In grappling with the “mess” of our present moment, the punk legend looks relentlessly to the future, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion.
Self-indulgent though it may be, pessimism can feel like a logical reaction to our present. The scaffolding is bowing underneath our feet. What’s there to rejoice about? But Vivien Goldman—erstwhile music journalist, PR maven, and Bob Marley biographer; current NYU professor; and eternal punk legend—looks relentlessly to the future on the aptly titled Next Is Now, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion once wrote; Goldman’s latest story is unflaggingly hopeful.
Next Is Now is a linear continuation of Goldman’s oeuvre, threading dubby new wave with funky basslines a la Tom Tom Club and treating spoken-word visions and falsetto melodies like downtown nursery rhymes. Produced by Youth (Killing Joke, the Orb, Paul McCartney) in Goldman’s native London, it incorporates vestiges of ’80s post-punk akin to her 1981 cult classic “Launderette.” Opener “Russian Doll” shares that song’s sauntering reggae tempo, but the record piles on modern flourishes, like the layer cake of synths and embellishments on “Vertigo.” Fans of her work will detect the transition from lo-fi to hi-fi most keenly on songs like “Home,” where the tinny charm of 1981’s “Private Armies” goes glossy, bright chords underpinning electronic blips and a mirage of “A neon whale/Flashing on the wall/At the corner of Houston Street & Broadway.”
But where Goldman’s 30-year-old single concerns itself with a laundromat dalliance, this track—like the others on the album—interrogates the day’s heaviest issues. “He was legal when I met him/Then they changed his status,” the song opens, narrating the tribulations of living undocumented. “My Bestie & My BFF,” which emblematizes the album’s relentless hopefulness, earnestly entwines activism and pleasure. “Meet you at the demo/Catch you at the disco,” Goldman sings, insisting that “My bestie and my BFF/We’re gonna change this mess.” Part of the charm of Goldman’s catalog, epitomized on 2016’s excellent Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982), is the improvised, off-the-cuff nature of her delivery, which sounds like a punk version of scatting, and here, a lot of that spontaneity is lost—we’re treated to less conversation, more oratory.
The most salient protest songs traffic in specificity, like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its DDT, or Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” its swinging dead so searingly visceral. An anthem like “Bread and Roses” draws its strength from its simple, vivid symbolism. What’s missing on Next Is Now, and what would elevate these songs beyond their earnestness, is a better understanding of “this mess,” whether it’s centered in time and place—America, 2021—or whether Goldman defines it through a personal lens. Gentrification lament “Home” almost gets there with its images of “Alluvial levels of home/Stacked like firewood,” but the chorus—“Home is in the air/Home is everywhere”—feels like a Seussian answer to serious grief.
The ambling “Substitute,” a wistful, bass-led ballad, is the closest we get to a personal lens, and this tighter perspective is a welcome reprieve from the generalities on other tracks. Briefly, she muses, “Why did I walk away/When I wanted to stay?/That famous ambivalence/The best seat on the fence.” Sometimes, the truest story is also the untidiest, and Goldman’s experimental work evinced that; her best songs’ visible bones and unpredictable directions lent them their undeniable allure. Reality itself probably sits somewhere on the fence between pessimism and optimism, and Next Is Now could use more of that ambivalence—less platitudes, more doubt; less triumph, more teeth.
0 comments:
Post a Comment