#281: Mary J. Blige, "My Life" (1994)

         I.

My Life reminds me of all my teenage winters. I can’t remember if I owned it or just listened to it at a friend’s house for hours on end, staying in out of the cold. One way or another, we knew the album in its entirety—every word. It was that way with every good song, every dance that we needed to learn, every party that we needed to find. We always got the message. Everyone’s boyfriend or brother was an aspiring DJ. Everyone had a friend of a friend who had a tidbit we needed to hear. We even wrote each other letters, when it came to that, and it often did. Maybe it’s the filter of memory, but information didn’t seem that hard to come by. No one ever seemed that hard to reach. Maybe because we were always together, or when apart, paging each other with the beepers we painstakingly saved up babysitting money to buy. Maybe it was because the breadth of what we thought we needed to know was not yet that great.

In the way that digging into the past reveals forgotten details, I realize now that the winter I most associate with My Life actually took place two years after it came out. The Blizzard of ‘96 was special because it provided an excuse for squirreled away visits with a boy that took on more meaning than they might have otherwise. The storm ground the city to a halt. School was closed for days on end and absolutely nothing was happening. Somehow the boys had trudged thirty blocks through the snow to come stand in the street and shiver in front of our buildings. A few snowball fights and piggyback rides later, and the most devastating thing that could happen to a 90s NYC teen happened. My guy lost his beeper. There were layers upon layers of snow, and no chance of finding it. Until, days later, the beeper appeared miraculously amid the melted ice. That it still worked was a testament to how durable those things were.

I excitedly set the wheels in motion that would let him know we found it. I was thrilled to be the bearer of such good news, but it must be true that no good deed goes unpunished because the grapevine sent back word that he thought my friends and I had orchestrated the mixup to begin with. It seemed too good to be true that the hands of fate had seen fit to return his pager. I was crushed to discover that the way I saw myself was not the way I was seen. I was still emotionally innocent enough to believe that people would see me exactly as I thought I presented myself.

If that story happened today, in the era of endless memes and tweets about snooping through phones, DMs, and FB stalking, I’d likely be judged guilty by the court of social media, let alone one teenage boy.

 

         II.

This year, My Life turns 22 years old. That’s just about the age to start looking back on one’s nascent years in wonder, right? Mary J. Blige once described My Life as the album that “reached out and grabbed everyone and said, ‘I understand.’” To borrow a phrase from the kids, “What’s understood doesn’t need to be explained.” What we felt, even those of us who weren’t even old enough to fully understand what it meant, was her pain. The songs were pain, the album was drugs. The embodiment of love that hurts so good. She has said she felt herself slipping away during its making—that there was a “suicide spirit on there.” Rumors swirled about drugs, drinking, bad behavior, rude demands, angry interviews, and a volatile relationship with K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci.

Listening now, the album plays like the stages of grief. Mary Jane. You Bring Me Joy. I’m the Only Woman. My Life. You Gotta Believe. I Never Wanna Live Without You. I’m Goin’ Down. Be With You. Don’t Go. I Love You. No One Else. Be Happy. Still, within the pain in her voice, as she lays herself bare, life remains: “In order for me to heal, I have to talk. I have to write it out. I have to hang it out. I have to talk it out. I have to cry it out. I have to get it out.”

For years people have said, some jokingly, many dead serious, that Mary J. Blige lost her Midas touch once she was drug-free and no longer in a tumultuous—and possibly abusive—relationship. They are rabid for the “Old Mary.” Hurt Mary. Watch old videos of Mary doing press for My Life in 1994—she’s reserved, quiet, tentative. We don’t truly begin to see her spirit come alive until she grabs the mic. She’s 23 years old, a pretty tomboy with a tough exterior built to hide a hurt interior, thrust into the spotlight. Pain hidden behind a shy smile and few words. We have videos of her performances and interviews and articles, but we filled in the rest from the music. If social media had been around when Mary was dating K-Ci, who knows what we would have seen or heard?

She has a new album coming soon featuring a song with Kanye West. It will be interesting to see what those two created in the lab. She who seems to have broken with most of the past that made My Life so painful and yet so pure, and he, who seems to have broken with the past that perhaps kept him safe. In the court of public opinion she has become too happy and possibly too safe, he, too free, and too wild.

I come back to one of Kanye’s epic rants again and again—when he said, “As a man, I am flawed. But my music is perfect.” Full disclosure: I find it fascinating. Short of the craziness of the now infamous interview he gave on Sway in the Morning where he claimed to be Warhol, Walt Disney, and Google—it’s one of his wilder boasts. There’s something beautiful in having that much belief in your work, especially when you know so many people disagree. My fight song is “Everything I Am” from Graduation. I know “I’ll never be picture-perfect Beyonce,” and “I’ll never be laid back as this beat was.” And that’s okay. Kanye has long known how much love/hate he inspires—”They rather give me the nigga please award / but I’ll just take the I got a lot of cheese award.” He knows fans clamor for the “Old Kanye” they believe died when he lost his mother. He addresses it on “I Love Kanye” from The Life of Pablo, and assures us that every Kanye is a Kanye of his creation and we will take whatever iteration he sees fit to present. We will love him, or leave him alone.

Maybe that kind of hubris can only come after experiencing extreme pain.

It’s telling to watch someone engage with change over and over and still be their own biggest advocate. It’s the hope that a focused attempt at self-love and a commitment to artistry can lead to growth. That’s the promise, right? That those risks might lead to glory. The only way out is through, whether the end result is loved or panned. Otherwise we risk relying on our inherently fallible memories of the past, the shadows of people we once knew, the safety we thought we had, and longing for more of the same.

—Lee Erica Elder

#282: Muddy Waters, "Folk Singer" (1964)

It’s her bath that makes Kathleen your friend at first.

She’s one of the few boaters who has a home on land as well as on water. She continued to travel the waterways after her son was born (later she will recount to you, roaring with laughter, how sometimes she herself would crouch and shit in a nappy when the on-board chemical toilet was full) until the challenges of being a parent finally made her seek out the comfort and safety of a house.

She lives right on the waterfront, which makes her home the Charing Cross Station of the local boating community: people pass through to collect parcels; charge their devices on shore power when the washed-out British skies fail to provide adequate solar; hold their grease-slippery fingers under scalding hot water in her kitchen sink, where (unconstrained by the volume of a storage tank) it flows in miraculous, unlimited supply from the tap.

You first meet her round a towpath fire, wearing a green Stetson that casts half her face in shadow and leaning into a burly bearded dude who is her youngest son’s father. You are wearing the floppy black hat that was your “opera hat” in your past life, the one you’ve just escaped. You exchange hats for a moment. She looks better in yours than you do but, on surveying her reflection, she says, “It feels like something very beautiful that I’m not cut out for.” You get that: you weren’t cut out for it either, ultimately.

Later that night she will get drunk and aggressively invite you to dance with her. You don’t like her much, or you get the sense that she doesn’t like you much: because you’re not game, staying resolutely by the fire in your old party-silks while she moves sinuous as the tongues of flame themselves. You have just come out of two years of being condescended to by London’s upper classes, where being soft-spoken in all-silks was the only way to be taken seriously. You are frightened by the raucousness and practicality of your new life, but in those early days people mistake that for you being too good to get your milk-white hands dirty.

But you watch her cruise away at the end of the night, her sharp witch’s nose turned into the wind, biker boots firmly planted on the deck, tiller held loosely in one hand, and you can’t help but feel admiration. She looks like the figurehead but she is the captain, and you’ve never seen that before.

Over the next few months, you cut your hair, donate your dryclean-only garb to charity, spend days with a belt sander—doing more harm than good as you leave a moonscape of gouges in your tongue-and-groove, but gradually, as a film of sawdust settles on every square inch of your new life, you begin to feel more competent and at home. When you bemoan the extent of your filth to Jonathan, he looks at you quizzically like you’ve failed to catch onto an essential piece of information, and then puts you on the back of his motorbike to Kathleen’s house.

Her house looks somewhere between a boat and a Japanese temple: porthole windows and wooden beams painted a friendly red. Two massive wooden dragons flank the door opening to her kitchen: red and snarling, silver and gentle, sun and moon. The windows are lined with thick velvet drapes she stitched together from offcuts; the walls with mosaics from mussel-shells smuggled home from restaurants.

You take to spending long nights in her kitchen, rosy post-bath with your hair slicked back. She reads you the tarot and sneaks skunk into your loose-leaf tea when you turn down the invitation to smoke with her, smiling one of her mischievous-imp smiles. She plays music on an ancient laptop: JJ Cale, Muddy Waters. She likes these deep-voiced men singing about their rivers and their longing for a good love. “One of these days, I’m gonna show you how nice a man can be….”

She dates men who are brutes or children or both. “This is my friend Mark, he has just come out of prison in the Netherlands.” Sometimes you avoid her house for a while as you wait for her to show the next one the door, which thankfully never takes long. When you return, she shows you the paintings she’s working on: a figure with a red-blonde plait holding a sphere, ocean, light and colour rippling out in concentric circles.

She’s from a big, Catholic family, where she learned how to fend for herself in a throng of brothers. Her life is more feral than you can fathom: coming home bruised from a fistfight with her ex’s new wife. You like her long stories about arguing her way to victory (“And I says to him, I says….”). You like the things she likes: the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, whom she admires for being female and yet a successful sculptor. In a different life—one that didn’t keep her busy chasing up the benefit payments that the government seemed to regularly withhold at random—her sculptures, too, would be in galleries. You can’t help but feel angry for her sometimes because of that.

You get to know her children: Aisling, who is a strange combination of listless and creative, pinning fabric to a dressmaker’s dummy in bursts of focus; Dylan, sweet and serious in his school uniform and odd socks, carving spoons and teaching himself poi.

You’ve seen the pictures of Kathleen in her first marriage, white-blonde and hopeful, laughing, peeling potatoes with each leg stuck through the handles of a plastic bag to drop the slivers of skin in. That girl seems very different.

You have one of the happiest moments in two years of grief-haze on Christmas morning, cycling through deserted North London with presents for her children in your backpack. Having somehow been welcomed into this family.

But in the new year, things change. It begins with her furiously rearranging furniture: every time you enter the house the living room is somewhere else after she has enlisted her eleven-year-old son’s help to carry sofas and armchairs up and down stairs.

For months she has been courted by one of her ongoing flings, a pilot with a drunkard’s nose like an angry strawberry in the middle of his face who keeps promising to leave his wife for her. He sent her an expensive guitar even though she doesn’t play, which she told you about scathingly. But then one day you enter the house and he’s there, condescending to you within the first few minutes of conversation. “Alan lives here now,” Kathleen announces from behind you, but when you turn to look at her, she doesn’t meet your eyes.

After they’ve gone out, you walk around the house, looking at his bathrobe hung from the hook in her bedroom like a sloughed-off body abandoned by its spirit: is this really the life she wants for herself?

Before long she stops returning your calls, sending only curt texts: no, tonight’s not good, we’re not in. You hear that they’re engaged. She rings you occasionally to manically prattle about losing weight to fit into her wedding dress, leaving not a moment’s pause in the conversation.

You’re baffled. You think: maybe loneliness has worn her down, the way it wears all of us down, trapped in our own orbit.

Then she borrows Jonathan’s boat so she can take Alan for a “jolly.” In the chaos and confusion of the day, Jonathan’s cat gets lost: they’re too impatient to wait for her to come home before driving off, and moor up in a different place when they get back, which tends to confuse cats. The cat never returns. When you get angry with her about it, she uses it as an excuse to cut ties with you, telling you that she’s “sick to death of you and your opinions.” You wonder if it’s really about the cat, or if it’s about your views on Alan; views which she once shared.

You dream of the two of them, walking in skeleton make-up like a Día de los Muertos parade, like court cards in the deck: majestic and imperious.

Some months later you hear they are no longer together. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Though your expressions of support are politely received when you next cross paths, still she doesn’t quite meet your eye anymore.

As winter draws near, you cycle past her house, looking at the velvet drapes drawn in the bay window, thinking about the dragons and music and mosaics hidden behind them. You miss them; you miss her asking “How are you, Miss Moo?” like in the first few weeks after your father’s death, when everyone else was too afraid to. You miss her kitchen with its cracked-open window, sending the sounds of the blues, wild and sad and strong, out into the tidy Georgian streets.

—Emma Rault

#283: Barry White, "Can't Get Enough" (1974)

I was young but I was never really small. At least, not during the part that defined much of my childhood. That period of my life comes equipped with an “OVERSIZED LOAD” distinction like precarious highway towing. Looking backward, I prepare myself accordingly; lay down flares, hire a small outfit, affix proper signage. The turning radius on that epoch makes for a big swing.

I was a fat kid.

Not at first, sure, but the mechanics were well established. My burgeoning interests in Nintendo and gluttony formed a symbiotic relationship of unchecked hedonism, coiled and wound tighter than knotted wood. Twisting orchid-like around my swelling frame, the incestuous marriage of internal vices grew heel-step with my prodigious bulk. Thus I was inundated.

I was rendered solid, immobile, like a boulder abandoned after a total glacial melt.

At age 11, I was 5’2” and weighed 12 stone.

But it’s not a sad story, not entirely. Although I never felt love at school like I did at home. I was never “piggy” at home. I was safe. From Sam, Curtis, Mike N., Charlie. And this wasn’t even a sophisticated jab, like a Lord of the Flies allusion suggesting that, were we to suddenly fall into martial law as a homeroom, I’d be beaten to death with sticks.

I was “piggy” because in their eyes I was nothing more than a tub of shit. And no one wants to be caught dead playing Mancala with shit.

But I maintain this is not a sad story, although it certainly reads like a tragedy.

Think, for instance, of my idol.

I was a happy child, comedic in the self-indulgent way of fools, often wearing a showman’s hat. With my childhood’s sell by date stamped for the mid ‘90s, I gravitated to Chris Farley like a fellow heavenly body.

He carried more than I did and wore it with aplomb, making it a piece of him. He upset the stasis, challenging the common dichotomy that a fat versus thin binary often conjures. Plus David Spade was never as funny.

That’s my now-speak, obviously, but back then I was his disciple. Whether I was pantomiming my favorite SNL bits or falling into a swimming pool with my clothes still on, I lived for the stage. My family loved and endured me.

Chris Farley died on December 18, 1997. He was sad and did a lot of drugs and I was swallowed by the void he left.

His death preceded one of my many bouts in the wilderness. Less untamed, say, than the expanse left to Cobain junkies, or the feeling of betrayal packaged with a major label release. I was still young, remember. But it had me metaphorically wandering.

I tried Meat Loaf for a while. His grandiose frame mixed like a cocktail with the swashbuckling sexuality of a windblown pirate left an immediate impression. The glitz and glitter of his rings and sequins. The frill of his shirts, that hair. And he had a rocking, dicks-out (now-speak again) aesthetic with the physical heft to back it up.

But ultimately his songs were too long—despite being thematically stirring, pubescent-ly speaking—and his name just made me hungry.

There were several more, after. I burned through fancies like someone on a bender. I whirled untethered, rudderless, my inner fabric stretched thin and flapping in the high winds of my destitution. The nights were dark and I snacked luxuriously.

But then I found Barry.

Suddenly I didn’t have to be manic, to over-gesticulate, to lack grace. There was a better way to reflect life back at the world around me. I could have my cake and eat it too. I didn’t have to be an accepted version of what I was.

With Barry it wasn’t about rocking; it was about the groove. I’d found my savior.

There I was, back on the stage, but this time doing my best Barry White. I had (some of) the moves, affected that baritone—funny coming from a boy with his sack still firmly planted in his perineum—and wore my shirt open so the fans would hit it just right.

*

In seventh grade I reached the apex of my mass. I’d expanded in such a glorious fashion, opting for clothing that stretched and breathed, nothing fitting; I walked everywhere with the audible swoosh of athletic warm-ups (i.e. clothes meant to stretch over other clothes).  T-shirts from that era fit two of me now.

I was no longer in classes with those shit boys. I was no longer “piggy”—although had they been around I’m sure my status would have been reaffirmed as such. I had matured, become more adult in my pursuits.

I had fallen in love.

Hindsight being the sharp grindstone that it is, I know now I was punching way beyond my weight, but adolescent me was blind to reason. I wasn’t the type to draw hearts on my math homework, or scrawl our names out forever in whiteout pen on my trapper keeper. My ambiguous sexual longing lay tightly wrapped inside, writhing to the sound of my wrap-around headphones:

Girl I don’t know, I don’t know why
Can’t get enough of your love babe

We’ll call her Stacy.

She had all the trappings of a quintessential crush: attractive, intelligent; her presence instilled a competing flight/fight response that more often than not just resulted in perspiration. I was not without courage entirely, but it’s a safe bet, were she to comment on me then, her description would read: odd. But I digress.

Let me set the scene.

It was the first dance of that year. I had on forest green swishy pants, a black T-shirt, and a mock silk short-sleeve dress shirt with flames on the front. Motherfucking flames. I felt unstoppable. I’d pre-gamed with Barry White, letting Can’t Get Enough loop back on itself as I piled on generic brand hair gel until my dome looked like a succulent. I was ready. My dad dropped me off at the entrance to the cafeteria and I strutted into the din of voices and music.

From my revisionist vantage point I moved through those rooms crowded with my peers strutting a high quotient of affected cool; sipping a glass of something brown, moving in slow motion like the opening credits of Reservoir Dogs, smoking absently. In reality I shuffled audibly and dribbled Cherry Coke down my front in a rush to reach the dance floor to find Stacy.

The room was a mess of kinetic light. Every novelty light imaginable was mounted to the DJ booth, whirling, pulsing, like a Spencer’s Gifts on ipecac. Clustered around in the semi-lit gloam of the gym my classmates moved with a furtive excitement. There was blood in the water.

Uncharacteristically, I asserted myself to the booth and groped amid strobes and mirror-ball quicksilver for a pen to scrawl on the request list: “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe” by Barry White.

And so I waited. I had another Cherry Coke and some Sour Punch straws to calm my nerves. I shifted my weight, sweated. Then I heard that falling guitar, and the deep buttered voice I associated interchangeably with confidence:

I’ve heard people say that
Too much of anything is not good for you, baby

I rubbed the citric acid into my gums for luck and crossed the parquet, in-bound for Stacy. I had a fanfare behind me: my man, my mentor, my Obi-Wan of rotund beauty and palpable swagger. I walked right over in time to see Stacy cozy up at arm’s length with Mike N. And I thought he was expelled! My night went into a tailspin.

Yet it was still my soundtrack they shuffled to, and I did my best to shuffle, too.

*

Rejection was like a fire that swept the harvest, consuming all. But below it something ancient smoldered, with more prudence. Now awake, it grew in waiting.

In route to the fireworks at Hart Park on July 4th I heard on the radio that Barry White had passed away at age 58. I kept mostly to myself that night as I buried another hero in a pyre of sulfur light and flames.

But I maintain this is not a sad story.

How one speaks about their rebirth is much in the vein of recounting a dream. The intense wonder of blinding light, unfurled explosions and arrays of color that lay textured, cushioning the sound beneath that evaporates like dry ice in the morning. The after-burn of color hanging like reverb in your mental theater.

Though I move through these memories deftly now, it wasn’t always candy.

Chris Farley taught me how to hide my pain in laughter: to be the clown. Barry White made me buoyant, and taught me not to let the Mike N.s and Stacys tarnish my rhinestones. He taught me how to carry my weight, and how to wear it well.

—Nick Graveline

#284: The Cars, "The Cars" (1978)

Rich’s mom used the wall next to the staircase like a human evolution diorama. At the bottom, there was Rich flat on his back in his crib, naked with his legs and arms akimbo. The first time I met Rich’s mom, she took it off the wall and showed it to me. She put her index finger above his supposedly erect penis and bragged about how he was so mature even then. Richard buried the right side of his face with his hand but kept one eye open to see how I reacted. This was the only time I ever saw him naked in the light.

The next photo was him dressed and painted as a vampire in the first or second grade. His face was bone white. The part of his mouth that he didn’t lick off was smeared with the blood of an imaginary villager. One night while we were tangled up in his bed, I asked whether he ever gave the villager a name. He shrugged.

Next to the vampire was two Little League baseball players. The one on the right was Rich. On the left was Henry, his then-best friend. Rich played third until his dad couldn’t afford to have him keep playing. Rich said or did something right after his last game to make sure Henry stopped being his friend.

Rich stood in front of his mom and dad. The department store Christmas tree loomed over them. His mom wore a bright red dress with a wreath-shaped brooch pinned above her right breast. Rich and his dad wore matching suits. Rich’s stomach threatened to cascade over his waistband. Rich’s mom and dad both had their hands on Rich’s shoulders. Their mouths contorted into thin smiles, teeth slightly visible. I knew from my own family that the most important time to lie was during the holidays.

From the top of the stairs, the junior high version of Rich scowled at the family below. The crimson clip-on tie dangled beneath the part of the collar that wasn’t enveloped by his second chin. “He fought like hell to hang this one,” Rich’s mom said. “I don’t know why.”

Rich never fully accounted for the gaps between each photo. I always started asking questions as we lay in Rich’s bed. The first or second time, Rich shut me up by making out with me; I backed off. After we were done kissing, we listened to the ceiling fan whir as it dried the sweat on our bodies until it became a new layer of skin. I pushed him away the third time he tried shutting me up, lay so stiff that Rich finally got the hint. He spoon fed me only as many answers as it would take to cure me back into his arms.

I knew the needle was helping him disappear layer by layer. I knew his body well enough where I could tell when his wrists and waist shrank. The parts of his body Rich would let me touch, I could feel his bones more through his skin. Once, my thumb stumbled onto a scab in the fold connecting his forearm to his upper arm. I decided to stop seeing him or talking to him for as long as I could until he was willing to tell me what I already knew.

After a week, I finally caved and went over to Rich’s house while his mom was working the night shift like she always did. The door crept opened after the second knock. I walked in and found Rich’s mom sitting on the couch. The photos from the evolution diorama were on the living room table. I ran upstairs to Rich’s room before Rich’s mom could say anything. I saw Rich’s bedroom for the first time when I turned on the lights. There weren’t any women pinned to the walls lusting after him. There weren’t any cars either. He treated the floor like a hamper. His comforter was plaid. It was peeled back on the side of the bed he preferred to roll out of. Rich’s mom never said a word as I ran out of her house.

Rich’s face was never stapled to telephone poles or taped to windows. A week later, a “For Rent” sign was staked in front of Rich’s house. I sometimes heard a tap or scrape against my window, hoped it was Rich wanting me to come outside. It was always just a bug or the wind.

—J. Bradley

#285: Stevie Wonder, "Music of My Mind" (1972)

“Would you rather be deaf or blind?”

I always said blind. It was one of the more tame “would you rathers” I asked and answered in childhood. My only impairment was preteen suburban malaise; after outgrowing playing pretend on the playground, we exerted the privilege of imagination on hypothetical dilemmas. Having never met a blind or deaf person, I cited music as a chief consideration for choosing blindness, convinced that words could paint a picture better than an image could sing a song. The key of life was something to be heard.

The absence of one sense often sharpens the others, so it’s no surprise that Wikipedia lists more than 208 notable blind musicians, the most famous being a toss-up between Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. The first album Little Stevie Wonder recorded was A Tribute to Uncle Ray, a 1962 compilation of Ray Charles covers. Only 11 years old, Stevie was pressed to recreate some kind of blind man magic. The album flopped.

Of course, Stevie soon found his own voice, a signed and sealed legacy delivered by the end of the decade. His audience grew from acquaintances to soul mates in the 1970s as Stevie matured from a hit machine to an artist, releasing no less than five inarguable masterpiece albums in a row. 1972’s Music of My Mind marks his first collaboration with a British electronic duo called TONTO’s Expanding Head Band. Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff had invented The Original New Timbral Orchestra (TONTO) just two years earlier, the largest and most capable analog synthesizer in history. Accompanying Music of My Mind’s deep bass lines and rolicking guitar hooks are beeps and hums never before heard in soul music: ambient sounds that defy onomatopoeia. Listeners could not picture the instrument such tones could be coming from. Today, anyone can Google image search to see the curved wall of buttons and knobs six feet high and 20 feet across, but in 1972, the machine was out of sight. These new sounds came from whatever shapes your mind conjured. Music of My Mind is a visual album, but not in the Beyoncé sense. The album cover, on which Steve’s face is reflected in his sunglasses, hints at this deconstruction of the senses. Think you can’t make eye contact with a blind man? Just put on Side A.

The synth began as the academic pursuit of a few white people in the mid-60s; Robert Moog’s genesis and Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach set the tone for Bookends and Abbey Road. For 12 years, Motown Records had been in the business of reclaiming music stolen from black Americans, but this time around, Stevie had taken a white man sound and made it not only digestible, but groovy, expanding heads like no pasty Brit ever could. A semblance of justice.

Now for some hindsight: my stating a preference between being deaf and being blind was grossly insensitive. (Who would have guessed that “would you rather have pubes for teeth or teeth for pubes?” would end up being the less offensive childhood quandary?) It was also generally misguided. I’d imagined that a blind person experienced life in the same way I did when I closed my eyes, but of course it doesn’t work like that. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles didn’t even see the world in the same way. Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, six weeks premature. The oxygen therapy that saved his underdeveloped lungs caused his retinas to detach, meaning he never had functioning eyes in waking life. Diagnosed with glaucoma, Ray Charles lost his sight gradually, from ages four to seven. There’s a community of blind people who have adapted their keen hearing into a form of echolocation, using sound to navigate the structures surrounding them. It’s a perception I might not recognize, but to have spatial reasoning is to see.

I’ve wondered what role Stevie plays in designing his album coverscan the visions in his head be described in words? Can he visualize someone else’s concept? I’d like to think that when Stevie hits the piano, he’s swaying his head to the beat and to the view, something like those sunset rings on the cover of Songs in the Key of Life.

In my early 20s, I went on a date with a man who was born deaf. He had cochlear implants and communicated like anyone else I’d gone on a date with. When I asked him about his favorite bands, he told me that he didn’t care for music, in fact, most of time he found it grating and unpleasant. I didn’t hold it against him, because of course he heard sounds differently than I did, but I found myself struggling to keep the conversation rolling. I realized how much I relied on music as a topic during those getting-to-know-you conversations. We never went out again, and looking back, I wish I’d asked him more about the media he did lovemovies or paintings or poems. Without being wrapped up in the background noise, he would almost certainly notice things I wouldn’t have. Why privilege one sense over another? I think if I couldn’t hear music, I’d find it somewhere else. And even if I didn’t, I’d keep looking anyway.

—Susannah Clark

#286: Al Green, "I'm Still in Love With You" (1972)

When Al Green steps off a Greyhound in Midland, Texas, in the winter of 1968, he has 35 cents in his pocket. Everything else he owns is in a cardboard suitcase. His soiled, lime-green polyester suit—hardly adequate in this biting Texas wind—looks like he hasn’t taken it off in a week, and the soles of his imitation alligator loafers are wearing through. For nine months now, he’s been playing lonely roadhouse clubs across the South—“the chitlin circuit”—singing his lone hit, “Back Up Train,” for the ten people who show up each night to hear it. He’s hungry and tired, but his only prospects for a meal and a decent night’s sleep lie at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. So he picks up the cardboard suitcase and sets off down the highway, probably wishing he’d never given up that car-waxing gig back in Grand Rapids.

In his autobiography, Take Me to the River, Al interprets what happened that night the way he’s interpreted virtually every moment in his career since becoming an ordained minister: as an act of divine intervention. Willie Mitchell, an influential bandleader, was headed home to Memphis after a successful West Coast tour. Al, a one-hit nobody, was literally singing for his dinner. Intrigued by his unconventional delivery, Willie bought him a drink after the show (Al exchanged it for a ham sandwich), and asked a question interviewers would be asking for decades: Where’d you learn to sing like that? (“Here and there” was the answer Al gave, coyly glossing over his love for Jackie Wilson, his time on the Baptist revival circuit, and his childhood penchant for mimicking bird songs.) A professional curiosity, that’s all it was. No offer of a record deal, nor a contract. It wasn’t until the night was ending, and the roadhouse owner refused to pay the musicians, claiming that they hadn’t drawn a big enough crowd to cover his expenses, that Al worked up the nerve to approach Willie again. He didn’t have the cost of a bus ticket to Grand Rapids. Would he drive him as far as Memphis?

Two years later, Willie and Al are hunkered down in Royal Recording Studio in Memphis, the home of Hi Records, working on the songs that would fill out Green is Blues, his first for the label, and the precursor to a string of classics, three of which ended up on this Rolling Stone list. The session isn’t going well. Al wants to huff and puff his way onto the charts the way big-lunged stars like Otis Redding, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson did before him. Willie, who came up playing trumpet in a jazz band, wants something quieter and more nuanced. What Otis did with a shout, he wants Al to do with a whisper. Al isn’t quite there yet. The takes are piling up, and still Willie is shaking his head. “Slow it down,” he says. “Soften it up. Feel what you’re singing.” He points at the band, a group of Memphis musicians he's assembled. “Let them be gritty.”

Probably not enough has been said about Hi Rhythm in recent years. Yes, they backed Cat Power circa The Greatest, and yes, their guitarist, Teenie, who died in 2014, was Drake’s uncle. (That’s him mugging in front of a Memphis chicken restaurant in the video for “Worst Behavior.”) But in the early ‘70s they exerted a massive influence on soul music with their lazy, swinging rhythms, their high-powered horn section, and those delicately strummed guitars: what became known as “the Memphis sound.”

The story begins back in 1949, when Willie called on an untested, 14-year-old named Al Jackson Jr. to fill in on drums for a Memphis swing band. “He was the worst drummer you ever heard,” he later told Rolling Stone. But where others heard an incompetent amateur, Papa Willie heard potential. By the time Jackson was in his late twenties, he was drumming for Booker T and the MGs, the legendary Stax Records house band. You might not know Jackson’s name, but you know his rhythms: Sam & Dave’s “Hold on, I’m Coming”; Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”; the MG’s “Green Onions”; all the Otis Redding hits. (That’s his beat Kanye sampled on “Otis”.) That loping, syncopated rhythm buoying “Let’s Stay Together”? That’s Jackson, too. His talents became so renowned that Willie had to get Howard Grimes, another Memphis drum prodigy, to fill in when Jackson’s increasingly lucrative commitments kept him busy. Grimes was good enough that Willie later claimed he couldn’t always tell the difference.

Willie made a habit out of recruiting amateurs. He nabbed brothers Leroy and Charles Hodges, who played bass and organ, from their high school band, the Impalas. Their younger brother Teenie eventually showed up at Willie’s house one night, drunk, guitar in hand, looking to get in on the action. “You play like shit,” Willie told him, before inviting him to move in upstairs. There wasn’t a guitarist in Memphis who played with the kind of restraint he wanted, so he took Teenie into his home for three years and taught him himself. Willie was nothing if not patient. By the time Al got to Memphis, Willie and the boys had been playing together for over a decade.

The lush gritty soul sound that catapulted Al to stardom didn’t happen overnight. You can hear glimpses of it on Gets Next to You and Let’s Stay Together, but it’s not until I’m Still in Love With You that they deliver an entire album worthy of their talents. The emphasis here is on all of their talents, not just Al’s. Of the three singles that cracked the Billboard Hot 100, Jackson co-wrote two of them and Teenie, the third. While Al wrote his vocal lines in a matter of minutes, Jackson would labor over the drum parts for days. Nowhere are those efforts more audible than “I’m Glad You’re Mine,” a good song that Jackson’s inventive drumming transforms into a great one. It’s Teenie though, who is the unsung genius of this record. His sparse style gave Al’s voice the space it needed to get lost in. And his rhythmic sense—second only to Jackson’s—is the motor underneath the album’s hood. That’s his driving guitar lick—a throwback to the bluesy grit of their early records—that propels the album’s centerpiece, “Love and Happiness,” and the 98th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone’s count. (That foot you hear tapping off the count at the beginning? That’s Teenie.) And of course Willie is here too, the magician behind the curtain. His fingerprints are all over I’m Still in Love With You, from the big stuff—the horn sections, the string arrangements, all those jazz chords—to the tiny details: the rich snap of the snare drum, the ghostly warmth of the organ tone.

Enough has been said about Al Green’s voice. His range. That otherworldly falsetto. The world of feeling he can wring from a whispered syllable. If you were born into a world where “Let’s Stay Together” was part of the cultural bedrock—audible everywhere from wedding receptions to Waffle House—it’s hard to imagine hearing that voice for the first time. But for some audience members at this 1972 performance of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” that may well have been the case. It’s a gripping performance, no matter how many times you’ve watched him sing. As the song starts, the lights drop, cloaking the band and the audience in shadow—an effect that lends Al the eerie appearance of being alone in a room full of people. The volume on his mic is turned up so loud—or the room is that quiet—you can hear his lips open and close. Al, always a ham for the spotlight, rises to the moment; he doesn’t appear to sing the song so much as exorcise it from his mouth through a series of facial contortions. But’s it not Al’s face that delivers the gut punch; it’s a kid’s. During the last verse, as Al stretches out that “la-la-la” bit until it’s a kind of whispered trill, the camera swings behind him to reveal a young boy, seated front and center. He is staring up at Al, transfixed. You don’t need to blow the video up to full screen to recognize the expression on his face: it’s the one we all make when something beautiful and unfamiliar floats into our ear drums.

—Ryan Marr

#287: Grateful Dead, "Anthem of the Sun" (1968)

In 1967, recording sessions were done in some kind of orderly form—songs had been selected, arrangements had been made, musicians had been hired, studios were booked, artists came, sang overdubs or sang live, we then proceeded to add and sweeten strings and so forth, went into the mixing stage,

 

and out came a record. I kept a 10-strip of L hidden in the sleeve. One of those summer nights, fresh out of high school, we dropped and drove to Virginia Beach where one of us had a father with a house where no one slept. We only had reason to let gravity guide us to the shore, to lay down in the stars and sand, invited by the sun and the tide, which would breathe us back in morning time. It was chilly, but not too chilly,

 

an October morning in Palo Alto, 1963—after stealing a couple hours’ sleep, a young man awakes on the floor in the aisle of a closed movie theater, having jimmied the ticket window open shortly before dawn. He stands and walks into the beams of sunlight that frame the lobby door. It’s okay, he’d say if anyone bothered, a buddy of mine sweeps the popcorn and mops the pop here. He woulda let me in, but he got all fucked up

 

on burgundy and grass last night, ya dig? Now these guys came along and none of that applied! Didn’t have the material ready, went into the studio experimenting with sound—they were like kids in a candy store with all this great equipment. It was all state of the art, you know, and they were availing themselves of it

 

and going to school on it. On the East Coast, the sun comes up slow. I’ve seen it rise enough times, it’s a watched pot—not the fiery orange peak we’d painted and set fire to in our minds that night. Every day, like moving under water after dark, we can swim deep and swim deeper, believing there’s a surface bound to come before a breath, but the sun is small and pale on the Eastern horizon

 

and we had lost our sense of pressure. We were dealing with, yes, a counterculture and, yes, a new method of recording, but also there was the element of chemicals involved here, which never had been a factor with the acts we dealt with, or if it had been it certainly was

 

under control. Enough times, he hustles rent money busking banjo to pay for a room in a friend’s house for a week or two—always space with a short-term open door, always a friend with a friend who doesn’t know what he can afford next week

 

on either side of the deal. We didn't speak much on the beach there that dawn. It was the leg of the trip where everyone agreed to quietly recede into the low tides of themselves. I have a photograph—one of a small, out-of-focus handful, no one knew I snapped—of three bodies spread out before me, before the ocean, far from each other

 

in their silence. These guys were stoned, living in a fantasy world, looking so hard

 

for sounds that may not even be possible. We each weigh our expectations and their realities in our own and only ways. When we finally leave, we step barefoot from the sand

 

onto concrete. He climbs out the way he came in, straightens his pea coat, covered in dust and lint, sticky with fountain soda and salt water taffy, crusted continent of spit warm with the scent of spilled beer. He lights a cigarette to catch his breath and squints, smiling through the morning fog. However I find him, I hand him the coins he’ll need to ride through the day.

 

Thank you, he always says. We are going somewhere else and we will not return.

—Doug Fuller

#288: X, "Los Angeles" (1980)

X's Los Angeles is film noir poetry describing the underbelly of the Beautiful Great Dream City of the West Coast. The album shows us the dark underbelly is the Beautiful Great Dream City. That it’s all underbelly actually. Los Angeles is a landscape that remains beautiful but indelibly marked with the dark sordid textures of skid row violence, unspeakable cruelty full of tortured souls caught in the current of life reeling past them and through them at the same time. Here we find the city of Los Angeles as the fantasy temptress and destroyer of dreams where everything comes at a cost that can’t be measured in dollars.

As a kid, Los Angeles is a dream to me. I am a million miles from anywhere resembling life as it ought to be. This small town rural America hole I am living in is the polar opposite of where I think I want to be. There is a city a mere 70 miles away, but that requires money, a car, a license. Those might as well be a private jet and pilot. I am all adolescent existential crisis. X’s Los Angeles is a dark oasis, like the mythical city of Cibola built on sin, vice, release, and redemption. I am merely wandering my current sociocultural desert until I can descend unto my real people. Thus finds 14-year-old me encountering the darkest record I have ever heard. There are a ton of these stories about music, youth, awakening, and discovery. This one is mine. There are a million squared songs about love and relationships with no end in sight. They keep coming because we never really find a full, complete understanding of the subject that embodies, drives, and haunts us. Thus it is with these personal stories of art and redemption. That’s what all punk rock is eventually: redemption. Redemption from an oppressive state of being. Redemption from stifling burdensome places. Redemption of self. Redemption of others. Even at its angriest, bleakest, and most hopeless, Punk rock is a belief that somewhere, some way there is something more, something better. Punk rock is the hope that something is worth screaming about, while demanding its instantaneous manifestation.

In one furious sweep of musical slate, X wiped away the loud angry punk rock standard spiel with a musical vocabulary that blended more influences than anything before it. Los Angeles melds the bleakness of the Velvet Underground with the ferocious power of the Stooges, the pure  rebellion of Sun rockabilly and the literary sensibilities of Carver and Bukowski. It is literate, contemplative, and observant in an era of punk when almost nothing else was. It redefines the expectations and possibilities of punk. It raises the bar for an entire genre of rock music.

John Doe and Exene Cervenka were emigres to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a collection of observations, experiences, and feelings of the foreigner in a new land that is at once alien, overwhelming, and exciting, enhanced by the discovery and catharsis of the power, possibility, and freedom of punk rock. It is, at turns, dark impulses or redemptive cleansing framed in beauty, fear, excitement, confusion. They were children in a really vicious playground and they reflected that outwardly on this album.

I came to this album a high school punk rocker in a tiny East Texas town when punk rock barely existed outside of big cities on the coasts. Landing squarely in the heart of these songs, they mirrored all the bleakness and confusion of my hyper-adolescent angst and anxiety. Unable to see a road out, no hope on the horizon, I existed in that peculiar teen mental state of dread filled with irrational insanity, where how things are is a permanent unchanging state. Los Angeles was Promethean. I saw a dark disturbing place that was terrifying, exciting, fascinating, ugly. It was full of thrills, dangers, and sexual tension. The Los Angeles of the record was like a punk rock Anti-Oz and I wanted to follow its brick road to this place far away from rednecks, jocks, tiny minds, and tiny souls. If the darkness in this crazy previously unimagined world was as inevitable as the oppression of home then let’s at least add the excitement of a world where something interesting happened.

From the opening track of “Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not” to the conclusion of “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” Los Angeles is a musical equivalent to Bosch’s “Garden Of Earthly Delights.” It all comes down to Sin and Redemption. Los Angeles is a glittering, unflinching look at the worst aspects of the Great West Coast Dream City that always carries with it the hope. It tells us that even though things are terrible, they can be better, showing that the ugly and the beautiful are inexorably intertwined and parasitic in nature. That was a lot to take in as a kid. Like most kids, I took what I wanted and ignored the rest. I’ve carried this album with me in one form or another for the better part of three decades. Its power and beauty have only increased for me over the years. What it has meant to me has varied, morphed, and transcended. It remains through all of that a friend, a yardstick, and a touchstone.

—Bosco Farr

#289: The Kinks, "Something Else by the Kinks" (1967)

There’s this paint huffer named Caldwell who lives in an empty shack in that crap neighborhood behind the mall. Fucking Jimmy likes to visit him and ask him questions like he’s an oracle. That’s another thing about Jimmy—his tendency to romanticize garbageheads like Caldwell. He’s sure they’re the pure ones, that they know shit the rest of us don’t know. Caldwell knows how to get high on acetone paint and that’s something I don’t know how to do, but that’s as far as his special knowledge goes, if you ask me.

I made Jimmy promise we’d never huff paint and he agreed. You’d have to be completely wacked.

“Never,” I said.

“Right-o,” he said.

Last time we visited him, Caldwell was sitting in the dark in that abandoned house with a pile of his own poo about a foot away from him and the paper label from the spray paint can stuck to his chest. Upside down. Krylon Gold Metallic. And it’s so crazy hanging out with Caldwell that the fact that the label is upside down becomes the thing I shake my head over. Like in sci-fi movies where you call bullshit on a character eating a fresh apple in his space pod, meanwhile the premise involving mind-reading aliens, time warps, and sentient, resentful planets is all cool with you.

Caldwell’s just one of Jimmy’s pet losers. There’s also this Vietnam vet who hangs out on the bench in front of the library. He has this riff about how Revelations is talking about the suburbs, the suburbs, man, how the suburbs are the end of it all, people in boxes, mass conformity, and maybe he’s right, but I don’t think you have to be Mr. Observant to come up with that. Just listen to Something Else by the Kinks. They hit it square on the head a long time ago with no biblical shenanigans and they used IRONY. Neighborhoods! Man, the Kinks know from neighborhoods. “Waterloo Sunset”? “Afternoon Tea”? “Situation Vacant”? They know.

I found a CD of Something Else at a garage sale and I was drawn to the title. Something Else. Like, there’s all the usual stuff over there and then here’s us, over here. The Kinks—we’re something else. Me, I’m like that, too, something else, and the CD was 75 cents, and the lettering was kind of green and black and psychedelic, so what the hell? I bought it. That’s one good thing I forgot to mention about Caldwell the Idiot—he’s got a pretty decent old boom box in that derelict house that he plays by running an extension cord to the car wash next door. Not all the time, but when the manager’s not on duty. I grew up listening to country music and whatever’s on the radio, that sort of high-note, autotuned babybaby stuff, so I never heard anything like the Kinks. It’s what I guess people mean by rock and roll. Like, in the pure sense, like as an actual specific kind of music and not just something you say, like, “That rocks!” when you see a cool clip on YouTube or whatever. And I like it. I like rock and roll. It’s smart, unlike Jimmy and Caldwell, and it’s got attitude, but it’s also got heart.

So I figure if I’m going to be hanging out in this sty, I may as well have some good tunes, so I bring Something Else and I start to play it. The first song, “David Watts,” has me thinking, yeah, David Watts sounds like a tool, one of those captain-of-the-football-team douchebags like Jimmy says he used to be before, but, here’s the thing, David Watts actually sounds less pathetic than the narrator of that song, who just wants to be like him and can’t. And then what’s cool and what makes me use the word IRONY, which is an awesome word, is that you can tell the Kinks know their narrator is a loser, even though they’re singing in his voice. Like, how do they make it so I can I tell? They just do. It’s got layers, man. THAT’s rad, but I know better than to try to bring any of it to the attention to Jimmy or Caldwell.

I’ve found a window ledge that’s open and lets fresh air in that smells like soap and car wax from the car wash next door, which can be kind of a nice smell. The ledge is less gross than the rest of the place, so that’s where I sit. White paint chips that are probably lead paint get all over the butt of my jeans, but it’s nicey-nice compared to what’s on the floor—spray paint empties, fast food empties, an ashtray packed like a mass grave, and poo. Human excrement, yeah. Jimmy and Caldwell are crouched there, going back and forth like they’re princes of industry negotiating big deals instead of a couple of drug addicts in Lawton, Oklahoma, settling on a price for some shitty-looking weed.

“Share it with him,” I tell Jimmy, reaching over and toeing his skinny back with my cowboy boots. “Share it with him and he’ll let you pay whatever.”

Jimmy looks over his shoulder at me and nods and gives me a sweet smile for a second. Dammit, that’s the thing. Just when I think it’s all badness forever. Fucking Jimmy—I love the guy. We met in a treatment center a few months ago.

So of course Caldwell gets high with us even though weed is like water to him compared to huffing paint, which he goes on and on about. High for four hours! Intense psychedelics! Then he clues in to the music. The CD is playing “No Return,” which is a really sad song. Ray Davies sings, If I could see just how lonely my life would be if you passed me by. That line is how I feel about Jimmy, which I tell myself is why I keep going on this crazy journey we’re on. Voyage to the underworld, he says. Drug tourists, he says. We’ll jump out just in time! But I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy. Look at poor Caldwell. I wonder who he used to be? I can’t imagine. The song is saying, “And there is no return.”

“Sure there is,” Jimmy says. He’s such an optimist, is Jimmy.

“Bossa nova,” Caldwell says from somewhere deep in his chest. Caldwell looks like a skeleton in filthy jeans and a T-shirt that says “Great Plains Coliseum STAFF” on it. He’s got wispy blond hair like a giant, scary baby, and blue eyes that water all the time. He’s barefooted this visit because he sold his shoes for some all-weather deck paint that he huffed already as we can see by the redwood color that’s all over his mouth and nose, with spray going up practically to his eyes. “That’s a cool bossa nova,” he says, pointing at the boom box.

“Boss of what?” I say.

“That kind of beat,” he says, bobbing his head. “That’s what you call it.”

His face crinkles around his eyes and the rust-colored spatters from the deck paint crack like the surface of an icy pond.

I’m sort of amazed. “Do you know about music, Caldwell?”

Caldwell nods. He points at his shirt. “I was a roadie for twenty years,” he says.

“A roadie?  Did you ever meet any famous people?”

“Nope,” Caldwell says. “I set up the drum sets.”

Then Jimmy says, “Hey, wait a minute, we got you something,” and runs out to my car. He comes back with a can of silver spray paint.

“What are you doing?” I say, standing up from the window ledge. “Where did you get that?”

“Let’s let the pro show us how it’s done,” he says. He’s giving me a smile, but it’s not sweet. Fucking Jimmy.

“Not me,” I say. “No way.”

So I turn around and stick one leg out the window and squeeze my body out so I’m straddling the windowsill with my head and shoulders outside. The Kinks are singing “Situation Vacant.”

Then he had to leave the apartment / And sought a less plush residence. Tell me about it.

I smell the paint and my lungs burn. Over at the car wash, I watch a big-bellied guy wearing a John Deere ball cap pull in with his brand-new, white F-150 and get out to vacuum it. Dashboard cross, hunting rack, head lamps—everything on the car looks like money to me, something you could steal and sell. He’s bought one of those sprays that gives you a new car smell and I lean out far enough to get away from the spray paint smell and I smell it, the illusion of newness. I imagine his driveway and the house he lives in, just like all the other houses on his block. What a loser, I think.

Behind me, Jimmy’s doing it, he’s huffing. Then he’s high, whooping and hollering, and he comes over to me and hugs me around the hips and pulls me through the window. I turn and look at him, and there’s his sweet smile, but it’s covered in silver now, silver all around his mouth and nose and the Kinks are playing “Death of a Clown” and that’s what Jimmy looks like—a clown, or a spaceman, somebody’s child, my love, a dead man, or something—what is it? Something else.

—Constance Squires

#290: Al Green, "Call Me" (1973)

So I’m reading John Landau’s 1973 Rolling Stone review of Call Me, and he starts going on about how Al Green’s voice is like some untamed, wily thing threatening to break loose:

Because the singer disdains most forms of discipline, preferring to let his voice wander into every nook and cranny of the modest melodies he writes, turning phrases inside out, and wreaking havoc with the vocal structure in general, he requires the leveling force of a steady band playing tight, clean arrangements.

With all due respect to Landau as a critic and to all of his work with The Boss, I can’t figure out what the hell this cat is talking about. Al’s voice is a lot of thingswarm, comforting, profoundly soulfulbut undisciplined? And what does he mean by “wreaking havoc”? What sacred structure did Al’s ever-so-sweet falsetto render unto ruin? When did the gentle timbre of his precise annunciation ever descend into chaos and desolation? Mr. Landau, you ain’t never heard nothing like havoc on an Al Green record. Nah man. You must’ve gotten him mixed up with somebody else.

Near as I can tell, Al, Willie, and the rest of the boys just figured out that good soul music doesn’t always need to swelter. Sometimes you can just let the groove simmer low and slow, like the way the organ slides in on that first verse of “Call Me”like a lover sliding into bed and grabbing you tight around the belly. And when Al hits that note about two and half minutes in, then lets it just fade away like a sunset….That ain’t nobody’s havoc; that’s some Grandmaster-level soul shit right there.

I think this Landau cat doesn’t really understand how folks listen to Al Green. See, when I need that cry-my-heart-out-longing-for-my-woman-sound, I put that Otis on. When I got that funny feeling, you know, something almost like a hopeful kind of heartache, I reach for that Sam Cooke. When I need to get these tears out, Donny Hathaway makes the song cry. And Marvin, well you know Marvin. That man could sing the secrets right out of your soul. But I always felt like Al had this other thing going on, kind of quiet, kind of like grace. Yeah, grace. Grace like the drink at last call before you go back out into the lonely cold of a winter’s night, or grace like mama and daddy dancing close in the middle of the kitchen on Saturday morning while the eggs and toast burn. That’s what I hear when I put on Call Me: someone singing like he knows how badly we need grace just to get through the day.

Landau wasn’t all wrong, though. Al does crawl all up inside those melodies, bending the pitch to his will and finding ways to make even the simplest sentiments feel newly rich. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” should be the corniest song ever, but he takes that whole sad Hank Williams affair and turns it into an eloquent lament we can feel in our bones. But that was always one of his greatest gifts: he could take a line that would collapse in on itself if sung by anybody else and make it sound like the truest words someone ever spoke. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when Al sings, I always believe him. I believe he means every note. I believe he wants to make us believe too. And I could be wrong, but it seems like we still all desperately need to believeas much as we did in 1973that we can be healed.

It’s been harder to write this than I expected. Not because Call Me has lost any of its compassionate gracefulness with age, but because it’s been hard to reconcile the record’s care and restraint with all the rage steadily surrounding us. I’ve had trouble trying to hear its subtlety over so much shouting, so much weeping, and so many bullets. I want to say something hopeful like “Love always speaks louder than fear or hate,” but there are too many bodies in the street for me to really believe that. As good a record as Call Me is, it cannot breathe life into the dead. What it can do is remind us of how good real and true togetherness feels. It can give us just enough healing to go face the horror again tomorrow. For at least a little while, it can remind us that things can be different if we want them to be.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for all the supposed connectedness we have at our fingertips, it often feels as if I’ve never been more alone. A text is not a hug. A “like” is not love. Tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram posts, and Snapchats are not intimacy no matter how magical their mimicry of it. So as much as I appreciate your reading this, here’s what we ought to do instead: Call on me and I will call on you. Let us drink and dance together in the middle of the kitchen like mama and daddy did. Even if they didn’t, even if that image is as much a fantasy as our online, make-believe selves, let us move our hips and shake our asses until we make it so. Let us drink from each other like it’s last call and there’s a storm outsidebecause there is. Let all of that wrath be swallowed in the embrace of warm, wet lips. Let us sit, breathe each other in real deep, and whisper Al’s incantation: “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).”

—Mikal Gaines

#291: Talking Heads, "Talking Heads: 77" (1977)

The girls in the dorm said Cheryl could do magic. Not like scarf tricks or a rabbit from an old top hatshe could read your palm or tarot, silence an enemy, mix you a perfume to wear on your left wrist that would lure your crush close. Her side of the room was decorated with red string lights and leopard print, bottles and oils, spices lined neatly on a shelf above her bed, a suitcase record player on a small stand near her desk.

The magic was instinct, she told them. Not from a book.

When her mouse of a roommate went to study at the library, she put the Talking Heads on, 77, just loud enough to hear it if you came to her door. She was open for business. The music is the magic, she told them. Melody is ritual. If the spell was complicated, she might play a song a few times; "Don't Worry About the Government" before a worrisome test, "The Book I Read" for a love spell, "Psycho Killer" when a mean girl with straight hair and slipper-pink nails taunted you across the dining hall.

Services were by trade, by trusta bag of crisps and candy left quietly hanging on her doorknob, a neck massage during finals week. If she carved your ex's name into an onion and buried it underneath his window by a waning moon, you were expected to do the laundry she left outside your door the next morning without complaint.

*

Becky wanted a love spell. There was a boy in her math class, Ryan, who had an Indian tan and strong arms and wild eyes who smiled at her sometimes, but not enough.

Cheryl warned her that love spells were potent, not to be fucked with, best to use as a last resort when he just wouldn’t make that final move. Love spells are more powerful than anything, she said. They cannot be broken. Make sure this is what you want, that you know him well enough to cast this. But Becky begged, and she relented. The spell was cast, his name carved in a slim red candle dressed with rose oil. Becky burned it in her window for seven nights, letting the smoke drift out in a thin whisper. She stared at him in class. Each day he smiled a little bit more.

And on the eighth day, when the candle was nothing but a small stub buried in the forest at dawn, he asked her out. She left a gift card taped to Cheryl's door.

There were flowers and love songs played on a guitar. Champagne on a one-month anniversary, declarations of love every minute of every day. Becky moved into his apartment, coming back to the dorm only to get clothes and say hi. She stopped sitting with them at dinner. The girls in the dorm hardly saw her at all.

But Ryan loved her too much, grew possessive, then violent. He drank hard at parties and shook her when she begged him to call a cab. Checked her phone, demanded to know why she was late coming back from class, told her she didn't need to go to class at all. Brought his father's gun back after Thanksgiving, threatened to kill both of them if she ever tried to leave him. She fled while he was asleep, hid in her old room, refused to come out for class. The girls told her to go to the cops, but she couldn't. He would kill her. No one would believe her anyway.

But a love spell could be broken, right? She pleaded with Cheryl. I warned you, she chided. Love spells are not to be wasted on fools. But she agreed to help. There would be no charge this time.

*

Becky needed a banishing spell. Something strong to keep him away for good. Cheryl played "Psycho Killer" backwards and handed her a vial without a label. Something sweet, she promised. To restore his sweet temperament. Becky poured it into the electric blue backwash he carried to lacrosse practice and sent him out with a kiss, a silent prayer that Cheryl's promise would take action quickly. She didn't have eight days anymore. She wasn't sure she had eight hours.

He collapsed on the field. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Antifreeze, Cheryl said without a smile when Becky told her what happened. Sometimes magic isn't enough.

—Libby Cudmore

#292: Bob Dylan & the Band, "The Basement Tapes" (1975)

Tell the truth. You get tired. Once you did it like that, now you do it like this. If you can bear to do it at all. Maybe you never really heard what you thought. Maybe you’re only here because you forgot how to be anywhere.

This is when you get in a motorcycle accident.

Think about the legend. The one where your body’s brought low but your spirit abides. That kind of thing. Muck it up with the usual bunting. Rivers and bayonets. Foundlings and fire.

Practice silence. They’re going to say you’re burned, disfigured, dying. About at least that last bit, they’ll be right. They know. That’s the way it is. Mrs. Augustus is tired too, and she’s been dying longer than you.

Shelter in the past. Say things like, The old songs. Say it often. At parties. To people giving you the wooly eye trying to find your disfigurement. The old songs. You hear the old songs. Sort of croak it like, so they get the idea.

The idea is that you hear the old songs.

Blame it on the kennel master if you want to play dead. No one will question you if it sounds like a metaphor for war or something. Nobody’s going to accept that you’re turning your back on the endless road. Which is to say: have another kid.

Ah, butterfuck. That made it worse. This damned world. Even death can’t hold it still. You’ve already been the future, and you didn’t like what you made of it.

Ask the mirrors. Give yourself the wooly eye. Say you believe in the wisdom of reflection. The moon’s teeth are like a mirror. You probably said something like that once. Seems like your kind of thing.

You know this.

If someone asked you to name the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, you’d answer with a joke.

It might be the only truth you practice, and it makes a man a liar. You found the formula. It’s all punchline. It’s you and it’s of you. Sometimes it’s Canadians. That’ll happen. Canadians will happen.

What do they know of fighting?

What do you?

The fight is held in bad hands, over bad bodies. The doctor won’t say it, but the mirrors might. Something about knaves at the crossroads. You can’t remember endings because you’ve never known one, so laugh into the wind.

Let’s calm down, Commodore.

God can’t shake a hand without breaking the bones. What does He know of bodies? The definition of Heaven is being without one, but your first memory was hearing a horse’s leg crack. You said that once and now you’re married to that truth.

Never go home.

Hang out underground. But in a normal way. You’re not dying. You’re dying. Burying yourself is the only way to be sure. Don’t tell anyone. Tell Canadians. Not anyone you love.

Do you love anyone? You love the old songs. A curse isn’t a curse unless you sing it. Saw that on a placemat once. The waitress says it’s not that way for her but it might be for you.

Befriend a wolf.

Or if not a single wolf then every dog whose howl holds up the night. Put the math to work for you this time. Call up the money man and see where it stands. It’s never where you think. Once you own one dog every dog owns you. That one’s true.

The old truth.

Fuck Paul Simon.

Keep it to yourself. Maybe tell Levon Helm. He’s cool. You share a sickness. Everyone’s got one. You’ve got two. Time and knowledge. The old sickness. And eczema. Three then. You’ve been worse than scalded.

Like what it came to up there. Alone together, throwing motorcycles at the trees. You couldn’t believe the end times could end anything. You knew guys named Solomon the Earl and Judah Pete. You tried most things twice, but you didn’t change once.

Sing about it. Sing about everything. Do it alone. Do it in bed. Don’t stop. You tried stopping. It didn’t work. Promise you’ll meet again. Count the miles. Make the number so big it might be God. Make the past so gone you come round to it again.

A decade gone, and you have to live it over. Every lie you’ve ever spoke you speak again only this time you have to believe it. Whiskey in a teacup, nothing ever gets so dark. You rise from the Earth but the sky doesn’t invite you higher. Should have never learned to walk if there was only one way to stop. The horse knew that. Ask again.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was a man go blind.

That’s the punchline.

—Adam Peterson

#293: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat" (1968)

You know who Foster Campbell is even if you don’t know him by name. You met him once in a hookah bar, or that time you got lost on the subway, or at an unsanctioned boxing match where you lost 250 dollars on a fight you are pretty sure was rigged.

He’s the guy who’s allowed to bring open containers into baseball parks, the guy who’s been sleeping on your friend’s couch for a month but your friend says he doesn’t know him. He knocked your sister up once. He went to school with your cousin.

I first met him when I was at a house party in this weird neighborhood, which is sort of Foster Campbell‘s natural habitat. Lefty, who got that name by doing things with his right hand you don’t even want to know about, had brought me to the party insisting I would love the scene. I think some things we had done together recently had given Lefty the wrong impression of what I was into, but I went anyway.

There were pictures of Easter Island heads on the wall and beautiful women walked around in their underwear and bathrobes and frowned. I’m not sure if they were hired to do so, or if they lived there and had just not been informed that there was a party going on around them. Neither would have surprised me. There was a guy painting a picture on an actual easel and he pretended not to notice the glue-huffing and dry-humping that was going on right next to him. Lefty ended up making out with this cisgender chick in the front hallway and I sort of hung around the untouched booze that was organized alphabetically on the kitchen table.

None of it would have bothered me too much if that record hadn’t been playing on the turntable. It was either Galaxie 500’s On Fire or a local band who was doing a pretty good impression of the Music Machine’s (Turn On) The Music Machine. Everyone was doing that garage rock thing that summer. The bass was humming and writhing and it sounded like it was recorded in a used Volkswagen. I went out back to sit on the porch and look out over the other buildings and other porches on the block, the ant farm of connected paths, alleyways, and backyards that make up every Chicago neighborhood.

He was already out there when I stepped onto the porch. And by “he” I mean Foster Campbell. I knew it was him, because I had heard he was coming to this party. Lefty might have said something about it, or maybe I heard someone talk about it when we first showed up.

You know what he was wearing. You’ve met him. He had a cool piercing, but not one that was too obvious or desperate. A tattoo snuck out from under his clothes. He seemed rumpled and like he needed a haircut, but he was still great looking.

I could have sat down across from him, but I wanted to lean against the siding so I could look out over the neighborhood and watch other people on their own porches. Something told me he wouldn’t mind if I sat down right next to him.

“I love that T-shirt,” he said. “I saw it when I first walked in. Hilarious.”

“Hey thanks,” I said and looked down at it as if I had to remind myself of which shirt I was wearing, though wearing it had been a very deliberate and tortured decision.

“Got a smoke?” he asked.

“I don’t smoke,” I told him.

“You didn’t come out here to smoke?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting for 30 minutes to bum one.”

“I’m pretty sure you can smoke inside.”

“No one smokes anymore,” he said and sighed the same way my dad did when he lamented how often basketball players traveled.

“I had to get out of there,” I explained. “I just couldn’t take that record anymore.”

“You don’t like the Velvet Underground?” he asked.

“I thought it was the Wipers or someone like that.”

“Naw way,” he said. “It’s Lou.”

“It sounds like they didn’t bother to rehearse,” I said, trying to dismiss the record.

“Who wants to rehearse when you’re in a band?”

The argument made some kind of strange sense coming from him. There was a puzzle-logic to it that made me want to hear the rest of the record. He bobbed his head along to the manic tempo and tapped his thigh to the slapping sounds that constituted the drum beat.

“This is the best one,” he said.

Minute one of “Sister Ray” must have been recorded at the perfect frequency for that apartment because when the 17-minute ode to drugs, oral sex, and obliviousness began it felt like we were on an elevator getting shot into space. My stomach lurched and my mouth dried up. I was sure that when I looked over the side of the porch I was going to see the Earth shrink and disappear. He nodded his head and smiled at me.

That’s when I decided to do it. That’s when I leaned over and tried to kiss him. He pulled back and looked at me with the sad eyes that had made me want to kiss him in the first place, but now made me want to punch him.

“Are you trying to kiss me?” he asked.

“The fact that you are asking me that is a pretty bad sign.”

“I sort of have a girlfriend,” he explained and kept his eyes on me in case I tried something else.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away from him and looking back out onto the labyrinth of Chicago backyards while Lou Reed sought a mainline, “I do too.”

The insistent guitars were my frustration. The cranky, thrumming organ was my embarrassment. We sat with that song playing for a long time. Longer than its Ulyssian run-time, it seemed.

When the record ended someone put on Joe McPhee’s Nation Time and the spell was broken. I looked over at Foster Campbell and smiled. He smiled back, but I could tell he was waiting for me to leave. It was my responsibility to go, I realized. I had been the one who had done something dumb and made everything all awkward and uncomfortable for us both. I stood up and pretended to stretch. He continued smiling, but not in a mean way. He didn’t look like a sly fox, pitying the dogs who could not catch him. He smiled in the kind and polite way you did on Valentine’s Day in third grade while everyone in class stuffed envelopes and tiny treats into the shoebox you had lovingly decorated with construction paper hearts and glitter glue.

I found Lefty and we left the party with a group of cute college kids who claimed to be the West Suburban College Debate Society. I tried to forget about Foster Campbell, but everyone talked about him all the way back to Lefty’s place.

When I think about that record now I always think of Foster Campbell and I wonder what happened to him. I’ve heard he’s working in a railyard in Wilmington and that he maybe owns a consignment shop in Tallahassee. Sometimes I wish I knew for sure. I’d like to ask him what he thinks about the jarring and spliced voices shouting back and forth during “Lady Godiva” or what the hell he thinks John Cale was talking about in “The Gift.” Mostly I just wish I smoked back then.

When you run into him, don’t mention that I was talking about him. He probably knows already, but still.

That party isn’t something I like to talk about all that much. Or even think about. You’re probably thinking, "What's the big deal? Who hasn’t made out with Foster Campbell?"

My answer to that is: Well, me, for one.

—Matt Meade

#294: MC5, "Kick Out the Jams" (1969)

Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet.

Brother J.C. Crawford makes it sound really easy, doesn’t he? Makes it all sound really simple. And I don’t know, maybe in 1968, it was. Maybe you could just look out and see which direction revolution was coming from. Maybe you could just jump into the fight and know which side was which. The old heads I know tell me you could feel revolution: in the sounds and in the streets, in distorted guitars and dropped-acid dreams, in gunshots and soul claps, in zombie kids eating their parents and Rosemary’s devil-born brood, in Tommy and John Carlos’ raised fists, in the Panthers’ growls as they became “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” in people’s tears after the bullet stole away Martin’s dreamy get-down, in the Godfather’s hips when he saved Beantown, and just maybe, you could feel it crackling in the air at the Grande Ballroom on the witches’ sabbath with some crazy white boys from Detroit.

Could be that all of this is bullshit too. Could be that everybody then was just as confused and disillusioned as we feel now. Could be that everybody was too high to remember most of what really happened and so they told the best version of it. Could be that as simple and as sexy as Crawford makes it sound, we don’t really choose in five seconds. We choose and then we choose again, all of the time, sometimes without even knowing. And every one of those small choices takes us a little closer or a little further away from the revolution we think we want.

It’s hard to listen to Kick Out the Jams without nostalgia, without romanticizing it all to hell. And that’s weird because it isn’t even my own past I’m fantasizing about. I’m not old enough to truly claim the MC5 as my own. I’m playing make believe in someone else’s history. I’m stealing someone else’s glorious moment of revolt. Part of me feels guilty for that. Then I think that there’s nothing special about it really. Americans do it every July fourth. Parents hold on to old records usually hoping that their kids will hear a little bit of what they heard when they were younger. Record companies put out reissues betting that they can rope in a whole new audience for what’s essentially an old product. Nostalgia for shit you didn’t actually experience yourself or for things that never existed at all might be the greatest American commodity. In fact, that’s kind of how I discovered the MC5.

I wish I could say that someone passed down a dusty vinyl copy of Kick Out the Jams that I learned to love and cherish, but I’m pretty sure I first heard about them from one of those lame VH1 countdown specials they ran all of the time when I was in college. “The Greatest Hard Rock Songs of All Time” or whatever new reminiscence they were selling that week. I think I watched almost all of those countdownsreally exercises in canon buildingbecause I thought it might educate me more about music. But that was the point, right? They wanted to remind the people old enough to actually remember that their old, beloved stuff was still worth paying attention to and let everybody my age know what they needed to be up on to earn those older folks’ respect.

I ended up back home with my parents for a year after college, working as a line cook in the same small town I had planned to put far in my rearview. I was desperately in need of some rebellious sounds. So you bet your ass that when I saw Kick Out the Jams at the local record storethey still had those thenI grabbed it and cranked the shitty speakers in my ‘93 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera as loud as they would go without rattling the windows too badly.

But as I listen to the record now, with my thirty-sixth birthday rapidly approaching, it feels haunted. Not just by that earlier version of myself or by the sense that I’m appropriating the language of somebody else’s insurrection, but also by doubt about whether I’ve become part of the problem or part of the solutionabout whether I have realized my purpose here on the planet. When I hear the righteous recklessness of Brother Wayne Kramer’s guitar or the searing conviction in Rob Tyner’s voice, I’m not so sure.

In a 1994 interview for a Swedish radio station, Tupac Shakur offered a stark proclamation about the prospect of becoming an old revolutionary in America:

In this country, a Black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that’s right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. ‘Cause once you turn 30, it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a Black man, in this country. And you don’t wanna fight no more. And if you don’t believe me you can look around, you don’t see no loud mouth 30-year-old motherfuckers.

I should admit that I was never that big a fan of Pac while he was alive. That was in part because I bought into the corny east coast vs. west coast beef and also because I was never really blown away by him as an emcee. Still, when I heard him talking on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” his words hit me flush on the chin. He got me thinking about how much fight I have left in me, about which battles are even worth fighting, about how much of my heart and soul are still intact. Some days all I want to do is rage, but a lot of the timemore of it than I’d like to admitI just feel tired and numb.

I watched the video of Eric Garner’s execution by police. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the others. It’s not because I worry that I won’t be able to handle it. I’m worried that I can. I’m terrified that I’ll be able to sit comfortably behind my computer screen, watch someone else who looks like me die, and then go on with my day like this is the way it’s supposed to be.

After I marched in a Black Lives Matter protest, my mom said it reminded her of the sixties, but I’m not really sure what she meant. Was she just talking about seeing black folks in the streets again with picket signs and raised fists? Or maybe she was lamenting that we are still fighting the same fights she did plus a whole bunch of new ones? Probably both. I tell myself that it’s more complicated now. That we know more about how our intersectional identities shape the contours of existence under neoliberal capitalism, that power is really more of an amorphous social construct than a centralized force, that current antagonisms between repressive state apparatuses and the people are just the latest manifestation of tensions inherent to the American experiment in democracy and freedom. And then I think, “What would Pac Say?” I feel like he’d probably say that there’s still “a lotta talk, by a lotta honkeys, sittin’ on a lotta money, telling us they’re high society.”

—Mikal Gaines

 

#295: Leonard Cohen, "Songs of Love and Hate" (1971)

The first time I listened to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, I never wanted to hear it again. It begins with “Avalanche,” which carries you away right from the first chord, rolling through lyrics like you who wish to conquer pain / you must learn what makes me kind / the crumbs of love that you offer me / they’re the crumbs I’ve left behind. It accelerates down to the chilling last lines: it is your turn beloved / it is your flesh that I wear. A Rolling Stone review called the album “depressing”; another critic said it’s “one of the scariest albums of the last forty years.”

I didn’t want to listen to Songs of Love and Hate because it’s so dark. I try, in much of my life, to avoid exposing myself unnecessarily to pain. I don’t listen to certain music, or watch certain shows, or read certain books because I don’t want to suffer if I don’t have to. There’s enough pain in the world already, I generally think. It will come my way in some shape or form over and over again, so why seek it out?

Sometimes that strategy has gone too far. When sadness has hit, or anger, or some other form of pain, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid it. When certain feelings are brought up by experience or the vagaries of human mood, I try to push them aside for a more convenient time, often by transferring that energy into worrying about nothing. Usually, I’m able get through whatever I need to get through, then end up collapsing in a panic attack after the situation’s over.

I spent years in therapy for anxiety, a condition I’ll always have to some degree. One source of my anxiety is a fear of feeling pain, especially sadness. Sometimes, when I’m sad, I have a childlike worry that I’ll always be sad—that the clouds will never lift, and that I’ll end up depressed. Even though I’ve learned how to deal with my feelings reasonably well, an underlying terror remains that my darknesses will return in the form of all-consuming anxiety. That it’s there, lurking, waiting to pounce.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate feels like a voluntary wrapping of myself in that darkness. I don’t want to take myself to that place. I volunteered to write about this album as a challenge—to see if I could sit through it and come out with something worthwhile. To see if I could come out of it whole.

Every time I pressed play, I found myself wanting to hit mute. Focus on the lyrics, I’d tell myself. This was an opportunity to spend time with Leonard Cohen’s mastery of language. If I could just block that strumming, that dry voice, I’d think, I would be able to learn from Cohen’s extraordinary use of imagery, like these lines from “Avalanche”: When I am on a pedestal / you did not raise me there / Your laws do not compel me / to kneel grotesque and bare / I myself am the pedestal / for this ugly hump at which you stare. Or like this fragment from “Sing Another Song, Boys”: as all the sails burn down like paper /…they’ll never, they’ll never ever reach the moon / at least not the one we’re after / it’s floating broken on the open sea.

I worried that the album’s mood would seep into my bloodstream. If I could just do a close reading of the lyrics, I thought, I’d come out unscathed. Reading, you can put the pages away. When a song gets stuck in your head, there’s not much you can do to get it out.

But this album does not exist for our enjoyment. It intentionally forces listeners into a place of pain. Cohen’s voice assures us from the very first track that Your pain is no credential here / it’s just the shadow of my wound. This album doesn’t exist to make us feel good. Unlike so much popular music, it wants to challenge us. It drags us, kicking and screaming, into an abyss, from the first chords of “Avalanche” to “Joan of Arc”’s fiery conclusion:

It was deep into his fiery heart / he took the dust of Joan of Arc / and then she clearly understood / if he was fire, then she must be wood / I saw her wince, I saw her cry / I saw the glory in her eye / Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

Listening, I worried I would not be able to escape. I worried that publishing this essay on my birthday would somehow curse the year ahead. I worried, like I used to the times I really, truly, let myself feel pain, that it would never let me loose.

I didn’t want to listen to the album because it always brings me back to a fraught year of my life. When I was 22 and living alone in a studio in Washington Heights, I feared that anxiety would swallow me whole. That winter, several things hit at once. I could have handled most of those challenges just fine if they’d come at me singularly, but they collected, one upon the other, like an avalanche. The day after Christmas, I developed pneumonia. My then-boyfriend wouldn’t take me to the doctor, so I sweated out a 103-degree fever for three days before finally hauling myself downtown in a cab.

Pneumonia left me weak for over a month. Usually active, I was too easily winded to walk up the escalators at my subway stop anymore, and had to stand to the side to let people pass. Work, plus the commute, was enough to wipe me out for the day. Weekends, I needed to sleep and sleep. I became paranoid about health, fearing that every time I touched the subway railing I would catch another disease that would knock me back off my feet.

Then, just as I was beginning to really get over the pneumonia, I was rejected for a major grant that would have changed my life. Then, my boss suddenly resigned, throwing my workplace into months of chaos. In the midst of all this, the then-boyfriend cheated on me. I started having frequent panic attacks for the first time in years.

Luckily, I was seeing a therapist at the time. Having a place to go talk things out, it allowed the buildup to slow. And, at times, working with her helped me get the anxiety out. For me, anxiety is often a symptom of other emotions lying in wait. That year, it was a mix: fear of losing my job, anger at the boyfriend, disappointment about the grant, fear of getting sick again, and an overall resurgence of anxiety itself.

The only way to let a feeling out, I’ve learned, is by expressing it. In art, in music, in exercise, or simply by talking. Except, not so simply. Therapy isn’t just talking; it’s forcing yourself to identify and confront feelings you may not want to look in the eye. There were times when I’d end up in a ball on my therapist’s couch, shaking and howling wordlessly. During those moments, I wondered if the pain was going to kill me right there.

But it didn’t. Eventually, I sat back up and made my way home. If there was a fog around my head that evening, it was a little lighter the next day, or the next. Even if a new worry settled, I could remember getting through to the other side of something like it. Tunnels, yes, but also—and most importantly—light.

Or, to follow Cohen’s metaphor in the album’s concluding track, “Joan of Arc,” fire and wood. Except, I learned, I could choose not to be wood. I didn’t have to follow Cohen’s logic of if he was fire, oh then she must be wood. Every time I found myself in a dark place, love would call my name.

I think that’s what’s at the heart of Songs of Love and Hate: love calling our names. “Love Calls You By Your Name” is the fifth of eight songs on the album, and it marks something of a tonal shift. Though melodically it’s not the most upbeat—that’s probably the deceptively peppy “Sing Another Song, Boys”—the song has some hope embedded deep within it. If we look between things, we’ll find love. As Cohen himself once said, the song “searches out the middle place between the beginning and the end of things,” and it approaches a meeting point between despair and hope.

In therapy, I sought that center. Sometimes, I didn’t get there. But other times, I reached that meeting point, or even passed it by, finding hope. It started to happen consecutively. And, as I processed my feelings, the worry and the fear all subsided. I learned how to deal with anxiety: by sitting with the feelings until they faded of their own accord, by learning to calm myself, by reminding myself that the feelings wouldn’t last forever. I recovered from the pneumonia, and, slowly, anxiety’s hold lessened. I began to have panic attacks only once a week, then once a month, then back to the normal few times a year.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate is one of the most visceral musical experiences there is. It throws you into the physicality of panic and despair, then takes you on a journey through the depths until it—and you—can find a way out. At first, I worried that Cohen’s album would return me to the way I felt at 22. That its melancholy would be able to seek me out. But, every time “Joan of Arc” ended, I went back to my life. The darkness subsided, as it always does.

Songs of Love and Hate is about despair. The combination of Cohen’s lyrics, his baritone, the slow melancholy strumming, and the unnerving background voices of children and women, sends us to dark places. But the album also finds hope in its center, as we, too, must seek the hope embedded in our own cores.

By the next winter, I was edging towards the other side of that anxiety. Though I made it out of that phase stronger, I sometimes still worry when the next long wave will hit, when I’ll next have months in which I’m constantly on the verge of a panic attack. But I try not to let myself indulge those worries. It will come, and I will deal with it when it does, stronger now because I’ve sat through it before.

I worry now that I don’t have anything new to say about facing our own personal darknesses. Cohen says it best: Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright? Yes, sometimes it must. But I think what I have learned—what Songs of Love and Hate reminded me—does bear repeating. Here, I paraphrase one of my college professors: Sit through the mess, and you will figure out how to untangle it. Sit through the darkness, and you will find a way to make a flame that will brighten, not consume.

—Marissa Mazek

#296: The Smiths, "Meat is Murder" (1985)

Bestiary

Bes·ti·ar·y

noun

A a descriptive or anecdotal treatise on a mythological or real animal.
 

Gen-X

noun

The generational cohort following the Baby Boomers.
 

A bestiary for a Gen-X boy

Get him to quote the Smiths. Quote them back to him with ellipses, a double bed and a stalwart lover for sure….Make him believe that sex is all you think about but never what you ask for, let his need hover in the spaces between.

Wear Doc Martens, own stilettos, paint your lips. Ask him about the books he's reading, the songs on his mixtape. Correct yourself, playlist, and laugh like music. Be the wild-art girl he wanted in college, not the dull-sincere woman he is married to now. You are wanton but chaste, your longing written in lipstick across your breasts.

His kiss is haunted by cigarettes. Meat is Murder but you'd still eat his dick just so long as the hotel room is in his name. But it may never come to such a headmaster ritual. He will love you on Sundays down the page, cut you on Monday in letters scrawled across.

Love is a fork in the road. He will either say three words too often or never, become an anchor or an island. The joke has ceased to be humorous, but you will always laugh. His winter heart craves the applause, the static and spotlights of a happier time. Your affection will be an encore in the theater of his life and in return, he will shower you with praise. You will be brilliant and witty, charming in an age that trades in quick vulgarity.

Expect no promise. This love is going nowhere fast. But trust that he is lying in his tent in the middle of the night with his eyes on the ceiling, imagining brass and leather, red wine and white sheets. He tastes your mouth, conjured from the digital space, from paperbacks printed on cheap ink.

But there is a box in his closet, band shirts and flannel, a pair of jeans soft as tissue that he lied about throwing away. Here is where he stores his heart on cassettes that cannot be replayed, a chess game never finished. Here is where he keeps you, safe from the world.

So you will meet in coffee shops and quiet bars, travel to cities hours away for a moment of badinage with a man who cannot ever be yours. But you will never truly be his either, this love is a black box masquerade, ice in a tumbler. You will say goodbye on a cracked sidewalk, his breath white between you. Well, I wonder….

—Libby Cudmore

#297: The Mothers of Invention, "We're Only In It for the Money" (1968)

Frank Zappa grew up saying he wanted to be a scientist like his father, but admitted his dad feared buying him a chemistry set. Instead, he bought him a drum set. At a ripe twelve years old, Zappa looked at his father and said, “Pop, I’m going to make a million dollars.”

Which is a funny history to learn when approaching We’re Only In It for the Money: the album takes a methodological approach to music. At surface level, it’s a funny, scientific satire. You’re laughing, but it’s the kind of laugh where you’re both cynical and critical of the outcome that it might actually be serious.

Songs vary from a minute to six, sprinkling some snare drums and loud guitars with vocal delivery ranging from phone conversations, high pitched melodies, and pure shouts. The lyrical framework exaggerates the commercial success of the counterculture and openly mocks the hippiedom movement and hippie persona blooming in the 1960s. In a broader ideological fashion, rather than giving in, Zappa and the Mothers of Invention decide to play the part and produce this scathing psychedelic rock record that bullshits hippies on their activism (or lack thereof).

It’s difficult to decipher the meaning behind the maniacal minute-long interludes. When listening to something like “Harry, You’re a Beast,” you can feel the narrator’s contempt towards listeners: “You paint your head / your mind is dead / you don’t even know what I said.” The group is frank about how the influx of weed, cash, and running away from home is somehow more appealing than any awareness of injustice and violence. Even “Who Needs the Peace Corps?,” the second track on the album, parodies the passiveness of hippies with “First I’ll buy some beads / and then perhaps a leather band / to go around my head...I will love everyone / I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street.”

Zappa further harps on the colorblind hippie in “Concentration Moon,” an allegory on the Japanese internment camps created by the American government during World War II: “Hair growing out / every hole in me / AMERICAN WAY / threatened by US / drag a few creeps / away in a bus / AMERICAN WAY.” To put it lightly, so many people are ignorant to the prominent disparities that have historically hurt people of color and minorities, but I can’t help but experience some increased self-consciousness when realizing how Zappa’s comments mirror some activist activity in 2016.

In today’s widespread activism, we call things out and hashtag our causes, sometimes leading to more clicks than actual commitment. I myself am guilty of this. More often than not, there is a powerful focus on human impact and influence, but what is more common is the ability to capitalize on this “wokeness.” We click and share when convenient, when another letter or video revealing a deep injustice goes viral. Brands decide to speak out when it favors their bottom line: feminism is now marketable, #BlackLivesMatter can still be declared by companies that have yet to hire and invest in people of color, and somehow hiring a straight actor to play a trans character speaks to Hollywood’s progress.

In the 1960s, psychedelic rock and the counterculture could thrive in some ways because it boiled down to the simplicity of “love everyone.” When speaking to a friend about We’re Only In It for the Money, he quipped that something like “#AllLivesMatter” would have worked in the ‘60s because nobody would dig deeper into the nuances and differentiation; there was a deep desire to escape the chaos of war and violence. But that cannot work, not in 2016: you have to underline this complex, otherwise unjust history and confront discomfort to inch towards reconciliation and closure.

Frank Zappa himself made history by producing an album that mocked the Beatles because he thought they too were doing this for the money. Maybe they were, but wasn’t he, too? That’s the ongoing joke in We’re Only In It for the Money. It’s for the millions of dollars, but does it have to be?

— Upma Kapoor

#298: Kanye West, "The College Dropout" (2004)

She is so profound, Marcia is. She’s always thinking about things bigger than everything else. Bigger and bigger; unsatisfied with small anything. She’s always wanted to explore, walking through woods at age six, reading about space at age eleven, looking through antique shops at eighteen, always wondering the stories behind everything around her. What walked in these woods before she did? Are there aliens? There has to be, right? Who wore that bracelet? How’d it end up there?

She reads books on philosophy; she reads articles on Voltaire. She swapped shopping at the mall for thrift stores so she could “avoid high prices,” she said, but really it was because she’s heard of too many stores using child labor. She feels too guilty wearing something with the label “Made in China” written but “By a Nine-Year-Old” left unsaid.

She is thoughtful, Marcia is. She buys gifts for her friends for no reason other than she thinks they’d like it. They aren’t huge or flashy—a giraffe silly band, a bracelet that says my name—but she gets so excited and gives you a cheek-to-cheek grin as she drops the present into your hand.

I have my own spot in her house: her slippery black couch in the basement, across from her spot.

And then there is Harriett. Harriett Kohler, the quietest of our trio. She cries a lot, her emotions overflowing out of her at the slightest of things: a butterfly, a Sinatra song, a well-timed joke. But she is still, somehow, more practical than the rest of us. She does the right thing; she tries to feel the right emotions. She doesn’t know how to reply to us a lot, but she is the most clever person I’ve ever met, and that’s why I don’t know how to reply to her a lot. She is patient and quiet and calm; she is a gentle person.

Harriett watches a lot of movies, anything she can get her hands on, and she sends us more memes than we know what to do with. She and I read fan-fiction together and laugh at the same parts. She is just as thoughtful as Marcia, and possibly the most gracious out of us three, laughing at her own faults while making Marcia and I feel good about our own.

Harriett is more spiritual than the rest of us. She asks God a lot of questions—small questions, big questions. Why did you have to make razor bumps exist, God? How are ants born, God? What is the counter to greed, God? She is deeper than anything else I’ve known, her quietude burying her depth.

Marcia and Harriett knew each other before meeting me. They’ve always been a bit closer, understanding each other’s good moods and bad moods, each other’s attention spans. I met them in seventh grade amongst a myriad of other girls from some elementary school I’d never heard of before, hidden through the woods across the big street I was too young to cross. But when I met the two of them we deemed each other a trio of best friends; I was to fit in with them and understand them as they understood each other, for better, for worse, until death do us part. We were a trio, never to be separated.

We started eighth grade; we started ninth grade. I let boys get in the way of us, my jealousy targeting Marcia in eighth grade and Harriett in ninth, stagnating my friendship with both of them. And then it was eleventh grade and we all had different classes and different social spheres and our trio hadn’t been a trio since our first year together, and we missed it. Harriett and Marcia were still friends, Marcia and I were still friends, Harriett and I were still friends, but individually it didn’t feel as right or as tight. Marcia started a group chat, and twelfth grade, we decided, was to be the year of the trio.

We began to re-understand each other as a unit of three. Together we figured out how our humors intertwined—that Marcia’s eccentricities made Harriett laugh so hard she snorted, that just because my humility and humor were closely tied together did not mean I actually hated myself. Together we figured out that Marcia felt trapped in relationships because she wanted to travel more than she wanted to love. Together we figured out that the best way to get Harriett to open up was to be more specific, to ask how she’s doing physically and emotionally and any other way we could think of in order to avoid the “I’m good”s and “I’m fine”s. Together we held hands and cried over boys who didn’t care about us; together we held hands and laughed about how stupid we were in middle school, about how stupid we still are and will probably always be.

When we were eighteen, our college choices moved Marcia a state north and me three hours south from Harriett. College was weird for us. It was the opposite of high school; in college Harriett was always busy with friends, people actually knew about me before I met them, and Marcia stayed in her room every day and every night. And instead of us all automatically worrying about each other, Harriett and I worried about Marcia.

She went to the cat cafe sometimes, Marcia did. She’d sit there with the tabbies and the siamese and talk to them like they were Harriett and me, and she’d post pictures with the cats while Harriett and I posted ones of us on roofs with our friends, ones of us watching Full House reruns with our friends. And slowly Marcia became smaller. She receded into herself and became nervous talking to others, almost passing out talking just to her professors. She started wearing Crocs everyday, light blue Gonzo stickers splayed out haphazardly on them. She stopped playing her ukulele; she started to rip pieces of paper up and leave them in her bed. Harriett and I had to remind her to shower. Harriett and I had to remind her to go outside every once in awhile. And Marcia started calling us crying or calling us afraid of being alone or calling us to talk about the futility of humans, desperate not to be alone anymore, not to feel like a waste of space. But we were a state south and Marcia’s roommate stopped talking to her and Marcia went home.

And when Harriett and I came home for the summer we all but lived at Marcia’s house. We got fro-yo and we binge-watched all of the X-Men movies and we learned Outkast verses and Kanye verses and Eminem verses, and we didn’t let Marcia go. The summer was one big hug, cozy and close. Marcia started giving cheek-kisses goodbye and bear-hugs hello. She started loving again, not just loving Harriett and me but loving the trees around her and loving the lightning bugs that brought Christmas lights in July and loving the roughness of paper in the old notebooks we found in thrift stores.

And when Harriett, Marcia, and I parted ways a few days ago, Marcia didn’t kiss us goodbye.

And now I’m sitting in bed still reeling both physically and mentally from tonight, the first night of my second year, the first night of drinking too much and shrugging away the stupidity of it all, the first night of the year that I got lost from my college trio, the first night I’ve kissed somebody of whom the only thing I can remember is a light blue Polo, the first night I’ve realized how much I love the calmness of my new apartment. And now I’m realizing that Marcia is sitting alone in her room again. She’s sitting next to her new roommate, using small talk as the only alley to conversation. She’s mentioning something about minions and her roommate is nodding slowly, as if she understands, and a silence comes over them. And Marcia is sitting alone in her room again, her roommate sitting next to her.

And Harriett and I will spend the year loving Marcia, hoping she doesn’t have to come home to remember what happiness feels like, and Marcia will spend another year wondering if she should just drop out.

—Nicole Efford

#299: Weezer, "Weezer" (1994)

There was a boy on the other end of the line, which meant my best friend and I each had one ear to the phone. Our cheeks grazed as Ellie spoke:

“We’re rocking out to ‘Say It Ain’t So.’” A beat. “In just our bras.”

It was true, we were. Or we had been before getting on the phone. We head-banged, we wailed, pulling up our bra-straps when they fell to the thrash of air-guitar chords. On the line was my crush, not Ellie’s, but she did all the talking. At age 13, I could only flirt by proxy. And what she just told him, that we were rocking out, wearing only our bras, to a Weezer song, was a game changer. I don’t remember how the suitor in question responded, but his reaction was likely not something that could be gleaned over the phone. Up until this point, it never occurred to me that I had any control over my desirability. I stood waiting for a lightning bolt when all this time, love had nothing to do with destiny, and everything to do with marketing.

Released in 1994, Weezer’s self-titled debut bred a generation of self-deprecating Nice Guys who pledged allegiance to Surf Wax America, guys who are likely still miffed that the Blue Album ranked on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time and not Pinkerton. It was those guys’ kid brothers who I had set my sights on, endeavoring to impress them with my music taste in post-bedtime instant message conversations. “You can’t be a Weezer fan without being a Pixies fan,” one of them typed to me once, arguing, “Weezer songs are just recalculated Nirvana songs, which are just recalculated Pixies songs.” The moment when a boy becomes a mansplainer.

My favorite book-and-movie in high school was Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the white-male music snob’s manifesto. I fell for Rob Gordon in the way that most teenagers fall for Holden Caulfield: that is, I didn’t yet realize that he is the phoniest phony of all. But despite its insufferable narrator, a lot of the one-liners still ring in my ear a decade later, especially: “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

The big takeaway from High Fidelity is that true love depends on what you’re like as opposed to what you likethat liking the same books and movies and films isn’t enough to withstand a meaningful relationship. Listing your favorite bands in an online dating profile can be just as objectifying as showing cleavage. But what you're like is usually not the same as who you are, certainly not when you're 13. It's who you seem to be to someone else. You have much more control over what you’re like than over who you are. I’ve used the Blue Album as a litmus test, in hopes that once I found that someone whose heart pounded to Weezer at the same rate mine did, we would suddenly be transported to that elusive world where the boys look just like Buddy Holly and the girls keep their make-up on the shelf: A strange and distant land / Where they speak no word of truth / But we don't understand anyway. 15 years later, I’ve dated my share of Weezer fans, and I still haven’t made it there.

Even with Ellie’s lessons in prepubescent seduction, I never went out with the boy on the phone.  Turns out his mom had been listening to the call and and banned him from seeing us without the supervision of a parent or youth pastor. Unrequited love stings less when chaperoned.

I know that taste is nurtured, but I wonder about the biological component, how some songs end up under your skin while others just float next to your ears. I am only truly “over” someone, I’ve realized, when I can listen to all the songs that scored our relationship without any immediate physical reactionmy brows stay soft, jaw relaxed, stomach still. When I can consider that song as first a cultural relic and then a personal one. I’ve started watching the memories instead of feeling them, but the picture is clear as ever: my best friend and I, rocking out, shirts piled on the floor, intensely emoting to a song about alcoholism before I’d ever sipped my first beer. When the objects of our desires stayed safe in the garage where they belonged, answering when we called.

—Susannah Clark

#300: Black Sabbath, "Master of Reality" (1971)

Growing up, one of the most important places for my social development was the Aladdin's Castle Arcade in Rocky River, Ohio. Aside from me simply loving video games, this was one of the first places where I was surrounded by people who did not find me profoundly strange.

There were “adults” who worked there who liked the same things I did. I remember these people being in their mid-forties but it is far more likely they were college-age. I felt cool for maybe the first time in my life the day I walked in and one of them remembered who I was.

Those years when I was 8, 9, 10, 11 felt almost exclusively defined by athletics. If you were good, you were OK everywhere else. If you were bad (as I was) you took what you could get. That dynamic would repeat each year of my life until college.

Permit me an aside to establish my ranking on this merit-based athletics social economy. You know those scenes in movies or TV shows where the big game is on the line and the scrub on the team strikes out to end it? I was that scrub.

So you can imagine how I felt the first time I beat one of the local heroes in Mortal Kombat or set a top-ten score in Ridge Racer. It was, in almost every sense, a new experience. Not that new experiences are in terribly short supply when you’re 11 but when you’re a nervous, uncoordinated, emotional child the good ones can be few and far between.

But it wasn’t just geek camaraderie and games that made Aladdin’s Castle an important place. It was also the space itself. Westgate Mall was a 10-minute walk from my house. Aladdin's Castle was located on the far side of the mall, far away from the department store anchors or the movie theater that would one day become a massive atrium food court (see, the trick is to hit up the Sbarro 10 minutes before the mall closes and they’ll sell you slices for a dollar).

It was quiet over there. Once you entered the mall the arcade was the first or second spot on your left. Across the way was a Radio Shack. A Radio Shack across from an arcade just had to be by design. Just a few steps up was an ice cream shop, a hot pretzel place (Hot Sam’s?) and a store where you could get all kinds of popcorn. These types of popcorn places are still popular. There success baffles me. But back then the popcorn place sold Icees so they were getting my money. If you continued north the mall opened up; Dillard’s to the left, Waldenbooks to the right.

So, Aladdin's Castle was isolated save for a Radio Shack, a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one. And the only things close by were junk food. As a mall-going slacker just finding his way this small, lonely appendage in a big pool of commerce was ideal. You could circle around the mall past all the people and essentially take the back way in, getting to the arcade without having to actually see anyone. As I got older and bullying got more serious this became even more important.

So games, what did they have? This is an incomplete and possibly inaccurate list untethered from chronology; Street Fighter 2/Turbo etc., Mortal Kombat/2/3 etc., Killer Instinct/2, After Burner, Numan Athletics, Revolution X, Area 51, Time Crisis 2/3, Tekken 2, Lethal Enforcers, Operation Wolf, Heavy Barrel, Shinobi, Ninja Gaiden, Tron, The Simpsons Arcade Game, NBA Jam, TMNT Arcade, Ridge Racer. There were hundreds more but at a certain point the Space Harrier at Great Northern Mall (the mall with the Taco Bell, as I remember it, and current home of MALL GUY) blends in with the Altered Beast at Westwood Movie Theater which overlaps with Battletoads at Swings-N-Things.

In between games there was the manager who told me what a great movie star Rowdy Roddy Piper was and how I needed to see They Live. There was a kid, maybe four years older than me, I think he was from Arkansas or Texas, who was there every day and, in two years, started working there. He was effortlessly good at MK2. I remain impressed by his ability to play as Shang Tsung and, during the limited “Fatality” window, transform into Sub-Zero, hit his opponent with a deep freeze, transform back into Shang Tsung, transform into Scorpion and then perform the “take off mask to reveal skull and breathe fire on the guy turning him into a skeleton that crumbed to ash” fatality.

If you know what I’m talking about I’m sure you’re nodding your head. If this sounds vaguely familiar I assure you it was so impressive at the time. And if this is all gibberish I just want to thank you for making it this far along without bailing on my story.

I can’t pinpoint it but I would guess the death of the Great American Video Arcade started in the mid-nineties. I would consider myself a part of the last great arcade generation. PCs and consoles started producing reasonable arcade ports. Then the internet started eating away at mall shopping. These were two spiked walls slowly closing in from both sides. Arcades were a novelty by the early 2000s and dead-gone by the end of the ‘00s. Which was OK, the cat’s in the cradle as they say. And if you were an awkward pre-teen in 2001 you had chat rooms and MMORPGs so you got yours.

They’re back now. If you are over 21 you can go to a “barcade” which is a portmanteau I’ll never like. I’ve gone to a bunch of them. Often they do more to remind me how terrible arcades were. Most of the games are bad. Most of the games are engineered to take your money. I never noticed this stuff when I was 11 and it sort of sucks to understand the business of it now.

But, there are still moments of brilliance. From 2016 alone I can recall: a long run through Crystal Castles, the sound from a working beefed-up Asteroids cabinet, an NBA Jam session with three friends, a deep Gauntlet game and finally, after twenty-five years, beating The Simpsons Arcade Game.

But there was also that night when, despite the game being free, a friend and I could not beat Terminator 2. We went on so long that I was convinced it was impossible and that this was the most cynical video game ever made. If the game wasn’t free I’d estimate we pushed $20 in quarters. Imagine being a kid and paying that much, only to hit a wall. But there we were, endlessly mashing “Start” and firing shotgun shells into the T1000 as played by Robert Patrick and that sumbitch would NOT fall into that goddamn vat of molten iron no matter how much we tried.

So, it wasn’t a perfect environment. And at 11 I was mostly too naive to notice drugs though a ton of the friends I made at the arcade were there or headed that way. But you’re going to get that mix when you’re a misfit with the misfits. And yeah, sometimes the place where you get your escape from reality is going to be full of computers designed to take your money. And sometimes the headquarters of your nascent rebellion is a business in a mall owned by a casino company. Don’t get me wrong, I was lucky to have it.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski