Dolemite Is My Name

Eddie Murphy has been in movies for thirty-seven years, but Dolemite Is My Name is the first time he has played a real-life person — Rudy Ray Moore, the self-described “ghetto expressionist” who rose up by making records and then movies that turned the African-American urban experience into ribald slapstick. Moore was already 48 years old when his first movie, Dolemite, was released in 1975; it helped expand his cult, which has survived his death, in 2008, at age 81. Dolemite Is My Name celebrates Moore as a hustler and an anti-mainstream creative; it fits right in with the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s previous films (Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, Big Eyes).

Murphy brings not only his still razor-sharp comedic instincts but a certain gravitas, a whiff of defeat, to his performance. The stakes seem higher, the obstacles to success taller, than in those other weird-show-biz biopics. Moore is a black man pushing fifty; in the words of Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, “If you were gonna make it, you woulda made it before now.” Murphy plays Moore as if hearing those words on repeat in his head. There’s desperation under his confidence, and a hot drive to surpass his abusive, belittling father. Perhaps Murphy, 58, needed some years under his belt, some failures and humbling, before he could play Moore with truth and honor. (The character of Dolemite is a different story; Reggie Hammond, Axel Foley, and many other Murphy heroes were essentially slimmer, sleeker Dolemites.)

Directed by Craig Brewer (who’s also helming Murphy’s Coming to America sequel), Dolemite Is My Name settles, in its second half, into a tongue-in-cheek, half-irreverent making-of-Dolemite comedy. It doesn’t make the mistake of holding up Dolemite as any kind of art. Watch the 1975 film again and you’ll see it transcends its amateurishness with its eagerness to please — packing its 90 minutes with sex and violence, it comes close to being a “good parts only” guilty pleasure. Yet it also stops dead so that Dolemite can unspool one of his rhyming stories, the progenitors of hip-hop, for an audience of appreciative street dudes (and later in his nightclub). The sense we get from the new biopic is that Dolemite may not be everyone’s idea of art, but it is pure expression. Moore took inspiration from the signifying of winos and junkies, put his own spin on it, and delivered it to those who laughed at its familiarity and those just discovering it. It is, in its way, art.

The biopic stays bright and colorful despite its structure of ups and downs — Moore and his crew work hard, sweat, and improvise to get that damn film in the can. Murphy is surrounded by ringers like Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and especially Wesley Snipes, as Dolemite’s director and onscreen villain D’Urville Martin, pretty much the only participant with any Hollywood experience. Snipes is to this movie what Burt Reynolds was to Boogie Nights; he brings all his film roles and all our knowledge of his offscreen foibles to his portrait of a jaded Tinseltown satellite (dining out on having played an elevator operator in Rosemary’s Baby) who offers hope to a despairing Moore at one point. Watching Snipes up there with Murphy carries levels of associations and memories, mostly warm. At this point, both men, once kings, seem to have passed through ego into human-scaled consciousness, and therefore become kings anew.

As in Ed Wood, the hero here gathers a group of misfits around him to achieve the common goal of a Z-budget flick. Moore works with blacks, whites, gays, Jews, and of course women to realize his dream — the movie is good-hearted, though it sort of underplays Dolemite’s casual misogyny (at one point in the 1975 film Dolemite deals his lover a couple quick slaps in her face before resuming coitus). You could watch Dolemite Is My Name and miss that Dolemite is a pimp; the women in Dolemite are there to act as Dolemite’s kung-fu enforcers, but they’re also there to show their merchandise. Once again, an Alexander/Karaszewski script softens some of the reality (don’t think too hard about how D’Urville Martin is played as somewhat gay and the never-married Moore, about whom rumors have flown in recent years, isn’t¹). But generally this is a convivial and compassionate tribute to creation by any means necessary.

¹On the other hand, much is made of Moore’s being nervous about shooting one of Dolemite‘s sex scenes until Da’Vine Joy Randolph as his confidante Lady Reed suggests that the scene could be played for laughs. We never see Moore with any girlfriends, either.

3 from Hell

So it turns out that Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding was the corroded soul of Rob Zombie’s “Firefly” films. Haig, who went to the great grindhouse theater in the sky this past September 21, was front and center, a leering psychotic ball of greasepaint and rage, in Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005). In the new, much-belated third film, 3 from Hell, Haig has one vehemently defiant scene early on, and then ol’ Captain Spaulding gets the death penalty. (Haig was supposed to have a much bigger role, of course, but his health forbade it.) Although the striking Richard Brake takes over what would have been Spaulding’s grisly activity and is perfectly fine at it, Haig is dearly missed.

Given the choice of having Haig for a matter of minutes or not doing the film at all, I don’t know which I would have chosen (nor do I know if Zombie had the option to pull the movie’s plug). I do wonder, though, why 3 from Hell was made, because the rotgut masterwork Devil’s Rejects was a perfect, hard, diamond-like finish to the story of the Firefly family, rounded out by Spaulding’s daughter Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), who makes Mallory Knox look like Mallory Keaton, and her hellbilly adopted brother Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley). At the end of Devil’s Rejects, it certainly seemed as though Zombie had given them a Viking funeral and Peckinpah send-off all in one, but they survived the police onslaught (“twenty bullets in each body,” we’re told here), and Baby and Otis spend ten years in prison.

Cut to 1988. Baby is up for parole (hilariously) and Otis is sprung from a road crew by his half-brother Foxy (Brake). Soon enough, the three are on the lam, menacing enemies and strangers alike, and we get the depressing feeling we’ve seen this before. Baby does her drifty, swaying-cobra routine that snaps into lethal focus, and Otis drops pompously demonic pronouncements like a dinner-theater Manson. The usual gnarly sadism, vintage needle-drops, language that would make a Marine blush, and rather offensively offhanded nudity follow. (I am not as convinced as Rob Zombie apparently was that a Firefly victim, courageously played by Sylvia Jefferies, needed to be stripped naked and then be knifed to death in that state on someone’s front lawn in pitiless daylight. The death, and her suffering, would have had equal impact if she’d been allowed to stay clothed.)

I’ve only seen the unrated cut of 3 from Hell, so I’m not sure what bits of grue (a gory woman blubbering while her flensed face hangs on a tree; intestines out where we can see them; the results of arrows, machetes, and bullets versus flesh) made it into the R-rated version — but who, given the choice, is going to opt for watered-down Rob Zombie, anyway? The thing is, Zombie has already freaked us out with most of this violence before; even the bit with the disembodied face is a variation on a much stronger scene in Devil’s Rejects. Zombie probably wanted to get the old gang back together for one last bloody ride, and that’s understandable (as long as it is a last ride and we don’t see another of these goddamn things in 2025). Zombie has gifts; he really does. And I’d rather see him using them with fresh material than repeating himself, which is what he did to some extent in 2016’s 31 and also here.

Zombie, 54, will probably never change. If he lives to be 80 and he’s still able, he’ll still be making second-generation grindhouse fare in his jittery greasy-grimy-gopher-guts aesthetic — I don’t expect to see Zombie’s Ikiru or Fanny and Alexander. But B-movie integrity can be as much of a trap as insincere Hollywood romps; past a certain point, both approaches start to feel inorganic. The Devil’s Rejects felt like a story Zombie just had to tell, and a story that nobody else could tell so sharply. 3 from Hell doesn’t. Again, it seems to have no urgent reason to exist, except perhaps to give us a last glimpse of Captain Spaulding (if not Sid Haig, who will still appear posthumously in two more films by other directors). So, hooray for Captain Spaulding. The rest of these motherfuckers, not so much.

Midsommar

Whether it was curiosity or masochism that led me to Midsommar, the second feature by Ari Aster, I’m grateful to whichever it was. I more or less hated Aster’s debut, the high-pitched horror Hereditary, but this one’s the real deal — it sets a brittle but menacing tone early on and sustains it for well north of two hours. Midsommar feels like a hard shot from the source of terror — an allusive work of art, admittedly built out of earlier art. It will be (already has been) debated and discussed in perpetuity, and it’s the sort of film as comfortable on the front cover of Fangoria magazine as it will be as an eventual spine number in the Criterion Collection. When you hear Martin Scorsese or someone else going on about cinema, Midsommar is what they mean. It doesn’t just shock or spook. It unsettles.

The set-up is almost comically thorough and bleak. The leads, Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), are in a relationship that looks to be circling the drain. Something traumatic happens that makes sure they stay together (thinking back on it now, I wonder who or what is ultimately responsible for the tragedy), and they find themselves accompanying a friend back to his home turf in Sweden, specifically a remote commune where dwell an ancient band of pagans called the Hårga. The Hårga are awfully sunny and polite and friendly, and if we’ve seen more than one movie before we mistrust them on sight. But as directors as disparate as Robin Hardy (The Wicker Man) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) knew, the horror doesn’t only lie in the “foreigners” our onscreen avatars find themselves among; it’s also in how “we” change, or don’t, in relation to them or in response to them.

It is true that Midsommar gets a couple of mean creepy moments out of a disfigured boy, the result of inbreeding in the Hårga clan, but he doesn’t do anything bad — he’s elevated as an oracle in the society. Besides, Aster has louder and wetter disturbances in store. I should probably say that the reported level of violence and perversity in Midsommar — likely from viewers who don’t see many horror movies — has been overstated. When it comes, though, it’s a sharp jab in the chops, all the more ghastly for unfolding in broad, shadowless daylight. At certain points some of the characters take psychedelic drugs, which in the world of the Hårga is really gilding the lily. Pugh and Reynor add a prickly, precarious vibe to the festivities; they’re neither good nor bad but realistically flawed, and they don’t always act nobly or wisely.

If we “liked” any of the protagonists in a simplistic manner, it’d be harder to see what Aster is truly going for. At many points, we have a god’s-eye vantage point on the action; the script keeps us in the dark about the Hårga and their motives, while the filmmaking (cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski deserves awards) is all blue skies and open air. The camera eye is neutral, showing us the primal, alien rituals without editorializing. Even the Dani’s-eye, psilocybin-soaked visions are like, hmm, that’s odd. (There’s actually a character named Odd.) At one point the outsiders loudly berate the Hårga for “just watching” as gore makes rainbows in the sunny air. We agree, yet we’re also just watching, and this is what we came to watch, whether or not we knew it.

Midsommar is an immersive and illogical experience. There’s a director’s cut, for now available exclusively from Apple, that runs 171 minutes and fleshes out more of the relationship between Dani and Christian. It’s not necessary, though, for us to see ourselves in them or vice versa. We identify with the outsiders only sporadically (especially not the idiot who accidentally micturates on a sacred dead tree), and the minds of the Hårga are as obscure to us as the mind of a spider. Ari Aster has a distinct voice — he seems to take for granted that people are invariably going to be difficult and self-defeating — though maybe not the most steady control of his effects yet. There are still, as in Hereditary, a few too many moments wherein we’re not sure if we should laugh, or whether Aster means us to laugh. Consistency may never be his strong suit. But he has delivered, in this cult epic, a powerfully paranoid mood piece. Time will tell whether Aster can function without hellish covens and nightmarish attempts to re-assert gender primitivism, but I’m certainly ready to tag along with him and find out.

Wallflower

This past weekend, a film opened. You may have heard about it. Controversial in some quarters, it tries to enter the head of a man headed for a breakdown. His life is miserable; he wants to connect with women but doesn’t know how. He tries to fit into a community that will accept him, but it doesn’t work. Eventually his implosive anguish — we may as well say his toxic masculinity — expresses itself in explosive violence. Some commentators have said the movie sides too much with this man; others see it differently, as a depiction not glorification of anomic savagery.

Joker? No, Wallflower, a much smaller independent film based on a real-life tragedy. In 2006, a 28-year-old loner named Kyle Aaron Huff spent some of an evening at a rave in Seattle, then at an after-party. The next morning, he returned to the site of the after-party with a shotgun and a handgun; by the time he was done, seven people were dead, including Huff, by his own hand. Five years in the making, and funded on Kickstarter, Wallflower was cowritten and directed by Jagger Gravning, who’d known two of the victims and who wanted to divine meaning in the entrails of the massacre. Who was Kyle Aaron Huff (unnamed in the film, and played by David Call), and what drove him to his actions? Gravning offers some clues, and shows a few revelers trying to reach out to the killer, but sometimes fellowship isn’t enough. What would have been?

The glowering loner has his small arsenal in his truck, and at one point he acts as though he means to take his guns into the party at its peak, when the sun is still down. But he seems to think better of it — temporarily. Maybe he wants someone to change his mind, to touch something in his soul; maybe he wants to fall in love. He knows he won’t, but he’s willing to entertain the possibility. Meanwhile, we meet various players at the after-party: Link (Connor Marx), an affable anarch whose house it is; Strobe Rainbow (Atsuko Okatsuka), a lesbian cartoonist going through an acrimonious breakup. Strobe and the killer actually have a couple of things in common, but they may be too alike in the wrong ways. She seems to sense his bad vibes, and seeks to repel him from her group.

In this way do former outcasts ostracize current ones. It’s not Strobe’s fault, of course, nor does the movie come close to suggesting it is. But these are all people who — the film implies — escaped a small-town life where they were considered strange, and found a community of the likeminded strange in the rave scene of Seattle. The killer himself is originally from Whitefish, Montana, where he has a history of small dust-ups, including shooting up a moose statue. He came to Seattle, he says, because it was “close by.” He wanted to run away from home, but not too far. (The actual Huff moved there with his identical twin brother; the movie doesn’t mention a brother.) David Call does quietly pained work as the killer seems to pass an internal point of no return. Symbolically castrated and ejected from the group, he walks sadly to his truck.

Gravning has some definite chops as a director. Whether out of financial necessity or out of respect for the dead, he doesn’t show much of the carnage as it’s happening; we get a few aftermath glimpses. The style of the filmmaking is subdued and mildly doomy even during the bouncy rave sequences, when the killer is never far from the camera’s gaze, leaning against a wall staring in morose incomprehension at the ravers. A couple of the stoned conversations are as dreary as they are in real life, but mostly Wallflower walks a fine, unsteady line between keeping the narrative engaging and somehow making the story “entertaining” (exploitative). The narrative itself is splintered, nonlinear, reflecting the killer’s own cluttered headspace. By the end, attention is also paid to the continuing PTSD and coping of the survivors, and I found myself indifferent to how true to the letter of the real story the movie was. It feels true enough. Many, many fewer people will see Wallflower than saw Joker in its opening weekend, alas.

Life Is Cheap and Death Is Free

Even by Warren Zevon standards, 1989’s Transverse City — Zevon’s seventh studio album, and his second since getting sober — is perverse and bizarre. Zevon had bottomed out after the general non-reception of his 1982 album The Envoy, and had spent the better part of five years in the wilderness recuperating, reading, filing the occasional live gig. Then, in 1986, things started to happen. Martin Scorsese, one of Zevon’s idols (he’d dedicated his 1980 live album Stand in the Fire to the filmmaker), gave prominent placement to Zevon’s hit “Werewolves of London” in his Paul Newman/Tom Cruise vehicle The Color of Money. Within a week of the movie’s release, we saw the first (but by no means the last) best-of-Zevon comp, A Quiet Normal Life, featuring “Werewolves” front and center. The next summer, in August 1987, brought Sentimental Hygiene, Zevon’s first sobriety record and his first for the label Virgin. Critics and fans embraced it.

So what did Zevon do for an encore? Well, see, he’d been reading William Gibson and Thomas Pynchon…

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Transverse City landed with a heavy thud in October 1989. Zevon’s one and only “concept album” — I’ve also seen it described as a “song cycle,” and that seems to fit better — it was steeped in the language and paranoia of the dense cyberpunk fiction Zevon had been devouring. Such was its reception that Zevon was let go from Virgin. If the label thought Zevon was going to be a good commercial boy and serve up “Werewolves of London, Part 2,” they must’ve been thinking of someone else named Warren Zevon.

This goddamn thing kicks off, on the title track, with elaborate mouthfuls like “Here’s the song of shear and torsion/Here’s the bloodbath magazine/Here’s the harvest of contusions/Here’s the narcoleptic dream,” like an apocalyptic street vendor showing off his wares. Just in case the album hadn’t sufficiently alienated the hoi polloi, track 2, “Run Straight Down,” opens with Michael Ironside droning the names of poisonous chemicals, leading into Zevon announcing “I went walking in the wasted city/Started thinking about entropy.” Take that, new fans! Ahoooo, werewolves of dystopia!

The conventional wisdom is that, if Sentimental Hygiene was Zevon’s personal detox album, Transverse City was his post-detox album, where he peered around through clear, sober eyes and saw a late-’80s wasteland. Some have claimed the album as a barbaric yawp of fear and loathing. It’s very likely that during the writing, Zevon was venting anxiety and weltschmerz. But the Zevon I hear on the album — and I’ve listened to it a lot in the last two weeks or so, even before realizing its 30th was approaching — sounds almost elated at times. Take that title track: Zevon is rattling off all the diseased nooks and crannies of the futuristic society he’s painting, and it could come off as a hectoring litany like Leonard Cohen’s “The Future,” except it doesn’t. Zevon sounds as if he’s gloating over all the new rhetorical toys he gets to play with. He’s thrilled as fuck to occupy himself in the vast sandbox built by Gibson and Pynchon, just as he loved to evoke Ross Macdonald (another idol) in his many walkabouts through the back alleys of criminals and screw-ups. Zevon loved language, and it’s by no means clear that the voice we hear is especially fearful. To him, this nightmare world of loneliness and toxicity is just another patch of noir territory, sealed with an intellectual’s smirk.

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I first started to suspect Zevon was actually grooving on what he was supposed to be decrying when I heard “Down in the Mall,” track 9, for the hundredth or so time. Now, this could easily be mistaken for a banal anti-consumerist pie in the face of the ’80s shopping ethos. And it certainly sounds satirical, what with the refrain “Up on the escalator/Darlin’, we will ride” presenting itself as a parody of outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde (or Frank and Jesse James, stars of the first song on Zevon’s breakthrough self-titled second album) going for a ride, whether on horses or behind a wheel — except here it’s to go from, like, Sears to Sam Goody’s. Irony, of course, was one of Zevon’s frequent tools, but let’s also remember this was the same man who had an OCD thing about buying scores of identical gray Calvin Klein shirts. He would go from department store to department store on the lookout for the damn things, and then stash them, never taking them out of the package. To my ears, “Down in the Mall” is more interesting as an acknowledgment of the excitement, the hunting/gathering aspect, of shopping to get what you want than as a condemnation of mallrats.

Like any good dystopian author, Zevon was doing two things with Transverse City. Number one, he was having a ball for himself world-building through sometimes incongruous turns of phrase — building not so much a world, really, but a mood, an atmosphere. Number two, he was ostensibly writing about the future — once referring to the album as his “2010 sci-fi project” — and one song, “The Long Arm of the Law,” refers to “the war in Paraguay back in 1999,” which at the time was a decade in Zevon’s future, and is now two decades past. But really the album is more about 1989, or the ’80s, than about whatever far-flung cyberpunk milieu the narrative occupies. Part of the job of the better sci-fi, after all, is to comment on the artist’s own world using the vocabulary and design of the world to come.

Zevon is at his grimmest in “Run Straight Down,” which — talk about perverse — was released as a single and as a video. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, one of the album’s many guest stars (as per usual for Zevon, who was a musician’s musician), drizzles some gorgeous guitar noodling over the main character’s account of wandering around the city of crap and deciding he’s better off just surveying the societal/climate damage from his couch on the late news. For the most part, Zevon isn’t terribly adventurous musically; he lays down engaging but basic rock/pop melodies (which give songs like “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” their particular infectious quality) and then ladles verbal weirdness on top of them. A wrought iron fence can be ornately designed, but it still has to function as a fence, and most of Zevon’s songs serve as fine structures underneath the rhetorical finials. “Run Straight Down” is different; it doesn’t seem to owe much to rock or pop. Eerie and dissonant, it plays on one’s inner Spotify when one least wants it to — it’s the soundtrack to the wolf hour.

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More often than not, the songs on Transverse City could appear on any other Zevon album in terms of theme and content, aside from a slight tickle of the future. Such is true of “The Long Arm of the Law,” track 3, which sounds much like the theme song for an action TV show about outlaws a step ahead of Boss Hogg or somebody. Except for the aforementioned 1999 dating, the track may as well concern another in Zevon’s thick tarot deck of crooks, lowlifes, and scofflaws. Some things will never change; there will always be low scum challenging the order of things, as well as high scum. In the context of a paranoid cyberpunk album, though, it’s thematically plugged into the same power strip as the other songs. It’s different electricity, and it makes “Long Arm” sound different than it would by itself or in the company of songs like “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Zevon knew he couldn’t go too far afield — in his words, he couldn’t indulge in a song about “11th-century Indian architecture” in the middle of what was supposed to be a dark-futuristic album — but a few of the songs attach themselves to the larger Transverse City theme, like remoras to a shark, without necessarily being organic to it. (I will say, though, that when Zevon works up to “When the judge says ‘Who done it?’/You’ll be crying ‘Not me! Not me!” he really acts that not me! By golly, he means it.)

That’s also true of the next track, “Turbulence,” with its frequent refrain “Turmoil back in Moscow brought this turbulence down on me.” Turmoil/turbulence — Zevon had a real talent for this sort of assonant larking (even Zevon’s loathed gravestone hit has the impeccable sequence “little old lady got mutilated late last night” — “lady/lated/late last night”). The song gives Zevon license to play with geopolitics, one of his favorite toys, and again it wouldn’t seem out of place on The Envoy. Zevon liked to tongue the sore tooth that was Russia (his dad, née Zivotovsky, was a Russian immigrant who developed mob ties in the new country), but this song doesn’t seem to have anything much to say about the future of Russia or of its place in American nightmares. It’s another song that’s more about the time in which it was recorded than about 2010 or whenever. The implication, though, is that Russia will go on being mired — in self-doubt, in war in Afghanistan — for the foreseeable future.

One of my favorites comes next, the creepy “They Moved the Moon,” which shakes out as the album’s closest thing to a true love song. The narrator can’t process change, is deeply confused by it, and needs a partner to be his anchor, to stabilize him. “They changed the stars around,” he keeps complaining, and he was expecting you to be there to get him through it. But you weren’t. (Sorry, man.) Tonally, “They Moved the Moon” seems to float in the same strange brackish pool that hosts “In the Air Tonight” — spacey but grounded in bold, basic emotions, fear, anger, tension, release. It feels like someone trying to breathe inside a tightening chest. Whoever Zevon is singing to, she (Zevon was nothing if not staunchly heteronormative) has the power of clarity over him. He can’t see straight without her. An OCD alcoholic needs familiar things, needs routine. They can’t just keep moving the moon and changing the stars around, for Christ’s sake.

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Onward to track 6, “Splendid Isolation,” the one song on the album you stand a fair chance of having heard, since it’s on a couple of the Zevon compilations. We are assured by the man’s grown children, Ariel and Jordan, that reclusiveness is in the Zevon DNA; “The family crest is a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign,” cracked Jordan. The narrator sings the praises of solipsism; unlike the poor quivering bastard in “They Moved the Moon,” he doesn’t need you — or likes to claim he doesn’t. On one occasion, the use of double negatives either trips up or reveals the narrator — “Don’t wanna wake up with no one beside me,” he sings, which could mean either that he doesn’t want to wake up alone or that he doesn’t want to wake up with someone beside him. The rest of the stanza, though, re-affirms the reclusive context. To tie the song into the surrounding dystopia, the narrator confesses, “I’m putting tinfoil up on the windows/Lying down in the dark to dream/I don’t want to see their faces/I don’t want to hear them scream.” They? Why would they be screaming? Again with the (tinfoil) paranoia. Whatever else it is or isn’t, this must be the weirdest bit in a single since “And it rained like a slow divorce/And I wish I could ride a horse” in Robyn Hitchcock’s “Balloon Man.”

But isolation has its limits, and the next card Zevon deals from his deck is the internet-as-sex song “Networking,” wherein Zevon the writer and lyricist delights in all this nerd terminology he probably got by eavesdropping on IT guys, not unlike Mark Knopfler breaking out the notebook when a guy in a hardware store started venting about how that ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it. “It’s a long hard road and a full hard drive,” he writes, probably chuckling to himself over his cleverness. Zevon got by with this sort of thing because he was clever, and he used it to cut to the chase. “I will upload you, you can download me” is an undeniably fine — and, in 1989, prescient — turn of phrase; it could be dirty if squinted at, with the side benefit of being the correct use of these terms in a less poetic sense. The 2003 reissue of Transverse City signs off with an acoustic demo of “Networking” as a bonus track, and while this means the album no longer ends on the wistful note it once did, it at least sends us back out into the world with the affable, analog grumble of Zevon accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica — he really sounds as though he’s “truly basic” and “installs with ease.”

Recently, thinking about Synchronicity and the rest of the Police corpus, I decided that Sting (another clever lad) was driven by anger and a need to prove he wasn’t just some dumb pop-star pretty boy — he’d been educated as a teacher, thank you very much. (Sting seemed to chill the hell out as soon as he went solo and his nerves weren’t being stomped by Stewart Copeland.) So a song like “Synchronicity II” stands outside the Jungian agonies of its protagonist, while his rage builds up, taking the form of a monster casting a shadow on a lakeside house. When Sting sings about rush-hour workers “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes,” he’s too busy sniffing the perfume of his own schoolboy simile to occupy that car himself. He feints towards compassion, but the real mission of the song is to help illustrate a thesis. “Gridlock,” track 8 on Transverse City, is a much more engaged and American pass on similar material. Since it focuses exclusively on the frustrations of traffic jams, it’s free to climb into the narrator’s crawling skin. The music, perhaps ironically, is the most basic hard rock on the album, coming on like your standard roll-down-the-window (and let me scream) summertime cruise anthem. The lyrics express constriction and rage (“I feel like going on a killing spree”) while the music — featuring Neil Young on crunchy, aggro lead guitar — evokes escape. Prophetic as always, Zevon seemed to have written the theme song to the sweaty, buzzing-fly opening ire of 1993’s Falling Down. (“I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” is the finest thing in that movie and could easily be a Zevon lyric.)

Zevon leaves us (on the original album, anyway) with the gently sorrowful “Nobody’s in Love This Year,” which again would fit as well on a non-dystopian album, and again only seems apocalyptic in proximity to its neighbors. The air is dead, the water is dead, experience is dead, love is dead. Zevon starts this whole journey with a carny-barker list of inhuman things to observe in Transverse City and ends on a very human entreaty: “I don’t want to be Mr. Vulnerable/I don’t want to get hurt.” Much as The Wall was Roger Waters’ response to fascism everywhere he saw it, foremost in himself, Transverse City (an urban sprawl crossing at an angle to humanity?) diagnoses societal ills through the author’s own symptoms. Zevon set out to fashion his very own Neuromancer and came back with one of his most autobiographical (and certainly most neglected) works. “The muse is a tough buck,” said S.J. Perelman, and sometimes it takes you down weird side roads. You wanna write a cyberpunk novel, kid? Okay, you do that. You’re gonna end up just writing about your own shit, but fine. What else is new?

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As I said, Transverse City tanked, and Virgin gave Zevon his walking papers. They’d sunk a lot of dough into Sentimental Hygiene, and weren’t in the business of playing patrons-of-the-arts to a cult favorite. I’ve heard all of Zevon’s studio albums, and this one speaks to me most directly, for whatever reason, maybe because Zevon uses future-shock themes as a Trojan horse to sneak past his own gates. He can’t look at the eclipse of his soul directly, so he peers at it through the sunglasses of sci-fi. (The future’s so dark, I gotta wear shades.) What we end up with on Transverse City is apprehension not about the future in general but about Zevon’s own future as a still newly-sober artist. The booze and drugs had done a good job of blunting his reception of reality, but now he’s at risk of being Mr. Vulnerable, isolated down at the mall. His antennae are clean, pulling in disturbing signals with no interference. And yet, being Zevon, he’s going to be dryly witty about it all, and even amused on some level. (“I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,” quipped the dying Zevon to David Letterman at the top of his final appearance on Letterman’s show in 2002.) That’s where his instinct as an entertainer kicks in, despite himself.

Usually concept albums have a unifying figure — Pink, Tommy — but any attempt to pry one out of this album is a fool’s mission. Is the rough tough creampuff in “The Long Arm of the Law” the same narrator who issues an amiable geek-cred come-on in “Networking”? I don’t think so. There’s no Jesus of Suburbia here, no Kilroy. Generally Zevon’s songs don’t share any fictional narrator, but listening to him across the decades, we don’t get the sense that all the songs emerge from distinct voices, either. There’s one voice on all the albums, and that’s Warren Zevon. That’s why, despite some of the strongly late-’80s production, Transverse City sounds newly minted thirty years later. Although it can be inadvertently predictive (accidentally like an oracle?), it’s a walking tour through an artist’s preoccupations, griefs and grievances, the world filtered through ostensible dystopia filtered through Zevon. I’m convinced that the album, much moreso than “Werewolves of London” or “Excitable Boy” or even his masterpiece “Desperados Under the Eaves,” is key to deciphering him. It’s just this gnarled, overlooked Rosetta Stone for the rest of Zevon’s work and life.