THE DEAD AND THE QUICK
THE LAST SUPPER
Over the past month, avoiding Elvis Presley—you remember him—required some fancy footwork. All stops were pulled for his would-have-been 50th birthday (January 8): A Golden Celebration, RCA’s six-LP set of mostly unreleased material; eight conventional reissues; an up-to-date MTV video for the rerelease of “BIue Suede Shoes”; HBO’s “Elvis: One Night with You,” 52 uncut minutes of raise-the-dead jam sessions originally taped for the 1968 comeback TV special; an hourlong tribute on “Entertainment Tonight.” Plus a proclamation from the president: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: Mississippi’s own Elvis Presley. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine. . . . ” Well, no. Stop me before I kill more. Not exactly. But almost. You get the idea.
A Golden Celebration—outtakes from the initial 1954–55 Memphis Sun sessions, the complete soundtrack of the 1956–57 TV appearances, searing 1956 concerts recorded in Elvis’ hometown of Tupelo, a side of the ’67 improvisations, much more—is full of surprises. In Tupelo, the crowd is tearing itself to pieces; people are being trampled. Elvis tries to calm the audience with a brief address on the difference between art as representation and art as action. “Here’s a song that says you can do anything; he says, introducing “Blue Suede Shoes.” “But don’t. Just don’t.” No luck: riot is the only proper response to what Elvis and his combo have already done with “I Got a Woman.” In Memphis a year earlier, still no more than a local noise, “The King of Western Bop,” he’d been trying to catch the soul in “When It Rains, It Really Pours.” There are a couple of lazy false starts; then the 20-year-old rolls into the tune with so much lust he sounds as if he’s singing naked. lt’s great stuff—and, in the present moment, somewhat beside the point. The active esthetic fact today is not that Elvis Presley once lived, but that he is now dead. The point is closer to what, in the present moment, happens every 7:35 A.M. on San Francisco’s KFOG-FM.
“lt’s time . . . for Breakfast with Elvis,” announces DJ M. Dung. You’re thrown back by a torrent of Elvis’s hugely operatic WELLLLLLL’s; then there’s a quick splice to “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (“Well, roll my breakfast, ’cause I’m a hungry man”), or perhaps to “Elvis Sails; an interview single recorded on September 22, 1958, the day PFC Presley left the U.S.A. for Germany (newsman: “How long has it been since you’ve had a chance to eat today?” Elvis, depressed: “Well, I ate breakfast this morning . . . ”). Another interview, Elvis full of confidence: “Rock ’n’ roll music, if you like it, if you feel it” (Dung interrupts with an echo so dank he seems to be speaking from Elvis’ stomach; “Feel it, feel it”) “you can’t help but move to it”—which falls smack into the fabulously kinetic opening notes of the first guitar break in “Hound Dog,” even though one understands, through the wonders of aural collage, that “movement” now means bowel movement, not toe-tapping. Dung “opens the doors’’ to the “KFOG kitchens” (sounds of pots clanging, cafeteria line forming), and the day’s “celebrity chef,” a listener phoning in, offers the menu Dung is to cook for the King, who is described as sitting patiently but anxiously, almost desperately, waiting for his first meal of the day. And this is Elvis not as he revealed himself in 1954, or 1956, or 1968, but as he dropped dead on August 16, 1977: a drug addict a schizophrenic, a glutton, bloated beyond memory, beyond all the history he had made. The menus began, last fall, straightforwardly enough. Then they went regional (Tennessee catfish and grits, Maryland soft-shelled crabs dipped in milk batter, a spread catered by Brennan’s of New Orleans), ethnic (Italian, Polish; for Rosh Hashanah, kosher), organic (“He’s been looking a little puffy lately; said the day’s caller). Then they got weird.
First came an all-junk food blitz; it climaxed with Moon Pies garnished with Snickers bars. Then petit déjeuner Zippy the Pinhead: linguine with Alka-Seltzer, oatmeal omelet with Liquid Paper, and waffles with Vaseline, all washed down with a bottle of Pagan pink wine. “I just got to work at the pet hospital,” a woman said the next day, “and I was feeding the dogs, and one of them was a real hound dog if you know what I mean, and of course it reminded me of the King, and, ah, the food looked pretty good, and so, for Elvis’ breakfast today: Kal Kan Liver & Beef, a side of Kibbles, and a nice bowl of water. Chow down, Elvis!”
“I held a séance in my living room last night,” said a man the following morning. “We made contact with Elvis, and he can’t believe what you’ve been feeding him. His stomach is going haywire. He wants something normal. You’re going to make him scrambled eggs, three pieces of toast—two buttered, one with butter and a touch of strawberry preserves—orange juice, and coffee. And that’s it.”
Earlier, one Peter Wood had mailed in his menu on cassette. Mustering a fine imitation-Elvis voice, and accompanying himself on guitar to the tune of “Heartbreak Hotel,” he sang:
Last night while I was dreamin’
I heard somebody scream
And there was Elvis, baby, lookin’
Hungry and mean
He said, Well, I’m so hungry, baby
Yeah, I’m so hungry, baby
I’m so hungry, I could die
Well, I fixed him up a breakfast
Of poached eggs and ham
A toasted English muffin, covered with
Strawberry jam
But he just looked at me
And then he cried I been so hungry, since I died
So I went to the kitchen
And left the cupboards bare
Fixed him up a breakfast that was
Beyond compare
Well, French toast and omelets, baby
Green beans and ham hocks, baby
He ate so much, I thought he’d die
Well, buttered baked potatoes
I fried him up hash browns
I made him little pork sausages that
Were freshly ground
Hot gravy biscuits
Cheese dip on Triscuits
He said, I’ve had enough.
Against the backdrop of scandal lowered ever since Elvis ceased to take regular meals, it has to be emphasized that from beginning to end “Breakfast with Elvis” is made in a spirit of love—gleeful, even vengeful love, but love nonetheless. And so have countless similar manifestations over the last seven years. They have formed a great common art project, the work of scores of people operating independently, linked only by their determination to solve the same problem: who was he, and why do I still care?
It began, perhaps, on legal terms: Elvis’s death liberated those who wished to confront him from the strictures of libel and fair use. The opening shot was Diego Cortez’s Private Elvis (1978), an album of newly discovered Presley photos showing a nice American army boy sticking his tongue down the throats of Munich whores; borrowing the techniques Michael Lesy had used in Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Cortez produced the same shock. Then came “Elvis Drugs,” from Michael Nesmith’s video Elephant Parts, 1981:
Open on fresh-faced preteen girl in pigtails; in the background, three or four adults stoned out of their minds. Thick, hearty, doo-wopping Elvis-voice comes up on the soundtrack, remaining constant. Girl:
Hi! Are your parents forgetting to take their drugs?
Mine used to, too.
Now that they’re getting older, they do forget . . .
But the truth is, now is when they need them most of all. Running the world is a bitch. and they were totally unprepared for it.
So what can you do to make sure they get off every day?
Give them these: colorful, pleasant-tasting Elvis Drugs!
They make drug-taking fun! Parents love ’em!
They remind them of someone who shaped their early moral judgments! . . .
Elvis Drugs!
All Shook Uppers—
Love Me Tenderizers—
Blue Suede ’Ludes!
Elvis Drugs!
The fun way for adults to get the drugs they need!
A score of bathetic Nashville tribute singles were released in the month following August 16, 1977; since then punk bands have told the story, from X’s terrifying “Back 2 the Base” to the Butthole Surgers’ “The Revenge of Anus Parsley” to the Nightingales’ inspired “Elvis, the Last Ten Days” (putative diary excerpts: “Why do I feel guilty? I’m not to blame’’). There were Eddie Murphy’s parodies, William Eggleston’s creepy Graceland photographs, Memphian Ted Faiers’ painting of Presley dead on his toilet, cartoonist Gary Panter’s just published Invasion of the Elvis Zombies. Overreaching them all was Elvis’ “Greatest Shit!!”; a bootleg LP comprised of the most abysmal movie songs the King of Rock ever sang (Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya”), plus a few extras. The sleeve pictured Elvis in his coffin, captioned “. . . FAT DEAD PERSON.” Inside was a reproduction of a prescription supposedly made out to Elvis by Dr. George Nichopolous on August 15, 1977: “Dilaudid, 50, Quaalude, 150, Percodan, 100 . . . ” By some miracle the album was perversely listenable. “Why’s this on it?” said a friend as side one closed with “Can’t Help Falling in Love’’; “That’s not ‘shit.’” Then, on this unquestionably authentic outtake of one of Elvis’ loveliest ballads, he lost the beat. “Aw, shiiiiiiiit,” he said. All these things, and a hundred more like them, converge on the reversal of perspective that has been punk’s contribution to contemporary culture: a loathing that goes beyond cynicism into pleasure, a change of bad into good and good into bad, a tapping of a strain in 20th-century culture set forth by avant-garde artists from de Sade to Céline to George Grosz. Punk turned that strain into ordinary humor, which is to say ordinary life. It provided the context that makes Elvis’ “Greatest Shit!!” listenable and “Breakfast with Elvis” a work of everyday art.
The people who call in to KFOG every day are not punks; KFOG is not a punk station. But the emergence of punk simultaneously with the death of the founding rock ’n’ roll saint was pure serendipity. (So was the emergence of punk simultaneously with the seemingly absolute recuperation of the likes of de Sade, Céline, and Grosz.) In the formal punk milieu, his status as a corpse legitimized Elvis—it made him an interesting subject, a fecund metaphor. Rot is fertilizer. In the wholly amorphous domain of pop culture per se, Elvis’ death made him human: a man,who walked and stumbled, talked and babbled. Floating in the air, an issue even if only on the level of a son or daughter’s new haircut, punk added the frisson that brought the newly human Elvis back to life.
Throughout his 42 years, Elvis Presley was promoted as the embodiment of clean living—that’s why the dope-sex-gorge revelations following his death had such news value, and why Elvis-scandal still has kick. On conscious or unconscious levels, fans and inheritors (those who had loved his music, and those who, like the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, simply knew that without Elvis they would not have taken their first steps into public life) felt betrayed. They felt betrayed even if, like Johnny Rotten, they believed that clean living was a bourgeois scam, ensuring that without money and power one’s blue suede shoes would be stepped on the instant one left one’s house. The scandal, it is worth remembering, broke over Elvis even before he died, days before; had he lived, he would have been torn to pieces. The culture he had made was a popular, democratic culture; the sin most hated by the crowd, by individuals thrown back on themselves, is hypocrisy.
Yet Elvis’ sins sparked a sense not only of betrayal but of confirmation—“Celia shits!,” as Jonathan Swift put it—and punk, making bad good, was able to turn hypocrisy upside down. Elvis’ tawdry death sanctioned that of Sid Vicious, and when Vicious went out with “My Way’’ which, by the end, Elvis had exchanged for “Can’t Help Falling in Love’’ as a last word at every tawdry concert—he sanctioned Elvis. Together they freed fans to indulge themselves. For the first time, they were free to really play with Elvis—to give voice to their every fantasy.
In 1982, at a conference in Memphis attended by devout, working-class Elvis fans (all women, save a foreign student), l listened to a no-holds-barred discussion of whether or not Elvis Presley had gone to heaven. Punk has done no different. In the fanzine Flipside, one comes across a Raymond Pettibone cartoon showing a young decedent in white gown and angel’s wings, tears streaming down his face: “You’re just faking! Elvis is here; we know it. Tell us where he is! Show us Elvis!” “All dressed up like an Elvis from Hell,” runs a line from a Gun Club song; it’s an image that calls up Jim Jones, who clearly modeled himself on the post-1968, black-helmeted Presley. Cool lt Reba’s “Money Fall Out the Sky” is about pop success; after covering the financial side of the problem, the singer gets down to cases:
I want to live—like Elvis
Drive a car—like Elvis
I wanna sleep—like Elvis
Walk around—like Elvis
Take drugs—like Elvis
Make love—like Elvis
Go to hell—like Elvis.
In Memphis in 1982, the women who took up the question of Elvis’ fate after death weren’t sure of the answer. Neither are these punk artists. “Rock ’n’ roll,” Elvis can be heard to say on the HBO special, “is basically gospel music—well, it sprang from that. . . . ” True or false, it is true that rock ’n’ roll inexorably drags its discussants to religious metaphors (“Forgive them, they know not what they do,” said the Showmen of antirockers in their 1961 hit “lt Will Stand.”) It is no accident that in the beginning Elvis was damned as an Antichrist, and that after his death he was celebrated by Sam Phillips, a serious man, the man who produced Elvis’ first records, as the avatar of the Second Coming. And it is no accident that, turning the strain of de Sade, Céline, and Grosz to himself, Johnny Rotten announced himself with the words “I am an Antichrist,” or that he once posed nailed to a cross.
So there he is: begging for food on KFOG, burned down to obscenity in “Back 2 the Base’’ (“Elvis sucked doggie dicks,” screams a psychotic AWOL soldier on a bus), drawling “Aw, shiiiiiiiit.” Had he reached his allotted threescore and ten, he would have remained what Johnny Rotten was forced by the punk rhetoric of 1977 to say he was: an old tart, a bore. But think of it this way: no comment on rock ’n’ roll can be made without explicit or implicit reference to Elvis Presley. Had he been fixed as a bore, the form itself might have died by implosion. Thus he died at the right time: death and punk have kept Elvis working, and set him free. No longer does any fan have to feel small—except in those odd moments, “I Got a Woman” or “When It Rains, It Really Pours’’ on A Golden Celebration, when the ineffable says hello.
Punk didn’t change the world, but like all pop explosions it changed the way some walk through the world, and the way some talk about it. Punk revealed contingency: its enemy was always hegemony, domination’s presentation of itself as natural. By the time of his death, Elvis had become hegemonic—not because he had traduced Richard Nixon into making him an honorary narcotics agent, but because he had made rock ’n’ roll seem fated, an objective fact. In Memphis in 1954 and ’55, it had been a subjective choice. Today, as on “Breakfast with Elvis,” he says what he was never permitted to say—he says what, given the size of his reward from a democratic culture that countenanced no hypocrisy, he never permitted himself to say. I’m hungry, he says. I want. I don’t care—gimme. Like Manny Farber’s termite artist he plunges ahead, burrowing, eating away the boundaries of what is right and proper, never wondering what might come of it.
“I got a feeling for you, baby,” he sang in 1955, halfway through “When It Rains, It Really Pours”; “you really opened up my nose.” Memphis writer Stanley Booth was listening with me; he had followed Elvis from the beginning, seen him take the stage in Memphis in 1956 and promise that “them people in New York and Hollywood are not gone change me none”. Booth’s mouth dropped open. “My nose?,” he said, grinning. “No wonder they had to wait until he died to put that one out.”
COMMODITY FUTURES
Since the pop negations of the Sex Pistols lo these eight years ago, rock ’n’ roll has functioned as a culture of margins around a collapsed center: the most interesting performers have repelled mass communication, or evaded it, or failed to get their hands on it. But in 1984 the center was where the action was. In a world closing in, which denies the freedom to move, to want, that one gets from a world opening up, most may be happy to settle for art that merely keeps time, that frames the day rather than changes it. Thus in 1984 the most memorable music was played on Top 40 radio, not squirrelly independents; it was sold by multinational conglomerates, not through avant-garde post office boxes. To keep up you didn’t have to buy a single record.
It was a year of helpless manipulation: the manipulated were helpless, but so were the manipulators. Michael Jackson, setting out with his brothers on his Victory tour, became the most intensely celebrated person in the world, mainly because the mass media had discovered something they had not been warned about and did not understand: a young black man selling over 30 million copies of his odd take on the meaning of life. In a time when the language of advertising had shifted with the country toward division and exclusion, glamorizing the new political fact that if you weren’t the best you didn’t exist (“Winning,” read a Nestlé ad featuring an Olympic-style medal cast in chocolate, “is everything”; “We have one and only one ambition,” said Lee A. lacocca for Chrysler. “To be the best. What else is there?”), success on the order of Michael Jackson’s forged its own reality principle.
It was wonderful, last summer, just to get up in the morning and scan the papers for the latest newsbreak: to discover that a clandestine “Michael Jackson culf’ had formed within the Jehovah’s Witnesses (which, as everyone knew, counted Jackson himself as a devotee, and which, one was informed, was based on the notion of the return of the Archangel Michael); to read that (for a glorious moment) the U.S. Postal Service expected to clear a cool $18 million from Jacksons-ticket mail order fees; or, my favorite, originally from the Wall Street Journal, run in my local paper under the headline “Let them Eat Cake”:
Some [American companies operating in Mexico] have begun to subsidize food and transportation and to pay workers above the Mexican minimum wage of $4.80 a day. One company is considering giving watches to workers with good attendance and longevity records. Another is giving out Michael Jackson albums.
Thriller was simply not rich enough to sustain such publicity, to trivialize it—as, in 1956, everything said about Elvis Presley was trivialized by one minute of “Don’t be Cruel.” For that matter, Thriller was not rich enough to sustain itself. Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols had caused countless people to form groups and demand whatever it was they wanted and say whatever it was they had to say; Jackson had brought forth not even imitators, but only impersonators. But though he charged a representative with the denial of rumors of homosexuality, hormone treatments, and ocular plastic surgery (nasal surgery was not denied), if Jackson knew a setup when he saw one he was too polite to say so.
It was a setup. According to the imperatives of the spectacle, where “even the true exists as a moment of the false” (Guy Debord), the media smothered Jackson, trumpeted him to the point where the public, even the media itself, got sick of him (“Let Them Eat Cake”). Accordingly, as Bill Brown has written, the public rightly became both irritated and suspicious. An invisible margin at the very center of Modern public life cracked wide open, just before the Victory tour was to begin in Kansas City, on July 6. With the papers full of the news that tickets would cost $30, would have to be paid for in advance (even though ten buyers were to be present for every seat), and would be available only in $120 blocks of four, LaDonna Jones, an eleven-year-old black girl from Lewisville, Texas, wrote a letter to Michael Jackson care of the Dallas Morning News. It wasn’t fair, she said.
That was all it took. It was all over. The Victory-tour management sent Ms. Jones free tickets, but it was too late. Hidden in a uniform that likely weighed as much as he did, Jackson fought against the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, but no one ever beats a fable. He was all through.
The rhythms of the marketplace had their own reality principle: the circulation of commodities had to be maintained. Jackson’s fall left an opening for Prince, who was perfectly positioned with both an album and a film. Suddenly the media revealed him as a black Elvis to Jackson’s black Johnny Ray, his own man where Jackson was a puppet (forget that both Elvis and Johnny Ray were white translators of black art; the mass media can communicate everything but irony). On the basis of his weakest music and a Jailhouse Rock-type film updated by MTV, Prince pulled off an unprecedented hat trick. All at once, he had the country’s number one single, number one album, and number one movie.
That was the news. The surprises too took place in the center. Jacksonism and Princicity were respectively slave and king of media structuralism, but two events were surprising because they were attacks on that structure, on the contexts everyone took for granted—media shocks. And it was no accident that neither surpriser would have existed without the Sex Pistols—that both were once acolytes of those masters of the negationist prank.
Annie Lennox of the English duo the Eurythmics appeared on the Grammy awards telecast to sing their hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This):’ She appeared not as her trendily androgynous, short-cropped-orange-haired self—the self that had already appeared on the cover of Newsweek, the self that would, prima facie, sell more Eurythmics records. Rather, she appeared as a sleek, irresistible 1968 Elvis Presley, right down to the sideburns, gleefully baffling a good 90 percent of the viewing public, just to have a little fun.
Elvis Costello is a British singer who was born as a pop star the day he stood as a commuter waiting for his train, and grinned as his fellows raged over the fact that, the night before, the Sex Pistols had said “fuck” on television. On the Johnny Carson Show, a show where Ronald Reagan, even in his absence, had for almost four years been the biggest star, Costello stood alone to sing his nuclear-holocaust song “Peace in Our Time,” changing the already anti-Reagan lyrics to make them even more so. As songwriting, the change was crude; as media politics it was pure violence. The moment hung in the air because it was met with dead silence.
Lennox, Costello, and LaDonna Jones were the Most Valuable Players of 1984. They didn’t come close to making the best music, but without them the year’s version of rock ’n’ roll would have been no more than the orchestration of just another day—a better game, nevertheless, than just another day with no orchestration at all. Take the 1984 Top Ten, then, not as history, but simply as a calendar.
1. Van Halen, “Jump” (Warner Bros. single). Singer David Lee Roth was reading a news story about a man standing on a ledge and a crowd below chanting for him to jump; Roth figured if he’d been in the crowd, he’d have been dumb enough to say the same thing, so instead he wrote this song. Clumsy and soaring, it married Roth’s patented loutish ness to good humor and self-deprecating warmth. In stray, seemingly accidental instants—Roth shouting “Aw, you might as well jump!” just before Eddie Van Halen’s typically mindless guitar solo—this ode to fun was even dramatic, a little frightening. It might have been the emotional indecipherability of Van Hal en’s guitar solo that kept the record on the radio for so long, and I hope it stays on for years. Even if it doesn’t you can bet that someday, somewhere, a man will stand on a ledge, a crowd below will chant for him to jump, and suddenly he won’t hear the crowd at all, but a memory of this song in his head. Then he’ll kick up his heels just for the fun of it, come down on the ledge, and go back to his life-or miss, and die happy.
2. Prince, “When Doves Cry” (Warner Bros. 12”). Like most of the movie, the rest of the Purple Rain soundtrack was guff when it wasn’t mush; here Prince curled his rhythm around his voice and his voice around rhythm, until vulgar strings conducted by band member Wendy took the tune right out of itself. It was the most formally ambitious rock ’n’ roll since Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean: and it never gave up its secrets, all of which may have been hidden in the astonishingly compact one-man guitar jam session that kicked it off.
3. Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the U.S.A.”/“Shut Out the light” (CBS single). Social realism—with plastique.
4. Tracey Ullman, “They Don’t Know” (MCA single). The best Leslie Gore record Leslie Gore never made, it should have played under the credits of Sixteen Candles, a picture in which Molly Ringwald, flinching from her grandfather’s embrace, rescued the filmic American teenage girl from countless runaway hookers and dead baby-sitters.
5. Cyndi Lauper, She’s So Unusual (Portrait lp). Because she is—her version of punk made Laurie Anderson’s seem preppy—but also for inspiring Exude’s locker room answer record, “Boys Just Want to Have Sex.”
6. Billy Joel, “For the Longest Time” (CBS single). By the doo-wop standards of the 1950s, to which it aspired, a mess, and also entrancing. More than that (even if there was a little cheating on the bass), the first acapella record ever to hit the Top 40.
7. General Public, “Tenderness” (I.R.S. single). This was a mood-elevator so powerful ifs hard to believe you could buy it without a prescription. It was David Wakeling and Ranking Roger, late of the Beat, back with a richer sound, a lyric charged with puns questioning every word, James Jamerson’s bass line from “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and a thick, crying vocal that somehow turned into a smile by the time it reached whoever heard it.
8. Michael Jackson, “You’re a Whole New Generation” (Pepsi-Cola radio commercial). At first, Jackson’s willingness to impose an advertising jingle on the melody and arrangement of his epochal hit “Billie Jean” came forth as an atrocity, a slap in the face to everyone who had loved the song: the ultimate sellout, all the worse for its apparent lack of consciousness. Many months later, when the constant airplay bought for the commercial had allowed it not just to replace but to entirely supersede the original (and one must believe the money kept flowing because market research proved the ad’s efficacy), one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” as a new piece of music. It was tougher—the rhythm was harsh, the production not confusing but direct, the voice rough and fierce. When Jackson sang the line “That choice is up to you,” defining the option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice. Altogether he communicated wholeness where “Billie Jean” had broken into fragments, anger instead of restraint, certainty in place of doubt. That only made the buried, apparently unconscious message that much more displacing. “You’re a whole new generation,” Jackson sang as the fade began, “you’re Iovin’ what they do. . . . ” Wait, wait—who was this “they”?
9. Alphaville, “Big in Japan” (Atlantic 12″). The cross-cultural intimations of this best-record-the-Eurythmics-never-made were daunting: the American dance-club version of a song about Japan, sung in British English by a German group, named for a French movie about totalitarianism starring an American who never made it at home. There was an inescapable apocalyptic tinge to the music, and the biggest thing ever to hit Japan was the bomb. Of course, in pop music the phrase “big in Japan” means a failure: a band is promoted as “big in Japan” when it can’t make it at home. Here the lyric simply recounted a broken love affair—the singer is a big deal in his fantasies, nothing in the real world. Try and keep the song to that. The despairing mnemonics of the piece were so strong they convinced a listener it was made to put flesh on any free associations it might call up.
10. Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper, translated from the German by Leigh Hafrey (Pantheon Books). American pop culture as a disease the 40-year-old narrator of this novel would go out and catch if he didn’t already have it. He grew up in a country defeated by Americans and occupied by them; what he got out of it was a nagging sense of loss at never knowing who he might have been if an accident of geopolitics, courtesy of U.S. Armed Forces Radio, hadn’t convinced him “Rock Around the Clock” carried “the most important lesson since the Sermon on the Mount.” Sound familiar? Heard “Jump’’ lately?
—Greil Marcus
