CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

BY

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

THE BEASTIE BOYS "Licensed To III"

(Def Jam)

The wisecracking arrogance of this record is the only rock ’n’ roll attitude that means diddley right now. With the mainstream claimed by sincere Craftspersons and the great tradition of Elvis Presley, Esquerita, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Madonna sucked into a cultural vacuum by nitwit anarchists and bohemian sourpusses, three white jerkoffs and their crazed producer are set to go platinum-plus with “black” music that’s radically original, childishly simple, hard to play, and accessible to anybody with two ears and an ass. Drinking and robbing and rhymihg and pillaging, the Beasties don’t just thumb their noses at redeeming social importance—they pull out their jammies and shoot it in the cookie puss. If you don’t like the joke, you might as well put your money where your funnybone is and send a check to the PMRC.

A

BOSTON “Third Stage"

(MCA)

Never again can us wise-asses call it corporate rock without thinking twice. Whatever possessed Tom Scholz to spend seven years refining this apparently unoccupied articulation of an art-metal thought extinct years ago, it wasn’t megaplatinum ambition. In fact, it would appear to be self-expression. If Scholz seems more hobbyist than artist, more Trekkie than Blind Boy Grunt, that’s no reason to get snobbish. And no reason to listen, either.

C

BURNING SPEAR "People Of The World"

(Slash)

Like many angry young men before him, Winston Rodney has mellowed with the gathering of years and assets. And like many angry young men before him, he’s surrendered some edge. Innate musicality plus the right cushy production will sometimes benefit victims of this syndrome, and here he finds the formula, keyed to a horn section that happens to comprise three American women. So all hail unity and the honorable disc-race.

B +

DAVID BYRNE "Songs From True Stories"

(Sire)

It isn’t not all as archly mawkish as the rearranged dreamsongs from his group’s worst album. Pretentiously dinky is more the prevailing mood—a soundtrack only, like so many arty soundtracks before it. One where Byrne, Meredith Monk, the Kronos Quartet, and some locals who couldn’t have known what they were getting into do for Texas what Byrne & Eno did for Africa.

C +

CAMEO “Word Up"

(Atlanta Artists)

Larry'Blackmon’s a funny drummer, and I wouldn’t say albums are something he just gets away with. But not for nothing did Vince Aletti name “The Single Life” after his last significant effort. So buy the 12-inch. And if you want more, wait for the best-of his current masterpiece makes inevitable.

B

EASTERHOUSE "Contenders"

(Columbia)

Like so many leftist ideologues before them, they make promises they can’t keep. “Out On Your Own” opens side one by calling the Red Wedge’s bluff, “Get Back To Russia” opens side two with praise of Leningrad in spring, and then it’s mostly uniform arena-jangle. But lately they’ve been surpassing their quotas: those two songs are among the four 1986 copyrights, as is the equally notable “Nineteen Sixty Nine.” So maybe the future will actually be brighter, for once.

B

FISHBONE "In Your Face"

-(Columbia)

Last time they looked like sons of P-Funk and sounded like sons of Frank Yankovic’s dotage, which suggested their stock in trade was cognitive dissonance. This time they look like 2-Tone fashion plates and sound like bigtime new wave satirists, which suggests their stock in trade is haircuts. Uniting the two phases is their sense of rhythm or lack of same.

B-

HUNGRY FOR WHAT “The Shattered Dream"

(Better Youth)

Black up the leader’s cuspids and change their name to Garageland or London Calling and they could play any tribute bar between Boston and D.C. Only difference is they write their own anthems and don’t fake any Cockney—when you start out in German, singing English is tribute enough. And though they won’t make you love it, I bet they could make you like it—there’s more spirit in their frank, admiring imitation than in the ersatz originality of whichever hybrid is tearing up the alternative playlists this week.

B

KOOL & THE GANG “Forever”

(Mercury)

If in 1973 I’d been told that 13 years hence Casey Kasem would name a then ghettoized funk group as the top singles act of the ’80s, my heart would have swelled until my head interjected it that the top singles act of the ’70s was the Osmond family. In this I would have been wise. And if I’d then been told that the secret of Kool’s success would be a bland black singer named James Taylor, I would have observed that he couldn’t possibly be worse than our white one. In this I would have been unduly optimistic.

C-

THE MIGHTY LEMON DROPS "Happy Head"

(Sire)

These shamblers do sometimes twist the cliches gently in an attempt to bring them back to life—the gurl who’s “Like An Angel” is stuck up, for instance. But mostly they rely on guitars sorpewhat more punkish in attack than those of the countless American bands who’ve been working the same garage-pop angle since long before the Brits invented it.

C +

MOTORHEAD "Orgasmatron”

(GWR/Profile)

I admire metal’s integrity, brutality and obsessiveness, but I can’t stand its delusions of grandeur—the way it apes and misapprehends reactionary notions of nobility. One thing I like about Lemmy is that he’s proud to be a clod, common as muck and dogged in his will to make himself felt as just that. Add that rarest of metal virtues, a sense of humor, which definitely extends to the music’s own conventions, as on the lead cut of his first album in three litigationpacked years: “Deaf Forever,” a good enough joke right there (especially for Sabbaf fans), it turns out to be a battlefield anthem—about a corpse. And then add Bill Laswell, who was born to make megalomania signify: where most metal production gravitates toward a dull thud that highlights the shriek of the singer and the comforting reverberation of the signature guitar, Laswell’s fierce clarity cracks like a whip, inspiring Lemmy, never a slowpoke in this league, to bellow one called “Built For Speed.” Result: work of art.

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A-

IGGY POP “Blah-Blah-Blah”

(A&M)

You should point out that The Idiot and Lust For Life were cut with the Bowie of Low and “Heroes” while Blah-Blah-Blah was cut with the Bowie of Let’s Dance and “Dancing In The Streets.” Or you could surmise that copping to conscience did even less for Ig than finding true love did for Chrissie Hynde.

C +

THE SCREAMING BLUE MESSIAHS “Gun-Shy”

(Elektra)

If Hungry for What is Garageland Calling, these pros are the London Sandinistas— strictly roots punks who can play their axes. I don’t mean ex-punks, either. They bury those roots except when they need a hook, and age has not withered nor custom staled their compulsion to snarl at the military-industrial complex and the girl next door.

B +

“SOMETHING WILD”

(MCA)

From the oppressive Top Gun to the not unattractive Pretty In Pink, the predictabilityin-diversity of the soundtrack album typifies promo’s noveltly fetishism, and if this one’s no different, at least it’s better. Not only does Jonathan Demme do right by found exotica like Sonny Okossun, he knows how to specialorder it, from a David Byrne-Celia Cruz duet to Sister Carol’s saucy reggae “Wild Thing.” He even gets songs that don’t need pictures from eternal sidemen Steve Jones and Jerry Harrison—though not from Oingo Boingo’s indefatigable Danny Elfman, or from eternal once-was Jimmy Cliff.

B +

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND “Live/1975-85”

(Columbia)

Any event this public will provoke backlash, and any album this monumental is sure to arouse unreasonable expectations and unlikely to satisfy all the reasonable ones. So if not one of the eight songs from Born In The U.S.A. improves on the studio version, how bad does that make them? If what little remains of the mid-’70s shows that turned him into a legend is overblown enough to make you wonder if you got taken, trust yourself. If the three new originals and four covers don’t leap out, figure they weren’t supposed to. This album is about continuity and honest reassurance, a job very well done. Although it takes some smart chances (e.g., “War”), it wasn’t meant to shock or enlighten or redefine—it was meant to sum up, and it does. There isn’t one of its 10 sides that excites me end to end, and there isn’t one I couldn’t play with active pleasure now or five years from now. If anything, it isn’t long enough.

A-

TALKING HEADS “True Stories”

(Sire)

These songs were conceived for a movie, rarely an efficient way to initiate an aural experience. Yet they’re real songs, not detached avant-garde atmospherics, and honest though David Byrne’s sympathy may (I said may) be, they leach their vitality from traditions' that demand more heart than he ordinarily coughs up. Interesting they remain. But no way the rhetorical gris-gris of “Papa Legba” or the evangelical paranoia of “Puzzling Evidence” or (God knows) the escapist solace of "Dream Operator” is gonna fascinate like “Crosseyed And Painless” or “Slippery People”—for one thing, Byrne lets us know what the new songs mean, which ain’t much. Do they rock, you want to know? Oh yes they do.

B

RANDY TRAVIS “Storms Of Life”

(Warner Bros.)

With his rotogravure cover and spare instrumentation, Nashville’s hot new thing cultivates an aura of neotraditionalist quality, as is the fashion these days. Fortunately, the quality at least is real. He sounds like an unspoiled John Anderson singing the material of a lucky George Strait. The two hits are the two side-openers and are the two best, and neither could have been written by anybody who didn’t work nine-to-five thinking up puns and angles.

B +

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN & DOUBLE TROUBLE “Live Alive”

(Epic)

Formally, this is generic live double—four prev unrec tunes, most of the 10 remakes a minute or two looser. But Vaughan wasn’t made for the studio—live is the only concept he has any feel for. His material blooms with a little weeding, his big throaty moan gathers heat under a spotlight, and the dumbfounding legato eloquence of his guitar rolls mightily down his band’s expert arena-boogie groove. As a bonus, he ends by reminding his yahooing Texans about Africa: “I may be white, but I ain’t stupid”—vamp, vamp—“and neither are you.”

A-

JOE LOUIS WALKER “Cold Is The Night”

(Hightone)

Producer-penned songs begin and fancy up each side, which is half the Hightone story— this would be one more piece of moderately sharp spit-and-shuffle blues without that spitand-polish. The other half is label honchos Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker’s insistence on artists determined to rise above— like Robert Cray, Ted Hawkins, and No Relation Walker, who must have started out emulating both Junior Wells and Buddy Guy and taken it from there.

B +