Real Life Rock Top Ten – February 2012

(1) Rid of Me, written and directed by James Westby (Phase 4 Films/Submarine Deluxe). In 2002—though it looks earlier: people can still smoke in bars—a woman is kicked out of her marriage and stranded in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All she wants is revenge: on her ex-husband, his old girlfriend/new wife, his worthless friends, on herself for buying into the scam in the first place. Katie O’Grady walks her character through her dead-end room, into a job in a candy store, down supermarket aisles, and then, as a formerly nice middle-class genteel housewife in her thirties, straight through punk, until she ends up lying down drunk on a sidewalk in the middle of the night. It all rings so true you don’t really believe she’s going to get up; the movie could end right there, but it doesn’t. Because there’s still this subplot about a Cambodian rock song the director wants to get in.

(2) Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Quail and Dumplings,” from Wolfroy Goes to Town (Drag City). Will Oldham brings you into the tune slowly, picking his mandolin in and out of an old mountain pattern, with Angel Olsen following his words in the background, then barely stepping past him with soft ooos. You relax into the song. Then someone claps hands, and Olsen grabs the song and, at first sounding as if she’s going to expire on the spot, stands up and demands that the song give up truths it hasn’t even hinted it might contain. Her voice breaks the pleasant folk spell Oldham has cast; there’s something stentorian and cruel in her cadence, in the way she hits back at the song as if it’s an enemy, a lie. And it’s this moment of drama that gives the song the power to tell whatever truth it knows. When Oldham comes back, after a rough, harsh electric-guitar break from Emmett Kelly, with “Weather ain’t judgment and money ain’t love,” he can stop you cold, the banality of the second phrase brought down by the uncertainty of the first.

(3) Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence— Nonfictions, Etc. (Doubleday). A lot of scraps— there are four pieces on the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 that doggedly, dutifully say nothing. There’s a stiffness in many of the essays on fellow novelists, reputation, career, book tours, and literary theory. But when Lethem writes about music, there’s an unencumbered energy flowing through his sentences, a sense of discovery. The seemingly tossed-off, priceless notion that “pop was a trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by ten...