#361: Outkast, "Stankonia" (2000)

1. Halloween, 2000. Three astronauts—American Bill Shepherd and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev—launch into orbit for the International Space Station. Yasser Arafat calls for resistance in Jerusalem, and four Palestinians are killed in the Gaza Strip. Outkast releases their fourth studio album, Stankonia. On a folding chair in a backyard in Minneapolis, with the urgings of my friends still echoing in my ear, a face leans towards mine, and I have my first kiss.

2.  It is a tangle of lips, teeth, and saliva. I don’t know what to do with my hands. They hang awkwardly at my side and as my braces hit his teeth, I imagine myself an orangutan. He has hair that he gels into devil horns, and I wear too much lip gloss, and I can feel it stick to his lips when he pulls away. I laugh in a way I hope is cool and run inside.

3.  What I have just written was a lie. Halloween in 2000 was on a Tuesday. The party, and my first kiss, actually happened the Saturday before.

4.  It happens that I lie on occasion.

5.  Stankonia: Coined by André 3000. From “stank” and “Plutonia.” The name of André 3000 and Big Boi’s recording studio in Atlanta.

6.  Stank: Verb, simple past tense of “stink.” To emit a strong offensive smell. To be disgustingly inferior. Or, slang: funky.

7.  Plutonia: Noun. A futuristic city, as depicted on a poster in André 3000’s bedroom.

8.  I know this from Wikipedia, just like I know that Stankonia debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard chart, that it won Best Rap Album at the 2002 Grammys, that it took a year to record, that André 3000 and Big Boi found it liberating to own a studio, able to work at their own pace and rhythm, to set their own hours. I imagine them waking at three in the morning, music tearing through their veins at 155 beats per minute, stumbling out of bed and driving to the studio, desperate to record. Is it likely that they were regularly deep in sleep at 3 a.m.? I suspect this is unrealistic.

9.  I write on Wikipedia: “Stankonia has been credited as the inspiration behind the work of numerous influential writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Emma Riehle Bohmann.”

10.  Wikipedia deletes my words.

11.  In the bathroom after the kiss, I press a fist into the flesh of my stomach to calm the butterflies. I reapply my lip gloss. I straighten the neck of my halter top. Is it cold to be wearing just a halter? I have no memory of the weather.

12.  Maybe this is why I lie, or maybe why it started: to fill the blanks in my mind, to live up to the expectation that I remember it all.

13.  Or maybe it’s just an attempt to be funny, to be remembered myself.

14.  Here is one thing that is true about me: I believe I am a good person.

15.  Here is another true thing: At night, I dream I am running, and with every step I take, my knees sink closer to the ground, my back bends until I am hunched double, and soon I am crawling on my hands and knees.

16.  In October 2000, “B.O.B.” is on the radio, “Ms. Jackson” is on the radio, we roam the halls of school saying “Forever? Forever ever? Forever ever?” and AOL Instant Messenger is cool. Entire relationships play out online, emoticons take on lives of their own, confessions fall into the Internet like it’s a bottomless hole, like we haven’t yet realized that anything that exists there will exist forever.

17. I imagine André 3000 and Big Boi in the studio, throwing out rhymes, testing them, André saying, “But you know, I’d just like to, you know, sing a bit,” Big Boi scoffing at him. In truth, many of the songs developed separately, André at home, strumming an acoustic guitar, Big Boi in the studio. Somehow it all comes together: “B.O.B.” has drums, guitar, organs, a choir in the background.

18.  In October 2000, I am just discovering music beyond the Beatles. Outkast explodes into me. At the school dance, I sit on the bleachers in the corner, hoping I am hidden in shadow, while my foot, unbidden, taps along to the music. Someday I will learn to embrace dancing, to let my body take over, to not care, but not yet, not for years.

19.  I am just discovering music, discovering Outkast, and every discovery shows me how little I know. The boy with the devil horns breaks up with me in the girl’s bathroom next to the gym and I think I am devastated, but I’m not.

20.  That is another lie. I am a little bit devastated, but I get over it.

21.  Operation Iraqi Freedom begins a year and a half later. March 2003. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland join forces to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist government. I am babysitting a little girl who turned a year old just over a week ago. She has curly brown hair and a turtleneck onesie with American flags on it. The TV displays the night sky over Baghdad. I can just make out the outline of buildings and clouds. There are few lights visible in the city, save those of the bombs, just flashes of white on the screen, like shooting stars or airplanes.

22.  I don’t realize that “B.O.B.” is not a new song.

23.  Operation Iraqi Freedom does not make me realize that the things I have thought were important are not really important. I do not evaluate my life, knowing that soldiers, civilians are dying. When students stage a walkout at school to protest, I leave with them and drive with my friends to Opitz, an outlet store in the suburbs.

24.  I have never admitted this before.

25.  I want to say something about Outkast, about Stankonia, about its effect on my life, on the person I’ve become. I am failing at saying this, maybe because it hasn’t. I am trying to make the album fit over my life, and I can’t.

26.  And yet, when I listen to the album, I realize I know every song. That the beat to “B.O.B.” plays in the cadence of my footsteps as I run. My friend owns a T-shirt called, according to the website it came from, “Persistence of Ms. Jackson” that has Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” on the front, melting clocks dripping down her front, and the white block print over the timepieces says, “Forever? Forever ever? Forever ever?”

27.  September 2005. Richmond, Indiana. Five years since the kiss, ten years before the T-shirt. The leaves dangle, their stems on the brink of breaking free of the tree branches. I sit with a friend on a wooden swing, our legs pushing idly against the grass, unevenly, so we spin from one side to another. “Don’t you think,” she says, “that Outkast was a little bit precious?” I think about it. I nod. I do think so.

28.  I don’t realize until later that she said “prescient.”

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#362: The Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream" (1993)

Siamese Dream is dad rock. This is what it means to get old.

Getting old doesn’t mean feeling old; getting old is feeling young but being aware that you are not young and quietly freaking out about it and then convincing yourself that you are happy to be getting older and that you are a better person now than you were when you were young and shallow and then realizing how much leeway there is in the world for the young and regretting that you weren’t more of an asshole because you know you could probably have gotten away with some of it, and then forgetting all of that because you have to winterize the flowerbeds and put the lawn waste into a biodegradable paper bag and set that bag out at the curb and also your knee hurts and you probably have cancer in your nostalgia. Getting old means looking back on things that happened two years ago and realizing they actually happened fourteen years ago. There must be some kind of formula to calculate that. Don’t tell me what it is.

Siamese Dream was released in the summer of 1993. I won’t say here how old I was in 1993, but I could legally drive a car.

When I first heard the Smashing Pumpkins, it made me nervous. But let me describe to you the basement I was in when this took place, because the music is the basement and that basement is the music. It was the kind of basement that was all interior walls and slivers for windows; it was dark down there, and you were grateful for the dark because it was also the kind of basement you didn’t want to get too good a look at. You didn’t want to see what that carpet looked like. You didn’t want too clear a shot at what people were doing down there—it was better to see them through the haze of incense smoke and weak, dirty lamplight. This was my friend’s basement. Forbidden things happened down there, I assumed. Things I wouldn’t recognize. Things I wouldn’t be able to process if I saw them. Things that would ruin me. This is what the Smashing Pumpkins sounded like to me then: like something that would corrupt me if I let it.

You think Bruce Springsteen is dad rock? Bruce Springsteen is not dad rock; Bruce Springsteen is granddad rock.

My dad is a granddad. Watching him try to figure out his MP3 player is like watching Papa Geppetto disarm a nuclear bomb.

The edgiest guys I ever knew were the beautiful skate punks in that basement listening to the Smashing Pumpkins—in a corner of the band room talking about Fishbone, in the back of the bus playing Ritual de lo Habitual on a boombox. Some of them are dads now and some of them aren’t. Some have gone to the brink and come back. Some are bald or nearly bald or on their way to being bald, but what can be done about that. They are still the edgiest motherfuckers I know, at least according to what they post on Facebook.

I teach classes in English at a smallish college in southwestern Ohio, which means I am surrounded now by millennials. Most of them were not born in the summer of 1993—most of them would not be born for another five or six years after that. I’m not quite old enough to be their dad, but I’m old enough to be their dad’s friend. We could hang out, drink craft beers together. Quote Pulp Fiction. Compare our favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater. This is what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the guy at the zoo whose T-shirt says Slayer and whose tattoo says anarchy, explaining to his toddler son the parameters of acceptable public behavior and laying out the consequences if those parameters are transgressed. He’s got a chain on his wallet and a stroller loaded up with bottles of water and sunscreen. This is what I’m talking about.

What is the statute of limitations on coolness? I was cool for one year in 1997—does that still count?

There’s something corrosive to me about the Smashing Pumpkins to this day—at least in those first three albums. They have a sound of metal scraping against metal, like a car being keyed. That’s a sound that either has not aged or has aged in a way that I can’t perceive, and the fact that I’m not sure which one it is makes my prostate throb. Still, it’s music that has held up remarkably well. Siamese Dream in particular is something close to a masterpiece, but if I say this—if I declare it—does that add legitimacy or take legitimacy away? When do I become your dad’s annoying friend who is constantly urging you to seek out some antiquated piece of twenty-five-year-old culture that you have no intention of tracking down? You haven’t heard Siamese Dream? You gotta listen to Siamese Dream. It’s a masterpiece! And don’t listen it on some low bit-rate Pandorify bullshit streaming service. Find it on COMPACT DISC. Pluck out those earbuds, listen to something through SPEAKERS. Fetch me another Fat Tire and let me tell you about the Pixies.

Kurt Cobain will turn 49 on February 20th of this year. He was a dad. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” no matter what you think of it, is a dad rock anthem.

Nothing stays the way it was except in your own head.

Getting older means figuring out that it doesn’t matter what you listen to or which shows you’ve been to or which movies you’ve seen or which drugs you’ve taken. You will be defined as uncool by the smug little narcissists who are younger than you, and their opinion matters more than yours because they are coming to replace you. And it means coming to realize that you pulled exactly the same nonsense when you were the smug little narcissist—but you had never been laid and your band sounded terrible and you thought you could see the purity of true art but really you didn’t understand a single goddamn thing about anything that was real or meaningful. It means beginning to recognize the honest beauty of those skate punks, of that dirty basement, of the music, of just about everything. It means turning on the lights.

Life’s a bummer when you’re a hummer. I think I get it.

—Joe P. Squance

#363: New Order, "Substance" (1987)

There was no ceremony. The curtain lifted on a chance meeting, one tethered to neither time nor place—the setting a crowded room, where bodies bent and wove in a mass to the ebb and flow of invisible balance. Heat and sound, acting out their desires by pushing and pulling strings to guide each tangle of hopes and fears into the infrared of another; the tempo and swirling textures the speakers’ gifts, marking time.

Normally the bar promised solitude, frequented by a few regulars and people accustomed to stewing in their own silence as the music played and the bartenders traded shifts, washed glasses. It was around these times of cold-month celebrations that got everyone together for a debauched class reunion; all the bar’s alums under one roof drinking.

What I was was drunk and lonely, or perhaps tipsy and wistful. This must have left my mind at the frequency of a whale song, unrecognizable over the din of the room but felt in the latent animal receptors buried in the core of another, drink in hand, swaying.

Now I was not the type to advance without a call to arms. My career in that arena of battle is fraught with error, in that enough misfires and friendly fire fill my dossier to hint at the futility of future engagements. But something in the fabric of the room, the evening, the whiff of longing to be approached, the comfortable bubble of public isolation waiting to be pierced had me shouldering my frame between the limbs, sliding on pools of melted snow to the point just before where the whites of her eyes looked grey in the dim light.

Her boots, still clung with snow, shifted in their space, as mine stood opposite.

“I’m not encroaching, I hope,” clumsy, yes, but where to begin? I was never a conqueror; the military jargon too loaded with cheap innuendos, plus flags should never be planted forcefully—the very least acquiesced.

“That all depends,” she rallied, keeping her eyes sharp and pulling at the frayed label of the bottle in her left hand.

“Perhaps that’s not the question, let me try again. May I?” I gestured to the patch of bar floor before her, genuflecting. Don’t bother. I will forever play the fool. She remained coy, myself exciting inspection. “Permission granted,” she said, the label hanging free now like a frayed veil.

“Are you home or did the holidays bring you back north?” I treaded carefully.

“Didn’t you see my name on the mailbox?” she inquired, deadpan.

“Funny, you seem tucked away for someone in her natural element.”

“Well maybe I’m just passing through. Home isn’t really binding.”

“This is true. Wherever you lay your hat?”

“When I wear one.”

“And when you don’t?”

“I can wear my hair however I like.”

“Certainly a perk. It looks lovely tonight.”

“But you don’t know how it usually looks.”

“Yes but I’ve seen plenty of hair.”

“An expert, I take it. Pity I can’t say the same about yours….” She trailed off and here she smiled and the room seemed to widen and contract all at once inciting a sort of spatial vertigo all in an instant like a sucker punch or a hit of nitrous or like waking up from a vivid dream. She pressed her thumb on the underside of a ring with a dull stone. I rolled my ankle, leg stretched back, feeling the cartilage realign and tumble.

“William,” I said, offering up my name.

“Will?”

“William.”

“I’ll call you Will. What about you, Will? Is this home?”

“No, but it will always be.”

“Seems we’re both victims of an invisible hand.”

“Suppose we are.”

“Where do you see the hand taking us, Will?”

“Another round?”

“How bout I get this one.”

*

I never got her name. We were headed to the other side of the river to a venue I used to go to infrequently for a dance night that I’d heard about in passing. She knew someone working the door or whatever so we wouldn’t have to pay for entry, plus they had cheap beer and kept the lights real low. What I’m trying to say is that she had the reigns. I remember we talked about how the city looked different, how observing change is a palpable feeling. We arrived outside the venue as a light snow began to fall through the orange glow of the streetlights.

The place looked dingy. Inside the foyer a salt stained carpet led to a guy the size of a lineman who asked for IDs and cover. The whole room was bathed in red.

“I thought you knew the door guy?”

“Gary must not be working tonight.”

“No matter, I got money.” I handed the guy some crumpled bills and so did she and we made our way inside.    

It was packed. I’m talking fucking slammed. We immediately peeled off our coats and draping them over our respective arms made a wide berth towards the bar. I remember sweating, the hot toffee fire taste of whiskey, the cool relief of domestic beer. And I remember it was loud. Although we drank from cans I watched her fingers search for the contours of a label.

After stashing our coats against the wall by some sound gear I felt her grab my arm and then her breath on the side of me face.

“Dance with me!” she hollered above the music.

“You lead!” I shouted back.

Here’s where it gets blurry. I don’t drink whiskey. Rather, I don’t drink whiskey anymore. It makes me forget things, like nights, happenings. But I did that night because something wanted me to. I wanted to. Forget, or just blur the edges. Maybe it was survival instinct. Maybe it was just a mistake.

We hit the floor like it was a robbery, her pulling me to the middle where the lights spun kaleidoscopic, and bodies fenced us in. And we moved. Her hands were on my shoulders pulled close like a high school dance before the chaperones could break us up, I laid mine on her sides, later pulling her close, entwining them behind her back. It was something slow—breathy vocals and reverb.

I remember as the song faded, from inside the swirl of the guitars I could hear voices welling up, and the drive of drums. Then the guitars broke through and the clouds lifted. We broke apart like wrestlers regaining our footing, squaring off, pounding the ground with each snare hit as the guitars jangled and ripped through the room. All around us people were clashing into each other, laughing, and the lights kept spinning.

Our hands formed a lattice as the lyrics broke over the room, something about heaven and hope.  She pulled me in close and that was when we kissed and the ground was so slick with melted snow I almost fell. It happened so fast and being off-balance I didn’t have time to shut my eyes, her silhouette outlined in rose filters hung as we pulled away. Her eyes flashed green, blue, then grey. Or was that the song? She wore the same smile she betrayed earlier, more comely, a little more don’t-make-me-come-over-there. With her arm around my waist she turned us around.

“Let’s get a drink!” I heard her say as the lyrics rang oh no, I’ve never met anyone quite like you before

*

The next morning it was my head that rang. I remember the walk back in what amounted to a blizzard after the music stopped. Practically a white-out, the flakes falling like wet cotton. I was staying at my dad’s apartment back on the other side of the river. He’d left the place empty for the night so he could celebrate the cold with his new girlfriend, someone he’d met at the gym. All I know is I managed to keep track of the key.

Once we got back it must have been well after three in the morning but we poured fresh drinks—I know this because my glass is still half empty—and talked. Then I remember her turning the light out, her breath again on my neck, the weight of her body, her hair. Her voice.

“Kiss me.”

It was tangled, fuzzy, blown out like a speaker. I’d been sleeping on the couch, which offered little room. My head swam laps. Light peaked through the blinds, the sound of wind rushing branches against the windows. We made our own noise. I don’t remember sleep.

The next morning I was left alone with a slip of paper, addressed to Will, with no name. Her cursive was slanted and loopy.

Tonight I think I’ll walk alone I’ll find my soul as I go home

My flight left later that evening and my girlfriend met me at the airport smiling, waiting with a kiss.

—Nick Graveline

#364: The Doors, "L.A. Woman" (1971)

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps, ‘Oh look at that!’ Then whoosh, and I'm gone….and they'll never see anything like it ever again—and they won't be able to forget me, ever.

—Jim Morrison

The poet makes himself a seer through a long, a prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. ….He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed at the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable, and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed.

—Arthur Rimbaud
 

My hound dog sleeps at my feet. His body shudders with dreams and they move through the threads of the thick quilts and blankets that cover me. Dreams enter us at the places where threads cover our skin, the woven threads and skin aligning, or, more directly, through the soles of our feet. Dreams enter hound dogs by day through the smooth black pads of their paws, when they run. Not being clothed with threads, all of the dreams of animals enter them straight through the earth.

I dream we are in a field. It is stubble, the stumps of grainstalks left after reaping. It is winter, fog. A gray rabbit is running through the field. The rabbit is a silver fire that trails across the stubblestalks and burns up at the horizon. My dog chases. They, both of them, rabbit and hound, cut a path across the earth that is both flat and curvature, both winding and straight, as all paths across the earth are.

Two animal shapes soft and furry and fiery, the fury of the chase, two four-chambered hearts pounding, and mine. Watching. (Am I in the field with them? Am I standing on that earth?)

*

This is the field of my childhood and thus the field I must cross in all my dreams to reach the borders of everything that lies beyond, and in dreams we are always cutting through the early years that lie inside us in which we saw the world so lucidly, so infinitely, our eyes like the eyes of rabbits.

In those early years I was always at the doorway, watching. I was always in the fields.

I remember the tangled brush piles where the foxes slept. And mink trails. The creek was a slow gold comet. The sycamore tree was a bolt of lightning I climbed to the fatherless sky.

*

My dog chases the rabbit. All is silent, all perfectly serene, when he pierces the rabbit’s throat with his long teeth. As if the rabbit were a plum, his teeth a silver knife. He runs with it hanging in his jaws, its head askew and limp. They are both together a dagger across the low sun. All bodies are in this celestial motion and the rabbit’s dreams enter the hound through the teeth (the only other way that dreams enter animals, the most direct).

I fall into the rabbit’s eye. (Yes, I know now I was there and do not remember if there was barbed wire or not.) The eye is a pool, perfectly still. It grows wider. I am swimming towards some kind of blackholeness or it is spreading toward me, the place where there is no blood, no teeth.

The rabbit’s eyes are my sister’s eyes. I dreamt of her two nights ago. In the dream I held her as a child—as I once held her, as a child, against me. I looked into her eyes and saw no colored iris, no pupil, no flowers blooming. A place where there were no bones to gnaw.

*

I yelled and the dog let the rabbit go. Its gray body dropped back to the earth and it bounded away the way it came, carrying an unalterable hole in its neck as the holes made by the teeth or knives or bullets of our hunters are always gaping unalterably in our throats, each of our words having to bound and leap and claw across that chasm, then having to pull back the barbed wire of the teeth before traveling beyond.

We walk into our dreams and go to the blackhole pools to swim, that we might hunt the hunter down inside us whose holes gape eternally across the universe, that we might catch the hunter in our jaws, the jaws that house our tongues which rock and cradle the breath before it is born, breaking into the broken world.

And is it love or what is hunting us.

Are there other hungers I do not know of. Lizards warm their blood against the stones, some other fire than inside. (When I wake, I want to walk barefoot across warm stones in winter sun, and I will call my sister.) The rabbit is bounding away, released by the hound, it is a silver fire again and its soft padded feet are like currents of night moving into the soil.

—Holly Haworth

#365: Rage Against the Machine, "Rage Against the Machine" (1992)

The Bare Ruined Choir was a Portland, Oregon band founded by Daniel Wargo in October 2010. It had originated as a solo project in his Portland State University dorm room and had grown into a multi-person outfit by May 2011. Other members of the band were bassist Ben Noyce, the keyboardist Homer Johnson, and the drummer Oliver Templeton, with Wargo fronting the group on guitar and vocals. The Bare Ruined Choir quickly rose to prominence in their home city and attracted national reviews, providing the band with opportunities to open for Beach House in 2012, Father John Misty in 2013, and the War on Drugs in 2014.

Wargo and the rest of the band did not tour in 2015 and decided to record their second album that winter, an album tentatively called Kissing Cousins. Wargo didn’t want the band to record in a studio, though, as the recording of the group’s first album was a process he didn’t want to repeat. He wanted the Bare Ruined Choir to record in a space that allowed for experimentation with the material, a place in which the music would allow itself to find its essence. Studios were constricting, according to Wargo. Their business practices of charging for studio time forced bands to produce rushed and uninspired material, which is exactly what Wargo thought of the band’s self-titled debut.

The frontman began looking outside of Portland and to the countryside for such a place to record and found a cabin in eastern Oregon through Taylor Slick, a member of his food co-op. Thinking that this was the environment that would best foster the band’s creative endeavors, the Bare Ruined Choir packed their instruments and struck out for Burns, Oregon to record their next album. 

The band then disappeared. The last time anyone had contact with the Bare Ruined Choir was in January 2016: a phone call by Daniel Wargo to his sister Sarah on her birthday. After three months of silence, Taylor Slick was pressed by worried family members to visit the cabin. He found the cabin empty. No band members and no instruments. The only item Slick found was a CD copy of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled album and the words FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!! spray-painted on the cabin walls. Police departments throughout Oregon conducted a statewide search for the missing band, even calling in federal investigators, but no trace of them was found. Not until November 2016.

A week before Thanksgiving, American radical Ammon Bundy released a video to news outlets detailing the continuing goals and progress of his national militia movement. Wargo’s mother

Roxanne spotted Daniel in the video, standing behind the organization’s leader.

“When I saw the video, I couldn’t believe it,” said Roxanne Wargo. “But it was Daniel. It was my boy.”

Before joining Bundy’s rebels, Wargo kept a clean-shaven face and cut his hair in a side part pompadour, rarely wearing hats. Wargo was now growing a beard and donning a Stetson, blending in with Bundy’s militia. Instead of a carrying a guitar, Wargo was wielding an assault rifle.

“We identified Wargo in the November 18 video and then subsequently identified him in other videos and photographs,” said CIA analyst James Hopper. “He was a prominent member of the insurgents, a figure we acknowledged but never knew the identity of. We never thought to use the Oregon missing persons list.”

The radicalization of Daniel Wargo and the rest of the Bare Ruined Choir is a mystery to officials. No one knows if the band travelled to eastern Oregon with intention of joining Bundy or if they were recruited by his troops.

“What prompted Wargo, Noyce, Templeton, and Johnson to join Bundy and his militants is unclear at the moment,” said Hopper. “But our intelligence shows the band sold their instruments and recording equipment to a Burns pawnshop in early February 2016. They used that money to buy tactical gear and assault rifles, joining Bundy at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge shortly after.”

“I just don’t understand how this happened,” said Matthew Goodson, Wargo’s childhood friend. “Listening to Rage Against the Machine was probably the most political thing Daniel had ever done.

“But maybe I should have seen this coming. I thought I saw Daniel nodding his head to Godsmack once.”

On May 24, 2017, federal officials orchestrated a siege on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The operation lasted two months and resulted in 93 deaths, eclipsing the 1993 Waco incident. Daniel Wargo was one of the deceased.

Found in Wargo’s personal effects was a box of reel-to-reel tapes. Those tapes are believed to be the surviving recordings of the Kissing Cousins sessions.

“After listening to the tapes, we do believe it is the Bare Ruined Choir. However, none of the tracks are original songs. The four tapes consist entirely of Rage Against the Machine covers,” said Hopper.

Shortly after officials acquired the tapes, the recordings were leaked online. The Kissing Cousins sessions were downloaded a reported one million times within three days. Pitchfork provided the unofficial release a score of 8.3.

The bodies of Daniel Noyce, Oliver Templeton, and Homer Johnson were not found at the refuge following the siege. Their whereabouts are unknown. Authorities believe the remaining members of the Bare Ruined Choir are disbursed throughout the country, operating in or leading other Bundy cells.

“While we don’t know their current locations, we are operating on a couple promising leads,” said Hopper.

* 

The following letter written by Daniel Wargo, dated May 23, 2017 and addressed to his sister Sarah, was found along with the Kissing Cousins recordings.

My Very Dear Sister,

Indications are very strong that a strike will fall on the refuge, perhaps to-morrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel compelled to write a line, that it may fall under your eyes when I shall be no more.

Remember always, my dearest Sarah…

Anger is a gift.

Daniel

—Dillon Hawkins

#366: Johnny Cash, "American Recordings" (1994)

Here are some facts about American Recordings that help explain the total insanity behind its existence, which one might not necessarily garner simply by listening to the music, which sounds largely if not entirely like a collection of some pretty good country songs:

1. American Recordings was Johnny Cash’s 81st album.

2. When American Recordings came out in 1994, Johnny Cash was 62 years old.

3. Johnny Cash made his first studio recordings in 1955, which means he’d been recording music for just under 40 years when he made American Recordings, which was his 81st album. That is a whole lot of music to record in 40 years.

4. American Recordings was the first in a four-album run that is across the board considered the second-best period of the across-the-board second-best country music artist of all time. At the end of this period, Johnny Cash was 70 years old. The period only ended (probably) because he died.

5. Rick Rubin produced American Recordings.

6. This one is big and weird and cannot be understated: Rick Rubin produced American Recordings.

7. Other albums produced by Rick Rubin within the two year window on either side of his producing American Recordings: Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Mack Daddy, Flipper’s American Grafishy, the Last Action Hero soundtrack, Slayer’s Divine Intervention, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Chief Boot Knocka, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute, Andrew Dice Clay’s Dice Live at Madison Square Garden, AC/DC’s Ballbreaker, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Return of the Bumpasaurus.

8. Needless to say, none of these albums sound much like American Recordings.

9. Rick Rubin is (probably) the most important producer of the last 30 years, but everyone’s favorite story about Rick Rubin is still this one: when he was 17 years old, Rick Rubin got all his friends to come heckle his band at one of their shows, and also got his band to get into a brawl with his friends in response to the heckling, and also got his dad to wear his police uniform and break up the brawl, even though his dad had no jurisdiction in Manhattan, where the show was taking place. At 17 years old, Rick Rubin orchestrated local buzz around his own band by orchestrating a fake riot, which required a lot of help from basically everyone he knew and explains a lot about who he would grow up to be.

10. In 1993, Rick Rubin changed the name of his record label from Def American to American because he found the word “def” in the dictionary and declared it (essentially) no longer cool.

11. When he changed the name of his record label, Rick Rubin held a funeral for the word “def.” 500 people attended. The Reverend Al Sharpton presided. This is how the Los Angeles Times described the funeral: “Mourners followed a 19th Century-style horse-drawn hearse and a six-piece brass band playing ‘Amazing Grace’ past the mausoleum that holds Rudolph Valentino’s remains to a freshly dug grave with a simple black granite slab inscribed DEF.”

12. Rick Rubin held a funeral for a word and then within six months had signed Johnny Cash, who then made what would become probably the second most famous of his then-81 albums.

This is not always the case, that the facts which coalesce behind a record become the reason a record is so beloved.

That last sentence, actually, is almost patently untrue. Many, many very famous, beloved records are famous and beloved largely due to the facts behind their very existence more so than the music on the wax. Some of them, like American Recordings, are comeback albums—this makes sense, because everyone likes a good comeback album (and no one likes a bad one). Others are harder to explain: Rolling Stone, for example, considers Sgt. Pepper’s the greatest album of all time, a reasoning it explains with eleven paragraphs detailing first-hand stories behind the album’s importance and creation. Sometimes the music itself is mentioned, but pretty much always in the context of its “firsts,” rather than, say, its sonicness or sweet-ass harmonies. Another: Nevermind, no one’s favorite Nirvana album and definitely not their best, is the most famous and beloved album of a whole generation of Americans because of what it meant when it was released. James Brown’s classic Live at the Apollo is basically 20 percent Brown’s voice, 10 percent showmanship that you can’t see because you can’t see audio, and 70 percent screaming teenagers—it’s more cultural artifact than listenable record, but that doesn’t negate its bigness. The story simply surpasses, again and again.

American Recordings is this kind of collection. It’s 13 songs long, two of which were recorded live at Johnny Depp’s nightclub (you be you, 1994), the rest in the Man in Black’s literal living room in Tennessee. It documents an aging legend using only his aging, legendary voice (more legendary than aging, tbh) and an acoustic guitar. Sometimes he says fuck it and just sing-song-talks. It’s in parts both moving and nice to listen to. It is never amazing. (The closest it gets is the nearly transcendent, v funny closer “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” mostly effective thanks to the live audience providing laugh track to all the right parts.)

But it doesn’t need to be, not really. There are 12 good reasons at the top of this page why not, and about two dozen you could add to those. It’s one of those album where we all agree: sometimes just existing is enough. Sometimes maybe even preferred.

—Brad Efford

#367: Madonna, "Ray of Light" (1998)

In moments of darkness, Madonna is my karaoke savior.

I am no karaoke superstar. I would like to have considered myself a valuable member of the South Hunterdon Regional High School Chorale, but in all honestly, I mostly just listened to the guy next to me and tried to emulate his pitch. I have no concept of how to read music, or to hit a note without scooping my way there. None of these things come natural to me.

I do, however, have a somewhat decent ear, which I use mostly to do terrible impressions of my girlfriend’s Minnesotan accent, as well as throw dance parties where I am trusted to put a sequence together of similar songs that make everyone stay out on the cleared dancefloor space in front of the dartboards for long enough that, yes, another drink does sound like a good idea, and sure, I would like a shot while you are up there.

Madonna’s game has always been emulation. She is someone who always knows what is going on and is incredibly in tune with the universe, almost like a larger-than-life mystical yoga sex champion who captivates whatever audience happens to be walking by her at the moment. This tends to work well more often than not, although as of late, it seems as if the pop trends have passed her by at this particular time: grandiose claims over vague EDM beats—Madonna has always been better served in showing, not telling.

You can’t blame her for wanting to tap into this zeitgeist, as Ray of Light (and to a lesser extent, the excellent and underrated Music) is a perfect example in grabbing hold of what is swirling around her and Madonna-izing it. Ray of Light is the most 1998 album in the history of 1998 and homegirl absolutely nails it.

It has everything you could ever want! “Candy Perfume Girl” has lots of little bloops and bleeps with a crunchy distorted guitar driving things forward! “Nothing Really Matters” is a classic Madonna track that we’ve come to expect from the Queen with flourishes that take it out of the 1990s Eurohouse House and into the palatial ice mansions that we all lived in during the late 1990s. “Ray of Light” sounds like a better version of Republica’s “Ready to Go,” with a much better and more entertaining video (although Madonna would never be caught dead playing Virtua Fighter 2 on a Sega Saturn—Madonna is the human embodiment of the mysterious uncle of a friend of yours who works for Nintendo who swears that there’s already a Nintendo 128 in Japan and he got to play Super Super Mario 128 Galaxy Zelda Kong before anyone else).

The reason that I choose Madonna as a karaoke go-to is that her songs are easily recognizable, fit into any situation perfectly, and are relatively easy to sing. The power of Madonna has never truly been in her voice, but in her ability to adapt to different trends. I would never use the term “timeless” to describe Madonna. She seems incredibly rooted in place and in era—it’s just that she’s one of those giant walking tree Ents that can plant herself into one spot like she has always been there, before slithering on over to another forest without giving anything a second thought. Even as I write this, I find myself conflicted in my viewpoints of how she exists: is what she does emulation, or has she been so ahead of the curve that it only seems like she is aping others—that she has become so synonymous with the push of electronica music toward the mainstream, that she was the one who brought us here, rather than jumping on a ship that was already well off shore and sailing toward a distant land of dancefloor liberation?

While I am uncertain as to the answer of that, what Madonna has always brought is heart: that even though she may never be the perfect singer (remember how mad everyone was for her being cast as Evita and how she had to go get vocal lessons?) she is able to bring a sensualness and vulnerability to even the coldest of William Orbit’s productions.

One particular karaoke instance stands out above all others: I was recently unceremoniously thrown out of a relationship, and needed to leave town. I drove six hours to go visit a friend of mine, and, well, get drunk. That night, we stumbled into a bar that was hosting karaoke. My friend Lisa slipped the DJ 20 dollars to put my name next, where I announced that I had just been broken up with, and proceeded to belt out “Borderline” as loud and as heart-first as I possibly could.

It probably wasn’t great (my friend Chris claims to have video, which he will never release to the public, thanks buddy), but it perfectly captured what I was feeling at the time: sometimes you just need to immerse yourself in something unfamiliar and give it all you got.

—Brian Oliu

#368: Eagles, "Eagles" (1972)

A town is a thought in the desert that goes against the desert’s flatland thinking. It’s probably a bad thought we keep having. A dry thought in a dry shade.

We aren’t even supposed to be here today. Before this we were pretty much just two people. Other people’s loved ones. Suddenly we’re two people in a situation. When the radiator fan splinters into its car-stopping parts, one of its long black plastic pieces curves into a cheshire smile. That fucking Eagles song.

The car breaks down 12 miles outside of Winslow, AZ. There are some real hateful things to say about Winslow, AZ, but why say them? For starters we can see it when we close our eyes. We don’t close our eyes. There’s that one about the cheating side of town.

Though there must be some somewhere, we don’t see any water in Winslow. We see a La Quinta Inn. We decide this is Winslow’s history. Winslow’s history is pretty much up for grabs. The local high school labors under the banner of a white Bulldog. When it seems clear we’re going to be here forever, we take turns posting up near the corner statue of the Man with the Guitar. It sounds like it could be Picasso but it’s the fucking Eagles.

Two versions of the flatbed Ford. The truck parked on the curb is empty, my lord.

If it feels like the Eagles are always playing somewhere it’s because they are. There’s that one where you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave, and then there’s the La Quinta Inn. By the pool we meet a man who has the first name of a fish. He tells us some people believe the lightning has special powers but he doesn’t go in for that Navajo stuff, we’re not those kinds of Indians, he says, and he and the women he’s with shake with laughter like they’re the ground in a hard rain.

That was the desert. This is the desert. The tapwater in Winslow tastes nothing like riverwater or poolwater or other kinds of water. The High Life tastes like High Life.

This is before the rain sealed off the canyon, before the sun came out and dried up all the rain.

We will never be here again.

Winslow is a vortex for feeling like you’re slowing down to take a look—or else being looked at slowly—from a pickup. Everybody’s cover is blown. Everything’s hard to find. Time splinters into its parts like car parts.

On an aimless walk in the low sun we take long hard looks at Winslow without saying anything about Winslow or anyone in it. It’s an approach we both know how to take to a thing that has both of us in it.

In the La Quinta Inn there’s desire, and there’s the desire to get out of Winslow. This is after the tent, which seems like days ago, lifetimes even, and which was like a radiator, in that it flooded, and which was like Winslow, in that it had both of us in it. About what happened in the tent before the radiator, before Winslow, nobody’s saying.

It must be hard, one of us ventures, having seven women on one’s mind. And this not even being the one about our lyin’ eyes. That night we watch a movie we both love without speaking. There’s a consensus about vortexes, about what kind of scarf and shirt combo makes a real musician.

The last part, love without speaking, maybe that’s it.

And just outside of Winslow, all the signs say, there’s some tourist thing we know we’ll never visit. A long time ago a fire in the sky became a stone that hurled itself down, scooped a hole in the earth about a mile wide. Now it’s an empty lake.

—Todd Rodman

#369: The Smiths, "Louder Than Bombs" (1987)

You say: The world will end in the night time. You know this because the world hides truths, is dignified, proud. At night, you say, there will be fewer eyes to see the world fall apart and spill its secrets—you’re not talking about the nickel-iron alloy sitting at its center, nor lava, nor magma, nor magnetic fields; not those kinds of secrets. These are other secrets—things you and me can’t even imagine. When the world ends in the night time, those things will be obscured by shadow, illuminated by only the moon’s thinnest light. So yes, you say—when the world grows weary and ends, it will be at night.

In bed, everywhere around us, we feel the stillness of our house. The quiet. When I shift toward you, you turn to face me and the bed sags a little in the middle. Your face near my chest so I can feel you breathe. My mouth against your hair. I imagine your DNA dissolving in my saliva’s enzymes.

I say: Sleep or sex?

You say: What kind of question even is that?

*

You say: The world will end in the day time. That, you say, makes sense, is when men’s work threatens the very construction of our planet. You say, it is the drills and bombs that will end us all, end everything, that it’s only a matter of time before humans stop the Earth in its orbit and we fall into the sun, or break into giant pieces, become asteroids, circling, circling. And what then, you say? What will become of us all, dying in the day time, all our secret horrors realized—mortality will stop being an abstract, will become a real, tangible thing we will all wear on our faces as we all die in public.

You ask me: are you happy?

I say: No.

You ask me: Are you sad?

I say: No.

You say: Do you remember your dreams?

I say: Not for a long time.

You reach across the bed, grab my hands that have been folded over my chest. You say, You’re cold. You say, It’s that Eskimo blood in your veins.

I say, I’m not an Eskimo.

You say, I meant like the song.

I say, Oh.

You say, I don’t know.

*

You set the needle on the record’s edge and light a cigarette that we will pass back and forth in bed. After an initial first static burst, there comes a harmonica. You go to lift the needle, set it down after the first song, but I ask you to stop. This is our ritual, Side D of the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs, bleary and exhausted, low-lit and smoky. Except “Hand in Glove.” We skip that one most nights, but tonight, I want to hear it.

You ask, Why?

I say, Because the sun shines out of our behinds.

You make a noise that I don’t recognize.

I say, Are you ok?

You don’t answer but continue to make the noise and then I understand you are laughing.

On our copy of the record, the songs after “Hand in Glove” sound gritty, are worn down from repeated plays. Tonight, we don’t notice because God, how sex implores us. We let ourselves lose ourselves.

*

You say: Is there any point ever having children? You say, not just us, but in general. But also us. And in this nighttime world we inhabit.

I say, Are you trying to tell me something?

You say, No. You say, but if I were, what would be the point? You say, This world. You say, I don’t believe in mothers. I can never be one. You say, This world. But, you say, to think of a little boy…

I say, Or a little girl.

You say, No. How could we do that to a child?

I say, Do what?

You say, Raise it.

I say, She could be a poet.

You say, Or she’d be a fool.

I say, That’s Morrissey talking.

You say, We’re all Morrissey when we talk.

*

You say: What I do know is we’re here and it’s now and that’s the only thing, for now and for always. You say, the world will go on, or it won’t. We’ll have a child or we won’t. We’ll remember our dreams or we won’t. You slide over so your body is against mine and pull the top sheet and blanket up to both of our chins. Your head is on my shoulder and you say, Take me, I’m yours.

I don’t know if you mean this or if you’re quoting lyrics again. I say, You mean, take you?

You say, What else would I mean?

And I don’t know if it’s the right thing, right now, in the stillness of this empty house, as winter cold creeps in around the windows, but I feel your warm body beside me and know that it’s the only thing, has always and will always be the only thing. This house feels big, the neighborhood, city, state, country, bigger still. I feel exhausted and I say, This world. I say, I’m tired.

You say, But first.

You say, Please.

I say, Maybe there is another one.

You say, Another what?

I say, You know.

You say, Another world?

I say, There must be.

You say, But here, now.

You say, Please.

I fold into your warmth.

—James Brubaker

#370: Mott the Hoople, "Mott" (1973)

It was getting toward sunset on the Fourth of July when All the Young Dudes hit the deck of the SS RNR CIRCUS for the annual Glam Slam Jam and the air was hot. The boys were dressed in their usual regalia of 70s-throwback-flirting-with-a-drag-show aesthetic that would have made the Thin White Duke tip a coiffed head in admiration. The vessel, a reproduction of an antebellum riverboat, embarked from Mud Island for its usual churn up the Mississippi and back down for a starboard view of Memphis’s riverfront skyline. The crew was equally bedazzled for the event, carrying confetti guns in lieu of armaments, with flares attached at the hip for easy deployment when the night got into full swing. The Captain, who claimed to have spent time roaming beneath the iron curtain with the Starman during his Berlin years, acted as a de facto master of ceremonies. Not to mention he was rumored to have scored the same cocaine listed in the liner notes of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life.

The crowd was the usual smattering of old Memphis rockers and audiophiles who kept original issues of Creem and Melody Maker in plastic sleeves only to be handled with freshly-laundered cotton gloves. Young dudes just delving into the Mott, casting eyes about the planks on the hunt for their very own Penny Lanes. Of course there were tourists, told by their phones that this was the premier paddlewheel-driven rock tribute; all square, their selfie sticks colliding with waving arms and raised bottles, complaining about the heat. Sure they weren’t expecting the rampant drinking and casual open-air drug use, but when you cram enough nostalgia and fervent rock fans together, all dipping into their private stashes to share in the collective revelry of a bygone era, things are bound to get a bit sloppy.

All the Young Dudes, though, were anything but. Each member of Memphis’s very own tribute to the Hoople offered a mixture of underground-famous studio player notoriety and the gregarious swagger of barfly troubadours. More importantly, those dudes kicked out the jams like motherfuckers surging on weapons-grade adrenaline. The Dudes’ Ian Hunter, cutting a jib on the Mason/Dixon of Electric Warrior and Road Warrior, punctuated each lyric with the lit tip of his cigarette, tucking it into the neck of his +-shaped guitar when it was his turn to rip. The rhythm section traded hits and slaps along with a tight roll of medical grade White Light (you know it’s gonna make you go blind) expelling clouds of cannabinoid smoke and working three times harder than all the fog machines combined. Swinging from the lifeboats were young cats from the local scene all looking to catch a bead of sweat as the ship continued carving its path, leaving hissing roaches and guitar licks bobbing in their wake.

While the Dudes continued to hold court aboard the CIRCUS, on the other side of Mud Island a similar vessel at anchor: steam-powered and hell-bent on absolute river dominance of a more nefarious caliber. Where the Dudes were attempting to bask in the warm shroud of the slowly ebbing twilight—somewhere between pastiche and true love expressed through emulation—the SS WAGON WEAL aimed to shoot them down.

Apparently, and this is word of mouth through some of the city’s back channels, the captain of the CIRCUS, the one who rolled with the Starman, had run some bad coke to fund this year’s annual Glam Slam Jam—the premier paddlewheel-driven rock tribute in arguably Tennessee’s real music city. Word about Beale was that the captain had been under pressure from some of the upper-ups around Memphis to bring in more out-of-towners to keep the GSJ in the black after what had amounted to several years of decline. The fat cats who’d been leaning on their thumbs, and subsequently the captain, were concerned that a certain other city in the Volunteer State also built on a river (but not one that Mark Twain really gave two shits about) was drawing not just the majority of Tennessee’s Fourth of July vacation money, but the great middle Southeast’s overall expendable income as well. This was bad news for the captain, and frankly left him in a spot tighter than a drumhead.

What the captain had settled on, and this again is just what so-and-so heard from one of the young dudes working valet at Rendezvous, was that rather than get a bunch of out-of-town amateurs in the mix for his favorite party on no wheels, the captain mixed some of that famous Beat My Brains white with over the counter anti-acid medication and passed it off as pure to some of the less informed powder heads around Shelby County. He was making it hand over fist. What the captain hadn’t accounted for was that one of those less informed heads happened to own the SS WAGON WEAL, a right-down-to-the-bolts replica of a Civil War river gunboat; locked and loaded and twice as long as the SS RNR CIRCUS. Their captain, high on the same shit as Iggy plus generic brand TUMS, hoisted anchor just as the RNR made its up river turn and headed back up towards the city.

As the Dudes called intermission, the captain swung the ship around and came on deck for a state-of-the-union type address.

“Y’all feelin’ alright?” he belted through gritted teeth into a microphone strung up with holiday lights.

“All the Young Dudes, ladies and gentlemen! Man alive, y’all is hot as grits tonight! I wanna thank the Dudes, and all y’all for coming out for what is shaping up to be a memorable evening. Give it up for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen!”

The captain paused for cheers and applause as his eyes caught the approaching gunboat in the distance. With drug-honed vision sharper than a red tail, he recognized the mounted figurehead of General George Pickett as none other than the SS WAGON WEAL approaching at 20 knots portside. This was not a drill.

Turning his back to the crowd, the captain lifted a small mound of that true LFL white into his left nasal cavity and inhaled. Resuming his emcee duties, he gave orders with an air of celebration.

“Hoople heads, I present to you, once again, the Dudes!” Waving his arms frantically to the light booth, signaling the projector, who swung the spots from the captain back to the stage where the Dudes, being amateur professionals, dropped their smokes, and once again it was strictly business. The captain pulled his first mate in close to whisper in his ear, “Get ready to give these bastards hell” as the Dudes launched into “Honaloochie Boogie” with a high-haired, eye-patched roadie stepping in to man the keys. The crowd, running too hot to notice the crew taking up positions along the port side, struggling with crates and what looked like brightly colored mailing tubes, went wild.

As the Dudes kept the crowd rapt and raging, no one noticed the SS WAGON WEAL barring down. At 18-inch increments, the crew had lined the mortars for the nights’ culminating firework display to point outward all along the vessel’s port side. The crew stood at the ready, hushed and smoking, awaiting the command. The captain drummed his fingers on the ship’s wheel in anticipation. In the distance, a flock of seagulls dipped into the rocking wake below the horizon.

“Boys, watch my footwork and get ready to shoulder ‘em,” the captain announced, muscling the wheel, churning the whole CIRCUS to run perpendicular to the approaching WEAL. This happened like lightning. The CIRCUS drifted at an angle of self-defense as the crew hustled to spark the display shells and get them loaded. The Dudes were ripping into “All the Way from Memphis” and just when their Ian Hunter belted out “Forgot my six-string razor—hit the sky,” a wave of explosions lit up the back port and rear of the vessel like a goddam firefight. The crowd officially lost it. The WEAL was not expecting to lose the upper hand of surprise (and muscle), and was effectively caught with their pants down. The display was immaculate.

“Give ‘em hell, boys!” At that, the crew let fly flares and confetti at the scuttling shapes on the WEAL’s deck. In the midst of the barrage, the WEAL let loose a volley that completely missed the CIRCUS’s carousing deck and hull, but managed to blow the lid off the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid off Wolf River Harbor. The WEAL screamed past the CIRCUS in a blaze of pyrotechnics and craft supplies as the Dudes launched into their namesake and their voices filled the night.

“HEY DUDES!” The captain shrieked over the rising chorus, weaving between the Dudes’ call and response, as he watched the WEAL catch fire like dry kindling, the Pyramid ablaze over his shoulder, the wind carrying the smoke as the Dudes carried the news.

—Nick Graveline

#371: Arctic Monkeys, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" (2006)

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not was essentially the mantra of, and definitely the soundtrack for, those middle years of undergrad, which were mostly comprised of cruising around the West Kentucky countryside with friends, looking for a place to get high. We lived in the dorms, didn’t have girlfriends, weren’t old enough to get into bars, weren’t cool enough to go to parties, weren’t smart or involved enough to be occupied, and weren’t boring enough to attend school-sponsored events. So we’d buy a bag of shitty weed, pile into someone’s car, and roll out.

The roads stitched together a patchwork of cornfields and tobacco barns, cow pastures and tiny churches, the main street strip malls and the wooded hills that surrounded Kentucky Lake. Head north on 16th until the town’s lights start to fade; go left at the stop sign onto Cole’s Campground, which will become Walston, which will become Collins, which will loop around onto Airport; left onto Poor Farm back to town. Or catch the 641-spur out to 80E toward LBL; first left onto Bethel; second left onto the no-named stretch of gravel where we once drove off the road and spent hours waiting in the dark for a wrecker with Prentice Duncan, the farmer who owned the land, and his humongous son-in-law, Randy; right onto Elm Grove, back to 80, and back to town. Or take 94 onto Clayton onto Outland School, where one night we got too close to an oncoming truck—three inches to the left and we could have been killed—and the driver’s sideview mirror came through the window in a shower of pebbled glass; quick right onto Old Salem and back to town. Or so on and so forth, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Once the engine turned over, the Arctic Monkeys propelled us onward. From the first pounding drumroll of “The View from the Afternoon” to the last saccharine chord of “A Certain Romance,” we became muddled-up North England clubbers, staggering after taxis, pissing off bouncers, prowling pubs and dancefloors with the dull sheen of indiscriminate hormones in our eyes—just another face in the “queue” the Monkeys might say. True, we weren’t North England clubbers; we were West Kentucky stoners. And while we didn’t know the places and people in the songs, we knew what they were about: the push and pull of personality and circumstance, the tumult of chance and fate, the wide range of selves that appear within that haphazard liminal space between Saturday night hedonism and Sunday morning redemption.

Not to mention, it’s pretty decent rock ‘n’ roll—at turns distorted crunch, house beat thump, or melodic reminiscence, with lyrics offering the even-handed critique of a keen and, for the most part, kind observer. Nothing revolutionary nor particularly transcendent, but an apt representation of the surrounding world and the speaker’s place within it. At worst, an unintentional testament to the torturous luxury of the existential malaise reserved for aimless, extended adolescents. At best, a streamlined frenzy cranked up to eleven, pulled tight between a rhythm section dialed-in to ass-kick, a torrent of lyrics bounding between unreasonable self-assuredness and crippling self-loathing, and a sonorous guitar plucking along at cut-time as if having stumbled into the wrong session—the whole damn thing seeming to fray at the edges, practically bursting at the seams with all the discordant energies inside.

Which again is why we liked it.  Every verse and measure spoke to the yet unknowable, almost uncontrollable self that we were told was our primary responsibility to know and control. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not the album proclaims, but even that’s a far cry from a resounding declaration of an individual identity. Here lies that human tendency to self-actualize through negation. In other words: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not, and it’s not what you say it is.” Not old enough, not smart enough, not cool enough, we told ourselves—but these reasons were only projections of our own insecurities. And so, perhaps more accurate, if not more cumbersome to parse: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not, and I am not what I assume it is that you think that I am.” The real tensions then, internal of course, between the person we want to become, our uncertainty of how to proceed, and the fear of what we’re becoming in the meantime.

The North England clubbers took to the dancefloor in revolt; we West Kentucky stoners took to the roads. What began as exploration, became a ritual of escape. The clubbers themselves disappeared in the crowd to cut loose, let loose, be immersed within something other. The long country roads, often dark and empty, offered a different type of anonymity, but in effect the same dissociation from self. In truth, we came to know the roads better than we knew ourselves. We knew where we wanted to go and how to get there, at least for the next thirty minutes, the next hour, until the next strum of that last saccharine chord.

Nowadays, when I find myself back in that little town, the car almost steers itself. 16th to Coles Campground to Walston and so on. New blacktop, new sidewalks, new dorms taking over a cornfield, strip mall stores replaced by different strip mall stores, strip mall churches, and so forth. The cast and crew that shared those long days and short years out cruising, now scattered throughout the expanse of adulthood, with military and museum and social service careers, with wives and children and mortgages and mutual funds, et cetera. Oh, how times have changed ad infinitum. But the roads are the same. When I drive them now I remember us, how we were, how we could both lose and find ourselves within the span of an album, how necessary it seemed to escape. Night after night we retraced those routes, the days’ worth of bullshit classes, half-assed extracurriculars, and all the things people said or we thought they said, unspooling behind us. Somehow we always managed to pretend that we wouldn’t have to turn around and follow the thread back home.

—Colin Lee

#372: The Police, "Reggatta de Blanc" (1979)

What I knew of the Police began and ended with their singles, Moulin Rouge’s adaptation of “Roxanne,” and the fact that my mom loved Sting partly because he was a “yoga master,” which is what she told me each time the Police got airplay or came up in conversation: “Oh, I like Sting. He’s a yoga master.” My mother had become, in my adolescence, devoted to yoga, and in the evenings after work, you could hear her practice in the TV room, even with the door closed, her breath whooshing with control and concentration. So much of my mother I know from the sounds of the ways in which she escaped into herself: the whirr of her sewing machine from the basement as she pieced together a quilt, the scratch of a stalk of charcoal as she drew in her sketchbook.

The Police seemed ubiquitous on the radio back then, maybe because my mother was my chauffeur to and from school and skating practice, and we clocked at least ten hours in the car each week listening to MIX 107.3 (tagline: “A mix of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and TODAY”), which kept the Police on heavy rotation, so that now, whenever I hear Sting’s cottony croon, I’m returned to that safe and timeless place of the passenger’s seat before I knew how to drive, the view out the window still limitless, a frame for where I knew someday out there the rest of my life would happen.

It’s telling that, unlike most of the bands I listened to incessantly, the Police are a vehicle for memories that have nothing to do with the Police; they were just always there. They were the background elevator noise, innocuous but faintly tacky, like seashell-patterned wallpaper at a beach house. The music equivalent of a Nilla wafer: perfectly fine, but would you ever champion it as a dessert?

Sting is the same old Sting when I listen to him now on Reggatta de Blanc, but I’m startled by how good he sounds, even though I’ve been hearing him practically my whole life. The Police are still sort of cheesy, but the difference is now I’m starting to actively enjoy them. I’m entering into that dangerous territory, here, of liking what my parents liked. I’m sending out an S.O.S.

The Police’s cheesiness saturates even the smallest details. The title of this particular album, Reggatta de Blanc, is French for “white reggae,” which, aside from being problematic, is also just geeky. Listening to this album, half of me wants to genuinely dance (though it’s impossible not to dance like a dad while listening to the Police—go ahead, try, I dare you), but the other half feels like it’s trapped in a slow-motion nineties dance montage, the kind where the camera rapidly zooms in and out on a strobe light (see, especially: “It’s Alright for You”). Also, please view this video and tell me whether it’s cheesy or awesome, I honestly can’t tell.

As far as I can tell, the Police have always been received with some ambivalence—their corniness isn’t necessarily a quality they’ve acquired over time due to seeming outdated. In the original review of Reggatta de Blanc in Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen wrote, “Sting's lilting mock-reggae wails—papier-màché plaintive though they may be—work like the siren of an emergency vehicle, guiding and warning of momentum. It's a perfect example of why I've always found the Police less offensive than arresting.” Offensive, arresting: it’s a tightrope, and Sting wobbles precariously on top.

And then there’s this fun little jewel: Sting’s real name is Gordon. Gordon. According to a legend told to me in confidence by Wikipedia, the nickname originated from his habit of wearing a black-and-yellow-striped sweater when performing with the Phoenix Jazzmen, his band before the Police. His bandmate, also named Gordon because England is a dark, dark place, thought he looked like a bee: hence, Sting was born. And even this is the cheesiest transformation story of all time.

Gordon all-too-willingly shed his birth name in favor of Sting, once telling a journalist who had called him Gordon, “My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting—who is this Gordon character?” (Necessary side note: is it not sort of creepy that his children call him “Sting” rather than “Dad”?) When Gordon became Sting, he was in college. When the Police got together and Sting-the-bumblebee-look-alike became Sting-the-rock-star, he was about 26, just a little younger than I am now. I can understand this desire to shed off a part of yourself, to go quick and slithering and new into the tall grass. But what to do when you want to shed the old self, and to avoid the one waiting for you? Why do I, as so many others, cringe at the thought of becoming my parents?

Like my mother before me, I’ve taken up yoga. Its physicality—the movement, the stretching, the alignment of the body with the breath—helps me deal with and temporarily escape from a life that, admittedly, isn’t all that difficult, but one that is difficult simply for being a life. (Sting, it should be known, practices yoga for an hour and a half each day, a routine that probably contributes to the stretchiness of his vocal cords.) Yoga urges you to accept your weaknesses, work with them, whether they’re mental or physical, rather than struggle against them. The woman who teaches my classes purrs, If you can’t do this today, that’s okay. Forgive yourself. Take a break. Love yourself.

I roll my eyes reading back over those words because yoga is cheesy, and writing about yoga, even cheesier. Is it because of the earnestness with which it requires you to confront yourself? Is it because it engenders the desire to function well as a human being? These motives are decidedly unhip because they run contrary to the essence of rock stardom: the ability to not give a fuck.

There’s a cultural cliché that parents are stand-ins for cheesiness, that they just “don’t get it,” that they are irrelevant because they care too much or don’t care about the right (i.e. cool) things—and when they do, it comes off as trying too hard. But as I get older, I find myself growing more and more prickly to this trope whenever I encounter it, which is always, in television and movies and books. It’s so boring in how it reduces what could be a three-dimensional character into someone else’s anxiety.

I think it’s not so much that parents are cheesy but that they are subversively rock 'n’ roll: they are now old enough to not give a fuck. If parents at times seem clueless, it’s because they no longer care about hiding their cluelessness, whereas younger people still make a furious effort to cover up their own moments of ignorance, of discomfort. Parents will dance without abandon at your neighbor’s holiday party. Your mother will openly love Sting (and Enya, but that’s another essay). Your father will wear his huge straw hat with a wide, floppy brim on every outdoor excursion, and he will commute to work on a recumbent bicycle outfitted with a long orange flag that sticks right up from the back. Your mother will accidentally (and forever) call John Mayer “Johnny May-May” in public and laugh when you correct her. They will tell their children that they are proud of them at inopportune moments. These things, in their own way, are super metal. Imagine living an entire life, and instead of coming out the other side cynical and hardened, only growing more and more earnest, more and more cheesy. I think I would like that sort of life; I think I would like to be that sort of person.

If I’m afraid to start liking the same things my parents liked, afraid to catch myself parroting the same phrases, playing with my hair the way my mother does, crumpling my face like my father’s, maybe it’s not so much that I’m afraid of being scoffed at for the cheesiness and irrelevance associated with my age. Maybe it’s more my hesitancy to admit that time is passing, that life could be so complicated that I lapse on whatever separate identity I forged for myself, that who I’m meant to become is inevitable, the hours spent daydreaming in vain out the passenger’s window about what shape my life would take while the Police grooved on in the background, because the future was sitting right next to me, lived in the same house with me, breathing loud and clear.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#373: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers" (1969)

When I was a little girl, I was a pacifist, though I used to punch my best friend on the playground when he swore. When I got older, and I saw how many people could not survive the long wait for peaceful reconciliation, I changed my mind. Today I cringe, remember the arrogance with which I declared to a room of friends, “I’d go to war, if the cause were just,” because I wanted to believe I would—I think it would feel good to be righteous, don’t you? It’s the ultimate Manichaeistic fantasy: If I’m good, and they’re evil, nothing I do against them could ever be wrong.

It feels cool, brave, and essentially American to speak this way. Yet the world is full of just causes, and I’m not going anywhere. On the other side of twenty-five, I find myself tossing in my sleep, eyes shut tight against the nightmares on the television screen while the chorus of “Volunteers” rages through my head:

    Look what’s happening out in the streets
    Got a revolution
    Got to revolution
    Hey, I’m dancing down the streets
    Got a revolution
    Got to revolution

Volunteers is a good album, Jefferson Airplane’s sixth, and the first I’ve reviewed for The RS 500 that actually warranted a place on Rolling Stone’s list. The tracks reel with woozy guitar riffs and the kind of folksy, melodic through-lines that make moonshine and skinny-dipping feel like natural epilogues to any Friday night soiree. The album has everything an essayist could ask for—a hidden swear word, a censored title, bed-hopping band members, and a passionate anti-patriotism that loves the people while despising their oppressors.

Released in 1969, and titled satirically after the faith-based nonprofit Volunteers of America (Jefferson Airplane was aiming for “Amerika,” but had to withdraw the name due to objections), the album exudes frustration with American politics in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Now, I’ve a limited enough understanding of present world events to know that keeping my mouth shut is almost always the better option, so I won’t attempt to take on the specific zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, but will merely say that overtly partisan art makes me uneasy, especially when the message is so deliciously destructive as to border on hedonism.

“We are all outlaws in the eyes of America,” promises the album’s rabble-rousing opening track. “We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young, but we should be together.” What a thing to say. Got a revolution, got to revolution.

But revolution is dangerous, and damaging, and plays, again and again, straight into the hands of whatever capitalist war machine taught us that paying our debts in human life is a perfectly acceptable transaction. I mean, wouldn’t Bitcoin be a better alternative?

There’s no way to live that does not place a burden on others, or deplete the larger system—if I write on vellum, I slaughter the beast; use paper, I kill the tree; but if I do not write, the story dies, and is not the story another life? (One that may outlive the herd and the forest.) But there’s a reason the angel guarding Eden carried a burning sword—one that cast light instead of darkness, knocking down shadows with cauterizing flame. It was a blade that healed as fast as it maimed.

The perfect revolutionary does not fear the destruction or death the act may cause. This person knows that a death of principle outweighs a life of cruelty. I admire these people greatly—priests and soldiers and countless, selfless others—a child may display this willingness just as plausibly as a grown man or woman—but I am not among them. I want to live.

So what recourse is left to those who ache for our world yet will not lie down for her? I propose to you, in all seriousness, that the answer is before us.

Volunteers.

Though Jefferson Airplane’s rhetoric was problematically simple, their personal expression of rebellion was spot fucking on. What Jefferson Airplane did to express their own frustrations was much more effective than what they urged others to do: Jefferson Airplane made music. And then they shared it.

Last month my friends and I saw Frnkiero and the Cellabration perform at a tiny venue in Hamden, CT. I’m not sure how The Space stumbled upon its perfect name, but at first glance that’s all the place really is—tucked away in a cramped industrial complex, the building announces itself by way of two neon palm trees, scattered picnic tables, and a quaint, free-standing ticket booth that squats in front like a Hobbit hut. It’s nothing like the chrome concert halls I learned to love in Baltimore, or the dive-bar karaoke I enjoyed tragicomically in Roanoke, VA. You know that gap in between what you think you want, and what you actually need? Yeah, that’s The Space.

You enter onto a landing at the base of a split staircase offering visitors a tantalizing choice: go upstairs, where wait a vintage clothes shop, 80s arcade hallway, and, rather pressingly in my case, the bathroom—or turn right and descend, entering a concert hall that looks a lot like your high school cafeteria, if the administration had served edible food and taken a benevolent eye to punk posters and skinny jeans.

Because The Space does not serve alcohol, kids of all ages are able to see shows. I saw actual children lurking on the stairs, though the majority of the crowd for this concert was high school age, freed from their weeknight curfew because all the public schools were closed the next day for local elections.

A girl to my left, standing a cool head-and-shoulders above the crowd, sported a black bomber jacket with the furious slogan “This is Our Culture” stamped in capitals across the back. On the right sleeve, a mirror-verse American flag patch displayed a trapezoid with a crown where the stars should be. (I looked this up later. It’s a Fall Out Boy jacket. I have three or four of their albums but apparently I’ll always be clueless when it comes to looking cool.)

I wanted to ask her about it—What is our culture? And who is invited to participate there?—but I was too conscious of the decade between us, and kept silent. I spent the rest of the opening acts staring happily into the crowd, cataloguing the fierce joy on the faces of the young women surrounding me. I felt like I didn’t know them, but I used to. I want to know them again.

Finally, the headliners came on. I was really there for Frank Iero, their front man, but the music caught me up, the way live music always does. There’s something about being able to feel the drums straight through the floorboards that always gets me. I’m a poet. My art doesn’t let me reach out to touch.

Eventually, it got to be too much. The vibrations hovered over me, then overtook me. They opened me up, and then my whole body was shaking with it, whatever punk song, whatever occupying force Frnkiero and the Cellabration were churning out for the crowd. There was room in my body for all of us, for me and the music and the company, like suddenly I took up less room than I used to, but I didn’t feel cramped, just surrounded. Every day I grow more and more frightened for myself, and the planet, and the wonderful, terrible, incomprehensible people I share the planet with. But shoulder-to-shoulder with this surging organism of rhythm and youth, I felt momentarily comforted.

On stage, Frankie cradled the mike in both hands. “I hate my weaknesses,” he howled. “They made me who I am.” And he didn’t realize it, but he’d just christened my revolution. Because my crowd? We’re full of weaknesses. But it’s what we make with our weaknesses that matters.

So, my advice?

Make something. When you can’t stomach the violence in the news, or the look on your colleague’s face when a student tells her she’s “too black.” When you take a walk and realize all the bees are gone, and the squirrels and chipmunks are dwindling too….write a song. Put it in a play. Build something. Bake something. Give it away. Wherever you’re creating, there’s a revolution. Jefferson Airplane thinks you should.

—Eve Strillacci

#374: Roxy Music, "Siren" (1975)

What do we want out of music? What do we think it owes us?

These are variations of two questions I’ve begun asking on an almost daily basis the high schoolers to whom I teach English: why are we reading this? Why was it written, and why do we care? Supposing we do at all. Supposing we aren’t just wasting our time.

I think about this problem almost every time I listen to an album, whether for the first time or the thousandth, and it’s a problem that becomes noticeably electroshocked into my consciousness when the album at hand is simply perfectly fine. Not particularly awful, not blowing my mind: just perfectly fine. A-OK. All right by me. When I listen to it, I’m probably shimmying a little, and I certainly like most if not all of the songs. Eric Clapton’s “important” records are great examples of this, as are gauzy singer-songwriter dealies like Tapestry or early Elton. The problem with albums like this—and it’s the same problem I’ve started stressing out my poor unsuspecting high schoolers with—is that they aren’t doing a damn thing to challenge their listener.

But is this what we want out of music? Is this what music owes us?

I’ve just started reading the collected transcripted conversations between David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky during their days together on the former’s Infinite Jest tour. I thought I would almost certainly find the book odorously tedious, but within the first thirty pages, I was unexpectedly struck by something Wallace said about difficult art: “[I]t’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.” To use Wallace’s vernacular, this isn’t earth-shaking stuff—avant-gardeners from Duchamp to Artaud to Merzbow have either stated or proven the sentiment a million times over—but it’s extremely important, I think, for someone to come along and remind us every now and then of its truth. Oh, right. Music should be moving stuff along. That’s what’s precious about it.

All this is to say that I’m both a perfect and terribly wrong person to be writing about Roxy Music’s fifth album, Siren. For starters, when I woke up this morning, I’d never heard it. It’s got some stellar production, the sax solos are smooth as a strobe light from start to finish, Brian Ferry’s crooning along at his Ferryest: it’s a perfectly fine album. At moments, I’d say, it’s even amazing. “Both Ends Burning,” for example, is so much fun, and the groove it builds seems almost impossible. It’s one of those songs for which they’ve invented the phrase “lost in the music.” I dig it, most sincerely. I’ll probably listen to the record a few more times, even. Maybe I’ll close out a mixtape someday for someone with “Both Ends.” But I’ve got to admit: Siren is no Roxy Music, the band’s self-titled debut which is missing from the RS 500, and which is a better record than any Eno-less iteration of the band could ever dream of making.

Preferring to write about Roxy Music brings everything back to my main point: remembering what music should do, what it owes us, what we hope to get out of it. The album isn’t perfect, for sure, but at least it’s exciting, at least it’s challenging, at least, at its highest points, it sets its sights on the hopelessly weird and cuts the brakes. I want to come back later to the opening track, because it’s incredible, and focus instead on the weirdness sprouting up throughout the other nine.

In the bigger picture, most songs on Roxy Music resemble recognizable genres and pastiches—the countrified swing song here, the fuzzed-out space-rock there—but you don’t even have to peer that closely to find the gorgeous challenges behind the veneer. Most of them, of course, can be traced directly back to Brian Eno: glitches, bloops, stereo-panning electronic squelching. Never totally overtaking the songs themselves—which are absolutely Brian Ferry songs, in all the best ways—but instead working fearlessly to spice them up, to reward the curious listener, to get freaky and funky all at once. “Virginia Plain” tosses you a revving engine as soon as the music drops out, then transitions into a static-wrapped bridge just before ending without warning, almost sporadically. Album closer “Bitter End,” with its electro-spoons and pained sax soloing resting peacefully in the way-way background, comes out sounding like the worst vaudeville show you’ve ever been to (in a good way). “The Bob” starts out sounding like Black Sabbath before devolving into a collage of gunfire, static, and detuned synthesizer, then transitions—logically, somehow!—into a romping, clean guitar solo, which shifts, finally, back into the Sabbath durge. It’s fucking weird. And it’s challenging. And, most importantly, it doesn’t suck.

How do you balance all of these qualifiers? How do you come out the other side of weird art with only minor dings? Well, first, I think, you need a mastermind. Roxy had Eno, and when he left, they maintained the listenability that’s all over their debut record—actually, they wildly improved on it—but they lost the bizarre that made them so extra-exciting. Is Roxy Music the most listenable album in my collection? God, no. “Chance Meeting” follows “The Bob,” and it’s tiresome, plodding, and dumb. All the worst aspects of the avant-garde, right there in your face. Is Roxy Music a little difficult, a little fun, even really damn groovy when it wants to be? All of these descriptions are absolutely accurate. Yes. Most certainly.

Which brings me to “Re-Make/Re-Model,” the album’s opener. It is a perfect song. Easily, without question, the best they’ve ever made. It sounds simultaneously, and still today, like both the utter apex of rock ‘n’ roll and the complete debasement of everything we understand rock music sounds like. After a little ambient crowd noise, the thing practically explodes. The drums kick into a constant two-beat that sounds more like a heart racing than anything you’re ever likely to hear again—it’s an overpowering, almost suffocating drumbeat, beautiful in its dedication. The guitar and saxophone start soloing over and through and with each other with what appears to be little concern for harmonic turn-taking or even the one-upmanship we understand soloing is for. The constant noise of these instruments, in fact, feels more Free Jazz than Hendrix; the only even familial equivalent I can muster is the Stooges, but this is gnarlier, more focused. Somewhere in the mix, of course, too, is Bryan Ferry, glamming it up with his Dracula vibrato. The song’s weird enough as it is—without Eno, it would already be bordering on a shut-it-down noise catastrophe. But Eno’s there, crowded by his reel-to-reel and his unnameable, self-invented electronic monstrosities, blooping and glitching and squelching away. By the end of the song, the structure’s mutated into a more recognizable pattern of a pack of musicians taking turns soloing, and by then, it’s a welcome relief, a terrific understanding of what listeners ache for.

And what is that again? To feel afraid? To feel challenged? To get into the muck and come out with our hearts racing, our skin goosepimpled, our life changed a tiny bit for having heard something utterly unlike anything we’ve heard before? I believe this is true. And if it isn’t true, then I’ve lost track of why we do anything at all. Art should reflect humanity: on this issue I think we can agree. But beyond that, art must first understand humanity as surprising and unlikely, at its best when it’s daring to dare us. Sometimes, we want a little Siren. True. But we need a little Roxy Music if we want to move the stuff along.

—Brad Efford

#375: Jackson Browne, "Late for the Sky" (1974)

“Late for the Sky” | Fort Collins, Colorado, 1999

I go back to this basement apartment, the one beneath the blue house on Stover Street, where “awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone and close to the end of the feeling we've known.” I sit at the end of the futon, the golden ellipse of Chardonnay in a glass. Another bottle opened after he has gone to bed. CD cases scattered on the living room floor, the green glow from the stereo a hush. I’m “drifting alone through the night,” staring at the space where the tile of the kitchen meets the carpet, thinking of the frail line between the life I’m sharing and the life I want but can’t name. The curled cord dangles from the wall phone, silent, the way it will be after he packs up his truck in a month while it snows. I set my glass under the faucet and watch the hot water erase the evidence of every sip before easing myself back “into the bed where we both lie.” The lights of passing cars scan the wall like a Xerox machine. He turns over in sleep, sighs.

“Fountain of Sorrow” |  Stillwater, Oklahoma, 1996

Another year, another man, this one calling to say he found the For Rent sign in my yard. The distance between us had set in and settled, a “loneliness springing up….like a fountain from a pool.” And I didn’t know what to do but move away from it. That last night, he sat on the edge of my scratchy brown couch, his left knee bouncing. I handed him a Bud Dry, watched him prop the bottle on his knee as if to steady it. Around us, the truth of taped boxes. We sat close in the low lamplight, and he kept one hand on the bottle and the other holding his bowed head. “What I was seeing wasn't what was happening at all.” And I wouldn’t see it for years, not until he asked to meet, to count it as the first mistake that left him with the “hollow sound of [his] own steps in flight.” I can still see him waving big in the parking lot, smiling, the way he does in the photograph I keep in the bottom of a suitcase. A month later, a stranger found his body on the side of a biking trail in Houston. I carry the loneliness now, and “[He] could be laughing at me, [he’s] got the right. But [he goes] on smiling so clear and so bright.”

“Farther On” | Canton, New York, 2012

I once taught at a small university in northern New York, and there, I met an accomplished man, that year’s Visiting Writer. He lived in a corner house that came with the position, a two-story white clapboard. Many afternoons, I took long walks through the Adirondacks with his curly-haired, graceful wife. When I’d pick her up, he’d step away from his writing room on the second floor and perch on the top step, stroke his trim gray beard while she bundled up against the cold. Often, they’d have me and my young daughter over for dinner, and after the wine had been emptied and the dishwasher churned, he would pass through my recent pages. His pencil marks on each one. He dismissed my writing about my daughter’s father, the man I shared the basement apartment with, the man who came back before leaving again for good. “He left, he doesn’t get to be written about,” he’d scoff while the candlelight flickered in his glasses. One night, he showed my daughter how to cast a fly rod in their living room. Always on those evenings, a Jackson Browne CD on the stereo in the dining room. We’d sit around the table, speaking our disappointments, our desires toward the distance. “They were cutting from stone some dreams of their own but they listened to mine anyway.” We write letters now, look over each other’s shoulders from somewhere farther on.

“The Late Show” | South Fork, Colorado, 2001

Let’s just say a stranger and I skipped rocks in the rain, the river passing us like a bus we had just missed. It was July, a month after I learned I was pregnant, when I drove through the smell of sweet pine to visit a friend. Her neighbor with a beard and a blue shirt stepped into the house and introduced himself. (Long ago.) On the rocky bank of the river, he and I skipped smooth, flat stones into the current. Let’s just say we talked about water, where it goes, if it’s different in Colorado than in Texas. Soon we were too soaked to stay outside, so we hid away on his front porch for the rest of the afternoon. (You know it’s useless to pretend.) I have thought of him many times, his blue shirt, his beard, his long hair in my hands. Maybe I needed to know what I would choose if another reality came into view, like a gas station on a long, empty road. (You’d never know.) I haven’t seen him since that day, when the rain let up and the sun reminded us of people beyond his front porch, when he forced himself to drive at least twenty towns down the road. That night, I snuck back to stand in front of his house, imagined the sound of his truck door shutting. This is the man I always want to go back for, to find “standing in the window.”

“The Road and the Sky” | Stillwater, Oklahoma, 1995

It had always been a dream of his to leave the Wormy Dog Saloon and end up in Mexico, so when he leaned into me around midnight and asked if I wanted to go to Matamoros, I said yes. Five hours before, he had picked me up for our first date, and after buck burgers and beer, we’d wandered over to the Dog before leaving it for Mexico. “All I want to do is ride.” Noon the next day, I sped us toward a gulf hidden behind a gray curtain. “Now can you see those dark clouds gathering up ahead?” We drove toward the darkness, feeling with every mile we were approaching the gates of a carnival that had just left town. But when we crossed the border, all the gloom disappeared with tequila and tacos, gift-shop sombreros and the giddiness of having run away. That night, I stepped off a curb in flip-flops, splashed through deep puddles of leftover rain. When someone called to tell me years later he had been found in Houston, I learned not to “think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet.”

“For A Dancer” | Boulder, Colorado, 2002

It’s raining here, too, and I’m standing in a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, where the woman behind the counter hands me the hot water for my tea, her smooth brown hair falling to shoulder. I’m wearing the brown corduroy overalls I wore every day during the last two months of my pregnancy, and I ask her the story of her name, printed on her apron. Her father, in 1971, had left New Jersey bound for the freedom of the open west in his white VW van, his wife in the passenger seat. The van made it as far as Boulder, so that’s where they had lived ever since, where he drove a taxi to make a living. He named her “Dancer,” for the song. She remembers riding next to him on the nights she had trouble sleeping, the passengers speaking from the backseat, the shadow of his profile against the dark. When I found out I was having a girl, I thought for a time about naming her Dancer, then thought better of it. I didn’t want my daughter to have someone else’s name, someone else’s story. She had her own. I named her Indie. (The world keeps turning around and around.)

“Walking Slow” | Mesquite, Texas, 2015

I run the streets “through my old neighborhood.” Most of my friends moved away or left in other ways years ago, so I run through memory—where Steve Baker’s white pickup sits outside his house, before the year he gambled his way into a debt he didn’t want to come back from. I pass Denise’s house and the afternoon her father dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack and the Saturday, decades later, when her brother, only twenty-two, did the same on a running trail. I run by Leslie’s front porch and the night we all thought she ran away until someone found her on her front porch, hiding. We were all hiding back then, maybe from all that unknowing of youth that bears down, too sudden and too long. I take the extra blocks to Tracy’s. Her parents moved south years ago, their house on the corner a different color from the cream her father repainted every other summer. I once asked if she wanted me to take a photograph of it. She said no need, it holds no meaning for her, nor does the town. But “I'm puttin' down my left foot. I'm puttin' down my right foot. I got a thing or two to say before I walk on by.” Running this sidewalk, I’m seventeen, sitting outside her house in my red Cavalier Z 24, the wine coolers we’ll drink tonight in the trunk of my car.

“Before the Deluge” | Anywhere, Anytime

Somewhere there’s a bar with Jackson Browne on the jukebox, and shadows lean on stools with their backs to the door. I walk in, squint against the darkness and find them all. As each song slides to the next, the man who left us huddles at the bar in a flannel shirt. He empties his beer, stands, then turns toward the back door and walks out. The writer and his wife pour wine from a shared bottle in a corner booth, a fountain pen and a sheet of beige stationery on the table. The man I went to Mexico with waves from behind a pool table just before he drops the 4 ball in the side pocket, a move I watched him do many afternoons at the Dog. He’s got a pitcher of Bud Dry on a near table and motions for me to grab a glass. Steve, Denise, Leslie, and Tracy sit around the curve of the bar, looking like they did in 1988, before life didn’t turn out the way they thought it would, the way it never does for any of us. Still, they’re tossing their heads back in laughter. Dancer’s dad sits in his taxi out front in case any of us needs help finding our way home. And the bearded man, the one with the long hair and the blue shirt, he’s leaning against the jukebox to select the next song. Indie sings along.

—Jill Talbot

#376: Bjork, "Post" (1995)

It seems strange to describe Bjork as an artist who is grating into the microphone for you to get your life together, but that’s how “Army of Me” opens up on Post. Bjork tells us, verbatim, to “stand up / you’ve got to manage / I won’t sympathize / anymore.” This is the same woman who told you all is full of love, but she is not having it today.

It’s offbeat from Bjork, really, but it’s offbeat in the way we now expect from Bjork. I’m not here to gush on how Bjork is this unique, timeless pop star. Post is the album where Bjork tells you how she is doing right now. In 1995, after the politeness of Debut, Bjork smashes that truth and pulls you into her pools of ambition. She dares to cover “It’s Oh So Quiet” by Betty Hutton, brings you to this fairy-tale-folk fable with trip-hop on “Isobel,” and still goes grunge on “Army of Me” to shake your spirit loose and show that she can do more. Post drops and shifts the status quo on how to produce and promote experimental music; it is the album that transforms Bjork into the pop star she is today.

Which begs the question: is Bjork a pop star? There has to be something said about an artist who is able to be as influential as she is today, and still have the amount of creative freedom she has without the heavy commercial cost of being a pop star. She acts in films; works with engineers and scientists on immersive technology; she writes and illustrates children's books. There is this comically, carefully performative identity to Bjork: there are swan dresses, MoMA exhibits, bell dresses (I feel like there’s a theme here), collaborations with Thom Yorke…the list itself could be unpacked in a biography. There is no currency of friendship though, no #SQUAD goals or Instagram feed to scroll through Bjork’s beautifully filtered life. No Twitter hearts, no need to shrink Bjork’s legacy to a single social media screen. She lives the pop culture dream without the pop star vibes: some fame, but with some creative freedom, too. The woman brought a microphone to the beach so she could sing to the sea when writing for Post—what type of rare romantic freedom is that?

There’s that gushing again, but I’m projecting so much onto this album what I feel like my life should be at this moment. In 1995, Bjork went ahead and worked on an album to share what she knew, wholly and honestly, across the spectrum of genre and lyrical ability. This album did not define the landscape of her work, but helped her race seriously and wholeheartedly through her decades of success. Some scandal may have lingered, but it was more often enormous extensions of honing and processing her craft. That requires some new-wave confidence that seems so distant, potentially lightyears away, to even consider attempting in 1995.

Knowing what you want, and saying what you want however you want to, requires another level of confidence that seems difficult to attain and impossible to interpret altogether. I so desperately wanted Post to be this colorful and textured album that would have taken me back to 1995 and taught me exactly, word by word, how to make confidence happen. There’s the day-to-day panic of being wrong; the fear that working hard is not enough (is it actually ever?);  there it is, the fear. I wanted Post to shake fear out of me for a good hour and a half. That’s all young impressionable women want from their pop stars these days, really, to be heavy and celebratory in their attention and praise and performance. Right?

I wanted Post to rescue me from the self-doubt in writing a light-hearted, personal essay. “Rescue” in itself carries so much weight, and perhaps too much expectation to put on an artist you hardly know anything about, except that she wears cool dresses and strives to make new things nearly twenty years after her debut into the diversified experimental music landscape.

I can’t say I want to be Bjork; but, I think, in order to be more and make things new, we are required to embrace the uneven nature of growth: these hills of self-reflection, slight embarrassment, some sadness we hold closer than we would like to admit, and so forth. But what Bjork acknowledges, and sings throughout Post, is that accepting that discomfort and living through it can help us find out what makes us distinct. We remain faithful to ourselves, we stand up, we manage, we keep moving. We try. That, in itself, is full of love.

—Upma Kapoor

#377: John Lee Hooker, "The Ultimate Collection" (1991)

The lessons, after a certain point, were always the same. I’d hand over a CD, tell Simon which track, and wait for him to piece the thing together. He’d mumble, slide the capo around, find the right key easy enough, and eventually get the gist without too much hassle. His fingernails were shaped like guitar picks, thick and nicotine-brown. His arms were so hairy it sometimes seemed impossible. I never knew when I walked into the cramped listening booth of a back room who I’d get: Simon the Patient, Simon the Furious, or, most likely, someone halfway between.

But I really wanted to learn these songs. I was in ninth grade and on day one he’d taught me the twelve-bar blues, so what else was there left for me to care about?

Well, chords. And chords were hard, but I managed. Stuck it out. Learned a Beat Happening song or two and had the shrugging realization: Oh cool. Chords. But barre chords: nothing was more difficult. Even now, with taxes and twelve-hour days teaching high schoolers and planning a wedding and forgetting to ever call home, nothing is more difficult than barre chords. To say that Simon quickly learned my limits is inaccurate. As a teacher myself, I know now that he created my limits by allowing me to give simply zero fucking shits. But as a ninth grader, it was pretty cool to get to learn “I’ll Fly Away” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The buck stopped there, and the buck was my interest in learning to play guitar.

But I did really want to learn these songs. Like every boy bumbling through suburbia in the Western world, it all started with the blues. Oddly enough, for me, the spark wasn’t my parents’ Stones or Zeppelin records (my dad was all John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, my mom all Cat Stevens and Chicago), but Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, adapted from Daniel Clowes’s comic about an apathetic teen falling in love with Depression-era country blues records. There’s a scene in the movie where Thora Birch stays up all night listening to Skip James sing “Devil Got My Woman” on repeat and the next day Steve Buscemi uses its weird mystical power to try and sleep with her. But that last part’s a little irrelevant. The point is that hearing Skip sing in that movie changed everything for me. I went from digging the White Stripes to discovering Son House and Robert Johnson and realizing, of course, that these were just White Stripes songs, but better. And they were better because they were real. And they were real because they were emotional. And I knew they were emotional because….well, I wasn’t sure why because no one is sure why. It’s what blues theorists and obsessives have been trying to pinpoint for almost a hundred years. What I did know was that I wanted to learn these songs.

Simon taught me a twelve-bar blues run in our first lesson and for awhile it was all I really knew how to do. And I wasn’t even any good at it. The strings hurt my fingers, which cramped quickly and led to spectacularly short practice sessions. When I did practice, though, I played nothing but that blues run so fervidly that one Saturday morning, I showed up for my guitar lesson and couldn’t play a lick of anything Simon had asked me to study that week from the method book. I could strangle you right now, he shouted, his face quickly reddening. Even the little of his skin you could make out through his thick weedy arm hair seemed to get beety. That’s how frustrated, how angry.

But after that day, he gave up. I started bringing CDs, telling him a track number, and watching him learn the framework and jot it down for me in my little music-staffed spiral. I taught myself how to read tablature. He taught me basic major and minor chords, and how the capo should hug the fret just so. I quit showing up after a couple months, which was just enough time to build calluses and understand how rhythm works. For the blues, it was plenty.

Because the blues is, at the end of the day, unbelievably simple music. Even punk rock, with its two-maybe-three-at-most-chord structure, is more difficult: the shit’s all barre chords. With the blues, you go C7-F7-G7. Or, if you’re lazy, you can still sound good enough with a solid C-F-G. Or don’t play the thing at all: mute the chords, bang on the body, and moan. Not only is this good enough—in many ways, it’s preferred. People rag on gussied-up blues. Even in Ghost World, the butt of a very funny joke is a bar band called Blueshammer, made up of white bros with frosted tips playing a hyper-amped electric blues song called “Pickin’ Cotton Blues.” It is what it sounds like. And the patrons at the bar absolutely love it, dancing and cheering and knocking poor 78-collecting Steve Buscemi’s beer onto his lap. It’s a scene that’s part insider-satire and part universal: everyone knows the blues is best at its simplest.

And by everyone knows I mostly mean everyone has agreed. Because there is no grand truth about the blues. We glorify its origins in old rare recordings by Skip James and Robert Johnson and a hundred others because we recognize that they inspired the people we really think are dandy: four-piece rock bands bastardizing the “good” stuff in all the right ways. There’s something in simplicity that we’ll always keep mooning over. The way a couple guitar chords and a light boot-stomp can’t possibly mask that mysterious emotion stuff that pulls us right out of our skin, maybe. Or maybe the way anyone can take a week, learn two or three chord changes, and call themselves a musician. There’s definitely that pesky specter of appropriation in the mix, too, the same one that hovers over every single genre of Western music, and the same one that everyone wants someone else to bring up first.

For me, I’m guilty of it all. But I really wanted to learn those songs, and sometimes I even tune my crappy Craigslist guitar and learn a couple new ones. And in this way, this small, stupid way that means nothing to anyone, I guess I’m making music. Unfortunately, there’s just no better way to describe it.

—Brad Efford

#378: Oasis, "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" (1995)

It’s 2015. I’ve just dropped my daughter off at her preschool in the annex of an old white house with ghosts in the windows. Twice a week I walk her to the gate and watch her disappear into someone else’s world. A single palpitation every time.

In my car in the parking lot I slide (What’s the Story) Morning Glory into the CD player so that I can write this story about it. I let it play. It’s one of those perfect corduroy mornings and my mind begins to unspool itself. Across the street, the Miami Community Federal Credit Union is just about to open; a group of farmers in their work clothes mill around outside the front door holding cups of coffee. And then the sun shifts and erases every single thing, and I am not listening to anything at all.

I’m thinking instead about the Clientele, who seem a distant heir to Oasis (or Felt or the Shop Assistants or the Mighty Lemon Drops)—a fifth cousin, maybe, or an estranged nephew. I’m thinking about “Losing Haringey,” about a man who wanders down an unfamiliar street and finds himself sitting in an old photograph, and how melancholy a sound they made, and then it’s 2011 and we’re driving to our fertility treatments and there’s not much to say between the two of us and so we fill the empty space with this music, wispy and pale, inoffensive in the best possible way. Our prospects here are looking bleak and it’s taking its secret toll on each of us. The sound—regretful in reverse, like nostalgia for the future—ameliorates some part of our shared sense of dread. Or maybe it’s the discovery of it—the newness—that is a comfort to us.

And now it’s 2006. My stepdad is dying and I spend a lot of time alone in my head. I go for long walks. I take a drive. There is the cemetery where a portion of his ashes will soon be buried. There’s the white house with the ghosts in the windows where my daughter, who does not yet exist, will one day go to school. Across the street is an empty lot. What does all this have to do with Oasis? Nothing, I suspect. Oasis is irrelevant.

But let’s talk about it. We can talk about “Wonderwall” if you like, but can we talk about Ryan Adams first? It’s 2004 and he’s breathing life into a mummy in a tomb. There’s still a beating heart in that song but he’s excavated its soul and he’s recited an incantation and he’s somehow managed to re-animate the thing, bring it back from the dead. It coughs up dust and opens its eyes.

By 2004, Oasis has more or less disappeared. They’ve made three albums since Morning Glory (and would make two more after that), but can you name any songs from them? Ryan Adams has done them a great favor and even Noel Gallagher has to admit that Adams got the song right, but now it’s 1998 and I’m in the backseat of my friend’s car listening to OK Computer and thinking about the crunch of those guitars—about that spastic shaker in the closing seconds of “Paranoid Android”—and how the whole thing has risen up from the ground like a monster made of garbage technology and human skin and how it has just stomped the absolute fuck out of the nineties and everything from it. This thought finds me there, sitting in the backseat, still riding the apogee of some pretty okay mushrooms, going from a concert in Columbus to my friend’s parents’ house in Cincinnati, and the thought has such weight that it sits down next to me, buckles in and says hello.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory is released on October 2, 1995 and I don’t know where I am in this. I’m in college; I’m playing music in a band and listening to things I won’t admit to here. I’m in a parking lot in 2015 and trying to remember but it’s like opening your eyes in the sea and Oasis is bringing back nothing, but what I do remember is a radio station that I’m just beginning to love, called 97X. They broadcast from a shack in one corner of my tiny hometown—their signal hits the ears of all the kids that need it, and then drifts out over cornfields and into the ether. This is where I first hear Joy Division, first hear the Smiths, first hear the Cure. I hear XTC. I hear Blur. This is where something amorphous in me begins to solidify. And maybe Oasis fails to register because when I listen to their music all I hear are the echoes of these other voices, and maybe it’s only the purest sounds that ring out the longest.

As pure as it is, 97X—like all beautiful sounds—eventually winks out into silence. Their studio is razed; it sits as an empty lot, and on that empty lot some forward-thinking committee builds the Miami Community Federal Credit Union, and now there are ghosts in the windows of that house too.

But let’s talk about Oasis. Let’s talk about the guitars, I guess, but can we talk about Catherine Wheel instead? Can we talk about “Black Metallic?” Because those guitars are the sound of sex and that song is the soundtrack to the drive home after shoving our hands down each others’ pants while pretending to watch Saturday Night Live on the couch in my mom and stepdad’s basement and it’s 1992 and nothing has disappeared and everything is out ahead of us and this is the beginning of all the things that will be fun and complicated from this point forward, and I am astonished to imagine (though how could I imagine it?) that this same girl I’m fooling around with now will one day, years from now, bear the weight of our infertility and will one day, not long after, produce from her body a tiny perfect human, who will one day, yesterday, play a toy piano with her foot.

Do we need to talk about all this? Maybe we don’t. Maybe I should have just stuck to the album, or to “Champagne Supernova,” but this is the album and this is “Champagne Supernova” because everything has its origins and everything lies on a continuum. We probably could have talked about the Happy Mondays, about the Charlatans, about the motherfucking Stone Roses, but all we really need to talk about are the Beatles—because all rivers eventually lead back to the ocean—and all you really need to know about me is this: It’s nineteen-eighty-something and I am a kid. My world is only what I can see, and even less than that. I know nothing—about music, about pain, about sex or drugs, about dreamy nostalgia, about dread, about love. My parents have split and it’s not so bad as you might imagine, but our house is filled with ghosts and those ghosts are us. My brother sits me down. He has a Panasonic tape player and Rubber Soul on cassette, and the beginning of everything occurs when he slides in the tape, puts his finger on play, looks me in the eye and says, Listen to this.

—Joe P. Squance

#379: TLC, "CrazySexyCool" (1994)

About sexual expectations of teenage girls, one of your friends says, “It’s not fair. Why do we have to be the ones to say no? I want it just as bad as they do.”  

“Then don’t say no,” you say. And so it was.

In the foothills of Appalachia, in the mid-1990s, you’re a white teen. Everyone around you at your high school, with the exception of a handful of people (perhaps ten), is white. Many of the white boys you know wear Starter Jackets and baseball caps to the side, b-boy style. The white boys bump their way through the parking lot of the school in Camaros or Mustangs blaring Dre or Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony. Posters of Michael Jordan are in the bedrooms of every guy you know. Rebel flags are prevalent, as are trailers and satellite dishes. Teenage white guys call females “bitches” or “hos.” Your junior year, some students set crosses ablaze on the baseball field in honor of white heritage. The misappropriation of culture is schizoid and selective in nature.

You have AOL dial-up (charged by the hour), you’ve mailed off for information about colleges, and get your hair cut like Winona Ryder’s in Reality Bites. Most of your friends’ parents married right out of high school. Yours hadn’t; they went to graduate school. Your parents are now busy recovering and remarrying after their divorce. You know infidelity was involved. You recover from their divorce in your room, watching MST3K or listening to CDs. You read a lot of Fitzgerald. You think of ways to meet JFK, Jr.

The world is starting to view women differently and you are at your most impressionable. Women are now allowed sexual urges, too. You know this because Sharon Stone made out with another girl and flashed her panty-less crotch to the camera in Basic Instinct, although to balance the equation, her character is a serial killer (but you ignore this). The term “slut shaming” is but a twinkle in some young feminist’s eye.

With all the hypocrisy around you, becoming sexually active seems like the most honest and obvious recourse. It is an outlet for you and your peers, much like occupational therapy for a stroke victim, though there are very few guys in your small town who are not racist and/or super into Jesus. This outlet needs a soundtrack that not only facilitates mood, but promotes a message without stigma and endorses the ability for women to want, initiate, and walk away from safe sex as they wish. TLC speaks to your needs, not to mention Left Eye set her boyfriend’s house on fire. You and your peer group feel her action to be empowering in a weird way, especially when her football-player boyfriend doesn’t file charges. And even if “Waterfalls” mentions AIDS (which is scary to you because Magic Johnson has it and Eazy-E died from it), it still has a sexy bassline and groove and when the horn section comes in for some reason it makes you feel like you could be anything in a few short years. The world outside of where you are is a mystery, but a hopeful mystery. The world will soon be connected like the thick straight lines drawn to connect stars in the constellations, creating a picture. But you don’t know that.

One day, you are thirty-six and drive a station wagon. It makes you feel good that it is a German “sports edition” station wagon and not a minivan. You live far away from where you grew up, but know from Facebook that many of your old classmates are still into Jesus and confederate flags.

You work out at a college gym while your eight-year-old son goes to swim practice, and watch the students sweat and flirt with one another. You have a graduate degree and teach literature. Though you are a democrat, you are more concerned about the wage gap between the sexes than trigger warnings and slut shaming. “Waterfalls” comes up on your phone in shuffle play while you run in place on the treadmill. You remember all the lyrics, Left Eye’s squeaky voice as she flawlessly raps at a warp speed, and recall that she is dead now. Then you try to remember the girl you were. Though the song helps, the memory is too faded and before you know it, the music shuffles to something else.

—Edie Pounders

#380: Toots & the Maytals, "Funky Kingston" (1975)

It’s hard to describe marinara sauce; I could talk about the richness, the warmth that blankets you, the spurts of flavor that flood your mouth. But sauce is something that can’t be described so much as it can be felt. Everybody feels something when it comes to marinara — to any sauce, really. Ask somebody what marinara sauce makes them feel, and though they may look at you strangely, they’ll tell you. I asked a few people, they all said either “safe” or “at home.” I say it makes me feel safe, too.

I’m in college now, where my diet usually consists of Easy Mac and bagels and more peanut butter than I’d ever thought I’d have. But I had spaghetti a few days ago, the pasta overflowing the plate with only an ice-cream-scoop-sized mound of marinara on top. The proportions were all wrong. There were hundreds of other students around me, the music was some Katy Perry song, there was no distinct smell. The environment was all wrong. And then I took a bite, and it was good enough, but there was neither garlic nor bits of jalapeños.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a marinara snob, and I have nothing against Katy Perry. But it was one of the first culture shocks I experienced in college. I wasn’t concerned about studying or getting As, and I was only slightly concerned about making more friends, but the marinara sauce bothered me. See, I grew up with a father who spent hours upon hours poring over our thirty-year-old crockpot, with its green rim matching green leaves that swirled in quadruplets around the pot. It always reminded me of a compass, with one quadruplet pointing north, one pointing east, one south, one west. The pot would be hidden in a kitchen corner, its cream color blending in with the beige walls behind it. But Dad would take up the rest of the counter space with cutting boards and knives and ladles, ladles everywhere. Giant plastic bags of giant orange carrots would lie on the counter, as would half-sliced tomatoes and chopped-up fragments of leeks and the translucent remnants of garlic shells. But my family’s favorite were the peppers — half of the counter was filled with peppers of all colors and flavors. And sometimes the rest of my family wouldn’t even know all this was going on until “Dinner!” was called.

Our home was very tall, with high-up ceilings and four flights of stairs, so the smells and sounds never travelled much farther than the kitchen. Everything was muffled, insulated in one room, and when you were outdoors you’d have no idea what was going on indoors. You could even be in your room and all of a sudden Mom would open the door to ask a question and your room would fill up with the smell of stewing marinara. There was always an initial confusion—you’d be  perplexed as to where the smell was seeping up from—and then it’d hit you: Dad was making marinara. He was having a field day in the kitchen and you didn’t even know.

My dad used to listen to reggae while making dinner; kitchen-wise, he really only specialized in Toots & the Maytals and marinara sauce. The reggae made the marinara seem so much fuller. I find that reggae does that often; when life seems empty, just put on some Toots & the Maytals and life seems soft, rich. Or maybe this just works for me because they’ll forever be associated with my dad and his marinara. I hear the funk start and I immediately picture my suburban father (who was usually still decked out in a tie and starched white button-down) nodding his head along to the beat and dropping everything to start dancing at the parts he felt the most.

That’s what Toots & the Maytals are for me—a feeling. When the brass first blares in their album Funky Kingston, this wash of simplicity rushes over me. Life is absent when the brass plays; nothing exists but me and the brass and the marinara. My blood seems to slow down and warm up, everything is relaxing. Then “Louie Louie” picks up and my heart picks up pace solely because, even from a campus nowhere near home, I can practically hear Dad singing along to the melody under his breath, his face red and glistening from the kitchen’s rising heat, then he’s talking about how he slow-danced to this song once in college, then Mom comes in and they dance together. It’s one of my favorite daydreams: Mom and Dad slow-dancing as the living room swirls with the warmth of marinara sauce. They stop dancing when the music stops and the singer begins talking, then they start swaying when the singer’s words morph into a melody once again. I’d sit on the couch and smile up at them, just observing and feeding off of their little bubble of joy, and because of those daydreams I feel as if I’m on a first-name basis with the band. To me, they are the Toots.

The Toots and their Funky Kingston are an experience. They’re a family of different musics mixing together—reggae, soul, blues, funk. It’s an album that could never be filtered into a single category. A marinara sauce album. Songs like “In The Dark” and “Louie, Louie” and “Love Is Gonna Let Me Down” are the base of the sauce; they simmer and resonate and stop the album from becoming this hodgepodge of noises and flavors. The peppers and onions and carrots and garlic are songs like “Time Tough” and “Pomp & Pride” and “Got To Be There”; they give the album a little extra tang, bringing unexpected pops to the calm, relaxing music. Then there is “Country Road,” which makes everything feel as though it’s coming to an end—it’s the resounding last bite of the marinara.

But Funky Kingston’s last two songs, “Sailing On” and “Pressure Drop,” they’re the spices; they burst the album back to life after the slow wave of “Country Road.” They’re what you remember most. And they’re uplifting and different than the rest of the album—“Sailing On” and “Pressure Drop” are even starkly different from one another. It would be like one flavor being dominated by another, a jalapeño taking over the taste of saffron. “Sailing On” is a slow-dance type song, and “Pressure Drop” is a funky song where you could pull out the oddest dance move and nobody would care. Their flavors are just different, but the difference brings the whole album together, and even though the album is ending, the end makes you feel warm and safe, just like taking that last bite of marinara while watching your parents hug after a slow dance in a room still swirling with the warmth of marinara and Toots.

—Nicole Efford