David Krasnow

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  music November 1998

  Christian Marclay

  WHEN CHRISTIAN MARCLAY began spinning other people’s records into his own music around 1980, his only like-minded contemporaries were DJs who used the turntable as both rhythm track and soundbyter, dropping in a little James Brown shout, say, to signify “funky”; their innovations made hiphop the cause célèbre of cultural-studies postmodernists. Marclay, though, hewed to a lo-fi, highbrow avant-gardism, exploring the sonic properties of records to effect his own version of musique concrète; he backed up not MCs but improvisors on the noisy fringe. He seemed to be a high-late-modernist holdout

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  print May 1998

  Lou Reed

  WISELY, LOU REED: ROCK AND ROLL HEART, a documentary airing on PBS, turns the spotlight away from Reed’s influence (“hegemony” might not be too hyperbolic) on rock ‘n’ roll after punk. Instead, director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, better known for his photo portraits of art-world luminaries, troops out some oddball testimonials (Sonic Youth, sure, but Suzanne Vega? Who “wanted to be Lou Reed”?) and says “ecce homo.” But what a man: Reed is the hardest-core New Yorker in the rock pantheon, and New Yorkers make good copy. “As soon as we crossed the Hudson,” Reed relates of a 1968 trip to San

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  print March 1998

  Arto Lindsay

  Time stands still for no artist, so to compare ARTO LINDSAY’s new record Mundo Civilizado (Bar None) to his work twenty years ago might seem unproductive if not banal. Yet in Lindsay’s case, the evolution is fascinating: he seems to have changed species altogether. In his ca. 1980 trio DNA, Lindsay tortured and influential guitar corruptions were dubbed “skronk” by critic Robert Christgau in an inspired onomatopoeia; his vocalizations emulated those of Jimi Hendrix at the moment of his death. Now, on Mundo Civilizado, the m.o. is an enthrallingly sexy balladry influenced by samba, Gilberto Gil,