Eshtine

top ten again

Rufus Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright

This is the legacy of Randall Roberts, a dj at a little radio station I've mentioned before, KDHX. He played cuts from this album as I was driving to the station to take my shift. I would sit in my car in baffled wonderment. How could any modern song be so exceptionally crafted?
The whole album sounds like how I imagine today's albums might sound if the polish of pop music hadn't been abandoned in the anarchy of rock and roll. In rock, emotion trumps skill; if you play it loud enough, it doesn't matter that you're playing it badly. On the "pure pop" end of things, the situation isn't much better. The hooks may be finely crafted, but the content of the songs is generally so shallow as to be nonexistent. Real songwriting, which requires depth of expression as well as the ability to write a hummable tune, seems a dying art.
That is why this album is such an anomaly. The creation of these melodies in today's world doesn't make much sense; they should have been written in the heyday of the Brill Building. The voice, though, is post-Dylan. Wainright is very nasal and his enunciation casts no light on the lyrics. Speaking of the lyrics (although they don't generally make much literal sense), there's no mistaking their modernity, either. So much of them are a young and overly romantic gay man learning sad lessons about love. The one that caught my ear first never mentions its major theme by name--a death-specter that looms over sex whether or not young gay men today choose to think much about it. The song is "Barcelona," and the most Wainright will say directly to the bull he might one day have to fight is "Fuggi, regal fantasima." It is what Verdi has his "Macbetto" say to the ghost of his father: "Leave, royal ghost."
That's another thing you don't hear much of from today's rock stars or pop stars: opera allusions.