe sits down at the bar and signals for a beer. The expression on his face as he does so (his modesty, his happiness to be in this place) is striking, but no setup for what happens next. The camera begins to move around the bar, picking up old people, young people, men, women, pool players, drinkers, people just standing around in this nameless western place: where they're from. And every one of them is lip-syncing the words to "Man on the Moon."

There's nothing new about this device; as a trick of self-glorification ("I'd like to teach the world to sing--my song") it's as old as MTV. It was used perhaps most famously, and certainly most obnoxiously, by Talking Heads in "Wild, Wild Life," where a bunch of small-town types in David Byrne's vanity film True Stories were trotted onto a stage to mouth snatches of the tune like contestants on The Gong Show. "Man on the Moon" takes place in a different world. Face to face, line by line, what you're seeing and hearing comes across as ordinary conversation: somehow it seems as likely that the weathered old man in the cowboy hat would be saying "Man on the Moon" as "Gimme another one, Joe." The tableau expands--begins to construct itself as a feeling, something shared, the way a song on a jukebox can change a room--and suddenly you realize you don't want this to end. You begin to worry that it will--even though you're not sensing the song nearing its end, you're simply drawn into the bar, this intimate place, part of it.

The cuts are not so fast now. You get to know the faces, the people. The warmth in the room is as physical as the sensation of a cold lifting. The room seems to be swirling, though it's not, there are no more special effects; by this point it's emotion that's moving too fast to keep up with. And then in the midst of this fine conversation, this magical invocation of community in its smallest, most everyday dimensions, the camera gives up a second or two to a blonde woman, smiling to the person she's talking to--not at the camera. The knowledge in that smile, a knowledge that's superior to nothing, that assumes everyone in the room knows what she knows; the pleasure and confirmation as the woman puts her lips around "They put a man on the moon"--it's as perfect a moment as you'll find anywhere, though for you, watching this video, the moment will be somebody else saying the same thing.

2 Heavenly: P.U.N.K. Girl (K Records, Box 7154, Olympia, WA 98507). A five-song ep that's stronger than last year's lp Le Jardin de Heavenly, and more playful: you can imagine Emma Thompson fronting this English band, even if you know it's sweet-voiced Amelia Fletcher, joined by three men and one Cathy Rogers on vocals. Heavenly's idea of play, though, is to pull the rug out from under you. "Hearts and Crosses" starts off in a lacy virgin's bedroom, and the air is filled with flowers, angels, fantasies of true love ("How would it feel to hold him for real? To whisper 'I love you' and lean on his shoulder?"). The tone is sunny, confident, friendly, cool--like the Jamies' 1958 hit "Summertime, Summertime." This is classic pop, you've heard it forever--but never, it seems in the moment, with such convincing delicacy. Then the tune breaks, and there's a flat, spoken, rhymed narrative about date rape. It's rough: "He bit her hard but never kissed her." Fletcher's voice never rises, and when the tune comes back, the tone hasn't altered a bit from the opening--just the story, which is now about ruin, not betrayal so much as memories that can't be erased.