#348: Muddy Waters, "At Newport 1960" (1960)

The attentive reader will recall my vexed relationship with the abstraction of "The 1960s." And surely the attentive reader will not at all be surprised when I bring that vexation to bear on an album whose title announces the decade it greets, At Newport 1960, a live recording of Muddy Waters's set at the Newport Jazz Festival from that year. It's an album that has everything to do with the decade about to unfold, and nothing to do with this or that grand narrative of the decade itself. And yet, the attentive reader will interject, to say that an album speaks to the decade that follows it necessarily implies some narrative of that decade, whether I want it to or not. This point is well taken. It is so well taken, in fact, that I must admit it leaves my whole aversion to "The 1960s" in a somewhat dubious place. By distancing myself from this abstraction in this way, don't I just allow myself room to construct another, equally abstract "1960s," just in terms of the particular elements I personally want to highlight? The short answer to this line of questioning—presumably originating in my attentive reader—is, well, yes. And the only thing for me to do is take back everything I've said. And lest the attentive reader turn into a hostile one, and accuse me of so much postmodern frippery, I should now admit that this gesture of taking back everything I've said is of a piece with At Newport 1960, whose strangeness has something to do with the way it, itself, takes back everything it's said at the end. The only difference between the album and me is that the album doesn't announce its recanting.

To begin at the end: the last song on At Newport, "Goodbye Newport Blues," is sung not by Muddy Waters but by Otis Spann, the pianist in Waters's band and a veritable bluesman in his own right. The lyrics, according to a number of things I read, all of which seemed to agree and all of which seemed equally vague, were written that day, on the spot, by none other than everybody's favorite Popular Front poet, Langston Hughes. He wrote the words—so the various online accounts say—after finding out that the directors of the Newport Jazz Festival had decided to acquiesce to the demands of the city of Newport, RI, which had called for the concert to be canceled after a riot broke out the previous day. This isn't entirely clear just from listening to the song or to the lyrics; they sound like, well, blues lyrics, at least at first. An opening verse that treads familiar territory—"It's a gloomy day at Newport / everything is sad, sad, sad"—gives way to a second, more unsettling one, full of questions:

What's gonna happen to my music?
What's gonna happen to my song?

Even knowing that these lines respond to the immediate predicaments of the Newport festival, I still can't help but hear in these questions a response to the general situation facing black blues artists. On the business end of things, record labels infamously lied, cheated, and stole—not much has changed, has it?—to make sure bluesmen saw as little of the money their music made as possible. And in terms of aesthetics, white rock and roll, the archetypal "1960s" genre, took whatever it wanted and without so much as a second thought from black artists. It makes total sense, then, that one would ask, "what's gonna happen to my music?" And it's a marvelous coincidence that this sentiment would weave itself through the immediate breaking-up of the Newport Jazz Festival, as if the latter event were a particular demonstration of the sentiment's broader truth, its basis in a racist reality.

But there's more to it than that, even. Langston Hughes, one of the greatest North American political poets, penned these lines in July of 1960, a year after he helped compile his own writing for a Selected Poems that included none of his most politically radical verse in it. This editorial decision on Hughes's part has a lot to do with his general feelings after his House Unamerican Activities Committee hearing in 1953, which led the author of such brilliant (and explicitly communist) poems as "Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria" to downplay his previous political commitments. How is this not part and parcel of the worry over "what's gonna happen to my music?" The great sadness in these lines issues forth from a fear of what the future will bring, whether its new-born babe will be wrapped in the red flag of Revolution, or if it will continue asking, "are you now or have you ever been…?"

If there's a good reason not to take back everything I've said, then, as I suggested I might do at the beginning, it's because of this very ambivalence on Hughes's (and Waters's, and Otis Spann's) part. "The 1960s" doesn't quite make room for this sense of quiet defeat, maybe because it is a tone in keeping with "The 1950s," but maybe because it doesn't quite fit into the idealist narratives of the nostalgic chroniclers I here tendentially oppose. Am I saying, then, that this album is a sad manifesto for a decade of defeat? No way—no such quietism and retreat in the blues. In fact, it's important, if not decisive, that Hughes's lyrics aren't in his attractive Collected Poems volume. They're not a poem. They're lyrics to a song. They're nothing without the music that accompanies them.

Thus the uncertainty, however personal it may be for Hughes, however specific to one event it may be in scope, brings with it the possibility of a collective response. Hughes doesn't get up and read his words. He hands them over to Otis Spann, who sings them and plays the piano, while Muddy Waters plays the guitar, and the rest of the band plays their respective instruments. A crushing loss becomes, suddenly, an occasion for collaboration, for people coming together and working together. The contingency of the thing—the duration of the song—doesn't really matter so much as the thing itself, that it happened, which means that it could conceivably happen again. How many other events could we tackle as a group? How many other things could we respond to in so beautiful a way?

If I have spent the entirety of this piece writing about one song, then I have done so because the contours of its situation say something about the rest of At Newport, which is very far indeed from a contemplative, melancholy reflection on state repression and the fate of political consciousness. It's a party, a celebration, a group of people—band and audience alike—who seem quite fond of one another, and quite happy to spend the time they have together. Why else would Waters and co. play through "Got My Mojo Working" twice? And why else would Waters change the lyrics to "Hoochie-Coochie Man" in the last chorus, rewriting a declaration of individuality ("you know I'm the hoochie-coochie man / everybody knows I'm him") into a statement of hope and defiance and most importantly of collectivity, one that lies at the root of many of the accounts of "The 1960s" I have taken peculiar aim at? It's a couplet worth closing with, as a gesture of both reconciliation with and continued defiance of "The 1960s," and as an announcement of that Utopianism that, if nothing else, "The 1960s" usefully summarizes and reminds us to find everywhere and in everything, and to struggle in the service of on the daily. And so I give the last words to Muddy Waters:

you know we are the hoochie-coochie boys
the whole United States knows we're here

—David W. Pritchard

#349: Jay-Z, "The Black Album" (2003)

When I was six years old, I would wake up, dress myself in mismatched outfits and admire myself in the mirror, eat breakfast with my mom, and go to school. My teacher would guide us through math and science, but my favorite part of the day was Reading Time. Our librarian would sit our class of 25 little kids in the corner of the library and read us a story. At the end of the day, I’d go home and my parents would help me with my math. I’d play with my dolls, and after dinner my family would sometimes watch a Disney movie. I loved the princesses; I always wanted to be one. Then, I’d pretend to fall asleep and my dad would carry me up the stairs, where my mom and dad would both tuck me in, kiss my forehead, and turn out the light.

When I was six years old, Jay-Z’s The Black Album was released. Every morning, I admired myself in the mirror and saw in me a princess. During Reading Time, our librarian would read us books of little white boys and girls playing, learning, growing, and I saw myself in them. When my dad got home every night, he would be able to help me with my math. All of the dolls I played with were white. All of the Disney princesses I watched were white. I was able to fall asleep knowing that I was safe and loved, even after my parents turned out the light.

I got through middle school with my head in a book and with a close-knit group of friends, and we were all very dramatic. She said this, he said that, she did this, can you talk to her for me? We were preoccupied with each other and with running out of sight from the creepy security guard who would say our shirts were too low-cut and our skirts were too short and that he’d make us change into our gym clothes. But like so many kids at that age, we were too preoccupied with ourselves to notice how 80% of the students in our classes were white. Or how the school administration brought in police and K-9 squads to sniff weed out of student lockers. Or how the next day, a handful of minority students were gone. We didn’t notice any of it, because they weren’t in our classes to begin with. We hadn’t known them. And so we continued, saying we were scared of a quiz or of gaining weight or of the drugs that we knew the popular kids (all white) were getting into. But we weren’t really scared. We knew we were safe.

In high school, my freshman year class was quickly amid scandal as three boys were caught passing around sex tapes, not only of them having sex with three freshman girls, but without the girls knowing they were being filmed. The boys were expelled and only one of the girls’ names got out. She transferred in weeks. Some said the boys got community service, others said they got off with a warning. Nobody knew for sure, but by the end of the month, we did know that the boys were at private schools nearby. Sophomore year, my gym teacher made all of us line up and do yoga, except he only taught us upward and downward dog, and he would walk behind us, down the lines of fifteen-year-olds with our pubescent hips high in the air and his eyes on us all. “Move your hips up, more toward me,” he’d say, and we did because what else could we do? Nobody said anything, and we did as we were told. Eight years later, I’ve just learned that the same coach yelled at a black basketball player for being too slow, saying he’d mop the floor with the boy’s dreadlocks. But still, nobody said anything, not even to other students, and for that reason most of us didn’t know what he’d said. Gossip stayed localized to our cliques; he said, she said, do you think our gym teacher is kind of creepy? Much like our middle school honors classes, our high school APs had fewer and fewer minority students as we neared graduation. In all the time I’d been there, we’d had countless pep rallies and dances, but not a single Black History Month assembly. A year later, I heard they tried to shut one down after it was proposed. The students fought hard and took the issue online, and they were finally allowed an assembly. In the end, a student somewhere in the crowd yelled out the n-word, and everybody talked about it on the way back to their classes.

By the time I went to William & Mary, I enrolled in classes and subjects I was never presented with before: Psychology as a Social Science, Language and Culture, African American Literature. I hadn’t realized it before I went to college, but the amount of African American lit I was required to read in my entire life was miniscule—the only ones I can remember were Frederick Douglass’s narrative and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, both of which were optional. So I swam in the words of Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and so many more. First, I cried; then, I got angry. Angry that the only black doll I saw in stores when I was young was a single American Girl Doll, costing more than a hundred dollars. Angry that my middle school brought in police to take away minority students with weed in their lockers but didn’t persecute the popular white kids who were passing pills around in the cafeteria. Angry that my high school protected the teachers who preyed on children, who tried to silence the Black voices who were calling for some recognition of their culture and history. Angry that underneath all of the sexualized wrongs I felt through my life, racist wrongs were right there and I hadn’t noticed. Angry that I had gone 19 years without being angry. Angry I had lived my whole life not seeing what was going on around me. And then, amidst all the anger, a new sense of resolve. A sense of intention that I was and still am grateful hit when I was only 19.

The first time I heard The Black Album, I didn’t listen. I mean really listen. I heard it and moved on to the Jay-Z album I knew better, Watch the Throne, which was much more prevalent in my generation. Parties played “N***as in Paris” and “Who Gon Stop Me,” and we all danced and drank and didn’t listen.

Now, every time I listen to “Moment of Clarity” I feel even more anger and resolve than I did as a nineteen-year-old, given all of the hate that’s come to light in the four years that have passed. In the past four years I’ve kept my eyes open and receptive to everything that feels wrong, even if only for a second. Jay-Z poeticizes:

Fuck perception! Go with what makes sense 
Since I know what I’m up against 
We as rappers must decide what’s most important 
And I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them.

I cannot help those who don’t understand what’s really going on—the discrimination and pain Black people and other minorities are feeling—if I don’t try to understand it myself. It doesn’t matter what we perceive to be true. There were no Black dolls when I was six years old, but there were little Black girls who wanted them. There were no Black princesses, and so some little Black girls didn’t see themselves as princesses, even though they all are. We believed our school administrations would protect us, but they employed men who sexualized young females like myself, persecuted minorities and silenced them, and let the white students who committed serious crimes amongst their peers walk free. Little I perceived made sense in the end, and only now that I’m in my early twenties am I understanding that we need to decide what’s most important, because we’re up against systems that will continue to skew our perception if we let them. If we’re comfortable knowing that what we see isn’t real.

—Nicole Efford

#350: The Yardbirds, "Roger the Engineer" (1966)

Writing about music from the 1960s invariably involves writing about "The 1960s." I place the decade in quotes because of the mythical qualities that attend the writing about it, as if it were the decade, the one where everything happened that made us in the present (many of whom perhaps were not alive in the 1960s) into the animals we are. Something like that. I hate this abstraction but I don't know how else to talk about an album like Roger the Engineer, which was released on July 15, 1966. It is a month before the Beatles would put out Revolver. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is one year old, and Rubber Soul is going on eight months. I could go on and on laying the groundwork of creative foment that no doubt the Yardbirds were involved in and responding to. But I am less interested in this endless teasing out of an archive in the name of the grand abstraction of "The 1960s" than I am in the amazing accident that Roger the Engineer dropped the day after Bastille Day.

Focusing on the French commemoration of their bourgeois revolution seems a bit odd, but I like the way it frames a lot of what goes on in the 35 minutes of Roger the Engineer. For instance, the album begins and ends with two halves of a whole proposition about quantification: "Lost Woman" starts with a familiar count-off of the beat on a cymbal, and "Ever Since the World Began" fades out with Keith Relf singing "you don't need money" over and over again. If you listen through the whole album and start it over again immediately (I recommend this, even if you are unconvinced by this stuff about money), suddenly the cymbal-counting trope, one of the most ubiquitous and pleasurable of rock tropes, seems inextricable from this denunciation of the thing that organizes most of our social life around the activity of counting.

Between these two bookends, the Yardbirds elaborate a celebration of life. Why not focus on that, then? Well, I will. Or I am. But without setting up the role that money plays here, it's hard to see the celebration. You might see "The 1960s," but then miss the trees for the forest. Or some forest, not the one I see in the 60s—which is to say if we're going to talk about the 1960s, better to do it in terms of revolutions (French or otherwise: and it's worth noting another French "event" is on the horizon; Roger the Engineer came out in 1966, two years before the May 1968 riots and demonstrations) and opposition to the tyranny of money than some vague Geist or another. After all, the refrain of "you don't need money" appears at the end of a song that uses "Satan" as a symbol for human greed and the profit motive that have lorded over the world since the beginning of time. Leaving aside the historiography here, the transition from a droning, nasally-sung passage that practically invents Black Sabbath's aesthetic in a single gesture, to a danceable, major-key hook in "Ever Since the World Began" makes it hard to ignore the importance of money for Roger the Engineer. The Satan of la société de consommation has to appear so that the Yardbirds can respond to it.

The response we get is not quite the storming of the Bastille, or the occupation and transformation of the Sorbonne into an "autonomous university." It might, however, give pleasure in ways that are consistent with the positions that begat such revolutionary foment. The album's big single, "Over Under Sideways Down," is a case in point: an insouciant call and response between a shout of "hey!" and a guitar riff builds into a song whose lyrics we might summarize as a simple and indolent plaint about not wanting to do anything, were it not for the appearance in the first verse of wages as the thing that keeps civil society and its various compulsions moving. It's not just "laughing, joking, drinking, smoking," but it's all this "till I've spent my wage." It is no accident, then, that in the second verse another quietist sentiment—that we should just go enjoy ourselves rather than argue about it with others—appears alongside a recognition that fun "is all for free." Obviously these are complicated, circumscribed sentiments, but it's interesting to think about them in light of a more overtly politicized structure of feeling.

Of course nobody listens to the Yardbirds—or any rock music for that matter—solely for the lyrics. If they tell you as much they're lying. And the music here is quite the opposite of the indolent tone of the lyrics. It's up-tempo, energetic, improvisatory, even hopeful. Jeff Beck is determined to prove that he never met a rhythm section he couldn't build a riff around—is this an allegory for mutual aid, some kind of Utopian vision of human cooperation? That would be very "The 1960s" of me to say, wouldn't it? But then I suppose it's worth conceding to the hagiographers of 60s rock the point that, in whatever ways it could, this music attempted to develop a way of seeing the world not beholden to money.

Not that we need a hagiography to get at this kernel of truth. We have songs that do the work of expressing it for us. And they don't necessitate a turning away from the world, but rather an indignant and perpetual confrontation with it. "I want somebody to tell me why there's always smoke up in the sky," sings Relf in "What Do You Want," in a way that suggests that the anti-cash conclusion—"you don't need money"—is not merely crudely idealist. Or, if it's crudely idealist, its crudeness and idealism have their roots in a serious concern about the world, whose basis in some antipathy toward money has a striking resonance for us in the present. What better slogan for our present situation could there be, than "you don't need money!" And where better to be reminded of this than in the songs of the Yardbirds.

—David W. Pritchard

#351: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979)

There is an old house down in the hollow where there is a dim light. You almost don’t see it. But then in winter on a certain day when the sky is gray-bright and you are walking on the ridge opening your eyes to everything in the spaces between the trees, you will see it just sitting there like it has always done. Empty, hollowed out. You will see it, a house of ancient boards and slanting rusted roof the color of the red oak leaves that carpet the ground. Having no door, it is neither open nor closed. It is part of the hollow, and you go down to it because you are neither home nor away and why not in the hollow then.

There are no clocks ticking inside the house, only the sound of light rain patter on tin roof, same as rhododendron patter that has quieted the ticking in your mind as you have been walking all day. But you stop and listen here and it is not the same patter after all as that on the waxy leaves. You close your eyes. It is a higher rust-note, and it makes you want to sleep here, for many days and nights. You imagine all the shades of dim light and of darkness through which you could dream, rain pattering on the rough tin above you. You sink in deeper, more to the place you have been trying to get to, and you think, it is ok, to sink in this way, to let your chest cave in the way it wants to.

You close your eyes and listen: the sound of rust. Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished.

The earth caves in this way, into these hollows and sinkholes. Stones yield to water and time, soil yields to stones. Iron yields to rain and salt and air, oxidizes. Be more like this, you think. Neither open nor closed.

*

I have been learning of the Japanese practice called wabi-sabi. It is a beauty-seeing practice based on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It celebrates impermanence, the natural condition of all things.

While the words wabi and sabi do not translate easily from the kanji written language in which each word is a pictogram, a body of complex meaning and visual form in itself, wabi can be defined as “the loneliness of living in nature” or “a quietness,” while sabi is the beauty that comes with age, the impermanence that is suggested in the wear-and-tear of an object.

There is a phonological and etymological connection with the word sabi to the word rust, that natural reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water, that rust that is a corrosion of machines and steel and human-made things: barbed wire, roofs, gates, gutters. Latches, hinges, nails. The things that hold our houses together, enclose them. Keep the wild animals and weather out. All rusting. Latches that fasten our doors, that we might close out the rain and the wind, be guarded against them. Nails that fasten the boards.

*

You would like to sink further in. You think of his face whom you love, cannot stop loving, the lines around his eyes, light in the irises like that in rotting oak leaves. Your chest caves no different than this soil. You run your hand along the weathered boards, smooth-rough against your palm and fingertips. You notice the colorful lichen that have found their way into the grains and cracks and are spreading and flowering out. Beautiful, you think. This decay. Sometimes you let go like this, in rare moments like these. The light is changing. You feel chilled standing in one place. You keep walking, neither leaving nor not leaving the house. Sometimes you will see it sitting still and empty, in among the bare trees. Sometimes you will not see it, on your way somewhere, walking past.

—Holly Haworth

#352: Dire Straits, "Brothers in Arms" (1985)

On the fourth of July my mother would take my brother and me to watch the fireworks behind the technical college near our house. The year I was umbilically attached to my Walkman, probably one of the last years we sat and watched the fireworks as a family, the sun was setting on the 90s and most people I knew spent their allowance on CDs. I didn’t get an allowance but the radio was free. As it got dark and we waited for the show to begin over the treeline I listened to “So Far Away” on a cassette of songs I’d taped off the radio. When it was over I’d rewind the tape and begin the song again.

*

Nostalgia has its roots in the word “homesickness.” It smashes together the Latin words for “return home” and “pain.” Nowhere in its definition does it mention the brothers Knopfler.

*

An album directed at the early CD-buying market, Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million copies on CD, which became the primary medium of my own music consumption until well into college. It is the very definition of pop music to people who were buying CDs at full price in 1985, and not engaging in primitive piracy or rooting through the used bins as I would come to do—that is, people who were the age I am now, caught between their first adult salary and some future moment when they’d have something more pressing to spend it on, someone to save it for. Young professionals with money to burn.

*

“Money for Nothing” was the Billboard #1 hit the day I was born. I want my MTV. Now the “M” in “MTV”  doesn’t stand for anything.

*

Here I am again in this mean old town / And you’re so far away from me / Where are you when the sun goes down / You’re so far away from me. This song belongs in the pantheon of songs about rock musicians on tour. It shares its DNA with Journey’s “Faithfully” and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.” So far away from me / So far I just can’t see. And yet my experience of the truncated version of the song that I wore out on my Walkman under the exploding Virginia sky was terrifying in its bigness, stultifying in its ability to create out of nothing a longing for longing. I didn’t have any sense of what it’s like to desire someone across a great distance, let alone how it feels to be a Knopfler on the road, and yet the gravity of that feeling was physical and delicious and without object. I missed, and was nostalgic for the feeling of missing.

*

In the 1980s, the British Phonographic Institute launched a campaign that insisted “Home Taping Is Killing Music (And It’s Illegal).” Referencing a precedent set in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., where the Supreme Court ruled that recording TV shows on Betamax constituted fair use, and in order to protect the rights of music listeners to tape whatever they wanted off the radio, the non-profit Home Recording Rights Coalition was founded. While the website HRRC.org still exists, their account has been suspended. The pirates have moved on to vaster, deeper seas.

*

My adolescence was generally unremarkable in that I could often be found in my room with my headphones on, trying to get as far away from home as possible. The #1 hits of the last 30 years were about as far as the radio could take me, and by pressing record I could acquire and hoard the ones I loved. We didn’t have cable so I never watched MTV. College and grad school were an embarrassing blur of pretending to have seen music videos I hadn’t seen, of gushing over hidden gem tracks I hadn’t heard. I’d spend long post-party cram sessions on YouTube so the next time these songs came up at the bar, I could say, and by a technicality truthfully, I remember.

*

Somewhere in our usage of the word nostalgia, a sense of longing for things past got involved. The further one is from the longed-for object in time, the more powerful the sentiment: at least, that seems to be the implication. This definition isn’t particularly helpful in understanding how the pace of progress can create a longing for the recent past, or how a longing for the past can be experienced by a child with no real past to speak of. How a person can come to own a thing she didn’t earn.

*

I’m watching the video for “So Far Away” in my office in the dark—something I’ve somehow never done—and it bums me out. I hate that they’re smiling. I hate their over-zealous, skinny white guy swagger. They look like the rock ‘n’ roll caricatures their caricature of a blue collar worker is on about in the album’s second track, the ones getting all that money for nothing and those chicks for free. This video is the very definition of something that hasn’t “aged well” though it is, as I am, only 30 years old.

*

When Brothers in Arms came out, Rykodisc, the label that released it, couldn’t get CDs manufactured fast enough to meet the worldwide demand. I still have all my CDs but I no longer have a way to play them.

*

If I could define nostalgia I’d say it’s the precise feeling I have when “So Far Away” gets to the part where the radio version would’ve faded out but because it’s years later and I’m a grown-ass(ish) woman streaming the album version on Spotify the song continues its slow fade for another minute and a half. Still I know where that moment is and where it would have been, it’s in my body and it feels like the fourth of July.

*

Perhaps a secondary definition would be that nostalgia is the phenomenon of living in two moments at once: the present moment, and a more distant moment that, with the help of some stolen triggering agent, some ancient tension belonging not to you but to the vast network of souls that came before, comes back to inflict itself on the present.

*

This year I’ve been listening almost exclusively and inexplicably to records that were released the year I was born, albums I had no contemporaneous experience of, and yet somehow feel gravitationally drawn to, as if they belong in some way to a collection of events that make up my life. Maybe this is an attempt to run into the arms of a long-lost parent, to root out an empirical connection I have to these albums that was forged on the day I was born and that will bridge some perceived gap in my history. To provide evidence of some kind of lineage, another home to return to, to run away from. To explain what I’m missing when I’m missing nothing.

*

What remains unstated about nostalgia and its authenticity is the importance of ownership: that what’s lost to you in time must, at some distant point, have been yours. Brothers in Arms hit the syndicated airwaves and splintered into millions of pieces. Some of those pieces found their way to me years later as shrapnel, collateral, long-delayed derivatives of the original. What keeps me returning to that July evening in Virginia in my childhood has nothing to do with Dire Straits. I can’t miss Brothers in Arms because it isn’t missing. What’s lost and therefore longed for is how I’d hover over the stereo as the radio DJ’s voice disappeared beneath the swell of those first familiar notes, anxiously waiting to press record.

—Laura Eve Engel

#353: Kanye West, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010)

I started listening to Kanye West during a time when I was trying very, very hard to exercise regularly. For probably a year of my life, Kanye was the closest thing I had to a workout buddy. I’d cue up My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as I stepped onto the machine and lurch into action when the intro of “Dark Fantasy” gave way to the actual song.

Lately I’ve been trying to reestablish a regular workout schedule, and the last time I went to the gym I listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy for the first time in years. I’ve been listening to podcasts lately instead of music when I exercise, because there are several I really like and only limited hours in a day and something’s happened to my relationship with music as I’ve gotten older—it feels busier, doesn’t fade into the background as easily as it used to. I don’t remember music being something I had to actively listen to, the way I feel like I need to now. Or maybe it’s my relationship with quiet? I’ve become more comfortable with quiet, would rather read a book or write something or think without any additional noise. (I am only 29, how is it that I’m thinking of music as noise!) At any rate, I was floored at what listening to the album did for my workout.

Part of it was muscle memory, I think—I was on the same type of machine I used to use regularly all those years ago, an elliptical-type thing that I heard someone refer to as a “grasshopper” once, although I just tried to google it and couldn’t find anything—anyway, my body remembered the machine, how you have to push from your core and keep your strides strong to move it in an elliptical motion, or else it’ll just go up and down like a stair-stepper. I liked it, still like it, because of that immediate tactile feedback—if you’re lagging, you can really tell.

So, yes, my body remembered the machine, but more than that was the music. It felt like the music was powering my legs. I felt like I wanted to dance while exercising. The hour flew by, the energy of the songs carrying me through it, the energy of the songs and the energy of a particular kind of nostalgia.

Around the time we graduated, my college boyfriend and I broke up. It wasn’t the first time we’d broken up, but it should’ve been the last—he was moving to Washington, DC, and I was moving to Richmond, Virginia, and we had no plans to live in the same city ever again. I mean, that’s the logistical reason, but there were also a lot of other reasons—ones that I can see now, but was not willing to see at the time. We broke up and we should’ve stayed broken up, but we didn’t.

Instead, he came down to visit me. I remember one particular weekend in late fall (it was cold in my rented room in the old drafty house in the funky neighborhood where I lived), a weekend where we were on the verge of getting back together but weren’t quite yet, so everything was a thrill. Being with him was a continual rush of adrenaline, and a sort of puzzle—I wanted so badly to be what he wanted, which is a thing that happens, I think, when you’re young and not sure of who you are. I can’t be sure which of us put the album on, but we were in my room, so in my memory it was me. I was delighted when I found out that he, too, had listened to the album, and liked it. We’d come to it separately, and that we both liked it seemed a sign.

This is, of course, in many ways ludicrous—My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a huge album, both popular and critically acclaimed. But I didn’t typically listen to popular rap music, and neither did he. And, really, the thing is this: he usually didn’t like things I liked. Which is not to say that we didn’t like many of the same things—but typically they were things he came to first, things he introduced to me. I felt so proud of myself, that I’d found something he thought was good without him having to direct it to me, like it legitimized my tastes, demonstrated I had something to contribute. It was only a good feeling at the time, a glow—even though, looking back at it, I see how ridiculous that was, that the times I felt appreciated as a legitimate person with legitimate things to contribute were so few and far between.

It’s funny, because my memory of that weekend is a good one—I felt warm next to him, happy to be getting what I wanted, happy to be with the person I most wanted to be with. Even loved. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something I associate with the good parts of a relationship that I now realize was mostly not very good for me. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I wish you’d have some backbone, he told me once—and it hurt because he was right. It hurt because I didn’t have enough power in the relationship to ever have backbone, we weren’t ever on an even enough keel—I was too afraid to lose him, though I shouldn’t have been.

It’s strange to me now how much I labored to maintain a thing that made me so unhappy. I would never have admitted it made me unhappy at the time, couldn’t even see it—that’s strange to me, too. But I guess that isn’t fair to the memory of the relationship, or to my past self. There were things that were good about it. He did introduce me to a lot of music, shape my tastes, and it was good. I knew him in that remarkable way of knowing someone you love—the way he breathed while he slept and the smell of his hair in the morning. I learned the one-liners he’d quote, absorbed them into my own vocabulary, quoting movies sometimes that I hadn’t even seen. I’d read books while he and his roommates watched sports or action movies. There were times we’d lie on his bed and listen to the rain, times we picnicked on his balcony, and when he had to go to jury duty he read the book I told him I thought he’d like while he waited (I guess a lot of jury duty is waiting), and he liked it. I knew what he liked to eat and I knew what he liked to drink and I knew he worried about how much his mother loved him. I thought he was funny and I thought he was handsome and he loved me, I think, in his way. Sometimes he looked at me with astonishment, surprised by his own affection. I do believe it was the best way he knew how to love at the time.

But looking back, I suspect much of what kept us going was actually fear. Fear of the unfamiliar, fear of the unknown, fear that there wouldn’t be anything better. And this week, as I pumped my arms and legs in an endless cycle with that strange sense of ease that came from listening to these songs for the first time in forever, I saw finally the shadow of that past fear when I got to certain songs, to “Blame Game,” or “Runaway”—I regard them so differently, now, from how I did then. It’s fear that keeps you in thrall to someone, that makes you talk about your involvement with a romantic partner as if you have no control over it. I used to feel sympathy when I would listen to those songs, and I thought sometimes people can’t help but do hurtful things. I used to think I can’t love you this much was an okay way to feel in a relationship, unavoidable, part of the thrill and part of the beauty. I was with someone who often said he didn’t know why he treated me poorly, and I think it’s a sign I’ve grown that, now, when I listen to those songs I think: Those couples in those songs are struggling in ways that seem unpleasant, they don’t seem like their relationships bring them enough joy, and that kind of perpetual conflict is not necessary. They’d be better grieving the broken thing and moving on. Because if the rhythm of the thing is the only thing keeping you going, that’s not enough.

But on the first day we listened to those songs together, we couldn’t see our own weakness. We were young and neither of us knew we deserved more than those brief pockets of happiness—and for that weekend, we were happy. We were happy to see one another after a long time apart, and we went to the great restaurant across the street from where I lived and, after, spent the night drinking wine, my face flushed with joy, and I believe he was happy, I believe we both genuinely were happy, on that day we learned we both loved a Kanye West album and couldn’t yet see that our love was the sort of thing a person doesn’t want forever.

—Katelyn Kiley

#354: Billy Joel, "52nd Street" (1978)

I was going to do it. Honest, I had all the sound bites rehearsed—of relationships running their course, of it’s-not-you-it’s-me, of better-off-friends.

But then her cat died.

And then it was her 29th birthday.

And then she had to console her best friend who got cheated on.

And then I got the flu and she brought me soup, damnit.

And then we started watching Gilmore Girls and I thought if I dumped her she’d change her Netflix password.

Then Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years.

And now it’s fucking Valentine's Day and she got us Billy Joel tickets.

She has a thing for over-the-hill rock stars, like she was born in 1956 instead of 1986. She’s dragged me to see Springsteen, Dylan, Simon without Garfunkel, Neils Young and Diamond. Dudes whose influence I can’t deny. But that's the thing about influence—it’s a death notice. The writers kill you off, making way for the person who sounds like you but younger and more attractive and with a Snapchat account. The day a critic calls you “influential” is the day you should stop making music, because everything you produce from then on out will be considered shit, even if it isn’t.

“He’s still got it!” she always says, and I wonder which Instagram filter she’s using, because all I see in front of me is a burlap sack of a man, jowls wiggling with rasp. She told me once that she likes this music because it reminds her of her father. Maybe I hate it because it reminds me of mine. Or maybe she just has really shitty taste in music.

Lucky for me, they’re all starting to die off now. At least I’ll never have to see the Eagles.

So here we are, in line at the baseball stadium. Billy Joel, this one is especially troubling. The guy whose biggest hit is an ode to why he’s too good to be playing at dive bars, a song I only hear at dive bars. I just paid 120 bucks to see the musical equivalent of thousand island salad dressing.

I’m reading Gawker articles on my phone about how uncool Billy Joel is when she taps me on the shoulder.

“Jack!” she says. “This guy just invited us to the front row!”

“Oh, I just meant you,” said the security guard, earnest in his regret. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were with someone. I’m afraid I can’t let him in.”

“But why?” she asks.

“Billy likes to have pretty girls in the front.”

She faces me. “Well then, no thank you.” But her disappointment is obvious.

“Go ahead,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?” And we waffle for a few more rounds, both knowing she’s going to end up in the front.

“I’ll be fine in the back.” I tell her. “This is your big chance. Honestly.”

“You’re so selfless,” she says, pouting her lips. “I’ll text you.”

Sitting alone in section 436, row X, I’m back in planning mode.When breaking up with someone who’s done you no wrong, you have to strike when the iron is cold. She’ll have a post-show glow, that’s going to set us back at least three days.

My phone vibrates. She’s tagged a photo of us on Facebook waiting in line, cheeks pressed together, smiles aligned. Her caption: “We’ve been waiting...For the Longest Time! lol.” We look happy. God, everyone must think we’re so happy.

I flick the screen, scroll more selfies. She is pretty, Billy Joel’s security guard has a point.

“Are you here alone?” A Long Island accent from above. A 50-something woman with crispy bangs and an “I Started the Fire” T-shirt is in the seat directly behind me.

“Oh no, my girlfriend’s actually in the front row.” I say, pointing to the closest of six jumbo screens. I can’t actually tell which girl is her though—they all have long brown hair. Not a blonde in sight in this post-Brinkley world.

“It’s okay,” Long Island says. “I’m here alone too.”

The lights go out and the crowd erupts over a layer of manic piano chords. And for a minute, it sounds like a carnival.

But then, the bass kicks in and Billy’s before us, bobbing his fat bald head, whining: I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

I ask myself, as I have so many times before, what the fuck I am doing here.

I know, I’m here for her, doing what the boyfriend is supposed to do. Her happiness should make me happy.

The set goes on, some songs I recognize: “Uptown Girl,” “New York State of Mind,” that song Elton John ripped off for the Lion King soundtrack. I promise you, I’m trying. Trying to acknowledge the cross generational joy around me, trying to gleen some kind of greater cultural insight out of this experience. I got nothing.

At least this time I don’t have to put on a show for anyone. Not for her, not for the world wide web. She’s told me before that she wishes she’d grown up in the 1960s and 70s, that she could have heard the records released in order and watched rock ‘n’ roll turn the world to technicolor or whatever. But I wonder who she’d be without likes and shares and retweets. I wonder who we’d be.

Now she’s posted a video to  Vine—the “ack a tack ack ack ack ack” from “Movin’ Out” looped over, over, and over again. Grating.

“Get off your phone, young man!” Long Island digs her hot pink nails into my shoulder. “You’re missing out on a legend!”

He’s singing another moany ballad, called “Honesty,” which I only recognize because she made me listen to the Beyoncé cover on the ride here.

Hoooooooonesty, is such a lonely word.

C’mon man.

Hooooooonesty, is hardly ever heard.
And mostly what I need from you.

I hear him. I have to end it, tonight. No more delaying, there’s never going to be a good time. It’s only fair to her.

Billy gets up from his baby grand and moves to the synth stage left. It’s time. The familiar riff reignites the crowd.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray….

Like a vision, she appears on the Jumbotrons, smiling 30 feet across, her woo streaming back on thousands of shiny rectangles in the stands. She doesn’t notice at first, but when she does she looks right into the camera. Hi Jack! she mouths.

“That’s my girlfriend!” I shout, jumping to my feet. I turn around, and Long Island is methodically reciting eight decades of American history at the top of her lungs, tears streaming down her face. I don’t catch her attention.

Rock and Roller Cola wars, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!

I get a text. “did you see me??”

I swipe to Twitter. Breaking: “Netflix Announces Gilmore Girls reboot in 2017.”

I can’t do it.

—Susannah Clark

#355: The Yardbirds, "Having a Rave Up" (1965)

My dad always called it—like, when he was talking about my mom—“playing tapes in your head.” Hearing what you want to hear. Living off muscle memory instead of reality. When you look at someone new and can’t get a clear picture because of all the ghostly layers in front. It’s like relationship cataracts.

*

I needed new glasses. We were about one year in, and I’d already learned not to open myself up to your judgment. But I wanted someone to help me choose new glasses. (Just like I wanted someone to help me pick work heels—slutty—and a new winter hat—you look like an eraser—and a dress for my friend’s funeral—at least we only have to see you in it once, aw I’m just kidding, no but really….)

In the store, I hooked a pair of roundish brown tortoiseshells over my ears. I looked for you. You were in a corner, on a pouf, looking at your phone. I moonwalked over and began to vogue in front of a mirror. When it got nothing, I leaned over and vogued on your face, making you pretty, making you hot, crowning you the king of the ball, Benny Ninja from America’s Next Top Model, granting you a coolness you didn’t even know existed, all those square halos around your head.

You didn’t like them. (The glasses.)

You thought they looked like yours. They were different shapes and sizes, but it’s true both pairs were brown. Which I guess is an unusual shade for eyeglasses. (Although not in Brooklyn.) You stormed out of the store, hissing that looking like me was the last thing you’d ever want to do.

Anyway, later that night, we met your friends for drinks. It was almost your birthday. The story came up and I told it in a funny way, making both of us the heroes and the glasses the villains. I cast the whole thing as hapless and funny: me Diane, you Woody, and my new specs the runaway lobsters. You both had black glasses before, your friends said. Who cares if they match again now? You said, wasted and honest, Because she looks better in them than I do.

I see the disappointment in your friends’ faces and I hang my head in shame—for both of us, for different reasons. And I hear the Yardbirds….If you've ever been to New York City / You know what I'm talking about, yes you do / Well, if you've ever been to New York City / You know what I'm talking about / They got such pretty little girls in that big town….

*

Round about two years in, you said a terrible thing to me. The funny thing is, I never thought about leaving. (Remember what made me do it, finally? It was Matt’s text about a chicken-flavored lollipop.) That terrible thing you said, my worst fear, the most awful and damaging thing a man could say, didn’t make me think of leaving. When you insisted on starting the laundry at 10 p.m. on Sunday nights, I thought about it then. Thought about it when you went out with your best friend, who you’d once slept with, and slunk back too late, whiskeyed up and giggly. Other times too, of course. But not then, when it was obvious.

That fact hurts more now than what you actually said. Although I can still hear those words rolling across the floor of my brain and tocking into each other. Like fat, heavy, blue-veined marbles.

Anyway, I didn’t let you touch me for a month. When I gave in, you had sex with me on the floor (this was at the old apartment, on 38th Street, the one where the next-door neighbor remixed his own techno tracks and the dog walker stole a thousand bucks cash the day before we moved out) and honestly, I don’t think you noticed I stared into space the whole time. I just looked at the ceiling and wondered if this was what it felt like to do a rape scene in a movie. And in my head, while you were recording yourself into my memory, a tape played: I'm a man / I'm a full grown man, yeah / A man / I'm a natural-born lover-man / You don't talk about / A man.

You cried when you were very, very drunk. Got weepy over how much you loved me. Sometimes on the subway. Sometimes at a bar. Sometimes you would vomit and the next morning, doing a Clorox douse that lit up my entire nasal passage, I would wonder what I was cleaning. Was it 90% puke and 10% evaporated tears? 85-25? Less? What percentage should I be hoping for?

I used to read about domestic abuse on a bulletin in a bathroom stall in my first-year dorm. They tacked it up a few weeks after we moved in. Does he put you down in front of your friends? it said, black block letters on a purple background. Does he make you feel less than? Does he say that no one else will have you? That no one else will put up with your crazy? That no one else will ever want to fuck you? Does he think that he’s a man / a full grown man, yeah / a natural-born lover-man, but really he’s….

Three and a half years in, I thought to myself—you are living stereotypically. You are a pamphlet. Take the mental questionnaire. Fill it out honestly. If you answer yes even once, tell a Resident Advisor or the Dean of Students. (Except this is adulthood, where the closest thing you come to true authority is a good therapist and when you find one of those, you almost want to get the fuck out, because at that point they’re so achingly close to being the parent you always dreamed of that you can’t stand it.)

I never took the questionnaire. Because I love you / Just the same / And I want you / To remain / By my side. It’s a bizarre feeling when you realize you’re re-enacting something from a piece of purple paper you used to shit in front of.

*

We broke up because you walked slowly from the subway to our front door the time I got food poisoning from chestnut soup during restaurant week. I thought I was going to lose it in my pants, and you—the one with keys—took the tiniest steps home. Like your feet were bound. Like someone was watching and you didn’t want to seem like a man in a rush. Eventually, I yelled at you. Then I snatched the keys and ran up the four flights of stairs, sphincter loosening with each step.

We broke up because I made dinner and put a bowl down in some grease on the stove. You leaned in close to scream at the side of my face, keeping your arms straight and your body far away. If I’d turned 90 degrees and kissed you, we would have looked like two very chaste cartoon figures, two strawberry shortcakes sweetly smooching. She’s so respectable / she’s so respectable / did you love her / no no no / did you hug her / no no no / did you squeeze her / no no no / did you kiss her / no no no

I walked into our second bedroom and sat, choking down gummy Velveeta mac ‘n’ cheese. Moments later, you followed me in. You wanted me to eat dinner in the living room. I started crying. Why did you yell at me, I said. I didn’t do anything to you, I said. Your eyes softened. I ate my cold dinner in the living room. Because honestly, four years in, it felt ridiculous to sit by myself in the dark.

*

I’m a year out. I thought I left you behind, the tapes shredded in my car, shiny brown guts spooled all over the passenger seat, but I wonder when I can have myself back again. I wonder when I’ll get over wasting half my 20s. I wonder when I’ll stop instinctually adding, then removing, your favorite foods from my grocery cart.

Anyway, I almost recorded a football game for you the other day. I tried to cure myself by taping it and watching it alone. I have no idea if it worked. It's hard to tell because, you know, I still hum them. The sad songs of smart women.

—Molly Seltzer

#356: Randy Newman, "12 Songs" (1970)

12 Songs is a brutal listen. It is almost unthinkable that this is the same Randy Newman who would go on to write sweet songs for Pixar. And it’s a difficult album to critique because of both the artist who created it and the pedigree behind it. Robert Christgau famously called 12 Songs “a perfect album,” and Newman is widely regarded as a smart, acerbic songwriter who rarely makes his intentions explicit. That said, in 2016, a song like “Yellow Man” is tough to take.

Now, if you haven’t heard “Yellow Man,” go ahead and click here and give it a listen. On the album, “Yellow Man” follows Newman’s cover of “Underneath the Harlem Moon” and reads, more or less, like a 1970s update of “Harlem Moon”’s downtown racism, just swapping out Harlem for Vietnam. Contemporary critics lauded this choice, crediting Newman with sly swipes at the disgusting side of the American psyche. Yet, by the publication of the original RS 500, when it came time to write about the album, the couplet of songs is ignored entirely.

Look, if you buy what Newman is selling, this is great, deadpan satire. A joke so close to its target, they become the same thing. And the gag is propelled further by a comic who just isn’t interested in signaling to the audience where the punchline is. Newman simply plays his songs and lets the listener parce out intent from the patchwork of images and melodies. The sequencing of the tracks is a clue. As is the placement of “Old Kentucky Home” immediately after “Yellow Man.” Newman gives the listener a huge dose of American racism, both from the North and South, and leaves it at that.

But I just don’t buy it. I don’t think Newman is racist. I just think he misses badly. The fulcrum of the joke that lets “Yellow Man” exist in a way that makes listeners comfortable hinges on listening to “Harlem Moon” and thinking “Wow, that’s horrible what people wrote about African Americans way back when.” Only to have Newman swoop in one track later with an updated version using contemporary racist attitudes towards Vietnam as the fuel. “Boy oh boy, we sure do look foolish,” we’re meant to think. “That witty troubadour Randy Newman sure gave us what for!”

Call me a killjoy but that just isn’t enough. There is truth to it, yes. But I can’t help the feeling that there were far too many people giggling for all the wrong reasons before, during, and after the song’s release. This is all speculation, but I feel a certain sense of “getting away it” layered in some of these 12 Songs. And believe me, Newman knows there are people like me out there who will write reviews like this. Years later, with the release of “Short People” he’d find out what a real miss looks like.

But it isn’t just too-bold swings at stereotypes that make 12 Songs so uncompromising. The song “Suzanne” is, musically, one of my favorites on the record. Lyrically, it tells the first person story of a man who finds a woman’s phone number scrawled on a wall and plans to stalk her down and rape her. In what may be another sly sequencing joke, “Suzanne” follows “Mama Told Me Not to Come” which is one of Newman’s most joyous, paranoid, silly and ultimately great songs.

12 Songs is a nasty record. And it has to be up to each listener to decide if the tricks Newman is pulling are working or if you can see a little too much of the man behind the curtain to believe the illusions. So many critics hail these types of risks as bold or unflinching. But those platitudes really hinge on if you think the risks are working. Personally, they don’t work for me. So it’s difficult to salute the effort.

Newman would go on to release a truly great string of records throughout the 1970s. And to appreciate them it is a good idea to cozy up with the monsters in 12 Songs if only for a few listens. It doesn’t work all the time. And the record is far, far worse for the wear than anything thus far seen on The RS 500, but there is value in making the call yourself. And even within all that nastiness there are still a few genuinely perfect songs. “Mama Told Me Not To Come” is still the best anxiety-ridden nerd anthem anyone would write until the Talking Heads showed up. And “Suzanne” is “Frankie Teardrop” levels of terrifying. Try out 12 Songs. It is ok if you hate it.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#357: The Rolling Stones, "Between the Buttons" (1967)

Here is Charlie. He’s propped up against a gilt headboard with a small canvas resting against his knees, pencils balanced delicately on his thin abdomen, rising and falling with his calm breathing. Outside it’s Sydney, but who cares? It could be anywhere, here in this hotel room. And that’s the joke, the absurdist point he wishes to make by sketching each hotel room where he stays on tour with the Stones. He’s not painting the cities, the landmarks, the broad avenues, heraldic statures, ports or pubs or suburbs of any city anywhere, no, this, the inside of the rooms is what he paints. Because they are his experience—what it’s like to be in the Rolling Stones.

*

Here are two drunks in a bar in the Earl’s Court Road. It’s early February, 1967, and these two Londoners, Colin and Ralph, have been listening to Between the Buttons since its release a couple of weeks earlier, on January 20th.

“It’s the SAME PROGRESSION, mate! I tell you, why can’t you hear it?” This is squat and stalwart Colin, who has red hair and full lips with a flaming beard that he lifts and lowers when he’s talking, as if to fan himself, or to add emphasis to his words. Tonight, the beard is up and down as Colin again sets forth his theory about Between the Buttons wherein the album mimics the subject matter and progression of Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys, released the previous year.

Ralph says, “I don’t think Mick Jagger gives a fuck for Brian Wilson, you know? I don’t think Charlie Watts would give him the time. Wilson is a fey bastard. The Stones, man, they’re straight up fucking, is what they are, not all this airy fairy wouldn’t it be nice bollocks.”

*

Next door in Mick’s room or on the other side of the hall in Keith’s, down the way where bloody brilliant Brian Jones lays his head, there you might find the Rolling Stones rather as you expect to find them, with the groupies and the alcohol and the drugs. But here in Charlie Watts’s room, it’s quiet but for a Charlie Parker LP playing low and the sound of Charlie’s healthy breathing as he takes in and out the stale air. In with the stale air, out with Charlie, in with the not me, out with the me, in with God, out with the Ego, breathing, like drumming, an exercise in working both sides of a binary, the precious polarity that it all boils down to, that jolly bilateral symmetry making a drum set the reflection of a human mind and its capacity to alter the airwaves around it. Charlie’s breathing and painting the hotel room. He sketches mattresses, shiny silk bedclothes. He works on showing light shimmering on silk, he works on depth of field as he tries to capture his toothbrush on the counter through the open bathroom door, but always it is too big, it looks like something much closer than it’s meant to look. Drawing is hard. Jazz is hard. Rock is easy, but, and who gets it, rock makes money, people love it. People will love the cartoon he’s dashed off for the back of Between the Buttons, people will love his rhymey doggerel and try to parse its meaning.

*

“But listen,” Colin says. He knows he’s right and so he persists, buying another Newcastle for Ralph just so he’ll listen. “Blimey if both of them ain’t about the same bloody thing. A relationship, like a man’s first one, birth to where he loses her and don’t know why.”

Ralph leans against the bar and looks into his glass. It is a patient look. “Most of rock and roll’s about the same thing, though, right? They’re not singing about a cure for cancer or economic theory, now are they?”

When Colin gets drunk his skin flushes up his breastbone until his whole head and neck are crimson. That’s happening now. He twirls a coaster and makes his point. “Song One on Pet Sounds? ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’ Song one on Between the Buttons? ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’ Last songs? Pet Sounds: ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.’ Between the Buttons? ‘Something Happened to Me Yesterday.’ Both of them sort of dealing with it, man. The sadness.”

*

So Charlie plays rock and devotes his down time to grinding away at something hard, something that demands all of his attention. That’s when you feel your ego leave you, when you lose track of time or having any sense of a body—when you’re absorbed in learning something new and hard. Each hotel room is enough different to present a challenge while enough the same to let him hone his skills. He’s getting good at the deep folds of the thick, light-defeating drapes that cover the windows and the way the air conditioning lifts the sheer curtains underneath. Just enough. Not a billow, but a lift.

*

“Ah, ‘Something Happened To Me Yesterday’ is about Mick discovering he’s a blood pouf, like the rest of the world couldn’t have told him just by looking. It’s about a homosexual experience, if you like. It ain’t about no girl. Now, ‘Miss Amanda Jones’—that’s the one for me.”

“But the middle songs, too—” and Colin is ready to launch into it, but Ralph looks at him and laughs as “Ruby Tuesday” starts up on the jukebox and Colin just shuts the fuck up.

*

This is 1966, it’s a hot summer, it’s early days, and Charlie still imagines he’ll spend his middle years playing for a jazz trio in the East End somewhere, this rock thing, that Rolling Stones phase a dream of his early youth. If he knew how many hotel rooms there would be, would he even have started? Or would he have painted instead of sketched—fully rendered Technicolor dreams of hotel rooms, each one a night in a life.

—Constance Squires

#358: Miles Davis, "Sketches of Spain" (1960)

Before I was a woman, I was a girl, and when I was a girl, I was a figure skater. Of course, it’s not so cut and dry as that. As a figure skater, it is necessary to be both girl and woman at once, and in the right ways. (Read: more Nancy Kerrigan than Tanya Harding, even though Tanya was the one with a triple axel.)

I am fourteen years old. I am at the gym, walking up the stairs to the elliptical machines. It’s about to be the first time a guy tells me to smile. My skating coaches tell me to smile all the time, but they aren’t strangers, and they’re trying to make me understand the art of performance. My hand has just touched the railing when a young man stops me. He has a white towel flung over his shoulder like the neck of a swan freshly shot from the sky. “You know,” he says, and I’m thinking he’s about to ask me where the bathroom is, “you’d look so much prettier if you smiled.” I blink rapidly, and my head draws back in surprise as if to escape into the shell of my body, and my memory of how to converse is gone, and then I realize I’m staring at him with my mouth open. He laughs. “Just smile.” And I do, awkwardly, and try to laugh with him, but I feel very small and visible.

Remember to smile, my coach tells me before I step out into the ice. Especially as you pass in front of the judges. I always promise her I will, but I usually don’t actually do it. It feels too forced, mechanical, as if I’m a dolled-up puppet tugged upon by strings. I haven’t yet learned, in other words, how to forget myself.

Michelle Kwan tells the story of when she skated at fifteen to Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” a piece of music that tells the New Testament story of the girl who performed a dance for King Herod. The story goes that Herod loved Salome’s dance so much, he offered her anything she wanted. I wonder what Herod expected her to ask for—probably he thought it would be nothing he couldn’t offer. Jewels, animals, fabrics. She requested instead for the head of John the Baptist to be delivered to her on a platter.

After I was fourteen, I was fifteen. The logic of it took me by surprise. Oh, I thought, the world does not wait for me. I was nowhere near as advanced as Michelle Kwan. I had been skating for five years, and now I was hurtling through puberty. I fell on all my double jumps. I couldn’t land a thing. Whenever I went down on the ice, I could feel in my body the presence of a woman taking shape. And I wished to cut her out.

Kwan had competed on a senior level before the year she skated to “Salome,” but from the way she and her family and her coach Frank Caroll talk about this program, it basically marked her debut as a figure skater—and as a woman. It was the first time Kwan donned makeup, and, more importantly, the first time she understood choreography: “I really learned a lot in learning how to feel the music—as if you were performing with it. Instead of just going out there, and skating and jumping and skating and jumping and spinning . . . I really got into the character and was really dramatic.” She won her first (of many) national and world titles that year.

Kwan continued this trajectory, year after year, and by the time she performed her long program to Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” at the 2003 World Championships, her artistry was so powerful, so emotional (some would have you believe these things are opposite, when in fact they easily go hand in hand) that in the last thirty seconds or so of her program you could barely hear her music over the roar of the audience, which included my mother and me , perched up in the nosebleed section and crying along with everyone else, staring down into our binoculars, watching tiny Michelle in her blue dress fly over the ice. From our vantage point that high up, she was a drop of rain sliding down a pane of glass—that effortless, that mindless, gathering the audience to her as if it were condensation and growing larger with each movement.

*

“I think the perfect thing is when some musicians can both read a musical score and feel it,” Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography of his experience recording Sketches of Spain, a description which also aptly applies to physical artistry. His and Gil Evans’s arrangement of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” is less explosive, not as orchestral as the version Kwan skated to in 2003, but it’s just as grand and sweeping. It wanders. It oscillates sharply between soft and loud, catching you off balance just when you’ve adjusted to the volume. “Is this even jazz?” Pitchfork asks. Apparently, this is something a lot of critics asked about Sketches of Spain upon its release, since the album stayed so close to compositional tradition.

But jazz is famously difficult to define, and this genre-policing question is similar to ones that I hear all the time about writing (Is this poetry or is it prose? or, more dreadingly, What is a poem?) and even figure skating (Does it count as a sport?). That’s fine. It is comforting to have names for things, to know where one belongs. But I believe genre is constricting, and blurring the lines is how you keep form innovative and interesting. In his autobiography, Davis writes about how he had originally hired classically-trained trumpet players to play on the album, but then hired new ones because “they couldn’t improvise their way out of a paper bag.” He “wanted them to feel it, and read and play it.” On classical musicians in general, he writes: they “only play what’s there and nothing else. They…have the ability of robots. . . . That’s all that is, that’s all the classical music is in terms of the musicians who play it—robot shit.”

“Robot shit”—what an incredible way of turning the lofty idea of perfection on its head. Davis was revered precisely because he didn’t ascribe to those ideals. “Miles seemed incapable of playing false or forced notes,” Sean Murphy writes of Sketches of Spain in PopMatters, “in part because his technique was not impeccable.” Murphy goes on to write that Davis’s “solos were ceaselessly expressive, lyrical and filled with concentrated feeling.”

*

I love the language people use to describe Davis’s trumpeting, because something so ethereal and abstract is difficult to wrangle words around. One can write forever on technique, but when one tries to describe the feeling rising like vapor, like another self, that technique inspires—that is almost nameless. Reading the attempts is like watching critics try to wrestle a cloud into a box. Murphy’s review was one I read of four that pronounced Davis’s trumpet solos “lyrical”—a funny word choice given that the word usually connotes something with words. But it fits nonetheless.

And it’s true that in some traditional Spanish songs off Sketches of Spain, Davis’s trumpet enacts the part of what would usually be a singer. Of “Saeta,” Davis writes: “My voice”—by which he means his trumpet—“had to be both joyous and sad in this song, and that was very hard.” But if you can pull something like that off—being more than one thing at once—you’ve created, or become, something transcendent.

*

Bodies often act as the lyric in figure skating. Up until about two years ago, competitive figure skating didn’t allow the use of songs with lyrics. It was a rule, like most rules, steeped in complacent tradition, but one I never questioned. I was drawn to how skaters could weave, with the elegance of spiders, a well-trodden piece of music into a tight new composition. The best figure skaters performed as if they heard lyrics or a story in the music anyway—they knew how to receive and enact emotion from a sound without words. More than that: their bodies were the words.

That is, admittedly, a lot of pressure to place on a body.

*

Some of the greatest moments in competitive figure skating arise from surprises, especially those that happen because a skater suddenly, to use the words of Miles Davis, “feels it.” Of course, programs are heavily choreographed, but still—throwing themselves up into the air, skaters don’t necessarily know they’re going to land a jump until the second they do. They enter white space, static. And then they emerge.  

When Sarah Hughes landed her final triple jump toward the end of her free skate at the 2002 Olympics, thereby becoming the first woman to ever land seven triples in one program, she gave out a scream and clapped her hands as if they were cymbals. It was electrifying. It was dramatic. You could feel her joy surging through you. And in a total upset, she ended up winning the gold medal after coming up from fourth place. In the 1998 Olympics, the French skater Surya Bonaly spontaneously tossed off a backflip, illegal in competitions. She knew she hadn’t skated well enough to end up on the podium anyway, and she wanted to get a rise from the crowd. But it’s a stunning moment: the viewer is expecting her to transition into a lutz jump, and all of a sudden her body contorts as if it’s disobeying the laws of physics, her head is inches from the ice, and before you know it, she’s done a backward somersault, midair, on thin blades, and landed on one foot. She is the only skater—male or female—who has ever been able to do that. It drew audible gasps from the audience for being so exciting, and yet, it was illegal.

And listen to the way the male commentators talk about her after that. “She’s gonna get nailed,” Scott Hamilton says almost gleefully. “That’s an in-your-face move,” observes the other.

They can’t wait for the rules to bring her back down to earth. For the judges to remind her that even though she’s done this incredible athletic feat, she’s really just a human who fucked up.

*

About ten years ago now, the International Skating Union (ISU) implemented a new scoring system, meant to make figure skating more objective after judges got caught trying to fix the results in the 2002 Olympics. The system assigns different points for each performed move—the more difficult the move is, the more points it gets, with a perfectly performed move (already a ridiculous notion, because perfection doesn’t really exist) awarded the full amount of points. As a result, there’s no longer any automatic comprehension of a skater’s score without a commentator’s analysis. The audience is held always at a remove.

Most importantly, though, by encouraging skaters to rack up points through performing the same difficult moves in almost exactly the same order, the scoring system also churns out programs that are, to put it bluntly, robot shit.

*

Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of innovation. Two years ago, the ISU allowed the use of music with lyrics or words in competitive figure skating, largely to cater to younger audiences and inject new energy into the sport during a time of dwindling popularity. I suppose this is exciting, but it’s largely unnecessary—or perhaps it’s a move that’s just several strides too small. If anything, figure skating’s greatest enemy is not so much its lack of innovation in style, but its desperation to adhere to rules, its attempt to hold itself to objectivity when it can’t help but be a largely subjective sport.

The rules are necessary for it to exist, but they also blot out what makes skating so enjoyable in the first place.

That’s what happens when you place so many expectations on one body. That’s what happens when you try to pin an objective number on a mess of contradictions.

And of course, our bodies are sets of rules.

*

When Miles Davis talks about feeling it, I think he must mean something akin to what Michelle Kwan feels in the last thirty seconds of her program to “Aranjuez.” Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” It is like that, watching Michelle, and you can tell it’s like that for her too, that as she tears our heads right off, her head is blasting away, too, and as we go wild in the stands we’re all just gifting each other our heads on platters. I have felt this feeling while skating, once or twice, but of course on a much smaller spectrum and stage. It is like a chemical process, subtraction and addition all at once: the whole world reduces to blur and you turn not woman, not girl, but movement itself; your body becomes the world, and you don’t have a body at all. It’s such a relief. You feel like you have become that impossible thing: perfect. But of course, there’s no such thing. And you know this because just as suddenly as the feeling happens, you remember your body, you remember you are inside it, and the music stops.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#359: Elton John, "Honky Chateau" (1972)

One of the worst things you can do to your heart is tell middle-schoolers what you love.

Watch their faces as you recite the poem or as the song plays, while you realize they're too young to care quite as much as you. They don't mean not to, they just haven't gotten there yet. We should teach them, I'm convinced, only our third-favorite things.

I've been team-teaching a Music and Lyrics class at a private boys middle school, and we asked a group of fifth-grade guys to bring in a favorite song and explain why it was important to them. We said we'd participate too.

I promptly went home and chose “Honky Cat” from Honky Chateau, which I might only know because it was what my dad knew. I sat and tried to imagine how I could possibly explain why it's perfect.

It's a losing proposition if you have enough invested in it.

And to represent the whole album, to sell it to adults? I knew this opportunity was coming, too, and that there was no way to do it enough justice. What if I'm too tedious and technical? If I break down the chord structures and the harmonies and diagram the magic out of Honky Chateau, will you shrug and listen to one song on YouTube, turn back to your go-to music, remain stubbornly loyal to other piano players, put on some perfectly good goddamn Billy Joel?

And if I get too desperate, too certain you'll feel the same way, will you decide not to? Will you get defensive like I sometimes do? I'm sure it's interesting, I'll say, thinking of all the stuff I'd wager is better, just like I'm still in middle school. Maybe I'll give it a try, I'll say. I'm sure it's worth listening to.

*

I stayed home from school and listened to my dad's records today. It's no less glorious a sentence than it was in the mid-90s, the last time it was true.     

I remember lying in the dark, plastic space stickers greenly glowing, listening on the boxy CD-player/radio for the KIOW guy (North Iowa's Music, News, Weather, and Sports) to say I could stay a little longer.

The alarm turned the radio on instead of a buzzer and sometimes they were playing Madonna or Mariah Carey and I'd have to wait a while. The voice that read the listings was oddly nasal and supremely confident and sometimes we saw that guy at church or the Red Owl grocery store. It was always so awesome and so terrible when he told me it was only a delay.

When enough magic accumulated, enough to snow the porch door closed and to freak out even Midwestern Superintendents, I'd stay in my room all day. I had thick dark green carpet, and I'd sit on the floor and listen to records and organize my baseball cards. They had to go by team and by year in the plastic pages, and in a separate binder altogether if the card was weird or special or shiny or rare, or if the player had a famous enough name. I wanted to be able to pull those ones out later, find them again easily, show them to people, though nobody I knew was likely to be that impressed by a shiny tin-foil Ken Griffey, Jr.

During this memory I don't remember how old I was or what grade I was in or even if some of this is true. I just remember that I remember it, like a drug drip. Like an endless snowdrift climbing up a fogging windowpane. Like a dream, except that I nearly never recall those anyway.

Most of my childhood I remember the way I remember a dream, on the rare occasion I'm gifted one—not the whole linear plot, but just an occasional, spooky or beautiful, crystal and contradictory image or two.

Sesame Street wallpaper and a Speak and Spell and a turntable spinning 70s rock and roll.

    *

I haven't even said much about Elton yet, though I feel like I've been humming and humming his tune. I've been terrified to write this, though it was the first record I thought of out of all five hundred. It was the first record I thought of out of all of them in the world. But I know I can't just sit here and quote “Mellow,” I can't just sit here and sing “Susie” to you and make everybody believe.

The three records I remember listening to are Honky Chateau, some type of story about Blackbeard or Bluebeard the pirate, and a Christian album that featured a song about Zacchaeus in a sycamore tree. Is it possible that  those things are all from the same time in my life? Is it possible that I loved and appreciated Elton John as much as I think I did at such an early age, but that in high school I purchased Nickelback albums and performed them, singing into the mouth of a Coke bottle for the echo, in my room? Who knows.

I know I listened to Honky Chateau over and over and read the liner notes and learned the lyrics every time I was home alone and my parents wouldn't rent me a Nintendo. In my mind I found that particular record myself, and I think it's probably because my dad didn't put it into my hands, that he didn't insist (like I'm now insisting) that I can be so moved by it still. Maybe I'm lucky I stumbled onto this one on my own. Maybe I'm ruining it for you by telling you that it's magic. It's fine if you stop reading and wait to pick it up for a quarter at a Goodwill all on your own.

Later my best friend and I sang the record (well, this time an MP3) together loudly. Our favorite song, at least for a few days, was “Amy,” which makes sense. We'd have wanted by then to imagine someone slowly coming to love us even though they weren't sure they were interested. Somebody seeing something sexy in us although we were not anything like James Dean. We'd karaoke that punchy, perfect melody at the top of our lungs, believing we could change a crush's mind if we begged and blasted this song. All we ever wanted was a girl to wreck our dreams.

*   

One of the worst things you can do to your soul is show the person you love something that changed and changes you and watch them fail to change too.

*

I told my middle-school students that I loved the album because I'd never heard the piano used that way before, jangly and pounding, and perfectly propping up such sassily golden vocal melodies. I told them I responded to the clever language, that I was already smitten by simile. One more thing that's probably bullshit but also pretty much rings true.

And one of the best things you can do to your heart is to be wrong from time to time. Luckily, nobody even talked about The Lion King. One of them tapped his foot and almost smiled. One of them said “Rocket Man” and one yelled out at the top of his lungs, god bless him, “B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets!”

*

I know making everybody love this is a lost cause. There are lots of lost causes we long for.

My school is shut down and my road hasn't been plowed yet; I've got nowhere to go. It's like trying to find gold in a silver mine. Trying to drink whiskey—ooooh!—from a bottle of wine. That's fine. I aim to sit here on the rug by my record player and pretend not to care what you think. Not in a superior way, but just because I do care; it'll be hard for me to bear if you can't quite see it. I'm going to pretend not to be confused by each person in the world that this doesn't speak to. I'm going to listen again and love, and revise the attempt, and I'm going to try.

—Eric Thompson

#360: Buzzcocks, "Singles Going Steady" (1979)

Look at them, all those creeps, all those teenage hormones boiling and bubbling up and popping out of their mouths. Shouting dirty words like incantations, as if on a dare. Look at them on every corner, digging sticks into mortar of brick walls to pass the time. Look at them snarling, look at them with narrowed brows. She knows them, their physicality. How they like to fuck strangers. How they like to leave the lights on so they can see.

They catcall her. Tell her the ways they want to use her body. She walks with hunched shoulders, trying to block their energy out, trying to force it onto anything else, anywhere else but here. She hears a song in her head, a voice other than theirs. That, she can handle.

Then she sees it: a sign stapled to a telephone pole. She stops and reads:

ARE
YOU
AN
ORGASM
ADDICT?

She pulls off one of the little paper tabs with a phone number on it and tucks it into the pocket of her coat. She turns and stares at the boys on the corner, huddled around a lighter they’ve found on the ground, trying to make it strike and light against the wind, but it produces only smoke.

*

A voice: “Hello?”

“Hello, yes?” She hesitates, and breathes. “I’m calling about the… the ad?” She hears a commotion, the sound of someone not quite prepared to be discussing things over the telephone. Like the sound of a snare drum. Maybe fumbling for glasses. Maybe stubbing out a cigarette. She imagines actions she can’t even know producing the sounds on the other end of the phone.

“Oh, yes, that.”

The voice is high and breathy; its tone rises and falls, sustaining single syllables like in old poetry: o-O-oh, ye-E-es, tha-A-at. She can’t tell if the voice is male or female, or neither. She doesn’t care. She only knows that she once read somewhere that when you fall in love with someone it feels like being plunged into a deep, dense fog, where thoughts don’t come clearly and nothing makes sense for days, and that after only four words a fog is beginning to settle over her head, and she realizes that she might be falling in love with the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Meet tomorrow?”

She nods, then realizes that the voice can’t see her, and so she says quickly: “Yes.”

The voice gives her an address and a time which she scrawls onto a flyer advertising a yoga retreat. She whispers “thank you” and hangs up the phone, her heart beating a little faster than it had been before.

She gets up and pops a cassette into the hi-fi. It starts abruptly, a familiar high-pitched voice overtop of the whine of spindles catching the spokes of the cassette.

....want you-oo-oooo, on top of me....

She is an addict. She knows this. She finds ways of ducking into the ladies’ room at work to get herself off, checking first for any feet under the doors of the stalls. She spends most of her nights at home, the privacy and comfort of her own bedroom far more appealing than any public restroom. She dresses in stiff clothes to try to dampen her urges: polyester pants with too many buttons, starchy high-necked shirts with knotted collars, cable-knit sweaters and thick wool socks. Never skirts. (She used to wear wool pants but the itch of them just set her off.) Her addiction makes dating nearly impossible; she moves too quickly for them—yes, even men; yes, even boys who stand on street corners and like to fuck strangers.

The last date she went on was with a guy a work friend had set her up with. He had longish hair and a creased brow that could indicate he was lost in serious thought but mostly just made him look angry. He took her to an arthouse movie theater to see some old French film. She loves the idea of foreign films but hates reading subtitles. Half an hour into the film, which appeared to be about a pixie-haired Parisienne who wanted to have a threesome, she reached over and began fumbling with his zipper, only to have him discourage her through a mouthful of popcorn. She tried not to be embarrassed by his rejection but lost so much focus that she couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the movie. She made up her own story, which probably ended less tragically anyway.

After the movie they went to a club that had small strips of pink and blue neon running the length of the walls, where the floor was sticky and the drinks had too much ice in them. She ordered a rum & grape juice, downed it quickly, and dragged her date to the edge of the dance floor. The crowd was dancing to something fast and angry, with loud distorted chords that fell down the neck of the guitar, drums that moved almost ahead of the music, too eager, sweaty bodies jumping up and down, boys with long arms and girls with shoulders hunched up to their ears. Their realness and closeness excited her and confused her; she wanted to reach out and touch each of them as they danced. She moved into the crowd. She felt her own body pressing against them, and she began to dance, and she thought that the energy her body released into the crowd, and into the room, directed toward the voice singing fast and high over the song—she thought that would be enough for now. She would think about touching everyone later, in the safety of her bedroom. Until then she maintained a heightened awareness of the danger of other bodies.

Her date disappeared at some point in the night and she knew it was for the best. The only thing she hated more than reading subtitles were men who refused hand jobs in movie theaters.

Two days later she found herself staring at a poster stapled to a telephone pole. And then, that phone call. Back here in her bedroom now, she finds herself thinking of that voice.

She lies on her bed, staring at the ceiling, and begins to unbutton her pants.

*

The next day she goes to the address written on the back of the yoga flyer. There is another group of boys huddled on a nearby corner, watching her, digging their eyes into the barely perceptible curves under the bulk of her sweater as they shout all the dirty things they would do to her body if she were to cross the street. She turns back to the building. There is no sign and the doorbell is missing its bell but the address is correct. She bangs loudly on the door from fear and curiosity, but also possibly out of some kind of lust.

The door opens under the weight of her fist, and she follows a dimly lit staircase to an upper floor. She is possibly dreaming, she thinks.

And then she is dreaming.

The room appears empty. But something is there. What she sees in front of her is less of a thing than it is a shift of the light in the room, a place where the lines of the bare floorboards and windows become curves, her eyes tripping over a vision. It’s as if an image of a room has been folded over something three dimensional, a mirage draped over a dress form.

“I….we spoke on the phone?” She speaks in the direction of the shift in light but looks to her left and to her right in case there might be someone else there. But the voice that speaks comes from the bend of light.

“Will you kiss me?” It’s that high-pitched voice again, the squeaking whine of a cassette spindle in need of oil.

She’s not scared. But the fog in her head grows thicker and she tries to figure out what comes next. She wants to kiss the voice, to feel its closeness. But she can’t figure out where the voice wants her to kiss it. There is no face, no obvious surface where she would leave her lipstick marks. It’s as if it’s so real that she can see it, but there is no possible way she can touch it.

She thinks back to the pressing bodies on the dance floor. Dangerous bodies with arms and legs and flesh. Faces to kiss and mouths to be kissed by. Not like this. She shouldn’t fall in love with an abstraction like this. It would be far too complicated. How could she fall in love with a voice without a body, nothing more than sound that bends the light like a cassette whirring on the hi-fi? All these things suddenly seem nebulous: love, and sex, and bodies, and the voice standing—could she even say it was standing?—in front of her in that room. A fog as dangerous as smoke.

She knows she shouldn’t. She doesn’t know. She moves closer.

—Zan McQuade

#361: Outkast, "Stankonia" (2000)

1. Halloween, 2000. Three astronauts—American Bill Shepherd and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev—launch into orbit for the International Space Station. Yasser Arafat calls for resistance in Jerusalem, and four Palestinians are killed in the Gaza Strip. Outkast releases their fourth studio album, Stankonia. On a folding chair in a backyard in Minneapolis, with the urgings of my friends still echoing in my ear, a face leans towards mine, and I have my first kiss.

2.  It is a tangle of lips, teeth, and saliva. I don’t know what to do with my hands. They hang awkwardly at my side and as my braces hit his teeth, I imagine myself an orangutan. He has hair that he gels into devil horns, and I wear too much lip gloss, and I can feel it stick to his lips when he pulls away. I laugh in a way I hope is cool and run inside.

3.  What I have just written was a lie. Halloween in 2000 was on a Tuesday. The party, and my first kiss, actually happened the Saturday before.

4.  It happens that I lie on occasion.

5.  Stankonia: Coined by André 3000. From “stank” and “Plutonia.” The name of André 3000 and Big Boi’s recording studio in Atlanta.

6.  Stank: Verb, simple past tense of “stink.” To emit a strong offensive smell. To be disgustingly inferior. Or, slang: funky.

7.  Plutonia: Noun. A futuristic city, as depicted on a poster in André 3000’s bedroom.

8.  I know this from Wikipedia, just like I know that Stankonia debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard chart, that it won Best Rap Album at the 2002 Grammys, that it took a year to record, that André 3000 and Big Boi found it liberating to own a studio, able to work at their own pace and rhythm, to set their own hours. I imagine them waking at three in the morning, music tearing through their veins at 155 beats per minute, stumbling out of bed and driving to the studio, desperate to record. Is it likely that they were regularly deep in sleep at 3 a.m.? I suspect this is unrealistic.

9.  I write on Wikipedia: “Stankonia has been credited as the inspiration behind the work of numerous influential writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Emma Riehle Bohmann.”

10.  Wikipedia deletes my words.

11.  In the bathroom after the kiss, I press a fist into the flesh of my stomach to calm the butterflies. I reapply my lip gloss. I straighten the neck of my halter top. Is it cold to be wearing just a halter? I have no memory of the weather.

12.  Maybe this is why I lie, or maybe why it started: to fill the blanks in my mind, to live up to the expectation that I remember it all.

13.  Or maybe it’s just an attempt to be funny, to be remembered myself.

14.  Here is one thing that is true about me: I believe I am a good person.

15.  Here is another true thing: At night, I dream I am running, and with every step I take, my knees sink closer to the ground, my back bends until I am hunched double, and soon I am crawling on my hands and knees.

16.  In October 2000, “B.O.B.” is on the radio, “Ms. Jackson” is on the radio, we roam the halls of school saying “Forever? Forever ever? Forever ever?” and AOL Instant Messenger is cool. Entire relationships play out online, emoticons take on lives of their own, confessions fall into the Internet like it’s a bottomless hole, like we haven’t yet realized that anything that exists there will exist forever.

17. I imagine André 3000 and Big Boi in the studio, throwing out rhymes, testing them, André saying, “But you know, I’d just like to, you know, sing a bit,” Big Boi scoffing at him. In truth, many of the songs developed separately, André at home, strumming an acoustic guitar, Big Boi in the studio. Somehow it all comes together: “B.O.B.” has drums, guitar, organs, a choir in the background.

18.  In October 2000, I am just discovering music beyond the Beatles. Outkast explodes into me. At the school dance, I sit on the bleachers in the corner, hoping I am hidden in shadow, while my foot, unbidden, taps along to the music. Someday I will learn to embrace dancing, to let my body take over, to not care, but not yet, not for years.

19.  I am just discovering music, discovering Outkast, and every discovery shows me how little I know. The boy with the devil horns breaks up with me in the girl’s bathroom next to the gym and I think I am devastated, but I’m not.

20.  That is another lie. I am a little bit devastated, but I get over it.

21.  Operation Iraqi Freedom begins a year and a half later. March 2003. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland join forces to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist government. I am babysitting a little girl who turned a year old just over a week ago. She has curly brown hair and a turtleneck onesie with American flags on it. The TV displays the night sky over Baghdad. I can just make out the outline of buildings and clouds. There are few lights visible in the city, save those of the bombs, just flashes of white on the screen, like shooting stars or airplanes.

22.  I don’t realize that “B.O.B.” is not a new song.

23.  Operation Iraqi Freedom does not make me realize that the things I have thought were important are not really important. I do not evaluate my life, knowing that soldiers, civilians are dying. When students stage a walkout at school to protest, I leave with them and drive with my friends to Opitz, an outlet store in the suburbs.

24.  I have never admitted this before.

25.  I want to say something about Outkast, about Stankonia, about its effect on my life, on the person I’ve become. I am failing at saying this, maybe because it hasn’t. I am trying to make the album fit over my life, and I can’t.

26.  And yet, when I listen to the album, I realize I know every song. That the beat to “B.O.B.” plays in the cadence of my footsteps as I run. My friend owns a T-shirt called, according to the website it came from, “Persistence of Ms. Jackson” that has Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” on the front, melting clocks dripping down her front, and the white block print over the timepieces says, “Forever? Forever ever? Forever ever?”

27.  September 2005. Richmond, Indiana. Five years since the kiss, ten years before the T-shirt. The leaves dangle, their stems on the brink of breaking free of the tree branches. I sit with a friend on a wooden swing, our legs pushing idly against the grass, unevenly, so we spin from one side to another. “Don’t you think,” she says, “that Outkast was a little bit precious?” I think about it. I nod. I do think so.

28.  I don’t realize until later that she said “prescient.”

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#362: The Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream" (1993)

Siamese Dream is dad rock. This is what it means to get old.

Getting old doesn’t mean feeling old; getting old is feeling young but being aware that you are not young and quietly freaking out about it and then convincing yourself that you are happy to be getting older and that you are a better person now than you were when you were young and shallow and then realizing how much leeway there is in the world for the young and regretting that you weren’t more of an asshole because you know you could probably have gotten away with some of it, and then forgetting all of that because you have to winterize the flowerbeds and put the lawn waste into a biodegradable paper bag and set that bag out at the curb and also your knee hurts and you probably have cancer in your nostalgia. Getting old means looking back on things that happened two years ago and realizing they actually happened fourteen years ago. There must be some kind of formula to calculate that. Don’t tell me what it is.

Siamese Dream was released in the summer of 1993. I won’t say here how old I was in 1993, but I could legally drive a car.

When I first heard the Smashing Pumpkins, it made me nervous. But let me describe to you the basement I was in when this took place, because the music is the basement and that basement is the music. It was the kind of basement that was all interior walls and slivers for windows; it was dark down there, and you were grateful for the dark because it was also the kind of basement you didn’t want to get too good a look at. You didn’t want to see what that carpet looked like. You didn’t want too clear a shot at what people were doing down there—it was better to see them through the haze of incense smoke and weak, dirty lamplight. This was my friend’s basement. Forbidden things happened down there, I assumed. Things I wouldn’t recognize. Things I wouldn’t be able to process if I saw them. Things that would ruin me. This is what the Smashing Pumpkins sounded like to me then: like something that would corrupt me if I let it.

You think Bruce Springsteen is dad rock? Bruce Springsteen is not dad rock; Bruce Springsteen is granddad rock.

My dad is a granddad. Watching him try to figure out his MP3 player is like watching Papa Geppetto disarm a nuclear bomb.

The edgiest guys I ever knew were the beautiful skate punks in that basement listening to the Smashing Pumpkins—in a corner of the band room talking about Fishbone, in the back of the bus playing Ritual de lo Habitual on a boombox. Some of them are dads now and some of them aren’t. Some have gone to the brink and come back. Some are bald or nearly bald or on their way to being bald, but what can be done about that. They are still the edgiest motherfuckers I know, at least according to what they post on Facebook.

I teach classes in English at a smallish college in southwestern Ohio, which means I am surrounded now by millennials. Most of them were not born in the summer of 1993—most of them would not be born for another five or six years after that. I’m not quite old enough to be their dad, but I’m old enough to be their dad’s friend. We could hang out, drink craft beers together. Quote Pulp Fiction. Compare our favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater. This is what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the guy at the zoo whose T-shirt says Slayer and whose tattoo says anarchy, explaining to his toddler son the parameters of acceptable public behavior and laying out the consequences if those parameters are transgressed. He’s got a chain on his wallet and a stroller loaded up with bottles of water and sunscreen. This is what I’m talking about.

What is the statute of limitations on coolness? I was cool for one year in 1997—does that still count?

There’s something corrosive to me about the Smashing Pumpkins to this day—at least in those first three albums. They have a sound of metal scraping against metal, like a car being keyed. That’s a sound that either has not aged or has aged in a way that I can’t perceive, and the fact that I’m not sure which one it is makes my prostate throb. Still, it’s music that has held up remarkably well. Siamese Dream in particular is something close to a masterpiece, but if I say this—if I declare it—does that add legitimacy or take legitimacy away? When do I become your dad’s annoying friend who is constantly urging you to seek out some antiquated piece of twenty-five-year-old culture that you have no intention of tracking down? You haven’t heard Siamese Dream? You gotta listen to Siamese Dream. It’s a masterpiece! And don’t listen it on some low bit-rate Pandorify bullshit streaming service. Find it on COMPACT DISC. Pluck out those earbuds, listen to something through SPEAKERS. Fetch me another Fat Tire and let me tell you about the Pixies.

Kurt Cobain will turn 49 on February 20th of this year. He was a dad. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” no matter what you think of it, is a dad rock anthem.

Nothing stays the way it was except in your own head.

Getting older means figuring out that it doesn’t matter what you listen to or which shows you’ve been to or which movies you’ve seen or which drugs you’ve taken. You will be defined as uncool by the smug little narcissists who are younger than you, and their opinion matters more than yours because they are coming to replace you. And it means coming to realize that you pulled exactly the same nonsense when you were the smug little narcissist—but you had never been laid and your band sounded terrible and you thought you could see the purity of true art but really you didn’t understand a single goddamn thing about anything that was real or meaningful. It means beginning to recognize the honest beauty of those skate punks, of that dirty basement, of the music, of just about everything. It means turning on the lights.

Life’s a bummer when you’re a hummer. I think I get it.

—Joe P. Squance

#363: New Order, "Substance" (1987)

There was no ceremony. The curtain lifted on a chance meeting, one tethered to neither time nor place—the setting a crowded room, where bodies bent and wove in a mass to the ebb and flow of invisible balance. Heat and sound, acting out their desires by pushing and pulling strings to guide each tangle of hopes and fears into the infrared of another; the tempo and swirling textures the speakers’ gifts, marking time.

Normally the bar promised solitude, frequented by a few regulars and people accustomed to stewing in their own silence as the music played and the bartenders traded shifts, washed glasses. It was around these times of cold-month celebrations that got everyone together for a debauched class reunion; all the bar’s alums under one roof drinking.

What I was was drunk and lonely, or perhaps tipsy and wistful. This must have left my mind at the frequency of a whale song, unrecognizable over the din of the room but felt in the latent animal receptors buried in the core of another, drink in hand, swaying.

Now I was not the type to advance without a call to arms. My career in that arena of battle is fraught with error, in that enough misfires and friendly fire fill my dossier to hint at the futility of future engagements. But something in the fabric of the room, the evening, the whiff of longing to be approached, the comfortable bubble of public isolation waiting to be pierced had me shouldering my frame between the limbs, sliding on pools of melted snow to the point just before where the whites of her eyes looked grey in the dim light.

Her boots, still clung with snow, shifted in their space, as mine stood opposite.

“I’m not encroaching, I hope,” clumsy, yes, but where to begin? I was never a conqueror; the military jargon too loaded with cheap innuendos, plus flags should never be planted forcefully—the very least acquiesced.

“That all depends,” she rallied, keeping her eyes sharp and pulling at the frayed label of the bottle in her left hand.

“Perhaps that’s not the question, let me try again. May I?” I gestured to the patch of bar floor before her, genuflecting. Don’t bother. I will forever play the fool. She remained coy, myself exciting inspection. “Permission granted,” she said, the label hanging free now like a frayed veil.

“Are you home or did the holidays bring you back north?” I treaded carefully.

“Didn’t you see my name on the mailbox?” she inquired, deadpan.

“Funny, you seem tucked away for someone in her natural element.”

“Well maybe I’m just passing through. Home isn’t really binding.”

“This is true. Wherever you lay your hat?”

“When I wear one.”

“And when you don’t?”

“I can wear my hair however I like.”

“Certainly a perk. It looks lovely tonight.”

“But you don’t know how it usually looks.”

“Yes but I’ve seen plenty of hair.”

“An expert, I take it. Pity I can’t say the same about yours….” She trailed off and here she smiled and the room seemed to widen and contract all at once inciting a sort of spatial vertigo all in an instant like a sucker punch or a hit of nitrous or like waking up from a vivid dream. She pressed her thumb on the underside of a ring with a dull stone. I rolled my ankle, leg stretched back, feeling the cartilage realign and tumble.

“William,” I said, offering up my name.

“Will?”

“William.”

“I’ll call you Will. What about you, Will? Is this home?”

“No, but it will always be.”

“Seems we’re both victims of an invisible hand.”

“Suppose we are.”

“Where do you see the hand taking us, Will?”

“Another round?”

“How bout I get this one.”

*

I never got her name. We were headed to the other side of the river to a venue I used to go to infrequently for a dance night that I’d heard about in passing. She knew someone working the door or whatever so we wouldn’t have to pay for entry, plus they had cheap beer and kept the lights real low. What I’m trying to say is that she had the reigns. I remember we talked about how the city looked different, how observing change is a palpable feeling. We arrived outside the venue as a light snow began to fall through the orange glow of the streetlights.

The place looked dingy. Inside the foyer a salt stained carpet led to a guy the size of a lineman who asked for IDs and cover. The whole room was bathed in red.

“I thought you knew the door guy?”

“Gary must not be working tonight.”

“No matter, I got money.” I handed the guy some crumpled bills and so did she and we made our way inside.    

It was packed. I’m talking fucking slammed. We immediately peeled off our coats and draping them over our respective arms made a wide berth towards the bar. I remember sweating, the hot toffee fire taste of whiskey, the cool relief of domestic beer. And I remember it was loud. Although we drank from cans I watched her fingers search for the contours of a label.

After stashing our coats against the wall by some sound gear I felt her grab my arm and then her breath on the side of me face.

“Dance with me!” she hollered above the music.

“You lead!” I shouted back.

Here’s where it gets blurry. I don’t drink whiskey. Rather, I don’t drink whiskey anymore. It makes me forget things, like nights, happenings. But I did that night because something wanted me to. I wanted to. Forget, or just blur the edges. Maybe it was survival instinct. Maybe it was just a mistake.

We hit the floor like it was a robbery, her pulling me to the middle where the lights spun kaleidoscopic, and bodies fenced us in. And we moved. Her hands were on my shoulders pulled close like a high school dance before the chaperones could break us up, I laid mine on her sides, later pulling her close, entwining them behind her back. It was something slow—breathy vocals and reverb.

I remember as the song faded, from inside the swirl of the guitars I could hear voices welling up, and the drive of drums. Then the guitars broke through and the clouds lifted. We broke apart like wrestlers regaining our footing, squaring off, pounding the ground with each snare hit as the guitars jangled and ripped through the room. All around us people were clashing into each other, laughing, and the lights kept spinning.

Our hands formed a lattice as the lyrics broke over the room, something about heaven and hope.  She pulled me in close and that was when we kissed and the ground was so slick with melted snow I almost fell. It happened so fast and being off-balance I didn’t have time to shut my eyes, her silhouette outlined in rose filters hung as we pulled away. Her eyes flashed green, blue, then grey. Or was that the song? She wore the same smile she betrayed earlier, more comely, a little more don’t-make-me-come-over-there. With her arm around my waist she turned us around.

“Let’s get a drink!” I heard her say as the lyrics rang oh no, I’ve never met anyone quite like you before

*

The next morning it was my head that rang. I remember the walk back in what amounted to a blizzard after the music stopped. Practically a white-out, the flakes falling like wet cotton. I was staying at my dad’s apartment back on the other side of the river. He’d left the place empty for the night so he could celebrate the cold with his new girlfriend, someone he’d met at the gym. All I know is I managed to keep track of the key.

Once we got back it must have been well after three in the morning but we poured fresh drinks—I know this because my glass is still half empty—and talked. Then I remember her turning the light out, her breath again on my neck, the weight of her body, her hair. Her voice.

“Kiss me.”

It was tangled, fuzzy, blown out like a speaker. I’d been sleeping on the couch, which offered little room. My head swam laps. Light peaked through the blinds, the sound of wind rushing branches against the windows. We made our own noise. I don’t remember sleep.

The next morning I was left alone with a slip of paper, addressed to Will, with no name. Her cursive was slanted and loopy.

Tonight I think I’ll walk alone I’ll find my soul as I go home

My flight left later that evening and my girlfriend met me at the airport smiling, waiting with a kiss.

—Nick Graveline

#364: The Doors, "L.A. Woman" (1971)

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps, ‘Oh look at that!’ Then whoosh, and I'm gone….and they'll never see anything like it ever again—and they won't be able to forget me, ever.

—Jim Morrison

The poet makes himself a seer through a long, a prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. ….He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed at the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable, and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed.

—Arthur Rimbaud
 

My hound dog sleeps at my feet. His body shudders with dreams and they move through the threads of the thick quilts and blankets that cover me. Dreams enter us at the places where threads cover our skin, the woven threads and skin aligning, or, more directly, through the soles of our feet. Dreams enter hound dogs by day through the smooth black pads of their paws, when they run. Not being clothed with threads, all of the dreams of animals enter them straight through the earth.

I dream we are in a field. It is stubble, the stumps of grainstalks left after reaping. It is winter, fog. A gray rabbit is running through the field. The rabbit is a silver fire that trails across the stubblestalks and burns up at the horizon. My dog chases. They, both of them, rabbit and hound, cut a path across the earth that is both flat and curvature, both winding and straight, as all paths across the earth are.

Two animal shapes soft and furry and fiery, the fury of the chase, two four-chambered hearts pounding, and mine. Watching. (Am I in the field with them? Am I standing on that earth?)

*

This is the field of my childhood and thus the field I must cross in all my dreams to reach the borders of everything that lies beyond, and in dreams we are always cutting through the early years that lie inside us in which we saw the world so lucidly, so infinitely, our eyes like the eyes of rabbits.

In those early years I was always at the doorway, watching. I was always in the fields.

I remember the tangled brush piles where the foxes slept. And mink trails. The creek was a slow gold comet. The sycamore tree was a bolt of lightning I climbed to the fatherless sky.

*

My dog chases the rabbit. All is silent, all perfectly serene, when he pierces the rabbit’s throat with his long teeth. As if the rabbit were a plum, his teeth a silver knife. He runs with it hanging in his jaws, its head askew and limp. They are both together a dagger across the low sun. All bodies are in this celestial motion and the rabbit’s dreams enter the hound through the teeth (the only other way that dreams enter animals, the most direct).

I fall into the rabbit’s eye. (Yes, I know now I was there and do not remember if there was barbed wire or not.) The eye is a pool, perfectly still. It grows wider. I am swimming towards some kind of blackholeness or it is spreading toward me, the place where there is no blood, no teeth.

The rabbit’s eyes are my sister’s eyes. I dreamt of her two nights ago. In the dream I held her as a child—as I once held her, as a child, against me. I looked into her eyes and saw no colored iris, no pupil, no flowers blooming. A place where there were no bones to gnaw.

*

I yelled and the dog let the rabbit go. Its gray body dropped back to the earth and it bounded away the way it came, carrying an unalterable hole in its neck as the holes made by the teeth or knives or bullets of our hunters are always gaping unalterably in our throats, each of our words having to bound and leap and claw across that chasm, then having to pull back the barbed wire of the teeth before traveling beyond.

We walk into our dreams and go to the blackhole pools to swim, that we might hunt the hunter down inside us whose holes gape eternally across the universe, that we might catch the hunter in our jaws, the jaws that house our tongues which rock and cradle the breath before it is born, breaking into the broken world.

And is it love or what is hunting us.

Are there other hungers I do not know of. Lizards warm their blood against the stones, some other fire than inside. (When I wake, I want to walk barefoot across warm stones in winter sun, and I will call my sister.) The rabbit is bounding away, released by the hound, it is a silver fire again and its soft padded feet are like currents of night moving into the soil.

—Holly Haworth

#365: Rage Against the Machine, "Rage Against the Machine" (1992)

The Bare Ruined Choir was a Portland, Oregon band founded by Daniel Wargo in October 2010. It had originated as a solo project in his Portland State University dorm room and had grown into a multi-person outfit by May 2011. Other members of the band were bassist Ben Noyce, the keyboardist Homer Johnson, and the drummer Oliver Templeton, with Wargo fronting the group on guitar and vocals. The Bare Ruined Choir quickly rose to prominence in their home city and attracted national reviews, providing the band with opportunities to open for Beach House in 2012, Father John Misty in 2013, and the War on Drugs in 2014.

Wargo and the rest of the band did not tour in 2015 and decided to record their second album that winter, an album tentatively called Kissing Cousins. Wargo didn’t want the band to record in a studio, though, as the recording of the group’s first album was a process he didn’t want to repeat. He wanted the Bare Ruined Choir to record in a space that allowed for experimentation with the material, a place in which the music would allow itself to find its essence. Studios were constricting, according to Wargo. Their business practices of charging for studio time forced bands to produce rushed and uninspired material, which is exactly what Wargo thought of the band’s self-titled debut.

The frontman began looking outside of Portland and to the countryside for such a place to record and found a cabin in eastern Oregon through Taylor Slick, a member of his food co-op. Thinking that this was the environment that would best foster the band’s creative endeavors, the Bare Ruined Choir packed their instruments and struck out for Burns, Oregon to record their next album. 

The band then disappeared. The last time anyone had contact with the Bare Ruined Choir was in January 2016: a phone call by Daniel Wargo to his sister Sarah on her birthday. After three months of silence, Taylor Slick was pressed by worried family members to visit the cabin. He found the cabin empty. No band members and no instruments. The only item Slick found was a CD copy of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled album and the words FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!! spray-painted on the cabin walls. Police departments throughout Oregon conducted a statewide search for the missing band, even calling in federal investigators, but no trace of them was found. Not until November 2016.

A week before Thanksgiving, American radical Ammon Bundy released a video to news outlets detailing the continuing goals and progress of his national militia movement. Wargo’s mother

Roxanne spotted Daniel in the video, standing behind the organization’s leader.

“When I saw the video, I couldn’t believe it,” said Roxanne Wargo. “But it was Daniel. It was my boy.”

Before joining Bundy’s rebels, Wargo kept a clean-shaven face and cut his hair in a side part pompadour, rarely wearing hats. Wargo was now growing a beard and donning a Stetson, blending in with Bundy’s militia. Instead of a carrying a guitar, Wargo was wielding an assault rifle.

“We identified Wargo in the November 18 video and then subsequently identified him in other videos and photographs,” said CIA analyst James Hopper. “He was a prominent member of the insurgents, a figure we acknowledged but never knew the identity of. We never thought to use the Oregon missing persons list.”

The radicalization of Daniel Wargo and the rest of the Bare Ruined Choir is a mystery to officials. No one knows if the band travelled to eastern Oregon with intention of joining Bundy or if they were recruited by his troops.

“What prompted Wargo, Noyce, Templeton, and Johnson to join Bundy and his militants is unclear at the moment,” said Hopper. “But our intelligence shows the band sold their instruments and recording equipment to a Burns pawnshop in early February 2016. They used that money to buy tactical gear and assault rifles, joining Bundy at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge shortly after.”

“I just don’t understand how this happened,” said Matthew Goodson, Wargo’s childhood friend. “Listening to Rage Against the Machine was probably the most political thing Daniel had ever done.

“But maybe I should have seen this coming. I thought I saw Daniel nodding his head to Godsmack once.”

On May 24, 2017, federal officials orchestrated a siege on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The operation lasted two months and resulted in 93 deaths, eclipsing the 1993 Waco incident. Daniel Wargo was one of the deceased.

Found in Wargo’s personal effects was a box of reel-to-reel tapes. Those tapes are believed to be the surviving recordings of the Kissing Cousins sessions.

“After listening to the tapes, we do believe it is the Bare Ruined Choir. However, none of the tracks are original songs. The four tapes consist entirely of Rage Against the Machine covers,” said Hopper.

Shortly after officials acquired the tapes, the recordings were leaked online. The Kissing Cousins sessions were downloaded a reported one million times within three days. Pitchfork provided the unofficial release a score of 8.3.

The bodies of Daniel Noyce, Oliver Templeton, and Homer Johnson were not found at the refuge following the siege. Their whereabouts are unknown. Authorities believe the remaining members of the Bare Ruined Choir are disbursed throughout the country, operating in or leading other Bundy cells.

“While we don’t know their current locations, we are operating on a couple promising leads,” said Hopper.

* 

The following letter written by Daniel Wargo, dated May 23, 2017 and addressed to his sister Sarah, was found along with the Kissing Cousins recordings.

My Very Dear Sister,

Indications are very strong that a strike will fall on the refuge, perhaps to-morrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel compelled to write a line, that it may fall under your eyes when I shall be no more.

Remember always, my dearest Sarah…

Anger is a gift.

Daniel

—Dillon Hawkins

#366: Johnny Cash, "American Recordings" (1994)

Here are some facts about American Recordings that help explain the total insanity behind its existence, which one might not necessarily garner simply by listening to the music, which sounds largely if not entirely like a collection of some pretty good country songs:

1. American Recordings was Johnny Cash’s 81st album.

2. When American Recordings came out in 1994, Johnny Cash was 62 years old.

3. Johnny Cash made his first studio recordings in 1955, which means he’d been recording music for just under 40 years when he made American Recordings, which was his 81st album. That is a whole lot of music to record in 40 years.

4. American Recordings was the first in a four-album run that is across the board considered the second-best period of the across-the-board second-best country music artist of all time. At the end of this period, Johnny Cash was 70 years old. The period only ended (probably) because he died.

5. Rick Rubin produced American Recordings.

6. This one is big and weird and cannot be understated: Rick Rubin produced American Recordings.

7. Other albums produced by Rick Rubin within the two year window on either side of his producing American Recordings: Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Mack Daddy, Flipper’s American Grafishy, the Last Action Hero soundtrack, Slayer’s Divine Intervention, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Chief Boot Knocka, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute, Andrew Dice Clay’s Dice Live at Madison Square Garden, AC/DC’s Ballbreaker, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Return of the Bumpasaurus.

8. Needless to say, none of these albums sound much like American Recordings.

9. Rick Rubin is (probably) the most important producer of the last 30 years, but everyone’s favorite story about Rick Rubin is still this one: when he was 17 years old, Rick Rubin got all his friends to come heckle his band at one of their shows, and also got his band to get into a brawl with his friends in response to the heckling, and also got his dad to wear his police uniform and break up the brawl, even though his dad had no jurisdiction in Manhattan, where the show was taking place. At 17 years old, Rick Rubin orchestrated local buzz around his own band by orchestrating a fake riot, which required a lot of help from basically everyone he knew and explains a lot about who he would grow up to be.

10. In 1993, Rick Rubin changed the name of his record label from Def American to American because he found the word “def” in the dictionary and declared it (essentially) no longer cool.

11. When he changed the name of his record label, Rick Rubin held a funeral for the word “def.” 500 people attended. The Reverend Al Sharpton presided. This is how the Los Angeles Times described the funeral: “Mourners followed a 19th Century-style horse-drawn hearse and a six-piece brass band playing ‘Amazing Grace’ past the mausoleum that holds Rudolph Valentino’s remains to a freshly dug grave with a simple black granite slab inscribed DEF.”

12. Rick Rubin held a funeral for a word and then within six months had signed Johnny Cash, who then made what would become probably the second most famous of his then-81 albums.

This is not always the case, that the facts which coalesce behind a record become the reason a record is so beloved.

That last sentence, actually, is almost patently untrue. Many, many very famous, beloved records are famous and beloved largely due to the facts behind their very existence more so than the music on the wax. Some of them, like American Recordings, are comeback albums—this makes sense, because everyone likes a good comeback album (and no one likes a bad one). Others are harder to explain: Rolling Stone, for example, considers Sgt. Pepper’s the greatest album of all time, a reasoning it explains with eleven paragraphs detailing first-hand stories behind the album’s importance and creation. Sometimes the music itself is mentioned, but pretty much always in the context of its “firsts,” rather than, say, its sonicness or sweet-ass harmonies. Another: Nevermind, no one’s favorite Nirvana album and definitely not their best, is the most famous and beloved album of a whole generation of Americans because of what it meant when it was released. James Brown’s classic Live at the Apollo is basically 20 percent Brown’s voice, 10 percent showmanship that you can’t see because you can’t see audio, and 70 percent screaming teenagers—it’s more cultural artifact than listenable record, but that doesn’t negate its bigness. The story simply surpasses, again and again.

American Recordings is this kind of collection. It’s 13 songs long, two of which were recorded live at Johnny Depp’s nightclub (you be you, 1994), the rest in the Man in Black’s literal living room in Tennessee. It documents an aging legend using only his aging, legendary voice (more legendary than aging, tbh) and an acoustic guitar. Sometimes he says fuck it and just sing-song-talks. It’s in parts both moving and nice to listen to. It is never amazing. (The closest it gets is the nearly transcendent, v funny closer “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” mostly effective thanks to the live audience providing laugh track to all the right parts.)

But it doesn’t need to be, not really. There are 12 good reasons at the top of this page why not, and about two dozen you could add to those. It’s one of those album where we all agree: sometimes just existing is enough. Sometimes maybe even preferred.

—Brad Efford

#367: Madonna, "Ray of Light" (1998)

In moments of darkness, Madonna is my karaoke savior.

I am no karaoke superstar. I would like to have considered myself a valuable member of the South Hunterdon Regional High School Chorale, but in all honestly, I mostly just listened to the guy next to me and tried to emulate his pitch. I have no concept of how to read music, or to hit a note without scooping my way there. None of these things come natural to me.

I do, however, have a somewhat decent ear, which I use mostly to do terrible impressions of my girlfriend’s Minnesotan accent, as well as throw dance parties where I am trusted to put a sequence together of similar songs that make everyone stay out on the cleared dancefloor space in front of the dartboards for long enough that, yes, another drink does sound like a good idea, and sure, I would like a shot while you are up there.

Madonna’s game has always been emulation. She is someone who always knows what is going on and is incredibly in tune with the universe, almost like a larger-than-life mystical yoga sex champion who captivates whatever audience happens to be walking by her at the moment. This tends to work well more often than not, although as of late, it seems as if the pop trends have passed her by at this particular time: grandiose claims over vague EDM beats—Madonna has always been better served in showing, not telling.

You can’t blame her for wanting to tap into this zeitgeist, as Ray of Light (and to a lesser extent, the excellent and underrated Music) is a perfect example in grabbing hold of what is swirling around her and Madonna-izing it. Ray of Light is the most 1998 album in the history of 1998 and homegirl absolutely nails it.

It has everything you could ever want! “Candy Perfume Girl” has lots of little bloops and bleeps with a crunchy distorted guitar driving things forward! “Nothing Really Matters” is a classic Madonna track that we’ve come to expect from the Queen with flourishes that take it out of the 1990s Eurohouse House and into the palatial ice mansions that we all lived in during the late 1990s. “Ray of Light” sounds like a better version of Republica’s “Ready to Go,” with a much better and more entertaining video (although Madonna would never be caught dead playing Virtua Fighter 2 on a Sega Saturn—Madonna is the human embodiment of the mysterious uncle of a friend of yours who works for Nintendo who swears that there’s already a Nintendo 128 in Japan and he got to play Super Super Mario 128 Galaxy Zelda Kong before anyone else).

The reason that I choose Madonna as a karaoke go-to is that her songs are easily recognizable, fit into any situation perfectly, and are relatively easy to sing. The power of Madonna has never truly been in her voice, but in her ability to adapt to different trends. I would never use the term “timeless” to describe Madonna. She seems incredibly rooted in place and in era—it’s just that she’s one of those giant walking tree Ents that can plant herself into one spot like she has always been there, before slithering on over to another forest without giving anything a second thought. Even as I write this, I find myself conflicted in my viewpoints of how she exists: is what she does emulation, or has she been so ahead of the curve that it only seems like she is aping others—that she has become so synonymous with the push of electronica music toward the mainstream, that she was the one who brought us here, rather than jumping on a ship that was already well off shore and sailing toward a distant land of dancefloor liberation?

While I am uncertain as to the answer of that, what Madonna has always brought is heart: that even though she may never be the perfect singer (remember how mad everyone was for her being cast as Evita and how she had to go get vocal lessons?) she is able to bring a sensualness and vulnerability to even the coldest of William Orbit’s productions.

One particular karaoke instance stands out above all others: I was recently unceremoniously thrown out of a relationship, and needed to leave town. I drove six hours to go visit a friend of mine, and, well, get drunk. That night, we stumbled into a bar that was hosting karaoke. My friend Lisa slipped the DJ 20 dollars to put my name next, where I announced that I had just been broken up with, and proceeded to belt out “Borderline” as loud and as heart-first as I possibly could.

It probably wasn’t great (my friend Chris claims to have video, which he will never release to the public, thanks buddy), but it perfectly captured what I was feeling at the time: sometimes you just need to immerse yourself in something unfamiliar and give it all you got.

—Brian Oliu