#58: The Rolling Stones, "Beggars Banquet" (1968)

There he is. You can see him only from behind, in slight profile at times, but the blonde bobbed hair gives it away. Brian Jones, sitting in a tight circle alongside Keith Richards and Mick Jagger as the Rolling Stones rehearse “Sympathy for the Devil” in the recording studio, captured forever in Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One. He wears a simple white shirt and a pair of black trousers with fat red and white pinstripes, its matching coat draped casually on the back of his chair. Though you can’t see his face, not really, Jones seems lucid, engaged, tapping his foot in time and throwing blues embellishments into the song’s basic melody.

Later, in another scene, he’s there in a larger circle, recording the “whoo-whoo” backing vocals for “Sympathy,” along with the rest of the band and Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg. He wears a cream shirt, green bell-bottoms, and has a silk scarf tied around his neck. He reaches up, once, and puts his hand tentatively on Pallenberg’s back before withdrawing it after four short seconds. All this is proof. Proof that he did contribute at least in part to this one song, the first track on Beggars Banquet.

The record’s producer, Jimmy Miller, would tell Rolling Stone that Jones “was sort of in and out.…He’d show up occasionally when he was in the mood to play, and he could never really be relied on.” By this point, Jones’s erratic behavior was fairly common knowledge, a side effect of his psychological struggles and drug abuse. The band would patronize him, or to use Miller’s own language, “accommodate him,” when Jones was lucid enough to show up. “I would isolate him,” Miller said, “put him in a booth and not record him onto any track that we really needed.”

But there he is in Godard’s film, playing the guitar, recording backing vocals, both of which Jones would be credited for in the liner notes to “Sympathy.” He would also be credited with acoustic guitar and harmonica on “Parachute Woman” and slide guitar on “No Expectations” and “Jigsaw Puzzle,” but most of his contributions to Beggars Banquet would be ancillary: Mellotron on “Stray Cat Blues,” sitar and tambura on “Street Fighting Man,” harmonica on a few songs. He’s given no credit for the album’s final tracks, “Factory Girl” and “Salt of the Earth.” Quite a fall for the man who had founded the Rolling Stones a mere six years prior, the man who gave them their name and their earliest identity, who had created their trademark “guitar weaving” sound with Richards.

At the end of the year, the band would film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. There’s Jones, one of the most talented multi-instrumentalists of his day, a prodigy seemingly adept at playing any instrument put in his hands, reduced to shaking the maracas on “Sympathy for the Devil.” On “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Parachute Woman,” Jones wears his guitar more than plays it, the instrument looking every bit as ill-fitting and affected as his oversized purple coat and baggy yellow pants. And at the end of the show, during the mass sing-along to “Salt of the Earth,” he’s there, between Richards and Charlie Watts, swaying out of sync with the rest of the crowd, unable to remember the words to the song. This would be his last formal appearance with the band.

Seven months later he would be dead, found at the bottom of a swimming pool. “Death by misadventure” as the coroner’s report so poetically put it.

*

Contrast these images with the Brian Jones in this video of the Stones playing “Paint It, Black” just two years earlier in 1965. Here he is, sitting cross-legged on the stage, dressed all in white, smiling, looking directly into the camera, his entire body moving in time with the song as he plays the sitar. This Rolling Stones is still his band, his and Jagger’s, Keith Richards merely a backing figure who the camera never focuses on.

Read the comments on the video and you’ll see that for many fans, the Rolling Stones never stopped being Jones’s band, even almost fifty years after his death. “Brian is still the Original Stone!” one user says. “Brian was the inspiration and most talented member of the group,” another comments, “I miss him.” Another poses the question, “Why does it say ‘with Brian Jones’ u mean Brian Jones ‘with The Rolling Stones.’”

So many fans still hold up Brian Jones as this romantic ideal, Adonis, the original member of the “27 Club” of icons dead before their time. He was the tortured genius, the beautiful martyr, the hard partying rock god. Such idolatry is easy; it has created this romanticized myth of Brian Jones, a myth far sexier than the reality.

It’s this myth that leads fans to comment on a YouTube video, “All their ground breaking songs…were written when Brain Jones was alive. After Brian died and Mick Taylor joined the band, they were no better than a generic garage band.”

*

But like all myth, the myth of Brian Jones is a good story that reveals more about the teller than it does the subject. Because Brian Jones was not the Rolling Stones. He formed the band, gave them their name, gave them their sound, but what they achieved had far more to do with other contributors.

Their achievements had more to do with Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager who encouraged the Stones to write their own songs, to move away from the blues covers that Jones insisted on. It had more to do with Jagger and Richards, both their songwriting power and their pure embodiment of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. It had more to do with the band’s ability to sell itself, both its sound and image, while creating complicated business ventures that allowed them to circumvent British tax laws and become one of the biggest rock bands to ever exist.

None of this would have happened without Brian Jones, but most of it happened without Brian Jones.

In fact, the Rolling Stones’ generally agreed upon “Golden Age” of 1968-72, the years they released what many consider their greatest albums, were years in which Jones played little to no part. Beggars Banquet is the start of this Golden Age, and Jones’s contributions were hardly integral. Jones would supply congas to “Midnight Rambler” and autoharp on “You Got the Silver,” but otherwise he played no part in Let It Bleed. He would be kicked out of the band shortly after, and shortly after that he would die in the swimming pool of his farmhouse in East Sussex. Both Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street would be written, recorded, and released after his death. These four albums are largely the Rolling Stones’ greatest contributions to music, and Brian Jones had nothing—or almost nothing—to do with them.

*

Myths reveal more about the teller than they do the subject. So what do these myths tell us about Brian Jones? We have the myth told to us by those who were there—Jimmy Miller, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, countless others—of Brian Jones being completely absent by the time the Golden Age began in 1968 with Beggars Banquet. We have the myth of the idolizing fans of this Adonis, blonde, beautiful, smooth and sleek in a way that Jagger and Richards never quite were, the only true genius of a group who were reduced to “a generic garage band” after he left.

Yet we have these films shot in 1968, One Plus One and Rock and Roll Circus, that show neither myth to be true. Because there he is in Godard’s film, contributing to the recording of Beggars Banquet, giving at least something to the Rolling Stones’ greatest era even if his influence on the band was all but over. For his bandmates and producer, his frequent absences and erratic behavior, his utter surrender to his addictions, likely caused enough frustration that they wished he weren’t there, but there he was.

But the Brian Jones we see in Rock and Roll Circus is no god. He is a puppet, propped up and stumbling through the motions, shoved off to the side where he can be hidden as the camera zooms in on Mick or Keith. He strums his guitar and raises his hand like he remembers raising his hand to strum dramatically, to be the rock god he remembers himself to be, but his hand is limp and the movement without conviction. This Brian Jones is a tragic figure, certainly, but no Byronic hero. This Brian Jones is pitiful.

*

Go back even further. Go back to that video of “Paint It, Black” from 1965. Notice that, even then, Jones is removed from the band. He is on a separate riser on the left of your screen so that when the camera focuses on Jagger, the rest of the band is in the shot, but Brian Jones is off screen. He is physically above them and removed from them. Despite the YouTube commenters focusing on Jones almost solely, he is on screen for a mere 47 seconds out of the video’s 2:19 runtime. And yet he’s the only member of the band other than Jagger who gets a full close-up.

*

It is nearly impossible to tell the story of the Rolling Stones without Brian Jones. None of what they became would be possible without Brian Jones, but their greatest output was created without Brian Jones.

Prior to 1968, the Rolling Stones produced some fantastic songs and a few decent records, but nothing compared to Beggars Banquet, their first truly cohesive album that functioned as a singular musical statement. Beggars Banquet is their Rubber Soul, the beginning of the Rolling Stones as a band capable of recording an entire LP of brilliance. This was made possible, in part, by breaking with the tired psychedelia of 1960s and by returning to their roots in R&B and Americana.

But part of what made this possible was the loss of Brian Jones the man, even if they could never shake the myth.

—Joshua Cross

#76: Prince and the Revolution, "Purple Rain" (1984)

I’m currently staying at my parents’ house for the holidays, and last night, my sister, our childhood best friend, and I watched videotapes from our Catholic school’s Christmas pageants. As we watched in my parents’ basement, I realized we were surrounded by relics of the past, including family photo albums, DVD box sets of Friends, and my once-prized CD collection.

In every person of a certain age’s music history, there are two important milestones: the first CD you owned, and the first CD you owned with the notorious “Parental Advisory” label slapped on its cover. The existence of the aforementioned label is thanks in no small part to Purple Rain.

In 1984, then-Senator Al Gore’s then-wife Tipper bought a copy of Purple Rain for her daughter, Karenna. She later heard the lyrics to “Darling Nikki,” a song which discusses several adult themes.

I knew a girl named Nikki, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend,
I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine,
She said how'd you like to waste some time,
and I could not resist when I saw little Nikki grind.

Appalled by the lyrics, Tipper Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center with other prominent women in Washington, known as the “Washington Wives.” This group, along with several politicians, lobbied the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the 1980s to have a music rating system. This system was meant to echo the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)’s rating system that determined what films were appropriate for children to watch.

Out of that lobbying came the “Filthy Fifteen” in 1985: a list of 15 songs the group deemed to be the most inappropriate. It was made up of a who’s who of ‘80s musicians, including Madonna, Def Leppard, Cyndi Lauper, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and Mötley Crüe. Topping the list was, of course, Prince’s “Darling Nikki.”

The Parents Music Resource Center’s lasting legacy, though, is the “Parental Advisory” label that is now featured on albums deemed inappropriate for younger listeners. This label made its debut in 1990, when 2 Live Crew’s aptly-named Banned in the U.S.A. became the first album to have it printed on its cover.

Though the label was meant to prevent underage ears from hearing inappropriate content, it ended up having a similar effect to the MPAA’s rating system, and the youth of America began doing everything they could to get their hands (and ears) on the albums.

If you didn’t have cool parents, these albums were often obtained through a sneaky (and sometimes illegal) strategy. As an almost-11-year-old Catholic school girl with morals, I certainly wasn’t going to shoplift at Tower Records or Sam Goody, so I would have to find a more creative way to achieve that second music milestone.

On February 16, 1999, my family was eating dinner at the now-closed Sign of the Whale restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. A local radio station was hosting an event at the restaurant and happened to be giving away CDs. After my little sister got a copy of Vertical Horizon’s Everything You Want, the pickings were slim, and the radio DJ could see my disappointment as I shuffled through jewel cases of artists I didn’t recognize. She then pulled out of her bag a wrapped copy of Blink-182’s Enema of the State and asked me to check with my parents to see if it was okay for me to have this CD. I went back to my parents to ask, conveniently leaving out the fact that the CD had a “Parental Advisory” label on its case. They okayed it, and that night, a week away from turning 11, some new words entered my lexicon, for better or for worse. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t learn what all the lyrics alluded to until I was in high school. I had received the Sacrament of Confirmation in the Church of Rock and Roll.

The irony in Prince’s album inspiring a crusade for music censorship is that he ended up censoring his own music later on in his career. After becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in the early 2000s, he refused to swear in his music and even stopped performing songs such as “Darling Nikki,” “Little Red Corvette,” and “Erotic City,” the B-side to Purple Rain’s iconic opener “Let’s Go Crazy.” He later reversed some of these decisions and began to re-incorporate some of the songs back into his live sets.

I was fortunate enough to see Prince perform “Darling Nikki” at an after-party show a month before he died. My friend and I waited several hours with hundreds of people at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall to get into the cash-only show. At 2 AM, we were finally in the midst of the Purple One, standing about 15 feet away from his stage. At 5’2” (but at least four inches taller in his signature platform heels), he commanded the crowd and had us dancing up a storm.

I would experience a very different kind of storm two years later, on the last day of my Purple Rain pilgrimage to Minneapolis. Earlier that day, I had toured Paisley Park, which served as Prince’s home, offices, performance space, and recording studios. Later, I unfortunately didn’t get to purify myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka in the most traditional way. Instead, just as I was about to join my friends in the water at a public beach, a hailstorm came out of nowhere and I was attacked by Lake Minnetonka in a painful form of condensation. Sometimes it snows in April, and sometimes it hails bruise-inducing stones in May.

Earlier today, I decided to dig through my old CDs while finishing this piece. As I flipped through stacks of cases, hearing that familiar clack that you don’t often hear anymore, I found several of my “Parental Advisory”-labeled CDs. I thought about how many of them were tied to a specific point in my personal history, and how much more relatable some of the adult lyrics grew as I got older.

Much like how I probably got that copy of Enema of the State too early in life, my actual Confirmation, which solidified my role as an adult in the Catholic Church, took place when I was too young to decide whether I wanted to remain in that world. In a way, that’s how life works. We often experience fragments of it when we’re too young to understand, and then we slowly get through it by finding the rest of the puzzle pieces to form the picture.

—Emilie Begin

#59: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Chronicle" (1976)

Listening to music can be pretty narcissistic. Riding in my parents’ car down highway 25 as John Fogerty croons his way through “I Heard It through the Grapevine” and desperately pulling together some connection between myself and the song. Trying so hard to conform my life around the top 40 hits about lost love or cheating or screwing up a good thing when 16-year-old me had never been on a date, let alone been in any sort of relationship. Fighting to justify myself or find solace from being the predominant loser at my small, private, Christian high school. Attaching fragments of memory to fragments of songs, lines out of context, themes melding with tone, pinpricks of understanding.

“Susie Q”

I show up to the square dance fundraiser for our high school because I’m a volunteer, but I don’t dance. The old man in the blue and pink plaid shirt leading the whole thing has a decades-old machine that allows him to loop music and make calls and teach everyone how to dance in those tight patterns. I watch him work, turning dials and tapping his feet as he talks, distracting myself from the humid warmth of dozens of bodies whirling in circles. Dancing, even a geometric dance, feels intimate to 16-year-old me, skin touching even chastely, eyes aligning, turning together, so I abstain even after my math teacher tells me to “get out there.” The girl with the red curly hair dances with the same guy for the bulk of the night, laughing and smiling in ways that probably mean much less than I want to admit, and I don’t have the nerve to cut in. So: I sulk in corners and ask to help with concessions in order to hide behind the blue counter and give people Skittles. They don’t need any help, of course, and later they call me out as a good volunteer when all I really wanted was an excuse not to watch her do-si-do with my best friend.

“I Put a Spell on You”

I start playing guitar as a way to learn bass when I’m 14. Guitar is a proof of concept and so I grind my fingers into black calluses playing clunky patterns on old strings. I don’t really understand keys yet, and I can’t play chords. I throw my head against a musical wall until I break through and finally get a bass, learn to play scales and blues riffs, hit my first barre chord on the acoustic without any dead notes, sing while playing a 3 chord progression. I take the acoustic to school and play in the closet under the stairs during breaks because I want to impress everyone as a moody artist and I want to continue to practice. I learn “Stairway to Heaven” and basslines by Flea. Then I learn them again, learn them better. My friends learn to play guitar too and progress faster than me and outdo me in nearly every way. I keep playing regardless because I want to do something. I’m aching to do something even though I have no idea what that is.

“Proud Mary”

My friend who everyone says has dreamy eyes learns to play “Proud Mary” from a white guy with a lot of opinions at the lake house. It’s the day after we’ve spent the night there, and contrary to what classmates think, we mostly drank Mountain Dew and played guitar and video games. Dreamy eyes struggles to hit the rapid chord changes but gets to the long D major and rests there. This song is almost baffling for me. The chords move faster than some of the basslines I’ve written and actually make a melody, which feels antithetical to my narrow rules about what music should do. As dreamy eyes works on the song, I try to play the bassline on my acoustic, and the guy with opinions gives me a smug and annoyed look, like he knows I’m struggling with the “easy” part that he can nail without thinking. Dreamy eyes keeps trying until he gets a few of the chords right and then hands the guitar off to someone else while we all go outside. I try the song’s chords myself over and over but never get them right so I tuck the song away and give up on it for years.

“Bad Moon Rising”

Around the time that puberty and all its havoc comes around, the depression that runs in my family takes hold like a cold fever. At 14 and 15, I sit in my high school classroom floating in suicidal ideation, visions of ways I could die or hurt myself, and I build this stoic persona as a way to grab some of the control that I don’t have inside. One day, the girl in the lavender sweater creeps a mechanical pencil towards my pupil as a test of will. She doesn’t believe my stoneface and wants to show everyone I’m full of crap. I tell her I’m not going to flinch as she slides the pencil through the air, and I don’t. I don’t know if I don’t care about the potential pain or welcome it or if I just know that I can out-“chicken” her, but I don’t worry about her slipping and gouging out my eye even as the pencil lead touches my eyelashes. My best friend laughs and lavender sweater looks disappointed. My best friend calls me “insane” and writes a quote from me down in his notebook. Getting in the notebook becomes a benchmark of standing and antics in the high school, and despite myself, I rarely make it in.

“Lodi”

It’s no one’s fault your town is small, that your house hides back in a suburb of a dying downtown and a Mexican restaurant and two video rental shops, that a small Confederate soldier sits in the “town square,” that the Walmart doesn’t even sell groceries and the Bumpers goes out of business because this town can’t support a Bumpers and a Sonic, that the gas station (you know the one) sells two Mellow Yellows for the price of one, that the storage closet where your basketball team works out is barely bigger than your living room, that the new gym floor was laid over the existing floor and makes your baskets half an inch too short which means your team shoots worse in away games, that the school dress code prohibits facial hair and teachers say boys should make better grades than girls because you’re supposed to be leaders, that all of your classmates go to the same three churches except for you (a non-denominational Christian), the Methodist, and the Pentecostal family, that the poorest part of town is downwind of the paper factory and primarily African-American, that the one time you drove into that neighborhood an older man stared all of you down and two cars escorted you out of the neighborhood because you only came to voyeur, that dreamy eyes got out of a ticket for going 55 in a 30 because he was the son of a prominent realtor, that you feel so alone sometimes that it makes you angry in a way you don’t understand even years later, that you won’t stay in touch when you all move away even though you know the bitterness hurts only you. It’s nobody’s fault.

“Green River”

Creedence Clearwater Revival are from San Francisco, which makes their Southern vibe all that more odd. They embrace the sound of the South, the feel of the blues, and the rhythm of the River in a way I never could. As a transplant, I fought being part of the South. I resisted the accent, refused to say y’all, and to this day still feel surprised when someone says they can hear that I lived in Mississippi for over a decade. Like Fogerty, I can put on a mask of Southern idiom and behavior, but 15-year-old me wanted nothing to do with being Southern. A place rife with tradition built on destructive Confederate myth, I still don’t know what it means to be from Mississippi, even though Mississippi would claim me if I asked.

“Commotion”

I learn how to slap the tops of our high school desks with a ruler in a way that amplifies the sound and fills the classroom like aggressive white noise. Everyone hates it and dislikes me for doing it, but I don’t stop. Maybe it’s because I feel ignored. Maybe it’s that people stop listening to what I’m saying in the middle of me talking to them. Maybe I’m just being awful because I can. In either case, I hate slapping the desks for how it makes people look at me, but I do it anyway.

“Down on the Corner”

The bassline for “Down on the Corner” is iconic in a music store kind of way. It’s the sort of bassline you hear everyone play when they’re trying out basses or amps but aren’t sure what to play. We all want to impress, for someone to say, “That’s great, dude,” and mean it, for our efforts to add up to more than hours spent on a hobby we might end up letting go of eventually. This bassline is the first I figured out by ear, just playing along and picking it up. I’m a sight-player, meaning I play best by reading music or tablature, so this was a big moment. As I get the hang of the progression and realize just how simple it is, my dad walks by my room and pokes his head in and says that I’m “so awesome” because he knows that I’ve never played that before. I didn’t even know how much I wanted that moment until it happens and I keep chasing it for years to come, like a drug.

“Fortunate Son”

Wrangler Jeans once used “Fortunate Son” in an ad campaign for their jeans. I saw it on its first run before it was discontinued and at the time of writing this, I can’t find any version of it online to rewatch. I remember them only using the lyrics “Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Ooh, they’re red, white, and blue,” and then cutting the vocals after that while attractive people ran around in tight jeans in trucks and the outdoors. They, of course, omitted the following line, “And when the band plays, ‘Hail to the Chief’ / Ooh, they point the cannon at you.” Skewing a protest song into a patriotic anthem didn’t go over well with the general public or my dad. He grew up with the song. When he sees the commercial, he laughs for a while. Once I am in on the joke, I do too.

“Travelin’ Band”

Lavender sweater tells us all she’s not into dating right now, that she doesn’t believe it’s something she should be doing at the moment. We all take this in stride even though 8 out of 10 of the high school guys want to date her, myself included. She lives almost an hour and a half away from our school and I never understand why she goes to our school in the first place, but she does. Our small school is academically advanced in certain subjects, particularly English and Math, but there are lots of good public schools (considering the education budget of Mississippi) and a glut of private schools in the area. In Mississippi, Christian schools and private academies came to be, in many cases, because of desegregation. If you can make your school “academically rigorous” or require an application or charge high tuition, you can segregate without much effort since wealth in the area often follows racial demographic lines. The old ache of an old wound. Some Christian schools, like mine, arose as a response to the “secularizing influence” of public schools. In the spring, lavender sweater stops coming and goes to the public school nearer her house, but we all see her again at a Valentine’s Day costume party with her boyfriend. We all feel a quiet defeat.

“Who’ll Stop the Rain”

I don’t know how to grapple with high school. I’ve been trying to write about this period for years with almost no success because how do you encapsulate a period with so much change and flux? I discovered my depression and deepened my relationship with Jesus during the same period. I couldn’t talk about high school without swearing for a while, laughed wryly at people who wanted to have a reunion, and realized how horribly I treated everyone. High school seems to be universally panned as a bad social experience for anyone not blisteringly popular, but usually for them, too. Some days I’m not far beyond the kid who sat on the stairs playing guitar before basketball practice. Some days I feel worlds apart from that self-important jackass. Some days I watch him through a one-way mirror with mix of compassion and regret.

“Up Around the Bend”

Dreamy eyes’s new car is having engine trouble, so he needs to drive his car to a dealership two hours away. He jokes that the car will explode on the way and I say I want to come with. We both joke about dying in a fireball and no one else laughs.

“Lookin’ Out My Back Door”

Dreamy eyes has a cabin on the family farm. It sits on top of a hill in the middle of the country near our rural town so it feels incredibly isolated. There is no plumbing and the only toilet is a seat nailed to a couple of boards stretched between two trees over a steep incline. We go out there as a group to play music and videogames and a lot of the younger guys come along. The friend who makes movies and the friend who plays drums are currently into restricting the veins in each other’s necks until they pass out because it causes a weird sensation, a sort of high, and the younger guys all want in. Only dreamy eyes and I don’t do this. After being choked out, the guy who lived in Russia as a missionary collapses on the lone bed in the cabin only to lie stunned for a few minutes until suddenly jumping up and screaming “My head! My head!” while bounding in circles on the bed. We essentially ignore him. I enjoy being included but everything feels like it’s happening at a distance. I want everything to be safe, ordered, good, and so much of this feels far away from that. I also have a creeping suspicion that I’m unwanted, only here as collateral damage from inviting the younger guys. When dreamy eyes and the guy with the black hair throw coals from the fire through a slit in the window, I get locked out of the cabin with them for the night and have to sleep in a car. I’m only annoyed because I know I won’t sleep and I don’t, but being excluded from the cabin almost feels like a kindness.

“Long as I Can See the Light”

My faith blossoms towards the end of my sophomore year and my suicidal ideation mostly goes away because of that. When I grapple with ideation in years following, I don’t always know what to do with the experience. Even when I want to die to escape the pain and be free of this broken body and with Jesus, suicide still feels like the wrong choice. Some Christians believe suicide to be an unforgivable sin, an ultimate distrust in God. In high school, I believe this and this makes me afraid of it, but as I grow in my faith and away from my ideation, I see suicide as another death, an escape that is not outside the scope of Grace. The more I understand this, the less I want to kill myself, but the ideation is never that far away.

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

The girl with red curls gives my best friend hand massages in study hall. This is not a euphemism. For obvious reasons, nobody believes them when they say their relationship is platonic, that they are just friends. As a young white guy, culture teaches me that I own any women I find attractive, so I feel hurt by their affection but can’t explain why. Accepting that she’s not into me hurts in ways I don’t fully understand how to navigate, so I pine at my desk and hope for something that I should just let go of already.

“Have You Seen the Rain?”

Despite large sections of Scripture that address deep sorrow with compassion and understanding, depression is still chronically misunderstood within Christian circles. Being depressed in the church can be portrayed as having weak faith or hope in Christ and not as something like diabetes or heart disease, which you can exacerbate but can also exist independent of your choices. This misunderstanding sat inside me for years, making it hard to recognize the difference between my own decisions and what the disease was doing once the depression fell on me like a wave. So I blamed myself for my depression entirely, seeing every part of it as a choice I made or failed to make. As a Christian, believing that everything in my life is in my control is a tragic irony. However, the depression stays and it’ll take me over a decade before I forgive myself for having a mental illness and even longer before I finally get help.

“Hey Tonight”

On one Saturday in early fall of my junior year, I play the best basketball of my life. I score a few points, sure, but more than that, I am effective defensively. I nearly dunk, steal the ball, block shots, rebound prolifically, and take a charge facing the wrong direction. It’s called a foul on me but my coaches say they’ve never seen anything like it. We’re playing in a small tournament with two other schools, and we win both games. The tournament was originally supposed to be a standard four-team bracket, but when one team backs out, we play round-robin instead. Because we win both of our games, we’re crowned the champions. We go and get supper and play mini-golf, and then head back to the gym for the award presentation. When we arrive to accept our trophies, my head coach tells me to carry the championship trophy while my tall friend with glasses will receive the MVP award. I’m over the moon. However, when we finally get back from eating, they’ve already had the award ceremony before the consolation game to decide second and third place. Since we were all gone, one of the moms who drove us accepted it on our behalf. I hold the trophy briefly and then give it to my coach.

“Sweet Hitch-Hiker”

I got my driver’s license almost a year late. Because there was nowhere to go and my family didn’t have an extra vehicle I could exclusively drive, my mom had to force me to practice driving and eventually take the test out of necessity. Even then, I rarely drove places on my own. I was far more likely to bike around my small neighborhood and be chased by the neighbors’ dogs than cruise around town.

“Someday Never Comes”

Decades later you sit at your desk. You feel the first throes of the anti-depressant taking hold. You pray and cry because you didn’t remember. Is this what it felt like? Oh, God, you didn’t remember. Your past melds together and you finally find yourself in deep silence and stillness the likes of which you’d given up dreaming about. Yet even as a lifetime of this strangeness looms ahead of you, you feel profound peace knowing your ever-fracturing brain was never outside the scope of Grace, even if that Grace comes primarily through counseling and pills. Your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life, especially through the valley of the shadow of death.

—Josiah Meints

#71: Paul Simon, "Graceland" (1986)

“Son Op” fades quickly but gracefully in, announcing itself with two measures of slowly building layers of accordion, then thrusting a righteously bulbous rhythm section onto you without asking if you’re ready to begin. The fact that it grows from there is miraculous, never fading, unconcerned with a bridge, thinking only of your feet and whether they are moving, your heart and whether it is racing.

“Son Op” is not the best of South Africa’s long-living, long-suffering, long-joyful Boyoyo Boys, but it’s perhaps the most bluntly indicative of their early magic. This would be the same magic that Paul Simon, at a crossroads in his personal and professional life, fell under the spell of when a friend sent him a compilation tape of contemporary South African tunes. Simon has been both open about the story of how his fascination with the music that would form the bones of his culturally dominating Graceland began, and dodgy about the specific artists he stepped over to get there. You could replace his name and the title of his album in that previous sentence with the name and masterwork of dozens of (some might say all) white American musicians, and the song would sound the same. When Paul Simon heard the Boyoyo Boys for the first time, he heard inspiration and hungered to join the tradition. Where you place your opinion of this on the spectrum between honorable and slimy surely dictates your feelings about Graceland.

And look back, to only half a decade before. Before Graceland, there was 1980’s Remain in Light, David Byrne’s masterpiece with Talking Heads that felt both blindingly new and suddenly like the natural apex of the songwriter’s rocketing career up to that point. It, too, strips rhythms from the traditions of west and south African communities to tell its stories of midlife ennui. Brian Eno’s production situates the songs on Remain in Light in the electro-experimental era from which it spawned (and would go on to spawn even more radically), but the influences are right there. And this is why Angélique Kidjo’s 2018 full-album cover of Remain in Light still feels so essential as the year comes to a close.

Kidjo is not a household name in the United States, but this says far more about the United States than it does about her. An immediate and massive star since the release of her debut record Pretty in 1981, Kidjo was the first woman to be named one of Forbes’s “40 Most Powerful Celebrities in Africa,” was listed on The Guardian’s “top 100 most inspiring women in the world,” holds honorary degrees from Yale and Berklee College of Music, and is currently serving as the Harvard Jazz Master of Residence. She has three Grammys and thirteen albums to her name. And this is all extremely surface-level research; Angélique Kidjo (born Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo) is only one of a thousand bright examples of the Great American Blindspot.

Kidjo was born and raised in the west African coastal nation of Benin, sandwiched slimly between Togo and Nigeria, and has said about her version of Remain in Light: “As [this record] was influenced by the music of my continent, I want to pay back the homage and create my own African take on Talking Heads’ songs.” This is very diplomatic, indicative only of the thrilling joy that often infects her music—in the same promotional statement, she also said “We all know that rock music came from the blues and thus from Africa. Now is the time to bring rock back to Africa, connect our minds, and bring all our sounds to a new level of sharing and understanding.” “Now is the time” is such an interesting expression here, because it isn’t clear why now, and why not always or anytime. I guess now is the time because now has always been the time, whenever now has been. Kidjo’s interpretation of Remain of Light is bombastic around every corner, a reinterpretation that feels simultaneously full of genuine brightness and a biting, necessary irony. “Once in a Lifetime,” stuck right in the middle as it was on the Talking Heads’ original listing, is the most vivacious standout—Kidjo relishes in Byrne’s lyrics, turning his half-shout into a full one, his murmured chorus into a ripping statement of intent. It’s a six minute tour of Beninese rhythms, controlled where it needs to be and let loose just about everywhere else; look, the artist is saying, let me show you what you missed. Take a look at these hands. Take them. Come.

Like Remain in Light, Graceland is tough to grapple with because it’s both sides that make it magic—Paul Simon’s ever-young voice, almost pastel in its cunning calmness, and the unrelenting Soweto sound, so exciting to the ear, so absolutely bursting with vibrant urgency. It’s Simon’s lyrics about New York romance and divorce in the heartland of America and hitting middle age gracelessly and terrified, all of it layered thrillingly over music unintended for its jacketing. It’s tough because the record is so good—the songs simply bulletproof, track by track by track—but by many accounts, its production is an ugly quagmire of sonic theft, misattribution, and painfully familiar white (American, male) privilege. Twenty-five years after its initial release, the deluxe remaster worked to give credit more appropriately, with songs sporting new features by Ladysmith and Los Lobos, of course, but also the Boyoyo Boys, Good Rockin’ Doopsie, the Twisters, the Gaza Sisters, and General M.D. Shirinda. The thing is that Graceland will never be perfect—there’s too much shady damage done, too much bitterness through the years, too many question marks that don’t pass muster—but the roots of rhythm remain, and they are glorious, as close to perfection as one could achieve through 11 songs and the unfortunate production techniques of the upside-down 1980s.

When you watch footage of Paul Simon winning the Grammy for Album of the Year for Graceland, you’re watching a relic from a stranger time. Whoopi Goldberg and Don Johnson present the award in matching suits and when she announces his name from the envelope, Whoopi jumps up and down in unbridled excitement. The audience delivers Paul a standing ovation. The stage decoration feels ripped from Keith Haring’s stepbrother’s rough draft notebook. In his acceptance speech, Paul is gracious and seems more humbled than you might expect, almost embarrassed even, and at the speech’s end he does name some of the South African musicians who worked on the record. But it isn’t only these musicians who we must remember to remember, is it? It’s the roots, the snatched rhythms, of colonization.

I don’t know that there is a correct way to enjoy Graceland in 2019, but I enjoy it immensely, and I am grateful for its songwriting and for the craft of its musicians. I am grateful for the musical rabbit holes it sends me down. I am grateful to begin with this record, to honor it for the beauty it holds, and to pull on its loose threads until the whole thing unravels.

—Brad Efford

#61: Sly & the Family Stone, "Greatest Hits" (1970)

Until iTunes, I never cared about year end lists. But once it became apparent that each year I could comb through those lists, find terrific stuff I missed, and then buy those songs for a buck a piece, year end lists became one of my favorite things. 2004 to 2010 were the salad days. Year after year I would make a “missed” list and burn it to CD or just let the playlist repeat over and over on my iPod.

Somewhere in 2011, Spotify launched in the United States. It was a big deal. Here was a library the size of iTunes that you subscribed to and it was all yours. I went a bit mad at first. And for a long time, several years, I was posting monthly playlists to my Tumblr. They featured blurbs like this from May 2014; “Parquet Courts-Sunbathing Animal-Minor Threat for total lazy slackers.”

For awhile I was not only creating monthly playlists but also making a year end playlist AND collaborating with friend/writer Neal Christyson on our favorite albums. Here’s is Neal working his way up to praising Chance the Rapper’s 2013 album Acid Rap: “2013 was a year full of monster rap releases. Kanye West was projecting his face on the side of buildings. Jay-Z released an album which, for a period of time, was exclusively available on Samsung cellphones. Despite all of my protests, Drake continued to be Drake...” Dearest Neal, it is 2018 and Drake has maintained this trajectory.

Two years ago, I stopped working on the monthly lists. And last year, the year end wrap ups stopped. And now, in 2018, I am still excited by year end lists but also, like, they are starting to freak me out. I’ve always known I won’t have time to listen to every song, watch every movie, play every video game, read every book...but there was always a feeling that, well, access would help thin the field. It wouldn’t matter that I wanted to see Hard to be a God in 2013 because, well, when would I have the chance?

In 2018 I have the chance nearly every hour of every day. Which, OK, I definitely said I always wanted that. But it also kind of sucks. The volume of choice absolutely fries my brains. In 2018, my most listened to artist was R.E.M., a band that has not been active in 8 years. That was by design. I retreated to old favorites with finite catalogues and established quality.

Which brings me to Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits. What a blessing a greatest hits album is in 2018. And this one especially so. Because, well, I’m not crazy about this band. I like them. I respect them. If you told me they were your favorite that would make sense to me. But, I can listen to anything I want at any point of any day and I’m just not going to finally dig into There’s Riot Goin’ On.

But Greatest Hits? Sure! Twelve songs, nearly all of them absolutely perfect. Why not? I’m not super invested in the artist, but I like the artist. A compilation is perfect. I’ll take it a step further and say my enjoyment of a greatest hits album is, at least partly, inversely related to how much I enjoy that artist. My friend Jeff says one of the best greatest hits album of all time is The Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits 74-78. His reasoning is something along the lines of SMB not really being essential listening in the broader context of rock but his good songs are also too good to disregard entirely.

I think that pattern holds true for many of the “iconic” greatest hits albums. ABBA Gold, The Eagles 71-76, Journey’s Greatest Hits, The Cars Greatest Hits,  The Best of The Doors, etc… There are others where the album itself has taken on its own life—Singles Going Steady and Hot Rocks both come to mind. And sure, plenty of these albums were released because of greed or settling an album contract or to capitalize on an equally exhausted and aging set of 1980s or 1990s consumers, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a good time when you only have a limited time.

So now, in 2018, feeling shredded, wouldn’t you enjoy a Best of Drake? Or what about, Lil Wayne: The Mixtapes 2003-2008 or The White Stripes Singles or The One Godspeed You! Black Emperor Song You Need to Hear. Yes, sure, you can go to YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music to get different takes on what these lists might look like. But now we’re just comparing playlists. Now we have to rank those. And people are crazy. This “Best Drake Songs” playlist is 155 songs long. Someone tighten that up, ok?

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#62: Guns 'N' Roses, "Appetite for Destruction" (1987)

Nicky walked down the hallway. Girls stared at her, pulled gum from their mouths, winding its pink flesh around slow, lazy fingers, leaning against lockers, following her with their eyes as she walked down the hallway. Boys stared at her, punched each other in the upper arm; they were jungle animals, they felt things in their groins, they stirred and barked and made kissy faces as she walked down the hallway.

Her face was thin and freckled. Her hair was sprayed sky high in the front, a wall of deep brown hair like a shield, like armor. Don’t fuck with me. She wore her stone-washed jeans tight, cuffs pegged, a pink plastic comb lodged in the back pocket. She wore high tops with the laces untied.

She, Nicky, did not chew gum. She smoked cigarettes on the corner during lunch. She sat in boys’ laps while they smoked. The boys had mullets and smoked Marlboro Reds and so she smoked them too. They borrowed her comb to comb back their hair. She pulled the pink plastic from her back pocket and reached it out to them; when they reached for it, she pulled it quickly away and laughed her hard, loud laugh, taking a drag from her Marlboro Red.

She wore the same shirt to school almost every day. I can remember it perfectly even now: black, a cross and five skulls, each skull with long hair, and banners, tattoo-like, above: “GUNS *N* ROSES”; below: “APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION.”

Nicky was a legend.

“Do not fuck with Nicky,” said a gum-chewing girl, turning back to her locker to pull out her algebra book. They said she lived in a trailer park on the north side of town. They said she fought like a boy. She didn’t pull hair; she punched faces. I leaned into the lockers and watched her walk down the hallway.

*

I’m at work. It’s March. I work on the fifth floor of an anonymous building downtown, in a small cubicle where I mostly shuffle papers around a desk. There are numbers on the paper that blend together and fade into other numbers. I wear a suit to work, drab, gray, anonymous. Every day I bring a brown paper bag to work containing a yogurt (strawberry-banana) and peanut butter on wheat bread, eating it silently at my desk between the hours of noon and one.

Down the dim, beige hallway, I see a woman approaching. She has deep brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and held in place with hairspray, and a thin, freckled face; she’s wearing a tailored wool sports jacket over pants that fit her tightly. My co-workers watch her walk down the hallway. A woman twirls a phone code around a finger; a man punches another man in the arm.

She walks down the hallway, past me. She smells of Tom Ford’s Fucking Fabulous and cigarette smoke.

I follow her outside.

“Hi… Nicky?” She looks up. I can see her eyes, like the bluest skies. “We went to school together?” She straightens her jacket and tucks her hair casually behind her ear.

“Nicole,” she says. She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse: Marlboro Lights, not Reds, I notice.

“We weren’t friends, but I remember you. You used to be really into Guns N’ Roses,” I shift in my suit; she doesn’t remember me.

She looks at me with a furrowed brow, clicks her lighter for the fifth time and the flame finally emerges; she holds it to her cigarette, inhales, then exhales a thick cloud of smoke into the graying air.

“Maybe you’d like to go for coffee sometime,” I suggest.

She remains silent.

“We don’t have to talk about the past.”

“Why the fuck would I care if we talked about the past or not?” she shoots back, glaring at me through a haze of smoke. She doesn’t pull hair; she punches faces.

I’m not offended by this. I look her in the eyes and see that she’s wavering, soft. She’s not really offended either. “Anyway, I just thought we could have coffee sometime.”

She doesn’t agree or disagree, she just smiles, so I leave it at that.

*

The girls’ bathroom is where they sprayed their hair. I could hear them talking. I was frozen inside of a cubicle, my knees tucked to my chest, holding my breath, playing a ghost. I could hear the hiss of the spray can; it sounded like Izzzzzzy.

“Axl Rose is from Indiana,” said Nicky. Indiana was just across the border, a line I knew they sometimes crossed late at night in shitty cars, smoking cigarettes with the windows rolled down. The border was invisible on country roads, sometimes barely felt when you hit a bump as you crossed the state line, where one road’s taxes were shittier. I knew this fact made her feel close to him. Like she could touch Axl Rose just by crossing that state line.

“Duh, they’re from LA,” said the other girl, punctuated by the hiss of a spray can going Duffffff. LA was foreign, with different vegetation, palm trees, bougainvillea. It was a mythical place; it involved plane flights and fantasies.

“Who gives a fuck about LA?” Nicky didn’t give a fuck about LA.

Nicky put on her headphones. Through the foam ear covers I could hear Axl howling “Because you’re crazy, hey hey, You’re fucking crazy, oh my, You know you’re crazy, oh child, I said you’re crazy, ay, ay, yeah.”

I wondered how crazy Nicky was. If she would really punch someone in the face. I imagined Nicky crossing state lines, kissing boys. I imagined Nicky in LA, walking down the Sunset Strip punching people in their faces. I pulled my knees closer to my chest. The spray can went Slashhhhhhh.

*

Two days later, I bump into Nicky outside again. She’s at the end of her cigarette, picking the skin around her thumbnails.

“Hey,” I say. “Coffee?”

She furrows her brow, slowly puts out her cigarette in the metal ashtray between us, and follows me.

*

Nicky lived in a trailer park on the north side of town. Her father worked in the porno industry and her mother was on heroin. She let guys do things to her in exchange for cigarettes. She didn’t pull hair; she punched faces.

No: Nicky lived in a small house on the north side of town. Her father worked at a warehouse and her mother was a night nurse. She kissed boys sometimes, but mostly she listened to Guns N’ Roses alone in her bedroom.

No: Nicole lives in an apartment on the north side of town. She works on the fifth floor of an anonymous building downtown, pushing paper with numbers on it.

No: Nicole lives in an apartment in Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

No: Nicole: Address unknown. Workplace unknown.

*

“Why are you so obsessed with getting coffee with me?” We’re sitting across from each other in a booth of one of those nostalgia diners. Neon runs along the ceiling, bright and glaringly turning our faces pink and blue. It’s strange to see her sitting here in front of me, real, in the flesh. A song plays quietly in the background: I see you standing, standing on your own, it’s such a lonely place for you, for you to be…

“I… used to want to be you. You were a total badass.”

“You thought I was a badass?” She gives a sort of half-smile at the idea. She pours another packet of sugar into her coffee and stirs it slowly.

“Everyone did. No one wanted to fuck with you.”

She looks up abruptly when I say the word “fuck.” I hear how it doesn’t sound right coming from my mouth. I’m wearing a suit. I belong in beige hallways. She sips her coffee, still staring at me. “So you just wanted to get coffee to tell me that people used to be afraid of me?”

“I don’t know… I…” I look down at her thumbs, the skin around the nail gnawed red. Without thinking, I nervously bring my thumb to my mouth. “I used to look for you on the internet, to see where you’d ended up. You’re impossible to find.”

She stops stirring. “Where… did you think I’d end up?”

“I just wanted to see who you turned out to be.” I think about you, honey, all the time… I think about you, darling you’re the only one.

“Look,” she pauses and leans in towards me, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m not the girl I was in high school, and even if I was…”

I twist my napkin around my finger.

She looks me right in the eyes. “Your version of me, whatever fantasy you came up with, it’s not me.” She leans back, finishes her coffee, slides a couple of dollars under the empty mug, and walks out the door without looking back.

*

“Did you hear about Nicky? She died in a house fire this summer.” “She got into a bar fight and now she’s in prison.” “You know that stripper bar? She works there.” “You remember Dave? She married him and they have like five kids.” “Did you hear about Nicky? You still don’t want to fuck with her.”

*

Open search window.

Google: Nicky.

Results: A grainy picture of a girl in tight stonewashed jeans, head cocked to the side, wearing a Guns N’ Roses shirt.

Address: Unknown.

History: Unknown.

*

I walk back to my cubicle. There are new papers on my desk with new numbers fading into other new numbers. I open a playlist on my work computer. I find the song I want and put the earbuds in my ear.

She’s got a smile that it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything was as fresh as the bright blue sky

Now and then when I see her face
She takes me away to that special place
And if I stare too long, I might break down and cry

I open the brown paper bag, pull out the yogurt, peel back the foil lid, slip in my spoon, and take a slow bite. I open a new tab and search her name. Nothing comes up. It’s as if she doesn’t exist. I search again.

Nicky. Refresh. No results. Nicky. Refresh. No results. Nicole. Refresh. No results. Nicky.

—Zan McQuade

#63: U2, "Achtung Baby" (1991)

Take a drink, for example. Remember how you and I never quite mastered that civilized art of sharing a moment.

Even now, we could mosey in from a cold breeze-strewn evening into a wood-beamed bar with lime-washed walls and gentle-bent ceiling. We would see and feel the fire as a confluence of hopes and relief. We would both, perhaps, follow the glimmer and gentle sway of the big fire’s light as it seeped into the dark corners of the room, light smiling back at us through a glass of the light-sweet farmhouse cider they make in the next county over. The cellar-cool glass with winking bubbles and earnest, hard-earth funk of wild yeast thick enough to smell even with the glasses at arm’s length. With glasses full, fire roaring, and the low-slung ceiling, we would find ourselves a little snug, maybe with a table for two. At such a table in such a snug as that we could spend all night. Never have to leave, would we? But how many such ciders could we stomach before it all went belly up?

Or what about the riverside in high summer? One of the little rivers trickling the run from swamp to sea, mud-streaked and stinking of sulfur sand and the tidal wash. What did our glasses full of the green-apple freshness of Prosecco smell like when we swirled them in with the smell of so much earth and water? Or is it the Chenin Blanc blend you prefer to remember, full of cut grass and that bitter-rich fold where a sachet of dry chamomile meets the smell of a live flower? In the summer’s wet heat, we last even less time before we’re at each other’s throats, or wrenching up bad oysters with heads buried in the saltgrass by the water’s edge. Snails are always clinging on to the marsh grass, edging themselves high and low as the water comes and goes. You and I could never master that kind of surviving rhythm.

But how, even now, a look back into the moments we reveled in still leaves my face flushed, and my breath chopping away at the back of my throat, wind-blown as the bay after a storm washes back out to sea. Cold waves, streaked with shatter-sharp bits of light, filtering through a procession of small-puffed clouds pelting north.

I didn’t try to read it as tea leaves when you threw my boots out of our moving car in Michigan, and we laughed together like maniacs as the only watertight shoes I’ve ever owned tumbled beyond the guardrail and landed somewhere in the scrap brush lining the shore below. We laughed until you had to pull over and gulp deep for air. My face would have been red, and I should have known then how little we could trust the stability of what we’d worked so hard on.

*

Lately with the season changing, I receive sudden, jolting glimpses back into this world most nights. The sky pushes recklessly in all directions, and dead leaves gather at the corners of my house, and clouds slip over the ridge tops and past the radio tower lights. Night bleeds into night, and I don’t have the strength of constitution not to linger, to try to remember the way those moments smelled, how it felt to think of the future from beneath those years, their muddled hopes and the plans we tended to.

Those old notions still sip like the unfurling honey-smoke of single malt. They sink into the lining of my stomach, with the mixing texture of ice and warm liquor. As the old moments settle across my eyes again, it is achingly clear how much I should have loved them more, reveled deeper into their mystery and joy. In my mind’s eye, the blurry snaps of moments still warm to the touch. When we left the bar in [ somewhere ] and you carried me out to our car, not in the fireman’s carry, but like I was floating in a canoe out to sea one last time with you stood in the shallows, and your loving hands weren’t holding me from falling but gathering memory and courage to say a proper goodbye. In your tiny arms, I remember feeling as warm and windswept, as loved and as tended to as when in mercy you volunteered us to take your sister’s dying cat to be put down so she wouldn’t have to say the words, or be there when they pushed the syringe in to ease the passing on. I felt the same dutiful buoyancy you gave to that cancer-hollowed cat as you set it gently on the metal table and they filled his failing heart with what must have been the sweetest feeling of relief.

*

The richest, sharpest memory I still have of us sharing a drink was the cans of Bigburger we took from a stranger on the train platform in Berlin as we decided in a series of glances that, yes, we would love to accept these beers from this thick-necked, purple-faced man in a yellow shirt, and that yes, we would love to sing the song about Dortmund with him (though, no, we did not know any words), and would we like to come to the game?

We did not. But, swept up in the churning train platform, full of drinking, singing fans, we did not feel the need to disappoint our newfound friend. We let him sweep us along, with his denim-clad, chain-smoking friends, to the stadium, where it seemed best that we did buy a ticket and come in with our new minder. We sat for a while in the highest reaches of the Olympicstadion watching two soccer teams, their singing, shouting fans, letting cool spring weather wash over our heads. We felt very far away from the city, from our own lives, from each other even. We left the game just after halftime. We learned the next day the two teams had played to a routine draw, no goals scored. The yellow-shirted Dortmund fans would go home, but we wondered if they would do so sad, frustrated, or cheering a brave result. Did our rough Dortmund-shirted minder get in a scrap with the blue-shirt-wearing Berlin fans on his way out of the stadium?

The night we left the game, the city seemed quiet. We were warmbellied, and we wore our jackets unzipped and wandered happily through Soviet-facaded grey streets, swaying, letting light and near-light blur together in what we thought felt like a familiar piece of the grey, sprawling city. We had, as we came to discover, taken the right train, but arrived at the wrong platform. It was nearly two in the morning by the time we found our way back to our hotel, and by that point you had lost a shoe, bought a new pack of cigarettes, and when we finally found our room, you told me, as you turned the contents of your purse onto the floor looking for a light, that tomorrow we would find a different train to take us to a different city where we could buy suitcases full of different clothes, and after enough time had passed, we would even pick new names for ourselves.

—Aaron Fallon

#64: The Rolling Stones, "Sticky Fingers" (1971)

They have always been a part of your education, from the very start. It’s the you, here, you see. Like a primer on how to be a girl, the album that kicks off with one of the nastiest tracks in rock: whipping slaves, house boys, Cajun queens. You’ve been looking at Mick and the boys since you can remember, since you were very small and sitting on the hardwood floor in front of the stereo, holding your parents’ octagon-shaped cover of Through the Past Darkly. Like a lot of things at that time, the cover photo of Keith’s pale lips smooshed up against glass made you feel both alternately fascinated and repelled.

Fascinated, but ultimately seduced: it’s Mick singing to you, educating you, telling an attentive girl what she’ll need to be in the running to be a cool chick, the kind of girl to inspire the most brilliant rock tracks.

*

Winter in north Mississippi is cold; most years see snow. The region suffered a catastrophic ice storm in 1994, a year before you traveled there, sight unseen, to start a new life as a transfer student at Ole Miss. You were a girl from another south, Southern California, and you didn’t know anything about actual cold.

You didn’t have a car; you’d flown into Memphis and taken a shuttle down to Oxford and spent the first night in a chain motel and the second in your new dorm, the loser dorm, the dorm for “nontraditional” students—foreign exchange students, the odd grad student, older transfers like yourself. Your neighbor is a chubby blonde from down near Jackson, with a drawl so thick you have to watch her mouth to clue into her sentences: I was fixin’ to go to Mizippi State but came up here instead. Both of you have Chinese exchange students for roommates, wisps of black-haired young women who smile politely but only break into laughter when cooking with their fellow transfers in the cramped communal kitchen.

What are you even doing here?

You failed at being a true groupie, though just a few years earlier you spent Saturday nights cruising the Sunset Strip, forever hoping for that rare long-haired rocker boy who might could (as your dorm neighbor would say) also read a book. Nights spent screaming “Lars!” up at the windows of the Chateau Marmont because you and your friend had heard a rumor that Lars Ulrich and the rest of Metallica were in residence. Buzzed nights spent slamming your right hand in a car door and not feeling a thing, or finding a bruise the next day.

You’d studied, see. Satin shoes, nasty boots, cocaine eyes: check. Throw me down the keys, Lars.

*

Everything is new and different, which was the point. It had seemed like a good plan, earning your degree far from home after you’d finished the general ed credits at your community college. You chose this place because you liked Southern writers like Eudora Welty and Ellen Gilchrist, and loved Southern bands more—you dreamed of the Allman’s blue skies, Skynyrd’s simple kind of man. Instead it’s freezing and you find yourself homesick and listening to a couple favorite CDs over and over—Sticky Fingers being one. Within the first few weeks, your Chinese roommate leaves for off-campus housing with a friend, and you’re alone as you prop your new Timberland boots up against the windowsill, the window open a sliver, blowing cigarette smoke out into the frigid air. You should be out at the bars down in the Square, meeting new people, but despite your loud music, you’re a quiet person and realize—too late now—that in your ignorance you didn’t factor in the primacy of the Greek system here, how along with football it provides the dominant culture. If you didn’t read books or listen to music, you could easily believe it’s the only culture. You’re too old, too bookish for this shit.

To a one, the student body is relentlessly clean cut: the girls wear boxy white t-shirts boasting of various sorority functions, the short-haired boys in baseball hats, their just-scraped, shaved faces blushing easily.  You were finally supposed to be starting your adult life, but are regressing. After class you ignore your homework, contemplating instead the impressive bulge of the mystery Warhol stud on the CD cover. You crank up “Bitch,” provoking the RA with the volume and a mild bad word, until she comes and knocks on your door again, turn it down please, people are trying to study. (Are they really?)

*

There is another South, the one in your mind, and you go there, instead. The south of the Delta blues, the slide guitar, of Muscle Shoals in Alabama where the first tracks of Sticky Fingers were recorded. The south Mick invokes in his British accent, singing “You Gotta Move,” written by a  Mississippi blues-man, the south that is plantations and dark history, hear him whip the women just around midnight.

You go on miles-long walks off campus, your thighs tingling and itchy with the cold, and see the poverty ringing the pretty town and the white columns of the courthouse, glimpse a level of poor you never saw amid the working-class stucco bungalows of your childhood. There are so many mobile homes tucked off the roads between bare trees, and so many beat-up cars, old long American sedans always missing a headlight.

By the end of your first month you see all you really came for: there’s the Jitney Jungle market, the frat house flying the Confederate flag, unironically blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” out a window on a Saturday afternoon. You’re supposed to be immersing yourself in a new way of life, but not unlike the Stones, you’re merely a tourist, getting an eyeful, sending home souvenirs—lighters and keychains emblazoned with the Colonel Reb mascot, one that plays Dixie when you push a button. You can leave, this isn’t your world, unlike all these extremely polite young people, these future Republicans in their khakis and polos who party to Phish and the Dave Matthews Band.

Besides your neighbor, who invites you over to watch her beloved VHS tape of Ray Stevens comedy clips, no one talks to you beyond pleasantries. But just as when you were a child on your parents’ floor, there is Mick, and his you, teaching you, this time instructing you on how to ride this out. Each song has a you, usually directed at a woman, though often it’s Mick talking to himself, the same way you do, waking and rising and attending classes without speaking to anyone, just your interior narrator.

In Sticky Fingers you inhabit a liminal space, physically smack in the Deep South, even as some songs evoke your own private California, the country twang of “Dead Flowers,” which could live comfortably beside your daddy’s Merle Haggard, “Wild Horses,” the 45 single you bought in high school, hoping someday a guy might feel as sad and tortured over you.

When spring arrives, you’ll attend a crawfish boil (“suck dat head!”) and admire the pink azaleas blooming across campus. There will be more long walks along picturesque train tracks where kudzu twines up the telephone poles. There will be those very specific wide blue skies of the American South, and on one night, your dorm window open wide, the sweet breeze will carry amplified notes of the The Allman Brothers, playing live at the football stadium across campus. You don’t have a date, nor the extra cash for a ticket.

You’ll fly home for the summer, returning in August with your car, a dull gray Nissan that only barely delivers you across the country. You’ll remain for another semester before packing it up, calling it quits on your Southern experiment. You can still listen to Sticky Fingers, and Jane's Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking without tipping into nostalgia for that era, with the exception of “Moonlight Mile.”

It’s a wintry song, and whether the Stones’ “head full of snow” is climate or cocaine doesn’t matter; this slow, sad chug of a closing track remains the soundtrack to all your cold nights alone, sleeping under strange, strange skies. Listening to it transports you right back, to a place you never knew well, a place that kept its mysteries close, but a place where you learned to be alone.

—Kelly Shire

#66: Van Morrison, "Moondance" (1970)

Though belated, it was no doubt a break-up gift.

The turntable arrived at my apartment in Cambridge right before my 23rd birthday, an unexpected gesture after a few necessary months of not speaking. It’s not that I didn’t read into it; the petty questions came from all angles as I struggled to rip the packing tape: What message is he trying to send? Is this supposed to make up for everything? How materialistic does he think I am? So now he has the upperhand?

But once I found the perfect spot for it—atop a cabinet that was just the right needle-dropping height—my resentment subsided. After years of collecting decorative vinyl that I could only play at friends' apartments or my parents’ house, I finally had a record player of my own. I texted him thanks, sincerely.

There were a few more steps to audio bliss. I bought brand new speakers, black cinder blocks with neon yellow accents (they were self-amping, so they couldn’t have been that nice). The wiring seemed simple enough: red on red, black on black. But each time I twisted the knob to on, only the left speaker crunched with feedback.

I’d like to think that my sophisticated ear thoughtfully selected an album recorded in stereo so the opening track would split distinctly between two speakers, but I’m sure Moondance just happened to be on the top of the stack of used records collecting dust. “It Stoned Me” served me well: the needle would drop, Van would sing Half a mile from the county fair and the rain came pouring down to my left, and when he reached oooh the water with nothing to the right, I knew immediately that I had to fiddle with the wires again.

After about 30 adjustments, I finally heard crisp horns brimming from the right. It’s alive! It was a marvelous night for a moondance, and I indulged. A few tracks later though, sometime around “Crazy Love,” a sad thought pricked me: would keeping this record player keep my ex in my life? Would I think of him every time I flipped sides, every time I twisted the copper wires the same color as his hair?

*

Every relationship has its artifacts. There are objects in our apartment that my current boyfriend has no idea came from an ex of mine (though I suspect he’ll start asking more questions after reading this). They’re mostly practical—I certainly don’t think of the guy who gave me the cast iron skillet every time I fry eggs in the morning.

Astral Weeks, the record before Moondance, might have been a more appropriate soundtrack for the moving-on process, as Van Morrison wrote most of it meandering around the very neighborhood outside of Boston where I lived. One of my top five of all time, Astral Weeks is the ultimate staring-at-the-ceiling record; I’ve spent many nights in hypnotized by its strange beauty. But Moondance was the record I needed at 23—energetic, familiar, something I could sing along to. I needed to be grounded. As Ryan H. Walsh recently put it in a review for Pitchfork: “Van the Man was tired of floating in space; it was time to dance.”

Putting on Moondance to test the speakers has become a ritual. I used it to break in the next four apartments I lived in. In new cities and states, I twisted and pressed and re-angled the wires, listening for those triumphant horns that would christen my new home.

Like most people who collect vinyl, I tend to romanticize the analog. When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would come without a headphone jack, signaling a shift to wireless-only listening, I vowed never to upgrade—even if I was receiving the music digitally, I wanted to be tethered to a concrete object. I needed to feel the connection, to twist the wire in between my fingers. I was scared of floating in space.

*

As it turns out, a turntable is a perfect break-up gift. Instead of a totem to the past, it was a vehicle for new memories—rocking out and cooling down, wallowing and bouncing back, twisting and shouting. (Though this was not necessarily the intention behind the gift; I think it’s safe to say that none of my exes have ever carried the ulterior motives I subscribed to them). When the time came, about six years and fourscore relationships later, I left the record player on a ledge in the lobby of my apartment building, a note stuck to its cracked plastic cover: “It works!”

My new record player is a multi-functional upgrade; it came with its own slim speakers with red and black wires that clicked right in. Van’s horns rang on the first try. The Bluetooth feature is hard to resist; 23-year-old me would balk at the fact that sometimes we play albums over Spotify that we own on vinyl tucked on a shelf less than 10 feet away. For all the metaphors in fine-tuning and strengthening connections, now I’d rather press play on my phone, staying on the couch beside my love. It seems I don’t need to fiddle with the wires anymore.

—Susannah Clark

#67: Radiohead, "Kid A" (2000)

“I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky.”

I didn't write those words—those are the opening lines to Brent DiCrescenzo's infamous Pitchfork review of Kid A, lines that became a memetic part of my college friendships far before I ever got into Radiohead. The air of pretension oozing from that piece was enough to draw me into reading the full review, and boy, did it not disappoint. Allusions to CS Lewis, comparisons to a stillbirth, alien abductions—it’s impossible to describe this review without accidentally impersonating Bill Hader’s Stefon. But for all my love of the piece, I had never even heard a Radiohead album before. 20 years of rotations, passes through comets’ paths, and travel, and to my knowledge I had never felt those beautiful bleep bloops scratch across my eardrums. So I set out to change that.

My sophomore year of college, I gave myself the task of listening to Radiohead’s entire discography in sections—spend two days apiece listening to nothing but a single album, with the hopes that at the end of the two weeks I would have gained a proper appreciation (read: Stockholm Syndrome’d myself) for the band’s work. I’d heard songs of theirs here and there: I knew the hits, I’d fallen in love with “Bodysnatchers” way back in 2007, I’d even become obsessed with a great Jay-Z/Radiohead mashup album (named Jaydiohead, naturally). It all went so swimmingly at first—even in the weeds of their first album Pablo Honey, I liked what I was hearing. I recognized something special in The Bends, even being years divorced from the context in which it would’ve been considered a legendary alt-rock album. Getting to OK Computer on those fifth and sixth days solidified it for me—if this was the album that kicked off the band’s status as all-time greats, then the way it made me feel was enough for me to recognize them as personal favorites. I hadn’t even gotten into the meat and potatoes of their work yet! But OK Computer was as perfect a collection of 12 tracks as I had ever heard, and I couldn’t imagine that the bridge between OK Computer and In Rainbows would have anything to put me off of their work.

Then I got to Kid A. Good grief. 

DENIAL

…Is this it? The astounding, unparalleled Radiohead album that changed the musical landscape and claimed a spot in the Mount Rushmore of all-time indie records? There must be some mistake. Maybe I’ve got the wrong version of the album. Maybe Spotify started bugging out and switched an incredible, wall-thumping rock record with whatever experimental Brian Eno album they accidentally labeled as “Treefingers.” Gotta give kudos to whatever upstart jazz trio behind “Morning Bell” managed to con Spotify into uploading their work as a Radiohead album, though.

ANGER

…Is this it?! For real?? With the title track and everything??? Was there such a dearth of music in 2000 that Thom Yorke drunkenly warbling over a discarded Postal Service demo was really worth a fucking Grammy?! All the incredible instrumentation is gone, replaced with weird GarageBand bells and lyrics from a terrible poetry generator. “Yesterday I woke up sucking on lemon?” Christ. We were all so relaxed when Y2K didn’t happen that this passed for “best of the year,” I guess.

BARGAINING

…Is this it? I’m missing something. There’s a meaning behind this music that I’m not savvy to. It does seem like there’s a largely metaphorical story of some sort here that everyone’s connecting to. Maybe I’m just not old enough to get it? Maybe “Idioteque” just speaks to a part of life that I haven’t yet experienced, where one goes through a symbolic “ice age” that is coming, where we are meant to…take the money and run? Ugh. Fuck. I don’t know what any of these goddamn bleeps and bloops mean.

DEPRESSION

This… is it. Radiohead traded in their absolutely electric guitar work and powerful anthemic vocals for…this. I spent a week hoping they’d transcend their reputation as a sad boy quintet, but Kid A is the very album that solidifies it. Can I even finish this two-day experiment when I know what lies on the horizon? How many times can I listen to variations of “In Limbo” without lying down for a year, ready to accept any and all bedsores? It’s a wildly inaccessible album, written by and for a version of Radiohead that I don’t recognize. The lyrics are purposefully abstruse, the music feels like an attempt to shed the goodwill of their most recent success in favor of a strangely-timed, turn of the millennium embrace of the digital lifestyle. Why? Why have they done this to themselves? And more importantly, why have they done this to me?

*

I was 20 when I first listened to Kid A in full, and it was an extremely jarring, alienating experience. It took about three listens for me to even accept that I could enjoy any of the tracks on the album, and by that point I felt like I’d been brainwashed, letting the fumes of a collegiate laundry room bleed into my nostrils while I convinced myself that there was a true artistry in the abstract nature of “Morning Bell” that I just wasn’t savvy to.

To this day I’m convinced that the only parts of Kid A I truly love are the parts that lean more into the accessible, radio-friendly nature of Radiohead. “Optimistic” follows enough of a standard song structure for my brain to understand it. “The National Anthem” builds to a climactic frenzy in such a way that my heart feels energized. Even “How To Disappear Completely”—as bleak and dismal as it is—feels simple enough that it’s not alienating to me. But at the time that I’d done this two-day listening experiment, that wasn’t enough for me. I spent hours writing out (now-deleted) tweets on how frustrating it was to know that Kid A was the most beloved album in the Radiohead oeuvre when it was so far the one I liked the least. (Yeah, even more than Pablo Honey! It was that strange to me!) But instead of extending the period of time for me to truly understand it, I just moved on. And moving on to Amnesiac felt like a slap in the face. All of the inaccessibility and ambient instrumentation was multiplied exponentially. I didn’t have the energy to be frustrated again though, so I took the two days in stride and was happy to be in the loving arms of Hail To The Thief when it came along. But I never really embraced Kid A like I should have.

In fact, I don’t know that I ever got a chance to reckon with my feelings towards Kid A until I decided to write this piece. I initially asked RS 500 editor Brad Efford to write some words on OK Computer, only to find that it had already been claimed. I told him I’d write about Kid A instead because I was insistent that I had to write something in tribute to the band, as they’d become such a strong part of my life. So I did the two-day experiment again with just Kid A, and it all felt so different.

I still look at that Pitchfork review and laugh at how perplexing an abstract it is, but in a lot of ways I also connect with it. The way it’s written is the exact way Kid A feels, and the metaphors DiCrescenzo uses have become similar to the visuals my mind connects to it. My initial reactions to the album will always be there, grandfathered in as a gut feeling of how I “really” feel about it, but I still see a lot of beauty and value in it that I wouldn’t have possibly seen while trying to brute force my way into becoming a Radiohead fan. There’s a lot of indescribable, ethereal magic in the album that reminds me of how I felt finally seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen: the foremost feeling was a resounding “what the fuck does this mean,” but the thought overwhelmed me so much that I forgot to take in the beauty in every frame (or note). Radiohead made a piece of work that discards all of the reputation their audience demanded of them in favor of all the reputation they wanted to have, and they still managed to make something strong, emotional, completely unique, and absolutely oozing with skill. Trying to embrace the album like any other piece of music is a fool’s errand, because it’s not like anything else. It’s not a story, or a collection of sounds they just liked—it’s an experimental opera of sorts where the inaccessibility is part of the experience.

ACCEPTANCE 

Kid A isn’t my shooting star (In Rainbows holds that honor for me). It forms a series of wondrous constellations in that same night sky that I could have easily missed if I’d placed so much importance on finding the comet’s trail that had been promised to me, but that isn’t the vision I needed. That isn't the way I needed to see the album. This is it.

—Demi Adejuyigbe

#68: Michael Jackson, "Off the Wall" (1979)

My first memory of Off the Wall comes from 1984, when the album was 5 years old and I was 6. My parents had split up much earlier; in fact, they divorced the very month Off the Wall was released. By 1984, my mom had married a man whose teenage son (my idol) stayed with us a few nights each month and he coached me on what big kids listened to—Thriller, in a word. That summer, I flew to see my dad, who’d moved out of state with his new wife to a kid-free home with fancy crockery, hi-def electronics, and—much to my delight—a big record collection.

Upon arriving at Dad’s house, I announced to my stepmom that Michael Jackson was one of my two new stepbrothers. This seemed to me very possible, given the amount of people I adored who lived other places, with other families. She and Dad had filed their records in an oak cabinet by the den. I asked her to “play Michael Jackson,” which, to my six-year-old mind, meant playing Thriller. “We do have one of his albums,” my stepmom said, “but it’s an older one,” and then she pulled out a cover with a smiling young man who looked the age of my babysitters. He wore a prom tuxedo and leaned against a stack of bricks. Sans glove, sans glitter. I didn’t recognize his face.

She attached a gigantic set of headphones to the receiver and started the album. The headphone cushions were so big they squished my cheeks in, but through them, I first heard the strained whispers and swarm of disco violins that kick off “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”

There are no violins on Thriller, I thought. What the heck was this?

Who knows how far beyond those opening measures I got before abandoning the stereo to find something else to do. But for years, Off the Wall was, to me, another disappointing knock-off of My Amazing New Brother. It reminded me of the countless MJ send-ups on Saturday morning cartoons—a moonwalking Smurf or a Chipmunk squealing through “Beat It.”

Three decades later, that exact copy of Off the Wall is here next to me while I type this, still in fabulous shape, perhaps because it was so rarely played until I recently snatched it from Dad. If you haven’t heard an analog copy of Quincy Jones’s masterful production, woven like the late-disco equivalent of a Flemish tapestry, you’re missing out. It may have taken me decades to realize its power, but Off the Wall now rates as my favorite headphones album in all of Pop.

Where Jones and Jackson designed Thriller to be a record with as many hits as (super)humanly possible, this first collaboration smacks more of a unified sonic concept. You can hear in the production a pushing back against the flaccid, uninspired disco that, post-Saturday Night Fever, had saturated basic American culture. Of course, much of Off the Wall is still very much in the spirit of disco—jaunty bass-lines, orchestration that shimmers like a mirrorball, and an alarming number of lyrics discussing “the boogie”—as in THE boogie with a definite article, thank you very much. But in addition to these disco markers, the Off the Wall sound is always complex and polyvocal, lush and anti-metronomic. It breathes and moves as it blends funk riffs, Latin rhythms, Quiet Storm balladry and contrapuntal jazz runs into a barreling, gleeful menagerie of the best that ‘70s dance music had to offer, both including disco and moving beyond it.

Even though Off the Wall is chock full of singles (the first four released tracks all charted in the Pop Top Ten), it enjoys the kind of cohesiveness that’s cherished in capital-A albums like Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely or What’s Going On. The album is exceptional, I think, because it designs this irresistible unique sonic language for itself, and then, over the course of nine songs, it teaches the listener to hear—and revel in—that language.

The two dozen session musicians—Louis Jordan, Wah Wah Watson, and the splendiferous Sea Wind Horns among them—play Jones’s dense arrangements with a sparkling sonic profile that establishes, then maintains, and finally challenges itself by the close of the second side. Over the course of nine tracks, this unique sound becomes not only familiar, but familial. And there, at the head of this family table, is Michael Jackson’s singular voice.

This is his first solo album away from all his other families; both Motown records and his brothers are absent (save Randy, who plays hand percussion on “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”). And from the first note he sings, Jackson tells his new family, they of the Quincy Jones studio, that he has come to play. Listening to him, I get the impression of a precocious kid at a big Thanksgiving meet-up, running from kitchen to living room to card table. Bright and engaging, he joins in on any conversation that will have him, talking big game, stirring pots, parroting punch lines, and yelling at the football on TV. With each visit to some family clique, he spazzes out even more, but that kind of energy is never anything but welcome, especially when it comes packaged in a voice like his.

The first note he hits—that OOOH! at the start of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”—is the highest vocal moment of Off the Wall. Right out of the gate! That bent shout, just shy of a soprano’s high C, opens into the melody line, where MJ lives in the fifth octave, soaring over the measures in a breathy falsetto not unlike the lofty string hits at the top of the track. MJ vox as disco violin? Check.

Not to mention, “Don’t Stop” is of his own devising, one of the three songs he wrote for Off the Wall, all of which appear on Side A. Visceral and alive, MJ sings of a “force” that has brought him into this sonic space, one powerful enough to keep him pushing, keeping on, until his appetite—for love, for music, for kinship—is sated.

On the next track, “Rock With You,” Jackson’s voice drops a full octave, refusing falsetto for all but a handful of measures. His singing is less overcome here, more wry and confident, as one must be when asking one’s partner to take this dance to the next level. And while still managing to be smooth as hell, MJ’s “Rock With You” vox sports a terrific chestiness, with a kind of push in the highest notes of his melody that sounds to me like a Sea Wind horn in mid-bleat. MJ vox as sexy sax, as “magic that must be love”? Check and check.

And don’t even get me started on track three, “Working Day and Night,” which launches MJ back up into his falsetto, but also builds on that established sound with a second vocal challenge. Jackson’s breath, grunts, and sighs all groove alongside the heavy arrangement of hand percussion—bottles, handbells, and claps—that runs through the song. MJ vox as hot drum track? Chicka-chicka-uh-uh-check.

I defy you to find a more cohesive Side A in pop music—the gradual architecture of instruments (MJ included), the shifts in tempo and tone, and the delicious volley between fervor and disco glide. It’s perfectly parsed to tease the listening body (as well as the dancing one) up and back and up again: You don’t stop, and then you lie back and rock with somebody. You work day and night, then you get on the floor and dance it away.

Side A culminates in the album’s title track, in which Jackson’s voice daps that high B-flat from “Don’t Stop” with the lowest sung note in the album—a C# nearly three octaves down-key from where he began. In his “Off the Wall” vocal, we hear all the earlier tricks so far—percussive grunt, soaring falsetto, gritty belt—working together, plus the added treat of the backup vocals: several pitch-perfect MJs multi-tracked into a tight funk chord. MJ vox as decathlete, as fifth element, as a Jackson 5 choir all to himself? Quintuple check.

Side B is both more easygoing and more expansive—a goofy Paul McCartney pop cover, a weepy ballad, and a duet all painting with the same palate from Side A, but flying further from the bar each time. It kills me whenever I hear the first notes of “I Can’t Help It”—the Stevie Wonder and Susaye Green song that, according to Spike Lee’s 2016 Off the Wall documentary, Jones plucked from the slush pile of Songs in the Key of Life. I’m just crazy about this song—the Wonderful key changes alone! It carries all the out-the-gate thrills of a track one or track two, but lives tucked away at the back of Off the Wall, waiting in the third-to-last spot like a sneak attack.

In it, you hear the jazzy, smiling voice that Michael brings to Thriller’s “Human Nature” and Bad’s “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” but this vocal take sounds more in apprenticeship to Jones and Wonder’s original work-ups. Though he was already one of the most famous voices on the planet, in 1979, Michael Jackson was still audibly capable of showing us the way a song might surprise him—how he might meet its challenges with reverence, delight, or almost prayer. That surprise, in turn, almost always surprises me when I listen to it carefully.

For me, the payoff of deeply considering pop culture is the rare chance to feel the scales of hype drop away from an icon. Sometimes, if you deeply listen (or re-listen) to a voice that’s been thrown at you your whole life, and you do so with both innocence and abandon, the icon attached to that voice is denuded of all the superlatives that the world decided to heap upon it—superlatives that often talk over an artist’s purest talents. Perfect expression never needs fame to do its job.

Stripping fame away to view such expression on its own terms often brings the voice closer to me as a listener, with no decades of overblown storytelling, mass marketing, or laden criticism between the two of us. When it’s just the voice and its audience, there’s a different sort of kinship at work, a magic that must be love. You might go so far as to say that it is, in its way, a kind of family.

—Elena Passarello

#70: Billy Joel, "The Stranger" (1977)

It’s almost an internet sport, in a way, to make fun of Billy Joel. He’s one of the last bastions of a very specific iteration of New York, of a very specific type of music—operatic narratives, told with a an accomplished voice and over an expertly played piano, something that could be beautiful if not for the performance of its earnestness. And therein lies what’s so easy to mock—the mawkishness of his belief in the very humanness of his melodramas.

However, even amongst his cruelest detractors, there is no denying that one collection of his songs manages to pull itself out from Billy’s self-created sea of grandiose sincerity, allowing you to wade through its narratives as opposed to feeling drowned by them. Largely considered his magnum opus, Billy Joel’s The Stranger was written, recorded, and released just months after his 28th birthday. It holds some of his most famous and most critically praised songs—“Only the Good Die Young” is a karaoke staple; “Just the Way You Are” is, to this day, amongst the most frequently selected first dance songs of all time; and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is recognized as one of the most accomplished ballads of the century—and yet there’s an air of a wanting for maturity in the album. Joel offers an acknowledgment that he’s not getting any younger, but whereas other artists would chose to focus on impending mortality, the inevitable beginning of a natural decline, he almost always pivots instead spitting in the face of his imminent aging.

The album opens with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” a song that is so obviously and aggressively immature about its speaker’s perception of growing up that it’s almost impossible to believe it’s not satire. Yet, as the album unfolds, we are met again and again with songs not about Anthony specifically, but about the messiness of navigating what happens once you’ve moved on out into the real world. What is there to say about The Stranger if not that it’s an assurance that you can obliterate your alleged roadmap? We see this most clearly smack in the middle of the album, with “Vienna” leading into “Only the Good Die Young.”

“Only the Good Die Young” is the kind of song you write when you never really believed that you’ve been close to death. It’s the type of song that laughs at mortality without relishing the irony of its proximity, an anthem of youthful abandon screamed in bars or out of car windows at that age when you really think you just might live forever. This yearning for freedom is an important part of any Bildungsroman, yet it is nothing without a nod to getting older in turn, the absence of which most of the album highlights. Of course, the exception is obvious: “Vienna.”

“Vienna,” as a song, is so accomplished in its role as “rumination on aging” that it was used in the pivotal scene of a movie about aging, 13 Going On 30. The film follows Jennifer Garner’s character, Jenna Rink, as she messily navigates a full adult life—a covetous editing job, a hot boyfriend, a luxurious New York apartment—into which she has been instantly thrust thanks to a fulfilled wish (and some unexplained magic?) at her thirteenth birthday party. As one would expect, Jenna makes a multitude of egregious and seemingly obviously avoidable mistakes along the way, which is what makes this movie comedy instead of a horror film. The contrast of a 13-year-old mentality with a have-it-all 30 year old’s life? Hilarious. Fitting, then, that one of Billy’s songs would be used in the film, as is how Billy approaches aging on The Stranger—all of the markers of having grown up without any of the maturity, the trappings without the rods. We see someone reaching for the adulthood they think they should have earned, and yet find themselves falling, falling, and climbing still.

The pivotal scene of the film finds Jenna having run home to her parents, feeling utterly lost and unmoored by this new adult life in which she has found herself—one she has so desperately longed for, and which has chewed her up and spit her right out. After seeing some carefree teenagers on the train and discovering that her childhood bedroom has been converted into a catchall exercise-room-crafting-studio-storage-space in her absence, Jenna locks herself in the same closet in which she locked herself at her party—the same one which brought her into her thirties in the first place—and begins to break down, rocking herself back and forth and whimpering before rushing into her father’s arms when her parents find her there. The contrast of her adult body and childlike reaction highlights the deep, earnest humanity of the moment, and is nearly soundless beyond “Vienna” playing over the all of it.

I think about this as I walk home from work on a cold autumn night, just before Thanksgiving. I’m taking the long way back to procrastinate packing to go home to my mother’s, even though, for the first time in my adult life, I’m actually excited to be going. The trees are almost bare here now, the wind is cold under the fluorescent moon, and I’ve been putting off washing my winter coat, so I shiver as I walk over a mile back to my apartment where I have lived alone for almost two years—something upon which I outwardly pride myself. In reality, it hasn’t been cleaned in months, not really, and I’ve done such a poor job of caring for that space or myself that I actively avoid going back. Some days, it feels like I don’t remember how to be a person at all, like I’m clawing up the face of Everest just to brush my teeth. I remind myself of this when a coworker tells me that my Instagram is lit, that having the appearance of having everything together is miles away from actually having anything together. I used to blame this inability to be who I needed to be on anything but myself—on my family, on being restricted by the preferences of others, on geography, on age. I assumed that once I’d successfully moved out on my own, I’d somehow magically have the life of which I always dreamed—I’d have all the outer appearances of happiness and togetherness, yes, but because of that, I’d also actually maybe be happy.

I’m walking home and I’m listening to “Vienna” and I’m willing myself to consider what 13-year-old me would make of what she, at 25, has grown into. At times, when I was so, so young, when the house was dark and warm and quiet except for my too-loud pink iPod mini blasting in my earbuds, I didn’t think I’d make it to 25 at all. Other times, when I did find myself able to imagine a future that long, I thought I’d magically be cured of myself—my immature, emotional self—by the time I was this old. It seemed logical to me that I would either die young as a mess or only ascend into adulthood through the merits of maturity. It’s a strange thing to want to die before you want to get older; it’s stranger to realize that, at one time, those feelings meant exactly the same thing.

When I originally volunteered to write on The Stranger, I thought I’d write some witty observational, oh-so-clever thing about how the album moves from “Vienna,” a fear of aging, to “Only the Good Die Young,” a track which revels in knowing youth’s impermanence. I assumed I’d be writing  about the experience of growing up, notably from the perspective of someone who’d already done said growing. I assumed I’d wax poetic about the experience of seeing 13 Going On 30—my first PG-13 movie, and before I was 13, thankyouverymuch—and deeply relating to the melodrama of the scene wherein Jennifer Garner crying back in the closet in her character’s childhood home, and looking back on that scene with a sense of smug superiority that I’d aged beyond it. Of course, I was wrong. Upon rewatching, that moment in the film reads as truly, deeply earnest, underneath the sarcastic and overly-patronizing perspective of Jenna projected in the earlier scenes of the film. It’s a break from the comedy and the caricature, allowing us to see the person, the human, the child we’ve been following all along, and the message underscoring her journey: aging does not an adult make. It strikes me, as “Vienna” plays and Jenna sobs, that maybe we could only laugh at her when we had that distance set by her exaggerated immaturity—her childishness around boys, the aesthetics of her wardrobe, her unadulterated earnestness—all indicators that she has not grown up at all. It’s much harder to laugh at Jenna when we’re watching her visit her parents’ home crying, lost and defeated and overwhelmed by simply living the life around her, realizing that adulthood isn’t all she’d been made to believe it would be. It’s harder to laugh when you know Jenna is real, when you know Jenna is you.

—Moira McAvoy

#69: Led Zeppelin, "IV" (1971)

Led Zeppelin’s fourth album seems to me, a child of the ‘80s, to have always existed. Was there ever a time before my knowing of “When the Levee Breaks”? Did I ever first hear “The Battle of Evermore” or allow “Going to California” to carry me off? Memory is a funny thing, but it’s almost as if I was born pre-programmed with the songs in my DNA.

Like all great music, the album incarnates in cavity and flesh, a divine organization. Rippling through a microcosm of space, it commands all surrounding matter to worship the same sound, to resonate in singular communion. How does music do what it does to us? Even though we can outline the geometry of the element, name it wave or identify its pitch, when we hear it in exemplary forms, we are still seduced by its ineffable mystery deliciously, willingly astray.

Led Zeppelin IV has glamoured its audiences in many ways since its inception. When released, it bore no title, and the cover was absent the band’s already famous name. As such, it is variously called Led Zeppelin IV, Untitled, The Fourth Album, Zoso, Four Symbols, and Runes—the last three in relation to four symbols that mark the album’s interior in place of a proper title. This, however, is not the mystery of Runes—it is the mystique: a superficial but compelling exterior that may or may not have an actual mystery inside.

That kind of mystique—and guitarist Jimmy Page’s love for the occult and all things Aleister Crowley—has led to some interesting devil-worshipping theories about the band, notably a six-hundred page doorstop called, I kid you not, Fallen Angel, which promises to lay bear the devilish sutures of Zeppelin’s music. And here I thought Led Zeppelin IV was just a kickass rock album with geeky allusions to The Lord of the Rings and a frontman who conveniently sings in my vocal range. The true exigency for Fallen Angel was likely music’s power to enrapture—a power that binds together demon and deity worship music alike. Music is a powerful invocation: it can circumvent our linear, logical minds, and nearly rend our subtle bodies from our manifested, earthly selves. So likely this: feeling himself thus overcome, the author of the aforementioned tome came up against the boundary of his own unknowing. Consumed with the fear, he sought to conquer the mystery through naming. He chose a name available at the fingertips: “devil.” I see different magic.

Released in 1971, the album opens with “Black Dog,” in which the iconic riff and Robert Plant’s vocals circle around each other like a strange attractor. In chaos theory, such a system “attracts” independently moving points into the same complex orbit. The points are like cars racing chaotically on a winding, invisible track—some taking wide or sharp turns, some looping several times around one circle of a figure eight. Even when they begin at almost identical “starting lines,” the points will diverge quickly onto different routes—and yet, absent any disturbance, they never leave the track. The virtuosity of the song is an even stranger dynamical system: John Paul Jones on bass and Page on guitar are in one time signature while John Bonham on drums and Plant’s vocals are in another. The song feels like it may spin into chaos at any moment. Just when it’s definitely going to crash and burn, the band keeps going, and by sheer tenacity they hold the thing together. It’s exciting to hear, it baffles and amuses. And it rocks hard.

The song segues into an homage to—or appropriation of—a former decade of black American rock and roll stars: “It’s been a long time since the book of love,” sings Plant, in allusion to the Monotones’ big hit from 1957. “I can’t count the tears of a life with no love,” he continues, “carry me back, carry me back / carry me back, baby, where I come from.” The band wrote it when, failing to conquer the album’s other virtuosic track (“Four Sticks”), Bonham launched into the drumline from Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’” (also 1957) and Page chimed in with a seriously Chuck Berry-like riff (Hoskyns). Fifteen minutes later, the song was finished. “Rock and Roll” is a celebration. And it rocks—hard. Although there is no mystery in the song, it possesses the powerful magic of nostalgia. Nostalgia makes a choir of past and present. When we hear that harmony, we feel a sense of being home, tinged with our painful sensing of the impenetrable edges of the barrier of time.

Through controlled chaos and then nostalgia, the album’s opening songs are persuasive. They render the flesh willing. But so far, this is earthly magic. No demons and no gods have come to play here.

“The Battle of Evermore” is the first song I feel deeply seduced by on Zoso. It is a Celtic ballad that references primarily Tolkienian and minorly Arthurian legend. It is not mysterious—we haven’t yet arrived to a true mystery on the album. “Evermore” also doesn’t have mystique. But it is mystical—that is, through it, if we allow, we can enter a spiritual, trancelike ecstasy. There are no drums on the track. The song bewitches through Page’s rhythmic mandolin in a process known as entrainment.

There are three rhythmic centers of the human body: the lungs, the heart, and the brain. Each one pulses and whirs and, deliciously, they influence one another. So when “Evermore” hyper-attunes our brainwaves—entrains them into its rhythm—that altered rhythm can waterfall into willing breath and blood. The human body craves synchrony, that magic trick of spacetime. Any regular rhythm of sound or sight or vibration will sweep us right along with it, into its parallel reality. Like a shadow, this transcendent state needs a physical force to materialize it, and it cannot be untethered from the body to which it belongs.

Similarly, “Going to California,” which features Jones on mandolin and is also absent the drums, is a poetic folksong, almost a lullaby—that genre meant to soothe a body through entrainment into sleep. It just beats “Misty Mountain Hop” as the most sincere track on the album.“Made up my mind to make a new start,” sings Plant. “Going to California with an aching in my heart.”

The song tells of a hero’s journey. “When the Levee Breaks,” on the other hand, tells of an exodus.

The song was written by Kansas Joe McCoy and the original stars himself and influential blueswoman Memphis Minnie. It’s about the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 that caused an estimated half a million African Americans to lose their homes (Coyle). Minnie, who was around 30 at the time of the flood, experienced it first-hand. She was living with her sister-in-law who said:

We were scared to death when it broke, 1927. The levee broke and the water come over. Me and my two little children left and went to Walls, up on the hill there. “Kid” [a childhood nickname for Minnie] and them, they come on to town. When the water went down, we went back. (Garon)

Paul and Beth Garon call the song “an announcement of a new beginning, even in its sadness,” perhaps in part because the subject matter of the song is discordant with the sound of McCoy’s rhythm guitar in cheerful syncopation and Minnie’s bright finger picking.

Zeppelin’s cover is not a mere reproduction. The time signatures and style differ greatly. The cover has a digital witchiness compliments of distorted, wailing vocals and wobbling guitar that blur the boundaries of signal and noise; and engineering by “magus” Jimmy Page (Davis), who edited the track in many ways, notably so that the harmonica’s echo comes before the sound instead of after. McCoy’s lyrics are direct, his vocals deadpan. By comparison, Plant’s vocals swell emotionally. Pronouns on Zeppelin’s version have unclear referents and the persona is slippery. At times, the implied speaker seems to be the same as the one in McCoy’s version. But at other times, the speaker seems of a different time period. That is to say, its memory differs from the original.

The historic memory is this: Plantation owners in Mississippi refused to let African American sharecroppers flee the 1927 flood, fearing that the labor force they exploited would not return. An approximately eleven-mile “refugee camp” (more accurately termed “slave camp”) was set up on top of the levee itself—river on one side, flood on the other (Barry), where the workers were paid seventy-five cents a day to fill and stack sandbags (Ambrose). Sixty-four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the National Guard carried men who tried to flee back to the levee at gunpoint. In 1942, fifteen years after the flood, planters were still holding workers hostage, paying the police to patrol rail depots and prevent African Americans from getting on trains to Chicago (Ambrose). While some black sharecroppers were able to escape North in pursuit of work that paid vastly higher wages at the time of the flood, for many, the grip of the plantation owners didn’t relax until 1945, one year after the first cotton harvesting machine came to the area (Coyle).

“Going to Chicago,” sings Plant, just after the second time the song makes a major tonal shift from a moody drudgery electrified by harmonica to a celebratory reprieve. The lyric is notably missing from Kansas Joe McCoy’s original.

Music is a communal act. It builds on what comes before. Repeating really exceptional musical ideas is what makes the whole thing work. But we also cannot divorce music from structures of power that wield violence in the world. How concerned were the band members of Led Zeppelin with the violence to African Americans exacerbated by the 1927 flood? I wish I knew. We do know that the band is notorious for non-attribution (see Hann, for example), and I don’t think the fact that they transformed the work is any excuse. They attributed Minnie for “Levee” (though not McCoy, which feels to me like a willful act of favoritism).

As for the regenesis of “Levee,” it’s maybe the best track on The Fourth Album. It bears the memory. It’s haunted in a way the original was not. I don’t find it mysterious. But I do find it miraculous.

So here we have the so-called “mystery”—strange attractors and nostalgia and entrainment and historic memory and distortion. Through the veil of their mystique, the members of the band are just four talented humans following what compels them.

Still, it would be untruthful to say no mystery remains. We see the how but can only caress the exterior of the impenetrable membrane of why the music does what it does to us. Knowledge doesn’t always supersede mystery. The two are not mutually exclusive; they can exist at the same time.

In hubris or out of fear, we feel the mystery and call it devil or god because of the emotion it evokes. But try as we might, the veil over our uncertainty will never be broken for us. We can seek the waves of the mystery, yet there is no river we can ford to the other side of our unknowing. We can purchase no mode of transportation, figurative or real, to arrive there. Anyone who claims to have named the mystery has failed to understand this. We can sense the mystery, yes; we can feel it in our veins and even allow it to home inside our chests, but still the mystery remains a mystery. We can taste the mystery, dance inside of it, and let it vibrate along the deep fjords of our vagus nerve, but the mystery remains the same. Were we to die into afterlife or be raptured into heavens, still, as discrete beings, the mystery would remain. From the mystery, there is only one means of escape: to be erased into the continuous and infinite seeing of the divine. The only way to gain the mystery is to lose ourselves.

—April Gray Wilder

Ambrose, Stephen. “Man vs. Nature: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.” National Geographic, 2001.

Barry, John. Interviewed by Linda Wertheimer. NPR, 3 Sept. 2005.

Coyle, Laura. “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.” National Museum of African American History & Culture. Accessed 4 Nov. 2018.

Davis, Erik. Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3 series). Bloomsbury, 2005.

Garon, Paul and Beth Garon. Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues. City Lights Books, 2014.

Hann, Michael. “Yes, Led Zeppelin took from other people’s records—but then they transformed them.” The Guardian, 2016.

Hoskyns, Barry. Led Zeppelin IV: Rock of Ages. Rodale Books, 2006.

#72: Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly" (1972)

Me and Kaley knew we’d got lucky when I found a drawer full of old CDs in the nurse’s office. They were all piled up in the bottom of a metal file cabinet drawer with no files in it. Most of it was crap, like techno ‘80s stuff and a bunch of grandpa music, but Superfly was there, by Curtis Mayfield. I’d never actually heard that album except in the movie, which is a trip if you never saw it and kind of got me interested in being the drug queen of Lakeview Middle School that I thought I was before I wound up here. I also knew “Move on Up” because my mom used it as her alarm song in the morning. I’d be lying there in bed in the early hours when it was still dark and through the wall I’d hear the first few seconds of, “Move on Up,” so zippy and energized, like the sound waves were yellow and orange, which must be why moms chose it, but she’d hit snooze at least two times so I’d hear those same opening chords over and over again and hardly ever heard the whole song until I found that CD.

I snuck into the nurse’s office for some rubber bands. I knew they’d be the crappy kind that pull and tear your hair, but Kaley and I were bored and we didn’t care about split ends anymore. I’d been in there almost three weeks and my roots were starting to show, which looked really weird because I’m a redhead and my hair was dyed purple, so I was looking kind of Halloween-y, but not in a good way. The only rubber bands were a couple of grimy green ones that probably used to hold newspapers together and they were in the top drawer. I found them right away, but I figured I may as well look around while I was in there and while Kaley was keeping watch and while we knew the nurse would be sitting on the pot playing Words With Friends for at least ten minutes (don’t EVEN ask me how I know that! You do NOT want to know!). There wasn’t much else to steal except some much-needed chapstick, the shitty kind that dries your lips out, and some paper clips because they had pointy ends and you never know when you’ll need that, and a rock—I don’t know what kind, just, like, a pet rock—and a book about horoscopes. It’s dumb but fun to read and sometimes you want to believe it like when it tells you that you and Jared, who hasn’t come to see you once since you been in here, is your soul mate according to the sun signs AND the moon signs, which you have to admit is kind of amazing.

When I came out of the office, Kaley left her post at the bathroom door and we went back to our room to go over our loot. We kept it in a hole we dug into Kaley’s mattress and flipped it over. It didn’t take long to figure out we could play Superfly in the rec room on the old boom box and the orderly who hung out in there and kept an eye on us had no curiosity about where it came from. I mean, he wasn’t going to see some old CD and assume it was stolen. I bet none of the nurses even knew those CDs were in that drawer.  

We listened to it a lot. Kaley and I would sit on the couch and work on our hair and talk and whatever while the other druggy losers played pool or read books. No TV. But Superfly playing made everything seem so much cooler than it was. We felt like we were in a movie, and we were the stars, super cool chicks with great clothes and hair and the best coke in town. I was more of a meth user, and so was Kaley because that’s what was cheap, but still. Kaley decided to go for an afro, which really changed her look, and then she gave me cornrows, which didn’t look very good on me, she said because my hair was like limp string. While we were listening to “The Pusherman” one day we started talking about how Curtis Mayfield’s message was kind of a downer and kind of made us feel bad about our druggy past, unlike the movie, which, as I said, makes you want to rock that white rock and wear bell bottoms. Mayfield’s talking about people with tombstones in their eyes! That is creepy! I said so, and that was when Kaley told me that Curtis Mayfield was her great uncle.

I knew she was lying, we all did, everybody in the rec room started firing questions at her about him and somebody said he was dead. Kaley got all tore up about it and started to cry, which made her mad, which made her want to fight, and she decided I was the one. She pushed me hard so that I fell halfway off the couch and had to stand up real fast to keep from falling.

She stood up, too, and there it was, the reason I knew I wanted her on my side in that place and not against me. She was ready to GO and I mean it, she’d have torn those cornrows she just spent two hours on right out of my head.

“Girl,” I said, “I don’t care if you want to say your uncle is Abraham Lincoln!” I kept my hands down.

“But he is. Curtis Mayfield is my uncle.”

“The musician?”

“Curtis Mayfield is my uncle.” Her face was like stone. Tombstones in her eyes.

“Okay, okay.”

Well, what the hell? We need our stories, right? I get that. But not everybody would let her be about it. This guy, Lane, who was a rich dickhead, kept laughing at her and calling her Niece-of-Superfly until finally she flounced out of the rec room and went to bed.

That night we got to leave the facility. Nine of us piled into a white van and they took us to a meeting in the closest town, one of those places big enough to have a mall and a few high schools but not big enough to be called a city. “That’s my hometown,” Kayla said.  “I live there.” Normally I’d have rather gnawed off my own leg than make a special trip to sit in an empty storefront at the end of a half-empty strip mall and listen to a bunch of people talk about how grateful they were to be there, but being in treatment wipes your social calendar clean and any chance to get out feels like a big party. Kayla and I did our makeup. I taught her how to line the inside of her lids and she showed me how to do Amy Winehouse liner on the top. It really takes a steady hand, let me tell you. We looked hot, if I do say so myself. “Superfly,” she said, and I agreed. It felt so good to wear my hoodie and my boots. I almost felt like myself again.

In the van Lane started teasing Kayley again, and this time it was me who got hot. He was sitting on the row of benches in front of me and I reached up and smacked him hard on the back of his head. He swung around and probably would have hit me back, but Cheryl and Jesse stopped him. The bus driver yelled and threatened to take us back to the facility but he didn’t do it.

We took up a whole row of seats along a green cinder block wall in the back of the meeting and sucked down a couple of pots of weakass coffee. You could tell the woman chairing the meeting, who looked like she was remembering her own wasted youth when she looked at us, was trying hard to make us feel included. She kept calling on us and we kept saying, “Pass,” until she called Kayla.

Kayla had something to say. “Y’all know my uncle Curtis,” she said, addressing the group. There were about thirty people there besides us. All kinds of people, most of them older than us, but that wasn’t hard. Half the room was already facing us and the other half had to turn in their seats. When she said that, a few of them nodded!

“Good to see you here, Kaley,” a Hispanic man in a heavy Carhartt coat said.

She smiled at him. “Is he coming?”

“Running late,” someone offered.

I jabbed her in the side. “Are you serious?” I said.

She spread open her hands like all the signs of the zodiac would start dancing on her fingertips. “Told you,” she said.

Then after a while a small black man with round glasses and a Chicago Bulls jacket on scooted in, bringing a blast of cold air with him. He walked back to the coffee pot and poured himself a cup then sat down on the other side of the room from us. When he caught sight of Kaley he stood up and came over to our side, sitting down in the empty seat in front of her. He gave her a fist bump over his shoulder. After the meeting when we were all shaking hands he went around to everyone in our little juvy group and introduced himself as Curtis Mayfield.

Lane looked pissed off. “Should we call you Superfly?” He was such a dick.

Curtis Mayfield grinned at him and nodded. “You know it! Here, let me give you my card.” He took out a fat wallet and handed Lane a card that said, “Superfly Roofing and Construction. Curtis Mayfield, Owner.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lane said. He was polite to his face but on the way home in the van he gave Kaley a hard time. I was pretty pissed off, too—I mean, she could have told us she didn’t mean the famous one. None of the drama kept us from listening to Superfly in the rec room, though, and I got to where I knew every sound on that album. After I got out I set “Move on Up” as my alarm clock song, to my mom’s amazement. Kaley texted me a picture of her getting her 6 month chip and then I texted her the same.

—Constance Squires

#73: Led Zeppelin, "Physical Graffiti" (1975)

Led Zeppelin was inescapable. The endless Block Party Weekend that was (and is) New England FM radio became anesthesia, the clutch of songs playing on an endless loop, transitioning music into wallpaper.

At camp, the director who hung a brightly colored band poster on an otherwise unremarkable office wall.

So many brown paper bags converted to book covers. So many cheap repros of concert T-shirts. The odd tattoo, the lanternman.

***

You knew the house. You’d visited your girlfriend there for more than a year before you moved north from the city for grad school, scanning for flags on every visit, something resembling punk. A record store downtown, a college radio station, but that was pretty much it. Shows two hours south, or, if you wanted to visit your friends, who felt more distant every day, four.

The house had a basement and a garage, luxuries the city did not provide.

A gifted drumset later and you were in business.

***

Your friend with the same last name showed you a David Bowie DVD collection which contained the “Dancing in the Streets” video with Mick Jagger. You remembered seeing this on the local video channel—but until the moment she showed it to you, you’d forgotten it existed. Maybe you blocked it out of your mind because it was so awful.

You bought your own copy and one weekend you watched all the videos on the multi-disc set with friends. Bowie was dazzling.

***

By the time you made the transition from camper to staff member, you were already listening to punk and hardcore. And some of the guys in the CIT cabin turned you on to Run-DMC and Public Enemy.

The staff were firmly classic rock dudes. Lots of Rush. Lots of Triumph. Lots of Styx. Lots of Zeppelin.

Down at the waterfront, the director woke the staff every morning by playing “Dazed and Confused.” Every. Morning.

Over time, you worked up the ranks and became Ecology director, and delighted in blasting “Kerosene” or Ministry or Minor Threat and doing your best to negate the classic rock dinosaur.

***

You remember a record-buying trip to Harvard Square before high school graduation. You and your friend were in the usual pizza spot in the Garage, sitting with slices listening to the pop music channel they funneled in, kinda snickering at the inanity of the top 40. Sandwiched between two innocuous songs, Bell Biv Devoe and MC Hammer, was “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” You were shocked to hear the song in this context.

***

Maine, you discovered, wasn’t picked over the same way Boston was, where you had to be there at the right place and time to find gems. The pined landscape was littered with them—and cheap. Money was tight as you whacked away at city debt and squeaked by on a stipend, but the usual media scavenge was reasonable—even affordable.

“Physical Graffiti” was eight-fifty at the little basement record store downtown.

***

Every summer you go back up to Boy Scout camp to help out with the staff banquet—a chance for the guys who worked to spend a final evening together as a group before the demands of school or work pull everyone back into their previously established orbits. It’s a deeply sentimental affair, one that inevitably makes you think of all the years you spent working Ecology, blasting Avail and Sinkhole, hanging out with your friends.

While you were still a staff member, the banquet was strictly a steak-and-potatoes affair. Then a bunch of your contemporaries went to culinary school and got restaurant gigs. They assembled a volunteer team to serve up multi-course dinners which, over the course of fifteen-plus years, evolved into themed affairs with multiple choices and vegan options.

Ten years of waiting tables landed you in the front of the house, clearing and resetting. But somehow a title got stuck on you and you’re managing.

***

You were the oldest regular student at grad school, so people assumed you knew what you were doing, even though you felt like this was far from the case. And it made you feel guilty, and dumb.

All this talk of texts. Textual analysis. Student papers as texts. Textual comments.

***

Before you moved, your friends came over every Monday for five years and you’d drink and carry on and hatch schemes so you started writing down details in notebooks which were sometimes hilariously indecipherable depending on the evening and how fuzzy things got around the edges.

One Friday, a poster tube with your name on it appeared at the door.

You opened it and found a repro 1980 Led Zeppelin tour poster.

Then you checked your bank account. You’d ordered this, after Monday was made Tuesday.

***

There’s “Custard Pie” and “Kashmir,” of course, the lovely “Bron-Yr-Aur,” but “In the Light” is your favorite.

Part of this was never hearing it on the radio, or at camp.

The song is vulnerable, lacks the swagger of so much of the band’s catalogue.

It sounds broken, almost an afterthought. The weird ascending/descending guitar figure during the song’s outro leaves a window for John Paul Jones’s odd keyboard figure; Bonham, of course, is filling all over the place and a second Jimmy Page emerges to duel with himself.

Like they haven’t quite figured out how the song should go yet.

Like they might return to it later to figure it out.

Like they were unsure.

***

After the drumset arrived, you started leaving the house early enough to walk to school, headphones on, puzzling out drumbeats on your favorite songs. Or trying to. Much of it was way over your head, too skilled or too fast or both. There was no way you’d ever be able to get your right hand going as fast as Jeff Nelson’s, as Tommy Ramone’s. An advanced degree would be required to decipher the single flag semaphore of Amy Farina’s beats on the Warmers record.

But it was fun going back through and listening to everything through a different lens.  Previously, the drums hadn’t been your focus. You’d spent a little time on the guitar, mostly sliding a power chord shape up and down the neck to play hardcore songs, though the initial pull of lyrics had coincided with your early writing days.

***

You stay at your parents’ house when you work the banquet, a half hour away.

This distance felt so substantial when you first started driving, half the time it took to get to Boston for record shopping trips. Now you’ve driven more. Last summer you and your wife went from Cape Cod to Alabama, then up to Detroit and back again; this summer you and a buddy did a book tour out to Milwaukee; there was the year and a half of driving an hour and a half into the sun each way to your first post-grad gig.

***

Grad school gave you the idea of the new literacy: ways in which texts could be interpreted that the author might not have intended.

***

Early takes of “In The Light” are available online, and portray a wildly different song than the final draft. There’s still Bonham bombast to be found, but the keyboard figure sounds rinky-dink—an adjective seldom applied to Led Zeppelin. It’s as if they didn’t know what to do, so they mic’d a kid’s music box and left the room.

***

Some of the guys who return to camp year after year for the banquet are your contemporaries, dudes you worked with for years. Of course, for much of your time on staff you were trying way too hard: to live up to the idea of punk you always carried around, to look official, whatever. So you didn’t always get along. This was totally your fault – but you realize, too, that some of these guys were simultaneously trying to live up to whatever ideals were in their heads. You were all doing this.

And you didn’t know some of the guys who returned every year at all—at first. But they’ve returned and you’ve returned, and the distinctions between timelines have fallen away and you’re all the same.

***

Those fills on “In The Light” slay you, every time, segues from the otherworldly keyboard parts into the more standard rock bits.

Part of the fills’ appeal is their simplicity: in the basement, on the kit, you could puzzle these out, unlike so many of Bonham’s beats.

Another part is imagining the band in the room together: we need a fill here.

Well, how about this?

And it’s perfect.

***

Just a few months back now. You drove to camp and worked the banquet, surprised and pleased to see a bunch of old friends who didn’t usually make the trek.

Not everyone knew each other, which you thought was weird—dudes you palled around with hadn’t worked with some of the long-tenured banquet attendees. Of course, with introduction they became part of the larger whole, the greater good.

On the way back to your parents’ house, you slid Physical Graffiti into the CD player. If you timed it right, “In The Light” would end just as you pulled into the driveway.

You didn’t time it right.

So you drove past your parents’ driveway. Listening to the seemingly broken pieces, stapled together by simple fills, the fadeout as Bonham strung together monster runs, dueling Pages.

You drove through Concord, now into Loudon, as “Bron-Yr-Aur” started. The plan had been to pull into the driveway and kill the ignition, but what was a plan? Instead, you stayed in the moment and cruised the familiar roads, letting the disc and the night stretch on beyond plan. You’d read the night as it came.

—Michael T. Fournier

#74: Neil Young, "After the Gold Rush" (1970)

At fourteen, I am a band-T-shirt-and-black-eyeshadow wearer, shuffling in my Vans and enormous JNCOs at my local junior high. It is spring of 1999, a strange time: only a few weeks after the Columbine shooting, which has made everyone look at me suspiciously, edging away from me in the halls. The stares that have always been there are of a different quality now, and make me self-consciously adjust the neon plastic barrettes in my magenta hair. At a routine appointment, the dentist I’ve had all my life pointedly asks me if I intend to shoot up a school.

But at fourteen, I found solace at the mall, where I met up with friends who looked like me, and felt most welcome loitering in a Hot Topic. The scent of unburned sandalwood incense and baby powder and something unidentifiably candy-sweet wafted through the store as my friends and I would window shop for merchandise we could rarely buy. Sometimes we coveted clothing, or jewelry with glittery or spooky motifs, but it was almost always music.

I noticed, too, that the store had started stocking more LPs alongside the CDs. I don’t remember exactly how it transpired, only that I ended up with a clunky stereo from the ‘80s with a turntable on top, which was purchased from an ad in the paper. I especially loved the knee-high speakers we bought with it, that could seemingly blast away even the worst day of 8th grade. But I had very few records of my own to play, at least until I could start working in the summer. Something possessed me to start pilfering my parents’ from the shelf in the basement. I noticed After the Gold Rush, with its gloomy, grainy black-and-white cover, and deemed it promising: it didn’t look too suspect on the outside, at least. If any of my friends found tame, boring music in my room, it would be the end of my social life. Deep down, I must’ve known that these unspoken rules about what made something “cool” were not all that different from what the popular kids lived by; if I was truly free to be myself, I wouldn’t care. Still, I trekked upstairs with some trepidation, feeling like I was betraying something, defecting from my side.

The opening track, “Tell Me Why,” to my 14-year-old self, made me picture people singing around a fire at a sleepaway camp in the 1960s. The acoustic guitar was so clean and cheery, one could clap or tap a foot along without much practice. The vocal harmonies channeled something almost angelic. It evoked landscapes of sunny fields, forgotten times. All of this was a far cry from the drop-D tuning and distortion, the overt aggression and bluntness I was accustomed to. I slid the record back into its sleeve, and tucked the album covertly into the rest of my collection, between Dead Kennedys and System of a Down, and hoped no one saw it when they came over.

That summer, I woke up at six o’clock each morning to work on a tobacco farm, as my parents and grandparents, and most young people in my town, had done for generations. For ten weeks—or however many we could handle—we’d work eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, picking and drying tobacco leaves that would be used for high-end cigar wraps. I was excited: it meant I could spend my own, hard-earned money on music and clothes, and cheese fries at Denny’s with my friends.

Every morning, I walked about half a mile to the nearest major intersection in the early light, where I would wait with my lunch bag to be picked up by a decommissioned school bus painted blue. Everyone wore their most beat-up old clothes, myself included, meaning I could usually pass as a “normal kid” if my hair was tied back. It was strange stripping myself of the thing that felt so central to my identity at the time. We all looked the same, groggily boarding the bus that would carry us teenagers from our suburban neighborhoods, across the Connecticut River that divided us and the next town over, a farming community known for its great school district.

The bus wound down the dirt roads between the fields and belched us out near the barns. The family who owned the property then barked orders, and assigned our work for the day in small groups. A lot of us working at the tobacco farm were around my age, or a little older: mostly high schoolers, a population I’d be joining in a few months. Already in the fields when we arrived each day were the migrant workers, all from Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean, who lived on the property in tiny, run-down cottages. They would spend the summer, and return home at the end of the season, preceded by the weekly wire transfers of their checks supporting their families. There seemed to be a significant number of these workers, and yet, oddly, I felt like I hardly saw them: they always seemed to be working elsewhere, off in a different section of the field, concentrated in one corner of the barn. We never spoke to them.

The work was grueling and grotesque. It was July, and the heat was brutal; some worked out in the fields, directly under the sun—but I was lucky, and assigned to work in the sheds, which provided shade but not much else. Here, the broad, green leaves would be strung up on wooden laths with the aid of a pre-war contraption. With one leaf in each hand, we’d jam the thick stems up into a serrated blade that would thread a string through them, allowing the leaves to be hung and dried. Speed was a priority, and more than one kid was sent to the hospital because the blade went through their thumbs. The dirt floors of the barns were a fine, loose powder that would whirl up and land in our eyes, or mix with the sticky tobacco juice that dripped down our wrists, making a mascara on the hair of our arms.

The rafters of the barn were filling with leaves in varying stages of drying, acting as insulation that held in the summer heat. The air smelled like stale, unlit cigarettes. I was covered in filth and sweat, my biceps burning from the repetitive motion. I began complaining loudly about my misery. I was slowing down, clumsy with exhaustion, and not treating the leaves delicately enough; ripped tobacco leaves were useless. If anyone important came by, I surely would’ve been yelled at. I whined about just needing a break, which I knew would not be granted. One of the migrant workers walked over to my staton without a word, and began sewing my leaves for me. He was totally calm, and moved with a fluid efficiency that I could hardly fathom. With the exception of the trickle of sweat snaking down his dark neck, his work looked effortless. I watched silently, unsure of what was happening. Why was he at my machine? He finished three laths of work, just over a minute, then met my eye, nodded, and returned to his own machine across the barn. I managed a “thank you” a few seconds too late.

This moment happened almost 20 years ago, and yet it’s a memory that resurfaces often. I am left wondering now, as an adult, was this a gesture of kindness, because I was so young and a girl and the work was truly strenuous—or did he just want me to shut up and stop whining? Was his stoic silence in doing my work unprompted something symbolic that I’m still not sure I understand? I think of this moment most whenever I hear “Southern Man.” The obvious racial element, as well as the setting of a tobacco plantation perhaps makes for a facile observation. But this moment happened just shy of the 21st Century, several states north of the Mason-Dixon, and yet there was no scathing song critiquing the region I grew up in. Growing up, it was easy to criticize other places and pretend, with our cable TV and my bedroom full of cheap clothes and toys, that the truly distressed and backwards places were elsewhere, in geography and history. Meanwhile, a family in a picturesque New England town was bussing in children from the less desirable suburb across the river, and housing black international workers in “little shacks” to support their carcinogenic agribusiness.

One of the things I have grown to enjoy about After the Gold Rush is its understatedness. The almost-waltzy “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is deceptively, well, heartbreaking. The pain is all the more evident in its subtlety. The jubilance I thought I first heard in “Tell Me Why” is tempered with lyrics about alienation and hardship. Young’s voice is often characterized as “whiny,” even by a number of his fans. But it’s not quite true: it’s more urgent, mournful, exposed; at his highest pitches (in songs such as “After the Gold Rush” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”), his voice reads as almost a whimper, a plaintive insistence at singing a line that seems nearly too painful to voice. “I Believe in You” is haunting in its slow-brewing gloom. Young is sometimes pegged as the “Godfather of Grunge,” and only just recently have I come to believe it: the darkness evident in these songs is palpable to the careful listener—something I was not at 14. At that age, I would sometimes find the smooth gap between the grooves on the record, gently dropping the needle down from between my black-polished nails, and listen only to “Southern Man,” the song with the plainest message, the loudest guitar.

—Lisa Mangini

#75: James Brown, "Star Time" (1991)

Let’s get something out of the way: I am in no way the right person to evaluate James Brown, his life, or his musical legacy. Such a task should be treated much more carefully and gracefully in the hands of someone who knows more and knows better. I do not know better, I do not know much at all, but I think we can collectively agree that James Brown is one of our most gargantuan cultural icons and his legacy (also definite) is founded upon some of the greatest music in all of recorded history. His music is what music aims for.

The way I originally approached Star Time—a whopping 72-track, 4-disc compilation heavy in the years between 1964-1973—for the purposes of writing on it, was all wrong. I reserved 72 days for myself, promising (nay, dramatically vowing to myself) to listen to a track a day on repeat, to really glean its essence, like some kind of sonic vampire. I tend to over-dramatize tasks to make them more appealing when it comes around to actually completing them (lazy), and it usually pans out that my idea was dumb and impractical so I’ll utterly change course (mercurial). I planned to dig deep into each track and really come up with an idea to flesh out what each song “really means,” or to see how the track could play into with whatever mundane thing happened that day, to prove its universality or whatever. Oof. All wrong, friends.

First, there is no way I can work my way through each track on an individual basis. To do so would be to dismember a man’s career—his life—into individual parts, and this compilation is doing something different; it is experiential, it progresses, but it is never sequential. It is also not at all like an album (a fairly recent invention) in terms of conceptualization; there is no solid theme to constrain it nor any kind of obvious limitations that would result in a stricter curation. Second, to try to feel something specific or to respond with prescribed emotion once a day, like brushing teeth or taking pills, would reduce Star Time, in all its glory, to tedium. This compilation is one big 72-track high note that cannot be diminished nor “reacted” to; it is much more fluid and is felt holistically.

The other tactic I considered when writing this was to be much too succinct by simply saying “He sings real good.” Because MY GOD, HE SINGS SO GOOD. It would be so simple and also correct to leave it at that. And so easy, as this is my first bit of focused writing as I inch my way out of a jaded, post-MFA depression.

What I landed on is an exploration of a feeling. Instead of these extremes (saying too much or too little), what seems most right is to just feel it, the whole damn thing, all of soul music. And, like James Brown, I need to tell you how I feel. A word about soul:

I. A WORD ABOUT SOUL

Some things are holy. My gray cat peacefully gazing out the window, drenched in warm morning light. Fresh biscuits for a hangover. The roughness of my mother’s hands and how mine look and feel more like hers every year. That first gravitation to someone new—someone right, or even better, someone wrong. To be gin-drunk and lusty in the South, sweating, hips searching out hands in a smoky room with “Prisoners of Love” purring in the background. To be gin-drunk anywhere, held close and swaying. To move at all, to be moved, that is holiness. By holiness, I mean the nearly inexplicable quality of those moments and people and objects in our existence that bury themselves deep into the soul upon sensing them—that which moves us. These things are the raw material of soul, and we take them in every single day. James Brown’s soul music, his soul-annihilating and soul-nurturing music, is for the everyday.

For the past several months, I’ve been feeling my way through a dense fog. There is something incomprehensible about the way the world is slowly turning its gears, all its cruelty and simultaneous wonder. To a degree, I can explain what’s happening, the way it is happening on an individual, moment-to-moment basis. We pay attention to those things almost manically. It’s the big picture destruction that seems harder to grasp. The deepest sort of pain that turns us cruel—I cannot explain that kind of influence.

Then comes the despair I have known to associate with that fog. When I despair, I turn to soul—the balm to big-picture pain—because what can tell us what to do with pain better than dancing it away, at least momentarily? What should redeem our souls but soul? In his autobiography, Brown states, “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” So, I think I can confirm then that this piece is about dancing to James Brown. Sweet, holy, redemptive dancing. It’s about the truth of movement in a room.

A friend of mine, long ago during my undergraduate years, once used the phrase “Boogie Truth” during a discussion about the impetus and afterburn of dancing, specifically bar dancing on a Friday night once the school-week stress is on held on mute. Ultimately, the truth of dancing is sex—always sex, the reason and the effect. I agree, but I think sex is half the reason. The other half is pain. I dance because I’m hurting.

Star Time is the best example I can think of to demonstrate the Boogie Truth as I see it: sexy escapes rolling between waves of pain. Often the trickster, James Brown blends ballad with upbeat orchestrations, resulting in a sexy backdrop for his main lyrical truth: pain. Then, he gives us some organ-squealing, horn-stabbing interlude to ponder the next movement. How are we to solve such profound sadness? Well, let’s take it to the band. Listen to “There Was A Time”; my God, James Brown's voice is insane of course, but in this one, the tightness and energy of the band is unreal. Brown, ever the ruthless bandleader, ensures that each part of the complex unit remains effortless in its syncopated support of Brown’s squealing vocal performance. Demarcations between the two (instrumentation and vocals) often seem inextricable, as complex, feverish rhythms propel the lyrics into movement and vice versa. James Brown makes us move, and that is why he is the Godfather of Soul.

II. A WORD ABOUT THE GODFATHER

The King of Soul. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business (toured and performed hundreds of shows a year). Soul Brother No. 1. Mr. Dynamite. The Godfather of Soul.

With Star Time, we aren’t dealing with the “Best Of” or the greatest hits. This is a monster of a compilation, sure, and there is something to be said about a lack of modesty here, formally speaking. But James Brown’s lack of modesty, his braggadocio, is what makes him the Godfather: “I’m a greedy man” (“I’m a Greedy Man”); “I’ve got money and now I need love” (“I’ve Got Money”). To bear witness to the pipes of James Brown, even several decades removed from his peak, is a privilege. We do not deserve to have such a voice—a rusty belt slapping metal, sometimes syrupy sweet in its reverence for pain. At the beginning of “Devil’s Den,” Brown belts a lightning fast note that I can only compare to screeching brakes. His range is mythological. How the hell did he get all the way up there in that stratosphere?

A quick personal history of self-inflicted vocal training wounds: when I first started playing in a band, I’d scream into a pillow every night (because I heard a rumor that Tom Waits did this to get his throat all gravelly) with the very unrealistic hopes that I could train my vocal chords into hitting high-and-rough registers. What I got instead was a lot of pain and the inability to speak for two weeks. In many ways, what I’m getting at is pain. Pain is a universal, and I come to soul music bearing it openly without reservation.

I can’t talk about the musical legacy of James Brown, though, without addressing the eponymous “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.” This is more for me than it is for you. Brown has received much criticism over the years for being a misogynist, and this track is notorious for its quite literal proclamation of those attitudes. I feel a couple of ways about this song. (Surprise, surprise: more inner turmoil.) To try and see a thing within the context of capital-S Soul, long after Brown has departed from us, I want to draw attention to the last few sentences of this song: “He’s lost in the wilderness / He’s lost in bitterness.” The track ends with “He’s lost!”

I do believe in redemptive moments. I believe there are unique pathways into all of our beliefs and attitudes, no matter how problematic, and each one of those pathways is speckled with inalienable truths, like old gum, often grounded in pain and trauma. This trauma is felt individually, but it is shared culturally. What “He’s lost!” expresses to me (as I aim to feel this song on its own terms) is doubt. It feels like shame. In that way, I am learning something here and, because this song makes me a better thinker, I’ll never turn this track off, despite its grave offenses. What I am choosing to do with this song is to see its gum-speckled pathways, to feel what I perceive to be individual/collective pain, and in that way, James Brown becomes visionary for me. This may seem to more hard-lined individuals like a convoluted, roundabout way to permit certain art into my life, but it is not out of ignorance of the patriarchy, or toxic masculinity, or any of the other buzzwords or coined phrases that make it easier to talk about these very complicated things. For me, it’s about the Boogie Truth. The curation of my own life, my craft, and the art that influences it involves the recognition of all pathways and the openness to let it speak to me in ways that I find meaningful.

I could also talk about how many people James Brown wronged in his lifetime, about his penchant for misogyny and domestic violence (check out Cold Sweat: My Father James Brown and Me). I could explore his impoverished upbringing in the south, his six-year sentence after a high speed chase (“Public Enemy #1”), his social activism (“Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved,” “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud”), and his struggles with addiction (“King Heroin”).  But these truths can already be found in the music. And Star Time is ultimately about movement driven by pain, sin, pride, pleasure, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat. Repeat it until it sinks in and drives you to move. I think soul music operates in this way: it lays itself bare for the complete, inextricable range of feeling. Pain, ever the universal. Soul, always the cure:

Get up offa that thing, 
And dance 'till you feel better, 
Get up offa that thing, 
And try to release that pressure!

—Kori Hensell

#85: Aretha Franklin, "Lady Soul" (1968)

When I was seventeen, I met a boy—let’s call him Noah—a few days into February. A mutual friend set us up, claiming she had never met two people more perfect for one another. He sent me candy and a stuffed animal on Valentine’s Day and hid in my neighborhood so he could see my reaction, which my friend told me about later. He took me to dinners and movies and visited me during lunch at school. He taught me the rules of soccer so when I went to his games we could talk about them afterward. He held my hand in the hallways.

By March, Noah and I had stopped holding hands. At lunches I talked and he stayed quiet; he just barely said hello after his soccer games. Our dates stayed in his basement where we watched TV in silence. He didn’t laugh anymore around me.

In April, I asked him if he would still date me if I were 600 pounds. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to date a fat girl.” I asked him, “What about if I gained 60 pounds?” That was the first time he looked at me with hate in his eyes. “Did you not hear what I said? If you get fat, I’m done.”

Over the new few months, the hateful look in his eyes came back more and more often.

“Let’s just stay on the couch, where would we even go together?”

“We both know we’re not going to last, don’t be so upset about things that don’t matter in the long run.”

“Stop wearing so much makeup, it just makes you look trashy.”

“You eat so much.”

“I don’t want to kiss you anymore.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever love you. You’re just not a lovable person to me.”

With each thing he said, I got quieter. I was scared to say anything to him, to touch him, to see him. I thought if I stayed with him long enough he could like me again, maybe. But he broke up with me in August, and then we hugged for the first time in months.

*

That same month, I met another boy—let’s call him Brandon—a few days before leaving for my freshman year at college. He liked it when I called him Brandy, he said he loved listening to me, and he hated Noah. “You deserve so much better than him,” he always said.

Brandy went to school across the country but we didn’t stop talking. We sent good morning and goodnight texts and talked on the phone on the way to class. I joined an a cappella group and a sorority and made some of my best friends, while every night we FaceTimed and, very quickly, we fell in love from across the country. But at the end of the semester, he left his school unexpectedly.

We spent December wrapped up in one another, smiling.

Brandy started working in the spring, digging trenches in Colorado for six hours a day, while I sat in classes and got lunch with friends and laughed. By the end of February, though, he said, “I just don’t like talking to you when you drink, can you stop?” I didn’t know what he meant—stop drinking or stop talking to him. “I guess both, whatever you choose. I just don’t like you when you drink.” So I stopped drinking, hoping he’d still love me.

As the spring continued, Brandy began to call me every few hours. He cried more often than not, it seemed, and he said he couldn’t live without me. “You’re the reason I get up in the morning,” he said. “I need you to need me like I need you. Don’t you love me? Don’t you need me too?”

And because I loved him, I decided then that I needed him. I talked to him for hours and hours everyday, telling my friends at school that I didn’t feel like going out anymore, that I didn’t want to, that I needed to talk to Brandon. I got quieter.

In May, Brandon and I were reunited again, after four straight months of being apart. He stopped smiling by the second week of the month.

“You want to hang out too much.”

“You’re suffocating me.”

“I love you less.”

I stayed quiet.

By the end of the month, we both agreed we weren’t good together anymore. I lay in bed and cried for a month; I wrote about how lost I felt. I didn’t know who I was without him. I needed him.

*

Listening to Lady Soul for the first time now, I keep thinking about these two relationships. Aretha sings of getting cheated by the men she loved, and I have always felt cheated too. “You tell me to leave you alone,” she says, in “Chain of Fools,” and I can almost hear both Noah and Brandon saying those things to me. I wish I had listened to Aretha back then, instead of crying for days, even weeks, after those breakups. I wish I had listened to “Good to Me As I Am to You” and really thought about how I let myself be treated. How I gave myself up so I could be loved, and unloved, badly.

But listening to it now, I feel Aretha’s words coursing through my veins. I feel them pump through my heart, straighten my spine, clear my head. They envelop me.

And “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” makes me feel whole, especially knowing the man I’ve been seeing for a year now.

I’m not ashamed of him, so we can use his real name: Ian. A little over a year ago, a mutual friend set us up for a date at Chili’s, which neither of us thought would amount to anything. We lived in different states, I was going abroad in a couple days, and we didn’t go to the same school. It would be too hard to stay in contact after just one date.

But we smiled the entire night. We ate fajitas and talked about how much we love Arizona and started inside jokes we still laugh about now. He asked to see me again, and again, and again, and then we had spent three days straight together with neither of us realizing how much time had gone by. It felt like three years and three minutes all at once.

Then I went abroad for two months, but we talked every day and he said how much he couldn’t wait to see me when I got back. He listened to me when I told him about my adventures abroad, and he really listened. Every night that I got to talk to him made the night feel as bright as daylight. When I came back, he visited me in Williamsburg; it felt like I had never left. He met my friends and I met his; he taught (and is still teaching) me the rules of football and about how he films the games; he held me tight when I told him about my past relationships. I told him I’d have a lot of anxieties in our relationship because of my past ones, and he said he’d do anything to help me. “Anything to make you happy,” he said, and still says.

Early on in our relationship, I asked him if he would still date me if I were 600 pounds. “Of course,” he said, laughing a little, “how you look doesn’t change how I feel about you. But I’d try to help you lose weight because that’s just not healthy.”

I also asked him if he minded that I drank. “Not at all,” he said, “what you do is up to you.”

We said we love each other a few months into the relationship, but we also say we started falling in love at Chili’s. “It was a little love,” we say.

*

I have never felt love the way I love him, and I have never felt love the way he loves me. And I have never felt love the way I love myself, now.

Ian has driven almost four hours just to hold my hand after a terrible week, and I have done the same for him. He has encouraged me to speak when I get scared and quiet, especially when it’s with something about our relationship. He encourages me to write, to sing, to spend time with friends, to eat whatever my heart desires. He says I’m the most lovable person he’s ever met. And after a year of dating, he still says he can’t wait to see me again, even when we’re falling asleep next to one another.

But I think Aretha Franklin would like, even more, that I have learned to treat myself better. I’ve learned to respect myself. I told Ian explicitly that if he wasn’t okay with the things I’ve been through and how I make my decisions, he could leave. He stayed, and I have stayed, too. I sing love songs to myself when I drive, I wear as much makeup as I want, I tell Ian I can’t talk sometimes because I’m with family or friends, I make time to remind myself of the good things about me.

I know I’m lovable, because I love myself.

I wish I had known about Aretha Franklin and Lady Soul when I was younger, but I am just grateful to know it now. Aretha, if you’re hearing any of my words, know that I have heard yours. Know that we, both, are here to stay ourselves, with the love that we have always deserved.

—Nicole Efford

#77: AC/DC, "Back in Black" (1980)

Like rock ‘n’ roll itself, AC/DC’s Back In Black can feel like a gallery of clichés.

The album after the lead singer drinks himself to death; the rich kid savant producer who gives rock this loud a polar sharpness; lyrics with the wattage of an older sibling’s encouragement; lyrics with the loving stupidity of an older sibling’s advice; drums so warm they almost breathe; the GOAT all-black album cover; 1980 Leo season made real (US release date: July 25), a Mobius strip of White Anglophone nonsense and bravado that helped forge the commercial culture of the decade as much as Reagan’s creaky old smile did; loud, clear, fun, inescapable, shallow, pure.

Funny thing is, clichés happen. The child of a prosperous South African engineer and a German heiress, producer Robert “Mutt” Lange really does have a remarkable gift for clarifying rock: smaller studio amps to control Malcolm & Angus Young’s guitars; a prodigious number of takes; wiping the background clear of clutter so that the sounds people are paying money for, power chords and more power chords, soar.

The replacement for the deceased Bon Scott, Brian Johnson, really did go from journeyman to lead singer on the most popular rock album of all time. Johnson’s voice, once thought too high, even harsh, compared to Scott’s, now sounds predestined for these songs. Johnson’s voice scratches at lines, wails and snaps. The levity is there too. Listen to how he changes the refrain slightly at the end of “Hell’s Bells,” from “Oh” to “Aw, hell’s bells!” like he’s just dropped something.

But you get it. You don’t need a hagiography. Even if you can’t stand a single second of the music, if you’re reading this, you’re involved. Back in Black is like caffeine, capitalism, love, and the devil: even if you don’t believe in it, it believes in you.

Maybe a snippet of “You Shook Me All Night Long” (the shouted “YOU” that starts the chorus?) pings around in your own brain’s compartments, you having been in concrete stadiums, having sat through movie trailers and a battalion of sports promo packages in this life, having been subjected to AC/DC’s ersatz followers, laughable hair metal runoff.

Maybe it’s closer to you. Maybe you lifted weights to Back in Black or routinely closed up a short-order kitchen with it. Maybe you had a pedantic older sibling who put “Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” on a mixtape a few months ago, couldn’t change it now, and would be goddamned if he’ll listen to Ace of Base while he drives you home.

*

Like a cursed or enchanted object, I don’t know how or when AC/DC’s Back In Black arrived in my life exactly.

I know I have had my own copy since college, having bought the CD at Encore on South State in Ann Arbor. I ripped it onto my desktop and have been ferrying those files from desktop to laptop to iPhone in the decade since. I know that much.

Listening to music and writing about it was close to a daily activity for me then. I worked on the college newspaper. It was my extremely intense and very important job to provide 500 words on Interpol or Ludacris or to cover a show at the Blind Pig. My friend, two years older, the music editor, would feed me albums I had missed or had never even heard: Autechre’s Amber, Television’s Marquee Moon, Spoon’s Girls Can Tell.

For a happy while, and with a pronounced peak at the time when I bought my own copy of Back in Black, I wager I was spending nearly every waking hour either listening to music to write about it or reading a book to write about it.

I didn’t need to work an actual, full-time campus job. I fell in with no student organization outside of the paper. I was out of state, with more than a minor tendency toward happy isolation, and I was churning through more media (though I certainly would have said “art” then and yes I was the worst) at a more ruthless, hungry pace than I have since.

AC/DC cut through the churn. Without the self importance of Led Zeppelin, without the sleeve-tat-bro-pout of Metallica, with the fun of ABBA, with the right kind of a Little Richard obsession, AC/DC and Back in Black kept making itself necessary to my life.

Before I realized it, the album had the same effect on me as coffee in the morning and cold beer in the afternoon. Get up, tidy the apartment, walk to class, deadlift this, errand running, read that, a quick repast with a friend to down a whiskey before moving on to the second half of the night, a chapter for which you want to be properly energized, a little loose but keyed in (“I’m tryin’ to walk a straight line / on sour mash and cheap wine”), all of it enhanced by “Hell’s Bells” or “Back in Black,” or—saints preserve me—“Let Me Put My Love Into You.”

The album’s pulse hit me at just the right time. As an English major interested in—shocker—intense early 20th century poets, ashy, sealed-off indie rock made in a cabin sounded like music made for a cabin. I was 22. I had enough frustration with Byzantium and Ariel. AC/DC fit.

I loved a drink, enjoyed loud-ass conversations and parlous decisions. They were all verve and performance, the minute of warm, anticipatory drums at 3:20 on “Shoot To Thrill” sounding like the heartbeat of a gigantic, friendly animal, the drums building to Johnson’s sizzling vocal fit, a pure version of the thing done to death, the rock star who just can’t even handle the words right now, howling and breathing with want.

Outside of rap, the music that surrounded me in early, middle-school adolescence was reflective of the private day school in which I spent my days: white, wan, and believing itself to be both more engaging and progressive than, you know, those other schools. Lots of discussions in which sixth graders were trusted with ‘big ideas.’ A few older draconian lacrosse players. Clinton-era achievements.

Dave Matthews and Phish, those were the two that I remember most. I remember what felt like their hegemonic control over my classmates, especially the cool ones. To me, that music sounded like artisanal paste or a FREE TIBET sticker on a zebra-striped Range Rover, or “the only people for me are the mad ones” printed on anything.  These bands had electrified instruments and beating hearts and this was what they made?

Maybe I let it get to me too much, but that complacent odor, that blasé, baked-on vibe, that all seemed to come from the music my peers loved. I think that aura helped drive me from home, out of that school, made me wary of the idea of “chill.” I could have used Back in Black then.

So, for me, that’s the most clichéd thing about Back in Black. The energy I wanted my life to have—bullshit as a desire like that is—runs through the best parts of an album so accomplished, so inescapable, that my desires aren’t even my desires anymore. My own petty passing facts aren’t so different from a million other coming-of-age narratives soundtracked by this exact album. And isn’t that just the biggest rock cliché you’ve ever heard.

—Evan McGarvey

#78: Otis Redding, "Otis Blue" (1965)

Poor Otis, dead and gone
Left me here to sing his song
Pretty little girl with the red dress on
Poor Otis, dead and gone

- The Doors, “Runnin’ Blue” (1969)

That was Jim Morrison’s crass eulogy for Otis Redding, recorded about a year after Redding died in 1967. It introduced one of the weakest songs on one of the Doors’ weakest albums—not much of a legacy for “Poor Otis.” Thankfully, the Doors were not the only ones to memorialize Redding in song. His protégé Arthur Conley recorded “Otis, Sleep On,” which rhymes “heaven” and “Redding” in its opening couplet. Wilson Pickett re-wrote Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John” as “Cole, Cooke and Redding,” casting Otis in the JFK role. But the Doors’ homage stands out for its sheer presumption, as though Redding had named them his musical executors. I recognize this same presumption in myself at this moment, as I appoint myself the one left here to sing the song of Otis Blue. John Milton, writing of Shakespeare in 1630, asked why there should be any stone or marble monument for him: “What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?” Otis Redding, too, needs not the Doors’ weak witness or my own. Still, Milton wrote his poem, and I will have my unnecessary say as well.

There are more than ten Otis Redding LPs in my collection, but Otis Blue is not one of them. That’s not for lack of trying on my part. When I was discovering soul music in 1979, all of Redding’s original releases had been deleted from the catalog. Only two compilations were in print, but hearing those convinced me I needed to own the rest. I managed to secure used copies of many of his albums, but Otis Blue never turned up. This platter’s elusiveness was particularly frustrating since Paul Gambaccini’s Rock Critics’ Choice: The Top 200 Albums (1978) identified it as Redding’s best: #23 out of 200. The Immortal Otis Redding was at #33, and had the two Redding factions formed a single voting bloc, he might have risen even higher on the list. (That book’s canonization of Otis Blue, I suspect, is responsible for its exalted position on the Rolling Stone 500.) Fortunately, nine of the eleven songs on Otis Blue were also on the two-LP Best of Otis Redding (1972), so I got most of its contents indirectly. Now, of course, Otis Blue can be had instantly via Spotify, or in a deluxe CD reissue, or even, for about $250 on eBay, in its original format as Volt Records S-412 (condition: Excellent).

Otis Blue would be lovely to own, but it is not Redding’s best album. That honor, surely, goes to The History of Otis Redding, a flawless compilation of singles released just prior to his death (and thus prior to “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”). Otis Blue, Redding’s third LP, was his finest to date, however, and it does include two of his greatest songs: his original, pulsating version of “Respect” and the searing ballad “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Aretha Franklin, incidentally, tried her hand at the second of these songs as well, but that cover would not have led Redding to say (as he reportedly did of her “Respect”), “that girl done stole my song.” The Rolling Stones also covered “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” but no one—not even Jerry Butler, who co-wrote it—could take this song from Redding. Redding’s fifth album was called The Dictionary of Soul, and the liner notes to Otis Blue also venture a definition of that term (“an intensely dramatic performance by a singer, projected with such feeling that it reaches out and visibly moves the listener”), but one could simply offer “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” as Exhibit A and leave it at that. It is the archetypal soul ballad, and its alternation between power and vulnerability is endlessly fascinating and moving, most notably on the way Redding slowly glides up to a high A on “You are tiiiiiiired,” lingering on a dissonant G# against the tonic while he decrescendos at the same time. Jagger’s falsetto version sounds embarrassingly feeble in comparison. Aretha wisely does something different entirely at that point in the song, knowing she could not improve upon perfection.

Mention of the Rolling Stones here may seem impertinent, but their rise and Redding’s were intertwined. They were very early adopters of his music, recording “Pain in My Heart” and “That’s How Strong My Love Is” in addition to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” all in 1965. Redding returned the favor on Otis Blue with a rollicking version of “Satisfaction.” Redding recorded the song only a couple of months after the Stones did, and his version is a blistering rave-up that runs roughshod over the original lyrics. He would take a similar approach to “Day Tripper” the following year.

In fact, it turns out that most of Otis Blue is covers. Along with “Satisfaction,” Redding offers his versions of songs by Solomon Burke (“Down in the Valley”), William Bell (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”), B. B. King (“Rock Me Baby”), and the Temptations (“My Girl”). In addition, he included no fewer than three songs by Sam Cooke: “Shake,” “Wonderful World,” and “A Change is Gonna Come.” Cooke had been shot to death six months earlier, and Redding was perhaps feeling that Cooke had left him here to sing his songs. This was not mere opportunism, however; he had already included songs by Cooke on each of his first two albums. The homage was heartfelt, and Redding’s gruffness adds a distinctive edge to Cooke’s smooth facility. Still, “Otis Sings Sam” is not a foolproof formula. “Shake” works well, perhaps because its lyrics are fairly trivial (e.g., “Ding-a-ling-a-ling / Honey, shaking is the latest thing”). On “Wonderful World,” however, Redding’s frequent interpolations add little (“I don’t know much about my history” spoils the original’s spare opening), and on “A Change is Gonna Come,” Redding robs the song of some its bite. Not only does he omit the anti-segregation verse (“I go to the movie, and I go downtown / But somebody keep tellin’ me, don’t hang around”), he also rewrites Cooke’s bitter bridge:

Then I go to my brother
And I say, “Brother, help me please”
But he winds up knockin’ me
Back down on my knees

becomes the less confrontational, more sentimental

There’s a time, I would go to my brother
I’ve asked my brother, “will you help me please?”
He turned me down, and then I asked my little mother
I said, “Mother…,” I said, “Mother, I’m down on my knees!”

As a teenager I preferred the unvarnished, impassioned singing of Otis and Aretha to the more restrained, string-laden style of Sam Cooke, but now I think I was partly deceived by surfaces.

Speaking of surfaces, Otis Blue is a great title. One wonders why the label felt the need to add the bet-hedging subtitle, Otis Redding Sings Soul. Evidently “soul” was a selling point they wanted to emphasize. His previous LP had been Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, and his next one would be The Soul Album. “Otis Blue,” in contrast, hearkens back to Ray Charles’s brilliant The Genius Sings the Blues (1961) and perhaps even to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959). Blues, however, even kind-of blues, was not what young, African American record-buyers were purchasing in the mid-sixties, and with the exception of “Rock Me Baby” Otis Blue does explicitly not lay claim to the blues tradition. Then again, neither does Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971). There’s not a 12-bar blues or AAB verse to be found there, but that album, like its cover art, is saturated in blue. And if you are fortunate enough to own both Blue and Otis Blue, you might notice that the heavy-lidded blonde women on their covers look remarkably similar.

—Will Pritchard