#328: Sonic Youth, "Daydream Nation" (1988)

There’s a kind of magic in New York City. You walk out of your door on an ordinary day, you go about your business and perhaps, on your commute, at a meeting, at a dinner or party that you tried your hardest to get out of, you make a connection. The degrees of separation are thin. Down corridors and around corners, doors open magically, often ones you didn’t realize you needed to enter. I like to think of these as serendipitous—they always lead to something, even if it’s not what you were expecting.

Sonic Youth’s “Hyperstation”—“Falling outta sleep I hit the floor / I pull on some rock tee and I’m out with the door / From Bowery to Broome to Greene / I’m a walking lizard / Last night’s dream was a talking baby wizard / All coming from female imagination / Daydreaming days in a daydream nation…It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation / Daydreaming days in a daydream nation”—sounds like a New York City summer. I imagine that the summer of 1988 must have felt endless, especially if you were just a couple of months away from opening the door to Daydream Nation—one of the most revered albums of all time, one that would join the Library of Congress Archive of Culturally Significant American Recordings, and one that would wind up on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Daydream Nation was born on October 18, 1988. In the months leading up to the release, the band recorded at NYC’s Greene St. Recording—known primarily at the time for pumping out hip-hop records. The engineer, Nick Sansano, worked with groups like Public Enemy on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, released in June of 1988, and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock on “It Takes Two.” On the surface, band and engineer didn’t have much in common musically. Perhaps the common denominator was an understanding of the power of noise.

Rob Base, and DJ E-Z Rock—may he rest in peace—came from Harlem, as did I. “It Takes Two” (from the album of the same name, which dropped in August 1988) was fiery. The song takes me back to creating dance routines with my best friend after school in her parents’ living room. This is a song you heard blasting from Suzuki Jeeps on 125th Street o­n a hot Saturday afternoon, when the thing to do was to walk up and down the avenues to see who was who and what was what. The other song from that album that really moved me was “Joy and Pain.” I don’t know if I was aware of it then, but it encapsulated the complexity of life in four lines: “Joy and pain / Like sunshine and rain.” I was too young to understand the true sentiment, just old enough to recognize the basic tenets—you don’t always get what you want, life isn’t fair, but sometimes it’s beautiful. That undercurrent took it from party song to classic.

Daydream Nation shares this timelessness. It might have been made in the summer of 1988, but it never feels dated or old. Widely considered Sonic Youth’s magnum opus, it was their last record on an indie label before they got their first major label deal—it got them their deal. Digging into their catalogue, the unexpected is the norm. Take their side project with Mike Watt, as Ciccone Youth. “Get in the Groovey,” which riffs on Madonna’s “Into the Groove” is so tongue-in-cheek. It underscored how they made the jump to the sound of “Teenage Riot,” their first “mainstream” hit, which really wasn’t that mainstream after all. It was another way of looking at themselves, at their sound. It set them apart because it seemed so different from what they were already creating, but maybe it was who they were all along. Describing the image of the single candle used as Daydream Nation’s cover art to Rolling Stone, Kim Gordon said, “We wanted to use something that was outwardly conservative looking, just because people wouldn’t expect that. The most radical things outwardly look very conservative.”

How do you make a classic? How do you design an album that captures a mood, a time, a moment, so strongly that it becomes home? How do you create an endless summer or the coldest winter ever? I think Sonic Youth wound up breaking new ground because they weren’t trying to—they were simply open to change. Their attempt to capture the magic of their improv sessions led to the impressive length of the album. The chords layer so instinctively that it’s hard to distinguish where one track ends and the next begins. It’s uncertain, like one of those magic days in NYC where you never know who you’ll run into, or what you’ll get into—all that’s certain is heady, delicious anticipation. There’s a sense of urgency to hold on to the moment, knowing letting go is inevitable, like in “Cross the Breeze,” when Gordon sings: “Let’s go walking on the water / Come all the way please / I wanna know / Should I stay or go? / No need to be scared / Let’s jump into the day / I wanna know / I think I oughta go / Close your eyes and make believe / You can do whatever you please / I wanna know / I think I better go.”

Even after a double album’s worth of songs, the end comes quickly. It feels just like a city summer—hot up in Harlem, crazy down in the village—every summer that is important, monumental, where something is at stake, even if that is just finding a way to make it unforgettable.

—Lee Erica Elder

#329: James Brown, "In the Jungle Groove" (1986)

FELLAS THINGS DONE GOT TOO FAR GONE

Clyde could barely feel the weight of the sticks in his hands; they hung at the ready as he shifted his body. The stool behind the kit was tilted. The walls hung with carpeting kept the sound penned in. There were no windows.

But James’s voice hung like a chandelier in that cramped room. Others chimed in over the intercom as the tape reels began to spin and Jimmy broke out with a bold stroke. The air jabbered. Horns flanked from either side and with a quick eye from the man Clyde laid it down. James took to the rug and got to work.

Soon the room was taken in by the groove—the kicks, snares, claps, and cymbals rode the ebb and kept the pace. It was give and take. Each player sharing the ring, bobbing and weaving, sparring like the prelude to a fistfight, or rather giving each other space to walk it out.

Throughout the session there was no fanfare beyond their noise. Streamers didn’t fall, and by round of applause they were not crowned the winners. But pressed in the grooves, housed in the vinyl, the moment gestured to a time beyond the known horizon; waiting in the crates like a quiet storm.

CAN I SAY SOMETHING?

In The Jungle Groove was not a record in the proper sense. Its intention was to capitalize on a sound that was beginning to gain traction among a burgeoning generation of music consumers. A compilation of tracks remixed and unreleased that captured the shards of funk and soul that went on to be the seeds of hip-hop; if anything, this record was a greatest hits for what would be the foundation of a genre.

Released in August 1986, the album boasted cuts recorded almost two decades prior that had gathered dust, or lacked the grace of a proper pressing. Aimed at “true students of the Godfather” and eschewed for passive listening, what it was was a weapon. In nine tracks and clocking in at just over an hour, what followed was a veritable arsenal of samples: horns, yells, cuts, grooves, loops, and breaks that when pulled tight caught voices in a soft landing.

For MCs that needed training, it was an arena—to run tires and jump rope, to make sense of a world that demanded stillness in the wake of oppression. For producers, it became the hallmark of a sound.

CAN I GET A WITNESS? 

It’s windy and raining. The traffic off the lake hums at midday, the din of engines idles. Inside the record shop, behind walls of glass blocks, the light spills across the crates in dishwater grey. Thumbing through, your hands pause over the image of a man at rest, leg up, in a train station, at a bus stop, in a holding cell. Dressed in all denim with an unlit cigarette. In The Jungle Groove scrawled in graffiti script. You’ve heard of James Brown, sure, who hasn’t, but never this. Stuck to the plastic cover above his profile someone’s written in marker:

“Quintessential”   “An underground number one”   “—a classic”

And before you know it you’re making your way across the store to the listening station.

“Be careful with that one, and no scratching,” the owner punctuates with a nod toward the vinyl in your hand. Scratching? You carefully remove the record and place it on the table. Adjusting the headphones, you drop the needle on side one and wait in cushioned silence. Then that voice: “Fellas, things done got too far gone…” and you’re hit full on with horns, drums, guitar and your mouth slides open without you noticing.

The minutes fall away. You have a sudden urge to feel the record, a tactile desire. To pull back the drums, to walk back the voice, that voice. You look around. You can feel the grooves in your prints circling below; that drag. Shoulder pressed to ear and you lay your tips down on the track like a hand to a lover’s back. And suddenly you bring it back with the angle of rotation on the table like ERREEEHHKK and then the guy from behind the counter pulls you back.

CAN I TELL ‘UM?

When sunsets burned low to the smell of charcoal the heat was the last thing to break: the cooler and bottles sweating, the hydrant cracked open. The layered voices and fading sun caught in blocks by the smoke. Clotheslines hung over the block like banners and flags as children and neighbors hopscotched, slapped thighs, and told stories. From inside the needle on the song spilled a groove into the street; the ricocheted shuffle off the record, the arm jumping with soles on the parquet as plastic forks scraped paper plates.

At the end of the block DIY contraptions and repurposed amplifiers rose from milk crates and garbage cans. RCA turntables pulled from home stereos came together on a broken door set on cinderblocks with power cables running to the streetlights. With everything connected all eyes turned toward the sun and its descent. Falling from full orange roundness to half, to a sliver of light above the buildings, and like a synapse the city grid rushed to fill the encroaching darkness. When the bulb above threw its glow the equipment began to hum, the energy kinetic. Hands up and down the block went up with a cry as the needle hit the groove and sound rushed to the corners of the evening.

PUT YOUR HAND ON THE BOX AND FEEL THIS

The boombox entered the park at shoulder height, held fast by a heavy ringed hand with volume on full blast. It was just after sundown, and the gazebo at the center, old fashioned and weather-worn, hung in a halo of sodium light. Unremarkable were it not for the brothers dragging cardboard, pounding it flat on the wooden floor, milling about, stretching. And with the mounting of steps, the sound amplified naturally under the vaulted ceiling, and the bodies closed in around it. A mesh of chatter and trash talking hung just below the drums.

“Who we got on deck?”

“My man stole fire, you cut this tape?”

“My ol’ man worked late so I copped his stereo.”

“Shit’s hot!”

“Man how you get it to ride on like that?”

“Some cats, they tape up their breaks. I catch mine right every time.”

“Shit man, get outta here.”

“Ha almost copped yourself a foot!”

“When you see a man doing a windmill you stand down.”

Each tight coil of limbs unfurled into the physical embodiment of sound. The legs swung with the sticks, hands working overtime. When the tape faded into hiss the ringed hand would flip sides and it all picked right back up. Entering one by one they took turns, paid homage to the music, and kept it cool as ice.

KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN
KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN
KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN

Never in your life had you been told to fear the pavement. You learned to walk on those sun-hot slabs that scraped away the skin from your knees. Now you’ve had to offer way more than skin. The murmurs that you’d heard, that hate had taken over. It was never real beyond what hung like sour apples in your feed. You think for just a flash about the first place you tasted caramel, the sound of sirens blurred with horns, the word petrichor and how it used to rain.

Ultimately your mind hurtles back to a time when your family went out walking on a Sunday. Hand in hand by the lake and your momma held your hand with her hair tied up like when you said you think of her wearing nothing but that scarf and a smile. How that skin meant the world to you, a hunger for the taste of salt. Pretty soon it’s just dark but the feeling stays to linger.

You worry now just like you used to, but now the film whispers too in place of just you. We move as a team, we never move alone.

So when I say hut motherfucker you run like your momma calling. There’s no room for spare luggage. There’s no ‘I'll meet you there,’ it's a we all go or we ain't moving. I got nothing but love for you baby can you dig it?

—Nick Graveline

#330: Neil Young, "Tonight's the Night" (1975)

In 1975, John Ashbery published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In the collection’s title poem is this passage:

How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.

Included with early vinyl releases of Tonight’s the Night are a handful of lines written by Neil Young: “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”

*

I’ve been stalling on writing whatever this is, as though waiting will somehow make something arrive.

*

If you’ve read Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, you know that during the recording of Tonight’s the Night—most of it taking place on a single day, August 26, 1973—Young and his producer, David Briggs, subsisted on tequila and hamburgers. “That was the input,” Young said.

*

David Briggs was born and raised in Douglas, Wyoming, 250 miles southeast of Greybull, where I was born, and 135 miles northeast of Laramie, where I now live. Briggs left Wyoming on Christmas Day in 1960 to hitchhike to Los Angeles, then Canada, then back to California. Young was hitchhiking through Topanga Canyon when Briggs stopped to pick him up. The rest, as one is prone to say, is history. Beautiful, fucked up history.

*

It was July, and it was raining in Morrison, Colorado. I was waiting for Young to take the stage at Red Rocks. The stranger to my left was drunk and asking me about my occupation when Young walked out to the piano, sat down, and started playing “After the Gold Rush.” I think of “I was thinking about what a friend had said / I was hoping it was a lie” as a precursor to Young singing “When I picked up the telephone / And heard that he’d died out on the mainline” about Bruce Berry.

*

That shining bit of piano at the beginning of Tonight’s the Night is Young. Behind him are muffled voices, a taciturn hi-hat. You can hear the tape rolling. Three people sing “Tonight’s the night,” repeating it until, at 45 seconds and the first mention of Bruce Berry, everything gets loud. There’s slipshod improvisation. The whole progression’s a mess. And there in the middle of it all you know that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that technical grace isn’t on display, doesn’t matter that nothing’s in tune, doesn’t matter that voices enter and leave out of sync with each other. What matters is that you feel something immeasurable making its way to you across some kind of restless transmission. It makes sense, then, that the last word sung in the song is an acute Whoa.

*

Bruce Berry died of a heroin overdose on June 4, 1973.

Danny Whitten died from a combination of Valium and alcohol on November 18, 1972. He’d been trying to kick his heroin addiction.

I’m sorry. I don’t know these people. This means something to me.

Danny Whitten played guitar and sang with Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He worked on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush. On November 18, 1972, Young gave Whitten $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles after firing him from the band. That night, Young received a call from a coroner in Los Angeles. Danny Whitten was dead.

The Farmers Almanac archives say the temperature at Los Angeles Municipal Airport was around 65 degrees on November 18, 1972. No rain reported.

Bruce Berry was a working man. He used to load that Econoline van. He was a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And if Wikipedia is to be believed (I’m sorry), Berry was, for a while, a happy man.

Of the historic events noted for June 4, 1973—and there aren’t many—the most annoying event has to be the patent for the goddamn ATM being issued to some guys named Don, Tom, and George.

*

There are so many vehicles in Tonight’s the Night.

Think about it.

In “Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown” there’s “Snake eyes, French fries / And I got lots of gas.” Car’s implied. Could be a fart reference too.

In “Roll Another Number” Young sings “It’s too dark to put the keys in my ignition / And the morning sun has yet to climb my hood ornament.”

In “Albuquerque” Young sings about flying down the road, starving to be alone.

In “Lookout Joe” a Cadillac puts a hole in the arm of Bill from up on the hill.

In “Tired Eyes” four dead men are left lying in an open field full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors.

And, of course, there’s that Econoline van in “Tonight’s the Night.”

Part of Jonathan Demme’s Journeys, a 2011 concert documentary featuring Young, is spent in a car. Young drives around his hometown, Omemee, Ontario, and talks about his childhood there. At one point, Young drives past a public school named after his father and says, “I tried eating tar off the road. That was the beginning of my close relationship with cars, I think.”

In a 2014 NPR interview about his Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, Young talks with Ari Shapiro and this exchange happens:

YOUNG: …As a matter of fact, I love listening to music in cars.

SHAPIRO: Why do you prefer to listen to it in the car?

YOUNG: Well, because the scene is always changing. It’s the world’s greatest video. And you’re semi-occupied by, you know, driving the car. So your subconscious is wide open. Your conscious is busy, so you’re not thinking about the music too much. You’re just feeling it.

*

When I think of me at my worst, I remember months of weeks of days of hours of not remembering, spaces of time I’ll never recover. At the points where going out into the world seemed feasible, I’d leave Seattle and drive around Washington with my music, drive across a state or two before coming back. Often, the music I was listening to was Neil Young’s.

*

When John Ashbery won the 1975 National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, he said this in his acceptance speech: “For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as ‘difficult’ and ‘private,’ though I never meant for it to be. At least, I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense Proust meant when he said, ‘Each of us is truly alone.’ And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something that may change us.”

*

In his review of Tonight’s the Night, Robert Christgau wrote, “In Boulder, it reportedly gets angry phone calls whenever it’s played on the radio. What better recommendation could you ask?”

For the record, I think Boulder’s ridiculous.

For the record, I’m glad Young ripped off the Rolling Stones.

*

Young once tried to describe Tonight’s the Night. He said, “When I first started the record, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But I did get into a persona. I have no real idea where the fuck it came from, but there it was. It was part of me. I thought I had gotten into a character—but maybe a character had gotten into me.”

*

Tonight’s the Night isn’t my favorite Neil Young album. (And does it have to be?) That will always be On the Beach, which was recorded after Tonight’s the Night but released before it. Reprise, Young’s record label, thought the content of Tonight’s the Night was too dark. It took him two years to convince Reprise to release the album.

No matter. The dark makes its way through.

—Shannon Tharp

#331: The Beatles, "Help!" (1965)

The drummer has the lights in his eyes and his clothes have been painted red. He’s standing on the beach and he’s wearing a suit and the suit has been painted red and his face has been painted red and he’s in the Bahamas for the first time in his life and it’s cold in a way that he never expected. The water is invisible, though, and the sky is a color he’s never seen before. He’s up to his shins in the cold Atlantic and he shivers with a memory of coldness, of the cold seeping in under his skin and filling the spaces between his bones, even the tiniest bones of the tips of his fingers. He was cold, always: cold before he was a drummer, cold before he had a name, cold when he crunched sugar in his teeth in a bomb cellar while the world shook dust into his hair, cold when he was nobody but a child who was dying.

The drummer is on a soundstage that looks like Buckingham Palace and he is flubbing his lines. The drummer has been smoking grass for hours and is trying to say his words and to put them all in the proper order but everything is a smear and no one is taking any of it seriously. The drummer doesn’t read so well because he spent most of his time as a child who was dying, his mind far away, on a hill covered in thick grass, floating like a spore, then coming to rest on the soft bed of a treetop, warmed like a blister in the weak English sun. Someone brings tea to the soundstage. Later, they’ll pretend to sing their song about wanting to be loved.

The drummer is tied to a bed on the deck of a sailboat bobbing in the frigid waters of the Bahamas. They’ve ruined another suit—they’ve ruined so many. Painted it red. He doesn’t think of the waste anymore, and he doesn’t think about how he doesn’t think about it. The child who was dying owned two shirts and two pairs of short pants and one pair of socks and one shitty pair of shoes, but tonight the drummer will eat shellfish and conch, pigeon peas and pork. He’ll drink rum and Coke. He’ll peel off his ruined suit and slide into a fresh one, he’ll break the paper on the shirt himself and he will not think about what it means, and tomorrow he’ll put the ruined suit back on and he’ll watch as it is ruined even more with red paint and salt water. Later, they’ll pretend to sing their other song about wanting to be loved.

The child who is dying has the lights in his eyes but he is far away and it doesn’t seem to bother him. His body is exploding like a supernova. It crackles and pops but there isn’t any music in it. He understands nothing about it and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the thing that happened. Later, he’ll eat Heinz beans. He’ll drink powdered milk from a clouded glass. His bedclothes will turn gray as he looks at the pictures in a comic book and he will be absolutely nobody, shivering under a blanket.

The drummer climbs into the boot of a car. The drummer waves an empty wine bottle at a tiger. The drummer plays the drums in a field in the freezing English countryside under an Earl Gray sky, surrounded by tanks and haystacks. This is what he’s doing. He shivers and he laughs at the shiver and they keep that bit in the film and when he watches it, much later, at the premier, he’ll remember the chill and he’ll see it on the faces of the others, his brothers, whom he loves. He will not remember the heat of the fever that nearly killed the dying child, because who would want to remember such a thing if they didn’t have to? He only watches as they pretend to play their song about hating yourself and feeling desperate and it is just like any other song except it isn’t.

The child who is dying does die and then is reborn. The child who is reborn starts all over from nothing and has nowhere to go but goes somewhere anyway. He has no name so he picks one.

The child who is reborn has the lights in his eyes, and it is the light of the Bahamian sun, and he is up to his shins in the frigid Bahamian waters and they are painting his suit red and they are painting his face red and his brothers are standing next to him and they’ve all been smoking grass for hours and laughing and it’s all the same as it always has been but it’s all becoming something else. The drummer has a belly full of shellfish and conch and he is thinking about the rums and Cokes he will drink when this is finished, and he nearly thinks about the child who was dying but he doesn’t, he thinks only of the water he is standing in now and how far it is from where he came from and how clear it looks—how mercifully free of filth and silt, how absolutely transparent in the most astounding way—but how cold it is, how surprisingly cold.

—Joe P. Squance

#332: Richard & Linda Thompson, "Shoot Out the Lights" (1982)

            “Remember /
                        when we were hand in hand?”
 

But no, no—I don’t want to go there.

This is not a breakup album.

So many of the pieces on this site about rock and roll are about lost love, cruel break-ups, drift-outs, sappy, hapless exits. So many of the first lines are laced with bittersweet nostalgia:

            “My mother listened to Springsteen’s ‘One Step Up’ when she left my father.” (#467)

            “We were on a mountain in Switzerland when Beth told me she didn’t think she loved me anymore.” (#383)

            “That I loved him there is no question, I can say that now that he is gone.” (#425)

            “The last time I saw Tiff…” (#471)

            “Where the fuck was she, anyway?” (#460)

            “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.” (#355)

            “At some point in college I acquired a Smiths album.” (#473)

            “In graduate school, a common seminar move was to say, “I think we need to talk not about [singular noun] but about
            [plural noun]”—not sexuality, but sexualities.” (#400)

            “But then her cat died.” (#354)

            “Most of all, he remembers her scent.” (#384)

            “Is it fair to love an album for its last song?” (#395)

I had an anti-romantic image in my mind of what my first contribution to this project—this website about rock and roll!—would be. It would be baroque and unrelatable. It would not be about youth. It would not be about loss or college. It would be inedible.

A wild futuristic fuck you!

An anti-punk arabesque snake temple for old people!

If there needed to be cybernetics, there would be cybernetics!

And then my turn came, and Shoot Out The Lights was up for grabs, and I salivated and snatched it up. —I love this album! —It’s about taking aim. And darkness. —And Richard Thompson is on the cover looking smug. —And there’s only one light bulb left in the spaceship! —And he’s shooting it out!

And having chosen this flickering force field on which to map my progressive essay not about love and not about loss and not about heartsickness or my 20s or 30s—

I caught the cool eyes of Linda Thompson, looking down at me warily from her portrait on the peeling wall, and I remembered what this album is. Or, what it’s supposed to be: One of the great albums about the end of a marriage. One of the great albums about love in its death throes.

Maybe, definitely, like, the 3rd greatest late-70s/early-80s rock and roll breakup album.

And what could be sadder and lovelier and more bitter than Richard Thompson writing lines like “Don’t use me endlessly / It’s too long / too long to myself” and getting his soon-to-be-ex-wife Linda to sing them?

And what could be better nostalgia-fodder than an undeniably great love letter lost in the iPod shuffle (despite its greatness) behind those cooler, flashier “see ya” albums Blood on the Tracks and Rumours?

And so I’m tempted to write a narrative of love and loss and young romance that would pit this album against Dylan’s bleeding heart, and give Stevie and Lindsey a run for their witchy money. To write a romantic gut-punch that gives Richard and Linda’s story the 20th century gravity it deserves…

But I’m not going to do that.

Because this is not a breakup album, okay?

This is an album with the lines “The motion won't leave you / won't let you remain, don't worry / It's a restless wind / and a sleepless rain, don't worry.”

And it’s an album with the lines “In the dark who can see his face? / In the dark who can reach him?”

And even the most beautiful, heartbreaking song on the record—a song that’s obviously about Richard and Linda’s fraying love affair—

“I’m walking on a wire /    
                                                     I’m walking on a wire…”

—calls to my mind a narrative not from my past, but from the other side of the world’s precarious sci-fi present:

In the last shot of Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life, we see Sanming, one of the two main characters, turn to face the jagged silhouette of the buildings he has been helping knock down.

Sanming is a coal miner from northern China, who has come far south to the Yangzi River to find his errant wife and daughter. While he searches for them, he finds work on a demolition crew. He spends his days tearing down the houses of Fengjie, an ancient city which, in a few months, will be completely submerged by the waters of the Yangzi as they rise behind the Three Gorges Dam (the enormous weight of which, it’s been calculated, will shift the earth’s poles and slow its rotation).

On his way home, Sanming looks back at his day’s work and sees a tightrope walker, calmly stepping through the air on a line strung between two half-destroyed buildings.

There is no explanation for any of this: the artist’s exercise, his risk and his flourish, as he balances between the two buildings doubly doomed by hammer and water. Sanming’s speechless watching. Our watching them both work their endlessness into the scar-scape. The film is over.

When Richard and Linda sing “I’m falling” together for the last time, they sound triumphant. It makes no sense.

And in the last moment of “Walking on a Wire,” when all he has to do to end the song is pluck his guitar one last time and bring the pain to a close, Richard Thompson hesitates.

The previous note is fading; the moment to act seems lost.

And when he finally ends it, too late, he knows damn well that with that pause and with that moment’s sweet tension, he’s embedded in our muscles the longing to hear it all again.

                        “Do it all day, the backstreet slide…”

Why do we want to write about our past when we write about music?

Is it an essayistic privileging of the music’s placement (its lyrical aspect, what it means to us, what it means to the culture) over its displacement (its geometrical aspect, its bullet in the brain, the lights it shoots out)?

This need to distance ourselves from a piece of music by “putting it in its place,” and comparing it to other, better (or worse) musical experiences—it’s the conceit that’s given order to this whole project. But does it come from the same hierarchical function of the brain which, as we get older, loses its nuance, keeps elevating one arbitrary set of memories over the rest, and eventually rigidifies into nostalgia?

                             “Oh, you've got to ride in one direction /
                                                                                 Until you find the right connection…”

Maybe the only way to do justice to loss is to never lose.

I think I could listen to “Walking on a Wire” for three hours on repeat and feel a thrill from it each time.

But if I distance myself from the music (and in the end, I have to distance myself) it should be by substituting space for space, sensory field for sensory field.

Writing can do this, if it’s got rhythm. If its presence hurts more than the absence it describes.

                              “Let me ride on the Wall of Death /
                                                                                   one more time.”

I listen to a rock song and I want to write. What’s happening to me?

It’s like reaching into clear river water to wash your hands and wanting to tattoo them. Like living and wanting to live.

So is it fair to love an album because its last song is called “Wall of Death?”

But no, no—because “Wall of Death” isn’t even a part of the album it nominally brings to a close. It transcends everything before it. There are those steely grinning, rising and falling, opening chords—and this is not a breakup album, and it never was.

This album is a carnival spaceship with a thousand light years to go! And only one light bulb left blurring—

—and in the star-scape of warp speed, Richard asks his estranged wife Linda to

sing with him a heroic ode to daring, to fear, to the wish to be as far away as anyone can imagine from security and domesticity.

It will be the last song on the last album they will make together.

But despite the love I have now, despite knowing I’ll remember it as love, I still want to write my anti-memory essay, my empirical orality play, my skin-tight depth-charge...

You can waste your time on the other rides, but I want the future, with its knife-edge and its garden hose running miracle blue! Its tangelos! Its speech bubbles shattering against the surface!

You’re going nowhere when you ride on a carousel, but baby, this website is a wall of death.

And through the steel cage I catch glints of where we’re headed:

#305: “The ghost of Lucinda Williams walks through Lake Charles. She’s blindfolded, holding a plastic bag with two goldfish in it. One’s the past. One’s the present. ‘Big Swirlie,’ she calls out to whoever will listen, ‘and Little Swirlie.’”

#235: “Her cabinet stands around her, their hands nervously twitching…but President Patsy Cline’s finger hesitates over that big red button. ‘Why should our destruction be mutual?’ she muses. ‘Why shouldn’t you have to survive, to watch me burn?’”

#206: “That little red corvette stays double-parked forever, collecting blue traffic tickets…”

#157: “The ‘again’ in the chorus of “Love Will Tear Us Apart’ suggests that love might also keep those two together.” – Graham Foust

#26: “In the future, time travel is possible. Your mission: go back to 1982, somehow get to Stevie Nicks. Tell her not to do anything else with this song, to just leave it like this forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPEhIoKeTg0”

#16: “Bob Dylan’s in limbo, recovering from a carriage accident, his leg up in a yellowing cast. The cast, his living will and testament, has been signed by IBM’s robot overlord board of directors. ‘He’s left all his legacy to us,’ the e-board e-sings. Their hard drives have been uploaded directly from Dylan’s brain. But from a floral shadow in the corner of the hospital room, Woody Guthrie chuckles. ‘Take another look, knuckleheads,’ he says. ‘You’ve signed that cast in invisible ink.’”

#1: “Richard asks Linda to sing ‘Just the Motion’ with him one more time, ‘for the memories.’

              ‘What memories?’ they laugh.

              They look back at Earth and sigh. How much of it, really, was about the music?

              ‘It’s clear that the Beatles are the only thing holding up the planet these days.

              But…what’s underneath the Beatles?’

              Richard grins. It’s an old joke of theirs.

              Linda gives him that look. ‘Man, it’s Beatles all the way down.’”

—Joe Lennon

#333: X, "Wild Gift" (1981)

In retrospect, of course your tour was short. At the time you didn’t think anything of it, so mesmerized were you by a constellation of dust in sunlight seeping through translucent curtains.

You didn’t see much of the two back rooms. One tenant still slumbered at noon on the left, and a dirty litter of kittens avalanched from the room on the right as the owner shoved them back with a tasseled loafer.

These were obvious red flags. Yet you ignored them with an “It will be fine,” focusing on a copse of trees across the street, the cheap Asian market across the intersection. And the price, the lowest online.

Your wife had corresponded with the owner’s, who expressed a desire for a quiet, responsible tenant. You projected this terse email onto the place, transforming it into a haven from a town packed with youth away from home for the first time and all the dumb shit that rides shotgun—dumb shit the two of you had gotten out of the way almost twenty years prior.

The phone call from your wife, who went down a week early: this place is smaller than we thought.

Back room roof eaves, both sides, limiting headroom. The sleeping dude, the mewling kittens.

But it would be fine. You were there, doing it together.

The truck you booked was way too big and utterly terrifying to drive, no replacements available on a booked Labor Day weekend. You backed the mammoth over the lawn and destroyed the front staircase railing with the back bumper as a hurricane loomed in the distance. Sheets of hard rain pelted windows overnight.

The symbolism, you thought, was perfect: the storm clouds lifting just in time for triumphant arrival.

Post-move and pizza and beer with your friends, the first full day dawned, and with it the realization why the place was so cheap.

Some of it, anyway.

Your downstairs neighbor worked maintenance for your landlord’s properties. You learned the names of his two yippy dogs within minutes because through your thin floor every bark, every whine was audible.

So were the bellows of the maintenance man’s wife. You’d met her in passing the day you signed your lease, and, later, saw her working the convenience store adjacent to your shared place. The maintenance man, you learned, was partially deaf, requiring every communication between them to be in all caps.

It wasn’t the kittens or sleeping tenant that abbreviated your tour.

A curtain of paranoid silence descended after you told your wife the pizza was almost ready. You heard the neighbor first tell her husband that the neighbors were having pizza, then remark that they should, too. The whole thing gave you the creeps.

Her son visited on weekends, parking his tricked-out hot rod behind their shared beater. You had a hard time believing your wife when she’d stand silently next to one of the nigh-useless heating vents and point, face a rictus. But before you dated, she’d briefly lived in an apartment where spoons disappeared. She would know.

Temperatures below fifty turned the apartment into an icebox, you discovered in mid-October. Your oil heat offered brief comfort before going—where? You tried to trace the lack to a leak before the realization that the apartment was virtually uninsulated. Your dad arrived some weeks later with thick sheets of rigid foamcore and a power saw. You propped these sheets against the eaved bedroom’s flat walls, tacked thrift store blankets where you could. After dark, you’d push foamcore into the windows. These comforts were more psychological than physical, and heavily backloaded: you’d pry insulation from the mansards each morning, greeted by the same sun that had so captivated you initially, and think that you’d made it through another day.

You got used to it.

In the spring, you heard the neighbors bellowing about cleaning products, boxes. You texted your wife immediately: they’re moving.

A few glorious weeks of silence and beautiful weather later, you met the next roommate, a mild-mannered college kid, sweet and quiet. Your life was no longer a chorus of yips and hollered queries about pizza toppings.

And the smell went away.

Another hurricane loomed, this one with your adopted home in its sights. You worried that so much as a glancing blow from a tree branch would crumple the whole building and made arrangements to stay with friends. As you readied to leave, you met one of your two new neighbors, a kid being moved in by parents in a BMW. Seemed nice enough.

Your apartment didn’t so much as lose power through the storm. You returned to find the new neighbors installed.

At least the prior tenants had a schedule: they’d watch cop shows on TV for a few hours before bedding down by nine, both leaving the house before you woke.

The new neighbors were not entirely unlike the maintenance man and his wife: they, too, spoke in bellows, but for no reason. And at all hours. You’d be falling asleep before your ninety-minute-each-way commute only to be woken by shouts about pizza rolls being ready. Some nights this would happen at eleven, others three-thirty.

You realized the assertion the landlord and his wife made—that they were looking for quiet, responsible tenants—was complete bullshit. You should have realized this much earlier.

But it was far easier not to.

You went downstairs and asked them to keep it down. We can hear everything, you said.

Okay, the kid replied, eyes bloodshot.

The next weekend, they invited thirty friends over.

Look, you said on your shared porch, we just want to know when this is going to end. So we can sleep. We can hear every word. There’s no way to escape the noise.

If you don’t like it, the kid replied, you should move.

You went back upstairs, where your wife wore earplugs in an attempt to blot out the noise. You couldn’t help but think: our whole fucking life is a wreck.

                     For Kat

—Michael T. Fournier

#334: Graham Parker, "Squeezing Out Sparks" (1979)

I teach English at a private high school with a one-to-one model. One student, one teacher together in a (small) classroom. It’s a full-time school set up like tutoring and intended to allow to disappear completely that seemingly inevitable gap between what a student needs and what a teacher is under obligation, under contract, to give. Lessons become conversations built around questions firing off from both sides. Inside jokes ricochet off the walls the longer the year goes on. If a kid’s having a shitty day, everything can stop. You can catch up on the academics later. Relationship, emotional health, growth over all else.

Given this opportunity, I’ve recently started ending my semesters with a very particular assignment. First, I ask the student to make lists of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, and bands. Then, I ask them look at those lists and see if any themes pop up among and between them. We discuss at length what they’ve discovered, and the results are typically two-pronged: the student has a definite “taste,” and the student’s taste is all over the map. They like bands within a single genre (usually emo/screamo/goth) but like movies of a different genre altogether. They might be into a couple shows with dark or supernatural themes (like, well, Supernatural), but might like three different shows with entirely different purposes, as well.

The point is this: everyone makes their own story from the art they ingest, and that story is allowed to mutate over time. I’d say it should be encouraged as natural, in fact. Especially in high school, and especially-especially early on in those years, most humans are trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing and who the fuck they really are. In my classroom, I want these particular humans to be honest with themselves about themselves. I want them to see their own story laid out before them, and I want them to watch it change. I want them, above all else, to take ownership over this story. It is theirs. It is them. That’s empowering.

Or at least that’s the hope. I feel a little bad about hijacking this piece on Graham Parker to write instead about Prince. But tbh I don’t feel too bad. I’m sure Graham Parker has his place in music history and I’m sure he has his fan base that will roil from the injustice. But as the editor of this project, I pushed for others to write the Parker thing for months and no one was interested. And now Prince has died. And I know these things aren’t related, but they’re also unavoidable. Once I watched This is 40 and in it Paul Rudd represents an aging musician who no one remembers or wants to go see on his reunion tour and I thought that musician was fictional. It was Graham Parker, playing himself. I’m sorry if it seems unfair to bring this up. Some histories are bigger than others. Someone write the Graham Parker piece this piece should have been—I will read it. I want to be educated. But Prince has died.

A lot has been said about Prince both while he was with us and in the week since he’s passed on. I don’t have much to add beyond another story, another familiar perspective. I always teach my students what Joan Didion taught the world, that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and what DFW then flipped on its head, that we tell each other stories to “become less alone inside.” So all I can do is try and live, try and be less alone. This is what Prince and his music is for a lot of us, too. A reason to live, to try, to connect, and in living, try to connect at all costs.

I’ve started getting my students to flay themselves open so their own stories become apparent to them, and so they can dispense with any foolhardy, outdated notion of shame toward themselves and their interests. One student listed Marvel superhero blockbusters as her favorite films and then quietly went on with the addendum: and it’s embarrassing, but The Lion King is actually my favorite movie though. I made her write it down at the top of her list. I should have made her circle it three times and underline it in red pen. It’s beside the fact that The Lion King is a good movie—it could have been The Guilt Trip or North or The Room, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. Ownership is everything. Confidence is only the start of it.

Prince is infamous at this point for saying “I can’t be played. A person trying to play me plays themselves,” and I want it printed in all-caps on high school diplomas. Your story belongs to nobody but you. The power to comprehend that story, to shape it and brand it and live it out the best way you can figure out how, is in your hands. That isn’t just important—it’s everything.

And this was Prince to a lot of people. It was Bowie to a lot of people. Believe it or not, it’s also Kim Kardashian to a lot of people. All three of them, and about a thousand others, are that for me. I make lists sometimes to remind myself of myself. I find it rejuvenating, even essential. What are my favorite foods, my favorite music, my favorite words? Who am I and where did that come from? How have I changed, and is this evolution or devo? It isn’t easy to remember, on a regular basis, who you are. It isn’t easy figuring it out in the first place. But it starts with influence, it ends with a mirror, and everything in between should be true.

So I’m sorry-not-sorry for neglecting Graham Parker. He doesn’t factor into my story. Of course I listened to this record, Squeezing Out Sparks, a number of times through. It sounded like Elvis Costello, which doesn’t sound like much to me. But it might to you, and you should ask yourself about it. Question the themes that got you there, and if you like the answers then print your name on them, all-caps, size 72. Find your Prince, even if it ain’t Prince. Maybe someday it could be, and maybe not, but go looking. Don’t quit. Don’t hide. Go looking.

—Brad Efford

#335: Soundgarden, "Superunknown" (1994)

In the beginning, sound was all there was. Before the word, a mouth. Before the gardeners, a garden.

There was a thought, and the thought had a song, and the song was growing: stir-scrabble-shudder-slink-climb-out-upward-sink-shudder-quake-burrow-slow. A soft begin. A creeping go.

Now the earth has no ears, except those canals that worms carve, so before worms the dirt heard nothing, and knew nothing of the song. The trees have no ears, except for those holes that beetles make, or woodpeckers bore, so without bugs and birds an aspen heard nothing of its own quaking.

The ocean’s ears it cast up from itself.

The north wind has ears, of course, little knots where it ties the trunks of pines, but the wind’s story is many seasons in the telling—it has no time for secrets other than its own.

Listening was born slowly.

But oh, we humans liked it.

Music was the earliest form of storytelling. In fact, we told our very first stories to our mothers with our heartbeats. What they heard from us enchanted them, and they carried our little rhythms with them wherever they went, sometimes exclaiming, sometimes urging others to listen, to hear with their palms, their seashell ears, our overtures. Our Movement Is.

Later, we made instruments outside of our bodies. Whatever else we’ve done, we taught the stones to speak; we turned trees into their own tongues, stroked the stretched skin of our animal brethren until the voice of the dead thundered among us.

When the wind sawed through our teeth we heard it whisper—but through a whittled flute, we heard our own souls clearly for the first time. They were so beautiful, caves relaxed into tunnels. Swamps eased to rivers. Lakes leapt in joyful hives of steam.

That’s probably why we’re in this mess, if I’m honest. We fell in love with the sound of ourselves, and we never looked back.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned—last week I listened to Vance Joy’s “Georgia” thirty-six times on Monday alone. Work was terrible and lobotomies are a rather permanent coping strategy when you’re twenty-six and still nominally charming to non-relatives.

On Tuesday, I blared Japanese theme songs in my headphones for three straight hours and then blamed my headache on a lack of sleep. Yes, I’m aware gluttony is one of the seven deadlies. No, I do not think turning the volume down would make much of a difference in the long run.

Wednesday was a hard day. Morning and afternoon passed in a haze of horror, while I sorted image after image out of a manuscript at work. My employers publish criminal justice textbooks—their authors have a fortitude I lack, fearlessly engaging those subjects at which I can hardly bear to glance.

There is a grimness to the slump of a body bag that suggests there will be no victory over the grave. I sat, poring over the broken teeth of a bombed-out bus, the ache of a shattered elementary school window, until Tchaikovsky wrestled me from my chair. In the bathroom, I hunched at the sink and felt the spines of a million feathers needle into my flesh. I don’t care what the DJ calls it—Swan Lake is never “easy listening.” In fact, that whole term is misguided. Listening is hard.

On Thursday I wrote an essay about music. It wasn’t a very good essay—I’m not much of a musician—but if Eudora Welty is right, and the voice that speaks in your head when you read is really the voice of the story, then writing is a kind of listening, sure as anything. Maybe that’s why writing about writing is so difficult; it’s a way of eavesdropping on the eavesdropper: reflexive, chaotic, and generally fruitless.

More often, we’re better off listening to the stories the world is trying to tell us. The ones that stick, like little bits of pop tunes, hanging around our brains. When we concentrate on those stories, whether it’s to hear the reader-voice, or just to catch the last notes of that sweet, lingering tune, something amazing happens. We shut the hell up for a minute, and remember that we’re part of a story.

I’m not going to lie—this is a fucked up time we live in, and a fucked up time we leave behind. Stories of transformation are so often plagued by tragedy or violence—not every curse is lifted; not all who suffer are freed. But our story—the song of humanity—doesn’t end in darkness. I was resting in the garden when the north wind told me so.

—Eve Strillacci

#336: Radiohead, "In Rainbows" (2007)

I spent the summer of 1999 the way I spent most summers as a kid: bored, on the swing set in our backyard, waiting by a boombox. When the right song came on the radio—“All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow, or maybe “Fly” by Sugar Ray—I pressed record on the tape deck. It got me high, to capture a fleeting moment like that on tape. I’d rewind it and swing, listening to the music Doppler back and forth in my ears, drunk on the melodies. It’s hard to describe the pleasure I’d get from this without resorting to cheesy drug metaphors. These tapes made me feel good, plain and simple, like some god of my backyard-size universe.

I don’t remember how NOW That’s What I Call Music Vol. 1 entered this picture. I know that it wasn’t always there, because it eliminated the need to wait by the radio. All my favorites were now on one handy compact disc: “Together Again” by Janet Jackson, “I Will Buy You a New Life” by Everclear, “As Long as You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys. It had one undeniable classic (“MmmBop”), the weirdest one-hit wonder of the decade (“Sex and Candy”), and the high water mark of the swing revival (“Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, a band whose repulsively bone-headed name I never understood until now). It was truly a slice of late-‘90s radio; the only thing missing was a Third Eye Blind song. I loved this stuff. Passionately, indiscriminately, in a way that only a child with one CD probably could have.

NOW 1 had some dead weight though: K-Ci & Jojo, Imajin, “Barbie Girl,” by Aqua. Usually I skipped over these, but if my older brother was around, we let “Barbie Girl” play out. We thought it was funny to parody the lyrics in an affected, girly sing-song. I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World. It’s fantastic, dressed in plastic. You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere. In a way, it was funny: two boys with a prepubescent grasp of irony, parodying a parody. The song that followed was less fun. It was sluggish, full of eerie piano chords. The singer sounded like he was moaning the way you do when you’re sick and you want someone in earshot to feel bad for you. As the youngest, it was my job to descend from the swings, walk over to the radio, and press my index finger on the skip button. That song was “Karma Police” by Radiohead.

What Radiohead, the face of anti-corporate art rock, was doing on a record that could be accurately described as the essence of a Wal-Mart music aisle, is a good question. I don’t remember hearing them on the radio. “Karma Police” might have been popular on college stations, but on the Billboard charts that determined what I listened to, it peaked at a lowly 69. Even to my ears now, it doesn’t meet NOW 1’s accommodatingly broad definition of pop music. It has an interesting melody, but it lacks momentum and charisma—the stuffing of any decent pop song.

For a long time I never realized that Radiohead was on NOW 1. Like the other duds that weren’t “Barbie Girl,” “Karma Police” never made enough of an impression to register. It wasn’t until I was a full-fledged Radiohead fan in college that I rediscovered the jewel case and realized what I’d been skipping over all those years. A weird moment of cognitive dissonance followed. On the one hand were my childhood musical inclinations; on the other was my collegiate fixation with Radiohead. Somewhere in between my music taste did a 180. What happened?

*

During the early half of high school, I was into “screamo” music. “Screamo,” for anyone who didn’t attend high school in the mid-2000s, sounds like what you think it does. Imagine a sentimentally-charged punk song (an emo song) jacked up on drop-D metal riffs for dummies, punching a hole in the wall of a suburban basement. This was music written by and for intense teenagers, most of them white, male, and dressed like myself: tight jeans and band T-shirts. The one key I owned (to my Mom’s house) dangled from a neon green carabiner over my right butt pocket. I’d never been drunk or high, but I Sharpied black Xs on my backpack to let everyone know I was above all that. The shows were weird, comic affairs: angsty teenage boys screaming about girls and death (like they were synonymous) in traditionally hushed settings—a church, a library, occasionally a suburban back yard.

I met Andrew in the parking lot of a Baptist church after one of these shows. I recognized him from geometry class, where we sat near each other, but had never spoken. Andrew was not a “screamo person.” I was surprised to see him in this crowd. I was even more surprised to learn we had bands in common. Emo bands, for sure, but not the kind my brother and his screamo cohort went for. These were bands who chose to sing instead of scream, to employ chords and melodies in lieu of dissonance. Andrew knew them all, and then some. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t listened to Radiohead. We made plans to hang out and burn each other’s CD binders.

Andrew turned me onto a slew of bands in the years that followed, but Radiohead was not among them. He burned me copies of OK Computer, Kid A, and Hail to the Thief. Amnesiac, too, I think. It doesn’t matter; none of them stuck. I skipped through them in a desultory haze, hunting for that dizzy high I expected music to deliver. That was back when I had a job cleaning preschools on the weekend. I didn’t have access to the internet. I definitely didn’t read music blogs. The only context I had for these Radiohead records were the toilet bowls I scrubbed while listening to them. I remember thinking I’d stumbled onto an apt soundtrack for doing that.

The song that finally kicked down the doors to the kingdom was “There There (the Boney King of Nowhere).” It took a while to find it. It’s buried deep on Hail to the Thief, where it emerges from a cloud of glitchy studio wonkery, riding an actual analog drum beat. I can’t think of another Radiohead song that grooves this urgently. Every time I hear it, it takes a saintly act of self-restraint to not drop what I’m doing and start banging air toms. I was hooked even before the chorus, which featured the first complete sentence in a Radiohead song I actually understood: “Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”

How Radiohead, that use of a vague pronoun. Just ‘cause you feel it? Just ‘cause you feel what, exactly? Love? Anxiety? Hope? My teenage ear understood that it to be the feeling you get when a song guns it to your core. Maybe you get chills down your spine, or maybe your head goes weightless. I tend to get goosebumps on the back of my forearms and a cold tingling on the back of my neck, like someone has placed a damp cloth there. Whatever it is you feel, I had the impression that Radiohead was saying it didn’t mean shit. This was a decidedly anti-emo thing to sing. From a screamo standpoint, this was blasphemy.

It feels a bit contrived to hold one line in a Radiohead song responsible for a sea change in my music taste. The truth, of course, is that it happened gradually, for a lot of reasons. I made more friends like Andrew, with CD binders of stuff I’d never heard of. One of them introduced me to Pitchfork, where I discovered sarcastic takedowns of my favorite emo bands alongside fawning reviews of Radiohead records. Pretty soon the old me, the screamo me, was buried under a mountain of cultural detritus. By the time I left for college, screamo was an embarrassing phase best left unmentioned, like a LiveJournal account you forgot to deactivate. Real art, I might’ve told anyone who had the misfortune of talking to me around this time, was more than just a vessel for emotion. It had something important to say about society. It was inherently difficult, and if you didn’t get it, well, you didn’t get art. I remember listening to that robot voice in “Fitter Happier” talk about “getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”while I walked to the campus dining hall to eat food I wasn’t even paying for. That was the same year I paid $80—a small fortune in undergraduate expenses—to see Radiohead play a huge amphitheatre show. I literally called them “the greatest band on Earth” in my campus newspaper.

*

Looking back on my life as a music listener is a good exercise in embarrassment. From about middle school onward, I was—to borrow a popular word from middle school—a poser. The music I liked said more about who I wanted to be than who I actually was. Consider one of my favorite songs, “Title Track” by Death Cab for Cutie (more girls and death!), which has a line about tasting a girl’s lipstick on the filter of a cigarette. I was 14 years old when I heard this song. My lips had never tasted a cigarette filter, nor a girl’s lipstick. But something about that line left a profound mark on me. I wanted to identify with it, more than I actually did. It was this same yearning that drew me to Radiohead, I think. I liked the cover of Hail to the Thief more than I liked most of the songs on it. I wanted to care about the dehumanizing effects of modern life, long before I’d even filed a tax return.

The funny thing about these postures is that by the time my actual identity caught up with them, the music had lost its luster. My affinity for screamo dried up quickly after my first girlfriend. Those songs were all histrionics and emotional fireworks; they had little to say about the day-to-day banalities of an actual relationship. Graduating from college had the same effect on Radiohead. Songs about the soul-sucking corporate world, it turned out, weren’t that great a soundtrack to actually work to. I currently spend the 9-to-5 hours of my week in a windowless cubicle of an office building; the last thing I want to listen to is a record about it.

If I go back to Radiohead at all, I go back to In Rainbows. In Rainbows is not an experimental record about the demise of western civilization. In Rainbows is a pretty basic rock record for adults with feelings. I like to think of it as OK Computer Lite: “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” with all the “Fitter Happier” bullshit stripped away. When it came out, many critics noted that Radiohead had put out a love record. That seems like a lazy generalization to me, but “House of Cards” is a love song. “Reckoner” has some of the most emotive moaning of Thom Yorke’s career. “Videotape,” a piano ballad about an old timer pulling out old VHS tapes of his life, might be the most sentimental thing they’ve ever recorded. Even “There There,” with its skeptical chorus, wouldn’t sound out of place on In Rainbows. Because that’s the weird thing about Yorke’s knock on feelings: it’s dripping with feeling. Each time Yorke sings it, he stretches the syllables out a little further, loading them with all the sentiment they can handle. Juuuuusst ‘caaaaause yoouuuuu feeeeel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

I could go on, but the basic gist of it is this: In Rainbows still puts goosebumps on the back of my forearms, and their other records don’t. I’d say there’s even a chance that tiny, ten-year-old me might not have skipped every song on it. But that’s hard to say. Sometimes I pretend I can still regress back to being that little kid on the swing set, communing with the angels over “MmmBop,” but I don’t think it works that way. Once you’ve handed over your music taste to older siblings, or friends, or the internet, it’s a bit like a faustian bargain. You don’t get to take it back and start over. A part of me, I suspect, will always be like that one-key carabiner guy at the screamo show, trying to prove something to somebody. When a song like “There There” totally bowls me over, the best I can do is tell that guy to shove it, and wait for the tingling in my forearms. That might be the only way you know it’s not another posture, that it’s actually there. Just ‘cause you feel it.

—Ryan Marr

#337: Jethro Tull, "Aqualung" (1971)

Days after I moved to Minnesota for college, my roommates and I sat in a circle on our dorm room floor and shared our testimonies. Wrapped in animal-print fleece and brightly colored pajamas, we’d just finished a box of Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese, toast, and grapes we’d proudly shopped for and prepared ourselves. After dinner, we sat in a circle and conjured up the holy emotions we were supposed to feel when invoking the divine. We’d been taught that to share your testimony—to talk about when you accepted Jesus, how it made you different and how you stayed the same—was to glorify God. Sharing felt like a big deal then, but it was nothing new. I’d shared my testimony at youth group overnighters, Cheeto dust still on my fingers; before bunk beds of girls in lantern-lit camp cabins; on mission trips around the world, in Mexican migrant camps and Czech orphanages and South African slums, where we’d used flannel graphs and face paint when words didn’t work. I’d done it again and again, with reverence, even as I trembled.

It’s a long road that brings a kid to that place on the floor. It goes back all the way to diaper days and feels as natural as breathing. You hear the same story every week, you trace the rims of hundreds of plastic communion cups, and you believe.

I don’t remember what I said that night to my roommates, but I remember, for the first time in my life, being afraid I had nothing to testify.

*

Many people call Jethro Tull’s Aqualung a concept album, and although the band itself doesn’t approve of the label, the themes are plain: God vs. religion, the corruption of the church, Christian hypocrisy and idolatry—all familiar topics I’ve wrestled with a lot over the years. As a convalescing Baptist, you can never really get away from them. But lately, if I think about them at all, it’s with a quiet acceptance.

Maybe that’s why the spiritual songs on Aqualung don’t resonate with me nearly as much as the ones that land on the human side of the divine. “Cheap Day Return,” one of the shortest songs on the album and a departure from the overall style, is a tiny acoustic snapshot in which Ian Anderson stands at the train station after visiting his father. Then you sadly wonder, does the nurse treat your old man the way she should? She made you tea, asked for your autograph, what a laugh. And though it sounds like the story should continue, there’s only a short instrumental break before the song tapers off, and you’re left, mercifully, wondering what’s unsaid.

*

A block from my apartment in Roanoke, Virginia, there was an old southern church building, all brick and triangular, with a neon red sign overhead, simple capital letters that read JESUS SAVES. The church was on top of a hill and the sign was visible from far enough away that I could see it every night driving home. Sometimes it said JE US SAVE or ESUS AVES and sometimes the lights flickered. It was always the important parts that burned out.

In some of the album’s most memorable lyrics, Ian Anderson sings: If Jesus saves, well, He'd better save Himself from the gory glory seekers who use His name in death. But between save himself and the rest of the line, there’s a break just long enough for the chords to strike and for you to imagine all the things Jesus better save himself from. The first time I heard it, I wished they’d cut it off at the break. Every time after that, I wished for mystery just a little bit more.

*

Sophomore year of college, I drove my roommates to Iowa for fall break. About 30 miles outside my hometown, a multi-car pileup on I-380 stopped all traffic and we were stuck in my Volkswagen Beetle for more than an hour, gridlocked with the headlights off. Although it was cold for October, we opened the sunroof to let the stars in.

We started talking about the semester and about Jesus, and ended up on the topic of how much we wanted to say the word fuck. By then we’d completely adapted to our sterilized campus. None of us had realized how much we’d needed out, or, for that matter, how inconceivable and ridiculous it was to have spent nineteen years avoiding all profanity—especially fuck, the big kahuna. So right there in the midst of all those stopped cars, we breathed deep and screamed it into the night. Fuck this and fuck that and fucking fuck and motherfucking motherfucker, too, just for good measure. Jesus doesn’t fucking care if you say fuck! one of us said in joyful revelation, or at least one of us meant to.

*

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Wond’Ring Aloud.” It’s a simple love song, the kind I’m a sucker for, where you can picture the scene exactly as described, down to the buttery toast, and it’s so damn sentimental in the best possible way. But when Anderson sings, We are our own saviors, you can’t help but take what might be a throwaway line in a different context as significant within the framework of the album. Here, it’s not God who saves—it’s you, it’s me, it’s the love we have for each other, it’s the crumbs left forgotten in the bed.

—Lacy Barker

#338: Big Brother & the Holding Company, "Cheap Thrills" (1968)

// She knows this goddamn life too well so we best listen up. But what’s a rasp really good for? Can a breathtaking break in a woman's voice cast glass, shatter spells, shake off sadness? Let me stop myself right there, save us from overanalysis, let me just say this: yes.

The kind of person who doesn't like a little mess in their magic is the same kind of person who, beaten down by their sterile-voiced dentist, insists on drinking Sunkist orange soda through a bendy straw. If you listen to Janis at a certain time of before-morning with the right amount of sugar in your tea you will be transformed, transmogrified from distracted to superlative; you'll become one of those stubborn numbers you always envied—the ones greater than or equal to something else. Well, here are four gentlemen and one broad, as the emcee calls her, who'll make you feel like a story problem that is finally solvable. Close your eyes and clench your throat. Feel her warble wiggle in your toes. Each little vocal catch a catechism, every breath and every cataclysm whistling past the bones of your own nose. She says she needs a man to love and maybe you're not feeling man enough right this minute, or maybe you're no man at all, but still, don't you think you could be what she's moaning over? Don't you want to screech this little blues rock thing and be a man to love, just now, just for a moment this morning? Let her make and re-make you over again, into a sleek and elegant thing, into a chapter in a charming adventure novel, a refined equation that is more than the sum of your paltry, mismatched parts.

\\ Janis isn't making anyone, no one's making Janis. The scream queen. What we dug “rasp” up for in the first place. What we hear on entering heaven, on spelunking deeper into hell. She is both, the dichotomy materialized, a freshman year college course on duality. Which is to say: human. She is human. A gut-feel for the blues and the strange insistent blackout of the turn of the decade, the terror and love and anger and love and war and peace and love and love of the upside-down America of the sixties. Not without the hat-tip to Tina Turner, to the girl groups, to the stage show semi-freakouts of Elvis and Little Richard and the incomparable Mr. Dynamite. She says living’s easy in the summertime and we’ve heard it a thousand and one times before and we’re hearing it for the very first time: that’s how sublime, how twisted she’s got tradition, and history, and this goddamn broken broken-record decade. You can say it again, it’d stay the same: if she ain’t the voice of the generation, she’s no doubt one of them.

No. Bullshit. She’s the voice of the whole generation. Stationed out satelliting in an orbit around the romance and the distrust. No one’s making Janis. How could they? How’d that work? You think she’s susceptible? You think she’s a product? Sure we’re all products, but you think she’s a product? You think she’s from Earth? Serious questions, all with answers, no good ones.

There is a tortoiseshell shorthair your little brother’s leashed with your father’s old belt and set on fire for the hell of it. Watching it squirm is beautiful and awful and nothing you’d ever want to see again. It makes you sick. It makes you mad. It ignites. Janis isn’t making anyone.

// Let's not dress her up too pretty, then. (She favored grubby men's shirts and tights.) Let's not fancy her a posthumous god, as gods don't generally overdose when they're twenty-seven. Seems like we need our “voices of generations” to be so hungry they falter, overdo it, fuck up a little more and sooner than anybody meant them to.

But let's get one thing clear: the effect her sound has on us is not just because she didn't live long enough to lose the gut-fire and cut a lifeless 80s record. If you crack open some stuffy biography you can bet your ass it says despite her untimely death, Janis….and in another book that same sentence begins with because of. Yes, she was drenched in duality, heavens and devils swallowed down like medicine and fired back up gleaming and twisted as one. But let's call her singular, too. Janis didn't die because she sounded so good and she didn't sound like that because she was bound to die. She wasn't startling just because she was the antithesis of Judy Collins. Listen—she'd have startled anyone in any age throughout space and time. She was just a regular young human who could sing, in some ways; yes, we can hold off on the hagiography.

Maybe make is the wrong word, but Janis was capable of causing things: causing a mosh pit, causing a car wreck, causing a punk kid to pause in the middle of a subway tunnel and cry. She had duality but also singularity. Singularity, as in a distinctiveness so distressing as to be beautiful. And also as in the spacetime kind, when the quantities used to measure a body's gravitational pull become infinite in a way that does not depend on a single goddamn thing.

\\ How smart is it by the way to frame this thing as live? The people lost it at Monterey watching Janis and her Holding Co. tear through tunes like a wet chainsaw, so much so that it was infamous that day, that minute, even quicker. Some groups, when they hit the stage, they just don’t got it. No heat, no noise, no soul. Not so with Janis, not so with the whole Holding Co. We got the Internet. The whole thing’s down on tape.

“Combination of the Two”’s got the whole band sharing vocals, woo-woo-ing down there all together, Janis howling an octave above the boys, taking the rightful spotlight every time she opens her mouth. “Ball and Chain” they even ripped live for the record, that’s how magnetizing. That’s how possessed that voice, that spirit. And look: I just clicked the wrong thing, got sent to the clip of the band reunited, sans Janis, at Monterey in ‘07. That’s 2007. It is not good. It is old-blood bar-band covers of the blues. The new Janis has the rasp, but she is not Janis. Obviously. Without the hunger that comes with being 24 years old, being strung out, being raised in the Texas high desert, being one with the time, the people, the black magic incantation the wizard recited to give it all to you, to take it all away: what even are you?

Shit. I fell again into the sermon. Look: listen. The music, it speaks for itself. All the rest is feedback echoing the vibes that were good enough—no, better—the first time around.

—Eric Thompson & Brad Efford

#339: Tom Waits, "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974)

Side 1

    “New Coat of Paint”

My mother still swears by a color of paint she calls “Hubert’s white,” a mixture of white, yellow, and gray, which a man—named, appropriately, Hubert—used to repaint the house my parents and I lived in when I was a child. It was a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac within walking distance of Lake Michigan, a real Midwestern idyll of a place with a trim front lawn, a wooden play set, and a back deck for entertaining. The house was dusty blue when we bought it, with cream trim and a front door done in demure red. I half think my parents picked that house because of its massive basement, which we would never have had in England. Basements are far less frequent there—something to do with flooding, I imagine.

Our immigrant story isn’t exceptional. We moved for my dad’s job when I was small. I must have asked where my grandparents were, or when we’d see them next, but I was too young to remember much of anything and there wasn’t really much to miss. England is fairly close to the U.S., culturally if not geographically. I had watched different television shows than my American friends, and read different books, but at least we spoke the same language. I learned early on that I said some words “wrong” and I learned to correct myself. By the time I was nine, I was indistinguishable from any other solidly middle class Midwestern schoolkid, and I was peeved that my parents wanted to repaint our house, then sell it.

We were moving again, this time to Virginia, once more for my dad’s job. As a nine year old I could name all 50 states, but I wouldn’t have been able to point to Virginia on a map. Being 4,000 miles from my hometown in England didn’t mean anything to me when I was four, or five, or even nine, but the 800 miles between our home in Wisconsin and our future house in Virginia was a real gut-wrench. I was used to weekly phone calls with my relatives, to recording all our birthdays and holidays on film for our grandparents as my sister and I aged, but I couldn’t conceive of my life without my friends, or the tree outside my bedroom window, or our blue house.

My parents insisted that the house would need to be painted for it to be sold. Dusty blue didn’t look fresh enough in a market that was already chock full of saleable homes in sensible neighborhoods. Enter: Hubert and Hubert’s white. Hubert’s son and his other assistant were kind to our dog, and to my sister and I, so they were okay by us. We would play outside near where they worked when we could, but we liked to pretend to be scared of Hubert, who was Polish and had a strong accent. I think my mother gravitated toward him because he was also foreign, and we pretended to fear him for the same reason. The painters finished their work and the house sold not long after we moved.

Of course, Virginia was nothing like Wisconsin, because I wouldn’t let it be. At age 10, I was insistent that my childhood was done. Our new neighborhood’s 4th of July parade had nothing on the ones we used to go to. In Wisconsin, we got to play in fire trucks that reeked of carnauba wax and diesel. We ate our first hot dogs and waved our first American flags. There was a big picnic and we got to drink whole cans of Squirt and gorge ourselves on homemade fudge. It was as American as me mishearing “for which it stands” as “for Richard Stands” in the Pledge of Allegiance, then convincing a friend that my version was right. This Virginia 4th of July was one long parade of oversized trucks filled with middle-aged people I didn’t know, throwing Tootsie Rolls to the people watching by the roadside, cheering for something I didn’t know or recognize.  

Side 2

    “Fumblin’ with the Blues”

I want for The Heart of Saturday Night to gel with my memory of life in Middle America, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel much of anything when I listen to this record—no “haunting innocence” or “restlessness,” as Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden experienced when he reviewed the album back in 1974. When I hear The Heart of Saturday Night, I’m waiting for a chord Waits never strikes—one of sincerity. More than 40 years of music has been recorded since, and maybe it’s the worn out cassette tape sound that’s getting to me, but putting these particular clichés on repeat hasn’t gotten me any closer to the sentiment of this album. I’m fumbling with something, but it’s not “the Blues” or even sadness. I want for Waits’s Midwest lonely to feel the same as my Midwest lonely.

It amuses me that this record went Gold in the UK, a place that I also think of as home, full of people whose lives are far away from Tom Waits’s, as far away as I feel from this album. The sound and the lyrics must have come together to ring something like true to them. I wonder if they heard “The Heart of Saturday Night” and thought about apple pie in truck stop diners and believed that’s what the United States was, that this was the quintessential “American experience” that everyone talks about. Being both inside and outside American culture, I feel strongly that there’s no such thing. Maybe distance is what allows us to cozy up to something outside our own experience, and to love it, without looking too closely.

It’s not as if Waits wrote with me in mind. The album was released almost exactly 16 years before my birth, and it’s for folks whose memories are places full of road noise and truck stops and past-midnights. Beyond sheer time and geography, Waits also cites Jack Kerouac as one of his major influences, a rootless misogynist with little regard for anything outside the narrow lens of his own experience (read: women’s lives and feelings). For all that I feel I’m always attempting to broaden the scope of my compassion, my heart really flatlines when I hear Tom Waits sing about women on this album. It’s not a delight to hear about his women, rendered, as they are here, in two dimensions.

I wanted this album to mean something to me. I wanted “Midwest dreaming of a Wisconsin bed” to be about my life, and my differences, and my desire for music to be the puzzle piece that bridges the gap between my feelings and experiences. All the classic barriers to entry are present in this album: I’m not a man, or old enough to consider myself an expert on any kind of sadness, or working a blue collar job—a rare instance where my circumstances are a hindrance rather than a gateway. But I struggle to think of anyone for whom this record could ring true. The closest I get is that someone out there must feel the same way about night driving and cigarette smoke hanging in the low light over a bar as I do about fire trucks and grapefruit soda and the 4th of July.

—Helen Alston

#340: Black Flag, "Damaged" (1981)

Smoke swirling off the tip of Jay’s Marlboro Light coats the plywood on the floor. It soaks into the leather couch and blankets the walls of the studio, mingling with rows of framed concert posters, oil paintings, one-shot cutouts. Jay takes a long drag then a heavy step towards the palette on his left. He mixes the flesh tones with his paintbrush, exhales and adds broad strokes to the skate deck canvas. Inhale, step, exhale, mix, paint, repeat.

Each 185-pound step causes a ripple in the unfinished flooring; each ripple causes the needle of the record player to skip. I was born with a bottle in my mouth. Skip. Six Pack. Now I got a six so I’ll never run out. Skip. Six Pack. Jay sings along, obviously not annoyed enough by the skipping to step lighter in the garage-apartment-turned-art-studio. I’m annoyed, but not annoyed enough to pick up my magazine proof spread across the couch and relocate from the studio back to our house.

“Oi, red or black background on this one?” Jay turns toward me and asks, the long ash from his cigarette drifting to the floor without even a flick of his wrist.

“Black.”

His nod turns into head-banging, his unspiked mohawk and worn leather jacket syncing in movement to the inflections in Henry Rollins’s voice.

I continue watching the rhythm of the smoke, the painting, Jay’s movements, before going back to looking for the rhythm in the fine art and design magazine I’m editing: Local Hotspots, Global Reach, Traveling Exhibits. Inhale, step. Exhale, mix. Paint, repeat.

“Should the text be larger on this page?” I ask Jay, who shakes his head no while singing: I know it will be okay. I get a six pack in me, all right.

This song was easily Jay’s anthem when we first met in fifth-hour freshmen biology thirteen years ago. My earliest memory of him: a drunken cheek-piercing episode during class that led to a punctured facial artery. As I watched him run out of the classroom bleeding that day, I had no idea that five years later, we’d begin dating or that thirteen years after that, we’d still be together, living in a house long made a home. He ran out of the classroom that day yelling, “Everything’s fine.” He had a six pack in him, and he was all right.

Jay doesn’t have a six pack in him now as he stomps to the back of the studio to grab black paint—the needle skipping, skip, then gliding through the grooves to bring about a fast, heavy, melodic bass line from Chuck Dukowski. These days, Jay only drinks a fraction of what he used to. The drumbeat mirrors the bass’s established rhythm and leads to a guitar build up. This feeling haunts me. Behind these eyes, the shell seems so empty. Though I wonder if anything lives inside. I finish making my edits to the Hot Spots layout.

Just as “Six Pack” commemorates a fair portion of Jay’s youth-to-earlier-adulthood experiences, the song “What I See” represents a fair portion of my hormone-filled teenage years spent flipping through pages and pages of journaled emotions of self-angst. Now, I simply flip through pages and pages of magazines, newsletters, and other publications for which I write and edit.

In one month Jay will be featured in his fifth art show (he sold out at two of his last four), I will be finalizing edits with the design team for the second issue of the magazine I oversee, and Henry Rollins will continue to write articles for LA Weekly, speak out in regards to the 2016 presidential race, record podcasts, tour internationally, and star in a new movie. Thirteen years ago Jay was constantly drunk and doing reckless things. Thirteen years ago I was self-destructive and looking for an outlet. Twenty years prior to that Henry Rollins was loud, aggressive, combative, and recording the album Damaged. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers don’t recognize that they will one day get older, possibly even grow up. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers just think they’ll be dead by twenty-seven. Then one day they turn twenty-eight.

I move on from editing Local Hotspot to Global Reach. From Global Reach to Traveling Exhibits. Jay moves on from painting the background to clear-coating the skate deck. The needle moves on from “TV Party” to “Thirsty and Miserable.” From “Thirsty and Miserable” to “Police Story.” From “Police Story” to “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.” Jay and I both look at each other when we hear the drum hit it off with a one, two, one, one, two. One, two, one, one, two. Jay burned this song on a CD for me right before we started dating. We used to drive around fast, the music turned all the way up, seeking out a liquor store that would sell to us even though we were underage. We used to sneak into abandoned buildings and discuss conformity. We used to scale fire escapes and the rooftops of vacant buildings and share the things that bothered us. We needed an angry yet empathetic voice.

A lot of punk icons died before they hit Jay’s and my current age. Darby Crash: suicide. Sid Vicious: drug overdose, possibly intentional. I’m sure that’s the route a lot of family members thought Jay and I were going when we were fifteen. I know a handful of people from when I was fifteen that went that route.

Jay steps back from his painting, two-thirds of the way through “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” where the guitar and bass halt and leave just the drums and Henry Rollins’s voice. “I think I’m calling it,” Jay says, looking at his finished piece.

“It looks really good,” I say, honestly, nearing a stopping point in my evening’s project. The needle glides to the end of side A before the arm of the record player automatically picks the needle up and moves it to the side of the vinyl. Jay signs the bottom of the painting. We both decide to head back to the house. We have more work to do tomorrow. We’ve watched throughout our years as Henry Rollins has continued to do more and more work. We turn the light out behind us before locking the studio, not flipping the record to side B because we’re already there.

—Angela Morris

#341: Moby, "Play" (1999)

I grew up with Premium Cable. We had HBO and The Movie Channel and later Starz and Cinemax. Today, a trip back to my parents’ house features many of those same channels but with added on-demand functionality and HD/Non-HD streams. Movie channels were always a luxury my parents allowed themselves. As a result, in a pre-Internet world, I spent night after late night of my early teens up late, watching movies.

I remember watching the premier of the 1993 thriller Sliver. I may have confused its self-seriousness for good filmmaking and hey look, breasts. The first time I saw Kids, it was on cable and either preceded by or followed by a short “discussion” vignette wherein the cast, filmmakers, parents, etc. all weighed in on the film’s subject. My 14-year-old brain’s takeaways from that movie were as follows: skateboarding beatdown was awesome, the Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” was a good song, Jenny = new type of hot.

There was something intensely relaxing about flipping to the “guide” channel and watching it slowly scroll the 80 or so available networks. When the “guide” channel was a new, novel invention, half the screen was covered with static advertisements with bland, soft jazz playing in the background. Eventually commercials and even scripted content would come to fill this space. But once upon a time, that channel really was just there to show you what was on.

While most of the premium channels’ time was booked with marquee movies like the aforementioned Sliver or Kids, late late at night they allowed the level of experimentation in their programming to grow as the overall quality of the films dropped. This created a solid block from midnight to around 4 a.m. where you could find risque but relevant movies like Single White Female followed by horror schlockfests like The Refrigerator followed by foreign darlings like Delicatessen. Gregg Akari’s Nowhere comes to mind whenever I think about the pure shocking joy of watching something my mind was totally unprepared for. This would have been around 1997/98 so I’d already seen plenty. But even then, this colorful, aggressive, hyper-sexual and moderately star studded examination of west coast madness truly surprised me.

I bought it on VHS and forced friends to watch it. It became something of a trend. This happened for a few reasons. One, I wanted to understand the movie better. I spent my teens constantly worried I just wasn’t getting something. Bouncing these bizarre echoes off my peers was a kind of calibration. It felt good to ask, “Wasn’t that fucked up?” and have them answer in the affirmative. Two, I did not want to be alone in seeing these things. Along with the inferiority associated with seeing but not understanding, there was the guilt of having witnessed. I wanted to spread things around to either prove I wasn’t messed up OR to mess other people up with me. This trend peaked in the early 2000s when I ruined a perfectly good party by forcibly screening a bootleg VHS copy of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo. I am sorry, everyone.

Now, to say every night was filled with exciting, challenging films would grossly misrepresent my experience. Most everything I watched was garbage. I have clear memories of mainstream bombs like Hackers, The Temp, No Escape, and The Good Son in equal measure with hours and hours of B-grade horrors on par with Phantasm III, Night of the Demons 2, and just about everything in the Puppet Master series, including a tremendously awful Puppet Master spin/knock-off called Demonic Toys. Horror was such fertile late-night programming I think I’ll just name more movies because so many of them are worth noting if for no other reason than no one ever notes them: The Mangler (killer laundry machine), Screamers, Return of the Living Dead 3 (first instance of a goth zombie?), Maniac Cop, Castle Freak, Sleepwalkers, Carnosaur. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

These nights ceased to be special around the year 2000. The Internet all but destroyed any joy I took in passive viewing and replaced it with a manic need for active information. I’ve managed to easily translate this need across several generations of technology from playing Starsiege: Tribes on a dial-up Internet connection with USA Up All Night on in the background to, 18 years later, half-heartedly watching Star Trek on Netflix while frantically refreshing 4-5 apps on my phone. Just saying it now makes me loathe myself. And though I love Twitter and I’m always up for seeing what kind of hijinks your new babies are up to, I do sometimes wish for the peace/calm I felt sitting alone in a dark living room at 3 a.m. watching an awful movie. The remote control only had 12 buttons. The screen on the television was round and deep. When I shut it off to race the sunrise to bed it crackled in this way that made it seem as though the television had been under tremendous electrical strain. The machine ached so that I might watch Alicia Silverstone try to murder someone with a hive of bees in The Crush. For that, I am forever sad and grateful.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#342: Depeche Mode, "Violator" (1990)

Can the whole of a life be held in nine songs? I think it can. When Violator was released in March, 1990, I had just turned sixteen. I’m forty-two now, and I’ve never let it go. In a box in my bedroom closet, there are two cassettes of it. Both have wound to the end. I’ll start there, and press rewind.

9. “Clean.” An end to the tears / and the in-between years. When I saw Depeche Mode live for the first time in September, 2013, I had been clean for nine months, almost ten. My yellow Narcotics Anonymous key tag, the one that said “Clean and Serene for Nine Months,” was indented with bite marks, from all of the frustration of living without pills, of living without the escape. I had had fantasies of being close enough to the stage, and throwing it to Dave Gahan, one recovering addict to another. Instead, I wept when Martin Gore sang “But Not Tonight.” The key tag was rough in my hand, a talisman I hadn’t planned on. I’m still clean three years later.

8. “Blue Dress.” Put it on / Please don’t question why. It was an anonymous Sunday in the winter of 2008-09. I pulled a black dress from H&M over my head; adjusting it, smoothing it out; thinking that the cleavage was too low. I was preparing to meet my lover at a cheap motel in a neighboring town. I lied to my mother, saying something about a “coffee date.” The motel was next to a bowling alley, and across from an ice cream parlor, promising air conditioning and HBO in its rooms. My lover always paid for the hours we spent there. It was a routine: he would go to the office, and I’d wait in the car. A man coming out of a room saw me sitting there once, and gestured to me with his mouth. The dress was flimsy; too thin for winter in Connecticut. I had too much lipstick on. Once we were in the room, my lover appraised me. “You dress nice,” he said.

7.  “Policy of Truth.” Never again / is what you swore / the time before. The first time I experienced withdrawal sickness, I told myself that it was stress brought on from trying to sell copies of my first book. Or it was a twenty-four-hour virus; a fluke of summer. But another voice whispered to me. The prescription ran out before it was supposed to. You know what this is. I shivered in an apartment with no air conditioning at the end of June. Dramamine helped me sleep, but didn’t keep the nausea away. I wondered if my intestines would last. But then, it passed. I could file the experience away, making the promise that it wouldn’t happen again. I’d be more careful. But I wasn’t. I was never careful with pills. When I saw that the count was low, I would start gathering my supplies: chicken soup, ginger ale, Imodium. The voice that whispered to me had a smirk in it: You’ve got this all under control, don’t you.

6. “Enjoy the Silence.” Pleasures remain / So does the pain. In September of 2009, I met a man that I wanted to talk to all night. And frequently, that’s what we did. We quoted Woody Allen’s Love and Death to each other. I turned him on to John Cheever and Richard Yates. We both loved Violator. “It’s ear porn,” he said. After he left, about five months later, I couldn’t listen to it. The words had been written and burned into our bodies. I drowned out his absence in other ways, wondering if the album would mean something different when I listened to it again. In the silent space that my ex inhabits, it does.

5. “Waiting for the Night.” When everything is dark / keeps us from the stark reality. I guess I’ve never cared for reality that much. When I was sixteen, and listening to Violator repeatedly, I would rewind “Waiting for the Night,” so that Side One wouldn’t have to end. I would turn off the lights in my bedroom, sinking into Martin Gore’s voice. I could imagine that I was someone other than a suburban Connecticut teenager who had already spent some time in psychiatric hospitals. I could imagine that one day, I’d write something that would make me famous.  It was there, in the journal I kept, bound in black fabric with tiny pink roses. In the summer of 2012, I waited for the night for different reasons. I would sit on my couch, waiting for the painkiller to make its slow way through my bloodstream. I would try to fight off the nod out, but I couldn’t. I’d wake up at three in the morning, still on the couch, shoulders and neck aching from having been in the same position for so long. I’d shuffle out to the kitchen, promising myself that it would be one pill less that day; that there would be fewer false nights to wait for. It never worked out that way.

4. “Halo.” You wear guilt / like shackles on your feet / like a halo in reverse. Dave Gahan can make guilt sound like something you’d want: a secret to be shared with a lover, or the small thrill of a lie gotten away with. In a former life, not so long ago, I was a thief, a taker of all things. Sex, drugs, money. As a teenager, listening to this, guilt sounded almost romantic. As an adult, I realized that guilt is jealous; it doesn’t want to let you go, whether you’ve anything to be guilty about or not.

3. “Personal Jesus.” Feeling unknown / and you’re all alone. I love the way that Johnny Cash’s cover of this song takes it away from the pounding synths and the dark smoothness of Gahan’s voice. I want to like the original, but Cash wins me over with his way of speaking/singing it; rough-hewn and sort of pleading. It seems more intimate, somehow. Less a fantasy.

2. “Sweetest Perfection.” I want the real thing / not tokens. I sat on the edge of my bed, unfastening the two buttons at the neck on the back of my dress. I wanted my former lover to do it, but he just sat there, maybe watching the action. I wondered if we were just using each other to assuage that real thing, loneliness. It felt like it. This was a token, some kind of transaction. After we were done, I told him that I went somewhere else during sex. It was neither good nor bad, just away, separate from myself. My body was a token, no longer real.

1. “World in My Eyes.” Nothing more than you can feel now / That’s all there is. I remember being sixteen and listening to this album incessantly. I wanted to be initiated into its mysteries. To listen to it then was to sink into a black pool, over and over, and never mind the drowning.

It’s a pretty rare day, now, when I don’t hear at least one song off of Violator. Depending on my mood, I’ll whisper its words like a mantra, or I’ll think of it as background music, the spell it had on me broken. In the CD liner notes there is a picture of a rose, an almost-x-ray of the rose that adorns the cover. The stem on the cover is broken in a few places; the flower inside is whole. All I ever wanted, all I ever needed.

—Sarah Nichols

#343: Meat Loaf, "Bat Out of Hell" (1977)

Every five or six weeks, I kill a celebrity. It’s usually a former child star or an aging rocker. Almost always a man. They have to be indisputably famous but not too relevant—otherwise people won’t believe it.

So I start celebrity death hoaxes in my free time, so what? I’m an architect, an engineer. I’ve been at it since even before social media. Did you ever hear that Steve from Blues Clues overdosed on heroin? Yep, that one was mine, my first opus, composed in the cafeteria at Rivercrest Middle School.

These days, all it really takes is a tweet, but I like to go the extra mile, screenshotting the CNN homepage and photoshopping in a banner headline: “BREAKING: Macaulay Culkin Dead in Car Accident.” Car accidents and drug overdoses tend to spread the fastest. People don’t even need a link to click on, the image is enough. I’ve whacked Cory from Boy Meets World, Eddie Murphy, the Taco Bell chihuahua. I measure success by the time it takes for the story to get debunked on Snopes. If it doesn’t make it to Snopes at all, I consider it a failure. I rarely fail.

My ex-girlfriend, bless her rancid heart, inspired this most recent hoax. I wrote her a drunken e-mail last night, asking if she wanted to get back together. I told her in boozy earnestness that the flame in my heart had gone out. Her response: “You sound like a character in a Jim Steinman song. Fuck off.”

She establishes dominance by throwing obscure pop culture references my way. Or at least she tries to. And yeah, I had to look it up, but when I realized who she was talking about, I felt no shame. Jim Steinman, the guy who wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” He invented Wagnerian rock: sweeping, raucous songs with mythical characters and karaoke-defying vocals. And we have him to thank for Meat Loaf.

What Jim Steinman did for power ballads, I want to do for celebrity death hoaxes. So why not use the same muse? After crafting and tweeting the screenshot, I log on to one of my many dummy Facebook accounts and create a page: R.I.P. Meat Loaf. “On Tuesday, March 28, 2016, Meat Loaf passed away from a heart attack at the age of 68,” the description reads. “ Like this page in remembrance of one of the top selling artists of all time. Leave your condolences below.” I click “Invite Friends.”

Before you ask: No, I don’t ever feel guilty for toying with the emotions of thousands of strangers. For one, they’re strangers. And two, they’re dumb strangers, dumb enough to accept a friend request from someone they don’t know, dumb enough to believe what they read. It’s not that the story is hard to disprove—a quick Google search will do it—it’s that people don’t even bother to verify. It’s their own damn fault if they’re heartbroken. And another thing: a death hoax is the best thing that could happen to a washed-up famous person. When was the last time you thought about Meat Loaf? The man, I mean.

Twelve minutes after the launch: the posts have started.

“RIP mr. loaf”

“ : ‘ ( “

“I would do n e thing 4 luv”

“I knew he would have a heart attack. All that cocaine and yo-yo weight loss…”

“finally, Meat is resting in paradise at the dashboard light.”

“heartbreaking.”

“First Lemmy, then Bowie, now Meat? 2016 sux.”

“ \m/ “

And so on. I’m reading Meat Loaf’s Wikipedia page when I discover that the dude’s cheated death like five times—surviving a car crash, a shot-put to the head, two broken legs after a stage dive gone wrong, and an emergency landing after a gear in his private jet failed. And oh yeah, he has a heart condition, something called Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome (lucky guess on my part). Yet time and time again, he emerges intact, a bat out of hell indeed. It hits me what a landmark achievement this is, getting people to believe that Meat Loaf actually died this time. Meat Loaf was my Holy Grail, and I didn’t even know it.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend caught me logging into one of my fake Facebook profiles. I told her about my hobby and she flipped out, calling me a loser, a creep, a sociopath. But really, I’m just a storyteller. Does a rumor not have artistic value? Aren’t novelists and playwrights and songwriters lying all the same?

Like a proud parent, I revel in every share and retweet. The story hits Snopes within three hours. The post includes a comment from Meat Loaf’s rep, and a tweet from @RealMeatloaf:

“not dead yet, thx 4 the luv. now that i have your attention: new record out sept 16”

20k likes, 6k retweets. I gotta start charging for this.

“It’s a hoax guys,” someone posts to Facebook, linking to the Snopes article. I delete the tribute page before anyone else can post their relief.

Three hours to Snopes, that’s a new record for me. I take another swig of Jack Daniels and log in to my real account, the one that bares my actual name. No new notifications. None for weeks.

—Susannah Clark

#344: Lou Reed, "Berlin" (1973)

I

Caroline says, “I love you. You know that, don’t you?” She cracks the passenger-side window and flicks out her cigarette. “I do love you, but sometimes love just isn’t enough.”

“I know you love me,” I say. “And I love you, but you’re right, it isn’t enough.”

Caroline and I are at the end of seven years—college sweethearts who later became residents of Oklahoma as I started my graduate career. But now, as we occupy the latter halves of our twenties, and after all those years together, the unit we once were has slowly bifurcated. I want to get married, and she doesn’t; I want kids, she prefers a life without; I’ll be starting my PhD in the fall, committing five more years of my life in this great state, while she has a career and a new job opportunity waiting for her in the District come December. With these last few weeks, Caroline and I are going to make the best of it, enjoy our time together, and when December arrives, I’ll drive her back east and we’ll become intimate strangers because love isn’t enough.

“Here,” she says. “This is the exit.”

We pull into Frontier City, a western-themed amusement park outside of Oklahoma City, just as the gates open. It’s a few days before Halloween and the kids are dressed in costumes. Princesses, superheroes, pirates and ninjas, some ghosts. The park itself is adorned in cheap K-Mart decorations and some of the attraction names have been changed—scribbled over in fake blood—to puns. On the Brain Drain grounds is a makeshift cemetery. An assortment of latex arms and heads burst up through the ground. The mechanical cowboy musicians that entertain and bewilder children and seniors are decorated with cobwebs and rubber guts and organs, with foam skulls and bones resting at their feet. They are now billed as the Rolling Bones.

Caroline and myself spend a few minutes looking at the park map and decide to ride Silver Bullet. The attendant for the rollercoaster is dressed in a werewolf costume, the irony lost on no one. In line I listen to the teenagers in front of us discuss their rollercoaster photo game plan. Billy Bob is going to do this when the rollercoaster passes by the coaster cam, and Mary Sue will do that. I remember doing the same thing when I was their age, coordinating outrageous and humorous poses with my friends as the rollercoaster passed the camera. But we never accomplished our goals. No matter how many times we discussed the plan, we were never ready. When the rollercoaster shot off or took its first plunge, we all reacted with terror, some with delight. We would watch the rollercoaster while in line, know its dips, turns, and screws, but when we were actually in the moment, our plans faltered.
 

II

Caroline says, “Lou Reed is dead.” She slides her phone into her purse and we walk through the turnstiles and onto the rollercoaster platform. We take our seats three cars behind the teenagers. I buckle into my seat and pull the bars down across my lap and then the rollercoaster slowly clinks forward.

As the coaster climbs, ascending to the drop-off, the point of no return, I think of Lou Reed. He was my favorite musician throughout high school and college. Growing up in a conservative blue-collar family of coal miners and truckers in West By God Virginia, I always felt like the outsider. I connected with Reed’s transgressive lyrics and themes. He was my hero. I listened to “I Wanna Be Black,” read Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” and considered myself an American existentialist, much like Reed. His view on American culture and its losers and misfits created a sense of belonging for me.

When I first started dating Caroline, I would sing Reed songs to her. I sang “Caroline Says,” but only once. “Why are you singing a song about an abusive and doomed relationship to me?” Caroline asked. From then on I refrained from Berlin songs, relying instead on tracks from Coney Island Baby: “You’re the kind of person that I’ve been dreaming of. You’re the kind of person that I always wanted to love…”

I would drive over to her house after class in those early days and we would crawl into bed together, becoming a mess of sheets, me singing to her: “You really are a queen...” And then I would leave and she would call me and say, “I can smell you in the sheets still.” I would turn my car around and return to her house and crawl back into bed with her, becoming a mess of sheets again, crooning, “And you, you really are a queen, oh such a queen, my queen…”

But now Reed is gone. I had read about his liver transplant earlier that year and the string of cancelled performances in the months following, all signs of an ailing musician. The truth still hits hard. I wasn’t ready. It seems like a silly thing not to be ready for, a musician I never met.

After exiting Silver Bullet, Caroline and I walk to the booth selling snapshots of the ride. I pull out my phone and read the responses to Reed’s passing on Twitter and Facebook. Caroline looks to the booth and then to me. “You’re fucking ridiculous,” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but then I see. In the photo, everyone on the rollercoaster is screaming or laughing, the teenagers in front of us especially, except me. I look like I’m watching Sarah McLachlan’s SPCA commercial at 60 MPH.
 

III

Caroline says she’s ready to go. We exit the park and return to the car. I listen to music on the ride home, she reads. As we turn off the interstate and pull into Guthrie, still thirty minutes from home, Lou Reed’s “How Do You Think It Feels” comes on the radio. Caroline looks up from her book and laughs. “Look, Lou is communing with you from beyond.”

I chuckle, too, and Caroline returns to her book. After a minute:

“Hey, Caroline?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know Reed’s Berlin was derided by critics when it was first released? That Rolling Stone called the album a disaster? And that thirty years later they had a change of heart, turned around and called Berlin a minor masterpiece? Did you know that?”

“I think you might have told me, once or twice. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it.”

Caroline nods and closes her book. Lou Reed gradually fades out and I reach over and turn off the radio. We sit in silence for the most of the ride back to Stillwater until Caroline turns to me and says, “Dillon?”

“Yes?”

“You know I love you, right?”

—Dillon Hawkins

#345: Talking Heads, "Stop Making Sense" (1984)

A few years after Stop Making Sense was born, I was.

Before that, as my senses started to sharpen, I was thrown around inside my happy mother, dancing and singing to her favorite band, Talking Heads. I came into the world instantly comforted by the sound of David Byrne’s voice, like the coo of another parent. The tickle of sounds produced by Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth must have felt as familiar as the percussion of my mother’s heartbeat—as the strum of breath and laughter.

A few years after I was born, my brother Gabriel was. Though my parents aren’t religious people, he wasn’t named by accident.

Gabriel was born less than a year after the death of my sister—he gave my family the first breath of joy we were able to take in a long time. During his childhood, he made sense of how wheels work by playing with wooden trains; he stared out the window in his car seat, asking how Christmas wreaths were attached to 30-foot light posts; he studied sharks and dove into other obsessions, collecting facts about the world to make sense of how it worked. Though he’s traded trains and sharks for other questions, he’s still making inquiries of order.

The six years I lived before Gabriel was born feel like a life separate from this one. When he was born, we became a new family, with a different order—different members. I think of this when I consider the differences Gabriel and I have in approaching the world—that maybe the only way a six year old could experience the death of a sibling was emotionally—that maybe I’ve never known how to approach anything any other way since. And maybe because Gabriel was born into the shadow of that loss, he worked out another kind of logistics. But as I’ve gotten older, I realize it is more than our experience that makes us move differently through our lives. That Gabriel was born wondering, asking questions and taking every inquiry seriously.

These variations in us have sometimes frustrated me. Growing up, I have wanted straight-forward affirmation and love from him. I have wanted him to be able to see the wooden train and love instinctually before he figured out how it worked, measuring its worth. I have wanted him to experience the loud range of emotions that have made my version of this world appear in technicolor—but those are colors you can’t see, can’t categorize. But mostly: I have just wanted him to love me as much, irrationally and unreasonably, as I love him. Every time I have ever looked at him, I have felt before thought.

Despite the differences in our experience and our nature, Gabriel and I share Talking Heads. Whether we learned to love the music that colored our childhoods or inherited it from our parents, we have this in common.

I often listen to Talking Heads and try to make sense of why it calls to Gabriel. The lyrics, appealing to his love of the ironic, require the investigation so natural to him. And they’re just really good. In our childhood home, we grew up dancing frantically to Talking Heads. As we’ve gotten older, dancing has become the most natural expression of love. Physically, he is not far off from David Byrne—their long, bony limbs look jointless when they dance—like they’re filled with water. And though when we grab each other by the elbows and jump, we are often singing the lyrics to “Psycho Killer” or “Life During Wartime” to each other, this is our sibling love language.

When I’m not around him, which is most of the time now, I listen to his favorite Talking Heads songs, searching for some answers in the lines or some kind of Morse Code message in the drum beat. Among my brother’s favorites is “Burning Down the House”—one of his favorite lyrics: “dreams walking in broad daylight.” I play out different ideas of what that may mean to him. Maybe a spotlight on the unconscious? Maybe materialized desires, or fears? I have spent a lot of time trying to extract his emotional life from such few words.

Another of his favorites—my favorite—is “This Must Be the Place.” I imagine him listening to it in his dorm room as I listen to it in my apartment 300 miles away. Us both singing along to the opening line: Home is where I want to be.

I don’t mean to say that my brother doesn’t experience emotion—that is grossly inaccurate. And I also don’t mean that I don’t ask questions and expect to spend my life in wonderment, as evident here. I think it’s just that I want to see logic move aside from time to time. And I do: when we dance to Talking Heads, I do. I am just greedy for his happiness—and to bear witness to it.

On this day, March 21, Gabriel was born. I wonder often if he realizes that he saved us on that day twenty-one years ago. When my mother went into labor, my grandparents picked me up from my kindergarten classroom. I remember running down the hall of my elementary school in light-up tennis shoes to meet him. As vivid as a six year old’s imagination is, he was, and is, so much better than I could have imagined.

I picture him now, with the quiver of “This Must Be the Place” in his earbuds, walking from one philosophy class to the next, where he works to make sense of this world he was born into. I wonder if he realizes that he is still saving us, but I hope he doesn’t preoccupy himself with that.

In less than a week, we’ll both be heading home to celebrate his birthday. At some point, our parents will put on Stop Making Sense. We’ll turn it up so loud that we won’t even be able to hear each other singing: “Love me ‘til my heart stops, love me ‘til I’m dead!” We’ll only break when at the end of each song, the crowd cheers.

—Elise Burke

#346: De La Soul, "3 Feet High and Rising" (1989)

Maybe the best way to consider De La Soul’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, is to skip past it entirely, to their sophomore effort, De La Soul Is Dead. While 3 Feet High is a fun, ambitious intro to the group’s bright, mindful style, De La Soul Is Dead—released just two years later—works double-time to burn that all to ashes. Within the first few minutes, the group (a) announces its death, (b) trashes both Vanilla Ice and children, then (c) moves headlong into a low-bass track about the emptiness of success. It’s an incredible album: a loose-ended, pissed off kind of brilliance; label-forced image rebellion as commercial art. Every ultra-positive track on 3 Feet High finds its perfect devil’s advocate here. Oh, you liked “Me, Myself & I?” Here’s a new track about an abused child who shoots Santa Claus with a hand cannon. Oh, you like how warm and sweet “Eye Know” is? Cool, here’s a track about how getting what we always wanted sort of means we’ll never have an authentic relationship again. As a whole, the album amounts to a very real, existential distress call. Everyone! We made it! And it is fucking awful!

If you grew up on early 90s hip-hop like me, it might be tempting to call what happened to De La Soul between their first and second albums a dark turn, or the moment the founders of hip-hop’s neo-hippie D.A.I.S.Y. age broke for good, and turned cynical. The rationale makes sense. 3 Feet High is, on its face, a brash force for good. It samples Schoolhouse Rock! and Hall & Oates and Steely Dan. The group prefaces nearly everything with their vibrant brand (“Da La heaven,” “De La style,” “De La orgee”). They call sex “buddy.” There are skits. A whole track is dedicated to listing people who need a haircut. One of the group’s emcees named himself “yogurt” spelled backwards.

And yet, for all of that unspoiled joy, 3 Feet High is just as cynical as De La Soul Is Dead or any other of the wonderfully bitter, hilarious albums they released over the next two decades, projects that increasingly distrusted the rap industry, their place in it, and sometimes, the point of hip-hop at all. The part of cynicism 3 Feet High speaks to, though, is the part non-cynics never talk about, something that broadcasts to most ears with the unheard frequency of a dog whistle.

But not for me. I hear it. I’ve been hearing it clearly my whole life.

*

“Do not be cynical,” was how Conan O’Brien closed out his six-month run as host of The Tonight Show in 2010. “I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” I get what he was going for: O’Brien’s run on that show ended in an ugly, public way, sabotaged by a network that had supported him for over a decade, and he wanted to leave on a note of defiant resilience. And yet, as a lifelong, often reluctant cynic, I winced. Not because Conan had attacked my philosophy, but because what he’d sent out to the world at that moment, tears welled, was the misguided message that cynicism, above all things, is a choice.

Cynicism tends to read as patently simple (everything = bullshit), an assessment rivaled only by the simplicity with which it’s often regarded (cynics = assholes). At worst, non-cynics tend to avoid us at all costs. At best, we become a social afterthought; a depersonalized mascot to our social groups. The embodied safety of the known quantity. I’ve been called “Eeyore” and “Male Daria.” I’ve been told with scorn that I have “poisonous thinking,” or to “keep it pos,” or to do yoga. Even the most well-meaning people seem to approach my cynicism as a fundamental programming error. “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” a friend asked recently, and when I said no—because of course I didn’t, because holy hell, why would I volunteer to build myself an opportunity for certain failure and heartbreak—she said “I thought you might say that,” then tried to change my thinking, proposing simple, executable resolutions, like “I will read two books and learn a new word.”

I don't know the origins of my cynicism. It could root from something as formative as my upbringing in a Midwestern mill town turned obsolete by American industry, or from something as pissy and shallow as how I thought I loved someone as a teen and she didn’t love me back (boo hoo). Either way, it’s a part of my makeup, which I was lucky with, at first. I came of age as a cynic during a time where I could bark it out at the world and the culture would bark it right back at me. There was De La Soul, yes, but also Janeane Garofalo, and Marc Maron, and the Dead Milkmen. My generation’s avatar appeared on a Rolling Stone cover wearing a T-shirt that said CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK.

But my cynicism has aged, and badly. Now in my late thirties, I have a catalogue of utter social failures, where my innate distrust and tendency toward a certain dourness has been made as obsolete as the dead town I hail from, and the ghosts of those failures haunt. One moment among many: after my wedding ten years ago—an event my wife, also a cynic, dreaded as much as I did—I sat with a very cool, rosy coworker, sharing my photos from that day. This is us at City Hall, because fuck a church wedding, I said. Here are my relatives, who almost seem to want to be there. I liked my coworker, and was truly excited to show her all of this. Our wedding was fantastic and surprising in rich ways neither my wife nor I were prepared for, sparking something new and alive inside us that we were only just beginning to understand. But how could I explain any of that without first showing how achingly low our expectations were? What we feared the most?

“You’re awful,” my coworker said, before I could get any further.

Her eyes were hard, face flushed.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked me, then never spoke to me again.

Who, exactly, would choose to have those kinds of interactions?

*

So I’ve come to understand my cynicism as less of a doomed prism through which I view the world, and more of a perpetual, internal conflict where blasts of bright hope meet a wall of doubt, and lose big. But there are rare times, like my wedding, when that hope wins, which is where 3 Feet High and Rising comes in.

The album’s charm lies in its wild joy, but also in its complete unsustainability. Now looking back at 3 Feet High, it’s easy to see that De La Soul’s spirit was meant to break, which it did. The album was produced during an era in hip-hop where sampling was a free-for-all (see also: the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique), and it became a warning shot of deep caution to hip-hop artists of the end of that era as well. But it wasn’t the Steely Dan or the Hall & Oates samples that did De La Soul in. Instead, it was a tiny, twelve-second sample of the Turtles’ “You Showed Me,” that appeared fleetingly on “Transmitting Live From Mars,” a French-spoken, minute-long interlude of utter silliness on 3 Feet High that, by 1991—just months after the release of De La Soul Is Dead—ended up costing the group close to two million dollars in copyright violations.

One might understand the impulse, then, to burn everything to ashes.

But 3 Feet High is still there. That untamed joy exists. I can download it, carry it with me, access it whenever I want, which is what I think of often when my expired sensibilities tend to alienate non-cynics, or when I can’t figure out a way to communicate that beneath the mountain of distrust and fear I’ve been cast with, there is something warm and renewable and dumbly hopeful that's hard to show—a longing almost, to return to an unbroken moment of goodness and purity that I fear might not have ever existed in the first place. But with 3 Feet High, it does. It’s proof of the truer underside of cynicism, evidence that the outlook I’ve been shouldered with is built of more layers than many may think. The album’s existence is a strong argument for the theory that every expression of cynicism is, at its heart, a desperate, unending callback.

Maybe that’s the case with De La Soul, too. In 2014, after twenty-plus albums and other projects that explored cynicism as an art, they gave it all away to anyone who wanted it, no charge. Then, in 2015 they announced a new, crowd-funded project laced with the kind of raw ambition and bigness that 3 Feet High trafficked in, with no small measure of the caution, wariness, and reactionary distrust that came in their work after. “For the first time, we’re going to sample ourselves,” they announced, then invited heaps of musicians in for long studio sessions designed to produce an unending archive of original sounds for De La Soul to wade in, chop up, and make their own for new, independent efforts, bound by almost nothing.

In other words: They’ve found a pathway, maybe, to get back to something pure again.

It’s an experiment in music, but also in philosophy: a massive act of fully realized cynicism, both sides of it working above-ground, and in concert. I’m watching it all closely, and having so much fun with what might happen. I’m aching to know the results, but at the same time I know now, as a weathered vet of this racket, that this excitement and uncertainty is the best part of the hand I’m dealt. In that sense what De La Soul is making now is a tiny experiment for me and my cynicism as well—something workable, not unlike the types of New Year’s resolutions my friend proposed. Nothing about what De La Soul is doing right now is bullshit, and I’m enjoying the wide possibility of sitting with these full, open moments, however small, when none of the tiny joy I'm feeling can find a way, yet, to be forever unmade.

—Mike Scalise

#347: Pink Floyd, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1967)

The first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I drove to the store, bought a pack of smokes. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I bought a pack of Camels and drove down to the river. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I tried not to cry until I hung up the phone. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was to go down to the river and look up at the sky, at the stars, and I remembered, at first, not the photo you once took of Sagittarius, but the picture that accompanied it, the picture of the beach at night, the camera set on a tripod and tilted back to see the sky, the empty chair beside it—that empty chair. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: how? No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: why?

*

This is an essay about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Or maybe this is a short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is not an essay or short story about the night that my parents called me on the phone to tell me you were gone. This is not an essay or short story about how the next morning I woke up to the news that you had killed yourself. This is also not an essay or short story about how later that week, I heard that you had died from an accidental drug overdose, nor will this be an essay or short story about how, later still, that same week, a mutual friend informed me he’d heard something else, something, something hotel, something, something, unknown. This will also not be an essay or short story about how sometimes I still Google your name, the name of the city in which you died, and “suicide,” or “murder,” or “death,” or “investigation,” not because I need to know what happened, but because I can’t stand not knowing. No, this is an essay or short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The album begins with a song about space. About planets and moons and stars. You were into Astrophotography. When I started writing this essay or short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, how could I not think of you?

*

When visiting your mother in Costa Rica, you went to the beach at night. Maybe there are answers in that. You took a tripod, a camera, a chair. Probably some other things. You said you took three trips over two nights, spent ten-plus hours. All between sunset and sunrise. You took a picture of the stars and posted it on Facebook. You said that the photo was of the center of the Milky Way, the constellation Sagittarius. You explained that, deep inside, there is an astronomical radio source called Sagittarius A*, which is believed by many to be a supermassive black hole around which our solar system revolves. Lately, I’ve been thinking that we all know a thing or two about how it feels to revolve around supermassive black holes. Something tells me you knew, too.

*

When I listen to “Chapter 24,” on Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, I think about you. The song is about mysticism, is about the I Ching. Because you are gone, I think maybe there are answers here. There is something in the song about return, but that something is inscrutable. Syd Barrett sings, “A moment is accomplished in six stages / And the seventh brings return.” What does return mean? It doesn’t mean return from the grave. I know that. But in the song, the idea of return feels comforting, as if speaking of some kind of victory, or a return to normalcy perhaps. I begin reading about the I Ching, its twenty-fourth chapter, segment, section, whatever. That’s how little I know about mysticism and religion—I don’t even know what to call it. I learn that the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching is known as “Fu,” or, in English, “Return.” Its symbol, or hexagram, or whatever looks like this:

I don’t know what any of this means. I keep reading and find this line from the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, one of the versions that Barrett’s lyrics are said to most closely resemble. Parts of Wilhelm’s text look like poems. Other parts look like prose. Here is the part from Wilhelm’s translation of the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching that looks like a poem:

RETURN. Success.
Going out and coming in without error.
Friends come without blame.
To and fro goes the way.
On the seventh day comes return.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

Here is an excerpt from the part that looks like prose: “After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.” He also writes, “…the winter solstice, with which the decline of the year begins, comes in the seventh month after the summer solstice; so too sunrise comes in the seventh double hour after sunset . . . In this way the state of rest gives place to movement.” Something about the return of a banished light and the lengths of days, sunsets and sunrises. I still don’t know what any of this means.

*

I can’t help but think that Piper at the Gates of Dawn is an album obsessed with the unfathomable, with impossible mysteries, with the inscrutable. Barrett’s songs, here, lean wildly into the unknown, the uncertain, the beyond. To myths and folktales and fantasy. Listening to these songs, I’m not surprised at the trajectory of Barrett’s life, at his odd behavior in Pink Floyd that led to his mental breakdown and dismissal from the band, at his becoming a bald recluse who spent his days painting and gardening in Cambridge, at his quiet death in 2006. That is the life one expects from a man whose songs so desperately were trying to understand the world around him through mysticism, mystery, fantasy. I can’t help but think that the truth of your demise is unfathomable, an impossible mystery, inscrutable. Unlike Syd Barrett, I can’t look at the arc of your life and make sense of suicide, or a drug overdose, or something, something, hotel, something, something, unknown. I will never know why you’re gone. I will never know how you left.

*

The more I look at the name of the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching, the more it stops looking like “Fu,” and begins looking like “F-U.” Maybe this is because I find everything that I’m reading difficult, vague, frustrating. Or maybe I’m just lashing out.

*

Here are the things I know: There are no answers to be found in the I Ching; There are no answers to be found in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found in writing an essay about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found in writing a short story about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found from your family; There are no answers to be found from your friends; Years after he left Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett had no hair; You started losing your hair when you were young, but you were nothing at all like Syd Barrett, I don’t think, but then, I never met Syd Barrett; The I Ching says, I think, that some sort of renewal or rebirth occurs just after the winter solstice; You were born three days after the winter solstice in 1978—I think that means something, but it probably doesn’t; You are the powerful light that has been banished but you will not return.

*

In the message you sent me after your trip to Costa Rica, you told me you were seeing a psychologist. You told me that you didn’t want to kill yourself because it would hurt too many people, but that you sometimes didn’t want to exist anymore. You said you were working on it, though, that things were looking up. I trusted you.

*

There’s one more thing I know: flipped upside down, Hexagram 24 looks like one of the Recognizer ships from Tron. This seems silly, I know, but it’s not. We used to talk about Tron. You once told me that Tron was one of the things that made you interested in computers, which became your life’s work. I remember visiting you in the computer lab when we were undergraduates. You showed me one of your animations in which a man fought with a parking meter. The parking meter won.

*

The night you took pictures on the beach in Costa Rica was in early June. You posted the pictures on June 24. Maybe you were on the beach the two nights before that? June 22 and 23. The 2015 summer solstice in Costa Rica was June 21. If Pink Floyd and the I Ching say that the winter solstice marks the end and beginning of one cycle, does the same hold true for the summer? I picture you under the stars, in awe of the infinite night sky, and maybe that was the beginning of something that couldn’t be stopped. I wonder, did you know, then, that you’d be gone before the next solstice?

*

But none of that matters. None of these things are connected. I know that. But where else am I going to find an answer? The first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: how? The first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: why?

*

I look at the upside down Recognizer ship from Tron, or the right side up Hexagram 24 from the I Ching—whichever, they’re the same. It speaks to me, says “F-U.” Sometimes, now, I scroll down your Facebook wall because it’s the closest I can come to seeing you. When I approach June, I hold my breath, wait for your picture of the Milky Way, of Sagittarius, of Sagittarius A* to slide up my screen. I wait for the tripod and the empty chair and remember what it feels like to be orbiting around a supermassive black hole.

—James Brubaker