“Revolution 1” (The Beatles)

Renounces violent legal and institutional change in the present, in favor of a preliminary project of individual moral reformism (“free your mind”): the final, most sinister implication of the doctrine, “All you need is love.” Backing track downshifts the impulse to “rock” toward quietistic, contemplative, shooby-doo-wop shuffle. The famed altered lyric in this White Album version, “Don’t you know that you can count me out/in,” amounts to a bit of pandering, really, toward all self-styled revolutionists. Let’s compare it to Marx (Groucho, that is), and his more general allergy to community and inclusion: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” Marx will have none of it; Lennon, on the other hand, doesn’t want to be bound to the insurgency and its strictures, but would like to continue to serve as sniping, spiritual advisor from the sidelines. Coming off more than a bit Fabian in inclination (and no, not Fabian Forte), it’s useful to remember that the Fabian Society was named after the general Fabius Maximus (280-203 BC), known as the “Cunctator,” or the “Delayer.” Putting off revolution while remaining comfortably glum.

“East-West” (The Butterfield Blues Band)

From the liner notes: “‘We’re gonna get together and hate the notes.'” Difficult to know which ones. Attempted hybridization of musical “worlds” results in slurring, sitar-like guitar and feedback, while drums anticipate growth of Fusion. But droning bass ostinatos allow Bloomfield to glide on the foundation for the middle seven minutes, sliding evenly between multiple nodes. Still, the problem lies in hemispheric penetration and the production of worldliness. Kind assimilation, but (buried) glimpses of borderlessness.

“The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness” (The Feelies)

Every time you look to an adjacent dwelling, there’s the potential of seeing another “you.” This could be unsettling or, more optimistically, revelatory in certain ways. Building through a one-minute intro, the trax follows a domiciled narrator, water dripping in the background, the kick drum like a heartbeat, and the first of a repeated, single-note guitar figure (in half-time as compared to the ending’s double time). Through a ploddingly fast beat, we learn that the “boy next door” (who is also the singer) is ushering in a new form of averageness: “he doesn’t plan to work too hard” and, unlike “boys” from the gauzy past, he won’t “make [his] parents proud.” Indeed, “this one beats ‘em all.” What are the “bigger” and “better things” that the both the neighbor and singer are into? A general hostility to parenting and a discrete sense of identity that romanticizes teen angst as lovable irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility—to one’s self and to those enclosures that promote it—as first principle in a gesture toward promising, shared identity.

“Head Like a Hole” (Nine Inch Nails)

Self-mastery, self-sufficiency, self-assertion (blisteringly) in the face of endless, plodding, abyssal hollowing-out by capital and the marketplace (“god money”). Backwards understanding of the broken and the fixed. Wanted: band which advocates hollowing-out in response to capital’s call to assert the self.

“Igneous” (AMM)

Ongoing attempt to rewrite the rules of improv. Unlike, say, jazz improvisation, it’s difficult here to discern much in the way of traditional themes and variations, call and response, etc. Under the rubric, The Nameless Uncarved Block, the goal of the project is to avoid form, and to focus instead on the matter itself, enacting a kind of Marxian materialism. With patience, one can recognize the guitar, the piano, and the like, as the instruments’ physical possibilities are patiently explored and potentially exploded. But the problem with the materialist orientation brings one to a classic différance: as soon as matter becomes coherent (is read as “igneous,” for example), one already has given up on that which is “nameless” and has invoked an implicit form.

“Constant in Opal” (The Church)

Similar to their other trax riffing on exploration (“Columbus,” “Destination,” and even a cover of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer”), here The Church turns inward toward the form(al)-bound. Perhaps centering on Australia (a prolific “producer” of opal) or Afghanistan (ultramarine/lapus lazuli), location is only part of the problem. “Swarming like carrion birds,” “puzzled travelers” and their “words” find nothing for all their digging despite the promise of finding “yourself” in the related search for luxurious goods (after the requisite narrative cuts and polishing). Following the initial rhymes in each verse, there’s a funny word association: wealth—melt; words—birds; flowers—showers; and the third verse shifts the initial rhyming term from the second to first line while seemingly moving the analogical toward a reversed causal. Geological identity as another historiographical exercise, while our lives are lived in a “shaft”—groping for ourselves and stratabound.

“All the Young Dudes” (David Bowie)

Mott the Hoople’s far more famous version is so welcoming in its vocal outro: “I want to hear you, I want to see you, and I want to relate to you.” Thus, Ian Hunter firmly positions the song on the side of the glam “dudes,” while Bowie’s original take on them is relentlessly ambivalent. Yes, “I got T. Rex,” but in order to really get it, “man, I need a T.V.,” too. Bowie puts his finger on glam’s worrying teletechnological supplement: the “television man is crazy,” and anti-rock, but if I smash the boob tube I won’t see this week’s “Top of the Pops,” or the latest Russell Harty or Bob Harris interview with Marc. This concern, of course, redounds on Ziggy, who worked and shopped his television image as hard as anyone. Two strategies remain possible: abandoning entirely the image of the pop idol (purity), or unworking the mediascape as a pop artiste (parasite).

“96 Tears” (? and the Mysterians)

Originally entitled “69 Tears,” and decency standards only foreground the dislocating effects of paternalism and love (of the sculpted social world): even when lovers face each other, their backs are against the wall and against each other simultaneously. Dumpee-turns-dumper storyline ends with singer crying, highly aware that gendered social emplacements always end in the requisite tears. Implied race politics: can the naming (“?”) ever avoid complicity in a world of counting?