#421: The Best of the Girl Groups, Volumes 1 & 2

The Phil Spector Guide to Girl Groups
Part 2: “Do You Remember Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio? (Or, How To Get Enough Women Of Color On Your 500-Best Album List)”
 

“It was 1963 and everyone called me Baby, before I knew to mind.”
—the opening line of Dirty Dancing
 

Nevermind the 300 pages of bland, chronological prose—you can read Ronnie Spector’s whole life story in just the index of her autobiography, which lists more entries under Phil Spector’s name than her own.
 

Spector, Phillip, wall of sound created by

Ronnie published Be My Baby: How I Survived... in 1990, the same year Rhino Records released The Best of the Girl Groups: Vols. 1 and 2. More than 750 distinct girl groups sang songs that made the pop charts from 1960 to 1966. A proven formula: three to five black girls named for winsome objects with a definite article: the Crystals, the Exciters, the Chiffons, the Toys. Some produced by Phil, some not. Each group had their own plight, their own I love you, I need yous and hairdos stacked high. But if I told you that it’s Ronnie Spector crooning on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” would you know to correct me?

Spector, Phillip, number one songs predicted by

Are anthologies and “best of” records worthy to be called albums? Retrospectives are certainly enjoyable, convenient, and cost-efficient. But an album is more than the sum of its tracks—it's an emblem of an era, a right of passage forever etched in the grooves. A compilation is short stories, an album is a novel. Is it the Girl Groups of the early ‘60s we’re honoring with the inclusion of this Best of…? Or is it the executive at Rhino Records who calculated that by 1990, baby boomers were making enough money to buy their teenage soundtrack instead of fishing for it on the radio?

Spector, Phillip, Ronnie’s comeback attempts sabotaged by

The titular character in Citizen Kane built his singer an opera house, and Phil Spector built his a Wall of Sound, what he called a “Wagnerian approach to rock & roll.” While Charlie Kane filled his mansion with rare marble statues into his old age, Phil hoarded royalties and obscure B-sides, releasing tracks in England without any of his girl groups’ knowledge. In 2002, after an 11-year lawsuit, Phil paid the original members of the Ronettes $1.5 million in uncollected royalties.

Spector, Phillip, black culture loved by

The editors of Rolling Stone must have had some quotas to fill in their list of 500 greatest albums, as 423-421 is a block of tokens. First the Supremes, then the Ronettes and then those others, right in a row so as not to be missed. Their silky voices still carry, but Diana Ross and Ronnie Spector didn’t break the glass ceiling—they stood on top of it, in heels, avoiding cracks, staring down at nameless back-up singers oohing and ahhing from below.

Spector, Phillip, romanticization of

In 1991, a year after The Best of the Girl Groups charted, another record label released Back to Mono (1958-1969), a four-disc compilation of Phil Spector’s hit singles: the best of the best of the Ronettes and the Crystals and those others. Most of the tracks on Back to Mono already appear earlier in Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums,  but we still find this record presiding in the top 100. Phil has been in prison since 2008, serving a sentence of nineteen years to life. In 2012, Rolling Stone editors revised and updated their 2003 list, perhaps reaching out to the baby boomer’s children, a younger, more politically correct generation. Let It Be, the Beatles album Spector injected with orchestral syrup, fell from number 86 to 392. Back to Mono slipped just one slot, from 64 to 65.

Spector, Phillip, Ronnie’s shoes hid by

On the June morning when Ronnie finally escaped the Spector mansion in 1972, she ran out of the house barefoot, shredding the bottoms of her feet on asphalt and broken glass. She and her mother hailed a cab and went straight to a law office. She never returned to the property.

“Everything was his idea, except my leaving him,” said Susan Alexander, the failed opera singer ruminating on her late husband at the end of Citizen Kane.

Spector, Phillip, fame and legacy of

The full title of the Ronettes’ first record is Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes, featuring Veronica, though the entry on Rolling Stone’s 500 just reads Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes. While researching for this essay I stopped into my local record store to see if I could find a copy on vinyl.

“We don’t have that particular title,” the clerk told me. “But we do have the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, and a couple ‘Greatest Hits.’”

—Susannah Clark

#422: The Ronettes, "Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes" (1964)

The Phil Spector Guide to Girl Groups
Part 1: "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)"

Boom. Boom Boom. Pow. Four precise beats and the narrative begins. Twenty-four years before igniting the opening credits of Dirty Dancing, the drum fill in “Be My Baby” redistributed the chemicals in Brian Wilson’s brain. In his own words, his mind was not just blown the first time he heard the song, it was “revamped.” It was 1963, the year of the Beach Boys’ first number one single, the year he first took LSD, and the year the chords constantly ringing in his head turned into voices. For the next decade Wilson played the record on repeat, reportedly one hundred times in one day, dissecting every “be” and “my” and “little” and “baby.”  His children recall a period of waking up to Boom. Boom Boom. Pow. every single morning.

So goes Pet Sounds lore. Ronettes producer Phil Spector spoke of Wilson’s obsession with the song in a 2008 interview with BBC: “I mean he's a little gaga over it... I'd like to have a nickel for every joint he smoked trying to figure out how I got the ‘Be My Baby’ sound, you know he is demented about it.”

“Demented,” “gaga,” as deemed by a man currently serving life in prison for murder. In a court documented narrative, Spector pulled a gun on Lana Clarkson in 2003, to stop her from leaving his house. In 1968, he didn’t need a gun; he had electrified gates and a herd of wild German Shepherds to keep his wife from leaving the premises. Ronnie Spector, the original bad girl of rock ‘n roll, the very voice that hypnotizes us in “Be My Baby,” spent more than a year locked inside of a California mansion. Phil hid her shoes. And he forced her to watch Citizen Kane over and over again.

Released in 1941, Citizen Kane depicts the life of a monolithic newspaper mogul named Charles Foster Kane. The film is framed by one journalist’s investigation to uncover the meaning of Kane’s mysterious last word: “Rosebud.” Presumably, Phil re-played the film as a reminder to Ronnie that like the opera singer Kane marries in the film, she would be nothing without him.

“Charles Kane turned his Xanadu into a walled fortress, and that’s just what Phil did to our house,” Ronnie writes in her autobiography, Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette.

A superlative among superlatives, “Be My Baby” might be the Citizen Kane of pop songs. Citizen Kane being an idiom for legacy, a benchmark familiar even to the generation who can’t find it streaming on Netflix. If Citizen Kane redefined how we tell stories, “Be My Baby” redefined how we sing them.

And yet, those lush layers of woodwinds and strings, protective background vocals and sweet cream lyrics were composed by a murderer, an abusive madman. Each time we press play, we forgive him all over again. Who cares who wrote it, who collects the royalties? The song just sounds too damn good. That’s the manipulative tragedy of popular music.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

A recent poll determined that Dirty Dancing is the most re-watched film amongst women. For almost three decades, first wives and 12-year-old girls have rewound the night when spandexed lovers discovered they needed each other so. Psychologists often point to the “exposure effect,” how familiarity adds a layer to a narrative that transcends cheap suspense. When you turn on Citizen Kane for the first time, you keep watching to find out what “Rosebud” means to Kane. When you turn it on again, and again and again, you keep watching to find out what “Rosebud” means to you. We start to tell the story ourselves. Because who is a creator other than the person who knows what comes next?

In the final three minutes of Citizen Kane, our journalist surrenders his quest to find the meaning of Rosebud, positing, “I don’t think a word can explain a man’s life.” And maybe a song can’t either.

But nostalgia prevails, dropping quarters into a refurbished jukebox; the snow globe shatters, Johnny lifts Baby into the air, and we hear it once again: Boom. Boom Boom. Pow.

—Susannah Clark

#423: Diana Ross and the Supremes, "Anthology" (1974)

My mother carries me in body-warm blankets to Vivian Volvo to doze in the backseat, blood hourglassing to my skull as the car careens in the ridgecut’s curve illuminated in the streetlights’ arched, interval orange as the unbalanced tires warp out the black sea on which my breathing rowboats. Burning, burning yearning… Whatever voice from the waking world penetrates a dream is a kind of a god. I have learned to pray, Deus ex cassette tape. Sugar’s Ribs neons on the dark ridge like the expectation of tomorrow’s heat as the brakes scuff and ache time to a slower pace. At the exit ramp’s red light, no traffic passes and yet we wait. He has called her, his wants stamped by Percocet, and asked her to come, and so she goes.

Middle of the night, middle of the summer, I always wait in the car, asleep, not asleep, on these errands, something easy, Motown, in the deck, the whir of the tape as it spools and unspools, not unlike memory, and not like it.

A-side. B-side. A dark figure approached the car. I tensed.

Once she flicked her cigarette out the open window. Outside it parabolaed and whipped into the back, cherry-end sweetening my thigh to a sear. I screamed, she swerved, the road kept going. The road led there night after night. Set me free, why don’t you, babe? I’d mouth into my half-reflection in the window, but I’d never sing. I’d never sing. I’d click my teeth every tree, mailbox, streetlight, driveway, billboard we’d pass. Are we a dream’s dream? She’d get me a warm Coke at the Exxon. My teeth grew soft. I wanted to bite right through them, and spit them out. I wanted to bite right through my lip and draw blood.

Sometimes we’d ride to the pharmacy, where the lights poured out of the drive-thru like whatever imagination I had of heaven was, like chiffon if it weren’t finite, the way a body is finite to the voice that replicates, replicates, replicates from room to cut to track to remaster. Sometimes I wondered dreamily where I began and ended, if I lived beyond the hot car and its sputtering air conditioning, the windshield that said to the night take me, take me. She let me fall asleep before we’d go, so I wouldn’t, wouldn’t I, know what was going on. You can’t hurry love, you’ll just have to wait. How far could I go to become someone else? A lip sync, a practiced dance, a closed-eyes scene. I pretended to sleep. I knew the words but had to pretend to know the lyrics, the fade-out, the call-and-response, the Supremes as conscience.

I wanted to throw that cigarette back at my mother, send it smoke-knotting the air where it might find the floor and set fire, set fire like his apartment that blazed after the fish tank burbled water onto the electrical outlet and sparked like the brilliant seawater scales of the thousand-dollar fish he watched swim like a television, stoned. His two plastered legs clunking on the stairs as he scooted down the stairs. The tank must have boiled, the fish leaping like later mercies from a tower or cooked in their own skins as the plastic sea-plants melted like candlesticks, before the glass ruptured, the fire receding oceanic as the fifty gallons spilled before evaporating and ceding the carpet back to the flame and char, the not-long-after-the-fever of my mother’s, the race of her heart that I would not feel without my ear against her breast, that would only reveal itself in her cheeks that silvered in the rearview mirror as she checked to see if I was awake or asleep, awake or asleep. Baby, baby.

I began to pray, wanted things I didn’t want. I wanted to pop the door lock and walk across the lot, to the dark road that believed in danger more than it believed in going somewhere, the way our car believed in motion more than arrival. I was bored. I was tired. At some point as the road arched up around the ridgecut, I was no longer in the backseat of the car in 1996. I was here, in my bed, in the dark. I gave it my voice. It gave it back. Once I saw a second-story window filled with light. I called it my mother, and I loved it.

—Emilia Phillips

#424: Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" (2002)

1.

Critics often describe Springsteen’s model for arranging albums as a “four corners approach” in which each side of the record begins jubilantly, only to end somewhat emotionally unraveled.

I know that most listeners don’t still play an album through start to finish. Forms change. Songs get shuffled, emotions muddled. The good and bad intermingle, as they always have.

I don’t want to wax too nostalgic for the old days: the needle skipping across the grooves or how dubbing album cuts for mix tapes inevitably meant imprinting the recording with a vestige of its creation. I know that in those moments, I didn’t want the scratches, the background noise of everyday life. I wanted a seamless progression from track to track, no sound or blip, no marker of transition.

But I know this, too: in one of his last voice mails to me, my brother ends his message, then fails to hang up immediately, because he has to sneeze. Now, nearly five years after his death, his recorded voice rarely makes me cry anymore. But that sneeze—the most quotidian and messy part—evokes tears every time.

2.

Upon its release, The Rising was hailed as a 9/11 album. Writing in Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder described it as “a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them.”

Some of the songs on the album were written before 9/11.

Before my brother’s death, I didn’t hear the sneeze in his voice mail. I’d listened only to the words, then disconnected. Only afterward, scouring each possible source for him, did I notice the rest.

3.

Before boarding the BWI—BHM flight I booked last-minute after learning of my brother’s addiction, I sent my mother a text. We hadn’t spoken in months, for reasons she’d surely describe differently than I would.

We obviously still have things to sort out, I wrote. But we can set those aside for now to focus on helping Austin. I’ll be there tonight.

I spent the next four days at my brother’s. We shivered together, him from withdrawal, me from the temperatures to which he’d dropped his air conditioning as he detoxed.

My mother and I have never spoken of that message or the issues preceding it again.

4.

Airplanes stay aloft from the precisely calibrated intersection of what NASA calls “the four forces.”

5.

The elderly woman on BOS—RIC has been talking for hours, though not to me. She’s loud, though, and I’ve heard plenty, first in the terminal and now as the flight taxis out to the runway.

She’s cycling through what I now understand to be her accustomed terrain life in Manhattan, relocation to Richmond, children on Cape Cod. I know her politics, birth year, and medical history. I know that she is widowed, and I learn that she selected two readings for her husband’s funeral: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee” and the lines Horatio speaks upon Hamlet’s death.

I listen over the plane’s engine as she recites them: Goodnight, sweet prince, and legions of angels fly you to your rest.

Because I have turned to those words, too, I know that she has misquoted them, that legions is really flights; fly, really sing. The man next to her tells her how beautiful the funeral must have been, how perfect the words, and I think how she’s disrupted the meter, amended the string of gs that curl through Shakespeare’s original line.

I know that you cannot tell an elderly woman that she’s misquoted a text at her husband’s funeral, that the phrasing isn’t the point.

6.

Years ago my parents’ house caught fire. Not all of it was destroyed, though they had to move out for rebuilding. On the first night in the rental house, my mother grew agitated over the fact that she couldn’t find a remote control for her television.

She had not been harmed in the fire; she was perfectly capable of walking to the television and changing the channel. But she harped on that remote for days, as if it were the most crucial aspect of her existence.

We knew it was a talisman, a clear metaphor for her lack of control over her life and circumstances. So we bought a universal remote, then, when she disliked it, we bought every brand available. None worked—not the same features, not the same arrangement of buttons. Finally, we slipped back into the scorched house, entered the rooms the fire marshal hadn’t yet deemed safe enough for passage, hunted until we found it, returned it to her waiting hand.

7.

In my brother’s final days, which we knew were his final days (he overdosed; doctors declared him brain dead; we took him off life support two days later), I worried about how I would announce his death. I knew that was not the point, not the real problem before me. But I knew, too, that I couldn’t control the fact that his life was ending, could only control what I said about it.

He was the youngest, the baby, the unambiguous favorite. We believed him the most talented, the most charming, the most likely to become widely known. I, the most academic child, knew he was actually the most innately intelligent child. I knew, too, that his death was tragic, not the inevitable and natural end to a full and long-lived life but an all-too abrupt and dissonant rending of our family.

Afterwards, from the hospital waiting room, I typed the words on which I’d settled, the words I’d claimed from another who’d witnessed the death of a young man destined for more than he’d actually become: Goodnight sweet prince, and flights of angels sing you to your rest.

8.

Two months after my brother died, I published an essay about the experience. Titled “Watching Your Brother Die,” it described just that.

On the morning it went live, I didn’t know what to do, so I drove thirty minutes to the nearest real shopping center to buy cowboy boots. It marked a new approach to grief for me; after two months of seclusion, I decided to run after things I wanted.

I hadn’t listened to Springsteen since my brother died. I picked The Rising, which I’d only encountered briefly before, because I thought it was about 9/11.

It is, of course. And of course it’s not.

9.

They don’t make Mother’s Day cards that say I’m sorry this isn’t from him. Each year, I think they should.

At first, this was from resentment. Over time it shifted, a genuine desire to acknowledge my mother’s sadness, a wish to restore to her what she most loved.

10.

Released less than a year post-9/11, The Rising marked a dramatic return for Springsteen, his first number-one album in over fifteen years.

Some critics bemoan what they perceive as his exploitation of tragedy. Others, such as one presenter at the 2005 “Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium,” see the inverse, claiming, “Healing also came in the form of Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising.”

Despite grief, my life after my brother’s death is really quite lovely. Upon realizing that few things can be harder than witnessing and surviving my brother’s death, I grew less timid. I’ve pursued work I believe in, visited places I’ve always wanted to see, eaten lavishly. I believe that nothing can stop me from seeing, doing, experiencing, tasting.

I often feel guilty for this.

11.

My mother softens.

We still avoid phone calls, text infrequently. But we see each other two or three times a year, and sometimes she asks me questions about my life, listens to some of my replies. She hugs me goodbye when I leave town; every now and then she says she loves me.

As if in a bad sitcom, I stutter out a response. Okay, I say, or Thank you.

12.

With The Rising, for the first time in nearly two decades, Springsteen recorded an album with the E-Street Band.

The album’s title song begins with a focus on self—the speaker references his blindness (“can’t see nothing in front of me, can’t see nothing coming up behind”), his own journey (“make my way through this darkness”; “lost track of how far I’ve gone and how high I’ve climbed”) and the burden (“stone”) he carries on it.

In time, though, other lyrics surface, gain prominence in my listening. Perhaps this is linked to the different contexts in which the song appears, moving from elegy to exhortation, 9/11 to inaugural celebration.

At some point I’m struck by a shift in perspective; near the end of the song, I hear something I’ve never noticed before. The focus changes from the speaker to the recipient: May you feel your arms around me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this shift, the idea that instead of looking inward the whole time, the song eventually moves to a broader view—a lament becomes a benediction.

13.

Years pass. I stiffen less at Mother’s hugs. I visit for her birthday, trying to act on a belief that perhaps my presence can be a balm.

During the visit, Mother offers a gift of her own—my brother’s professional-grade camera and accessories. He’d love for you to use it, she tells me, referencing my upcoming trip to Borneo. I should have given it to someone a long time ago, but I just couldn’t get rid of his things.

I do not know how to transport this home, as I’m nervous about checking it, and it’s too large to fit in the overhead of the small commuter plane.

She keeps talking, telling me about the trips she and my brother planned to take together.

My mother has flown only three times in the last three decades. My brother was scared of cities and foreign places, refused even to join me in Europe.

But I don’t argue anymore. I simply nod, say Thank you.

14.

One night I hear a live version of the song “The Rising” and notice a different lyric than I’ve heard before. Convinced that it’s a variation only for concert, I return to the album, only to realize I’ve been hearing it wrong for months: May I feel your arms around me, the song proceeds. I listen repeatedly, then confirm it on Springsteen’s official website. There was never a grand wish, no benediction, no shift in the speaker’s perspective.

15.

Grief isn’t linear. Like flight, it’s the product of a number of competing forces. I becomes you, then reverts. Legions and flights intermingle. Yet still we make our way through the darkness; we find a way to move through it.

—Elizabeth Wade

#425: Gram Parsons, "Grievous Angel" (1974)

I.

That I loved him there is no question, I can say that now that he is gone. But to love a lost man who is living is too much to really know about oneself although I always knew from the beginning the way it would go and I won’t say I chose it, or ever accepted it, though I saw it for what it was, saw it with prism-like eyes that reflected the world to me in perfect sorrowful clarity, separating one truth from another though I often didn’t know what to do with the many and separate truths and I would wipe my mind with the blue of sky, wipe it clean of words or knowing (though the heart is always knowing and holding so much more than the mind) and how can we see and all and still choose the way we do, what is the knowing for?—I am not sure I can tell you that part or that we can choose who to love, or choose not to love a person because of any knowings or diamond sight, and though it hurt I loved him from the first moment my prism eyes held his light—I saw and knew and the light shattered inside me, knowing.

Knowing that it was a slanted light and some men cannot be saved from their private sadnesses and women who think otherwise are fools and will spend their lives chasing phantoms. Oh, I was a fool.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

II.

What I saw and see with my prism eyes is the grievousness of angels and that the weight is too much for some and that angels do not really have wings. What I saw with my eyes were his eyes and some people are left too alone and that is why they sing so beautifully. And some angels follow the way of their fathers and there was his daddy Coondog who shot himself when Gram was twelve, and there was his mother Avis who drank herself to death and some angels have mothers who are sad and some never get past all the grief. What I heard was his voice, and it was beautiful and it was saying why are we all so alone here.

III.

He was singing from a great sad tender country heart and he had seen the sadness of great lonesome-road America, seen it in the truck stops under fluorescent lights and the gas pumps with the vast rumbling highway-night stretching out beyond and in the diners with lonely spoons clanking stirring packs of white sugar into lonely-clanking cups of black coffee, steaming, and in the sweet desperate faces of waitresses and the eggs cracked onto skillets, the tossed shells, and in the grease traps out back, in the brick-walled train stations in the creases of slacks and the shine on the toes of shoes, in the ticking-second clocks on the walls and in the starched collars and pursed lips of men like his father.

He saw it in the barrooms, sticky residues of stale beer on countertops and in the lines around the eyes of men drinking whiskies, in the long columns of ash on the ends of cigarettes and in the Saturday night Main Street neons, in the pool halls and the shoulders hunching over card tables in casinos, in the Indians slouched on the sides of roads.

He saw it in the shiny Buicks and on the palm-tree boulevards of sunny Florida and in the chrome streets of Manhattan in the sparkle and sharp sunlight of high-rise windows and in vast shining Los Angeles and he wasn’t sure where to go, only that the roads of America tell a man to go, go anywhere so long as you’re going, you can’t stay here you have to move and fast and where is there to go anymore for a sad tender country-heart man without a father but on and on under the bright lights until gone until down and out in some far-off place at the end of some road, like Joshua Tree, the place he would go, where at night the air got clear and one could hear one’s own breathing in the cold and the stars burning above and see motionless black silhouettes of ancient spiny trees and in the rocks one could touch the dust of aeons and all was hushed there—there, there—that is where he is now, his heart still burning with lost cosmic end-of-the-road America.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

IV.

He saw it all with his own tear-bucket coal-black eyes turned upside-down, in fact he saw too much and took anything to blur his vision and in the bright lights he couldn’t see a thing and he sang with eyes closed and poured it out and I saw him there in the lights and I loved him but it wasn’t enough it isn’t enough to open his eyes and I swear I tried to love him.

He saw mirages like oases from which he couldn’t drink and the golden fields that lay between those bright-light places went by too fast, like dreams out of the plate glass train windows just golden dreams and everyone passing through and what rest and where to lay oneself down in what fields on a golden afternoon in sad America and what salvation and his eyes blurred with tears and his eyes closed endlessly.

V.

I watched the moon come up tonight and thought of how lonely his body burning in the desert out there like he asked for, casket filled with gasoline, how lonely the flames that licked at the desert sky, and how final, and at death it is just me and you, moon, just the cold fire of the moon. I thought that and I am not sure if I said it too, as I have been in the habit of saying my private thoughts aloud, like scripture, repeating them as if in prayer, so I said it is just me and you now, moon, and I am not sure if there is anything beyond this small comfort for me now and clouds moved across the moon.

—Holly Haworth

#426: Cheap Trick, "At Budokan" (1978)

Cheap Trick’s At Budokan confirms that the shrieking sibilant hysteria of teens sounds the same in every language. Recorded in Tokyo on two nights in late April 1978, it endures as one of the quintessential live albums of the seventies, an honor it shares with The Who’s Live at Leeds, Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, and Kiss’s Alive! Cheap Trick was, and remains, a pure product of the seventies, as they married macho riffs with a Beatles-esque sensibility that favored whimsy and artful arrangements over grandeur. Tracks like “Hello There,” “Goodnight Now,” and “Clock Strikes Ten” echo the buoyancy and meta-narrative of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while “Come On Come On” and the Fats Domino cover “Ain’t That a Shame” sound like outtakes from The White Album. Less ambitious than Led Zeppelin, less ostentatious than Rush, Cheap Trick wanted the best of pop and rock, and in their definitive work, they unified the frivolity of a summer road trip with the snarl of a band still working out their angst.

At Budokan spawned two massive hits that are still classic rock standards nearly forty years later—“I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender”—and these remain the band’s signature tunes. It’s strange to realize both had already been recorded in the studio for 1977’s In Color and 1978’s Heaven Tonight, respectively, yet the realm of radio would have us believe they only exist amid the crowd roar. What does that iconic chorus mean when it entreats us to surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away? I think it means the idealism of the sixties is over. Gone are the days when we threw ourselves into causes or new loves with swooning abandon. America is no longer a dirty beach we can pick clean in an hour with our first grade class on a service learning field trip before we sit, kicking our heels on the dock, with cheese sandwich crumbs tumbling out of our mouths. “Surrender” reminds us that our parents rummage through our records. Our parents smoke dope and lie about how they met. Our parents are the remnants of a war that almost blew the world to smithereens. No wonder they just seem a little weird. Under the bleachers, in the back seat, as the stars shine, when no one can see, our hearts exploding in our chests, you never know what you’ll catch.

There’s a case to be made, and I’ll make it, that neither of these famous ditties are the album’s best. “Need Your Love,” the closing cut on side A, clocks in at nine minutes, and its infectious, chugging syncopation, liturgical falsetto hook, and crunchy, punchy riff make it unforgettable. Like other extended space-outs of the decade, its lyrics are a thin excuse to jam, but “Need Your Love” dodges the spiritual bombast of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the tedious clichés of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and the neanderthal misogyny of Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold.” Like The James Gang’s magnum opus “The Bomber,” “Need Your Love” has more in common with Ravel’s “Bolero” than it does with rote rock gestures, as its central melody meanders through subtle permutations until the whole shebang builds into an orgasmic crescendo of awesome. Seriously: someone should sample those last eight bars and drop a beat. “Need Your Love” is a haunted farmhouse of a song, full of nooks and crannies to explore. It’s the kind of song record executives and ex-girlfriends hate. It’s the kind of song no one ever hums for the music store clerk with their wide, embarrassed eyes imploring, do you know the one I mean?

For two years in high school—as well as my first winter break from college—I was one such clerk at the Annapolis mall. Though our retail outfit didn’t sell vinyl—it was the heyday of compact discs—the ambiance was similar to the shop spoofed and celebrated in High Fidelity. We did our best to assist our yuppie customers while simultaneously despising their wealth and lack of taste, cursing them as they left with Yanni or Blink 182 or TLC albums they could have easily bought for $5 less at the Best Buy down the road. For several months, whenever business slowed to a crawl, we lethargically packed away the wall of cassettes, letter by alphabetized letter, and sealed them shut with squeaking tape guns that wafted everywhere the pungency of industrial adhesive. We shipped each box off to some distant warehouse none of us had seen but which, in my imagination at least, became the long eerie corridor in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Maybe palettes of Bel Biv Devoe and Teena Marie rot in a secret government bunker after all, right next to God’s gilded radio to humanity. During the holiday season, we defaulted to that robotic lethargy all too familiar to retail employees, as the lines snaked past the registers’ last-ditch displays of empty jewel cases into the stacks. It verged on a religious experience whenever someone returned from their food court pilgrimage to Sbarro, at the far distant end of the mall, with a round of cheese slices and Cokes. On warm summer days, when inventory was done and customers were few, I read Rolling Stone and Spin, filling my mental gaps in the rock canon, gleaning the latest industry gossip, and embellishing my deluded adolescent fantasies of stardom.

It was on one such day that I read an interview with Billy Corgan espousing his Cheap Trick fanaticism. Though I loved The Smashing Pumpkins’ early work, they had already begun their precipitous decline, and the unexpectedness of Corgan’s comment—coupled with the colossal aesthetic gap between the two groups—sent my head spinning for the rest of the afternoon. The Pumpkins’ implosion followed a stereotypical trajectory: their collective energy was smothered by a megalomaniacal front man, their success made them cripplingly cynical and self-reflective, their sound and subject matter grew monotonous, and ultimately, their insecure bid to remain relevant saw them churn out mediocre material rather than wait for inspiration to find them again. Whatever happened to all this season’s losers of the year? Homer said it best when the band made a cameo on The Simpsons in ’96: “Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Whatever failings Cheap Trick had, they didn’t take themselves that seriously. Rick Nielsen’s quintuple-neck Hamer and trademark flipped-brim cap made a mockery of rock’s pretensions. “Look Out” and “Big Eyes” reflect a songbook from a band that wants to be blasted with the windows rolled down as you drive through the ruin and glory of teenage Friday nights, cruising the strip for someone, anyone, to catch your gawking stare and smile. Even in their darker songs, such as “Dream Police,” the sickly-sweet melodies and jangly arrangements resisted the ethos of the lyrics themselves. I pondered all of this as I found Cheap Trick’s Greatest Hits in the discount bin, sold it to myself with my employee discount, and fed the disc to the house system that had, moments earlier, been blasting Ricky Martin’s warbling dross. There wasn’t a single customer in the joint. Every time I got to thinking, where’d they disappear? I checked the track listing for the Budokan numbers. I skipped ahead until I heard the screams.

—Adam Tavel

#427: Peter Wolf, "Sleepless" (2002)

Lately, everything around here has been a growing pain. I’m just completing my MFA in Creative Writing at Hollins University—just finishing two transformative years, two years in which I’ve written and read and cried and grown far more than I ever anticipated. Two years of constant change, of change being the only constant, and now that’s about to change, too. For months, I deny it, but then the acknowledgment begins.

It starts one rainy March morning, as I drive to the annual spring literary festival—my last before graduation. I’m thinking about previous Lit Fests: in 2013, when I was just visiting, admitted but uncertain; in 2014, as a first-year, with my thesis due date still a year away; now, in 2015, about to take my comprehensive exams, turn that thesis in, and graduate; the next times I attend will be as an alum. I’m passing a slowpoke sedan when it hits, that thunderbolt moment, though the clouds bear down only rain: graduate school is over for me, and my eleven classmates. Soon, we’ll have our degrees. Soon, many of my friends will be leaving town.

I speed up, the rain blurring my windshield, and put the wipers on high. The mountains look like they begin just at the end of the highway, though I know they’re really miles and miles away. Fog curls around them, obscuring the peaks and nuzzling up against their bases. By the time I leave 581, a few miles down, the Blue Ridges are almost totally gone, hidden under a blanket of fog.

I’ve been listening to Peter Wolf’s Sleepless. On the exit ramp, I turn the sound up and go back to the first track. Shaky nerves, baby, got the best of me / I need a shot of somethin’ much stronger than tea. I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. Last literary festival as a student. Last couple of months to work exclusively on my writing for who knows how long. Everything around here is a growin’ pain.

I mope through the morning’s reading, a moving excerpt from a visiting professor’s memoir. During a break, my roommate says she thinks she has forgotten the flash drive with her thesis on it at home, but isn’t positive; I drive her back, speeding along the highway I’ve just left. Sleepless plays through while my roommate thinks out loud about where her flash drive could be. I strain my ears for the music:

I've been swept and kept up all night
Sometimes I didn't rest at all
I've been shifted, lifted up sky, waited on a waterfall
I know sometimes it's easy, and sometimes it's rough
I just can't seem, girl, to get enough
I said never (never) oh, never (never) never like this before        

Wolf’s blues album is about love, yes, but it could also be about transition, for what is love if not a sea change? What is spending years dedicated to art if not love? Never like this before could apply to the last two years of my life: to moving six states south, to dedicating years to that risky thing called writing, to a big breakup, to friendships made and friendships somehow twisted into something unrecognizable, to small successes and bigger doubts. I’m just one of the twelve writers leaving the Hollins MFA program this year; the other eleven have stories greater and more complex than mine. All of us have had experiences over the last two years that have made us shake our heads and think, never like this before.

Flash drive found, my roommate and I head back to campus. I put “Run Silent, Run Deep” on as I drive my Subaru past Carvin’s Creek. A family of ducks swims in the water. All the rain has heightened the creek, made it spread out around the bases of trees that are normally dry. I pout around my office for a while, then meet a professor for lunch.

We sit in a corner of the dining room while my friends and other faculty fill long tables, chatting with the visiting writers. I’ve been drowning in doubt lately; my novel’s too long, it’s never going to get published, my classmates are better writers than I am. All writers know these thoughts—managing them is part of our job. But when they hit me, they hit, surging and rushing until I can’t hear myself think.

My brilliant and gracious professor pulls me out of the slump. Sometimes, I think I just need validation, and the professor says what I need to hear. She tells me to let my novel be long. She tells me that what I’m doing is good, that it’s important. Over at the next table, my friends laugh with Charles Baxter. I wish I was there, learning from him, but what I’m hearing now is what I need. I go into the afternoon’s readings heartened, my fog starting to lift.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

A few hours later, I leave campus. The rain has stopped, and the afternoon has misted over, damp but no longer chilly. “Oh Marianne” comes on: The world is a sad place / so put on a brave face / and dance. I feel braver, ready to finish this draft and to go out into the world beyond school.

As I get on 581 for the fourth time, I fill my car with the sounds of “Nothing But the Wheel”: I’m holdin’ on, holdin’ on, holdin’ on, holdin’ on. The next two months will pass too quickly, I know. And, after that, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, or what my writing life will look like, or where my friends will be.

The mountains, now in my rearview mirror, open back up. The day unfolds like an album, nervous first, then despairing, then, finally, lifted up. The final eponymous song of Peter Wolf’s album ends with the first line, a circle completing, but also different this time around: I’m still sleepless. Still sleepless, yes. I’m still doubting, still scared, but the afternoon is bright.

I play Sleepless after every transitional moment for the rest of the semester. After my last tutorial; after turning my thesis in; after sitting in a professor’s home for the last time before she moves and most of my classmates do, too; after my last Friday afternoon office hours and my first big this-is-ending-and-I’m-going-to-miss-it-desperately cry. Mostly, I replay “Growin’ Pains” and “Nothing But the Wheel,” but I sometimes flip through the tracks, waiting to see what speaks to me. Often, Peter Wolf’s lyrics bring an unexpected wisdom—guidance I didn’t know I needed until I hear it.

I’ve spent the last two years in the company of the eleven brilliant writers in my cohort. I’ve also been lucky to know the eleven who graduated the year before us, and the twelve who will graduate in 2016. Thirty-four talented, wise, generous, brave people. What I’ve learned from them is countless.

Two years writing is two years of risk, of failure and trying again. It changes you—how can it not? Two years focused inward, but also looking always outward, learning about the world and about myself. I’m a better writer and person because of this experience, because of my classmates and faculty. They’ve given me the wisdom I didn’t know I was seeking, told me it’s okay to sit in uncertainty. Maybe we’re all only holding on to nothing but the wheel, but what a good wheel it is: steady, bringing us back, always back—if we want—to each other, and to language.

—Marissa Mazek

#428: The Police, "Outlandos d'Amour" (1978)

Listening to Outlandos d'Amour at the Office, 2015

8:59 am, “Next to You”
A strong, upbeat start. Pleasingly repetitive, driving guitar. To my left, a group of twenty-something women are talking about baby rabies—not, like, babies getting rabies but women getting rabies for babies. Meaning they’re insatiable, and they want them. What can I do? All I want is to be next to you. The Police make me think of my mother, and I wonder if she ever felt the way we feel in our twenties, but then I remember she’d already had two babies.

9:35 am, “So Lonely”
After a team meeting, we retreat to our desks and stuff in our earbuds. Sting sings falsetto over a reggae beat. No one’s knocked upon my door for a thousand years or more. We reply. We forward. We reply-all with emoji sign-off, and, for a minute, we feel good.

10:17 am, “Roxanne”
A client call went bad. Or it went good. Sometimes the hallway laughter sounds the same. The laughter at the beginning of “Roxanne” was supposedly caused by one of the Police accidentally falling butt-first onto the piano. I picture Stewart Copeland, cigarette in his mouth, bleached locks flying.

11:28 am, “Hole in My Life”
My inbox is full again. The chorus of this song is catchier than I want it to be: hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, yeah, yeah, yeah. In an old Rolling Stone review of Outlandos d’Amour, the critic writes: “Sting can't make us see that there's anything special about this generation, because he knows there really isn't.”

Graphic by Marie Sicola

11:34 am, “Peanuts”
Before I found out my mother couldn’t name a single Police song, I thought she’d love “Peanuts.” Certainly she’d resonate with the Police: don’t wanna hear about the drugs you’re taking, the love you’re making, the muck they’re raking. Years ago, we’d seen Sting on TV, in a sleeveless, rhinestoned shirt, and she’d said what a “very nice looking young man” he was. She said that about others, too: Byron Sully, the tomahawk-throwing, also-sleeveless boy toy of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman; Jim Brickman, the clean-cut pianist; John Wayne in chaps. But this time she’d said it with feeling, like he was someone she used to know, in the intimate way all girls know their crushes.

12:30 pm, “Can’t Stand Losing You”
I think a bird has gotten inside until I see a guy doing bird calls in front of the window. I mute the music and someone’s talking about Appalachian mamas putting Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles and rotting their teeth away. Someone else mentions something about justice in America: I can’t stand, I can’t stand losing you.

2:01 pm, “Truth Hits Everybody”
One thing my mother always has loved is the truth—all kinds of little everyday truths, old wives’ tales, Women’s Day articles, and biblical, capital-T Truth. Recently, she moved back to the mountain country she was born in after thirty years in sheet-flat Iowa. For weeks she felt altitude sick. I got that way, too, when I visited, as if being too close to the sky makes your lungs give out. When I first hear Sting say, “Truth hits everybody,” I think he’s saying, “Truth hates everybody.” I can’t get that out of my head.

2:05 pm, “Born in the ‘50s”
At a tech company, none of us were born in the 1950’s, not even our bosses. Maybe our grandmothers were getting baby rabies about then, clutching our mothers to their chests when President Kennedy died and blaming it all on the Communists, just the way Sting says.

3:40 pm, “Be My Girl—Sally”
The first half of the song is just monotonous background noise as I watch a pair of co-workers over in Quality Assurance dancing under a parrot piñata. But then, out of nowhere, the Police break into a 2-minute, sporadically iambic spoken-word poem about a blow-up doll named Sally, who’s like a rubber ball, served up in the morning deflated on a plate, and it becomes clear my mother would hate everything about this.

4:53 pm, “Masoka Tanga”
People are zipping up, but the Police are in the Caribbean, ad libbing and jamming away. Ma wa ba wa ta la throw awa, to ma ba sue le dah, oh! Clearly they’ve got something to prove. I just want an ending that feels more final than dissipating drumbeats, but, this time, that’s all there is—the fadeout, and that nagging, unexplainable feeling of wanting to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

—Lacy Barker

#429: Brian Eno, "Another Green World" (1975)

—but what point is there, I often wonder, in even trying to assign meanings, in bothering to try to understand mysteries: things happen, things don’t happen, and who (not me, usually) can say why, and who knows the sum of everything I don’t know (have never known; will never know) that informs those happenings and non-happenings, and how would knowing alter what’s already transpired: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” reads the first of the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards Brian Eno designed with his friend, the late painter Peter Schmidt, and which Eno used extensively in the composition and recording of Another Green World: generous advice for any artist contemplating one’s next move, because whose life can proceed without full respect given to one’s countless errors, without at least pretending (or accepting) that one meant some of them: but is meaning even anticipatory, or only retrospective? That evening—all those evenings—I wandered Hooker Avenue looking at footprints in concrete sidewalk squares and the etched plexiglass of bus shelters and crows inscribing dusk and chain-link fences orange with rust: everything seemed marked—there seemed a necessary link between my next move as an artist and my next move as a person: the poems I’d begun writing in response to the maddening, endless, meaningless rattle of an idling Ford F-250 diesel engine on an otherwise beautiful sunny September morning because I felt if I didn’t write them I might never write anything else, and in one of which I encoded my debt to the moods Eno’s music offered me as I wrote—“the extant daydreams of the man ironing / a pair of trousers and wandering some greener world…”

Still, if I ever thought that Eno’s music might offer me meanings, a record such as Another Green World, with its sideways pop songs accompanied by small instrumentals, confounded that belief: making meaning and evading meaning is one of the primary tensions of this LP, famously composed (or improvised and then edited) in the studio rather than being planned, and anyway, as with most pop music, meaning resides less in these songs than in whatever experiences we connect to them—as Eno said, “meanings can be generated”: or, as in “Sky Saw,” the first track on Another Green World: “All the clouds turn to words / all the words float in sequence / no one knows what they mean / everyone just ignores them…”

The fretless bass and “Anchor Bass” and Jaki Leibezeit-style drumming (by Phil Collins!) that begin “Sky Saw” would have, had I heard them in my teens, meant nothing I wanted to be involved with—too proggy and noodly, too excessive—but the “Digital Guitar” and “Snake Guitar” (such fanciful instruments fill the LP’s liner notes) and John Cale’s seesaw viola line that ends the song, well, sure, those would’ve always sounded great to my ears. But by the time I bought this record, in grad school, I could appreciate this song—even if I still preferred the short instrumentals on the LP, musical fragments that rarely resolved and onto which I could project whatever feeling I liked: sometimes, I’m pretty sure, I could listen to an hours-long loop of “In Dark Trees” or (other times) “The Big Ship” (“My intention,” Eno wrote three years later, in the liner notes to his record Ambient 1: Music for Airports, “is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres”)—

—but I never finished my idea that Eno’s seventies solo LPs seem to concern middle age to me, or mean more to me in my own middle age than a lot of other records, or than they did when I was younger, even though Eno was himself a young man when he recorded them—“On Some Faraway Beach,” yes, but, on this LP, “St. Elmo’s Fire” (“Brown Eyes and I were tired / we had walked and we had scrambled / through the moors and through the briars / through the endless blue meanders…”) or “I’ll Come Running” (“I’ll find a place somewhere in the corner / I’m going to waste the rest of my days / just watching patiently from the window / just waiting, seasons change, some day, oh ho / my dreams will point you through that garden gate…”) or “Everything Merges with the Night” (“Rosalie, I’ve been waiting all evening / possibly years, I don’t know / counting the passing hours / everything merges with the night”) or especially “Golden Hours,” which begins with Farfisa chords (“Choppy Organs”: the song also credits “Spasmodic Percussion” and “Uncertain Piano”) so lush and familiar that—because I heard this synthesizer sound throughout the pop music of my childhood and absorbed it environmentally—it triggers a near-unconscious nostalgia in me, even before Eno starts to sing lyrics that explicitly reference perceptions of time and age and discordant piano notes ring low in the mix:

“The passage of time / is flicking dimly upon the screen / I can’t see the lines / I used to think I could read between / perhaps my brains have turned to sand / oh me, oh my / I think it’s been an eternity / you’d be surprised / at my degree of uncertainty / how can moments go so slow? / several times / I’ve seen the evening slide away / watching the signs / taking over from the fading day / perhaps my brains are old and scrambled…”

At that point, Robert Fripp’s sparkling guitar and a background voice sighing like John Lennon’s in the middle of “A Day in the Life” animate the song’s dreamy order before contrapuntal overdubbed vocals (“who would believe what a poor set of ears can tell you?”) and John Cale’s rich, romantic viola slide the song toward its fadeout.

And if I sit here on a mid-May morning in 2015 listening one more time to Another Green World—the album both background and foreground—while outside my window winds swirl hurricanes of hundreds of maple keys, and feeling still almost certain that events I experienced in 1995 happened, say, just a few years ago and that 1975—well, those things happened a long time ago, of course, I was a tiny kid then, but it wasn’t forever ago, it’s not history, I’m not that old—and maybe now this all sounds as noodly and self-indulgent and excessive to you as “Sky Saw” once sounded to me, one more dude’s self-pitying moan about how mystifying life feels from his own compromised and minor point of view: but maybe I’m not totally wrong, since, as theoretical physicist Paul Davies has written in Scientific American, “We do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time.…the flow of time is subjective, not objective”—and there’s always another world and it’s always a greener world, and maybe middle age means admitting that that world’s (or this world’s) as much a daydream as the buzzing, humming, twinkling textures in “The Big Ship,” building and shimmering and cresting and fading, so many hidden intentions disguised as errors—

—Joshua Harmon

#430: Vampire Weekend, "Vampire Weekend" (2008)

Dear Fifteen-Year-Old Me,

It’s two in the morning right now and I’m worrying about what I should invest in for college (Mace? A lifetime supply of laundry detergent?), and how I’m going to leave everybody and everything I’m comfortable with behind in a few months, and if I’m going to find a roommate who I can actually get along with for a whole year, and why I can’t just go back to being a fifteen-year-old. I didn’t have many problems when I was you—your problems extended as far as worrying about how much junk food you could hide in your room without Mom finding out or how long you could get away with avoiding your chores. Fifteen is naïvety and ignorance and, just like Taylor Swift said, there's nothing to figure out.

Do you remember that time you sat in your room at some after-midnight time—the house quiet save for your iPod blasting Vampire Weekend’s brilliantly-named first album, Vampire Weekend, at full-volume like any ‘normal’ teenager would. That night was the first time you said “fuck,” which, of course, was the best part of “Oxford Comma” to any fifteen-year-old goody-goody. It was the first ‘fuck the system’ song you’d ever heard. But when the word slipped out you smacked your hand over your mouth as if you’d just said the most horrifying word known to man. You were so afraid somebody was going to hear you. But what if someone had? What if you had been out with your family? What would have happened then?

Do you remember the only answer you could come up with?

Nothing.

And you started listening to more Vampire Weekend, and you started to feel powerful. And at fifteen, power is hard to feel. While your friends were dealing with eating disorders and school stress, you were listening to “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)” feeling that you were Blake—you were the one with the new face. And I’m going to let you in on a little, awful-but-true fact: When everybody else is going through rough patches and you’re sitting there with a genuine smile on your face, the power escalates. Your power radiated across the school and people came to you for advice, and because you were basically a teenage life-coach (Exaggeration? Please define the word. No, you were definitely a life-coach. You should have been paid for your killer services), the power you felt boarded a rocket and landed on the moon. In simpler terms: You were invincible; nothing could touch you. Just like Blake, the moon had a new face and that face was yours.

You became Johanna in “A-Punk,” stealing power as she stole the ring from His Honor’s lilywhite hand. But a reformation is coming just for you, by the name of “M79.” It's going to take a little time / While you're waiting like a factory line—those first two lines will hit you like a baseball going at ninety-three miles per hour. Because you pretty much believe in geocentric theory, except more to the point that you specifically are the center of the universe, you will believe that you, too, are waiting in a factory line. You are following the path of your fellow sophomores: going through the motions of high school, being conditioned for college, comparing friendships and pasts, etcetera. But as long as you’re in that factory line, what power do you really have?

So you’ll become less of a teeny-bopper drama queen—all thanks to Vampire Weekend and their cleverly-named first album. No longer will you dwell on the past or present, but you will begin to look toward the future and milk it for all it’s worth. And no more gossiping, either. When you desperately want to shit-talk, you’ll ask yourself WWEKD (What Would Ezra Koenig Do)? Because, after all, nastiness will cause your doom.

But that’s something to talk about in another letter, to Sixteen-Year-Old Me.

Do you remember going to the Bahamas for winter break sophomore year? “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was how you spent your time there. At the gym, at the beach, in the hotel room, wherever you could bring your iPod—the music was rushing into your head, flooding your senses with its frenzy.  You didn’t understand the song’s meaning, and I’m pretty sure I don’t either, but it was catchy and that’s all that mattered to you.

You know, when I think about it, fifteen was like a giant shrug of a year. You’d listen to “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” and just shrug along to it because you didn’t have to stand a chance against anything. You were under the radar; you were a speck on a windshield. You were small and unimportant and, no matter how much you denied it, I know you loved it. There were no big decisions, and you didn’t have to worry about the pin-striped men of morning or denying romance. It was just a happy tune that you were happy to listen to.

I remember how “Campus” and “Mansard Roof” were your favorites, though. You made a separate playlist just for those two songs and you’d sit there, listening to them go back and forth for hours. At fifteen, you sought freedom, and that’s what those two songs gave off. Sleeping on a balcony? Count you in. Walking on the tops of buildings? Perfect. You pictured yourself in those songs. You were on a campus; you were seeing Argentines collapse in defeat. But the song would change and you’d be back on the couch ignoring the dirty dishes. Far less exciting stuff.

But now? Now I’d choose dirty dishes over this album. I don’t need exciting stuff anymore. The only song I still listen to is “I Stand Corrected,” since I stand corrected: I do not have any power, and more things matter than catchiness, and I have to face-off with so many big decisions, and complete freedom is not what I want. Koenig puts it best when he says No one cares when you are wrong / But I’ve been at this for far too long. I’ve been wrong for about half of my life, and nobody has really cared. I was young and naïve, what could anybody say? But it’s time I make some right moves now. I can’t afford to not give a fuck about an Oxford comma when it may affect my grades and I can’t afford to fuck the bears out in Princetown when it may affect my safety (and health and relationships, if you’re really thinking about it). I’m not you anymore, no matter how much I wish I was.

I know that seventeen is very close to fifteen and I am still a little baby of a human, but adult problems have started popping up and I’m just a little baby of a human. How am I supposed to deal with emotions and boys and college and…I don’t know…taxes? Adulthood is ominous and looming ever closer, ever taller. And I’m sorry to break it to you, Fifteen-Year-Old Me, but you haven’t grown at all. We’re still 5’3”, so most things seem giant and scary, but adulthood takes the cake—no doubt about it. Remember how Six-Year-Old Me had to have the closet doors closed for fear of monsters? Well now it’s kind of like that except the doors are creaking open and there actually is an undefeatable monster in there: adulthood.

Do you want to switch places? I long to be you again; when I was you, I had nothing to figure out and life was dumb and fun. But now, life is stressful and I have too much to figure out. I don’t feel ready.

I’m not sure why I started writing this letter. You can’t write back, but I figure that since we’re the same person, you could help me in some way.

So. Do you have any advice, Fifteen-Year-Old Me?

Please tell me something other than that I should start adulthood by asking myself only one question: WWEKD?

Love and miss you,

Seventeen-Year-Old Me

—Nicole Efford

#431: PJ Harvey, "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" (2000)

As a young girl, my life was full of firecrackers, flickering television screens, stolen lipstick, and whiskey. It was full of boiling Irish blood, broken bones, and grudges, full of smoke and poker and cutting dresses out of magazines, slick shaven legs and dirty feet. My sense of self rested somewhere between flowery chalk drawings in the driveway and late-night basketball games, between period blood and motorcycle grease. My family was full of vocal men and silenced women and I never wanted either for myself and I never understood why it had to be that way…How could that happen? How could that happen again?

*

I am fifteen years old, in the car on a road trip to my grandparents’ house in Illinois. I have been listening to Pixies, Nick Cave, the Cramps, and know all the words, but I’m sick of women blurred in the background. At this point in my life, I don’t know how to articulate any of this, but I do know I want to see myself more in the things I love, want to see a young woman with her head up, smiling, but don’t know where to look.

I put my older sister’s burned copy of PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in my portable CD player. I don’t know what to expect because I only know the name. I press play. The disc spins under the plastic. I hear the frantic power of a woman’s guitar, a woman’s song.

*

When I started playing guitar, I was eleven. I played and sang the songs I knew best from childhood and any songs I was taught. Country songs about men in love. Folk songs about women dying beautifully. I’m watching from the wall. I sang the male experience, soaked it all up as the only kind of experience worth putting into words. One day there’ll be a place for us.

*

I hear a woman’s song and it is as if the words were meant for me. It is the year after my father left home. Things I once thought unbelievable in my life have all taken place. I saw it coming, but I am still heartbroken. All around me people bleed. We are no longer speaking. This world all gone to war. I lean my head against the car window’s cold glass, and listen with all my heart.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

*

This is the year I write my first song. Keep the walls from falling on me. And learn every PJ Harvey song I can. Just give me something I can believe. The year I learn to growl like a woman. I was in need of help. I am in need of articulation. It will take years and the help of many more women for me to be able to say I only need myself, and mean it.  

*

This is the year I meet my first love. We act like lovers. Speak to me about your inner charm, and how you’ll keep me safe from harm—I don’t think so. We hold hands and kiss—speak to me—he tells me he loves me—the language of love—so I write him into my songs—the language of violence—where I know my voice can dominate. I tell him they are all fiction.

*

When I write my first song, I feel connected to her and every other girl picking her guitar up to play, every other girl learning, for the first time, to use her voice—to speak for herself.

I start wearing leather with my lace, playing power chords. I show my first boyfriend the music video for “This is Love” on a school computer. He says she has a mouth like a ripped pocket. Sometimes I can see for miles. I start exploring the dark places of a woman in love with a man.

*

When I was fifteen, I heard a woman singing like I have never heard a woman sing before. Her voice, strained but powerful. Her P’s popped. Her H’s hissed. I learned her melodies and words by heart, and kept them close. Set myself free again.

When I think of her now, what she meant to my girlhood, I think of a stomping heeled shoe, the honesty of her womanliness in flux, her rough edges—feminine grit. It was for me. My small life, growing. Guitar strings and calloused fingers, and PJ Harvey in my headphones.

​—Amanda Bausch

#432: Brian Eno, "Here Come the Warm Jets" (1974)

One weekend afternoon c. 1984, when I was in eighth grade and pop music had supplanted almost every other source of potential meaning in my life, some DJ at WBCN 104.1 FM Boston—which I received in my bedroom forty miles west via a five-foot T-shaped gray plastic antenna I’d thumbtacked to my bedroom wall, only partly disguised by the early U2 posters I’d also hung there to cover the dark wallpaper and faux wood paneling—played the title track from Brian Eno’s second LP, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). My stereo then served as the primary conduit through which the external world reached me, but that external world—as represented by music, anyway—had yet to confound me so deeply. I can recall few first-time-I-heard moments as well as this one: my spruce-shaded bedroom in the upstairs corner of our house, the door shut against anything that might disturb the haphazardly rigorous self-education underway; my walnut desk with built-in bookcase and fluorescent light that my father had brought home from a yard sale; my mattress and boxspring on the floor beneath the window because I thought it looked cooler than having a bedframe; and these familiar quarters dismantled by what I understood as the willful strangeness of Eno’s song. At that point, I’d heard some of the odd, sometimes artsy whimsy of the Sixties—which I despised with a zeal appropriate to my age—and the artsy gestures of the new wave and post-punk I was discovering with an equal intensity—but I had no template whatsoever for this ballad’s plaintive lead guitar, mellow piano, and chorus singing about oh, how they’d climbed. I laughed at how absurd the song sounded, as the facts that much of Eno’s music deliberately entertains absurdity and irrationality, and that the bands I was learning to love owed overt and covert debts to his records, whooshed right over my unschooled head like the wind noises punctuating the song.

As much as I wanted to dismiss the song—it was old; it was weird, but not in a cool way; it was quiet and slow; it was unsettling and unfamiliar in ways I wasn’t ready for—I couldn’t. “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” bothered and beguiled me for years, even as my tastes got weirder and older and quieter and slower and more unsettling, and though I didn’t buy that LP, or any other Eno LP, for even more years, I never forgot that song, either.

*

“I was talking to David Bowie about…the records that first affected us and I said that the first one that I can really remember being awestruck by was Get A Job, by the Silhouettes, because I’d never heard doo-wop or anything like it, so it was a mystery, and really thrilling as well. He said it was either Eight Miles High or Mr. Tambourine Man for him, that sound just made him shiver.

“As you get older, you get fewer and fewer of those kind of thrills because you learn what the context of things is, so I can listen to the Silhouettes now and say ‘Oh yes that’s New York doo-wop,’ or whatever… and just being able to place it like that immediately reduces it, knowing that it’s one of many similar things, rather than being this strange singularity. I said to avoid that I suppose one of the reasons one becomes a composer is that you want to recreate that thrill for yourself. You want to do something that makes you say ‘God, where did that come from?’”

—Brian Eno, Melody Maker, “Energy Fails the Magician,” January 12, 1980, interviewed by Richard Williams

*

I heard Eno’s name invoked with respect (and occasional disdain) in the context of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, which he produced the same year I first heard his own music. I learned he’d been involved with some of the early Roxy Music tracks on the cassette my mother kept in the car (though I hadn’t yet seen his fantastic feathers-and-bell-bottoms glam shot inside the gatefold of For Your Pleasure)—and that he’d produced a bunch of the Talking Heads records I knew well. Eno reappeared when a friend dubbed Bauhaus’ cover version of “Third Uncle” on a mixtape. And when I discovered that there was much more to David Bowie than “Space Oddity” and “Suffragette City.” And when Eno said that My Bloody Valentine’s song “Soon” was the “vaguest piece of music ever to get into the charts.” By college in the early ’90s, I’d heard most of his solo recordings, and by the end of the decade I’d finally accumulated all the LPs, but still, it took middle age for me to appreciate Eno’s work as fully as I might, and once again it was a slow burner of a piano-led ballad that arrested me—“On Some Faraway Beach,” from his first LP, Here Come the Warm Jets:

Given the chance / I’ll die like a baby / On some faraway beach / When the season’s over / Unlikely I’ll be remembered / As the tide brushes sand in my eyes / I’ll drift away / Cast up on a plateau / With only one memory: / A single syllable / Oh, lie low, lie low…

Though Eno never wanted his lyrics to mean much—“Essentially all these songs have no meaning that I invested in them. Meanings can be generated within their own framework,” he once said, or “the words on the first album are just there to give the voice something to do. Just arbitrary sets of words which didn't add a dimension to the music”—sometimes even in middle age a pop song feels mere mirror to the same way it did at fourteen, and I see myself more in them than elsewhere (Borges: “I recognize myself less in [Borges’s] books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar”), and I don’t want to write about the title of Eno’s first solo LP or his famed sexual exploits or his tiff with Bryan Ferry: I want to talk about myself and that mirror, and two days: one circa 1984 in my boyhood bedroom, and one I can pin to June 17, 2009, thanks to a date written in a notebook, an evening I walked along Poughkeepsie’s Hooker Avenue just past South Grand Street, watching boys standing outside a 7-Eleven and composing in my head some lines in a poem while I listened to Here Come the Warm Jets on my iPod and thought about how even my plans to leave the town I hated depressed me, and maybe tried to make that feeling substantial by giving it the language of a poem and the soundtrack of a song that suddenly collapsed that fourteen-year-old self letting music make meaning for me and the middle-aged self who felt a growing awareness of just how precisely any of the meanings I try to make for myself are unlikely to be remembered amid a life that so often, even when I’ve learned the contexts for things, feels mysterious in my efforts to understand it—

*

Or, as Lester Bangs wrote about Here Come the Warm Jets in his review for Creem, “Don’t miss it; it’ll drive you crazy.”

—Joshua Harmon

#433: George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass" (1970)

In college, a friend told me I was a “dark horse,” a phrase I thought made me sound very compelling. This label transcended the perception I had of myself: fairly shy, quiet, boring. Or rather, I was interesting to myself—in the way, I suppose, that everyone is—but assumed my reserve came off as dull to others, which in turn made me worry that perhaps I really was dull. I rarely spoke up in public settings and classes, and I didn’t really open up to someone until I felt I could trust them, which usually took a long while. I was unsure sometimes whether my timidity was a hesitancy to speak my mind or if it was a symptom of having nothing to say.I was the sort of person who longed to be spontaneous because I recognized it as a desirable character trait, but struggled going along with last-minute changes in plans. It seemed all my friends were extroverts, and though they often pulled me out of myself, I also occasionally felt lost in the sea of their personalities. All of this to say, it was hard for me to reconcile my shyness with my self: who I knew I was, versus how I felt I must appear.

But maybe what I liked best about being thought of as a “dark horse” was the implication that I could exceed people’s expectations of me—that someday, terrifyingly, I could even blow my own expectations for myself out of the water. And there was something exotic about being the dark horse, so for awhile I used this term as an explanation, as a crutch. Instead of pushing myself to be more open and outspoken, I imagined myself sloshing with rivers of ancient wisdom. I dispensed advice to close friends with worldly sage, trying to lend the impression I had already lived a hundred lives before this one.

The moniker also put me in mind of my favorite Beatle, George Harrison, who was often called the same (and even had an album and a song called Dark Horse, which later led to his eponymous record label). Growing up, I had always identified with George because he was marked the “quiet one,” but maybe this comparison was wishful thinking on my part. I wanted my still waters to run deep without being sure they actually did. Regardless, it was comforting for me to have a shy person to look up to, especially one that was successful. I absorbed the fact that perhaps I could succeed at something I loved, even if I found it unbearable to be in the spotlight.

In popular imagination (or maybe just in my imagination), George was also the wise Beatle, the one who cared more about chasing inner peace than drugs and women.  In an interview with Guitar World, George’s son, Dhani Harrison, talks about a letter George wrote to his mother when he was young:

He was on tour or someplace when he wrote it. It basically says, 'I want to be self-realized. I want to find God. I'm not interested in material things, this world, fame—I'm going for the real goal. And I hope you don't worry about me, mum.' He wrote that when he was twenty-four! 

I remember stumbling across that quote when I went through my own teenage Beatles frenzy, four decades after actual Beatlemania, and thinking how wise George was, and consequently, how real. But as I get older, I’m not exactly sure what being wise means. I haven’t really thought about the Beatles in a long time. I still listen to them occasionally, sure, but I haven’t considered them outside of the context of their music the way I did when I was a teenager and obsessively read up on them, so the rather simplistic image I had of George when I was fourteen has been preserved for over a decade: reserved, self-effacing but brilliant, striving toward enlightenment. And then I started doing research for this essay.

A few years ago, Martin Scorsese produced a documentary about George Harrison, and Harrison’s ex-wife Pattie Boyd published a memoir. Between the documentary and the memoir, I find myself, via multiple tabs of Google search, wading through the more unsavory details of George Harrison’s private life. How in his inner circle of friends George wasn’t thought of as shy so much as bitter and cocky; how he cheated on Pattie with Ringo’s wife, Maureen, and how Pattie once returned home to find them locked in the bedroom together. Did I know these sorts of details when I idolized him? I don’t remember. And if I did, why did I overlook them, instead favoring a more flowery and innocent version of Harrison?

It startles me, how upsetting it is to read those details about George’s private life, even when I haven’t actively looked up to him in years. Of course, it’s always discomfiting to find that someone you once idolized is not only imperfect but somewhat abominable. But if I had admired George for his guitar playing or his singing, it would be different. Instead, I admired him for his alleged wisdom, his success despite his shyness, traits which turned out to be much more complicated than they appeared.

During the time of my life that I most identified with George, I also took the most comfort in his lyrics, which told me that everything was impermanent, constantly changing. Listening to “Within You Without You,” for example, temporarily reminded me not to take myself so seriously (“and to realize you’re only very small / and life flows on within you and without you”), though it didn’t do much to make me consider why it was that I took myself so seriously. I actively sought out adages, going to bookstores and flipping through banal quotable cards (“Life is a journey, not a destination”; “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain”) to hang on my wall. In the same way I craved a label such as “dark horse,” I loved platitudes because they made more comprehensible a life I still found overwhelming and roaring in its uncertainty.

The most popular song off Harrison’s solo album All Things Must Pass, a title that is itself a platitude, is “My Sweet Lord,” a song about longing for communion with a higher power. The beauty in this song doesn’t belong to the lyrics (all of which express exactly one sentiment: the desire to be one with God, and the fact that it takes a long time to do so) but in the sound. Or maybe the beauty is in the fact that the melody makes its incredibly mundane lyrics beautiful, which distracts us from the fact that it isn’t saying much at all.

Platitudes—and song lyrics—that act as placeholders for deep thinking, designed to placate pain or discomfort, are not bad exactly. But I’d argue they aren’t good either--sometimes discomfort shouldn’t be placated. So: what does it mean to be wise, and does real wisdom actually exist?

I don’t know. The version of me who liked being called a “dark horse” would say yes, because I felt then that wisdom was attainable; it was the only currency I felt I ever had a chance of owning. I thought wisdom could make me interesting to other people, and so I believed in it. But I hadn’t lived long enough and didn’t know anything. (A fact which is still true.)

Is this what George thought, too? That creating around himself a constructed aura of sagacity would help him stand out in the wake of the more colorful, witty duo of John and Paul? Do we always have to bend to other’s perceptions of us? Are we just making shit up as we go?

William James said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,” which I like. It implies a certain meditative quality I think George would embrace: a calm mind in the face of too much information and too many details. But it’s also yet another platitude—in my mind, this quote marches in rainbow-colored text across a white-square card. There is no escape from boiled-down bits of knowledge, advice, guidance. This is because, to communicate knowledge, it must first be put into words, an action which inherently simplifies thought. There can’t be wisdom without simplification.

But of course we can’t have wisdom without recognizing contradictions, either, acknowledging that too often opposing characteristics coexist. Such as the ones in George, the ones in all of us: the public and the private. And sometimes there is no answer for the questions these inconsistencies raise. This is something I couldn’t see when I was younger: that I could be both quiet and loud, introvert and extrovert, successful and a failure, an interesting person yet, like everyone else, alarmingly mediocre. That I could be both a dark horse and one waiting for the light, impatient for the paddock door to open and let me be seen.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#434: Big Star, "#1 Record" (1972)

“I was outside at this bar on the nicest day of the year so far, and there was this little boy—I don’t know—how old are little kids when they’re about two and half feet tall and can’t walk right yet? You know, when they run around on tip-toe with both arms out like little birds because they don’t have any balance—what’s that, three or something? It’s so fucking cute, they just instinctively sense that if they put their arms straight out they might not eat it, but this kid ate it bad--BAM—and busted his nose, howled for like ten minutes. I heard his mom say it was his first bloody nose. Can you imagine? First Bloody Nose: that’s a damn mile-marker. He got scooped up, his mom wiped his face, and then he went after it again, arms out, like Ain’t no one goin’ to turn me ‘round.”

“When I first heard Big Star, I was in college in Ohio, far from home. My friend slid the CD into the car stereo, and I asked him whether Big Star was named after the grocery store. He looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew Big Star first as the place my teenaged sister disappeared most nights to work as a cashier, where she pushed carts into tight rows under the street lights’ incandescent glow, to pay for the car she’d totaled almost immediately after it showed up in our driveway. When I heard the opening of ‘Feel’—”

“—Yeah, that first, nasty, descending progression of ‘Feel’—the cheap guitar tone of fucking champions; that’s the strut of dudes who are pretty certain they’re going to rule, guys who figure the words Big and Star as reasonable, even just, descriptions of the endeavor, a logic that extends to the title #1 Record: this the unassailable logic of untried champions. Yeah, that guitar part sounds like Manifest Destiny as discovered in somebody’s mom’s basement—”

“—When I first heard ‘Feel,’ when I first heard Big Star in my friend’s car in Ohio, it was like sliding back into Memphis in an instant: that winding Midwestern road disappears and I’m in the backseat of my mother’s car, six years old. We’re pulling into the Big Star parking lot to pick up my sister—sixteen-years old, so wild and mysterious—from her night shift. Those neon lights, those warm, brilliant opening chords of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’ slide over my skin and I’m in Overton Square in 1972, and everyone’s at a show at TGI Friday’s or out on the street, traffic blocked up in all directions. All I can feel is all that promise, the energy of all those crowds on that street which would be abandoned in ten years’ time, the buildings left empty and shuttered.”

“In its most fantastic moments, you get the sense listening to Big Star that, in the trans-Atlantic ping-pong match of bad-boy blues rock that occupied so much of the sixties and seventies, these boys from Memphis had actually learned something. Like really bright kids at school, they’d paid attention, and learned something useful, something they could practically apply. The delivery on #1 Record is so assured because there’s no prior experience to diminish their certainty and that’s heartbreaking in hindsight. There’s a tenderness buried beneath the bluster that makes it actually infectious—”

“By the time Big Star chooses their name, sitting on the curb, staring at the Big Star grocery store’s neon lights, Alex’s voice is completely transformed: he’s in his twenties when he records the vocals for ‘Thirteen,’ and he sounds his own age, maybe for the first time. His voice is stripped down and vulnerable but never precious, more aching than sweet.”

“Agreed. Not precious, not even a little. ‘Thirteen’ is in essence, not just a perfect pop song, but it manages to sound actually sincere and un-self-conscious, like the artifice is inseparable from the experience. It’s fantastic and devastating. There are moments on the record that are eerie and almost uncanny. Jesus, why is that, that when rock music is accurate, like clinically accurate in its description of heartbreak, when rock music is so accurate, so representative of human affairs, that it’s always conducted by the hands of children? They were kids!”

“For Alex, thirteen was the year before it all took off, the year before he stopped showing up to classes at Central High School and his deceptively gruff voice, sounding decades older than it was, started showing up on the radio. While other kids went to school, Alex showed up in televised, lip-syncing performances with the Box Tops. They mime playing at the organs and guitars, making faces at the camera, improvising bizarre dance moves, barely keeping up the guise. Alex can hardly hold eye contact with the camera but he’s trying, his hair hanging lank over his sharp-angled face, lips curled into a grimace that might be hiding a grin. And that’s him, too, later—Big Star was always the thing pushed right up against its opposite: ‘Thirteen,’ both ode and elegy to adolescence. The band name and the album title both suspended somewhere between a sincere boast and an ironic joke. Jody seemed worried that calling the album #1 Record might jinx them. But each track was—is—so inarguably good, so irresistibly catchy. Like you said, infectious…”

“Yeah. It’s the incautious enthusiasm, the novel understanding of defeat, the way a thirteen-year-old knows defeat. I know it’s impossible, but their first record sounds like a near complete absence of self-consciousness. I know that can’t be true in fact, but it feels and sounds like some moment of innocence, some little hermetically sealed chamber, with the lid taken off. Like pop music was still capable of being un-self-conscious.”

“Listening to Big Star now, I still somehow manage to dream up a new ending, where the records sell the way they were supposed to, where Chris Bell doesn’t die at twenty-seven years old, where Alex Chilton doesn’t die at all, ever, but keeps making weird, perfect music that seems somehow new each time I hear it. In this imagined ending, I can mention Big Star in a room full of people and everybody knows them, where everybody argues over which Big Star song they love most.”

“Listen to Third/Sister Lovers. It’s the lonesomest record in the world, not just on its own, not just because there’s defeat practically oozing out of the speakers, but because there was a beginning in #1 Record and a middle with Radio City and Third is the end. I just don’t know how to talk about Big Star without talking about the whole run. They were a perfectly narrative band: beginning, middle, end. It’s like Plato’s house band or something. I think about that kid outside the bar—for him, that bloody nose was still just an aberration: get a bloody nose, pick yourself up, run around some more. Big Star makes a great record that eats shit, they get up and make another record, and another, figuring next time maybe they won’t get a bloody nose. What I want to know is, would Big Star have done it if they knew how fucking bad it was going to hurt?"

—Joe Manning & Martha Park

#435: Nirvana, "In Utero" (1993)

Kurt has promised to keep an eye on the baby while Court runs out for groceries. The baby is asleep in the middle of her parents’ king bed, splayed out and vulnerable, eyelids shuddering intermittently. Her onesie is striped purple and white, and bears a small spit-up stain just below the collar. In this context, it seems to say, Yes, I am able to eat, but I will not hold it all in simply because you expect it of me. In fact, just because you do, I will not. Blech.

Kurt lies next to Bean flipping through an old Cosmo he’s not sure why he has. He’s vaguely certain he took it weeks ago from the doctor’s waiting room. His gut burns, as usual, but today it is a mild burn, more like bad gas than death, and as a result it barely registers. The magazine’s mostly only getting flipped through, though every now and then Kurt stops long enough to black out the eyes of the ad models with a Sharpie whose butt he chews between vandalisms. There is nothing to this day. There’s not a lot of sun coming in, and the apartment is quiet but for the phantom riff in the back of his head; he’s not sure if it’s his or from a new Nike commercial.

Kurt’s been thinking a lot lately about who he is. Sometimes he’s certain he’s suffering from amnesia. He knows he is a father, and he knows he knows himself best, can feel himself most vividly, when acting dadly. Or in ways he assumes dads act: jet-plane mashed pea delivery, constant hum-driven cradling, bathtime, storytime, patience. But all the in-between parts he gets fuzzy on. What’s he done himself, and what’s he read or heard elsewhere about his life? He makes music sounding mostly like all his favorite music, not trying, not really, to make it better, just trying to do it justice. He sings and sometimes screams. He loves his wife and sometimes wants to kill her. He knows the feeling’s mutual, and he knows it’s what’s keeping them both alive. His name feels amorphous, his gender irrelevant, his future ultimately idle. He’s not so into the cameras, the interviews, the hoopla, but he remembers wanting it constantly only years ago. He is a prehistoric beast caught mid-motion by the meteor: more spectacle than human, more already dead than just thinking about it.

Bean stretches, turns, puckers. She is dreaming about her dad as a skeleton, the kind from the old Mickey Mouse cartoon, the bones that sing and dance in sync. In her sleeping mind, she laughs and claps her hands together, applauding his movements, very much digging the thrill of live performance, the goofy way her daddy moves in clatters. Bone-on-bone, one-step, two-step. She is unafraid; she loves this man.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

In a few days, Kurt’ll be off to a soundstage to make the music video for his band’s next single. The song’s not about anything, not really, but if it has to be, it’s about Courtney. About how he hates her, fears her, loves her. About her vagina and his daughter and his mother. Actually, maybe it isn’t so much about nothing as it is about a lot. The video will be red and hellish and feature a Christ figure in a Santa hat crucifying himself in the first 30 seconds. Kurt feels about the concept the same way he feels about the new record: he isn’t sure how much of it is him taking his fans to task—laughing in their faces, waving his money around—and how much of it is genuine. Only one more way he’s lost track of where he begins and where, if anywhere, he ends.

He is both thrilled and neurotic about this new album, about the number of ways a number of people are bound to hate it, but he tries not to think too much about it. Court would tell him to stop being such an asshole, a narcissist, a total buzzkill. He knows she’s right, and so does she. Their daughter makes a little gurgling sound, so Kurt gently picks her up and holds her against his shoulder, rubbing her back almost imperceptibly. He sings “SOS,” the ABBA song he can’t stop playing as of late, and his voice is quiet and sweet even when filling in all the guitar parts.

Sometimes he can’t help but see himself beyond himself and wish somehow this image could get out to the rest of the world without the image itself imploding. That is to say: the secret little life he and this smaller half-he on good days get to experience. Mom at the store, the band doing their own thing, whatever it is he doesn’t even start considering. He isn’t bored, isn’t bent double, isn’t hiding. He is sitting on his unmade bed and listening to his daughter dream about nothing but him. He has weighed his life and found himself mostly OK. No idol, no rock star, no artist, but OK. In this low light, this new person’s weight laid restless across him, he is happy, or could be. No: is, most certainly.

​—Brad Efford

#436: Beck, "Sea Change" (2002)

The Golden Age

I drive home from Tennessee in gusty rain, caught in a storm of semis, trapped in narrowing highway traffic. Overdone by the stress of driving, flashing back on our accident, I get off at Newport and wind my way up into the leafy mountains. Pop in a mixtape and listen as Beck croaks: “Put your hands on the wheel, let the golden age begin.” The grades are steep. Detour at a downed bridge. (“Window down, the moonlight on your skin…”) I get lost in the drizzle and fog: passing for miles tumbledown barns and lonely horses in corners of tiny fields; a fast-filling river studded with fly fisherman. (“Treacherous road with a desolated view...”) Electric again on the switchbacks, I allow the music and rain to wash me raw. (“Drive all night just to feel like you’re okay…”) By the time I come to the turn for Hot Springs, I have returned to an earlier self, pre-accident. I sing along, yearning for stasis, to be content with simple things, wishing hard to come back. (“Doesn‘t even get by, I don’t even try, I don’t even try…”)
 

Paper Tiger

Fight or flight, my therapist tells me. (“Just like a paper tiger…”) That root impulse. Cellular tug. But how often are you really in danger? Hardly ever. (“No more ashes to ashes, no more cinders from the sky…”) Though I want to wrap my hands around that driver’s neck. To slam my car into the back of his sedan. Yell fuck you or throw a punch. And the hot flashes of shame and self-loathing? What of those? Where do I go then? Where are you in your body? Can you feel your feet? (“All the laws of creation, tell a dead man how to die…”) Too busy coaxing myself out of that oak outside the window. Unable to differentiate branches and feelings. Can you follow your breath? I nod. I can do that. (“…the desert down below us, the storm’s up above….”) And I walk a few steps in this way and, after a while, drop back down into my body (“Like a stray dog gone defective, like a paper tiger in the sun…”)—tired, sore, sad, scared. (“Like a broken diamond…”) Ok, I say, I can do that. (“Hold onto nothing…”)
 

Guess I’m Doing Fine

I woke this morning to birdcall and a far-off train. (“There’s a bluebird at my window, I can hear the songs he sings…”) No subway rumble, bus hiss, traffic clamor. I lay in the dark and assessed my condition. (“Oh the jewels from heaven they don’t look the same to me…”) Left hip tight. Body stiff and achy the way it used to be a year out. Right leg a little weak, dull pulse in the femur at each break. (“I just wait the tide’s to turn, oh I yearn to leave the past behind…”) Left foot a block, stiff at the ankle, like someone has strapped tape over the top of my arch and pulled tight. (“Guess I am doin’ fine…”) Even my ribcage makes itself known here and there—with a tiny blare of pain at the sternum where it hit steering wheel. Must have been all those cement sidewalks, hundreds of subway steps. (“Rest my face up against the window, see how warm it is inside…”) Everything about New York takes extra effort, someone said. I can take this soreness, this tightness. (“See the things that I’ve been missing, missing all this time…”) I can take it.
 

Lonesome Tears

As we moved through our recovery, away from the wreckage, month after month, I relied on a trick of thought to get through the difficult hours. Would say to myself: Another hour, then sleep. Two more days ‘til the weekend. Another few weeks and… (“I don’t need them anymore…”) Like smoking a bowl or turning on an afternoon episode of Mad Men. Walking along an endless turn that never straightened out, always peering around the bend. (“Lonesome tears, I can’t cry them anymore”) Now, wanting life to return to its normal cadence, to re-inhabit it hour by hour, I have become immensely restless—like a night traveler stepping out of his car in some lonely gas station stretching, (“I don’t need them anymore…”) drawing in a few deep breaths before folding back into the car and driving again. (“Lonesome tears, I can’t cry them anymore”)
 

Photograph by Marie Sicola

Lost Cause

(“Baby you’re lost, baby you’re lost, baby you’re a lost cause…”) Not the abruptly slowing cars ahead, or the way traffic snarled to a standstill, not inching forward as the right lane merged with the left, (“Leave you here, wearing your wounds…”) not the blinking lights ahead, nor the ambulance sprawled sideways across the lanes; not the men and women huddled in the breakdown lane, not even the one automobile, turned over on its hood, door ajar. (“They see you coming, they see you go…”) None of it stirred my son and his friend from their video game cocoon, never once looking up to see. And on the way back from the match, late afternoon light cutting sideways across the lanes, visor down to block the blare, I passed the exit for 221, the road we crashed on at just this hour, heading up to Spruce Pine for a weekend getaway. (“There’s a place where you are going you ain’t never been before…”) I kept us straight on 40, letting the quiet music carry me forward; and as we headed up the mountains, (“No one left to get your back now…”) the stench of burning brakes from the trucks coming down, with the sun now bright and triumphant behind the Black Hills calling out the oncoming night in trumpeting reds and yellows, (“I am tired of fighting I am tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause…”) even I didn’t look up from my cocoon of driving and notice all the potential wreckage, even I didn’t flare up in my own body or lose hope for the future. (“Baby you’re lost, baby you’re lost, baby you’re a lost cause…”)

End of the Day

I remember the first time after the accident I stepped tenderly into my own shower. After months in a wheelchair, then lugging a walker, then a cane…I hadn’t had a real stand-up shower ever since the wreck. (“I have seen the end of the day come to soon…”) Free standing, head down, floating around the little steamy bubble like a sunflower, the water just a notch under scald…(“Not a lot to say, not a lot to do…”)…letting myself hope, maybe for the first time, that I’d get back to my old life, my old body, taking a peek of the night’s show on tiptoe…(“…Depression dogs beset after you, wasted time…”)

Round the Bend

I walk the river trail from parked car to community garden. A few summers back I’d toiled there before giving in to the weeds. (“We don't have to worry, life goes where it does…) The day is warm, finally, after weeks of cold, and the breeze arranging the treetops whispers hoarsely of rain as bamboo rustles and clacks. (“Faster than a bullet from an empty gun…”) I hoped the old ceramic Green Man I’d planted in the center of the plot would have remained, but only new rows lined by straw, an indent in the clay. (“Loose change we could spend”) The garden cabin porch is empty except one woman typing away on her laptop. The garden cat’s a shadow slink in the periphery. Some students are heading out to the river. Others gather round a fire-pit. I watch as someone pours out tea in mismatched cups to a circle of friends. A dog sniffs my pant leg then wanders off.  I sit on a stonewall overlooking the garden and write abandoned garden plot. A pair of crows argues up in branches. (“Turn”) I write: Green Man ceramic pressed into the earth. Gone.

Already Dead

The young woman who takes my ticket throws me a suspicious look. I stroll absent-mindedly through the aquarium, green lights and tanks on all sides. (“Time wears away all the pleasures of the day…”) Kids crisscross the space in random routes; adults converge in the corners. I hate so much about the place—the rows of bored sleepwalks drooling at the exhibits, the trapped fish—despise all the little expected surprises. (“Already dead to me now…”) Still, I can’t help circling back to the schooling fish exhibit: entranced by the cylinder of silver fish that revolves endlessly in a loop, bright scales flashing in and out in an aquatic weave. (“Because it feels like I am watching something die…”) There is a pad of stones beneath them, a whoosh of air from above like a mini carousel. There’s no leader, a kid points out to nobody in particular. I want to lean over and sneer: That’s right, kid. Get used to it. But I keep staring at the fish in school. (“On the edge of nothing more…”) The children wander off. I am left with the fish, their attentive, horrifying faces pressed against the smudged and scratched Plexiglas.

Side of the Road

At the back of a paperback pulled off the shelf, I find a few fragments of marginalia jotted years before. (“On a borrowed dime in different light…”) I have no recollection writing them. (“In a random room…”) He asked her to meet him in a strange city, at such and such a hotel, on the last Saturday of August. She hadn’t promised she’d come. But, if she did, he was sure it meant that everything they’d shared—all the unspoken glances and sparks between them—would bloom at the designated moment she walked into the hotel lobby. (“Kick an empty can across an empty floor…”) How strange to find my shadow version, no longer alive, sloughed off like a coat of snow. (“Let it pass on the side of the road…”) And, on the back page: They’d done all they could to salvage it; there was nothing left but to untangle their libraries. (“What a friend could tell me now…”)

—Sebastian Matthews

#437: Lil Wayne, "Tha Carter III" (2008)

At 3.8 million units sold and counting, Tha Carter III has got to be the best selling comedy album of all time. Leaked in 2007, then released as an official/unofficial mixtape later that same year, then officially released in 2008, this kaleidoscope vision of Wayne’s world (party on) is one of the most creative, fun, lazy, funny, frustrating, bizarre, etc. albums ever made. It’s a nasily laugh at a hip-hop industry begging Wayne to make good on the trending maturity of the first two Carter albums. They wanted an opus and they got a rubber chicken. Wayne wrote a relationship song where the metaphor is police brutality. He told us he was from Mars. He wrote, “Swagger tighter than a yeast infection.” I don’t think someone trying to carry hip-hop on his back as a serious artist writes that. Upon release, Tha Carter III defied expectations. It would go on to influence a generation of hip-hop by showing MCs how to be stupid again.

Take, for example, this lyric: “I do this shit for my clique like Adam Sandler,” or the fact that he tries to summon Beetlejuice by saying his name three times. Wayne sings the hook to Rihanna's “Umbrella” and, at the start of “Got Money,” arguably the album’s biggest club hit, Wayne screams, “I need a Winn-Dixie grocery bag full of money right now to the V.I.P.” On any other record, these could be isolated riffs on humor or just symptoms of good times and too much Promethazine. But in 2008, the release of Tha Carter III held the attention of an industry. Remember when part of the album leaked a year early and Wayne’s response was to add some tracks and release it as an official EP? Everyone wanted a piece of III and the demand was so huge, Wayne knew he could throw out tracks from the session at will and still have a hit. A ton was riding on III. People legit expected Lil Wayne to save hip-hop. And then Wayne raps, “I’m a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed.”

Yeah. He did that. And made it work about as much as you could expect a line like that to “work.”  The album sold millions and left everyone enthralled. It also disappointed people who were banking on Wayne finding that next level. Face it, Weezy isn’t in top form on Tha Carter III. I won’t break it down bar for bar, but just listen to “3 Peat” and “Mr. Carter.” These two tracks make up the messy, underwhelming introduction on Tha Carter III. The awkward monologue that starts “Mr. Carter” is an especially low low-point. On it, Wayne makes sure to let us know that when he says he feels big, he doesn’t mean that he feels heavy/fat. He means like, you know, size-wise. Well, thanks for that. Compare this to “The Mobb,” the five-minute coronation that opens Tha Carter II. No contest, “The Mobb” wins every time.

And the inconsistency pissed a bunch of people off. Reviewers were baffled. Fans, myself included, felt cheated. Now, looking back, it is almost fun to listen to Wayne phone it in on “Phone Home” and just not give a shit on  “Lollipop” (C’mon, the joke of “So I let her lick the wrapper” is so bad. It is a dad joke). Throw in Auto-Tune and David Banner’s insane beat for “La-La” and you wonder if Wayne’s been listening to Dr. Demento. (You could probably make a pretty rad beat out of Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads” though.)

Who does this? Who produces this kind of album when the world is watching? It isn’t as simple as a squandered opportunity or wilting under pressure or running out of ideas….Tha Carter III is loaded with ideas. I’d like to think the album came together like it did because Wayne believed he was the best and he was going to have a good time. The joy of just removing filters and notions of cool and getting down. This music became the ultimate bravado move and ushered in a half-decade of “I don’t give a fuck” wanna-bes who clearly, desperately GAF. Tha Carter III might be that rare album where Wayne slipped one past the label, past the press, past all of us. Where the mess made just enough sense.

Much of the clutter doesn’t hold now. Today, Tha Carter III feels an order of magnitude more self-indulgent than it did in 2008. Back then, Wayne’s pedigree was enough to make you second guess your ears. But his post-Carter III output—Rebirth (good lord, this thing), I Am Not a Human Being, Tha Carter IV, I Am Not A Human Being II—are all wildly uneven or downright bad. People aren’t anticipating Wayne records or clamboring for leaks anymore. No one is wondering if he’ll redefine the genre again. Wayne stopped caring what we thought until we stopped caring entirely. Has it gotten so bad that he needs a “comeback” album? Probably. But the beat on “A Milli” was the beat of the decade for 2000-2009. “Lollipop” is one of those songs that was so crazy I remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time. And “Let the Beat Build” is a very high high-point. They’re certainly enough to make you miss that summer of 2008, when Wayne was everywhere, laughing at it all.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#438: The Cure, "Boys Don't Cry" (1980)

“Killing an Arab” details the beach scene in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, where the main character Mersault somewhat inexplicably murders a man who earlier had a confrontation with Mersault’s acquaintance. Many misconstrued the song’s message and intent, and some copies of the album had a warning sticker, not for explicit language, but literary provenance, no doubt providing a point of entry, for many, to an exemplary angsty-young-man novel. The most direct influence on The Stranger, according to Camus, was James M. Cain’s classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.

---

I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

—Albert Camus, The Stranger

The streetlight streaked the rain puddled on the pavement in long dull stripes like scrapes on a wounded tyke’s knee. Johnny Simile had been playing stickball down by third and Lex, took a dive into second, dinged himself up good, ran home and wailed bloody murder to Momma. Momma’s good for wiping away errant tears and the smooching of booboos; some momma’s good for rye and water and kisses elsewhere too, but that’s another story. Now just the salty street caressed by sodium dance.

Not a soul to be seen in this dismal drizzle save your faithful hero: some dunce of a cat not smart enough to step out of the storm. A habit I might’ve picked up in the war ducking around mildewed trenches, but I lived through it didn’t I, so I guess I ought to have been doing something right, despite Sarge McGrady’s many hard words otherwise. Me and Patches got nine lives, sure; Sarge was a real asshole. In the present deluge—Niagara Falls gushing from the brim of my cap, feet squishing in drenched, holey socks—I was coming back from meeting with Ol’ Joe Louis, an infantry pal from the Argonne, now local fuzz down the 16th precinct. We were rapping on a closed case from last winter, loose ends needed tying, shuffling papers on the table like so many spades and diamonds. Case was a real freakshow went by the name of Spiderman who was up and eating folks left and right. Creepy twink had a tagline even: “Don’t struggle like that or I’ll only love you more,” he’d say to the victim right before tucking in. We got wind by way he recorded the damn thing: a sight I’ll not once forget. Real sicko, that Spiderman. As luck would have it, slug between the eyes from my .357 got the worms eating him. Turnabout, I say. A thousand million shivering furry holes. We got some real sick shows in this town all right.

I ducked my head into my collar and quick stepped up the stairs to the front door of the brownstone and let myself in. My office’s on the third floor and I was huffing and puffing as I pushed past the stack of papers inside. I nabbed the top one off the pile and threw it on my desk; headline splay: Fire in Cairo. Same ol’, same ol’. I sparked a Morleys and stared out the window into a translucent haze, puffing away contented as a dragon perched on his booty. Dirty soles smudging the storied ink of our grey lady, relaxed and easy. It’s a life.

The name’s Bob if you were wondering, Bob Smith. Some right unoriginal saps pushed me out into the world; makes for a real gyp in the Yellow Pages, you better believe. Have to shell out for an 1/8 page ad to stand out from all the other yokels. Picture of a gat and a smile, Bob’s your Uncle, no case too strange, no offer too small. Olly olly oxen free. Spécialité de la maison: divorce and blackmail jobs. Yeah, yeah, you sussed it right, I’m a PI, a Private Dick, and somebody has to pay the bills around here (that’d be me), Yellow Pages included. Samsara’s a real bitch. This particular spin of the demon wheel all started last winter. This dame come in the office all bluster and misgiven accuracy. So what. Yeah, till she plunks a couple of C-notes down on the desktop and I’m all ears. Right foxy bird too. The lady and the tramp, that’s us. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Same old sob story but boys don’t cry, we just stamp our feet and scream a little.

Turns out this broad was summering over in Algiers—I checked the atlas, smart guy—and ended up putting a couple holes in a local cabana boy. Some accusations this way and that, but a lonely beach and just the two of them; the sand don’t speak. Well-heeled she was, they got it straight enough to get her repatriated. But now she’s spooked, see, thinks she brought home a little more than her souvenir Aladdin’s lamp and a notch on her gun belt. The boy’s soul in her hands. Nothing concrete: noises, flashes, feeling she’s not alone. Echoes of footsteps following close behind. That kind of thing. That’s why I’m sitting in my office wet as a duck’s ass rather than down at Ed’s Tavern drowning in something else entirely. Bills, remember?

I must have got some shut eye quick because when I wake up the rain’s stopped, just the tap dripping in the other room. Where is this dame? Ten-fifteen Saturday night and the tap drips, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip…

To be continued

—Erik Wennermark

#439: Sam Cooke, "Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963" (1985)

The middle school dance is full of velvet and glitter and white kids dancing to soul music.

The middle school dance is a kaleidoscope of weeping under the water fountain.

The middle school dance is a school of fish that are getting their friends to get his friends to ask him to dance.

The middle school dance is a faith.

The middle school dance is a pin in the wrist, a bone corsage.

The middle school dance is from 4-8 pm.

The middle school dance is a drag.

The middle school dance is a fold in the very fabric of time on the ample rump of the middle school’s front office secretary, Pamela Hadler.

The middle school dance is framed by chaperones.

The middle school dance is, contrary to popular depiction, completely punchless.

At the middle school dance cans of warm soda and travel-sized bags of chips are for sale for $1 to benefit the cheer squad’s newest set of uniforms.

The middle school dance is on its tiptoes, peering into the backyard of the high school, where it is still only afternoon and the marching band and the football team vie for practice field space as in cars high schoolers vie for each others’ skin under their thin jackets.

The middle school dance shivers.

The middle school dance is so ready.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

The middle school dance walks across the practice field to the high school on Mondays and Wednesdays for Calculus.

The middle school dance is weeping in the bathroom stall while its girlfriends whisper through the thin metal It’s okay, I had a hamster who killed himself, too.

The middle school dance won best dancer in the whole entire 7th grade for twisting the night away. It didn’t even know it was entered in the competition.

Someone had entered the middle school dance as a joke.

The middle school dance is a belly digesting.

The middle school dance is a crossover hit.

The middle school dance knows whose parents are smokers and whose are late and whose are separated and asking around about if Stephanie McMannis’s recently widowed mother is ready to “get back out there.”

Whether or not it is dark at the end of the middle school dance depends on the season.

The middle school dance folds up easily to transform back into a gym.

Therefore the middle school dance has a climbing rope but no one quite knows where it comes from, if it descends from somewhere or if someone makes his way to the rafters and ties it in place.

The middle school dance is highly legal, in fact, encouraged, as it helps keep kids who like to dance off the streets.

The middle school dance is growing older as it pulses. Sometimes it dares to think of itself as a cabin by the sea.

—Laura Eve Engel

#440: The Pogues, "Rum, Sodomy & the Lash" (1985)

Why do I like the Pogues? Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is a great pop album, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it; but it adorns itself in the most degraded ornaments of historical defeats, as if to say that in this defeat we can still have a good time. That's a notion as ubiquitous as I am suspicious of it. I mean, I don't want to admit historical defeat, who does? I'm on the cusp of quoting Joyce or maybe Yeats, so perhaps I should stop. Even so, everything on this album happens decidedly after a moment of excitement and possibility. It's Belacqua, from Dante's Purgatorio: sitting at the foot of the mountain too lazy to ascend, saying as much to our esteemed poet and his even more esteemed tour guide through the cosmos.

At this point even the initial question seems implausible. Do I like the Pogues? Keston Sutherland says that favorites are complicated objects, and that things become our favorites for a host of reasons that aren't necessarily the best possible ones. I take him seriously, find his insight generative, and would like to think that Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is an object lesson in how disgust and delight intermingle, at least for me. I can't avoid the album's machismo, or its celebration of a series of political defeats as just another day where we end up at the bar; but I can't ignore how from all this the Pogues manage to give pleasure, a pleasure significant enough that I have undertaken to write about it.

Pleasure can't redeem anything, of course; the Pogues still must face up to the long nightmare of history, which they try to wake up from again and again by borrowing the folk conventions of the murder ballad and the drinking song to find a form for feeling inert and useless. But I think pleasure has a Utopian edge to it. In part because, as I just said, the feeling here is one of purposelessness. How hard it is to comprehend having no purpose these days, when everything must either account for its utility or perish! How wonderful the dream of some sort of collective social being, even if only provisionally and only in mutual acknowledgment of suffering! Again, these don't change what I don't like about the Pogues, but they make me want to listen to Rum, Sodomy and the Lash repeatedly, where glimpses of the opposite of everyday life make themselves felt even if only in their falling away from possible realization. Thus "Wild Cats of Kilkenny," with its opening vocalization of a cat's shriek, might also be the sound of saying no! to legibility and, indeed, to purpose itself. What if we were like wild cats, what if we could live pleasurably, or even freely?

At the same time, opposition holds sway: this song, and all the others, are pop songs, they reiterate a pattern of conventions that we recognize and that return us to a state of objective unfreedom. It's like that Wallace Stevens poem, "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," in which music no longer functions as it once did, as a "mode of desire, a mode / Of revealing desire," and instead comes to figure absence and a chance for future fulfillment. The uncapturable aesthetic experience brings us back to the very capturable, and captured, social world we inhabit. Stevens wants a music—which for him means also poetry—of the future. I think the Pogues wanted a pop music of the future; in "Dirty Old Town," the speaker kisses his lover "by a factory wall." The town's dirt implicitly relates to the factory, which in turn brings to bear a host of associations about labor and the time of labor, as well as the demands made by the fact of labor on everyone. Does repetition in a pop song say something about labor and what it does to the landscape?

Even if it does, in the throes of mass culture such an insight doesn't mean much for us. It's part of being in the thrall of the culture industry. No matter how rhapsodic I might be in describing something, that fact remains the same. But Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is a childish album in ways that supersede the sometimes hackneyed attempts to read rebellion into the flailing and hissing of punk. It does what children do when they want to figure something out: it imitates, it causes trouble and steals wantonly from everything around it. The result is degraded but compellingly so. If it still sounds like I hate that of which I speak, I would only point out that Samuel Beckett's favorite character in Dante's Divine Comedy was, in fact, Belacqua. And if we take Beckett as giving us the most realistic description of life in the 20th century, then maybe degradation seen as a fact rather than a moral impugnation can organize how we approach such difficult but, to my mind, rewarding albums as Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Maybe saying so is pointless. Maybe that ends up being the point.

—David W. Pritchard