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Rating: Quiet please performance in progress...
In 1996 in New York, the sheriff-mayor policy of Rudolph Giuliani has already started, in fact, he is one year away from the end of his first term. The city, after a decade of yuppie leadership over the rest of America and the world, has finally become the post-modern hell of many novels and thousands of films. Politically speaking, it was precisely thanks to this flourishing of criminals that New York effectively became a separate state, a Disunited State of America: its security policy is akin to a disguised war, the mental state is one of a police state, and the social state is one of alertness. To this day, whether that remedy was better or worse than the evil we cannot ascertain, considering the temporal proximity of those events and taking into account how many and what things made and continue to make New York the city of upheavals, from "Sex And The City" to September 11, 2001.
But we remain in that 1996: New York is no longer the city of the American dream, capitalism is ruthless and self-referential, ordinary people are afraid to relate and live: a disposable decade has distracted consciences. Once upon a time, one would die (or kill) for an ideal, now one might die (or kill) for a refrigerator: thus, more or less, you will find written in "La Porta Proibita" by Tiziano Terzani, only that the great city that the great Tiziano spoke of was not the New York of yuppie decadence but the Beijing of Maoism's decline: the depreciation of the intrinsic value of the reasons for finding death is the index of the deterioration of civilizations, whether capitalist or socialist or whatever else. In New York too, one could be killed over an apartment theft (though a refrigerator is a bit hard to steal) or one might end up killed by a zero-tolerance cop for having committed or attempted to commit that crime.
As with all painful phases of an inevitable metamorphosis, intellectuals and artists, the most sensitive souls and sharpest minds, sense the change, feel the symptoms of the painful process more strongly, and suffer more deeply from it. Deep down, however, they learn to live with the pain better. Ric Ocasek, a yuppie who rode through the eighties until the last possible month, a man, as you will find written somewhere, very inclined to the avant-garde but who always preferred the charts, no longer has the twenty years of his times with the Cars. Literally tired of going on perpetual tours, he had almost entirely abandoned his pop rock and plastic synth beat inspirations to give rise to a serious, dark, cold form of authorship. He brings to this project at hand and dedicates to his city cryptic and hyper-clear lyrics, music - mostly bases - icy and/or danceable but easily linked to his style. His attitude is to capture the moment, develop the detail, enlarge it, and make the sense perceived. If it is the details that make the difference, then he is the cold, analytical documentary maker of that state of things. Accustomed to a New York in perpetual creative ferment, disciple of Andy Warhol, surfer on the waves of mass-market music in the eighties, minimalist poet, New York-dependent, he cannot help but let that slight but incessant despair for what the city had become, show. Inside the booklet of his darkest and most extreme album, "Negative Theater," he wrote that at the beginning of his career he would spend nights moving from house to house, from new friend to new friend, fitting his lanky two meters into their bathtubs. Trying to live like that again in New York in 1996 is unthinkable. Ric, who from the disposable U.S.A. philosophy has had it all, wealth, fame, a super top model for a wife and if I am not mistaken five kids, observes from his apartment at the top of the skyscraper, spies on lives, takes notes for every street corner, but does not delve into the more evident, more sensationalistic but ultimately more predictable aspects: he wants the detail, he who is so minimal that his two meters weigh barely fifty kilos. And he stays there, observing those ants below declaring war over crumbs, and talks about it in a whisper as a documentarian would in the savannah among beasts.
Gillian McCain, by now who knows what happened to her but very well known in the U.S.A. for an exceptional book that captured punk with the right detachment and utmost completeness, while still using the same statements from its top players, with a daring collage of statements made by the stars, not when the games were over but as the phenomenon was ongoing, she is in her red brick house in the suburbs, and one time you can find her in the kitchen and the next in the bedroom. If for Ocasek every man should have taken self-defense lessons, for Gillian men are fluids: seed, saliva, sweat, blood, beer, gasoline... Hers is an internalized lyric, digested and evacuated. Words that nourish, but which I imagine are rotten, and thoughts putrefied like expired food. And still outbursts, invocations, diarism, confessions. There is almost always an eye on the sexual aspect, on the painful meaning of having to metabolize all the world's defeats, to have to incorporate them into oneself, and the New York woman cannot but do this through that opening.
And if Gillian seeks the transcendental to liberate herself, or truly to attempt reconciliation, to curse it as to seek its help, Alan Vega... Well, Alan Vega is always himself. After "Listen Up, Saint Francis," obviously from McCain, he comes in with the entirely opposite mood, debuting with "Messiaaaa? Yu-uh Messiaaaaaaa?" almost to provoke him, almost to say "why don't you step forward?", like a new fearless enemy for yet another good, beautiful and banal superbeing. Vega thus proliferates where Ocasek wanders armored and equipped with detection systems, and where McCain plunges dressed in a white sheet like a virginal martyr, secretly promising herself eternal peace and the glory of God or a superior of his.
And then Vega invites you to breathe deeply the smell of war, to unleash hell in your life, to declare your hostility to this world and every other possible world. The result is a hopping spleen, almost always danceable, almost never contemplative but pure action, almost always directed at rushing toward this end, since it would be inevitable.
Ocasek is the brain, McCain the lower abdomen, and Vega is the gut.
The music genre is called "spoken word", a genre that boasts some notable examples, for instance the remaining Doors when they set Morrison's poems to music, but almost everything is in Ocasek's hands, who has been offering exemplars on every album since the distant "Candy-O" and of Vega, a dancing crooner like a satyr over the most skewed rhythms and the most Piranesian geometries since the times of no-wave with Suicide. McCain mostly limits herself to a much more traditional recitation over a carpet of noise and Ocasekian sounds.
The snapshot of a declining east, with artists outside the big numbers circuit who are there consuming their own obsessions and the stories they tell themselves, them who ended up being part of an elite and therefore do not know how to reconnect with the masses, and very likely no longer even know how to recognize them. A rollercoaster inside a horror tunnel dug under a city that, having stopped growing, begins to self-devour. A ride through a glossy black hell.
Get Your Ticketz!!!
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