HIGH NOTES+ |+P A G E+2+O F+3

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David Bowman, author, "Bunny Modern," Salon contributor:

One of my absolutely killer favorite albums of the '90s is Chris Whitley's death-guitar laden "Din of Ecstasy" (I am perhaps one of only a handful who felt this way). Last winter I had the opportunity to interview Whitley in conjunction with his third release, "Terra Incognita," and afterward, the guitarist did what I'm sure every interviewer of a musician dreams of: He made me my own personal cassette of outtakes and demos. I believe I am the only listener in America whose ears have been graced by Whitley songs such as "Die in Your Mouth" and "Complex Sex Ritual."

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Greil Marcus, author, "Invisible Republic" (Henry Holt) and "Dead Elvis" (Anchor):

The thing that continues to fascinate me is the way that all these Elvis non sequiturs continue to appear in news stories. I've detected over the past few years a hidden theme that always has to do with malevolence, with evil, with some murderous act. Elvis appears as a joke, as a predator, as a demon. Here, for example, is something I recently found in the New York Times, this from the prosecutor who was giving the summation at the Terry Nichols trial:

[Beth] Wilkinson attacked the defense presentation of witnesses who swore they saw others who might have helped in the bombing, including the suspect who was first identified as John Doe No. 2, a man who was later found to have had nothing to do with the plot.

"As a result of the media frenzy, sightings of John Doe 2 were about as common and credible as sightings of Elvis," Ms. Wilkinson said. "No one is telling you Tim McVeigh was never with anyone else. The issue here is, who is on trial? John Doe 2 is not on trial. Tim McVeigh is not on trial. This is the trial of Terry Nichols."

There is an implication here that Tim McVeigh was at one time seen with Elvis. This is what I don't think I'm ever going to get over -- I had a lot of trouble with this idea when it first occurred to me. I first noticed it quite a long time ago when I came across all these inexplicable pairings of Elvis and Hitler, which are not as common as Elvis and Jesus or Elvis and Clinton. I was baffled by Elvis and Hitler, until I received a letter from a girl I knew in fourth grade. In fourth grade, she was this insane Elvis fan. She had the nerve to actually go to an Elvis concert in 1956, for which we teased her mercilessly. She led a very tragic life -- both her parents were killed when she was 13, she got married young, had kids and then divorced.

She wrote me when "Dead Elvis" came out. She said that it wasn't until just a few years before that she had been able to throw off the mantle of Elvis, that he had dominated her life like a demon until her mid-40s. He had been an all-consuming, all-powerful force representing all that was beautiful, all that was powerful, all that was unattainable. He had a life force that cast other people into the shadows and made her feel less alive. And she made that very explicit. There's something of that behind all these references where Elvis represents something fascistic, something about domination. It has to do with his continued sovereignty over ordinary people.

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Will Hermes, Salon contributor:

I moved around a lot in 1997, and what struck me most was how many alternative nations one nation can hold. I saw techno pioneer Carl Craig drop beats for a beautifully deranged crowd of old-school, martini-slurping, black and white 30-somethings in Detroit; jumped around with a bunch of white teens to U.K. jungle DJ SS and MC Warren G in a crumbling Minneapolis warehouse basement; watched more white teens ripping out rows of seats during Korn's set at Lollapalooza in Palm Springs, Fla.; chilled with bourgeois lesbians and their children at a sold-out Lilith Fair in the Minnesota 'burbs; saw Christian punk rockers MXPX thrash it out in San Jose and East Indian smooth boys in turbans bumping to bhangra at a club in New York City. But I suppose the most memorable scene was seeing the great Colombian rock band Aterciopelados at a little San Francisco club called Slim's. I'd never heard of them (a friend insisted I go), and I watched the packed house of expats and rock en Español fans go bonkers, moshing, stage-diving and singing along. It reminded me that the breadth of our country is immeasurable and unknowable, a notion that always makes me feel patriotic.

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Mark Athitakis, Salon contributor:

For a genre that's caused so much contention among critics and listeners, "electronica" has become assimilated into the mainstream with impressive speed -- Aphex Twin's "Boy/Girl Song" in a Bank of America ad? But while I never really questioned electronic music's validity, I distrusted the "new punk" tag that followed close behind. Sure it's art, but can it rock? Hearing German knob-twiddlers Mouse on Mars perform "Super-Electric" live with Stereolab erased every doubt: For 20 minutes (40 minutes? an hour?), the music brilliantly swirled, swelled, closed in on itself and climbed back out again, the whirrs and buzzes more than keeping pace with the guitars. "Musical revolution" is all media hype, but the overwhelming revelation I heard there was pure. Forgetting about Next Big Things, I'm content to simply accept that moment at face value -- and look forward to discovering it again in 1998.

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Charles Taylor, Salon contributor:

What hit hardest for me this year was four of five moments in movies that offered the elation of hearing the perfect song at the perfect moment: the Emotions' "Best of My Love" accompanying the exhilarating tracking shot that opens "Boogie Nights"; Pam Grier holding herself tall and true in "Jackie Brown" to the tune of Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street"; Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" heard in the opening credits of "Welcome to Sarajevo" and sounding like a wail from a lost paradise; Luna's version of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's duet "Bonnie and Clyde" heard in the closing credits of "Irma Vep," a lament not just for outlaws but for the way movies we love turn us into outlaws when they end, searching for the next temporary place to call home; and most of all, the few seconds MTV's "Week in Rock" showed of a 1962 promotional film of Francoise Hardy singing "Tous les garons et les filles." It looked as if Jacques Demy had been asked to shoot a scene for "Masculine-Feminine," and Hardy's face -- fresh, cool and ready for whatever was coming -- summed up the beauty of youth on the verge of endless possibilities.

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DJ Spooky, techno artist and Paper columnist:

It seems so bizarre -- we stand at a precipice of our own imagination in the American pre-millennial cultural landscape, and finally electronic music hits the American pysche in a way that most people can deal with. This little ditty is pretty much straight off the dome -- thoughts floating with no temporal reference Mir station-style -- while the planetary culture (and the government that put you in space) slowly vanishes beneath you. Princess Di's media death, Elton John's capitalizing on same, Biggie Smalls' rhyming the hip-hop equivalent of Walt Whitman's poem "I Sing the Body Electric," Sublime's vocals from beyond the grave, etc., etc., etc., etc. Aside from the "electronica" of the Chemical Bros and Prodigy, we had moments like Alec Empire and his Atari Teenage Riot crew opening for one of my favorite rock bands, Rage Against the Machine, or the Invisible Scratch Picklz and the X-Men finally getting their props from a much much much larger audience, or for that matter, people like me being able to jam with a whole orchestra to create a musique concrete collage with one of my favorite composers, Iannis Xenakis, or seeing one of my jazz heroes, Butch Morris, cooling out at my party, Abstrakt, every Tuesday checking the vibe ... I could go on, but you gotta admit: In a period where movies like "Titanic" seem to reflect the rigid hierarchies of a society adrift on a cold icy sea, and the barriers between different cultures seem to be our invisible iceberg that could sink the "American Dream," I gotta fess up: Damn, multi-culturalism feels good. What next? Tribe Called Quest does a collaboration with Boris Yeltsin? Anyway, people are a lot more open to musical diversity right now than they have been in years. And for me, that's the best moment of '97.

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Michelle Goldberg, Salon contributor:

Though a fierce backlash has arisen against the Lilith Fair, it was easily the most significant musical moment for me in 1997. Not the artists, necessarily -- I've seen loads of better bands this year -- but the vibe. It was the mellowest, friendliest, least bitchy atmosphere I've ever felt at a concert. To me, that makes all the difference between trying to look like I'm having a good time (or trying to look coolly disaffected, depending on the venue) and actually being able to forget myself for a few hours. I actually got weepy when Tracy Chapman sang "Fast Car" -- that song was huge during my hideous high school years. Whenever I was in the car of some loser guy who was driving me and my friends around our loathsome town with bottles of Jack Daniel's and hopes of statutory rape, and I'd hear that song, I'd close my eyes and plot my escape to New York City, which finally happened when I turned 16. Looking around at the Lilith Fair, I could see it meant just as much to the thrilled girls holding their lighters in the air with a sweet kind of ridiculous earnestness.

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Stanley Booth, author of "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" (Random House, 1984), Salon contributor:

My most musically significant moment of 1997 was first hearing the loudspeakers in Ray Charles' outer office and then spending an hour or so talking with him. Having listened to him since I was 12 (he's 12 years my senior), I was reassured to discover that, like me, he values most highly Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Willie Smith, Hank Crawford, Lonnie Johnson, Charlie Parker, Clark Terry, Milt Jackson and a large but still limited number of other artists who have what we call "a distinctive sound." Sad to say, but neither of us hear many today who possess such a sound. He gave me this line: "Next time you talk to a rap artist, ask them to hum you the melody."

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Joe Heim, Salon contributor

Every once in a while I lose faith in music. Nothing sounds new. Nothing sounds interesting. I look through my stacks of CDs and find nothing I want to listen to. It's always temporary, but enduring these bleak periods I question the possibility of pop salvation. Ron Sexsmith saved my music soul this year. Last July, in the midst of a full-on musical meltdown, I headed to Seattle's now-defunct Backstage to catch Sexsmith's set. With his first melancholy note, the 33-year-old Canadian delivered a healing punch usually reserved for Sunday morning televangelists. Singing his dreamlike stories -- "Pretty Little Cemetery," "Thinking Out Loud," "Average Joe" -- Sexsmith reminds me of a wounded Roy Orbison. The voice isn't as pretty, but the hurt is raw, and when he sings, "She was not the girl next door, but the girl from 'round the corner," I am lost in its inexplicable perfectness. And, once again, I believe.

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Sean Callahan, Salon contributor:

For me, the musical moment of the year was hearing Cornershop's wonderfully jangly "Brimful of Asha" (from the album "When I Was Born for the 7th Time") on my Japanese-built radio in my American-made, Mexican-assembled car. This ode to Indian pop culture by the English sons of Indian immigrants is proof that pop music, like capitalism, will only grow stronger as it continues to plunder foreign lands.

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Brett Campbell, Salon contributor:

Last summer, Oregon's National Public Radio outlet, without surveying its members, tried to eliminate all its music programming -- mostly classical, jazz and world music. But outraged music fans struck back, organizing a letter-writing campaign to newspapers and the station board of directors. The protest culminated in a downtown rally at which a thousand music lovers, playing classical music through loudspeakers, demanded the changes be rescinded. Alarmed, the station's board met in a special session and decided to keep the most popular would-be victim, NPR's "Performance Today," the best classical music show on the air today. The proposed program changes reflect our increasingly bottom line-oriented culture's disdain for history, art and meaning, even in one of the last bastions of public spirit, public broadcasting -- but the response showed that people really do still care about great music.