Rock 'n' roll as a second language

Cornershop "Woman's Gotta Have It" (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros. CD)

Cross Big Audio Dynamite's whimsical samplings with Nirvana's beefy guitars and drums and top it off with a big heap o' Ravi Shankar and you have England's Cornershop, led by Tjinder Singh, a Briton of Indian extraction.

From the sitars and tablas that wind their way through funk workouts like "6 A.M. Jullander Shere" and churning rockers like "Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu," to the apropos-of-nothing cover photo of a miniskirted babe, circa 1970, Cornershop's entrancing new release transmits a pleasant sense of dislocation. "First I was a foreigner/Then everything was cool forever," sings Singh, and you may feel the same way after hearing Cornershop's exotic yet familiar sounds. This is rock 'n' roll as a second language, filtered through the experience of the sons and daughters of the people who run your neighborhood convenience store.

-- Joyce Millman

"Savage Dreams"
by Rebecca Solnit (Vintage Books)

Virtually ignored upon its hardcover publication by Sierra Club Books, "Savage Dreams," Rebecca Solnit's ambitious, visionary meditation on the encounter between European culture and nature in the American West, should find the wider readership it deserves as a Vintage paperback. Despite Solnit's activism in the anti-nuclear movement, her book is the furthest thing imaginable from earnest environmentalist hand-wringing and exhortation. Long, engrossing loop trails through such topics as the role of walking in the discoveries of physics, the history of landscape painting, the conflict between the Arcadian and Utopian social impulses and her own ambivalence toward her fellow protestors ("I often find it embarrassing to be associated with them") lead elegantly back to two spaces -- the desert and Yosemite -- where human beings are provoked to contemplate our place in the cosmos.

-- Laura Miller