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(My Life With The) Thrill Kill Kult

Smart Bar

July 21

Reviewed by Tom Zav

Most people think a 'sampler' is a little box of chocolates you give to a favored aunt on Valentine's Day.

In the techno music world, a 'sampler' is a device for capturing sound bites. These sound bites, or 'samples,' are often spoken vignettes of political speeches, pontifications, or just odds and ends. The samples are integrated into the music, adding a sleazy tabloid-like texture. Class dismissed.

You sat through that lesson to better understand the Thrill Kill Kult. The band started back in 1987 when singer Groovie Mann (not his real name) and friend Buzz McCoy (not his real name either) decided to start a 'sample band.' Their desire was to mirror the ridiculousness they read in tabloid headlines at the grocery check-out.

They have a good bass hook. They have a 135-beat-per-minute kick drum. They have samples of a stoned woman saying “My friends turn me on-I live for drugs." They have an industrial strength, glitzy, glittery Las Vegas-style show. They have heavy digital editing. They have a hot, smoky, sweaty club to play in. So guess what? Folks lined up for a midnight show on a Wednes-

day, just to see them.

I stepped off the elevator just in time to enjoy one of their early teen-hit singles: "Cooler than Jesus." Afterward, they moved into a revved-up rendition of one of their later teen-hit singles: "Sex on Wheels." By the time they got to their teen-hit single "The Days of Swine and Roses," I was tempted to join the moshing. (Really though, sometimes I think Clevelanders will stage dive for any band whatsoever. "Hey man, it's Odd Girl Out." "Cool man, Aaaahhhhh!")

For over an hour we were treated to a non-stop barrage of well-constructed samples and sweaty rhythms. The band seemed to enjoy it as much as the crowd, with lead singer Groovie Mann (like I said...) stumbling around under the weight of the chains around his neck. "But," you ask, "what club band would be complete without a Diva?" Backup singer and former uh-huh girl Jacky Blacque (not her real name either) took the role and provided a provocative focal point throughout the show.

"Daisy Chain for Satan," another teenhit single (of course) was the encore, yet the crowd didn't seem all that responsive. Too hot, too sweaty, too tired and too much in a daze to show their appreciation at this point. But then, to a band that loves tabloid headlines, that's the point of the show. One of their samples says it best: "Reality is the only word in the language that should always be in quotes."

The displaced eroticism of the opera queen

The Queen's Throat:

Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

by Wayne Koestenbaum Poseidon Press $22.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Timothy Robson

This book stands in a unique position in the literature about opera. A number of adjectives come immediately to mind: ecstatic, baroque, provocative, campy, self-indulgent, bizarre, and orgasmic are among them.

Wayne Koestenbaum, who teaches English at Yale University and is a self-identified opera queen, really gets his rocks off in this book. He applies the metaphors of opera to homosexuality (primarily male homosexuality, although there are numerous references to lesbian desire throughout the book) and attempts to enlighten us as to why so many gay men have such a strong affinity for opera and opera singers. The Queen's Throat is not much about music (at least from this musician's viewpoint); it is about "attitude." And one must have attitude to be the proper opera queen.

The musician thinks about the technical aspects of music-the way the composer has assembled notes into melodies, chords, arias, scenes, acts. The opera queen thinks about the peculiar way that his favorite diva sings a particular three notes of an aria. The musician considers musical structure; the opera queen dreams about the diva's costume in the third act.

Koestenbaum divulges his own coming out as a gay man and opera queen in the early, anecdotal segments of the book. For a young man who realizes that his feelings do not match those of others around him, opera-the ultimate artifice-is an escape from a cruel reality. Opera becomes a kind of displaced eroticism. The gay man can identify with the diva's larger-than-life behavior. We recognize that the diva is “different" because a freakish characteristic of her physique (her vocal cords) allow her to create sounds unavailable to us. Not only

can the diva create the sounds, she can put them to dramatic use to move us. The diva is queer, but okay; everybody knows that opera singers are not of this world. The diva (Maria Callas is the ultimate example) destroys herself and her voice for our sake.

Koestenbaum devotes chapters to proper diva and fan behavior. (The opera queen must have a proper gush technique.) He also discusses at length the "shut-in" opera fanthose who know opera primarily, or only, through the Texaco Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoon, Opera News magazine, and recordings. All the better for a true opera queen, since if the contact is purely aural, the imagination is free to concoct an entire staging of an opera. The book ends with a description of the author's "Pocket Guide to Queer Moments in Opera."

I had never considered as queer the final scene of Salome in which the princess Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist-quite the opposite, in fact. But for Koestenbaum: "What does Salome want? To give head, to kiss a severed head, to masturbate, to love someone of another religion and race. . . After her scene, the orchestra and the soldiers' shields crush her ... Salome is a cautionary tale directed at voice culture. Its grim moral: Head tones, and the men and women who produce them, are perverse. Those who love head tones are perverts, and should be killed."

Huh?

ing reading. Koestenbaum draws some reThe Queen's Throat begins as fascinatmarkable parallels from opera to gay life. He seems unable to sustain his level of discourse, and the analogies become strained. Several parts of the book began as essays published elsewhere, and there are many brilliant moments: The sum of the parts, however, just does not add up to a unity. This book is to the literature about opera what the Peruvian diva Yma Sumac was to musical performance-an overblown oddity.