Days between stations: as far from the trends as one can get, these acts make the ultimate connection

Over the past months I found myself returning to the slow, hazy tunes on a pre-release copy of Nina Nastasia's Run to Ruin (Touch and Go). I'd get lost in its oddness: the way it felt as if it came less from anywhere in Nastasia's Hollywood hometown or current life in New York than from some drugged, after-hours Central European cafe in the '30s--the way the album seemed to emanate less from anything happening in the world of pop music than from a fantasy that the world of pop music didn't exist.

Listening to Dylan Willemsa's progressively hysterical gypsy violin on Nastasia's progressively claustrophobic "I Say That I Will Go," I thought of Cat Power and Meg White, drummer for the White Stripes-the way they tend to incite a kind of hysteria in fans and critics. Nothing would be easier than to dismiss Nina Nastasia--her album, her little-girl voice, her name--as pretentious and precious. And nothing, apparently, is easier than dismissing Meg White and Cat Power.

At the Experience Music Project's lively conference in Seattle this past April--about 500 critics, academics, musicians, and fans discussing everything from the discovery of the Delta blues in a YMCA rooming house in Brooklyn in the '40s to a horribly embarrassing, meticulously organized audiovisual presentation on the oppressiveness of pop cliche from 1970 to the present-hostility to the two acts was patent. Panelists and audience members who brought them up got a lot of laughs--but they brought them up as if they had been somehow offended. "Nothing wrong with the White Stripes that, you know, a drummer couldn't fix," you heard. All Cat Power needed was to go away.

Was it because these musicians are bad--incompetent, stupid, a con--or because they don't fit? The White Stripes are supposed to be part of a movement, part of the Strokes-Hives-Vines Stripped-Down Resurgence of Real Rock 'n' Roll, but White plays as if she hasn't heard. Cat Power ought to be a sensitive female singer-songwriter, but she's not sensitive at all. Why else would she write a song where a woman seemingly claims to be carrying Jesse Jackson's son? ("He's related to you," she chants psychotically, but somehow very believably, "He's dying to meet you.") Why else would she perform as if she doesn't care if you listen? These people look nice, but they don't act nice.

At a recent show in San Francisco, Meg White started many songs as if she were practicing in her room. There was a sense of experimentation, but more than that, an aura of insulation, of haying the door closed. Yet if Jack White with his guitar and Meg White with her drums play, as they say, as if they're in their own little world, whatever barriers they erect are transparent. Meg White has enormous stage presence, not because of broad gestures or signature rifts but because she is so plainly herself--that is, not someone else, because she is filling a place no one else could fill. Again and again as the songs went on, Meg White appeared to draw Jack White toward her, and then engaged the sounds he made as if they were physically present, bending backward and forward in a thrilling drama of attraction and repulsion, tease and refusal, yes and no and yes. The drama wasn't addressed to the audience in the hall any more than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers addressed themselves to audiences in movie theaters, but the drama the band made wasn't altogether different from the drama enacted by Astaire and Rogers. The legitimacy that pop trends seem to bestow on performers was revealed as the real con; the White Stripes were creating their own legitimacy.

Nina Nastasia's songs are pretentious because they dare to sound strange, out of place, irrelevant. That gypsy violin is a foreign language even if you understand it, especially in the five and a half minutes of "The Body." The song seems much longer, because whatever it is that's happening here--an emotional breakdown, a crime, or the Gestapo showing up (there is the faint sound of European police sirens deep in the background in the final moments)--it never holds still.

The song makes me think of a moment in the film Aimee & Jaguar [1999], set in Berlin in 1943, when a Jewish lesbian passing for Aryan tells a friend why she hasn't gone away: "It's my goddamned, mediocre little right to be free. As long as I can." She could be speaking for the performers here, and vice versa.

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