#268: Paul Simon, "Paul Simon" (1972)

In the summer of 1996 four of us pooled some money and bought a beat-up, hard-rode 1985 Dodge Prospector conversion van for $750 from the Mid-American Auto Auction in Louisville, Kentucky. The thing was amazing—it had wooden venetian blinds that mostly worked and one of those little ladders anchored to a rear door. That the van shook like it was entering the atmosphere when rolling faster than 44 mph meant nothing to us. We fixed it up, which really consisted of three things, in increasing order of importance: 1. Found a way to stash some weed behind the CB. 2. Replaced the missing rear captain’s chairs with some replacements we found at a junkyard. 3. Took a copy of Neil Young’s Zuma to a local mall and had the cover airbrushed onto a license plate that we proudly affixed to the front of the van. Thus was the van christened Zuma. As my father said, we were about to meander into parts of the country deeply unknown to us in a vehicle he wouldn’t trust to circle the block. But we set forth on our adventure. About 18,000 miles of driving over nine weeks, with most of our stops being the grand National Parks of the west, where we’d hike, backcountry camp, and try to stay awake following each ten-mile trek long enough to drink whiskey.

We had the things you’d expect. Sleeping bags and backpacks. There were a couple of acoustic guitars and a somewhat ingenious storage system created by lashing together milk crates with bungee cords. We wore out two copies of Rand McNally’s United States road atlas, an indispensable tool in those pre-GPS days, particularly for people hoping to avoid interstates and keep to William Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways. And we brought some road culture, of course: in addition to a journal I never cracked other than to note the locations of our daily campsites, I brought with me a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I’m also the one who placed the obligatory, totemic copy of On the Road in one of Zuma’s door pockets.

A Discman connected to the speakers through a tape adapter stayed on the console next to the beer cans and food crumbs. In between the two first seats were rows of CDs. Although we may have each had Discmans, music was a communal, though not necessarily equitable, affair during the trip. Three days in, one of the guys requested Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” and I think I managed to filibuster that selection for, quite literally, weeks. We were not the easiest folks to get along with.

Certain records served as the background to that trip, soundtracking midnight drives through the Tetons, or the marathon, single-shot drive we took from Arches in Utah to Glacier in Montana, or the 23 hours spent shuddering from Albuquerque to New Orleans, which is still the only time I’ve ever spent in Texas. The first Son Volt record. Bowie’s Hunky Dory. American Beauty. The first two (remarkable and criminally neglected) Dire Straits records. Any Neil Young, with extreme prejudice in favor of Tonight’s the Night, Zuma, and Comes a Time. These were all in heavy rotation.

We also listened to quite a lot of Paul Simon’s eponymous 1972 solo record. Like all music that ever means anything to you, to this day, insofar as I ever listen to that album, it has the ability to tractor me back to that time, those places, and those friendships which have frayed, been redeemed, or ended silently over the past 20 years.

Since finishing that last sentence, I’ve been staring at the screen. It’s been quite some time, and I’m surprised at what I’m about to attempt. When I first set out to write this piece—or rather when I accepted the assignment—I intended to spend some time exploring how Paul Simon fit into the, for lack of better concepts, teleology and history of American musical populism. The thing about the Zuma trip was supposed to be scaffolding to delete once I started talking about my ideas. But that’s proven impossible. Not because that task is objectively impossible, but because I can’t clear my mind of one of my fellow travelers and how every time I think of the Paul Simon record I think of him and what our friendship was and what it has become. But I also don’t quite know how to talk about that, either.

*

You know “Mother and Child Reunion.” If you’re taking the time to read this, you surely know that song. But do you know how the song got its title? According to a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Simon was eating at a restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown. The menu included a dish featuring chicken and eggs called, of course, Mother and Child Reunion. According to that RS interview, Simon’s response was, "Oh, I love that title. I gotta use that one."

That’s about as sentimental as Paul Simon gets.

Simon’s a great songwriter—and songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” invested him with the aura of an emotionally raw troubadour. I’d argue that reputation was always-already incorrect, but in his first solo record he revealed himself as an emotionally distant poet of the everyday. Not that he only wrote about the banality of everyday life. More to the point, he wrote about even the most transformative moments—social protest in “Peace Like A River” or losing one’s virginity in “Duncan”—but delivered everything with a Vulcan’s detachment. It’s beautiful. It’s also cold.

For the record, I find this a startling observation. Paul Simon has long been a contender for honorable mention in any top-five list I’ve created while boozing away the night. And I’m a sloppy emoter. But when my impressions of that record were made, I think my ears were as novice as Simon’s heart was when he wrote those songs.

Simon was 30 years old and desperately trying to escape the long shadow of his co-fame with Art Garfunkel when he released this record, but it is a young man’s record. Paul Simon doesn’t reckon with its past. The record doesn’t indulge in nostalgia and is a bit frozen in the extremities. There may be heat in the heart but the way the record touches the world is with icy fingers that can’t quite feel what they’re grasping. It feels strange, in hindsight, that this album played such a role in that long-ago trip. It’s not a road record. It’s a roadside motel record.

In the ’72 interview, Simon goes on to discuss “Mother and Child Reunion” further. Critic, producer, and, in this instance, interviewer, Jon Landau says that he read a lot into that track’s title, to which Simon says:

“Well, that's alright. What you read in was damn accurate, because what happened was this: last summer we had a dog that was run over and killed, and we loved this dog. It was the first death I had ever experienced personally. Nobody in my family died that I felt that. But I felt this loss—one minute there, next minute gone, and then my first thought was, ‘Oh, man, what if that was [Simon’s wife] Peggy? What if somebody like that died? Death, what is it, I can't get it.’"

Paul Simon is less clumsily expository than this interview response, of course, but the album feels marbled by similar emotional near-connections. Feelings exist in the record’s atmosphere, if you will, but if we keep with that metaphor, they are exhaled as easily as they’re inhaled. They don’t seem too deeply enmeshed in the songs. Sometimes this is in the service of irony, as in “It’s carbon and monoxide / that ol’ Detroit perfume,” the first lines of “Papa Hobo,” a playful invocation of the Motor City’s realities—realities which lead the narrator to hit the road and leave town. Some of the songs don’t feel complete so much as suspended with narrators that are enchanted by getting through the day in a life that is both easy and rewarding. “Everything Put Together Falls Apart” is an unfinished idea. And “Run That Body Down” offers the record’s best example of its alluring, easy banality. The record play-acts at emotion.

*

This guy that I keep thinking about—let’s call him Neil—was one of my best friends. Starting early in high school we spent years together, inseparable, playing music, drinking Keystone Dry, doing other white dude things. And then life intervened. By life, at least in this instance, I mean desire. It’s a trope, of course, but at some point Neil started sleeping with a women who had recently dumped me, and when he did that, something broke, and drift started.

The rupture was abrupt.  Over years, we tried to heal. The break occurred before we bought the van and headed out west. That journey wasn’t an attempt to salvage the friendship. But it did cast the friendship’s frailty in an entirely different light. There were things we couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about. Music remained a safe common ground, where the biggest battles would be fought over which Bowie era was superior. We listened to Son Volt and Dire Straits. We keyed in to Paul Simon.

The ability to be romantic and adopt a philosophical posture toward the dissipation of our youth is a stupendously privileged thing in which to engage. We often—and here “we” means a lot of middle class, literary kids like me—ache in some stupid, forlorn, bad-poetry way, contriving a sense of sentimentality in the moment. This clouds reality, though. The knock-off Keatsian appreciation of the passing moment obscures what is passing. Time, life, sure, but in this context friendship. For years that’s how I approached my history with this dear old friend. The point became the poetic echo of a lost friendship. The loss of the friendship became the point of the friendship.

But why does Paul Simon connect so intimately with a two-decade-old experience? I think it’s because the record tends to shrug off its hollow emotional core with a similar kind of poetic shrug. Neil and I have been trying for several years to re-establish something. We’ve never been fully out of each other’s lives, but nothing has ever really felt natural. Maybe we’re coming close to that now. I don’t know. But what I do know, and what thinking about Paul Simon confirms for me, is that expression of an emotion is not the same as feeling that emotion. That even though we always know that the cherished things in our lives are passing away, what we should never honor is the process of loss over the things you lose.

—Michael Washburn

#269: The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Psychocandy" (1985)

“Pure? What does it mean?”

    - Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°”

I’d love to be able to tell Sylvia Plath that I know what “pure” means. Pure is a sound. Pure is a place where noise becomes poetry. Pure is Psychocandy, a fusion of sex and despair and offerings-up. Psychocandy is bedroom music; starting with the Reid brothers brooding and dreaming in a too-small space in East Kilbride, Scotland, to me, over thirty years later, looking at a picture of my childhood bedroom in suburban Connecticut, circa 1982, and remembering that five or six years later, I started writing song lyrics on the wall, and ripping up the carpet, not caring that the house was a rental and that I had no permission to do those things. The exposed carpet tacks that bordered the floor-edge near the door were for other people to step on; I either invited you in, or you didn’t come in.

Step back and watch the sweet thing
Breaking everything she sees

    - The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Happy When it Rains”

I close my eyes for a minute while I’m listening to “Taste the Floor” and the feedback and noise carve out places in my body. This noise doesn’t mean to do me harm. I take it into me, like a tuning fork or a divining rod. I can hold on to it. It runs through me the way those first moments of “Everything in its Right Place” ran through me the first time I heard that in 2000: I was afraid, because a noise knew what lived in my head. How did it know? How does a sound so devastating know, now, what an almost-43-year-old holds in her head (She’s singing to herself / as she’s singing in herself)? Noise and pain sing in me, and the music guesses this. It doesn’t tell me I should have worked through this by now. Instead it tells me don’t turn off.

And I watch, And I watch, And I watch

    - The Jesus and Mary Chain, “In a Hole”

I want to tell you that in 1985, when Psychocandy dropped, I was the cool kid, playing it incessantly, alternating between it and New Order’s Low Life, which also came out that year. I could tell you that, but I’d be lying to you. I was eleven years old in 1985, by most accounts weird, and by my own, desperate. I looked the part, dressing in the approved uniforms of affluent pre-teen 80s suburbia, but I was tall for my age, with puberty encroaching. I slouched. I turned my shoulders in, hoping no one would notice my body. It was all right to show enthusiasm, but not too much, for books or art, and I was too enthusiastic. I danced to Madonna in the living room of that rented house, and I said I wanted to be a writer. It was the only thing I knew from a small lifetime of watching: the arbitrary cruelties of school, the way my mother almost succumbed to a near-lethal episode of depression. The way words moved on a page, and held people like me long after the authors had gone. I watched and I watched and I watched.

Paula Mejia, in her 33 1/3 volume on Psychocandy, writes that it’s “an album that viscerally clangs with the sound of struggle and outcasts making sense of their bitterness, using music as survival and, ultimately, a form of escape” (24). Would I have known what to do with Psychocandy’s poetry-noise if someone had handed it to me in 1985? Probably not. I knew about escape; I made up other worlds in my bedroom all the time. I borrowed other people’s pop fantasies, not understanding that I needed one of my own. If you had asked me about bitterness, I probably could have owned up to unhappiness, but bitter has an edge on it. It would take a few more years, and hours of bedroom listening, before bitterness seeped in.

Listening to the album now, I bite down on the noise. It’s that solid. It tastes like copper; heavy, with the sharpness of blood. It’s singing like myself, a poem of feedback. Hold on to the knife in the socket, it says. Hold on to the purest burn.

—Sarah Nichols

#270: The Rolling Stones, "Some Girls" (1978)

Several years ago, HBO released a documentary about the Rolling Stones that I watched more than once. During that time of my life, I was stuck halfway between heartbreak and new love, and there was this part of me that wanted to fall in love with a non-presence, with something that could not hurt me. The documentary was a bunch of primary-source clips spliced together—no voiceover, just footage of the Stones at their concerts, in their dressing room, in news stories from the time. It felt a little like watching someone else’s home videos. It made me feel nostalgic for a time I had not come even close to experiencing.

This was a welcome reprieve from my everyday nostalgia and regret, that powerlessness you feel when a thing you tried like hell to keep going ends anyway—that space where it still seems like that ending could possibly be the worst thing, when you are still struggling and cannot yet see the steps you’ve taken toward something you cannot even comprehend at the time: a life without that struggle.

I guess I felt a ghost echo of that life when I watched the documentary, picking up on a possibility I wasn’t even aware of. Or maybe I just found it a more comforting kind of longing. At any rate, I wanted to write about it. I started listening to the Rolling Stones a lot, and Some Girls was the album I ended up listening to most.

Here is what I remember: putting on the album and pulling out the typewriter I liked to write on back then. I picked Some Girls because I had an idea about listening to the album as its own thing—that an album would have a kind of cohesion, be a made thing, in the way that a greatest hits album wouldn’t be. I picked that particular album somewhat at random, mostly because it had “Beast of Burden” on it, which is my favorite of all their songs (I’ve never shared this without people reacting with surprise—I guess that song isn’t usually a favorite, and I never really know what to say to that except: Oh, well, it’s mine).

I was listening to the music in an attempt to channel their spirit, or to work through what appealed to me about their spirit, or to tap into the recklessness and nostalgia I felt, the longing I felt for some other past layered on top of the longing I had for my own past layered on top of the thrill of having kissed a quiet and unassuming-seeming man and being so unexpectedly, completely upended. I wanted to care about it and I wanted not to care about it—which is how the Stones seem, to me. They have feelings, but they also have bravado, they have energy that comes from more than just those feelings, energy that is all their own.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d ever listened to the Rolling Stones. In my first year of college, they played a concert in the stadium across the street from my dorm, and I bought their greatest hits compilation (a multiple-CD set) in preparation for tagging along with my parents and aunts and uncles to the show. I knew many of the songs already, but in a peripheral way—I had heard them I guess, but I don’t know that I’d ever made a point of listening. Leaving home was both tough and easy; I missed my parents and my old home but I also didn’t. I wanted to adjust, to feel settled where I was, more than I wanted to return home, but I was in flux regardless. I wanted to like something my parents liked, a safely-delayed sort of connection.

They smuggled airplane bottles of booze into the stadium and I felt inducted into some illicit club of adulthood, even though there was no way any of that liquor was going to make it into my soda. Halfway through the show, someone called in a bomb threat and the Stones left the stage while officials investigated. My uncle got pretty upset while waiting, wondering why they weren’t evacuating us, afraid the whole place was going to go up in flames. He and his wife went back to their hotel while the rest of us waited it out, and the Stones eventually got back onstage to play some more songs, and so he missed the end of the show.

It’s funny, because I hadn’t thought of this in ages, and now, in remembering, I wonder if they’d shared a joint on the walk over to the stadium, something that would enhance paranoia—what’s interesting to me about this idea isn’t the possibility of the thing itself, but the fact that such a thought would have been completely alien to me when I was eighteen. The airplane bottles were the limit of my imagination, the biggest rule I could picture them breaking. It makes me want to reach through time and pet my hair, oh you sweet, naïve, serious thing.

It was a lot of excitement, that evening, but the biggest excitement was seeing Mick Jagger onstage. We did not have good seats; he was a small figure in the distance. He was an old and wrinkly man. But he moved purposefully and easily, with an energy that astounded me. Mick Jagger was 43 years older than me, old enough to be my grandfather, and it seemed impossible to me at the time but there I was, thinking it: he was unmistakably and undeniably hot. I’m struggling as I write this to come up with a way to describe it that doesn’t sound laughable, and it occurs to me that I don’t have to describe it, not really: you know Mick Jagger. You’ve seen his energy. It’s part of why he’s famous. But the strength of that energy, how apparent it was even when he was inches high on a stage so far away, how it traversed an age difference of nearly a half-century, that surprised me. But I guess that’s part of what sexiness is.

Years later, in the face of meeting a new man I was excited about, I wanted to understand that swagger, to disassemble it into all its parts (impossible, but that’s what I wanted to know)—maybe more to understand this man I met, who was one person when he talked to you and another person entirely when he kissed you, than to understand it inherently on its own or somehow embody it myself (for a woman it’s different anyway, more passive, such a pretty pretty girl). So I watched a documentary over and over, I listened to the songs, I tried not to be too sad about what had passed or too scared about what was to come. I had met a lovely, lovely man, something promising—but it would take us years to figure out how to engage with that something in a productive way. I didn’t know it, but the giant unknown thing was just tumult giving way to more tumult. Oddly, I’m nostalgic for it now.

—Katelyn Kiley

#271: The Beach Boys, "The Beach Boys Today!" (1965)

Sam and I were camp friends, which meant that from the ages of six to fourteen we spent a month of every summer together at Camp du Nord in northern Minnesota, swimming, horseback riding, going on nature hikes, singing around the campfire, and every other camp activity you can name. She was from Oxnard, California, though the way she talked about it, you’d have thought she lived in Hollywood itself; I was a farm kid from Wisconsin. She taught me how to French braid my hair, how to craft friendship bracelets, how to do the Macarena. I taught her how to pee outside, how to identify poison ivy, how to whistle using a blade of grass. Looking back, I can no longer remember if we really were such stereotypes of our upbringings, or if it was just camp that turned everyone into a caricature of themselves.

I can state with confidence now that camp was a different world, that we each reinvented ourselves for four weeks every summer. I embraced my outdoorsy, tomboy side, in part because my doing so made Sam declare that she was going to help me “be a girl,” like that was the end goal for all girls, everywhere. I can laugh at that now, but as a child, all I wanted was to be a girl. A normal girl, who didn’t show up in overalls on her first day of sixth grade at the new middle school, who had a curling iron to form her bangs into perfect poofs above her forehead, who had dresses hanging in her closet that she could slip into and no one would mention how odd it was that she wasn’t in jeans.

Sam and I didn’t talk during the rest of the year. We exchanged a handful of letters—postcards, mostly, mine always with cows or the cheese castle in Kenosha or the state capitol building, hers of the Hollywood sign, the ocean, the Los Angeles skyline. “Can’t wait to see you this summer,” we’d write, and we meant it.

Our last year at camp was the summer we were 14. We’d be in high school in the fall, and if we returned to camp, it would be as junior counselors. I think both of us knew that we wouldn’t be coming back, but neither of us had said it. The last few summers had been more strained than in the past. It took us a couple days to slip back into our friendship, and we each had more references to events from our regular lives. I had brought my school yearbook for the first time and spent much of the first day showing her pictures of all my friends, most of whom were mere acquaintances, if that. But we were still close, still inseparable, and if you had asked me, I’d have said that we’d remain that way for the rest of our lives, with or without camp. I’d have known that it wasn’t true, but still, I wanted to believe it.

At the end of each camp session, there was a dance for the older campers, those entering middle school and above. The girls wore dresses that they’d kept in their lockers in their cabin the entire session, and the boys wore slacks and button-down shirts. Some of them gelled their hair into spikes, a practice that for the most part fell by the wayside during normal camp life. Sam, like many of the other girls, had a camp boyfriend from the time of our first dance. His name was also, coincidentally, Sam, and when I’d asked her if that wasn’t confusing, she’d laughed and said she liked it.

Sam and I had looked forward to the camp dance all month. Sam had brought makeup, and she helped me get ready. She said that her Sam had a friend who liked me, who had told her Sam that he wanted to kiss me. I had never been kissed before, though I’d told Sam that I had. I was nervous and excited.

We took over an hour to get ready. It was the age of glitter, and we applied glitter eyeshadow, glitter stars next to our eyelids, glitter lip gloss. Sam had a tub of silver glitter dust that we threw in the air and spun under as it fell, so we sparkled and shone with each movement. When I look back at photos from that night, I can see how obvious our efforts were: the eyeshadow weighing down our lids, the mascara clumpy on our lashes, our lips sticky with lip gloss that came off in thick strands against the plastic cups we drank from. We were beautiful.

The music at these dances was always terrible. The camp director would play entire albums at a time, sometimes multiple times in a row. They were never the pop and R&B artists that we listened to in our own time, but rather music from the sixties and seventies, the sort of music he’d cut his teeth on at his own middle school dances. The dance was held in the mess hall, cleared of its tables, with a disco ball suspended from the ceiling and crepe paper along the walls. Cameras flashed in the semi-dark, capturing campers gyrating against one another as counselors attempted to break them up and ensure six inches remained between their bodies.

“There’s Sam and Tyler,” Sam said when we entered. Tyler was the boy who liked me. I blushed as they approached, but knew they couldn’t tell in the dim light. Sam kissed her Sam, their lips smashed against one another for an interminably long second while Tyler and I scuffed our feet against the floor that still bore signs of its everyday use in the form of food stains that would never come out.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

The Beach Boys were playing, and Sam—my Sam—said, “Should we dance?” even though none of us knew how to dance to these songs. We hadn’t yet gained the control of our bodies needed to pick out a beat on our own, hadn’t yet gained the confidence to make fools of ourselves.

“Okay,” I said. I had never danced with a boy before, but I mimicked Sam’s stance, her cocked hip, her head toss, her smile like it was nothing. “Do you want to?” I asked Tyler.

“Sure,” he said, and we followed the Sams onto the dance floor. They were instantly pressed against each other, hip to hip, cheek to cheek, his arms wrapped around her back, her hands straying down to his butt. Tyler and I maintained the requisite six inches between us, our feet shuffling against the floor, our toes kicking each other. His hands were on my shoulders, covering the spaghetti straps of my dress. His palms were clammy with sweat.

“Sorry,” I said as our feet bumped.

“Sorry,” he said.

I knew, without being told, that when the song ended, he would kiss me. That was how it worked at camp dances. Songs ended. Dancers kissed. Sometimes it was just a peck on the cheek, other times a full-blown make out session with tongues, but regardless, if you danced with someone, you kissed them.

The song ended. Tyler dropped his hands. He took a step back. “Well. Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I leaned forward. I didn’t purse my lips, but when I replay the scene in my mind, I do, and the image makes me cringe.

“Well. I guess I’ll see ya,” he said. He backed away from me and then walked quickly toward the snack table.

I remained on the dance floor as the next song started, another one by the Beach Boys. I could feel the tears filling my eyes, but I didn’t move. If I moved, I would start crying. If I moved, everyone would see me.

The Sams swayed together in front of me. There weren’t six inches between their bodies. There wasn’t even an inch. One of the counselors came up to them and said something, held her hands up to demonstrate the distance. My Sam laughed and they scooted apart, but as soon as the counselor left, they pressed their bodies together again. My Sam laid her head on her Sam’s shoulder so she was looking at me. She smiled, but I could tell she didn’t really see me. If she’d seen me, she’d have left her Sam, come to my side, taken my hand, and walked me off the dance floor. If she’d seen me, she’d have let me cry and known that it wasn’t just about the kiss or the rejection, even though I didn’t know that myself.

But she kept dancing with her Sam and I stood by myself as campers swayed around me and the Beach Boys asked did I want to dance and I answered silently, yes. Yes.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#272: Sleater-Kinney, "Dig Me Out" (1997)

I first saw Sleater-Kinney on the Dig Me Out tour. I was 15 in 1997, so my friend Marie drove us from Greensboro to Chapel Hill on a school night, blasting the album the whole way. Inside the Cat’s Cradle we connected with some girls Marie knew from online riot grrl message boards—girls who’d driven from as far off as Georgia or Florida just to hear Corin Tucker’s live vibrato or see Carrie Brownstein smile. Girls who radiated with the palpable belief that their lives would be forever altered by one concert.

If we’re being honest, I was meh about it all. Sleater-Kinney was a little too cerebral and polished for my taste; I preferred the sloppy, confrontational thrash of Bikini Kill. But that year I’d made it my mission to own everything in the Kill Rock Stars catalog and after weeks of waiting, Dig Me Out had finally arrived by mail. I’d ripped open the package and raced upstairs to my bedroom, where I queued the album on my stereo.

The truth was that I didn’t love it then and I still don’t love it now—but seeing Sleater-Kinney live was different.

For one, I hadn’t yet attended a lot of shows, so there was an inherent electricity in standing inside a smoke-filled club on a Wednesday. The other girls and I had made a play to be right there, up front, and we’d squeezed ourselves through the crowd to press ourselves against the stage under the glaring lights. The rest of the audience buzzed behind me.

Looking around, I realized I was in a crowd of almost entirely women, and that I felt safe. Dancing often made me feel self-conscious or uncomfortable, but maybe everyone felt safe that night because once Sleater-Kinney took the stage we collectively surrendered our bodies to dance like our lives depended on it.

And some audience members’ lives probably did depend on it, a fact I was keenly aware of even then. Sleater-Kinney maintains a large queer following, and North Carolina was and remains notoriously LBGTQ-unfriendly. Still, that night we danced and screamed and when Marie’s online friends made a sudden play to rush the stage, we followed.

Propelled by adrenaline, we hoisted ourselves up. Now, I was an unruly teenager who’d suffered the parental—and sometimes legal—consequences of my impulsivities and immediately feared being dragged off stage like some hysterical groupie in a Bon Jovi video. Thankfully, that never happened. We were safe.

And we’d sparked a chain reaction. Girls and more girls hiked the stage, too, all of us dancing and screaming and shaking and going crazy alongside Corin and Carrie and drummer Janet Weiss. It was our Ed Sullivan Beatles moment, only the moment was about us—straight or gay, female or genderqueer. It was about being comfortable. It was about art. And it was about community.

These pure moments of surprise and joy happen less and less as you get older, but that night remains a touchstone, one of my earliest moments of feeling empowered, validated. Nearly 20 years since that Sleater-Kinney concert, the word empowerment can seem both twee and artificial, more a corporate mechanism than anything as spontaneous as dancing on stage or as grassroots as the riot grrl movement. When deodorant commercials tell women that their product is empowering, the meaning of the word is muddled, its agency sapped. Today, empowerment is so entangled with a beauty and fashion industry hellbent on undermining a woman’s power for corporate profit.

It should go without saying, but the world isn’t safe. I would learn that again and again as I grew up. When I wasn’t getting promoted or receiving the same opportunities as my male colleagues or when a man on the subway put his hand between my legs, I could never forget it. The lesson again reverberated through my body after learning that Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the popular vote, but not the presidency.

The world wants its women pretty and cowering. The world wants its women focused on deodorant-sanctioned empowerment rather than the attainment of actual power. Seeing Sleater-Kinney was so revelatory, in part, because Corin’s voice wasn’t “angelic.” Carrie and Janet’s rhythms weren’t “smooth.” Here was a group of people who defied convention, who refuted the factory farm of glossy and neutered anthems, and for a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, I didn’t need to be the band’s biggest fan to recognize the value and courage in that.

It’s easy to feel cynical, especially right now. But we’ve got to keep fighting in whatever capacity we can. We’ve got to keep making art and music. We’ve got to climb the stage. We’ve still got to dance.

—Sarah Sweeney

#273: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Going to a Go-Go" (1965)

    for Ben

Last night I was listening to Going to a Go-Go with my friend Ben, who has a story about a Canadian soldier who was lying in state, a soldier named Smokey. In this story, Ben's friend works as a tour guide in Canada's Parliament building, and in the course of giving this standard tour the friend informs the tourists, or rather misinforms them, that the Smokey-in-state is none other than Smokey Robinson. This is not my story, so I can't really be more specific than that, and in telling it in this way I've ruined the punchline, which would have been the point in the first place if I was going to construct this analogy between a pop album primarily focused on heartbreak and yet which—like so many great pop albums—takes it as an occasion for sounding a little sunny. And anyway, the story is Ben's and not mine. Can I write about a pop album using someone else's anecdote?

I want to be clear that this is a formal and compositional problem more than an ethical one. Or, if it's ethical, then unfortunately I intend to be callous about it. I don't think that rarefying personal experience is the best window into thinking about all the complexities of our relationships to objects. In this sense we relate to objects pretty much the same way we relate to pop music: what is "personal" about it is ultimately something fairly un-individual and generic; it's built into the songs themselves. For example, I was going to write about the guitar in "My Girl Has Gone," a delicately strummed introduction that soon vanishes beneath the exuberance of the orchestration that accompanies the song's ironic hook about heartbreak. But when I looked up the album on Wikipedia—is it OK to admit I did this? how does this differ from using Ben's story about someone else's story as a springboard for this piece?—some anonymous editor had already praised Marv Tarplin's "startling guitar riffs."

And yet—this is a misreading. The word in the Wikipedia is "starting" and not "startling." Either way it's fairly inadmissible, for, as we all know, citing Wikipedia is unacceptable in essays. Is this the kind of essay in which citing Wikipedia is unacceptable? Am I "citing" it in the uncitable, unacceptable way? All these questions I've accumulated since the beginning of this piece are questions about textuality, that variegated constellation of representational strategies we deploy (sometimes without even thinking about it) constantly to organize our perceptions of the world. Textuality is the "l" I added into the word "starting" on Wikipedia: it's the small mediation that gives the lie to the "immediacy" of whatever we experience as immediate, the minimal distance between us and the sheer empirical data that constitute "existence" that we sometimes notice and which sometimes startles us because it feels almost like a mistake that we realize: "there wasn't an 'l' in the word after all, it was just 'starting'" or "this story is Ben's story about someone else's story: can I tell it?"

It's no accident that this roundabout writing about pop music has landed on the theme of textuality. Most writing about pop music is writing about textuality. It's hard to argue otherwise: the sorts of tonal asymmetries that I mentioned above—upbeat songs about downbeat themes—are almost instantly recognizable, to the point where when I write them down it feels like I'm telling you something you already knew. Part of the reason I'm having so much trouble writing about Smokey Robinson is that you've heard Smokey Robinson before: either the artist himself, or the music for which "Smokey Robinson" is the name for a complex set of devices, an arsenal of techniques to achieve specific sonic effects. So what do I have that is not a value-superlative, to tell you about this album that you probably know, whether you know you know it or not?

Nothing, except maybe this anecdote about a dead Canadian soldier, and it's not even my story, it's Ben's story—or, it's Ben's friend's story he's kindly shared with me. So I have my friendship with Ben, the textuality of this friendship. But how can a friendship commend to you an album, let alone give an account of it? Fond as I am of giving accounts of things, I'm trying something else out. Let me close with my own anecdote:

Last night Ben and I listened to Going to a Go-Go all the way through together. Most of the way through the album we sat quietly and listened to a kind of music we both knew well already and were already fond of. Call it "Motown," call it "Smokey Robinson," it doesn't matter. The point is it was very familiar, though no less pleasurable for the feeling of immediate recognition, of non-strangeness. Then came the album's last song, "A Fork in the Road," which begins with Robinson and the Miracles blithely harmonizing on the word "beware" over a delicate, mid-tempo arrangement of strings and xylophone. The song's title derives from the lyric, "although I may be just a stranger / lovers, let me warn you: there's a danger / of a fork in love's road." And as Robinson sang this over the same almost dreamy instrumentation Ben looked at me and said "this is nice; the whole album is nice, but this ends really nicely." I agreed, which I guess you knew already, because if I hadn't I wouldn't have written it into this piece, used it as a mediation of how I think pop music is a strange cipher for textuality, whose lessons I feel like I need constantly to remind myself of so that I can do things like write. But let us not forget the other text sitting alongside Ben's text, the text of Robinson's lyric, the danger of a fork in love's road. Is this not also start(l)ing to hear or to think about, pop music as the reminder that everything has the capacity to appear to be the same as everything else, but that doesn't mean that the fork in the road goes away? In fact it maybe intensifies that fork. And that was when Ben said, "let me tell you about Smokey Robinson [NB: who is not dead] lying in state." And that was when the album ended.

—David W. Pritchard

#274: Labelle, "Nightbirds" (1974)

     Are you lonely
     are you lonely
     living in a city without a heart?

A lot of Labelle's Nightbirds as I understand it is disco music, and I’m a stranger to that. I don't get on the dance floor—that floor is lava unless I’m five drinks in. Last time I indulged was at a white-tent wedding in Vermont, with a set of brightly-colored, loose LED balloons being lifted, punted, and swatted above the dance floor.

Of course I'm lonely, I think. If this city had a heart, I’d hear it pumping by now. I’d stop downloading all these smartphone apps. I’d stop swiping through Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, take my dancing shoes and go home.

I had guinea pigs as pets when I was a kid. They're extremely social creatures. Apparently, it's illegal in Switzerland to possess only one of them. When one of yours dies, rental services can provide your surviving pet a friend to hold them over. It seems on point.

Here’s what I found. Loneliness calcifies. Sure, it starts out aching, like a muscle you’ve torn, warm and sensitive to the touch. Time, however, camouflages it. Loneliness, extended from a state into a practice, is a farmer tan that gets evened out, or an errant plank of wood you stomp down until it’s flush with the floor.

This is typically the part where one of my friends saves the afternoon by telling you to calm down. You’re hanging around too many married people with kids. You just need to get laid. Maybe they’re right.

* * *
====

Earlier this year I got to a point where I felt ready to get back into the dating scene I’d mostly abandoned for years. For me, that meant online dating. I refurnished my OkCupid profile, downloaded 4 or 5 other apps. Excessive? Maybe. But for all the work I put into my profiles, 90% of this game is profile pics. I’m not ‘80s Rob Lowe. I’m Toby Ziegler from that scene in The West Wing where he says to Josh Lyman, “How you do get women? Smart and funny, right?”

So it made sense for me to diversify. I sent dozens of messages out. I tried smart and funny and sometimes it worked, other times it fizzled. Still, the swiping mechanic of these apps is simple, comfortable, and fun. Soon you start singling people out for pettier and pettier reasons. For instance, one otherwise lovely girl uses the phrase “Partner in Crime.” Nope. Another one watches NCIS and doesn’t mention Game of Thrones. Next. You don’t feel bad. She’ll never know.

Eventually I hit a match on a girl with a cute picture of her wearing a long-sleeve tee with “STAR WARS” written on it. This is on Bumble, an app where after you match, the woman must make the first move to initiate the conversation within twenty-four hours, or it fades forever. She doesn't initiate, but it turns out we have a mutual friend—the wife of my coworker and friend, Josh. I ask him about her. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “that’s my wife’s boss at the animal shelter.” Josh helps me make a meet-up happen. He says she's excited, but nervous.

I get invited to his wife’s birthday dinner the next week. First I drive down and spend an hour at their house while everyone gets ready. Josh and his wife, Jessie, have three children. The oldest daughter is six years old, smart and talkative. The boy, a two-year-old, sees me standing next to his similarly bearded father and exclaims, “Two daddies!” I introduce myself, trying to correct the error. I pull out my smartphone and play Pokemon Go with them. The wide map and endless cast of characters don’t seem to paralyze them. They just want to hear Pikachu go PIKA! on my phone.

At the restaurant, my match shows up and is incredibly quiet. First I think it's shyness, and I try to engage her in common interests—Star Wars, pets. She won't look me in the eye. When I step away for a moment, she tells someone at the table that I'm cute, and word gets back to me. On my return, I mention Harry Potter, and how I just figured out my patronus was an otter or something on the Pottermore website. Nothing.

Come on girl, I think, everyone loves a patronus.

This dynamic lasts until the end. On the way home Josh, Jessie, and I do an autopsy. Maybe she's just cold like that. Maybe she didn't like that I mentioned an allergy to cats. I'm incensed, as that seems unfair, but I remember that Josh's cat made me sneeze uncontrollably before I left his house.

Pika, as it turns out, is Japanese for the sound a spark makes. There was none.

* * *
====

It’s Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. I’ve taken the week off work to write and visit old friends who still live in the area after I’ve moved away. Once I take the exit heading into D.C., the Labelle track “Somebody Somewhere” begins on my car stereo. The song seems an appropriate anthem for the empowered men and women I know who are ready to see Hillary Clinton take the best house in town. It helps that the guy she’s running against would see the White House as a step down from his other holdings. From this hopeful song:

     Somebody somewhere has all the answers to the questions in our minds
     somebody somewhere has grown impatient with your reasons and your crimes
     and no more lies shall be told, no more lies shall be sold

First, however, I have to wait for my hosts to get off work, and write awhile at a restaurant called The Coupe on 11th Street in Northwest. On the street corner sits a stand for copies of the Washington Hispanic, the candidates' faces on the cover, with the headline “El futuro en tus manos” (The Future in your Hands).

     Somebody somewhere has all the answers to the questions in our minds
     somebody somewhere has grown impatient with your reasons and your crimes
     and no more lies shall be told, no more lies shall be sold

Much like dating, this song seems unfamiliar and awkward to me until, despite yourself, you’re caught up in it.

* * *
====

It’s a strange, offhand kind of cruelty we deal to one another in these apps. We put out what amounts to a baseball card’s worth of information. Almost instantly, we choose to keep someone in our deck or discard them forever. We answer batteries of questions about our preferences, sexual proclivities, even trivia:

Which is bigger, the sun or the earth?
In the phrase, “wherefore art thou Romeo,” what does “wherefore” mean?
In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?

What do people want from this? Labelle sings in the energetic “What Can I Do For You?”

     People want true things, or nothing at all
     People want sincerity and nothing more

Take that as you will. I got to D.C. a few days after a second date with someone I’d met on OkCupid. Well, first date. The first time we met was in a Barnes & Noble for tea, and you could argue that's just a standard catfish/creeper check. This particular night was Halloween. A Roman centurion served us our food and a unicorn stood over the grill. I liked her—smart, pretty, committed to a nursing career and watched Parks & Rec—but she presumably didn't feel the same. Dinner ended early, she won the check dance, and was noncommittal about meeting up again. I texted her a few days later. Her schedule was bluntly full. I wondered if I'd have handled it the same way.

It's hard to be honest. Sometimes it's even harder to listen.

* * *
====

Polls start to close, and I get to the house rented by the newlywed couple from Vermont—the last time I danced to anything. As we watch CNN, the tension rises against odds that tamped it down earlier in the day. We're all anxious, but sure enough that this is a party.

     Who holds the key
     who will it be
     you or me

The mood is, on balance, hopeful. We've seen the likelihood for Hillary Clinton’s win drift down over the last few weeks from around 90% down to about 67%. It’s not ironclad, but it’s enough for us to feel secure in concocting a drinking game on our whiteboard. Selections include:

A state's called Blue – Drink. Yell, “Nasty!”
A state's called Red – Drink. Shout, “Wrong!”
Your home state goes Trump – chug a Yuengling.
CNN promotes a new toy (touchscreen, holograms, mystic seer) – Drink.  
CNN fucks up while using their toy - Drink.
The House flips  – Drink until you pass out.

But you were probably watching with me that night. You know how this ends.

* * *
====

Some of us call it a night early, disgusted. Others stay up until five a.m., waiting for all the networks to call it and the speech we thought would never come. Some of us cry, others comfort each other. Someone else punches a wall. One friend calls her Canadian parents warning them to expect her back home. Many condemn a deeply racist, sexist country. We feel alone.

     Somebody somewhere must lead us onward to the truth in our hearts
     somebody somewhere will hear our cries for freedom if we never, never stop

I want to change my answer on OkCupid—maybe a nuclear war would be exciting, in a certain light.

I can't stop thinking of how confident we were—how blithely we made wagers, the game we made of it. I think of my uncles—white, working class men in middle America, whom I was furious with for voting for the winner—and their Facebook posts. We had failed to connect with these voters and failed to respond to something that festered this year—a sense of being left behind that, despite its attendant horrors, was still real. We'd swiped left too quickly, dismissed too smugly, and paid the price.

I spend some days in DC watching protests, hitting old haunts like my alma mater and the Red Derby, a favorite local dive. Wednesday afternoon, I go to the local taqueria solo, tipping unreasonably and abnormally well.

* * *
====

One blessing of this kind of loss—you get to know yourself again. The songs that put you on the streets start ringing in your head. The people you knew would be out there with you all start to coalesce, to re-form.

     Nothing good comes easy
     nothing makes it fast
     no one ever made love
     overnight to last

You are no longer pretending to be something you're not. There is no time left to pretend.

If this is going to work, I have to know myself and be willing to know others. I have my profile ready, but here's a preamble that's too much for OkCupid:

I am a public servant, a poet and a friend. I believe chorizo tacos are the perfect food. I believe dogs are truly loyal to us while most cats merely tolerate us. I believe the darkness around us is deep, but that a kelson of creation is love, and that will keep our ship afloat. I have three computers with three keyboards and they all kill fascists. Courage is no longer optional.

This may not be a game I'll win. No, it's not really a game at all. But I'm still in it.

I got me. What can I do for you?

—Benjamin Walker

#275: Eminem, "The Slim Shady LP" (1999)

I bought my own engagement ring in college. I got it at the hippie mall, downtown, at the classy junk shop, Chi-Chi’s, the one that sold wooden African earrings and tiny plastic timers set to go off the day George Bush would finally be out of office.

I did it because things had changed. The night before, he’d tucked my hair behind my ear, the same old trick, but this time, he kept talking.

    You knew the commitment, he said.
    I thought you could get out of it, I sobbed.
    I don’t want to get out of it.
    I’m going to be a terrible war widow.
    It’s ok, he tucked. I’ll only be a B+ corpse.

Now, today, we’re on the phone. We are always on the phone. My job and my friends, my shampoo and my shoelaces, my half-decafs and my houseplants, they are only real when recreated. Reality is in the connection between his ear and mine. As soon as I hang up, items that are actually tangible become less so.

This cottony mist feeling comes with a noise. When you talk to someone who is standing on the other side of the world, you hear a faint buzzing on the line. Sometimes I wonder where it got picked up. What part of space it comes from. Is the sound some kind of large reverberation from those marbled, looming planets? Or just the dry static in between stars.

I like to paint my nails while we talk. I change the colors every day and go through so much acetate that the tips of my fingers grow weak and thin. I have to double-bag my trash because the chemical eats holes in the plastic. I have begun to use nail strengthener to prevent fractures. This too, I remove and replace. 

   What’s going on? I say, as music begins to blast through the phone.
    Insurgents.
    Ha ha, I say. Ha ha, my heart says. Haha. Haha. Haha.
    Chris and Taylor are got back from the weight room.
    Tell me they’re not playing Eminem.
    I’m eating M&Ms.
    Slim Shady? Really? That album is ancient.
    We prefer the term “pre-war.”
    Remember how often we listened to that freshman year?
    Too much.

I don’t ask if he means that we listened to it too much or that he remembers it too much. Early on, I asked those things. Now I stroke my peeling nailbeds and try to forge emotional connections with my furniture so that neither party becomes a ghost.

We are silent. I want to hear him breathing, but I can’t. I want to hear him focus, but I don’t. What I want is to hear him want to come home. Instead I get Eminem’s world—his innocence, his tenderness, his angry white trash.

    These are the results of a thousand electric volts, he raps softly.
   A neck with bolts.
    Nurse we’re losing him, check the pulse!

Nausea rolls in my stomach like a gentle, private earthquake. The strain of maintaining his safety with my mind is exhausting. I have been keeping him alive with my thoughts, just as you can keep an airplane aloft by willing it not to crash. I quickly erase the phrase “we’re losing him, check the pulse” from the universe’s memory.

   Are you opening something? I ask.
    Easy Mac.
    You really are in throwback mode today.
    I’m tempted to make you feel bad and say something like, “I’m here fighting in this terrible war and have nothing else to make me happy.”
    Don’t burn yourself on the hot water, baby.

I hum with Eminem and start my second coat. I’m remembering us in his dorm room at 6 a.m. He is going to ROTC rehearsal. I can never come up with the actual word for it. Training. Practice. Drills. Something.

We’d gone to a foam party the night before. He talked to his friends while I rearranged the magnetic words on the fridge. Head full of mountains / go under for the best tomorrow / suck my dictionary, you.

He walked into the kitchen and lifted me on the counter, rattling dirty dishes in the sink. I remember feeling how solid he was, how muscled his arms. So strong, so down, so rooted. Next to us, food continued congealing.

At 6, he didn’t want to go to ROTC rehearsal. He used me as a blanket. I felt very patriotic when I cast myself off.

   You have to eat something.
    I’m gonna puke it up.
    Y’all are so tough.
    Fine. Are we out of bananas?
    You say “out of” like your dorm is a grocery store. There’s only ever been Easy Mac and beer.

I made it—two packs of mix to one pack of noodles, just how he liked, and I was proud to know this tiny, intimate fact about another person. He dressed. He ate. I gave a fake salute and watched him watch my breasts jiggle when I threw my arm forward. As I stood in the doorway and he jogged down the hall, I noticed a line on the back of his neck, grime leftover from the foam party the night before.

    Wait, I said, snatching a washcloth and waving it like a hanky from the bow of a massive ship.
    Come back, I called. Wait!

He’s never alone there, so we often lapse into silence. Sometimes we’re so comfortable being silent that I grow worried. I wonder whether he calls because he doesn’t want to be a person without someone to call. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether he talks. In that case, all that matters is that our phone tendrils meet each other in space.

I wonder if he just doesn’t want to be the guy alone on his bunk, listening to another man’s music.

   You know the problem with Eminem, I say.
    Aside from the violence, misogyny, and obsession with drugs?
    He doesn’t say the word “cock” enough.
    Sweetheart, you’re so right.
    Actually, not enough rappers say the word cock. They all just use dick.
    It’s a travesty.
    Can’t we write a letter to someone?
    We need to take drastic action!
    Yes! Call in the Arm- oh.
    You made that joke on purpose, he says.
    I made that joke on purpose, I say.

I have Eminem stuck in my head now, but it’s there in a weird way. I can’t get to any content except the refrain – HI! My name is, HI! My name is, HI! My name is

Later, I fake a dial tone in my head, because cell phones don’t do them for you. They should bring that back, the empty, metallic bawwwwww. I look at my hands on the table. Nails done. I can feel the burn on my skin beneath, so I know they’re drying.

I look at the ring on the table; it’s the one I bought, but he imbued it with joint power the first time he left. I don’t want to slip it on again. The cotton mist creeps around corners when I wear it, the buzzing becomes addictive. I have faith and a sinking feeling that someday, I will speak loud enough to take it off for good.

We sit and stare at each other, the ring and I. It’s not clear who’s going to blink first. For the life of me, I cannot remember why I bought it in the first place.

—Molly Seltzer

#276: Parliament, "Mothership Connection" (1975)

1. P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

Often before we’d start dancing, during the prelaunch of Mothership Connection, the boys would roam Main Street to the huge electrical hub that lit the neighborhood—they called it the Pillbox. It hummed, pulsing with energy, like a baby rocket. I’d often stay behind, listening to the album’s first track from the kitchen counter, waiting.

Now this is what I want you all to do: If you got faults, defects or shortcomings, you know, like arthritis, rheumatism or migraines, whatever part of your body it is, I want you to lay it on your radio, let the vibes flow through. Funk not only moves, it can re-move, dig?

It was a really good sound, the rev-up of Mothership and hearing them climb the stairs with the different pitches of their laughter. I imagine that anticipation sounds different for everyone—the moment before something you want to happen happens. “P-Funk” and hearing them near was that for me. The color of the apartment in deep night buzzed for us: a purple glow I imagine is the color of electricity’s blood.

During this summer, seven years ago, Andrew and I lived atop the bridal salon my mother owned. I’d stay up all night dancing with the boys and once they fell asleep, I’d whisper softly to the one who became my best friend. Dane would stay up with me, and in the morning I’d sneak back into my bedroom where Andrew slept alone, peel off nightgown and robe, and drag myself into work clothes. All day I’d sell and steam wedding gowns, forcing myself awake, wondering about what it took to make lifelong commitments in all those yards of Alencon lace. All I concretely knew that I’d want in the future: the feeling I had this summer. But all along I knew that I wouldn’t. Even when we danced, I was aware that summer was rolling too quickly into another season.

Once upon a time called Right Now.

          2.   Mothership Connection (Star Child)

This is how I remember it: every night we shuffled wildly on the carpet. As instructed, we laid our faults, defects, and shortcomings on the radio, though I’m not sure we knew that we were. A few of us literally were pre-diagnosis, unsure about the strange things our bodies did and wanted to do.

We turned the music up. We shouted over it, but didn’t say anything.

If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys.

We were a ragtag crew. Here are our names: Elise, Andrew, Dane, Alex, David—sometimes Bobby, Aria, and Scott.

This is how I remember them: Alex smiled and laughed more than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He was always ready to participate in whatever fun anyone else wanted to have; he was generous that way—a way I am not. David was solid, pillar-like—even inebriated he was stoic and I always trusted him. Bobby danced like he didn’t have bones; he was uncomplicatedly fun. Aria and I rode the bus together in middle school and she was willing to tolerate me, all those years later—to validate my desires, to dance when called to—she was a friend. Scott felt like my brother, in that I always wanted him there but I had to suffer watching him live parallel to me, sometimes dipping in. Dane was like my phantom limb, my touchstone person, my telepath. Andrew—my boyfriend—was the reason we were all together. He was a mad flame everyone wanted to watch jump. He was constant and we all wanted, constantly, to please him. Fierce, fiercely devoted, and loud, he captivated and eluded us all.

After we’d dance, we’d fall into different pockets of the apartment or the neighborhood. I’d read upside down, put Band-Aids on skinned elbows, argue about the intention of ‘it is what it is’ (a phrase I’m still wary of), make six boxes of mac ‘n’ cheese, lower the lights, and tell the boys to listen to the lyrics of harp songs. On many of these nights I’d faint and then wake up beside my blurry boyfriend asking, instead, for Dane.

Ain't nothing but a party, y'all.

I feel like we were always falling. Like gravity had gotten aggressive that summer—throwing us down, or forcefully towards each other. We were tripping down the stairs, passing out on the asphalt beside cars—we were all hitting the ground in one way or another. I’d drop often from these fainting spells, the root of which I didn’t yet understand. Dane, with his cataplexy, would go into a sort of seizure-like state from hard laughter, crumpling and twitching. I’d always race to his side and shove my finger in his mouth. Though he always bit down hard on my knuckle, I sometimes wonder if it was just so I felt needed.

One night while everyone was dancing, I snuck into the bridal salon and tried on a wedding gown. I felt Mothership rattling the ceiling—all the feet of my friends shook the chandelier. I sat on the floor in a heap of silk and listened for the proof of them, staring at the mirror. I looked so off in that shade of white. I remember wondering if one day we would all be dancing to these songs, with me in this kind of dress. I put a veil on and pulled the netting over my face.

Face it, even your memory banks have forgotten this funk.

If every other memory is seen through the veil, I remember this in total clarity: Sneaking back in and hovering at the back of the apartment, I watched Dane see me, open my cabinet, pour me a glass of water and glide through everyone else, still dancing, unaware of me. He handed me the cup and asked: “Where did you go?”

          3.  Unfunky UFO

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think we were all sleep-deprived—at least we were all something-deprived. I didn’t feel belonging, in the traditional sense, but I think we were triumphantly comfortable being together. We united in music, loud enough to cover up our own quiet, independent grief. Mine was less private and less quiet, maybe. I regularly concerned them all by slipping into the scorching hot, overflowing bathtub in my clothes. I did strange things sober.

Sometimes they’d enter day-long fevered hangovers that no amount of Tums or Tylenol or big breakfasts could cure. None of us were aware of our limits yet, or maybe were not interested in obeying them. This isn’t meant a criticism— even without liquor, without smoke, I imbibed the most.

All this to say that we all hurt and some of us were hurting each other. But it didn’t stop us from dancing, from sharing, from going to sleep in sick piles, from needing each other in this strange moment, before takeoff.

Early in the summer, Dane went to Honduras to work in a clinic where he gave eye exams; I remember glasses spilling out of his trunk before he left.

You've got all that is really needed to save a dying world from its funkless hell.

Not long after he got there, there was a military coup—the president was ousted and exiled. Dane sent emails about gunfire and burning tires—being less than a mile from the presidential house—but mostly that he hoped that everyone in the states was aware of the political implications. He wanted us to know what was happening and why it mattered. I sent back self-involved emails about the nightmares I was having about him, buffered by stories of what we did on the nights he wasn’t there. How much we missed him—loved him.

Soon after the coup, Dane got sent back to the states. I was overjoyed—we all were—but knew he wouldn’t be. He had this project in mind, to collect poems from children at the clinic. I put a Welcome Home party together where we filled a piñata with candy and poems that I made everyone write that we then translated, poorly, into Spanish. I scoured the party store for other relevant objects and found a bin of eye patches, surely for pirate costumes, but I bought those, too, so we’d appear eye-troubled and in need of him.

I sometimes think of this party as among the most loving gestures of my life. But when framed differently, it was maybe among the most careless. We were twenty-year-olds, so clumsy already with love—how on Earth could I convince anyone, including myself, that it could be divided?

We’re unfunky and we’re obsolete and out of time.

We’re out of time.

4.  Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication (The Bumps Bump)

My crew made music. They all made music. Everything we did orbited their creation or appreciation of sound. I didn’t make music, though I was encouraged by Dane to sing, which I did only because he made me feel like I made beautiful noise. Though truly I didn’t, I still felt a certain kind of ecstatic frenzy singing along.

I was called to write—I knew even then that words were my lifeblood. Their sharp, musical quality when arranged right on the page and in mouths, caused me to salivate and sweat.

Everyone knew that this work was the work of my life, but that I’d hardly begun. I’d hide in the dressing rooms at work and scribble narrative poems, stupid, ephemeral blocks of text. I had this enormous catalogue of literary journals, agents, publishers that one afternoon, as the boys peeled themselves out of sleep and got ready to teach their music lessons, I opened. Out of it fell all these sheets of paper—words.

I knelt on the floor and tried to piece together their intended order, glancing between them to try and figure out who’d done it. I asked Andrew. I asked Dane. Alex and David, too. No one fessed up, even when I puzzled them together: DON’T GIVE UP. ONE DAY YOUR TRUEST DREAMS WILL REALIZE.

Eventually Dane admitted he’d been the one who snuck the pages in my book; in case I hadn’t known, he believed in me.

But it was hard to know what to do with love that activates like this. That rumbles, wanting to rocket. It’s hard not to want to let it take off.

Give people what they want when they want and they wants it all the time.

5.  Handcuffs

If I ever slowed down, took a breath or break, I’d pick back up for “Handcuffs.” I never thought of it as my favorite, but it was the one I wanted to dance to—this was the song I was always waiting for.

Every one of these tracks is meant to get wild to, but this one had a sharp gravity. It pulled me up and jerked me back to reality, too. No matter how loud we’d turn it up, it never let me disengage.

Oh, do I have to put my handcuffs on you, mama? Do I have to keep under lock and key?

Every day at work, the brides would cry so joyfully—so eager and in love and sure. I always eyed them in the mirror as I zipped up the gowns, searching their faces for the uncertainty I imagined unavoidable, despite any amount of love. I’d look hard, suspiciously, never finding any glint of doubt.

When I danced to “Handcuffs,” I wondered if anyone else noticed the parallel. I felt akin to the subject of the song. I felt my creature-like lovin’ was to blame—susceptible, too, to flattery and game. But, would I really submit to other humans that called my name? The thing was that the person who you’d expect to call my name didn’t. As much as I felt like her, needing to be handcuffed to stay put, to stay chaste, I often didn’t feel a hand even grab, or even graze, my wrist.

Now we both know that's not how it should be.

At a certain point, it was clear to our whole small tribe—I mean, nothing was clear, even to me. But everyone knew that there was something between Dane and I that was palpable and significant and happening. But don’t misunderstand what I mean by happening.

We’d sneak out of the apartment and go to the park down the road. We’d talk about our histories and futures, wedged in the plastic tunnels of the jungle gym. I hardly remember what we’d say, but I think we both felt maybe we were just hopeful, fleshy tragedies. Once he tried to open a glass bottle on the cement curb and it shattered. I sobbed, all our friends circling us there in the street, glass everywhere, my hand trying to hold his blood in. I can only imagine what they thought.

So little really happened between in action or even in words, but I loved him powerfully and reached into the inaccessible place and I wanted to be allowed to be his champion. And he did that for me, too. The loving, the reaching, the wanting.

Don’t you know that would be uncouth?

We had this glass marble that we found wedged in the pull-out sofa’s mattress that summer. We’d pass it back and forth. He’d press it secretly against my palm and I’d stare at the little licks of green and orange glass cast in the sphere like maybe that’s where his voice was hidden, telling me what was true. We’d never say anything about what it meant, but I think it was something like:

I that hope you will understand.

6.  Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)

When summer came close to ending, we were all readying for different changes. We went to bed earlier—we saw less of each other. We didn’t listen to Mothership as much. We saw each other in shifts.

Andrew was getting ready to leave to start school in Baltimore. I was getting ready to say goodbye to him, to all of them as they scattered into different pockets of the northeast. I stayed in the little apartment for months, listening to their echoes dim. Every day I’d wake up in my bed, knowing they were all elsewhere, making music, hearing music. I’d stay up late on the sofa under a pile of beat-up veils, sewing the barely-fabric back to the combs.

One of the last times I saw Dane, we played Monopoly with our others. I just remember thinking he was so frustrating as he passed out all his colorful dollars to everyone else who was struggling to pay up. I couldn’t stand watching him give so much away.

I guess every season has an arc, like every album. There’s always something innately sad to me about the second-to-last anything—more so even than the last track, last moment, last line. That awareness of the almost-over is even more painful.

Give up the funk.

7.  Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples

Most of us became anecdotes to each other. I cringe to write that because my blood pumps with every person I’ve ever loved, every one of these people, but we became dormant and inactive in other’s lives.

Eventually I got to Baltimore to study writing. Andrew and I stayed together, but were always haunted by what we hardly acknowledged out loud but both knew about that summer. It’s strange how we provide feelings their own bodies, their own way of taking up space, wedging themselves between things.

Though that summer became a part of our pasts, it was always very much alive in our bond to each other. To be fair, how couldn’t it be? Framed on every desk I’ve written at since that time, Dane’s voice has screamed “DON’T GIVE UP”—something I have to believe Andrew felt, too, but wasn’t saying.

Somehow I am back in the business of weddings—now I fluff their trains and send them down the grand staircase of an art museum to make their vows. All these years later, I am still searching couples’ faces for a flicker of uncertainty without ever finding any. I trust that this means that one day, a whole lifetime is something I too will be able to happily, undoubtedly, give.

When we danced all those years ago, I don’t think I was engaged with the story of Mothership Connection—just the sounds. It seemed like it was about trying to access something—the funk—which was, if not the cure, a certain kind of medicine.

I thought we were space-travelers in the purple glow of the apartment, unable to speak through our spacesuits, searching for that interplanetary dose of funk. Though I am not sure what the rest of them would say, I think I failed to really get it.

But I’ve been listening close lately, and I realize that Mothership Connection isn’t just about a season, it’s about a lifetime—it’s an epic—it’s a series of journeys, not just the one. The funk has to be obtained, experienced, but also lost. But then, of course, it is to be pursued and taken back.

It used to frustrate me that the album ended with so few words. The gaa-gaa-goo-gah, gaa-gaa-goo-gah, gaa-gaa-goo-gah-gah at the end of “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples” though, I think, is supposed to be baby sounds—newborn language—preverbal effort to externalize a feeling. It’s so clumsy and indiscernible, these first attempts.

But what better way to leave anything—with the first of many worthwhile tries we make in a lifetime.

—Elise Burke

#277: Janet Jackson, "Rhythm Nation 1814" (1989)

America turned loose on America -
All living is listening for a throat to open -
The length of its silence shaping lives.

                        -       Claudia Rankine, Citizen

THE MANIFESTO OF THE RHYTHM NATION 1814

A generation full of courage, come forth with me! We are drawing battle lines, with music by our side, to fight the color lines.

Let’s work together to improve our way of life. Join voices in protest to social injustice. Let it be known:

WE ARE A PART OF A RHYTHM NATION

People of the World! Unite! We hereby form THE RHYTHM NATION.

What We Want
What We Believe

We draw together to fight homelessness, drugs and crime spreadin’ on the streets, we fight for the people who can't find enough to eat, for the kids who can't go out and play: that's the state of the world today, that is why we have come together, this is our struggle.

This is the test: No struggle, no progress.

Say it people: NO STRUGGLE, NO PROGRESS.

Lend a hand to help your brother do his best. Things are getting worse! We have to make them better! It's time to give a damn. Let's work together, come on.

MIZ JACKSON
Ministress of Information
The Rhythm Nation 1814

In 1989, when Janet Jackson released Rhythm Nation 1814, I was thirteen years old, growing up in a white middle class household in southern Ohio. And therefore I probably have no right to say anything about Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814.

I’d like to talk for a moment about what just happened in this country. When I started out writing this piece, it was a piece of fiction: the story of Miz Jackson and Black Cat, the runaway white rebel who joined the cause to help her black brothers and sisters fight for the Manifesto of the Rhythm Nation. The manifesto is just as you see it above: mostly from Janet’s own lyrics. Then, in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, as the returns for the American election came in and elected Donald J. Trump, who had run a campaign—let’s be frank now—on a platform of racism and xenophobia, as the next president of the United States of America, I realized how tone deaf this piece would turn out to be. How much it felt like appropriation. How much it relied on my being white, privileged enough to have fantasies about white liberals joining the cause, how much it relied on my readers being so, too. So I scrapped it. (The “Miz” in “Miz Jackson” was borrowed from “Nasty Boys,” intended to be an echo of Trump’s own words in the final debate. It was also a nod to an idealistic liberal white revolutionary, Mizmoon Soltysik of the Symbionese Liberation Army, famous for kidnapping Patricia Hearst.)

But I want to let the manifesto stand. Because, initially, the title song on Janet Jackson’s album was a manifesto, and that has to be recognized. When Janet Jackson made this album after 8 years of Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, she was writing lyrics with sincerity about the struggles of black people in America. I’m sure I understood some of the social issues Janet Jackson was singing about in a distant sense as a thirteen year old, but it’s incredibly likely that I was under the impression that I was changing the world just by listening to a Janet Jackson album. But listening to Rhythm Nation 1814 did nothing to change anything. In the 27 years since her album was released, black men and women are still being imprisoned for Reagan’s war on drugs; and if there is no cause to imprison them, they are simply being shot in the street by police officers.

In my original story, I explained the fourth verse of our very own national anthem, in which Francis Scott Key wrote, in 1814:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

The year of Francis Scott Key’s writing of these words is the reason for the 1814 in Janet’s album title. This was written before the Civil War, before the practice of slavery had been outlawed in the United States. According to some historians, Francis Scott Key was writing in this verse specifically about the Corps of Colonial Marines, escaped American slaves hired by the British to fight against the Americans in the War of 1812 and the Battle of Fort McHenry, about which these verses were written. In this verse, he is actively rooting for the demise of these former slaves. The refrain became our national anthem, sung before ballgames; our national anthem, during which some recently have felt compelled to kneel rather than salute. It’s worth understanding to its complete depths, drilled down to the fourth verse. It’s part of us; just as the slavery described therein is part of us, an undeniable part of the fabric of this country. We as white people need to confront this and own it.

This too: silence is consent.

I’m writing to break my silence.

I read an assortment of Black Panther texts and speeches in preparation for writing the fiction of Miz Jackson’s manifesto. I borrowed—or, rather, appropriated—tone and even a few words directly from their platform. Maybe it was Janet’s reference to the “Black Cat” that pointed me in this direction, but it seemed obvious to me that my fictionalization of Janet Jackson’s call to arms—and especially a white liberal’s interpretation of it—would have parallels to that of the Black Panther Party. They were both equally tired of the murder and the destruction of their communities. The Black Panthers rejected capitalism and promoted a socialist agenda for educating and feeding their children: We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. Janet Jackson wrote pop music that was commercialized and sold but espoused the same message: We fight for the people who can't find enough to eat. Her message was heard in bedrooms across America, but was it heard? How much of a manifesto was it, packaged and sold to little white girls in the Midwest? Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, spoke on April 27, 1969 (seven months before he, too, was killed in a police raid), of the socialist intent behind starting the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program: “We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.”

Manifestos, like Janet’s about breaking the color lines, with no practice ain’t shit.

Wouldn’t it have been easy to write something light about a Janet Jackson album, take you on an escapade? In my story there were soft moments when Miz Jackson read a letter from her revolutionary lover who wrote “I miss you much.” That was predominantly what I took away from Janet Jackson’s album back when I first heard it. Shot like an arrow going through my heart / That's the pain I feel / I feel whenever we're apart. Making up dance routines and squealing when her slick-looking music videos came on MTV. The privilege of dance routines. But I’m 40 now. I’m a white woman living in America where Donald J. Trump was just elected president by 53% of white women, and if I don’t confront the fact that the ease with which I greeted Rhythm Nation 1814 back in the day is an important indicator of the level to which I need to help change things, then I’m doing nothing to break the color lines Janet sang about. Ain’t shit.

I suppose in the end this is, like Claudia Rankine’s “America turned loose on America,” an essay turned loose on a piece of fiction, or: myself turned loose on myself. We write in order to sort through our thoughts, give them shape. I wrote this in order to confront what is happening in this country as well as what is happening inside me, the white privilege I have grown up with and how to handle and utilize that privilege going forward.

There are things we can do with our energies, and things we cannot help but do, and I cannot help but do this: activate my awareness. Join voices in protest to social injustice. For real this time: more than just listening to Janet Jackson’s album in my bedroom.

Huey P. Newton, speaking to The Movement (a leftist newspaper associated with SNCC and SDS) in August of 1968: “I personally think that there are many young white revolutionaries who are sincere in attempting to realign themselves with mankind, and to make a reality out of the high moral standards that their fathers and forefathers only expressed.” Most liberal whites are predominantly unactivated allies. Some of us think we are being allies, but what have we given so far but words? Am I giving more than words here, more than a shallow assessment of Janet Jackson’s own protest? And by giving words, aren’t we just talking over those we need to be listening to?

Here I am, Janet: I’m listening to your manifesto. I’m ready to struggle and cast aside the ease of fantasy I grew up with. I should have arrived here before, fought harder, truly struggled, not just shouted encouragement on the sidelines of the struggle. I’m reaching out to lend a hand like you asked back when I was thirteen, before I knew how to give it. I was listening, but I wasn’t listening.

That ain’t shit.

—Zan McQuade

#278: Harry Smith (Ed.), "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952)

Harry Everett Smith did not die on November 27, 1991. No, Harry Everett Smith disappeared—vanished, seemingly, without a trace in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. The date of November 27 was provided by the missing man’s legal representatives to authorities and creditors as the official date of death after an exhaustive five-month search for the 68-year-old visual artist, self-educated student of anthropology and ethnography, and self-proclaimed mystic ended with far more questions than answers.

In the years leading up to his vanishing, the staff working at the Hotel Chelsea reported seeing Harry Everett Smith carrying boxes to Room 328, his permanent residence at the time, daily, sometimes two or three times a day. The boxes, often overflowing, consisted entirely of his eccentric collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print records—artifacts, according to Harry Everett Smith, that represented man’s complexities and idiosyncrasies. Varying cultures’ manipulations of string for games, stories, and divinations fascinated the ethnographer; the age-long yearning for flight and transcendence found in paper airplanes astounded the anthropologist; the craft, geometry, and superstitions intertwined with Ukrainian Easter eggs bemused the artist and mystic; and the recordings of America’s past haunted the old man.

Management at the Hotel Chelsea feared, though, Harry Everett Smith’s room was becoming a site of hoarding brought about by his compulsive, decades-long ethnographic predilections. However, upon inspection, under the pretense of a supposed water leak in the room directly above 328, a maintenance worker reported that none of the boxes, nor any string figure, paper airplane, egg, or record, were found in the room, just the usual furnishings. Disbelieving this, hotel manager David Reed, pretending to give in-person courtesy calls to all 250 residents of the hotel, visited Harry Everett Smith’s room and discovered the maintenance worker was telling the truth: the room was, in fact, absent any boxes and collectibles. Curious about the final location of Smith’s collection, as he and the staff were sure they had only seen boxes going into the boarder’s room and never any coming out, Reed stopped Harry Everett Smith in the lobby one morning and asked the old man where he stored his collection. Harry Everett Smith simply replied, “Oh, I put them in storage.”

On June 11, 1991, poet Allen Ginsberg visited his close friend Harry Everett Smith at his hotel residence. There, the two men spent the evening listening to records and smoking marijuana while discussing America’s rapid approach towards the new millennium, a conversation that hampered the otherwise optimistic mood of the room. Ginsberg expressed concern about the direction of American poetry, while Harry Everett Smith conveyed unease with the current course of conservation for the world’s greatest treasures. Easter eggs, paper airplanes, and string figures—physical objects—could stand a chance against the specter of time through the adequate methods of preservation, but it was the ephemerality of music and its media that concerned him. Music lasts in fleeting moments. Those moments are often transcribed to physical objects for preservation, yes, but the physical objects of transcription were now becoming as ephemeral as the fleeting moments of music themselves. The relatively young CD technology, for example, with its supposed lossless sound and promised physical longevity, did not convince the collector. Not long after compact discs became available on the consumer market, Harry Everett Smith purchased Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits and was disheartened with the “disc rot” that began to appear over time—the  discoloration, or bronzing, of the disc caused by abrasions or oxidation of the reflective layer that rendered it unreadable, therefore unplayable. And magnetic tape recordings, with their susceptibility to sticky-shed syndrome, did not provide a stable alternative to the crisis of media preservation. Of course, Harry Everett Smith recognized that vinyl records were not without their faults, but the longevity of their form with the proper care, as far as he was concerned, was the proper path forward. He couldn’t help but smile at the idea of Voyagers 1 and 2, launched fourteen years prior, traveling across the cosmos with phonograph records, each containing greetings and salutations in 55 languages in addition to the sounds and music of Earth, and those records reaching the inhabitants of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years. “Who would listen and what would they think of us? Would we be worth their time? Would they want to know us?” were questions that Harry Everett Smith often pondered when he considered the two ambassadors. But with each iteration of media development, Harry Everett Smith feared that music, testimony to the human condition writ large, was on the verge of oblivion. In 40,000 years, the extraterrestrials of Gliese 445 could possibly hold in their prehensile organs the only available recordings of human existence, and upon visiting our blue world, discover us as frauds without evidence or proof of our humanity. Ginsberg, of course, giggling from the pot, tried to comfort his friend with the same kind of humanism that usually consoled Harry Everett Smith: man would find a way, as they always had, to preserve and curate, to carry on. To this reassurance, Harry Everett Smith responded, “I don’t want to think or know about what comes after this, but I have a plan.”

As the evening came to a close, Harry Everett Smith pulled out his six-LP compilation of American folk music, a compilation he curated from his personal collection of 78s and released in 1952 with the help of Folkways Records, and began to play Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator.” Ginsberg complemented his friend on the selection of songs on the compilation, a range of songs, he noticed, that highlighted the American folk tradition exquisitely. The collector thanked the poet for his praise and confided that there was, in fact, to be a seventh vinyl disc in the box set, but it was cut at the last minute during production due to cost. Ginsberg, enthusiastic and wanting to hear the songs that were excised, was told by Harry Everett Smith to return the following evening for another listening party as he needed to consult his archives for the seventh disc to do so. But when Ginsberg returned the next day, Harry Everett Smith was not in his room nor would he ever be in the room again. June 11 was the last time Harry Everett Smith was ever seen.

*

Two weeks after his disappearance, the Hotel Chelsea management closed Harry Everett Smith’s account and was in the process of removing his belongings from the premises, what little effects he had, when hotel maid Esmeralda Díaz discovered the steel 6-foot x 3-foot door in the back of the hotel closet. Upon opening the steel door, Esmeralda Díaz entered a temperature-controlled corridor of approximately 50 feet in length with four doors, two on each wall. Díaz, curious, opened one of the doors to discover a large room with hundreds of rows of shelves. On the nearest shelf, the maid could make out string figures pinned to black felt boards. The maid immediately closed the door and reported the discovery to hotel manager David Reed, prompting an investigation by both hotel officials and members of the Smith estate. By all intents and purposes, the door should not have existed. The head maintenance official could not find evidence of the door, nor the corridor and rooms, in the hotel plans. Dimensionally, and logically, the door should have led to the brick wall facing the back alley of the Hotel Chelsea and the four rooms to the parallel streets north and south of the block. But the door, and its corridor and rooms, were inexplicably there, and apparently, so was Harry Everett Smith’s collection. These rooms were Harry Everett Smith’s archives.

A week after the door was discovered, Henry Wallace, Smith’s lawyer and estate executor, appointed the task of cataloging Harry Everett Smith’s collection to four paralegals. This is what the paralegals discovered when they began the process of cataloging: Each room was devoted to one of Harry Everett Smith’s ethnographic predilections, and in that given room, every iteration of that artifact could be found shelved. For example, in Room A, the string figure gallery, one would discover every variation and permutation of the Apache rug: Apache rugs starting from one inch and intermittently moving up in size by the half-inch, as well as constructed from every material known to man, organic and inorganic. Apache rugs made of cotton twine, sisa, jute, hemp, henequen, coir and other natural fibers before moving to twine of every metallic base. In Room B, one would find a paper airplane in every variant: different sizes and weighted sheets in every imaginable color in the spectrum, from A to Z: Absolute Zero, Acid Green, Aero, Aero Blue, African Violet, Air Force Blue, Air Superiority Blue, Alabaster, Alice Blue and so on and so forth. The same could be found in the vinyl record gallery, Room C: every pressing, national and international, of every given release starting at “Aa” was there, and each album had hundreds upon hundreds of copies to account for the variations in sound inherent in each one—each record’s sound conditioned by the production and handling of the individual record. The categorization of every permutation from A to Z was a mere hypothesis, though. After spending two months in Room C, their days inside increasing each week, the four paralegals had not left the first entry of the library—the first record archived—and there seemed to be no end in sight to that particular record. The same was for the cases of Rooms A, B, and D: the rooms and shelves were seemingly infinite in length with infinite entries. Given Harry Everett Smith’s rigid and precise archival tendencies, the Smith estate could only come to the natural conclusion that the four rooms were infinite archives, his own Library of Babel.

Allen Ginsberg, learning of the seemingly boundless library, and remembering Harry Everett Smith’s request of the poet, posited that, perhaps, his friend was lost in his own library. Against the wishes of his partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg decided to mount an expedition into the library to find Harry Everett Smith. Ginsberg recruited the help of Smith’s lawyer, Wallace, a competent mountain climber and backpacker, and college-student videographer Richard Clark as the third party. The three men entered Room C on August 31 and returned to the Hotel Chelsea nearly three months later, on November 20. All three men were malnourished and unkempt when re-entering the hotel room and in varying states of distress. Ginsberg and Wallace screamed and raved unintelligibly about what they had experienced in the library, while Clark, on the other hand, returned in an almost catatonic state. Clark simply handed over a tape recording of the expedition and retreated into seclusion.

The day before Harry Everett Smith was officially declared dead, members of the Smith family and the Wallace firm convened and listened to the Smith Rescue Expedition tape to hopefully explain the disappearance of Harry Everett Smith and to determine the cause of Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark’s mental declines. This is what they heard: In week five of their expedition, the three men—Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark—could hear the faint sound of folk music playing in the distance, which, to the three men, could only be coming from Harry Everett Wallace. However, after three weeks of trying to find the source, the three rescuers never seemed to get closer: the immeasurable library appeared to be echoing the music off its never-ending walls and shelves, making the music travel farther than the three men were capable of trekking. Taunted by the reverberations of the fathomless archive, in addition to its immense size, the three explorers reached almost complete mental breakdowns. The fact that the three returned to the Hotel Chelsea alive was considered a near miracle.

Immediately after listening to the tape, and under the recommendation of the Smith family and Wallace firm, Hotel Chelsea management closed the door to the infinite library, permanently sealing shut an extensive collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, out-of-print records, and presumably, Harry Everett Smith.

—Dillon Hawkins

#279: David Bowie, "Aladdin Sane" (1973)

The storm’s slowing inland, like a semi truck hitting the steep, hard-packed slope of a down-grade’s emergency pull-off. In the delirium of dark and rain made mirror by the rental car’s windshield wipers and oncoming headlights, I blindly thumb through my Amazon Cloud player for anything that will keep me awake, that can provide a backbeat to the rock-a-bye of the wind gusts rising out of the Shenandoah. I type bo by muscle memory so I can toggle between Bob and Bowie. No sleep with a voice nasal-y and fast talking, I think I’ll call it America, I said as we hit land; no sleep in the heaviest of Bowie’s albums, oh honey, watch that man.

I’m driving back to New Jersey from Lena and Brad’s wedding in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to which I’d driven that morning—five hours down, five hours up. I wanted to stay, wanted to have another whiskey ginger and join the dance floor, but I have a reading tomorrow in Newark I can’t miss, and much grading to do besides. My thoughts seem like the flat line of a heart monitor, a beaded break sliding across the screen. I’m worn out from weeks of travel and work. A few weeks ago, at my gate in Minneapolis, I told a guy that I liked his hat, a black baseball cap with the cross-stitched image of Ziggy Stardust from the cover of Aladdin Sane, red and blue lightning homespun in heavy thread, orange-red mullet, the sharp cheeks, eyes downcast.

“Thanks,” the guy said, smiling as he turned to see who’d spoken. I caught his eyes’ movements, their gaze mirrored in shape by the scar on my cheek, right eye to jawline.

I moved forward, as if my zone had been called.

I’ve been traveling alone a lot lately, on trains and planes and rental cars. I like the me that travels alone, the one that leaves behind my husband at home, my dog, the dirty dishes, the laundry, a couple changes of clothes stuffed in a duffel bag, earbuds in, an order of two coffees from the flight attendant’s cart. In-laws have often made comments about the fact that I travel on my own, that I’m the wife that leaves her husband alone. “Where’s J. at?” my mother-in-law says of a picture of me and a friend in a new city.

Recently, while hiking with my husband along a steep trail beside the Musconetcong River, we passed a young woman, out for a hike alone. It was deep on the trail, way back from the road. We told her hello, and she said hello back, her eyes scanning everyone and everything. After she was out of range, I told J. that I would never do that, never go out into the woods alone.

“I would be worried if you did,” he says, tugging our dog away from some deer scat.

My father, a forensic scientist and former cop, lectured me throughout my childhood about the dangers of girls and women going out on their own. He told me which way to twist an attacker’s wrist, to kick the backs of their knees, use fingernails on their eyes, “and don’t be afraid to give them a hard kick to their privates.” Not until recently did I ever realize what an impact these early lectures had on me and the way I move in the world, the way I avoid being truly alone away from help or streetlights or a phone.

J. once gave me pepper spray to keep on my keychain—I think it was a stocking stuffer. After a while, even though I lived in a city and rode my bicycle to and from the campus where I worked, I stopped carrying it, as if it was an invitation to try me, and I started meeting every man’s eyes as I passed him. I started telling them “hello.”

I’m not sure what changed in me, why I felt this would keep me safe, why I took the risk of not having a defensive weapon. I remembered then something else my father said, that I should never show fear—that is, weakness—in public. Stay alert. Show that you will remember a face, that you will remember who they are, if something ever happens. Traveling alone, although not a hike in the woods, allows me to be in public, in the world as myself, not a woman, a vulnerable target, a person with somewhere to go.

I buzzed my hair off after I was clear of cancer, in part because I was still so afraid it would return and, also, because I’d been so afraid that I would lose my hair in chemo, back when the doctors thought I’d have to go through a few rounds. Thankfully, the biopsy from the third excisive surgery of my cheek let me off the hook of chemo. By buzzing it later, when I was “okay,” or as well as the aftershocks of the anxiety and trauma would allow me to be, I was able to take ownership over my body, a body that had felt de-sexualized, some days even gender-less, when I was sick.

When I went out with my husband to supper, servers often called me “sir” when they walked up behind me. I wasn’t offended. It was like having someone hurl a pebble at me when I was standing behind tempered glass. In some ways, it was the most respect I’ve ever received from strangers in public.

“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a lesbian?” a hairdresser asked me candidly.

“So what if they do—there’s nothing wrong with that. Plus, it’s none of their business,” I said, and she didn’t reply, but I could tell in the mirror by the way she studied the hair clumping up like bales of hay before falling to the floor that she was worried for me.

On Twitter, I say something about how triggering the news is about Donald Tr*mp’s sexual misconduct, and a rando responds that I’m just jealous that he didn’t rape me and that no one would ever “consider me” because I look like a “little feminazi.”

A female friend types to me, “feminazis unite!” but even that hits me the wrong way. The word further problematizes feminism, connecting it to Nazism. I block the rando, close my computer, and go to bed.

Near Grimes, Pennsylvania, a marquee reads:

GOD UNIQUELY & LOVINGLY

CREATED YOU

TRANSGENDER IS      HUMANISM

There’s a telephone number beneath the message, and I wonder who would answer if I called. I’m surprised to see the sign, even though I don’t quite follow its meaning and fear that it has been defaced from “TRANSGENDER IS DEHUMANISM,” since I’m in a part of the country littered with “BLUE LIVES MATTER” and “TR*MP PENCE 2016” signs. If it is as I fear, I wonder if the argument is that God created each person as a specific gender and, therefore, one shouldn’t try to change it. If it isn’t, if it is in support of trans individuals, it’s suggesting that it’s God’s intention to create each individual’s unique gender identity. I hope it’s the latter.

Every time I travel, I lose myself in my head and almost forget that I have a body, except when my hips begin to ache from sitting at the wheel all day or my feet start to swell from a cross-country flight. Tonight, my body reveals itself only in its sleepiness. I’m uncertain if the bodily disconnect is a good or a bad thing, something I should want, something I should even need. Do we need the mercy of being relieved from our bodies sometimes? Does you mean the you I understand myself to be, or the you that others see me as, a body?

When I was a kid, I used to play in drag all the time. I wanted to have all the boys’ roles in playtime: father, sheriff, cavalry general. I wore baseball caps so often that my softball coach called me “The Hat,” and my mother once had to make me a giant fake beard out of felt and brown-dyed cotton balls and elastic so I could wear it for a book report at school. I wouldn’t let my mother refer to my underwear as “panties,” and I loathed the thought of ever having a period or wearing a bra or buying makeup. I hated the color pink and I detested princesses, because I saw them as weak. In truth, I saw all things “feminine” as inferior to explorers and scientists and doctors and cowboys (all of which I envisioned as male) because women didn’t seem to have any agency in their lives, in the world. It wasn’t until I hit puberty that I began to pay attention to, even see value in things I thought were “for girls.” (Estrogen, man.) My feminism seems to have an antecedent in my tomboyishness, in that play-drag. Although I identify as a woman, I want to complicate what that means, how being a woman sometimes means embracing feelings and expressions of masculinity, or what some often think of as “masculine.”

When I became sick, I retreated into those early feelings of gender-inbetweenness, in part, I believe, because I wanted to recover my agency, or at the very least to signal to the world that I didn’t have any agency as a woman over my sickness. My melanoma was sexless, genderless, and it had control over me, my body and possibly my death, as well as my thoughts. It said, hide in yourself, girl. Change who you are and maybe it won’t recognize you.

But accompanying these feelings were the comments—from friends and strangers alike—about the scar that shifted and changed and redrew itself across my face with every surgery. “What’s the other guy look like?” our house mover joked, as if I was one “guy” and I’d been in a roadhouse knife fight with some biker.

A nurse once said, “Once it heals, it will become less noticeable, more feminine looking.”

“Think of it as a beauty mark,” someone else said, without my query.

Although I temporarily felt less feminine, I didn’t feel as if I had gained any agency; I just felt dehumanized. I was the somebody that something had happened to.

It took months, even a few years, before I began to regain a sense of myself as something beyond the cancer, something not defined by it. In doing so, and through therapy, I learned to honor all of me, the androgyny of my mind and my trauma, the way some days I still need to find myself not woman, just me.

—Emilia Phillips

#280: U2, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000)

We could have been friends, but there wasn’t much to me in those days. Bits and pieces, strings of unconnected thoughts, underneath a chaos of fragmented notions. As bad as I seem, I promise I was worse than I am. In all my crustached, lip-smacking glory, refraction of heaven-bent light through my constant excitable spittle, wearing my Dragon Ball Z T-shirt, with notions of the future we were all training our hearts for—in the midst of knowing I was a fallow field of human evolution—I had a locker next to hers, and I wanted so badly to talk to her about this album: All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

When I asked if she’d heard it, though, she held with me the kind of hyper-focused eye contact people make when they realize the person they’re talking to has come a little unhinged. She’s unlucky enough to be closing the adjacent locker—positioned to make a quick escape—and inside a moment’s passing, the thought occurs to her. That’s when she starts to think U2 doesn’t just annoy her. She starts to think of that shit-stain megalomaniacal prick of a singer, running around in his translucent sunglasses, or wearing a gold suit and pretending to be the devil.

She was right to think, hopeless, when she looked at me and saw I was careening into an adulthood where I will still (often and secretly) think of that maniac in the colored glasses whenever I can’t get my locker open. An adulthood in which I will still think, When exactly did U2 stop being cool, and how did I miss it so thoroughly? Why was U2 still cool to me? I’m not the only one still wondering: “When did U2 become uncool” is still a frequently-searched question on Google, which makes me feel oddly comforted.

*

If I had the courage and the time machine to go back to that moment, in our old school, right before she slammed the door shut and turned the combination lock with a quick twist of her thumb and index finger, I’d ask if she remembered the millennium. It feels so thoroughly quaint to talk about now. Back then, though, it was a big deal. The run-up to 2000 seemed to start somewhere in 1997, and it lasted forever. All anyone could talk about was the future. We all felt the stillness of time, looming up suddenly the way an onrushing train seems to slow across the leaden folds of a panicked brain.

If I could go back in time, I’d ask if she remembered the moment of relief she felt at midnight when it all switched over. The devil, of course, wasn’t in anyone’s computers. It wasn’t in the clocks, or the machines stashed down in the bowels of the world’s banking houses. But we weren’t to know for sure, then, were we? The devil is in the details, and such details are always with us.

For U2, the nineties were bookended by Achtung Baby in 1991 and All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000. The creation of Achtung Baby—which was essentially a re-creation of U2 itself, following accusations of self-righteousness, bombast, and tiresome sincerity—took three years and nearly destroyed the band. In writing Achtung Baby, U2 was determined to avoid making the “Big Statements” critics had grown tired of, without doing away big material: the band explored spiritual doubt, personal failings, and tensions of religious and sexual devotion. In the Rolling Stone review of Achtung Baby, Elysa Gardner writes, “Squarely acknowledging his own potential for hypocrisy and inadequacy, and addressing basic human weaknesses rather than the failings of society at large, Bono sounds humbler and more vulnerable than in the past.”

Between Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind, there was Zooropa and Pop, two albums in which the band experimented with their sound as well as with irony, parody, and megalomania. Held up with the rest of their albums, I think these two are a little boring and overdone. But their stylized performances during the resulting world tours were fascinating. Before there was Trump—back in the gaudy nineties, when we didn’t think it was necessary to abandon all decorum to pursue spectacle—there was the Pop Tour, with Bono prancing around on stage, his powdered face all full of makeup, playing the devil.

What should the devil look like, anyhow: agitating, playful, and grim? Smug, calamitous, and shy? Unsteady in his gaze and in his walk, or stony-eyed—moss-bitten, even? Manic Bono found him in MacPhisto—furious, giddy and delighted. In performances in Italy, Bono-as-MacPhisto talked about how he missed Mussolini, and would leave messages for il Duce’s granddaughter, telling her what a great job the old man had done—and that he would have been very proud of her.

Thousands in the audience laughed, unsure whether from anxiety or the release of feelings unspoken. These moments became a hallmark of the church U2 never meant to form. To beat the devil, mock him, and he runs away. To mock the devil, all you’ve got to do is become a pop star. When this was a kernel of an idea, it was charming. Promising. But it always had to come to an end.

*

All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released on a precipice: in 2000, the year the world was supposed to end but didn’t, and one year before the September 11th terrorist attacks that made us feel that if the world hadn’t altogether ended, it had certainly changed forever. Imagine, injected between these two moments in time, an album with lyrics like:

And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if our way should falter
Along the stony pass
It's just a moment, this time will pass

As Joshua Rothman writes in his 2014 New Yorker article “The Church of U2,” classic U2 “expresses a particular combination of faith and disquiet, exaltation and desperation that is too spiritual for rock but too strange for church.” For U2, Achtung Baby might be Ecclesiastes (“What are we going to do? / Now it’s all been said / No new ideas in the house / And every book has been read”), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind is straight-up Gospel (“Because Grace makes beauty / Out of ugly things / Grace finds beauty in everything / Grace finds goodness in everything”).

Post-Pop U2 emerged reborn and fully formed in those reeling first years of the millennium. With All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band arrived at a place just beyond the yearning and doubt expressed in previous albums. In this way, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a kind of culmination of the decades-long spiritual exploration of a rock band that took the devil seriously enough to bring him out on stage. These days, Bono needed to get in and out of Satan’s shoes quicker than before—his lips curling up into that evil grin, and then relaxing into grace.

At the time, All That You Can’t Leave Behind launched U2 back in the spotlight. U2 was back, and they were boss, and more than anything they were ready for the moment they found themselves in: what better band to play the first show in Madison Square Garden following 9/11, than a band that had been formed in the crucible of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a band that could, in songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” sing about terrorism and, somehow, make people want to dance.

*

Since then, of course, U2’s story has changed again. They came back, but then they were all too present: dancing silhouettes in Apple commercials, on their own black and red iPods, and then on everyone’s Music Libraries, whether you wanted them or not. By the time U2 made How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Bono was everywhere, singing “Your love is teaching me how to kneel.” In Songs of Innocence, he sang, “You no longer got a hold on me / I’m out of Lucifer’s hands.”

Maybe the band’s embrace of commercialism lined up too nicely with their increasingly solidified Christian identity. In retrospect, certainty might be a harder sell than all that questioning. Maybe faith isn’t as cool as doubt, after all. But for me and all us weirdos standing dumbfounded in the lonely gust of wind that rushes through a high school hallway, U2’s crystallized faith wasn’t enough to shake our own.

High school—Bono would have shrugged it off. In a little while you’ll be blown by every breeze. Weightless as a notion. Flighty as a turkey vulture, drifting off across the ridge on the updraft, hungry for the smells of all the rotting shit the high schoolers tossed out of their backpacks as they walked to class. When the bell rang we could all walk out of the lunchroom together—me and Bono and the Edge, with Bono dancing up the amphitheater steps and gleefully pointing at the other weirdos. Edge’s steady gaze gives nothing away, or only a mild curiosity.  The moment aches on, and Edge just shakes his head. In a little while, you’ll be fine.

—Aaron Fallon & Martha Park

#281: Mary J. Blige, "My Life" (1994)

         I.

My Life reminds me of all my teenage winters. I can’t remember if I owned it or just listened to it at a friend’s house for hours on end, staying in out of the cold. One way or another, we knew the album in its entirety—every word. It was that way with every good song, every dance that we needed to learn, every party that we needed to find. We always got the message. Everyone’s boyfriend or brother was an aspiring DJ. Everyone had a friend of a friend who had a tidbit we needed to hear. We even wrote each other letters, when it came to that, and it often did. Maybe it’s the filter of memory, but information didn’t seem that hard to come by. No one ever seemed that hard to reach. Maybe because we were always together, or when apart, paging each other with the beepers we painstakingly saved up babysitting money to buy. Maybe it was because the breadth of what we thought we needed to know was not yet that great.

In the way that digging into the past reveals forgotten details, I realize now that the winter I most associate with My Life actually took place two years after it came out. The Blizzard of ‘96 was special because it provided an excuse for squirreled away visits with a boy that took on more meaning than they might have otherwise. The storm ground the city to a halt. School was closed for days on end and absolutely nothing was happening. Somehow the boys had trudged thirty blocks through the snow to come stand in the street and shiver in front of our buildings. A few snowball fights and piggyback rides later, and the most devastating thing that could happen to a 90s NYC teen happened. My guy lost his beeper. There were layers upon layers of snow, and no chance of finding it. Until, days later, the beeper appeared miraculously amid the melted ice. That it still worked was a testament to how durable those things were.

I excitedly set the wheels in motion that would let him know we found it. I was thrilled to be the bearer of such good news, but it must be true that no good deed goes unpunished because the grapevine sent back word that he thought my friends and I had orchestrated the mixup to begin with. It seemed too good to be true that the hands of fate had seen fit to return his pager. I was crushed to discover that the way I saw myself was not the way I was seen. I was still emotionally innocent enough to believe that people would see me exactly as I thought I presented myself.

If that story happened today, in the era of endless memes and tweets about snooping through phones, DMs, and FB stalking, I’d likely be judged guilty by the court of social media, let alone one teenage boy.

         II.

This year, My Life turns 22 years old. That’s just about the age to start looking back on one’s nascent years in wonder, right? Mary J. Blige once described My Life as the album that “reached out and grabbed everyone and said, ‘I understand.’” To borrow a phrase from the kids, “What’s understood doesn’t need to be explained.” What we felt, even those of us who weren’t even old enough to fully understand what it meant, was her pain. The songs were pain, the album was drugs. The embodiment of love that hurts so good. She has said she felt herself slipping away during its making—that there was a “suicide spirit on there.” Rumors swirled about drugs, drinking, bad behavior, rude demands, angry interviews, and a volatile relationship with K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci.

Listening now, the album plays like the stages of grief. Mary Jane. You Bring Me Joy. I’m the Only Woman. My Life. You Gotta Believe. I Never Wanna Live Without You. I’m Goin’ Down. Be With You. Don’t Go. I Love You. No One Else. Be Happy. Still, within the pain in her voice, as she lays herself bare, life remains: “In order for me to heal, I have to talk. I have to write it out. I have to hang it out. I have to talk it out. I have to cry it out. I have to get it out.”

For years people have said, some jokingly, many dead serious, that Mary J. Blige lost her Midas touch once she was drug-free and no longer in a tumultuous—and possibly abusive—relationship. They are rabid for the “Old Mary.” Hurt Mary. Watch old videos of Mary doing press for My Life in 1994—she’s reserved, quiet, tentative. We don’t truly begin to see her spirit come alive until she grabs the mic. She’s 23 years old, a pretty tomboy with a tough exterior built to hide a hurt interior, thrust into the spotlight. Pain hidden behind a shy smile and few words. We have videos of her performances and interviews and articles, but we filled in the rest from the music. If social media had been around when Mary was dating K-Ci, who knows what we would have seen or heard?

She has a new album coming soon featuring a song with Kanye West. It will be interesting to see what those two created in the lab. She who seems to have broken with most of the past that made My Life so painful and yet so pure, and he, who seems to have broken with the past that perhaps kept him safe. In the court of public opinion she has become too happy and possibly too safe, he, too free, and too wild.

I come back to one of Kanye’s epic rants again and again—when he said, “As a man, I am flawed. But my music is perfect.” Full disclosure: I find it fascinating. Short of the craziness of the now infamous interview he gave on Sway in the Morning where he claimed to be Warhol, Walt Disney, and Google—it’s one of his wilder boasts. There’s something beautiful in having that much belief in your work, especially when you know so many people disagree. My fight song is “Everything I Am” from Graduation. I know “I’ll never be picture-perfect Beyonce,” and “I’ll never be laid back as this beat was.” And that’s okay. Kanye has long known how much love/hate he inspires—”They rather give me the nigga please award / but I’ll just take the I got a lot of cheese award.” He knows fans clamor for the “Old Kanye” they believe died when he lost his mother. He addresses it on “I Love Kanye” from The Life of Pablo, and assures us that every Kanye is a Kanye of his creation and we will take whatever iteration he sees fit to present. We will love him, or leave him alone.

Maybe that kind of hubris can only come after experiencing extreme pain.

It’s telling to watch someone engage with change over and over and still be their own biggest advocate. It’s the hope that a focused attempt at self-love and a commitment to artistry can lead to growth. That’s the promise, right? That those risks might lead to glory. The only way out is through, whether the end result is loved or panned. Otherwise we risk relying on our inherently fallible memories of the past, the shadows of people we once knew, the safety we thought we had, and longing for more of the same.

—Lee Erica Elder

#282: Muddy Waters, "Folk Singer" (1964)

It’s her bath that makes Kathleen your friend at first.

She’s one of the few boaters who has a home on land as well as on water. She continued to travel the waterways after her son was born (later she will recount to you, roaring with laughter, how sometimes she herself would crouch and shit in a nappy when the on-board chemical toilet was full) until the challenges of being a parent finally made her seek out the comfort and safety of a house.

She lives right on the waterfront, which makes her home the Charing Cross Station of the local boating community: people pass through to collect parcels; charge their devices on shore power when the washed-out British skies fail to provide adequate solar; hold their grease-slippery fingers under scalding hot water in her kitchen sink, where (unconstrained by the volume of a storage tank) it flows in miraculous, unlimited supply from the tap.

You first meet her round a towpath fire, wearing a green Stetson that casts half her face in shadow and leaning into a burly bearded dude who is her youngest son’s father. You are wearing the floppy black hat that was your “opera hat” in your past life, the one you’ve just escaped. You exchange hats for a moment. She looks better in yours than you do but, on surveying her reflection, she says, “It feels like something very beautiful that I’m not cut out for.” You get that: you weren’t cut out for it either, ultimately.

Later that night she will get drunk and aggressively invite you to dance with her. You don’t like her much, or you get the sense that she doesn’t like you much: because you’re not game, staying resolutely by the fire in your old party-silks while she moves sinuous as the tongues of flame themselves. You have just come out of two years of being condescended to by London’s upper classes, where being soft-spoken in all-silks was the only way to be taken seriously. You are frightened by the raucousness and practicality of your new life, but in those early days people mistake that for you being too good to get your milk-white hands dirty.

But you watch her cruise away at the end of the night, her sharp witch’s nose turned into the wind, biker boots firmly planted on the deck, tiller held loosely in one hand, and you can’t help but feel admiration. She looks like the figurehead but she is the captain, and you’ve never seen that before.

Over the next few months, you cut your hair, donate your dryclean-only garb to charity, spend days with a belt sander—doing more harm than good as you leave a moonscape of gouges in your tongue-and-groove, but gradually, as a film of sawdust settles on every square inch of your new life, you begin to feel more competent and at home. When you bemoan the extent of your filth to Jonathan, he looks at you quizzically like you’ve failed to catch onto an essential piece of information, and then puts you on the back of his motorbike to Kathleen’s house.

Her house looks somewhere between a boat and a Japanese temple: porthole windows and wooden beams painted a friendly red. Two massive wooden dragons flank the door opening to her kitchen: red and snarling, silver and gentle, sun and moon. The windows are lined with thick velvet drapes she stitched together from offcuts; the walls with mosaics from mussel-shells smuggled home from restaurants.

You take to spending long nights in her kitchen, rosy post-bath with your hair slicked back. She reads you the tarot and sneaks skunk into your loose-leaf tea when you turn down the invitation to smoke with her, smiling one of her mischievous-imp smiles. She plays music on an ancient laptop: JJ Cale, Muddy Waters. She likes these deep-voiced men singing about their rivers and their longing for a good love. “One of these days, I’m gonna show you how nice a man can be….”

She dates men who are brutes or children or both. “This is my friend Mark, he has just come out of prison in the Netherlands.” Sometimes you avoid her house for a while as you wait for her to show the next one the door, which thankfully never takes long. When you return, she shows you the paintings she’s working on: a figure with a red-blonde plait holding a sphere, ocean, light and colour rippling out in concentric circles.

She’s from a big, Catholic family, where she learned how to fend for herself in a throng of brothers. Her life is more feral than you can fathom: coming home bruised from a fistfight with her ex’s new wife. You like her long stories about arguing her way to victory (“And I says to him, I says….”). You like the things she likes: the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, whom she admires for being female and yet a successful sculptor. In a different life—one that didn’t keep her busy chasing up the benefit payments that the government seemed to regularly withhold at random—her sculptures, too, would be in galleries. You can’t help but feel angry for her sometimes because of that.

You get to know her children: Aisling, who is a strange combination of listless and creative, pinning fabric to a dressmaker’s dummy in bursts of focus; Dylan, sweet and serious in his school uniform and odd socks, carving spoons and teaching himself poi.

You’ve seen the pictures of Kathleen in her first marriage, white-blonde and hopeful, laughing, peeling potatoes with each leg stuck through the handles of a plastic bag to drop the slivers of skin in. That girl seems very different.

You have one of the happiest moments in two years of grief-haze on Christmas morning, cycling through deserted North London with presents for her children in your backpack. Having somehow been welcomed into this family.

But in the new year, things change. It begins with her furiously rearranging furniture: every time you enter the house the living room is somewhere else after she has enlisted her eleven-year-old son’s help to carry sofas and armchairs up and down stairs.

For months she has been courted by one of her ongoing flings, a pilot with a drunkard’s nose like an angry strawberry in the middle of his face who keeps promising to leave his wife for her. He sent her an expensive guitar even though she doesn’t play, which she told you about scathingly. But then one day you enter the house and he’s there, condescending to you within the first few minutes of conversation. “Alan lives here now,” Kathleen announces from behind you, but when you turn to look at her, she doesn’t meet your eyes.

After they’ve gone out, you walk around the house, looking at his bathrobe hung from the hook in her bedroom like a sloughed-off body abandoned by its spirit: is this really the life she wants for herself?

Before long she stops returning your calls, sending only curt texts: no, tonight’s not good, we’re not in. You hear that they’re engaged. She rings you occasionally to manically prattle about losing weight to fit into her wedding dress, leaving not a moment’s pause in the conversation.

You’re baffled. You think: maybe loneliness has worn her down, the way it wears all of us down, trapped in our own orbit.

Then she borrows Jonathan’s boat so she can take Alan for a “jolly.” In the chaos and confusion of the day, Jonathan’s cat gets lost: they’re too impatient to wait for her to come home before driving off, and moor up in a different place when they get back, which tends to confuse cats. The cat never returns. When you get angry with her about it, she uses it as an excuse to cut ties with you, telling you that she’s “sick to death of you and your opinions.” You wonder if it’s really about the cat, or if it’s about your views on Alan; views which she once shared.

You dream of the two of them, walking in skeleton make-up like a Día de los Muertos parade, like court cards in the deck: majestic and imperious.

Some months later you hear they are no longer together. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Though your expressions of support are politely received when you next cross paths, still she doesn’t quite meet your eye anymore.

As winter draws near, you cycle past her house, looking at the velvet drapes drawn in the bay window, thinking about the dragons and music and mosaics hidden behind them. You miss them; you miss her asking “How are you, Miss Moo?” like in the first few weeks after your father’s death, when everyone else was too afraid to. You miss her kitchen with its cracked-open window, sending the sounds of the blues, wild and sad and strong, out into the tidy Georgian streets.

—Emma Rault

#283: Barry White, "Can't Get Enough" (1974)

I was young but I was never really small. At least, not during the part that defined much of my childhood. That period of my life comes equipped with an “OVERSIZED LOAD” distinction like precarious highway towing. Looking backward, I prepare myself accordingly; lay down flares, hire a small outfit, affix proper signage. The turning radius on that epoch makes for a big swing.

I was a fat kid.

Not at first, sure, but the mechanics were well established. My burgeoning interests in Nintendo and gluttony formed a symbiotic relationship of unchecked hedonism, coiled and wound tighter than knotted wood. Twisting orchid-like around my swelling frame, the incestuous marriage of internal vices grew heel-step with my prodigious bulk. Thus I was inundated.

I was rendered solid, immobile, like a boulder abandoned after a total glacial melt.

At age 11, I was 5’2” and weighed 12 stone.

But it’s not a sad story, not entirely. Although I never felt love at school like I did at home. I was never “piggy” at home. I was safe. From Sam, Curtis, Mike N., Charlie. And this wasn’t even a sophisticated jab, like a Lord of the Flies allusion suggesting that, were we to suddenly fall into martial law as a homeroom, I’d be beaten to death with sticks.

I was “piggy” because in their eyes I was nothing more than a tub of shit. And no one wants to be caught dead playing Mancala with shit.

But I maintain this is not a sad story, although it certainly reads like a tragedy.

Think, for instance, of my idol.

I was a happy child, comedic in the self-indulgent way of fools, often wearing a showman’s hat. With my childhood’s sell by date stamped for the mid ‘90s, I gravitated to Chris Farley like a fellow heavenly body.

He carried more than I did and wore it with aplomb, making it a piece of him. He upset the stasis, challenging the common dichotomy that a fat versus thin binary often conjures. Plus David Spade was never as funny.

That’s my now-speak, obviously, but back then I was his disciple. Whether I was pantomiming my favorite SNL bits or falling into a swimming pool with my clothes still on, I lived for the stage. My family loved and endured me.

Chris Farley died on December 18, 1997. He was sad and did a lot of drugs and I was swallowed by the void he left.

His death preceded one of my many bouts in the wilderness. Less untamed, say, than the expanse left to Cobain junkies, or the feeling of betrayal packaged with a major label release. I was still young, remember. But it had me metaphorically wandering.

I tried Meat Loaf for a while. His grandiose frame mixed like a cocktail with the swashbuckling sexuality of a windblown pirate left an immediate impression. The glitz and glitter of his rings and sequins. The frill of his shirts, that hair. And he had a rocking, dicks-out (now-speak again) aesthetic with the physical heft to back it up.

But ultimately his songs were too long—despite being thematically stirring, pubescent-ly speaking—and his name just made me hungry.

There were several more, after. I burned through fancies like someone on a bender. I whirled untethered, rudderless, my inner fabric stretched thin and flapping in the high winds of my destitution. The nights were dark and I snacked luxuriously.

But then I found Barry.

Suddenly I didn’t have to be manic, to over-gesticulate, to lack grace. There was a better way to reflect life back at the world around me. I could have my cake and eat it too. I didn’t have to be an accepted version of what I was.

With Barry it wasn’t about rocking; it was about the groove. I’d found my savior.

There I was, back on the stage, but this time doing my best Barry White. I had (some of) the moves, affected that baritone—funny coming from a boy with his sack still firmly planted in his perineum—and wore my shirt open so the fans would hit it just right.

*

In seventh grade I reached the apex of my mass. I’d expanded in such a glorious fashion, opting for clothing that stretched and breathed, nothing fitting; I walked everywhere with the audible swoosh of athletic warm-ups (i.e. clothes meant to stretch over other clothes).  T-shirts from that era fit two of me now.

I was no longer in classes with those shit boys. I was no longer “piggy”—although had they been around I’m sure my status would have been reaffirmed as such. I had matured, become more adult in my pursuits.

I had fallen in love.

Hindsight being the sharp grindstone that it is, I know now I was punching way beyond my weight, but adolescent me was blind to reason. I wasn’t the type to draw hearts on my math homework, or scrawl our names out forever in whiteout pen on my trapper keeper. My ambiguous sexual longing lay tightly wrapped inside, writhing to the sound of my wrap-around headphones:

Girl I don’t know, I don’t know why
Can’t get enough of your love babe

We’ll call her Stacy.

She had all the trappings of a quintessential crush: attractive, intelligent; her presence instilled a competing flight/fight response that more often than not just resulted in perspiration. I was not without courage entirely, but it’s a safe bet, were she to comment on me then, her description would read: odd. But I digress.

Let me set the scene.

It was the first dance of that year. I had on forest green swishy pants, a black T-shirt, and a mock silk short-sleeve dress shirt with flames on the front. Motherfucking flames. I felt unstoppable. I’d pre-gamed with Barry White, letting Can’t Get Enough loop back on itself as I piled on generic brand hair gel until my dome looked like a succulent. I was ready. My dad dropped me off at the entrance to the cafeteria and I strutted into the din of voices and music.

From my revisionist vantage point I moved through those rooms crowded with my peers strutting a high quotient of affected cool; sipping a glass of something brown, moving in slow motion like the opening credits of Reservoir Dogs, smoking absently. In reality I shuffled audibly and dribbled Cherry Coke down my front in a rush to reach the dance floor to find Stacy.

The room was a mess of kinetic light. Every novelty light imaginable was mounted to the DJ booth, whirling, pulsing, like a Spencer’s Gifts on ipecac. Clustered around in the semi-lit gloam of the gym my classmates moved with a furtive excitement. There was blood in the water.

Uncharacteristically, I asserted myself to the booth and groped amid strobes and mirror-ball quicksilver for a pen to scrawl on the request list: “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe” by Barry White.

And so I waited. I had another Cherry Coke and some Sour Punch straws to calm my nerves. I shifted my weight, sweated. Then I heard that falling guitar, and the deep buttered voice I associated interchangeably with confidence:

I’ve heard people say that
Too much of anything is not good for you, baby

I rubbed the citric acid into my gums for luck and crossed the parquet, in-bound for Stacy. I had a fanfare behind me: my man, my mentor, my Obi-Wan of rotund beauty and palpable swagger. I walked right over in time to see Stacy cozy up at arm’s length with Mike N. And I thought he was expelled! My night went into a tailspin.

Yet it was still my soundtrack they shuffled to, and I did my best to shuffle, too.

*

Rejection was like a fire that swept the harvest, consuming all. But below it something ancient smoldered, with more prudence. Now awake, it grew in waiting.

In route to the fireworks at Hart Park on July 4th I heard on the radio that Barry White had passed away at age 58. I kept mostly to myself that night as I buried another hero in a pyre of sulfur light and flames.

But I maintain this is not a sad story.

How one speaks about their rebirth is much in the vein of recounting a dream. The intense wonder of blinding light, unfurled explosions and arrays of color that lay textured, cushioning the sound beneath that evaporates like dry ice in the morning. The after-burn of color hanging like reverb in your mental theater.

Though I move through these memories deftly now, it wasn’t always candy.

Chris Farley taught me how to hide my pain in laughter: to be the clown. Barry White made me buoyant, and taught me not to let the Mike N.s and Stacys tarnish my rhinestones. He taught me how to carry my weight, and how to wear it well.

—Nick Graveline

#284: The Cars, "The Cars" (1978)

Rich’s mom used the wall next to the staircase like a human evolution diorama. At the bottom, there was Rich flat on his back in his crib, naked with his legs and arms akimbo. The first time I met Rich’s mom, she took it off the wall and showed it to me. She put her index finger above his supposedly erect penis and bragged about how he was so mature even then. Richard buried the right side of his face with his hand but kept one eye open to see how I reacted. This was the only time I ever saw him naked in the light.

The next photo was him dressed and painted as a vampire in the first or second grade. His face was bone white. The part of his mouth that he didn’t lick off was smeared with the blood of an imaginary villager. One night while we were tangled up in his bed, I asked whether he ever gave the villager a name. He shrugged.

Next to the vampire was two Little League baseball players. The one on the right was Rich. On the left was Henry, his then-best friend. Rich played third until his dad couldn’t afford to have him keep playing. Rich said or did something right after his last game to make sure Henry stopped being his friend.

Rich stood in front of his mom and dad. The department store Christmas tree loomed over them. His mom wore a bright red dress with a wreath-shaped brooch pinned above her right breast. Rich and his dad wore matching suits. Rich’s stomach threatened to cascade over his waistband. Rich’s mom and dad both had their hands on Rich’s shoulders. Their mouths contorted into thin smiles, teeth slightly visible. I knew from my own family that the most important time to lie was during the holidays.

From the top of the stairs, the junior high version of Rich scowled at the family below. The crimson clip-on tie dangled beneath the part of the collar that wasn’t enveloped by his second chin. “He fought like hell to hang this one,” Rich’s mom said. “I don’t know why.”

Rich never fully accounted for the gaps between each photo. I always started asking questions as we lay in Rich’s bed. The first or second time, Rich shut me up by making out with me; I backed off. After we were done kissing, we listened to the ceiling fan whir as it dried the sweat on our bodies until it became a new layer of skin. I pushed him away the third time he tried shutting me up, lay so stiff that Rich finally got the hint. He spoon fed me only as many answers as it would take to cure me back into his arms.

I knew the needle was helping him disappear layer by layer. I knew his body well enough where I could tell when his wrists and waist shrank. The parts of his body Rich would let me touch, I could feel his bones more through his skin. Once, my thumb stumbled onto a scab in the fold connecting his forearm to his upper arm. I decided to stop seeing him or talking to him for as long as I could until he was willing to tell me what I already knew.

After a week, I finally caved and went over to Rich’s house while his mom was working the night shift like she always did. The door crept opened after the second knock. I walked in and found Rich’s mom sitting on the couch. The photos from the evolution diorama were on the living room table. I ran upstairs to Rich’s room before Rich’s mom could say anything. I saw Rich’s bedroom for the first time when I turned on the lights. There weren’t any women pinned to the walls lusting after him. There weren’t any cars either. He treated the floor like a hamper. His comforter was plaid. It was peeled back on the side of the bed he preferred to roll out of. Rich’s mom never said a word as I ran out of her house.

Rich’s face was never stapled to telephone poles or taped to windows. A week later, a “For Rent” sign was staked in front of Rich’s house. I sometimes heard a tap or scrape against my window, hoped it was Rich wanting me to come outside. It was always just a bug or the wind.

—J. Bradley

#285: Stevie Wonder, "Music of My Mind" (1972)

“Would you rather be deaf or blind?”

I always said blind. It was one of the more tame “would you rathers” I asked and answered in childhood. My only impairment was preteen suburban malaise; after outgrowing playing pretend on the playground, we exerted the privilege of imagination on hypothetical dilemmas. Having never met a blind or deaf person, I cited music as a chief consideration for choosing blindness, convinced that words could paint a picture better than an image could sing a song. The key of life was something to be heard.

The absence of one sense often sharpens the others, so it’s no surprise that Wikipedia lists more than 208 notable blind musicians, the most famous being a toss-up between Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. The first album Little Stevie Wonder recorded was A Tribute to Uncle Ray, a 1962 compilation of Ray Charles covers. Only 11 years old, Stevie was pressed to recreate some kind of blind man magic. The album flopped.

Of course, Stevie soon found his own voice, a signed and sealed legacy delivered by the end of the decade. His audience grew from acquaintances to soul mates in the 1970s as Stevie matured from a hit machine to an artist, releasing no less than five inarguable masterpiece albums in a row. 1972’s Music of My Mind marks his first collaboration with a British electronic duo called TONTO’s Expanding Head Band. Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff had invented The Original New Timbral Orchestra (TONTO) just two years earlier, the largest and most capable analog synthesizer in history. Accompanying Music of My Mind’s deep bass lines and rolicking guitar hooks are beeps and hums never before heard in soul music: ambient sounds that defy onomatopoeia. Listeners could not picture the instrument such tones could be coming from. Today, anyone can Google image search to see the curved wall of buttons and knobs six feet high and 20 feet across, but in 1972, the machine was out of sight. These new sounds came from whatever shapes your mind conjured. Music of My Mind is a visual album, but not in the Beyoncé sense. The album cover, on which Steve’s face is reflected in his sunglasses, hints at this deconstruction of the senses. Think you can’t make eye contact with a blind man? Just put on Side A.

The synth began as the academic pursuit of a few white people in the mid-60s; Robert Moog’s genesis and Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach set the tone for Bookends and Abbey Road. For 12 years, Motown Records had been in the business of reclaiming music stolen from black Americans, but this time around, Stevie had taken a white man sound and made it not only digestible, but groovy, expanding heads like no pasty Brit ever could. A semblance of justice.

Now for some hindsight: my stating a preference between being deaf and being blind was grossly insensitive. (Who would have guessed that “would you rather have pubes for teeth or teeth for pubes?” would end up being the less offensive childhood quandary?) It was also generally misguided. I’d imagined that a blind person experienced life in the same way I did when I closed my eyes, but of course it doesn’t work like that. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles didn’t even see the world in the same way. Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, six weeks premature. The oxygen therapy that saved his underdeveloped lungs caused his retinas to detach, meaning he never had functioning eyes in waking life. Diagnosed with glaucoma, Ray Charles lost his sight gradually, from ages four to seven. There’s a community of blind people who have adapted their keen hearing into a form of echolocation, using sound to navigate the structures surrounding them. It’s a perception I might not recognize, but to have spatial reasoning is to see.

I’ve wondered what role Stevie plays in designing his album covers—can the visions in his head be described in words? Can he visualize someone else’s concept? I’d like to think that when Stevie hits the piano, he’s swaying his head to the beat and to the view, something like those sunset rings on the cover of Songs in the Key of Life.

In my early 20s, I went on a date with a man who was born deaf. He had cochlear implants and communicated like anyone else I’d gone on a date with. When I asked him about his favorite bands, he told me that he didn’t care for music, in fact, most of time he found it grating and unpleasant. I didn’t hold it against him, because of course he heard sounds differently than I did, but I found myself struggling to keep the conversation rolling. I realized how much I relied on music as a topic during those getting-to-know-you conversations. We never went out again, and looking back, I wish I’d asked him more about the media he did love—movies or paintings or poems. Without being wrapped up in the background noise, he would almost certainly notice things I wouldn’t have. Why privilege one sense over another? I think if I couldn’t hear music, I’d find it somewhere else. And even if I didn’t, I’d keep looking anyway.

—Susannah Clark

#286: Al Green, "I'm Still in Love With You" (1972)

When Al Green steps off a Greyhound in Midland, Texas, in the winter of 1968, he has 35 cents in his pocket. Everything else he owns is in a cardboard suitcase. His soiled, lime-green polyester suit—hardly adequate in this biting Texas wind—looks like he hasn’t taken it off in a week, and the soles of his imitation alligator loafers are wearing through. For nine months now, he’s been playing lonely roadhouse clubs across the South—“the chitlin circuit”—singing his lone hit, “Back Up Train,” for the ten people who show up each night to hear it. He’s hungry and tired, but his only prospects for a meal and a decent night’s sleep lie at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. So he picks up the cardboard suitcase and sets off down the highway, probably wishing he’d never given up that car-waxing gig back in Grand Rapids.

In his autobiography, Take Me to the River, Al interprets what happened that night the way he’s interpreted virtually every moment in his career since becoming an ordained minister: as an act of divine intervention. Willie Mitchell, an influential bandleader, was headed home to Memphis after a successful West Coast tour. Al, a one-hit nobody, was literally singing for his dinner. Intrigued by his unconventional delivery, Willie bought him a drink after the show (Al exchanged it for a ham sandwich), and asked a question interviewers would be asking for decades: Where’d you learn to sing like that? (“Here and there” was the answer Al gave, coyly glossing over his love for Jackie Wilson, his time on the Baptist revival circuit, and his childhood penchant for mimicking bird songs.) A professional curiosity, that’s all it was. No offer of a record deal, nor a contract. It wasn’t until the night was ending, and the roadhouse owner refused to pay the musicians, claiming that they hadn’t drawn a big enough crowd to cover his expenses, that Al worked up the nerve to approach Willie again. He didn’t have the cost of a bus ticket to Grand Rapids. Would he drive him as far as Memphis?

Two years later, Willie and Al are hunkered down in Royal Recording Studio in Memphis, the home of Hi Records, working on the songs that would fill out Green is Blues, his first for the label, and the precursor to a string of classics, three of which ended up on this Rolling Stone list. The session isn’t going well. Al wants to huff and puff his way onto the charts the way big-lunged stars like Otis Redding, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson did before him. Willie, who came up playing trumpet in a jazz band, wants something quieter and more nuanced. What Otis did with a shout, he wants Al to do with a whisper. Al isn’t quite there yet. The takes are piling up, and still Willie is shaking his head. “Slow it down,” he says. “Soften it up. Feel what you’re singing.” He points at the band, a group of Memphis musicians he's assembled. “Let them be gritty.”

Probably not enough has been said about Hi Rhythm in recent years. Yes, they backed Cat Power circa The Greatest, and yes, their guitarist, Teenie, who died in 2014, was Drake’s uncle. (That’s him mugging in front of a Memphis chicken restaurant in the video for “Worst Behavior.”) But in the early ‘70s they exerted a massive influence on soul music with their lazy, swinging rhythms, their high-powered horn section, and those delicately strummed guitars: what became known as “the Memphis sound.”

The story begins back in 1949, when Willie called on an untested, 14-year-old named Al Jackson Jr. to fill in on drums for a Memphis swing band. “He was the worst drummer you ever heard,” he later told Rolling Stone. But where others heard an incompetent amateur, Papa Willie heard potential. By the time Jackson was in his late twenties, he was drumming for Booker T and the MGs, the legendary Stax Records house band. You might not know Jackson’s name, but you know his rhythms: Sam & Dave’s “Hold on, I’m Coming”; Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”; the MG’s “Green Onions”; all the Otis Redding hits. (That’s his beat Kanye sampled on “Otis”.) That loping, syncopated rhythm buoying “Let’s Stay Together”? That’s Jackson, too. His talents became so renowned that Willie had to get Howard Grimes, another Memphis drum prodigy, to fill in when Jackson’s increasingly lucrative commitments kept him busy. Grimes was good enough that Willie later claimed he couldn’t always tell the difference.

Willie made a habit out of recruiting amateurs. He nabbed brothers Leroy and Charles Hodges, who played bass and organ, from their high school band, the Impalas. Their younger brother Teenie eventually showed up at Willie’s house one night, drunk, guitar in hand, looking to get in on the action. “You play like shit,” Willie told him, before inviting him to move in upstairs. There wasn’t a guitarist in Memphis who played with the kind of restraint he wanted, so he took Teenie into his home for three years and taught him himself. Willie was nothing if not patient. By the time Al got to Memphis, Willie and the boys had been playing together for over a decade.

The lush gritty soul sound that catapulted Al to stardom didn’t happen overnight. You can hear glimpses of it on Gets Next to You and Let’s Stay Together, but it’s not until I’m Still in Love With You that they deliver an entire album worthy of their talents. The emphasis here is on all of their talents, not just Al’s. Of the three singles that cracked the Billboard Hot 100, Jackson co-wrote two of them and Teenie, the third. While Al wrote his vocal lines in a matter of minutes, Jackson would labor over the drum parts for days. Nowhere are those efforts more audible than “I’m Glad You’re Mine,” a good song that Jackson’s inventive drumming transforms into a great one. It’s Teenie though, who is the unsung genius of this record. His sparse style gave Al’s voice the space it needed to get lost in. And his rhythmic sense—second only to Jackson’s—is the motor underneath the album’s hood. That’s his driving guitar lick—a throwback to the bluesy grit of their early records—that propels the album’s centerpiece, “Love and Happiness,” and the 98th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone’s count. (That foot you hear tapping off the count at the beginning? That’s Teenie.) And of course Willie is here too, the magician behind the curtain. His fingerprints are all over I’m Still in Love With You, from the big stuff—the horn sections, the string arrangements, all those jazz chords—to the tiny details: the rich snap of the snare drum, the ghostly warmth of the organ tone.

Enough has been said about Al Green’s voice. His range. That otherworldly falsetto. The world of feeling he can wring from a whispered syllable. If you were born into a world where “Let’s Stay Together” was part of the cultural bedrock—audible everywhere from wedding receptions to Waffle House—it’s hard to imagine hearing that voice for the first time. But for some audience members at this 1972 performance of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” that may well have been the case. It’s a gripping performance, no matter how many times you’ve watched him sing. As the song starts, the lights drop, cloaking the band and the audience in shadow—an effect that lends Al the eerie appearance of being alone in a room full of people. The volume on his mic is turned up so loud—or the room is that quiet—you can hear his lips open and close. Al, always a ham for the spotlight, rises to the moment; he doesn’t appear to sing the song so much as exorcise it from his mouth through a series of facial contortions. But’s it not Al’s face that delivers the gut punch; it’s a kid’s. During the last verse, as Al stretches out that “la-la-la” bit until it’s a kind of whispered trill, the camera swings behind him to reveal a young boy, seated front and center. He is staring up at Al, transfixed. You don’t need to blow the video up to full screen to recognize the expression on his face: it’s the one we all make when something beautiful and unfamiliar floats into our ear drums.

—Ryan Marr

#287: Grateful Dead, "Anthem of the Sun" (1968)

In 1967, recording sessions were done in some kind of orderly form—songs had been selected, arrangements had been made, musicians had been hired, studios were booked, artists came, sang overdubs or sang live, we then proceeded to add and sweeten strings and so forth, went into the mixing stage,

and out came a record. I kept a 10-strip of L hidden in the sleeve. One of those summer nights, fresh out of high school, we dropped and drove to Virginia Beach where one of us had a father with a house where no one slept. We only had reason to let gravity guide us to the shore, to lay down in the stars and sand, invited by the sun and the tide, which would breathe us back in morning time. It was chilly, but not too chilly,

an October morning in Palo Alto, 1963—after stealing a couple hours’ sleep, a young man awakes on the floor in the aisle of a closed movie theater, having jimmied the ticket window open shortly before dawn. He stands and walks into the beams of sunlight that frame the lobby door. It’s okay, he’d say if anyone bothered, a buddy of mine sweeps the popcorn and mops the pop here. He woulda let me in, but he got all fucked up

on burgundy and grass last night, ya dig? Now these guys came along and none of that applied! Didn’t have the material ready, went into the studio experimenting with sound—they were like kids in a candy store with all this great equipment. It was all state of the art, you know, and they were availing themselves of it

and going to school on it. On the East Coast, the sun comes up slow. I’ve seen it rise enough times, it’s a watched pot—not the fiery orange peak we’d painted and set fire to in our minds that night. Every day, like moving under water after dark, we can swim deep and swim deeper, believing there’s a surface bound to come before a breath, but the sun is small and pale on the Eastern horizon

and we had lost our sense of pressure. We were dealing with, yes, a counterculture and, yes, a new method of recording, but also there was the element of chemicals involved here, which never had been a factor with the acts we dealt with, or if it had been it certainly was

under control. Enough times, he hustles rent money busking banjo to pay for a room in a friend’s house for a week or two—always space with a short-term open door, always a friend with a friend who doesn’t know what he can afford next week

on either side of the deal. We didn't speak much on the beach there that dawn. It was the leg of the trip where everyone agreed to quietly recede into the low tides of themselves. I have a photograph—one of a small, out-of-focus handful, no one knew I snapped—of three bodies spread out before me, before the ocean, far from each other

in their silence. These guys were stoned, living in a fantasy world, looking so hard

for sounds that may not even be possible. We each weigh our expectations and their realities in our own and only ways. When we finally leave, we step barefoot from the sand

onto concrete. He climbs out the way he came in, straightens his pea coat, covered in dust and lint, sticky with fountain soda and salt water taffy, crusted continent of spit warm with the scent of spilled beer. He lights a cigarette to catch his breath and squints, smiling through the morning fog. However I find him, I hand him the coins he’ll need to ride through the day.

Thank you, he always says. We are going somewhere else and we will not return.

—Doug Fuller