Dance With This Man!

Dateline: 1/6/98

Slim Moon: Won’t You Dance With This Man? (Kill Rock Stars 268)

Slim Moon’s Kill Rock Stars label is the great hope both of indie records and poetry’s purity and more than that, it rocks. I love him and it (where it=KRS). Hearing his solo spoken CD does not disappoint: it’s metal for the mental.

as if the poem were something to sneak up on

He begins low and slow, as if the poem were something to sneak up on, or as present as breath. “Hi, this is Slim, and this is my spoken word cassette,” so self-effacingly unselfconscious that you’re happy to be in the same room with him, even happy God invented technology so that the CD could emulate his being

in the room with you, even though he’s probably out there in Portland, and you’re probably not. Not to mention that the cassette is a CD.

Poems? I’d say so, although at one point Slim allows “I was born October 15, 1967 in Missoula. . . I’m a mountain boy. . . I always wanted to be a writer. . . I never imagined I’d be a talker. . . but I guess that’s what happened” and there is that feeling all over the place of “just talking,” (“Is that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?”) even when he utilizes a musical bed in which the poem won’t lie. The hesitations and burps are left in. The album is dedicated to Steven Jesse Bernstein.

The most produced versions of that are three longer poems using, shall we say, a repetitive crescendo form: with fuller accompaniment, occasionally a second or third voice, an ambient sensibility leaks in, and grows and grows -- cool. “The Black” is a harrowing trip into that color, a depression with no pill out ("outhouse / whorehouse / slaughterhouse").

there is that feeling all over the place of “just talking”

“Critterville” on the other hand is a two-voice sendup of all things religious and pompous. It’s wickedly funny, set in a ville where everyone’s an animal and magic and shares -- as wacky a coming-of-age tale as I’ve ever heard. Somehow the Eiffel Tower becomes a high tension wire and. . . And “The Sign, the Symbol, and the Signifier” hilariously deconstructs Deconstructivism with a list of synonyms for fecal matter, spoken over a couple of guitars doing some Zappa noodling while a child’s xylophone drones whimsically on.

You get two haikuesque sampled homilies (“That’s why I walk with my head up / When I hear wack rhymes I get fed up” [BDP]; “You’re either talking 'bout the place to be / Who you are what you got / or 'bout a Sucker MC” [NWA]). As the record moves along, Slim lets some self-consciousness slide in, and some pacing, and it’s all good, and sweet and kind, even when he’s confessing “I think I’m in love with my best friend’s mom.” There’s a ton more, and it all makes for a fun-filled, amazingly engaging listen, like having a smart guy over for dinner. You don’t even mind that the guy doesn’t do the dishes. You know he’s getting things right at KRS (we await the Edwin Torres release impatiently!), and even in his Last Words (“If you like this, get the Sue Fox cassette. It’s even better”), he can’t stop pumping.

--Bob Holman

If you can't find Won't You Dance With This Man? in your local record store, order it directly from Kill Rock Stars, 120 NE State Avenue #418, Olympia, WA 98501.

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