#454: Alice Cooper, "Love It To Death" (1971)

It would be nice to walk upon the water, to talk again to angels on my side.

—Alice Cooper, “Second Coming”

My grandfather once told me about trick or treating when he was a child. There was one house that gave out king-sized candy bars, and the way he tells it, he and his friends would spend Halloween night changing from one costume to another so they could keep going back to that same house. The way I imagine it, he has to walk up and down the sets of rolling hills that characterize Cincinnati—butterfly hills, I used to call them, for the feeling they made in my stomach. I can picture my grandfather at twelve, trudging up hill after hill, carrying a plastic pumpkin just like I used to, filling it with king-sized candy bars. First he’s a pirate and then he’s a ghost and then he’s a mummy and then he’s a farmer. At the end of the night he has twelve costumes and twelve candy bars. I wonder why the people at this house never noticed it was the same person returning again and again, but maybe the point is that they did notice, and they didn’t care.

My cousin drowned when he was nineteen. It was Halloween night, or, to be more specific, the early morning hours of the Day of the Dead, and he jumped into the Mississippi down in New Orleans, where the river is so wide it carries ocean-faring ships and is hardly recognizable as the same river that flowed past my house in Minneapolis when I was growing up. Sometimes, in my head, he jumps off a bridge that looks suspiciously like the Golden Gate. Sometimes, he runs along a rickety dock and dives off the end. An old man is fishing, and stares after him in surprise. At this point, I no longer remember which of these scenarios—if either—is correct. I know that he had taken acid. I know that he had given his dog to a friend to take care of. I know that I was in eighth grade and had just come home from school when I found out. I was eating the last of the fall crop of raspberries off the bush in the backyard, and my mother came outside and told me. I had a raspberry in my mouth, and I started crying, and even as I cried, there was a part of me that thought how interesting it was that I could go from one emotion to another so quickly, that a person really could suddenly burst into tears.

I visited the ruins of Troy, in Turkey, when I was in college. The ancient city is more like a town, with crumbling walls overrun by grass and weeds.  A large wooden horse stands near the visitor’s center. It has a house on its back with windows, like a tree house, and children clamber up and down the wooden steps and wave from the windows to their parents. I wonder what the Trojans would think of the joking way we refer to their plight. A man approached me as I was standing outside the gift shop, getting ready to leave. I’d become distracted by the litter of stray kittens climbing in and out of cracks in the stone walls. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me! I heard you speaking English.” This is what I hate most about traveling, I have found: the men who will use any excuse they can find to tell women of their beauty, to ask for their number, to ask for their hand in marriage. I prepared to ignore him and walk away. “Excuse me,” he said again. “I am hoping you can help me. You speak English. I have always wondered—what is it, the difference between ‘Oh my God’ and ‘Oh my gosh?’”

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Maybe there’s some sort of lesson here, about trusting strangers, about not closing yourself off to an experience before it’s occurred, about how reality doesn’t always match up with what you imagine. When I imagine my grandfather, when I imagine my cousin, I’m nowhere close to what actually happened. And when I think I know what a stranger is going to say, there’s always room to be surprised. Maybe this is what life is always trying to tell me, and I should listen more closely.

I watched a video of Alice Cooper performing during their Love It to Death tour in 1971. The video quality was poor, the picture grainy, with static bursts every few seconds that broke up the chords. When he sings “Second Coming,” Alice braces himself against the stage wall. His mascara creates tears on his cheeks, and he holds one hand to his head, as though he can hardly bear what is happening. “Have no gods before me, I’m the light,” he cries, his voice barely audible over the guitars, and then he staggers back from the microphone, his hands pressed to the sides of his head. He stumbles off the stage, almost falling, looking as if something inside of him has broken. When he returns, he’s in a straitjacket.

I don’t remember what I told that man in Troy. I probably said something about how saying “Oh my God” can be considered taking the Lord’s name in vain, and so people use “gosh” instead, out of fear of offending someone, be it God or a human being. That, I feel, is a fairly accurate answer to his question. But I wish I hadn’t explained that. I wish that I had told him that there is no difference, that they are both ways of evoking the sacred, of marveling at or bemoaning life and its always-fluctuating circumstances. I wish I had told him that it didn’t matter.

The closest I’ve ever come to walking on water is over frozen creeks and lakes. In places, the water freezes so clear you can see through to the rocks that line bottom. You can see weeds, suspended in ice, looking as if they might break free at any moment and continue to bend and sway with the current. It’s disconcerting, and sometimes, if I stare too long, it makes me dizzy.

I am not a person who searches for the larger meaning in the things that happen to me. I don’t read the myths and apply them to my own life. Because the fact is, the city of Troy would have had a sentry set up at night, and he would have noticed the Achaeans climbing into that wooden horse, and he would have woken someone up. And maybe my grandfather did return over and over to one house in search of king-sized candy bars, and maybe it’s just a story he told us because we were children and would believe anything. The cold, hard facts are that my grandfather will not live much longer, and the city of Troy is in ruins and I no longer can remember what I thought of as I toured it, and I will never be able to appreciate Alice Cooper the way people say I should.

But what I have instead is this: one of the last times I saw my cousin, we were in the Colorado Rockies. We climbed up a small mountain, one of the mountains with a wide path and steps carved into its side, with lines of people making the trek from a visitor’s center just a few hundred feet below the summit, up and back down in the span of an hour. My cousin would be dead just four months later, but of course we didn’t know it then. There’s a picture of him and me and my younger sister at the summit, all giving each other bunny ears, my sister and I on tiptoes to reach the top of my cousin’s head. Shortly after the picture was taken, at my cousin’s suggestion, we ran back down the mountain. We leapt down the shallow steps, let the air rush past us, traveling at top speed from above the tree line to just below it, from thin air at altitude to a place where there was oxygen aplenty, past tourists who waited until the last minute to leap out of the way, our mouths open and the wind carrying away our laughter, and when we reached the visitor’s center, for a few minutes, none of us could breathe.

Oh my God, we said. Oh my gosh.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#455: Los Lobos, "How Will the Wolf Survive?" (1984)

Maybe there was such a thing as pure lust. Ally’s heart had been broken and she would never love again—never!—but there was no getting around the almost surreal fineness of Tito, the grill guy at Burger King, where she worked. He was tall and thin with black almond-shaped eyes, long eyelashes, and a long thin nose. His hair, suppressed under his BK hat, was black and wavy. He had a perfect ass and the way his forearms rippled when he flipped the burgers made Ally understand the cliché about going “weak in the knees.”

He didn’t talk to anyone much and was two years older than her—he should have been a senior but had dropped out of high school the year before, gotten a GED and was now taking some classes at a community college. He called her Little White Girl when he talked to her, which wasn’t often until she figured out his weak spot, which was a white cassette tape that he kept every day tucked into the back pocket of his black work pants. She spent a fair amount of time staring at that particular spot and one day she made out the lettering across the top of the tape: SLASH.

“SLASH Records?” she said, jamming a bunch of medium lids into the medium lid holder.

It was her first night to close, her first night to see him take off his brown and orange polyester work shirt to reveal a gray T-shirt with the arms cut out down to the waist so that she could see the muscles all the way up his arms and the way his ribs gave way to stomach muscles that actually rippled—they rippled!—under his soft brown skin when he poured hot water over the grill and pulled the water down the surface and into the drain with a steel squeegee. He stopped and glanced over at her. “What?”

“Your tape says SLASH. That’s rad. X is on that label, and the Germs and the Blasters. What’s the tape? Violent Femmes? Del Fuegos?”

He pulled it out of his back pocket and rounded the corner to the manager’s office.  She heard Monique yell at him, but he returned with a tiny boom box that he plugged in and set atop one of the fryers. “Los Lobos,” he said, popping in the tape.

“I’ve heard of them,” she said.

“Really?” For the first time, he looked straight at her and took her in, what there was to see. She was exactly what he called her, a little white girl, scrawny and sixteen, barely five feet tall with no boobs, a bad perm, and bad skin. She squirmed under his gaze—he was even hotter when he looked her in the eyes. She had told her friends, Shandra and Meg, about him and they had embarrassed her by coming in last week and leaning over the register to get a look at him on the grill to the left of the front counter. If he’d noticed their giggles, he hadn’t let on. “You know you’re hot when you look good in brown and orange polyester,” Shandra said, while Ally, mortified, had shushed her and begged them to leave.

“It’s so weird the way they put SLASH and SST records in the import section—I buy anything on those labels. I’ve looked at How Will the Wolf Survive? a couple of times.”

“Well, now you can check it out.” He hit play and a straight-ahead, thumping groove spilled into the room. Tito’s right foot tapped as he scoured the grill. The chorus reassured her,“Don’t worry baby, it’s going to work out fine.” A positive sentiment? She wasn’t used to hearing anything like that, and since the lead singer’s buttery, amber voice immediately ventriloquized Tito for her, she pretended that sweet, comforting line was Tito himself taking an interest in her well-being, even thought she knew it wasn’t true.

Los Lobos were MUSICIANS, like, for real. It was no part attitude, no part fashion, it was all music, and as the tape played on, its sound tinny and small on the cheap boom box sitting on the fryer, she grew quietly impressed with the band’s range. There was pure rock, some country stuff, bluesy stuff, even mariachi music. They sang in English and Spanish. They rocked out with an accordion—an accordion—which seemed like the aural equivalent of Tito looking hot in brown and orange polyester. By the time she Windexed the windows, she had given in to a little hip sway.

“You like it, huh?” Tito grinned at her. He was even hotter when he smiled. “Imagine it on a good stereo system,” he said. “What would that be like?”

She gave him a thumbs up, her stomach flipping too hard for her to trust herself with speech.

That night, after they hit the lights and headed out the side door, with Monique griping at them about food costs, Tito, wearing a black motorcycle jacket, walked over to a brand-new red 1985 Z-28 that had been parked in the side lot for almost a week. He peered in the windows.

“It’s so weird he hasn’t come back,” she said. She had watched the Z’s owner, a guy in his twenties who had just ordered a shake in the drive-thru, jump into a car with a girl and ride away.

“Having a good time, I guess.” Tito strapped his shiny black motorcycle helmet under his chin and walked toward his motorcycle, parked next to her cheap tin can of a car by the back dumpsters. “It’s got a sweet stereo.”

After the restaurant closed the next night, Tito got out his Los Lobos tape again and they listened while they went through their closing duties. They didn’t talk, but she felt enveloped in the music with him. She sat on top of the drive-thru counter while he mopped. At one point, he looked up at her and said, “This one’s about you.”

She nearly stopped breathing. What part, what line? It was about a girl named Evangeline. Was it a compliment or not? As if he knew what she was thinking, he sang out loud the line, “She is the queen of make believe, Evangeline.”

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She thought about it and decided he knew she had a crush on him and thought it was cute, the way little girls dreaming of handsome princes is cute. She kicked the stainless steel cabinets with her heels and looked out the drive-thru window at the red car glinting under a streetlight. She would never love again—never!—but if Tito would take her seriously—oh, Tito. It could never work. He was a high school dropout and she was on the honor roll, but his blinding hotness was something she sat in school and looked forward to all day long. She had volunteered to close on the nights he closed just so she could see him in his gray T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. If only she could do something to convince him she wasn’t a child. Then she had a thought, clear and simple as two plus two is four. “We should break into that Z,” she said.

He leaned against his mop and laughed. “You’re a little bandita, huh?”

“You said it has a great stereo.”

He stopped mopping and stared past her, out the window at the shining hood of the car. “You know how to hot-wire a car?”

Ally laughed. “Right.”

“I do,” he said, and gave her a wild, conspiratorial grin that caused her to slide off the counter like her bones had all turned to mush. He drew close to her and whispered, “Tomorrow night, bandita!”

The next night they waited until they saw Monique’s Cutlass disappear into traffic, and then they crossed the lot to the car. Tito pulled out of his jacket an unbent coat hanger and a couple of other mysterious pieces of metal whose purpose she couldn’t visualize. “You keep an eye out,” he said, bending to his task. She stood on the other side of the car and watched the traffic rushing by on the street outside. In the distance, she could see the state capitol, a pump jack lit up on its lawn, bobbing up and down through the night. She was paralyzed with a strange expectation, part fear, part wild joy. In a few minutes, he was in the car. She stayed outside watching until she saw the tail lights come on, then she jumped into the passenger seat. He ejected a tape and set it on the dash. She looked at it. “Gross,” she said. Quiet Riot.  

Los Lobos kicked in and filled the car. Tito fiddled with a magnificently complex-looking equalizer lit up like a spaceship until he had lifted the bass and done something to the treble so that the guitar work came toward them like delicately wrought suspension bridges glowing in the dark air. But something had happened to her the moment she slid into the car. Bandita, she thought. Not me. She was thinking about how Tito knew how to break into and hot-wire a car, how surprisingly unsexy that was, almost as unsexy as being a high school dropout. He smiled in the dark, looking out over the dash at the vacant lot next door. Closer to him than she had ever been, she smelled the animal fat in his clothes and studied his sublime profile. When he turned to look at her, she realized he was about to kiss her. She felt her jaw lock and her throat close. She didn’t want him to—she didn’t know why, but there it was. “I can never love again,” she said out loud.

He hesitated a moment, shaking his head.  Then he popped the tape and stuck it in the inside pocket of his jacket.  They had barely gotten through the first song. He reached down below the steering wheel, feeling for the wires, and the car went dark and still. “We should go,” he said. “I work a double tomorrow.”

—Constance Squires

#456: Marvin Gaye, "Here, My Dear" (1978)

At a pivotal moment in the great horror movie Pontypool, protagonist Grant Mazzy asks, "How do you take a word and make it…strange?" Our question now is similar but with a twist: how do you take a pop album and make it bad? I don't mean Marvin Gaye has made something unlistenable with Here, My Dear, but that the album sets itself the task of being otherwise than a pleasant or delightful, fun listening experience. It's complicated even to say what I want to say about it—that it's "bad" and therefore great—and already I have wandered dangerously into the territory of the "so-bad-it’s-good" crowd, so I will tread carefully.

Perhaps it's best to start over: Marvin Gaye makes a divorce album. It is "about" the end of his marriage to Anna Gordy Gaye. It is also a fact of that relationship, as he would have to give half the royalties from the album to Anna as part of their settlement. An album of defeat, but one of ruthless experimentation. You can't do much reading about Here, My Dear without running across the glorious couplet "Somebody tell me please / why do I have to pay attorney fees?" It's as if I could stop there and that's, as Keats says, all ye need to know.

But I haven't even begun. Calling the album, as I started by doing, "bad," seems to be a provocation, and it's an old tale told every time someone has a bone to pick about cultural capital. You throw your favorite thing into the mud, really grind it down, then pull it out and in the course of several paragraphs clean it off so it glimmers, authentic as the monument you have now proved it to be. I don't like this kind of writing about things because it's as dishonest as it is ubiquitous. I like Here, My Dear because it seems to be about that very kind of "dishonesty," in a different register, a pop song register, where Gaye doesn't seem to trust the kind of song he is so good at writing to affect anyone anymore. Gaye looks out at the world and sees only himself, consumed as he is by a divorce, and like Catullus mourning the loss of Lesbia, he can only write about sparrows. Well, one sparrow.

The album is myopic, wandering, lazy, monotonous, and far too long to listen to in one go. I've done it twice today, and I don't want to do it again. But an album can do that on purpose, can't it, and what do we do, how do we account for that without first saying, "This thing that seems like trash, it is actually glorious and authentic!" How indeed. To start with, we might invoke Marvin Gaye's previous works, albums further down on the RS500 list and with much more cultural clout, albums like What's Going On, that establish him in the public imaginary as a truly great musician and artist. And I mean, he is, listen to him sing. But there is not so much vocal dexterity or even artfulness of arrangement or anything really as complex as the hits Gaye has produced on Here, My Dear. It is straightforward, with repetitious instrumentations and vocals dubbed presumably to hide the fact that they are half-hearted and wounded-sounding, they sound like a wound, that is, Gaye sounds less like he is singing about being in pain than he does like he is actually in pain. And this is what is exciting about this "bad" album: it is "bad," it is all the things I've said in the preceding paragraphs, because it grasps fairly astutely the structure of feeling of going through a tremendous, relationship-ending process like divorce. Gaye sings, not just "about" divorce, but in a manner adequate to the banality of heartbreak.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

I should probably explain myself. Much typing has been expended on what is basically the sublimity of popular music, the way it invigorates and thrills, all that stuff—sound familiar? So does most pop music. I'm not in the business of making moral judgments, but I'm trying to make a distinction. Here, My Dear sounds like this, and it doesn't. It starts off with the slow build, the layering of instruments, the vocal tracks coming in slowly, the harmonies that devastate and remind you this is the guy who sang "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "I'll Be Doggone." But it doesn't have a narrative, it doesn't go from point A to point B and grow and swell and explode and simmer and fade out. It just starts, and then it stops. It calls attention to its plasticity rather than the swooping swerve of Being; it's Apollonian rather than Dionysian, a beautiful and crafted record even as it sets out not to be a pleasant one. And this moves me, and it stays with me, because it makes for a listening experience that makes one uncomfortable and bored, even frustrated, with the artist. It does not ask for sympathy or identification, just time. And when you're done, it's not like you have gone on some kind of redemptive journey. You listened to the album, and there you have it. Glad that's over with. Now what? Gaye refuses even the subtlest hints of narrative, so that the tracks do not develop, they accumulate. Heartbreak, pain, does not have a narrative. It just repeats. That seems to be the great insight here, and it lays bare the repetition at the heart of pop music while turning it against itself by making of that repetition an instrument of antagonism (by the artist, toward the audience) rather than one of pleasure and easy listening. And when I say this, I don't mean that this is a "deep" album, requiring intense and art-competent listening. I mean that it is actually difficult to listen to, the experience of listening to it takes effort and gives little in return. All the fantasies of the enlightened and thoughtful listener are set aside. It just happens, and keeps happening.

Maybe there isn't any good way to write about Here, My Dear without sounding like I'm puling about authenticity. Gaye doesn't bother to put on an act, he doesn't affect feeling, because he knows that doing that would only make it an album about the act he put on, rather than the actual feeling. It's hard to talk about dissimulation in an album so self-involved as to worry about how its maker won't get any of the royalties because of the divorce. What's the point? asks Gaye, with none of the grandiosity of punk, or the sly hopefulness of the 1960s. At the end of Pontypool, Grant Mazzy intones dramatically, "It's not the end of the world. It's just the end of the day." Imagine Mazzy's talking about heartbreak and you've got a good summary of Gaye's album.

—David W. Pritchard

#457: My Morning Jacket, "Z" (2005)

My name is Z. I have been here some years. I cannot say how many revolutions. There was a time when I counted those things.

If one’s life is a series of ripples radiating outward from, and back into, an original centerpoint—that is, a series of widening circles drawn around a dense and mysterious core, some “I” that blossomed forth from an unknown origin-point in the cosmos—I am now walking the outermost, and widest, circle. Beyond it, there is an unknown space, darkness raveling out into more darkness. That same darkness out of which I emerged, in the beginning.

I came here for the azure sky, the winter light. When a man undertakes silence, he needs a great deal of distance into which he may cast his thoughts, as casting a line into the sea.

The thoughts are not bait, not a hook. They are the line, reeling out, nearly invisible against the blue. There is nothing to catch. It is merely the action of casting and reeling that interests me.

I remember a day long ago, before I came here, when I was very ill. It was a cold, bright day. I was walking down the street. There was a man I came across, in faded denim, hair to his shoulders. He asked me for money and I gave it, knowing as I placed the coins into his palm that I could never repay him for the blue of his eyes, that flood of desolation. What was washed clean inside of me.

I would that I could become threadbare and held to the light, that the light might strike my skin as a golden husk.

I have been thinking of the fields of goldenrod in August, the corn huskers lotion that my father used on his face and hands, his worn flannel shirts. The smell of leather, the horse’s hair pulled taut and bowing across a fiddle’s strings. The sun that struck the horse’s mane, the dust of barns, and of the grain silos filtering almost vertical beams of light through golden wheat. Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

There are so many selves, each one peeling away, translucent as the skin of a snake. I no longer remember who I was, if remembering is re-inhabiting, which it isn’t. Remembering is trying to apprehend the form of a ghost in one’s house. It is peripheral, sliding along at the edges, the sensation of something behind you, a shift of the air. Let us not say remember, then. Let us say that the past is a presence of a different substance, an unusual quality of light.

Past selves are smaller circles within the radiating ring of circles that make a life. All of the past is encompassed, then, within the present. Between each circle there is a distance (a death?). An axis (+) that transects each circle at four points; these are paths that lead into and out of each circle. One cannot travel these paths, from past to former self, with the corporeal body. One must travel these paths as a spectral form of light. One must travel the dark tunnels of time as a ghost travels up and down a hallway.

When the sun begins to sink in the evening, I have to be out in that light, moving across the ridge. I like to see the distances closing in, pale yellow washing the horizon, bright flare of orange, that fast slip of light in the West. (Do the distances close in or grow greater?) I walk, watching the vesper sky, until dark, when diamond stars begin to shine forth as dancers leaping onto an empty stage, and seeing becomes a kind of listening. Coming back across the ridge, I hear the sound of my boots against the frozen earth, as a shadow in my ear, cracking.

In the winter of his 35th year, severely ill, Vincent Van Gogh went to the south of France for refuge, to the city of Arles. He was enchanted by the light of Arles. He washed the somber earth tones from his palettes and mixed new colors. There, out moving in the light each day, he painted his most illuminated pieces, dappled in yellows, mauves, and ultramarines. Van Gogh wanted his work to lead to God.

I wonder if he heard a great silence, before severing his left ear with a razor.

Afterwards, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy (a former monastery), in the last months of his life, he composed his heart’s masterpiece, “The Starry Night,” that painting with so much darkness and music in it.

I want to point a finger at the moon, then cut my finger off.

Nights, I dance with the paradoxes. Dawn is as a great weight pressing down upon me— I struggle mightily under it.

This winter my thoughts have turned to the sea. Once, when diving at the old shipping port, off the coast of where I lived for a time, I saw an eel hunkered beneath the concrete wall of the port. I descended towards it. It crept out, moving like a slow tremor. It looked at me, swaying back and forth like an electric wire ungrounded. Its eyes were the black sparks of the sea. The eel and I looked at each other for long minutes there, a kind of silent music between us, far under the shimmering surface, where tumultuous light was breaking among the waves.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

I should like to revisit the sea, to submerge myself in the salt water. To hear, again, that rhythm, the steady swell and break, earth’s metronome, as an uninterrupted and endless sigh. I remember long winter days at the shore spent swimming. Not swimming but floating on top of the rising waves. How I was lifted up and over them, the weightless drift of my body. A continuous effortless motion. And inevitably, when the tides began to shift, how I would find myself suddenly swept into the trough of a wave, how the body would struggle for one brief moment against it then give itself over to the pull. It was a blinding surrender that was not without fear but was surrender nonetheless. How the body, then, would be taken away—to give in to that, how I would lose myself completely to the wave, to be rolled and rolled into it, that ecstasy of union, to lose my footing, my direction, then to be pummeled and knocked against the sand, to come up on the shore breathless, as so much seafoam.

I have not, as some say, abandoned the world, but in fact am plunging myself deeper into it.

Van Gogh’s paintings from Saint-Rémy, his last and most beautiful paintings, were full of swirling. The edges of the individual, separate marks of color that distinguished his earlier paintings began to soften, swirls of light merging into darkness. Boundaries between cypress, field, mountain, and sky became blurred. He painted what he could see from the cell windows of the asylum: golden fields of wheat with skies of blue above, birds flocking. He wrote to his brother: “I do not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” Also that he was entirely absorbed “in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea.” He died soon thereafter.

It is said that no man is an island.

On my walks in the evenings, when yellow light is seeping in behind the bare branches of the woods, I have seen an elk hulking between the trees, standing still, brown as the bark on the tree trunks. I have seen the elk as one sees an elk in the trees: as a remnant, or future, self.

I am the alpha and the omega. But there is something else: a movement that precedes the first letter, a shadow trailing off behind the last. Something at the edges, wordless.

Another memory of long before I came here, before I took the vow: walking in the back alley, where starlings would gather in the tree of heaven, quiet as seedpods rustling on the branches. When I walked underneath the tree, how they would disperse on the air in one great tumbling wave, rolling across the sky, all together, as if swaying to some silent music. How they plunged and swirled into circles and arcs, and I would feel the trembling of the air on my upturned face. Their small singular bodies formed a swelling symphony the beauty and grace of which even they could not understand, and I knew then that the world was not just graffiti and couches with broken springs and the pungent juices fermenting in the bottoms of garbage cans but that it was this, too. This swarm of wings, held together and cleaved apart in each moment by something unseen, unknown, mysterious.

I feel I am coming to the end. I do not consider myself at the edge of the world but rather in the dense center of it.

—Holly Haworth

#458: Elton John, "Tumbleweed Connection" (1970)

Are you kidding? You’ve placed Tumbleweed Connection above Armed Forces and I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight? You’d take Tumbleweed Connection rather than Elton’s own Caribou or Don’t Shoot Me? Who loves this album? None of its songs are on Elton’s Greatest Hits (#138 on the Rolling Stone 500), and none of them get played on classic rock stations. Somebody somewhere must have strong feelings about this album, though, and had I owned it at a more impressionable age (I picked it up in my twenties), I can imagine it would be dearer to me than it actually is. I love Elton John more than you do, but even I don’t think this a terribly successful album.

At what is Tumbleweed Connection trying to succeed? It seems to be a loose “concept album,” the thematic thread being westerns or perhaps the Confederacy. Various phrases evoke a nineteenth-century American setting: “chain gang,” “kin,” “Deacon Lee,” “river boat,” “New Orleans,” “Yankee,” “cornfield,” “East Virginia,” “stagecoach.” The shadow of the Band looms large. “Country Comforts” (singled out by some as the album’s standout song) revisits and sentimentalizes the uneasy small-town encounters of “The Weight.” Crazy Chester has turned into Old Clay, and “The Weight”’s alienation and sense of burden have turned into an uncomplicated yearning for “any truck that’s going home.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” gets rewritten as “My Father’s Gun,” and a line from “Across the Great Divide” (“bring your children down to the riverside”) resurfaces almost verbatim in “Burn Down the Mission.”

There is so much of this that one is tempted to suspect parody. Perhaps Tumbleweed Connection, released in October of 1970, was a satiric spoof of recent back-to-the-country albums like The Band (September, 1969), CCR’s Willie and the Poor Boys (November, 1969), CSNY’s Déjà Vu (March, 1970), and the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead (June, 1970). The cover art suggests this possibility. In sepia tones it depicts Elton on the cover (and Bernie Taupin, lyricist, on the back) waiting at a deserted train station that seems to possess that “old-fashioned feeling” he sings about in “Country Comforts.” Looking closer, however, we see that the old-timey placards on the walls of the station advertise British products: Cadbury’s chocolates, Mazawattee Tea, Huntley & Palmer’s Ginger Nuts. Perhaps, then, we will be getting a deliberately British and ironic take on Americana, as we would the following year with The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies (1971)?

No, that’s not what’s happening here. After the weak drug pun of the title (weed connection), there is not a joke in sight. It is the self-seriousness of Tumbleweed Connection (I keep wanting to call it Tumbleweed Junction) that most clearly distinguishes it from the effervescent work Elton would soon produce. Compare the earnestness of “Talking Old Soldiers,” a dramatic monologue in which “old mad Joe” shares his tragic, drunken wisdom to another fellow in the saloon, to Don’t Shoot Me’s satiric “Texan Love Song,” in which a redneck rails at the hippies with their “communistic politics and them negro blues.” It’s easy to blame the somber tone on Bernie Taupin, but it’s also true that Elton had not yet learned to imbue Taupin’s more soppy and sentimental lyrics with his own campy sensibility. He also had not yet assembled the crack band of his 1972-1975 heyday: Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass, Nigel Olsson on drums. On “Amoreena,” where three quarters of that lineup is in place, things rock much more persuasively. Much of Tumbleweed Connection now sounds overproduced, however, burdened by lugubrious strings, cumbersome background singers (couldn’t they have found something better to do with Dusty Springfield?) and even an occasional oboe.

Still, this is Elton approaching his prime and therefore not to be sniffed at. Along with “Amoreena,” the best cut on the album is “Burn Down the Mission,” which closes side two. The last-resort agricultural incendiarism of this number again echoes the Band (“King Harvest Has Surely Come”) and CCR (“Effigy”), but the music is wholly original and unexpected. Bassist Herbie Flowers (he of “Walk on the Wild Side”) plays on this track and commands attention. Drummer Barry Morgan contributes stirring fills on the chorus and fuels a couple of manic interludes between verses. Most of all, Elton has given the lyrics a complicated, florid musical structure that they hardly ask for. The song opens with Elton’s solo piano moving (twice) from G major to E minor to an unexpected Bb major. The verse repeats this trajectory, then leading us through Eb major and eventually back to G. Next comes what appears at first to be the chorus (“Bring your family down to the riverside”), which follows a well-worn harmonic course: F major, C major and back to G major. That section ends with the return of that odd Bb major chord, on which we linger for a couple of measures, until we reach the actual chorus and are sent soaring with a glorious and unexpected Db major chord (“Burn down the mission!”). Db major is as far as you can get harmonically from G major, but the song makes it feel as joyous and liberating and necessary and inevitable as an act of arson. Nothing on the album is more satisfying that moment, and nothing could be.

—Will Pritchard

#459: The Drifters, "The Drifters' Golden Hits" (1968)

There are ways the world can slip up from underneath you and then, you know what I mean, a regular Saturday morning with your son in his Batman costume, shrieking at his own shadow, and your husband grumbling at the TV, turns sideways and then all the way upside down—you're a bat now in your own life and it's wonderful. 

Your family’s apartment is every song sung by the Drifters that you ever loved. The furniture itself and all the empty spaces between are filled up with the whole sound of the Golden Hits album.

    Everything I want I have
         whenever I—

You stretch, accidentally burn your wing on the hot plate of the coffee maker, but the sudden delight of wings and your super sensitive giant bat ears make the burn so forgettable. Pain is trivial when you can fly, when you look like a mouse married a dragon and delivered you into the universe: a bat.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

    Everything I want I have
         whenever I—

You open the refrigerator for eggs and milk, let the shame and pleasure of this much plenty flicker through you like electricity or the sick feeling after a hundred bowls of your favorite ice cream. The music keeps playing. The rubber seal of the refrigerator door pulls open and the light comes on in its cold interior like a lit stage. Dare anyone to believe that the neighbors can’t hear it, too, the refrigerator singing,

    the ferris wheel ride isn't turning around anymore
        …but I've still got some sand in my shoes    

You reach for the old loaf of sourdough bread, crack the eggs into a wide bowl, add milk, vanilla, and cinnamon. Stir. The routine of it comforts. The whisk slaps through the eggy mixture. Frustration starts melting away or dissolving into something else. You’re making French toast, but this Saturday morning feels like when you put the sugar and the water in the saucepan on the stove and stir to make caramel.

    There’s some kind of wonderful.     

You want another sip of your coffee, but don’t reach for the mug because maybe actually you don’t want it. Your son somersaults across the length of the rug. Your husband’s still growling at the news. You reach for your coffee. You’re still not used to your wings, your furry feet, your little paw claw. You spill your coffee.    

    your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire proof

You say something vile at the TV, something that expresses vehement agreement with your husband. You don't do it because you agree or even because you want to be agreeable or make his day. You're going for the startle effect. You're hoping he'll grin. Or better: he'll giggle. Or better still: he’ll like you more.

Why? Because you called that TV talking head a nasty word and because you're a bat now. People love bats. They’re enchanting. Your son knows where he came from—part man, part bat. None of it is costuming. Your family is a team sport and you’re all starters. There is no bench. Like the cheerleaders in your high school used to chant at pep rallies, “You gotta want it to win it. And we want it bad.”

“Don't curse,” says your husband. And now you're like the sugar and the water in the saucepan when it gets too hot, been in too long, not stirred enough. You’re burning. You’re burnt. You’re somebody’s ruined dessert.

Don't curse? As though you couldn’t have said something so much worse. You could have asked him why he was too tired last night, again. Started that fight in front of your four year old. If you wanted a man to lecture you, you’d get divorced and go be single again, spend your Saturdays at coffee shops on blind dates listening to some stranger go on about brake fluid, and your husband could sing “I Count the Tears” to himself,

    na, na, na, na, na, na, late at night

You whisper in your husband’s ear something even more vile than what you said to the TV. You intend for there to be a joke in your voice, an unmistakable playfulness.

Instead it comes out like you mean it or maybe, best case scenario, it sounds sarcastic, acerbic. Then you start thinking maybe that’s what you’ve become—a complete miscommunication. A failed joke. You’re not even funny. You’re mean. Disingenuous, on a good day.

Don’t go there. Stop the thought loop before it starts.

Still, when did you become so full of rage and judgment? Strangers deserve respect. Don’t be cruel. Anything else is better. Be didactic, moralistic, silly, sentimental, gross, whatever—be anything else. Don’t invent strangers just to be condescending to them. Your car seems like it really might need new brake fluid. Your husband disagrees, probably just to be disagreeable. There you go again. Throwing rocks. Is that who you are? A rock thrower?

This is supposed to be a wonder-filled upside down Saturday. Stop ruining it. Sing “This Magic Moment” to yourself. Or hum it, at least. Cut another piece of bread off the loaf, and slice right back through all that self-involved I’m-so-terrible talk, find your way to your own beating bat heart and the lovely angry man in front of you.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

“I didn’t mean it like that,” you say. You wait a moment, over-soaking the French toast, and it occurs to you that maybe he meant what he said as a kind of joke, too, and you didn’t get it, didn’t want to hear it, chose not to. Maybe you’re both doing the same thing—flipping flirting into fighting like two people stuck in a lazy old habit. “Still, don’t tell me what to say,” you say to him.

He looks over from the TV. He could laugh the whole thing off, but why? You slide the soggy French toast onto the griddle and listen to it hiss.

“We want it bad,” he says and laughs.

Oh. We’ve had this argument before, been all the way upside down and laughing. You flap your bat wings and give that man a kiss, while your shrieking son pounds his fists on the floor and roars for the two of you to tell him and tell him now, “What are you guys talking about? And why are you so loud?”

Your husband makes up an answer as each of you balance a breakfast plate on your head. You and your baby Batman son take your husband by either hand, and the three of you fly away from the broken news on TV to eat breakfast up on the roof. Rise up above all that rat race noise, the tired beat feeling, the stale heat of it all, and head to the only place I know where you just have to wish to make it so. We’re almost there, now. I hope I made enough toast. Everything I want I have whenever I—. Our neighbors have found their way to the rooftop, too, thank God.

You better believe the sun is shining, and the day is good. Each of us sings to the others, darling, you can share it all with me. We cozy in, rest.

—Annie Mountcastle

#460: Hole, "Live Through This" (1994)

Where the fuck was she, anyway? If Tess were home, Lauren would be hearing Live Through This coming from her bedroom at the end of the hall, but all was quiet. There was no way she overslept—Tess was a strangely early riser for such a partier, and it was already 9:00. Lauren opened Tess’s bedroom door and peeked in, saw a hairy leg hanging over the bed, and closed the door. If she was sure it was Keith, she’d wake him up, but with Tess you could never be sure, and that could be embarrassing, calling to the wrong dude. Lauren hoped the sound of the shower would wake whoever it was and he would be gone before she emerged from the bathroom.

She had just finished rinsing the shampoo from her hair when she felt the blast. The sound had jagged edges that ripped the air like tissue, shook her eyes in their sockets, instantaneously liquefied her bowels. She leapt from the shower to the toilet while her and Tess’s toiletries flew from the shelves. Baby powder, toothbrushes, and two pink birth control cases fell on her head. The medicine cabinet flew open and aspirin and vitamin bottles dropped into the sink. Then it was quiet. She wrapped herself in a towel and turned off the shower. She looked out the bathroom window, fully expecting to see a passenger plane sticking out of the ground in her backyard.

She heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Lauren?”

“Keith. Are you okay?”

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know. Where’s Tess?”

“She took my Bronco.”

“Where?”

“She needs a copy of her social security card before she can start the new job today. I’m not sure where you go to do that.”

“Downtown,” she said. “The Murrah building.”

*

That night it rained. The bombing site was lit up like ten football fields and its light poured down streets and alleyways like a spreading infection. A helicopter thumped overhead. Keith sat in the passenger seat unfolding his rain poncho and wrestling with it as he pulled it over his head. Lauren parked in the empty parking lot behind the First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, a few blocks away from the Murrah building. The tall, stained glass windows of its sanctuary had been blown out, and from the sidewalk, Lauren could see the shadowy ceiling of the inside of the church, unprotected. Glass crunched beneath their feet as they walked, jewel-toned shards glittering like a bloody ocean under moonlight. A police car appeared from an east-west road a couple of blocks down and came toward them. They ducked behind a dumpster and waited for it to pass.  “We’ve got to be careful,” Lauren said.  They peeked out from behind the dumpster and continued on, dashing from parked cars to recessed doorways to stay hidden until they found the perimeter, yellow tape stretched as far as they could make out. On the other side of the barrier, they saw figures on guard. “I feel like a criminal,” Kevin whispered.

“We just need to know,” Lauren said. “If your car isn’t there, we’ll know she’s okay.”  Lauren thought of all those times Tess had come close to starting a real job—getting some credit in the straight world, as the song said—only to panic and take off, sometimes for a day or more.  One time, Tess had taken the bus to Dallas to see Pavement instead of starting work at a vet clinic. Let it be something like that. All day long, as the body count climbed on the news, and national news crews streamed into the restaurant where she worked, she told herself that Tess had just flaked out again. So they would have a look around, they would satisfy themselves that Keith’s Bronco was not there, and they would go home and wait for Tess to return from whatever wild-hare adventure she had taken.

They rounded a corner and the building came into view a half a block away. “God!” Keith grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her into his chest. She pushed away and turned to look. She had seen it on television a hundred times that day, white and torn and crumbling, like a layer cake that someone has ripped in two with bare hands, and she recognized what she was seeing as the same sight she had beheld all day on screen, but there was no comparison. The addition of depth made the sight hard to take in, hard for the mind to assimilate. The visual field regressed into the bowels of the building, into exposed rooms and dark crannies behind overturned desks and dangling potted plants. What looked like crumbs hanging from cake on television, were car-sized chunks of concrete in real life, straining to fall toward the crater in the middle of the building. Despite the rain, the building still appeared to be smoking. Was it steam? Whatever it was, it gave the wet concrete debris the look of a live animal, a being whose entrails steamed and strained to fall even further from the shattered shell of the body that had held them. Her body quailed as she tried to pick out where the floors had been, looked into the rooms imagining the fate of a tender human body amongst all that hard matter. Tess could be in there. The floors of her mind crashed in on themselves and she bent over and vomited. Keith had turned away from the sight of the building, his hands over his eyes.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

“What floor was the social security office on?” Keith asked in a tight voice that she could barely hear over the loud hum of a nearby generator truck.

She wiped her mouth with the bottom of her poncho. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s not do this,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

The building was lit up like the middle of the afternoon. She could see every zit and hair on Keith’s face, his eye sockets cast in shadow. “Come on,” she said.

Through burned air, they walked toward the building, moving through groups of fast-moving people wearing ponchos and other rain gear, FBI and ATF logos everywhere apparent. Police cars, Red Cross, and news trucks crammed the space. A crane towered overhead. The building was writhing. She squinted to understand what she saw. As she drew closer she realized that it was crawling with rescuers, people moving inch by inch through the rubble, looking under every piece of debris. As they approached what had been 5th Street, she began seeing cars. Some were burned out. Some were melted. All were covered with a layer of cement dust, now wetted to mud. She nearly stepped on a big man sitting on a curb, weeping, his shuddering back to her. As they passed him, Lauren felt ashamed for intruding into the work of dying that was going on under that rubble, so private and unexpected, for intruding into the taut and fragile headspace of these rescuers who, on television, seemed like people far out over a mental tightrope suspended above deep space, people who could be knocked off their thin wire of duty and purpose by the slightest disruption to their concentration, and who, Lauren could see now, were victims themselves, in the middle of a catastrophe that was ongoing.

“This way,” she said. Keith nodded and pushed ahead of her, but suddenly she had to put out her hands to keep from running into him. He had stopped. She stepped up next to him and saw what he saw. She couldn’t make out the green paint under all the debris that had piled on top of it, but the boxy shape was right and through the open space where the windshield had been she could see the shark tooth necklace that always hung from his rear view mirror. It was Keith’s Bronco.

*

They were silent most of the way home. As Lauren turned into her driveway, she said, “She could be alive. They’re still searching.”

Keith nodded. “Remember last week? The one-year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, how sad everyone was?” He laughed. “One guy. A suicide. I don’t mean to say it wasn’t sad, but—” he sucked his teeth.

“I know,” she said. Death. Death. Death. “Let’s get fucked up.”

At the front door, she saw a light inside that she didn’t remember leaving on. Then she heard something. Behind her, Keith made a choking sound. She turned the key. Yes. Fucking Hole. Fucking “Doll Parts.” Someday you will ache like I ache. She flung the door open and they rushed into the living room, looking down the dark hallway to the source of the music. Then light flooded the hall as a door was flung open. Tess shuffled into view, scratching her head. “Hey baby,” she said, looking up at Keith. “I’ve got some bad news about your car.”

—Constance Squires

#461: Public Image Ltd, "Metal Box" (1979)

“The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.”

            —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

Amid the Internet’s endlessly accessible, archived, overlapping present tense, our DVR’d, rewindable, pausable now, I miss most the sense of the inaccessible but very recent past and its foreclosed possibilities. My own childhood felt full of the just-missed-out-on, the overlooked-until-it-was-too-late, the taken-for-granted. I’m speaking of music and other consumable forms of pop culture, sure, but also friendships, experiences, places: the overgrown lot a few streets away, where my mother and I picked wildflowers and where teenagers broke beer bottles in circles of sooty stones, all bulldozed for a brick condominium by the time I turned ten. None of this is in any way catastrophic—especially as Adorno’s use of that word inevitably implies the Holocaust—though perhaps it gets at Adorno’s sense of the past as irredeemable, discontinuous, unnarratable. Still, we might read  “as if destroyed” as a warning against a romantic, nostalgic view of the ruined, fragmented past. At thirteen, fourteen, I watched bands pose and prance on MTV and wondered what the world wasn’t offering me so easily as I unwillingly committed to memory, say, a Howard Jones keyboard solo or a Mr. Mister melody: the cultural present, as I experienced it, was awful. A year later, I loved rummaging the import bins at Al Bum’s, loved studying cryptic post-punk LP covers. It seemed easy to confuse one band and another, because all of them felt equally mysterious—because the world felt mysterious. Still, the most interesting narratives have always been the ones I can’t quite piece together, don’t quite understand. The past—my parents’ past—bored me. But the recent past intrigued me because it seemed destroyed, irretrievable except through these records, which lingered in those bins for months until one day they’d vanished. Eventually I realized I’d stop mourning their absences only if I brought them home myself.

This unattainable past occupied my frequent what-if? alternate history fantasies about my life. All fantasy is intrinsically selfish, and my own historical contemplations never essayed much beyond the limits of my own vaguest memories. If the present moment disappointed me—and, when I was a teenager, it invariably did—how easy to ignore it by pondering other selves I might have been but wasn’t, by projecting myself into other places, houses, families, friendships, talents, bodies. I wanted less a better past than to possess a better present via the past.

This superior present I imagined was pathetic, as if a shade of difference in my social or economic status or my physical appearance or my cultural knowledge would have transformed me in any way. Jah Wobble, PiL’s bassist on First Issue and Metal Box, referring to his younger self, his younger friends, puts it more succinctly: “I think we were all emotional cripples back then.” Wobble’s friends included one who, in January, 1978, rejected his own recent past by exchanging safety pins and torn clothes for tailored suits, the name Johnny Rotten for John Lydon, and a role as frontman of the U.K.’s most infamous punk band for an ostensibly more democratic position in Public Image Ltd. As the reinvented Lydon told Tom Snyder in a disastrous 1980 television interview, PiL “ain’t no band. We’re a company. Simple. Nothing to do with rock and roll. Doo-dah.”

“It seems to be an old-fashioned format,” guitarist Keith Levene elaborated haltingly a few minutes later, as Lydon and Snyder smoked cigarettes, “to go on stage with guitars and play loud music.… John said something in an interview: everyone’s really preoccupied with going backwards, and I think the reason it’s a good idea not to be a rock and roll band, and to concentrate or direct our energies as a company is because—” at which point Lydon and Snyder simultaneously interrupted him and Tomorrow with Tom Snyder went to a commercial break.

 

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

“I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer.… I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.… Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!”

            —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I’ve never listened to Public Image Ltd’s classic 1979 three record set Metal Box. Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition, on the other hand, I’ve spun endless times. By the time I came to PiL c. 1987 or so, those metal film canisters had vanished into that recent past I couldn’t touch or acquire, and I didn’t see one until 1990, hanging on the wall at Nuggets Records in Kenmore Square and, despite some rust spots, priced way above my meager means. Lydon, Levene, and Wobble, PiL’s three mainstays when Metal Box came out, never intended it to be an easy release: the deep-bass, wide-groove 45 RPM 12˝s meant that four of the six sides held only two songs each, and that Metal Box began with a side-long, ten-minute dirge. “It effectively deconstructed the idea of ‘the album,’” Simon Reynolds claims, “encouraging people to listen to the tracks in any order.” Beyond that, Levene noted, “We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out.”

Virgin changed the track sequence, omitted a lock groove, and compressed Wobble’s basslines into a cheaper-to-manufacture double LP packaged in a more standard gatefold sleeve: Second Edition appeared three months after its original iteration, early in 1980. When I was sixteen, copies remained easy to find in record stores. Even this diminished artifact felt important: it sounded strange in a way almost no other record I owned sounded strange: circuitous, trebly guitar riffs; stumbling basslines that all seemed to be played on the E and A strings; vocals punctuated by all kinds of groans, moans, shrieks, hiccups, howls, trills, and whines. The entire effect felt harrowing, and listening to this album, for me, both summoned and relieved the distress it articulated. Speaking of his guitar sound, Levene said, “It could be really thin glass penetrating you, but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.” Or, as Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”

“[L]isten to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post-Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins.”

            —Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

A friend and I recently admitted to each other that we laugh out loud while rereading Minima Moralia. He loves the passage “where Adorno turns his blinding interrogation light on banality—how casual conversations with strangers on a train make us complicit with murder and atrocity, how throwaway expressions like ‘Oh, how lovely!’ testify to just how unlovely existence is, how going to see a movie (no matter how vigilant we are while watching it) leaves us stupider and more corrupt, etc.” (In this fragment, “How Nice of You, Doctor,” Adorno observes “Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other.”) I laugh at “Articles May Not Be Exchanged”: “Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort.… The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.”

When I discovered PiL, I would have been unable to make much of Adorno’s sometimes dense rhetoric—just as PiL’s dismantling of traditional rock song structures made their work initially incomprehensible to me—but Adorno’s relentless critique throughout Minima Moralia would have spoken to me then at least as much as it does now: like Lydon, I’ve always been a cynical bastard. In 1978, Lydon told an interviewer his new music involved “misery, depression, self-indulgence, all those trite little obsessions.” Years later, on MTV, he confessed, with a shrug and a laugh, “I’m just permanently agitated by everything and anyone. I cannot help it. It’s the way I am!”

I wasn’t, at sixteen, laughing at Lydon’s lyrics throughout Second Edition: I was hoping someone would recognize my rueful agreement at what then seemed his percipience, a posture Adorno would have loved to mock: “Ready-made enlightenment turns not only spontaneous reflection but also analytical insights—whose power equals the energy and suffering that it cost to gain them—into mass-produced articles.” Lydon’s physical beatings at the hands of patriotic mobs throughout the Silver Jubilee summer of 1977, his pain over the deaths of his mother and his friend Sid Vicious, his paranoia and isolation in the Chelsea house he shared with bandmates, friends, and hangers-on in 1978 and 1979: all distilled into the moans he musters throughout the dozen tracks of Metal Box, then pressed into vinyl records in an edition of sixty thousand.

A decade later, I finally saw Public Image Ltd live, at an outdoor venue with the Sugarcubes and New Order. Lydon sauntered onstage wearing baggy Day-Glo clothes and scarlet hair extensions, and shouted into the microphone: “Here’s your Uncle Johhhhnnnny!” The crowd cheered wildly; I cringed. His band, anonymous session musicians since Wobble’s and Levene’s departures years earlier, played the hits. I remember little of this show beyond the water-squirting flower headband Bjork wore, but I’m pretty sure PiL played “Public Image” as well as the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” or exactly the sort of tired rock-star stuff Lydon had once sneered about. Whether his foray into punk nostalgia was rejection or celebration of his recent past, it only confirmed that I’d once again arrived a few years too late for something vital and forever lost.

—Joshua Harmon

#462: R.E.M., "Document" (1987)

In the summer of 2012, I was finishing up my job coordinating an after-school arts program for children living in public housing, after a year of working with the world’s most cynical boss (“Most of these people,” this person once said to me, “are lazy scum”), while also housesitting for a friend who was in Greece with his family, watching his two dogs, two cats, and his daughter’s Chinese water dragon. Despite the lack of air conditioning in the house, there were perks: he had the nicest kitchen you could imagine, and one of the biggest vinyl collections I had ever seen. One afternoon after coming home from work, I sat in the den and poked through one of the stacks of records: Kate Bush, Paul Simon, Men At Work—I had found his 80s section. But I settled on one, Document by REM, because I had heard only one song of theirs up to that point, “Losing My Religion,” and because I wasn’t in a Kate Bush kind of mood.

*

Sometimes I jokingly tell friends that my goal in life is to live comfortably in contingency. If I believe in any sort of agency at all, in any kind of control we can claim over the world’s waves, I believe we find it only when we acknowledge how little of it we truly have. And listening for the first time to “Exhuming McCarthy”—I loved it for its disconcerting poppy-ness, its sharp irony, its explicit criticism of the burgeoning sense of American exceptionalism during the Reagan Administration (Peter Buck, who felt the country under The Great Communicator had turned into an amusement park, had suggested an alternate title for the album: Last Train To Disneyland. While I’m taken by the sentiment, I think we can all be glad the title suggestion was vetoed. )—I could only think of my boss one morning telling me that Bill O’Reilly “spoke the God’s truth on his show,” and that government interventions like public housing and food stamps only served to imprison folks and overtax the people who really made this country tick.

I’m sure we all know the old arguments: welfare either equals the playing field, or it acts as a debilitating crutch; that big government is working to protect this country’s most vulnerable, which is the bedrock of any democracy, or it’s an insult to the principles of self-governance upon which America was founded—but when talking about poverty, I don’t think the question posed is about Republican vs. Democratic values (though I think it’s clear at this point where I stand between the two poles). When talking about poverty, I think we’re talking about agency: what do we have to do, what do we need, to be able to live most freely?

*

The turn in Document, to my ears at least, occurs on “Fireplace,” where the unbridled, seemingly blind optimism of the first half of the album gives way to something a little heavier, a little more unsettling: the song opens with Michael Stipe rather bluntly chanting, “Crazy, crazy world / crazy, crazy times.” And it’s true, in 2015 as it was in 1987, when the album was first released: we’re living in a crazy, crazy world, in crazy, crazy times. Instead of the Iran-Contra Affair, we have ISIS; instead of the Berlin Wall, we have Bobby Jindal’s (fabricated) “no-go” zones. Last month, writing to a mentor about how dismal everything had seemed recently, he responded: “I find myself fighting depression over the state of the world, despite also feeling tremendously lucky. But there are moments when things fall together and meaning and hope preside.” I sent off a quick response, taken from one of George Oppen’s letters that my mentor had reminded me of: “I think there is no light in the world but the world, and I think there is light. My happiness is the knowledge of all the things we do not know.”

*

There are no all-encompassing answers to the questions I’ve raised—and I suppose if I were serious about living in contingency, I wouldn’t aspire to any. But there’s a distinct difference between rejecting all-encompassing answers and rejecting answers in general. Says W.S. DiPiero on John Keats, whose Negative Capability George Oppen is surely alluding to:

We travesty Keats’s inquiring, sensuous intelligence, however, if we cite him as an endorsement of the unwillingness to pass judgment, to evaluate, to assert or deny. Negative Capability is no counsel for failed nerve. Keats was advising himself to be patient in the quest for definitiveness. It is counsel of patience of the imagination.

*

Coming to a close with the album, on what must be my 50th or so listen in the past couple weeks, the lyrics seem more and more prescient, despite—or perhaps because of—Michael Stipe’s typical, obfuscating style:

Oddfellows local 151 behind the firehouse
Where Peewee sits to prove a sage to teach
Peewee gathered up his proof
Reached up and scratched his head
Fell down and hit the ground again

Pewee the sage is left scratching his head; Peewee the sage finds himself ultimately deposed and grounded. Rilke might say he’s been forced to “live the questions”; and much as I’ve repeated that little quote like a balm against my own confusion, I’m reminded now that, despite how comforting Rilke means to be, living the questions is at the end of the day uncomfortable. Agency, contingency, Negative Capability, questions: no, no, no. Or, maybe, maybe, maybe.

You see, at the end of the day, in whatever psychic or existential discomfort I find myself in, I rest assured for some reason knowing that I can say “end of the day.” End of the day, at least Peewee can fall down and hit his head on the ground. End of the day, I’m thankful and, like my mentor, feel tremendously lucky knowing that at least there’s a ground for Peewee to hit. I’ve got no answers—how do we live most freely?—but if any virtue is forced onto us, it’s patience, and I guess I’ve got some time.

—Christian Detisch

#463: Echo and the Bunnymen, "Heaven Up Here" (1981)

My favorite scene from the movie High Fidelity takes place during a busy day at Championship Vinyl, a record shop owned by Rob (John Cusack) and staffed by Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso). In the scene, the three characters are each given a moment to do what, for me, is the best part about being into music: they get to turn someone else on to a band they like. They each have their own methods. Rob, store owner, maintains a respectable distance by playing The Beta Band’s Three EPs over the store’s sound system. He scans the room, watching people slowly start to nod their heads. Dick, shy and soft spoken, awkwardly chats up a girl about Green Day and segues to a discussion of their influences, ultimately stopping with The Stiff Little Fingers. Finally, Barry aggressively drags a customer around the store piling records into his arms each time the man admits to not having heard something. After finding out the guy doesn’t own Blonde On Blonde (RS500 #9), Barry hands him a copy and embraces him, assuring the customer that things are going to be OK. It is great. I suggest you watch it here.

I love how this scene depicts one version of discussions I’ve been having with my music-loving friends for decades. I know people who absolutely hate the way Dick and Anna immediately jump from Green Day to the Clash, as if those two entities can never touch. And for a long time I took issue with the idea that, somehow, the Jesus and Mary Chain picked up where Echo and the Bunnymen left off. After all, Echo dropped an album in 1997 and JMC did in 1998. It doesn’t seem like the passing of a torch, does it? But what I am leaving out is that, until 1997, Echo was on indefinite hiatus and JMC, with a newer, sleeker sound, did put out two record albums, 1992’s Honey’s Dead and 1994’s Stoned and Dethroned. Now, I’ve played those records and to me they don’t have a single thing to do with Echo’s big, soaring anthems. But it feels like I can engage this dialogue like I wold actual people.

Like the best talks about music usually do, the one in this scene clued me in to bands I’d never heard. And one of them was Echo and the Bunnymen. When this film was released in 2000, I’d certainly heard Echo songs. They feature prominently on both the Pretty in Pink and Lost Boys soundtracks. I loved both of those movies. So, yeah, Echo was around, but I wasn’t paying attention. But Barry’s manic insistence, his force when discussing music lineage, got me thinking. It planted a seed. Then, in 2001, I saw Donnie Darko, and that movie's use of Echo’s “The Killing Moon” in its opening scene took me a step closer. Then, finally, around maybe 2003, either an uncle gave me a mix CD with “Villiers Terrace” on it or he gave the CD to my sister and I stole it from her, but either way once I heard that track it clicked, and Echo became a band that I really liked. It took time and I had to get pushed from a few different places, but I found my way to something good.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

That same year, 2003, is when the original RS500 dropped. My dad saw a copy at the grocery and gave it to me. I was 22 and home from school for Christmas and, being home with little to do, I obsessed over it. I read every review twice, I circled albums I wanted to hear by bands that seemed interesting. The issue was especially important then because by 2003, I had reached peak snob. I was really into punk and hardcore and shows in basements. I am sure you know the type. If my present self sat at a table with my friends from 2003 I doubt I could keep up, so insular and specific was our world. The RS500 started to chip away at a lot of my pretensions and gave me context for not only the music I loved, but also the music I hated. And sometimes context is enough to make a Honky Chateau or At Budokan seem listenable. This was good, I needed to lighten up or I might have turned into someone like Barry...only I would have been so much worse.

The scene in High Fidelity is three minutes long. In that short time, the dialogue references Echo and the Bunnymen, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Bob Dylan, Green Day, the Stiff Little Fingers, the Beta Band, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Serge Gainsbourg, and Joni Mitchell.  There are also clearly visible record covers from Bad Brains, the Mummies, Motorhead, and the Minutemen, and these are just the ones I can identify. It’s hardly a 500-album compendium. But it stuck with me. I got a nudge. Maybe without it I don’t vibe with “The Killing Moon” and maybe I’m not here right now typing this. It gets harder and harder to stay stoked on new tunes. So if you’ve heard something good, let me know. And if you see that Echo/JMC connection you’ll have to enlighten me, because it doesn’t make any sense at all.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#464: Def Leppard, "Hysteria" (1987)

Out of touch, out of reach, yeah, you could try to get closer to me

A puffy ginger mullet, braces, freckles and acne, garish Jams shorts, a Quicksilver T-shirt, high-top white Reeboks, a stonewashed jean jacket, loitering the aisles of Kemp Mill music at Tysons Corner mall. Mooning over Karin D., my first unrequited love, calling up DC101 and requesting “Love Bites.” Googling her now, over 25 years later, it appears she is teaching kindergarten in the same town, perhaps corralling children down the same hallways of the same school where we (I) first fell in love. I’ve moved probably fifteen times since then: five countries, as many states. When I move on I often wonder what I leave behind: a sense of connection, the slow establishment of relations, resources, comfort; each stop chalking up a few new acquaintances to have them drift away after the next move or the next next. I’ll see you when I see you. A fading cipher in suburban DC, Denver, New York, Baltimore, Tuscaloosa, Chicago, Rome, Saigon, Colombo, Hong Kong.

This album is not holding up at all. When I’ve listened to Def Leppard in the past ten or twenty years, I’ve opted for Pyromania, the album previous to this and possessed of a drummer with two arms and a full band unaware of danger, unconcerned with coming drug overdoses, not yet ensconced in Bible study, just ready to fucking rock. “Photograph,” off Pyromania, is the only Def Leppard song that still seems to have any value to me; its paean to longing, the impossibility of the woman in the picture; the cliché of a preteen boy and a lingerie catalog. While Hysteria’s “Women,” couched in Christian creation myth, is a disassembling of the woman into hair, eyes, legs, thighs; a KFC orgy, the photograph cut apart and reassembled in a cubist collage. Ahead of its time I suppose, “Women” is “Photograph” as Photoshop.

Oh, I get hysterical, hysteria, oh can you feel it? (Oh can you feel it?) Do you believe it? (Do you believe it?)

According to the Internet, female hysteria was a not-uncommon malady that afflicted women for a period of approximately 2,000 years before its unaccountable disappearance from the medical rolls about a hundred years ago; its early manifestations caught the scholarly attentions of Plato and Hippocrates. They attributed its cause to a “wandering womb,” as the woman’s uterus strolled throughout her body wreaking havoc upon internal systems like a collection of unruly droogs. Treatment varied from a hysterectomy—complete removal of the offending organ—to a doctor manually stimulating the afflicted woman’s genitals, bringing about “paroxysm” and a calming of hysterical tendencies. It is thought that a doctor’s fatigued hands occasioned the invention of the first mechanical vibrator.

Karin doesn’t appear to have a Facebook page. Is it under her married name? What the hell, Karin? Could you have saved me from this? Could I be at the Vienna Inn right now eating a Chili Dog with the boys? (I’m pretty sure the Vienna Inn closed down; it is now either a Chipotle or a Starbucks.) Could we go down to Neighbors on Sunday for some brews, wings, and the ‘Skins game? Would our children be playing Little League baseball at the old field, sponsored by Auto Zone, PetSmart? Would they be skateboarding in the drainage ditch by the community center? Enacting pyromania in the woods by the bike path, as Matt S. and I did, throwing fireworks into the trees, panic as the creeping tongues of fire spread, the wail of the siren. Matt’s mother believed that we’d just stumbled upon it; mine, less so, seasoned by my early mischief and affinity for fire.

I saw a picture of Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen on Dave Mustaine’s—Megadeth guitarist and singer—Twitter the other day. I follow Mustaine for comic value; he has become a caricature of the caricature that is Ted Nugent: guitar god, right-wing hysteric, 9/11 conspiracy theorist, though “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due” is still a ripping tune (as is “Stranglehold”). Dave Mustaine reminds me that turning into a reactionary asshole is the prerogative of all aging white men in this world, feeling hemmed in by a changing society they do not understand. Dave makes me feel a little better about my dad’s transformation in recent years: from a fiscally conservative, mostly sensible Republican to a man living in utter terror of anything outside the realm of his immediate influence. ISIS terrorists piggyback Ebola-carrying immigrants into his middle-American garage—they conspire against freedom while engaging in sordid homosexual acts under a tattered and soiled American flag in the substantial bed of his American-made pickup. In the picture on Dave’s Twitter, Phil’s head resembled an unnaturally distended birthday party balloon with a pageboy wig.

I gotta know tonight, I feel alone tonight, can’t stop this feeling, can’t stop this fire

Like hysteria, nostalgia was once a disease, though men were the primary sufferers of this particular ailment. The Internet tells us it was first discovered in the mid-1600s among soldiers sick for the comforts of home; the phrase “homesick” is derived directly from the word nostalgia’s Greek roots. Treatment ranged from the sensible: slowly monitored withdrawal from the object of affection, to the monstrous: live burial. During the U.S. Civil War, the preferred treatment was abasement and repeated insinuations of unmanliness: a boy’s favorite schoolyard taunt: “fucking pussy.” The diagnosis of nostalgia was carried on through the Great Wars.

I watched this movie Murderball recently, about the Paralympic Wheelchair Rugby team. Not to spoil it, but the team loses a match to their rival Canadian team at the 2004 games, making their best possible result the bronze medal, a great disappointment for a team that expects gold. The scene after the match is one of sadness, with many of the athletes and their loved ones crying. A dad stoops down to his son’s wheelchair and hugs his boy and cradles his boy’s head in his hands and tears flow from both men as the father tells the son he is the greatest son a father could ever hope for, that he is so very proud of him and loves him so very much.

It’s such a magical mysteria, when you get that feeling (When you get that feeling), when you start believing (When you start believing)

I had a crush on a Paralympic gold medalist once. She won medals in both the summer and winter games in wheelchair basketball and skiing. I remember one night in a Tuscaloosa bar—a place where the occasional “Pour Some Sugar on Me” would not be out of place, soused dudes and chicks pumping fists to the chorus—and I was tanked and the Paralympian and I got into a shouting match about something the specifics of which I do not recall, our foreheads pressed hard into each other’s, my unfocused eyes reflecting hers. Out of the corner of my beleaguered vision, her (I guess) boyfriend watched sheepishly, horrified across the room. Exhausted by my foolishness, she pushed off the barstool, into her wheelchair, and was gone. I watched her many continuing victories on a scratchy Internet feed from Beijing, 2008. One of the guys on the men’s team was in my Early American Literature summer school class at the University of Alabama; I do not recall him as a very good student, though I do remember an embarrassing moment when I asked him when he would be out of the chair, thinking it was a temporary injury. “Uh, never,” he replied.

Oh babe, Hysteria when you’re near, come on closer, closer to me

—Erik Wennermark

#465: The Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (1999)

Queen of the Savages / I Think I Need a New Heart

It does not often snow in Virginia. Rain does not often freeze. When you wake to a front porch enrobed in ice, you are not quite sure how to approach it. You think, Salt. Some people would have put down salt. And you look at the bag of trash in your hand that needs, somehow, to get to the can on the curb, and you look at the eight steep steps that stand between where you are and where you need to be. You know you cannot walk on something that shiny, just walk without both hands on the handrail.

Here is what seems best: to throw the bag of trash to the sidewalk, and labor your way down to meet it. You try to throw it gently, but it lands on its side and a bottle breaks and you are shocked, for a moment, by the noise, the disorder—though, once it happens, you think: What else could I possibly have expected?

Kiss Me Like You Mean It / It’s a Crime / Epitaph for My Heart

I don’t know what it means, not really, to write something off as bad debt. I can, of course, infer: a write-off means you pay less in taxes, right? And bad debt will never be repaid. (Well that was a bad investment, you said once when I told you I wanted only you, & had for a long time been with no other men.) Bad debt will never be repaid & so the government says, we will counter this wrong. You owe us less this year, they say, because you have faced a hardship. You owe us less this year because life handed you something unfair. Is that right? I don’t know if that’s right. Maybe that isn’t what it means at all. But if I were guessing, that’s what I’d guess. It was bad debt, we say, shrugging. We asked them to pay & they wouldn’t. We asked them to pay but then they were gone. They owe us but it doesn’t matter. Just bad debt. Some, & a little more.

Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing / Love is Like a Bottle of Gin

The first time I kissed you I thought: there will never be another man I will kiss as well as this. There are so many, many true things that don’t matter one bit.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

Two Kinds of People / (Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy

I have a friend who is a professor. He is very very handsome and very very kind, and because of this one of his students thought he might love her. He’d done nothing to deserve this, her waterfall of assumptions, the angry things she said to him when he, tactfully and professionally and, still, kindly, set her straight. But when he told me, my first reaction was not to sympathize with him. Instead, I said, unthinkingly, Oh. That poor, poor girl. He looked at me, surprised, as if I were accusing him of something. And I felt bad, seeing his confusion, but felt worse, still, for the girl, oh that poor girl and her aching heart and her bottomless want and her endless human striving for a life that, if it could just go right for a few minutes, would feel like something more.

All My Little Words / The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be

Are there more varieties of heartbreak, or of love?

The Things We Did and Didn’t Do

He poured a shot, & another.

I poured a shot, & another.

We took the shots & took more & walked to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes & came back home & poured more shots. We took the shots because when we took the shots suddenly things got less complicated. We took the shots & I picked a card & he lit a piece of paper towel on fire, blew it out, & rubbed the burned parts along his forearm until they dissolved—the ashes stuck, left a 3 and a C marked emphatic like a tattoo & he said was it a three of clubs & I said yes. By then we are outside, it is cold, more cigarettes, his car parked right out front. He showed me the mark where someone keyed it long ago—his ex, he used to think, he said, but he doesn’t anymore. & I think it probably was her, I didn’t tell him but I think it: he is the kind of man who’d drive a woman to extremes. So we turned the music louder than it ever should’ve gone & we took the shots & when we danced in the living room his hands were on me & he said what is a song that’s made you cry, & I said, I don’t know, none of them, though the truth is all of them, & then we were kissing & I pulled back, said, Slap me. He did. I put my face very close to his face. Slap me again.

—Katelyn Kiley

#466: Coldplay, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" (2002)

The last time I really listened to Coldplay, I was seventeen years old, which is probably the perfect age both to listen and then to stop really listening to Coldplay.

That, at least, is the cool thing to think—Coldplay being a band that has never been cool to love, though based on hushed conversations I’ve had with Friends Who Shall Remain Nameless, I suspect that most people have secretly loved Coldplay at one point or another.

On Rolling Stone’s Best 500 Albums List, the little blurb beneath A Rush of Blood to the Head reads, “Coldplay churn out bighearted British guitar rock on their second album – what Chris Martin aptly called ‘emotion that can make you feel sad while you're moving your legs,’” which is hilariously meaningless and vague, because exactly how is that any different from any other type of music? This, it seems, is also part of the reason why people hate them: their banality, their overwhelming, soupy blandness.

Despite “Clocks” insistent presence on the radio and on television shows circa 2003ish, the music video for “The Scientist” was my gateway into the rest of Coldplay’s oeuvre. I was at a friend’s house, sprawled across her sofa in the sort of sprawl specific only to fifteen-year-olds, watching television, when the music video appeared: a close-up of Chris Martin’s face filling the entire screen. “The Scientist” was the first video I remember seeing that didn’t involve a boy band or girl group dancing against a bright red background (note: I did not have cable growing up. I was deprived), and Chris Martin walking backwards over walls and through forests and floating leaves was the Most Beautiful Thing I Had Ever Seen, the revelation as he reverse-jaunted up a hill and past his apparently dead onscreen girlfriend to the site of a horrific car accident hitting me like a thousand beautiful bricks, each one finely crafted for me and me alone.

I was recovering from a car accident myself, one so bad it put me in the hospital with several broken bones, a new titanium rod lining the muscles inside my leg, and a morphine drip in my arm for a week. When, after a month, I finally returned to school in a wheelchair, my friends liked to steer me through the hallways at breakneck speeds, which I allowed if only for the change of pace.

It was an accident with no one to blame: I had stepped out in front of a car moving through a busy intersection. The bus in the first lane had stopped to wave me on, concealing the sedan in the next lane rushing up. I didn’t see the car, and the driver didn’t see me.

I spent a lot of time rewinding the sixty seconds of that one afternoon attempting to see what went wrong and when. With their video for “The Scientist,” Coldplay made me feel my minor tragedy—that the very concepts of tragedy and danger in general—could be romantic and compelling, rather than things to sensibly avoid. This of course is an iffy premise to buy into, but one that later would make the Twilight novels so popular. I was hooked. Their music became a receptacle for me to wash my own experiences clean of nuance and reckoning.

Coldplay’s music is manipulative. But it also manages to be impotent at the same time. “You’d practically expect the band to show up at your doorstep with a wilting bouquet and a Hallmark card,” the online music zine Pitchfork wrote of Coldplay’s single “Yellow.” Yet I can imagine that, to me as a teenager, a boy showing up with a card and flowers—who even cares about the state of them—sounded pretty ideal. And indeed, this was exactly the sort of sentimental crap—flowers, cards, candies—that made me feel better at a time when I inhabited a body completely foreign, with all its broken bones.

I spent weeks struggling down the length of my living room with a walker, and learned how to inch down the front steps on my butt with the help of my parents hovering at either side. I wasted days at a time in bed.

My life did not feel incredibly romantic or exciting. Hell, most of life is not incredibly exciting. But back then, this brutal fact enraged me, especially when I was stuck inside the house and relearning the basic concept of walking. I was fifteen and hormonal and the needle of my emotional odometer swung wildly from I’m fine to best day ever to I hate my life. The smallest thing could set off a melodramatic internal storm: brushing the arm of a crush in the hallway, an offhand glance from a friend, my father crunching his cereal across the breakfast table.

I preferred the dramatics of X&Y and Viva La Vida to Coldplay’s earlier albums, though it strikes me now, re-listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head, how much more personal their earlier music seems. I mean, not that much more personal, because let’s face it, Coldplay never really got beyond generalities. But still, in their first two albums you can hear a band rather than a faceless, over-produced machine. There’s a lot of distance between their later music and the listener, perhaps because their songs, through increasing popularity and overplayed Apple commercials, were becoming so very public.

I cannot imagine Coldplay’s music as a shared and communal experience, though such an experience is arguably fundamental to the very roots of music itself, because my teenage relationship with them was solitary and internal. For me, they embodied emotion itself. The minute I imagine Coldplay as a band that can be heard and scrutinized by other people, I can hear how they actually sound: cheap and sentimental.

“If nothing else, [Coldplay’s music] is harmless and pretty. Unfortunately, it's nothing else. If that's what you look for in your music, by all means, go for it. If you want substance, I suggest moving on,” sighs Pitchfork on Parachutes. Condescension aside, this is Coldplay’s Great Flaw: their music is emotion that they don’t bother to negotiate or refine.

“If your teachers suggest that your poems are too sentimental,” the poet Mary Reufle writes, “that is only the half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?” Coldplay does not try to be a stone.

The suggestion that harmless, pretty sentimentality automatically negates substance sounds wrong to me. I want to believe that the willingness to embrace such sentimentality must be indicative of something other than laziness or emotional unintelligence—of what, I’m not yet sure. And we all contain the potential, the capacity, for unrestrained sentimentality within us—it just doesn’t overwhelm as often as it did in adolescence. But it’s hopeful to imagine that it’s still there, growing and living and waiting to unfurl.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

To be as affected as I was by “The Scientist,” you first have to put aside the logic lacking in its music video. If you replay it so that it runs forward, Chris Martin essentially leaves his lover in the field to die—which is actually the most unromantic, fucked up thing ever—healthily strolls out of a totaled car and past her into the woods, pauses to lean on tree trunks and gaze forlornly into the distance, and comes to rest, for reasons unascertainable, on a mattress in the middle of a sidewalk. It’s nonsensical and utterly constructed.

These rather obvious hiccups would not have even occurred to me back when I was a teenager governed more by emotion than reason. Coldplay, the “most insufferable band of the decade,” managed to also become one of the most popular precisely because they embody our insufferable, bland, and banal emotions. We like to think we are different from other people, but really we are just as unique as everyone else. And we disdain sentimentality because it makes us vulnerable to this knowledge, though saccharine language is often the most straightforward—if the most unartful—way to get our sloppy, over-the-top feelings across.  

Ten years later, I am sufficiently cynical enough that the flaws in logic almost negate for me any emotional power that the video for “The Scientist” held over me, though on some primal level I still feel it’s a beautiful song. Why do I find it beautiful even when I know it is ridiculous?

I wish I could still recklessly love Coldplay—part of me would love to be as naïve and un-self aware as I was at fifteen. Growing older has meant that I no longer need to listen to music the same way as I did back then—obsessively, maniacally, with my entire body, hunkered into the passenger seat of my mother’s minivan, the sweep of trees past the window registering only as an extension of chords. Crossing the street with headphones in and barely noticing my own surroundings until it’s too late.

Ten years later, Chris Martin’s voice is still as familiar yet distant to me as my own bones inside my skin. Even now his singing slips into a vein, like the IV my nurse used to pump me up with morphine, numbing my body with a dumb high of hyperbole and madness. In this same memory I’m now rewinding myself into, I can see my father leaning over me in my hospital bed. He’s holding my hand, and crying for the first time, and I know there is nothing more sentimental than this, and nothing more goddamn true.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#467: Bruce Springsteen, "Tunnel of Love" (1987)

My mother listened to Springsteen’s “One Step Up” when she left my father.

Or, that’s the story I made out of the story she told me.

I was too young to remember their parting, only old enough to cache living at a house with him and, later, living at another without. It was as sudden and easy a break as waking from a dream—one life into another, each in its own place.

I don’t know what time of year it was, if we left in the night or while he was at work. If he was pleading with her to stay or telling her to go. I don’t know if we stayed somewhere for a while, or if we moved into the little white rancher my grandfather bought for us.

I don’t remember fights. I don’t remember crying. I might have told my father goodbye, or I might have not.

Maybe I didn’t know I needed to.

I couldn’t even tell you how old I was, or what year. It’s the divorce after the separation that I remember—his old partner moving in and my mother asking me to keep secrets, crying in a dark classroom while my fourth-grade teacher knelt on the floor so that she was my height and bigger than my grief.

A few years later, when my mother bought a couple of used Springsteen cassettes to play in her Volvo named Vicky, I remembered the song. I think I even knew some of the words. (Or, maybe, it’s that I know the words now when I’m remembering this, so it feels like I knew them then.) Even before she told me this was the song, it reminded me of my parents together—something that I don’t really remember as an image but an ambience, how silence breaks over bodies rather than an empty space.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

*

My life these last six years has been made of one loss after another, of overlapping shadows. Death, many deaths. Cancer.

Before all of this, when my husband and I were first dating, I told him one night in his car that I felt like I was due for great loss, because I’d had a relatively stable life—or so it seemed—up until then. I felt then like grief’s hurricanes had all turned back out to sea.

*

When I listen to Tunnel of Love now, I have a hard time listening to it all the way through, not because  I can’t keep it together or something, but because it feels like multiple albums. The title track feels like a single, and so it’s that late-80s reverbed, sensitive pop Americana track that stands alone, dividing the (mostly) throwaway opening tracks from the bittersweet quartet of “Brilliant Disguise,” “One Step Up,” “When You’re Alone,” and “Valentine’s Day.” When I listen to Tunnel of Love, I either listen to “Tunnel of Love” or the last four songs.

Because of my listening habits and my associations with the songs, Tunnel of Love doesn’t feel like a whole album. It feels like the air inside a room, a checking off of time, like looking at a photo with someone cut out of the frame.

*

Mostly I wonder if it actually means something that my mother listened to “One Step Up” when she left my father. If it means something to me. Or about me.

My mother also revealed I was conceived to Ravel’s “Bolero.” Could your conception song—or the songs your parents met to, or split up to—have something to do with you, with who you are? Are there those who believe that songs have the same sway over us as the stars, who would say “One Step Up” and “Bolero” are just as important as the fact that I’m a Cancer and a Fire Rabbit? That it’s part of the nurture that made me into who I am, like the fact that I was raised where I was raised with the money we had, the language we spoke, and the education I was given.

*

Tunnel of Love doesn’t mean what I want it to mean, what I feel like it should feel—a swell of grief, a touchstone in loss. But it wasn’t my soundtrack for leaving—I don’t even remember leaving. It’s music for coming back, for trying—for almost—remembering.

*

My father’s coming to visit at the end of this week. I’ve been listening to “One Step Up” on repeat all morning, and I can’t help but wonder if he knew this song as the one that soundtracked my mother’s departure. If he would ask me to turn it off if it came on the radio. Or if he would act like nothing bothered him. But most of all, I wonder if he had a song. I wonder if I know the words. I wonder if we ever sang it.

—Emilia Phillips

#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