#481: D'Angelo, "Voodoo" (2000)

—Brad Efford

#482: Steve Earle, "Guitar Town" (1986)

There’s not a lot of room in my life for country music. I like folk, and pop, not to mention the numb, unconsoling murmur of Swedish alt rock. Sometimes I jam out to 90s confessionals—Nada Surf. Something Corporate. Hey, It’s a Shame About Ray. Stacks of CDs clump in tiny Trump Towers in the foot wells of my car, in amongst the socks and receipts and forever-damp umbrellas. But not one of them is country.

Where I live, in your typical New England landscape, trees crowd close, and it’s a slow, bright creep until winter, when the leaves drop and you can finally see the sky. A daily commute around here might contain the right number of cows and barns and agile steeds to suit a Midwestern ballad, but the barns, mostly for drying tobacco, are in poor repair from disuse, and their support walls have warped like wet paper, giving the whole sloppy scene a lop-sided, fun-house mirror mien.

Instead of cowboys we have tax accountants, slumped over their steering wheels, breathing their soft animal breaths as they flock to the city. There are no quiet streets, no lonesome roads until well after midnight, though the local Starbucks closes at 8 p.m. on Saturdays, and the parking lot of Double Take Double Take Consignment is deserted by mid-afternoon. Still, there are people everywhere you look, taking silent walks down the bike paths at lunchtime, or else making urgent purchases at Benny’s Deli, stomachs clamoring to be fed. At half past five the neighborhood swells with the chatter of traffic. Dogs come out to reunite with their own front lawns. Governed by instinct, I drop my eyes as the Kauffmans march past, little Benjamin, mute with protest, sulking in his red wagon as it trails them.

To tell the truth, I don’t think country music is lonely enough for a place like this. Country music is all about isolation due to a lack of proximity; New England is isolation due to intimacy. The only way to live, when your neighbor’s bedroom is 12 aerial yards from your own, is to not know him at all. How else can you keep your edges clean, and stand fast in your enchantments?

In the Grammy-nominated title track from his 1986 album, Steve Earle promises to “settle down” and take his girl back “to the Guitar Town.” There aren’t any Guitars in the United States (I checked), but if there were, I think the reality might disappoint. According to the song, Guitar Town is just another place where “nothing ever happen[s].” Sure, there’s the siren song of a “lost highway” leading out of town, but there’s nothing appealing about highways. At least, there shouldn’t be. They’re cracked, strewn with garbage, and generally overrun by a cavalcade of businessmen jonesing for smokes. If the strangled lanes of the interstate sound like liberation to you, maybe you should head for somewhere new. But it doesn’t mean things will get better.

Just as country music romanticizes the open road, so too have Americans lathered suburbia with all the fancies of misdirected love. There is just no reason for it. The fewer people there are per square mile, the happier those inhabitants become. We may say there’s comfort in numbers, but mankind exchanged the herd mentality for something leaner long ago.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Take deer, for example. Have you ever seen a herd of deer traveling together (with their little deer valises)? First there is nothing but a thin mist spreading through the trees, the shuush-shuush of your ponytail as it swings against your jacket, the precise sound water makes opening around stones. Even this is enough. You are the loudest thing here; a chipmunk shrinks from your thunderous approach. You still, hoping to appease him, when suddenly they are upon you, flashing past on the left, or the right. Everything narrows to the heat and noise. They are a hot wind. An open vein.

You become invisible in those moments, frozen like the chipmunk, too insignificant to fear. This is where freedom comes from. But in suburbia, the deer travel in twos and threes. They step sweetly through untrimmed grasses, growing stern when approached. A sharp stamp has sent me veering more than once. Deer, like the neighbors, keep a close eye on you. Do I sound like I’m kidding? I’m not.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my neighbors, and I’m pretty sure they would call the paramedics if I fell and I couldn’t get up, but you don’t love something because you need it to feel safe. And you don’t settle in Guitar Town without weighing the delicate ferocity of a deer’s footstep. You don’t forget what it feels like to run.

—Eve Strillacci

#483: Gang of Four, "Entertainment!" (1979)

I read Wikipedia articles like “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, each hyperlink a cobalt pathway to destinations far and esoteric. I begin at the Café Wha? and twelve clicks later I’m at a list of professional darts players. And for the most dire of procrastinators, there’s always the “Random Article” button, the wiki-quivalent of shuffle songs. How else would I have ever found out about teledildonics?

To click or not to click? Dare I disturb the dull hum of informative prose? Every blue word is a gateway, a detour, a trap door that plummets you further and further from the initial inquiry. Infested with algorithms, the Internet is constantly suggesting, recommending, interrupting. Whatever media you’re trying to savor—click this instead.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Before I listen to an album, read a novel, or weigh in on Hollywood gossip, I brief myself on Wikipedia, reading just enough to grasp the common understanding. Sure, it’s a secondary, unreliable source, but it’s quick and free and… something about democracy.

Like anything, music is amplified through context, the ethos of a radio station, a coffeehouse playlist, a friend’s Spotify account or an iconic magazine’s 500-best. When we conjure a song online, multiple tabs offer an all-you-can-eat buffet of tidbits and unsolicited commentary. Of course, we don’t always have to multi-task. Maybe it’s not so hard to press play and lie on your bed away from the screen, gazing at the ceiling until you can actually see the melodies dripping through the cracks. One album, all the way through, that’s how I always imagined professional record reviewers do it. The rest of us don’t have time to sign off.

When I type in “Gang of Four,” Wikipedia first greets me with the story of the Chinese Communist faction led by Mao Zedong’s wife, attributed to the deaths of almost 35,000 people during the Cultural Revolution. The most common usage of the term. Part of a series on Maoism.

We must disambiguate. Along with several other political sanctions across the world, Gang of Four might refer to:

• Gang of Four (band)

• Gang of Four, authors of computing book Design Patterns

• "Gang of Four,” Big Two card game product

• "Gang of Four," Local Management Interface standard for Wide Area Networking

• Titled works:

  • Gang of Four, 2004 novel by Liz Byrski

  • Gang of Four (film), 1988 French film

• Fictional characters:

  • Gang of Four, villains of comic Riki-Oh

  • Gang of Four, four heroes of comic Oriental Heroes

Or it might refer to you and your three childhood friends who wreaked havoc on the playground back in the day. I click the link for the band and brace my attention span for more temptation.

Gang of Four are an English band from Leeds, classified as post-punk. Click. Post-punk is a rock music genre, an artsier and more experimental form of punk. Click. Punk rock is music that embraces a DIY ethic. Click. DIY ethic refers to the ethic of self-sufficiency through completing tasks without the aid of a paid expert.

And if I keep clicking, keep wondering, I might just find myself circling back to the Gang of Four page, conquering the click-hole once and for all.

Illustrations by Lena Moses-Schmitt

However I get there, I scroll down to the discography section, for their debut album Entertainment! Click. Released in 1979. Click. 1979 (MCMLXXIX) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1979th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 979th year of the 2nd millennium, the 79th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1970s decade. The year McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.

For the informed listener, is there such a thing as too much context? Back on the record’s landing page, I can hone in on the trivia that might coat my ear drums; If I listen carefully enough, I’ll be able to glean influences of funk, reggae and dub.  Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea claims that the first time he heard the record, "It completely changed the way I looked at rock music and sent me on my trip as a bass player." Pitchfork Media listed Entertainment! as the eighth best album of the 1970s. Kurt Cobain listed it in his top fifty albums of all time. What I’m about to listen to is officially Good.

But if I ex-out all those boxes, let the screen fall to sleep as I plop on the mattress, perhaps I can isolate the magic for just 53 minutes. I can pretend these raw sounds exist within a vacuum in between my ears.

I don’t stay in bed for long. Entertainment! is without question an album to dance to, equally suited for moshing and the twist. The bass lick that ignites the first track is as harsh at it is playful, a variation on the dips and thrusts that sustain the entire record. In all twelve tracks, the spittle of the drums and thrashing guitars spew at you from multiple directions, and the bass line always catches your fall.

I could look up the names and faces of Gang and Four, break down who sang lead on which track, his astrological sign and worst childhood memory. Or I could just tell you that the lead vocals on Entertainment! are commanding and sarcastic. Despite the context-blocker I’ve installed in my mind, I can’t hear their British sneer without likening the band to their punk forefathers. The lyrics follow the same formula perfected by the Clash and the Sex Pistols: exposing the dirt behind the daydream:

From “5.45”:

Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen
The corpse is a new personality

From “I Found that Essence Rare”:

Aim for politicians fair who'll treat your vote hope well
The last thing they'll ever do: act in your interest
Look at the world through your Polaroid glasses
Things'll look a whole lot better for the working classes

But what saves Gang of Four from becoming a Mohawked cliché is the vibrancy of their sound. The instrumentation is winking. What’s fighting the system without a few laughs? If we developed anything in the sphere between punk and post-punk, it’s a sense of humor.  

The lyricist is self-aware—repeating his sharpest lines over and over to build not choruses, but chants, mantras. Phrases had I left my laptop open, I would make my Facebook status, challenging my friends to the reference. But instead, alone in my bedroom, I shout along with the recording, over and over, until the syllables transcend semantics.

Try it:  

          I’m so restless, I’m bored as a cat.  Three times.  

          Our bodies make us worry. Four times.

          Repackaged sex keeps your interest. Six times.

          Guerilla war struggle is a new kind of entertainment. Eight times.

          Please send us evenings and weekends. 19 times.

          Goodbye. 37 times.

The polemic might dominate Entertainment!, but a few love songs soften the album’s character. True to traditional punk-rock etiquette, the Gang of Four vocalists interrupt each other throughout the entire record, and in the finale song, “Anthrax,” the argument comes to a head, with two voices talking and singing over each other. The chorus, what we’re supposed to be listening to, might be written off as typical adolescent heartache: Love will get you like a case of Anthrax, and that’s something I don’t want to catch.

But there’s a droning voice underneath the melody, incoherent but impossible to ignore. I put the song on repeat, pressing my ear to the left speaker. I catch a few phrases, but after the fifth listen I give up and search for the lyrics on the internet. These are the words literally between the lines:  

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe anyway but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone’s personalities. I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

Had I listened to this record B.G. (Before Google), I wouldn’t consider the song a piece of social commentary. I would have accepted the underlying soliloquy as indecipherable, like the thoughts inside a broken lover’s head. Have I cheated, tainted my listening experience? Perhaps the context should stay buried—maybe The Crucible has nothing to do with McCarthyism, and Animal Farm is really just about some huffy pigs.

Any given listener might know nothing of the British punk movement, of the Neo-Marxist rhetoric Gang of Four was channeling in the liner notes. But the same rage, defiance, and absurdist scoff could be felt by listeners in Cairo, Kashmir, or Ferguson, Missouri. And thanks to YouTube and torrent hosts, anyone in those places could stumble upon this record, burn a few mix CDs, and start a revolution. But the record isn’t titled Social Justice. It’s Entertainment!  

Entertainment might refer to:

• Entertainment, event, performance, or activity designed to give pleasure to an audience

• Entertainment (band), post-punk band formed 2002

• “Entertainment” (song), 2013 song by the band Phoenix

• Entertainment!, 1979 Gang of Four album

• Entertainment, 2009 Fischerspooner album

• "Entertainment” (song), track on Appeal to Reason, 2008 album by Rise Against

• Entertain Magazine, 2007–10 British entertainment magazine

• Entertainment (film), a 2014 Bollywood film, also known as It's Entertainment

See also: Amusement.

See also: Distraction.

See also: Coping Mechanism.

—Susannah Clark

#484: Mott the Hoople, "All the Young Dudes" (1972)

Because it is the first Saturday of the month, and Blaine and I are nothing if not creatures of habit, we stop by Zeek's Petz Store and buy another hermit crab. How did this ritual start? Whiskey? Rum? Vodka? It's hazy.

Zeek's smells like urine, shit, and sawdust, which is to say it smells like a pet store. There are the birds hopping and squawking, the ferrets slithering, hamsters tunneling, kittens mewling. The persistent low thrum of crickets. We have yet to see another customer on any of our crabbing sojourns and I have a sneaking suspicion our hermit purchases might be Zeek's only current source of revenue. A desire to keep Zeek in business could be one possible explanation for the six hermit crabs we now own, but a better one would be this: hermit crabs are fucking awesome.

Zeek looks relieved to see us. He must be figuring our aquarium to be getting full, but never fear Zeek, we will buy all the hermit crabs your cramped, strip-mall store can hold. They are sociable animals and, being sociable guys, we try to respect their right to party.

When we get home, we do a few more ritualistic things: we get drunk; we get out the Montana state map and the darts; we put on Mott the Hoople's All the Young Dudes.

The drunk part is because we like getting drunk. The state map and the darts are how we name our hermits. So far we have a Two Dot (who has no dots at all), Laurel (such a sweetheart), Great Falls (who we call Falls Great because he walks funny), Yaak (talkative little fucker), Wolf Point (total badass), and Boulder (he of the hefty shell). It is a perfect system. We plan to market it as a complete kit–shot glasses, map, darts–to expecting parents.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

All the Young Dudes is a more mysterious piece of the puzzle, harkening back to the total wastage of our first hermit crab purchase. Somehow–perhaps a raking of the dollar bin at the record store, or a chance encounter with a dumpster–the album came to be in our possession that first night. It's not a good record. It's some empty Stones worship at best. But it turns out Bowie wrote them a song, the title track, and that song is god damn perfect for naming hermit crabs. We put it on repeat. That wavering, drunk guitar lick to start it off! All the fucked up kids trying to figure their shit out. And then those young dudes come in, carrying the news. It's like Bowie wrote the song for hermit crabs. Their own anthem, at long last.

Blaine misses the map with his first dart because he's drunk. I miss the map with my first dart because I'm drunk. I look down at the unnamed hermit in his temporary cage and the little guy is clearly worried. He's looking forlornly at the aquarium across the way, full of his brethren. Never fear, I tell him, we'll get you a name real soon so you can join your buddies.

It takes four throws to hit the map, twelve throws to hit a city. And then, finally, we christen our newest crab. He is Red Lodge. He is red. It is a perfect name. We are drunk, but we handle Red Lodge carefully as we unite him with his new best friends, with the six best cities in Montana.

Mott the Hoople, on their tenth, looping cycle, yell about the boogaloo dudes and I’m so happy we have our little boogaloo dudes, shelled up and Montana-christened, ready to carry the news.

We sit there for the next hour, watching them scuttle and play, getting woozy off Mott’s repetition and, also, beer. What a thrill.

—J.P. Kemmick

#485: Pearl Jam, "Vitalogy" (1994)

1995

Ticketmaster is late to the meeting but he’s allowed to be late because, after a year of insults and accusations, of scathing testimonies and shit talk, Ticketmaster has won. Of course Ticketmaster was going to be late to this meeting if for no other reason than to make the other party sweat a little, make him soak in his failure.  

When Ticketmaster walks into the tenth floor board room at the offices of Epic Records, Eddie Vedder is already seated at the end of a long, glass conference table, his fingers pressed to his temples. Ticketmaster doesn’t sit down right away. He walks down to the end of the table next to Vedder, and stands over the young singer. Ticketmaster is very tall and has unnaturally long arms that dangle at his sides, fingers narrowing into thin slits, fine and sharp. Before taking a seat, Ticketmaster gently pats Eddie Vedder on the shoulder and lingers for a moment, waiting for the singer to look up. Vedder doesn’t budge.

After a moment, Ticketmaster traverses the room with three giant strides and sits at the opposite end of the table from Vedder, says, “You called me here today, Mr. Vedder?” Eddie Vedder says, “I did.” Ticketmaster says, “And why was that?” Eddie Vedder rubs his temples again and grits his teeth, then begins to explain that he needs Ticketmaster’s help in setting up Pearl Jam concerts on the East Coast.  He says, “The venues we want to play, they all have exclusive deals with you.” He looks down at the table, says quietly, “We need you.”

Ticketmaster pulls two cigars out of its pocket, offers one to Eddie Vedder. Vedder shakes his head. Ticketmaster says, “It’s a Gurkha.” Ticketmaster holds a match to the end of the cigar and puffs so that massive plumes of smoke rise in front of his face. Ticketmaster says, “I wonder how many tickets we’ll need to sell to one of your concerts to pay for a case of these.” He adds, “More than a few, I suspect.” Then, feeling as if the moment has been appropriately savored, Ticketmaster says, “What was that last thing you said? Can you repeat it? I couldn’t quite make it out.” Eddie Vedder looks up at Ticketmaster and, through gritted teeth, says, “We need you.”

Ticketmaster says, “That’s what I thought you said.” Eddie Vedder slaps his hands on the top of the glass table, making the entire surface vibrate, and stands up. He doesn’t make for the door right away, but it seems as if he might. Ticketmaster says, “Sit down, Mr. Vedder.” Vedder obeys. Once Vedder is sitting, Ticketmaster says, “I will help you, but you need to apologize.” Vedder says, “Out of the question.” Ticketmaster says, “Mr. Vedder, you’ve publically attacked me for months. You’ve instigated investigations and legal proceedings all for your misguided ideals.” Eddie Vedder says, “They aren’t misguided.” He says, “You exploit fans.” Ticketmaster says, “We provide a service to fans.” Vedder says, “You increase the price of tickets but you don’t add any value to the product.” Ticketmaster says, “Don’t add any value? Our outlets are accessible to customers around the country. How far did customers drive to buy tickets for the last leg of your tour?” Vedder doesn’t answer. “How far, Mr. Vedder?” Eddie Vedder says he doesn’t know.

Seeing an opportunity to wound Vedder further, Ticketmaster presses the issue, says, “And speaking of value—what of the value you offered your own fans with your most recent record?” Eddie Vedder says, “They like the record fine.” Ticketmaster says, “Only because they’re as misguided as you.” Ticketmaster waits a beat, then continues: “How much value do you think your fans gain from you complaining about the fame they have bestowed on you?” Eddie Vedder says, “That’s not fair.” And Ticketmaster says, “How fair is it to your fans to work hard to buy your music only to hear you barking at them about your small table growing too crowded, and how your ‘p-r-i-v-a-c-y is priceless to you,’ and about ‘all the things that others want from you’?” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s not like that.” Ticketmaster takes a puff from his cigar, knocks an inch of ash on the carpet and says, “Is it that you want to be important?”

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Eddie Vedder says, “It’s not about that.” He says, “I don’t want to be important.” Ticketmaster says, “Then what is this all about? Your fight against me? Your quibbles with fame? Your causes?” And Eddie Vedder says, “Sometimes I get scared. All these people are watching and I want to do good by them.” Ticketmaster laughs a low, dirty laugh that almost sounds like a growl, says, “So you were doing right by the models when you sang the line about rolling them in blood because they don’t look like you?” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s wrong the ways they have to treat their bodies and then the ways their bodies inspire other people to treat their own bodies poorly.” Ticketmaster says, “So you encourage violence against the models? You disrespect their humanity? You call them skinny little bitches?” Eddie Vedder tries to talk but before he can respond, Ticketmaster says, “And what about the gays, Mr. Vedder. What about the part where you say you’ll never suck Satan’s dick, as if sucking dick is the most vile thing a man can do.” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s a figure of speech. It’s about not capitulating to authority.” And Ticketmaster says, “But why drag, what for some is, an expression of love into your polemic? Aren’t you supposed to be a progressive?” Ticketmaster relishes this moment as Vedder visibly squirms in his seat. Ticketmaster adds, “You’re no better than a common jock.”

Eddie Vedder’s arms fall to his sides and his hands flex into fists. He says, “That’s not what we meant.” And Ticketmaster says, “But that’s what you said.” Eddie Vedder says, “We’ll do better.” And Ticketmaster says, “It won’t matter—you will slowly begin to fade. You have accomplished what you sought so dearly. Outsiders will stop storming your room. Your record sales will fall. You will maintain a base of passionate fans, enough to keep your career afloat, but you will descend into irrelevancy.” Eddie Vedder looks at Ticketmaster with something that almost looks like a smile. Ticketmaster says, “It will be just what you wanted. Your small table, that seats just two,” and Vedder, looking down at the big, glass table, perhaps at his own reflection, mutters, says, “You’ve proved your point.” Then: “What about the east coast.”

Ticketmaster stubs his cigar out in an ashtray, and dials his personal assistant on the phone. As Ticketmaster orders his assistant to begin preparations to sell tickets for Pearl Jam’s east coast tour, his eyes notice a change come over Vedder’s composure, as the singer appears more relaxed than he’s looked in a long, long time.

—James Brubaker

#486: Earth, Wind & Fire, "That's the Way of the World" (1975)

On Fridays I stayed at my high school long after classes ended, wandering the sprawling cinderblock buildings, watching the sun settle in the sky a bit earlier than it had just a month before. It was football season, and come nightfall I’d pull on a stiff polyester uniform—green and black with gold-painted plastic buttons—and pile into a school bus with the rest of the marching band and our director, Mr. Snell, a nearly-silent middle-aged black man who, in my memory, was at least seven feet tall. While other bands covered Top 40 pop songs, Mr. Snell kept us to the classics he loved, focusing on Earth, Wind, and Fire: “Let’s Groove,” “Fantasy,”  “September,” and especially “Shining Star,” from their breakthrough album That’s the Way of the World.

The bouncy levity of EWF’s music contradicted the rhythm of my days so utterly that it was almost absurd. In a school of nearly 2,500 students, I waded through over-crowded classrooms and hallways that smelled of bleach and the Chic-Fil-A sandwiches sold in the gym lobby. Mornings, half-awake, I slid through metal detectors and tried to avoid the fights that swelled up from the crowded halls like tsunamis. Like most of the others, I was in marching band because I did not belong anywhere else. I was not a trouble-maker or a Mathlete or a basketball player or a student government politico. I was not allowed to audition for Mr. Snell’s jazz band, his prized possession, either for a lack of talent or for choosing the wrong instrument.

I never saw Mr. Snell smile and I never heard him say we had played well. We’d stumble through a song and look to him, our instruments still raised, to see him give the tiniest wave of his hamburger-sized hands. “Again,” he’d say, giving us another chance, and we’d start over. I had never heard of EWF before learning to play their songs on my clarinet. The arrangements we performed were boisterous, with little attempt at harmonizing. Every instrument shouted all the notes. When Mr. Snell finally told us to stop, to move on to another song, I could never tell if we’d actually improved or if he just couldn’t stand to hear us play the same bars one more time.

Mr. Snell took us to New Orleans to march in a Mardi Gras parade and, another year, took us to New York City, where we wandered the open-air markets in Harlem for hours. We ran our hands over cowry shell jewelry and necklaces featuring the same assorted religious iconography—ankhs, stars of David, crosses—featured on the covers of the EWF albums we’d been rehearsing. At the market, Mr. Snell bought a knitted black kufi hat and wore it for the rest of our trip, and I tried to imagine him as he was in 1975, when That’s the Way of the World was released, chock-full of horns and kalimba and falsetto’d joy. In 1975, Earth, Wind and Fire topped the Billboard charts alongside a whole lot of white guys: Elton John, Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Barry Manilow, David Bowie, the Eagles. I imagined Mr. Snell listening That’s the Way of the World as the world’s ways shifted rapidly, ceaselessly, all around him.

A lot had happened in Memphis by 1975, in the seven years since Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on the balcony of a downtown motel. By 1975, Elvis was forty years old and had grown puffy and chatty. Still performing to sold-out crowds in his hometown, he would be dead in just two years. White flight was draining hordes of wealthier residents to the suburbs. This migration is often associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, but was also provoked by changing public school policies. In the mid-1960s, Memphis city schools enrolled a nearly equal number of white and black students attending segregated schools. Desegregation efforts were stalled and delayed until 1973, when busing was federally mandated in order to enforce desegregation. Over 10,000 students would be bussed to schools outside their segregated neighborhoods. Members of a group called Citizens Against Busing protested by burying a school bus in a giant pit, and 40,000 of the city school system’s 71,000 white students fled to private, religious, or suburban school systems over the next four years.  

In 1975, Memphis was in the midst of a transition that wasn’t resolved even by the time I found myself, in 2003, marching to “Shining Star” on Friday nights. The problems of 1975 still hadn’t been made right. My school was still segregated, but from the inside: the school’s “optional” program was mostly white and its “traditional” program was mostly black, and the two rarely interacted. I was proud to go to public school, but also aware that it was one of only a couple public high schools in Memphis that white kids attended.

Maybe EWF was simply the obvious choice for our band. Their gratuitous use of religious iconography resembled Memphis’ obsession with Egyptian imagery. The Memphis Zoo, covered in hieroglyphics and built to resemble an Egyptian palace, and the huge pyramid alongside the river with its fiberglass statues of pharaohs, are nearly identical to the cover of EWF’s later album, All ’N All. And EWF’s front man, singer, and songwriter, Maurice White, was born in Memphis in 1941. But our school was not one for motivational posters and EWF’s message was so optimistic, so devoid of cynicism, that it’s impossible for me not to see their selection as a deliberate message from Mr. Snell.

I wonder if Mr. Snell thought that, by emulating EWF, with their nine members, two drummers, a horn section, and their miraculously tight, singular sound, maybe we’d also learn something about unity. Over the course of daily practice, after-school rehearsals, summer marching camps, and Friday night football games, those songs lodged a kernel of joy and perseverance into my brain that couldn’t be shaken.  I’m sure we butchered those songs. I’m also sure that wasn’t what mattered, in the end. Mr. Snell may not have said many words, but if he spoke to us through Earth, Wind and Fire, the message he chose to share was something deliberately encouraging, uplifting, and hopeful to the point of delirium.

Now, a decade later, in the first cool evenings of autumn, my thoughts often drift to football games on Friday nights, to the high-pitched refrain of “Shining Star” that took up residency in my head. I see myself marching barefoot in the browning grass, or, in the winter, shoving heating pouches into my shoes, struggling to make my cold fingers hit all the right notes. I see myself in my stiff uniform, my too-big hat with its shedding feather plume, with the lights of a half-empty stadium gleaming off the keys of my second-hand clarinet. I see myself lining up in formation, listening for the cadence, my head craned back to see Mr. Snell’s face somewhere up in the stratosphere. And with the wave of his hand, it would all begin again. We’d get another chance to make it right.

—Martha Park

#487: Cyndi Lauper, "She's So Unusual" (1983)

Halloween, 1984. Your best friend Georgia helps you with your hair, which is the finishing touch you didn’t know would be the finishing touch until the hairspray dissipates and you take the visor of your hand away from your eyes to check in the mirror. Then there it is, touched and finished: hand-me-down prom dress, mascara like tribal war paint, bangles and scarves and, all the way up top, her hair like a flame setting your own head ablaze.

The girl in the mirror, she’s gorgeous; you’re gorgeous. Somehow, twelve years old and gorgeous. Wow, Georgia says. Now do me.

Because this was the deal the whole time: you’d get to be Cyndi if she could dress you up all the way, heels to flowing headdress. She’d be Cyndi but she’s black, so you both decide Cyndi’s black friend from the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video is the next best, most logical thing. You both know it’s a sacrifice, and secretly you’ve been compiling in your head over and over again all week the list of ways to make it right. Not that something’s wrong. Just incidental. Unfortunate. Whatever.

It doesn’t take as much work to get Georgia just right, which is good. Timing is everything, and right now you’re both too short on it. Sundown is in an hour, which means dusk is now, which means all the best houses won’t last long. Her mom already worked hard on her hair last night, twisting and tying and twisting, so you focus on the eyeshadow and lipstick. When you step away, she looks good. No: she looks great. You both do. Giggling and pouting in the mirror and taking brief dance breaks to flail arrhythmically to “Money Changes Everything” —already, this night feels monumental. Already lit brilliantly from behind.

*

Two hours and seven quickly-darkening neighborhoods later, the high hasn’t lifted. Your pillowcases would drag the ground if you let them, but between banging each other across the butt you’ve got them shoulder-slung like bindles.

I love you more, I love you more, Georgia is belting. Oh-oh-oh-oooooo-wee-oooooh.

When you were mine, you finish, then spin and stop only long enough to pop a handful of Runts into your mouth, bananas already removed and donated to Georgia.

Your route has had you going snaky over the course of the night, winding north, then northwest, then south, and back east again to where you started. It’s the same one you two have taken since you were six and your mom okayed piecing together a Princess Leia gown and pair of side buns. That year, Georgia was a cat, her ears and whiskers and tail made from cardboard and spare curtain fabric. The two of you had just met in Miss Lipton’s class; it’s still one of the best nights you can recall ever having known.

Now, this one’s shaping up to be not so bad itself. The two of you are dazzling, though currently in between houses; this stretch of the route has never been your favorite—all weedy, tricycles left abandoned in front yards, lights more off on Halloween night than left glowing—and the clapboard ranches are separated largely by patches of empty lots. You’re not sure if this is what your mom means when she says “bad neighborhoods”—as in Shuttle quick through the bad neighborhoods, now—but you don’t exactly dawdle.

You don’t realize it, but you’ve been humming “She Bop” for the last block or so, Georgia intermittently taking her Tootsie Pop from her mouth to see if she’s hit the center. So maybe it’s the humming, but you don’t hear it the first time the voice speaks. You only notice when Georgia stops walking for a half-step, then picks up speed without warning.

Hey! you shout, and follow quickly after, working nearly double-time to keep up. Slow down! And that’s when you hear it. Then again. And again. Louder each time—not louder, closer. Closer each time. The voice is not bothering to whisper, not here, not at this time of night. It’s even in tone, almost flat, without affect. Simply making a statement, like someone reading side effects off an Aspirin bottle.

Monkey. Hey, monkey. Hey.

Georgia is walking faster, it seems, with each step. The next house you come to is unlit, but you can see the dim sunrise of a porchlight maybe two or three blocks down. The voice, you can see now, is coming from a teenaged boy in a car riding parallel to the two of you and matching pace. He is leaning easily on the passenger door, both elbows resting on the window ledge, pimpled face peering out from the darkness. You wonder for a moment what this boy might make of your costume—if he thinks your hair looks nice, your makeup and lacy dress—then feel immediately ashamed and determined to make up for it.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Go away! you scream, your voice only slightly high, which gives you confidence. Screw off! You hook your elbow through Georgia’s to keep up with her more easily. Her face is set, and when you touch her she still doesn’t turn.

The boy laughs, but only once. Hey, monkey, want a banana? Banana, monkey? He makes noises like an ape, his voice still low, his eyes hard.

Then the car speeds ahead, and you think he’s given it up. But before the two of you can speak, or even slow down, you see that the car has only pulled to the corner ahead—the only one separating you and Georgia from the next house, still shining like a lighthouse. Georgia hasn’t stopped, so you follow suit, the two of you barreling toward the car as the passenger side door opens and the boy steps out, clad in a denim jacket, black T-shirt, and an oversized, hairy gorilla mask. He crosses his arms and takes a step toward you, then stops.

You keep getting closer. Why do you keep getting closer? You are not so subtly trying to steer Georgia to the other side of the street. But she’s paying you no mind, plowing ahead until the two of you are only a yard or so from the gorilla boy, his wide black nose and empty black eyes too realistic in the dark, on this street with no streetlights, on Halloween of all possible nights. Then Georgia stops, nearly tripping you onto your face in its suddenness.

You want to say something, but Georgia beats you to it. She unhooks herself from you softly, and takes the rest of the steps necessary to stand directly before the monkey. She stares at him for a moment, then makes a noise so unexpected you can feel chills crawling up your legs even through your fishnets: she laughs. Not very loud, and not for very long, but it’s her laugh all right. Deep and serious sounding. The monkey doesn’t move.

Man, Georgia says, done with laughing but grinning still. You want a monkey? Her blouse is black and covered in sparkles that catch the little moonlight there is, making her look like a thousand constellations, like the most powerful girl in the whole entire world. Ooh-ooh-ah-ah, she says, running an ape’s speech through the boy’s own affectless voice. The she swings her foot back and vaults it forward and up, catching him with terrible force between the legs.

The boy crumples like a dynamited building, heaving forward and throwing the gorilla mask from his face. He begins to moan quietly and rock from head to toe. You see all of this from across your shoulder, though; Georgia has run, and so, for the umpteenth time tonight, you’ve fallen in line. The two of you reach the next lit house at the same time, then you both bolt past it. You’ve got your prom dress lifted in both hands, which is how you realize that you’ve dropped your candy. The thought blitzes through you and is gone before you even have a chance to care.

*

The two of you--gorgeous, glimmering, brains buzzing with breathlessness--don’t stop until you’re back on your block. Only then, as if communicated telepathically, do you both hit the brakes and start gulping for air. Georgia is laughing, and you are, too: great, whooping laughter caught halfway between adrenaline and drowning.

My . . . . Georgia is trying to say. My . . . candy . . . .can’t . . . breathe . . . .my candy.

Let him have it, you think. Or the cats and raccoons. Whatever gets to it first. Still gasping, you reach up absentmindedly and can feel your hair—her hair—is a total disaster. All the hairspray in the world couldn’t live through tonight. You might care if right now, in this get-up, it didn’t feel so good not to. What you know for sure is that things have changed, that maybe you won’t feel it tomorrow or next week or a year from now, but it seems terrible and inevitable. It’s in the air, the moon, your best friend’s choking laughter.

Soon you will both venture back into your house, past your parents on the couch and up into your room. Cyndi will be waiting in the tapedeck, paused somewhere between songs of liberation and longing. You won’t think twice: you’ll hit rewind, then play.

—Brad Efford

#488: Husker Du, "New Day Rising" (1985)

Mary Richards bolts her door at 119 North Weatherly and, after hanging up her coat and setting her shoes neatly beside each other in her closet, turns off most of her lights so the neighbors don’t know she is home. This is long after Rhoda moved out to New York, after Phyllis moved to San Francisco, after Lou Grant died, after Murray’s novel won a Pulitzer, but before Mary meets her future husband, Congressman Steven Cronin, and moves to New York. Mary walks on her toes so her downstairs neighbors don’t hear her, and when she turns her television on, she sits close with the sound low. Mary Richards does these things because her neighbors make her uncomfortable. She doesn’t like that this is the case, but it is. 

The girl upstairs is bookish and vague, nice enough, but awkward. Mary met her a few months back on a Saturday, right after the girl—whose name Mary can’t remember for the life of her—moved in. Mary held open their building’s exterior door for the girl, whose arms were full of books. With the warmth she was known for when she was producing the nightly news at WJM, Mary asked the girl what she was reading, and the girl said, “Books,” and hurried up the stairs to her attic apartment. Later that day, bored with the sports and movie matinee options on her television, Mary made a pot of coffee, poured two cups, arranged a plate of wafer cookies and carried the spread upstairs to the girl’s apartment. She balanced the tray in one hand to knock on the door. After a moment, the girl opened the door. Mary was taken aback by the room’s darkness. She said, “I brought some coffee.” She said, “You’ve lived here long enough, I thought we could get to know each other.” The girl said, in a small voice, “I guess.” The girl said, “You can come in.” Then again, “I guess.”

Inside, the young woman neither invited Mary to sit nor offered a place for the tray. Mary started to set the tray on a stack of books. The young woman said, “Wait,” and moved the books to the floor. Mary set the tray down, and smoothed her skirt behind her as she sat on a small, plush chair, covered with a black sheet. Mary asked after the girl’s interests. The girl didn’t answer immediately, and when she did, she didn’t quite answer the question. She said, “Did you know there are approximately 200 UFO sightings reported every day.” Mary said she didn’t know that. She said, “So you’re interested in UFO’s?” The girl nodded her head, then said, “Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting was the first to be shared with a large audience. Now lots of people make reports.”  Mary said, “You know, I didn’t know that,” then she asked the young woman if she wanted coffee. Even through her discomfort, Mary was radiant as always. The young woman declined the coffee, but helped herself to a wafer cookie. Then she said, “You know it’s not like in the books.” And Mary, ever somehow both awkward and graceful, said “What? What isn’t like in the books?” And the bookish young woman said, “Being abducted.” She said, “There isn’t a bright beam of light, and they don’t tie you down.” Mary was just listening at this point, not knowing how to respond. The bookish young woman said, “But they test you. That’s why they take you away from your home, from your bed, so they can test the way things feel.” And here, Mary felt something sad turning over inside herself, and reached out to touch the bookish young woman’s knee, which only caused the woman to flinch. Mary backed off and listened as the girl finished her story. The girl said, “That’s why they take you. They want to know how you feel, to know if you are dangerous or weak.” The girl’s use of second person made Mary uncomfortable. The girl continued, “They want to know if humans are friendly. Then when they’re done, when they’ve seen how you feel things, they put you back where you were, on a street or in your bed.” Mary felt like crying, but she didn’t know why, and she felt like saying something, but she didn’t know what to say, so she said, “Oh, I’ve forgotten I need to pick a friend up from work.” Mary left without taking the tray with the coffee and wafers, still untouched save for the single wafer taken by the bookish young woman, and said, “Stop by any time,” as she saw herself out of the woman’s apartment, then out of the building to her car so she could drive aimlessly around Minneapolis for just long enough to seem like she might have actually been picking up a friend from work.

Mary likes to avoid her downstairs neighbors for different reasons. Living in the house’s main floor, in the apartment that Phyllis, and Lars, and Bess used to inhabit, are three young men who keep odd hours and work odd jobs and listen to odd, loud music late into the night. Mary Richards hates that she hides from her neighbors. Ten years ago, when she was still working at WJM, she would have gone downstairs and, not given them a piece of her mind, exactly, but gently asked them to be quiet, to be mindful of their neighbors, and they would have listened because she was Mary Richards, and people liked Mary Richards, and they did what Mary Richards asked. These boys, though, the one and only time Mary knocked on their door to ask them to be quiet, did not like Mary Richards.

The night Mary met the young men who live beneath her, she was, of course, asking them to be quiet because they were listening to music like buzz saws at ten o’clock at night. Ten o’clock! Mary was beside herself, so she knocked on her downstairs neighbors’ door, and was greeted by a man of average height and weight with short hair and a mustache that curled up at the ends. At first, Mary had to struggle not to laugh because she hadn’t seen a man, and a young man nonetheless, wearing a mustache like that since she was a little girl. She tried to ask the man to turn down the music, but the music was still so loud that he couldn’t hear her, so she stepped into the apartment, and shouted, “Can you turn that down?” while covering an ear with one hand and pointing down at the ground with the other. This was enough for the man with the mustache to understand what was happening, so he walked across the room and turned down the stereo. As he navigated the mess of empty bottles, discarded clothing, and piles of books, Mary scanned the apartment, spotted a long-haired man, seemingly asleep on the couch and a third, relatively clean cut young man sitting on the floor, cross-legged, holding a book open on his lap. How these young men could be sleeping and reading through the racket was beyond Mary. Mary also saw, on the far wall, just to the left of the stereo, a poster that read, “We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats,” in large, block letters. There were smaller words beneath. Once the music was down, Mary asked, “What’s the last line of the poster say?” The man with the mustache looked up at Mary, seemingly confused. He looked around. Mary pointed at the poster, said “What’s the small print say?” The man with the mustache said, “And get the cat skins for nothing.” Mary didn’t understand for a moment, then the implications of the words slowly untangled and began to make sense. Mary said, “That’s,” she paused, then, smiling, continued, “nice.” Then she said, “Can you guys keep it down.” Her voice was high, waivered a bit. She went on: “I have to be up early for my job, and I can’t even begin to think about sleep with all this racket down here.” The man with the mustache said, “You don’t have to go to your job.” Mary said, “I have to go to my job.” The man with the mustache said, “It’s just a job.” And Mary, losing her temper, which she rarely ever does, said, “When you’re older and have a real job, you’ll understand.” Before Mary could leave, the man with the mustache said, “I could never be like you,” and Mary had nothing to say, she just stared right in his eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw there, but whatever it was it was not what she expected—she didn’t see a lazy burnout, but something intangible and wise, gruesome and beautiful at once, a raw depth of emotion and disappointment and anger and grief. Mary said, “No, I don’t suppose you could be.”

When Mary left her neighbors’ apartment, instead of returning to her own, she walked out of the building, and onto the lawn. She looked up at the sky and felt a tightness in her chest. It wasn’t a heart attack, Mary knew that, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Her breath shortened and she thought that maybe she was having a panic attack. Mary wondered why she would be having a panic attack now, for the first time, and that’s when she looked up at the roof of her building and saw the girl from the upstairs apartment sitting in a lawn chair, looking up at the sky. Mary wondered if anyone or anything was looking back at the girl, and then her chest relaxed, and her breathing slowed. Right then, she knew that the man with the mustache was right—these people would never be like her, and they shouldn’t be. They were something new, Mary thought, a new day rising, a new type of person. New to Mary, anyway.

As much as Mary hates to admit it, this newness scares her. She doesn’t know what these people are or why they are the ways they are, and knowing these people makes Mary’s Minneapolis feel a little bit darker, and a little bit sadder. So now, most nights, when Mary gets home from work, she keeps the lights and television volume low and walks softly across her floor even when the girl upstairs is on the roof, even when the boys downstairs play their music loud, even when she feels so out of step in this strange new world surrounding her that she wonders if anyone would notice her at all.

—James Brubaker

#489: KISS, "Destroyer" (1976)

America’s mythos, based upon the idea of the self-sufficient, self-determining, self-made man, forms the core of our national identity (“anyone can be President!”), but it’s a charming exaggeration. Far more often, America has made its leaps and bounds thanks to a group effort. Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, but it takes fifty-five more men to sign it and make it official. Andrew Jackson has his Kitchen Cabinet; Lincoln his team of rivals; FDR his Brain Trust. Hundreds of people helped smuggle escaped slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad, even if the only one people can generally name is Harriet Tubman.

I’m not arguing that the site of the Daisy, a 1970s nightclub in Amityville, New York, should be added to the roster of National Park Service sites, but there’s an argument to be made that as far as American grit and determination meeting the group dynamic goes, this Long Island club is a Bizarro World Independence Hall. Because it’s at the Daisy in the spring of 1973, as New York thawed out of another winter, that four boys from New York City first covered their faces with makeup in four different roles: the Demon, the Spaceman, the Starchild, and the Catman. They had played a few gigs with their name already, but it’s on that March night that they truly became KISS.

*

I am not a member of the KISS Army, not even a member of the KISS National Guard, and yet I have been conscious of KISS my whole life, because KISS is an entity designed to make you conscious of it. Eight years before MTV went on the air (and ten years after Brian Epstein put the Beatles in matching suits), they understood that visuals could work with sound to create an entire package, impossible to ignore. Even if I did not listen to KISS, I always knew about KISS, and this is the genius of the band: that they were able to transcend whatever limitations they had in terms of talent or looks or station in life to become completely inescapable in American culture from the mid-1970s to now.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

This is what makes Destroyer (released March 15, 1976, ten days before I was born) an amazingly contradictory, beautifully American album; like Whitman, it is large, it contains multitudes. From its cover, a painting of the four leaping in full costumes and makeup over a pile of rubble, as though the four heads on Mount Rushmore had smashed out of their stone prison, the albums announces itself as an explosion or revolution—and then it immediately reverses that with its opening track. “Detroit Rock City” starts not with the grinding riff of the actual song, but with sound effects of someone eating breakfast (in a diner? At home?) while listening to a news report on a fatal car accident; this is followed by sound effects of them getting into a car, in which “Rock and Roll All Night,” off the last album (Alive, which saved both the band and their record label), is playing. The song cuts off, then comes back, the car sound effects Doppler across our ears, we hear the driver mumble-singing along with the stereo, the song cuts off again, the engine hums down the road, and then and only then does the riff for “Detroit Rock City” begin—a minute and a half into the album.

Ninety seconds is a long stretch of time, forever on an album. And nothing from this opening skit returns in Destroyer; instead, the album simply moves ahead, doing whatever it likes. Songs like “King of the Night Time World” invite the listener, “living at home” and “going to school,” to join KISS in their midnight universe. Children’s voices giggle over the Demon’s voice and sludgy guitars in “God of Thunder.” “Great Expectations” opens with a riff quoting from Beethoven’s Sonata #8. The album chugs along reliably between songs written to be concert anthems and songs written to invite the listener to escape their world.

And then there’s “Beth,” the tender orchestral ballad (the New York Philharmonic plays on the track), sung by the drummer, the Catman, which became the highest charting track (#7) in KISS’s history. It comes after “Shout It Out Loud,” a song clearly written with the next live album in mind, and the effect is like finding an art museum inside a gas station. The song is two minutes and forty-six seconds of schmaltz, a lover’s complaint that he cannot return to his girl “because me and the boys / will be playing all night” (if the cameo of “Rock and Roll All Night” at the start has any echo, I suppose it’s here). The song fades out, and then the pounding drums and the Starman’s voice begin “Do You Love Me?,” a song so ridiculously over-the-top-rock-star that Nirvana covered it ironically years later. There’s a brief instrumental track, nothing more than a doodle, and then the album is over. It takes about thirty-four minutes, including the opening minute and a half of skit. It’s not exactly an epic album, but then again, the Gettysburg Address is only 272 words long. Does Destroyer contradict itself? Very well, then; it contradicts itself.

*

I have listened to Destroyer dozens of times in the writing of this essay, and it has never improved. Its placement on the RS 500 as an album slightly better than ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres and slightly worse than Husker Du’s New Day Rising feels apt, like the fact that KISS made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on their 15th year of eligibility (the same class as Nirvana, who covered KISS and who made it into the Hall in their first year). It is an album that exists more as artifact or evidence of something bigger than itself.

When I listen to Destroyer, I think not about KISS, but rather SMACK, the one-night-only KISS cover band I saw in college, the night before KISS themselves played Topeka, Kansas. In a bar in Manhattan, Kansas, not too far removed in spirit from the Daisy in Amityville, four local boys took the stage in homemade costumes and girlfriend-applied makeup, and proceeded to rock its tiny stage. They did the hits, the ones even I could recognize. The Demon spat blood. The Spaceman’s guitar emitted sparks. A drunk middle-aged woman in the front pulled down her tanktop to show the band her breasts. The Catman came out from behind his drumkit to sit on a stool and croon “Beth” to the crowd, and perhaps I am inventing this detail, but I swear that he gave a rose to a girl in the audience at the end.

They played as best they could given the space they had, in a grotty little college bar called Rusty’s in the Little Apple. The Demon couldn’t breathe fire--a mainstay of KISS’s shows--because of both fire codes and common sense, but we all shouted out loud and promised to rock all night and party every day.

They were four boys in mid-1990s Manhattan (Kansas) imitating four boys in mid-1970s Manhattan (New York), and they were, on that night in April, performing that most American of acts: the invention of the self from nothing. With makeup and costumes, guitars and drums and amplifiers, and a crowd ready to cheer every mood, they were our own Founding Fathers of a moment that was simultaneously imitation and original, carving themselves their own city on a hill out of the wilderness of music and makeup. And I stood there in the crowd, like a spectator watching Lincoln at Gettysburg or listening to FDR on the wireless, amazed at it all, a room full of kings and queens of the night time world in a nation where we always said anyone could become anything, and where, for that night, I believed it, and now, when I hear the long opening of Destroyer, I hear that still.

—Colin Rafferty

#490: ZZ Top, "Tres Hombres" (1973)

When we were nineteen, my twin brother Dylan was in a cover band called the Pink Ladies, which he said was funny because none of them wore pink and none of them were ladies.  I thought it was stupid, but when I told him so, he told me I didn’t understand irony.  He flicked an imaginary rubber band at me after he said it, and I pretended to bat it away.

This was back in 1997, in those first months after high school, before I married-divorced, married-divorced, before Dylan and I stopped speaking.  I was waiting tables at the Perkins by the freeway during the day and taking English classes at the community college in the evening, and on the weekends I’d go with the Pink Ladies to their shows.  I’d lug around their guitar cases and bring them warm beers that I kept stashed in a duffel bag in the back of the van.  They played weddings mostly, and high school dances, but Dylan, like most musicians, dreamed of striking out on his own and being discovered. 

The way he talked about it always made me think of the prospectors heading out to California to strike it rich mining for gold.  Dylan was one of the late miners.  He’d missed the rush in ’49, was coming along in ’50 or ’51, and all the good claims were taken.  It wasn’t his fault.  He was born too late for the rock and roll movement, which was what he really loved, and in the wrong place, a small town in northern Minnesota where being famous meant having your hot dish be the first to go at church potlucks.  That whole year, our first one out of high school, he talked nonstop about leaving, moving down to the Cities or farther.  There were nights when I went to bed feeling heavy and certain that he’d be gone in the morning. 

Dylan had the right temperament for greatness, with the ability to twist girls around his finger, to sink into a depression that lasted days, to always get his way, to pitch a fit over something tiny, like when I used one of his washcloths to clean the makeup off my face one night.  He was good.  He could play guitar, he could sing, make his voice low or high as he needed, growling out lyrics, going up into a falsetto, but he was missing something.  He wasn’t great, and he wasn’t original.  He was a mimicker.  He’d watch videos of concerts, memorize how the musicians twisted and gyrated, and he’d copy that.

I remember one night, Dylan convinced the rest of the band to play ZZ Top.  They didn’t normally go in for the rock sound.  They kept it lighter, was how Dylan put it, and he always sneered when he said it.  Golden oldies for the weddings, pop hits for the high schoolers.  ZZ Top just wasn’t in their repertoire.  But Dylan loved them, and he loved Tres Hombres.  I’d hear him singing in his room, humming guitar riffs, tapping the beat on his stomach.  He’d start with “Waitin’ for the Bus,”  then move along through the album.  It was infectious.  He’d started calling me La Grange after he caught me doing it too, and soon that was all any of the Pink Ladies called me.  It didn’t make much sense as a name, but it was better than Sexy Sadie, which was what they’d called me before.

It was January, and it was cold the way only Minnesota can be, with that stabbing air that brings tears to your eyes and immediately freezes them on your lashes, streets so slick you could skate on them, mornings of cars refusing to start.  The Pink Ladies had been invited to play at a church social, which wasn’t their usual sort of venue, but also wasn’t unusual, since in the middle of January, we were all willing to do just about anything for entertainment.  I helped them set up in the basement, untangling cords and testing microphones, which they didn’t need in a space smaller than the elementary school cafeteria, but which Dylan insisted on.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

You could blame the cold for how it went, the fact that there’d been trouble with the heating and no one had told the Pink Ladies that, so when Dylan hit those opening chords of “Waitin’ for the Bus,” his fingers tripped and froze.  You could blame the audience, say they didn’t appreciate the music, say they were uncultured, say that Dylan and the Pink Ladies never had a chance.  You could blame Dylan for choosing that night to play ZZ Top instead of in a few months, when they’d play at the high school prom, for a group that might’ve been able to better appreciate it.  Singing about Jesus turning the Mississippi into wine would never fly with the good Minnesotan Lutherans.

The whole set was a disaster.  It wasn’t just that Dylan couldn’t play the chords right.  When he tried to imitate Billy Gibbons’ voice, he squeaked, he cracked, like he was thirteen again and couldn’t figure out how to carry a tune.  The fluorescent lights overhead cast a yellow sheen on his skin.  Even from where I stood, at the back of the room, almost hidden behind a stack of metal folding chairs, I could see he was sweating.  Dylan always sweat when he got nervous.  You could just see the rest of the Pink Ladies shrinking into themselves, like they thought that if they backed up far enough, they might be able to just disappear. 

When he’d finally played the last chord of “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” the room was silent.  Or not silent—someone coughed, a few other people sniffled, trying to clear their sinuses.  If one person had started clapping, everyone else would have joined in, but no one started.  Not even me.  It wasn’t like I stood there and thought through the moment, weighed the pros and cons of initiating the applause, finally choosing not to.  It was instinct, telling me to stay silent so that no one would notice me.

It might have been okay if I hadn’t looked back up at Dylan.  But I did, and he was looking at me, and our eyes met.  We didn’t have many twin moments, Dylan and me, but we had one then.  I knew, looking at him, that he would never leave our town, would never amount to much of a musician, would be forever dreaming of what his life could have been, and he, looking at me, knew that I knew this, and something flashed up in his eyes, the type of hatred and revulsion that children have for certain foods, that visceral certainty that if they even smell it, it will make them ill.  I could see it in Dylan’s face, and I could feel it in myself, too.   Then someone else in the audience put their hands together, tentatively, and the other church ladies joined in. But I didn’t. I dropped my eyes and pretended to knock my elbow against the folding chairs so that I’d have an excuse.

After the show, Dylan joked about it, said every musician needed to have a big flop so he could understand what failure was.  And it’s true that for a while, he seemed motivated to get out, to try harder, but that all came to nothing.  The Pink Ladies had disbanded by fall, and Dylan started working at the Fix-it-Rite across town, and he never left. 

Sometimes I think back to that night, to that moment of our eyes meeting across the church basement, and I think that everything else in our lives followed from that spark of hatred that we shared, and I think that I would do anything to take it back.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

But then I think, no, that was just another night, just another show, and everything that happened would always have happened, and it was nothing I did or didn’t do that caused it.  Then I usually stay up too late watching reality TV reruns and drinking Diet Coke and pretending that the reason Dylan and I don’t speak isn’t because he can’t stand that I know of his failure, but because he’s traveling the world, playing concerts to sold-out crowds, and that any day now he could show up on my front steps just to surprise me.  I can see him, the way he used to look after a show, his face pink and damp with sweat, his shirt untucked, the gel dripping from his hair, him running his hand through it and then wiping the grease on his shirt, leaving stains.  Or sometimes I see me.  I’m back in the church basement, and Dylan’s just lifting his hand from the guitar, his final riff still echoing through the room, and before he can even settle back into his regular slouch, I’m stepping forward, and I’m clapping, clapping hard.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#491: Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (1969)

On our second bird walk around the neighborhood, Nancy crouched down on the sidewalk, flapping her arms to keep me from stepping on the feather, and shushed me like she was shushing a grenade. To a ten-year-old, her intent was clear: talk and you lose your throat. I kept quiet, but inched closer. Nancy picked up the feather and held it under her nose, moved it in front of her eyes, then settled it next to her ear.

“Sometimes you can hear the squawk,” she said.

I put my ear beside hers and heard a medley of birdsong, but like most everything else, it was only in my head. I held out my palm, hoping Nancy would let the feather float down. It was long and jet black with gray, leopard-like spots and looked softer than silk.

But Nancy hesitated. I was new to the neighborhood and a pretty ratty-looking kid, and how was she supposed to know if I was trustworthy? Nancy loved three dead things more than she loved anything living: John F. Kennedy, feathers of all kinds, and Albert King. Trouble was, she didn’t love them very much, either. Most days, Nancy referred to Albert as the husband she’d have chosen for her dearest, most annoying friend—someone she loved to see in small doses. Albert seemed like a guy you’d need space from. On her softer days, when her hands ached, she called him “Velvet B.” There wasn’t a walk that went by without Nancy humming a tune from Born Under a Bad Sign, which she believed was the only record of Albert’s worth listening to. “The other ones are twice as long, half as good, and three times as fat,” she told me once. But this was after she told me she was a feather finder. She always led with that, as though finding feathers was the part of her that mattered.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Because she didn’t like inviting people in, I only saw Nancy’s feather collection once, a few weeks before I turned thirteen. I thought it was a good sign that something lucky was happening to me before I was about to enter my unluckiest year. Nancy asked me inside, and then took me to her bedroom to stand in front of the nightstand and the shiny box carved from a cherry tree. I could see the moon-shaped reflection of the lamp in the wood. Nancy told me to open it, but I was afraid. What if it were a music box stuck on the blues, and, when I smoothed my hands on the box’s sides, Albert would ascend, granting desperate wishes I never should have wished? Or maybe, the box belonged to Pandora herself, full of every bad thing that ached to get out.

Of course, it was neither. It was a box full of feathers stacked on feathers, arranged from largest to smallest. Some of them smelled bad, and I said so. Nancy said, “Dead don’t go far.”

She was fond of speaking that way, in short pragmatic sentences. I hardly ever heard her expound on anything, and, in general, she wasn’t keen on words. I think that was partially why she loved Velvet B. Nancy didn’t sing many of Albert’s words aloud. “The blues don’t need words,” she said when asked. But I disagreed. I thought the lyrics made the song, and on bird walks I sung nonsense words along to Nancy’s melodies, which often earned me a soft knock on the noggin, her way of inquiring whether or not there was anything in there.

After enough pestering, she let me look at the album cover of Born Under a Bad Sign. I dissected the truly bizarre hodgepodge of a black cat, skull and cross bones, snake eyes, a Friday the 13th calendar page, and an ace of spades on the front, and then I moved on to the lyrics. I didn’t understand how these words fit with the songs I knew, and unlike usual, I was being too literal, asking questions like, What’s in Kansas City? Will I need a personal manager when I become a woman? Who goes on dates at the Laundromat?  What kind of gun is a love gun?  Nancy didn’t have answers for any of them; she just stated emphatically that I was missing the point. Albert didn’t write those lyrics anyway, and I would do well to turn my attention to the guitar, his fingers on the strings, the riffs and sounds that would shape guitar gods for generations to come.

*

Shortly after I turned thirteen, I left my house one night at dusk to walk off a stomachache. I took the back way to the park, through the gravel alley where I liked to knuckle-thump trashcans and bowl with acorns and squirrels. Circling back around just as the sun disappeared behind the hills, I hopped the fence to my backyard and climbed the rope ladder up to my tree house.

I heard the flapping before I saw the hawk. Trapped inside, it must have flown in the window that had since blown shut. The hawk was red-tailed and his left wing was broken, the bone jutting out into the air. When he tried to fly away as I approached, his body only scooted against the floor. I knelt beside him and looked him right in the eyes, the way you’d look at someone to show you empathized. His talons were curled in and tense from hours of trying and failing.

What is it like to lose your ability to move? To move is to be alive. I imagined my legs falling off and dragging myself across a splintery wooden floor toward a doorknob too high for me to reach.

The hawk crowed. I scanned the tree house and, as soon as I saw it, went for the baseball bat in the corner. I wrapped my fists around the barrel and swung at the hawk until the squawking stopped and the feathers flew. Red, gray, brown and white, tail, flume, bristle and downy, they floated and landed all around the interior of the tree house. I sat, cross-legged, and folded my hands in my lap. I pictured Nancy in her recliner, Albert on the record player, born under a bad sign, toothy licks, gritty and buttery at the same time, D to A to G. I stayed there for hours as the night went black, humming to myself, waiting to be found.

*

Years later, after Nancy had passed, I discovered that scientists have studied which astrological signs are associated with negative human traits. One such study on hospital admissions showed that Aries are more likely to enter the hospital but Pisces are more likely to stay. It was fascinating, and I wanted more. Don’t we all want nature to explain why some of us are lucky, some of us criminal, hurting ourselves and others, some of us so, so blue?

The data isn’t there. At least not yet. I keep going back to the signs, to the knotty horns and the slimy gills. I read the horoscopes and measure how far the moon has traveled from the oak tree in my yard. I have to be honest: the ram and the fish do nothing for me. Their mystery feels too small. And the rest of the signs feel limited, too, as far as explanations go. The virgin and the scales, the bull and the goat and the ugly crab, all so easily lost. The centaur gets close, but then even it is not able to fly. I am looking for a different sign, one that leaves behind tangible things which you can find on the ground or, if you’re lucky, sit among quietly and wait.

—Lacy Barker

#492: Eurythmics, "Touch" (1983)

Who’s that girl running around with you?

— Eurythmics, “Who’s That Girl?”

As a teenager I used my youth—and my school uniform—as plumage in a years-long tail-feather dance for a few older, adult men. I had designs in learning The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” on my guitar, and I rocked my twin bed while imagining running off from Tennessee to California with a middle-aged, B-list actor. In my skewed, pre-feminism adolescence, I saw my youth as both a complement to their age and a roadblock in connecting to them. I started listening exclusively to non-contemporary music—classic rock, jazz, etc.—and watching old television and old films, especially those that seemed to belong to their youth. I threw myself into becoming the girl with knowledge, a grasp of experience beyond my personal experience, my second sight not into the future but, like an ordinary woman, into the past.

Typical of an only child, I sought cultural history as a means to connect to adults, even before puberty. In carpool, I had long conversations with my best friend’s mom while my friend ate Pop Tarts and dozed against the window. I spent summer days with my grandparents watching Perry Mason and insomniac nights watching the full run of Nick at Nite’s retro programming. My music, for many years, was my mother’s music. Bruce Springsteen. Jimmy Buffett. (There’s got to be a home video somewhere of me singing “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw.”) I used pop culture not only as a means to receive adults’ attention—I felt I could access their jokes and metaphors, indeed, their language.

*

Eurythmics’ 1983 album Touch arrived four years before I was born. I first encountered its hits “Here Comes the Rain Again” and “Who’s That Girl?” in the 90s through VH1, a network on which I binged and only neglected for MTV’s Daria. Listening to the album’s nine original tracks and rewatching the two music videos, I yet feel a great nostalgia, like an ink stain over my heart. Or, to use the Eurythmics’ own words, the music returns to me “falling on my head like a memory.” As an adult, I’m most compelled by Annie Lennox’s gutsy gender-bending, exemplified in her roles as both the female lounge performer and the male audience member who kiss at the end of the “Who’s That Girl?” video, especially now that I’m less bullied by hormones and seduced by forbidden (heterosexual) rendezvous, and more in touch with my own leanings. As a teenager, however, my interest in Annie Lennox and David Stewart depended only upon other people, indeed, any person I might want to connect with who had experienced the music in medias res.

In my investigation of the Time Before My Life, I collected knowledge piecemeal, like a panorama made up of many individual images. It’s something I still do through collecting vintage ephemera, pulp novels, smut magazines, science illustrations, music, etcetera. In fact, it’s what I do in writing poems. Some would attribute my behavior to feelings of a particularly hipster breed of nostalgia, a desire to return to some cultural motherland, and some might go so far as to argue that nostalgia reveals one’s inability to live in the present or work for a better future, a vestigial romanticism that makes it hard to crawl out of the turbulent ocean and onto the sunny beach.

But my interest in the cultural past, at least now, anchors itself in empathy,  something I feel we must sustain if we are to move into the future with any sort of hope. The wish to make other people more real to me is also why I read literature, why I bought an old radio that reminds me of my dead grandparents. The past, unlike the future, never dies. The past is always the past, no matter if we lived it or not. The time before our birth is full of possibilities, lives we don’t know and never lived. The future doesn’t leave artifacts, but from the artifacts of the past we can make a benign voodoo doll (a bit of cloth here, eye of newt there) with which we don’t control actions but, rather, simply understand them, and, since the past has prompted the present, we therefore better understand our own.

So while I can never experience Eurythmics’ Touch as someone might have the day it was released, I have the gift of experiencing it for myself as a twenty-seven year old in 2014, as well as the experience of my attempt to experience it in the way that others might have experienced it contemporaneously. Additionally, as a poet, I’m constantly seeking new ways to reinvigorate the language I use, and so, experiencing the cultural past allows me to experience the linguistic past, and therefore nudges me, like a good friend, into conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. My nostalgia, (a word rooted in the idea of going home) is a longing for a spiritual dwelling made up of others, its foundation beams made up of every one I love.

— Emilia Phillips

#493: Wilco, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (2002)

In the middle of “All Too Well,” one of the most structurally epic fuck-yous pop music has produced in a long time, a very worked-up Taylor Swift lays into her subject with such calculation and heartbreak that it sometimes physically hurts to listen to. Describing the moment to the uninitiated can be a little difficult: essentially, after three verses and a couple choruses of impeccable, brutal buildup, Tay rips through the song’s bridge like a carefully sharpened blade.

You call me up again just to break me like a promise,
so casually cruel in the name of being honest.
I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here,
‘cause I remember it all, all, all too well.

Maybe it doesn’t work written out like this. Maybe you have to hear it for yourself. Go now; I can wait.

If you still don’t get the chills you so clearly should be feeling rippling through your body, I think I have your answer. Go get your copy of Red, listen to it top to bottom (skipping “Sad Beautiful Tragic” and “The Lucky One,” because yikes), and see if it makes sense that way. Context can change everything, after all. If that particular album is a massive one for pop music and, more specifically, Swift herself—and it is—then “All Too Well” is the moment you realize its massivity. In other words: if you don’t buy that bridge, you don’t buy Tay, and at least you know you can move on with your life, satisfied that you tried.

I’ve been thinking recently about moments like this: the epiphanic kick to the head that any great album will inevitably eventually deliver. Of course, plenty of albums dish out so many of these over the course of their running time that the very idea of an “epiphany” is ludicrous—it means nothing if every track makes you get it. These are your Aeroplane Over the Seas, your Gracelands and 36 Chamberses. Bonafide chunks of brilliance. Real Mona Lisas.

The other kind, though—the great record exposed as such through one truly gut-busting, quickly-passing moment—is much more common. Taylor Swift is good at this, and not just one, but two of her albums model the trick expertly. (Exhibit B.: the subtle way she briefly rides the counter rhythm coming out of the bridge into the last set of choruses on “Fearless.” Trust me.) Arcade Fire has the moment in “Half Light I” where the music drops out and that ghostly pair of voices sings the word “echoes” in the most haunting way imaginable and suddenly The Suburbs falls into place. Eminem decided to say “I’m just playin’, ladies, you know I love you” in that very specific semicreepy, semisincere way at the end of “Kill You” and set The Marshall Mathers LP completely on its head. Tom Waits improvises for almost six minutes on “Step Right Up” and when he says, “Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife,” you are either on board with Small Change or not. The ship’s leaving. Toot toot, adios.

Somewhere on this ill-defined list is Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s a terrific album—twelve years after its much-heralded release, not many are contesting that. That layered production? Those weird astro-static noises? Those songs? Forget about it. Many people feel many feelings around, for, and through YHF, and I get that. Still, for me it all boils down to one brief snatch of sound—the epiphany in the heart of the anxiety-riddled light rock.

The crushing bummer “Ashes of American Flags” is the sixth song on the record, making it the fulcrum on which the album’s two halves swing up and down. And oh boy, do they. Love to crippling fear and right back up again, ad infinitum. “Ashes” is not my favorite song on YHF. I would put it with the bottom two or three, to be honest, its clunky lyrics and glacier pace colliding into something like a perfect storm of blandness—but once it ends . . . well, it’s a little difficult to explain.

The enormity of the ending of “Ashes of American Flags” is so difficult to properly explain, in fact, that Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and original Yankee engineer Jay Bennett nearly came to blows over how it should sound. You can see this all go down in Sam Jones’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, should you feel so inclined. To be honest, though, it doesn’t offer much in the way of insight: you can listen to the ten-or-so seconds that bridge together “Ashes” and album highlight “Heavy Metal Drummer,” think about what it might have cost the band—the contentious environment in the recording studio ended up driving apart Bennett and Tweedy for years—and still come up empty.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

And here’s what it ultimately comes down to. Here’s where that epiphany shit hits hard. Somewhere in the muddle of white noise, radio static, and glitchy space sounds, someone hits five keys on the piano. They sound random, just another piece of the ether, cutting-room-floor stuff that was kept for “atmosphere.” They’re pretty, but meaningless.

Then the next track comes hard-kicking in, and in the melody’s background, there it is again: that five-note succession, now the spine for a much livelier, much cheerier song built not from one man’s agitation and nerves, but from nostalgia and summer and KISS and getting stoned. The power of this transition cannot be overstated—in fact, in the way it shuttles you softly from blackness into the light of day, it serves as a perfect thesis statement for the entire album.

Maybe this sounds absurd. Just another ex-record store employee placing far too much weight on a minuscule moment in recorded music history to prove some kind of point about some obscure something even he can’t really explain. Someone already made High Fidelity, didn’t they? Wouldn’t you rather go watch Empire Records again instead? Fine. I know. And I won’t try to convince you otherwise. This is exactly that, and I am he.

But if you have the time to spare, just please. I implore you. Can’t it be possible that if you grab your headphones, put on Yankee from start to finish, or try your best with Red, some insight might come along after all? What is music, after all, if not another target for our obsessions? What is a perfect moment if not the catalyst for a thousand more just like it? No matter how brief. No matter. Go now. I can wait.

—Brad Efford

#494: MGMT, "Oracular Spectacular" (2007)

But there is really nothing, nothing we can do,
Love must be forgotten, life can always start anew.

Sometime in 2005 or 2006, maybe it was spring or summer—I’m not sure but I know it was warm outside because I spent most of Of Montreal’s set sitting on the patio, my ears ringing from the deafening volume in the tiny venue—I bought my now-soon-to-be ex-wife Julia tickets to a show at a now-defunct venue in Charlottesville, VA called the Satellite Ballroom. We’d been dating for a just few months, and I knew next to nothing about Of Montreal outside of the couple CDs Julia would often play in her car. I was still freshly reeling, wide-eyed in the new-to-me world of indie music that had burst open a year or so before when my adolescent love affair with Phish had finally come to a sudden, unexpected end—the result of some sort of internal tidal shift, certainly the subject for another time, another essay.

We made the hour-and-a-half-long trip to Charlottesville from Richmond, where Julia had just recently moved into a small two-bedroom apartment on Main Street with me and my best friend and bandmate—a comically bad living situation full of wildly varying degrees of maturity and conflicting life schedules (Julia had just started her first year teaching English in public schools, I had just begun my first year of undergrad, and my friend was working nights at a local bar). We drove her old blue Chevy Cavalier, also now-defunct, having been struck and totaled last year by a drunk teenager, oddly enough right outside of our old apartment on Main Street . . . sometimes I’d swear I’ve been wandering in circles for my entire life, the past always echoing through the present.

The Satellite Ballroom had the unquestionable vibe of a public school cafeteria—the kind of place that felt like it should be hosting a low-budget high school prom. They sold bottles of Yuengling and Starr Hill beer out of coolers from behind a counter that was clearly intended to serve as a snack bar. I wasn’t even twenty-one yet and they wouldn’t sell Julia, three years older than me, two beers for herself, so she snuck sips of Starr Hill Amber to me over the course of the night, causing me to feel uncomfortably self-aware of our age gap. When the opening act took the stage—a band neither of us had ever heard of—there were only a handful of people hanging around, so we went front and center to watch.

Two shaggy-haired guys rolled confidently onto the stage looking like they’d just gotten out of bed. One of them was wearing an oversized bright blue hoodie, khaki shorts and black Converse All Stars, the other a plain white V-neck t-shirt and jeans—very normal looking young guys (turns out they were both the same age as Julia), except that the one in the t-shirt was also wearing a red velvet cape tied with a golden tassel around his neck. 

One of them hit some keys on a laptop and the room began to fill like a hot air balloon with the blooming sounds of lo-fi synth—bubbling, purring, chirping like an analog world waking up in a digital spring, then four measures of a simple melody—happy but for the slight lip-quiver of vibrato before a bass-heavy drumbeat dropped to kick off the verse. And then they were dancing, singing, jumping back and forth around the stage with the shameless enthusiasm of teenagers in front of their bedroom mirrors—

I’m feelin’ rough, I’m feelin' raw in the prime of my life.
Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.

They were silly, they didn’t care, they weren’t even playing instruments, but their songs were really good, and turned out to be surprisingly memorable.

Control yourself, they sang, take only what you need from it / a family of trees wanting to be haunted—a chorus belted by two anonymous guys that stuck with me until, a couple years later, I started hearing them everywhere, when they turned up on SNL and David Letterman with a full band, all done up in elaborate, what I might call hippie-jungle-glam outfits—in all their freaky goodness, with a Grammy nomination, opening for Paul McCartney, an admitted fan, when the phrase “this generation’s Sgt. Pepper’s” started getting thrown around in reviews for Oracular Spectacular—when all that pretending turned, perhaps reluctantly, into something real.

Those shaggy-haired guys, of course, were MGMT on their first tour after releasing the Time to Pretend EP and, although I really enjoyed their set that night, I didn’t make much of an effort to find out who they were. At the time, I had some arguably high-minded ideals of what it meant to have a band or to play music at all and MGMT didn’t seem to fit in with any of that. With their prerecorded tracks, synth-heavy song production and seeming unwillingness to take themselves seriously as musicians, I think I was probably too ashamed to admit how good they made me feel. There was an earnestness in their performance and in their music that I don’t think I fully understood at the time—an honesty in the way they confronted not only a rapidly changing music industry, but the universally terrifying temporality of life.

Passed the point of love
shattered and untied
waiting to pick up the pieces
that make it all alright.

But pieces of what?
Pieces of what?
Pieces of what
doesn’t matter anymore.

Pieces of what we used to call home, the song ultimately decides. When Julia and I separated five months ago, I moved into an apartment with a new friend and bandmate right next door to the first place I lived in Richmond ten years ago, when Julia and I first met working together at a coffee shop downtown. The month we separated, I graduated with my MFA and started working at another coffee shop—circles upon circles, and yet every time I come around, something has changed, something is new. Ten years later, I’m financially and professionally right back where I was at age nineteen, with virtually nothing to show for the life I lived through my twenties—only what I have inside, these memories, the person I’ve become, which are as malleable and unreliable as love. This essay isn’t about seeing MGMT before they were famous. This is about growing up, spending ten years of my life settling into the idea of the rest of a life with one person and having that suddenly shattered and the rapid restructuring, the self-reckoning and the swimming back to shore that has gone on since.

When I listen to Oracular Spectacular now, I understand something about these changes—something about the reality of moving forward in this world. Perhaps it’s just the way they situate earnest, innocent lyrics about childhood—I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms / I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world—against lines full of tongue-in-cheek irony in regards to the loss of innocence we repeatedly experience as we grow as people, all melodically phrased over instrumentation that makes me want to move my body and celebrate how simultaneously difficult and wonderful life can be. Built into the album’s mission statement is a pre-acceptance of failure and the choice to revel in it.

The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce,
we’ll find some more models, everything must run its course.

Already, in my memory of that show, as in so much of our history together, Julia is beginning to slip away—as the past attempts to keep up, always circling the present, she is becoming a stranger in my mind. Six months ago, if someone had asked me what it’s like to be married, I, comfortable and secure, would have given some overly self-assured, idealistic response about the difficulties and rewards of truly working with another person over a long period of time. I would have felt so quietly right, and perhaps I would have been—too often our best really isn’t enough. Going back now, standing in front of that stage, a strange person beside me receding into a crowd of other strange people, what remains is a celebratory music echoing out through the room, keeping that memory alive and connecting my past to my present.

—Doug Fuller

#495: Bonnie Raitt, "Give It Up" (1972)

I get most of my ideas in the shower. It might be the action of lathering—the fingers massaging my scalp, preparing it like a surgeon about to lift my head’s heavy lid. I like the clash that occurs when the body zones out on autopilot, allows the mind to wander. Sometimes I'm surprised to rediscover what was intuitive to me as a child: that boredom often contains inspiration. 

The shower, increasingly, is also the only place where I sing, where I like the way I sound. Here is a place of safety: of ideas and resonance. This morning, stepping out of the tub, I slipped on the damp tile before catching myself with a hand on the counter. It’s a cliché, I know, that people die like this: one moment, upright and drying off, the next, splayed and splattered on the bathroom floor. I imagine the sound it would make, traveling up the entire body, through the windpipe and out the mouth: whoomp. One final stroke of body-shaking percussion.  

Undeniably, I am getting older. This is something I tend to notice the most in the shower, with my body right there for examination. But once I was a child, and there are some things my body still displays that bear proof of this:  a livid white stripe on my shin from an afternoon I spent jumping from twin bed to twin bed, eventually bashing my leg open on the bed frame. Another, smaller wedge of a scar on my kneecap from tumbling down the stairs. Another faint stripe on my hand, a burn from trying to save a crumbling Pop-Tart from the toaster. So many of these, accumulating across my body like snow, leaves.

It startles me now to think how I used to catapult my body around without even paying attention to it. I also used to sing everywhere: in the shower, outside the shower, in the living room, without being embarrassed. And when I say sing I don’t mean the benign, passive nature of humming to yourself as you cook dinner, of whistling while you work—I mean belting. I was really trying: I was young enough to lack any learned apathy or shame. 

Growing up, my house bellowed with the constant rotation of The Cranberries, Eva Cassidy, and Bonnie Raitt. I wanted all that they had: their powerful voices, their wisdom, how they could suddenly change tenor and key. My sister and I would put on our mother’s and aunts’ old dresses, swimming in the collars and waistlines, and dance, assuming what we thought were the rigid roles of adults, grabbing each other’s palms and swaying around the living room carpet, dipping and spinning one another like the people we saw waltzing in tuxes and gowns in old black-and-white movies. Bonnie and her cohort in our CD deck represented an adult world that I had yet to inhabit. Bonnie with the flaming red hair. Bonnie who knew what she wanted and how to go about getting it.  

Their music offered a disturbing spectrum of emotion that I could sense was, at that time, beyond me, winking far off like a shard of glass on the street. That music, Bonnie’s leaping voice, is my first memory of songs conveying something so big and abstract, something outside myself; that wordless chords could connote an emotion.

As a kid, I daydreamed about being a musician simply because I loved music. That’s only partly true. I see now that I wanted to be a musician because singing and playing an instrument seemed to be a way to have creative control over your life: a way of growing up without ever having to a grow up, to have fun all the time. The adults I knew—my parents, and the friends of my parents, and the parents of my friends—stood over pots of chickpeas on the stove. They sat on a couch and talked about boring things I didn’t understand, and the books they read were set in small type with no pictures. They read the newspaper while wearing slippers, and drove minivans and talked in parking lots to other adults while dropping off their children. In other words, the adults I saw in my day-to-day life were nothing like Bonnie, as far as I could see, or any musician for that matter.

I did not envy them. I wanted instead to be the beam of energy spilling through the speakers. I wanted to be as electric as the white streak punctuating Bonnie’s hair.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

In many ways, I felt like these singers were asking me: So, what kind of person are you preparing to be? What kind of woman? It’s interesting to go back now, years and years later, and really listen to Bonnie Raitt, especially on Give It Up, and hear all these discrepancies I never noticed as a child, to hear Bonnie as a powerful woman singing with confidence and authority about how helpless she feels, how down and out, a woman who needed a man to love her, a woman who would not make it on her own. I know this is, of course, somewhat essential to the blues, and, more widely, to the entire medium of song. This slippage is what makes her intriguing, her music full of contradictions. Isn’t that healthy? Isn’t that what being an adult means—being human?

Whenever I sang along with Bonnie, my mind would clear and smooth itself, a sheet settling over a bed. I felt, almost, like I could control time by losing myself in a song I knew as well as myself. Dancing and singing and falling and slipping: my dumb body just trying to navigate its way through the world. Bent over backwards at the waist with my sister’s hand on the small of my back, my head flung upside down, blood pounding in my ears, it was easy for just a second to forget where I was, to forget entirely about where I was going to step next.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#496: Boz Scaggs, "Boz Scaggs" (1969)

In 1969, a white boy can make a soul record with an entirely white rhythm section and include nonsensical jabberings like this in the gatefold:

Later at the stand of pigs Luke feasts on a knuckle Elrod plays patty cake with a mint julep and a chuckle he grins Elrod as the day is long I can wait say Luke with a long swill Now that will do and we’ll have two more of the same Helen Keller was born here and she made sense smile you may be on radar and on and on to seven days and seven nights a yesful orgy

Practically Beefheart anarchy poetry. And butting up against the words (signed only with an “OOOXXX”): a nude Duane Allman shot from below, grinning in the middle of the woods and cupping his shadowy nethers. His hat a dark halo around his dirty hair. It’s 1969: the baby-young editor of Rolling Stone is producing your record and no matter how hopelessly square you look, you can still put soul on wax with a bunch of white musicians and slap a picture of yourself on the cover.

There is no expectation here; no one will look at you in your polyester and bad greasy haircut and feel the curious, exciting tingle of “funk” skitter like a dark animal across their mind. Will you get down? Will you make the right sounds, and make them filthy? It doesn’t matter, not quite.

All the better, then, when on the opening track Rog Hawkins comes in kicking, overlaying conga on high hat, keeping time better than a wristwatch. Funkier, too. Against all odds. One verse through and the bass slides into the mix: jackrabbit-hoppy, and playful. Lady background crooners, Jimmy Johnson’s licks poking in and out, and yes, Duane’s, too, like neighbors stopping in to say hello.

It shouldn’t work. Should it? It shouldn’t. That outfit, that sepia, that name: Boz. Seems like there could be a dozen wrong ways to pronounce it. Maybe it’s all part of the gag, the long game white boys are playing in 1969, taking what isn’t theirs, but could be. See how easy. See what soul after all.

But that’s only the first three minutes. It’s no surprise that kind of groove is hard to hold on to. You get bluesier, rootsier, more Opry than Apollo, more Hank than Sam and Dave. Mostly, you make people want to put on Mr. Dynamite, which is never a negative. You’d rather do the very same, is the irony. How’s a wooden if well-meaning white man supposed to make waves? It’s 1969. There are ways. And you still think you can find them, break through, all that.

For starters, toss the organ-driven waltz numbers out the window. There’s where your voice drips, utterly passionless, supremely on the beat in the absolute worst way. Sadie Hawkins slow-dance cover band nonsense. The wah-wah on Jimmy’s tepid downstrokes don’t help, either. And while you’re at it, take out, too, the carousel kiddie stuff, the sappy honky ballads. Come on, man. Pick it up. Make it funky. Don’t read the words—feel them.

Because later history might rediscover this record and frame it in a whole new context. Like maybe someone’s going to break through before you do. Maybe it’s the man who refuses to play any way but nude during studio time. Maybe you think of him fondly now, maybe you don’t. Surely you recognize his talent. His soul and his guitar seemingly cement-melded even when noodling, his fingers moving so quickly through the clouds of rank smoke around him they leave vapor trails.

Maybe decades from now you’ll be nearly 70 and they’ll stick this record, your eponymous sophomore effort, on the tail-end of a list, mentioning your white rhythm section and the stoned naked guitarist you hired instead of mentioning you, your talent, your drive. Maybe, your insecurities inflamed, your life reverse-magnified through the wrong end of a telescope, you’ll suspect you only made the list because of that kid producer. Of what his little music zine became. Of the job your son landed as a columnist in its pages. Maybe you’ll wonder. 

But most likely it won’t make a lick of difference. Your moments will have come and gone, tour buses and synthesizers and sharp sunglasses and suits. Your shell so hardened all the little things will ping off without you even noticing. Or at least the appearance of. What is success? Have I been? Could I have been? Maybe these questions will linger. Or maybe you don’t even read that rag. Maybe you’ll put another down payment on another stretch of rich Napa soil. But this all comes later. Or doesn’t.

For now, keep doing what you’re doing. Try for funky, land somewhere just off-center. Sing about love lost and gained again—classic stuff, relatable—then scribble aimless jabber for the sleeve. It’s 1969. You’ll get it wrong a hundred times before you ever get it right. And if you never do—if you find yourself forever wandering down brown streets in brown suits, groping for all the soul you know you’ll never have—don’t worry. Stick it out; time will tell. If all goes right, it always does.

—Brad Efford

#497: The White Stripes, "White Blood Cells" (2001)

He drives the tour van and she puts her dirty feet on the dashboard, leaving a mark. She paints her toes white while the road rolls under, because it’s a preapproved contribution to the color scheme. They always bring plenty of pillows; sleeping happens in shifts. Whoever’s driving gets to pick the music.

It’s cramped quarters. But most days the closest she feels to him is when he’s at the microphone, she’s on the other side of the stage calmly beating the bejesus out of the drums.

When they’re parked, they play a French automobile-themed card game from the 60s called Milles Bornes. It’s all about traveling more miles than the other player. When he gets going fast she can give him a speed limit. When she gets too close to winning he deals her a stoplight, a flat tire, a car crash.

What a season, he sings every night at the encore, to be beautiful without a reason.

She drives the van and he writes another song and she wants to tell him it’s not brilliant but it is.

Some days she feels like a wind-up toy he’s ratcheted too many revolutions. He told her they’d never make it big, not really, but she should have known better than that. She’s an industrial machine he equipped with a kill switch, programmed to drum for endless days but not to drum too good.

What he says he’s always liked most about her playing is its lack of polish.

Lately people want to know, does he keep her quiet? Always been a lot of questions, which is how he likes it. Do they love each other like brother and sister, husband and wife, do they love each other at all? Of all the things he’s ever stood for in his life, silence has never been one of them. If you can hear a piano fall you can hear him coming down the hall.

Does he keep her from talking? She’d say he has nothing to do with it.

When they first met, he told her about a car fire he saw as a child in Mexicantown, how he woke up and sensed the flames without even opening his eyes, how he leapt out of bed and spotted it through the window, roaring tongues coming up through the sunroof and reaching almost to the moon, the cardboard sign in front that said, NOW, COME PICK UP YOUR TRASH.

She laughed and asked do I need to worry about you embellishing?

Yes, he said, raising his eyebrows. Yes.

When they married, he took her name and made it his own. Who’d want to worship a guy named John Gillis, anyway?

When they divorced, he never considered giving it back.

Some days all he can talk about are saints. St. James, St. Sebastian, and of course St. Rita, the one for impossible cases.

They tend to perform staring directly into each other’s eyes. Often, for the encore they play “We’re Going to be Friends.” To introduce it he leans way down near the first row and whispers kids are just so cruel to each other. It’s nice to fantasize that they’re not. It’s a cliché, but a cliché that fits too nicely to ignore, she thinks: he holds the audience right in the palm of his pale hand.

Good lord, the shit that she mumbles when he’s trying to sing, the things that he crows when the camera’s rolling.

He does yet another interview, though he claims to hate them: Quiet people … Randy Newman said shortpeople got no reason to live? Shit. He musta never met a quiet person.

When he was a furniture upholsterer, he said he didn’t even want to be famous, but couldn’t seem to help acting like it. He made those business cards that said Your Furniture’s Not Dead, wrote his receipts out in crayon, sewed handwritten notes into the insides of the sectionals he refurbished for the old ladies to find one day and say what in heaven’s name is the meaning of this? He drove all over town in the black and yellow van, wearing his black and yellow suits. And though not many people wanted him to fix their leather chairs, they knew who he was. They wondered about him.

It’s all these things that people need to know but are also desperate to avoid learning: that he wore braces and she talked with a lisp, that he met her tending bar at Memphis Smoke because she decided she was done with all the bullshit after high school. That he wasn’t born until his mother was already forty-five, all these little details that don’t look so good on gods.

His brother is a lawyer, his other brother is a chef. One brother is only an ophthalmologist.

They play a concert in Ontario that’s nothing more than a single E-flat chord sustained for five minutes, and then the crowd chants one more note, one more note, having no idea that might be all that’s left within them.

They are beginning to be extremely famous now. They crash on their friends’ couches for the last time. She makes her grandmama’s corn soufflé and he holds court, lecturing on the one and only way to make a chocolate malt correctly (hint: vanilla ice cream). In the mornings they fold the blankets nice and neat and leave them on the couch. Not like a chore, but because they know they should, because it’s a nice, right thing to do.

Soon it will all be champagne and air-conditioning, neither one of them at the wheel.

His house is filled with dead things he can’t let go of. Just like the furniture business, that obsession with preservation and repair. He collects refurbished animals. An eland, a kudu, a giant white elk, a zebra head, a gazelle. All taxidermied up and hung like paintings. Sometimes they take pictures with them for their album covers now. He keeps a crow in a Ziplock bag in the freezer because it’s illegal to stuff but too beautiful to throw away. She thinks it’s a little awful to keep something on display like that after it’s only a husk with flat eyes, cold and milky.

Does it feel good to fill the air with something incredible? Even now they would both say yes. When the spotlights blast and the feedback skreeks and some drunk spills his beer, screaming, I want to have your babies, they have their loneliest and loveliest moment of the whole day.

In the dressing room before a show, they don’t ask for much. Just some fresh strawberries and a tray with biscuits and tea, then they play AC/DC. He sits at the mirror, summoning something up. When a journalist knocks he turns him away, shaming him, saying it’s like asking Michelangelo about his shoes. He knows there will be plenty more of them to listen when he wants to talk again. When the record ends, she stretches out on the couch and hums her harmony for “Hotel Yorba” and he says sing out. He says nobody can ever hear you.

Quiet people can be confusing. She knows that. But maybe the world needs people of all volumes, jabbering over and under one another. It was a lot more fun doing this back when the chaos of his guitar solos still felt like a kiss. She never even wanted to play the drums, just loved his fingertips on her elbows as he taught her how.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She looks so goddamn good up there, though. He somehow manages to yowl like a stepped-on cat but make it a stunning melody. He stalks and stomps around and she pounds like a demon and they make something magic out of their tender turmoil, these confusing moods. It’s a lack of control that’s pitch perfect on stage, a little unwieldy everywhere else. But sometimes they sound so good up there and she looks so good and they look so good together.

If they stop and be quiet, three thousand strangers pull the words out from within them: any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most.

But then the show’s over. The electricity sizzles itself out and even his guitar and even him—spent and still.But now. But now. They’re the words they ended their third album with. He ended it with, she means. She just sang.

She drives the van and he plays with Lego people in the passenger seat. Raises their arms, bends them over, sits them down, has them hold hands, pops their little heads off. She wants to cry sometimes, but worries if she does he will hold her and it will be the last scene, the pose they’re stuck in as the credits start rolling.

—Eric Thompson

#498: The Stone Roses, "The Stone Roses" (1989)

“Tear me apart and boil my bones / I’ll not rest till she’s lost her throne / My aim is true / My message is clear / It’s curtains for you / Elizabeth my dear”

—Ian Brown, “Elizabeth My Dear”


After having too much to drink and desperately trying to plug a hole in conversation, I tell people about the summer I spent dating Ian Brown. Practically no one believes me, and I’ve got nothing that looks like proof, nothing I could hock on the Internet, not even a photograph. But I tell them anyway, usually about the time Ian drove us to London for the Queen’s Official Birthday, which is not the Queen’s actual birthday, but the one celebrated by the monarchy in the summer when nicer weather is more likely. Ian thought this was horseshit, another excuse for the royals to siphon money from commoners and needlessly parade in the streets. That year, it rained. The masses were soaked through, hundreds of umbrellas arranged like a hive over the crowd, making it impossible even to glimpse Elizabeth as she rode by in her carriage. Ian’s brown eyes were amused as he looked at me. I recognized the expression later in all the Stone Roses promotional photos and videos; it was the one that said he was larger than the rest of us, had been born a giant, deserved to be adored. 

In some moments it felt true.

Ian treated me bad because he knew without a doubt he’d be famous, same as half the boys in northern England. Some gassy-gut guy in a bar had told him he should be a rock star, validating his obsessions, a sentence he took to heart as if it were a proclamation by the archangel Gabriel. Ian allotted more time for the A major scale and for practicing with his boys than he did for me, but honestly I was content most of the time to stare at his coiffed Beatles haircut and thick, straight-as-stripes eyebrows, which made him look ethereally pensive and good-willed. My girlfriends’ boyfriends weren’t a fraction as cute on their best days, and back then cuteness meant more than most everything else.

When Ian was blazing mad he didn’t say “beans” or “hailstorm” or “shit,” the way I did. He said “Eliiiiizabeth!” or “Lizbeth!” or “Bloody bloody Beth!” which bothered me to no end. In those days I loved to watch the royals on television and buy the rag mags at the market. I thought Prince Charles was an absolute peach—those adorable ears!—and Diana the most gorgeous American woman in existence. I kept an exhaustive list of possible baby names for their future heir. They felt unreachable and reachable at the very same time, and the fact that Ian couldn’t appreciate this paradox was the strongest indicator our romance would be brief. Mostly I tried not to bring it up.

Even when it seemed like we didn’t like each other that much, he kept hanging around, and all the other boys I knew—diseased or sad or married—were worse. You take what you have. We all do that. When he answered the phone he never had much to say, just plain talk, like “okay all right okay.” He never asked how I was, even if I’d come down with something or sounded upset. After school and late into the evening, he’d ram cigarettes between my lips and tell me to smoke them sexy like a muse so he could write lyrics as the rings drifted up. It made me feel naughty and wanted. 

Shortly after we returned from London, I brought Ian home to meet Mum so she’d quit pestering me. I was certain she wouldn’t like him. Mum had been without a man since my infancy and was not the kind of woman to be dragooned by charm or much anything else. Stew simmered on the stove. I still associate the aroma of slow cooked beef with being young and at home. Mum had set the small round table against the wall under the cuckoo clock with her best china and a trio of new candles. The fourth chair was trapped against the wall since we rarely had guests.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” Ian said with an over-the-top smile. He was wearing a leather jacket. “Do you have any beer?” I felt myself blush at his forwardness.

She did, and although I’d rarely seen her drink the stuff, she filled up one for her and one for him and asked him to please have a seat. She didn’t bother to offer me a drink because she knew I’d say no. We all sat, and she made the mistake of asking Ian what he wanted to do after school, triggering a thirty-minute monologue about the brilliance of the Sex Pistols, his personal rock star aspirations, and the seismic shifting of the music scene in Manchester. He drank as he talked, per usual, and to my surprise and horror Mum matched him pint for pint, as if she’d been waiting for years for a man to come drink at her table. As soon as I heard an opening I steered the conversation toward our London weekend, and Mum asked about the Trooping the Colour parade.

“Bloody splendid,” Ian said, answering before I could get a word in. “Tons of colors. Some colors never seen before. You’re not a loyalist too, are you?” he asked sarcastically, which was not how I’d been taught to ask personal questions.

Mum leaned back in her chair and took a long drink, resting the mug between her breasts. When she spoke, she looked only at Ian. “You know how they say when the ravens leave the Tower, England shall fall?”

Ian had pointed out the ravens at the Wakefield Tower the day of the parade. According to legend, Ian told me, the resident ravens, humongous in size and blacker than crows, were the guardians of the kingdom, and if six ravens ever left, protection would disappear, too. Ian said the royal Raven Master kept seven instead of six so there was always a spare.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

“Those old buzzards should be dying any day,” Ian said with a laugh and reached for his drink. His sleeve nearly caught the flame of the centerpiece candles, and I gasped, but no one paid attention.

Mum set down her glass and leaned forward. “Let me tell you a little secret,” she said. “If the ravens ever leave the Tower, I’ll be there with my shotgun making sure they don’t come back.”

“Mum!” I said, hands flying to my mouth.

But she just raised her eyebrows at me as Ian lifted his beer, their glasses clinking together in a cheers.

Afterward the room fell quiet, and we set our focus on our bread and cheese. Every so often Ian flicked crumbs at me from across the table while Mum watched. I thought about how there must be a million mysterious things I didn’t know about the person I knew best and I thought about how Ian would live his whole life without decent manners or concern for others and still get everything he wanted. I’ve been proven right on both accounts over and over again. The stew bubbled over, and Mum jumped up to turn down the heat, her apron unfurling like a parachute. “God save the queen!” she said.

If I had proof of anything, for some reason I’d still want it to be this: Ian laughing, his hand on my thigh the way he knew I didn’t like, and me laughing along, taking a gulp from Ian’s glass, the beer traveling up and out of my nasal cavity, splattering all over the table, the cuckoo’s beak, the ridges on the back of the fourth chair. Mum saying, “And that’s how the blood will spill,” completely straight-faced with a ladle in one hand and a potholder in the other, sending us into another fit of absurdity, howling this time like a lost pack of alley hounds in the fat part of the night.

—Lacy Barker

#499: B.B. King, "Live In Cook County Jail" (1971)

It is nearly 90 degrees in Southwest Chicago, too hot for September, and Jewel Lafontant waits in the long shade of a guard tower as the Cook County Jail Jazz Band rolls through the handful of standards deemed morally commendable by the warden. The yard is so large and filling so steadily with tired, buzzing, angry bodies that the rim of barbed wire strung across the high walls around her seems more like cotton candy than fine razor, hardly enough to hold anyone back should the wrong thoughts start brewing.

She fans herself, absentmindedly taps her foot to a respectable “A-Train,” and cranes her neck to get a better look at the tower whose shadow she’s so thanklessly exploiting. Brick and thick green glass. Steel and a few holes large enough only for a rifle muzzle. All angles and indifference, like a spaceship left to rust after some failed reconnaissance. The whole uncaring shape of it would make her shiver were it not so hot out in the open frying pan of the concrete jail yard.

Someone has called her name. She turns to see Joe Woods, Crooked Sheriff of Crook County, making his diligent way toward her. He looks worried but is smiling still, hand at the end of a starched white shirt, sleeve rolled once, jutting stiffly out. Miss Lafontant, he says, though he knows very well that she’s married. She bites her tongue, shakes his hand, says, Joe.

You ready? His eyes are half-empty, fatigued, still expectant somehow in their shallows.

Say the word. At the end of this day of waiting to be told by white men where to stand and when to speak, it’s all she can think to say. Tomorrow, she will be back in the office, poring over cases, making her own tough choices like she’s used to. Since being made vice chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on International, Educational and Cultural Affairs just last year—a whole lot of big words for too many stuffy meetings, not enough action—she’s been half-seriously waiting for a call from the president himself any day now. And word is Nixon’s got her in mind for the Big Bench itself, first black woman in the Supreme Court. Wasn’t too long ago she was the first ever to make a case before them, and now there are whispers of her joining the brood. Look how important she’s become, how hard she’s worked to get here. Look how proud she’s made her mama.

But today she stands in the high 90-degree sun and waits to take to a makeshift plywood stage to introduce a middle-aged bluesman in the yard of the Cook County Jail, an institution Ebony has just anointed the “World’s Worst.” She knows King’s music, of course. Even before “Thrill,” before all the hoopla. It reminds her of her father: all that growling, slick danger awash in sensuality. Dirty and familiar, all at once. Repugnant and strangely alluring. She’d be the last to admit it, but she’s spent more than her share of nights alone swaying, brandy-blushed, to heartbroke black bluesmen, Mr. King certainly among them.

Now half an hour ago she met him in the bright administrative halls beyond the cellblock, and he certainly was charming. Very gracious to make her acquaintance and all that. She always liked a man who went to shake her hand rather than kiss it.

And here’s Joe again, sunglasses reflecting her stony visage back to her. He is signaling her to the stage. Showtime; she walks.

Standing before the rows of seated convicts comes natural to her, and speaking to a crowd’s no different. With the band all set up behind her—all but B.B., swaying softly from foot to foot just behind the risers—she feels like a bonafide musician for just a moment. Like she could take the microphone from its stand, coil it around her wrist like she’s seen Diana Ross do, and launch right into “Where Did Our Love Go.” Or, no. Make the piggies sweat. “Strange Fruit.” She smiles, more broadly than she’d planned.

Hello out there, she begins, testing the mic’s sensitivity. We’re about ready to begin our program. It’s a beautiful day in Chicago, and we’re going to have a wonderful time this afternoon. Lying through her teeth. What “beautiful day” have these shackled people, mostly black, mostly sneering or staring motionless at the lawn directly before them, ever seen? What “wonderful time” was ever theirs to know?

She gets through the obligatory acknowledgements to Joes Woods and Power, the latter without a doubt her least favorite judge in the county. The inmates boo loudly, drowning her out at the mention of each man’s name. The red-faced guards’ faces get redder, their hands moving quickly to the tools on their wide waistbands. Jewel stands unfazed, even laughs a little. All this for some music, she thinks, and waits for them to finish.

Now, B.B. King is known to everyone as the king of the blues, she continues. He’s been referred to as the Chairman of the Board of all the blues singers. He’s been called the man. She’s getting into it now, revving the prisoners like an engine, doing what she does best. Eye contact, attorney’s conviction, all that. But whatever we call him, I know him to be just a fine, warm human being full of humility. She grins even wider, nods as if in reverence, laying it on as thick as she knows how. Then she turns to the guitar player waiting at the stage’s edge. Would you please come forth, Mr. King?

And she steps aside, relinquishes the afternoon to electric live music: blistering speed-play, a rhythm section not even breaking a sweat in keeping up with the Chairman’s fingerwork. The blues played this way, in this heat, for this crowd? She has to work against its magnetic tide herself, sure it will be enough to incite a riot. She hopes the guards are as dangerous as they look.

It isn’t until twenty minutes into the set that the music slows into a steady twelve-bar groove and the bluesman swings his guitar out of the way. He rips the microphone from its stand and starts to pace and preach. All flop-sweat and righteous conviction.

Ladies, he says, and when the first few rows of inmates respond hungrily, it’s the first time Jewel even notices there are female prisoners in attendance. Ladies, if you got a man, King continues, and the man don’t do like you think he should, don’t you hurt him. And then, as though deeply dissatisfied by the crowd’s lackluster response, he shouts it, guttural and mean: I said, don’t you hurt him!

Jewel’s moved to the side of the stage now, and she can see his eyes, black and leveled and drilling his audience with pure conviction. This is not the warm, humble man she thought she’d introduced. In his place now is a different man entirely, one who seems to be speaking directly to her in the same voice she’s been hearing all her life when he says, Man happen to be god’s gift to woman!

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She’s hit with the sudden realization that though he might be preaching, this man’s god is certainly not her own. His is twisted, outdated. His face now the stricken, ugly one of someone who’d rather forget the sixties ever happened. In a flash, she sees her father again, but this time all the worst sides of him she thought she’d chosen to forget. The bitter postwar conservatism. The holding fast to old ideals.

But she seems to be the only one: what this man here has just said now gets the largest response from the crowd all day. Even the women in the front rows are cheering, clapping their hands wildly over their heads and nodding as if to say, Preach! Jewel has no other way to describe how she’s feeling except nauseated. It could be below freezing outside and at this very moment she’d still be a pot boiling swiftly over. Carouseling through her head come vivid portraits of every white judge in the district, every balding pate of every man sneering in uniform, every criminal blowing kisses at her even as she put him away. She feels the weight of the afternoon just listening to King go on. Another swindle. Another day.

In a half daze but still there enough to mind the way she must look to others, she looks calmly at her wristwatch before walking casual as anything back into the concrete compound, through the checkpoints, and into the sun on the other side of the prison walls. She knows she’s meant to thank the crowd and the band once the concert is done, but for now she’s very much undecided on the prospect of returning. She breathes in, chooses a direction without thinking, and walks until the music fades into her footsteps.

—Brad Efford

#500: Outkast, "Aquemini" (1998)

I might look kinda funny but I ain’t no fool

—André 3000, “Synthesizer”


My best friend and I wore our hair so long and greasy in tenth grade that our guidance counselor tried to convince us we were addicted to drugs. Despite the fact that we weren’t, Mr. McDonald repeatedly elbowed us in the ribs and, winking, called us hippies, mimed a pinched roach. It would have all made so much more sense to him if we’d just gone and gotten high.

That same year, another friend of mine spent an entire rehearsal for Arsenic and Old Lace passionately arguing that rap was irredeemably and officially not even music, and I agreed. He cited Nelly, Ja Rule, and Eminem, who I had to hear pumping out of every white jock’s pair of oversized headphones on the track bus: another story of another girl Marshall Mathers had tied up in his trunk and planned to drive somewhere quiet to stab. Fuck all that and all country, I said, the only two things I’d never listen to. “I lost my wife” music and “I killed my wife” music: what kinds of stories were those? How was I to know what I didn’t know?

I didn’t know it, but a few years earlier André 3000 was just beginning to bewig himself with a blond bob, try on marching band uniforms, and generate the inevitable assumptions. He’d gone soft, he’d gone gay, he’d gotten hooked on something, surely. Though I looked less freaky and way less cool, people also probably wondered about me when I donned my uniform and black-feathered helmet to provide the spectacle between halves of the Friday night football games, playing trumpet on the “1812 Overture” and prancing around the turf intended for battle. Was I a stoner burnout, a band-geek fairy, a jock, or a smart kid? Surely I couldn’t be all things; surely not just whatever I thought I was?

I suppose I can forgive myself for believing that all rap was trash, on account of all the rap I’d ever heard was trash. The same eight songs on the rural Iowa urban-music radio station, with their lyrics like slurred and overheard sentence fragments from the bathroom of a club. I had no access to smart and innovative albums like ATLiens or Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Then again, three years later I listened to Eminem and loved even him, or his wordplay and beats at least, if not always the plot points.

But we are all a little less and a little more than our own predictable plots.

*

On the title track of Aquemini, the hook begins like this: Even the sun goes down, heroes eventually die / Horoscopes often lie, and sometimes y.

This has got to be the most compactly efficient and lovely way there ever was of reminding us that we can rely on nothing, be sure of so little: and sometimes y. Don’t forget, Outkast somehow says in only three words, even our own alphabet refuses to tell us—certainly, unequivocally—how to use it to spell.

So after the hard, Southern, badass success of their first two albums, André is seen around town choosing striped knee socks and canary fedoras from thrift-shop bins and is accused of losing his edge. And how does he open the next album? With a fade-in to a sixty-second instrumental track in which he noodles around delicately on a kalimba he stumbled across at a flea market. And then the second track is a response and a mockery all in one, proving he still deserved street cred, while lambasting the clichéd ideas that hip-hop was expected to use as pro forma subject matter.

Return of the gangsta, thanks ta’ / Them niggas that think you soft / And say y’all be gospel rappin’ / But they be steady clappin’ when you talk about / Bitches, and switches, and hoes, and clothes, and weed / Let’s talk about time travelin’, rhyme javelin’ / Somethin’ mind unravelin’, get down

Which is not an empty promise, or a threat, but a preview of all the genre unravelin’, the goddamn gorgeous getting-down they then proceed to do.

*

When I first moved to Seattle after college, I rented one terrible half of a horrible duplex in a no good neighborhood on the very bad outskirts of the international district. It had bars on the windows and no character except for a flat, low roof you could scale the gate to access, fancying yourself a rabble-rouser. I used to lie on my back up there and listen to music, sometimes this album, to drown out the noises of the shouted drug negotiations. Aah-haah, hush that fuss. With the headphones off it was sort of depressing; with the soundtrack, suddenly transcendent.

One night I took this girl up there with an unzipped sleeping bag for a blanket to impress her. I was underneath the flight path of the Sea-Tac airport traffic, so the planes flew over right on line and right on time, the red and green lights of their wingtips like festive shooting stars. You could see just the tops of the few biggest and brightest buildings in downtown.

And if you fell asleep up there, in the light of the morning you could crouch down and leap up, and for one millisecond at your apex you could glimpse the Puget Sound.

She kissed me, but that was all. We climbed down, forgetting the sleeping bag, and later that night it thunderstormed and we kissed some more while binge-watching old Nickelodeon game shows: Double Dare,Figure It Out, Guts, What Would You Do? I held all these truths to be never-changing: I would stay in Seattle for the rest of my days, and Radiohead’s In Rainbows was the greatest album of all time, and I would never go to sleep before 2:30 am a day in my life, and I’d just found the best girl there was.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

But I was just another guy trying too hard and not hard enough and she was just another perfectly nice, pretty, normal girl who didn’t even know who Outkast or Joyce Carol Oates were. And anyway, every day for the rest of her life that girl forgot to call me, and the sleeping bag was soaked through, completely sodden with rain. I kicked it over the edge and listened to it squelch down, then threw it in my neighbor’s dumpster.In Rainbows (#336) didn’t even crack the top 250, or so Rolling Stone says, and I’m not mad about it. One day I got rid of most of my belongings and jammed the rest into my Grand Am and drove to the opposite coast where I found an apartment with no accessible roof or view of anything off in the distance at all, and where the only thing that ever flew over me was a hospital helicopter or two, and I wasn’t even any less happy. Sometimes more. And sometimes y.

*

What do you think you know?

The states, the seasons, the periodic table, the top ten ways to please your man? Do you know which sandwich will be the fifth greatest you’ve ever eaten three years from now? What your life will one day look like on BuzzFeed, what music you like, how many planets there are, the consonants, the vowels of the alphabet? Throw it out the window, leave it out in the rain and kick it all off your roof. Horoscopes often lie. Have your reverend stepfather stop by the studio to do his thing and put that barn-stomping harmonica hoedown smack in the middle of your hip-hop track, and just see what the world makes of that. Inquire of everyone on every street, Do you wanna bump and slump with us?

Is Aquemini the 500th greatest album ever recorded? Sure, and it’s also the 119th and it also didn’t make the cut. And your mother did or didn’t ever love you much depending on when and which way you look at it. One thing I know for sure is that it’s the only double-platinum album ever to feature a verse rapped over a pay phone from inside a jail, for whatever that’s worth and for whatever that might mean to someone.

Aquemini is also worth replaying and praising and parsing and pleading with others to pay attention to. And I believe that to the extent it is possible to really unequivocally believe something permanently I will continue to believe this.

In fifty years I believe I will be elderly, if still around, and modern music will mostly sound like two mournful whatever’s-replaced-iPads in heat calling out to each other across a great distance, and the oldies station will come on and I’ll sit on a roof somewhere and hold my old knees to my chest and listen to André and Antwan and I’ll watch the sunset, which I believe will still be happening daily. And the sun will be such a show-off. Consistently inconsistent—even that bright-blond melon will go down and will go down different than other days, will get down in style.

—Eric Thompson