#474: Manu Chao, "Proxima Estacion: Esperanza" (2001)

I can remember the palpable air of anticipation we felt at the end of the 90s, how impossibly important it sounded when people on TV chattered on and on about the coming millennium. Automatic gravitas: we talked about 1999 in terms of how we would party, but gave a sort of mystical deference to the following year. It was always the starchy, formal reference—“The Year Two-Thousand”—or that epithet, “The New Millennium.” Easy to forget, but in their pomp, those terms carried the swagger only the future (and its ever-present promises) could ever walk with.

Despite ourselves, there was a tangible sense that big changes were in the works if we could only make it there. In 1999, even Mos Def felt compelled to express that most basic urge to stay alive in terms of wanting to make it across the line: four MCs murdered in the last four years / I ain’t trying to be the fifth, the Millennium is here. On other fronts, all the Doomsday Preppers had whipped themselves into the Y2K frenzy, and one or two of them could always be seen frothing at the mouth in your neighborhood grocery store, hunched over a shopping cart full of dented cans. In March of 1999, The Matrix premiered, and we were all transfixed, certain that what we had seen was fiction, and that it was oh so relevant because somewhere, at that very moment, someone was designing a race of machines to rule us all (just as you ought to be sure that some disappointed weirdo is doing it now). Shit was thick: End Times wasn’t (and probably isn’t) an entirely ridiculous suggestion. And up from that weird trough of chaos came what?

Manu Chao’s wild, sad, rich, and occasionally cacophonic second album Próxima Estación: Esperanza emerged from a world obsessed with its own end (under the strong assumption at the hands of the machines it created). Esperanza blew up all across Europe in 2000—and finally hit the US in 2001, where it achieved moderate success, which, if you think about it, is astounding in and of itself. Where on earth do we place Spanish-born/French-raised, hardcore unblinking and unapologetic left-of-leftist badass Manu Chao and his second record in the context of the history of the New World, or even just America—let alone within the context of the Anglo-heavy Rolling Stone 500?

Best guesses:

One (thumb)

What do you reckon? I say it’s the case that a jury room full of old-ass founding fathers would’ve loved Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, ate their hearts out, even; that they would have been happy to give either album the Number One Spot on their own Exhaustive Magnum Opus List of great albums; they would’ve gasped and squealed with delight the first time they heard the intro to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” or saw a bunch of British people acting like jackasses because their day jobs afforded such creative license in a time of Cold War and leisure. Imagine it: me, you, Brian Wilson, John & Yoko, and Benjamin Franklin, tipsy, tripping maybe, and square-center of the petting zoo, desperately trying to cobble together a plan of where to go next.

Two (index and middle)    

This much I’m sure: all them frail-old-dead-presidents’ eyes would have been glittered over with proud grandpapa tears (no doubt to be dabbed at with a lacy kerchief and a stiff upper lip air of dignity); and then in self-consciousness, they’d sniff and blow their noses, and they’d chuckle and congratulate each other: haw-haw, what a country we have made. Benjamin Franklin would pour everyone another glass of Madeira and they’d sing God knows what—“He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and other gentleman songs. They’d marvel and say, Rock ‘n’ Roll: what a gorgeous thing we have wrought.

Three (thumb, index, middle)    

The founding fathers are, of course, the epitome of the stone gathering moss. Jefferson’s big-ass-rock-at-Monticello gathered enough moss to leave his kin with six-figure debt in an age of five-figure personal finance (the President’s salary was $25,000 at that time—still more than the average line cook or barista with a law degree makes now). Thomas Jefferson, with his deep personal failures of ethics and finance, still did a lot of productive rabble-rousing at least. He might well be the best of the bunch in that regard—and the coexisting truth is that in some very important human ways, he sets a very low bar, indeed.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Four (thumb, index, middle, ringless-ring)

Now this is important to point out as well: them salty old horsemeat sandwiches beat the British and gave us a platform on which we had room to change things and build a badass country. But, each in his own way was as much a cruel, cowardly, lucky piece of shit as any un-human critter has ever walked and breathed. That’s a fact.

Five (thumb, index, middle, ringless-ring, pinky)

Leaving behind the long-term past for only a moment, you might know that they call Manu Chao “El Tarzan de Catalunya,” and that he often goes about his business without a shirt. See it as your weird, Everybody Loves Raymond-watching uncle saw it in the 90s: Woody Guthrie speaking French, Arabic, Portuguese, Italian, and, most often, Spanish, travelling extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean, with no interest in mineral or oil rights. A dictator persecuted his family. He openly and fully supports the Zapatistas, and is rumored by the Internet to be friends with Gogol Bordello. Utter chaos.

And so Próxima Estación: Esperanza lands at #474 on the list, no one willing to commit to anything other than the importance that the album be allowed to exist while everyone waxes nostalgic about the first time they heard The Who. Problematically, it (arguably) isn’t even Manu Chao’s best work.

Próxima Estación: Esperanza might not have the grit of Chao’s first album, Clandestino, but it’s going to stay iconic for a reason. If Pet Sounds sits fat and puffy at the top of the pile with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, we can forgive Esperanza’s tendency to play around so many sounds, because it takes a travelling Spaniard to tells us what to make of our neighbors, of ourselves, of the new world order and the New World. It takes the Merry Blues to sound like the Americas, and it takes an unspeakable hubris to think a magazine list curated by accountants could ever do justice to Manu Chao or “his wild-ass greatness.”

And to be sure: these days, there’s lots of HOPE ‘08 bumper stickers, faded from winter salt and rain. The legacy of drone-killings and an unchecked surveillance state are things we’re going to have to grapple with for a long time yet. Mexico and Brazil, even with unspeakable oil wealth, still falter. Chile, post-Pinochet, has emerged as one of the happiest, least-corrupt places on the planet. Argentina won’t take the national jet out of the country on account of bad debts and fear of repossession by their foreign creditors. Everywhere you look, the map of the new world outpaces our ability to wrap our mind around it quick enough to adjust.

We’re trying desperately to cobble together a coherent vision, a plan of what to do next. There’s no precedent, no blueprint for this. Manu Chao, however, still pops up every now and again to play a show in front of the Maricopa County Jail in Arizona, to sing “Clandestino” acoustic and majestic. He’s got grit, and he’s got great-ass wildness; he’s got the deep sadness, and still sleeps on people’s floors. He’s goofy, righteous, and spectacularly cool. He is, in the broadest, grandest sense, what that every American kid in the 90s wanted so badly to become as we tried to navigate the sense of danger and big deeds the millennium would bring. Go on: put the poster on your wall. It says, next station: hope. We need that shit bad here in the future.

—Aaron Fallon

#475: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "Armed Forces" (1979)

Dear Women For Whom I Made Mixtapes Between the Years 1996 and 2005:

I’m 38 years old, which plants me firmly in middle age. You too, I suppose, although when I think of you all, you are still your twenties selves, past the naivety of the teenaged years but not yet into the carried weight of our thirties, with its mortgages and retirement funds and, for some of you, children.

If you’re like me (and I suppose that romantic pasts imply at least a little similarity between us), then nowadays, you think often about being older. There are the regrets of recognizing that certain avenues are closed off, of what might have happened if only someone had said or done a certain thing. There’s the realization of doing old-person-type things for the first time: wincing at how loud a movie is, starting a sentence with “nowadays.” And there’s gratitude, too, a thankfulness for having grown up in the time that we did, an understanding of how lucky we were to feel the wind in our hair while riding a bike helmetless, how lucky we were to have found out what sex was slowly, rather than discovering all its possibilities and terrors from the front page of RedTube.

Music was a physical thing for us, too, sold in stores and through 12 CDS FOR A PENNY magazine ads. We had mixtapes, first on cassette and later on CD. I miss them a lot. My friends now do year-end playlists on Spotify and in .zip files, and I download them, but I miss the joy of opening the mail to find that package bulging with possibilities, a tape or disc of songs I knew, songs I didn’t know, songs about which I’d only heard rumors.

(I know that I am in full nostalgia mode with you now; forgive me. I’m not prone to thinking about you, happily married as I am, but I have never made my wife a mixtape, and so this territory is yours.)

But those mixtapes were fanboy-to-fanboy, designed to wow and amaze not with emotion but with rarity. Unknown bands and the B-sides of import singles, the results of digging through racks of CDs in used stores until the tips of our fingers were black from a slowly accumulating dirt, digging for that which we knew had never been heard—these were our pursuits before Napster came along and rendered it all irrelevant. Once you could download someone’s entire collection in a few hours, the point of those racks vanished.

The mixtapes for you, though—they were an art unto themselves. I labored over them for hours, far beyond the 80 or 90 minutes that the formats could hold (never the 120 minute tapes, which held so much that they would eventually, too soon, break under the strain; I’d make a metaphor of them and our relationships if I’d used them, but I didn’t). I would stand in front of my collection and think carefully about what I wanted the tape to say about me. Then, I’d cue a song, press record, and begin.

Because this is what I believed about myself in those days: that I was what I consumed. What I watched, what I read, what I listened to most of all—these were the things that I believed I was. This is why I worked so hard on those tapes—because I was giving myself, I thought, to you. This is why I have never made a mixtape for my wife.

When I think of you, I am sorry for things—sometimes for how I treated you, and sometimes for believing in you. I am sorry for my youthful pretension, and most of all in that pretension, I am sorry for all the Elvis Costello songs on those mixtapes. You see, I loved him, all of him. In my collector’s obsession, I tracked down the reissued albums (the ones with all the bonus songs), the limited edition EPs and box sets, the albums he did with country musicians and jazz musicians and even the terrible concept album with the string quartet. You saw me in contact lenses in those years, but when I took them out at night, I wore glasses like his, glasses that are in fashion in 2014 but felt like my secret connection to him back then.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

I’m sorry for the Elvis Costello songs not because they are bad music—I can make a great argument for his first five albums and a decent argument for the next seven. I’m sorry because they’re songs about being a young man motivated solely by jealousy and lust (as Costello said he was in those days), and because I decided that four or five minutes of my love letters to you needed to be occupied by that.

The original title of his third album, Armed Forces, was Emotional Fascism. I knew that, and I still thought that its songs stood for me. I saw the cover art, tinted green through the trademark Rykodisc CD case, and its stampeding elephants felt like my heart, charging forward. It’s only now that I realized they were trampling everything in their path.

The cover art didn’t matter because I didn’t put the cover art on the tape. What mattered were the songs you heard, and they’re wonderful songs—the leadoff of “Accidents Will Happen” (“used to be a victim / now you’re not the only one”) into Steve Nieve’s majestic piano chords ringing out in “Oliver’s Army” (I would rather be anywhere else / than here today”). “Party Girl” and “Moods For Moderns” and closing the album with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”—the whole album is tightly wrought with furious playing and sneering lyrics and a stance of defiance that resonated so strongly with me that when I heard them, my body felt like a bell had rung right next to it.

That undercurrent, though, of resentment and fear and disdain (“you can please yourself / but somebody’s gonna get it”)—that should have been a warning to us. A warning that I didn’t know what I was doing, a warning that I too might have been far motivated by jealousy and lust than I understood. Fascism requires a fanatic audience, and I was ready to put on the uniform.

I should have put Armed Forces aside. I should have put on an extra R.E.M. song, or something from Nirvana’s Unplugged, or something that said anything besides I am capable of terribleness in love. I didn’t. But regret is another middle-aged tendency.

I still listen to Elvis Costello now, but I don’t need him the way I once did. Something’s changed, maybe in me, maybe in him, maybe in the way neither of us is an angry young man these days. After Armed Forces, Elvis Costello and the Attractions made a twenty-song tribute to their love of American soul music called Get Happy! These days, it’s my favorite of his albums. It’s not me, though. I get that now.

As I get older, I find nostalgia’s pull a strange thing. I hear music I hated in college and feel a joy in remembering those days of hating it. And so even though you and I didn’t end well, for whatever reason, I hope that if your Pandora station brings up “Chemistry Class” or the spectacular live version of “Accidents Will Happen,” you think of good times. Like Elvis sang on a later album, I hope you’re happy now; the difference between me and him is that I mean it.

Sincerely,

Colin

—Colin Rafferty

#476: The Notorious B.I.G., "Life After Death" (1997)

Like many people, you wish the first time had been a little different. You can't choose much in this life: your future favorite song comes on in an elevator while you're with three fat strangers and nobody you love, and that's what goes down in history.

Or you're crying on the curb outside a Wendy's on your very worst day of that whole year, while some methed-out lost cause from high school rolls by again and again, cruising the loop and making you hear every other thirty seconds of “Hypnotize.” And whichever boy it was that made you hurt and sent you running to the fast food parking lot will be lost to the sands of time, but the most kickass rapper in human history will be marked with and followed by that mood, like a pirate curse or invisible ink. It's like your stupid little sister always said—it's so random, and you'll never get another shot at discovering Biggie again.

For the rest of your life—when you're at the dentist, or too boozed up to drift off, or hitting every red light on the way to get your daughter from daycare—you’ll think about how you would have scripted it differently.

You could have learned Life After Death so many other, lovelier ways. Like lying on your bellies in your torn t-shirts sniffing Aidan's model railroad glue. Like parking by the river with Hailey Gunn and being gangster in the middle of a thunderstorm. So many gorgeous un-had moments. So many wasted, pissed-away, potentially perfect afternoons.

Instead, a week after you hear half of the one song, Daniel, your biology partner—all assholery and shiny acne—plays you the whole thing on his boom box while ignoring your DNA model and trying so hard to accidentally touch your ass. Oh, you don't know this shit yet? It's so boss. Let me lay some knowledge on you, baby girl.

You will always regret some things. The people who say they don’t are smug idiots, lying at least a little. You have begun to make peace with some of the things you know you couldn't or wouldn't have changed, like the neck tattoo that got you noticed but broke your mother’s heart. But you will never stop wishing you'd stood up off the curb and wiped your snot-face and run out and bought the album, taken it home that same day and read the glossy booklet while you ate Twizzlers (Cherry Twists) and nestled your head into the deep green carpet of your bedroom floor, drunk in each word, bass thump, and mic spit, everything sounding like the birth of the whole dirty old world.

Your favorite song from the album will continue to revolve over the years, of course, as it must, just like your favorite liquor and who you love—these things should not be static. “Hypnotize” to “Kick in the Door” to “Nasty Boy” to “Sky's the Limit.” You had your “Mo Money, Mo Problems” phase, certainly, but have come to believe it's a touch overrated. These days it warms your belly to dote on the looked-over tracks, the deep cuts and little-respected gems. Your therapist would have something to say about that, no doubt. You’re a sucker for a slow starter that grows on you with each listen.

For now, you believe with all your being that there's no better Biggie song than the twenty-first track from the worst disc of his best work. Lyrically, it's sort of a hateful thing, if you're honest with yourself. Puff Daddy guests, and he says he dates 'em like he hates 'em and treats 'em like he beats 'em, but it's so confusingly smooth. That melody carries a whole lot of sweetness inside it, hides a lot of the horror and hurt.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

And you can't help but love that the first line of the song is the world is filled with pimps and hoes, but the title is just “The World is Filled . . .”

You take a bath. You take a lot of baths, let your mind wander, shave your legs with expensive cream. You have daydreamed that Daniel will die before you. Not that you want him gone—he's not a bad guy, but you could have done so much better and didn’t and won’t. You’ve dreamed that he'll go first and you'll spend the days after that with your music and the memories it drags along behind like tin cans trailing behind the getaway car squealing away from the wedding.

You can remember exactly where you were when the first plane hit the building, and also that you were listening to Tom Petty. Not Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, just Tom all on his own. When you first heard “In Bloom” you were washing the dog, and you listened to all of In Utero—ten years too late—while chain-smoking menthol Basics and driving North to Seattle: how perfectly goddamn perfect. You've made love thirteen times while listening to The Wall, three of those on shuffle.

When you found out that Biggie died two weeks before Life After Death came out, you were standing in the grocery store trying to decide whether or not to steal a box of Ritz crackers while two girls gossiped the next aisle over. They thought the irony was hilarious, but you did not at all. Ha ha ha ha, one of them said, like an ugly horse, the last song on the album is called “You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You).” You have not forgiven those girls and you don't intend to.

You might have heard your favorite song for the first time in your best friend's basement, her hand darting out to flick the volume knob down every time her mom came down to change out the laundry just as a swear was coming. That might have been a good way, a good thing to be able to remember it by—really nice, but not sentimental or over-extravagant.

They never did make a video for that one, which makes you a little sad. So you just put on one of the others and mute it, soundtrack the thing yourself. The words don't match his mouth, of course, but so what? Whose do? The images still work. He's in a speedboat in the Florida Keys, where you always wanted to go and always didn't. He's at the barbershop, he's in a jail cell, his friend cannonballs into his private pool. It sure is, Biggie, you think. This world is so fucking filled.

—Eric Thompson

#477: Merle Haggard, "Down Every Road" (1996)

Dear M.,

I took that online New York Times dialect quiz a few months ago, and it placed me right in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was “lawyer” that gave me away. Unlike most of the nation, I pronounce the word phonetically, as “law-yer.” “Law-yer” with “lightning bug” and “Coke” and a three-syllable “caramel” all washes into the Tennessee valley city.

But whenever I travel and it comes up that I’m from Tennessee, New Englanders (trust me, it’s usually New Englanders) say, “You don’t have an accent!” Sometimes, they follow it up with “Are you hiding it from us on purpose?” or, if they’re feeling extra generously exploitative, “Could you do one?” I’ve often wondered what they expect—a genteel drawl that washes up on the ear like the coast of Carolina? or my best Barney Fife? a reenactment of In the Heat of the Night?

Whenever I’ve been asked to do a southern accent for someone else’s entertainment, I think about my father-in-law who, when I first met him, I couldn’t understand, despite the fact that he lived in North Georgia, only thirty minutes from where I grew up. My future husband took me to the trailer one weekend where his dad sat on the couch shirtless while he crushed several Mountain Dews, swallowed a sleeve of chalky Goody’s Powder, and chain-smoked Kools. I sat in an easy chair, nodded when it seemed appropriate, and eyed the disassembled Chevelle on blocks in the front yard. It took me several visits before I began to understand him, before I realized that the motorcycle “had a bitch-seat for an old lady” and that, when a cat did figure-8s between my legs out in the driveway, I should “pat the pussy.”

Once, when a friend’s Massachusetts family asked me to do an accent, I thought of my father-in-law’s then—smoke-weary, consonant-choked. I said to them what he always says, said, “I heard that.” I hurrrdat.

*

I slept every night as a kid with the country music station on, but I never heard or dreamed of you, Merle. It was pop country, but it was the only country I knew. My father thought it was the only safe option, the only music that would instill in me the American love of nation, family, and god. Back then, however, I thought country music was southern music, and I took pride in it the way one takes pride in a scar. This hurts, it’s still tender, so let me look at it in the mirror. I started saying “ain’t” and “y’all” even though no one in my family linked the chains of their sentences with these contractions. My paternal grandmother’s family came from good Pennsylvania stock and, on my mother’s side, a few generations back, we were (gasp!) Canadians.

You were someone I heard in Waffle House early Sunday mornings and crackling over truck stop speakers on twelve-hour car rides to Panama City Beach. I knew your name, but I couldn’t say what you sang or anything about the Bakersfield Sound or Outlaw Country. The only member of the old guard I knew was Dolly, and that was just because we went to Pigeon Forge at Christmas to see the lights, buy taffy, and eat at the catch-your-own-trout restaurant. Even then she was all billboard boobs and spangly things and a butterfly standing in for the w in Dollywood. Sometimes my grandmother would play an Eddie Rabbitt cassette or a A Family Christmas on our way there. But now I believe that was only because they were only a couple bucks at the Golden Gallon.

I went up to Opryland when it was also an amusement park and, later, when it became a mall. Now it strikes me that that’s what’s become of country: a show turned amusement park turned mall.

*

I have a friend who grew up in Palo Alto but spent his summers in Mississippi with his grandparents. Whenever he’s in a business transaction, he lays on the drawl. “You get better deals that way,” he says, and he does. I’ve seen it in action.

Companies know this, too. My mother works in the customer care center of a Fortune 500 insurance company. Many corporations put their call centers in the South, she tells me, because the people sound “nicer,” more trustworthy, authentic. I hurrdat.

*

On your website, it says “Merle Haggard knows all about hard living, uncertain love and workers ground down by depressing jobs” and that you’re part of a “vanishing breed” of “true Outlaws.” I can’t help but wonder, Merle, how much of that is persona, spin. How long being in the country music business has kept you away from those jobs. Or is your job depressing? And where’d you get that accent, being from California? Does the Telecaster draw your voice into it like a droplet to a pool of water?

I’ve never heard you talk, but I’d like to. I’d like to hear you say something in your natural voice. I’d like to hear it and not know where you’re from, not know where you want people to think you’re from. You’re from Bakersfield, but your accent is from country.

*

I wanted to be a cattle rancher in Texas. If I just put on the accent, that drawl, I’d make it happen. I’d be the first woman my age to run a homestead all by myself. I’d have cowskin rugs on the floor and a horse I liked named with the dignity of a train like “Silver Star” that I’d cry over when it died. There would be outlaws down there in Texas, because it was out in the middle of nowhere. I’d shoot them in the gut, and they’d fall dead easy. The boy in my class I liked would also grow up to own a ranch that butted up next to mine, and we’d fall in love, chasing after a loose bull.

—Emilia Phillips

#478: Loretta Lynn, "All Time Greatest Hits" (2002)

Over the last few months it's gotten harder to write about pop music, not least of all because I weary of the very genre that "writing about pop music" has transformed into. Fetishisms of immediacy, attempts to recapture the unrecapturable populisms of the 30's and 70's, elitist destructions of elitism which evacuate all content but preserve the structure of elitism itself, that unavoidable sense that I as a listener and reader who might disagree with a writer am the very image of the "square" who is not "with it" enough to understand why this or that song is the radical ground of some new collectivity—listed this way it's pretty hard to imagine anyone enjoying it, but O, gentle reader, spend some time on the internet, and among poets, and you'll see. More important than this, however, is my sense that writing about anything—to say nothing of pop!—feels like a pointless endeavor in the face of our present global catastrophe. Isn't it barbaric? I'm not Adorno, though I think he's right. But here I am, and I'm listening to "Fist City."

To open as I have, with a pointed collection of well nigh apocalyptic negations of the task at hand, seems at very least self-defeating, and yet totally appropriate for writing about Loretta Lynn, and country pop from before the 1980s in general. I don't know at what point the historical amnesia sets in, but somewhere along the line "everything but country and rap," that adolescent apothegm, congealed around the idea that these two generic modes—not all that incidentally originating in working class and black communities!—were not quite "legitimate" enough even for the grandstanding I made much of above to take notice of, or include in their various endeavors. Which is not to say that I think, over against other pop music, country and/or rap is, in fact, "legitimate," indeed the privileged scene of a sincere engagement—far from it! All culture is degraded and makes us complicit in our own domination. But as far as crisis goes, there might be something historically of interest that these otherwise easily derided (or, worse, blissfully ignored) genres have got to say to us.

What I mean by this is not to champion Loretta Lynn's accomplishment—which is great, lasting, and for us today urgent—as some liberal propaganda in which she introduces into the backwardness of the agrarian working classes of the second half of the twentieth century certain enlightened ideals we (my we, a geographic we) of the northeastern metropoles have already got under our belt. In fact it is exactly that liberalism that Lynn upbraids for its exclusion of the question of class itself. Thus a song like "One's on the Way," Lynn's masterpiece, should occupy a more prominent place in her oeuvre than the equally brilliant but somehow easier to digest "Fist City" and "Rated X"—although to separate all these songs seems unfair. Loretta Lynn has written us an extended treatise on immaterial labor, along with which we can tap our toes. But dare we? Or will we?

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

When I say it's hard to write about pop music I mean that I find the overwhelming tendency to have to be positive—lest one divulge one's secret "rockist," totally "elitist" background, by not liking what one is supposed to like. But I am writing about pop music, I am writing specifically about Loretta Lynn, and I find it not only easy but necessary; Lynn herself is the very killjoy that I as a critic am afraid of being, am often made out to be by the contours of this kind of discourse. To have an All Time Greatest Hits from her is to have a collection of 21, 3-minute full stops, each of which demands of its listener: now hold on a minute, what was that you said? It is this negativity—one that is not emotional but rather formal, which takes as the project of the catchy pop tune the destruction of the sunny pop feeling-tone—that I think we should pay close attention to, especially since it is the great legacy of country music, especially (if not exclusively) by women, to examine the contours of negation in all of its aesthetic valences. That is what bites so sharply and so excellently about the obliterating "One's on the Way": it is by juxtaposing the social fact of being a working class woman in the south that Lynn throws into relief the limits of the protests and marches for women's rights in New York City, rather than by way of spelling it out for us. It hinges on this opposition, rather than on the direct statement of the truth.

Thus I have to open a parenthesis, and write the paragraph that lies behind this entire essay, about an album that is not Loretta Lynn's All Time Greatest Hits, but which throws this latter into relief. It is my own little negation perhaps. I don't like the new Taylor Swift album, 1989. That's not all I have to say; there are songs I think are OK, and in general I am pro-Taylor Swift. What I don't like about her album is that she seems specifically to have expunged negativity itself from the very project of her pop music, and sought to create, broadly speaking, a triumphant self-actualization scheme very similar to the one that Lynn pillories in "One's on the Way," right down to the geographical specifics (it's an album "about" New York and living there—which fewer and fewer of us can afford to do, these days). Swift's album is not a "happy" one, tonally, in that its subject matter is the ambivalence and hurt that comes with changing locations and relations. But, to my ears, it is without the same tension, on the level of form (not content) that inheres in Loretta Lynn's best songs—and Swift's!—that tension that a song like "Woman of the World" can create by concretizing a sentimental jealousy, making philandering about what it's really about, that is, sex, rather than the muddy abstractions of love. That's an uncomfortable thing to have to confront, as a listener! Especially in a pop song! And yet it makes the song the stronger for it, involving the listener as strongly as it does in the production of feeling therein, and making of pop a more acutely material enterprise, one that runs up against its own degradation (O Adorno!) and tries to negate it at the same time (Richard Dyer! is that you!).​

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

But I have said the "h" word above, that fateful thing, History, and so now better say something about it. Loretta Lynn's music is interesting as a counterpoint to the history of gendered power dynamics that we are used to hearing about—the liberation of women who can now vote and (sometimes) have a right to bodily autonomy. Lynn writes about structures, not subjects, if I can be so hyperbolic. She uses narrative and the first person to offer up a personification of social dynamics, so that we are Brechtianly asked to reflect on the dynamic between the speaker and her lover in "Don't Come Home A Drinkin'," a dynamic that is humorous by dint of its being so palpable and omnipresent as a normal thing we find. It is an expectation, which she makes new and strange by singing about it as something that is not just "the way things are." And is this not the meaning of "As Soon as I Hang up the Phone," in which Lynn's speaker does not allow her interlocutor to end their relationship until she has said what she had to say? Even as the man gets the final say in that song, Lynn does not allow the inevitability of the dissolution of the couple to be a determination which silences everything that might take place between the beginning and the end of the phone call. It is not quite her most Utopian moment—that would be "Fist City," with glorious overtones of genuine agency even where and when it seems most impossible: within the heterosexual couple—but it is a melancholy tune that uplifts as it upbraids, chastising the notion that something so fragile as heterosexuality, or as masculinity, could take the shape of an eternal constant in the world.

So it is that Loretta Lynn is not just writing about feelings, although hers is a feelingful art; so it is that she receives tropes, but not without transforming them into her own brand of acerbity; so it is, finally, that we write, not about an "album" which has all the trappings of studiously wrought autonomy, but a "greatest hits" collection, on which songs merely invite us to go looking for where they first came into being. I'm here, insist the gaps in the history we have, if you want to find me. I can't imagine how anyone listening wouldn't pack up shop and go looking for all that they could manage to see.

—David W. Pritchard

#479: Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain" (1971)

Arizona, 1974

It’s a viciously hot afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona and I’m driving with my mother to a large bank downtown where important transactions happen. We’ve passed a cigar store Indian on the sidewalk and crossed Van Buren Avenue, poor and down-trodden then as today. Vietnam’s nearly over but in our household you’d never know it had begun. We are isolated, insulated, and air-conditioned. Inside the bank, I hear the cool click of her heels on the tile floor. She means business. A mural behind the teller depicts stagecoaches, copper miners, and an ever-westward expansion into endless wealth and prosperity. There’s something in the safe deposit box my mother needs. A deed of trust.

On the ride home, my mother lets me turn the dial on the AM radio. Neither of my parents ever share much of their taste in music. They own a record player that will unceremoniously disappear one day and a few Dave Brubeck albums I never hear my father play. In the living room, my mother occasionally reads sheet music and plays the organ; she makes everything sound like church. What do we hear that afternoon, desert light streaming through the station wagon windows? I’m six-years old and hopeful the randomness of radio will offer up The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” or “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” or Sammy Davis Jr. singing “The Candy Man.” I could turn and turn the circular dial through the infinite bland of AM pop and never hear a sound like Funkadelic.

Eddie Hazel’s Mother

Eddie Hazel, the lead guitarist on Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, a seriously guitar-driven album, was born in Brooklyn but his mother moved the family to Plainfield, New Jersey, supposedly to limit the influence of the big city on her son. Without knowing it, she’d moved Eddie within the radar of George Clinton and his doo-wopping Parliaments who would later break all the rules and cross all the musical lines as Parliament/Funkadelic. Hazel was only 17 when Clinton tried to recruit the guitarist for a tour. Hazel’s mother refused the invitation on her son’s behalf, but Clinton was persuasive, a performer, and managed to change her mind. Eddie Hazel entered the world of rock ‘n’ roll and would be dead by age 42.

Maggot Brain and “Maggot Brain”

The legend goes that when Funkadelic went to record “Maggot Brain,” the album’s title track, Clinton told Hazel to think of the saddest thing he could imagine. Hazel imagined his mother’s death and launched into a 10-minute mournful wail of a guitar solo. You can’t dance to it; you can’t hum it. Like all things Funkadelic, the song emerges from its own world, opening with an odd voice-over, the song’s only lyrics, which are finished in the first 30 seconds of a 10-minute song:

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time / Y’all have knocked her up. /I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe / and I was not offended /though I knew I had to rise above it all / or drown in my own shit.

Maggot Brain’s seven tracks move between psychedelic trance, crunchy rock, and even acoustic-laden folk. “Can You Get to That” features a rhythm guitar line pulled from the children’s song “The Old Gray Mare.” The up-tempo “Hit It and Quit It” riffs on James Brown but pulls the Godfather squarely into the rock arena. There are no horns on Maggot Brain.

These days, musicians can do anything: bands slip in and out of identities between different releases; players move between side projects with fluidity and fewer legal ties to single record labels. With so much music available on the Internet, songwriters sample past styles with ease. If we take such freedom for granted, bands like Funkadelic deserve some of the credit: they took the chances, writing the songs they wanted to write, finding an audience that was willing to follow their way of taking it to the stage.

Mothership Connection

The first song on Funkadelic’s self-titled debut album was called “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” The most far-out Parliament album was “Mothership Connection.” Other tracks included titles like “Music for My Mother.” “Cosmic Slop” features the refrain, I can hear my mother call / I can hear my mother call.

What’s with all the mother talk?

The secret of funk is that the music draws from tradition as much as from psychedelic and sonic experimentation. Funk is about freedom, about crossing lines. You can’t blend sounds (funk it up) until you know your traditions. George Clinton knew how to make something of musical connection and contradiction. He grew up in the doo-wop era; Parliament and Funkadelic always showcased great vocal harmonies. The funk of the early 1970s wasn’t just party music; it was the sound of burning cars and broken windows. The music on Maggot Brain sounds like a music that knows people are dying. Vietnam is raging and there are riots in the street. How can the music not absorb this? Something’s dying from the past as well, and Funkadelic carries those doo-wop and folk sounds forward even as the band knows it’s moving away from a home to which it can’t return.

*

For their 1974 album, Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Hazel wrote most of the songs, but he gave the song-writing credits to G. Cook: Hazel’s mother, Grace Cook. Funk was always trying to get back home, even when that home was lost.

Eddie Hazel’s obituary in The Village Voice said that Hazel “raised guitar playing to aristocratic heights through shamanistic means.” When he died, they played “Maggot Brain” at his funeral.

Music for your mother. Can you get to that?

—Keith Ekiss

#480: Raekwon, "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx" (1995)

This was the day after Joshua and Jess got married. I piled the wedding party’s tuxes into the trunk of my car and drove from Stillwater to the mall in Oklahoma City. It was a Sunday. There were going to be storms late in the afternoon, early evening, maybe, but when I left, just after lunch, the sun was bright and hot. The sky was clear.

Living in Oklahoma, one learns to respect forecasts of storms.  Even when the expectations of tornadoes or hail are low, we respect the wind, the lightning that cracks the sky for miles in every direction, the brief, blinding torrents of rain that the drought-scorched ground is too dry to absorb. The forecast for this particular day, though, was all about tornadoes.

And just as living in Oklahoma makes one learn to respect forecasts of storms, especially when those forecasts involve tornadoes and hail, one also learns to live with those forecasts because they are inevitable. If one, living in Oklahoma, were to put his life on hold every time the weather might turn dangerous, one might never accomplish anything for most of the spring. In Oklahoma, respecting the weather means being cautious and alert and hopeful while one goes about his business.

The day after Joshua and Jess got married, I was distracted. I wasn’t thinking about the weather. On my way to the city, I was thinking about stopping at the record store in Bricktown, which isn’t there anymore, now, and ended up being closed that day, anyway, and I was thinking about the butt end of a blunt in the outer pocket of my tux’s garment bag. I found the butt in the pocket during the wedding the day before and didn’t know what to do with it, so I stashed it in the garment bag. I was thinking about finding or not finding a job that would take me away from Oklahoma. I was thinking about how long it had been since I’d had sex. I was thinking about cleaning the kitchen when I got home. I was thinking about being exhausted. I was thinking about the slow decay of my own marriage, and how happy my newly married friends looked the day before, and how good I knew they’d be to each other, and how sometimes, when one isn’t happy, himself, other peoples’ happiness can be hard to look at, but not really when you care deeply for those people. That is to say, it wasn’t too difficult to see Joshua and Jess so happy. And I was thinking about being pulled over by a K9 unit and arrested for having the residue of some high school kid’s prom night in a garment bag in the trunk of my car. I don’t know if getting pulled over by a K9 unit is a thing that happens, probably not like that anyway, but the drive from Stillwater to Oklahoma City is quiet and flat, the perfect setting in which fears, rational and irrational, both, might stretch their legs.

On my way to the mall, I listened to Supreme Clientele. Something about driving around Stillwater that weekend had put me in the mood for Wu-Tang, and I’d been working my way through as many related albums as were on my iPod, and Supreme Clientele seemed right for that drive, especially when “Child’s Play” rolled around with that single organ note and yearning for simpler times and easier sex and relationships. The album ended just before I arrived at the mall, and I finished the drive in silence, not noticing the sun dissolving above me.

*

In retrospect, I should have known the storm had cooked itself up earlier than anticipated when I arrived at the mall. The sky had turned a dark gray and the wind was fierce. I tried to carry all of the tuxes into the mall from a distant parking spot. The garment bags were slick and repeatedly slipped through my arms to the asphalt. A woman, a few years older than me, walking away from the mall, stopped to help, picked up the three bags I’d just dropped, turned around, and carried them inside with me. I wondered if the cashed blunt was in one of those bags. The woman followed me into the store, handed the three bags she was carrying to the clerk, and left, accepting nothing but thanks in return. I was moved by the woman’s help. I felt briefly overwhelmed that a stranger would be so kind.

When I told the guy behind the register about the blunt, he shrugged. We searched through the garment bag’s pockets, but we couldn’t find it. It probably fell out in the parking lot. Or maybe, to this day, it’s hiding in some unreachable corner of my car’s trunk. It’s not important. What is important is that when I left the mall, a line of employees, some of them smoking, others with cups of coffee, some with nothing but their hands cupped around their eyes to keep out the wind and debris, were standing outside, watching the clouds amass overhead. I jogged to my car. It was time to respect the weather.

*

For the drive home, I settled on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. I don’t know why I chose that one. Maybe it seemed like the right album to listen to at the time because I’d been feeling exhausted from a year on the academic job market and whatever, and, despite Raekwon and friends’ punchy rhymes, sometimes the album feels heavy in a way that is similar to exhaustion. For all the album’s exuberant descriptions of street life, beneath it all there’s still that line, “You don’t believe in heaven ‘cause we’re livin’ in hell.” Granted, the sentiment was a bit melodramatic for my circumstances, but if there was a reason I picked this album that day, that was probably it.

*

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

The day I drove to the mall was the day before the Moore tornado ripped that nearby town to pieces and dominated the national news cycle for weeks. It seems weird, now, to think about driving away from the mall in Oklahoma City listening to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, right before so much sorrow landed a few miles away. Of course, it’s not like the album is a stranger to sorrow.

Another thing about Cuban Linx, in addition to its emotional weight, is the way it uses atmosphere, especially in its opening moments. “Striving for Perfection” begins with voices and ethereal synth tones that sound like they could be from the soundtrack for a low budget kung fu movie. This is a track, not a song. An introduction, an establishing shot. It sets the scene, establishes atmosphere. The first words we hear, soft in the left channel, assert that emotional weight I mentioned before: “Yeah, yeah I’m tired of doing this shit.” The rest of the piece is more affirmative, hopeful, but the established atmosphere never shifts entirely away from that sense of exhaustion. For every moment of optimism afforded the speaker of “Striving for Perfection,” for every “We gonna grow like a plant, Son” or “Let’s keep movin’ ahead man, keep your head up man,” we’re reminded of the exhaustion leading up to those moments, a “My man got outta state for fifteen” or a “I got shot at man, my mom’s window got shot up man.” That’s how Only Built 4 Cuban Linx begins, overcast, but with a few hints of sun stabbing through. The actual sky, that day, had no such sun.  

*

Here’s another thing about Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. The album’s second song, “Knuckleheadz,” expands on the atmosphere of “Striving for Perfection.” The song, thanks to a throbbing bass line and an airy piano sample, feels considerably lighter than what’s established on that opening track. But the atmosphere creeps in between the music in the form of sound effects. Looking at Rap Genius, now, the sequence of sound effects peppered throughout “Knuckleheadz” goes like this: “loading clip,” “gunshots,” “gunshots,” “loading clip,” “gunfire,” “loading clip,” “gunfire,” “tire screech,” “crash,” “car zooming by,” “sirens commence,” “sirens silence,” “inaudible conversation,” “tire screech,” “gunshots,” “tire screech,” “gunshots,” “tire screech,” “crash,” “passing cars,” “tire screech,” “crash.” Even as the song celebrates a hedonistic life of drugs and violence, with lines like “lay on the crime scene, sipping fine wines” and “let’s celebrate and sniff an eighth,” the very real weight established on the opening track enters into the song through these sounds. But those sounds are easy to take for granted. They don’t always register when we listen. They’re lurking just beneath the surface of the song, adding tension, adding weight.

And there I was that day, the sky dark and me driving away from the mall, and “Knuckleheadz” was playing and this sound, a siren, emerges from beneath the song’s mix, and cuts through the song and it sounds sad, desperate, like all the yearning of “Striving for Perfection” distilled into a single piercing whine. The sound hypnotized me for a moment, which is why it took me longer than it should have to realize that I’d never heard that sound in the song before. I turned off my car’s stereo. The tone stayed. What had emerged so seamlessly from the tragic sound effects of “Knuckleheadz” and so perfectly captured the spirit of violence, sorrow, and potential redemption running through the album wasn’t part of the album at all. It was a tornado siren.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

*

I’d like to say that I did the smart thing and pulled over at a sturdy looking business to take shelter, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to get back to Stillwater. I turned on a local radio station. The weatherman was describing the heavy rotation in the sky, not far from the mall I had just left. The weatherman named the roads the emerging funnel was following, then other roads being crossed by other funnels. When the rain started pouring down, I had to drive slow. On I-40, I passed the exit one might take to get to Del City. A few minutes later, the weatherman described a funnel cloud crossing I-40 towards Del City. Waiting on the ramps along the interstate, cars fitted with storm chasing gear waited for the next funnel to emerge. I didn’t stop driving. I turned off the weatherman, switched back to Raekwon. I hadn’t stopped my iPod when I switched over to the radio, and by the time I switched back, I was listening to the outro to “Heaven & Hell.” The album was almost over. I kept my eyes on the road, trying not to think about the tornadoes that were, hopefully, all behind me. I heard brief phrases from “Heaven & Hell”: “Blink of an eye and you’re gone”; “Get turned to dust”; “Word up, get evaporated, straight up.” I kept driving. Soon, the rain let up. Soon, there were no more storm chasers lining the road. I wasn’t gone. I didn’t get turned to dust. I hadn’t been evaporated. Straight up.

*

The day after I drove through that storm, a tornado came to Moore and blew a hole in Oklahoma that is still healing. Very few of the houses and neither of the elementary schools in Moore were equipped with appropriate safety facilities in the case of tornadoes. Seven children died in a school that day. Now, politicians fight over providing tornado shelters in schools. In the days after the Moore tornado, there were stories of men and women who died trying to outrun tornadoes. Newscasters told motorists not to race tornadoes. Told us to find safe places to wait. What they never told us, though, what Only Built for Cuban Linx was trying to teach me that day was that, sometimes, there are no safe places.  Sometimes, the only way out is to drive through the storm.

*

Eighteen months later, I find myself returning to that day, remembering the palpable sense of peril I felt. When I tell the story to new friends and colleagues, I leave out the things I was thinking. I leave out the music. I focus on the weather, on the more immediate fear I felt driving through the storm. In those eighteen months, I found a job that I love. In those eighteen months, also, my marriage has all but fallen apart while I waited for it to get better, while I hid in corners from feelings I wasn’t ready to confront. Now, when I listen to “Knuckleheadz,” I listen for the tornado siren. The song’s own sound effects sound canned, and fake, bullshit off of a cheap sound effects disc. Those sound effects don’t do justice to the album’s ferocious desire for transcendence, the sense that no matter how strong the desire to grow or escape, one must still confront a fragile present where one might, at any moment, “get turned to dust.” When I listen to “Knuckleheadz,” now, I want the urgency of the tornado siren while the sky rotates above me.

—James Brubaker

#481: D'Angelo, "Voodoo" (2000)

—Brad Efford

#482: Steve Earle, "Guitar Town" (1986)

There’s not a lot of room in my life for country music. I like folk, and pop, not to mention the numb, unconsoling murmur of Swedish alt rock. Sometimes I jam out to 90s confessionals—Nada Surf. Something Corporate. Hey, It’s a Shame About Ray. Stacks of CDs clump in tiny Trump Towers in the foot wells of my car, in amongst the socks and receipts and forever-damp umbrellas. But not one of them is country.

Where I live, in your typical New England landscape, trees crowd close, and it’s a slow, bright creep until winter, when the leaves drop and you can finally see the sky. A daily commute around here might contain the right number of cows and barns and agile steeds to suit a Midwestern ballad, but the barns, mostly for drying tobacco, are in poor repair from disuse, and their support walls have warped like wet paper, giving the whole sloppy scene a lop-sided, fun-house mirror mien.

Instead of cowboys we have tax accountants, slumped over their steering wheels, breathing their soft animal breaths as they flock to the city. There are no quiet streets, no lonesome roads until well after midnight, though the local Starbucks closes at 8 p.m. on Saturdays, and the parking lot of Double Take Double Take Consignment is deserted by mid-afternoon. Still, there are people everywhere you look, taking silent walks down the bike paths at lunchtime, or else making urgent purchases at Benny’s Deli, stomachs clamoring to be fed. At half past five the neighborhood swells with the chatter of traffic. Dogs come out to reunite with their own front lawns. Governed by instinct, I drop my eyes as the Kauffmans march past, little Benjamin, mute with protest, sulking in his red wagon as it trails them.

To tell the truth, I don’t think country music is lonely enough for a place like this. Country music is all about isolation due to a lack of proximity; New England is isolation due to intimacy. The only way to live, when your neighbor’s bedroom is 12 aerial yards from your own, is to not know him at all. How else can you keep your edges clean, and stand fast in your enchantments?

In the Grammy-nominated title track from his 1986 album, Steve Earle promises to “settle down” and take his girl back “to the Guitar Town.” There aren’t any Guitars in the United States (I checked), but if there were, I think the reality might disappoint. According to the song, Guitar Town is just another place where “nothing ever happen[s].” Sure, there’s the siren song of a “lost highway” leading out of town, but there’s nothing appealing about highways. At least, there shouldn’t be. They’re cracked, strewn with garbage, and generally overrun by a cavalcade of businessmen jonesing for smokes. If the strangled lanes of the interstate sound like liberation to you, maybe you should head for somewhere new. But it doesn’t mean things will get better.

Just as country music romanticizes the open road, so too have Americans lathered suburbia with all the fancies of misdirected love. There is just no reason for it. The fewer people there are per square mile, the happier those inhabitants become. We may say there’s comfort in numbers, but mankind exchanged the herd mentality for something leaner long ago.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Take deer, for example. Have you ever seen a herd of deer traveling together (with their little deer valises)? First there is nothing but a thin mist spreading through the trees, the shuush-shuush of your ponytail as it swings against your jacket, the precise sound water makes opening around stones. Even this is enough. You are the loudest thing here; a chipmunk shrinks from your thunderous approach. You still, hoping to appease him, when suddenly they are upon you, flashing past on the left, or the right. Everything narrows to the heat and noise. They are a hot wind. An open vein.

You become invisible in those moments, frozen like the chipmunk, too insignificant to fear. This is where freedom comes from. But in suburbia, the deer travel in twos and threes. They step sweetly through untrimmed grasses, growing stern when approached. A sharp stamp has sent me veering more than once. Deer, like the neighbors, keep a close eye on you. Do I sound like I’m kidding? I’m not.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my neighbors, and I’m pretty sure they would call the paramedics if I fell and I couldn’t get up, but you don’t love something because you need it to feel safe. And you don’t settle in Guitar Town without weighing the delicate ferocity of a deer’s footstep. You don’t forget what it feels like to run.

—Eve Strillacci

#483: Gang of Four, "Entertainment!" (1979)

I read Wikipedia articles like “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, each hyperlink a cobalt pathway to destinations far and esoteric. I begin at the Café Wha? and twelve clicks later I’m at a list of professional darts players. And for the most dire of procrastinators, there’s always the “Random Article” button, the wiki-quivalent of shuffle songs. How else would I have ever found out about teledildonics?

To click or not to click? Dare I disturb the dull hum of informative prose? Every blue word is a gateway, a detour, a trap door that plummets you further and further from the initial inquiry. Infested with algorithms, the Internet is constantly suggesting, recommending, interrupting. Whatever media you’re trying to savor—click this instead.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Before I listen to an album, read a novel, or weigh in on Hollywood gossip, I brief myself on Wikipedia, reading just enough to grasp the common understanding. Sure, it’s a secondary, unreliable source, but it’s quick and free and… something about democracy.

Like anything, music is amplified through context, the ethos of a radio station, a coffeehouse playlist, a friend’s Spotify account or an iconic magazine’s 500-best. When we conjure a song online, multiple tabs offer an all-you-can-eat buffet of tidbits and unsolicited commentary. Of course, we don’t always have to multi-task. Maybe it’s not so hard to press play and lie on your bed away from the screen, gazing at the ceiling until you can actually see the melodies dripping through the cracks. One album, all the way through, that’s how I always imagined professional record reviewers do it. The rest of us don’t have time to sign off.

When I type in “Gang of Four,” Wikipedia first greets me with the story of the Chinese Communist faction led by Mao Zedong’s wife, attributed to the deaths of almost 35,000 people during the Cultural Revolution. The most common usage of the term. Part of a series on Maoism.

We must disambiguate. Along with several other political sanctions across the world, Gang of Four might refer to:

• Gang of Four (band)

• Gang of Four, authors of computing book Design Patterns

• "Gang of Four,” Big Two card game product

• "Gang of Four," Local Management Interface standard for Wide Area Networking

• Titled works:

  • Gang of Four, 2004 novel by Liz Byrski

  • Gang of Four (film), 1988 French film

• Fictional characters:

  • Gang of Four, villains of comic Riki-Oh

  • Gang of Four, four heroes of comic Oriental Heroes

Or it might refer to you and your three childhood friends who wreaked havoc on the playground back in the day. I click the link for the band and brace my attention span for more temptation.

Gang of Four are an English band from Leeds, classified as post-punk. Click. Post-punk is a rock music genre, an artsier and more experimental form of punk. Click. Punk rock is music that embraces a DIY ethic. Click. DIY ethic refers to the ethic of self-sufficiency through completing tasks without the aid of a paid expert.

And if I keep clicking, keep wondering, I might just find myself circling back to the Gang of Four page, conquering the click-hole once and for all.

Illustrations by Lena Moses-Schmitt

However I get there, I scroll down to the discography section, for their debut album Entertainment! Click. Released in 1979. Click. 1979 (MCMLXXIX) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1979th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 979th year of the 2nd millennium, the 79th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1970s decade. The year McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.

For the informed listener, is there such a thing as too much context? Back on the record’s landing page, I can hone in on the trivia that might coat my ear drums; If I listen carefully enough, I’ll be able to glean influences of funk, reggae and dub.  Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea claims that the first time he heard the record, "It completely changed the way I looked at rock music and sent me on my trip as a bass player." Pitchfork Media listed Entertainment! as the eighth best album of the 1970s. Kurt Cobain listed it in his top fifty albums of all time. What I’m about to listen to is officially Good.

But if I ex-out all those boxes, let the screen fall to sleep as I plop on the mattress, perhaps I can isolate the magic for just 53 minutes. I can pretend these raw sounds exist within a vacuum in between my ears.

I don’t stay in bed for long. Entertainment! is without question an album to dance to, equally suited for moshing and the twist. The bass lick that ignites the first track is as harsh at it is playful, a variation on the dips and thrusts that sustain the entire record. In all twelve tracks, the spittle of the drums and thrashing guitars spew at you from multiple directions, and the bass line always catches your fall.

I could look up the names and faces of Gang and Four, break down who sang lead on which track, his astrological sign and worst childhood memory. Or I could just tell you that the lead vocals on Entertainment! are commanding and sarcastic. Despite the context-blocker I’ve installed in my mind, I can’t hear their British sneer without likening the band to their punk forefathers. The lyrics follow the same formula perfected by the Clash and the Sex Pistols: exposing the dirt behind the daydream:

From “5.45”:

Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen
The corpse is a new personality

From “I Found that Essence Rare”:

Aim for politicians fair who'll treat your vote hope well
The last thing they'll ever do: act in your interest
Look at the world through your Polaroid glasses
Things'll look a whole lot better for the working classes

But what saves Gang of Four from becoming a Mohawked cliché is the vibrancy of their sound. The instrumentation is winking. What’s fighting the system without a few laughs? If we developed anything in the sphere between punk and post-punk, it’s a sense of humor.  

The lyricist is self-aware—repeating his sharpest lines over and over to build not choruses, but chants, mantras. Phrases had I left my laptop open, I would make my Facebook status, challenging my friends to the reference. But instead, alone in my bedroom, I shout along with the recording, over and over, until the syllables transcend semantics.

Try it:  

          I’m so restless, I’m bored as a cat.  Three times.  

          Our bodies make us worry. Four times.

          Repackaged sex keeps your interest. Six times.

          Guerilla war struggle is a new kind of entertainment. Eight times.

          Please send us evenings and weekends. 19 times.

          Goodbye. 37 times.

The polemic might dominate Entertainment!, but a few love songs soften the album’s character. True to traditional punk-rock etiquette, the Gang of Four vocalists interrupt each other throughout the entire record, and in the finale song, “Anthrax,” the argument comes to a head, with two voices talking and singing over each other. The chorus, what we’re supposed to be listening to, might be written off as typical adolescent heartache: Love will get you like a case of Anthrax, and that’s something I don’t want to catch.

But there’s a droning voice underneath the melody, incoherent but impossible to ignore. I put the song on repeat, pressing my ear to the left speaker. I catch a few phrases, but after the fifth listen I give up and search for the lyrics on the internet. These are the words literally between the lines:  

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe anyway but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone’s personalities. I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

Had I listened to this record B.G. (Before Google), I wouldn’t consider the song a piece of social commentary. I would have accepted the underlying soliloquy as indecipherable, like the thoughts inside a broken lover’s head. Have I cheated, tainted my listening experience? Perhaps the context should stay buried—maybe The Crucible has nothing to do with McCarthyism, and Animal Farm is really just about some huffy pigs.

Any given listener might know nothing of the British punk movement, of the Neo-Marxist rhetoric Gang of Four was channeling in the liner notes. But the same rage, defiance, and absurdist scoff could be felt by listeners in Cairo, Kashmir, or Ferguson, Missouri. And thanks to YouTube and torrent hosts, anyone in those places could stumble upon this record, burn a few mix CDs, and start a revolution. But the record isn’t titled Social Justice. It’s Entertainment!  

Entertainment might refer to:

• Entertainment, event, performance, or activity designed to give pleasure to an audience

• Entertainment (band), post-punk band formed 2002

• “Entertainment” (song), 2013 song by the band Phoenix

• Entertainment!, 1979 Gang of Four album

• Entertainment, 2009 Fischerspooner album

• "Entertainment” (song), track on Appeal to Reason, 2008 album by Rise Against

• Entertain Magazine, 2007–10 British entertainment magazine

• Entertainment (film), a 2014 Bollywood film, also known as It's Entertainment

See also: Amusement.

See also: Distraction.

See also: Coping Mechanism.

—Susannah Clark

#484: Mott the Hoople, "All the Young Dudes" (1972)

Because it is the first Saturday of the month, and Blaine and I are nothing if not creatures of habit, we stop by Zeek's Petz Store and buy another hermit crab. How did this ritual start? Whiskey? Rum? Vodka? It's hazy.

Zeek's smells like urine, shit, and sawdust, which is to say it smells like a pet store. There are the birds hopping and squawking, the ferrets slithering, hamsters tunneling, kittens mewling. The persistent low thrum of crickets. We have yet to see another customer on any of our crabbing sojourns and I have a sneaking suspicion our hermit purchases might be Zeek's only current source of revenue. A desire to keep Zeek in business could be one possible explanation for the six hermit crabs we now own, but a better one would be this: hermit crabs are fucking awesome.

Zeek looks relieved to see us. He must be figuring our aquarium to be getting full, but never fear Zeek, we will buy all the hermit crabs your cramped, strip-mall store can hold. They are sociable animals and, being sociable guys, we try to respect their right to party.

When we get home, we do a few more ritualistic things: we get drunk; we get out the Montana state map and the darts; we put on Mott the Hoople's All the Young Dudes.

The drunk part is because we like getting drunk. The state map and the darts are how we name our hermits. So far we have a Two Dot (who has no dots at all), Laurel (such a sweetheart), Great Falls (who we call Falls Great because he walks funny), Yaak (talkative little fucker), Wolf Point (total badass), and Boulder (he of the hefty shell). It is a perfect system. We plan to market it as a complete kit–shot glasses, map, darts–to expecting parents.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

All the Young Dudes is a more mysterious piece of the puzzle, harkening back to the total wastage of our first hermit crab purchase. Somehow–perhaps a raking of the dollar bin at the record store, or a chance encounter with a dumpster–the album came to be in our possession that first night. It's not a good record. It's some empty Stones worship at best. But it turns out Bowie wrote them a song, the title track, and that song is god damn perfect for naming hermit crabs. We put it on repeat. That wavering, drunk guitar lick to start it off! All the fucked up kids trying to figure their shit out. And then those young dudes come in, carrying the news. It's like Bowie wrote the song for hermit crabs. Their own anthem, at long last.

Blaine misses the map with his first dart because he's drunk. I miss the map with my first dart because I'm drunk. I look down at the unnamed hermit in his temporary cage and the little guy is clearly worried. He's looking forlornly at the aquarium across the way, full of his brethren. Never fear, I tell him, we'll get you a name real soon so you can join your buddies.

It takes four throws to hit the map, twelve throws to hit a city. And then, finally, we christen our newest crab. He is Red Lodge. He is red. It is a perfect name. We are drunk, but we handle Red Lodge carefully as we unite him with his new best friends, with the six best cities in Montana.

Mott the Hoople, on their tenth, looping cycle, yell about the boogaloo dudes and I’m so happy we have our little boogaloo dudes, shelled up and Montana-christened, ready to carry the news.

We sit there for the next hour, watching them scuttle and play, getting woozy off Mott’s repetition and, also, beer. What a thrill.

—J.P. Kemmick

#485: Pearl Jam, "Vitalogy" (1994)

1995

Ticketmaster is late to the meeting but he’s allowed to be late because, after a year of insults and accusations, of scathing testimonies and shit talk, Ticketmaster has won. Of course Ticketmaster was going to be late to this meeting if for no other reason than to make the other party sweat a little, make him soak in his failure.  

When Ticketmaster walks into the tenth floor board room at the offices of Epic Records, Eddie Vedder is already seated at the end of a long, glass conference table, his fingers pressed to his temples. Ticketmaster doesn’t sit down right away. He walks down to the end of the table next to Vedder, and stands over the young singer. Ticketmaster is very tall and has unnaturally long arms that dangle at his sides, fingers narrowing into thin slits, fine and sharp. Before taking a seat, Ticketmaster gently pats Eddie Vedder on the shoulder and lingers for a moment, waiting for the singer to look up. Vedder doesn’t budge.

After a moment, Ticketmaster traverses the room with three giant strides and sits at the opposite end of the table from Vedder, says, “You called me here today, Mr. Vedder?” Eddie Vedder says, “I did.” Ticketmaster says, “And why was that?” Eddie Vedder rubs his temples again and grits his teeth, then begins to explain that he needs Ticketmaster’s help in setting up Pearl Jam concerts on the East Coast.  He says, “The venues we want to play, they all have exclusive deals with you.” He looks down at the table, says quietly, “We need you.”

Ticketmaster pulls two cigars out of its pocket, offers one to Eddie Vedder. Vedder shakes his head. Ticketmaster says, “It’s a Gurkha.” Ticketmaster holds a match to the end of the cigar and puffs so that massive plumes of smoke rise in front of his face. Ticketmaster says, “I wonder how many tickets we’ll need to sell to one of your concerts to pay for a case of these.” He adds, “More than a few, I suspect.” Then, feeling as if the moment has been appropriately savored, Ticketmaster says, “What was that last thing you said? Can you repeat it? I couldn’t quite make it out.” Eddie Vedder looks up at Ticketmaster and, through gritted teeth, says, “We need you.”

Ticketmaster says, “That’s what I thought you said.” Eddie Vedder slaps his hands on the top of the glass table, making the entire surface vibrate, and stands up. He doesn’t make for the door right away, but it seems as if he might. Ticketmaster says, “Sit down, Mr. Vedder.” Vedder obeys. Once Vedder is sitting, Ticketmaster says, “I will help you, but you need to apologize.” Vedder says, “Out of the question.” Ticketmaster says, “Mr. Vedder, you’ve publically attacked me for months. You’ve instigated investigations and legal proceedings all for your misguided ideals.” Eddie Vedder says, “They aren’t misguided.” He says, “You exploit fans.” Ticketmaster says, “We provide a service to fans.” Vedder says, “You increase the price of tickets but you don’t add any value to the product.” Ticketmaster says, “Don’t add any value? Our outlets are accessible to customers around the country. How far did customers drive to buy tickets for the last leg of your tour?” Vedder doesn’t answer. “How far, Mr. Vedder?” Eddie Vedder says he doesn’t know.

Seeing an opportunity to wound Vedder further, Ticketmaster presses the issue, says, “And speaking of value—what of the value you offered your own fans with your most recent record?” Eddie Vedder says, “They like the record fine.” Ticketmaster says, “Only because they’re as misguided as you.” Ticketmaster waits a beat, then continues: “How much value do you think your fans gain from you complaining about the fame they have bestowed on you?” Eddie Vedder says, “That’s not fair.” And Ticketmaster says, “How fair is it to your fans to work hard to buy your music only to hear you barking at them about your small table growing too crowded, and how your ‘p-r-i-v-a-c-y is priceless to you,’ and about ‘all the things that others want from you’?” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s not like that.” Ticketmaster takes a puff from his cigar, knocks an inch of ash on the carpet and says, “Is it that you want to be important?”

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Eddie Vedder says, “It’s not about that.” He says, “I don’t want to be important.” Ticketmaster says, “Then what is this all about? Your fight against me? Your quibbles with fame? Your causes?” And Eddie Vedder says, “Sometimes I get scared. All these people are watching and I want to do good by them.” Ticketmaster laughs a low, dirty laugh that almost sounds like a growl, says, “So you were doing right by the models when you sang the line about rolling them in blood because they don’t look like you?” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s wrong the ways they have to treat their bodies and then the ways their bodies inspire other people to treat their own bodies poorly.” Ticketmaster says, “So you encourage violence against the models? You disrespect their humanity? You call them skinny little bitches?” Eddie Vedder tries to talk but before he can respond, Ticketmaster says, “And what about the gays, Mr. Vedder. What about the part where you say you’ll never suck Satan’s dick, as if sucking dick is the most vile thing a man can do.” Eddie Vedder says, “It’s a figure of speech. It’s about not capitulating to authority.” And Ticketmaster says, “But why drag, what for some is, an expression of love into your polemic? Aren’t you supposed to be a progressive?” Ticketmaster relishes this moment as Vedder visibly squirms in his seat. Ticketmaster adds, “You’re no better than a common jock.”

Eddie Vedder’s arms fall to his sides and his hands flex into fists. He says, “That’s not what we meant.” And Ticketmaster says, “But that’s what you said.” Eddie Vedder says, “We’ll do better.” And Ticketmaster says, “It won’t matter—you will slowly begin to fade. You have accomplished what you sought so dearly. Outsiders will stop storming your room. Your record sales will fall. You will maintain a base of passionate fans, enough to keep your career afloat, but you will descend into irrelevancy.” Eddie Vedder looks at Ticketmaster with something that almost looks like a smile. Ticketmaster says, “It will be just what you wanted. Your small table, that seats just two,” and Vedder, looking down at the big, glass table, perhaps at his own reflection, mutters, says, “You’ve proved your point.” Then: “What about the east coast.”

Ticketmaster stubs his cigar out in an ashtray, and dials his personal assistant on the phone. As Ticketmaster orders his assistant to begin preparations to sell tickets for Pearl Jam’s east coast tour, his eyes notice a change come over Vedder’s composure, as the singer appears more relaxed than he’s looked in a long, long time.

—James Brubaker

#486: Earth, Wind & Fire, "That's the Way of the World" (1975)

On Fridays I stayed at my high school long after classes ended, wandering the sprawling cinderblock buildings, watching the sun settle in the sky a bit earlier than it had just a month before. It was football season, and come nightfall I’d pull on a stiff polyester uniform—green and black with gold-painted plastic buttons—and pile into a school bus with the rest of the marching band and our director, Mr. Snell, a nearly-silent middle-aged black man who, in my memory, was at least seven feet tall. While other bands covered Top 40 pop songs, Mr. Snell kept us to the classics he loved, focusing on Earth, Wind, and Fire: “Let’s Groove,” “Fantasy,”  “September,” and especially “Shining Star,” from their breakthrough album That’s the Way of the World.

The bouncy levity of EWF’s music contradicted the rhythm of my days so utterly that it was almost absurd. In a school of nearly 2,500 students, I waded through over-crowded classrooms and hallways that smelled of bleach and the Chic-Fil-A sandwiches sold in the gym lobby. Mornings, half-awake, I slid through metal detectors and tried to avoid the fights that swelled up from the crowded halls like tsunamis. Like most of the others, I was in marching band because I did not belong anywhere else. I was not a trouble-maker or a Mathlete or a basketball player or a student government politico. I was not allowed to audition for Mr. Snell’s jazz band, his prized possession, either for a lack of talent or for choosing the wrong instrument.

I never saw Mr. Snell smile and I never heard him say we had played well. We’d stumble through a song and look to him, our instruments still raised, to see him give the tiniest wave of his hamburger-sized hands. “Again,” he’d say, giving us another chance, and we’d start over. I had never heard of EWF before learning to play their songs on my clarinet. The arrangements we performed were boisterous, with little attempt at harmonizing. Every instrument shouted all the notes. When Mr. Snell finally told us to stop, to move on to another song, I could never tell if we’d actually improved or if he just couldn’t stand to hear us play the same bars one more time.

Mr. Snell took us to New Orleans to march in a Mardi Gras parade and, another year, took us to New York City, where we wandered the open-air markets in Harlem for hours. We ran our hands over cowry shell jewelry and necklaces featuring the same assorted religious iconography—ankhs, stars of David, crosses—featured on the covers of the EWF albums we’d been rehearsing. At the market, Mr. Snell bought a knitted black kufi hat and wore it for the rest of our trip, and I tried to imagine him as he was in 1975, when That’s the Way of the World was released, chock-full of horns and kalimba and falsetto’d joy. In 1975, Earth, Wind and Fire topped the Billboard charts alongside a whole lot of white guys: Elton John, Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Barry Manilow, David Bowie, the Eagles. I imagined Mr. Snell listening That’s the Way of the World as the world’s ways shifted rapidly, ceaselessly, all around him.

A lot had happened in Memphis by 1975, in the seven years since Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on the balcony of a downtown motel. By 1975, Elvis was forty years old and had grown puffy and chatty. Still performing to sold-out crowds in his hometown, he would be dead in just two years. White flight was draining hordes of wealthier residents to the suburbs. This migration is often associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, but was also provoked by changing public school policies. In the mid-1960s, Memphis city schools enrolled a nearly equal number of white and black students attending segregated schools. Desegregation efforts were stalled and delayed until 1973, when busing was federally mandated in order to enforce desegregation. Over 10,000 students would be bussed to schools outside their segregated neighborhoods. Members of a group called Citizens Against Busing protested by burying a school bus in a giant pit, and 40,000 of the city school system’s 71,000 white students fled to private, religious, or suburban school systems over the next four years.  

In 1975, Memphis was in the midst of a transition that wasn’t resolved even by the time I found myself, in 2003, marching to “Shining Star” on Friday nights. The problems of 1975 still hadn’t been made right. My school was still segregated, but from the inside: the school’s “optional” program was mostly white and its “traditional” program was mostly black, and the two rarely interacted. I was proud to go to public school, but also aware that it was one of only a couple public high schools in Memphis that white kids attended.

Maybe EWF was simply the obvious choice for our band. Their gratuitous use of religious iconography resembled Memphis’ obsession with Egyptian imagery. The Memphis Zoo, covered in hieroglyphics and built to resemble an Egyptian palace, and the huge pyramid alongside the river with its fiberglass statues of pharaohs, are nearly identical to the cover of EWF’s later album, All ’N All. And EWF’s front man, singer, and songwriter, Maurice White, was born in Memphis in 1941. But our school was not one for motivational posters and EWF’s message was so optimistic, so devoid of cynicism, that it’s impossible for me not to see their selection as a deliberate message from Mr. Snell.

I wonder if Mr. Snell thought that, by emulating EWF, with their nine members, two drummers, a horn section, and their miraculously tight, singular sound, maybe we’d also learn something about unity. Over the course of daily practice, after-school rehearsals, summer marching camps, and Friday night football games, those songs lodged a kernel of joy and perseverance into my brain that couldn’t be shaken.  I’m sure we butchered those songs. I’m also sure that wasn’t what mattered, in the end. Mr. Snell may not have said many words, but if he spoke to us through Earth, Wind and Fire, the message he chose to share was something deliberately encouraging, uplifting, and hopeful to the point of delirium.

Now, a decade later, in the first cool evenings of autumn, my thoughts often drift to football games on Friday nights, to the high-pitched refrain of “Shining Star” that took up residency in my head. I see myself marching barefoot in the browning grass, or, in the winter, shoving heating pouches into my shoes, struggling to make my cold fingers hit all the right notes. I see myself in my stiff uniform, my too-big hat with its shedding feather plume, with the lights of a half-empty stadium gleaming off the keys of my second-hand clarinet. I see myself lining up in formation, listening for the cadence, my head craned back to see Mr. Snell’s face somewhere up in the stratosphere. And with the wave of his hand, it would all begin again. We’d get another chance to make it right.

—Martha Park

#487: Cyndi Lauper, "She's So Unusual" (1983)

Halloween, 1984. Your best friend Georgia helps you with your hair, which is the finishing touch you didn’t know would be the finishing touch until the hairspray dissipates and you take the visor of your hand away from your eyes to check in the mirror. Then there it is, touched and finished: hand-me-down prom dress, mascara like tribal war paint, bangles and scarves and, all the way up top, her hair like a flame setting your own head ablaze.

The girl in the mirror, she’s gorgeous; you’re gorgeous. Somehow, twelve years old and gorgeous. Wow, Georgia says. Now do me.

Because this was the deal the whole time: you’d get to be Cyndi if she could dress you up all the way, heels to flowing headdress. She’d be Cyndi but she’s black, so you both decide Cyndi’s black friend from the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video is the next best, most logical thing. You both know it’s a sacrifice, and secretly you’ve been compiling in your head over and over again all week the list of ways to make it right. Not that something’s wrong. Just incidental. Unfortunate. Whatever.

It doesn’t take as much work to get Georgia just right, which is good. Timing is everything, and right now you’re both too short on it. Sundown is in an hour, which means dusk is now, which means all the best houses won’t last long. Her mom already worked hard on her hair last night, twisting and tying and twisting, so you focus on the eyeshadow and lipstick. When you step away, she looks good. No: she looks great. You both do. Giggling and pouting in the mirror and taking brief dance breaks to flail arrhythmically to “Money Changes Everything” —already, this night feels monumental. Already lit brilliantly from behind.

*

Two hours and seven quickly-darkening neighborhoods later, the high hasn’t lifted. Your pillowcases would drag the ground if you let them, but between banging each other across the butt you’ve got them shoulder-slung like bindles.

I love you more, I love you more, Georgia is belting. Oh-oh-oh-oooooo-wee-oooooh.

When you were mine, you finish, then spin and stop only long enough to pop a handful of Runts into your mouth, bananas already removed and donated to Georgia.

Your route has had you going snaky over the course of the night, winding north, then northwest, then south, and back east again to where you started. It’s the same one you two have taken since you were six and your mom okayed piecing together a Princess Leia gown and pair of side buns. That year, Georgia was a cat, her ears and whiskers and tail made from cardboard and spare curtain fabric. The two of you had just met in Miss Lipton’s class; it’s still one of the best nights you can recall ever having known.

Now, this one’s shaping up to be not so bad itself. The two of you are dazzling, though currently in between houses; this stretch of the route has never been your favorite—all weedy, tricycles left abandoned in front yards, lights more off on Halloween night than left glowing—and the clapboard ranches are separated largely by patches of empty lots. You’re not sure if this is what your mom means when she says “bad neighborhoods”—as in Shuttle quick through the bad neighborhoods, now—but you don’t exactly dawdle.

You don’t realize it, but you’ve been humming “She Bop” for the last block or so, Georgia intermittently taking her Tootsie Pop from her mouth to see if she’s hit the center. So maybe it’s the humming, but you don’t hear it the first time the voice speaks. You only notice when Georgia stops walking for a half-step, then picks up speed without warning.

Hey! you shout, and follow quickly after, working nearly double-time to keep up. Slow down! And that’s when you hear it. Then again. And again. Louder each time—not louder, closer. Closer each time. The voice is not bothering to whisper, not here, not at this time of night. It’s even in tone, almost flat, without affect. Simply making a statement, like someone reading side effects off an Aspirin bottle.

Monkey. Hey, monkey. Hey.

Georgia is walking faster, it seems, with each step. The next house you come to is unlit, but you can see the dim sunrise of a porchlight maybe two or three blocks down. The voice, you can see now, is coming from a teenaged boy in a car riding parallel to the two of you and matching pace. He is leaning easily on the passenger door, both elbows resting on the window ledge, pimpled face peering out from the darkness. You wonder for a moment what this boy might make of your costume—if he thinks your hair looks nice, your makeup and lacy dress—then feel immediately ashamed and determined to make up for it.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Go away! you scream, your voice only slightly high, which gives you confidence. Screw off! You hook your elbow through Georgia’s to keep up with her more easily. Her face is set, and when you touch her she still doesn’t turn.

The boy laughs, but only once. Hey, monkey, want a banana? Banana, monkey? He makes noises like an ape, his voice still low, his eyes hard.

Then the car speeds ahead, and you think he’s given it up. But before the two of you can speak, or even slow down, you see that the car has only pulled to the corner ahead—the only one separating you and Georgia from the next house, still shining like a lighthouse. Georgia hasn’t stopped, so you follow suit, the two of you barreling toward the car as the passenger side door opens and the boy steps out, clad in a denim jacket, black T-shirt, and an oversized, hairy gorilla mask. He crosses his arms and takes a step toward you, then stops.

You keep getting closer. Why do you keep getting closer? You are not so subtly trying to steer Georgia to the other side of the street. But she’s paying you no mind, plowing ahead until the two of you are only a yard or so from the gorilla boy, his wide black nose and empty black eyes too realistic in the dark, on this street with no streetlights, on Halloween of all possible nights. Then Georgia stops, nearly tripping you onto your face in its suddenness.

You want to say something, but Georgia beats you to it. She unhooks herself from you softly, and takes the rest of the steps necessary to stand directly before the monkey. She stares at him for a moment, then makes a noise so unexpected you can feel chills crawling up your legs even through your fishnets: she laughs. Not very loud, and not for very long, but it’s her laugh all right. Deep and serious sounding. The monkey doesn’t move.

Man, Georgia says, done with laughing but grinning still. You want a monkey? Her blouse is black and covered in sparkles that catch the little moonlight there is, making her look like a thousand constellations, like the most powerful girl in the whole entire world. Ooh-ooh-ah-ah, she says, running an ape’s speech through the boy’s own affectless voice. The she swings her foot back and vaults it forward and up, catching him with terrible force between the legs.

The boy crumples like a dynamited building, heaving forward and throwing the gorilla mask from his face. He begins to moan quietly and rock from head to toe. You see all of this from across your shoulder, though; Georgia has run, and so, for the umpteenth time tonight, you’ve fallen in line. The two of you reach the next lit house at the same time, then you both bolt past it. You’ve got your prom dress lifted in both hands, which is how you realize that you’ve dropped your candy. The thought blitzes through you and is gone before you even have a chance to care.

*

The two of you--gorgeous, glimmering, brains buzzing with breathlessness--don’t stop until you’re back on your block. Only then, as if communicated telepathically, do you both hit the brakes and start gulping for air. Georgia is laughing, and you are, too: great, whooping laughter caught halfway between adrenaline and drowning.

My . . . . Georgia is trying to say. My . . . candy . . . .can’t . . . breathe . . . .my candy.

Let him have it, you think. Or the cats and raccoons. Whatever gets to it first. Still gasping, you reach up absentmindedly and can feel your hair—her hair—is a total disaster. All the hairspray in the world couldn’t live through tonight. You might care if right now, in this get-up, it didn’t feel so good not to. What you know for sure is that things have changed, that maybe you won’t feel it tomorrow or next week or a year from now, but it seems terrible and inevitable. It’s in the air, the moon, your best friend’s choking laughter.

Soon you will both venture back into your house, past your parents on the couch and up into your room. Cyndi will be waiting in the tapedeck, paused somewhere between songs of liberation and longing. You won’t think twice: you’ll hit rewind, then play.

—Brad Efford

#488: Husker Du, "New Day Rising" (1985)

Mary Richards bolts her door at 119 North Weatherly and, after hanging up her coat and setting her shoes neatly beside each other in her closet, turns off most of her lights so the neighbors don’t know she is home. This is long after Rhoda moved out to New York, after Phyllis moved to San Francisco, after Lou Grant died, after Murray’s novel won a Pulitzer, but before Mary meets her future husband, Congressman Steven Cronin, and moves to New York. Mary walks on her toes so her downstairs neighbors don’t hear her, and when she turns her television on, she sits close with the sound low. Mary Richards does these things because her neighbors make her uncomfortable. She doesn’t like that this is the case, but it is. 

The girl upstairs is bookish and vague, nice enough, but awkward. Mary met her a few months back on a Saturday, right after the girl—whose name Mary can’t remember for the life of her—moved in. Mary held open their building’s exterior door for the girl, whose arms were full of books. With the warmth she was known for when she was producing the nightly news at WJM, Mary asked the girl what she was reading, and the girl said, “Books,” and hurried up the stairs to her attic apartment. Later that day, bored with the sports and movie matinee options on her television, Mary made a pot of coffee, poured two cups, arranged a plate of wafer cookies and carried the spread upstairs to the girl’s apartment. She balanced the tray in one hand to knock on the door. After a moment, the girl opened the door. Mary was taken aback by the room’s darkness. She said, “I brought some coffee.” She said, “You’ve lived here long enough, I thought we could get to know each other.” The girl said, in a small voice, “I guess.” The girl said, “You can come in.” Then again, “I guess.”

Inside, the young woman neither invited Mary to sit nor offered a place for the tray. Mary started to set the tray on a stack of books. The young woman said, “Wait,” and moved the books to the floor. Mary set the tray down, and smoothed her skirt behind her as she sat on a small, plush chair, covered with a black sheet. Mary asked after the girl’s interests. The girl didn’t answer immediately, and when she did, she didn’t quite answer the question. She said, “Did you know there are approximately 200 UFO sightings reported every day.” Mary said she didn’t know that. She said, “So you’re interested in UFO’s?” The girl nodded her head, then said, “Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting was the first to be shared with a large audience. Now lots of people make reports.”  Mary said, “You know, I didn’t know that,” then she asked the young woman if she wanted coffee. Even through her discomfort, Mary was radiant as always. The young woman declined the coffee, but helped herself to a wafer cookie. Then she said, “You know it’s not like in the books.” And Mary, ever somehow both awkward and graceful, said “What? What isn’t like in the books?” And the bookish young woman said, “Being abducted.” She said, “There isn’t a bright beam of light, and they don’t tie you down.” Mary was just listening at this point, not knowing how to respond. The bookish young woman said, “But they test you. That’s why they take you away from your home, from your bed, so they can test the way things feel.” And here, Mary felt something sad turning over inside herself, and reached out to touch the bookish young woman’s knee, which only caused the woman to flinch. Mary backed off and listened as the girl finished her story. The girl said, “That’s why they take you. They want to know how you feel, to know if you are dangerous or weak.” The girl’s use of second person made Mary uncomfortable. The girl continued, “They want to know if humans are friendly. Then when they’re done, when they’ve seen how you feel things, they put you back where you were, on a street or in your bed.” Mary felt like crying, but she didn’t know why, and she felt like saying something, but she didn’t know what to say, so she said, “Oh, I’ve forgotten I need to pick a friend up from work.” Mary left without taking the tray with the coffee and wafers, still untouched save for the single wafer taken by the bookish young woman, and said, “Stop by any time,” as she saw herself out of the woman’s apartment, then out of the building to her car so she could drive aimlessly around Minneapolis for just long enough to seem like she might have actually been picking up a friend from work.

Mary likes to avoid her downstairs neighbors for different reasons. Living in the house’s main floor, in the apartment that Phyllis, and Lars, and Bess used to inhabit, are three young men who keep odd hours and work odd jobs and listen to odd, loud music late into the night. Mary Richards hates that she hides from her neighbors. Ten years ago, when she was still working at WJM, she would have gone downstairs and, not given them a piece of her mind, exactly, but gently asked them to be quiet, to be mindful of their neighbors, and they would have listened because she was Mary Richards, and people liked Mary Richards, and they did what Mary Richards asked. These boys, though, the one and only time Mary knocked on their door to ask them to be quiet, did not like Mary Richards.

The night Mary met the young men who live beneath her, she was, of course, asking them to be quiet because they were listening to music like buzz saws at ten o’clock at night. Ten o’clock! Mary was beside herself, so she knocked on her downstairs neighbors’ door, and was greeted by a man of average height and weight with short hair and a mustache that curled up at the ends. At first, Mary had to struggle not to laugh because she hadn’t seen a man, and a young man nonetheless, wearing a mustache like that since she was a little girl. She tried to ask the man to turn down the music, but the music was still so loud that he couldn’t hear her, so she stepped into the apartment, and shouted, “Can you turn that down?” while covering an ear with one hand and pointing down at the ground with the other. This was enough for the man with the mustache to understand what was happening, so he walked across the room and turned down the stereo. As he navigated the mess of empty bottles, discarded clothing, and piles of books, Mary scanned the apartment, spotted a long-haired man, seemingly asleep on the couch and a third, relatively clean cut young man sitting on the floor, cross-legged, holding a book open on his lap. How these young men could be sleeping and reading through the racket was beyond Mary. Mary also saw, on the far wall, just to the left of the stereo, a poster that read, “We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats,” in large, block letters. There were smaller words beneath. Once the music was down, Mary asked, “What’s the last line of the poster say?” The man with the mustache looked up at Mary, seemingly confused. He looked around. Mary pointed at the poster, said “What’s the small print say?” The man with the mustache said, “And get the cat skins for nothing.” Mary didn’t understand for a moment, then the implications of the words slowly untangled and began to make sense. Mary said, “That’s,” she paused, then, smiling, continued, “nice.” Then she said, “Can you guys keep it down.” Her voice was high, waivered a bit. She went on: “I have to be up early for my job, and I can’t even begin to think about sleep with all this racket down here.” The man with the mustache said, “You don’t have to go to your job.” Mary said, “I have to go to my job.” The man with the mustache said, “It’s just a job.” And Mary, losing her temper, which she rarely ever does, said, “When you’re older and have a real job, you’ll understand.” Before Mary could leave, the man with the mustache said, “I could never be like you,” and Mary had nothing to say, she just stared right in his eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw there, but whatever it was it was not what she expected—she didn’t see a lazy burnout, but something intangible and wise, gruesome and beautiful at once, a raw depth of emotion and disappointment and anger and grief. Mary said, “No, I don’t suppose you could be.”

When Mary left her neighbors’ apartment, instead of returning to her own, she walked out of the building, and onto the lawn. She looked up at the sky and felt a tightness in her chest. It wasn’t a heart attack, Mary knew that, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Her breath shortened and she thought that maybe she was having a panic attack. Mary wondered why she would be having a panic attack now, for the first time, and that’s when she looked up at the roof of her building and saw the girl from the upstairs apartment sitting in a lawn chair, looking up at the sky. Mary wondered if anyone or anything was looking back at the girl, and then her chest relaxed, and her breathing slowed. Right then, she knew that the man with the mustache was right—these people would never be like her, and they shouldn’t be. They were something new, Mary thought, a new day rising, a new type of person. New to Mary, anyway.

As much as Mary hates to admit it, this newness scares her. She doesn’t know what these people are or why they are the ways they are, and knowing these people makes Mary’s Minneapolis feel a little bit darker, and a little bit sadder. So now, most nights, when Mary gets home from work, she keeps the lights and television volume low and walks softly across her floor even when the girl upstairs is on the roof, even when the boys downstairs play their music loud, even when she feels so out of step in this strange new world surrounding her that she wonders if anyone would notice her at all.

—James Brubaker

#489: KISS, "Destroyer" (1976)

America’s mythos, based upon the idea of the self-sufficient, self-determining, self-made man, forms the core of our national identity (“anyone can be President!”), but it’s a charming exaggeration. Far more often, America has made its leaps and bounds thanks to a group effort. Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, but it takes fifty-five more men to sign it and make it official. Andrew Jackson has his Kitchen Cabinet; Lincoln his team of rivals; FDR his Brain Trust. Hundreds of people helped smuggle escaped slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad, even if the only one people can generally name is Harriet Tubman.

I’m not arguing that the site of the Daisy, a 1970s nightclub in Amityville, New York, should be added to the roster of National Park Service sites, but there’s an argument to be made that as far as American grit and determination meeting the group dynamic goes, this Long Island club is a Bizarro World Independence Hall. Because it’s at the Daisy in the spring of 1973, as New York thawed out of another winter, that four boys from New York City first covered their faces with makeup in four different roles: the Demon, the Spaceman, the Starchild, and the Catman. They had played a few gigs with their name already, but it’s on that March night that they truly became KISS.

*

I am not a member of the KISS Army, not even a member of the KISS National Guard, and yet I have been conscious of KISS my whole life, because KISS is an entity designed to make you conscious of it. Eight years before MTV went on the air (and ten years after Brian Epstein put the Beatles in matching suits), they understood that visuals could work with sound to create an entire package, impossible to ignore. Even if I did not listen to KISS, I always knew about KISS, and this is the genius of the band: that they were able to transcend whatever limitations they had in terms of talent or looks or station in life to become completely inescapable in American culture from the mid-1970s to now.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

This is what makes Destroyer (released March 15, 1976, ten days before I was born) an amazingly contradictory, beautifully American album; like Whitman, it is large, it contains multitudes. From its cover, a painting of the four leaping in full costumes and makeup over a pile of rubble, as though the four heads on Mount Rushmore had smashed out of their stone prison, the albums announces itself as an explosion or revolution—and then it immediately reverses that with its opening track. “Detroit Rock City” starts not with the grinding riff of the actual song, but with sound effects of someone eating breakfast (in a diner? At home?) while listening to a news report on a fatal car accident; this is followed by sound effects of them getting into a car, in which “Rock and Roll All Night,” off the last album (Alive, which saved both the band and their record label), is playing. The song cuts off, then comes back, the car sound effects Doppler across our ears, we hear the driver mumble-singing along with the stereo, the song cuts off again, the engine hums down the road, and then and only then does the riff for “Detroit Rock City” begin—a minute and a half into the album.

Ninety seconds is a long stretch of time, forever on an album. And nothing from this opening skit returns in Destroyer; instead, the album simply moves ahead, doing whatever it likes. Songs like “King of the Night Time World” invite the listener, “living at home” and “going to school,” to join KISS in their midnight universe. Children’s voices giggle over the Demon’s voice and sludgy guitars in “God of Thunder.” “Great Expectations” opens with a riff quoting from Beethoven’s Sonata #8. The album chugs along reliably between songs written to be concert anthems and songs written to invite the listener to escape their world.

And then there’s “Beth,” the tender orchestral ballad (the New York Philharmonic plays on the track), sung by the drummer, the Catman, which became the highest charting track (#7) in KISS’s history. It comes after “Shout It Out Loud,” a song clearly written with the next live album in mind, and the effect is like finding an art museum inside a gas station. The song is two minutes and forty-six seconds of schmaltz, a lover’s complaint that he cannot return to his girl “because me and the boys / will be playing all night” (if the cameo of “Rock and Roll All Night” at the start has any echo, I suppose it’s here). The song fades out, and then the pounding drums and the Starman’s voice begin “Do You Love Me?,” a song so ridiculously over-the-top-rock-star that Nirvana covered it ironically years later. There’s a brief instrumental track, nothing more than a doodle, and then the album is over. It takes about thirty-four minutes, including the opening minute and a half of skit. It’s not exactly an epic album, but then again, the Gettysburg Address is only 272 words long. Does Destroyer contradict itself? Very well, then; it contradicts itself.

*

I have listened to Destroyer dozens of times in the writing of this essay, and it has never improved. Its placement on the RS 500 as an album slightly better than ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres and slightly worse than Husker Du’s New Day Rising feels apt, like the fact that KISS made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on their 15th year of eligibility (the same class as Nirvana, who covered KISS and who made it into the Hall in their first year). It is an album that exists more as artifact or evidence of something bigger than itself.

When I listen to Destroyer, I think not about KISS, but rather SMACK, the one-night-only KISS cover band I saw in college, the night before KISS themselves played Topeka, Kansas. In a bar in Manhattan, Kansas, not too far removed in spirit from the Daisy in Amityville, four local boys took the stage in homemade costumes and girlfriend-applied makeup, and proceeded to rock its tiny stage. They did the hits, the ones even I could recognize. The Demon spat blood. The Spaceman’s guitar emitted sparks. A drunk middle-aged woman in the front pulled down her tanktop to show the band her breasts. The Catman came out from behind his drumkit to sit on a stool and croon “Beth” to the crowd, and perhaps I am inventing this detail, but I swear that he gave a rose to a girl in the audience at the end.

They played as best they could given the space they had, in a grotty little college bar called Rusty’s in the Little Apple. The Demon couldn’t breathe fire--a mainstay of KISS’s shows--because of both fire codes and common sense, but we all shouted out loud and promised to rock all night and party every day.

They were four boys in mid-1990s Manhattan (Kansas) imitating four boys in mid-1970s Manhattan (New York), and they were, on that night in April, performing that most American of acts: the invention of the self from nothing. With makeup and costumes, guitars and drums and amplifiers, and a crowd ready to cheer every mood, they were our own Founding Fathers of a moment that was simultaneously imitation and original, carving themselves their own city on a hill out of the wilderness of music and makeup. And I stood there in the crowd, like a spectator watching Lincoln at Gettysburg or listening to FDR on the wireless, amazed at it all, a room full of kings and queens of the night time world in a nation where we always said anyone could become anything, and where, for that night, I believed it, and now, when I hear the long opening of Destroyer, I hear that still.

—Colin Rafferty

#490: ZZ Top, "Tres Hombres" (1973)

When we were nineteen, my twin brother Dylan was in a cover band called the Pink Ladies, which he said was funny because none of them wore pink and none of them were ladies.  I thought it was stupid, but when I told him so, he told me I didn’t understand irony.  He flicked an imaginary rubber band at me after he said it, and I pretended to bat it away.

This was back in 1997, in those first months after high school, before I married-divorced, married-divorced, before Dylan and I stopped speaking.  I was waiting tables at the Perkins by the freeway during the day and taking English classes at the community college in the evening, and on the weekends I’d go with the Pink Ladies to their shows.  I’d lug around their guitar cases and bring them warm beers that I kept stashed in a duffel bag in the back of the van.  They played weddings mostly, and high school dances, but Dylan, like most musicians, dreamed of striking out on his own and being discovered. 

The way he talked about it always made me think of the prospectors heading out to California to strike it rich mining for gold.  Dylan was one of the late miners.  He’d missed the rush in ’49, was coming along in ’50 or ’51, and all the good claims were taken.  It wasn’t his fault.  He was born too late for the rock and roll movement, which was what he really loved, and in the wrong place, a small town in northern Minnesota where being famous meant having your hot dish be the first to go at church potlucks.  That whole year, our first one out of high school, he talked nonstop about leaving, moving down to the Cities or farther.  There were nights when I went to bed feeling heavy and certain that he’d be gone in the morning. 

Dylan had the right temperament for greatness, with the ability to twist girls around his finger, to sink into a depression that lasted days, to always get his way, to pitch a fit over something tiny, like when I used one of his washcloths to clean the makeup off my face one night.  He was good.  He could play guitar, he could sing, make his voice low or high as he needed, growling out lyrics, going up into a falsetto, but he was missing something.  He wasn’t great, and he wasn’t original.  He was a mimicker.  He’d watch videos of concerts, memorize how the musicians twisted and gyrated, and he’d copy that.

I remember one night, Dylan convinced the rest of the band to play ZZ Top.  They didn’t normally go in for the rock sound.  They kept it lighter, was how Dylan put it, and he always sneered when he said it.  Golden oldies for the weddings, pop hits for the high schoolers.  ZZ Top just wasn’t in their repertoire.  But Dylan loved them, and he loved Tres Hombres.  I’d hear him singing in his room, humming guitar riffs, tapping the beat on his stomach.  He’d start with “Waitin’ for the Bus,”  then move along through the album.  It was infectious.  He’d started calling me La Grange after he caught me doing it too, and soon that was all any of the Pink Ladies called me.  It didn’t make much sense as a name, but it was better than Sexy Sadie, which was what they’d called me before.

It was January, and it was cold the way only Minnesota can be, with that stabbing air that brings tears to your eyes and immediately freezes them on your lashes, streets so slick you could skate on them, mornings of cars refusing to start.  The Pink Ladies had been invited to play at a church social, which wasn’t their usual sort of venue, but also wasn’t unusual, since in the middle of January, we were all willing to do just about anything for entertainment.  I helped them set up in the basement, untangling cords and testing microphones, which they didn’t need in a space smaller than the elementary school cafeteria, but which Dylan insisted on.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

You could blame the cold for how it went, the fact that there’d been trouble with the heating and no one had told the Pink Ladies that, so when Dylan hit those opening chords of “Waitin’ for the Bus,” his fingers tripped and froze.  You could blame the audience, say they didn’t appreciate the music, say they were uncultured, say that Dylan and the Pink Ladies never had a chance.  You could blame Dylan for choosing that night to play ZZ Top instead of in a few months, when they’d play at the high school prom, for a group that might’ve been able to better appreciate it.  Singing about Jesus turning the Mississippi into wine would never fly with the good Minnesotan Lutherans.

The whole set was a disaster.  It wasn’t just that Dylan couldn’t play the chords right.  When he tried to imitate Billy Gibbons’ voice, he squeaked, he cracked, like he was thirteen again and couldn’t figure out how to carry a tune.  The fluorescent lights overhead cast a yellow sheen on his skin.  Even from where I stood, at the back of the room, almost hidden behind a stack of metal folding chairs, I could see he was sweating.  Dylan always sweat when he got nervous.  You could just see the rest of the Pink Ladies shrinking into themselves, like they thought that if they backed up far enough, they might be able to just disappear. 

When he’d finally played the last chord of “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” the room was silent.  Or not silent—someone coughed, a few other people sniffled, trying to clear their sinuses.  If one person had started clapping, everyone else would have joined in, but no one started.  Not even me.  It wasn’t like I stood there and thought through the moment, weighed the pros and cons of initiating the applause, finally choosing not to.  It was instinct, telling me to stay silent so that no one would notice me.

It might have been okay if I hadn’t looked back up at Dylan.  But I did, and he was looking at me, and our eyes met.  We didn’t have many twin moments, Dylan and me, but we had one then.  I knew, looking at him, that he would never leave our town, would never amount to much of a musician, would be forever dreaming of what his life could have been, and he, looking at me, knew that I knew this, and something flashed up in his eyes, the type of hatred and revulsion that children have for certain foods, that visceral certainty that if they even smell it, it will make them ill.  I could see it in Dylan’s face, and I could feel it in myself, too.   Then someone else in the audience put their hands together, tentatively, and the other church ladies joined in. But I didn’t. I dropped my eyes and pretended to knock my elbow against the folding chairs so that I’d have an excuse.

After the show, Dylan joked about it, said every musician needed to have a big flop so he could understand what failure was.  And it’s true that for a while, he seemed motivated to get out, to try harder, but that all came to nothing.  The Pink Ladies had disbanded by fall, and Dylan started working at the Fix-it-Rite across town, and he never left. 

Sometimes I think back to that night, to that moment of our eyes meeting across the church basement, and I think that everything else in our lives followed from that spark of hatred that we shared, and I think that I would do anything to take it back.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

But then I think, no, that was just another night, just another show, and everything that happened would always have happened, and it was nothing I did or didn’t do that caused it.  Then I usually stay up too late watching reality TV reruns and drinking Diet Coke and pretending that the reason Dylan and I don’t speak isn’t because he can’t stand that I know of his failure, but because he’s traveling the world, playing concerts to sold-out crowds, and that any day now he could show up on my front steps just to surprise me.  I can see him, the way he used to look after a show, his face pink and damp with sweat, his shirt untucked, the gel dripping from his hair, him running his hand through it and then wiping the grease on his shirt, leaving stains.  Or sometimes I see me.  I’m back in the church basement, and Dylan’s just lifting his hand from the guitar, his final riff still echoing through the room, and before he can even settle back into his regular slouch, I’m stepping forward, and I’m clapping, clapping hard.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#491: Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (1969)

On our second bird walk around the neighborhood, Nancy crouched down on the sidewalk, flapping her arms to keep me from stepping on the feather, and shushed me like she was shushing a grenade. To a ten-year-old, her intent was clear: talk and you lose your throat. I kept quiet, but inched closer. Nancy picked up the feather and held it under her nose, moved it in front of her eyes, then settled it next to her ear.

“Sometimes you can hear the squawk,” she said.

I put my ear beside hers and heard a medley of birdsong, but like most everything else, it was only in my head. I held out my palm, hoping Nancy would let the feather float down. It was long and jet black with gray, leopard-like spots and looked softer than silk.

But Nancy hesitated. I was new to the neighborhood and a pretty ratty-looking kid, and how was she supposed to know if I was trustworthy? Nancy loved three dead things more than she loved anything living: John F. Kennedy, feathers of all kinds, and Albert King. Trouble was, she didn’t love them very much, either. Most days, Nancy referred to Albert as the husband she’d have chosen for her dearest, most annoying friend—someone she loved to see in small doses. Albert seemed like a guy you’d need space from. On her softer days, when her hands ached, she called him “Velvet B.” There wasn’t a walk that went by without Nancy humming a tune from Born Under a Bad Sign, which she believed was the only record of Albert’s worth listening to. “The other ones are twice as long, half as good, and three times as fat,” she told me once. But this was after she told me she was a feather finder. She always led with that, as though finding feathers was the part of her that mattered.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Because she didn’t like inviting people in, I only saw Nancy’s feather collection once, a few weeks before I turned thirteen. I thought it was a good sign that something lucky was happening to me before I was about to enter my unluckiest year. Nancy asked me inside, and then took me to her bedroom to stand in front of the nightstand and the shiny box carved from a cherry tree. I could see the moon-shaped reflection of the lamp in the wood. Nancy told me to open it, but I was afraid. What if it were a music box stuck on the blues, and, when I smoothed my hands on the box’s sides, Albert would ascend, granting desperate wishes I never should have wished? Or maybe, the box belonged to Pandora herself, full of every bad thing that ached to get out.

Of course, it was neither. It was a box full of feathers stacked on feathers, arranged from largest to smallest. Some of them smelled bad, and I said so. Nancy said, “Dead don’t go far.”

She was fond of speaking that way, in short pragmatic sentences. I hardly ever heard her expound on anything, and, in general, she wasn’t keen on words. I think that was partially why she loved Velvet B. Nancy didn’t sing many of Albert’s words aloud. “The blues don’t need words,” she said when asked. But I disagreed. I thought the lyrics made the song, and on bird walks I sung nonsense words along to Nancy’s melodies, which often earned me a soft knock on the noggin, her way of inquiring whether or not there was anything in there.

After enough pestering, she let me look at the album cover of Born Under a Bad Sign. I dissected the truly bizarre hodgepodge of a black cat, skull and cross bones, snake eyes, a Friday the 13th calendar page, and an ace of spades on the front, and then I moved on to the lyrics. I didn’t understand how these words fit with the songs I knew, and unlike usual, I was being too literal, asking questions like, What’s in Kansas City? Will I need a personal manager when I become a woman? Who goes on dates at the Laundromat?  What kind of gun is a love gun?  Nancy didn’t have answers for any of them; she just stated emphatically that I was missing the point. Albert didn’t write those lyrics anyway, and I would do well to turn my attention to the guitar, his fingers on the strings, the riffs and sounds that would shape guitar gods for generations to come.

*

Shortly after I turned thirteen, I left my house one night at dusk to walk off a stomachache. I took the back way to the park, through the gravel alley where I liked to knuckle-thump trashcans and bowl with acorns and squirrels. Circling back around just as the sun disappeared behind the hills, I hopped the fence to my backyard and climbed the rope ladder up to my tree house.

I heard the flapping before I saw the hawk. Trapped inside, it must have flown in the window that had since blown shut. The hawk was red-tailed and his left wing was broken, the bone jutting out into the air. When he tried to fly away as I approached, his body only scooted against the floor. I knelt beside him and looked him right in the eyes, the way you’d look at someone to show you empathized. His talons were curled in and tense from hours of trying and failing.

What is it like to lose your ability to move? To move is to be alive. I imagined my legs falling off and dragging myself across a splintery wooden floor toward a doorknob too high for me to reach.

The hawk crowed. I scanned the tree house and, as soon as I saw it, went for the baseball bat in the corner. I wrapped my fists around the barrel and swung at the hawk until the squawking stopped and the feathers flew. Red, gray, brown and white, tail, flume, bristle and downy, they floated and landed all around the interior of the tree house. I sat, cross-legged, and folded my hands in my lap. I pictured Nancy in her recliner, Albert on the record player, born under a bad sign, toothy licks, gritty and buttery at the same time, D to A to G. I stayed there for hours as the night went black, humming to myself, waiting to be found.

*

Years later, after Nancy had passed, I discovered that scientists have studied which astrological signs are associated with negative human traits. One such study on hospital admissions showed that Aries are more likely to enter the hospital but Pisces are more likely to stay. It was fascinating, and I wanted more. Don’t we all want nature to explain why some of us are lucky, some of us criminal, hurting ourselves and others, some of us so, so blue?

The data isn’t there. At least not yet. I keep going back to the signs, to the knotty horns and the slimy gills. I read the horoscopes and measure how far the moon has traveled from the oak tree in my yard. I have to be honest: the ram and the fish do nothing for me. Their mystery feels too small. And the rest of the signs feel limited, too, as far as explanations go. The virgin and the scales, the bull and the goat and the ugly crab, all so easily lost. The centaur gets close, but then even it is not able to fly. I am looking for a different sign, one that leaves behind tangible things which you can find on the ground or, if you’re lucky, sit among quietly and wait.

—Lacy Barker

#492: Eurythmics, "Touch" (1983)

Who’s that girl running around with you?

— Eurythmics, “Who’s That Girl?”

As a teenager I used my youth—and my school uniform—as plumage in a years-long tail-feather dance for a few older, adult men. I had designs in learning The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” on my guitar, and I rocked my twin bed while imagining running off from Tennessee to California with a middle-aged, B-list actor. In my skewed, pre-feminism adolescence, I saw my youth as both a complement to their age and a roadblock in connecting to them. I started listening exclusively to non-contemporary music—classic rock, jazz, etc.—and watching old television and old films, especially those that seemed to belong to their youth. I threw myself into becoming the girl with knowledge, a grasp of experience beyond my personal experience, my second sight not into the future but, like an ordinary woman, into the past.

Typical of an only child, I sought cultural history as a means to connect to adults, even before puberty. In carpool, I had long conversations with my best friend’s mom while my friend ate Pop Tarts and dozed against the window. I spent summer days with my grandparents watching Perry Mason and insomniac nights watching the full run of Nick at Nite’s retro programming. My music, for many years, was my mother’s music. Bruce Springsteen. Jimmy Buffett. (There’s got to be a home video somewhere of me singing “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw.”) I used pop culture not only as a means to receive adults’ attention—I felt I could access their jokes and metaphors, indeed, their language.

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Eurythmics’ 1983 album Touch arrived four years before I was born. I first encountered its hits “Here Comes the Rain Again” and “Who’s That Girl?” in the 90s through VH1, a network on which I binged and only neglected for MTV’s Daria. Listening to the album’s nine original tracks and rewatching the two music videos, I yet feel a great nostalgia, like an ink stain over my heart. Or, to use the Eurythmics’ own words, the music returns to me “falling on my head like a memory.” As an adult, I’m most compelled by Annie Lennox’s gutsy gender-bending, exemplified in her roles as both the female lounge performer and the male audience member who kiss at the end of the “Who’s That Girl?” video, especially now that I’m less bullied by hormones and seduced by forbidden (heterosexual) rendezvous, and more in touch with my own leanings. As a teenager, however, my interest in Annie Lennox and David Stewart depended only upon other people, indeed, any person I might want to connect with who had experienced the music in medias res.

In my investigation of the Time Before My Life, I collected knowledge piecemeal, like a panorama made up of many individual images. It’s something I still do through collecting vintage ephemera, pulp novels, smut magazines, science illustrations, music, etcetera. In fact, it’s what I do in writing poems. Some would attribute my behavior to feelings of a particularly hipster breed of nostalgia, a desire to return to some cultural motherland, and some might go so far as to argue that nostalgia reveals one’s inability to live in the present or work for a better future, a vestigial romanticism that makes it hard to crawl out of the turbulent ocean and onto the sunny beach.

But my interest in the cultural past, at least now, anchors itself in empathy,  something I feel we must sustain if we are to move into the future with any sort of hope. The wish to make other people more real to me is also why I read literature, why I bought an old radio that reminds me of my dead grandparents. The past, unlike the future, never dies. The past is always the past, no matter if we lived it or not. The time before our birth is full of possibilities, lives we don’t know and never lived. The future doesn’t leave artifacts, but from the artifacts of the past we can make a benign voodoo doll (a bit of cloth here, eye of newt there) with which we don’t control actions but, rather, simply understand them, and, since the past has prompted the present, we therefore better understand our own.

So while I can never experience Eurythmics’ Touch as someone might have the day it was released, I have the gift of experiencing it for myself as a twenty-seven year old in 2014, as well as the experience of my attempt to experience it in the way that others might have experienced it contemporaneously. Additionally, as a poet, I’m constantly seeking new ways to reinvigorate the language I use, and so, experiencing the cultural past allows me to experience the linguistic past, and therefore nudges me, like a good friend, into conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. My nostalgia, (a word rooted in the idea of going home) is a longing for a spiritual dwelling made up of others, its foundation beams made up of every one I love.

— Emilia Phillips

#493: Wilco, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (2002)

In the middle of “All Too Well,” one of the most structurally epic fuck-yous pop music has produced in a long time, a very worked-up Taylor Swift lays into her subject with such calculation and heartbreak that it sometimes physically hurts to listen to. Describing the moment to the uninitiated can be a little difficult: essentially, after three verses and a couple choruses of impeccable, brutal buildup, Tay rips through the song’s bridge like a carefully sharpened blade.

You call me up again just to break me like a promise,
so casually cruel in the name of being honest.
I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here,
‘cause I remember it all, all, all too well.

Maybe it doesn’t work written out like this. Maybe you have to hear it for yourself. Go now; I can wait.

If you still don’t get the chills you so clearly should be feeling rippling through your body, I think I have your answer. Go get your copy of Red, listen to it top to bottom (skipping “Sad Beautiful Tragic” and “The Lucky One,” because yikes), and see if it makes sense that way. Context can change everything, after all. If that particular album is a massive one for pop music and, more specifically, Swift herself—and it is—then “All Too Well” is the moment you realize its massivity. In other words: if you don’t buy that bridge, you don’t buy Tay, and at least you know you can move on with your life, satisfied that you tried.

I’ve been thinking recently about moments like this: the epiphanic kick to the head that any great album will inevitably eventually deliver. Of course, plenty of albums dish out so many of these over the course of their running time that the very idea of an “epiphany” is ludicrous—it means nothing if every track makes you get it. These are your Aeroplane Over the Seas, your Gracelands and 36 Chamberses. Bonafide chunks of brilliance. Real Mona Lisas.

The other kind, though—the great record exposed as such through one truly gut-busting, quickly-passing moment—is much more common. Taylor Swift is good at this, and not just one, but two of her albums model the trick expertly. (Exhibit B.: the subtle way she briefly rides the counter rhythm coming out of the bridge into the last set of choruses on “Fearless.” Trust me.) Arcade Fire has the moment in “Half Light I” where the music drops out and that ghostly pair of voices sings the word “echoes” in the most haunting way imaginable and suddenly The Suburbs falls into place. Eminem decided to say “I’m just playin’, ladies, you know I love you” in that very specific semicreepy, semisincere way at the end of “Kill You” and set The Marshall Mathers LP completely on its head. Tom Waits improvises for almost six minutes on “Step Right Up” and when he says, “Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife,” you are either on board with Small Change or not. The ship’s leaving. Toot toot, adios.

Somewhere on this ill-defined list is Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s a terrific album—twelve years after its much-heralded release, not many are contesting that. That layered production? Those weird astro-static noises? Those songs? Forget about it. Many people feel many feelings around, for, and through YHF, and I get that. Still, for me it all boils down to one brief snatch of sound—the epiphany in the heart of the anxiety-riddled light rock.

The crushing bummer “Ashes of American Flags” is the sixth song on the record, making it the fulcrum on which the album’s two halves swing up and down. And oh boy, do they. Love to crippling fear and right back up again, ad infinitum. “Ashes” is not my favorite song on YHF. I would put it with the bottom two or three, to be honest, its clunky lyrics and glacier pace colliding into something like a perfect storm of blandness—but once it ends . . . well, it’s a little difficult to explain.

The enormity of the ending of “Ashes of American Flags” is so difficult to properly explain, in fact, that Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and original Yankee engineer Jay Bennett nearly came to blows over how it should sound. You can see this all go down in Sam Jones’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, should you feel so inclined. To be honest, though, it doesn’t offer much in the way of insight: you can listen to the ten-or-so seconds that bridge together “Ashes” and album highlight “Heavy Metal Drummer,” think about what it might have cost the band—the contentious environment in the recording studio ended up driving apart Bennett and Tweedy for years—and still come up empty.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

And here’s what it ultimately comes down to. Here’s where that epiphany shit hits hard. Somewhere in the muddle of white noise, radio static, and glitchy space sounds, someone hits five keys on the piano. They sound random, just another piece of the ether, cutting-room-floor stuff that was kept for “atmosphere.” They’re pretty, but meaningless.

Then the next track comes hard-kicking in, and in the melody’s background, there it is again: that five-note succession, now the spine for a much livelier, much cheerier song built not from one man’s agitation and nerves, but from nostalgia and summer and KISS and getting stoned. The power of this transition cannot be overstated—in fact, in the way it shuttles you softly from blackness into the light of day, it serves as a perfect thesis statement for the entire album.

Maybe this sounds absurd. Just another ex-record store employee placing far too much weight on a minuscule moment in recorded music history to prove some kind of point about some obscure something even he can’t really explain. Someone already made High Fidelity, didn’t they? Wouldn’t you rather go watch Empire Records again instead? Fine. I know. And I won’t try to convince you otherwise. This is exactly that, and I am he.

But if you have the time to spare, just please. I implore you. Can’t it be possible that if you grab your headphones, put on Yankee from start to finish, or try your best with Red, some insight might come along after all? What is music, after all, if not another target for our obsessions? What is a perfect moment if not the catalyst for a thousand more just like it? No matter how brief. No matter. Go now. I can wait.

—Brad Efford