Ann Magnuson
It’s easy to forget that there was once a time when little girls didn’t dream of becoming stars, when women weren’t allowed onstage at all and female parts were played by men–centuries before Andy Warhol and John Waters. It wasn’t until the turn of this century that significant numbers of women dared venture onto the public stage; they were considered little better than prostitutes for plying their craft. Moving pictures and the ascent of Hollywood changed all that, at least theoretically, and within a few quick decades the middle class went from scorning the brazen hussies of stage and screen to worshiping them as icons of ideal womanhood.
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The Luv Show, the first solo album from Ann Magnuson, the singer-actor-writer-performance artist who was once half of the madly eclectic Shimmy-Disc band Bongwater, is a concept album based on this modern archetype. (Fans of Bongwater might have seen it coming, since Magnuson and Kramer were masters of the concept song–a short anecdote or spurt of stand-up comedy over music designed specifically to augment the content.) In Magnuson’s telling, the saga of the ingenue in Hollywood is much less Vincente Minnelli than Russ Meyer; she quotes directly from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in the liner notes-cum-program.
Now, there is an in-joke overkill common to works that draw so heavily from pop culture; retro is always at least one step removed from the immediate, and Hollywood retro at least two. But for any intelligent woman, irony is a necessary bit of sexual armor, and in the belly of the Hollywood beast, what else could provide the raw material for that irony? (Reality? Define your terms, please!) “Sex With the Devil,” a twitchy, clipped, Latin-cocktail-jazz pastiche, is pleasant enough up until the inevitable bloodletting, but Magnuson’s demon lover (played by Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell) tortures by tickling, and her giggling indicates that a resourceful woman can survive a shattered innocence intact as long as she keeps her wits–and her wit–about her.
The irony flows fast and thick, but it’s the expressiveness of Magnuson’s voice, the theatrical attention to musical detail, and the persistence of Magnuson’s intelligent humor that convince us that the pain and joy and desire are all quite real–you don’t even have to know Magnuson really is a small-town girl, from the insular, chemically poisoned, and economically depressed Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. The attraction of young artists from the sticks to larger, faster worlds is obvious and Magnuson’s frantic career has at times seemed like overcompensation. Surely her self-assuredness must sometimes feel like a strange mask to her. On The Luv Show she presents that mask, then lets us see–with a wink–what’s underneath.
