#468: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band" (1965)

There's a great video I've just come across of Michael Bloomfield and Son House giving separate, edited-together interviews during the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Bloomfield was, at the time, the 22-year-old guitarist wunderkind for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Son House was, even then, one of the greatest living bluesmen in the history of recorded music—he would have been 63 in the summer of '65. Both men are dead now—Bloomfield in 1981 at the supremely young age of 37 (drugs), and Son House years later, at the much more respectable age of 86 (cancer of the larynx, a singer's nightmare). Anyway, the video is a real trip to watch. It keeps cutting back and forth between the two men: one very clearly representing the new upstart vanguard of white blues guitarists, and the other what most who care about this kind of thing would still consider a flag-bearer for "real," "authentic" blues. Bloomfield, to his credit, admits that he basically has no right playing the blues, or at the very least, calling what he plays "the blues." He's from a very well-to-do background ("My father's a multi-millionaire, y'know? I've lived a rich, fat, happy life, man. I had a big bar mitzvah, y'know?"), which he speaks about as if it were some cosmic joke that he should ever have been born into such a scene.

Still, what can playing the blues possibly mean to him, beyond just hitting guitar strings in an aurally pleasing way? What can it mean to any white man? Or any person so financially secure at such a young age? Does color matter? Should it? Rock 'n' roll critics have been flailing around helplessly in some attempt at answering these questions for 50-plus years, I know. But still.

And, too, just to complicate shit: Bloomfield himself, while alive, seemed to flip-flop on his own specific connection to the music. In this video, he passes over his Jewish upbringing as a way to flippantly explain why the blues couldn't possibly be his to possess. "It's very strange," he says, "'cause I'm not born to blues, y'know? It's not in my blood, it's not in my roots, in my family, man. I'm Jewish, y'know?" He laughs, and the faceless interviewer laughs with him. "I've been Jewish for years."

Then later, as that very young man got a little less young and much more famous, he went on record giving that same Jewishness as reason for his ability to truly know the blues after all: "It's natural. Black people suffer externally in this country. Jewish people suffer internally. The suffering's the mutual fulcrum for the blues." And maybe he's right, in a way, but is it really the same? Could the blues really just be a channeling of the suffering of a whole people, even if the one expressing it hasn't experienced said suffering himself? I don’t know. Maybe.

But check out Son House in this video. He isn’t being interviewed physically alongside Boomfield, but you get the distinct impression of what he thinks of the young man, or at least what he represents, that House’s own thoughts on the subject of race and authenticity and the blues are that of an old-timer stuck firmly in his ways. The thing is, you could easily argue that these ways are very much the right ones to have. After all, Bloomfield does insist that he’s “no Son House,” and when you watch the elder bluesman play, you get what he means without him having to explain in the least. It’s all there in the way House’s right arm flaps like a bird with a busted wing-bone and his left one herky-jerks up and down the neck like it’s trying to catch that bird and throttle it. The whole blues narrative we’ve come to know, right there before us: eyes closed, swaying as though possessed.

I’m simplifying to make some semblance of a point, obviously, which is to wonder if the blues was ever—could ever—be intended for a white audience and white musicians. And if white folks get bluesy, if they get into their licks and start swaying in the crowd, is that inauthentic? Or just some other kind of possession? Some totally other kind of music?

I know I’m not the ideal person to be writing this—I’m not black, not even Jewish—but does that fact in itself make the questions, the observations, inauthentic? Maybe even totally void of an argument? Moot, as they, completely beside the point. I can’t answer that, I don’t think (though the answer, probably, is yes, absolutely).

So, what, then? I listened to The Paul Butterfield Blues Band like three times, and then it got boring, just those same 12 bars on and on, the same high-flying solos tossed in between. And then I thought, but is that their fault? Maybe the blues just never should have been Butterfield’s bag. Maybe when, in the video with Son House, Bloomfield swears up and down that his band’s frontman is “in there all the way,” that “there’s no white bullshit with Butterfield,” it’s just a 22-year-old kid who likes playing his guitar and promoting his new band. It’s not impossible. (In fact, both things, I’d say, whether or not they negate his authenticity, were pretty much undeniably true.)

This record came out in 1965, and is considered one of the first blues albums to prominently feature a white singer, after The Yardbirds first toured, yes, but still just before Fresh Cream and a few years before Zeppelin I (or II, or III…). I guess, in a way, that means it was before its time. But is its time worth celebrating? Take one look at Rolling Stone’s 500 Albums and it’s clear how riotously they continue to celebrate it. Would Son House be cool with that? Does it really make a difference? (No, and okay, yes.)

—Brad Efford

#469: Fugees, "The Score" (1996)

5 months it took
to think there was only you and to you I thought
there was only I

5 months it took
to wrap and melody scrap into a 13-track present
a red giant, the success of the star in its prime
exploded into a dark black hole
a white dwarf
and then nothing more
but were you keeping score?

seasons change, mad things rearrange
from empty winters to full springs to blossom summers
what seemed like a welcome change
became an unseen rearrange

I thought we were making music
but ask me again why I am here
ask New Jersey, how do you feel
looking out across the river
at that glittering red delicious
flawless and shiny—ting!
but a bite will soon uncover
unexpected, a bee sting
a mealy and dejected inside
too late, gone bad
a returned engagement ring

ask me how I feel
looking out across the aisle
I want that
wake up early make you breakfast
kind of love, that
let you win this game of checkers because
it’s cute when you do your winner-dance
kind of love, that
wrap your arm into my arm pretzel style
kind of love
because love isn’t something you say
it’s something you do

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

he was
strumming my pain with his fingers
he was
stringing me along with his words
I thought we had that
that glittering red delicious
that kind of love
but what kind of love
is conditional?
I never signed up for the kind of love
that wears a trenchcoat of promises
I think it’s
that kind of love
and yet, I catch my breath and there’s no one behind me

5 months it took me to realize
I should have been keeping the score
it was
the kind of love that makes you
the ever-optimist
maybe not this time, maybe another
full of hopes and excuses
the kind of love that makes you
the all-forgiving, a Mother Teresa
the kind of love that makes you
be the person you always said you didn’t think you’d be

warn the town the beast is loose
angry, you say fuck the system
I ask, why did you ever trust it
you knew what you were getting into

I was married

but it was real

I told you
time and time again

how do you think it made me feel?

I was pregnant

but it wasn’t mine

I put my everything in this

it went platinum, times six

who cared

like a Marilyn Monroe blonde
bottled I bought it for pennies

it was just 5 months

but that 5 months
in that basement
became my prison
the words, the chain on my leg

I was always told, be true and love freely
but why wasn’t I also told,
love freely but beware
those who fall too quick
will reach the bottom first

but maybe falling too quick
is the price I pay for enlightenment
there is no time for regret when what you’ve got left
is a masterpiece
a compilation of hurt and love
and those a-ha moments
carry you through

because it’s much easier to think it never meant nothing
than to think it once did
and that it just slipped away into a smoky wisp
like the candle that burned bright
I still smell the smoke of that once flame
but I know better than to dip my finger into
the hot wax
in this great future you can't forget your past
so dry your tears I say

fall hard, burn first
pain may be pleasure, but even if the pleasure’s worth the pain
wisdom without understanding
success without humility
love without respect
what is it?
what came of it?
they were keeping score but
what is it?
what came of it?

everything's gonna be alright, everything's gonna be alright
Fugees come to the dance tonight, everything's gonna be alright

—Prarthana Gurung

#470: LL Cool J, "Radio" (1985)

1.

I eased the car onto our street just as the song on the radio changed. Light noodling on the frets, towering mega-drums like a clock with giant arms ticking away the seconds. Ballad-beat, mopey guitar riff. Lena said: “Oh my God, yes,” and turned it up.

I didn’t even have time to ask, “What is this?” before the dual vocals—both the faceless lead singer’s and my radio-loving girlfriend’s—slipped into the lyrics: I’m not a perfect perrr-son.

Me: still no clue. Lena: fucking into it. Like, clenched fists and closed eyes. Like, three-beer bucket-seat karaoke. Soon enough she took a breath to tell me it was “Hoobastank, HELLO,” but it didn’t really matter. I was already sold. She didn’t know the second verse nearly as well as the first, but by the third chorus I had learned the words enough to belt along. By now we had parked and were just sitting in the car in front of our apartment in the middle of the night, reveling in what I was certain was my new favorite bad song. Making faces, using our hands, really glamming it up. The kicker: this was just a few days ago, right at the tail-end of 2014, meaning this song was very officially old. Where had I been ten years ago? Why hadn’t I ever heard this song? As an old friend of mine likes to say: who hurt me?

In 2004, when “The Reason” was (apparently) enjoying its time chewing through just about all contenders on Top 40 radio, I was spending the little time I spent in cars getting rides to and from school soundtracked by Led Zeppelin and The Killers. My older sister had the license and the wheels, the classic rock and Hot Fuss, and besides, I wouldn’t have given two hoots about the radio dial even if I were an owl. I was already a year into my teenaged record-store job, which meant a year into my music education, which meant the only education that ever really mattered to me. When we pulled away from home listening to “Mr. Brightside” or “Kashmir” for the umpteenth time, I wasn’t itching to catch the new Hooba—I was humming “I Wanna Be Your Dog” under my breath. And not Iggy: the live Sonic Youth version. Yeah, I was that cool.

So I completely missed “The Reason” when everyone sane was quickly tiring of “The Reason.” But the beautiful thing about the radio is that it works just like a clogged bathtub drain, and anything you thought you were finally done with will eventually just come back up again. It’s why the best stations are the ones with tags like The best of the nineties, 2k, and today! Mostly, what they mean is the “today” part, but when those nineties and 2k jams come seeping through the pipes, you remember why, even though you’d never admit it, not really, you still can’t live without your radio.

2.

LL Cool J knew this right from the start. At 17, he was already sure he couldn’t survive without his radio. He believed it so much that he called his first album Radio, put a ghetto blaster on the cover, and professed his love for the ‘waves right there on side one, track one. He went on Soul Train and performed his first smash hit—Kangoled, tracksuited—with a man on stage whose job it was to simply stand there and hold a big radio. Clearly, this shit went deep with young Todd James.

And why shouldn’t it have? By age 16, LL was already making demo tapes in his grandparents’ basement, which meant he was into music in a major way, and in 1984, what was music? Unless you could afford to go to clubs every night, it was the radio. And DJs, remember, were disc jockeys before they were He’s-the-DJ-I’m-the-Rapper DJs: spinning singles, digging for new hits, dictating every young person’s every afternoon. They were already rock stars before they found out how to be musicians, too.

So what else would LL possibly think to rap about besides his radio? It was his own personal daily soundtrack, his aphrodisiac, his connection to superstardom. And yeah, maybe it doesn’t seem like the most hardcore subject, but the guy’s still a teenager, and radio’s still good. Like deep-cuts, taste-making, kinda-dangerous good. “Don’t mean to offend other citizens,” LL rap-apologizes, “but I kick my volume way past ten.” Does he really mean not to offend, I’ve sat and wondered? I doubt it. Otherwise, what’s the point of taking it past ten at all?

3.

I don’t often think of myself as a very talented person outside of very specific, very unsexy tasks (washing dishes, serving a ping-pong ball, etc.), but I have always thought I would make a great radio DJ. I know, deep down, that the reality of the job is different, but in my mind, if you’re doing it right, DJing is basically just putting together glorified mixtapes. You pick a song, feel out the next one, then the next, taking listeners up hills, around corners, then down again at just the right moment. You can hold a CD, a hard drive, grooved wax in your hands, but music itself is not a tangible romance. It’s a feeling dependent on who’s playing it, when you’re hearing it, what it leads to when it’s over. Excuse the sentiment, but it’s kind of...everything, in a way.

I’ve only had my chance at the controls once, when I was a senior in high school. I was visiting my older friend and bandmate at college, and he had been given the reigns over the university station’s graveyard shift, midnight to six, all pitch-black hours with a listenership of approximately nil. We took the opportunity that I think anyone in our situation—young, geeking out, in a noise-rap band—would have, and played lots of our own stuff, taking turns nodding out briefly on the studio’s busted loveseat. In between the narcissism, though, we studied the racks (all CDs, by this point), giddy with control, settling on our favorite songs by college-rock gods and demigods: They Might Be Giants (“She’s an Angel”) and the Pixies (“U-Mass”) and “I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife for You.” I had played live music for crowds plenty of times by this point in my life, but this was different. We were cracking bad jokes and pushing the sound effects buttons more than was probably kosher, being dumb and passing along the music we loved to the uninitiated masses. Everything I had heard and assumed turned out to be true: I felt like a rock star. Or a superhero. The radio was power, even without a soul waiting on the other side.

4.

So why have music nerds turned their backs on the radio? It’s kind of a rhetorical question, I guess. Homogenization, monopolies, the Internet, suits in the studios. Duh.

And yet, the magic’s still there, isn’t it? Even on Top 40 stations, even between the syndicated Seacrest banter. There’s still stuff you’ve never heard before, songs you forgot you loved, ones you could have sworn you hated. And certain aspects of it, yes, are still supremely weird. LL Cool J’s teenaged love letter to the radio might have helped launch hip hop’s biggest label 30 years ago, but that they would later sign a band seriously called Hoobastank and use that same medium to shove mediocre rock down your throat isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Don’t blame it on Radio, and don’t blame it on the radio. It’s just music, after all, and music is nothing if not democratic.

It’s important to recognize that on that same side one, track one, LL never once signifies what kind of tunes his specific radio was cranking out. He says “I’m a hip-hop gangster, and my name is Todd,” but that could mean anything. Just because he’s a hip-hop gangster doesn’t mean he listened exclusively to hip-hop stations. I like to think his love for the radio went deeper than that. I like to think he knew just where to turn the dial to find all the good stuff. The honky tonk, the cock rock, the gospel that got him that much closer to his grandmother. If he really couldn’t live without his radio, then he knew it front and back, and I totally get that. It’s a machine that feeds on all the best parts of humanity: nostalgia, discovery, total geekdom. What’s not to love? Why would you ever want to live without it?

—Brad Efford

#471: Richard and Linda Thompson, "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" (1974)

The last time I saw Tiff, a few nights ago, we got fucking gone on some mid-grade weed she bought from her manager at Little Caesar’s and watched Looper. I don’t mean we got buzzed, or goofy, or anything like that—we were capital-s Stoned, slack-jawed and drooling. I don’t know why we were watching Looper. I’d seen it a few times already and Tiff generally doesn’t go in for that kind of sci-fi bullshit, especially if it involves time travel—because “Time travel isn’t goddamn possible,” she says. “And none of these movies ever get it right, anyway,” which, come to think of it, are fairly mutually exclusive ideas, what with the question of how a movie could get something right that isn’t goddamn possible to begin with and all—but that’s beside the point. Probably because the disc happened to already be in the Blu-ray player and we were so fucked on not-bad-but-not-great weed that we couldn’t really do anything else, not even change the disc, we watched Looper.

Honestly, I don’t remember watching the beginning of the movie, the parts with all those bodies appearing out of thin air only to be blown open with a shotgun, or the part where a guy’s younger self gets cut up and his future self’s fingers and nose disappear. I think the reason I don’t remember watching that stuff is because I wasn’t really watching it. It was on, but instead of watching the movie, I was watching Tiff watch the movie. I was looking for some flicker of something on her face or in her eyes because Tiff has been having a rough year. She failed out of school and her stepdad kicked her out of the house after her mom hit the road without even saying goodbye. That last part happened just about three months ago and, ever since, Tiff’s been bouncing between sleeping on friends’ couches, and staying in my bed. She’s also been stoned twenty-four-seven for most of that time. At first, she wouldn’t smoke before or at work, but when she found out her manager, Dorothy, some bi-sexual mom who moved here six months ago from Boulder, was stoned at work every day, and was willing to sell some of her stash from time to time, well, Tiff decided to roll with the workplace culture.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

And that’s fine, or whatever, but for a while now, I can’t even remember the last time Tiff and I said more than a dozen words to each other, and I can remember the last time we had sex, but it was a while ago, and I missed those things, and maybe those are the things I was thinking about while I was watching Tiff watch Looper. And, of course, watching Tiff watch Looper was kind of a drag until we got to the scene in the movie that begins with that prostitute, who is in a relationship with Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character, sitting topless in front of a mirror, and that Richard and Linda Thompson song starts playing. When that song started playing, Tiff jumped up off the sofa and started dancing around the room until the song stopped, or got too quiet to hear, I don’t remember, at which point she sat down on the floor and started crying. It was a weird scene, that’s for sure. Not the scene in the movie, though it’s kind of weird, too, but seeing Tiff leaping and spinning around the room while Linda Thompson sang about wanting to spend some money and go dancing in the city to escape her mundane daily life. It was the most anything I’d seen out of Tiff since her mom left, and for a moment I was worried she was having some kind of psychotic break. But no, she was just dancing, and humming along with Linda Thompson’s vocals because she clearly didn’t know the lyrics, but there is that line that’s all like, “Now the weekend’s come I’m gonna throw my troubles away,” and honestly, in retrospect, when I thought about that line, I thought maybe this isn’t that weird, really. I mean, Tiff’s got troubles. Let her throw them away.

Anyway, at the tail end of Tiff’s manic display, after she spun around the room, when she sat on the floor and cried, I assumed she was crying because of a line of dialogue after the prostitute puts some drugs in Joseph Gordon Levitt’s eyes. As the drugs kick in, Joseph Gordon Levitt talks about how he can’t remember his mother’s face but remembers her touching his hair. Thinking this line was what set Tiff off on her crying jag, I moved down to the floor and touched Tiff’s hair and she swatted at my hand and told me not to fucking touch her. When I asked her why she was crying, she told me it was the song. “That beautiful song,” she said, like she was Daisy Buchan crying over that rich asshole’s shirts. I told Tiff she was being weird. She ignored me and grabbed the remote control from the couch and backed up the movie to the beginning of the scene and we listened to the song again. This time, Tiff stayed on the floor and wept. “What song is this?” she asked through the sobs. “‘I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,’” I said. “Who’s it by?” she asked. I told her. She crawled across the room where my guitar was leaning against the wall. She grabbed it and slid it across the floor to me. “Play it for me,” she said. “I don’t know it,” I told her. She said, “Fucking play it for me.” I stood up from the couch, felt the room spin, steadied myself by staring at one specific cigarette burn in the carpet. Then I went to my computer and played the original version of the song. Tiff said, “You play it. I want you to play it.” And so I found tabs online and looked at them for a moment, fingering chords, tried to figure it all out, but I was too fucked up, and it was too hard because Linda’s vocals were out of my range, and I’d need to get used to singing it while getting the song’s rhythms under my fingers. “I’ll learn it for you and play it another time,” I said. “And Tiff said, “I want you to play it now.” She said, “Play it now and I’ll suck your cock.” I asked her if I could play something else, instead. She said I could, but it wouldn’t be good enough. I told her I’d play something from the same album. After I told her that, Tiff looked right at me, her eyes big and expectant. She asked, “Does it have a trumpet?” I said, “I don’t have a trumpet. I don’t play a trumpet.” She said, “Oh yeah.” And then we both sat and stared into the empty center of the room for a few minutes before she said, “Play your goddamn song.”

And so I launched into the guitar intro of the only song I know front to back from I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. The song, of course, was “The End of the Rainbow,” and as soon as I sang the opening lines, I regretted my decision to sing it. I stopped once, right after the songs first lines that go, “I feel for you, you little horror / Safe at your mother’s breast,” but Tiff wasn’t having it. She said, “Don’t stop.” I said, “I don’t think I should sing this, now.” She said, “Fucking sing it.” And so I fucking sang it. I fucking sang all the parts about having a shitty family, and being fucked over and robbed by everyone, and the parts about life seeming “so rosy in the cradle,” and especially the parts that go “there’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” And as I sang the song, I felt increasingly self-conscious—the way you might feel when you show someone your favorite movie and you can tell they don’t really like it, but you also can’t stop it, only this was way worse than that, because Tiff is Tiff and Tiff has been dealing with Tiff’s troubles, and there I was singing this song that says, “There’s nothing to grow up for anymore,” and it seemed like such an unfair thing to be singing to her. I tried not to look at Tiff starting at me as I played, and I managed to do that through the song’s short outro.

After a beat of silence, Tiff offered up a slow clap, then started packing her bowl. I offered her my lighter and she pulled her own out of her pocket. She said, “This movie fucking sucks.” I told her I didn’t think she’d like it. She said, “So you know what I like now?” I told her I didn’t mean it that way. Then I asked her if she wanted to go to bed. “I think I’m going to crash with Dorothy tonight,” she said. I told her that was cool, then she took a hit from her bowl and passed it to me. I took a hit and watched Bruce Willis talk to Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the TV. I said, “You got a ride?” And Tiff shook her head, asked me if she could use my phone. I slid it across the floor to her and she called Dorothy. I took one last hit from Tiff’s bowl and handed it to her as I left the room and made my way to bed. When I woke up, Tiff was gone, and I haven’t seen her since. Maybe I shouldn’t have sung that song to her, but what difference would it have really made?

That morning, after I woke up, I heated up some coffee that I’d put in the fridge the day before because I made too much and didn’t want to waste it, and sent Tiff a text, asking her if she’d be around later. When she didn’t reply, I sat down at my computer and started muddling through “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,” trying to match the resigned optimism of the lyrics to the song’s gentle rhythmic bounce. I sang, “Take me to the dance and hold me tight.” My fingers fumbled to find the song’s rhythm in the strings. I tried to sing the trumpet parts but they were out of my range. I sang, “Meet me at the station, don’t be late.” I sang, “I’m gonna dream ‘till Monday comes in sight.” I hope Tiff is dreaming, I thought. I thought, maybe I’ll see her on Monday, whenever that’s going to be.

—James Brubaker

#472: George Michael, "Faith" (1987)

Because we live in the age of the Internet, I find a news article about the bans by radio stations throughout the UK and US of George Michael’s first single, “I Want Your Sex,” from his first album, Faith, with relative ease. I also find a video of George Michael reacting to these bans in an interview. All of this delights me. If George Michael’s single were being released today, a ban wouldn’t be such a big deal. What would he have thought if someone had told him that less than twenty years down the road, anyone anywhere could type his name into a magic machine and see his videos, hear his music, learn about his life?

When I first heard about the reaction to the single, I thought it sounded kind of silly, but, reading the article, I start to understand the rationale of the bans, in a way. In the late 1980s, everyone was worried about AIDS in a way that’s almost difficult for me to comprehend. By the time I was a fully cognizant being, the epidemic had passed—the disease was still a thing to fear, sure, but it wasn’t something that was going to take down civilization as we know it. It certainly wasn’t a reason to ban a perfectly good pop song. The cultural context makes an extreme reaction and a decent amount of hubbub seem a little more understandable. But I wonder, too, how much of the reasoning behind the ban was a genuine fear of the medical consequences of promiscuity and how much of it was using the rhetoric of AIDS to justify a ban that was rooted, instead, in prudishness.

At any rate, the lyrics of “I Want Your Sex” are inane—it’s hard to imagine anyone turning to that song for any sort of guidance or taking whatever message it portrays to heart, which is why it’s strange to read about the reaction at the time it came out. Whoever would take a silly pop song so seriously?

In the article, George Michael says, “The media has divided love and sex incredibly.” He says, “‘I Want Your Sex’ is about attaching lust to love, not just to strangers.”

A BBC spokesperson says, “At a time when we are trying to help fight AIDS, this single goes against the grain. It tries to encourage sex.”

The article describes “I Want Your Sex” as a “Latin-flavored funk song,” which, to me, doesn’t seem particularly apt as a description. It says it is “the first record to run into censorship problems because of fears that it might be too sexually explicit for the age of AIDS.” I find something about that funny—not in the strange/questionable sense, but actually ha-ha funny—but I can’t quite pin down what it is.

In the video, George Michael writes EXPLORE on the thigh of a woman he’s in bed with, and the camera pans slowly over it. Then he writes MONOGAMY on her back—a continuation that is an appeal toward morality so overt as to be comical, something that might read as ironic today. But that’s the remarkable thing about artifacts of 1980s culture—they’re always so earnest.

It seems bizarre, to me, to write a song that so overtly pushes boundaries but at the same time to insist so stridently that it exists within the very boundaries that are being pushed. Part of me wants to shake him, to say: If you’re going to write a song about sex, just own it! Let the song be about sex! You talk about love like someone who doesn’t know what it is, like someone who’s never been in love with anyone (which, let’s be honest, at that point, he hadn’t). In 1987, George Michael was 24 years old. He still considered himself bisexual. That woman in the music video? He was in a real-life relationship with her.

Sexual and romantic relationships are deeply bewildering things to any 24-year-old, I’d say, but I’d imagine it’s especially difficult for those who question (or are trying not to question) their sexual identities. I don’t mean to psychoanalyze George Michael here, I just mean, it’s not much of a surprise that his album, his art, was so much about sex. It must have been the conflict at the core of his life. And I guess it’s not surprising, then, too, that as he developed as a heteronormative sex symbol, he’d want to insist upon his own kind of purity within that context. Yes, yes, I will put sex out there, he might have said, but only good, clean sex. The kind of sex you should approve of. The kind of sex everyone likes.

When George Michael’s music was on the radio, I was very young. Cognizant enough to enjoy music but not to comprehend lyrics. Songs were noise made by instruments mashed together with noise made by people, and sounds didn’t have to mean. Listening to the album as an adult, then, I was struck by how many songs I remembered that I didn’t realize I remembered (I would’ve told you, when signing on to write this essay, that “Faith” was the only single by George Michael I knew. Not so. Not so at all.), and by how sexual they were. As a child, I’m sure I bopped around to “I Want Your Sex,” without once wondering what “sex” was. I was a toddler. Toddlers speak in a combination of real words and nonsense language. For them, the voice is not an instrument to be used solely for communication. And so, sometimes lyrics were words I recognized and sometimes they were nonsense sounds. There was nothing about that to question.

His songs are souvenirs from an age when I expected, most of the time, not to understand.

And when I listen to them today, still, there is a lot about them I don’t understand. I’m okay with this, I think. I’m not sure what the monkey is a metaphor for, or what it would mean to set it free. I don’t know if satin sheets figure so much in videos from that time because people actually slept in them, or if they were just an aesthetic early music video trend—a stand-in for sex, in a way, a wink to the audience, you know what happens beneath that kind of sheet. I’m pretty deeply troubled by the assemblage of female body parts paraded through most of the videos of the hits from this album, all disembodied in a completely unnerving way, and it’s strange that I was alive in a time when that level of objectification was the cultural norm. I mean, it’s not like we live in objectification-free times, so for it to be so stark and noticeable in his videos—videos that were made not that long ago—is disconcerting. It makes me wonder about people, I guess. It makes me wonder about life.

And still, I find myself loving him. How his dancing is mostly shoulder sways and jerky claps or snaps, giving way to graceful twirls or slides. How his hips never move at all. His ridiculous earring and his highlighted hair and how, listening to his songs, I find myself dancing a little in my chair. He reminds me of a made-for-TV movie, really, how seriously he takes himself when all signs suggest he shouldn’t, and how that can’t help but garner a certain level of affection. It’s worth noting that this isn’t about him, personally, or even his particular music career, so much as it’s about him as an artifact of a time.

I never thought of George Michael as a person (again, I was so young when I first knew his music—songs existed independently of the musicians who made them, I didn’t care who they were) until the television show Eli Stone premiered on ABC in 2008. I don’t know if anyone else has heard of this show; it aired for only two seasons. I watched it on ABC’s website when online streaming was new, sitting at my desk in a room I shared with a girl who would prove herself to be the world’s most awful roommate. Back then, something being available online was reason enough to watch it.

Eli Stone is a lawyer who makes big money advocating for big business against the little guys, until he starts experiencing hallucinations—one of the main, recurring ones being George Michael performing his hit single “Faith” in various inconvenient places: the lobby at work, say, or the bedroom. In the pilot, Eli learns these hallucinations are the product of a rare and inoperable brain aneurysm—but he also suspects they might mean he’s a prophet, and interprets the hallucinations as signs that he needs to change his materialistic ways and dedicate his life, instead, to serving the greater good.

The show sounds preachy when I summarize it like that, but I don’t remember it as such. I remember it as light and funny, entertaining in an easy way, with clear demarcations between good and bad, and a safe kind of zaniness. It is the kind of show where God sends you a message in the form of George Michael, with his dark glasses and stubble, singing a song you haven’t thought of in years, but, hearing it, you want to move with it, because it’s still catchy after all this time, that fricative faith-a as fun to sing along with as ever. And George (you come to think of him as George) claps along with his lip-sync of “Faith” in a way that’s not offbeat, exactly, but just the tiniest bit not right, in an almost imperceptible way. It feels like a secret he’s shared with you, the way you can just barely tell that when the scene was filmed, he was lip-syncing without music, the quiet broken only by the rhythm of his hands.

—Katelyn Kiley

#473: The Smiths, "The Smiths" (1984)

At some point in college I acquired a Smiths album. I was downloading an absurd amount of music on a weekly basis–discovering Talib Kweli alongside Neutral Milk Hotel–so it's amazing I even got around to listening to the record. I couldn't say now which Smith's album it was, and my computer–and most of my music with it–was stolen a year after college, but my best guess is that it was a compilation, probably a Best Of. I liked it. I liked Morrissey's strange, flat crooning, and Marr's swirling, jangly guitar work. This was before I actually knew who Johnny Marr was, or before he joined up with my high school sweethearts, Modest Mouse. Before I began reading seemingly daily accounts about Morrissey's most recent, explosively dumb remarks. Before Macklemore jacked the singer's haircut.

So I was surprised when I listened to their self-titled debut and found so very little to like. I found it boring, in fact. Morrissey doesn't move around in the music much, preferring his trademark near-monotone, rambling lyrical style. The few times he slips into falsetto, I really wish he hadn't. The idea that Marr may someday be a great guitarist is buried in there somewhere, but his style is still shockingly similar from one song to the next. The only real thing setting most of these songs apart is the tempo, as if the band thought they could pull one over on us by speeding up or slowing down the songs, feigning a little Clash-idolatry. Morrissey appears to be scared or frustrated or confused by women, as if the idea that any band in the 80's could be anything less than masterful when it came to the opposite sex was a revelation. The vague lyrics touch on easy-to-mine subjects like child abuse and murder and sadness and shit. He name-checks dead kids. Controversy stoked the flame of their early career. Duh.

So what was it about that Smiths compilation I once owned and loved so much? Sure, the band got better, more inventive. The production improved. I got into Interpol. But that can't fully explain it. There was something else in there. I was an undergrad at a small liberal arts college. I was discovering stuff like. . .the world. Girls. Bad poetry written in tattered Moleskins. (“I wish I were a rose so I could give myself to you”). I voluntarily watched terrible movies about hard-hitting subjects like child abuse and school-shootings. I remember a teary-eyed conversation with a girlfriend my sophomore year after a viewing of the awfully unhappy movie Happiness. By the end of my freshman year the campus police informed me they had taken out a restraining order on my crazy (and very small) Japanese ex-girlfriend, for my protection. To say I was utterly baffled by women would be an understatement.

Which is all to say I was, clearly, in the prime of my Smiths-ready life. Whether I was even consciously paying attention to the lyrics or not, I was certainly living them. Besides, the great thing about The Smiths, and about Morrissey's voice in particular, is that you can get the full meaning of the songs without really even listening to them. The general malaise of Morrissey's croon and the occasional snippets of lyrics are more than enough. I soaked it up. I was finding Morrissey's politics for myself and then translating my newfound worldly woes into terrible verse, thinking I could scrub the world clean one poem or story at a time. I wrote a poem about killing God titled “Satan Was a Gunslinger.” Another about a mime committing suicide. I was finding new reasons to be simultaneously afraid of and excited by sex, and still not getting any. So many emotions! So much Smiths!  

I know I shouldn't even attempt an explanation at what might be in Morrissey's head–the man clearly struggles to do it for himself–but the more generous side of me would like to say that maybe he understood the melodrama, that he was hamming it up a bit. A few albums after their debut, on The Queen is Dead standout track “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” Morrissey gave us what I can only understand as a wink at his younger self, as if to say he, too, understood the allure of that first record. “I didn't realize you wrote poetry,” he sang. “I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry.”

Of course, there are a few grown-ass rock critics who would disagree with all of the above, who would say The Smiths are timeless, that they made a space for something new in the dance-crazed, butt-rockin' 80s, that you need not be a confused and crazed young man to appreciate the music. Obviously, they're right. But I've moved on to other bands. Now I listen to more sophisticated music. About confused politics and heartbroken young men.

–J.P. Kemmick

#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