#401: Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication" (1999)

A normal day, just home from school, I’d dumped my backpack in my bedroom and was in a hurry to get to the basement, the unofficial sanctum of my burgeoning pubescence, so I could cram in a few hours of Ocarina of Time on my N64 before dinner. I was thirteen, drumming on my chest as I walked through the house and singing the only way a thirteen-year-old knows how to sing—with earnest—in a voice that can only belong to a thirteen-year-old—a dysphonic collision of pitches and tones reminiscent of a bagpipe in the hands of a boxer.

Dream of CaliForrrnicAationnnnnnn…
Dream of CaliForrni…caaaaaaaa…shunnnnn…

My father, sorting through bills and junk mail at the table, paused and turned to address me. “What did you just say?”

I was guilty of something unknown and quickly looked to defer blame. “It’s a song,” I said. “I didn’t write it.” As if my not writing the words precluded my having said them.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“I don’t know, like, people want to go to California on vacation?” I offered. That was honestly the only thing I could figure, despite the song containing the lyric everybody’s been there and I don’t mean on vacation. Such was my obliviousness.

“It’s saying something about sex,” my father said. “Fornication is a word for sex.” He shook his head. “Don’t let your mother hear you saying it. Or your sister.”

Confused but exhilarated, I continued to the basement, where instead of flipping on the 64 and puzzling through the Water Temple, I popped in the Californication CD, pulled out the booklet, and began listening with new interest. Something about sex…well, sure…with lyrics like hardcore soft porn; young Kentucky girl in a push-up bra; live to love and give good tongue. But where else was sex hidden, and more importantly, what else was hidden with it?

*

I was ignorant, but not without good reason. Themes of this nature were totally absent from all of my previous experiences with music, as I’d pretty much only listened to—and again, in pretty much the only way you can listen to it, with earnest—Christian rock. Bands with songs titled “Hey You, I Love Your Soul,” “Straight Shooter,” “Superfriend,” “Super Good Feeling,” “Mighty Good Leader,” “Good People,” “Good Stuff,” “Love Liberty Disco,” etc. The message was pretty clear cut: You love Jesus and Jesus loves You and if Everyone would love Jesus then Everything would be totally overflowing with super awesome goodness. Granted, at thirteen I lacked any real perspective on worldly problems and didn’t have much to complain about, myself, but I still recognized that I didn’t feel like I was as good or super or awesome as those bands proclaimed was possible, and given everything I’d ever heard about “the difficult transitional period of the teenage years” I didn’t expect to feel that way any time soon. In fact, I desired this difficult transition, these changes that would happen, were happening, which would introduce a life that wasn’t so clear-cut and clean.

And what I found in Californication wasn’t clear-cut by any means, but instead an increasingly complex intermingling of the forces that compose reality. Sex was definitely present—the songs “Around the World,” “Get on Top,” and “I Like Dirt” practically pulsing with the sexual energy that made RHCP famous—touting the tangible mish-mashing of bodies that set the thirteen-year-old mind a-fervor. But paired with them were songs that presented a visceral pain within that sexual desire. “Scar Tissue” with its broken jaw and waving goodbye to ma and pa and with the birds I share this lonely view. “Emit Remmus” with cuss me out and it’ll feel all right. “Purple Stain” with to finger paint is not a sin / I put my middle finger in / your monthly blood is what I win evoking menstrual flow followed by black and white and red and blue / things that look good on you / and if I scream don’t let me go hearkening a sort of eagerly anticipated love-bruise.

But there was more than sex. There was drugs and addiction with “Otherside,” “Porcelain,” and “This Velvet Glove,” and within that examination a possibility of release from the turmoil through suicide. But what was most powerful was the yearning for understanding, a searching for meaning not only within the self, but as part of the collective conscious. See “Parallel Universe”:  Staring straight up into the sky / Oh my my, a solar system that fits / in your eye…Microcosm. Yet even within this recognition, there was a question, a longing to abandon what is present in hopes of  attaining what is real—see “Easily”:  throw me to the wolves because there’s order in the pack / throw me to the sky because I know I’m coming back. For the first hundred or so listens, I admit I would skip track twelve, “Savior,” simply because the first line, Dusting off your savior…, implied too much of a departure from the world I knew. Eventually I listened and found not a song about separating from Jesus, but resolving a troubled relationship with a father, and as part of that resolution, an embrace of all the good and bad in a manner that allowed true freedom: A butterfly that flaps its wings / affecting almost everything / the more I hear the orchestra / the more I have something to bring / and now I see you in a beautiful / and different light / he’s just a man any damage done / will be alright.

At thirteen, I didn’t know about sex or drugs or rock ‘n roll, hadn’t quite lived long enough to fathom what would be most difficult about becoming a real person in the real world. If anything, the album left me feeling that the looming changes of life would be more complicated than I could even begin to understand. Nonetheless, and perhaps all the more so, it seemed like the stirring doubts and worrisome questions were part and parcel, were in fact necessary for the transition out of youth to begin.

*

I don’t believe I made a conscious decision to turn away from the relentless opti-posi-simplici-tudes of my Christian-swaddled rocking, but a natural drifting occurred. And I hadn’t initially sought out the Red Hot Chili Peppers because I thought they held answers from beyond the pale veil. What first got my attention was actually an appeal to my very juvenile sensibilities, through the video game-inspired music video for the album’s title track. The video depicts the digitally-rendered band members passing through a series of quasi-Californian trials and tribulations—Kiedis punching a shark in the San Francisco Bay and ramping a convertible through (R)Andy’s iconic donut; Flea dodging murderous lumberjacks felling redwoods and a teenage bride with a baby inside; Frusciante stumbling through sci-fi/soft porn Hollywood basement studios; Smith snowboarding the Golden Gate Bridge—only to plummet through a ripped-wide San Andreas fault onto a subterranean platform where, transforming back to flesh, they receive both a “game over” and an option to proceed to the “next game” to which, before the screen cuts out, they select Yes.

As a kid, I perceived a set of crazy-cool wild adventures that made the music video entertaining, but as an adult, knowing the well-documented real-world hardships the members of RHCP underwent, I can’t help but interpret some connection between the video’s antics and their own transition as a band into a new realm of possibility and understanding. Some crazy shit went down…and we’re still here! What strikes me as most interesting though, is the end of the video/game. GAME OVER it says, not LEVEL COMPLETE. Failure, not success. And yet, the band members appear joyous to be united. And yet, the option for a NEW GAME appears. And yet, they choose Yes. And perhaps that’s the main difference between my Christian rock upbringing and the realm of Californication: the ability to ascribe a super good feeling, not in spite of, but because of the complex criss-cross of pleasure and pain, life and death, self-loathing and self-discovery, not judgment within in a dualistic realm, but appreciation as alternating currents within the same existence. Perhaps Californication presents its own brand of earnestness, not a whitewashing of the past and separation from the present, but a devotion to the complexity of everything and all as necessary constituents for life.

The chorus of the last track on the album, “Road Trippin’,” says, These smiling eyes are just a mirror for the sun. As the song ends, as the album ends, it fades out on an open-ended version of this line: These smiling eyes are just a mirror for…your smiling eyes are just a mirror for… For…for…for… For this and this and this and this. For everything and all.

—Colin Lee

#402: Nas, "Illmatic" (1994)

The closest that Illmatic offers to an ars poetica: "Genesis" sets the stage with a sample from the street's disciple, but right before the album starts in earnest with "N.Y. State of Mind" you can hear, real low, "I don't know how to start this shit."

The story goes that Illmatic debuted at a time when The Source was in its pomp and didn't want to give perfect scores to anyone, let alone some unsigned twenty-year-old. But with the advance release of Illmatic on their system, the editors let go of the old rules, and called it what it was: five mics.

There's another album and another story that keeps coming back around from that time: The Chronic represented everything agenda-setting about hip-hop at the time. Rolling Stone makes the claim that The Chronic is, at #138, nearly three hundred places better and/or more important than Illmatic. But The Source knew right away what the score was. They gave a young Nas the five mics—the declaration an album was a supreme classic, benchmark, institution—where they didn't opt to break the policy for The Chronic. There's a reason for that.

And a big part of it has to do with the crew of NY legends doing sublime work behind the beats; and it's got something to do with the rumble of the train passing through; it has to do with the jazz solos and it has something to do with the album's author, his block, and the meeting of history and future in his sound. The young Nas overlaid atop the Queensbridge projects gives a prophetic sensibility to the album cover. Everything about Illmatic represents.

Jeff Weiss, writing in 2013 for Pitchfork, says that the album doesn't leave the block, but if you listen close, all the hoods and crews show up. The phrase repeated on "Memory Lane" is, after all, "comin' outta Queensbridge." As in it starts here, but there's no telling where it ends. Nas himself says he always knew he was born to leave the block, to travel the city, to hear and see what everyone else was up to. "And I'm from Queensbridge, been many places," he says. The block matters, but the orientation is towards the world. The curiosity gives the album a big force against sadness. Ill will may be gone, but there's a big world out there, and life left to live.

The five mic award has got to have something to do with the fact that Nas plays something of the role of, not reporter, but real-time-historian perhaps. He relays traumatic events and damning allegations alike with neither hyperbole nor judgment, but always as they relate to the arc of the block. He is in Queensbridge, steeped in its history, but always makes his way around town, and the sound he's cultivated is richer for it.

Played back-to-back against Illmatic, The Chronic sounds a lot less groundbreaking, earth-shattering, and cry-it-from-the-hilltops than the constant eulogizing suggests. And that's not to say that some of what came next for Nas didn’t sounded like pop next to his early work (not to say that "Hate Me Now" isn't great pop). For that reason, maybe it makes sense to keep them far apart. But make no mistake: Illmatic raps with a razor under its tongue. Who looks good next to that?

Certainly, we're not trying to say there's no place for pop in this world. But when someone keeps shit that real, arranging not just beats, but big questions, big opposed forces? When we argue with others, it's rhetoric, but when we argue within the soul, it's poetry. That's what Yeats says, anyhow. I reckon we got to call Nas' sensibilities poetic in that regard. Pure, molten intuition.

Satisfaction with the world comes only from the elements of the line falling delightfully—unthinkably, even—into place. Fragments arranged against the unanswerable, if you want to call it that. The menace and the tangible sense of mortality run deep; the sense of wonder is charged up; the rhymes are tight. There's no calling this pop.

Here's why it matters: let it run through your ears. Use headphones, or find somewhere you can listen: first, put on the big, loping, saccharine hooks of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys in "Empire State of Mind." Now, get Illmatic. "N.Y. State of Mind."

Seriously, try it. "There's nothing you can't do, now that you're in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. The lights will inspire you."

"The city never sleeps, full of villains and creeps...I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death." The closest he offers to a final thought can't touch "Empire State of Mind" for sheer vacuity and the normal empty platitudes thrown at the City of New York on a regular basis. All Nas wants you to know is that "nothing's equivalent to the New York State of Mind."

Nas's New York is devoid of pop-savvy swagger, devoid of claims to glamor. It's downright bleak at times. But with Nas there's no irony, no condemnation, no shame, no plastic reveling, no glorifying. Instead, Nas observes, thinks, offers subtle prescriptives, wrapped in the rich flow that he was known for. "The streets had me stressed something terrible," he says.

There's no lights to inspire where the young Nas is at—he lets us know "I'm livin' where the nights are jet black."

So what keeps the despair from taking over? What steers a line like "life's a bitch and then you die" away from trite pessimism?

Whatever it is, it's a fine line. There's a richness to the production and to the lines themselves that never falls far out of reach. Nas didn't invent jazz-rap. He just did it best. And he did it when everyone was trying to do G-Funk. For his troubles, he couldn't get an album deal. So finely was it balanced that the reasons for passing on Illmatic that keep coming up contradict each other: he was too hard, and he was also too meshed up in the soft, old East Coast sound.

What's a record executive good for, anyway, if we're in the age when they have no room to sell what they acknowledge as good, but not market ready? The world has passed a record exec by, but Nas tells you on the intro track, "Genesis," that when the shit is real, you do it without a contract. The thoughtful quality that informs the lines throughout each of the album's nine tracks suggests that he means it.

The speaker is thoughtful as hell, even as he recounts moments of crisis—running through the building lobby, "probably full of children / I couldn't see as high as I be"—in the active world and prone to moments of detached revelation—he's certainly no mere reporter. He reveals with evenhandedness, but there’s too much familiarity, too much resignation—he’s too close to just report, no matter how flatly the words themselves fall into flow.

If we talk a lot of shit about Jay-Z for "Empire State of Mind," we can also add that he's got some of the great one-liners to add enough introspection (only just): "Like God give a fuck: I'm just a crook on a song." But Nas has always pondered deeper while rhyming harder: "Woke up early on my born day...my physical frame is celebrated cause I made it one quarter through life some Godly-like thing created."

—Aaron & Jordan Fallon

#403: Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd" (1973)

This essay wasn’t supposed to be an essay. When I started writing, I had grand ambitions: a short story about a trucker and a girl he meets on the road, a girl whose not-uncommon beauty (it is the beauty of a young and slender girl) he can’t help but notice, even though she’s not much older than his own daughter. The attraction and the resistance of the attraction wouldn’t be the point of the story, but it was the tension I was going to begin with. And I was going to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and start with her hitching a ride and see where it took me.

But these posts have deadlines, and I am not, primarily, a fiction writer, and I didn’t realize how long this sort of thing can take, how difficult it can be to conjure lines of dialogue and learn your characters through them. I mean, I knew, I guess, but every time I start a project I think for some reason it will be easier this time, and it almost never is. All of this is to say: there is a tension in the songs in Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd that reminds me of driving a long way in the night and wanting things you feel uneasy wanting, of the way that, no matter how you try to repress it, you can’t ever escape who you are.

This evening I made, for the first time, a fruit crumble. I tossed chunks of nectarine and raspberries in sugar and then I added some shredded coconut and chocolate chips. As I added them I thought, there’s a chance this will overcomplicate things. I tried it anyway. It overcomplicated things. I didn’t ruin it or anything; the dessert still tasted good. But the surplus of flavors made it less immediately identifiable as what it was, and if I make a crumble again (which I probably will—what could be easier than tossing fruit in sugar, massaging cold butter into flour and sugar and salt), I will make it the normal way, the fruit and the dough and nothing else to distract from it, except maybe a little whipped cream.

You get where I’m going with this: Lynyrd Skynyrd is the good crumble, the conventional crumble, the one I did not make. Having fewer elements (I’m talking, here, mostly about how the album was released in 1973, before digital, computerized components manipulated music as they so often do today) somehow opens a space for a purer sort of complexity.

But I’m not here to assess the value of Lynyrd Skynyrd; time has already done that. I listened to the album in its entirety for the first time when I started this project, and I knew half of the songs. Not in a “oh I think I’ve heard this before” kind of way—I knew the songs. I wouldn’t call myself a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan, and I’ve never sought out their music. This album was released 13 years before I was born. And yet, I know those songs, just from being a person living in America. I bet you do, too.

What kind of wild and ridiculous success is that? I mean, wild. But also, ridiculous. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a band that still exists even though almost none of its original members are alive. I am a little confused but also delighted by this fact. They are, essentially, a cover band for themselves. There is an audacity to this but also a naivete, a simultaneous inhabiting that parallels the way their music is so sincere it descends into camp. They are so much the southern rock band that they’re bordering on a parody of southern rock.

I worried that writing about a trucker would be too obvious and unsurprising—that maybe it would be silly, to choose a character so clearly associated with this kind of music. Truckers and factory workers, blue-collar men who wear boots and drink whiskey and work long days, men whose lives are hard on their bodies. Men who own rifles, men who are more affectionate with their dogs than their wives, men who speak few words and never admit to crying. Rough men and terse men, men who know how to bellow. Men who never doubt their own ability to build a bonfire.

But these characters are the characters of the songs—they match the image the band has cultivated, the ones they market to, and so it seemed right, in a way. To worry about being too much when it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd we’re talking about is counterintuitive. And anyway, there’s something I love in those men—how they remind me of my grandfather, maybe, even though their music is something I know my grandfather would have dismissed. But maybe that’s not it, not really. I think it might be because there’s always some sort of crevasse between the image of the man and the man himself, and no matter how narrow it is, it is always deep.

I find this crevasse appealing; I want to peer over the edge. I want to build a bridge across it, or jump in, fall down through a tunnel of ice. I can never know it in others the way I know it in myself, but I want to, and this, maybe, is one of the things that makes me a writer. There’s a tension, I guess, wrought by that familiar adage: He’s not what he seems. And so, we come to expect that this is what literature or wisdom will show us as we get to know a character. I think it’s pretty rare that people aren’t what they seem. People, generally, are what they seem to be. It’s just that, often, that’s not all they are.

So, my trucker would be a trucker and the hitchhiking girl would be just that. The crumble that I didn’t make would’ve been only a crumble, fully inhabiting its crumble identity, and it would’ve been better. So I guess this is all my way of saying, I can’t think of a way to describe Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd beyond identifying it as southern rock, because it so fully inhabits that category. And I love the songs, I do, even as I don’t know how to feel about that love, even as I want to laugh at myself for loving them. The songs can’t help being only what they are. They also can’t help being more.

—Katelyn Kiley

#404: Dr. John, "Dr. John's Gumbo" (1972)

Cicero argues that great rhetoric should do three things to its audience: move them, instruct them, and delight them. Sir Philip Sidney steals this schema so he can define the fundamental operations of great poetry. And now I am stealing it to talk a bit about Dr. John's Gumbo. I understand how perverse it sounds to use extant categories to talk about an album whose very title refuses any easy reduction to its constituent parts. By the same token, I understand the joys that go along with certain kinds of perversity, as well as the simple fact that reading a recipe for a dish is never the same thing as eating that dish. And so I divide my essay into three parts, in order to give three glimpses from slightly different angles of this marvelous stew served up by Dr. John and his band.
 

To move: "Let the good times roll"

It's worth stressing that on Dr. John's Gumbo (or in it, maybe) "moving" means more than just the private feeling of a sublime whoosh. One might "move" literally, by dancing or joining the party for which the music serves as metonym. The aforementioned whoosh is a collective whoosh, a whoosh of participation rather than isolation—not that sublimity connotes isolation, but often we talk of aesthetic experiences as though they are exclusively private, a perspective which would make it impossible to talk about an album boasting nineteen musicians and performers, and featuring almost exclusively songs Dr. John himself didn't write. The "good times" here move, they roll, we are invited to join them and thus we in turn move, as in a parade, or a dance, or history itself.
 

To instruct: "We're gonna mess around"

If asked to make a list of "didactic" pop artists from the 1970s, I probably wouldn't think to put Dr. John on it. I don't think anyone would. And yet Dr. John's Gumbo is a crash course in the musical history of New Orleans, a collection of the good doctor's favorite standards newly rendered in the studio by him and his band. Dr. John composed only one of the album's twelve songs. Does this make the title's possessive a cruel joke? Or is it a way of foregrounding what I've already called the collective imperative to participate in the music? Is this Dr. John's property, this gumbo, or is it something he has prepared to share with his audience? I'm inclined toward the latter, even as I can't quite give a full account of the complicated position Dr. John occupied (and occupies) with respect to black musicians and songwriters, in New Orleans and in the US more broadly. The "gumbo" is part of a larger party, and it gives back the results of its "messing around," it doesn't try to act as if it spontaneously appeared. Indeed, the liner notes to Dr. John's Gumbo, written by Dr. John, candidly detail the histories of the songs covered, as well as explaining in what ways Dr. John and his band decided to mess around with those songs. It's complicated, like I said, but we learn that this music didn't come from nowhere and it certainly didn't come from Dr. John alone. It, too, is historical; it, too, rolls, and through messing around Dr. John facilitates that roll. No one ever said pleasure was straightforward.
 

To delight: "Ha ha ha ha"

I deliberately chose a non-lyric to head up this section, the phonemes-that-don't-signify that form part of the call-and-response in the show-stopping "Huey Smith Medley." Dr. John's tribute to the great blues pianist is interesting mostly for reasons not having to do with the words (or the sounds made with mouths), but I use this to point out that the overall "delight" of the album is one that strategically avoids articulation or statement. If you were to comb through the lyrics, you would find numerous invocations and descriptions of joy and pleasure, of happiness and general well-feeling and being and feeling. But if this were all it took for an album to "delight," everything would delight, all pop would be the same pop. For Dr. John, the delight is that we can repeat stuff that's already been done, that repetition is not a death sentence but an enabling and liberating gesture. No wheels need be reinvented, no great sadness need occur about the death of the possibility of newness, when one can do a version of a song that's already there. That version, moreover, will never be exactly the same as the song it takes as its ur-text; "copying" or "covering" is simply an excuse to fail at doing something else that's already been done. The space of that failure is the pleasure of imitation and of tribute. We hear Dr. John's continuities with, and differences from, Huey Smith and Earl King and numerous other great artists everywhere on Gumbo. This, and the freedom to do it, the freedom of the impossibility of becoming someone else, underlies the delight in the album.
 

Volta:

But these are not three separate things. No movement without instruction; no instruction without delight; no delight without movement; and so on. The three categories usefully isolate aspects of a total machine, a whole, even autonomous (but not autarkic!), work of art. Dr. John's Gumbo excites not because I can check the boxes off as I'm moved, instructed, and delighted, but because listening to the bundle of sensations and perceptions that comprise the album invites me to participate in the process. I can't dance and right now I'm in a Westport, CT, Barnes & Noble, so that's out of the question; but is not writing about something a part of the process? And, knowing that what I've written will not be the same as listening to Dr. John's Gumbo, have I not done something analogous to recording a cover version of another song? I guess the takeaway from this album, other than that I want to listen to it again, is that the onus of having to start from scratch is a false one, it doesn't exist in the first place, and all there really is to do is go back and do something again in the hopes that something wonderful may happen. In Dr. John's case, something definitely did.

—David W. Pritchard

#405: Big Star, "Radio City" (1974)

Brooklyn Masonic Temple, November 18th, 2009.

There’s a beat-up white sedan parallel-parked on Clermont, three grown men sitting inside with the windows rolled down, even in this bracing November night air, and “Back of a Car” tipping out of their stereo. We’re walking to a bar before the concert, and we pass this car, and I make a note in my mind of these three grown men in their car, listening to Big Star. The voice of their hero, seeping through a tinny car stereo, into the ears of buddies, uniting them in the moment. This was life on that late November evening, on the verge of winter, picking up our thoughts from the ground where they whipped around in the wind with the fallen leaves.

Sitting in the back of a car
Music so loud can't tell a thing
Thinking 'bout what to say
I can't find the lines

We come back from the bar tipsy and buzzing, watching our breath appear before our faces, short-lived. It’s still cold inside, the vast hall filling slowly with concertgoers blowing into their hands to stay warm, lining up at the bar. We order beers and find seats in the balcony; I sit on the edge of my seat. My heart tingles as they arrive on stage. Alex is wearing a coat; he fiddles around in his pockets, pulls out a pair of reading glasses, then folds his coat and tucks it behind the guitar amps. I take a picture of this moment, finding it impossibly endearing - one of those moments that are so simple in life, a little bit of nothing, but the nothing that make up the majority of our existence here. Fiddling in pockets. Folding a coat. This is existence.

The photograph is out of focus; you can see the blur of my excitement, my hands shaking, alive with anticipation of the show ahead.

When Alex plays he prefers to stand towards the back of the stage, he’s almost shy, laughing while looking down at his shoes. No showboating. He’s uncomfortable in the spotlight, happier to live through his fingers as they travel up and down the neck of his guitar. Happier living through music. The consensus in later reviews of this show was that it was a little sloppy, a little careless, but in a way that made it a real Big Star show. Most people there were just happy to be there, to share the same space with a band that seems to never have really existed at all, that came and went, and then came back again, alive once more.

I take another photo that night of Alex; in this one Alex is blurry, walking back after the show to collect his coat again. It looks as if he’s barely there: as if he’s liminal, on the edge of life. A ghost. It’s a trick of photography, how cameras capture light, but of course since then I’ve attributed a far greater meaning to it.

Alex died almost exactly four months later.

You better not leave me here... How could you leave me here?
 

I didn’t really intend to make this an essay about death. This album isn’t defined by Alex Chilton’s death: it’s punctuated by it. It’s an odd, errant drumbeat. A closed parentheses on a footnote in the liner notes. It shouldn’t even matter. I set out, in fact, to write the precise opposite: I wanted to make it an essay about how alive everything is when I listen to this album. How underneath Jody’s drums on “Back of a Car” I can hear the hiss of summer insects outside the car windows, how there in Alex’s voice is a sunset, a good one. Sitting on a hill above a city, any city, your city, the sun setting, the car stereo on, your heart beating hard because you think you might be falling in love. That’s what this sounds like. Like those moments in life when you feel so alive and so head over heels in love with the world that you can’t imagine ever leaving it. I love you too.

Life is a messy tangle of shitty and awkward and boring moments, too. The whole album sounds to me like this kind of living. Like sloppy, honest-to-goodness real living. Drunk sex and vinyl booths in bars (“Mod Lang”) and the feel of your pillow on your cheek the next morning (“What’s Going Ahn”). A photograph of a bare lightbulb and a sex position poster in a blood red room. The crumpled up love letter that is “Way Out West.” Folding a coat.

And then, after all these moments, after the shitty and the boring and the euphoric, we go. Everything is here and then not here: those insects hissing in the background are only around for one season, before their song fades and we’re left alone to ponder what comes next. The leaves go brown and crisp and fall. We see our breath in the air. And there it is: mortality. Humming underneath everything. Reminding us what Alex sings in “Daisy Glaze”:

You’re gonna die. Yes, you’re gonna die. Got to go.
You’re gonna die. You’re gonna decease.

That’s it. That’s life. That’s being alive. The lyrics belie the music: that soaring guitar, those urgent drums. He makes dying sound so alive. Because that’s exactly what being alive is about: we butt our heads against our own mortality, and when we strike against death hardest, with the most urgency to live: that is when we feel the most alive.

Alex Chilton bumped around the universe, believing in astrology (of course he believed in stars!), fighting to stay alive himself some nights, drunk on couches, in booths at TGI Fridays, fucking and passing out. I like to think that when we die our atoms become a part of the universe. I like to think that these songs belong to the universe. That these songs make our universe. Those handclaps on “O My Soul” and “She’s a Mover” and that sloppy harmonica on “Life Is White”—they have entered the world, stirred the ghosts.

A haunting.

We should be terrified: we should be quivering in our shoes, waiting for the grim reaper to descend. I think he’s there most of the time. But I swear to god even Death stops to listen too when “September Gurls” comes on. I loved you; well never mind. And in that moment of carefree carelessness we’re so alive, and Alex Chilton is suddenly so alive, that we terrify the grim reaper himself, life fills our chests, and nothing matters in that moment. Not even death. Death is background to living, a hiss under the drums. End parentheses. Nothing matters, and at the same time everything—fumbling through coat pockets, waking up, seeing our breath in front of our faces—matters now more than ever.

—Zan McQuade

Photography by Zan McQuade

#406: PJ Harvey, "Rid of Me" (1993)

Last time there was a working bulb in that socket, I watched her through the mirror, in the shower, as she tossed her head back and around the way women know how to do. While sloughing off  the water hung up in all that hair seems like the primary intention of this motion, it’s just a secondary effect of a much more engaging ritual. A mystery is demonstrated when a body traces one momentary arch in space, there’s your primary purpose: the translation of subtlety into raw power, the way women know how to do. The Greeks talked a lot about furies and passions.  She knew the difference, and conflated them per her whim, blazing and terrifying as retribution and then the lightbulb blew, and then the light just went out. The explosion feathered tiny shards of glass onto the tile like moths. It was an unimpressive sound, I know, but noises get louder in dark bathrooms and the report felt like we were tied together and shot out of a cannon into night, like a release, like somebody putting a fire out.

Nobody ever changed the bulb, so I piss in the dark by echolocation now. Hand planted on the tile above the commode, tapping out a rhythm as though there’s a song in my head or I’m waiting. Sometimes I mumble melodies and words: “Show yourself to me and no one else. I’ll believe you.” But there are no words, no signs. Nothing. “Speak,” I’ll say, “I’m listening. God’s Truth. I’m not lying.” Nothing but the sound of a guy with his dick in his hand, listening for that pitch in the water—deeper in the middle than at the edges, like a tympany—that means you’re hitting your mark, finding some center, finally and for the first time in who knows how long. “Mary. Jane. Pollyanna. Where are you hid?”

She slept sometimes. After fever, after hair doused in gasoline got set alight and set free, and with all the blizzards and demons cast out noisily, then fury calmed, menace hibernated, and passion remained like a halo. I watched the moon come up through the window once. It laid a hazy, gauzy pall on our skin as it eclipsed behind the pendulous arm of a street lamp outside. Those high-pressure sodium vapor bulbs generate this ricking, tacking buzz; the same molecules that float in the ocean excited into a glow that, my hand to God, is the closest synthetic approximation of moonlight you’ll see.

In all the old ballads, everybody’s pure, virginal skin is described as lily white; she slept as I watched the earth’s only satellite swing through the sky, and as I thought of a Cold War and of Yuri Gagarin, and as I wished that I could follow him as he chased Apollo who never knew that the sun could even set, and as I saw the moonlight and the streetlight on our skin, I saw that we were not lily white, that we were less than lily white.

Tonight at the foot of my bed there are stars at my feet. Outside, through the threadbare strokes of the mad sextet who practices infrequently and poorly down the hall, I heard a human howling. I was quickened and terrified by what sounded like someone actively, violently, removing their own leg in a panicked effort to forget a terminal, aching fever in the head.

That night, as she swung from the ceiling, she told me some things. Damn your chest-beating. Please just stop your fucking screaming. Good Lord, you never stop. I’m bleeding. Just you stop your screaming. She screamed this at me and called me by my name, Henry Lee, until I knew her words by heart, until I felt my heart become bigger, until I learned how to walk again with tenderness and rage in me: loud, and with a reason, with passion and fury and ecstasy. Ekstasis: outside of one’s self; so said the Greeks.

And I thought that maybe I had never come back after that light bulb exploded, and so I dressed and went out into the street.

Somebody was playing a Bob Dylan cover somewhere which should have been more pleasant, but which sounded like something breaking hard. I walked in the dark in wide train track circles under security lights. I crawled on my belly beneath a fence to the creek where storm-water overflow runs in miles of concrete basin. I watched ripples in the darkness for some time from the brush and bramble, and a snake wove between my legs, and I was reminded of what I’d heard: that our pre-human ancestors, the ones with acute vision, our ancestors who were better at seeing things like snakes in the grass; they were the ones who didn’t get bitten, who didn’t die from snake bites, and who had children, and by this winding, generations-long mechanism, human vision, the ability to see danger in dim light, increased. I thought of the return of the Year of the Snake and of the divinity of calendars, the divinity of wide wide arcs transecting space, and that you could stand still, for a lifetime, and take solace knowing that at least you’d ridden on the back of something, measuring the length and breadth of thunderstorms and birthrights, standing on the shoulders of a fifty-foot queen who has demands of her own.

I crawled under the fence, came back from the wastelands, and a dry smoke in the streets obscured my vision again, though it could have been the fog of morning that I caught in the face, that moistened my eyes. I wandered in the direction of home as the sky blushed through all the shades of dawn—peach and plum and Rose of Sharon—I saw a woman alone at a bus stop, gesticulating close to her chest, palm up, then pointing, as if in needful conversation with a confidant. As I drew near I saw a shawl, and a familiar calico, and, because it was day now, and not the night, the street light went out, the sodium vapor bulb given rest and repose, just as I walked behind her. I was unrecognized as the pretender. In answer to a question posed by her companion, whom I could not see, I heard her say this, only: …No. I’ve missed him.

I agreed, and I thought to myself, “Yes, I have missed him too. I too have missed him.”

—Joe Manning

#407: The Clash, "Sandinista!" (1980)

1. The Magnificent Seven: Wonderful. A high water mark for this entire album and such a promising start. Still, the song hints of the tragedy to follow, particularly when Joe Strummer rhymes “mobster” and “lobster.”

2. Hitsville U.K.: A Phil Spector-style rock and roll song. It is great. Legit great. Using pop forms to satirize is something the Clash was always good at. But doesn’t it just sound a bit too polished? I mean, when you have the means to record a song like this and your homage is this good you probably learn to see the world as the monster you’re mocking.

3. Junco Partner: Our first look at Clash-Dub. This is a mild success that, unfortunately, is a bellwether for the far worse experiments to follow. The Clash were always advocates of reggae/dub, so this development shouldn’t surprise anyone. Unfortunately, instead of taking dub elements and crafting them into the Clash sound, the whole enterprise sounds more like blue-eyed reggae phoniness. It’s Pat Boone doing Horace Andy.

4. Ivan Meets G.I. Joe: A Studio 54 reference in a song about nuclear war. It may have seemed revelatory in 1980 but neither of those subjects have aged well in the agit-pop department.

5. The Leader: A totally suitable Clash rockabilly song. If one were to play a game and attempt to reduce all 36 songs on this album to a more tolerable 12-15 songs, this would surely make the list.

6. Something About England: We are currently 1/9th of the way through this thing. If listening to this record start to finish were a family vacation, by now we’d have had a huge outburst at our annoying kids and be sitting in a too-silent car feeling wave after wave of guilt wash over us. Sandinista made us bad parents.

7. Rebel Waltz: I will bet $100 that this was the first song Wes Anderson ever heard. He was in SoHo, in a tiny shop that sold nothing but leather elbow patches and doll furniture.

8. Look Here: The first song that feels more like a rave or gag than anything serious. As a listener, you need to draw the line when bands do this sort of thing. Because someone definitely told them not to record this. And where once they might have felt humility and said, “Yeah, this is a waste of people’s time,” now arrogance pushes them forward. Ugh, you can just hear them all cracking up at how funny they are.

9. The Crooked Beat: The story goes that the Clash fell asleep in the studio holding their instruments and this is what they recorded. It became the inspiration for the “Found Footage” genre of movies which, by and large, are better if for no other reason than they don’t take so long.

10. Somebody Got Murdered: Somebody = the Clash’s legacy.

11. One More Time / 12. One More Dub: No reason to separate these two songs into two, individual lines. “One More Time” is great but then here comes more dub. And there is even a sort of skit on there. Because let’s face it, the thing that makes good albums great is always skits.

13. Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice): Parenthetical in the song title. WATCH OUT.

14. Up In Heaven (Not Only Here): Oh hey, look at that, another one. Probably a coincidence and not someone being clever. Incidentally, this is another awesome Clash song.

15. Corner Soul: And here, on a pretty bad album, is just a stunning piece of music. Bands do this to fuck with you. The brilliance of the song keeps you coming back to the album because, well, a few songs are good so maybe you’re just wrong about the others. “Corner Soul” absolutely shines at the midpoint of Sandinista. This is The Clash finding success with Dub. Topper Headon’s drums skitter, mimicking reverb echo. Strummer’s lyrics evoke rather than dictate and that gives the listener space to bring something of themselves into the song. It is the type of track that really gets you to wonder if you missed something in all the clunkers that surround it. It’ll make you second guess yourself. Maybe you just need to grow into it? Nope, Sandinista is a solid EP with 28 bonus tracks.

16. Let’s Go Crazy: This is a Prince cover. Check it out. It is good. (It isn’t either of those things.)

17. If Music Could Talk: If this music could talk, it would beg to be put out of its misery. Seriously, Clash sax? Like, smooth jazz Clash?

18. The Sound of Sinners: A gospel tune. You know where Bono learned to be a self righteous windbag with absolutely no self-awareness? He learned it from Sandinista.

19. Police on my Back: THE CLASSIC CUT. I feel bad for this song. It should be on a better album. It wouldn’t be too out of place on Combat Rock which, for the record, is a much better album. But here it is, withering. Consider this your last supper...things will not be this good ever again.

20. Midnight Log: Your basic rockabilly Clash song.

21. The Equaliser: Even a blind dub squirrel finds a dub nut. Hey, a broken dub clock is still right once every 36 songs.

22. The Call Up: This is proof of concept for Sandinista. If they took care and made everything as good as “The Call Up” or “Magnificent Seven” or “Corner Soul” I would be writing about one of the best albums of the decade. Something about the moment when 70s myopia exploded into 80s excess.  Instead, I have to march down, way down, way, way down, to goddamn "Washington Bullets"...

23. Washington Bullets: Joe Strummer wakes from a feverish sleep wrought with dreams about human tragedy and the modern condition. Frantically, he reaches for his bedside notebook and scribbles; “Washington Bullets = Basketball Team...but also Washington Bullets = actual bullets and American army guys.” He draws some boobs, too. Then falls back to sleep.

24. Broadway: This song drove me to drink...paint thinner. Also, another little skit! This one actually foreshadows a song to come. I bet it was all Paul Simonon’s idea.

25. Lose this Skin: Tymon Dogg, the singer on this track, was an old roommate of Joe Strummer, had an eclectic and varied career as a musician and would go on the play in the Mescaleros and so, it is with a heavy heart that I say his voice sounds like a helium fart.

26. Charlie Don’t Surf: Originally, I wanted to set this up as a big Heart of Darkness riff but, given the Apocalypse Now reference herein I felt like maybe I should take the high road...so I wrote that fart joke on “Lose this Skin.” #pulitzer

27. Mensforth Hill: I’m sure some of you are upset that I am taking huge cheap shots at the Clash. Well, this song is the reason. This is the entire reason.

28. Junkie Slip: I am now ready for the end times.

29. Kingston Advice: I say, “I got some advice for ya.” And then I squeeze a whoopee cushion.

30. The Street Parade: In here, somewhere among all those delayed guitars, is a pretty good song by the British band the Clash. They say if you look into a mirror, light a candle, put a picture of your crush into your pocket and then play this song, your student loans will double.

31. Version City: The Clash pretty much stop trying from here on out. “I’ve never seen such funky country” is a lyric they wrote. Surely, at least one band member was thinking, “I need to quit this band,” while all this was going on, right? And if not, were they all 100% onboard for the harmonica solo AND rehashing the “Magnificent Seven” riff?

32. Living in Fame: It just feels like the Clash decided to include a song by another band here. The focus of the song? Well, I am glad you asked. The focus of the song is that the Clash are a good band.

33. Silicone on Sapphire. “Let’s bring back that xylophone from 'Washington Bullets'…” - the Clash

34. Version Pardner: An old, old computer wrote this song based on listening to the previous 33 songs on the album.

35. Career Opportunities: OK, different versions of songs with reworked or repeated motifs on a record that is HEAVILY influenced by a burgeoning dub/sample culture? SURE. FINE. You stink at it...but fine. So what is your excuse for including a Kidz Bop version of one of your best songs from your first record, Mr. The Clash? The lesson here is that if you’re someone who thinks you’ll never fall off the rails, that your life will be good forever and the world is a wonderful, kind place...just remember...the original “Career Opportunities” was released in 1977 and this version dropped in 1980. It only took the Clash three years to go from alpha to omega.

36. Shepherds Delight: So, why are we here? What does it all mean? What have I done? Is there a God? Why did I basically trash an album that is, at worst, widely agreed upon as a top 500 record of all time? Well, because sometimes things can still be absolutely awful and totally essential. What a huge pile of crap. Dig in.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#408: Sinead O'Connor, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" (1990)

Devin decided to change. She told me to sit tight but then changed her mind. “Will you just look in on him?” she asked. “Make sure he isn’t dead.” She dropped her wine glass off on the kitchen counter and went back into her bedroom. I got up and peeked in on Troy, her boyfriend, passed out drunk in her waterless bathtub. He was face down and ass up. Orange vomit speckled the fixtures.

I watched his back inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, and gave him a nudge with the tip of my shoe. I knew practically nothing about him besides what I could see right in front of me and what I’d heard from friends of friends, most of it not super flattering. He was tall, broad, handsome like a rock climber; he was also, I understood, a melancholic drunk who tended to grab things and shake them—like parking meters and people’s heads—and then get sad and apologize too much. Part of me wanted to pee into his beautiful hair. Instead, I backed out and quietly closed the door.

Down the hall, the door to Devin’s bedroom was open. I leaned just right and could see the bare skin of her back, the very edge of it, could see it stretch and move as she did, the shadows and indentations, the curve of it into her shoulder and the back of her neck. Then she moved forward and out of sight. Was maybe stepping out of her shorts.

“Drink another beer,” she said. She stepped into view again and in her movements I could make out the cage of ribs along her side, a purple cluster of bruises. In another scene I walked back to her bedroom, steady and with purpose, noiselessly, harmlessly, and pressed myself gently into her back, enveloped and coated her like warm wax. In this one I did nothing. I turned away, wondering how I’d arrived here, how my footsteps could possibly have brought me to this place.

I busied myself with her CD collection, which she’d stacked in tall crooked towers on a desk. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Oh, I think we’re beyond that by now,” she said. “It’s either late or it’s early.”

I wanted to glance back but kept my eyes on the cases. Browsing the titles I could trace our history, which stretched back like nerves. They were stacked in no discernable order but I started organizing them in my mind, finding all the points of intersection where our lives had overlapped and all the giant gaps in between where we’d drifted out of sight. So much of it was music that I hated—too caustic and pissy. She was “Bullet with Butterfly Wings;” I was “Tonight, Tonight.”

I ran my fingers over the spines, tapping each disc I recognized, marking them with invisible white dots. This one tasted like cigarettes and puke. This one felt like the worn cushion of a couch against my back in an un-air-conditioned apartment. This one was cold outside, and wet, and perfectly dark. This one had her fingers in my hair as I drifted near sleep. I turned around but Devin was nowhere to be seen.

At the bottom of one stack, pinned like a fossil under the strata, was I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. It took some doing, but I wedged it free. The case had a busted hinge and came apart in my hand, and suddenly Devin was standing next to me, her arm a vine around mine, her cheek on my shoulder. She’d put on old jeans and a tank top and had gathered her hair back in a messy bunch. She looked very tired.

“Aw lookit,” she said. “Look what you dug up.” She took the half of the jewel case that held the liner notes and started flipping through them. She burrowed her hand in mine, took it out again. “Oh man,” she said. She rubbed her eye on my sleeve, tossed the liner notes down and walked away. I plucked out the disc, examined it for scratches. It was in pretty good shape.

“Don’t play that,” she said from the couch. She held a long, thin paintbrush and a small jar of paint. She dipped the brush and started painting her toenails white. “I don’t want to hear that voice tonight. It’s too perfect.”

The voice was everything. I’d said as much years ago when I first played Devin the album. I liked the softness of it, she liked the spit. It was the only time our tastes in music had so perfectly overlapped. This one was a bone-cold winter and a week under heavy blankets, when we sucked each other’s breath and lay together with our clothes on, when we put vodka in spaghetti sauce, when we sat shivering on her roof and I flicked the cigarettes out of her mouth if she didn’t smoke them fast enough, when we watched the first and last fifteen minutes of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, when she pressed her nose to my temple and cradled my head in her arms.

It had been the voice—that voice which was strength and an ache, both delicate and jagged. I’d played her “Three Babies” and said, “Doesn’t this song make you want to weep?” She gave me a withering look, played “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and said, “Doesn’t this song just make you want to fuck?” She played it over and over, that pulsing, rhythmic outro. She sang the words, though I could tell she’d never really listened to them, each time with a different look in her eye that I couldn’t quite seem to make sense of or translate quickly enough. We’d only tasted each other—only nibbled, never bit—and at the end of that week her father got sick and she’d gone home. I didn’t see her again for eight months.

I looked at her now, with her heel dug into the couch, staring emptily at her toes, and wondered if she was waiting for me to leave. From the bathroom came a thud that rattled the light fixtures. We both pricked our ears but neither of us moved.

“Maybe I should go,” I said. She looked at me but didn’t say anything. Her face was unreadable. “Should I go?” I asked, but got no answer. For a second I thought she might cry, though I’d never seen that before and would have no idea what it might look like. She finished one foot, brought the other up and started in on it.

I set the CD in its case and put the two parts carefully back together. I wanted to play it; I wanted it to communicate something for me. I thought about wedging it back into the bottom of the stack but then just left it where it was, sitting out separate from the others, figuring she could put it where she liked. There was another thump against the wall, but this time she did not look up.

I fidgeted, looked around. I thought she might be waiting for me to say something. “You want me to stay?” I asked.

She snorted. “Yeah. The three of us could have brunch together.” She leaned in close for the smaller toes. She was doing a pretty haphazard job, though she was staring intently.

“No, I mean.” I put my hands in my pockets, took them out again. “Devin, do you want me to stay?”

She laughed but it didn’t last, and when it was over her face went dim. Her mouth opened and closed and I could see her swallow. If there was something she was waiting to hear, this was as close as I would get to saying it. From the bathroom came a sound like strangulation and a series of poundings so violent I half expected a bare foot, a bloody elbow, to come bursting through the plaster. Devin looked at me and smiled.

“No,” she said. “Nope, I don’t.” She set down her paint and brush and stood up. We looked at each other over this long gulch. It was perfectly silent. Neither of us moved.

—Joe P. Squance

#409: The Doors, "Strange Days" (1967)

With his beaded necklace, oily ringlets, and feline glare, Jim Morrison peered over my bed throughout my years in high school. I don’t know what possessed my adolescent self to tack up this particular poster, as his melodramatic, shirtless pose embodied one of the many qualities of the Doors that I derided: the exploitation of Morrison’s charisma to maximize the band’s teenybopper appeal. But there he was, the Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Risin’, unblinking and aloof while I learned to knot a necktie, solve equations with two variables, and meander through the pentatonic scale on my Gibson. Sometimes at night, cocooned in headphones, I would rhapsodize about traveling through time to become the bassist the band never had. Gig after gig, our primal, organ-drenched vamps would entrance Morrison, beer sweat pouring through our clothes, as he prowled those stoned children in the pit. We want the world and we want it NOW. I avoided thinking about his beard streaked with grey, how bloated he looked in his last Parisian snapshots, how melancholy and deep his baritone sounded on “Hyacinth House.” Like most teenagers, I policed my fantasies for signs of consequence. Instead, in the flood of imaginary spotlights, my jazzy runs held our nightmare jams together as we careened from exaltation to madness and somehow made it back.

At the close of 1967, the Doors were America’s most dynamic rock band. With the exception of Love—their Elektra label-mates—no other California group from the late 1960s unified such a disparate range of influences and distilled them into an original, cohesive sound: blues, jazz, surf, flamenco, pop, psychedelia, chamber music, cabaret, and French surrealist poetry are all ingredients in the Doors’ cosmic stew. That the band recorded six studio albums in five years is nothing short of remarkable given their combative personalities, relentless touring, and Morrison’s various extravagancies. Their self-titled debut, released in January of that year, is the stuff of legend. The band’s sophomore effort, Strange Days—released just eight months later—is both hard to praise and hard to hate in its entirety. It is an album jarring in its uneven compositions, poor sequencing, and relative brevity (it only runs 35 minutes), yet it somehow maintains a brooding fortitude. Much like the Doors’ oeuvre itself, Strange Days is best remembered for its haunted songs of forlorn love and social disillusionment, which, four decades later, still endure as a visceral counterargument to the harmonious platitudes of the sixties.

The album’s strongest songs find the Doors unchanged in sound but far more cynical in worldview. The album’s kickoff track, the dismal and reverb-drenched “Strange Days,” made for a peculiar single, and its uninviting moodiness still renders it a poor place to start. Regardless, the propulsive bass lines from studio musician Douglass Lubahn and the song’s major-key bridge keep its uninspired melody from devolving into a rainy day personified. “Love Me Two Times” is a raunchy goodbye ballad that foreshadows the straightforward sound the Doors would discover on Morrison Hotel, which has always been my favorite among their records, as it captures them as The World’s Darkest Bar Band. “You’re Lost Little Girl,” with its subdued textures alluding to the Beatles circa Rubber Soul, harkens back to “The Crystal Ship” from their first album, with Ray Manzarek’s organ and Robby Krieger’s guitar in perfect conversation. “Moonlight Drive” is perhaps the only Doors song that is truly evergreen—it would have fit on any of their albums—the result of it being their oldest collaboration, honed by years of tweaking. Finally, “When the Music’s Over” is a gritty, growled retelling of that other ten-minute odyssey, “The End,” but lyrics of failed romance have been displaced by a mocking, self-referential examination of rock’s transitory bliss.

The bad material on Strange Days is truly bad, and only matched by The Soft Parade—the Doors’ one true flop—in terms of its inanity and disposability. I’ve never been able to fathom why “People Are Strange” has endured as one of the Doors’ iconic songs since it sounds like it was written by a twelve year old, and they perform it with the hesitancy of a cover band playing their first frat party. Campy and obnoxious, it begins as a show tune and ends as pub singalong. “Unhappy Girl” and “My Eyes Have Seen You” strain toward goth-pop, the latter of which sounds like a rip-off of the Zombies. “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind” is too wispy and repetitive to be a successful song, which make it the stereotypical deep album cut that most listeners skip whenever the >> button is within reach. Last and certainly least is Morrison’s spoken-word poem “Horse Latitudes,” rendered with such mawkishness that it is impossible to take seriously. To this day, its hokey sound effects remind me of the Trojan rabbit catapulting over the castle’s parapet in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As a lifelong fan, I’ve accepted that the Doors’ legacy is equal parts muck and magic, but reading Stephen Davis’s Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend in the fall of 2004 gave me context and compassion for the band’s various blunders. From Oliver Stone’s bombastic 1991 film to that starry-eyed book of myths No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman, the Doors have always suffered from a lack of credible biography. Davis’s critical and objective meditation filled the gap. I read his book a year after visiting Morrison’s grave in Paris on a drizzly day of sightseeing with my friend Andy. My most vivid memories of that long, melancholy afternoon are study abroad clichés: trying to decipher a cartoonish city map written in French, searching out a lunch we could both stomach and afford, and shuffling through Pere Lachaise Cemetery with rain-sogged shoes. The following fall, I breezed through Davis’s tome on Sunday afternoons reclined in the tub of my drafty Toledo apartment—the grim irony of Morrison’s body being found in his bath escaped me—soothing the war wounds I earned playing pick-up football with my grad school pals. The bathroom’s emerald tiles glinted in the autumnal light, relics from the gaudy decade about which I was reading.

Suds-covered, groggy, and bruised, I finally saw the panoramic sweep of Morrison’s confliction and the band’s perseverance in the face of constant skirmishing. A bourgeois military brat, his childhood relocations left him a detached, habitual liar. (In his early interviews, he tells reporters that his entire family is dead.) Morrison’s secretive bisexuality compromised his ability to form relationships, and his covert liaisons were often a liability for his bandmates and their handlers, as their fortunes relied in no small part on his heterosexual machismo. Most significantly, by the time he was in his early twenties, Morrison’s alcoholism was the central force in his life. A dabbler in psychedelics, booze was his disease, and his adulthood was a prolonged drunkenness punctuated by brief moments of sobriety in which he wrote poems of naïve promise. In that tub, my silly, anachronistic yearning to be the band’s bass-slung backbone morphed into a young man’s appreciation and pity. When I closed my eyes and drifted off, I imagined Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore wincing on stage amid the feedback squall, the slurred lyrics echoing through their monitors, and the manic adulation of fans who kept their arms outstretched in the arena’s clammy darkness. The band wore the shadows of Jim’s spoiled tragedy. Hunched and solemn, they shut their eyes until he howled again—bestial, unknowable, midnight’s clown.

—Adam Tavel

#410: Bob Dylan, "Time Out of Mind" (1997)

For three years I walked—we walked, I mean, James Brown and I—every evening near sunset, through the fields behind our house, through milkweed and Virginia Creeper and ashy stalks of dried brown grass, across the tiny winding inches-deep Rutledge Creek, which for a while James Brown was afraid to wade through and so had to be carried across.

In his lifetime James Brown—not my James Brown, of course, but the other one, the original, with that voice, those moves, with two legs instead of four—in his lifetime James Brown spoke and sang and shouted some wonderful words, among them these: You may not be looking for the promised land, but you might find it anyway.

I wasn’t looking for the promised land. I was just walking. One of my eyes had gone bad; I couldn’t read or write. I’d fallen a fair distance out of love with my own life. Walking seemed like a good idea, and James Brown always wanted to go with me. Somehow he knew the very moment I’d even simply begun thinking about setting off. He wagged his tail double-time, sidled right up to my feet, made sure he kept close. He had nowhere in particular he was trying to get to; he just wanted out.

*

There’s a whole lot of walking in Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. The first words in the first song: I’m walking through streets that are dead / Walking, walking, with you in my head. Then one song to the next, the walking goes on and on: down dirt roads, through summer nights, into the middle of nowhere, through the mist and through the mind and along the line.

And when the walking stops, everything just gets worse: He’s pacing around rooms or standing out in the cold or crawling down avenues. He’s drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep or wading through high deep muddy water or praying for salvation laying ’round in a one-room country shack. He’s twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound.

I’m beginning to hear voices and there’s no one around, that weary croaking scorched husk of a cavernous voice admits. Well, I’m all used up and the fields have turned brown.

*

It’s in the fall, of course, with all that dying left to do in the cold months ahead and when you feel all used up and the fields have turned brown, that walking becomes a kind of sullen gray defiance, a march against rather than a journey toward. Walking in the fall, you understand that all manner of love and beauty has already been lost. You go on because, well, what’s the choice?

Everywhere, it seems, and all through time, anguish and longing, love and loss are the fuel that sets the afflicted heart aflutter. When I hear your name the death sweats come on me, the cantaor in flamenco cries out as though his side has just been pierced by a poisoned arrow. Sweet Jesus! Compañera, what I go through, loving you! Or he yelps with bitter resignation: I went to a field to cry like a mad man screaming, and even the wind kept telling me you loved someone else.

In fado the fadista, arms cast wide in grand supplication, laments:

My love my love
My knot of pain
My millstone of tenderness
My vessel of torture
This sea has no cure
This sky has no air
We stopped the wind
We don’t know how to swim
And we, we die
Slowly, so slowly

And here in America, in our many musics, all of which have roots tangled in the relentless horror and desolate hope of the African American, dark is the night and cold is the ground, love is careless and hearts are weary, and days are lonesome and long as we wander through a world of woe.

But hope, desolate hope: There's no sickness, toil, nor danger in that fair land to which I go.

*

After the uninterrupted unrequitedness of “Love Sick,” hope briefly bobs to the surface in “Dirt Road Blues,” the second track of Time Out of Mind, but it’s a grim hope at best:

Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed

That’s about the same kind of miserably happy resolution you find in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” when the poet-child listens carefully to the sea waves and discovers that they are hissing melodious, laving him softly all over, the word of the sweetest song, and all songs…the low and delicious word Death.

*

In 1875 Whitman endured his second stroke. The first, two years earlier, did its damage to his left arm and leg. This second stroke took care of the right. He moved in with his brother George, living in the same room that his mother, who’d just passed away, had been living in until her death. Five editions of Leaves of Grass had been published. Whitman’s life’s work—his life itself—seemed about done. He was fifty-seven.

When he was fifty-seven, Bob Dylan seemed about done as well. He’d released a couple of covers albums. He’d unveiled a third volume of greatest hits, got feted for 30 years in the troubadour business, unplugged himself—had he still been plugged in?—for MTV.

Maybe that low and delicious word, the word final, superior to all, was ringing ever louder in his ears, and he went looking for some way to answer it. Maybe he’d just sat down for a spell, taken a rest.

Whatever the reason, in 1997, Dylan released Time Out of Mind and laid claim as firm as he ever had to wandering and weariness and misery, laid claim not to the barbaric yawp so much as the hoarse murmuring of the sea’s waves, trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

It’s not dark yet, he sings—and then there’s a wry smile, an acquiescence—but it’s getting there.

*

In the fall, as the sun began to set and James Brown and I turned to head back toward home, thousands upon thousands of starlings would take flight from a distant bamboo grove for their evening murmuration, a remarkable weaving and shimmering and shape-shifting display that never failed to leave me breathless. Then they disappeared, sank back down into the bamboo grove, and night began.

I been hurt all my life. I learned how to turn the pain around and get energy, and I learned how to be alone. Those are James Brown’s words.

Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain, the old man that Dylan has become sings on Time Out of Mind.

Of course, that was nearly two decades ago. Dylan was only fifty-seven.

Even my James Brown, four legs and all, knows the classic reply to that line: He’s younger than that now.

Time Out of Mind—what exactly does that title mean anyway? That one has put time—and all its destruction—out of one’s mind? That for a time one was out of one’s mind?

Two decades later and Dylan croons Sinatra now like he hasn’t a care in the world, like it’s all been gravy, like he never bothered to listen to the low murmuring and heard the waves whispering that one low and delicious word.

Maybe he’s just sitting a spell, catching his breath.

—John Gregory Brown

Photography by John Gregory Brown

#411: Eric Clapton, "461 Ocean Boulevard" (1974)

I’ve been having stress dreams lately. Usually, as their name would suggest, they happen when I’m unusually stressed out about something—daytime worries carrying into the night—but I’ve been puzzled by them this time because that’s not the case. It almost seems like they’ve been happening because I’ve been so happy in the day-to-day. Apparently I am a person who cannot not worry. When my conscious self doesn’t, my subconscious takes over.

And so, the dreams. A dream in which I’m trying to convince my father not to sever his own arm from his body (he is doing it to save us, somehow, and I want him to slow down, to be sure there is no other way, but it seems I will not be able to convince him). A dream in which we are about to be buried under a wave of rubble, and I will not be able to save anyone. A dream in which I’m running down the street, rushing to get somewhere (by the time I wake I’ve forgotten where I was trying to go), and my legs keep moving slower, butting up against more and more resistance—I look down and see I am wading in water, I keep pushing and pushing against it, trying to run as the water rises, it never occurs to me to swim. A dream in which my mother and I are fighting, she is going to hurt someone if I cannot make her understand, she is never going to understand, in the dream I am so angry, in the dream I know I can’t stop until she listens but I also know she will never listen. A dream in which a boyfriend who is an amalgam of every boyfriend I’ve ever had—a series of boyfriends shape-shifting as one—betrays me over and over, in a different way each time. A dream in which I am an addict, with cravings I cannot control, and I watch myself do terrible things, I watch myself destroy everything, horrified.

Again and again, I wake unsettled. I wake worried or angry or ashamed. I wake frustrated with myself, my life, the ones I love. I wake in the middle of the night and shift to my boyfriend’s side of the bed, put my arm across him, I had a bad dream, I say, by which I mean a dream that made me feel bad, and he murmurs something unintelligible, pats my hand, and I rest my head against him until I fall back asleep. In the morning, he’ll ask what the dream was, and I will not remember. Or I wake in my own bed, throw the covers off and feel the fan move the air around me, take a sip of water, say out loud to myself, Settle down. Or I wake and it is morning. The dream life is not your life, I think as I shower, the dream life is not your life, let it slide away. I breathe, and the feelings linger even though they are not real. Settle down, I think as I make coffee. Settle.

I think Eric Clapton must have known that feeling. 461 Ocean Boulevard feels like one long settling down. A mellowing. An exhale.

From the image on the cover of the album, 461 Ocean Boulevard looks like a vacation. The sort of place where you can rise as late or as early as you’d like, sitting in the yard with a cup of coffee as the day begins or missing the morning altogether. At such a place, you’d wear clothes so comfortable they could double as pajamas, or you’d throw a big T-shirt on over a bathing suit and that’s how you’d go about your day. Because I am a writer, during my stay there, I would fill notebooks. I would read books I love. I would do these things, probably outside, in comfortable sunny weather, all day. It would be productive, but it wouldn’t feel like work. It would feel, instead, like an oasis.

And that’s how the songs on this album feel.

When I listen to rock music made in the ’60s and ’70s, I often think of my college boyfriend, who, when I was first getting to know him, declared that all music worth listening to was made before 1980. As far as I can tell, this is a sentiment not uncommon to nineteen-year-old boys.

They just don’t make music like that anymore, I remember him saying, which is true. At the time, I believed what he said not necessarily because I actually agreed, but because I thought he was smarter than me, that he understood things about music I did and could not.

But, so many years later, it still seems to me that the appeal of a lot of classic rock is undeniable. It’s music where you can really hear them playing the instruments. You can’t ignore that it was created by people. The songs have multiple components, and each component is a made thing. There’s a thrill to hearing them come together.

It was music that was satisfying to listen to as I rode in his car (a blue Honda Prelude, low to the ground), wearing sunglasses, windows down, late summer. I don’t remember listening to Clapton specifically with him, but we must have. I remember him telling me a story his father had told him about going to a Clapton concert—strangely, I remember him telling me the story (it was over winter break, I was visiting him, we were in his childhood bedroom) without remembering the contents of the story itself. When he talked about music it was often in relation to his father. Although he never would’ve said it so plainly, he prided himself on liking music that his father also liked.

I sometimes wondered if his love for classic rock had more to do with creating a space he and his father could inhabit together more than anything else, a space that helped him foster friendships with other boys at school who also hungered for communion with their fathers—and isn’t everything about this, really, for everyone, when we are nineteen? How to live apart, to be on our own but also, somehow, secure the connections we need but don’t understand or want to admit to needing? These are the beginnings of the lessons we will continue learning, dilemmas we face and overcome again and again as we assemble them into a life.

And while we are all knee-deep in that assemblage, here is a thing to love about music: it calms, consoles, and connects us as we leave each moment and catch the next. As we hang in that space between, holding nothing. As we ground ourselves again. Settle down. Settle. And the calm song sympathizes, Dear Lord, give me strength to carry on. And the calm song implores you, Plant your love and let it grow. The words to the song are simpler than the song. You exhale. It is a relief. This is your life.

—Katelyn Kiley

#412: Wire, "Pink Flag" (1977)

“No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones,” Joe Strummer and Mick Jones harmonize—if that’s the right word—on “1977,” the B-side of the Clash’s first single, “White Riot.” With one catchy, singalong chorus, they clear away twenty-three years of (white) rock hegemony; the song’s very title is a call to look to the present, not the past, for pop vitality. The Clash record the song in February, 1977, and CBS releases it a month later. It isn’t the first U.K. punk 45—that was “New Rose” by the Damned, in 1976—but punk hasn’t yet spread far beyond New York and London. Still, Mark Perry has already claimed in his fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, that “Punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS.”

During a late 1970 White House trip, Elvis Presley tells President Richard Nixon that the Beatles are a primary cause of youth drug use and anti-American protest, and leaves Washington with an honorary DEA badge—though the Beatles, of course, officially split eight months earlier, via a press release from Paul McCartney and a report in the Daily Mirror the next day. In 1977, Elvis, overweight and stupefied on a cocktail of Demerol, Desbutal, Dexedrine, Dilaudid, Placidyl, Quaalude, and other drugs, spends most days in his Graceland bedroom. (“The medicine within me / no doctor could prescribe,” he sings on “Way Down”—his last single, released in June, 1977—though Dr. George Nichopolous writes scripts, according to Joel Williamson’s Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, “for him for at least 8,805 pills, tablets, vials, and injectables” in the first eight months of 1977.) On August 16, paramedics find Elvis, in mismatched pajamas, dead on the floor of his bathroom. For decades, his fans believe that he staged his own death to escape the pressures of fame. The first Elvis sighting occurs on August 18, 1977: he is seen pumping gas into his Cadillac at a service station in Georgia.

In 1977, John Lennon, living in the Dakota on the Upper West Side, spends “entire days in bed, blaming his ill health on sugar, wine, tobacco, and marijuana, all of which he continually vowed to give up, though he lacked the willpower to do so,” according to writer Geoffrey Giuliano. Yoko Ono flies to Colombia with her Tarot reader to visit a “witch,” whom she pays sixty thousand dollars to perform rituals to help her husband’s flagging career. Upon her return, Lennon meditates, practices yoga and self-hypnosis, and resumes a macrobiotic diet. A month later, inspired by The 700 Club, Lennon announces to his friends that he’s been born again. In the Virgin Islands, Paul and Linda McCartney stay on a yacht in Watermelon Bay, recording songs for a forthcoming Wings album. George Harrison, in a 1977 television interview, calls promoter Bill Sargent’s fifty million dollar offer for the Beatles to reunite “crazy, you know? It’s trying to put the responsibility of making the world a wonderful place again onto the Beatles. You know, I think that’s unfair. I know a lot of people like the Beatles, but it’s like, eight years ago we split up, and it’s like difficult, you know?” Ringo, in an interview of his own, claims that he’s “getting happier all the time.”

In February, 1977, the Rolling Stones sign a four-album, $14 million contract with EMI Records. “None of it’s got anything to do with money, oddly enough,” Mick Jagger claims in a Rolling Stone interview later that year. “I mean, it translates itself into money, but none of us are greatly concerned with making money.… I just try to make the best music I can.” (Addressing his “staunchest critics, the English punk rockers,” Jagger says, “I think the Sex Pistols have copped out. Now they’re on the front of Rolling Stone. That’s a real cop-out. I mean, if I were Johnny Rotten, I wouldn’t do either. I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. But that’s not important. The important thing is the Sex Pistols are all right, and all that. Not a bad band, not the best…”) Keith Richards is arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who find an ounce of heroin in his Toronto hotel room. (Asked by Rolling Stone if the band will tour if Richards goes to jail, Jagger responds, “If he were in jail for a long period of time, I suppose we’d have to. We can’t wait five years. In five years we won’t be touring at all…”)

Nostalgia is an easy target in 1976 and 1977: in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon, the United States celebrates its Bicentennial with a safe, selective reading of its history. The American Freedom Train, painted red, white, and blue, carries historical artifacts (George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, Paul Revere’s saddlebags, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s robes, John F. Kennedy’s draft of his inauguration speech) and Americana (the dress Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, a pair of Joe Louis’s boxing trunks, moon rocks) throughout the continental U.S. In Vincent Collins’s cartoon Bicentennial, produced by the United States Information Agency, a bald eagle hatches from an American flag egg with the sound of an explosion, and a cornucopia fires Model Ts, hamburgers, hot dogs, television sets, and baseballs from its mouth.

Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee prompts a similar outpouring of national pride. Bonfires are lit the length of the country from one the Queen ignites at Windsor Castle; a million people line the route to St. Paul’s cathedral to watch the royal family roll past in a golden carriage, on their way to a thanksgiving service, and another five hundred million tune in on TV; street parties are held across the country.

In such contexts, and in the context of 1970s rock, slagging Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones is neither revolutionary nor interesting, and pretty soon the tropes and gestures of punk have ossified nearly as much as those of classic rock. I don’t want to indulge fantasies of authenticity, but still, what sounded—or, let’s be honest, looked—fresh and intriguing in 1975 and 1976 is quickly co-opted and commodified by 1977. (“They walk around together / and try and look trendy / I think it’s a shame / that they all look the same,” Dan Treacy observes in 1978, in the Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks.”)

In December, 1977, Wire release Pink Flag—maybe the last punk LP, maybe the first post-punk LP. In either case, it’s a necessary corrective to both classic rock and punk orthodoxies. Art-school graduates, the band (Bruce Gilbert, Robert Gotobed, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman) have taught themselves to play their instruments since forming the previous year. The record begins not with a jolt, but a plucked bass note and slowly building drums: this song, called “Reuters,” offers the report of “our own correspondent”—“prices have risen since the government fell, casualties increase as the enemy shell.…”—and indicates the cool detachment with which Wire approach songcraft. “It’s So Obvious,” a fifty-two second surge, makes the Ramones sound slow and makes the Clash’s B-side from earlier in the year sound like straightforward rock and roll. If those bands are punk, what is this?  The guitars crunch, the bass gallops along, the drums tick without flourish. But the lyrics express disgust mainly via the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Colin Newman yelps, “This is ’77, nearly heaven, it’s black white and pink, just think, there’s more to come, hum hum hum hum, it’s so obvious. Well it’s all right, just listen, can’t wait for ’78, God those r.p.m., can’t wait for them, don’t just watch, hours happen, get in there kid, and snap them.” The entire presentation is precise-but-cryptic, almost an obscure mathematical expression. The best of the LP’s twenty-one tracks—only three of which exceed three minutes, and thirteen of which are half that length or less—consist of beguiling, stylized fragments: they’re at turns catchy, noisy, pretty, familiar, disorienting. The minute-twenty-five of “Mr. Suit” might be the origin of American hardcore, while the minute-nineteen of “Fragile” might be the most exquisite minimalist ballad of that era (at least, until Wire release “Outdoor Miner” in 1978).

“The whole idea around punk was that it was supposed to be new,” Colin Newman is quoted in Wilson Neate’s book, Pink Flag. “Where in 1977 it was failing in its promise was that it didn’t deliver anything new. Elements of punk were starting to look awfully like rock ’n’ roll, and that was the one thing I was totally convinced about: it didn’t matter what I was doing, it shouldn’t be rock ’n’ roll.”

Greil Marcus, in his 1978 Rolling Stone review of Pink Flag, pegged the band—the lyrics, in particular—as “almost hysterically Opaque” and “pointed straight toward art rock.” But what better response to an era of easy pronouncements and whitewashed histories than obscure utterances whose meanings can’t be diminished to the sloganeering of most punk—of most rock—much less the sloganeering of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic? I’ll take “Tears fall in slivers, you broke my shades, the light too bright, let me bury my heart” (from Pink Flag’s “Fragile”) over the single command I recall most vividly from the 1970s: “Have a Nice Day,” with the accompanying yellow smiley face.

In 1977, I begin first grade in Miss Charamella’s classroom at May Street School. What I know of pop music comes through the AM radio in my parents’ car, or the sixty or so LPs—Motown and Stax, folk, and, yes, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—my mother’s younger brothers haven’t borrowed from her permanently. Like many others, I discover punk only well after the fact: and when I do, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Clash, the Dead Boys, et. al., sound too obvious, too simple, too similar to the rock they allegedly deposed. Instead, I fall for Joy Division, the Slits, Swell Maps, Public Image Limited, Wire—the bands that follow the initial wave of punk, that twist and distort whatever expectations I bring to their music. I find Pink Flag at Rockit Records in the second half of the 1980s. Many of us believe, at least sometimes, we should have been born earlier: if, when I look back at it now, 1977 seems to involve so many fantasies—the fantasy of a reunited Beatles or an Elvis alive and well somewhere in hiding; the fantasy of a national past that never existed; or, in the cases of, say, disco or Star Wars, the fantasy of escaping a reality that feels boring—then maybe my fantasy is to have encountered Pink Flag when it came out, to have experienced it not just retrospectively. But the past is never the ideal time in which to have lived.

The Clash appropriate—homage or parody, take your pick—the sleeve art of Elvis’s first LP for their own London Calling in 1979, around the same time CBS promotes them as the “only band that matters,” and around the same time they maybe start believing it. That same year, Wire release 154, their third LP in three years, and on tour, as if to undercut rock’s reverence for past hits and crowd favorites, they play almost exclusively new material. And as McCartney did at the start of the decade, the band offers a statement to the British music press effectively announcing their break-up in business terms—a split from their label, which becomes a lengthy hiatus as band members pursue various solo and side projects. Mike Thorne, Wire’s producer and unofficial fifth member in the late ’70s, says that “The head of EMI put it quite succinctly. Something like, ‘A record company is not an Arts Council.’” It’s an easy observation, since the company is doing well via its other commodities. The Rolling Stones, still recording under that contract signed in 1977, release Some Girls in 1978, and its first single, “Miss You,” goes to #1 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. (“Beast of Burden” and “Shattered” also make the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and 1979.)

As the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 demonstrate, cultural nostalgia is a potent force. If ostensibly forward-thinking punk fans and music critics can’t be bothered with interpreting ambiguities in a Wire song, then certainly the flag-waving revelers and paradegoers of 1976 and 1977 don’t “want to have,” as President Jimmy Carter infamously invites them in one televised speech, “an unpleasant talk…about a problem unprecedented in our history,” or to be warned that “the oil and natural gas we rely on for seventy-five per cent of our energy are running out.” They don’t want to be told (as Carter does two years later, in his “Malaise Speech”) that the nation suffers a “crisis of confidence…that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will,” nor scolded that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.” They don’t want, during a series of strikes in the coldest winter in recent memory, to hear Prime Minister James Callaghan return from the Caribbean to claim that only a “parochial view” of labor unrest suggests there is “mounting chaos” in England. No, they want a smiling, rugged former movie star—or a no-nonsense, tough-talking grocer’s daughter— to tell them that everything is okay, that everything will be okay, that nothing is required of them but a little cheerful hard work: Have a Nice Day.

—Joshua Harmon

#413: Minutemen, "Double Nickels on the Dime" (1984)

for Bill

I've been watching a lot of spaghetti westerns lately. Which is to say, it's hard to talk about Double Nickels on the Dime in a way that doesn't simply repeat some aspect of the dense web of mythologies that has woven itself around the album, not to mention the Minutemen themselves. And so I will approach things slantwise, in the hopes of resisting the temptation to indulge in one or more received narratives for as long as possible.

My slant, in this case, is the spaghetti western. How slanted this slant will turn out to be, I don't know; Boon and Watt seem to share a polemical ambivalence about mass culture that a director like Sergio Leone happily foregrounds every chance he gets. Moreover, in a concerted and reflexive way, the spaghetti western, like the standard Minutemen song, is about its own tropes, in the sense that things are framed so that we cannot naturalize what we perceive as we perceive it. The shots—and sounds—are made, and it is that made-ness we are asked to take in and consider. A song like "Viet Nam" makes a clear political point all its own, but it does so by invoking the decade and a half of protest songs that came before it. The guitar plays a riff that would be at home in any Gang of Four song if you slowed it down by half, while the lyrics clarify the difficulty of protesting something in a medium with stark limits on its capacity to protest effectively. The lyrics, short as they are, are worth quoting in full:

Let's say I got a number
That number's fifty thousand
That's ten percent
Of five hundred thousand

Oh here we are
In French Indochina

Executive order
Congressional decision
The working masses
Are manipulated

Was this our policy?
Ten long years
Not one domino shall fall

I don't mean to say the politics here are somehow insincere, but the song is "about" political songs as much as it is about colonial exploitation of the working masses. The gambit here is to strip away allegory or figure and just say the political things, just as in every movie in the Dollars trilogy Clint Eastwood sells his services and his signature squint to the highest bidder, and tells us as much. The question, here invitingly asked, is whether or not we can make effective moral or political arguments in a particular medium—a film or a song—and, more pointedly, whether we can make these arguments in a totally serious way. It's a hard question to ask, and one that still needs repeated asking today. It's also the strongest point of contact between a spaghetti western and Double Nickels, both of which begin with fealty to the redemptive power of art and end in a hail of bullets and dynamite. I'm tempted to call it satire, provided we all understand by that a single impulse: the Minutemen want to blow shit up.

The feeling here is historically specific, hinging on an attempt to deal with the fact that all the seeming political foment of the 1970s and its protest songs could not stop the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. "Reagan," here, inaugurates such despair and rage precisely because he is not the evil mastermind that Richard Nixon was. He's a cartoon become flesh, a total joke of an evildoer twirling his mustache, what we thought was the stuff of allegory but which now actively lives and breathes in the Oval Office. You can't make fun of Reagan because he does the work for you. He's his own caricature! Protesting him feels futile, and he's folded a rebuttal to any conceivable protest into his very way of being. Protesters degrade the culture, they're children. And Double Nickels is an album that metabolizes this comic-strip situation. Everything from the slogan to the verse-chorus-verse format of the political song falls short in the face of actual, real evil, which, pace Hannah Arendt, isn't banal so much as it is cartoonish.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

Not to grant Reagan too much power. He's a comic-book villain, though not as handsome as Lee Van Cleef or Gian Maria Volonté. But he's also a cog, one among many representatives of the interests of the ruling class, and I think Minutemen make music that's aware of this. Their name, after all, comes from a joke about a 1960s reactionary group that sent bomb threats to Angela Davis. They know that the right wing is serious business, but that most attempts to describe it in earnest end up sounding like jokes. This brings us back to the sonic frenzy of Double Nickels in yet another way. The album is a hodgepodge, a gigantic pastiche and collage of influences and types of instrumentation. It refuses to commit to a single set of tropes, instead hoarding them, magpie-like, under the banner of a concern that extends beyond a musical scene and its internal debates and investments. That is, as songs like "Viet Nam" or "Untitled Song for Latin America" (one of my favorites) demonstrate, Boon and Watt are far from Marxists, but they also sieve the rivers of politics in Marx-ish fashion, looking for root causes rather than contenting themselves with repeatedly denouncing what amounts to a collection of symptoms.

The dynamism of Minutemen's aesthetic morass comes from a commitment to particularity and to the inadequacy of particularity in and of itself. Every particular implies a universal with which it forms an intractable contradiction—this is the basic tenet of dialectical thinking. And Minutemen are thoroughly dialectical. Their basic formal question runs something like this: how is it that the punk and protest music of yesteryear, which so emphasizes its freedom and individuality, sounds so much like other popular music, and sounds so much like itself, as to become self-contained and hermetic? The answer to this question is that there is no way of separating off punk from pop, even if everybody at a given Black Flag show agrees that the state and capitalism are bad in ways that everybody at a Van Halen concert doesn't. Thus songs like "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" start by naming their imbrication in the systems they want to protest, insisting that you can't have Minutemen without the King of Pop, using this tidbit of pessimism as the basis of a great optimism: namely, what happens if we start out knowing that as makers of popular music we have already failed, and then go from there? What can a popular song do?

The answer to this question is always Utopian on Double Nickels, whose musical archive spans genres and generations and brings together British punk and American folk protest with great speed and dexterity. It's as if Mike Watt and D. Boon are interested in practical rather than theoretical "punk"-ness, as if "DIY" for them, ideological though it is, should be a doing and not just a slogan. "Archive" may not be specific enough to describe how Minutemen treat the music they draw on; it's more like a lending library, they visit constantly and always take new items with them. What if we could, this music asks, make music however we wanted and out of whatever we wanted? What if that was a formal principle rather than a matter of content? If Johnny Rotten said he was antichrist and anarchist, Watt and Boon did their anarchy, made it a living and material force, in their music.

The result of this is something like watching Eli Wallach run around in a graveyard in the famous scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: we are aware that this is nothing narratively new, that it derives its visual and its feelings entirely from what came before, and yet the brazenness with which the camera states that we are in the presence of artifice exhilarates and delights us. So too with Double Nickels: it is an album that says "I borrow" in ways that overwhelm the listener, even if the songs don't crack two minutes in most places. Much can be said about the pleasures of derivation, but here it feels like a way into a genuine sense of human activity or agency; like an endless array of possibilities are at our disposal, should we attempt to engage with them. Such slogans sound dangerously close to ad copy or what you hear in a marketing department, which of course makes them that much more perversely delightful in the context of a band like Minutemen. So too my comparison to westerns: in bringing things together, one stands to discover something about those things and about the activity of combination. We can hear that discovery, and the joy that attends it, in every song on Double Nickels.

—David W. Pritchard

#414: Go-Go's, "Beauty and the Beat" (1981)

I was eleven when my parents divorced, which was just old enough to appreciate the fact that the house was quieter without their constant screaming at each other, but young enough to still feel that it was my fault. My father took me out for ice cream the day after my birthday, and as I was trying to lick the peppermint bon bon off the edge of the cone before it melted into a puddle on my hand, he told me that he’d be moving out, thereby taking a hammer to the mirror that was my world and smashing it into pieces. The peppermint bon bon dripped and dripped, and I cried, and my dad said, “Cynthia, this doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” and then he went inside to get more napkins to clean me up.

The next weekend, my dad moved out of the house he’d shared with me and my mom and into an apartment with the woman my mother referred to as “that skank” when she thought I wasn’t listening. The woman herself told me to call her Ella. I spent every other weekend with Ella and my father at his new apartment, which smelled like mold and old Chinese takeout, and which didn’t even have blinds over the front windows. My father gave me Sharpie markers and a coloring book, like he thought I was still five, and my mother was furious when I got home, because I’d managed to mark up my T-shirt.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

I tried to hate Ella, but I was only a kid and incapable of nursing a grudge the way I can now. She bribed me, and I fell for it. She gave me barrettes and braided my hair and told me I was going to be a rock star in middle school. She wanted to know what books I’d read, what movies were my favorites, what kind of music I liked. She took me to the library and we went to Saturday matinees at the cheap theater, where they still made their popcorn with real butter. When she found me singing along to her Go-Go’s record, she went out and bought me the CD. “Now we can sing in the car,” she said. She helped me put my hair in a side ponytail and did the same to her own, and dressed us both in baggy, bright sweatshirts and pronounced us ready for the 80s. “You’re going to grow up and make history, too,” she said. “Be a badass female. You won’t be able to help it.” I liked when she spoke to me like that, like I could do and be anything.

When I got home that Sunday evening, I played the CD in the boombox I had in my bedroom. I kept the volume low, but my mother heard it anyway and came in. She didn’t knock. She never knocked anymore.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter what they say,” Belinda Carlisle was singing, “in the jealous games”—and then she fizzled into nothing as my mother hit the eject button.

“Where did you get this?” my mother said again. I mumbled something about borrowing it from a friend, but my mother said, “It’s from her, isn’t it? She thinks she can paint your nails and do your hair and be your best friend and I won’t notice. That skank,” she almost screamed, and I was surprised, because that was the first time she had ever called Ella that when she knew I could hear. My mother took the CD in her hands and snapped it in two, and the sound it made as it cracked seemed to echo through my bedroom.

My mother began to cry and say how sorry she was. She sat down on my bed and patted the mattress next to her. I didn’t want to be near her, but I sat down anyway. She was still holding the pieces of the CD. It had split perfectly down the middle. “I need you to do something for me,” she said. “Can you do something for me?” I nodded. “I need you to tell your father that you don’t like Ella,” she said. “I need you to tell him that you hate her, that if she’s there, you won’t go see him. I need you to make him believe you. Can you do that?” She leaned forward and her hair covered her face and she made a honking sound as she tried to blow her nose into her sleeve, something she’d always told me never to do.

I was only eleven, so I didn’t yet understand how love can make you crazier than you ever thought possible, how it can grab you with its teeth and thrash you back and forth to break your neck, how by the time it releases you, you don’t know who you are anymore. I hadn’t yet lain awake at night feeling like my stomach was twisting out of my body. I hadn’t moved out of apartments, switched grocery stores because I couldn’t stand to be in the same place where I had once been happy. I hadn’t cried so hard it sounded like screaming.

I didn’t know that my father had been sleeping with Ella for years while still married to my mother, that he’d known her longer than my mother, that he’d almost called off the wedding because he’d known he didn’t love my mother. I didn’t know that my mother had been calling him every night, alternately cursing him and begging him to come home. I didn’t know that he answered each time she called, that he called her honey and said that of course he loved her, he just couldn’t be with her, leading her to believe that she still had a chance. All I knew was my mother wouldn’t stop crying, and she had given herself the hiccups, and she had broken my CD, and I wanted her out of my room.

“No,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“That’s mean,” I said.  “You’re mean. I won’t do it. I wish I lived with Dad and Ella. I want to live with Dad and Ella!”

“You don’t mean that,” my mother said. “Cynthia? Do you mean that?”

And then I did the cruelest thing that I have ever done. “I hate you,” I said to my mother. “I hate you!”  

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

It wasn’t the first time I had said those words. When you’re a child, you can say them for anything: no dessert, no second underdog on the swing, no sleepovers on a school night. But this was the first time that I meant it. In that moment, staring at my mother’s blotchy face, the CD pieces still in her fingers, the pale white line that marked where her wedding ring had always sat on her finger, I hated her.

My mother stood up carefully, like she was afraid she might break something if she moved too quickly. She set the pieces of the CD down on my bedspread. I didn’t touch them until she’d left the room. I tried to fit the two pieces back together, but I couldn’t. Some little tiny chip had come free when she’d broken it, had gotten lost in the weave of the carpet, and when I placed the pieces next to each other, it proclaimed itself by its absence.

I didn’t move in with my father and Ella. My mother and I never mentioned the conversation we’d had. She stopped calling Ella “that skank.” She stopped talking about Ella at all. I still spent every other weekend with them, but when Ella tried to braid my hair, I flinched away from her. When she asked me about my life, I shrugged.

As it turned out, Ella left my father just two years later. She stopped by to see me on her way out of town. She told me that she was sorry we hadn’t been able to stay close. She told me that I was still a rock star. She told me that she hoped I’d remember her when I was older. Then she reached her hand out like she was going to hug me, a squeeze across the shoulders maybe, but instead she let it drop, and she turned around and got into her blue sedan and drove away.

I went back inside, where my mother was waiting. She didn’t say anything, just watched as I went past her up the stairs and into my bedroom. My window overlooked the street in front of the house, but when I pulled back the curtain, Ella was already gone. I had thought that I would feel sad, but as I watched the front yard, where the tire swing my father put up for me when I was little was swaying back and forth in the breeze, I didn’t feel much of anything.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#415: Van Halen, "Van Halen" (1978)

He could imagine committing the crime, any number of them—arson, blackmail, drunk in charge of a motor vehicle—that wasn’t the problem. It was the being proud of it in the aftermath that he couldn't conceive of, those smiles, all that smug mugging for the mugshots. No, Petey thought, he'd be tear-streaked and mortified in his.

Unless it had been a delinquency of joy, like crowd-surfing (or the aiding and abetting thereof) after the behemoth with the braided beard had asked everyone not to, something victimless and reeking of youth like that. Petey used to mosh, used to elbow the pretty girls near him and mime a helping boost, a questioning shrug. He'd make a basket out of his hands for them, a ladder to rebellion. He'd never touch the butts of their jeans unless it was to bestow an absolutely innocent and necessary momentum. They'd wink their thanks as they sailed away into the sea of drunken, groping revelers.

What you lost, as you got older, were the things like that, the gumption to go against people, even in little ways that made the world better for yourself without making it all that worse for anybody else.

“Goddamnit, Petey, are you even seeing this shit?” his friend asked, sharp elbow in his ribs, breaking the spell.

The Israeli punk band was tearing up the stage at Chilgrimage, the summer festival they'd attended every year since graduating college a decade ago. The bassist wore a trashcan, the guitar player some fan's underwear on his head. There appeared to be no lead singer, though frenzied yelps still blared out of the enormous speakers. Petey was looking the wrong way, the predictable idiot, staring at the stage and hundreds of upturned faces when the real action was behind him: the rock star, middle-aged and bare-chested, nearly finished ascending the metal tower that housed the audio booth.

Petey turned around. Was the guy going to jump? The crowd wouldn't be satisfied otherwise. Was that going to make it worth it?

The singer climbed down the same way he'd gone up, a little carefully. He marched around and around the pit, stole his drummer's sticks and played his skull as the crowd pressed inward, crushing, crushing toward the center to get near the crazy guys, the guys with all the fun dumb energy left, the plenty of idiot energy.

Petey got smooshed, spilled his five-dollar Dasani on a topless woman, got his big toe stomped on hard by a child, was introduced to a fat man's armpit, pressed up against a lovely teenager's back, smelled her cliché rosewater shampoo, lost his favorite corporate-logoed sun hat into the mess of feet and mud. His friends were nowhere to be seen. He stripped off his shirt and mopped the sweat from his head and noticed that the music had stopped. It was just the ear-ringing now and the notion that he had survived. It had been thrilling in the hollow center of his terror and now he had just enough time to make his way to the main stage. When the day-glo children pushed him out of the way, he didn't even mind.

“Nice war paint,” Petey said to a shirtless, hairless teen boy as he passed him by.

“Yeah, thanks,” the kid said, kinda smiled. “Nice, um, nice hiking sandals.”

*

Petey always kept an eagle eye out for his favorite stars at these kinds of things. Because sometimes they’d stroll around among the common folk for an hour, just to get a bite-sized taste of it. They needed elephant ears and people-watching through pot clouds as much as everybody else did. He both feared and relished the fact that he might miss something, might not know who it was at the time. He thought he saw the woman from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He thought he saw Dave Grohl. An ugly old son of a bitch walked by, looking like a motorcycle mechanic who got fired for hitting the whiskey. Pierced septum, stringy thin hair, half-assed dragon tattoo gone wrinkly. Profile like a Portrait of Someone Who Once Coulda Been Someone, With Ear Hair. Petey thought the old boy could almost pass for Eddie Van Halen. But then, practically anybody could be Eddie these days, if you squinted.

Maybe getting older was the exact opposite of becoming a celebrity, Petey thought as he walked. He'd sometimes imagined the crushing depression of making your first blockbuster, realizing some pipe dream, finding out it wasn't what you'd always needed in order to begin, to be. Maybe reaching oldness would be the process of arriving somewhere dreaded, achieving the anti-fantasy in order to find it was a place that you didn't so much mind being once you arrived accidentally.

He had wanted to be famous once, back before he met James Earl Jones. He'd tried to sell James a souvenir lollipop for his granddaughter at a crappy gift shop, and had been too scared to tell Darth Vader that the charge of $1.79 had been declined; he just surreptitiously swiped his own plastic instead. That booming voice, that face that nine out of ten American humans had seen and seen and seen. It changed people.

Obviously, James would have been good for it. Must have been some mix-up at the bank. Would have been no big deal to ask for a different card. The man must have had a bucketful, all platinum, or black gold, or plutonium, or whatever they make 'em out of for people with money.

Petey knew then that he was part of one of the big little underrated problems of the world, that he was making life worse for James.

The horror, the horror. Every single human either too nice or too terrible to you for the rest of your life. You'd have to spend your days questing for apathetic, mediocre reactions from your fellow man. Other people leaving you well alone because they couldn't care less was an honest-to-God blessing some people couldn't afford to lose. Plus, Petey liked the idea of a whole existence spent thinking about it that way—that he'd chosen not to ever achieve anything more than dulled and moderate successes. He'd weighed his options and chosen not to flip on the light switch in the dark room of his life that would have blinded everyone, left them with sunspots on the insides of their lids, blinking.

*

Petey hustled toward the spot his friends had staked out with a blanket earlier in the day. He pushed past the dance forest and the Esurance prize wheel. Little things had changed, booths had been switched out, they'd brought in better porta potties, but he felt each time as though he were striding through a mashup of all the previous summers, spun by a shoddy DJ.

Photograph by Marie Sicola

Last year, the final act had been Jane’s Addiction. Oh, the youth-reliving glory! It wasn't that they weren't still cool, it was just how much cooler they used to be. Or maybe it was that all the people who thought they were coolest were wrapped in blankets, some Babybjörned, grooving from high up on the grassy hill and watching the twin Jumbotron screens. Down in the pit you had zonked adolescent Canadians on ditch weed and ecstasy who kinda thought every third song was pretty tight and maybe a little familiar.

Petey's crew had reposed on one elbow and said they were thrilled, said it was the show of a lifetime. Doesn't it look intense down there? Hah! From the front row, how could you even hope to see? They'd played almost all of Nothing’s Shocking. How old and how happy this had made Petey!

Petey pushed on, skirting a crowd of people taking video of a young girl kissing and arguing with a tree. It's not that you ever make some big choice, he thought. It's not that you turn your back on staying up all night, on stabbing friends in the back to get lucky. You just fall asleep early and wake up early not liking what's on the radio and wishing you did. You just go dig out your old binder of Sabbath CDs and find that you're 50/50 on whether this is badass and nostalgic or just a bad sign, like how you've been drinking less beer and more wine.

And then you find yourself revolving by on another loop at the same festival, nearly midnight, and you find that you’ve eschewed the luxurious hill for the grimy pit, though you don’t even know who the main act is. Still, you’re down there in the throng and it’s headliner time, around witching hour, when your feet are sore and you have to keep bending your knees, putting weight on the left foot a while, then the right one, and the set changes are interminable, a personal affront, your bladder a beaten middleweight cruiser, and you’ve entered some dreamspace.

Petey rose up on the balls of his feet. The whole gorge went black and when the floodlights snapped Petey surged forward. It was the old boy in makeup and a crimson jumpsuit, the edge of his dragon glistening in the rain. He picked up the mic stand and flung it into the crowd, the metal just missing Petey's ear. It was like the violent-gentle, guttural whisper of a semi-trailer rocking past a sedan on the interstate. A tall dude cut in front of him and Petey gave the guy a hard shove, because screw that guy, and because he had to see, and because what's a little crime, anyway, if it's for a good cause? On stage the odd creature was stuck in the spotlight—struck head-on by the blinding blessing and menace, yet unconcerned, finger-tapping his strings, shredding and saying, It's me, it's still me you're all here to see.

—Eric Thompson

#416: Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" (1999)

I remember two stories people have told me about Tom Waits.

The first one is this: When my friend Joe was in high school he would give his younger brother, who was ten at the time, rides to school. For whatever mildly sadistic reason, Joe would proceed to lock the car windows and play select tracks from Bone Machine (the Waits album that sounds like a psychedelic nightmare-carnival) at maximum volume until his brother started crying.

Next is something from my friend Jon. I don't remember the song, but he would play the same one, all the time. I think it was from Rain Dogs, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is how afterward, he would tell me about how his dad disliked music, almost all music, but whenever he heard that one specific Tom Waits song, he would stop whatever he was doing and ask Jon to play it again.

Here's my point: people like Tom Waits for a lot of reasons. It might be safe to say they hate him for just as many. I think my response to his music is probably just as minuscule and idiosyncratic as everyone else's. From Mule Variations (the album The RS 500 has paid me handsomely to write about), I'm thinking mostly of the song “House Where Nobody Lives.” In other albums there are many of his songs like this: “Kentucky Avenue,” “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.” They’re songs that seem to be longing for a place that meant something to Waits, but a place that's now long gone.

And for a lot of my life I've been overwhelmed by places. Maybe more than most people, I don't actually know. What I do know is that trying to convey what's meaningful to me about them is overwhelmingly difficult. I've been writing for a lot of my life too, and I'm finally at peace with the fact that I won't ever be able to communicate, or communicate fully, what a place means to me. Before you stop reading because you've already read Derrida or Jacques Lacan, hear me out. What I want to tell you is why I think we can't write about places, and what any of this matters for. If at all.

*

I think a lot about buildings, and how beautiful and weird and sad they can be.

I think a lot about Pizza Huts, and how they amaze me. I'm not talking about the food (except for the lunch buffet: always relevant), but about the actual structures they're in. As a kid growing up in the 90s, I loved the restaurant, and would get excited by that bizarre trapezoidal edifice whenever I saw it.

But something weird happens to me now. I'll often drive by someplace that was built to be a Pizza Hut, but then re-purposed for another storefront. Even then, even though a pizza may not have been cooked inside that structure for a full decade, I recognize it. I love this, how the shape of a building alone can recall something meaningful, how arbitrary designs are coded into our psyches, and become activated by the strangest things, in the strangest ways.

And what else I love is that it's these shitty, overlooked buildings that actually become the stuff of our lives. We often want to define places by landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, something Frank Lloyd Wright built, etc. Famous buildings or architectural anomalies are cool, sure, but they're novelties. I grew up just outside of Chicago, and what makes me think of the city isn't the Sears Tower, but the piss-smelling L train and an under-lit, smokey basement off 26th Street. We live and create through vernacular architecture:

Suburban ranch homes lined up quietly in the summer dark.

Driving through Indiana, you can see for miles. When it's warm out, everything on blacktop shimmers and it makes me sad for some reason I cannot explain.

Once I walked alone to a gas station at 4 o'clock in the morning to buy candy. I was 16. It was winter, and it was so bright from the snow reflecting moonlight I could see like it was day.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

And if our lives are determined by the finite, imperfect spaces we live in, then, too, are our memories. Geography informs memory more than anything else, I believe. And for Waits and myself, place is enormously important in a specific type of remembering: nostalgia. So many of his songs, the ones I like most, are about this (especially “House Where Nobody Lives”): the desire to communicate a place long gone to him, and because of this, someplace longed for.

There's something about nostalgia that makes places and things more wonderful and more painful. It's a lens we see through, but any light from the past that's visible has already been refracted. Nostalgia is, if nothing else, a distortion. It makes us yearn to communicate things even more, yet it makes it harder to communicate anything accurately.

*

I might be crazy, or stuck in my own head (or both!), but I think Tom Waits understands all of  the consuming, unnameable drive to communicate something about the places and landscapes that define our lives.

What he also understands is something I do too, finally: the futility of all this. For me, all of his twisting and turning through personas, atmospheres, and different interpretations of familiar landscapes, is the attempt to convey at least something about the places that matter to him, while recognizing the impossibility of doing so completely. Maybe only from a hundred separate perspectives can we begin to convey a place essentially. But maybe, probably, we can't, yet will still try just as hard. Just as hopelessly. And there's something great about that too.

I'm not saying this is what Tom Waits is all about. I'm just saying I think it's present: present in Mule Variations, in Bone Machine, in Rain Dogs, in whatever. It matters to him. And it matters to me. And it might matter to you, too, if you care about places, if you care about, say, the Monongahela National Forest, or your Uncle's cabin in South Dakota, or the shitty ranch house you grew up in. Even if it looks exactly like all the other shitty ranch houses around it. Even if you don't live there anymore; even if it's a place where nobody lives.

—Jack McLaughlin

#417: U2, "Boy" (1980)

The Blues, as Ellison put it, might be summed up as “personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

By definition, no one is good at navigating catastrophe. But as teenagers, we’re extra-bad at navigating catastrophe—assuming whatever we’re up in arms about can, even by extraordinarily loose standards, qualify as catastrophe. As a teenager, in deliberate preparation for all the catastrophe I was worried was coming my way, I listened to U2. I listened to a lot of U2. The thing that distinguished them from any respectable band to claim (then and now) undoubtedly had something to do with earnesty, and that's probably what's separated them from the scenes they've inhabited throughout their long history of making music.

I discovered U2 way too late, once everyone else was already done and over with them. It didn’t help that my discovery of U2 converged with my most intensely churchy years—not really religious, just churchy. While spending years’ worth of weekends and summers repairing dilapidated houses and delivering Meals on Wheels with youth groups, I obsessed over each of U2’s eras—from Boy to their much-hated film Rattle and Hum, which was made the year I was born but which I did not discover myself until I was sixteen or so. I watched Bono, The Edge, Larry, and Adam sliding down Memphis’s bluffs on flattened cardboard boxes and touring Graceland looking teary-eyed and star struck, and I loved it.

The worlds between the singles first released before Boy and the final cut of the album are spectacular. Something crystallized in the studio—and from then to now, there’s a more singular arc, it’s always a stretch, but you can follow the path pretty clear. And the arc mattered: it took them up above the insular music scene of the late 70s in Ireland—which rightly or wrongly would’ve been called provincial Britain by some. Certainly, the Dublin of then wasn’t the Dublin of the 2001 recording of U2 Go Home, recorded live at Slane Castle some twenty years since they opened for Thin Lizzy, riding the waves created by the debut of Boy. And at the height of this wave, there's a particular recording of "Out of Control" that's still in heavy rotation for me.

I loved the outlandish Zoo TV and Achtung Baby tours, when U2 attempted to counteract those words that hounded them in each and every review: earnest and overly serious. But even their attempts at irony still managed to be too earnest, too serious: with multi-colored Trabants hanging from the ceiling, Bono and his various alter egos preached about Sarajevo, access to contraception, dumping radioactive materials with Greenpeace. Their activism was loud, showy, and I ate it up, thinking it somehow sanctioned my own smaller attempts to do good and make change in my quiet, churchy ways.

Listening to Boy was, for me, always a kind of homecoming. U2 recorded Boy when they were all under twenty-one years old, and when I listen to that album now, I can see myself as a teenager, falling in love with a band for the first time. I listened to U2 everywhere, all the time. On a church trip to Mississippi, stripping highway paint from the side of an old woman’s house, I’d have headphones jammed deep into my ears, listening to U2 and believing there was a way to be a person of faith, an artist, an activist—to do all of these things well—and still be sort of cool (right?).

Now look here: no one in the history of music, not since wandering troubadours had to sing for their nightly meal, was as hardworking as B.B. King, and he said those Irish boys can play. He meant it enough to sing with ‘em. He told Bono it was a deep song for such a young fella, and there’s damn sure no higher honor in the land. But maybe it was Joey Ramone called ‘em by the right name in the end (called ‘em gospel singers, I heard to tell). Say it's the truth or not, but don’t forget for a minute the other important part: B.B. King said they could play.

Chiming with glockenspiel and The Edge’s signature pulsating guitar, “I Will Follow” was written in tribute to Bono’s mother who’d died not long before, when Bono was fourteen. Bono claims to have sung the song from his mother’s perspective: If you walk away, walk away / I walk away, walk away, I will follow / If you walk away, walk away / I walk away, walk away, I will follow / I will follow. This song was kind of confusing to me: wasn’t she the one who’d left? Was she following him, or was he following her? How, I wondered, can someone follow someone after their own death? Was she a ghost? Whatever. What I hear expressed in this song is an ardent, hopeful faith, in spite of loss and pain.

My wife has never loved a band—as in, never loved a single band. She likes music, but she lives for paint—for colors I will never be able to see. She points out that I’m perfectly polite in galleries, but that my questions betray a gruesome lack of the real shit required to know and love a painting. Every time she brings me, there’s no way I belong—that’s the sort of ground you can tread when you’re married. But in formative media, we’re from different worlds, and I am the utter, sloppy opposite of her vivid world of brushstroke and dynamic art: I am a born sap—there’s no two ways about it—and I love U2.

Like “I Will Follow,” most of the lyrics on Boy aren’t ready for the voice—big, at times operatic—Bono is trying to give them. Amazingly, Bono wrote a review of Boy in the comments section of Rolling Stone’s website in 2008. After listening to Boy for the first time “in over twenty years,” Bono made jabs at his own girlish voice, his pretentiousness, the album’s “nonlyrics,” and his own “face like a baked bean and in search of a nonregional identity...” Bono also wrote some surprisingly insightful observations about Boy that helped me clarify my own confused, lingering attachment to U2.

For those years when I loved U2 whole-heartedly and unselfconsciously, it didn’t really occur to me that U2 might be deeply, fundamentally uncool. Even now, when I find someone willing to hear my case for U2, I have to remind myself that U2 might be a lot of things but they are definitely not cool. “[O]f course,” Bono wrote, “the pursuit of coolness is rarely the same thing as the pursuit of art…” No matter what Bono or U2 did to try and counteract their sincerity, their earnestness—their pursuit of art over coolness might have been the most sincere thing about them, something they couldn’t renounce without becoming a completely different band.

There’s a lot of murk and shimmer surrounding U2—by design, maybe, but surely it couldn’t have ever been any other way. What’s sure is that there is a constant play between sincerity and teasing, and there’s those who say that when it comes from Bono, it’s the same thing. But Bono has outed me and the hundred (thousand?) others cut from the same cloth, time and again. He’s never shy to leave us high and dry as his followers, those of us not quick enough to realize we shouldn’t take him seriously—or at the very least, that we should never, ever call U2 cool out loud. All of us sincere, weepy saps, desperately trying with a well-timed sarcastic quip, or oafish, appropriately juvenile stunt here and there—we all live in constant fear that the moment comes when we have to reveal all the bleeding-heart thoughts we live with constantly, or else betray them forever.

Let me put it this way: among those who would strongly identify as religious, my thoughts and words have never once carried water. People in my high school girlfriend’s church admonished me—“Every tongue got to confess”—when I was too quiet.

In high school, I didn’t tell many people that I was a preacher’s kid. I don’t know what, exactly, compelled me to keep this information private. I was five-foot-eight and weighed barely ninety pounds soaking wet the year I fell in love with U2, and, at fifteen-years-old, I had almost no conception of irony. I look at myself through memory as a case study in over-earnestness, carrying still-wet four-foot paintings through my high school’s crowded hallways, brooding from behind my curtains of hair, watching videos of frightened rhesus monkeys in AP Psych, spreading paint over thickly-layered canvases during all my classes. I lugged around a camouflage bag bought at an army surplus store, all grimy and covered with U2 and Harold and Maude buttons, amulets to protect me from the forces that would peer back, from a few years’ distance, and see in me an earnest grappling, a sincerity, that is as painful to remember as it was to try and get rid of.

And among those who love words and say there’s no God, I wouldn’t by any means reckon I’ve fared better, but they’ve at least proved slower to chastise me believing. So it was always in the folds of those crows I hid—people who didn’t ever think twice about God or faith of any kind, or even how the big story worked in real life. When an interviewer might bring up “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and Bono says, “We can be in the middle of the worst gig in our lives, but when we go into that song, everything changes. The audience is on its feet, singing along with every word. It's like God suddenly walks through the room. It's the point where craft ends and spirit begins. How else do you explain it?” you still flinch, because the man is in the process of trying to out how much you feel this shit.

As I retreated deeper into myself, my mother dug her heels in and wouldn’t let me disappear entirely. She tried to reach me through my obsessions (though she could never figure out the Jeff Buckley thing. “He doesn’t know how to just let a note end,” she said once). She drove for two days so I could see a Basquiat exhibit in Houston, and later that year she took me to Atlanta where we saw U2 in concert. It was jarring, to see the band members that had lived for me, only within my own private mind and heart, come out onto the stage. During that show, I felt an intense love for this band, and also felt it start to slip away. Not because they weren’t cool, which I’d kind of started to figure out, but because my love for them had been nurtured in isolation. Surrounded by thousands of dancing, screaming fans, I felt I had to cede some part of my personal attachment to the crowd.

When a section of the audience started chanting, “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A,” a shrill voice cried out, “They’re not even from here!” As if anyone could forget this band was from somewhere. This was, perhaps, what resonated with me most deeply about U2: everywhere they went, they were connected with their place, almost representatives of it. They were able, it seemed, to claim their home and its history without brushing over the ugly parts. And while there are no verdant moors or crumbling castles in Memphis, I was, and am, similarly obsessed with the story of my place. I have never been able to loose myself from the place I came from, and, lately, I’ve come to understand that I don’t want to.

As Bono puts it, Boy was an album about virginity and not wanting to lose it.

The day I lost mine was a miserably anticlimactic day, that, looking back at my young self (who maybe wrongly appears to me, chubby cheeked and in the grainy light of Super 8 film) and all the expectations I’d laid out on the bedsheets before—well, Jesus, it’s just heartbreaking, even still. In the afternoon, I went to see a girl who wasn’t very kind, but was very beautiful to me then. It was a sunny winter day, and bitterly cold in the wind. My strongest memory was how in the shower after, I waited under the pattering of warm water for something to feel different about the course of my life. All I could feel was a slow, small disappointment that’s stayed slow and small in all the days since then. How marvelously coincidental it appears then, that this album fills me with a certain kind of excitement, an abiding shame, and a deeper sense of hope than I’m entitled to, on the sum of events between then and now.

In 2001, U2 played two outdoor concerts at Slane Castle in Ireland, in front of more than 150,000 people. When they performed their first-ever single, “Out of Control,” Bono introduced each of his bandmates. (In this video, as with every other performance of U2, I find myself wondering where the hell they found Adam Clayton. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him speak. I have a theory that Larry is feeding off Adam’s life force—how else would Larry keep from aging a day while Adam looks thirty years older than the rest of them? Mostly, The Edge seems like a preternaturally nice dude, who has worn the same outfit every day for ten or fifteen years.) Anyway, performing in front of the lighted castle, it is clear that U2 are giddy to be back home, in front of a huge crowd. They are reveling in the Irishness of it all. Bono pulls an Irish flag from the crowd, saying “maybe just once…?” as he wraps his country’s flag tight around his body.

Always, it's the tension with U2. Shame and guilt everywhere and no way out of the dopey hope. It’s a good bet, though, that whether we're teenagers or not, if we’re real close-in on that tension, it’ll cause us to speak. What comes out, though, and how good it might be, we’re not to say. But there’s no mistaking the feeling we’re after. Primo Levi said that it is not important to be strong, but to feel strong; if we accept this as resonant in any fashion, we are certainly trading in the selfsame bits and pieces that the young boys of U2 were furiously fidgeting with as they assembled the extraordinary and crystalline studio cuts of their songs in 1980. Out of control.

No doubt about it, the songs are all in their way challenges, and likely juvenile ones. But the challenges grow bigger throughout the years that U2 are out on tour through the world. And in Boy the seeds were always there, and are still evident. Is there another big artist you could hand a buck to who might promise more?

Even now, my wife asks skeptically, as we watch all the old songs re-sung at a live show from the Elevation-era, “Is that a heart-shaped track he’s running on?” and I want to tell her so much more.

Bono ends his own comment section review of Boy by saying, “...i'm proud of this little Polaroid of a life I cant fully recall. As well as the ability to make embarrassing mistakes, the demands of a great debut might be fresh ideas, fresh paint and sometimes for its canvas, a fresh face…I miss my boyhood.” [sic] When I think back on my own less-than-great debut, all those embarrassing mistakes, those ideas that might have been fresh, a murky image of myself starts to emerge from the darkness, but never completely develops. Maybe my own earnestness, my sincere faith, is too painful to witness. Perhaps this is what I feel when I listen to U2, even now: It’s like I’m missing something I can’t fully recall. And I do—I miss it.

—Aaron Fallon & Martha Park
Illustrations by Martha Park (AF) & S.H. Lohmann (MP)

#418: Paul McCartney and Wings, "Band on the Run" (1973)

The first musical argument I can remember having must have taken place in 1971. I was in first grade, and I was disputing with my best friend the relative merits of the Beatles and the Banana Splits. Not the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or the Monkees, or even the Archies: the Banana Splits, a bubblegum band without a top-forty hit from an animated TV show I had never even seen. I was indignant, even then, that anyone would question the Beatles’ supremacy, and that the rivals would be a band so synthetic and ephemeral. I understood that the seventies were a fallen decade, and I mourned my belated condition. I had missed the Beatle moment.

Missed it just barely. We lived in London in 1968-69, where my brothers acquired 45s of “Get Back” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” I was less than three miles away when the Beatles gave their final performance on the rooftop of the Apple building on January 29, 1969. Back home in Massachusetts, my dad owned all the Beatles’ albums, and I remember being allowed to use his stereo to play (carefully) side two of Rubber Soul or side one of Abbey Road, my early favorites. But I knew the Beatles had broken up, and I understood that I was enjoying something that was over. Or was it just a temporary split? I remember reading hopeful reports in music magazines about prospects for a Beatle reunion. As a child whose parents never divorced, I focused my yearning on getting John and Paul back together.

That’s why I cherished Ringo, the 1973 album that seemed the prelude to a  reconciliation. Ringo’s song “Early 1970” had professed his desire to remain on good terms with “all three,” and Ringo, with John and George playing on one song and Paul and Linda on another, showed him doing just that. He even invoked Billy Shears in one song! It was hardly a Beatles album, but it seemed about as close as we could get.

Until one month later, when Band on the Run came out. Band on the Run had only one Beatle playing on it, but it was hailed by many as a work that could stand alongside the Beatles’ best, and in certain ways it courted that comparison. The title track’s celebration of a mythical band, for instance, brings to mind Sgt. Pepper and his crew. The way in which musical and lyrical snippets of “Band on the Run,” “Jet,” and “Mrs. Vandebilt” [sic] are reprised on side two is also reminiscent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, suggesting that this, too, was a coherent “concept” album of some sort. “Let Me Roll It” had a snarling guitar and a reverberant vocal that imitated or parodied John Lennon, perhaps answering his scathing 1971 attack on McCartney, “How Do You Sleep?” (The lyrics were mostly just another love song to Linda, however.) In any case, Paul seemed to have the Beatles on his mind, and rather than shirking his legacy, as he had in four underwhelming post-Beatles LPs, he seemed with Band on the Run finally to live up to his Beatleness.

At moments, however, the album feels less like a return to form and more like self-imitation. When “the undertaker [draws] a heavy sigh / Seeing no one else had come,” we are a bit too close to Father McKenzie. The third song on side one, “Bluebird,” is a lush and pleasant song, but it pales (or azures?) in comparison to the graceful ache of “Blackbird.” Like Robert Frost’s oven bird, “Bluebird” and Band on the Run and McCartney’s entire solo career ask us “what to make of a diminished thing.” How do we properly value McCartney’s lesser seventies work in relation to his sixties masterpieces? Robert Christgau, for one, viewed Band on the Run quite sternly. Denying that it was “McCartney’s definitive post-Beatles statement,” he gave it a C+. More conventionally, the Rolling Stone 500 calls it “McCartney’s finest post-Beatles hour.”

Perhaps the best thing would be to forget the Beatles altogether, thereby eliminating any sense of diminishment. What if this were not the album of an ex-Beatle? What if it came from the Raspberries or America or Klaatu or some other Beatlesque combo? How does it sound compared to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, or Countdown to Ecstasy (all 1973 also)? In writing this essay, I’ve become aware of how my reverence for the Beatles has caused me to overlook solo Paul. Over the years I have indiscriminately collected albums by ’70s pop artists. I have the entire ’70s works of Elton John and Rod Stewart and E.L.O., but I’ve never owned—never even listened to—much of Paul’s music from that decade. I know only the hits and Band on the Run, and even that LP, which I have owned for decades, includes a couple of deep cuts that I swear I never heard before last weekend. If some non-Beatle had produced these hits and these albums, we would esteem them a good deal more than we generally do.

The fantasy of a Paul who was never a Beatle was made use of in one of my favorite jokes from The Simpsons. Homer and Marge are trying to rescue Bart from the clutches of Mr. Burns, so they hire a professional deprogrammer:

Deprogrammer: Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, your son has clearly been brainwashed by the evil and charismatic Mr. Burns.

Marge: Are you sure you can get him back for us?

Deprogrammer: Absolutely. I’m the one who successfully deprogrammed Jane Fonda, you know.

Marge: What about Peter Fonda?

Deprogrammer: Oh, that was a heartbreaker. But I did get Paul McCartney out of Wings.

Homer: You idiot! He was the most talented one!

If (as Homer sees it) Paul was first and foremost the lead singer of Wings, if there’d never been a Beatles, or had Paul not been one of them, then Wings might be a group we now treasure as much as we do Big Star or Steely Dan, and Paul’s disbanding them in 1981 might be lamented as much as Robbie Robertson’s breaking up the Band or Rod Stewart’s leaving Faces. Instead, Wings (or Paul McCartney and Wings, as they are called on the label of Band on the Run) is band we must place well below the Beatles, but well above the Banana Splits.

—Will Pritchard

#419: Portishead, "Dummy" (1994)

Watching the red second hand glide, Beth thought about her posture. She’d hold her arms like she’d practiced—head cocked, eyes thrown at the dark shapes beneath the window of the projection booth, arms bent at her sides. In front of the mirror she’d been a Rodin, and even at her worst she allowed a comparison to a broken masterpiece. Even the Venus de Milo had her flaws.

A classmate coughed. In front and behind, the scuffling of graphite on paper mixed with whispers. A gust of wind outside tugged at the dying leaves off the oak trees that dotted the student parking lot, their delicate impacts adding silent stresses to the lecture Ms. Kovak somnolently decanted. Beth let the gentle cadence of her teacher’s words wash over her; how easy they flowed one into the other. Next to the photo of Earth taken from far away, the red line continued its progression.

Where was she? The words. It certainly wasn’t the words. Those she could write backwards in her best cursive, each one having spent time on her tongue, bringing forth moisture like a stone. She knew their contours, had felt them pull and twist at her dark places as she pressed both cushions of her headphones until they laid flush against her temples; the honesty, the longing, the pain. The way they dripped from the singer’s mouth, pooling in her eardrums.

What kept Beth’s eyes cutting at the red line beside Earth’s reflective light was her noises, culled from the desire to illicit the same response, to give them shape from her own longing. It was the noises she feared she’d make that kept Beth rapt in attention towards the clock’s shifting face. The hushed whisper she reserved for the echo of her parents’ footsteps on their house’s hardwood was the only space she’d allotted those words to roam. If the singer’s voice was water, Beth thought, then hers was a cobblestone street.

In front of the mirror, she’d watched her lips move, the sounds barely audible over the creak of wood, the soft domestic breaths of her parents’ motions. They rose jagged and misshapen from her throat, each word encased in a thick layer of earth and slag. In her room she’d kept those words close, quietly fussing over their appearance, smoothing out the rough edges, her head cocked and her eyes cast long into the distance. Today she’d show her sounds to the dark shapes, the ones beneath the projection booth, their forms one with the darkness around them. Her arms bent at her sides. Today she’d let them run wild and free, she thought, as the red line allowed a right angle to form between 12 and 3 and a sound cut short the lecture.

Beth blinked. Building-wide conversations erupted as tennis balls swept soundlessly on chair feet across tiled floors and the din of pent-up noise swallowed the bell. Students rose, unfurled bunched clothing and shuffled papers back into the various folds of their solid color Five Stars. Chatter followed each movement, as straps were slung over shoulders and the great exodus towards buses and cars and home began. Beth, however, was silent. Placing her hands palm down on the hard plastic of her desk, she raised her body reluctantly. Sucking air deep into her lungs, she exhaled. Canvas bag slung over her left shoulder, Beth was the last to leave Ms. Kovak’s room as the sweat from her palms evaporated off the desk’s surface and the red line continued its progression.

Out in the hall, the applause of footsteps grew as Beth joined the confluence of the student body as it sloshed along the scuffed faux-marble floor. Struggling to match the pace of the current, she made her way along the cramped tributaries from the math hallway into the foreign language hallway, coming to a pause where her locker was three in on the left in a bank of tarnished red metal. As she fumbled with the rotary’s combination, she felt in the rhythm of the metal the words that scrolled by on the ticker tape behind her eyes:

Did you realize, no one can see inside your view?
Did you realize, for why this sight belongs to you?

The door opened with a bang and Beth reached a hand in, procuring her headphones amidst the clutter. Wiggling the iPod from her front left pocket, Portishead’s “Strangers” was cued up and waiting to be received. The cushions enveloped her head as she pressed play and the horns spiraled and she slammed the locker shut. The clock in the hall read 3:07. She had 23 minutes before her audition.

*

No one had told her about the heat. Standing with her feet shoulder-width apart on the worn wood of the stage, she felt the light press like hands on her exposed skin. Becoming accustomed to the autumn weather, the mock summer pressed heavy on her frame. She was relieved to have removed her cardigan. In the darkness a throat cleared. The follicles on her arms basked in the warm glow, as Beth stood alone in the spotlit cloud, thinking about her posture. A bead of sweat came into being on the small of her back and began its slow descent.

A door opened opposite the stage, spilling light from the hallway down the aisle. The outline advanced through the sparse auditorium and paused to enter the row where several figures sat beneath the outline of the projection booth.  Beth felt her palms fill with a familiar slickness, and the cry of metal announced that her final audience member had arrived. 

“My apologies, detentions went longer than expected. You may begin whenever you are ready.”

Beth hung onto the vowel sound as it faded into the soundproofing. Where does sound go when it’s done being heard? The voices, the drums, the horns, the crackle and pops of vinyl, all absorbed into bodies, bricks, wood, fabric. Does it die? Can it feel pain? It hits yet causes none, but what about the equal and opposite reaction that Beth was taught exists by law. Perhaps that’s one law, like jaywalking, that’s meant to be broken, for convenience sake. Maybe the sound of sound dying is a frequency we’re not meant to hear, or can’t handle, like the voice of God. Beth blinks hard. It’s not God. But maybe not too far off.

When Beth was small she’d shuffle around the house testing the noises that came from the things she touched—the sigh of the mail slot, the dark echo of the laundry shoot, the way the steps yawned against her slight weight. She’d rattle doorknobs, swing cabinets on their hinges, and push furniture across the hardwood and linoleum. Her parents would laugh and share glances, catering to Beth’s need to make sense of her world, to make sound of her world. Every kitchen utensil was tested against the metal of the stove and the washing machine, as Beth categorized their timbres like each were a steel drum.

She remembers the noises her parents would make, the laughter spurred by a hushed remark, light kisses and whispers that in Beth’s primitive language stood for love. Even the sounds she didn’t understand, the ones that came at night, gave her comfort. In time those sounds were defined, spelled out, and as Beth’s frame grew, her body filling in the contours of her clothing, the sounds she made stopped sounding like her own. Her voice, like that first round of teeth, had another pushing beneath it.

“Beth?”

Beneath the heat of the lights, Beth felt stirring in the morass of her silence the words forming, clotting, taking shape. She tasted metal in her mouth as the room outside her lit radius sparked a soft luminescence. In the curtains and paint layers, between the fibers of the rugs and the interwoven fabric of the seats, the silhouettes of dead sounds were strewn and hung. For a moment Beth could see them all—a mosaic, a tapestry, and the darkness glowed brighter and hotter than her center of gravity and the lights were consumed briefly by the outpouring that Beth alone was poised to catch.

Can anybody see the light?

“We’re ready when you are.”

Cocking her head and with arms bent, Beth threw her eyes at the figures reclining in the darkness. The words, extracted from the rough ore of her chest, glowed hot in her throat: a magazine of sound. As the horns in her head spiraled, her voice rang out and the sounds in the darkness hushed their glow and met hers with a roaring silence.

—Nick Graveline

#420: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, "The 'Chirping' Crickets" (1957)

I like Buddy Holly and the Crickets, but I am constantly worried I'm not having the right response when I listen. This is in part because my response is, almost every time I hear The "Chirping" Crickets, that all of the songs sound very much the same. It's a comment I mean descriptively, not evaluatively, but which I associate with my pre-teen years, when my dad would make fun of the music I was getting into by saying that all the songs sounded the same. I didn't have the wherewithal or the cultural capital to respond with "So what? Isn't that why we like them?" back then, and even now that I know I can say that it still makes me feel a little silly. But there you have it: I like Buddy Holly and the Crickets because their music is incredibly formulaic and "samey" at the end of the day.

There is, in addition to my own reticence, a more general resistance to describing things in terms of the formulae they operate with, or the continuities between them. To celebrate a cultural production, we highlight its daring newness, the ways it breaks the mold—one need only read any given think piece on any given movie to see what I mean. But I find that sort of analysis exhausting, in part because it makes me feel cheated of some marvelous experience, and, more seriously, because it makes "novelty" feel like a genre or a trope all its own, thus depriving the word of any substance (if, of course, it has any substance in the first place). Instead of this approach, I would offer one that looks to the continuities that attend The "Chirping" Crickets, the ways in which Buddy Holly and his band link up with, rather than deviate from, other kinds of cultural productions.

This is to say that a song like "Not Fade Away" is great, not so much because it does something new, but because it brings together a lot of old things. It delights in the music that came before it; it excitedly asks that things influence it. Thus we hear Elvis Presley and Hank Williams in Holly's hiccupping vocals, the shifting between falsetto and regular singing voice; we hear the greats of the Delta blues (John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and on and on) in the guitar; we hear, in the drums and bass, rhythms right out of Bo Diddley; and we hear harmonies in the backing that would fit in the music of any act invited to the Grand Ole Opry. So when I say that Holly and the Crickets made "formulaic" music, I mean that they took a bunch of existing musical tropes and smashed them together. And that—more than some isolated encounter with the sublime—is what's so great about their music. We can, perhaps remarkably, see the active attempt to synthesize a bunch of disparate elements into the coherent unity of a single song.

In all this I don't want to reduce Buddy Holly and the Crickets to aesthetics alone; in their short existence the band lived in the same peculiar interstices their music formalizes and indexes. They were, after all, a white band who performed at the Apollo, and whose songs made significant headway on R&B charts. It's not that they were crusaders against racism or anything, but they reflected how complex the cultural interactions were along the lines of race. By sitting on the very vexed and contentious fault line between white cultural production and black cultural production, they laid bare the degree to which the former owed—and still owes—an unspeakable formal (and monetary, given the predatory practices of record labels!) debt to the latter.

These observations are easy to make from the present, and risk occluding the experience of listening to "That'll be the Day" or "Tell Me How" that is not simply meditating on our own guilt and complicity in ongoing racial exploitation and violence. The really difficult thing that Buddy Holly and the Crickets point up on The "Chirping" Crickets is precisely that our pleasures have been organized around this fundamental appropriation. It makes the quotations marks around the "chirping" take on a sinister valence. These aren't crickets, sprung fully formed out of nature; they are artificial crickets, and they are stealing everything they can get their hands on to hide the care with which their image and sound is manufactured.

My aim is neither to condemn nor redeem Buddy Holly. That seems pointless. What I do want to suggest is that we can't just ignore the peculiar position he occupies—the complexity of his own music's impulse toward cross-pollination and the ways in which he has been received by his audiences—to make ourselves feel morally pure in some way. We can listen and enjoy, and we do, or I do, and hope you will too; and we can recognize the contingency of our pleasure, the degree to which we have the privilege of taking pleasure in this, or anything at all. And that's not to say that some pop is less degraded than other pop. All pop is pop, it is all a cultural production. But the history of such a pronouncement brings to light the uneven contours of how it took shape as an apparatus that extends our exploitation into every facet of our lives. If this is the necessary consequence of a line of thought that begins with continuity and similitude, so be it. I like to think the other side of all of this "chirping" is the acknowledgment of its contingency—crickets don't sing all year round—and thus the very real recognition that, whatever degradations we face and deal with and live through now, they are ultimately historical, which means, if nothing else, that they will not last forever. Things can change! And Buddy Holly's music in some way reminds us of this. It's a small comfort, but if it jangles like "I'm Looking for Someone to Love," I'll happily take it.

—David W. Pritchard