#494: MGMT, "Oracular Spectacular" (2007)

But there is really nothing, nothing we can do,
Love must be forgotten, life can always start anew.

Sometime in 2005 or 2006, maybe it was spring or summer—I’m not sure but I know it was warm outside because I spent most of Of Montreal’s set sitting on the patio, my ears ringing from the deafening volume in the tiny venue—I bought my now-soon-to-be ex-wife Julia tickets to a show at a now-defunct venue in Charlottesville, VA called the Satellite Ballroom. We’d been dating for a just few months, and I knew next to nothing about Of Montreal outside of the couple CDs Julia would often play in her car. I was still freshly reeling, wide-eyed in the new-to-me world of indie music that had burst open a year or so before when my adolescent love affair with Phish had finally come to a sudden, unexpected end—the result of some sort of internal tidal shift, certainly the subject for another time, another essay.

We made the hour-and-a-half-long trip to Charlottesville from Richmond, where Julia had just recently moved into a small two-bedroom apartment on Main Street with me and my best friend and bandmate—a comically bad living situation full of wildly varying degrees of maturity and conflicting life schedules (Julia had just started her first year teaching English in public schools, I had just begun my first year of undergrad, and my friend was working nights at a local bar). We drove her old blue Chevy Cavalier, also now-defunct, having been struck and totaled last year by a drunk teenager, oddly enough right outside of our old apartment on Main Street . . . sometimes I’d swear I’ve been wandering in circles for my entire life, the past always echoing through the present.

The Satellite Ballroom had the unquestionable vibe of a public school cafeteria—the kind of place that felt like it should be hosting a low-budget high school prom. They sold bottles of Yuengling and Starr Hill beer out of coolers from behind a counter that was clearly intended to serve as a snack bar. I wasn’t even twenty-one yet and they wouldn’t sell Julia, three years older than me, two beers for herself, so she snuck sips of Starr Hill Amber to me over the course of the night, causing me to feel uncomfortably self-aware of our age gap. When the opening act took the stage—a band neither of us had ever heard of—there were only a handful of people hanging around, so we went front and center to watch.

Two shaggy-haired guys rolled confidently onto the stage looking like they’d just gotten out of bed. One of them was wearing an oversized bright blue hoodie, khaki shorts and black Converse All Stars, the other a plain white V-neck t-shirt and jeans—very normal looking young guys (turns out they were both the same age as Julia), except that the one in the t-shirt was also wearing a red velvet cape tied with a golden tassel around his neck. 

One of them hit some keys on a laptop and the room began to fill like a hot air balloon with the blooming sounds of lo-fi synth—bubbling, purring, chirping like an analog world waking up in a digital spring, then four measures of a simple melody—happy but for the slight lip-quiver of vibrato before a bass-heavy drumbeat dropped to kick off the verse. And then they were dancing, singing, jumping back and forth around the stage with the shameless enthusiasm of teenagers in front of their bedroom mirrors—

I’m feelin’ rough, I’m feelin' raw in the prime of my life.
Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.

They were silly, they didn’t care, they weren’t even playing instruments, but their songs were really good, and turned out to be surprisingly memorable.

Control yourself, they sang, take only what you need from it / a family of trees wanting to be haunted—a chorus belted by two anonymous guys that stuck with me until, a couple years later, I started hearing them everywhere, when they turned up on SNL and David Letterman with a full band, all done up in elaborate, what I might call hippie-jungle-glam outfits—in all their freaky goodness, with a Grammy nomination, opening for Paul McCartney, an admitted fan, when the phrase “this generation’s Sgt. Pepper’s” started getting thrown around in reviews for Oracular Spectacular—when all that pretending turned, perhaps reluctantly, into something real.

Those shaggy-haired guys, of course, were MGMT on their first tour after releasing the Time to Pretend EP and, although I really enjoyed their set that night, I didn’t make much of an effort to find out who they were. At the time, I had some arguably high-minded ideals of what it meant to have a band or to play music at all and MGMT didn’t seem to fit in with any of that. With their prerecorded tracks, synth-heavy song production and seeming unwillingness to take themselves seriously as musicians, I think I was probably too ashamed to admit how good they made me feel. There was an earnestness in their performance and in their music that I don’t think I fully understood at the time—an honesty in the way they confronted not only a rapidly changing music industry, but the universally terrifying temporality of life.

Passed the point of love
shattered and untied
waiting to pick up the pieces
that make it all alright.

But pieces of what?
Pieces of what?
Pieces of what
doesn’t matter anymore.

Pieces of what we used to call home, the song ultimately decides. When Julia and I separated five months ago, I moved into an apartment with a new friend and bandmate right next door to the first place I lived in Richmond ten years ago, when Julia and I first met working together at a coffee shop downtown. The month we separated, I graduated with my MFA and started working at another coffee shop—circles upon circles, and yet every time I come around, something has changed, something is new. Ten years later, I’m financially and professionally right back where I was at age nineteen, with virtually nothing to show for the life I lived through my twenties—only what I have inside, these memories, the person I’ve become, which are as malleable and unreliable as love. This essay isn’t about seeing MGMT before they were famous. This is about growing up, spending ten years of my life settling into the idea of the rest of a life with one person and having that suddenly shattered and the rapid restructuring, the self-reckoning and the swimming back to shore that has gone on since.

When I listen to Oracular Spectacular now, I understand something about these changes—something about the reality of moving forward in this world. Perhaps it’s just the way they situate earnest, innocent lyrics about childhood—I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms / I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world—against lines full of tongue-in-cheek irony in regards to the loss of innocence we repeatedly experience as we grow as people, all melodically phrased over instrumentation that makes me want to move my body and celebrate how simultaneously difficult and wonderful life can be. Built into the album’s mission statement is a pre-acceptance of failure and the choice to revel in it.

The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce,
we’ll find some more models, everything must run its course.

Already, in my memory of that show, as in so much of our history together, Julia is beginning to slip away—as the past attempts to keep up, always circling the present, she is becoming a stranger in my mind. Six months ago, if someone had asked me what it’s like to be married, I, comfortable and secure, would have given some overly self-assured, idealistic response about the difficulties and rewards of truly working with another person over a long period of time. I would have felt so quietly right, and perhaps I would have been—too often our best really isn’t enough. Going back now, standing in front of that stage, a strange person beside me receding into a crowd of other strange people, what remains is a celebratory music echoing out through the room, keeping that memory alive and connecting my past to my present.

—Doug Fuller

#495: Bonnie Raitt, "Give It Up" (1972)

I get most of my ideas in the shower. It might be the action of lathering—the fingers massaging my scalp, preparing it like a surgeon about to lift my head’s heavy lid. I like the clash that occurs when the body zones out on autopilot, allows the mind to wander. Sometimes I'm surprised to rediscover what was intuitive to me as a child: that boredom often contains inspiration. 

The shower, increasingly, is also the only place where I sing, where I like the way I sound. Here is a place of safety: of ideas and resonance. This morning, stepping out of the tub, I slipped on the damp tile before catching myself with a hand on the counter. It’s a cliché, I know, that people die like this: one moment, upright and drying off, the next, splayed and splattered on the bathroom floor. I imagine the sound it would make, traveling up the entire body, through the windpipe and out the mouth: whoomp. One final stroke of body-shaking percussion.  

Undeniably, I am getting older. This is something I tend to notice the most in the shower, with my body right there for examination. But once I was a child, and there are some things my body still displays that bear proof of this:  a livid white stripe on my shin from an afternoon I spent jumping from twin bed to twin bed, eventually bashing my leg open on the bed frame. Another, smaller wedge of a scar on my kneecap from tumbling down the stairs. Another faint stripe on my hand, a burn from trying to save a crumbling Pop-Tart from the toaster. So many of these, accumulating across my body like snow, leaves.

It startles me now to think how I used to catapult my body around without even paying attention to it. I also used to sing everywhere: in the shower, outside the shower, in the living room, without being embarrassed. And when I say sing I don’t mean the benign, passive nature of humming to yourself as you cook dinner, of whistling while you work—I mean belting. I was really trying: I was young enough to lack any learned apathy or shame. 

Growing up, my house bellowed with the constant rotation of The Cranberries, Eva Cassidy, and Bonnie Raitt. I wanted all that they had: their powerful voices, their wisdom, how they could suddenly change tenor and key. My sister and I would put on our mother’s and aunts’ old dresses, swimming in the collars and waistlines, and dance, assuming what we thought were the rigid roles of adults, grabbing each other’s palms and swaying around the living room carpet, dipping and spinning one another like the people we saw waltzing in tuxes and gowns in old black-and-white movies. Bonnie and her cohort in our CD deck represented an adult world that I had yet to inhabit. Bonnie with the flaming red hair. Bonnie who knew what she wanted and how to go about getting it.  

Their music offered a disturbing spectrum of emotion that I could sense was, at that time, beyond me, winking far off like a shard of glass on the street. That music, Bonnie’s leaping voice, is my first memory of songs conveying something so big and abstract, something outside myself; that wordless chords could connote an emotion.

As a kid, I daydreamed about being a musician simply because I loved music. That’s only partly true. I see now that I wanted to be a musician because singing and playing an instrument seemed to be a way to have creative control over your life: a way of growing up without ever having to a grow up, to have fun all the time. The adults I knew—my parents, and the friends of my parents, and the parents of my friends—stood over pots of chickpeas on the stove. They sat on a couch and talked about boring things I didn’t understand, and the books they read were set in small type with no pictures. They read the newspaper while wearing slippers, and drove minivans and talked in parking lots to other adults while dropping off their children. In other words, the adults I saw in my day-to-day life were nothing like Bonnie, as far as I could see, or any musician for that matter.

I did not envy them. I wanted instead to be the beam of energy spilling through the speakers. I wanted to be as electric as the white streak punctuating Bonnie’s hair.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

In many ways, I felt like these singers were asking me: So, what kind of person are you preparing to be? What kind of woman? It’s interesting to go back now, years and years later, and really listen to Bonnie Raitt, especially on Give It Up, and hear all these discrepancies I never noticed as a child, to hear Bonnie as a powerful woman singing with confidence and authority about how helpless she feels, how down and out, a woman who needed a man to love her, a woman who would not make it on her own. I know this is, of course, somewhat essential to the blues, and, more widely, to the entire medium of song. This slippage is what makes her intriguing, her music full of contradictions. Isn’t that healthy? Isn’t that what being an adult means—being human?

Whenever I sang along with Bonnie, my mind would clear and smooth itself, a sheet settling over a bed. I felt, almost, like I could control time by losing myself in a song I knew as well as myself. Dancing and singing and falling and slipping: my dumb body just trying to navigate its way through the world. Bent over backwards at the waist with my sister’s hand on the small of my back, my head flung upside down, blood pounding in my ears, it was easy for just a second to forget where I was, to forget entirely about where I was going to step next.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#496: Boz Scaggs, "Boz Scaggs" (1969)

In 1969, a white boy can make a soul record with an entirely white rhythm section and include nonsensical jabberings like this in the gatefold:

Later at the stand of pigs Luke feasts on a knuckle Elrod plays patty cake with a mint julep and a chuckle he grins Elrod as the day is long I can wait say Luke with a long swill Now that will do and we’ll have two more of the same Helen Keller was born here and she made sense smile you may be on radar and on and on to seven days and seven nights a yesful orgy

Practically Beefheart anarchy poetry. And butting up against the words (signed only with an “OOOXXX”): a nude Duane Allman shot from below, grinning in the middle of the woods and cupping his shadowy nethers. His hat a dark halo around his dirty hair. It’s 1969: the baby-young editor of Rolling Stone is producing your record and no matter how hopelessly square you look, you can still put soul on wax with a bunch of white musicians and slap a picture of yourself on the cover.

There is no expectation here; no one will look at you in your polyester and bad greasy haircut and feel the curious, exciting tingle of “funk” skitter like a dark animal across their mind. Will you get down? Will you make the right sounds, and make them filthy? It doesn’t matter, not quite.

All the better, then, when on the opening track Rog Hawkins comes in kicking, overlaying conga on high hat, keeping time better than a wristwatch. Funkier, too. Against all odds. One verse through and the bass slides into the mix: jackrabbit-hoppy, and playful. Lady background crooners, Jimmy Johnson’s licks poking in and out, and yes, Duane’s, too, like neighbors stopping in to say hello.

It shouldn’t work. Should it? It shouldn’t. That outfit, that sepia, that name: Boz. Seems like there could be a dozen wrong ways to pronounce it. Maybe it’s all part of the gag, the long game white boys are playing in 1969, taking what isn’t theirs, but could be. See how easy. See what soul after all.

But that’s only the first three minutes. It’s no surprise that kind of groove is hard to hold on to. You get bluesier, rootsier, more Opry than Apollo, more Hank than Sam and Dave. Mostly, you make people want to put on Mr. Dynamite, which is never a negative. You’d rather do the very same, is the irony. How’s a wooden if well-meaning white man supposed to make waves? It’s 1969. There are ways. And you still think you can find them, break through, all that.

For starters, toss the organ-driven waltz numbers out the window. There’s where your voice drips, utterly passionless, supremely on the beat in the absolute worst way. Sadie Hawkins slow-dance cover band nonsense. The wah-wah on Jimmy’s tepid downstrokes don’t help, either. And while you’re at it, take out, too, the carousel kiddie stuff, the sappy honky ballads. Come on, man. Pick it up. Make it funky. Don’t read the words—feel them.

Because later history might rediscover this record and frame it in a whole new context. Like maybe someone’s going to break through before you do. Maybe it’s the man who refuses to play any way but nude during studio time. Maybe you think of him fondly now, maybe you don’t. Surely you recognize his talent. His soul and his guitar seemingly cement-melded even when noodling, his fingers moving so quickly through the clouds of rank smoke around him they leave vapor trails.

Maybe decades from now you’ll be nearly 70 and they’ll stick this record, your eponymous sophomore effort, on the tail-end of a list, mentioning your white rhythm section and the stoned naked guitarist you hired instead of mentioning you, your talent, your drive. Maybe, your insecurities inflamed, your life reverse-magnified through the wrong end of a telescope, you’ll suspect you only made the list because of that kid producer. Of what his little music zine became. Of the job your son landed as a columnist in its pages. Maybe you’ll wonder. 

But most likely it won’t make a lick of difference. Your moments will have come and gone, tour buses and synthesizers and sharp sunglasses and suits. Your shell so hardened all the little things will ping off without you even noticing. Or at least the appearance of. What is success? Have I been? Could I have been? Maybe these questions will linger. Or maybe you don’t even read that rag. Maybe you’ll put another down payment on another stretch of rich Napa soil. But this all comes later. Or doesn’t.

For now, keep doing what you’re doing. Try for funky, land somewhere just off-center. Sing about love lost and gained again—classic stuff, relatable—then scribble aimless jabber for the sleeve. It’s 1969. You’ll get it wrong a hundred times before you ever get it right. And if you never do—if you find yourself forever wandering down brown streets in brown suits, groping for all the soul you know you’ll never have—don’t worry. Stick it out; time will tell. If all goes right, it always does.

—Brad Efford

#497: The White Stripes, "White Blood Cells" (2001)

He drives the tour van and she puts her dirty feet on the dashboard, leaving a mark. She paints her toes white while the road rolls under, because it’s a preapproved contribution to the color scheme. They always bring plenty of pillows; sleeping happens in shifts. Whoever’s driving gets to pick the music.

It’s cramped quarters. But most days the closest she feels to him is when he’s at the microphone, she’s on the other side of the stage calmly beating the bejesus out of the drums.

When they’re parked, they play a French automobile-themed card game from the 60s called Milles Bornes. It’s all about traveling more miles than the other player. When he gets going fast she can give him a speed limit. When she gets too close to winning he deals her a stoplight, a flat tire, a car crash.

What a season, he sings every night at the encore, to be beautiful without a reason.

She drives the van and he writes another song and she wants to tell him it’s not brilliant but it is.

Some days she feels like a wind-up toy he’s ratcheted too many revolutions. He told her they’d never make it big, not really, but she should have known better than that. She’s an industrial machine he equipped with a kill switch, programmed to drum for endless days but not to drum too good.

What he says he’s always liked most about her playing is its lack of polish.

Lately people want to know, does he keep her quiet? Always been a lot of questions, which is how he likes it. Do they love each other like brother and sister, husband and wife, do they love each other at all? Of all the things he’s ever stood for in his life, silence has never been one of them. If you can hear a piano fall you can hear him coming down the hall.

Does he keep her from talking? She’d say he has nothing to do with it.

When they first met, he told her about a car fire he saw as a child in Mexicantown, how he woke up and sensed the flames without even opening his eyes, how he leapt out of bed and spotted it through the window, roaring tongues coming up through the sunroof and reaching almost to the moon, the cardboard sign in front that said, NOW, COME PICK UP YOUR TRASH.

She laughed and asked do I need to worry about you embellishing?

Yes, he said, raising his eyebrows. Yes.

When they married, he took her name and made it his own. Who’d want to worship a guy named John Gillis, anyway?

When they divorced, he never considered giving it back.

Some days all he can talk about are saints. St. James, St. Sebastian, and of course St. Rita, the one for impossible cases.

They tend to perform staring directly into each other’s eyes. Often, for the encore they play “We’re Going to be Friends.” To introduce it he leans way down near the first row and whispers kids are just so cruel to each other. It’s nice to fantasize that they’re not. It’s a cliché, but a cliché that fits too nicely to ignore, she thinks: he holds the audience right in the palm of his pale hand.

Good lord, the shit that she mumbles when he’s trying to sing, the things that he crows when the camera’s rolling.

He does yet another interview, though he claims to hate them: Quiet people … Randy Newman said shortpeople got no reason to live? Shit. He musta never met a quiet person.

When he was a furniture upholsterer, he said he didn’t even want to be famous, but couldn’t seem to help acting like it. He made those business cards that said Your Furniture’s Not Dead, wrote his receipts out in crayon, sewed handwritten notes into the insides of the sectionals he refurbished for the old ladies to find one day and say what in heaven’s name is the meaning of this? He drove all over town in the black and yellow van, wearing his black and yellow suits. And though not many people wanted him to fix their leather chairs, they knew who he was. They wondered about him.

It’s all these things that people need to know but are also desperate to avoid learning: that he wore braces and she talked with a lisp, that he met her tending bar at Memphis Smoke because she decided she was done with all the bullshit after high school. That he wasn’t born until his mother was already forty-five, all these little details that don’t look so good on gods.

His brother is a lawyer, his other brother is a chef. One brother is only an ophthalmologist.

They play a concert in Ontario that’s nothing more than a single E-flat chord sustained for five minutes, and then the crowd chants one more note, one more note, having no idea that might be all that’s left within them.

They are beginning to be extremely famous now. They crash on their friends’ couches for the last time. She makes her grandmama’s corn soufflé and he holds court, lecturing on the one and only way to make a chocolate malt correctly (hint: vanilla ice cream). In the mornings they fold the blankets nice and neat and leave them on the couch. Not like a chore, but because they know they should, because it’s a nice, right thing to do.

Soon it will all be champagne and air-conditioning, neither one of them at the wheel.

His house is filled with dead things he can’t let go of. Just like the furniture business, that obsession with preservation and repair. He collects refurbished animals. An eland, a kudu, a giant white elk, a zebra head, a gazelle. All taxidermied up and hung like paintings. Sometimes they take pictures with them for their album covers now. He keeps a crow in a Ziplock bag in the freezer because it’s illegal to stuff but too beautiful to throw away. She thinks it’s a little awful to keep something on display like that after it’s only a husk with flat eyes, cold and milky.

Does it feel good to fill the air with something incredible? Even now they would both say yes. When the spotlights blast and the feedback skreeks and some drunk spills his beer, screaming, I want to have your babies, they have their loneliest and loveliest moment of the whole day.

In the dressing room before a show, they don’t ask for much. Just some fresh strawberries and a tray with biscuits and tea, then they play AC/DC. He sits at the mirror, summoning something up. When a journalist knocks he turns him away, shaming him, saying it’s like asking Michelangelo about his shoes. He knows there will be plenty more of them to listen when he wants to talk again. When the record ends, she stretches out on the couch and hums her harmony for “Hotel Yorba” and he says sing out. He says nobody can ever hear you.

Quiet people can be confusing. She knows that. But maybe the world needs people of all volumes, jabbering over and under one another. It was a lot more fun doing this back when the chaos of his guitar solos still felt like a kiss. She never even wanted to play the drums, just loved his fingertips on her elbows as he taught her how.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She looks so goddamn good up there, though. He somehow manages to yowl like a stepped-on cat but make it a stunning melody. He stalks and stomps around and she pounds like a demon and they make something magic out of their tender turmoil, these confusing moods. It’s a lack of control that’s pitch perfect on stage, a little unwieldy everywhere else. But sometimes they sound so good up there and she looks so good and they look so good together.

If they stop and be quiet, three thousand strangers pull the words out from within them: any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most.

But then the show’s over. The electricity sizzles itself out and even his guitar and even him—spent and still.But now. But now. They’re the words they ended their third album with. He ended it with, she means. She just sang.

She drives the van and he plays with Lego people in the passenger seat. Raises their arms, bends them over, sits them down, has them hold hands, pops their little heads off. She wants to cry sometimes, but worries if she does he will hold her and it will be the last scene, the pose they’re stuck in as the credits start rolling.

—Eric Thompson

#498: The Stone Roses, "The Stone Roses" (1989)

“Tear me apart and boil my bones / I’ll not rest till she’s lost her throne / My aim is true / My message is clear / It’s curtains for you / Elizabeth my dear”

—Ian Brown, “Elizabeth My Dear”


After having too much to drink and desperately trying to plug a hole in conversation, I tell people about the summer I spent dating Ian Brown. Practically no one believes me, and I’ve got nothing that looks like proof, nothing I could hock on the Internet, not even a photograph. But I tell them anyway, usually about the time Ian drove us to London for the Queen’s Official Birthday, which is not the Queen’s actual birthday, but the one celebrated by the monarchy in the summer when nicer weather is more likely. Ian thought this was horseshit, another excuse for the royals to siphon money from commoners and needlessly parade in the streets. That year, it rained. The masses were soaked through, hundreds of umbrellas arranged like a hive over the crowd, making it impossible even to glimpse Elizabeth as she rode by in her carriage. Ian’s brown eyes were amused as he looked at me. I recognized the expression later in all the Stone Roses promotional photos and videos; it was the one that said he was larger than the rest of us, had been born a giant, deserved to be adored. 

In some moments it felt true.

Ian treated me bad because he knew without a doubt he’d be famous, same as half the boys in northern England. Some gassy-gut guy in a bar had told him he should be a rock star, validating his obsessions, a sentence he took to heart as if it were a proclamation by the archangel Gabriel. Ian allotted more time for the A major scale and for practicing with his boys than he did for me, but honestly I was content most of the time to stare at his coiffed Beatles haircut and thick, straight-as-stripes eyebrows, which made him look ethereally pensive and good-willed. My girlfriends’ boyfriends weren’t a fraction as cute on their best days, and back then cuteness meant more than most everything else.

When Ian was blazing mad he didn’t say “beans” or “hailstorm” or “shit,” the way I did. He said “Eliiiiizabeth!” or “Lizbeth!” or “Bloody bloody Beth!” which bothered me to no end. In those days I loved to watch the royals on television and buy the rag mags at the market. I thought Prince Charles was an absolute peach—those adorable ears!—and Diana the most gorgeous American woman in existence. I kept an exhaustive list of possible baby names for their future heir. They felt unreachable and reachable at the very same time, and the fact that Ian couldn’t appreciate this paradox was the strongest indicator our romance would be brief. Mostly I tried not to bring it up.

Even when it seemed like we didn’t like each other that much, he kept hanging around, and all the other boys I knew—diseased or sad or married—were worse. You take what you have. We all do that. When he answered the phone he never had much to say, just plain talk, like “okay all right okay.” He never asked how I was, even if I’d come down with something or sounded upset. After school and late into the evening, he’d ram cigarettes between my lips and tell me to smoke them sexy like a muse so he could write lyrics as the rings drifted up. It made me feel naughty and wanted. 

Shortly after we returned from London, I brought Ian home to meet Mum so she’d quit pestering me. I was certain she wouldn’t like him. Mum had been without a man since my infancy and was not the kind of woman to be dragooned by charm or much anything else. Stew simmered on the stove. I still associate the aroma of slow cooked beef with being young and at home. Mum had set the small round table against the wall under the cuckoo clock with her best china and a trio of new candles. The fourth chair was trapped against the wall since we rarely had guests.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” Ian said with an over-the-top smile. He was wearing a leather jacket. “Do you have any beer?” I felt myself blush at his forwardness.

She did, and although I’d rarely seen her drink the stuff, she filled up one for her and one for him and asked him to please have a seat. She didn’t bother to offer me a drink because she knew I’d say no. We all sat, and she made the mistake of asking Ian what he wanted to do after school, triggering a thirty-minute monologue about the brilliance of the Sex Pistols, his personal rock star aspirations, and the seismic shifting of the music scene in Manchester. He drank as he talked, per usual, and to my surprise and horror Mum matched him pint for pint, as if she’d been waiting for years for a man to come drink at her table. As soon as I heard an opening I steered the conversation toward our London weekend, and Mum asked about the Trooping the Colour parade.

“Bloody splendid,” Ian said, answering before I could get a word in. “Tons of colors. Some colors never seen before. You’re not a loyalist too, are you?” he asked sarcastically, which was not how I’d been taught to ask personal questions.

Mum leaned back in her chair and took a long drink, resting the mug between her breasts. When she spoke, she looked only at Ian. “You know how they say when the ravens leave the Tower, England shall fall?”

Ian had pointed out the ravens at the Wakefield Tower the day of the parade. According to legend, Ian told me, the resident ravens, humongous in size and blacker than crows, were the guardians of the kingdom, and if six ravens ever left, protection would disappear, too. Ian said the royal Raven Master kept seven instead of six so there was always a spare.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

“Those old buzzards should be dying any day,” Ian said with a laugh and reached for his drink. His sleeve nearly caught the flame of the centerpiece candles, and I gasped, but no one paid attention.

Mum set down her glass and leaned forward. “Let me tell you a little secret,” she said. “If the ravens ever leave the Tower, I’ll be there with my shotgun making sure they don’t come back.”

“Mum!” I said, hands flying to my mouth.

But she just raised her eyebrows at me as Ian lifted his beer, their glasses clinking together in a cheers.

Afterward the room fell quiet, and we set our focus on our bread and cheese. Every so often Ian flicked crumbs at me from across the table while Mum watched. I thought about how there must be a million mysterious things I didn’t know about the person I knew best and I thought about how Ian would live his whole life without decent manners or concern for others and still get everything he wanted. I’ve been proven right on both accounts over and over again. The stew bubbled over, and Mum jumped up to turn down the heat, her apron unfurling like a parachute. “God save the queen!” she said.

If I had proof of anything, for some reason I’d still want it to be this: Ian laughing, his hand on my thigh the way he knew I didn’t like, and me laughing along, taking a gulp from Ian’s glass, the beer traveling up and out of my nasal cavity, splattering all over the table, the cuckoo’s beak, the ridges on the back of the fourth chair. Mum saying, “And that’s how the blood will spill,” completely straight-faced with a ladle in one hand and a potholder in the other, sending us into another fit of absurdity, howling this time like a lost pack of alley hounds in the fat part of the night.

—Lacy Barker

#499: B.B. King, "Live In Cook County Jail" (1971)

It is nearly 90 degrees in Southwest Chicago, too hot for September, and Jewel Lafontant waits in the long shade of a guard tower as the Cook County Jail Jazz Band rolls through the handful of standards deemed morally commendable by the warden. The yard is so large and filling so steadily with tired, buzzing, angry bodies that the rim of barbed wire strung across the high walls around her seems more like cotton candy than fine razor, hardly enough to hold anyone back should the wrong thoughts start brewing.

She fans herself, absentmindedly taps her foot to a respectable “A-Train,” and cranes her neck to get a better look at the tower whose shadow she’s so thanklessly exploiting. Brick and thick green glass. Steel and a few holes large enough only for a rifle muzzle. All angles and indifference, like a spaceship left to rust after some failed reconnaissance. The whole uncaring shape of it would make her shiver were it not so hot out in the open frying pan of the concrete jail yard.

Someone has called her name. She turns to see Joe Woods, Crooked Sheriff of Crook County, making his diligent way toward her. He looks worried but is smiling still, hand at the end of a starched white shirt, sleeve rolled once, jutting stiffly out. Miss Lafontant, he says, though he knows very well that she’s married. She bites her tongue, shakes his hand, says, Joe.

You ready? His eyes are half-empty, fatigued, still expectant somehow in their shallows.

Say the word. At the end of this day of waiting to be told by white men where to stand and when to speak, it’s all she can think to say. Tomorrow, she will be back in the office, poring over cases, making her own tough choices like she’s used to. Since being made vice chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on International, Educational and Cultural Affairs just last year—a whole lot of big words for too many stuffy meetings, not enough action—she’s been half-seriously waiting for a call from the president himself any day now. And word is Nixon’s got her in mind for the Big Bench itself, first black woman in the Supreme Court. Wasn’t too long ago she was the first ever to make a case before them, and now there are whispers of her joining the brood. Look how important she’s become, how hard she’s worked to get here. Look how proud she’s made her mama.

But today she stands in the high 90-degree sun and waits to take to a makeshift plywood stage to introduce a middle-aged bluesman in the yard of the Cook County Jail, an institution Ebony has just anointed the “World’s Worst.” She knows King’s music, of course. Even before “Thrill,” before all the hoopla. It reminds her of her father: all that growling, slick danger awash in sensuality. Dirty and familiar, all at once. Repugnant and strangely alluring. She’d be the last to admit it, but she’s spent more than her share of nights alone swaying, brandy-blushed, to heartbroke black bluesmen, Mr. King certainly among them.

Now half an hour ago she met him in the bright administrative halls beyond the cellblock, and he certainly was charming. Very gracious to make her acquaintance and all that. She always liked a man who went to shake her hand rather than kiss it.

And here’s Joe again, sunglasses reflecting her stony visage back to her. He is signaling her to the stage. Showtime; she walks.

Standing before the rows of seated convicts comes natural to her, and speaking to a crowd’s no different. With the band all set up behind her—all but B.B., swaying softly from foot to foot just behind the risers—she feels like a bonafide musician for just a moment. Like she could take the microphone from its stand, coil it around her wrist like she’s seen Diana Ross do, and launch right into “Where Did Our Love Go.” Or, no. Make the piggies sweat. “Strange Fruit.” She smiles, more broadly than she’d planned.

Hello out there, she begins, testing the mic’s sensitivity. We’re about ready to begin our program. It’s a beautiful day in Chicago, and we’re going to have a wonderful time this afternoon. Lying through her teeth. What “beautiful day” have these shackled people, mostly black, mostly sneering or staring motionless at the lawn directly before them, ever seen? What “wonderful time” was ever theirs to know?

She gets through the obligatory acknowledgements to Joes Woods and Power, the latter without a doubt her least favorite judge in the county. The inmates boo loudly, drowning her out at the mention of each man’s name. The red-faced guards’ faces get redder, their hands moving quickly to the tools on their wide waistbands. Jewel stands unfazed, even laughs a little. All this for some music, she thinks, and waits for them to finish.

Now, B.B. King is known to everyone as the king of the blues, she continues. He’s been referred to as the Chairman of the Board of all the blues singers. He’s been called the man. She’s getting into it now, revving the prisoners like an engine, doing what she does best. Eye contact, attorney’s conviction, all that. But whatever we call him, I know him to be just a fine, warm human being full of humility. She grins even wider, nods as if in reverence, laying it on as thick as she knows how. Then she turns to the guitar player waiting at the stage’s edge. Would you please come forth, Mr. King?

And she steps aside, relinquishes the afternoon to electric live music: blistering speed-play, a rhythm section not even breaking a sweat in keeping up with the Chairman’s fingerwork. The blues played this way, in this heat, for this crowd? She has to work against its magnetic tide herself, sure it will be enough to incite a riot. She hopes the guards are as dangerous as they look.

It isn’t until twenty minutes into the set that the music slows into a steady twelve-bar groove and the bluesman swings his guitar out of the way. He rips the microphone from its stand and starts to pace and preach. All flop-sweat and righteous conviction.

Ladies, he says, and when the first few rows of inmates respond hungrily, it’s the first time Jewel even notices there are female prisoners in attendance. Ladies, if you got a man, King continues, and the man don’t do like you think he should, don’t you hurt him. And then, as though deeply dissatisfied by the crowd’s lackluster response, he shouts it, guttural and mean: I said, don’t you hurt him!

Jewel’s moved to the side of the stage now, and she can see his eyes, black and leveled and drilling his audience with pure conviction. This is not the warm, humble man she thought she’d introduced. In his place now is a different man entirely, one who seems to be speaking directly to her in the same voice she’s been hearing all her life when he says, Man happen to be god’s gift to woman!

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She’s hit with the sudden realization that though he might be preaching, this man’s god is certainly not her own. His is twisted, outdated. His face now the stricken, ugly one of someone who’d rather forget the sixties ever happened. In a flash, she sees her father again, but this time all the worst sides of him she thought she’d chosen to forget. The bitter postwar conservatism. The holding fast to old ideals.

But she seems to be the only one: what this man here has just said now gets the largest response from the crowd all day. Even the women in the front rows are cheering, clapping their hands wildly over their heads and nodding as if to say, Preach! Jewel has no other way to describe how she’s feeling except nauseated. It could be below freezing outside and at this very moment she’d still be a pot boiling swiftly over. Carouseling through her head come vivid portraits of every white judge in the district, every balding pate of every man sneering in uniform, every criminal blowing kisses at her even as she put him away. She feels the weight of the afternoon just listening to King go on. Another swindle. Another day.

In a half daze but still there enough to mind the way she must look to others, she looks calmly at her wristwatch before walking casual as anything back into the concrete compound, through the checkpoints, and into the sun on the other side of the prison walls. She knows she’s meant to thank the crowd and the band once the concert is done, but for now she’s very much undecided on the prospect of returning. She breathes in, chooses a direction without thinking, and walks until the music fades into her footsteps.

—Brad Efford

#500: Outkast, "Aquemini" (1998)

I might look kinda funny but I ain’t no fool

—André 3000, “Synthesizer”


My best friend and I wore our hair so long and greasy in tenth grade that our guidance counselor tried to convince us we were addicted to drugs. Despite the fact that we weren’t, Mr. McDonald repeatedly elbowed us in the ribs and, winking, called us hippies, mimed a pinched roach. It would have all made so much more sense to him if we’d just gone and gotten high.

That same year, another friend of mine spent an entire rehearsal for Arsenic and Old Lace passionately arguing that rap was irredeemably and officially not even music, and I agreed. He cited Nelly, Ja Rule, and Eminem, who I had to hear pumping out of every white jock’s pair of oversized headphones on the track bus: another story of another girl Marshall Mathers had tied up in his trunk and planned to drive somewhere quiet to stab. Fuck all that and all country, I said, the only two things I’d never listen to. “I lost my wife” music and “I killed my wife” music: what kinds of stories were those? How was I to know what I didn’t know?

I didn’t know it, but a few years earlier André 3000 was just beginning to bewig himself with a blond bob, try on marching band uniforms, and generate the inevitable assumptions. He’d gone soft, he’d gone gay, he’d gotten hooked on something, surely. Though I looked less freaky and way less cool, people also probably wondered about me when I donned my uniform and black-feathered helmet to provide the spectacle between halves of the Friday night football games, playing trumpet on the “1812 Overture” and prancing around the turf intended for battle. Was I a stoner burnout, a band-geek fairy, a jock, or a smart kid? Surely I couldn’t be all things; surely not just whatever I thought I was?

I suppose I can forgive myself for believing that all rap was trash, on account of all the rap I’d ever heard was trash. The same eight songs on the rural Iowa urban-music radio station, with their lyrics like slurred and overheard sentence fragments from the bathroom of a club. I had no access to smart and innovative albums like ATLiens or Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Then again, three years later I listened to Eminem and loved even him, or his wordplay and beats at least, if not always the plot points.

But we are all a little less and a little more than our own predictable plots.

*

On the title track of Aquemini, the hook begins like this: Even the sun goes down, heroes eventually die / Horoscopes often lie, and sometimes y.

This has got to be the most compactly efficient and lovely way there ever was of reminding us that we can rely on nothing, be sure of so little: and sometimes y. Don’t forget, Outkast somehow says in only three words, even our own alphabet refuses to tell us—certainly, unequivocally—how to use it to spell.

So after the hard, Southern, badass success of their first two albums, André is seen around town choosing striped knee socks and canary fedoras from thrift-shop bins and is accused of losing his edge. And how does he open the next album? With a fade-in to a sixty-second instrumental track in which he noodles around delicately on a kalimba he stumbled across at a flea market. And then the second track is a response and a mockery all in one, proving he still deserved street cred, while lambasting the clichéd ideas that hip-hop was expected to use as pro forma subject matter.

Return of the gangsta, thanks ta’ / Them niggas that think you soft / And say y’all be gospel rappin’ / But they be steady clappin’ when you talk about / Bitches, and switches, and hoes, and clothes, and weed / Let’s talk about time travelin’, rhyme javelin’ / Somethin’ mind unravelin’, get down

Which is not an empty promise, or a threat, but a preview of all the genre unravelin’, the goddamn gorgeous getting-down they then proceed to do.

*

When I first moved to Seattle after college, I rented one terrible half of a horrible duplex in a no good neighborhood on the very bad outskirts of the international district. It had bars on the windows and no character except for a flat, low roof you could scale the gate to access, fancying yourself a rabble-rouser. I used to lie on my back up there and listen to music, sometimes this album, to drown out the noises of the shouted drug negotiations. Aah-haah, hush that fuss. With the headphones off it was sort of depressing; with the soundtrack, suddenly transcendent.

One night I took this girl up there with an unzipped sleeping bag for a blanket to impress her. I was underneath the flight path of the Sea-Tac airport traffic, so the planes flew over right on line and right on time, the red and green lights of their wingtips like festive shooting stars. You could see just the tops of the few biggest and brightest buildings in downtown.

And if you fell asleep up there, in the light of the morning you could crouch down and leap up, and for one millisecond at your apex you could glimpse the Puget Sound.

She kissed me, but that was all. We climbed down, forgetting the sleeping bag, and later that night it thunderstormed and we kissed some more while binge-watching old Nickelodeon game shows: Double Dare,Figure It Out, Guts, What Would You Do? I held all these truths to be never-changing: I would stay in Seattle for the rest of my days, and Radiohead’s In Rainbows was the greatest album of all time, and I would never go to sleep before 2:30 am a day in my life, and I’d just found the best girl there was.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

But I was just another guy trying too hard and not hard enough and she was just another perfectly nice, pretty, normal girl who didn’t even know who Outkast or Joyce Carol Oates were. And anyway, every day for the rest of her life that girl forgot to call me, and the sleeping bag was soaked through, completely sodden with rain. I kicked it over the edge and listened to it squelch down, then threw it in my neighbor’s dumpster.In Rainbows (#336) didn’t even crack the top 250, or so Rolling Stone says, and I’m not mad about it. One day I got rid of most of my belongings and jammed the rest into my Grand Am and drove to the opposite coast where I found an apartment with no accessible roof or view of anything off in the distance at all, and where the only thing that ever flew over me was a hospital helicopter or two, and I wasn’t even any less happy. Sometimes more. And sometimes y.

*

What do you think you know?

The states, the seasons, the periodic table, the top ten ways to please your man? Do you know which sandwich will be the fifth greatest you’ve ever eaten three years from now? What your life will one day look like on BuzzFeed, what music you like, how many planets there are, the consonants, the vowels of the alphabet? Throw it out the window, leave it out in the rain and kick it all off your roof. Horoscopes often lie. Have your reverend stepfather stop by the studio to do his thing and put that barn-stomping harmonica hoedown smack in the middle of your hip-hop track, and just see what the world makes of that. Inquire of everyone on every street, Do you wanna bump and slump with us?

Is Aquemini the 500th greatest album ever recorded? Sure, and it’s also the 119th and it also didn’t make the cut. And your mother did or didn’t ever love you much depending on when and which way you look at it. One thing I know for sure is that it’s the only double-platinum album ever to feature a verse rapped over a pay phone from inside a jail, for whatever that’s worth and for whatever that might mean to someone.

Aquemini is also worth replaying and praising and parsing and pleading with others to pay attention to. And I believe that to the extent it is possible to really unequivocally believe something permanently I will continue to believe this.

In fifty years I believe I will be elderly, if still around, and modern music will mostly sound like two mournful whatever’s-replaced-iPads in heat calling out to each other across a great distance, and the oldies station will come on and I’ll sit on a roof somewhere and hold my old knees to my chest and listen to André and Antwan and I’ll watch the sunset, which I believe will still be happening daily. And the sun will be such a show-off. Consistently inconsistent—even that bright-blond melon will go down and will go down different than other days, will get down in style.

—Eric Thompson