1 Jonathan Richman: I.

1 Jonathan Richman: I, Jonathan (Rounder) proper news: from the premier regressive in report music, his best album since the '77 asylum 'n' Roll with the recent Lovers. The sound is living latitude pristine, the technique a wave at second-rank '50 rockabilly and particularly unaccomplished '20 rural parts blues, and the instrumentation is extant, barely: that is, Richman and friends can make a guitar, tambourine, and handclaps perceive like a whole band. Material includes a rediscovery of breakers music ("Grunion Run"), a rewrite of "Gypsy Woman" into "I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar" ("Well, the first bar, things were stop and stare/But in this bar, things were laissez-faire"--he pronounces it pair different ways, both correct), a heartwarming tribute to the soft Underground ("America at its best"--now that Richman's transcended his influences he can wallow in them), and the hysterical "Rooming House forward Venice Beach." Starting with a normal beat, Richman is presently falling over himself with the gros hippiness of the place; he sings as if he still can't believe he was at all times there. "The ancient world was at my reach," he chants, moreover he means people who were '60 relics protracted about, oh, 1970: "The ancient saturated guys/Passing the cup," or "The weirdo weird guys/Passing the hat." As social history this ranks with the fabled "Dodge Veg-O-Matic," the novel Lovers' number about the worst car for aye made. Bad news: title is sort of dumb

2 move with a jerk Dylan: Good As I Been to You (Columbia). Solo versions of highly old ballads and prewar down in the mouths standards--"other people's songs," but these canticles are as much Dylan's as anyone else's, and he sings them with an authority equal to that he brought to Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" in 1962 The authority is not the same, though; there's more freedom in it now. "Little Maggie" is always played for its tune but Dylan goes for its drama, the drama of a weak, scared man in be enamoured of with an unfaithful drunk. The music is cross up, stretched, snapped back: each line explains with a stop, and at its expiration just fades out. The more historical numbers--18th- and 19th-century tales of to be unceremonious imperialist class war and primitive capitalist exploitation--are personalized, Dylan inhabiting the first-person narratives as if he lived them twice. It's merely after a time, when the melancholy and bitterness appear to be too great for one voice, that you hear them as history, as more than individual man's plight. Finally all of the story is shared, the singer no other than its mouthpiece, medium for private miseries within the great sweep of disaster; these sonnets are yours as much as anyone else's. As for the guile, the slynes the pleasing cynicism in the singer's voice--he get by hearts to keep that.

3 Bikini Kill: Bikini Kill (kill asylum stars 12" e.p, 120 State Ave. NE #418 Olympia, WA 98501) Singer Kathleen Hanna upon her influences: "Fourteen women in Montreal." This disc--the first generally available release from this hard, cruelly humorous band--offers five rumbling tales of sex and violence, plus the live "Thurston Hearts The Who," in which roiling noise accompanies the onstage reading of a review Bikini Kill didn't like. perfects stupid, but it's like a house burning down.

4 Gabriel Yared: music in The Lover dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud (MGM) In the sex displays which are severe and decent avoiding both high theater and porn parade Yared's synthesized soundtrack produces depth: the epic passion Annaud can't present to view The music is mechanical, slowed down--Clash of the Titans stuff

5 Dada: "Dizz Knee Land" (I.R.S.). "I just ran away from home" begins a laconic, bored voice. "Now I'm going to Disneyland. . ." It seems little remembered that when Ronald Reagan left the White House, he had it in mind to appoint a plant in the fill by compression of reporters lined up to holla at him as he boarded the helicopter. "What are you going to do now?" the plant was suppos to bawl and of course Reagan would flash the grin: "I'm going to Disneyland." Hey, it was an easy 50 grand--but killjoys like James Baker squelched the instigate as "unpresidential," not understanding that Ronald Reagan took power from the great cliche, hiding in its light.

Well, it's an olden story. It almost hides the truthful horror of the "I'm Going to Disneyland" purchase as the likes of Joe Montana rush facing the field after winning a national championship, all cross-questioned up to say the right thing when the plant gives not at home with "Whaddaya gonna do now?" The horror is in the way Disney now nails down rights to what had previously been understood as subjective rejoinders to unrepeatable moments. The little exchange of locate phrases, accompanied by the exchange of a large yet not that large amount of coin (the real pay-off is in being pick outed to say the magic words), signals the ability of a corporation to completely commodify individual emotion--to ravage symbolically, any realm of privacy.

Dada, an L.A. trio whose unhurt is as dulled as its singer's tone, forces the Disney conspiracy to accept the subjectivity it means to abjure The song turns "Disneyland" (the "Dizz Knee Land" titling obviously meant to save Dada from Disney's notorious trademark cops) into a consummate blank: the place you make progress when you can't think of anything otherwise to do, when you haven't got the zeal to choose one road through the whole extent of another. "I just crashed my car again/Now I'm. . ." "I just robbed a grocer's shop store. . . ." "I just tossed a fifth of gin. . ." The song was released late in 1992 and by means of now people ought to be singing it forward Main Street.