#288: X, "Los Angeles" (1980)

X's Los Angeles is film noir poetry describing the underbelly of the Beautiful Great Dream City of the West Coast. The album shows us the dark underbelly is the Beautiful Great Dream City. That it’s all underbelly actually. Los Angeles is a landscape that remains beautiful but indelibly marked with the dark sordid textures of skid row violence, unspeakable cruelty full of tortured souls caught in the current of life reeling past them and through them at the same time. Here we find the city of Los Angeles as the fantasy temptress and destroyer of dreams where everything comes at a cost that can’t be measured in dollars.

As a kid, Los Angeles is a dream to me. I am a million miles from anywhere resembling life as it ought to be. This small town rural America hole I am living in is the polar opposite of where I think I want to be. There is a city a mere 70 miles away, but that requires money, a car, a license. Those might as well be a private jet and pilot. I am all adolescent existential crisis. X’s Los Angeles is a dark oasis, like the mythical city of Cibola built on sin, vice, release, and redemption. I am merely wandering my current sociocultural desert until I can descend unto my real people. Thus finds 14-year-old me encountering the darkest record I have ever heard. There are a ton of these stories about music, youth, awakening, and discovery. This one is mine. There are a million squared songs about love and relationships with no end in sight. They keep coming because we never really find a full, complete understanding of the subject that embodies, drives, and haunts us. Thus it is with these personal stories of art and redemption. That’s what all punk rock is eventually: redemption. Redemption from an oppressive state of being. Redemption from stifling burdensome places. Redemption of self. Redemption of others. Even at its angriest, bleakest, and most hopeless, Punk rock is a belief that somewhere, some way there is something more, something better. Punk rock is the hope that something is worth screaming about, while demanding its instantaneous manifestation.

In one furious sweep of musical slate, X wiped away the loud angry punk rock standard spiel with a musical vocabulary that blended more influences than anything before it. Los Angeles melds the bleakness of the Velvet Underground with the ferocious power of the Stooges, the pure  rebellion of Sun rockabilly and the literary sensibilities of Carver and Bukowski. It is literate, contemplative, and observant in an era of punk when almost nothing else was. It redefines the expectations and possibilities of punk. It raises the bar for an entire genre of rock music.

John Doe and Exene Cervenka were emigres to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a collection of observations, experiences, and feelings of the foreigner in a new land that is at once alien, overwhelming, and exciting, enhanced by the discovery and catharsis of the power, possibility, and freedom of punk rock. It is, at turns, dark impulses or redemptive cleansing framed in beauty, fear, excitement, confusion. They were children in a really vicious playground and they reflected that outwardly on this album.

I came to this album a high school punk rocker in a tiny East Texas town when punk rock barely existed outside of big cities on the coasts. Landing squarely in the heart of these songs, they mirrored all the bleakness and confusion of my hyper-adolescent angst and anxiety. Unable to see a road out, no hope on the horizon, I existed in that peculiar teen mental state of dread filled with irrational insanity, where how things are is a permanent unchanging state. Los Angeles was Promethean. I saw a dark disturbing place that was terrifying, exciting, fascinating, ugly. It was full of thrills, dangers, and sexual tension. The Los Angeles of the record was like a punk rock Anti-Oz and I wanted to follow its brick road to this place far away from rednecks, jocks, tiny minds, and tiny souls. If the darkness in this crazy previously unimagined world was as inevitable as the oppression of home then let’s at least add the excitement of a world where something interesting happened.

From the opening track of “Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not” to the conclusion of “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” Los Angeles is a musical equivalent to Bosch’s “Garden Of Earthly Delights.” It all comes down to Sin and Redemption. Los Angeles is a glittering, unflinching look at the worst aspects of the Great West Coast Dream City that always carries with it the hope. It tells us that even though things are terrible, they can be better, showing that the ugly and the beautiful are inexorably intertwined and parasitic in nature. That was a lot to take in as a kid. Like most kids, I took what I wanted and ignored the rest. I’ve carried this album with me in one form or another for the better part of three decades. Its power and beauty have only increased for me over the years. What it has meant to me has varied, morphed, and transcended. It remains through all of that a friend, a yardstick, and a touchstone.

—Bosco Farr

#289: The Kinks, "Something Else by the Kinks" (1967)

There’s this paint huffer named Caldwell who lives in an empty shack in that crap neighborhood behind the mall. Fucking Jimmy likes to visit him and ask him questions like he’s an oracle. That’s another thing about Jimmy—his tendency to romanticize garbageheads like Caldwell. He’s sure they’re the pure ones, that they know shit the rest of us don’t know. Caldwell knows how to get high on acetone paint and that’s something I don’t know how to do, but that’s as far as his special knowledge goes, if you ask me.

I made Jimmy promise we’d never huff paint and he agreed. You’d have to be completely wacked.

“Never,” I said.

“Right-o,” he said.

Last time we visited him, Caldwell was sitting in the dark in that abandoned house with a pile of his own poo about a foot away from him and the paper label from the spray paint can stuck to his chest. Upside down. Krylon Gold Metallic. And it’s so crazy hanging out with Caldwell that the fact that the label is upside down becomes the thing I shake my head over. Like in sci-fi movies where you call bullshit on a character eating a fresh apple in his space pod, meanwhile the premise involving mind-reading aliens, time warps, and sentient, resentful planets is all cool with you.

Caldwell’s just one of Jimmy’s pet losers. There’s also this Vietnam vet who hangs out on the bench in front of the library. He has this riff about how Revelations is talking about the suburbs, the suburbs, man, how the suburbs are the end of it all, people in boxes, mass conformity, and maybe he’s right, but I don’t think you have to be Mr. Observant to come up with that. Just listen to Something Else by the Kinks. They hit it square on the head a long time ago with no biblical shenanigans and they used IRONY. Neighborhoods! Man, the Kinks know from neighborhoods. “Waterloo Sunset”? “Afternoon Tea”? “Situation Vacant”? They know.

I found a CD of Something Else at a garage sale and I was drawn to the title. Something Else. Like, there’s all the usual stuff over there and then here’s us, over here. The Kinks—we’re something else. Me, I’m like that, too, something else, and the CD was 75 cents, and the lettering was kind of green and black and psychedelic, so what the hell? I bought it. That’s one good thing I forgot to mention about Caldwell the Idiot—he’s got a pretty decent old boom box in that derelict house that he plays by running an extension cord to the car wash next door. Not all the time, but when the manager’s not on duty. I grew up listening to country music and whatever’s on the radio, that sort of high-note, autotuned babybaby stuff, so I never heard anything like the Kinks. It’s what I guess people mean by rock and roll. Like, in the pure sense, like as an actual specific kind of music and not just something you say, like, “That rocks!” when you see a cool clip on YouTube or whatever. And I like it. I like rock and roll. It’s smart, unlike Jimmy and Caldwell, and it’s got attitude, but it’s also got heart.

So I figure if I’m going to be hanging out in this sty, I may as well have some good tunes, so I bring Something Else and I start to play it. The first song, “David Watts,” has me thinking, yeah, David Watts sounds like a tool, one of those captain-of-the-football-team douchebags like Jimmy says he used to be before, but, here’s the thing, David Watts actually sounds less pathetic than the narrator of that song, who just wants to be like him and can’t. And then what’s cool and what makes me use the word IRONY, which is an awesome word, is that you can tell the Kinks know their narrator is a loser, even though they’re singing in his voice. Like, how do they make it so I can I tell? They just do. It’s got layers, man. THAT’s rad, but I know better than to try to bring any of it to the attention to Jimmy or Caldwell.

I’ve found a window ledge that’s open and lets fresh air in that smells like soap and car wax from the car wash next door, which can be kind of a nice smell. The ledge is less gross than the rest of the place, so that’s where I sit. White paint chips that are probably lead paint get all over the butt of my jeans, but it’s nicey-nice compared to what’s on the floor—spray paint empties, fast food empties, an ashtray packed like a mass grave, and poo. Human excrement, yeah. Jimmy and Caldwell are crouched there, going back and forth like they’re princes of industry negotiating big deals instead of a couple of drug addicts in Lawton, Oklahoma, settling on a price for some shitty-looking weed.

“Share it with him,” I tell Jimmy, reaching over and toeing his skinny back with my cowboy boots. “Share it with him and he’ll let you pay whatever.”

Jimmy looks over his shoulder at me and nods and gives me a sweet smile for a second. Dammit, that’s the thing. Just when I think it’s all badness forever. Fucking Jimmy—I love the guy. We met in a treatment center a few months ago.

So of course Caldwell gets high with us even though weed is like water to him compared to huffing paint, which he goes on and on about. High for four hours! Intense psychedelics! Then he clues in to the music. The CD is playing “No Return,” which is a really sad song. Ray Davies sings, If I could see just how lonely my life would be if you passed me by. That line is how I feel about Jimmy, which I tell myself is why I keep going on this crazy journey we’re on. Voyage to the underworld, he says. Drug tourists, he says. We’ll jump out just in time! But I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy. Look at poor Caldwell. I wonder who he used to be? I can’t imagine. The song is saying, “And there is no return.”

“Sure there is,” Jimmy says. He’s such an optimist, is Jimmy.

“Bossa nova,” Caldwell says from somewhere deep in his chest. Caldwell looks like a skeleton in filthy jeans and a T-shirt that says “Great Plains Coliseum STAFF” on it. He’s got wispy blond hair like a giant, scary baby, and blue eyes that water all the time. He’s barefooted this visit because he sold his shoes for some all-weather deck paint that he huffed already as we can see by the redwood color that’s all over his mouth and nose, with spray going up practically to his eyes. “That’s a cool bossa nova,” he says, pointing at the boom box.

“Boss of what?” I say.

“That kind of beat,” he says, bobbing his head. “That’s what you call it.”

His face crinkles around his eyes and the rust-colored spatters from the deck paint crack like the surface of an icy pond.

I’m sort of amazed. “Do you know about music, Caldwell?”

Caldwell nods. He points at his shirt. “I was a roadie for twenty years,” he says.

“A roadie?  Did you ever meet any famous people?”

“Nope,” Caldwell says. “I set up the drum sets.”

Then Jimmy says, “Hey, wait a minute, we got you something,” and runs out to my car. He comes back with a can of silver spray paint.

“What are you doing?” I say, standing up from the window ledge. “Where did you get that?”

“Let’s let the pro show us how it’s done,” he says. He’s giving me a smile, but it’s not sweet. Fucking Jimmy.

“Not me,” I say. “No way.”

So I turn around and stick one leg out the window and squeeze my body out so I’m straddling the windowsill with my head and shoulders outside. The Kinks are singing “Situation Vacant.”

Then he had to leave the apartment / And sought a less plush residence. Tell me about it.

I smell the paint and my lungs burn. Over at the car wash, I watch a big-bellied guy wearing a John Deere ball cap pull in with his brand-new, white F-150 and get out to vacuum it. Dashboard cross, hunting rack, head lamps—everything on the car looks like money to me, something you could steal and sell. He’s bought one of those sprays that gives you a new car smell and I lean out far enough to get away from the spray paint smell and I smell it, the illusion of newness. I imagine his driveway and the house he lives in, just like all the other houses on his block. What a loser, I think.

Behind me, Jimmy’s doing it, he’s huffing. Then he’s high, whooping and hollering, and he comes over to me and hugs me around the hips and pulls me through the window. I turn and look at him, and there’s his sweet smile, but it’s covered in silver now, silver all around his mouth and nose and the Kinks are playing “Death of a Clown” and that’s what Jimmy looks like—a clown, or a spaceman, somebody’s child, my love, a dead man, or something—what is it? Something else.

—Constance Squires

#290: Al Green, "Call Me" (1973)

So I’m reading John Landau’s 1973 Rolling Stone review of Call Me, and he starts going on about how Al Green’s voice is like some untamed, wily thing threatening to break loose:

Because the singer disdains most forms of discipline, preferring to let his voice wander into every nook and cranny of the modest melodies he writes, turning phrases inside out, and wreaking havoc with the vocal structure in general, he requires the leveling force of a steady band playing tight, clean arrangements.

With all due respect to Landau as a critic and to all of his work with The Boss, I can’t figure out what the hell this cat is talking about. Al’s voice is a lot of things—warm, comforting, profoundly soulful—but undisciplined? And what does he mean by “wreaking havoc”? What sacred structure did Al’s ever-so-sweet falsetto render unto ruin? When did the gentle timbre of his precise annunciation ever descend into chaos and desolation? Mr. Landau, you ain’t never heard nothing like havoc on an Al Green record. Nah man. You must’ve gotten him mixed up with somebody else.

Near as I can tell, Al, Willie, and the rest of the boys just figured out that good soul music doesn’t always need to swelter. Sometimes you can just let the groove simmer low and slow, like the way the organ slides in on that first verse of “Call Me”—like a lover sliding into bed and grabbing you tight around the belly. And when Al hits that note about two and half minutes in, then lets it just fade away like a sunset….That ain’t nobody’s havoc; that’s some Grandmaster-level soul shit right there.

I think this Landau cat doesn’t really understand how folks listen to Al Green. See, when I need that cry-my-heart-out-longing-for-my-woman-sound, I put that Otis on. When I got that funny feeling, you know, something almost like a hopeful kind of heartache, I reach for that Sam Cooke. When I need to get these tears out, Donny Hathaway makes the song cry. And Marvin, well you know Marvin. That man could sing the secrets right out of your soul. But I always felt like Al had this other thing going on, kind of quiet, kind of like grace. Yeah, grace. Grace like the drink at last call before you go back out into the lonely cold of a winter’s night, or grace like mama and daddy dancing close in the middle of the kitchen on Saturday morning while the eggs and toast burn. That’s what I hear when I put on Call Me: someone singing like he knows how badly we need grace just to get through the day.

Landau wasn’t all wrong, though. Al does crawl all up inside those melodies, bending the pitch to his will and finding ways to make even the simplest sentiments feel newly rich. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” should be the corniest song ever, but he takes that whole sad Hank Williams affair and turns it into an eloquent lament we can feel in our bones. But that was always one of his greatest gifts: he could take a line that would collapse in on itself if sung by anybody else and make it sound like the truest words someone ever spoke. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when Al sings, I always believe him. I believe he means every note. I believe he wants to make us believe too. And I could be wrong, but it seems like we still all desperately need to believe—as much as we did in 1973—that we can be healed.

It’s been harder to write this than I expected. Not because Call Me has lost any of its compassionate gracefulness with age, but because it’s been hard to reconcile the record’s care and restraint with all the rage steadily surrounding us. I’ve had trouble trying to hear its subtlety over so much shouting, so much weeping, and so many bullets. I want to say something hopeful like “Love always speaks louder than fear or hate,” but there are too many bodies in the street for me to really believe that. As good a record as Call Me is, it cannot breathe life into the dead. What it can do is remind us of how good real and true togetherness feels. It can give us just enough healing to go face the horror again tomorrow. For at least a little while, it can remind us that things can be different if we want them to be.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for all the supposed connectedness we have at our fingertips, it often feels as if I’ve never been more alone. A text is not a hug. A “like” is not love. Tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram posts, and Snapchats are not intimacy no matter how magical their mimicry of it. So as much as I appreciate your reading this, here’s what we ought to do instead: Call on me and I will call on you. Let us drink and dance together in the middle of the kitchen like mama and daddy did. Even if they didn’t, even if that image is as much a fantasy as our online, make-believe selves, let us move our hips and shake our asses until we make it so. Let us drink from each other like it’s last call and there’s a storm outside—because there is. Let all of that wrath be swallowed in the embrace of warm, wet lips. Let us sit, breathe each other in real deep, and whisper Al’s incantation: “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).”

—Mikal Gaines

#291: Talking Heads, "Talking Heads: 77" (1977)

The girls in the dorm said Cheryl could do magic. Not like scarf tricks or a rabbit from an old top hat—she could read your palm or tarot, silence an enemy, mix you a perfume to wear on your left wrist that would lure your crush close. Her side of the room was decorated with red string lights and leopard print, bottles and oils, spices lined neatly on a shelf above her bed, a suitcase record player on a small stand near her desk.

The magic was instinct, she told them. Not from a book.

When her mouse of a roommate went to study at the library, she put the Talking Heads on, 77, just loud enough to hear it if you came to her door. She was open for business. The music is the magic, she told them. Melody is ritual. If the spell was complicated, she might play a song a few times; "Don't Worry About the Government" before a worrisome test, "The Book I Read" for a love spell, "Psycho Killer" when a mean girl with straight hair and slipper-pink nails taunted you across the dining hall.

Services were by trade, by trust—a bag of crisps and candy left quietly hanging on her doorknob, a neck massage during finals week. If she carved your ex's name into an onion and buried it underneath his window by a waning moon, you were expected to do the laundry she left outside your door the next morning without complaint.

*

Becky wanted a love spell. There was a boy in her math class, Ryan, who had an Indian tan and strong arms and wild eyes who smiled at her sometimes, but not enough.

Cheryl warned her that love spells were potent, not to be fucked with, best to use as a last resort when he just wouldn’t make that final move. Love spells are more powerful than anything, she said. They cannot be broken. Make sure this is what you want, that you know him well enough to cast this. But Becky begged, and she relented. The spell was cast, his name carved in a slim red candle dressed with rose oil. Becky burned it in her window for seven nights, letting the smoke drift out in a thin whisper. She stared at him in class. Each day he smiled a little bit more.

And on the eighth day, when the candle was nothing but a small stub buried in the forest at dawn, he asked her out. She left a gift card taped to Cheryl's door.

There were flowers and love songs played on a guitar. Champagne on a one-month anniversary, declarations of love every minute of every day. Becky moved into his apartment, coming back to the dorm only to get clothes and say hi. She stopped sitting with them at dinner. The girls in the dorm hardly saw her at all.

But Ryan loved her too much, grew possessive, then violent. He drank hard at parties and shook her when she begged him to call a cab. Checked her phone, demanded to know why she was late coming back from class, told her she didn't need to go to class at all. Brought his father's gun back after Thanksgiving, threatened to kill both of them if she ever tried to leave him. She fled while he was asleep, hid in her old room, refused to come out for class. The girls told her to go to the cops, but she couldn't. He would kill her. No one would believe her anyway.

But a love spell could be broken, right? She pleaded with Cheryl. I warned you, she chided. Love spells are not to be wasted on fools. But she agreed to help. There would be no charge this time.

*

Becky needed a banishing spell. Something strong to keep him away for good. Cheryl played "Psycho Killer" backwards and handed her a vial without a label. Something sweet, she promised. To restore his sweet temperament. Becky poured it into the electric blue backwash he carried to lacrosse practice and sent him out with a kiss, a silent prayer that Cheryl's promise would take action quickly. She didn't have eight days anymore. She wasn't sure she had eight hours.

He collapsed on the field. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Antifreeze, Cheryl said without a smile when Becky told her what happened. Sometimes magic isn't enough.

—Libby Cudmore

#292: Bob Dylan & the Band, "The Basement Tapes" (1975)

Tell the truth. You get tired. Once you did it like that, now you do it like this. If you can bear to do it at all. Maybe you never really heard what you thought. Maybe you’re only here because you forgot how to be anywhere.

This is when you get in a motorcycle accident.

Think about the legend. The one where your body’s brought low but your spirit abides. That kind of thing. Muck it up with the usual bunting. Rivers and bayonets. Foundlings and fire.

Practice silence. They’re going to say you’re burned, disfigured, dying. About at least that last bit, they’ll be right. They know. That’s the way it is. Mrs. Augustus is tired too, and she’s been dying longer than you.

Shelter in the past. Say things like, The old songs. Say it often. At parties. To people giving you the wooly eye trying to find your disfigurement. The old songs. You hear the old songs. Sort of croak it like, so they get the idea.

The idea is that you hear the old songs.

Blame it on the kennel master if you want to play dead. No one will question you if it sounds like a metaphor for war or something. Nobody’s going to accept that you’re turning your back on the endless road. Which is to say: have another kid.

Ah, butterfuck. That made it worse. This damned world. Even death can’t hold it still. You’ve already been the future, and you didn’t like what you made of it.

Ask the mirrors. Give yourself the wooly eye. Say you believe in the wisdom of reflection. The moon’s teeth are like a mirror. You probably said something like that once. Seems like your kind of thing.

You know this.

If someone asked you to name the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, you’d answer with a joke.

It might be the only truth you practice, and it makes a man a liar. You found the formula. It’s all punchline. It’s you and it’s of you. Sometimes it’s Canadians. That’ll happen. Canadians will happen.

What do they know of fighting?

What do you?

The fight is held in bad hands, over bad bodies. The doctor won’t say it, but the mirrors might. Something about knaves at the crossroads. You can’t remember endings because you’ve never known one, so laugh into the wind.

Let’s calm down, Commodore.

God can’t shake a hand without breaking the bones. What does He know of bodies? The definition of Heaven is being without one, but your first memory was hearing a horse’s leg crack. You said that once and now you’re married to that truth.

Never go home.

Hang out underground. But in a normal way. You’re not dying. You’re dying. Burying yourself is the only way to be sure. Don’t tell anyone. Tell Canadians. Not anyone you love.

Do you love anyone? You love the old songs. A curse isn’t a curse unless you sing it. Saw that on a placemat once. The waitress says it’s not that way for her but it might be for you.

Befriend a wolf.

Or if not a single wolf then every dog whose howl holds up the night. Put the math to work for you this time. Call up the money man and see where it stands. It’s never where you think. Once you own one dog every dog owns you. That one’s true.

The old truth.

Fuck Paul Simon.

Keep it to yourself. Maybe tell Levon Helm. He’s cool. You share a sickness. Everyone’s got one. You’ve got two. Time and knowledge. The old sickness. And eczema. Three then. You’ve been worse than scalded.

Like what it came to up there. Alone together, throwing motorcycles at the trees. You couldn’t believe the end times could end anything. You knew guys named Solomon the Earl and Judah Pete. You tried most things twice, but you didn’t change once.

Sing about it. Sing about everything. Do it alone. Do it in bed. Don’t stop. You tried stopping. It didn’t work. Promise you’ll meet again. Count the miles. Make the number so big it might be God. Make the past so gone you come round to it again.

A decade gone, and you have to live it over. Every lie you’ve ever spoke you speak again only this time you have to believe it. Whiskey in a teacup, nothing ever gets so dark. You rise from the Earth but the sky doesn’t invite you higher. Should have never learned to walk if there was only one way to stop. The horse knew that. Ask again.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was a man go blind.

That’s the punchline.

—Adam Peterson

#293: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat" (1968)

You know who Foster Campbell is even if you don’t know him by name. You met him once in a hookah bar, or that time you got lost on the subway, or at an unsanctioned boxing match where you lost 250 dollars on a fight you are pretty sure was rigged.

He’s the guy who’s allowed to bring open containers into baseball parks, the guy who’s been sleeping on your friend’s couch for a month but your friend says he doesn’t know him. He knocked your sister up once. He went to school with your cousin.

I first met him when I was at a house party in this weird neighborhood, which is sort of Foster Campbell‘s natural habitat. Lefty, who got that name by doing things with his right hand you don’t even want to know about, had brought me to the party insisting I would love the scene. I think some things we had done together recently had given Lefty the wrong impression of what I was into, but I went anyway.

There were pictures of Easter Island heads on the wall and beautiful women walked around in their underwear and bathrobes and frowned. I’m not sure if they were hired to do so, or if they lived there and had just not been informed that there was a party going on around them. Neither would have surprised me. There was a guy painting a picture on an actual easel and he pretended not to notice the glue-huffing and dry-humping that was going on right next to him. Lefty ended up making out with this cisgender chick in the front hallway and I sort of hung around the untouched booze that was organized alphabetically on the kitchen table.

None of it would have bothered me too much if that record hadn’t been playing on the turntable. It was either Galaxie 500’s On Fire or a local band who was doing a pretty good impression of the Music Machine’s (Turn On) The Music Machine. Everyone was doing that garage rock thing that summer. The bass was humming and writhing and it sounded like it was recorded in a used Volkswagen. I went out back to sit on the porch and look out over the other buildings and other porches on the block, the ant farm of connected paths, alleyways, and backyards that make up every Chicago neighborhood.

He was already out there when I stepped onto the porch. And by “he” I mean Foster Campbell. I knew it was him, because I had heard he was coming to this party. Lefty might have said something about it, or maybe I heard someone talk about it when we first showed up.

You know what he was wearing. You’ve met him. He had a cool piercing, but not one that was too obvious or desperate. A tattoo snuck out from under his clothes. He seemed rumpled and like he needed a haircut, but he was still great looking.

I could have sat down across from him, but I wanted to lean against the siding so I could look out over the neighborhood and watch other people on their own porches. Something told me he wouldn’t mind if I sat down right next to him.

“I love that T-shirt,” he said. “I saw it when I first walked in. Hilarious.”

“Hey thanks,” I said and looked down at it as if I had to remind myself of which shirt I was wearing, though wearing it had been a very deliberate and tortured decision.

“Got a smoke?” he asked.

“I don’t smoke,” I told him.

“You didn’t come out here to smoke?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting for 30 minutes to bum one.”

“I’m pretty sure you can smoke inside.”

“No one smokes anymore,” he said and sighed the same way my dad did when he lamented how often basketball players traveled.

“I had to get out of there,” I explained. “I just couldn’t take that record anymore.”

“You don’t like the Velvet Underground?” he asked.

“I thought it was the Wipers or someone like that.”

“Naw way,” he said. “It’s Lou.”

“It sounds like they didn’t bother to rehearse,” I said, trying to dismiss the record.

“Who wants to rehearse when you’re in a band?”

The argument made some kind of strange sense coming from him. There was a puzzle-logic to it that made me want to hear the rest of the record. He bobbed his head along to the manic tempo and tapped his thigh to the slapping sounds that constituted the drum beat.

“This is the best one,” he said.

Minute one of “Sister Ray” must have been recorded at the perfect frequency for that apartment because when the 17-minute ode to drugs, oral sex, and obliviousness began it felt like we were on an elevator getting shot into space. My stomach lurched and my mouth dried up. I was sure that when I looked over the side of the porch I was going to see the Earth shrink and disappear. He nodded his head and smiled at me.

That’s when I decided to do it. That’s when I leaned over and tried to kiss him. He pulled back and looked at me with the sad eyes that had made me want to kiss him in the first place, but now made me want to punch him.

“Are you trying to kiss me?” he asked.

“The fact that you are asking me that is a pretty bad sign.”

“I sort of have a girlfriend,” he explained and kept his eyes on me in case I tried something else.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away from him and looking back out onto the labyrinth of Chicago backyards while Lou Reed sought a mainline, “I do too.”

The insistent guitars were my frustration. The cranky, thrumming organ was my embarrassment. We sat with that song playing for a long time. Longer than its Ulyssian run-time, it seemed.

When the record ended someone put on Joe McPhee’s Nation Time and the spell was broken. I looked over at Foster Campbell and smiled. He smiled back, but I could tell he was waiting for me to leave. It was my responsibility to go, I realized. I had been the one who had done something dumb and made everything all awkward and uncomfortable for us both. I stood up and pretended to stretch. He continued smiling, but not in a mean way. He didn’t look like a sly fox, pitying the dogs who could not catch him. He smiled in the kind and polite way you did on Valentine’s Day in third grade while everyone in class stuffed envelopes and tiny treats into the shoebox you had lovingly decorated with construction paper hearts and glitter glue.

I found Lefty and we left the party with a group of cute college kids who claimed to be the West Suburban College Debate Society. I tried to forget about Foster Campbell, but everyone talked about him all the way back to Lefty’s place.

When I think about that record now I always think of Foster Campbell and I wonder what happened to him. I’ve heard he’s working in a railyard in Wilmington and that he maybe owns a consignment shop in Tallahassee. Sometimes I wish I knew for sure. I’d like to ask him what he thinks about the jarring and spliced voices shouting back and forth during “Lady Godiva” or what the hell he thinks John Cale was talking about in “The Gift.” Mostly I just wish I smoked back then.

When you run into him, don’t mention that I was talking about him. He probably knows already, but still.

That party isn’t something I like to talk about all that much. Or even think about. You’re probably thinking, "What's the big deal? Who hasn’t made out with Foster Campbell?"

My answer to that is: Well, me, for one.

—Matt Meade

#294: MC5, "Kick Out the Jams" (1969)

Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet.

Brother J.C. Crawford makes it sound really easy, doesn’t he? Makes it all sound really simple. And I don’t know, maybe in 1968, it was. Maybe you could just look out and see which direction revolution was coming from. Maybe you could just jump into the fight and know which side was which. The old heads I know tell me you could feel revolution: in the sounds and in the streets, in distorted guitars and dropped-acid dreams, in gunshots and soul claps, in zombie kids eating their parents and Rosemary’s devil-born brood, in Tommy and John Carlos’ raised fists, in the Panthers’ growls as they became “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” in people’s tears after the bullet stole away Martin’s dreamy get-down, in the Godfather’s hips when he saved Beantown, and just maybe, you could feel it crackling in the air at the Grande Ballroom on the witches’ sabbath with some crazy white boys from Detroit.

Could be that all of this is bullshit too. Could be that everybody then was just as confused and disillusioned as we feel now. Could be that everybody was too high to remember most of what really happened and so they told the best version of it. Could be that as simple and as sexy as Crawford makes it sound, we don’t really choose in five seconds. We choose and then we choose again, all of the time, sometimes without even knowing. And every one of those small choices takes us a little closer or a little further away from the revolution we think we want.

It’s hard to listen to Kick Out the Jams without nostalgia, without romanticizing it all to hell. And that’s weird because it isn’t even my own past I’m fantasizing about. I’m not old enough to truly claim the MC5 as my own. I’m playing make believe in someone else’s history. I’m stealing someone else’s glorious moment of revolt. Part of me feels guilty for that. Then I think that there’s nothing special about it really. Americans do it every July fourth. Parents hold on to old records usually hoping that their kids will hear a little bit of what they heard when they were younger. Record companies put out reissues betting that they can rope in a whole new audience for what’s essentially an old product. Nostalgia for shit you didn’t actually experience yourself or for things that never existed at all might be the greatest American commodity. In fact, that’s kind of how I discovered the MC5.

I wish I could say that someone passed down a dusty vinyl copy of Kick Out the Jams that I learned to love and cherish, but I’m pretty sure I first heard about them from one of those lame VH1 countdown specials they ran all of the time when I was in college. “The Greatest Hard Rock Songs of All Time” or whatever new reminiscence they were selling that week. I think I watched almost all of those countdowns—really exercises in canon building—because I thought it might educate me more about music. But that was the point, right? They wanted to remind the people old enough to actually remember that their old, beloved stuff was still worth paying attention to and let everybody my age know what they needed to be up on to earn those older folks’ respect.

I ended up back home with my parents for a year after college, working as a line cook in the same small town I had planned to put far in my rearview. I was desperately in need of some rebellious sounds. So you bet your ass that when I saw Kick Out the Jams at the local record store—they still had those then—I grabbed it and cranked the shitty speakers in my ‘93 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera as loud as they would go without rattling the windows too badly.

But as I listen to the record now, with my thirty-sixth birthday rapidly approaching, it feels haunted. Not just by that earlier version of myself or by the sense that I’m appropriating the language of somebody else’s insurrection, but also by doubt about whether I’ve become part of the problem or part of the solution—about whether I have realized my purpose here on the planet. When I hear the righteous recklessness of Brother Wayne Kramer’s guitar or the searing conviction in Rob Tyner’s voice, I’m not so sure.

In a 1994 interview for a Swedish radio station, Tupac Shakur offered a stark proclamation about the prospect of becoming an old revolutionary in America:

In this country, a Black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that’s right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. ‘Cause once you turn 30, it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a Black man, in this country. And you don’t wanna fight no more. And if you don’t believe me you can look around, you don’t see no loud mouth 30-year-old motherfuckers.

I should admit that I was never that big a fan of Pac while he was alive. That was in part because I bought into the corny east coast vs. west coast beef and also because I was never really blown away by him as an emcee. Still, when I heard him talking on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” his words hit me flush on the chin. He got me thinking about how much fight I have left in me, about which battles are even worth fighting, about how much of my heart and soul are still intact. Some days all I want to do is rage, but a lot of the time—more of it than I’d like to admit—I just feel tired and numb.

I watched the video of Eric Garner’s execution by police. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the others. It’s not because I worry that I won’t be able to handle it. I’m worried that I can. I’m terrified that I’ll be able to sit comfortably behind my computer screen, watch someone else who looks like me die, and then go on with my day like this is the way it’s supposed to be.

After I marched in a Black Lives Matter protest, my mom said it reminded her of the sixties, but I’m not really sure what she meant. Was she just talking about seeing black folks in the streets again with picket signs and raised fists? Or maybe she was lamenting that we are still fighting the same fights she did plus a whole bunch of new ones? Probably both. I tell myself that it’s more complicated now. That we know more about how our intersectional identities shape the contours of existence under neoliberal capitalism, that power is really more of an amorphous social construct than a centralized force, that current antagonisms between repressive state apparatuses and the people are just the latest manifestation of tensions inherent to the American experiment in democracy and freedom. And then I think, “What would Pac Say?” I feel like he’d probably say that there’s still “a lotta talk, by a lotta honkeys, sittin’ on a lotta money, telling us they’re high society.”

—Mikal Gaines

#295: Leonard Cohen, "Songs of Love and Hate" (1971)

The first time I listened to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, I never wanted to hear it again. It begins with “Avalanche,” which carries you away right from the first chord, rolling through lyrics like you who wish to conquer pain / you must learn what makes me kind / the crumbs of love that you offer me / they’re the crumbs I’ve left behind. It accelerates down to the chilling last lines: it is your turn beloved / it is your flesh that I wear. A Rolling Stone review called the album “depressing”; another critic said it’s “one of the scariest albums of the last forty years.”

I didn’t want to listen to Songs of Love and Hate because it’s so dark. I try, in much of my life, to avoid exposing myself unnecessarily to pain. I don’t listen to certain music, or watch certain shows, or read certain books because I don’t want to suffer if I don’t have to. There’s enough pain in the world already, I generally think. It will come my way in some shape or form over and over again, so why seek it out?

Sometimes that strategy has gone too far. When sadness has hit, or anger, or some other form of pain, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid it. When certain feelings are brought up by experience or the vagaries of human mood, I try to push them aside for a more convenient time, often by transferring that energy into worrying about nothing. Usually, I’m able get through whatever I need to get through, then end up collapsing in a panic attack after the situation’s over.

I spent years in therapy for anxiety, a condition I’ll always have to some degree. One source of my anxiety is a fear of feeling pain, especially sadness. Sometimes, when I’m sad, I have a childlike worry that I’ll always be sad—that the clouds will never lift, and that I’ll end up depressed. Even though I’ve learned how to deal with my feelings reasonably well, an underlying terror remains that my darknesses will return in the form of all-consuming anxiety. That it’s there, lurking, waiting to pounce.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate feels like a voluntary wrapping of myself in that darkness. I don’t want to take myself to that place. I volunteered to write about this album as a challenge—to see if I could sit through it and come out with something worthwhile. To see if I could come out of it whole.

Every time I pressed play, I found myself wanting to hit mute. Focus on the lyrics, I’d tell myself. This was an opportunity to spend time with Leonard Cohen’s mastery of language. If I could just block that strumming, that dry voice, I’d think, I would be able to learn from Cohen’s extraordinary use of imagery, like these lines from “Avalanche”: When I am on a pedestal / you did not raise me there / Your laws do not compel me / to kneel grotesque and bare / I myself am the pedestal / for this ugly hump at which you stare. Or like this fragment from “Sing Another Song, Boys”: as all the sails burn down like paper /…they’ll never, they’ll never ever reach the moon / at least not the one we’re after / it’s floating broken on the open sea.

I worried that the album’s mood would seep into my bloodstream. If I could just do a close reading of the lyrics, I thought, I’d come out unscathed. Reading, you can put the pages away. When a song gets stuck in your head, there’s not much you can do to get it out.

But this album does not exist for our enjoyment. It intentionally forces listeners into a place of pain. Cohen’s voice assures us from the very first track that Your pain is no credential here / it’s just the shadow of my wound. This album doesn’t exist to make us feel good. Unlike so much popular music, it wants to challenge us. It drags us, kicking and screaming, into an abyss, from the first chords of “Avalanche” to “Joan of Arc”’s fiery conclusion:

It was deep into his fiery heart / he took the dust of Joan of Arc / and then she clearly understood / if he was fire, then she must be wood / I saw her wince, I saw her cry / I saw the glory in her eye / Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

Listening, I worried I would not be able to escape. I worried that publishing this essay on my birthday would somehow curse the year ahead. I worried, like I used to the times I really, truly, let myself feel pain, that it would never let me loose.

I didn’t want to listen to the album because it always brings me back to a fraught year of my life. When I was 22 and living alone in a studio in Washington Heights, I feared that anxiety would swallow me whole. That winter, several things hit at once. I could have handled most of those challenges just fine if they’d come at me singularly, but they collected, one upon the other, like an avalanche. The day after Christmas, I developed pneumonia. My then-boyfriend wouldn’t take me to the doctor, so I sweated out a 103-degree fever for three days before finally hauling myself downtown in a cab.

Pneumonia left me weak for over a month. Usually active, I was too easily winded to walk up the escalators at my subway stop anymore, and had to stand to the side to let people pass. Work, plus the commute, was enough to wipe me out for the day. Weekends, I needed to sleep and sleep. I became paranoid about health, fearing that every time I touched the subway railing I would catch another disease that would knock me back off my feet.

Then, just as I was beginning to really get over the pneumonia, I was rejected for a major grant that would have changed my life. Then, my boss suddenly resigned, throwing my workplace into months of chaos. In the midst of all this, the then-boyfriend cheated on me. I started having frequent panic attacks for the first time in years.

Luckily, I was seeing a therapist at the time. Having a place to go talk things out, it allowed the buildup to slow. And, at times, working with her helped me get the anxiety out. For me, anxiety is often a symptom of other emotions lying in wait. That year, it was a mix: fear of losing my job, anger at the boyfriend, disappointment about the grant, fear of getting sick again, and an overall resurgence of anxiety itself.

The only way to let a feeling out, I’ve learned, is by expressing it. In art, in music, in exercise, or simply by talking. Except, not so simply. Therapy isn’t just talking; it’s forcing yourself to identify and confront feelings you may not want to look in the eye. There were times when I’d end up in a ball on my therapist’s couch, shaking and howling wordlessly. During those moments, I wondered if the pain was going to kill me right there.

But it didn’t. Eventually, I sat back up and made my way home. If there was a fog around my head that evening, it was a little lighter the next day, or the next. Even if a new worry settled, I could remember getting through to the other side of something like it. Tunnels, yes, but also—and most importantly—light.

Or, to follow Cohen’s metaphor in the album’s concluding track, “Joan of Arc,” fire and wood. Except, I learned, I could choose not to be wood. I didn’t have to follow Cohen’s logic of if he was fire, oh then she must be wood. Every time I found myself in a dark place, love would call my name.

I think that’s what’s at the heart of Songs of Love and Hate: love calling our names. “Love Calls You By Your Name” is the fifth of eight songs on the album, and it marks something of a tonal shift. Though melodically it’s not the most upbeat—that’s probably the deceptively peppy “Sing Another Song, Boys”—the song has some hope embedded deep within it. If we look between things, we’ll find love. As Cohen himself once said, the song “searches out the middle place between the beginning and the end of things,” and it approaches a meeting point between despair and hope.

In therapy, I sought that center. Sometimes, I didn’t get there. But other times, I reached that meeting point, or even passed it by, finding hope. It started to happen consecutively. And, as I processed my feelings, the worry and the fear all subsided. I learned how to deal with anxiety: by sitting with the feelings until they faded of their own accord, by learning to calm myself, by reminding myself that the feelings wouldn’t last forever. I recovered from the pneumonia, and, slowly, anxiety’s hold lessened. I began to have panic attacks only once a week, then once a month, then back to the normal few times a year.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate is one of the most visceral musical experiences there is. It throws you into the physicality of panic and despair, then takes you on a journey through the depths until it—and you—can find a way out. At first, I worried that Cohen’s album would return me to the way I felt at 22. That its melancholy would be able to seek me out. But, every time “Joan of Arc” ended, I went back to my life. The darkness subsided, as it always does.

Songs of Love and Hate is about despair. The combination of Cohen’s lyrics, his baritone, the slow melancholy strumming, and the unnerving background voices of children and women, sends us to dark places. But the album also finds hope in its center, as we, too, must seek the hope embedded in our own cores.

By the next winter, I was edging towards the other side of that anxiety. Though I made it out of that phase stronger, I sometimes still worry when the next long wave will hit, when I’ll next have months in which I’m constantly on the verge of a panic attack. But I try not to let myself indulge those worries. It will come, and I will deal with it when it does, stronger now because I’ve sat through it before.

I worry now that I don’t have anything new to say about facing our own personal darknesses. Cohen says it best: Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright? Yes, sometimes it must. But I think what I have learned—what Songs of Love and Hate reminded me—does bear repeating. Here, I paraphrase one of my college professors: Sit through the mess, and you will figure out how to untangle it. Sit through the darkness, and you will find a way to make a flame that will brighten, not consume.

—Marissa Mazek

#296: The Smiths, "Meat is Murder" (1985)

Bestiary

Bes·ti·ar·y

noun

A a descriptive or anecdotal treatise on a mythological or real animal.
 

Gen-X

noun

The generational cohort following the Baby Boomers.
 

A bestiary for a Gen-X boy

Get him to quote the Smiths. Quote them back to him with ellipses, a double bed and a stalwart lover for sure….Make him believe that sex is all you think about but never what you ask for, let his need hover in the spaces between.

Wear Doc Martens, own stilettos, paint your lips. Ask him about the books he's reading, the songs on his mixtape. Correct yourself, playlist, and laugh like music. Be the wild-art girl he wanted in college, not the dull-sincere woman he is married to now. You are wanton but chaste, your longing written in lipstick across your breasts.

His kiss is haunted by cigarettes. Meat is Murder but you'd still eat his dick just so long as the hotel room is in his name. But it may never come to such a headmaster ritual. He will love you on Sundays down the page, cut you on Monday in letters scrawled across.

Love is a fork in the road. He will either say three words too often or never, become an anchor or an island. The joke has ceased to be humorous, but you will always laugh. His winter heart craves the applause, the static and spotlights of a happier time. Your affection will be an encore in the theater of his life and in return, he will shower you with praise. You will be brilliant and witty, charming in an age that trades in quick vulgarity.

Expect no promise. This love is going nowhere fast. But trust that he is lying in his tent in the middle of the night with his eyes on the ceiling, imagining brass and leather, red wine and white sheets. He tastes your mouth, conjured from the digital space, from paperbacks printed on cheap ink.

But there is a box in his closet, band shirts and flannel, a pair of jeans soft as tissue that he lied about throwing away. Here is where he stores his heart on cassettes that cannot be replayed, a chess game never finished. Here is where he keeps you, safe from the world.

So you will meet in coffee shops and quiet bars, travel to cities hours away for a moment of badinage with a man who cannot ever be yours. But you will never truly be his either, this love is a black box masquerade, ice in a tumbler. You will say goodbye on a cracked sidewalk, his breath white between you. Well, I wonder….

—Libby Cudmore

#297: The Mothers of Invention, "We're Only In It for the Money" (1968)

Frank Zappa grew up saying he wanted to be a scientist like his father, but admitted his dad feared buying him a chemistry set. Instead, he bought him a drum set. At a ripe twelve years old, Zappa looked at his father and said, “Pop, I’m going to make a million dollars.”

Which is a funny history to learn when approaching We’re Only In It for the Money: the album takes a methodological approach to music. At surface level, it’s a funny, scientific satire. You’re laughing, but it’s the kind of laugh where you’re both cynical and critical of the outcome that it might actually be serious.

Songs vary from a minute to six, sprinkling some snare drums and loud guitars with vocal delivery ranging from phone conversations, high pitched melodies, and pure shouts. The lyrical framework exaggerates the commercial success of the counterculture and openly mocks the hippiedom movement and hippie persona blooming in the 1960s. In a broader ideological fashion, rather than giving in, Zappa and the Mothers of Invention decide to play the part and produce this scathing psychedelic rock record that bullshits hippies on their activism (or lack thereof).

It’s difficult to decipher the meaning behind the maniacal minute-long interludes. When listening to something like “Harry, You’re a Beast,” you can feel the narrator’s contempt towards listeners: “You paint your head / your mind is dead / you don’t even know what I said.” The group is frank about how the influx of weed, cash, and running away from home is somehow more appealing than any awareness of injustice and violence. Even “Who Needs the Peace Corps?,” the second track on the album, parodies the passiveness of hippies with “First I’ll buy some beads / and then perhaps a leather band / to go around my head...I will love everyone / I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street.”

Zappa further harps on the colorblind hippie in “Concentration Moon,” an allegory on the Japanese internment camps created by the American government during World War II: “Hair growing out / every hole in me / AMERICAN WAY / threatened by US / drag a few creeps / away in a bus / AMERICAN WAY.” To put it lightly, so many people are ignorant to the prominent disparities that have historically hurt people of color and minorities, but I can’t help but experience some increased self-consciousness when realizing how Zappa’s comments mirror some activist activity in 2016.

In today’s widespread activism, we call things out and hashtag our causes, sometimes leading to more clicks than actual commitment. I myself am guilty of this. More often than not, there is a powerful focus on human impact and influence, but what is more common is the ability to capitalize on this “wokeness.” We click and share when convenient, when another letter or video revealing a deep injustice goes viral. Brands decide to speak out when it favors their bottom line: feminism is now marketable, #BlackLivesMatter can still be declared by companies that have yet to hire and invest in people of color, and somehow hiring a straight actor to play a trans character speaks to Hollywood’s progress.

In the 1960s, psychedelic rock and the counterculture could thrive in some ways because it boiled down to the simplicity of “love everyone.” When speaking to a friend about We’re Only In It for the Money, he quipped that something like “#AllLivesMatter” would have worked in the ‘60s because nobody would dig deeper into the nuances and differentiation; there was a deep desire to escape the chaos of war and violence. But that cannot work, not in 2016: you have to underline this complex, otherwise unjust history and confront discomfort to inch towards reconciliation and closure.

Frank Zappa himself made history by producing an album that mocked the Beatles because he thought they too were doing this for the money. Maybe they were, but wasn’t he, too? That’s the ongoing joke in We’re Only In It for the Money. It’s for the millions of dollars, but does it have to be?

— Upma Kapoor

#298: Kanye West, "The College Dropout" (2004)

She is so profound, Marcia is. She’s always thinking about things bigger than everything else. Bigger and bigger; unsatisfied with small anything. She’s always wanted to explore, walking through woods at age six, reading about space at age eleven, looking through antique shops at eighteen, always wondering the stories behind everything around her. What walked in these woods before she did? Are there aliens? There has to be, right? Who wore that bracelet? How’d it end up there?

She reads books on philosophy; she reads articles on Voltaire. She swapped shopping at the mall for thrift stores so she could “avoid high prices,” she said, but really it was because she’s heard of too many stores using child labor. She feels too guilty wearing something with the label “Made in China” written but “By a Nine-Year-Old” left unsaid.

She is thoughtful, Marcia is. She buys gifts for her friends for no reason other than she thinks they’d like it. They aren’t huge or flashy—a giraffe silly band, a bracelet that says my name—but she gets so excited and gives you a cheek-to-cheek grin as she drops the present into your hand.

I have my own spot in her house: her slippery black couch in the basement, across from her spot.

And then there is Harriett. Harriett Kohler, the quietest of our trio. She cries a lot, her emotions overflowing out of her at the slightest of things: a butterfly, a Sinatra song, a well-timed joke. But she is still, somehow, more practical than the rest of us. She does the right thing; she tries to feel the right emotions. She doesn’t know how to reply to us a lot, but she is the most clever person I’ve ever met, and that’s why I don’t know how to reply to her a lot. She is patient and quiet and calm; she is a gentle person.

Harriett watches a lot of movies, anything she can get her hands on, and she sends us more memes than we know what to do with. She and I read fan-fiction together and laugh at the same parts. She is just as thoughtful as Marcia, and possibly the most gracious out of us three, laughing at her own faults while making Marcia and I feel good about our own.

Harriett is more spiritual than the rest of us. She asks God a lot of questions—small questions, big questions. Why did you have to make razor bumps exist, God? How are ants born, God? What is the counter to greed, God? She is deeper than anything else I’ve known, her quietude burying her depth.

Marcia and Harriett knew each other before meeting me. They’ve always been a bit closer, understanding each other’s good moods and bad moods, each other’s attention spans. I met them in seventh grade amongst a myriad of other girls from some elementary school I’d never heard of before, hidden through the woods across the big street I was too young to cross. But when I met the two of them we deemed each other a trio of best friends; I was to fit in with them and understand them as they understood each other, for better, for worse, until death do us part. We were a trio, never to be separated.

We started eighth grade; we started ninth grade. I let boys get in the way of us, my jealousy targeting Marcia in eighth grade and Harriett in ninth, stagnating my friendship with both of them. And then it was eleventh grade and we all had different classes and different social spheres and our trio hadn’t been a trio since our first year together, and we missed it. Harriett and Marcia were still friends, Marcia and I were still friends, Harriett and I were still friends, but individually it didn’t feel as right or as tight. Marcia started a group chat, and twelfth grade, we decided, was to be the year of the trio.

We began to re-understand each other as a unit of three. Together we figured out how our humors intertwined—that Marcia’s eccentricities made Harriett laugh so hard she snorted, that just because my humility and humor were closely tied together did not mean I actually hated myself. Together we figured out that Marcia felt trapped in relationships because she wanted to travel more than she wanted to love. Together we figured out that the best way to get Harriett to open up was to be more specific, to ask how she’s doing physically and emotionally and any other way we could think of in order to avoid the “I’m good”s and “I’m fine”s. Together we held hands and cried over boys who didn’t care about us; together we held hands and laughed about how stupid we were in middle school, about how stupid we still are and will probably always be.

When we were eighteen, our college choices moved Marcia a state north and me three hours south from Harriett. College was weird for us. It was the opposite of high school; in college Harriett was always busy with friends, people actually knew about me before I met them, and Marcia stayed in her room every day and every night. And instead of us all automatically worrying about each other, Harriett and I worried about Marcia.

She went to the cat cafe sometimes, Marcia did. She’d sit there with the tabbies and the siamese and talk to them like they were Harriett and me, and she’d post pictures with the cats while Harriett and I posted ones of us on roofs with our friends, ones of us watching Full House reruns with our friends. And slowly Marcia became smaller. She receded into herself and became nervous talking to others, almost passing out talking just to her professors. She started wearing Crocs everyday, light blue Gonzo stickers splayed out haphazardly on them. She stopped playing her ukulele; she started to rip pieces of paper up and leave them in her bed. Harriett and I had to remind her to shower. Harriett and I had to remind her to go outside every once in awhile. And Marcia started calling us crying or calling us afraid of being alone or calling us to talk about the futility of humans, desperate not to be alone anymore, not to feel like a waste of space. But we were a state south and Marcia’s roommate stopped talking to her and Marcia went home.

And when Harriett and I came home for the summer we all but lived at Marcia’s house. We got fro-yo and we binge-watched all of the X-Men movies and we learned Outkast verses and Kanye verses and Eminem verses, and we didn’t let Marcia go. The summer was one big hug, cozy and close. Marcia started giving cheek-kisses goodbye and bear-hugs hello. She started loving again, not just loving Harriett and me but loving the trees around her and loving the lightning bugs that brought Christmas lights in July and loving the roughness of paper in the old notebooks we found in thrift stores.

And when Harriett, Marcia, and I parted ways a few days ago, Marcia didn’t kiss us goodbye.

And now I’m sitting in bed still reeling both physically and mentally from tonight, the first night of my second year, the first night of drinking too much and shrugging away the stupidity of it all, the first night of the year that I got lost from my college trio, the first night I’ve kissed somebody of whom the only thing I can remember is a light blue Polo, the first night I’ve realized how much I love the calmness of my new apartment. And now I’m realizing that Marcia is sitting alone in her room again. She’s sitting next to her new roommate, using small talk as the only alley to conversation. She’s mentioning something about minions and her roommate is nodding slowly, as if she understands, and a silence comes over them. And Marcia is sitting alone in her room again, her roommate sitting next to her.

And Harriett and I will spend the year loving Marcia, hoping she doesn’t have to come home to remember what happiness feels like, and Marcia will spend another year wondering if she should just drop out.

—Nicole Efford

#299: Weezer, "Weezer" (1994)

There was a boy on the other end of the line, which meant my best friend and I each had one ear to the phone. Our cheeks grazed as Ellie spoke:

“We’re rocking out to ‘Say It Ain’t So.’” A beat. “In just our bras.”

It was true, we were. Or we had been before getting on the phone. We head-banged, we wailed, pulling up our bra-straps when they fell to the thrash of air-guitar chords. On the line was my crush, not Ellie’s, but she did all the talking. At age 13, I could only flirt by proxy. And what she just told him, that we were rocking out, wearing only our bras, to a Weezer song, was a game changer. I don’t remember how the suitor in question responded, but his reaction was likely not something that could be gleaned over the phone. Up until this point, it never occurred to me that I had any control over my desirability. I stood waiting for a lightning bolt when all this time, love had nothing to do with destiny, and everything to do with marketing.

Released in 1994, Weezer’s self-titled debut bred a generation of self-deprecating Nice Guys who pledged allegiance to Surf Wax America, guys who are likely still miffed that the Blue Album ranked on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time and not Pinkerton. It was those guys’ kid brothers who I had set my sights on, endeavoring to impress them with my music taste in post-bedtime instant message conversations. “You can’t be a Weezer fan without being a Pixies fan,” one of them typed to me once, arguing, “Weezer songs are just recalculated Nirvana songs, which are just recalculated Pixies songs.” The moment when a boy becomes a mansplainer.

My favorite book-and-movie in high school was Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the white-male music snob’s manifesto. I fell for Rob Gordon in the way that most teenagers fall for Holden Caulfield: that is, I didn’t yet realize that he is the phoniest phony of all. But despite its insufferable narrator, a lot of the one-liners still ring in my ear a decade later, especially: “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

The big takeaway from High Fidelity is that true love depends on what you’re like as opposed to what you like—that liking the same books and movies and films isn’t enough to withstand a meaningful relationship. Listing your favorite bands in an online dating profile can be just as objectifying as showing cleavage. But what you're like is usually not the same as who you are, certainly not when you're 13. It's who you seem to be to someone else. You have much more control over what you’re like than over who you are. I’ve used the Blue Album as a litmus test, in hopes that once I found that someone whose heart pounded to Weezer at the same rate mine did, we would suddenly be transported to that elusive world where the boys look just like Buddy Holly and the girls keep their make-up on the shelf: A strange and distant land / Where they speak no word of truth / But we don't understand anyway. 15 years later, I’ve dated my share of Weezer fans, and I still haven’t made it there.

Even with Ellie’s lessons in prepubescent seduction, I never went out with the boy on the phone.  Turns out his mom had been listening to the call and and banned him from seeing us without the supervision of a parent or youth pastor. Unrequited love stings less when chaperoned.

I know that taste is nurtured, but I wonder about the biological component, how some songs end up under your skin while others just float next to your ears. I am only truly “over” someone, I’ve realized, when I can listen to all the songs that scored our relationship without any immediate physical reaction—my brows stay soft, jaw relaxed, stomach still. When I can consider that song as first a cultural relic and then a personal one. I’ve started watching the memories instead of feeling them, but the picture is clear as ever: my best friend and I, rocking out, shirts piled on the floor, intensely emoting to a song about alcoholism before I’d ever sipped my first beer. When the objects of our desires stayed safe in the garage where they belonged, answering when we called.

—Susannah Clark

#300: Black Sabbath, "Master of Reality" (1971)

Growing up, one of the most important places for my social development was the Aladdin's Castle Arcade in Rocky River, Ohio. Aside from me simply loving video games, this was one of the first places where I was surrounded by people who did not find me profoundly strange.

There were “adults” who worked there who liked the same things I did. I remember these people being in their mid-forties but it is far more likely they were college-age. I felt cool for maybe the first time in my life the day I walked in and one of them remembered who I was.

Those years when I was 8, 9, 10, 11 felt almost exclusively defined by athletics. If you were good, you were OK everywhere else. If you were bad (as I was) you took what you could get. That dynamic would repeat each year of my life until college.

Permit me an aside to establish my ranking on this merit-based athletics social economy. You know those scenes in movies or TV shows where the big game is on the line and the scrub on the team strikes out to end it? I was that scrub.

So you can imagine how I felt the first time I beat one of the local heroes in Mortal Kombat or set a top-ten score in Ridge Racer. It was, in almost every sense, a new experience. Not that new experiences are in terribly short supply when you’re 11 but when you’re a nervous, uncoordinated, emotional child the good ones can be few and far between.

But it wasn’t just geek camaraderie and games that made Aladdin’s Castle an important place. It was also the space itself. Westgate Mall was a 10-minute walk from my house. Aladdin's Castle was located on the far side of the mall, far away from the department store anchors or the movie theater that would one day become a massive atrium food court (see, the trick is to hit up the Sbarro 10 minutes before the mall closes and they’ll sell you slices for a dollar).

It was quiet over there. Once you entered the mall the arcade was the first or second spot on your left. Across the way was a Radio Shack. A Radio Shack across from an arcade just had to be by design. Just a few steps up was an ice cream shop, a hot pretzel place (Hot Sam’s?) and a store where you could get all kinds of popcorn. These types of popcorn places are still popular. There success baffles me. But back then the popcorn place sold Icees so they were getting my money. If you continued north the mall opened up; Dillard’s to the left, Waldenbooks to the right.

So, Aladdin's Castle was isolated save for a Radio Shack, a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one. And the only things close by were junk food. As a mall-going slacker just finding his way this small, lonely appendage in a big pool of commerce was ideal. You could circle around the mall past all the people and essentially take the back way in, getting to the arcade without having to actually see anyone. As I got older and bullying got more serious this became even more important.

So games, what did they have? This is an incomplete and possibly inaccurate list untethered from chronology; Street Fighter 2/Turbo etc., Mortal Kombat/2/3 etc., Killer Instinct/2, After Burner, Numan Athletics, Revolution X, Area 51, Time Crisis 2/3, Tekken 2, Lethal Enforcers, Operation Wolf, Heavy Barrel, Shinobi, Ninja Gaiden, Tron, The Simpsons Arcade Game, NBA Jam, TMNT Arcade, Ridge Racer. There were hundreds more but at a certain point the Space Harrier at Great Northern Mall (the mall with the Taco Bell, as I remember it, and current home of MALL GUY) blends in with the Altered Beast at Westwood Movie Theater which overlaps with Battletoads at Swings-N-Things.

In between games there was the manager who told me what a great movie star Rowdy Roddy Piper was and how I needed to see They Live. There was a kid, maybe four years older than me, I think he was from Arkansas or Texas, who was there every day and, in two years, started working there. He was effortlessly good at MK2. I remain impressed by his ability to play as Shang Tsung and, during the limited “Fatality” window, transform into Sub-Zero, hit his opponent with a deep freeze, transform back into Shang Tsung, transform into Scorpion and then perform the “take off mask to reveal skull and breathe fire on the guy turning him into a skeleton that crumbed to ash” fatality.

If you know what I’m talking about I’m sure you’re nodding your head. If this sounds vaguely familiar I assure you it was so impressive at the time. And if this is all gibberish I just want to thank you for making it this far along without bailing on my story.

I can’t pinpoint it but I would guess the death of the Great American Video Arcade started in the mid-nineties. I would consider myself a part of the last great arcade generation. PCs and consoles started producing reasonable arcade ports. Then the internet started eating away at mall shopping. These were two spiked walls slowly closing in from both sides. Arcades were a novelty by the early 2000s and dead-gone by the end of the ‘00s. Which was OK, the cat’s in the cradle as they say. And if you were an awkward pre-teen in 2001 you had chat rooms and MMORPGs so you got yours.

They’re back now. If you are over 21 you can go to a “barcade” which is a portmanteau I’ll never like. I’ve gone to a bunch of them. Often they do more to remind me how terrible arcades were. Most of the games are bad. Most of the games are engineered to take your money. I never noticed this stuff when I was 11 and it sort of sucks to understand the business of it now.

But, there are still moments of brilliance. From 2016 alone I can recall: a long run through Crystal Castles, the sound from a working beefed-up Asteroids cabinet, an NBA Jam session with three friends, a deep Gauntlet game and finally, after twenty-five years, beating The Simpsons Arcade Game.

But there was also that night when, despite the game being free, a friend and I could not beat Terminator 2. We went on so long that I was convinced it was impossible and that this was the most cynical video game ever made. If the game wasn’t free I’d estimate we pushed $20 in quarters. Imagine being a kid and paying that much, only to hit a wall. But there we were, endlessly mashing “Start” and firing shotgun shells into the T1000 as played by Robert Patrick and that sumbitch would NOT fall into that goddamn vat of molten iron no matter how much we tried.

So, it wasn’t a perfect environment. And at 11 I was mostly too naive to notice drugs though a ton of the friends I made at the arcade were there or headed that way. But you’re going to get that mix when you’re a misfit with the misfits. And yeah, sometimes the place where you get your escape from reality is going to be full of computers designed to take your money. And sometimes the headquarters of your nascent rebellion is a business in a mall owned by a casino company. Don’t get me wrong, I was lucky to have it.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#301: Dolly Parton, "Coat of Many Colors" (1971)

I don’t know how or when I am getting home. This work trip is ill-timed; we manage to arrive in Charleston during the only disgusting part of the year—January—and stay just long enough to catch a winter storm enveloping the greater part of the East Coast, just in time for the weekend. The storm is so big that it hasn’t arrived, but our morning flight out is canceled more than 24 hours in advance. Our airline offers flights two days from now, but can’t guarantee that my two colleagues and I can get on the same plane. We work our evening event and go back to the hotel, where I call up the airline again. The operator gives me even bleaker news, just as we’re getting ready for bed: no flights for three more days. My anxiety is through the roof and I struggle not to panic as I settle into a bed in the room I am sharing with one of my coworkers, because it’s been the kind of trip where there are no moments to yourself.

I can’t sleep. I start looking up rental cars. It is late but I am moments away from a full panic attack, my stomach tied so completely in knots that it is a wonder I don’t throw up. I text my boss and run the idea of a rental by her. It’s only eight hours’ drive. If we leave right when the rental car company opens, we might make the trip north before the storm hits our hometown. I expect my boss will shoot down the idea, but she confesses that they have their car ready and are planning to leave before dawn. I call my coworker in the next room over; we are all in agreement that we’ll only do it if we can rent a car with four- or all-wheel drive. There is one car available at the airport, so we order a taxi.

On the way to the airport, it’s already raining. It’s not even gone 6 o’clock yet and none of us have eaten, or had coffee. We beat the car rental employee to her desk. It is shockingly simple to sign our rights away and acquire the car, which is parked so far away that we are drenched with rain by the time we sling our bags into the trunk. I drive first. In the dark the rain feels like too much, but I white knuckle my way out of Charleston proper with my tongue stuck so hard to the roof of my mouth that it goes bone dry. I’m too nervous to drink water. At some point, I start to wonder if what’s hitting the windshield is rain or sleet. About an hour outside Charleston, we stop at a rest area. I barely make it to the toilet in time to relieve myself, making this the closest I’ve ever come to shitting my pants.

My more confident coworker takes the wheel. I get in the back and take small sips of water. We playfully argue about the radio. The energy in the car is forcefully cheerful. We flip animatedly between the XM radio stations. There’s one that always seems to be playing Adele, and the pop one with all the Panic! at the Disco, and for one really brief moment there’s Dolly with “Coat of Many Colors,” before my coworker in the passenger seat exclaims, “Ugh, I HATE country,” and flips back to the previous channel. There is definitely snow on the road.

We make it three more hours before the road is so thick with accumulated ice that we can’t do anything but coast to the exit with the nearest hotel and roll gingerly into the parking lot, tires crunching. I book one room for the three of us and sit on the phone with a rental car agent what-if-ing about what will happen when we can’t return the car within 24 hours. I learn that we are in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. I learn that there isn’t much to learn about Roanoke Rapids. It used to be a mill town, but the mills closed. ~16,000 people live here. A cursory Google search turfs up the unemployment rate—“nearly 13%.”

There is one good scandal: Carolina Crossroads, an entertainment development aimed at bringing more tourism to the area. Roanoke Rapids is about halfway between New York and Florida; it’s close enough to Richmond and Raleigh, just off I-95. Back in 2005, they need a guy to be the face of the entertainment area. We’re talking hotels, shopping, movie theater, aquarium, amphitheatre for live acts….$20 million dollars’ worth of plans. They hire Randy Parton, brother of Dolly herself, to manage the whole setup and hand over $3 million for him to oversee. They find out not long after the theater opens that Randy has spent a fair chunk of the money on himself and hosted unauthorized events in the theater, like his daughter’s wedding reception. Back at my hotel, the receptionist calls Randy a “first-class swindler” when I ask her about Carolina Crossroads. I get the feeling it is still something of a sore subject, 10 years later. I ask her what her favorite Dolly Parton song is, and she says “Jolene.”

“Jolene” clocks in at #219 on Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Songs of All Time,” while Coat of Many Colors only rides the album list down to #301. This album is a short one, and it’s over before you’re ready. None of the songs run over three and a half minutes. The entire record is under thirty minutes long, total. It is small and gutsy and while it’s not lyrically complex, this is not a record that shies away from grappling with issues. In the span of a half hour, Dolly’s childhood and adolescence are over. In the first song, her mom makes her a coat of rags, like Joseph’s; in the second, her mom runs away with her boyfriend. I listen to this album alone in our one hotel room while my coworkers are doing work down in the lobby. I stifle a really stupid sounding giggle when I realize the last lyric in the album is, “Everybody take your brother's hand and sing my song with me.”

I think one of the reasons we make it home the next morning—after spending an hour cracking away at the inch-thick layer of ice encasing the car—is telling stories. We leave the radio off. The plows have tried to work overnight. We know it’s about three hours home and we try to shoot for the gap in the weather on brown, slushy roads that are, in all honesty, barely passable. I sit in the back seat and tell every ridiculous story I’ve ever heard, interrupting myself to suggest that my coworker merge to the other side of the road; it looks slightly clearer over there. I tell them about the episode of 99% Invisible with the pigeon milk. I tell them about DJ Khaled getting lost on a jet ski and using Snapchat to call for help. I tell them about Randy Parton and Carolina Crossroads. The road goes all white about ten miles from our exit.

By the time we make it to Charlottesville, everything is so blanketed in snow that we can’t see the turn for the exit, but we coast into town, rolling past people in the streets on skis, until we get to the garage and park. We’re not dressed for the weather, and two of us aren’t even home yet. My coworkers make tracks to a restaurant staffed by locals happily pouring shots at lunchtime. My partner walks a mile in the snow carrying water, whiskey, and a pair of hiking boots; we make it back home, cold, disbelieving, and just beginning to feel the warmth from the booze.

It’s easy to mythologize the past; you can tell one side of something that happened long enough ago that there isn’t anyone around to tell you no. This holiday season, Dolly Parton will reprise the role of herself in the made-for-TV special, “Christmas of Many Colors,” the story of her humble beginnings sewn into a narrative about a Christmas miracle loosely based in her life’s story. The city of Roanoke Rapids has a Wikipedia page that spends more time dragging its way through the city’s brief association with Randy Parton than on the hundreds of years of history before and a good ten years since. I write down my side of this story without telling my coworkers, because it’s simpler or because I think my version is right, I don’t know. What does Dolly owe to her past, or Randy to Roanoke Rapids (aside from $3 million), or me to these women? I don’t know. But I do giggle when Dolly sings the last line off the last track on Coat of Many Colors, “A Better Place to Live”: “Everybody take your brother's hand and sing my song with me.”

—Helen Alston

#302: Public Enemy, "Fear of a Black Planet" (1990)

Black to the bone my home is your home
So welcome to the Terrordome

                                - Chuck D

There is a particular kind of cold that possesses southwest Virginia in January. It’s not the blustery ague of the Midwest, or the gnawing chill of New England. Instead, it’s marked by quiet unobtrusiveness—damp, seeping, and stealthy in the way that winter often is—already upon you long before you realize it’s come to stay.

The start of that calendar year, marking the midway point of my final phase of graduate school, moved in like a dark glacier. I’d returned to the southwest portion of the state shortly after New Year’s, in hopes of scraping together some weeks to write and think in solitude before having to contend, formally, with my thesis in the spring. At that point, I’d come to accept that the smooth stone of dispiritedness that lived in my stomach had all but become a permanent fixture in Roanoke: though I lived, taught, and wrote there, I knew I did not belong. This knowledge had become as familiar to me as the sound of my own name.

Literature is full of hysterical females—children, the elderly, young women of marrying age—who see ghosts, spirits, the inexplicable and the horrific, while those around them remain unconvinced (or sometimes, convinced but lacking hard proof or personal witness) of what these women claim to see. The responses vary: sometimes they are met with dismissal or outright reproof, while other times they’re met with pity or pity’s slightly more sophisticated cousin, sympathy. And occasionally, there’s vindication or confirmation of some kind by the story’s conclusion. But often, as is the case with any “good” ghost story worth retelling, the incidents in question are usually abandoned to ambiguity. Maybe she was just seeing things, or maybe she wasn’t. We’ll never know.

It is a near-impossible feat, attempting to accurately convey what it’s like to feel displaced because of the color of one’s skin. Some days, the best one can rely on is the precarious tilt of comparison, definition in terms of something else:

such displacement is like slow, precise dismembering

             such displacement is like slow, precise disembodiment

it is knowing that displacement is an anemic euphemism, because there is no noun precise enough to define what it’s like to exist with undiagnosable pain

it is knowing that displacement suggests that there is some “correct” or proper place in which one ought to exist to begin with

it is the impossibility of naming a precise locus of distress, and the expectation to account for it still

it is losing a sense of being fully present in your own body, though your own body is all you’re permitted to think about

*

I first encountered Public Enemy on a freezing night, that interminable winter. It was my first time venturing outside since a heavy snowstorm had buried most of the streets in layers upon layers of pristine sheets of ice, the ridged mounds of snow along the main roads like the arched spine of an enormous, white, sleeping creature. Other than in very brief interludes with my landlords next door (longtime residents of Roanoke who would faithfully extend kindness by bringing me food to ensure I was eating), it had been several days since I’d interacted with anyone. I’d locked myself in my apartment with the storm as my excuse, avoiding the ache of conversation for as long as I could. But for some reason, though the daylight hours were short, I found that on this particular evening in January I could manage to go out and be among people, as long as I wasn’t expected to say anything.

We sometimes speak of music being transportive. We praise its power to move us, however momentarily, out of time and out of whatever location we happen to find ourselves in. But some music works to the opposite effect: not serving as a quick means of escape, but as a grounding presence that renders specific times and places all the more acute in their immediacy.

After a failed night of trying to write in one of the few coffee shops nearby, I decided to call it quits for the day. I pulled up my music library and scrolled through my album selections, having downloaded Fear of a Black Planet earlier that afternoon. I loved the cover artwork immediately, almost irrationally, without even taking much time to scrutinize why the mere sight of it made me sit up a little straighter in my chair. Earphones in place, I clicked on “Contract On the World Love Jam,” its first hymn-like chords clanging out against the record scratch. The album followed me all the way into the night, back out into the dark lit only by a few streetlights and the unyielding drift.

*

In the weeks and months afterward, I listened to this album over and over—a little resentful that no one had told me about it before, and fixating, as I often do, on the handful of tracks that clung to me the hardest. “911 Is a Joke,” “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and “Power to the People,” played on repeat as I shuffled through the drill of routine tasks: making my bed, washing my hair, drinking coffee without tasting it. I played “Welcome to the Terrordome” often as I drove through the cobalt glow of the Blue Ridge—there was something apocalyptic about that word, terrordome. I could see it plainly in my head: Earth’s vaulted ceiling, chaos and panic rampant on the ground, with miles of nothing in the firmament in between. Nothing, that is, but the echoes of clear-eyed protest:

    When I get mad, I put it down on a pad
    Give ya something that ya never had
    Controlling, fear of high rolling
    God bless your soul and keep living

The richness of the plurality of voices in each track followed me, too. Not only through Public Enemy as a collective, but in the wide array of artists, media, and musicians they culled from to sample throughout—all of this creating an album that continues to be great not only for the sum of its parts, but for its ability to assemble everything into something wholly other, and enduring.

*

The more I listened to Fear of a Black Planet, the more it transformed into my own private tonic against despondency. I found that if I shook the quiet of my solitude with something—anything with teeth and a measurable, almost mathematical structure (not unlike classical music, I might add)—it brought something not entirely unlike repose, which I found I needed increasingly more of in my jaunts around Roanoke and its neighboring towns.

Although I had no desire to make sense of a city that, on a large scale, nodded at prejudice, default segregation, and the selective erasure of entire populations, I found that in this album, injustice no longer felt quite so isolating and unseen. Someone understood; someone was listening. Someone, it seemed, had been crying out for me—over twenty-five years ago, and long before I ever knew I wouldn’t have the strength to do it myself. It was as though the album had become a companion, who somehow, as I drove from town to town, daily passing half-buried vestiges of Jim Crow, daily passing by, for instance, the 80-foot-tall Confederate battle flag on I-81, run up by a local man as a public warning to ward off “black people and Democrats”—it was as though this companion knew how to manage to get me back home relatively intact, with these lines pulsing through my speakers:

    They say the Black don’t know how to act
    ‘cause we’re waitin’ for the big payback
    But we know it’ll never come
    that’s why I say come and get some

*

Nearing the end of this partial account—or as I think of it, a small witness of what I owe this music—I realize that I have no tidy, clever, or even vaguely enlightened conclusion to offer. Having since moved from Roanoke, and having long shed the winter, bracing myself for another, I have found, as I should have allowed myself to expect, that these burdens have not diminished in size due to geography. They have only adjusted to accommodate new grief: the painful awakening of coming back into my own body, while waking up most days to news of more rounds of death, body counts tearing through the year like buckshot.

I have spent more time trying to understand fear than probably any human being should—how it governs our internal workings, how it deforms us, both individually and as collective bodies. And I continue to pray, poorly (if such a thing as poor prayer exists), that my own grief and anger and exhaustion and defeat and ardor may be refined in the service of bringing about unyielding peace, however small.

I keep returning to the artwork: the unapologetic block font, the deep indigo of space surrounding planet Earth, moments away from collision with a celestial black body—a literal black planet. Light, in precise quadrants, glows in an X from its center, while the dark surface cracks into blood-hued red. And Earth hangs still, unmoved, though we know this cannot be for much longer.

—Natasha Oladokun

#303: Bob Dylan, "John Wesley Harding" (1967)

William James IV was a friend to the poor. That’s what he told me, anyway. Also an abogado, set against the assembled corrupt powers of Corpus Christi; an injudicious lover, trawling the intersection of Leopard & Vine when he wasn’t pining for his cheerleader girlfriend; a white trash troubadour, ever since he was a young boy in New York State, gifted a jacaranda guitar from the Nicaraguan sugar plantation owned by a friend’s father. Speaking of New York….did you know he passed the state bar before John F. Kennedy, Jr.? Wait a couple cuts; he’d be happy to share.

John Wesley Hardin, he was a lawyer too. Passed the bar in Huntsville Prison, on a 25-year bid for killing a deputy. Pardoned with eight years left, he hung his legal shingle (some sources say in El Paso, others claim Gonzalez), committed his final murder, and took a bullet through his skull. Some seventy years later, Bob Dylan gave him a “g”. It was, perhaps, the only new detail he had to offer: his Hardin has no fixed occupation—door opener? hand lender?—and no fate. He carries guns, he has a female companion, he accrues unknown charges. In an interview published in the liners to 1985’s Biograph box, Dylan told Cameron Crowe that “John Wesley Harding” was “the one song that I had no idea what it was about, why it was even on the album.” No other title was considered for the LP.

In his 42 living years, Hardin appeared, like an itinerant disease vector, in countless towns: in Alabama, Florida, Kansas and Texas. Some of these places are ghosts now, as dead as those dozens Hardin and Dylan insisted were killed in self-defense. As far as I can tell, he never made it to Corpus Christi. He did claim a gunfight with two Mexican men about 45 minutes out of town; he blew one off his horse, he said, and the other rode away after. Neither did Hardin make it to College Station, which was a tiny university outpost during his time, and a thriving university outpost in mine.

William James IV did make it to College Station: a Hastings used-CD bin, specifically, alongside Subhumans’ EP-LP and many albums that did not alter my cultural trajectory in any way. It was called Requiem for the Nineties, the title and artist name rendered in severe serif capitals, on either side of a small horizontal photostrip depicting a winter tree. I’d been involved with the campus radio station; the cover ought to have been a dead giveaway for middling execution. But that “IV” looked like a clue. I bought it and the Subs record.

Odds and ends, odds and ends: lost time is not found again. Greil Marcus surveyed the banished lands of Dylan’s Basement Tapes (recorded in the months prior to the John Wesley Harding sessions) and dubbed them the Old, Weird America. He used the same appellation in the liners to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the 1951 “occult document” that Marcus linked to the Basement Tapes in his book Invisible Republic. To John Fahey, those that dwelt in this America were, simply, “revenants”: dead citizens with the power to animate at any time, if we choose to hear. John Wesley Harding is lousy with revenants. The titles are a tarot of archetypes: the Hobo, the Immigrant, the Drifter, the Wicked Messenger. Play them in the right time, in the right order, and fate is revealed.

The major arcana of William James IV were apparent on Requiem for the Nineties, and on every subsequent CD of his I found. The Immigrant is there, but as a client, and as an absence. There is the Sex Worker—many, to be exact—and the Cheerleader, the District Attorney and the Piggy. Instead of Hardin or Tom Paine, there is Selena and JFK and JFK, Jr. and Dylan his own self. James is the Artist, the wry barefoot center of town. Power runs through and around him; his battles never end. He is charming and contemptible: an archetype every bit as recognizable as Judas Priest, who likewise knew that everyone has their temptation. As Frankie Lee expires in Priest’s embrace, having run himself ragged through two dozen prostitutes in a house “as bright as any sun,” I find myself thinking: I hope he has a good lawyer.

The Old, Weird America was, of course, once called simply “America.” The mysteries touched by Dylan, Fahey, and Marcus were perhaps not solved, but they were pondered, often by a great many people. Had we invented recording technology in, say, the 1860s, would we still have the Nugrape Twins? And if so, would they sound like John Mayall? Writing about the interstate system in 1984, Lee Sandlin noted that “it is a world that by design touches only tangentially on the actual landscape of America. The goal of construction was never to join distant cities; it was to finish weaving a net that would contain the continent.” John Wesley Harding is a stark document—hermetic and spare, like a Ph.D. candidate’s studio apartment—that tightens the looser strands of the Basement work. He presents a stasis that predicts flux: nervous men read letters and scout from watchtowers, anticipating overthrow. But how, and from whom?

I moved back to Austin and holed up in a second-floor apartment with my brother. I worked at a computer factory for months at a stretch—sometimes the second shift, sometimes overnights—until my temp contracts ran out. I’d buy Bud Ice or Thunderbird on my breaks; when I got home, I’d stash them in the freezer for a bit, then finish them off while dancing to music videos, passing out while the sky was still orange-black. I came home at 3 a.m. one day, when a neighbor was checking her mail. Because she’d never seen me before, and because we lived across a walkway, she wondered if I was following her home to murder her. She still tells this story when we’re at parties. I kept an eye on eBay, and whenever a William James IV CD appeared—not often—I bought it. I got them out of sequence, but he was always the raconteur. 1999’s Love Is the Power found him in rehab, pondering the Kennedy assassination and a motel bust that shook him to his core. (The full story of the bust can be found in “Red White & Busted,” a harrowing, live-tracked lurcher. He gets so het up that he starts screaming at his lead guitarist, Chris Gage: “RIP IT! RIP IT AGAIN, WAS THAT YOUR GOOD SIDE, MOTHERFUCKER?”) 1994’s On the Road to the Sun had “Desolation Arrow,” a full-on Dylan parody, and “The Last of the Believers,” his best Dylan homage ("I saw Jesus down at Wal-Mart / In a Volvo GLT / I said 'Now Jesus, I believe / that Volvo belongs to me’"). 1993’s South Texas Girl got him thinking about making love from nothing at all, as well as the daughter he saw too infrequently. (The cover model is reading Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.)

Upon receiving Love Is the Power in 2008, I decided to go further. I e-mailed the label head at Club de Musique, who had sold me the CD and whose website has the only worthwhile James bio. He replied the next week: he’d only met James during the Power sessions, and he passed on the e-mail of the producer, who had met James in 1990 and collaborated on a number of his records. In between a recap of his accomplishments—which are many—the producer noted that he and James were “close as brothers,” and he had about 300 copies of his albums, some of which he was willing to sell me. After living for a time with his ex in Corpus, James had decamped for Austin eight months prior. The producer had left messages with him and the ex, but no one replied. “Life is short,” the e-mail concluded. “The story is long. Nice to hear from you Brad.”

I left the story there. I also didn’t buy the producer’s CDs—I was broke, is how I spun it. Three new records for 33 bucks….that wasn’t bad. But I had come so close to the man, only to be turned away: the CDs were a poor consolation. I did another stint at the factory, then lost a series of jobs as a mail clerk, administrative assistant, and a non-profit marketing director. I met Catherine; her orbit of family and friends contained the same strain of vivant, only better tempered, that James presented. Her father was a Texas lawyer, by all accounts a remarkable man. He loved the Four Tops and his daughter, just as I did. Some of her high school classmates maintained a party house and booked the occasional gig at Saxon Pub or Sahara Lounge. Inevitably, they’d reach into their pocket and pull out Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” the final cut from Nashville Skyline, his follow-up to John Wesley Harding.

It’s my favorite of his love songs. And it’s a cross between the final two cuts on John Wesley: the passenger-train chug of “Down Along the Cove” and the heavy-lidded parley of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” The album’s final verse is “Kick your shoes off, do not fear / Bring that bottle over here / I’ll be your baby tonight”—will the night be fueled by alcohol, or autonepiophilia? I bet William James IV and I would make the same pick.

Because to me, the era of rock’s first flowering is as much a mystery to me as, say, Nelstone’s Hawaiians must have been to Dylan’s peers. (In sheer terms of elapse, they’re pretty close too.) The prosaic details—the hotels, the overnights in unfamiliar towns, the illicit substances, the assignations—are common to each, but also to many millions from Woodstock to Corpus Christi, from Hardin’s day to now. Until that closing one-two kiss, John Wesley Harding clears a dusty landscape of arbitrary justice and dread mysteries. Dylan and the Band bashed out the Basement Tapes all through the 1967’s Summer of Love—during which, depending on your vantage, the earth was cracking open, or bursting forth. With but four days left in the year, he emerged not with playfulness, but pronouncements. Dylan knew that each is timeless, but decided the time was really right for only one.

After contacting James’s producer, I picked up a bar regimen. On any night—in between karaoke takes on “Father Figure” and “Friends in Low Places”—if I listened hard enough, I could hear a chorus of Dylan’s drifters and renters: sharing setbacks, begging for more time. With enough beers between us, they became William James’s: profane, sly, lustful, stranded. Now I’m married, and my beers come from the neighborhood coffeeshop. It has an adjoining venue—locally acclaimed, hosting the cream of Austin’s pickers and strummers. Every couple weeks or so, you can hear Chris Gage & Friends. I’ve never paid to see him, but they always pipe his sets through the coffeeshop PA. I’ve never known him to make a foolish move.

—Brad Shoup

#304: Jeff Buckley, "Grace" (1994)

Well it’s you I’ve waited my life to see
It’s you I’ve searched so hard for

I.

All my life I have wondered how I will ever come to understand this, for when I think that I know what love is, it transforms into something else, something I can feel but not touch. Perhaps this paradox, and this illusiveness, is really just mercy. Perhaps it’s the divine’s way of keeping us all from burning up.

I know that as I proceed to use love and longing interchangeably, as though they are identical, that this is itself insufficiency: of comprehension, of articulation, as is the condition of my default false god. That is, the augury of translating—attempting to turn language into substance, and substance into lyric. And the attempt of trying to make sense of longing, which is anything but logical, whether or not it is humanly or divinely inspired.

But I know no other way about it than this—submitting to the words and song of those who’ve heard the voice of Someone beyond whatever it is we’ve all called reality. There is no way to argue this experience, any more than one can argue about whether or not we see light, or see by it.

This too is a shortcoming. Often, we call this poetry.

II.

When I told a friend, “I don’t know how to write about Grace,” what I meant was that an undertaking such as this would require honest reckoning with failure. It would mean trying and ultimately failing to name the very thing that, by its nature, defies designation both in art and lived experience. But this is always the case—is it not?—when staring into the bright shadow of God.

My friend listened, and said to me in reply: Love is awe-ful and will wreck you, but is perhaps the only way to let in any good. At this, I could only wonder at the truth. Are we not all made of dust and earth, buffeted about, regardless? Why should grace, then—that great wing of the divine—not also have its turn?

And there’s the hallelujah of it, he said. And there’s the hallelujah.

III.

To listen to “Hallelujah,” not just hear it, is to catch hold of the suffering that undercuts adoration, which undergirds worship and prayer. It is to discern the voice of a man growing old before his time, a man who, when he wrote the words I love you but I’m afraid to love you and I could not wake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under—was perhaps at that moment less of a prophet seeing his own death than he was a poet on the cusp of defeat. Perhaps, in writing, he too was dissatisfied with life’s excess of the tangible. Perhaps he too was not content with anything less “real” than the glint of the moon, not the moon; the scent of a dress, not the dress; the creak of a gate, not the gate. Perhaps this is the best any of us can wait for, with these bodies.

IV.

Often, throughout my adolescence, I would read the first two chapters of Genesis over and over, searching for a point of connection. Then one day—this prayer—untucking my shirt and lifting the side: Look here, Lord, if I’ve got nothing missing, what is this wound? What, then, did You take out of me?

In a way, I have not stopped asking this question. Art, the divine, the love of another—all have been defined for me in terms of felt absence, redeemed only by the promise of some sort of Word. I believe this Word must be something that means grace, or at least the expectation of it:

    Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire

V.

Coming to the end of this spring, I could barely compel even one line of writing to follow another. I’d lived in southwest Virginia for two years, feeling as displaced as the lost tribes Exodus takes such pains to chronicle. By then, the act of forcing myself to create was more torture than relief. Empty, I often turned to writing prompts for salvation. Then one day:

Read these abstractions, an exercise instructed. Write down what concrete pictures come to mind. Then create your poem.

    Rage:

The table, flipped over. Wine, in branched streams, slipping down a carved oak leg.

    Ecstasy:

Plum. Every dark shade—

I could get no further. Each of these, a merciless pitch and yaw to which no language could do justice.

And yet, though there was no love, grace, or God on this list, something within me—something I did not know—knew how to dissect etymology: where the spirit could see the body outside herself, in different time signatures—one rendition of me ringing out over another, keeping vigil while my whole head caught into a tongue of flame.

Whether any of this actually happened, or even makes any sense, is partly matter of perspective—like trying to determine which part of a storm cloud is made the most of water. Still, who can say how that unnamable sustenance appeared, as present as a dream: of what might be, and what, then, is already here.

VI.

All my life I have wondered how I will ever come to understand this: the presence of grace cannot be measured only in terms of scarcity or abundance. Like God, it is not a matter of conjured experience, and it is even less a matter of devout or ailing conviction, though it is partly that.

It is a matter of recollection and hunger. We do not remember what we ate on this day a year ago—we remember only that we were fed. And while we are also sustained (or is it driven?) by what we do not yet have, this always exists within the thin mesh between desperation and hope. Often, we call this mesh faith, and this faith, vulnerability.

Is this not what all the great bards and artists have taught us? That however much it may shape us, we do not have the luxury of settling for doubt. That we are burned, but not consumed—that we must risk something in uncovering our most hidden desires. That longing is belief, without the safety of clothes.

—Natasha Oladokun

#305: Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" (1998)

Not a day goes by I don’t think about you
You left your mark on me—it’s permanent, a tattoo

There is no way to write about a loved one’s death in a self-satisfying way. Most lives we’ve loved are too enormous for that. And death is petty and maudlin. It makes people uncomfortable. Though it remains our singular shared experience, the conversation surrounding it is hushed, held in late-night tones. Perhaps because it isn’t really death we want to keep tucked away, but loss. Perhaps because loss like this is a permanent absence you’re either forced to get comfortable with or go mental trying not to. When someone’s suddenly gone, you feel it much more than you understand it. Rational thought has no place here. Philosophers beware.

Largely, I’m a lucky so-and-so. I can count my losses on one hand. Each finger counted breaks me to the bone, but they are few and I am grateful. Last week was a year and eight months since Lena sent me a text to tell me Claudia had died. I was in the middle of teaching fifth grade Language Arts—I don’t typically check my phone. It must have been the end of class. My students must have been packing up their things. It matters and it doesn’t matter. I want to hang on to every detail of the day because I think of it now as the last day I still lived in a world where my friend Claudia Emerson lived with me.

I knew her before I knew her, if that makes sense. At the University of Mary Washington, it was a little hard not to. She wasn’t our only rock star, but she was the biggest. She’d won the Pulitzer three years before I got there and, miraculously it seemed, had stayed. She said she liked teaching undergrads, that their hunger made her hungrier. Her office door was covered in strange ephemera and what looked like photographs of bright feathers and bird skulls. At the one coffee shop downtown, you could find her writing quietly on her own at a corner table. You couldn’t typically take an upper-level poetry class until junior year, which meant your first two years as an English major were spent with the same hundred questions in your head, all more or less variations on what’s she like?

Writing poetry is a weird thing to do. As a teacher myself now, I always tell my high schoolers not to worry about it if they don’t like it—I cut the unit short if that’s the case. I never analyze lines with them unless they seem like they might want to. The first poem we read is always “so you want to be a writer?” because I want my kids to snicker and I want them not to worry about it. If they’re into it—poetry, I mean—they’ll fall in love on their own. I believe my job is only to hand them impossible, bewitching collections of words and say “Here, give it a try, just in case.” The medium is too fragile. The hackles go up the minute the filthy word is said: poetry. A punchline more than an art. Is it any wonder its foolhardy bearers have chips on their shoulders as big as they are?

Like most, I was force-fed the same dry oats throughout my entire academic career. I understand now the great beauty in language, but why was this my lesson at 12 years old, 14, 16? When it came to me, on its own, in college, it came hard. And, of course, it came from Claudia, who read the hermitic West Virginia poet Steve Scafidi’s “Life Story of the Possible” to the class in the early days of my first-ever poetry workshop. By the last line, she was in tears. Partly, my revelation came from the poem, which remains to this day one of my favorites, though mostly it was Claudia, exposed and open-hearted and laughing about it all at once. A small, cataclysmic response.

It’s hard to say who this is for. Recollections of moments of those who have died seem selfish, or boring at best. But Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is one of the greatest albums ever made—and it reminds me now heavily and only of Claudia, which, to be frank, somehow makes it even better.

I’m not even 100 percent sure that she liked Lucinda Williams as much as I remember, but it’s impossible that she didn’t at least like her a little. Her life, for one, was surrounded by and infused with music every day. She was a part-time lyricist and guitar player on top of the poetry, and her husband’s stringed instrument collection hung on the walls of their home. I keep his business card in my wallet: it says his name and beneath it, MUSIC. The first time I paid them a visit I met their cat, Lucinda. I freaked; Claudia and I talked Gravel Road. What else was there to say? Maybe it’s music that’s our great unifier, the one shared thread, after all. If so, it’s a good one.

At Claudia’s funeral, I stood in the procession filing into the great downtown church. It took a moment for me to realize that Steve Scafidi stood immediately in front of me, shuffling at my same pace, same confused glaze of a look. As much as any writer can, he had changed my life irrevocably. I had never met him—to this day, still haven’t. It was only appropriate I should see him then, there, for that occasion. All links over time break from their chain. It doesn’t mean that they’ve forgotten, will forget.

A few of us decided to get tattoos that night; it hadn’t been an easy day. We wanted to be links connected forever to our chain, we wanted never to forget. Claudia’s tattoo was of an iamb on the inside of her wrist, just below the palm’s ridge. It was she who told me the iamb was the heartbeat of poetry. Nearer to the end of her life, she explained her tattoo by telling others “it means stress unstress.” Both meanings true, both perfect. On an image of the tattoo on Facebook, the poet Mark Jarman told her he and his wife were considering iamb ink of their own. She asked, “For me as a kind of prayer?” and told him to do it.

So we got our own iambs. The needleman asked if that was all we wanted, that it would only take two seconds and we’d still have to pay the minimum, far more than a stress and an unstress was worth. A simple bowl and leaning ladder. The decision felt like a minor thrill, helped pump blood back into our demolished hearts. Today I trace my pinky across the lines just over my pulse. Today I teach Claudia in the classroom. Each time it feels like opening wide a set of locked double doors.

And I listen to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. When I hear Lucinda, I imagine Claudia. The loss has so tightly tied these together that by now it’s second nature. It’s an album that was written to perfection, labored over for years, held onto for as long as possible, and it shows. A labor of love is still founded on love, still seeks it. Country music has always bartered in the currency of loss. But music is the unifier—the medium, not the message. Music is the unifier. Too cool to be forgotten / hey hey.

via Facebook.com

—Brad Efford

#306: Beck, "Odelay" (1996)

I am fourteen. Newly so. It's my birthday and I want to celebrate even though I look like this. Yesterday at school I slid a flattened straw between my two front teeth to feel the plastic on my gums, but I pulled it out too quickly and felt it catch, felt the tug and then the little corner of tooth floating around in my saliva, spit into my hand. It happened between fifth and sixth period, so I just wiped it into the pocket of my jeans, pressed my lips together and made it through the rest of the day in silence. Now I can't stop running my tongue over my tooth's chipped ridge. It is a pleasant sensation, this altered mouth-scape. It's sharp but not too sharp. Familiar little groove.

*

The tooth has been chipped for years, really. It was the veneer I disturbed with the straw—the fake part. The actual chip happened in a roller-blading accident way back in fifth grade, so I know the drill by now: a trip to the dentist Monday morning, a finger wag for being careless, and then I'll get to look at a lot of cool tools and gadgets, flavored pastes and putties that become teeth and hot blue lights and a straw that sucks on me and I'll have a new fake tooth corner in a half-hour or so. Isn't dentistry surreal? I'll get back to school in time for drama class.

I still want to celebrate my damn birthday.

*

My family has moved, recently, from a split-level rental on a cookie-cutter suburban cul-de-sac  to a big fairytale cottage in an enchanted wood on the other side of town. My little brother has already joined the pack of boys that march around in line like elves, organizing enchanted soccer games. I am way more popular at my new school than I ever was at the old one. It really sucks that I can't have a big party. So many kids would come.

*

Let me tell you about Cathy Tupper, my best friend from my old school. I still want to celebrate my damn birthday and I know she'll be nice about my tooth because Cathy and I got hot together. That means we were ugly and invisible together first, so it would be very uncool for either of us to judge. When we met, in band class, sitting side by side with clarinets in our mouths, we were both the kind of girl you might call mousey, our hotness all hidden somewhere behind the oversized tee-shirts and thick glasses. The ponytails with messy bangs. The lack of mascara. Near the end of seventh grade, though, we both got contacts and started shopping in the Juniors department and suddenly we weren't invisible anymore. Boys started to make jokes about what those clarinets could be.

We didn't realize that becoming visible would mean that boys—men, too—would start saying things like that to us. We didn't know we would have to start "dodging dicks," as Cathy calls it, and we don't know how we're supposed to feel about it. But we sure do like feeling pretty. We are glad that we became hot girls together. We talk about these things, Cathy and me.

*

Let me tell you about Grant Stillman, my best friend at my new school. He will walk over from his parent's fairytale cottage pretty soon. He, too, lives in the enchanted wood, and he will, as usual, bring along some enchanted substance or another that will make us giggle in the backseat of my mom's car all the way to the mall. We are going to see Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Grant is one boy whose dick I know I will never have to dodge because he hopes to do some dick dodging of his own someday. We talk about these things, Grant and me. We talk about dicks and vaginas and we showed ours to each other once, like children playing doctor, I guess, except it was just a month ago. When he touched me Grant immediately recoiled, saying "men are like weapons and women are open wounds" and I guess he's right about that. He spent the rest of the night talking to the ceiling about the inequity of heterosexuality while I tried to draw him in my journal.

*

I'm weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday, tonguing my chipped tooth and letting the tears slide down my face in silence, feeling safe in the dark. Romeonardo peers through a bright blue tropical fish tank at My-So-Called-Juliet and I am thinking about my first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, and how Cathy Tupper introduced us over the phone, on a conference call from Justin Dwyer's dad's home office. Justin was Cathy's boyfriend at the time and Aaron Butler, Justin's best friend, was about to start going to my new school. Over the course of several more conference calls, we, the four of us, built it up into some kind of new-kids-in-love story and a few days later, via call waiting, in Cathy's voice, translated from the Justin translation of the original, Aaron Butler asked me to be his girlfriend. We didn't see each other face to face until a week later, on his first day at school, when he found me in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Our relationship mostly just consisted of us sitting together at lunch and walking together in the hallways, but now I'm sitting here weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday and Desiree is singing about kissing and I am thinking about that one, soft kiss that day before I got on the bus. My first kiss. My only kiss. When will I ever kiss again?

And now Mercutio-in-drag is dancing and I am thinking about the time I refused to hold Aaron's hand in the hallway because I just didn't feel like it at that moment and why did we have to hold hands all the time anyway? And now neon crosses, and now swimming pools and now bloody street fights and Romeo slew Tybalt and Romeo must not live and I am thinking about how Sandy Black stormed into French class that morning with a smirk on her face, like she had just eaten something delicious and she couldn't wait to give me a taste, how she used Spice Girls lyrics to say it at first, something like, "I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my lover to get with my friends," how I later learned that this alluded to the fact that she had witnessed my very first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, making out with Jenny Konopka on the bus that morning.

My-So-Called-Juliet is ugly-crying, poison-eyeing, and I am digging my tongue into the sharpest point of my chipped tooth, hoping to taste blood, and all that I am thinking is that Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

*

We have to kill some time before my mom comes to pick us up. Grant suggests pizza, but Cathy wants to buy me a present. I smile without parting my lips. I am thinking about how when I asked Cathy that night to ask Justin to ask Aaron Butler why he did it, he said, in Cathy's voice, another call-waiting translation of a translation, "Well, which girl would you want? The one who makes out with you on the bus or the one who won't even hold your hand?" My heart lurches a little.

We loiter around Tower Records for a while and Cathy buys me the CD I have been coveting since the summertime, with the one song that is sure to cheer me up, anytime, always, and presents it to me with a flourish. We listen to it in the car on the way home and my spirits pick themselves up off the dirty floor of my soul. The intro builds up in my gut and the outro assures me, "Awwww, it's all goood." I believe that decrescendo.

*

Jenny Konopka is my friend, sort of? She sidled up to me on the running track during mandatory exercise last week and told me she liked my iridescent nail polish and she kind of hasn't left my side since then? And I kind of don't mind, I guess? We are YMCA counselors-in-training, Jenny and I, and there aren't a lot of us. I guess Jenny decided I was the best fit for the empty slot labeled "Jenny's Summer Camp Friend," because I guess she maybe actually thinks I'm kind of cool, maybe? On Friday she introduced me to my new boyfriend, Brandon Moody, who is best friends with her boyfriend, Tommy Galloway.

Being a counselor-in-training kind of blows. It's just because none of our parents trust us to stay home all summer and we aren't old enough for real jobs yet. I'm pretty sure Grant and all of the other teenagers in the enchanted forest are ordering pizzas and playing Super Nintendo without me every day. But I do really like the things Jenny and I do with our boyfriends just feet away from each other in the little storage room above the racquetball court.

Jenny Konopka has seen me with Brandon Moody's tongue in my mouth and she has seen what I look like when I am thinking about doing it and she probably knows, like Brandon and I both know, that I love being felt-up but I don't want to do any feeling up of my own. Jenny knows all of that about me and she likes my nail polish so I think we must be actual friends, now.

*

Let me tell you about Brandon Moody's dick. I touched it, finally. I tried to avoid it almost all summer, but one day I guess I just gave in and I reached into his pants and I wrapped my hand around it. It felt kind of like a big worm at first and then it changed and I was holding this, like, flesh-rod and it was so weird I pulled my hand right back out. I think it might have been a mistake to touch it because Brandon won't stop talking about doing it now. He keeps trying to get me to sneak off into the woods with him, and he keeps reminding me that Tommy and Jenny did it last week and no one caught them. I said I was on my period for a while, but Jenny called me out after a week of that lie. "Mine only last like five days," she said, "so you should be able to do it now." She said that in front of Brandon Moody, too. Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

*

Brandon Moody and I are sitting at a picnic table playing footsie and he tells me to reach out under the table for his hand and when I do he presses something squishy into my palm. Looking down, I see that it is a condom with a sheep on the wrapper. The ones Grant keeps in his sock drawer don't have sheep on the wrappers and I wonder if Brandon's sheep-condoms are better than Grant's condoms, which come in clear wrappers so you can see which color you're getting. I turn the sheep-condom over in my hand, squeeze it and feel it squish again. I try not to react.

"I'm going to use that with you next Friday," is what Brandon says about it, and I know he means at the amusement park. There is a field trip next Friday. He is trying to be romantic, he says, so that our first time can be special. The amusement park is a special place, he says. Plus it will be easy to sneak off there, to slip the real counselors and then slip it in, he says, and he chuckles. I just keep nodding, not knowing what to do or say back to him. I like Brandon Moody. I really like him. I want him to keep being my boyfriend, so I just keep nodding.

*

Last night I freaked out. I didn't know what to do so I called Cathy Tupper and I told her everything. And Cathy Tupper told me I don't have to go to the amusement park and I don't have to ride any rides I don't want to ride. She said it seemed like a good night for a sleepover. And now it's amusement park day and I am sitting on her couch watching Seinfeld instead, because I want to remain master of my domain. I want my life to be a show about nothing.

*

When I return to the Y on Monday, Brandon Moody is no longer my boyfriend. I learn this first from Lauren Flayme, a pudgy, funny, gossipy girl a year younger than the rest of us. When I see him—sitting alone at a picnic table with his hands folded in his lap, as if he's been expecting me—Brandon explains that Jenny introduced him to her friend Candace at the amusement park and, in my absence, what choice did he have? He wants to still be friends, he says, but at lunchtime he and Jenny and Tommy all sit far away from me. I sit with Lauren Flayme.

As I walk the running track alone at mandatory exercise, I run my tongue over my smooth front teeth and I feel sort of dissatisfied and I realize my stupid heart isn't even broken. I watch Brandon, Jenny, and Tommy, so far ahead of me on the running track that I can see their smiling faces, not their backs. I kick a rock and squint at the sun and I find myself thinking about the night of my fourteenth birthday, back at the enchanted forest, Cathy, Grant and I lying across my bed, full of enchanted substances, listening to Beck and giggling at the ceiling, chanting, "Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay!"

—Claire Boswell

#307: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)

over this music / I make my first real friend / we agree to keep one another’s museums under development / at thirteen when being in agreement has never been more crucial / this band really rings our bell / though we aren’t like those weeping fans in the movies / we appreciate them / the lungs on them / their real face-gripping hurt seems to ache them / to pound the pavement / on the living room floor by the speakers / I love my new friend just for loving / what I love / enough / what makes a person / into a fan / what part of the heart gives over / to what part //

the first chord on this album is a famous alarm clock / its title is a famous mistake / my loyalty is single voiced and simple / like how there’s only one the Beatles / nobody brings this up at parties / in adherence to the rules of discourse at parties / that non-controversial subjects need not be mentioned / unless they can be posited as a guilty pleasure / and defended in a way that makes a person picture sex / as an argument about a band / simple with love / I persist in having nothing to add / but that 1960s teenage feeling / in the 1990s / I’d like to add the feeling the floor makes / when it’s by the speakers //

too green to have met myself yet I stashed some clues about myself inside my friend / for safekeeping / until I could be held accountable / I walked too many times to the record store to prowl the castaways / checked out that one book from the library / that broke each song down into its parts / spelled out who wrote which percentage of “And I Love Her” / clearly mostly it was Paul / I can’t yet be trusted with an idea about process / the idea of people in a room in the past / perhaps with sandwiches / making something that can crawl towards me in time / is also far away from me in time / closer is the considered image of my friend loving the same sounds as I am loving / and that this experience can be repeated / though I’m on a linear surface that only rolls forward beneath me / I can share it also now with you / when I land on a train decades later singing to myself / as long as I have you near me / I burst into it as if predetermined //

loving the Beatles was always absent effort until it wasn’t / until I vowed to learn to play “Blackbird” on guitar the real way / better than the boys / in this way the Beatles also taught me / when you love something long enough you build it a bed beside yours / inside your body / and compete with it //

when I’m feeling young everything I like is a study of seeing myself in it / the art or the enterprise of sitting beside someone else’s work / asking it for answers / this lasts and lasts / though I do in time devote myself to new sounds / with a studious diligence / I try to love “Guerilla Radio” / which is how I learn that sometimes love is work / when I use my mind to lift things / at first / my mind is weak / it wants to use what it loves best to explain itself to itself / what it wants is a vegetable it doesn’t have to try at / but that will contribute nutrients like anything planted / sown in rows for me to pluck easily with my small arms / in my sleep / unaware of much / though I would have said I wanted / everything at infinite capacity / what I was after / was to be surprised by how easily I could love //

this album makes a sound that’s more like the feeling of listening / one experience of a song enters at a time like a single voice / is that why those fans were always crying / because trying to understand how many events is one event / is impossible / kaleidoscopic / it breaks apart and becomes too numerous / in a stadium / where side by side / we recognize ourselves //

I’m uncomfortable with time and assessment / with the bland tyranny of my thinking / but these songs are good because they’re good / and because I love them / I collapse into an uncritical pile of shut up and because I said so / it’s a stunningly bad wedding vow that asserts love is fascist / love is authoritarian / still this hill is where I will live out my days / still whenever I love it’s the same as I want you to know what I’m able to love without trying / without process or the effort of the act / or how I learned to find others by sharing / as long as I have you near me / and how I’m dumbly flammable //

and what is it that makes me pair an ease of loving with an urge to dismiss it / O! I am an underappreciated appreciator of nothing nobody else doesn’t already appreciate / O! I fucking love the Beatles / and listen to them all the time / meaning nothing less than these tunes are in the walls of my body / its spongy absorbent bits / its twig sculpture on the forest floor / the sticky hellos it sends out of its mouth as it passes / to a future more complicated / fortified by this first simple giving over / hello, hello //

—Laura Eve Engel