Real life rock

ArtForum, Dec, 1996 by Jon Savage

8 JUNIOR VASQUEZ: remix of "Wave Speech" by Peter Lazonby (Brainiak). Lazonby's original is another fifteen-minute ambient trip - meditative and romantic - but Vasquez rips it up into a heart-stopping stomper that does what all great dance records do: insist that you live every moment as if it was your last. With a sampled female vocal as orgasmic as the Nuyorican voice on Raze's House classic Break 4Love, an explicit drug reference in the repeated, awestruck "high," and traces of the original's cosmic intentions (the Timothy Leary-type voice chanting: "Rising, floating, flowering"), this organ-drenched remix is perfectly poised between the city and country, between the spiritual and the sexy, between the sacred and the profane - as rare and as powerful as a blue moon.

9 R.E.M.: "New Test Leper" (New Adventures in Hi-Fi: Warner Brothers). R.E.M.'s best record for years has been lost in the publicity surrounding their new $80 million Warner Brothers deal, but this is exactly what they're paid to do. Singing intimately, Michael Stipe takes on a plain-folks persona ideally suited to the group's mid-paced folk rock: that of an unspecified outcast (who could easily be an AIDS sufferer) participating in the brutality of today's media bear pit - the ritual humiliation practiced by daytime-TV talk shows. Cut off by a commercial break, he can't get his point across: "I thought I might help them understand," he muses, but his anger breaks out in the vocal whiplash on the word "leper."

10 KULA SHAKER: "Tattva" (from K: Sony). With its youthful (early twenties) energy and Sanskrit lyric, Tattva was a sensational midsummer UK hit: falling within Britpop's mid-'60s fetish but building out from its sitar affectations into an apparently sincere spirituality. For a moment, Kula Shaker looked like a perfectly overproduced, androgynous 1968 pop group but with their next record, "Hey Dude," they reversed into tomorrow - allying 1969 riff-rock with the vaunting machismo of a lyric like "you treat me like a woman when I feel like a man." In this respect, Kula Shaker reflect all too well the needlessly conservative sex/gender attitudes of Britpop: scared of what?

11 BLACK STAR LINER: "Duggie Dhol" (from Yemen Cutta Connection: EXP Records). A predominantly Anglo-Asian ensemble from Bradford, Black Star Liner has also benefited from the formal and structural possibilities of electronic music: the ability to meld anything you want with a house beat, the freedom offered by home production and independent labels. Outstripping white rock's fascination with the sitar with a perfect blend of Indian classical and cheese pop, of West and East, "Duggie Dhol" features Cornershop's Tjinder Singh on guest vocal, recorded in Punjabi, as live and distorted as a holy man calling the village to prayer. Near the end, you begin to get it, as Singh rants away: "IBM, IBM, IBM. . . . COCA COLA!"

12 SOFT CELL: "Youth" and "Sex Dwarf" (from Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret: Mercury/Sire). The UK TV show "Top of the Pops" has taken to showing archive videos alongside its usual chart rundown. One week, they showed Soft Cell rampaging through "Tainted Love" - the biggest selling record of 1981 in the UK. Broadcast in between timid groups of Britpop lads - Ocean Colour Scene, Cast, et al. - they suddenly looked sensational: provocative, conceptual, revealing a deeply buried part of the British psyche, of which Northern camp is just a part. This segue encompasses Soft Cell's ambition, swinging from the best pop song ever written about old age ("Youth") to all-out perv-fest of "Sex Dwarf": bad boy fantasies exposed and turned into liberation through sheer glee, humor and those monstrous gay disco bass lines. The early '80s revival starts here.