Monday, August 02, 2004

Wakka Wakka Revisited

Our guest reviewer, my good friend, and bitter and murderously jealous arch-nemesis, Mr. Sheena Easton, returns, still turning over in his mind the mystery that is "Bam Thwok," the newest Pixies song:

The Boston skyline is pocked. Sensitive eyes see it—every poetic death in this city is charted and marked. You can see the deaths like you can sort of see the Milky Way, it's just like the imprint scientists look for to identify a blackhole: debris surrounding invisible sinkholes where big souls collapsed. No afterlife for those unlucky bastards—just limbo or nihil.

Forgive me for getting carried away, but that graveyard tang is what makes Boston rockers rock more profoundly than the rockers of other cities. The great Beantown songwriters are spirit mediums for the annihilated. Every golden Boston anthem is two-parts rock, one-part funeral dirge. And each has adifferent spin of the city's melancholy.

Which brings me to my redress of the Pixie's BAM Thwok review I had posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog...

I was at a wedding at the Hyatt Harborside near the airport last night, probably the best view of the Boston skyline on the harbor. One-hundred-eighty degrees of my view, at all times, was dominated by that stone obituary. If I wasn't working, I would have been drinking.

So driving home, I've got the radio on. Not FNX, something else, and I recognize the so-called iPOD exclusive. Kim Deal cutting through the frequencies, Frank Black's dry commentary. And it's like I'm hearing all those black holes reopening as I pass along route 1A into Lynn. Just like Stephen Hawking recently said in a classic flip flop of the intellect: black holes donot destroy information, they transmute it into something unrecognizeable,something weird, let out in spurts over eternity.

Something like the goddamn bridge of this song.

I've spent a lot of time in basements—the cellar was the Fortress of Solitude for my devastating preadolescence. And in those basements, I've listened to a lot of Pixies. And for a moment, listening to BAM Thwok, downtown Lynn felt like a cellar lit with a black light and comic books spread all over the place. So much energy it hurt.

So color me a thinking democrat, I withdraw my flaccid critque of BAM Thwok, and can only say that Kim Deal has made Jim Henson, making muppets in Heaven, an even happier man.


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