Schuyler went many rounds with mental instability, variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and depression, from the 1950s on… While his suffering figured in his writing, it was not its creative wellspring; the poems are not visionary, and do not aim to blur the line between sanity and madness. Yet he is often written about as a somewhat saintly figure, especially in later years, a holy fool with an effortless connection to his art.
I’ve never quite understood how the term “art-damaged” became a rock-critical commonplace, but if I had to explain it, I might play my interlocutor Kevin Dunn’s “Nadine.” The 1979 seven-inch makes creased, crushed junk-sculpture out of a 1963 Chuck Berry song, with Dunn’s treated guitar and Tom Grey’s synths holding a blowtorch to the familiar boogie-barrelhouse interplay…
Musically, OK Go and Erykah Baduh have little in common; the artists’ core audiences, even less. But their recent, much-discussed videos are cut from the same cloth. As anyone with an open browser knows, OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” records an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction, which unfolds in an unbroken sequence over the song’s four-minute length. What keeps you watching isn’t so much the mechanism’s can-do engineering as the knowledge that a single untripped wire or errant bowling ball would require starting from scratch.
Despite the LCD’s heft as a singles act and DFA’s traffic with remix culture, Murphy remains, generationally and even temperamentally, a believer in the album form – not as pop music’s “highest” form, but as one of several, each with their own potentials and constraints – and, in context, even the half-baked tracks here serve the honorable function of cleansing the palate for the more satisfying courses.
A narrator in a motorized wheelchair – played hilariously by Colleen Werthmann as a cross between The Church Lady and Kids in the Hall’s Cancer Boy – gamely offers historical context, until Jackson tires of having his story told by someone else and picks her off with his rifle. “Sometimes you’ve got to shoot the storyteller,” the ensemble sings. “Sometimes you’ve got to kill everyone.”