Britain
is beat these days, and it’s not just the mad livestock feeling the hurt.
When I was there in the fall, there were train wrecks, floods, bombs, everything
but a plague of locusts. Around that time, I heard Black Box Recorder’s sublimely
sweet single, "The Facts of Life." The sound was echt All Saints, lush
and cotton-candy soft. I almost tuned out, yet right before I did, lead singer
Sarah Nixey started to…well, not sing, exactly, but more, recite, in a clipped
British accent: "When boys are just 11/They begin to grow in height/At a
faster rate than they have done before/They develop curiosity/And start to
fantasize/About the things they’ve never thought of doing before…"
It sucked me in, and by song’s end, randy teens are exploring one another’s
bodies in, as Nixey relates, "a family car/a disused coal mine/a rolling
boat/or a shed." It was brilliant pop.

When
I heard the whole of Black Box Recorder’s second album, also called The
Facts of Life (Jetset), I realized that the single wasn’t just a one-off
novelty cut, but rather part of a nervy, pervy essay on pop style. This made sense
because Auteurs agitator Luke Haines was behind it, teamed up with Nixey and former
Jesus and Mary Chain drummer John Moore. To my mind, the Auteurs remain one of
the most underrated bands of the 90s, as ignored on our shores as the equally
guitar-bound Jam, but more perceptive and gripping. (Try After Murder Park,
where Haines’ brooding dissection of death and romance is filtered through
Steve Albini.) Past that work, however, Black Box Recorder seemed quite natural
after Haines’ instant classic Baader Meinhof–a meld of 70s funk,
casually tossed-off agit-prop and dramatic strings. A man who could do something
that bizarre could easily send up mainstream pop.

The
Facts of Life does that and more. The music wrapped around tunes like "Sex
Life" and "Straight Life" and "May Queen" purrs and coos,
yet the lyrics are at times as brutal as any of the Auteurs’ dark maunderings.
When I picked up the group’s first album, England Made Me (also Jetset),
I realized just how far Black Box Recorder’s experiment in pop perversion
had advanced. England Made Me is darker, sparer and closer to the Auteurs’
sound, with lyrics like "Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it"
predominating. It’s a fine record in itself, but there are moments–the
bittersweet pill "New Baby Boom," or the magnificent stuttering cover
of Althea and Donna’s 1978 reggae hit "Up Town Top Ranking"–that
show where things were headed.

I
talked recently with all three members of Black Box Recorder by phone.

Sarah
Nixey: You can never get sick of talking about your records, really.

SN:
They have taken bits of my conversation and used them for songs, or anecdotes
that I’ve told them. They’ll show me a song and it will all come back
to me, what I’ve revealed to them.

SN:
Well, we have these costumes that we wear. At Reading, we wore British Airways
outfits.

SN:
We draw the, sort of, mid-30s males. [chuckles] The older crowd. They’re
very respectful.

Luke
Haines: I think maybe the thing is, with Black Box Recorder, the writing doesn’t
necessarily come out of a particularly leftist tradition, which most British songwriting
does. That’s not even to say that it comes out of a right-wing kind of an
idea. I think it consciously ignores that–the idea that most art comes from
that tradition, which I think is a bit of a nonsense. This kind of nanny-state
idea, that socialism is a very good idea. I think that’s where a lot of the
songwriting comes from.

LH: The whole
thing was that "The Facts of Life," the single, was a fairly cynical
effort to get us on Top of the Pops. We wanted to see if we could write
something that was a fairly straight pop song.

LH:
Yeah. It’s all the things that you know exist. Not so much for me or John,
’cause we’re older, but more Sarah, because she’s younger, and
we put her forward when there was some kind of moron from some crap radio or tv
show. We sort of had nothing to do with it. But that whole debacle is so humiliating,
anyway. I’d be perfectly happy never to have another hit record again.

LH:
No, we made absolutely no money at all from it. Our record company at the time
were going through the usual kind of nonsense that English record companies go
through, i.e., not paying us. That wasn’t the point anyway. The point is,
who the hell wants any kind of level of fame, I really think. There’s nothing
there at all. It’s actually quite vacuous. And from that point of view, it’s
funny.

John
Moore: I think it’s more the cause [of it]. I suppose it is a soundtrack,
but mainly for intelligent people. The real soundtrack for all the shit that’s
going on is Robbie Williams. That’s what’s on people’s stereos.

JM:
Pub conversation number 3581–what would be a song that we just couldn’t
possibly touch?

JM:
It was really helped by the fact that on the day we recorded it, Sarah had been
out clubbing all night, and had this really incredible Sunday-morning voice on
her, a bad hangover, and she was in no mood to be fucked with. So we had to write
out these patois lyrics which we didn’t understand and she just gave them
the speaking cop treatment, and went home to have a hangover. It worked.

JM:
I don’t think we’ll excite the Anglophiles, because their idea of Englishness
is Radiohead. They like too broad an Englishness, that Monty Python humor… Over
here, [Virgin radio star] Chris Evans and Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, run things.

JM:
The Anglophiles who don’t like Black Box Recorder will love Jamie Oliver.
He’s been promoted to this position of being the arbiter of taste from being
a middle-aged ladies’ choice of tv chef. He’s got his own compilation
records now, and any band that’s on his show is guaranteed to get on Top
of the Pops. He has his own band, which he plays drums in. The guy is a fucking
disaster, really.

JM:
Yep, yep. He is Swinging London. If you watch Jamie Oliver, everyone will be on
the next plane over here. That’s what they think is going on. It’s not.
There’s foot-and-mouth disease. Probably caused by him.

Some of Weimar
Berlin has come down to us more or less intact, most notably Threepenny Opera
and scattered songs of its cabaret scene (marvelously interpreted a few years
ago by Ute Lemper and the Matrix Ensemble on their 1997 collection, Berlin
Cabaret Songs). For the visuals, there’s Otto Dix and George Grosz.
Seven decades later, much of it remains brilliant. There’s a vividness
and acidity to the latter, for instance, which continue to make them useful
antidotes to the Weimar fable. The sleek leer of many of the songs that Lemper
covered on Berlin Cabaret Songs replaces the Broadway turn that Weimar’s
taken in the public consciousness with something smarter and more salacious.

Mel Gordon’s
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin is another antidote.
In many ways, this eye-popping treasure trove of kinks and sex-killers, porn
and perversion is a catalog of exactly the things to which Brecht, Weill, Dix
and Grosz were reacting. The Weimar Berlin that Gordon describes is one suffused
with sex in all varieties and forms, an uncommonly commonplace Sodom where perversion
was the rule and not the exception. "Directories of nocturnal Berlin (in
adventurous straight, S&M, gay, lesbian, or nudist versions)," writes
Gordon, "could be had at any train station, hotel lobby, or downtown kiosk."
Flipping through Gordon’s "directory," the butch capitalist whores
of Threepenny and the fat leering burghers and crippled veterans ogling
flesh on the canvases of Dix and Grosz leap off the page unmediated by art.

There’s
a sort of overall scholarly premise imposed on this fascinating stuff. In fact,
it’s Voluptuous Panic’s one maddening weakness. There’s
no doubt that economic depression and postwar politics played a vital role in
creating the "panic" that Gordon so lovingly catalogs. Yet there are
moments (especially in the first few chapters) when Gordon feels that he must
do more than dynamite the Atlantis of Weimar Berlin. To say that his text paints
history with a broad brush is charitable. He uses a paint roller, especially
when he talks about the breakdowns in Weimar politics and economy that saw the
currency drop from an exchange rate of seven to a dollar in January 1921 to
4.2 billion to a dollar in October 1923.

For instance,
this is Gordon essaying the radical responses to the aftermath of Versailles
in Germany:

Some radicals
opted for a Soviet solution. But Lenin, the supreme revolutionary commander,
already knew what the seditious leaders of Bavaria and Hamburg would soon discover
to their regret: Germans were incapable of fomenting Socialist revolution; when
ordered to storm a railroad station, they would stand in line first to buy tickets.

That’s
nonsense. Yet despite the chunks of undigested and overreaching history-babble,
Voluptuous Panic is absolutely invaluable as a puncture in the curdled
romanticism and political overreading that has surrounded Weimar culture.

Gordon started
collecting the images when he wrote and directed a show for Nina Hagen about
Weimar dancer Anita Berber, and the sheer volume of stuff that he has assembled–photos,
kitsch art, magazines, cabaret programs–is staggering. He’s compiled
tables of different types of whores, gays and lesbians, and bullet reviews of
various gay and lesbian publications that sprung up in Berlin during the 1920s.

Most amusing
of all is the "Map of Erotic and Night-Time Berlin" at the end of
the book, complete with capsule reviews of the various nightspots. One such
place, dubbed "The Cabaret of the Nameless," was a Weimar Gong Show
organized by promoter Erwin Lowinsky, who lined up horrifically untalented and
mentally ill "performers" to entertain his patrons and stopped the
performances of anyone with a shred of competence. "Only the most pathetic
and hopeless creatures," observes Gordon, "were encouraged to complete
their numbers."

The detail
in Gordon’s compulsive listmaking is absolutely fascinating. The table
of whores, for example, consists of 17 discrete types with various additional
nicknames. Among these are included such charming streetwalkers as the "Gravelstones"
(described by Gordon as "Unattractive sex-workers on Oranienburgstrasse.
Included women with missing limbs, hunchbacks, and other deformities…")
and the "Munzis" (Gordon: "Pregnant girls and women who waited
under the lampposts on Munzstrasse for ‘old money’ clients in search
of this erotic specialty"). Especially early on in the book, when Gordon
essays prostitution and gay and lesbian life in Weimar Berlin, each page holds
manifold, cynical delights: a cartoon of an androgynous Berliner pausing before
the "Damen" and "Herren" doors; hilariously posed photos
of "Nacktkultur" ("nudist") calisthenics; an uproarious
two-page spread depicting a "Herr Bauer" and his "Shoe-And-Wheel
Masturbation Machine," which consisted of two sewing spools, a bicycle
rim, leather straps and used women’s shoes in a pleasure-inducing device.

Voluptuous
Panic grows much darker as you delve deeper. Gordon proves once and for
all that violent sadomasochism was alive and popular in Berlin long before the
Nazis came along. Some of the stuff is quite unsettling, especially the stomach-turning
incest/child flagellation paintings of Maurice Carriere. As chilling as the
last chapter on the effect of the Nazis’ seizure of power on Berlin’s
sex industry is (nightclubs shut down and turned into swastika-bedecked Nazi
headquarters), the chapters that immediately precede it on drug use and sex-murder
are in their way just as disturbing. One pair of photos shows an exhibitionist
of the era–the first photo in his outward and very normal appearance, and
the other with his coat stripped open and his cock hanging glum and flaccid
underneath. It’s not the cock that chills the marrow; rather, it’s
the hard glassy stare in the first photo and its ever so slight softening in
the other. It’s a look that you see often in Grosz and Dix: men hardened
by life and slightly softened only by kink.

Much of what
comes off the pages of Voluptuous Panic is redolent of the early 20th
century’s mania for explaining sex through pseudoscience. Berlin sexologist
of the era Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, quoted by Gordon, hypothesized that "happy
marriages are not made in heaven, but in the laboratory." But what’s
most startling about Voluptuous Panic is Weimar’s modernity. Much
of what the 20th century considered "modern" in regards to sex was
well in place in Berlin in the 1920s. Lipstick lesbians, erotic drug imagery,
morbid fascination with graphic sex crime: they are all here waiting to be rediscovered,
decades before the "sexual revolution" made them commonplace outside
this unique city and period.

In contrast, the maestros
of Reagan/

Bush Realpolitik–the Dick Cheneys and Condoleezza Rices and Paul Wolfowitzes–are
big-picture folks. They like their nation-states and their problems hefty. They’re
going to pay more attention to Latin America than anyone here has in a long
time (it’s a "hemispheric" concern), and they are already pounding
their drums busily on the Big Two, China and Russia, with the beat of failed
Clinton policy and a return to previous certainties amid the world’s perpetual
uncertainty.

Russia’s pervasive
economic chaos, and China’s massive societal dislocation, offers opportunities
for that expansive rhetoric–and some genuine initiatives to boot. It’s
a mantle that the restored Reagan/Bush team is eager to pick up. They’re
too smart to be mired in the past, but they do find continued utility in old
paradigms. So forget small-time concerns like the Kosovars and the East Timorese;
W’s America deals with big players like Chinese President Jiang Zemin and
Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Jiang’s the more likely
to ruin Bush’s honeymoon. He is busily razing churches and temples in the
Zhejiang province and waving a stick at Taiwan as his pockets groan with the
weight of pirated American videos and computer software. That bizarre sit-down
with CBS’ Mike Wallace in August before his visit to the U.S. didn’t
soften the image much either. Jiang leered nervously: What religious persecution?
We are only trying to protect members of Falun Gong from irritating muscle pulls
and the ennui that results from their excessive meditation.

As much as the incoming
Bush administration would like to make Quemoy and Matsu household words for
the first time since the Nixon/Kennedy debates, however, there’s a subtlety
and weight to Sino-American relations that defy any quickie dialectic. As brazen
as China’s manifold human rights violations are today, an examination of
its Hong Kong policy since the 1997 turnover (and its sublime management of
the spin surrounding it) is a testament to the force of Chinese diplomacy when
cash and national prestige are on the line. Besides, there are too many commercial
tentacles binding China and the U.S. together. The President-Elect’s father
realized this way back in June 1989, after the provocation of Tiananmen Square.
The kinder and gentler George Bush had National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft
and Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in Beijing less than a month
after the blood of the students who’d fashioned that crude Statue of Liberty
was washed from Beijing’s streets.

In Russia, the new administration
has a more willing partner for its back-to-the-future scenario. President Vladimir
Putin has spent much of the last six months rattling the U.S. foreign policy
cage and wooing a who’s who of America’s bogeymen: Libya’s Muammar
Qaddafi, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. (If Putin
could have visited deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in jail, he might
have done that, too.) Top that off with a bit of wedge politics with Europe
and China over the U.S. military’s missile shield and the first Russian
espionage trial of an American in 40 years, and it’s not hard to see a
pattern emerging. Putin even reinstated the music to the old Soviet anthem as
Russia’s national anthem, though he did abandon the words.

With the exception of the
Kosovo war, Clinton and Boris Yelstin had a warm friendship. Yeltsin didn’t
even complain overly when the U.S. shoved NATO expansion to Poland, the Czech
Republic and Hungary down his throat. It was a marriage of backslapping and
back-scratching.

Clinton was hoping that
Putin would be the same kind of undemanding fellow. He didn’t fret over
events in Russia that would have driven other administrations to the bully pulpit,
whether it was the flattening of Chechnya, the arrest of media mogul and Putin
opponent Vladimir Gusinsky in June, or sly public insinuations that something
other than a self-inflicted disaster sank the doomed nuclear sub Kursk
in August. Any of the above would have provoked a hectoring public lecture to
China, and how many lucrative business deals are U.S. companies signing in Russia
these days?

On Putin’s end, he’s
been busy signaling that the days of Yeltsin are over. At least until someone
notices him. It’s a shame, considering all the effort that Putin has put
in, that our own electoral campaign and postelection farce kept the Russian
President off the front pages. Some of the stunts that Putin has been pulling
have been quite witty, not to mention a blatant cry for attention: "Hey,
we still matter!"

One Putin gambit that did
break through the electoral haze was his dangling of hapless former Navy intelligence
officer Edmond Pope through a full trial and a conviction before cutting him
loose. It was a very old-school cloak-and-dagger move that’s not surprising
from a former KGB man. Other recent provocations have, alas, made less of a
ripple on the public consciousness. You have to like the chutzpah Putin showed,
for instance, in visiting Castro recently, a poke in the eye to whomever was
elected in the U.S.–and then dunning the Cubans for the $20 billion they
owe him.

His visiting Jiang Zemin
this past July so they could lambaste the U.S. missile defense plan together
was a neat China/Russia touch straight out of the novels of Allen Drury. Star
Wars is becoming somewhat of a Putin theme. The Europeans aren’t crazy
about it either (even when George W. says that he’ll stretch that umbrella
right over to them), and when Putin saw Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien
on his way back from Cuba, the Russian President asked Chretien to bug the U.S.
about it.

Much of Putin’s recent
maneuvering is so clever that it’s transparent. Canada and Cuba in a flanking
motion. Stoking the dying embers of a Moscow/Beijing fire. Spy vs. spy. The
anthem change. Some of it is a bit more unnerving, particularly his decision
in June to loosen Russia’s export restrictions on nuclear material, and
the greedy eye that he’s casting on oil-rich Central Asia. Keep an eye
on those stealthier moves. But a Bush administration that wants to talk tough
on foreign policy from the outset has to like Putin better than the jovial drunk
Yeltsin. Putin’s slightly sinister, but with a dash of wit and ruthlessness.
He’s a good target for talk of busting nuclear treaties, arming space and
pushing the economic black hole that Russia’s become out of the IMF. He’s
playing into the paradigm. For Putin and Bush, this might be the beginning of
a beautiful friendship.

Jasmina Tesanovic is one
of a number of Serbian writers who found herself in that position in the 1990s.
She’s written numerous books and translated Pasolini, Calvino and Brodsky
into Serbian. She recorded her experience in a diary that has become the most
prominent account of 1999’s Kosovo war from inside Serbia–The Diary
of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade, published by Cleis Press’
new Midnight Editions imprint. Tesanovic will be in New York next week to do
a reading from it.

Tesanovic’s ambivalence
is the hinge upon which The Diary of a Political Idiot swings, through
bombs and information via rumor and political gangsterism. As a prominent Belgrade
intellectual, her sympathies are Western-leaning and outward-looking, yet she
smarts at being bombed by NATO warplanes taking off from her beloved Italy.
"My American friend in Hungary," she writes, "saw smugglers with
thousands of packs of Pampers heading towards Serbia. How can you defeat NATO
with Pampers? she asked me. I said, we’ll all need Pampers soon."

The Diary revels
in the everyday details of life under war and martial law, calmly picking out
glittering detail and grim humor in the midst of chaos and emotional plague.
"The washing machine broke down," Tesanovic writes in the April 29,
1999 entry. "I wept as if somebody had died. I imagine myself doing all
the laundry by hand as well as the extra housework I’ve had to do since
the war started. Then I remembered hearing how, in NATO Phase Three, we will
have no water, no electricity, and no phone lines. I imagine myself with many
other women, washing the laundry in the Danube as they did in ancient Greece,
singing, gossiping and dancing, with kids running all around us."

Via e-mail, I asked Tesanovic
what coming to New York after the NATO bombing meant to her. "As Calvino
put it," she replied, "I have three levels of anxiety. The first one
is very practical and paranoid, belonging to dark times of being a Serb: Will
I get a visa? Will my airplane be hit by NATO or other bombs? The second level
is more concrete but makes me only slightly less anxious: Can I wear my fur
coat without being seen as a hippie or being lynched? Where will I smoke my
cigarettes? The third level of my neurosis is actually joyous. If I overcome
the first two levels and get there, why on earth should I ever come back?"

Tesanovic will read from
The Diary of a Political Idiot on Thurs., Dec. 7, 7 p.m., at KGB, 85
E. 4th St. (betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), 505-3360.

Velickovic wrote about that
afternoon in his self-published book of observations on the NATO bombings in
Belgrade, Amor Mundi, which came out last year. He says that he can’t
vouch for the absolute authenticity of the leaked document, but he is emphatic
in saying that the report’s account of his encounters with Curuvija that
afternoon is entirely accurate. "Whoever wrote the report," says Velickovic
on the telephone from Belgrade, "put in things that I had forgotten."

Amor Mundi captures
Belgrade’s paranoia during the NATO bombings succinctly and pungently.
For instance, Velickovic writes that at the commencement of the bombing in March
1999, "The nearby ‘New York’ restaurant is still open, but the
owner has erased the old name and written the new one on a piece of paper–‘The
Baghdad Cafe.’"

Logic would suggest that
Velickovic would be an optimist about the revolution that has swept Milosevic
from power at last and installed a fragile democratic government under Vojislav
Kostunica. Though he is optimistic about the future of Serbia’s politics,
he’s less sanguine about its consequences for his magazine and for Serbia’s
independent press in general.

"We will be able to
work freely," Velickovic tells me by telephone, "but I doubt it is
an end to our troubles. It will now be a matter of how to survive in a free
market. The problems will now be less political and more economic." He
adds darkly that Alexandria Biblioteka might not survive the postrevolutionary
transition and quotes to me the observation of a prominent Hungarian journalist
about his travails after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Eastern
Europe’s communist infrastructure. That journalist, says Velickovic, "told
me that ‘it was better for me to be a dissident than [it is] now in a market
economy.’"

Velickovic is a Serbian
independent media veteran. I met him a few years ago when the weekly that I
worked for in St. Louis hosted him as a visiting journalist. Ostensibly, I was
to impart the wisdom of American journalistic practice to him. Since Velickovic
was at that time the editor-in-chief of NIN (Serbia’s equivalent
to Time), that was a simply ridiculous notion. Not only had Velickovic
guided NIN to independent financial status during his tenure, he was
busily restoring the magazine’s journalistic credibility as well–a
tall order in the hyper-nationalistic and paranoid Belgrade of those years.
There wasn’t much the vapid alt-weekly press in the U.S. was going to teach
him. So I asked him what he wanted to do (among other things, meet writer William
Gass) and we did that instead.

On Nov. 3, 1996, elections
were held in Serbia. Opposition parties united under the "Zajedno"
(or "Together") banner were defeated at the national level, but they
won municipal elections in a number of major Serbian cities, including Belgrade,
Nis and Novi Sad. When the regime of Slobodan Milosevic started annulling these
elections, it kicked off a three-month wave of protests that nearly swept Milosevic
from power and forced him to recognize Zajedno’s November election victories.

"Nearly" is the
operative word here, especially as far as Velickovic was concerned. Zajedno
quickly fell apart in a spat of internal politicking exploited by Milosevic,
and Velickovic was among the first media victims that Milosevic targeted. The
management of NIN kicked him out of the editor’s chair that spring,
precipitating a six-week strike by the staff.

"Certainly," Velickovic
says of his firing, "it was Milosevic and his wife Mira Markovic who were
behind it. He did it in his own way, which was to make difficulties and problems
for me through the management of NIN."

It wasn’t the first
time that Milosevic and other politicians had threatened Velickovic. In a chapter
of Amor Mundi titled "A Short and Very Personal History of Threats,"
he mentions threats communicated to him from Bosnian Serb general and indicted
war criminal Ratko Mladic and murdered Serb paramilitary leader Zeljko "Arkan"
Raznatovic.

Velickovic resurfaced in
1998 as the editor of Alexandria Biblioteka. He started it in an even
chillier environment for independent media with the support of the independent
weekly Vreme and help from the Open Society Institute and the Fund for
Central and East European Book Projects. "It was obvious that we missed
a magazine of its type in Serbia," Velickovic observes. "Serious but
popular. It was a challenge, too, to start a magazine about international political
and cultural matters in a country where xenophobia and isolation were at their
highest levels."

Those conditions were heightened
by two factors. The first was a draconian "Information Law" passed
by the Milosevic regime. Its most cunning and devastating provision allowed
those who merely felt wronged by an article to sue the media outlet that published
or broadcast the material. This wasn’t a libel law, but merely a means
by which offended Milosevic cronies could sue media outlets in courts rigged
by the regime. The whopping "fines" that resulted from such "trials"
stifled most independent media and put a few out of business. The second factor,
of course, was the NATO bombing and the martial law that accompanied it.

In this poisonous atmosphere,
Velickovic made some gutsy choices for Alexandria, including the publication
of portions of Tim Judah’s often unflattering study, The Serbs,
and Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History. He also chose to publish
translations of essays by economist Jeffrey Sachs and philanthropist George
Soros. A Serbian translation of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
was published on- and offline. "It was especially a challenge during
bombing and martial law," Velickovic says. "But I do think that we
had a very important role as a small light in dark times."

Alexandria ran into
continued difficulties right up to the revolution. This past summer issue of
Alexandria, in fact, was kept off the newsstands by continuing harassment
of the magazine’s distribution network. "That group was chased off
the streets by Milosevic’s police," Velickovic observes. "They
were not able to sell many issues."

The Oct. 5 storming of the
Yugoslav Parliament building was the defining moment of the Serbian revolution,
but those who know the Balkans well might point to the seizure of state media
outlets that day as even more important. State media in Serbia had a large part
in bringing Milosevic to power and it fanned the flames of nationalist hatred
that resulted in four wars in a decade. On Oct. 5, the lockstep state media
changed its stripes overnight. The daily newspaper Politika, for instance,
was a primary mouthpiece for Milosevic’s regime; it was "independent"
by Oct. 7. State television and radio were equally and instantly "flexible."

At the end of our phone
conversation, I ask Velickovic about this sudden 180-degree change in the state
media and the public’s reaction to it. He argues that "a great number
of people knew that we lived in lies. So there is a skepticism. I am a big skeptic
about Politika and state television. I doubt that they can be easily
transformed. They must be changed completely. You can keep the hardware, but
you must change all the software." He says the "new software"
is already available in independent broadcast media like Radio B92 and weeklies
like Vreme.

Independents like Alexandria
will soon fight it out in a nascent capitalist economy where the major media
outlets that supported Milosevic have suddenly ditched him for a new look. "It
will be a struggle for the market," Velickovic says dryly. On the upside,
he notes that Vreme had healthy gains in circulation over the last month
or so. "But will that continue?" asks Velickovic. "Or will people
turn to more conservative and softer papers that are not so critical?"

The answer to Velickovic’s
question may decide whether Serbs have traded in the harsh isolation and misery
under which they languished for more than a decade for a milder form of the
same thing.

Schoolly D

Reached by telephone in
Philadelphia recently, Schoolly sounds more philosophical than pissed off about
the fact that he hasn’t reaped the full credit for his innovation and influence.
"The winners write history," says Schoolly. "Whoever’s making
the most money can fool the public and say that they created it themselves."
Schoolly adds that thereal irritation for him is that "artists like Prince
or Chaka Khan or jazz artists give props. Some of these guys don’t. That’s
what’s wrong with hiphop." Acknowledgment via sampling, Schoolly observes,
is the real payback. "It feels good in my pocketbook," he notes dryly,
adding that when rappers use his early stuff, "there’s always evidence.
It has a unique sound. Shit, I can’t even recreate it anymore. I know they
can’t."

Not that he’s sweating
it too much. "I just do my own gig," Schoolly argues. "I don’t
have time to sit around and think about this kind of shit."

The first call on that time
is Funk N’ Pussy. Schoolly says the title and inspiration came from
a North London club night ("Funkin Pussy") that London’s Time
Out says is a mix of "ol’ school funky breaks, hip-hop and P-Funk."
Schoolly says he hung out with that crowd on his trips to London, played there
with his band and eventually ended up recording a record that’s closer
to his roots. "When I played it for a friend," Schoolly continues,
"he just said, ‘That’s that Schoolly D shit.’ It’s
about what’s going on with me–smoking, drinking, hanging out, y’know?"

There were vice and hijinks
to spare in Schoolly’s early work. His first three records–1986’s
Schoolly D, 1987’s Saturday Night–The Album and 1988’s
Smoke Some Kill–married dense and sprawling sonic landscapes crafted
by Schoolly and his DJ Code Money to laconic and deadpan raps. Listening back
to tracks like "Gucci Time" and "Do It, Do It" and "Mr.
Big Dick" across a hiphop timeline littered with Too Short and the Geto
Boys and Eminem, there’s a humorous and almost innocent quality to much
of Schoolly’s music. The important elements of the gangsta palette (drugs,
bitches, guns, conspicuous excess) are there, waiting to be exploited, but Schoolly’s
touch with them is defter and lighter than what followed in his wake. (Schoolly
followed those albums up with the massively underrated 1989 album Am I Black
Enough for You?, an album that mixed gangsta moments with a bit of Sly Stone-era
political funk, and two less well-received and now out-of-print efforts, 1990’s
A Gangster’s Story and 1994’s Welcome to America.)

The other calls on Schoolly’s
time are a variety of film and tv projects, including a new RuffNation film
called Snipes and an as yet unnamed project for Cartoon Network. Most
notably, he’s worked with Abel Ferrara, scoring the director’s 1998
film, New Rose Hotel, and he’s involved as a composer and actor
in a number of productions, (Schoolly D’s "Signifying Rapper"–with
its hook from Led Zeppelin’s "Kashmir"–was used to great
effect in the original theatrical release of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant,
but it was dropped from the video when the Zep complained that it had been used
without permission.)

"When I met Abel 10
years ago," Schoolly says, "he told me that if I took the lyrics out,
my music would be perfect for film." When people doubted his move into
film music, says Schoolly, he’d just bring up Quincy Jones. "The same
thing happened to him," he continues. "People told him he was crazy,
and he told them, ‘I’m gonna be 50 one day.’"

When I ask Schoolly about
the Cartoon Network gig, I remind him that he was one of the first people to
be interviewed by Space Ghost on Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. "One
of the producers is a big Schoolly D fan," he says. "When they called
me up and asked if I wanted to be interviewed by Space Ghost, I said, ‘Damn
right I’ll be there. I watched Space Ghost when I was a kid." The
new cartoon that he’s writing music for, he says, is about some soft-boiled
detectives who want to be tough guys. "My girlfriend and I were in bed
watching it," Schoolly says, relating the program’s harder-edge vibe,
"and we were saying, ‘I can’t believe this is going to be on
Cartoon Network.’"

I tell Schoolly that it
sounds like his own gangster story is finding itself a happy ending. He corrects
me quickly: "I don’t know about happy ending, man. But it’s a
happy transition."

The Go-Betweens

That’s not exactly
the problem for Australia’s Go-Betweens that it might be for, say, Men
at Work. Founded by songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan in 1978, the
Go-Betweens were never big enough to cash in the first time around. They were
always critical darlings, but their knack for signing with ill-fated record
companies obscured the quality of their 12-year run. The band’s six albums
were filled with melodic yet challenging pop-rock that rated among the best
music in that genre to emerge from the 80s. From the fervently desolate Talking
Headisms of their 1981 debut, Send Me a Lullaby, to the sparkling
cycle of love songs found on 1988’s 16 Lovers Lane, the Go-Betweens
produced work that should have made them more of a name. By the end, especially,
it was an act of criminal public neglect. Two "best of" collections
(The Go-Betweens 1978-1990 and Bellavista Terrace: Best of the Go-Betweens),
a release of very early stuff (78 ’til 79 on Jetset) and a Beggars
Banquet remastering and reissue of all six studio albums with extensive liner
notes garnered more critical attention, but not the well-deserved reexamination.

After folding the band,
Forster and McLennan spent the 90s issuing solo work of varying qualities. (I’ve
always preferred Forster’s darker and more sardonic solo work. McLennan’s
best was his collaboration with the Church’s Steve Kilbey on the one-off
1991 eponymous collection, Jack Frost.) They decided to reunite and record
earlier this year. Their new album, The Friends of Rachel Worth (Jetset),
is one that stands with all but the very best of their previous work. Not bad
for 10 years off the job.

Forster and McLennan eschewed
a full band reunion for a new rhythm section featuring Sleater-Kinney’s
Janet Weiss on drums and Adele Pickvance on bass. The result is a record with
a stripped-down feel more reminiscent of the band’s earlier days.

"When we left off,"
Robert Forster tells me by phone from Germany, "we were heading in that
direction." He says that various circumstances–the supporting cast,
the indie-ready Jackpot studios in Portland where they recorded Rachel Worth–helped
create that simpler sound, but he adds that "you never know until you start
listening to things back. It’s only then that you know, ‘Oh, it’s
going to sound like this.’"

Even in the simpler setting,
the songs on Rachel Worth retain the melodic sparkle and verve that was
so appealing in the band’s later efforts. When I ask Forster why he and
McLennan decided to get back together, he says that a tour that the two songwriters
undertook together last year proved decisive. "We always knew that we worked
well together," Forster says. "But it’s the kind of thing that
has to be brought up to your face." The tour, he argues, did just that.
"We knew we were getting better as we went along, fine-tuning and fiddling."

As solid as much of their
respective solo work was, the Go-Betweens’ juxtaposition of Forster’s
and McLennan’s often jostling sensibilities was what sparked the band’s
most fruitful work. Forster’s cool and arty depth was an anchor that grounded
McLennan’s buoyant charm. Forster agrees that such juxtapositions are crucial
to the band’s appeal. "That’s what we like," he says. "That’s
what we’ve come to appreciate more."

Forster adds that there’s
also something less lofty at work as well. "It’s the fact that we’re
playing guitars together and singing together on each other’s songs. That’s
the core of the Go-Betweens’ sound."

The Friends of Rachel
Worth puts the dynamics of juxtaposition and collaboration firmly into play.
The album literally sways between chiming McLennan songs like "The Clock,"
"Magic in Here" and "Going Blind" and marvelously offhand
Forster sketches like "Surfing Magazines" and "German Farmhouse."
The latter is a delightful romp, as its bassline tumbles to a thump and Forster
reels off lines like this:

"It’s about the
time right after the Go-Betweens imploded," Forster says. "That’s
what I wanted to do: sit in a German farmhouse. I was happy to stay in the German
farmhouse."

Another Forster gem on Rachel
Worth is a wonderfully ambivalent ode to Patti Smith called "When She
Sang About Angels." The song describes a Smith concert with Forster flinging
carefully targeted darts at Smith’s eccentricities like "When she
sang about a boy/Kurt Cobain/I thought what a shame/It wasn’t about/Tom
Verlaine," and "When she sang about angels/She looked at the sky/Anybody
else, anybody else/But I let it go by." The prettiness of the song’s
melody masks the very precise dissection.

Forster says that "When
She Sang About Angels" is written "from a real fan’s perspective.
When you’re a fan and you’re watching someone, it’s irrational.
You can complain for half an hour about this or that, but you loved the show."
Perhaps some of the Go-Betweens’ devotees will carp in similar fashion
at their CMJ show this week, but on the strength of The Friends of Rachel
Worth, they’ll probably let it go by as well. It’s that good.