Elephant dancing: the who, the what, the wow, and the why

Interview, June, 2006 by Greil Marcus

1 SARAH BERNHARDT

L'Aiglon, from In Performance (no label)

At the Jewish Museum in New York, near the end of the exhibition "Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama," which closed April 2, there was, after rooms of posters, costumes, books, photographs, and silent film clips, a listening station. What you heard was four minutes from Rostand's L'Aiglon, starring Bernhardt (1844-1923) as the son of Napoleon, recorded for Edison in 1910--or rather what you heard was a wire being drawn through a body as its voice refused death: Not yet, not yet, Bernhardt seems to say, not until I have said what I have to say, and what I have to say is, Why? Why? I played it over and over; I couldn't believe I would have to walk out of the building and never hear it again. In the museum gift shop, they were sold out of almost everything, including "Who Do You Think You Are, Sarah Bernhardt?" T-shirts. But they still had copies Of this CD.

2 FRANK BLACK

Honeycomb (Back Porch)

The Pixies' singer; he recorded in Nashville, but he made a Memphis album--with, among many more Bluff City musicians, Reggie Young, guitarist on Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man." A highlight is "Song of the Shrimp," one of the most reviled Elvis movie songs, which with a laconically inebriated voice Black turns into a surreal folk ballad on the order of "Froggy Went A-Courtin'." Before that comes "Go Find Your Saint," with a rough voice riding a melody so sweet the singer's dirty coat seems to shine, and before that, with Black's voice high and slipping, is the most defenseless version of "Dark End of the Street" ever made.

3 THE WALLFLOWERS

"God Says Nothing Back" from Rebel, Sweetheart (Interscope)

Occasionally this single resurfaces on the radio out of the murk of last year, and everything around it feels cheap. With a stoic backbeat and Jakob Dylan's fatalistic way of biting off his words, this is the sound of someone thinking--about insignificance, in the pop world, in the real world.

4 CINDY BULLENS

Dream #29 (Let's Play/Blue Lobster)

In 1978, at 23, she made "High School History": If you pull out all the stops you can do stuff in high school they'll be talking about for years, but they stopped talking years ago. Now she's in her early fifties--and on an album about self-delusion, divorce, and pulling out all the stops, she concedes nothing.

5 IBM COMMERCIAL

"What Makes You Special?"

You see armies of determined men and women in suits like armor, in crowded elevators, marching down corridors, every one of them mouthing the Kinks' absolutely ferocious 1966 "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"--and, my God, for an instant nobody is.

6 YEAH YEAH YEAHS

Show Your Bones (Interscope)

All you read about them is how soon they'll be huge. The music is judged according to whether or not it will make that happen, and despite the fact that Karen O has a voice as human as it is urgent, she seems to judge herself on the same terms. Better than all that here: "Cheated Hearts"; the "Telstar" guitar solos in "Turn Into."

7 AMAZON.COM

Editorial Reviews

"Who writes this stuff?." asks my friend Steve Weinstein, passing this on, typos and all: "Jewel is about to deliver her most personal and autobiographical record so far--Goodbye Alice in Wonderland. Not content to relegate herself to a traditional music areana, or to be typecase, Jewel has established herself as a culturally significant and relevant brand."

8 PRINCE

3121 (Universal)

His version of "The Playboy Philosophy," circa 1962.

9 DEREK McCULLOCH & SHEPHERD HENDRIX

Stagger Lee (Image Comics)

On Christmas night 1895, in Bill Curtis's saloon in St. Louis, "Stag" Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons; by the time Shelton died in prison in 1912, he was more legend than flesh. In this blazing graphic novel--part folklore, part love story, part thrilling Law & Order episode with a deadpan denouement--helton hears a guitarist in the next cell playing the "Stackalee" song: "That song about me." No, says the singer: "I think Stackalee from Memphis." There are endless subtleties here--taken from the historical record when it's there, invented with the lightest touch when it's not--and, somehow, no resolution at all. Not after more than a hundred years, thousands of singers, and likely thousands more to come.

10 DEVIN McKINNEY A.K.A. DECLAN MAcMANUS

Popwithashotgun.blogspot.com, March 21

Too perfect: "I had a vision after watching The Sopranos the other night that the last show would end with Tony dying in Carmela's arms, and that the last song of all would be 'Poor Side of Town,' by Johnny Rivers."

Greil Marcus is Interview's music writer at large. Above: Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Photo: ALIYA NAUMOFF.