The New Urban Edge
by Sarah Crichton
Esquire Magazine, November, 1985
Leonard Cohen reemerged last spring to paly Carnegie Hall. There he was, on posters plastered across Manhattan, displaying all the bohemian affectations of an era long gone. But the Cohenites came out for the night, which was rather sweet, when you think about it. It's hard to know where they live or who they are, but like the Japanese soldiers still hiding in Pacific caves, there are some folkies left in this most self-conscious of cities.
New York folkies haven't had a singer to swoon over for a long time, but they do now. They have Suzanne Vega, whose self-titled A&M debut album is causing palpitations in Folk City circles. They're calling the twenty-six-year-old singer-songwriter the new early Bob Dylan, the new early Joni Mitchell, and yes, the new early Leonard Cohen. Those who worry she will be tainted by the folkie label are also calling her the new folk-style Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Patti Smith. It's not old-style folk music, they argue, it's proto-minimalist folk-rock. Several songs, they'll tell you, are prime examples of a new musical form: "folk-rap fusion."
Their concern is understandable. There is something terrifying about a waif of a woman who strums an acoustic guitar and sings convfessional poetry in a soft soprano. You prepare to be embarrassed at learning more about her than you ever wanted to know.
But Suzanne Vega does not embarrass. With wit, grace, intelligence, and an honestly cruel edge, she skates past the pitfalls of folk music. Her acoustic guitar is backed by synthesizers, electric guitar, drums. There is no self-pitying vibrato in her gvoice, and while she is often found in the stranglehold of love, she watches herself with irony and unflinching insight.
Raised in Manhattan, Vega writes urban songs. This is not the pastoral folk of the Sixties, or even the folk of the Village garrets. It's the folk of the scummy Lower East Side. Her own life is directed by a form of meditative Buddhism. It's reflected in her music, which is often chantlike and circular in motion and sound. "I am cool and smooth and curious," she sings, and it doesn't surprise us. That is what she sounds like. But underneath her cool detachment lies a heat that comes from burrowing beyond defenses to see what lies in her heart and her mind. What Vega finds there is startling, distinctive, true.
Does she ever stumble? Sometimes. If there's anything a folk singer likes better than songs about the railroad, it's songs about queens, soldiers, and the chivalry (or lack of it) between them. Vega's got one of these. There are times--and this is one of them--when she inches perilously clsoe to coyness, the hole into which many star folkies have fallen and disappeared. But these moments are counterbalanced by Vega's edgy realism.
Since the invention of the lute, the vagaries of love have possessed singer-songwriters, but few have been as honest as Vega about their obsessions. In "Undertow," a voracious ode to sex, she sings: "I believe right now if I could/I would swallow you whole/I would leave only bones and teeth/We could see what was underneath/And you would be free then."
Suzanne Vega may find herself a pawn of love, but we sense it will not maul her. It is 1985. If anybody's going to do some mauling, it will be Vega.
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