Howard Hampton’s Real Life Rock

1. The Diablos

   Motor-City Detroit Doo-Wops, vols. 1 and 2 (Regency import). Starting with the fallout romance of 1954’s “The Wind,” and led by Nolan Strong’s science-fiction falsetto, this bizarre R&B group reached for the stars and found oblivion. But as spine-chilling effusions come and go, each dutifully seeking the formula of success and instead discovering some freak alchemy of transcendence (manic laughter, sobbing gasps, love cries from the great beyond), the listener’s disbelief turns into wonderment. Their torturously erotic version of “Danny Boy,” or the giddy-with-dread “Everything They Said Came True,” makes it sound as if the real story of the Diablos’ music must still be filed away in some classified Atomic Energy Commission report on inner-city radiation experiments.

2. The D.O.C.

   Helter Skelter (Giant). Conspiracy theories and mutation are right up this antic, brooding, Armageddon-obsessed rapper’s alley. “Return of Da Livin’ Dead” sets the metaphysical horror-show tone, while “Secret Plan” reveals a crazed new world made of Masonic symbols and biblical debris: the Charlie Manson vibe lurking below every plot to rule the world, or the plan to expose those who are suspected of already doing so.

3. (3/4) Robert Cantwell

   When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard University Press, $24.95); BOB DYLAN: Guided by the Eternal Light (Tuff Bites). Cantwell’s stirring, evocative treasure-trove of a book is perched daringly between social history and dream interpretation. The lucidity and frank pleasure of the balancing act he performs are worthy of his formulation for the work of the folklorist/visionary Harry Smith: “mystical ethnography.” Here the seemingly innocuous suburban-genteel folkie movement of the ’50s and early ’60s (the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez) is seen as a facade to conceal vast, clandestine currents of the past flowing into the era’s amnesiac longings. Both exemplary and ephemeral, the folk revival becomes a fable of memory, smuggling a sense of play and of struggle alike into suburbia via an underground railroad of desire. Meanwhile, thirty-odd years later, performing live with his crack band of juke-joint savages last May and June, Bob Dylan is more like the distillation of such living memory than ever. As he plays ringmaster (plus a lot of taut lead guitar) to a circus of pandemonium and loss, stripping his songs down until they seem plucked from a timeless public domain, his voice sounds infinitely at home in its own wilderness: “as if the mountains themselves could open their mouths to speak.”

4. (3/4) Robert Cantwell

   When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard University Press, $24.95); BOB DYLAN: Guided by the Eternal Light (Tuff Bites). Cantwell’s stirring, evocative treasure-trove of a book is perched daringly between social history and dream interpretation. The lucidity and frank pleasure of the balancing act he performs are worthy of his formulation for the work of the folklorist/visionary Harry Smith: “mystical ethnography.” Here the seemingly innocuous suburban-genteel folkie movement of the ’50s and early ’60s (the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez) is seen as a facade to conceal vast, clandestine currents of the past flowing into the era’s amnesiac longings. Both exemplary and ephemeral, the folk revival becomes a fable of memory, smuggling a sense of play and of struggle alike into suburbia via an underground railroad of desire. Meanwhile, thirty-odd years later, performing live with his crack band of juke-joint savages last May and June, Bob Dylan is more like the distillation of such living memory than ever. As he plays ringmaster (plus a lot of taut lead guitar) to a circus of pandemonium and loss, stripping his songs down until they seem plucked from a timeless public domain, his voice sounds infinitely at home in its own wilderness: “as if the mountains themselves could open their mouths to speak.”

5. John Woo

   Broken Arrow (Fox). The film is superbly executed on its own Speed-with-a-nuke terms, but its relentless professionalism lacks the bloody, fetishistic grandeur of Woo’s Hong Kong passion (gun)plays. At the very least, he might have staged the climactic battle inside the Mormon Tabernacle.

6. Shania Twain

   “You Win My Love,” music video for single from The Woman in Me (Mercury Nashville). Nashville cheesecake, with this Cindy Crawford clone strutting her cum-hither stuff in what amounts to a Playboy centerfold audition. But tune into the trashy, insinuating hooks here and on her previous smash “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!” and you might catch a hint of Siren-era Roxy Music; Twain’s surely one of those Roxy album cover-girl automatons come to life. Does this portend Bryan Ferry’s inevitable comeback as a country coroner—er, crooner? Or, instead, an all-star tribute session with Twain attempting “Love Is the Drug,” Alison Krauss cooing “Prairie Rose,” and Johnny Cash preaching “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”?

7. Frank Black

   The Cult of Ray (American). Boss guitar and the hectoring, bemused voice of, in the 20-year-old words of one T. Pynchon, “the true paranoid for whom all is organized into spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” The lost link between Oedipa Maas and Ziggy Stardust.

8. Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra

   “The Forest of No Return,” from Second Star to the Right (Salute to Walt Disney) (Leo import). Mostly, this posthumous tribute from the original Afronaut to the architect of virtual America meanders aimlessly, but “The Forest of No Return” cackles as though hosting a hustler’s convention of voodoo economists. “THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY,” the warlocks chant with ominous glee. Then a threat, presented as fait accompli: “WE WILL NEVER LET YOU GO.”

9. Sleepers

   the less an object (Tim Kerr). Archival Bay Area art-punk, almost field recordings (“recorded . . . somewhere in the Hayward hills,” reads one credit), from a period bracketed by the Avengers’ “We Are the One” and Romeo Void’s “Myself to Myself.” Occupying the esthetic space between epilepsy and autism, the sleepers found a middle ground: narcolepsy. “Theory” was their prescient—if failed—bid for cultural cachet; the urgently out-of-it romantic pretensions of the other odds and dead-ends collected here make a decent case for them as Joy Division doppelgängers (right down to the tragic-ridiculous death of the lead singer).

10. Brigitte Lin Chin-Hsia

    Martial-arts cinema’s radiant goddess of sexual anarchy and polymorphism, shredding gender roles as remorselessly as she turns an enemy into chopped meat. Her motto is simple, unequivocal: “I come to bury everything.”