The “genius” in my iPod must have been subliminally preparing me for the ignominious defeat of American Idol’s Great Queer Hope by spinning up tracks from the latest album to emerge out of the apparently bottomless Arthur Russell archive, Love is Overtaking Me. A musical wunderkind of the NYC Downtown music scene, virtuosic cello experimentalist, dance music legend, and muse/musical mentor to Allen Ginsberg, Russell has already posthumously conquered several additional musical arenas. Championed by the likes of Jens Leckman, Russell’s catalogue is deep & varied enough to inspire fantasies of a “Songs of Arthur Russell” on Idol. Okay, that would take some alternate pop universe to happen. But that’s precisely where his songs seem to come from: a dream-state Top 40 of the heart and mind.
Since his days curating music at The Kitchen, and cutting disco records under various pseudonyms, Russell has held the ear of the cognoscenti. With Love is Overtaking Me, he reveals himself to be a one-man Laurel Canyon as well, equal parts Gram Parsons and Nick Drake, with just enough of a dollop of NYC grit and assonance to make his sound unique.
Russell’s songs make an excellent decompression chamber after the weeks of staring down Glambert’s throat as he struggled to command America’s attention through sheer sonic ecstasy. Love comes at the perfect moment, and in the perfect musical register: countrified and relaxed, but with none of that “relaxed fit” approach of a singer like Kris Allen, whose “frat guy with a guitar” type is typically taken by our culture to be the yin to Adam’s yang.
On “What it’s Like” — a Velvet Underground-like tribute to his heartland roots in Iowa — Russell puts paid to the Christian mythos from which Allen and his indistinguishable ilk spring: a young zealot confesses to his wife that he now loves Jesus more than she, only to prompt her admission, in return, that she only slept with him to find out “what’s it like.” As erotic and spiritual yearning to approach this unnameable “it” mingle and merge, Russell charts an astonishing excursion into what Zizek calls the perverse core of Christianity, leaving the milktoast troubadours of Christian soft rock far, far behind.
Some of these songs are unfinished sketches, of which Russell had recorded thousands at the time of his death. But their lack of polish only seems to increase their fabulosity. “Maybe She” is a queer boy’s paean to an intellectual crush, whom he wants to invite out for a walk, but fears she might infer ulterior motives: “she might think I want to date her, that would be hard to arrange, maybe I should ask her later.”
The precision with which “Maybe She” draws a portrait of that ubiquitous but rarely valorized state of mind, abashedly trembling on the edge of introducing yourself to an admired other, is turned inside out in the rhythmically infectious “Time Away,” in which he scoots about his room, picking up pants and putting away records while “taking time away to dream.” Russell lived a penurious life in an apartment that relied at one point on an extension chord, run upstairs by his neighbor Ginsberg, for electricity. His need to carve out time and space to create commands real respect in our era of gaytention deficit syndrome (which is really tied to our overconsumption and the need to work long enough hours to feed the vicious cycle). “Time Away” is an eloquent, jubilant reproach. But, lest we be tempted to romanticize the starving artist, Russell makes certain we overhear him sing to himself “You know I just can’t be sure anymore. I just can’t be sure.” Time away is a needed respite, but Russell is wise enough to acknowledge its transience.
The let-er-down-easy ballad “I Couldn’t Say it To Your Face” sounds like an undiscovered James Taylor single. And listening to the echoes of Taylor on Love has led me to reconsider an oft-disparaged singer who nonetheless held an important place in my childhood, whom I knew first as the composer of campfire songs I sang in summertime. “Fire and Rain,” “Something in the way She Moves,” and “Carolina on my Mind” have since been liquified into mush by their ubiquitous rotation on muzak and easy listening stations everywhere. All the more amazing, then, to discover in Russell a trove of songs that are like Taylor, only better, retrospectively restoring in me a childhood state of pleasurable sing along.
And there is something both queer and childlike in the gentleness of Russell’s songs to women, a bit like Sufjan Stevens but less twee: “I touched you on the arm, I meant you no harm” Russell sings on “Janine.” With Sufjan, it would be a moot point, since he couldn’t possibly hurt a fly. In Russell, one can hear the pressure of an as yet undomesticated downtown scene, post-Velvets but pre-Giuliani, a context that requires the consoling, cautionary lines “Janine: don’t go with those guys. What’s in it for you?” The anodyne sounds of Love emerged as an antidote to their times, not as an acquiescence to them, as so much underachieving indie rock today unfortunately sounds like.
This fall Duke Press is publish Tim Lawrence’s biography of Russell, and there will also be a conference at NYU about his life and work. Love is overtaking indeed.
