Marquee Moon

This song does not rush. It is content to take nearly eleven minutes because it has somewhere genuinely interesting to go, and it trusts you to follow. Television were not punk in the leather-jacket sense — they were thinkers, readers, guitar obsessives who happened to inhabit the same Lower Manhattan ecosystem as Smith and the Ramones. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd construct guitar interplay that is more akin to jazz conversation than rock combat: the two instruments circle each other, answer each other, diverge and reconverge in ways that reward close attention. The rhythm section lays down something steady and unhurried beneath it all, a foundation that lets the guitars float. Verlaine's voice is the strangest element — thin, slightly reedy, hovering at the edge of its own range, somehow perfectly suited to lyrics that are oblique and imagistic, full of urban gothic imagery and unexplained encounters. The song builds through a long middle instrumental passage that is one of the great guitar moments in recorded rock — not a shred display but a sustained emotional arc, two musicians thinking aloud together in real time. It belongs to the CBGB era but sounds like it arrived from somewhere slightly outside time. This is a song for headphones in a quiet room, for the kind of listening that is its own activity, when you have forty minutes and want to give eleven of them to something that will use them well.