Word: mule
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Listening to Tom Waits' Mule Variations is like picking a dirty mutt off the streets and taking it home--you're not exactly certain what it is, but it's a howler and a hellraiser for sure...
...bluesy musings than barroom rasped ramblings. Hobo yowler "Cold Water" will rattle in your head for days. Quieter moments are searing, Waits' gravelly voice bending like an old tree under the blade of a pocketknife. To top it off, he spikes the album with oddities like "Eyeball Kid." On Mule Variations, the music pounds and the lyrics are sharp, "My eyes say their prayers to her/sailors ring her bell/Like a moth mistakes a light bulb/For the moon and goes to hell." From the grinding sturm und drang of "Big in Japan" to the bittersweet strum and twang of "Pony," Waits...
...suspenseful, "I have to tell you the truth--ever since the legendary astrologer Patric Walker died I..." and we're prepared for something fantastic and mystical, like "I can't walk under a ladder without a black cat falling into my Prada purse" or "I threw a Manolo Blahnik mule at a mirror and haven't been able to find comfortable shoes for seven years." But instead she finishes with "I don't look at my horoscope as much as I used to." Okay, maybe flying all the way to Milan only to act like a human clothes hanger...
Journalists are the last to know. We're like terriers on speed; our heads spin at the slightest rattle. But history is a mule in the thicket; it moves when it moves. If you ask me, the story of the year could just as easily have been the moment when Iran lifted its fatwah bounty off the head of Salman Rushdie, or when Iranian President Mohammad Khatami gave an interview to CNN--baby-step signs of a revised national policy regarding the Great Satan...
...Steve's next band was equally impolitic; he named it Rapeman. Rapeman was quieter than Big Black, but this is relative. It had a human drummer, for one thing. Rapeman had only one album; it was named Two Nuns and a Pack Mule. The best song builds slowly from a single guitar and frequent silences; then it adds a bass line, then some white noise and then Steve's voice. The song is hypnotic, even lovely, but in typical Albini fashion, this song is called "Kim Gordon's Panties" and features classy lyrics like "If I had that to come...