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By Root 411 0

(“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” now don’t shudder, you’re being as silly as she is), but Tom Petty (“Breakdown”)? Even a song title as promising as “Bullshit” fails to deliver the goods, although one must sympathize with Grace when she sings that “all those assholes” (you know the ones) are annoying her, and adds (chorus) “I’m gettin’ tired of all this bullshit…. /Hey Jesus c’mon down and save us.” True, she's got the creme of Jamaica's session pros behind her (the Robbie Shakespeare/ Sly Dunbar contingent), but there are times when, even in the tropics, a sessionman is a sessionman is a sessionman. The real question with this total newavicization of yesterday's discolettes is, Who's left to hate and blame everything on now? Answer: New Wavelettes! Death to Fashion in any form! And no slow romantic Catholic deaths either— shoot ‘em on sight. Should she escape her inevitable termination long enough to make one more album, might I suggest Grace get really des-ecrative (Chrissie Hynde is small potatoes) and cover Lou Reed's “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” off Nico's 1967 Chelsea Girl album, which features such lapidaries as “Excrement filters through the brain,” “Filth covers the body pores,” and “Pus runs through minted hair.” Shit, they really knew how to party back then.

The Village Voice, June 25, 1980

*Dance-Oriented Rock (DOR) was then a music-biz marketing term.

Stevie Nicks:

Lilith or Bimbo?

Inever met anybody who didn’t like Rumours. It got played a lot around my house in the year of “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “White Riot,” and I think the reason why so many people who got airsick of being in the same room with Eagles records might find songs like “Dreams” bringing them to tears was that Fleetwood Mac transcended FM Hollywood, not only by playing and singing with open-eyed passion but by articulating the painful questions of love (and the real answers that hurt). “Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they’re playing” may have been obvious, but that was its very purity: you had been there, and could remember all too well when you first learned you can’t change anybody. The song was so honest and accurate that it became heartbreak instead of just being about it. It was cleansing for everyone who heard it, which was everyone period.

I guess what it comes down to is where you live, and I don’t just mean Hollywood or New York. That's part of it, but it's too easy. Stevie Nicks may be a space case, a terminal mutation of the genus Superstar (her manicurist gets a liner credit), and at times emetically narcissistic—the cover, which is thoroughly repulsive from where I sit as a man or graphix fan, is the worst thing about Bella Donna, her successful bid for solo stardom. The best things about it are state-of-the-art production, the husky passion of her voice, and her melodies, which are so tenacious I’m still listening a full two months after I first bought this record and decided it was a bunch of shit.

The reason I think it's a bunch of shit is Stevie's emetic narcissism, and one reason I’m still listening to it is that I think emetic narcissism is funny (gotta find some way to live with it, after all). Take the cover: if you think of yourself as a witch, you can probably count yourself in Stevie's constituency, and may not even mind that she's giving you the finger on the back. Some listeners may be more unnerved by the fact that the front cover credits a different hairstylist than the back and inner sleeve, and it damn sure looks like the same haircut (demand your money back). Finally, those are the dumbest shoes since the halcyon days of Quay Lewd and the Tubes. What kind of witch wears stacked heels?

But people don’t buy records for shoes, they buy them for songs, and now we’re back in bunch of shit territory again. There really are still some people who believe a love song says “I love you because you are like this and thus and so,” not “I love you because I am like this and that and the other thing.” Somewhere they exist. Though whether even they would want to listen