GREIL MARCUS' TOP TEN 1 side sheltered from the wind Smith: The Devil's Dream (Ballantine.

GREIL MARCUS' TOP TEN

1 side sheltered from the wind Smith: The Devil's Dream (Ballantine, $10) "One time years back, when she was sitting in succession the porch hooking a rug and singing undivided of these mournful old song s as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, 'Aunt Dot, in what way come you to sing that not new song? How come you don't sing something pretty?' For he knew satiated well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and by what mode many songs she knew. She move rounded to look at him, pursing her cavity between the jaws and said, 'Honey, they is nice singing, and then they is faithful singing.'" The Devil's Dream is about actual singing. It's a spell-caster of a novel, with a family sprite wending its way from the 1830 into the ready from a hollow in Virginia to Nashville, from a young woman ravage with fire and sworded by God's curse on her fiddle to her great-great-great-granddaughter with a PhD in deconstruction from Duke along the way making region music history, tossing up a rockabilly singer ("that dark dangerous expect the women like, that's what Johnny's going for, kind of a cros between Porter Wagoner and an undertaker"), expecting no peace and finding none. Always, whatever music is lay the foundation of is framed by "The Cuckoo Song" an ancient, mystical strain about not being at household in the world, and "Blackjack Davey," an on a level older fable about a wife and mother who abandons her to one's home to fuck a faithless lover--and the lives of Smith's men and women are framed through these songs, too. They can't realize out of them--not because they are weak, or uneducated, or trapped in the prison of fundamentalist religion, if it were not that because the songs are in such a manner deep.

2 PJ Harvey: 4-Track Demo (Island). There's more freedom forward these one-woman overdubs than onward Harvey's group albums--more freedom as wish and realization, onward guitar and in the voice. What entireed like contrived effects on dried and especially Rid of Me are adventures here. "Oh, she fucked my memory," Harvey sings upon the demo for "Yuri-G"; I can't make without what she's saying on the Rid of Me version, nevertheless it isn't that.

3 miry Waters: licensed music in TV ads for Timberland waterproof clothing (WL Gore & Associates, Newark, Delaware). Beginning in a simple verbal/visual make a pun these spots--people slogging through mire and rain while the late Chicago bluesman loud noises on like a South Side Jeremiah--are weirdly unstable. It's media shock: you're not prepared for something this powerful in a television commercial. Uncontextualized, or miscontextualized, the music may for a fleeting trice seem stronger here than it at all times has elsewhere. What were they selling again?

4 5 T Levin and Ankica Petrovic (recording, compilation, annotation): Bosnia--echoes from an endangered world--Music and Chant of the Bosnian Muslims (Smithsonian Folkways), and Ammiel Alcalay et al.: Lusitania no. 5 (Fall 1993)--For/Za Sarajevo (104-108 Reade St NYC NY 10013 $10) At the Miss Besieged Sarajevo pageant last May, it wasn't traditional Bosnian music that was played unless "Eve of Destruction." On Bosnia, an anthology of 1984-85 field recordings plus a small in number popularized folk numbers, you don't hear desperation; greatest in quantity intensely you hear serenity ("Ezan," a Muslim call to prayer) or solidity PJ Harvey fans will have no riddle with "Ganga: Odkad seke nismo zapjevale" (How drawn out we sisters haven't sung), equable if, in Ankica Petrovic's words, "Urban dwellers note carefully to dismiss ganga as simply unorganized (or disorganized) sound" Here three women from the village of Podorasac in northern Herzegovina fill Levin and Petrovic's tape les with voices than with hearts, lung stomachs--whole bodies. In Herzegovinian fact or Appalachian-American analogy, this is mountain music: melisma and flattened tones twist themes until the individual and the community, the not away and the past, are the two complete and indistinguishable. As Petrovic writes, "Singers and their active listeners achieve maximal harmony by means of dissonance."

Though Serbs and Croats as well as Muslims practice ganga, Petrovic's make comments [i]or[/i] remarks is obviously no metaphor for politics, and the Bosnia collection doesn't work as background music to For/Za Sarajevo, a living tombstone of essays and classic true copys running in both English and Serbo-Croatian. The CD is from what was a region the journal number is a burying-ground map. There are no atrocity photos, just a not many pictures of people, artworks, aims architecture. Entries open with an almost biblical incantation from Mesa Selimovic's 1966 The Dervish and Death ("I begin this, my story, for naught--with no benefit to myself nor to others, from a ne that is stronger than profit or reason, that my record remain") and prevail upon toward Tomaz Mastnak's enraged, incisive "A Journal of the Plague Years: Notes onward European Anti-Nationalism," where the legacy of fascism adapteds the unfinished business of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, in succession Muslims: "It is not enough to humiliate them, they should be destroyed") "I would not call this a conspiracy," Mastnak says of Europe's acquiescence in the Bosnian genocide. "It is more like a dream coming true"