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By Root 424 0

connoisseur of career twists and cosmically saddening to anyone who loves David: he's confused fashion with style, and let himself be packaged in a way that's embarrassing if not emetic. What's truly scary is how passionate and frank he is about it, maybe because he doesn’t yet see the subtle, crucial, tragic difference between wearing flash clothes to accent the blaze of your own one-in-a-billion personality and becoming the clothes. Here's an ad from last week's Voice: “The new album from David Johansen does it all with emphasis on melody, a touch of class and flash… but always ‘In Style’… Rock ‘n’ roll dressed to kill.” Come on, somebody, please tell me he's not selling himself so desperately it's pathetic.

Meanwhile, In Style itself is a perfectly pleasant album if you just wanna throw it on once in awhile. Me, I have this problem separating people's music from the stance or value system behind it, and what's behind In Style stinks (either that or the music's just not strong enough to make you forget, like the Stones used to).

The title cut, though it's an okay rocker, embodies the problem. Like the Voice ad, the song's a self-exposé, an admission that to get the riches and fame he wants, he's willing to conform, to compromise himself in the meantime: “Until there comes a day that I find me a better way/I’m doin’ it all up in style”—what more damning criticism of this album could I make than that? I knowhis back's to the wall, I know the last album didn’t get any radio play, just like I know that David likes sharp clothes with pockets full of spending loot, and that of course he always wanted his picture taken by Richard Avedon. What I didn’t expect from somebody as unique as David was an album of homogenized formula rock from Stones to Springsteen (later for Mick Ron-son!), and to see him peering through the bars of a package that veers between clichéd sexual commodity and imitation jaded cosmopolite. He used to be funky and now he may be chic though I doubt it, in fact he was always chic because he was funky, and now… he's beginning to … look like …

Trash.

Oh, but don’t forget the “touch of class and flash” (yeah, the touch!)—this is no bowzer boy making his play, selling out. And in a way he's not selling out, because this shit, to be what J. Rotten called one of the “stupid fools who stand in line,” seems to be what he really and truly desires with all his measureless heart, and there's the true tragedy and obscenity. But I’d just like to ask him: David, assuming you get the stardom you want on the terms you’re settling for, just how are you gonna avoid becoming the person you were talking to in “Frenchette,” who mistook the glitz for the soul, or the one you’re talking about/to in “Flamingo Road?” This song is half a masterpiece—the Springsteen-out-of-Van Morrison geographic metaphor is still a little too derivative—which finally just tries too hard, complete with Spring-steen pomp. This is also a song about a person who, in Little Richard parlance, got what she wanted but lost what she had: she made the big time, and now she's got “half the clothes in France” (rhymes with gratuitous “leather pants”), and it doesn’t mean shit, she's freezing to death in the back of a Lincoln Continental. Well, to apply the brutal logic of the mentality he's addressing, that does seem to be what happens to people whose value systems lie in their wardrobes. When he sings “I bet your conversation takes you everywhere” it breaks your heart for an instant, and suggests what he might achieve in lieu of becoming Rick Springfield for Vogue—a real, clear-eyed, even somewhat wise exploration of what men and women can do to each other when all the glamour's on the floor.

There's also “Justine,” a song in sight of the Grail of “Donna” which is nearly ruined by another goddamn Springsteen-mold arrangement; the single, “Melody,” a romping but vocally strained Four Tops tribute (so he sings more “correctly” now, so what); the disco-influenced “Swaheto Women,” which is neither sellout nor much of anything else; Stonesish blareblasts “She”