#448: The Police, "Synchronicity" (1983)

I know a thing about obsession, and the kind of love a person should be embarrassed to admit to. I know about being eviscerated, those selfsame rhythms, offering myself up again and again. I know a thing about confession.

A couple weeks ago, I stayed up with someone I love, and when it got late enough, the snow that was supposed to come started falling. We watched it caught in the porch light through his kitchen window. I stood in front of the table by the window and he stood beside me, and we didn’t touch and neither of us spoke, and what I felt in that moment was the most tenuous sort of awe, at how perfect that moment was, and that night, and how sad it was that it would pass. How sad, how sad: all the things we cannot keep.

“Every Breath You Take” is one of the first songs I remember being confused by. I couldn’t figure out if it was romantic or unnerving, and I got the feeling, as I listened, that the singer should be embarrassed by the force of his desire. It seemed, certainly, like a love song, but not one I’d like to have sung to me, or one I’d like to sing myself. I couldn’t tell if we were supposed to identify with or feel sympathy for or pity or fear him—the answer, I realize now, is yes. Yes and yes and yes.

When we write, when we create, we both are and are not ourselves. We could never fit all of life onto a page or into a song: tensions are identified, amplified, and a character is built, and an arc is chosen, and then the art takes on its own dimensions and its own identity. We understand: love, sometimes, makes stalkers of us, and this is the story of the song but it’s not the whole story.

Last night, I smoothed his hair across his forehead, and very, very softly, I insisted: You can’t hurt me anymore, when you say you don’t want me I simply won’t believe it.

I know this is, in some ways, deranged, but is it not also human, to sometimes be unhinged by the strength of one’s own feeling, and what is love if not a kind of faith, and is there anyone who truly knows where lies the line between faith and delusion?

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

I spent a lot of time wondering about love before I ever loved anyone, and I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about love after having loved, and I spend a lot of time wondering about love when I’m in love, and when I think of people, of human nature, of the grief and the solace at the center of our lives, I think of love. I wonder if this is absurd. I wonder if this is a character flaw. I wonder why it is, that I’ve always seen the world like this: there is the love, and there are the things we do to fill the space around and between the love. It is the love that pains us, but it is the love that makes us whole.

I want to apologize for my romanticism; this is how I’ve always been. My happiness is unbearable and my loneliness is unbearable and my boredom is unbearable, and sometimes I hate my own extremism, my dramatics, my sensitivity, my inability to maintain an even keel—but it is, mostly, I think, a blessing, to feel so much. To be vulnerable and to be alive.

I wonder, even now, if I’m misreading the whole thing—if I identify with the song but shouldn’t, if I feel a pang of recognition at that ugly sort of desperation that I shouldn’t feel or, if I feel it, admit to. But we all hold within us some ugliness and some desperation and a good deal of fear, and there is comfort in that, I think, to identify with one another through our imperfections. And it’s a good thing, the art that unnerves us because we recognize our own flaws within it. That community is a comfort: if we must sometimes be ugly and desperate, we must sometimes be ugly and desperate. Let us admit it. And so we forgive ourselves, and forgive the ones we love, and forgive the world for its difficulty and forgive our lives for their countless imperfections and we go on and on hoping for the best and the good things come and the bad things come and the good things come again.

​—Katelyn Kiley

#449: Big Star, "Third/Sister Lovers" (1978)

I.

…that night, David came home and watched his brother shoot up. It wasn’t David’s intent to watch Chris shoot up, he simply came home, walked into his brother’s bedroom and saw what he saw—the end of a rubber strap in his brother’s teeth, the needle breaking skin. In such a situation, what can a brother do? He can let it happen then send his brother away, to France, to…

II.

…broke up before naming the album. The album is an orphan: nameless, bandless, and with no true track listing. Some say it’s Alex’s solo album, and maybe they’re right. It’s a lost album, born of booze and pills, deemed uninteresting and unmarketable by all the labels who heard it. Deemed too grim, too disturbing until it was found and disseminated four years later by…

III.

…that Chris left Big Star because of the frustrating failure of #1 Record, which, despite positive reviews, was a commercial flop. Chris breaks down. There are fist fights, attacks, broken windows. When the dust settles, Chris is at Mid-South, psychiatric and rehab, and Big Star is…

IV.

…sings, “Jesus Christ was born today / Jesus Christ was born,” and it isn’t quite a Christmas song, and it isn’t quite southern religion, and nobody quite knows what to make of it, but there it is, smack dab between “Big Black Car” and…

V.

…meets with Alex, wants to help his old friend fix the wrecked album that nobody wants to release. Maybe a new running order, brighter production, a few swapped-out songs. Chris and Alex also talk about maybe collaborating together, again, but…

VI.

…is sixteen, he records “The Letter” with The Boxtops. In 1967, the song becomes a massive hit around the world. See him lip-synch on Up Beat, that tambourine, heartthrob thigh-slap. See his sly smile, acknowledging the absurdity of the non-performance. See that sultry-eyed, pout-sing of angular face—more twenty-six than sixteen—framed by waves of brown hair. In the eyes of the marketplace, this is his peak. A few years later, Alex leaves The Boxtops and meets Chris at Ardent, in Memphis, who…

VII.   

“…night I tell myself
‘I am the cosmos, I am the wind.’
But that don’t get you back…”

VIII.

…convinces the members of Big Star, excluding Chris, to reunite for a convention of music critics. Richard Melzer introduces the band: “Well, puke on ya momma’s pussy! Here’s Big Star!” And the critics adore them. And Big Star is reborn. When the band goes to work on what will become Radio City, there are songs that belonged to Chris, they are absorbed...

IX.

...unfortunate, and jarring use of “holocaust” as an adjective, as if that word somehow hadn’t been imbued with horrific connotations by the weight of history. He sings, “You’re a wasted face, you’re a sad-eyed lie / You’re a…”

X.

...the time David flies Chris to Europe, he has already recorded “I am the Cosmos” and “You and Your Sister,” the latter of which includes contributions from Alex on backing vocals. Most of the rest of what will eventually become Chris’s posthumous solo album, I Am the Cosmos is recorded on this trip, at the Chateau D'Herouville in France. Maybe Chris knew that, back home, back across the Atlantic, Alex, too, was recording new songs, that, too, wouldn’t be…

XI.

…records songs obliterated on whiskey and Mandrax then comes back to the studio in the middle of the night to fuck with what he’s recorded. His girlfriend is a senior in high school. She helps write, records some vocals, most of which are long gone. Sometimes the couple’s fights turn physical. One night, they are found…

XII.

…songs are a mix of sad-sack, songs of unrequited love, sad-sack breakup songs, sad-sack songs about depression, and not-so-sad-sack songs about spiritual salvation. “Look up, look up,” Chris sings, “He’s the light.” Chris sings, “Waiting to love you / Waiting to…”

XIII.

…there was the tour that prefaced the recording of Big Star’s third album, the East Coast tour where the gigs that weren’t cancelled were barely attended, and Alex…

XIV.

…of accidents happen within a mile of one’s home or…

XV.

...a big year for fans of Big Star, as it saw the release of an alleged, “intended” version of the album, now called Third/Sisters Lovers, as well as the release of Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos, two albums, lost and failed, tentative and parallel, drowned in the murk of whatever foul hex hung over Big Star and Alex and Chris until market forces and time allowed

XVI.

…the “album’s” release, Chris wraps his Triumph TR-6 …

XVII.

…sings, “Get me out of here / I hate it here.” On “I Am the Cosmos,” Chris sings, “I’d really like to see you again.” On “Big Black Car,” Alex sings, “Driving in my big black car / Nothing can go wrong.” On “There Was a Light,” Chris sings…

—James Brubaker

#450: Jackson Browne, "For Everyman" (1973)

For Everyman opens with a small surprise that time has sharpened: a cover of the Eagles’ “Take It Easy.” Not a cover, exactly, since Jackson Browne co-wrote it with Glenn Frey and was entitled to joint custody. But the Eagles had already hit with it, and the verdict of four decades has made it even more emphatically theirs. So now it is a pleasant change of pace to hear Jackson’s version, even if the song doesn’t quite fit him. Lighten up while you still can? Don’t even try to understand? That’s not what we look to Browne for. We want him to take it seriously, think deeply about it, and turn it into easy (but not too easy) listening. And so he does. His version of the song is more taut, less exuberantly soaring. Those Eagles three-part harmonies are gone, replaced by two-part harmonies on the chorus that are full of open-sounding fourth and fifths and that feel less confidently jubilant, more anxious. The minor chords sound more prominent here, and the giddy, banjo-fueled coda of the Eagles’ version is gone, replaced by a slow fade that doesn’t quite fade but instead segues into the next song. The two songs overlap, in fact, although they were apparently recorded separately, with different musicians. It’s a neat trick, one Browne repeats at the end of the album.

That second song inhabits more familiar Jackson Browne terrain. “Our Lady of the Well” finds him measuring the distance between himself and Maria—an ex-lover?—between his life and hers, his country and hers. She is presumably Mexican; he has come across the sand to find her among her “people in the sun / Where the families work the land, as they have always done.” He views her life sentimentally but realizes that his “heart remains among” the people he has left behind, and he must return to them. Not that we expected him to stay and work the land. Still, we are glad he has gotten some perspective on his life, and the song ends with a promise to show her what he has made: “It’s a picture for our lady of the well.” All’s well that ends well.

Or not quite, because the next song opens with an ominous, modal-sounding, sequence and our hero seems to be trapped in some kind of dreamscape (“Picking for a coin / Many other tiny worlds / Singing past my hand.”), or maybe still in Mexico (he says goodbye to Joseph and Maria at one point, suggesting some connection to the previous song). I can’t make much sense of all this, but the chorus is pretty, and Don Henley contributes some lovely high harmony. He is buried in the mix, however (revenge?), so that one cannot recognize his distinctive voice.

Next comes “I Thought I Was a Child,” which opens with a delicate piano solo by Bill Payne of Little Feat, joined eventually by David Lindley’s guitar. When Browne enters, however, his vocal sounds flat, both in terms of pitch and emotion. One notable feature of Browne’s pre-Pretender albums is how little reverb there is on the vocals. It is as if, striving for directness and honesty and bareness, he has eschewed all studio trickery. But here the vocals could stand a little beefing up, and anyone who knows Bonnie Raitt’s slightly slicker cover of this song (also 1973) feels again the inferiority of Browne’s version—or, perhaps, feels the absence of a producer on For Everyman.

Side one closes with a statement of sorts, a version of “These Days,” written by Browne at age sixteen and first recorded by Nico in 1967. On her Chelsea Girl it is an arty, folky ballad, with finger-picked guitar, a string quartet, and Nico’s flat, affectless delivery. That brittle take on the song is replaced here by a slower, more soulful arrangement that the album announces is “inspired by Gregg Allman.” Allman had covered the song on his 1973 solo album Laid Back, and I guess Browne liked the arrangement and copied it. It doesn’t quite come together for me as an anthem, although the interplay between Browne’s voice and Lindley’s slide guitar is compelling–something like what you get with Ron Wood and Rod Stewart on Rod’s first few solo albums. And the song moves prettily, poignantly back and forth between its major and minor chords. The best moment, though, comes with the song’s last words: “Don’t confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them.” But the final minute and a half of slide-guitar noodling is anti-climactic—pure self-indulgence on Lindley’s part.

Side two kicks off with “Redneck Friend,” one of what Nick Hornby has called Browne’s “limp, hapless, thankfully rare attempts to rock out.” I find this rocking out perfectly convincing, however. Jim Keltner is unimpeachable on drums, and Elton John (a.k.a. “Rockaday Johnnie”) does his best Jerry Lee Lewis impression. Lindley’s slide guitar is laid on thick, but it doesn’t weigh things down, and Browne plausibly simulates someone capable of shaking, rattling, and rolling on down the line. Like Springsteen’s “Rosalita” (also 1973), the song invites a young lady to escape from her stifling parents and take off with the singer. I have some fears that “Redneck Friend” is an allusion to Browne’s penis—“Rosie” on Running on Empty shows how he enjoys a penis joke—but maybe it’s just an invitation to hang out with Don Henley.

At this point, the rocking out ceases and we are back in mellow-ville. “Afternoons of smoke and wine” is a phrase from Browne’s first album, but I always associate it with “The Times You’ve Come.” This is another song that takes stock of an off-and-on romantic relationship; the details are not important. What matters is the bridge, in which suddenly Bonnie Raitt appears and harmonizes on the following lines: “Everybody’s going to tell you it’s not worth it / Everybody’s got to show you their own pain.” The final verse takes (again) a displeasingly post-coital turn (“Now we’re lying here / So safe in the ruins of our pleasure”), and one begins to suspect a pun on “come.” Yuck.

The puerility of such a pun, if there is one, sets the stage for “Ready or Not,” Browne’s supremely callow ode to an unplanned pregnancy. I hope the callowness is deliberate or “ironic,” but I doubt it. Still, the song stands as an artifact of casual seventies sexism and as proof that, even in the year of Roe v. Wade, abortion was not a viable outcome for characters in pop songs. Fortunately, the woman ends up “feeling better about it all the time,” and she willingly exchanges “all of her running around” for “some meaning.” By the song’s end, even the singer, who identifies himself as “a rock-and-roll band man,” is “thinking about settling down.” Isn’t that big of him?

From the ridiculous to the sublime. For Everyman’s penultimate song is my favorite. It’s the shortest song on the album, and it is somewhat overshadowed by the title track into which it segues, but it is a marvel of quiet intensity and aching lyricism. The ominous, brooding opening sounds a bit like that of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and while the song mostly just moves back and forth between two chords, the textures and flourishes are gorgeous. Is it just a coincidence that Joni Mitchell and her sometime-bassist Wilton Felder are playing on this cut? No. Her sinewy, barely audible electric piano is an essential dramatic element, especially at 2:22 when the song introduces a surprising new chord, and Joni provides a sly, ascending line to ornament it. She steals the show.

For me, at least, though probably not for every man. When an album’s last cut is its title track, you know you are in for a Statement (e.g., “The Pretender”). “For Everyman” provides it, one of Browne’s several meditations on the imminent earthquake/apocalypse (see also: “From Silver Lake,” “Before the Deluge,” “The Fuse”). It’s a nice mid-tempo number, with beautifully understated harmonies from the redoubtable David Crosby, and cascading drum fills from Russ Kunkel (we’re deep in James Taylor country here, with Leland Sklar on bass as well). What is the song’s, the album’s message? Something about everyman. Unlike in the medieval morality play of that title, Everyman here is more of a messiah figure than a representative of you and me. Or maybe they are one and the same? If he were writing for every man instead of waiting for him, it would make more sense. But when we’re easily listening, we care less about the sense than the sound.

—Will Pritchard

#451: Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black" (2006)

I can’t think about Amy Winehouse without thinking about relapse and that terrible, rotten word, “potential,” a word I learned by context and repetition as my mother would shake her head in rueful wake of her marriage to my father. “He was really just so full of potential,” she would say, and press her lips together in a grimace shaped like a smile. “It’s really such a shame.”

Writing about addiction sucks. It’s a disease rife with campy sex appeal, a black star for dabbling survivors and the minimum amount of fodder that might make someone feel like they’ve got a real story to tell. And a rock star? A tragic love for that strung-out, cat-scratched husband? It’s the trifecta of cliche, nothing but booby traps. Because to talk about Amy Winehouse isn’t just to talk about her rich, dark voice, a sound all fire and smoke. She wasn’t as obsessed with her voice as we are: there’s endless footage of her producing a sound that would be face-flexing, soul-emptying, scrambling-the-cosmos kind of work for Adele, Beyonce, Sarah Vaughan. But she stands—or, more often than not, sits—with that tiny, jerky jig in her shoulders and looks, on good days, bored; on bad days, comatose. Talent wasn’t her whole story.

There’s a school of thought that believes in parsing the artist from the art, and there are times when you’ll find me really digging in my heels on that side of the fence. But if there was ever an appropriate time to conflate a personal life with an album, it is Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.

The album wrote itself, she said, amidst the wrenching ache of her not-yet-husband leaving her for his former girlfriend. She wanted to die. The songs cover the range of an off-and-on, drunken love: the messy spectrum of emotions, the contradictory ebbs and flows, all with a striking mix of a poet’s economy and precision for language. Lines that demand “What kind of fuckery is this?” and announce that “nowadays you don’t mean dick to me,” blend seamlessly into gut-wrenching soul even if the lyrics stand stark on the page. They’re honest, blunt words, exactly the sort you would use in the throes of reconciling a complicated break-up on the phone with your friends. Slang wedded with Motown, with a fresh R&B sound could be cheeky, if it wasn’t for the palpable anguish. “He left no time for regrets / kept his dick wet / with the same old safe bet,” opens the title track, a song that cuts to the quick for anyone who’s been left before. In the pause preceding the chorus break, with percussion like a heartbeat, she sings, “You go back to her / and I go back to black,” repeating “black” with the haunting resignation of someone realizing her own worst fears about herself. I’m gutted every time I hear it.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

We have established specific methods with which to talk about love in songwriting, and Amy Winehouse ignores them completely. There is no timelessness, no buffing out details to make anything more universally relatable. My favorite example of this is “Just Friends,” a song that makes no strides to clear up the exact nature of a relationship that seems to involve at least another woman (“the guilt will kill you / if she don’t first”), and several people in the same living space (“it’s always dangerous when everybody’s sleeping”). But for anyone who has ever struggled with establishing a platonic nature with someone “off limits,” there are multiple parts of this short song that ring utterly on-point: diction about “safety” and “danger” when the stakes are simply whether or not to have sex; the seemingly conflicting but not mutually exclusive sentiments of “I’ll never love you like her” and “I wanna touch you; but that just hurts.”

Winehouse’s inclusion of drugs in her songwriting isn’t exactly flipping the bird at popular songwriting law, but it is certainly notable. Neither party favors nor jokes, drugs are the domestic stuff of her life, both the basis for a fundamental crack in the foundation of a relationship (“I love you much / it’s not enough / you love blow and I love puff”) and as ubiquitous and expected as furniture. In“Addicted,” we have a woman defiantly embracing her loneliness, in a classic stage in any burned lover’s recovery arsenal: to seize one’s abandonment and make it a choice. But she’s not really alone, not when she’s got something more potent and satisfying than any man had ever been: “Don’t make no difference if I end up alone / I’d rather have myself a smoke / my homegrown / it’s got me addicted / does more than any dick did.” Here, drugs aren’t just props; they’re supporting characters.

She’s been labeled a diva because to hear her sing is to be in the presence of a glorious,  all-powerful queen: she is Aretha, Etta, Galadriel. And that teased-out, streetside Cleopatra look? I can see how you could read it all as ego. But the truth is she really didn’t give two fucks about fame. She was increasingly flippant about her talent, acknowledging it as any domestic party trick, like being able to fold a fitted sheet into a perfect square. She didn’t seem to realize or care about the heft of the commodity she possessed—even half-pissed and wearing the same ratty ballet flats and street clothes she was photographed in for a week, she could stand up on stage next to Mick Jagger and be a typhoon of sound. Drug use is supposed to catalyze confidence: how many times have we heard a celebrity on a substance-fueled rant about how critical they are, how vital! Doesn’t the high make you immortal, light all your fires of self-importance? Blaze all the guns and beat every drum to the endless beat of yes yes yes. But when asked if she would be sorry to give up touring and making records in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, she only shrugged: “I don’t want to be ungrateful. I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.”

A few weeks ago, my high school crush blew up Twitter with news of his overdose. I hadn’t kept up with him personally, but I watched the TV show he wrote for and cheered every time his recurring character, a dopey caricature of the sweet stoner boy I used to know, came on screen. In the days following his death, interviews surfaced where he spoke candidly about his addiction: it wasn’t a secret, featuring heavily in his standup material, but the interview I listened to was during a season of sobriety, humorless and straightforward. “I’m still trying to value my life,” he said. It’s almost surreal to hear someone say that so candidly, particularly someone whose life seems to overflow with everything we consider valuable: talent, success, fame, a thousand Twitter followers. But for me to assign worth to what I think did and didn’t matter in his life is insane—we each have a list of what enriches us, what makes us whole, regardless of what anyone else might value on our behalf. And to add a substance dependency into the mix is to throw the whole game into wild terrain. “The thing that happens with opiates if you stop taking them is you get fucking sick,” the interview ends. “...Now it’s like, oh I have to do this, I have to take drugs, or I’m not well.” To dismiss this as some weakness of character, some lack of discipline, is a reckless affront to our humanity.

What I hate about this notion of mourning the loss of someone’s potential is the idea that we as collective strangers could decide anything about this one woman’s life trajectory. It’s an infinitely judgemental way of dismissing the most straightforward and bald facts of a human reconciling her own existence, her own way. To say it’s such a shame that a woman who could do one thing well didn’t do it for fifty more years is to dismiss the work she has produced, not to mention her individual life as she lived it, her own loves and needs and struggles. “I wish I could say ‘no regrets’ / no emotional debts / and as we kiss goodbye the sun sets / but we are history,” she wrote, a comment on the endless forward momentum of living that feels, in the wake of her death, apocryphal. Maybe it’s a kind of coping, to lament the loss of this talent. But I also suspect there is a grain of deep disrespect for an individual’s immense and whole self, all the parts that swell and recede, that break and sometimes don’t repair. We cannot mourn the loss of some cloud-vision of what a million strangers have for an individual’s applied talents, not when we have albums like Back to Black to take us in, and cover us up.

—S.H. Lohmann

#452: John Prine, "John Prine" (1971)

           2. May, 2011 / Missoula, MT

We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.

—Chuck Klosterman

There is much more preparing to be done than you once would have expected. Here is what you once expected: to move delicately and with nothing but triumph into graduate school straight from your small southern undergraduate haven. To get into a top-tier writing school. To, you know, have it made the way you wanted it made.

But there is much more preparing to be done, now that the last rejection letter has arrived. I.e.: plan B. I.e.: who knows what now. You start at the basics: you’ve lived in the spectacular, confused Commonwealth of Virginia your entire life up to this point, so maybe it’s the right time to split. To get some perspective. You apply to occupations in all the places that seem the most opposite while remaining U.S.-bound (for family, significant other, fear of the foreign, name it): Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Phone calls, applications. Two months later, you’re landing in Missoula, starting work next week.

You don’t know a soul; your roommates come care of Craigslist, the kind you might speak to on the phone just once before agreeing to the lease. Which you know a little about, because that’s what you’ve done. The airport taxi driver’s kind—he reminds you that this city’s the eleventh most difficult in which to find a job right now. But, he says—but!—when you visit, you might not leave. This man’s warped optimism is intriguing. You’re nervous for this new weird part of life, but still it feels right. Maybe necessary.

Missoula proves to be wide open and astounding, a city nestled on all sides by mountains that loom but welcome with gracious simultaneity, a college town that somehow avoids making year-rounders feel overrun. The strangest part is ironically the most familiar: a hungry, healthy music scene that’s all Appalachia, banjos and mandos and jaw harps. There’s an annual folk fest, local bars with house bands that don’t need amps. For you, right now, living this life, it’s everything you needed without ever imagining you might.

At this point, your own time in a band has come grinding to a halt. You had had differing ideas from your best friend and bandmate, and handled it poorly. He is still making music, album after album of smart, meaningful folk-rap recorded in analog and distributed hand-to-hand, but you don’t regret your absence. You can’t. You weren’t right for where it was headed; in the time since, you’ve taught yourself some hybrid of fingerpick ukulele-style guitar and you sing country songs sometimes on your porch like a stereotype and you’re content. Missoula, too, is perfect for this different kind of worthless noise, this sending soft acoustics into the big sky and thinking about a whole slew of nothing.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

It’s unexpected, the way this becomes the perfect place to discover all the songs you once believed you had no space to take in. That is to say, all your dad’s old music: John Prine, Marty Robbins, Jackson Browne. Tapes he’d burn through in the Saturn, which turned into discs he kept his fat leather CD wallet meticulously stocked with. You’d slip your Discman on as soon as you were able to, in those years, turn the punk rock up to drown out “Sam Stone.” Why, then, is the song so wrenching to you now? Why, now, does your father’s life’s soundtrack come drifting to you? Who have you become?

For one, you catch on quick to John Prine being punk rock in ways people never admit but everyone who takes the time to pay attention understands. That is to say, in the same ways Dorothy Parker and Randy Newman and Stephen Colbert are punk rock: sneering, sarcastic, deceptively formulaic, still somehow thoroughly appealing. Prine’s first album seems like a bunch of country-folk Gram Parsons stuff, and from the outside, that’s precisely what it is. The thing’s predominantly acoustic; there’s pretty much no drums. Dude’s in all denim, sitting on a haystack on the album cover. For years, it pretty much screamed DAD. But listen closer, and the songs are rotten from the inside out, all wasted promises and heroin addiction and old folks left to die alone. The record’s biggest love song is mostly about masturbation. It doesn’t take long to get it: this guy’s pissed off, desolate, and holy shit is he a damn fine songwriter.

Your dad’s a good man. Chatty, easygoing, and above all else, more and more supportive as the years go on. You don’t really need Prine in the way some sons or bitter writers might need a connector to get closer to their fathers; as your Virginia-bred father’s father might put it, y’all solid. But all the same, you’ve come to the music when it seemed to suit you best. It feels like home, like memory embodied in a single nasally voice, like all the time you spent blocking things out you only wasted. When you’re home from Montana for Christmas, you tell your dad you’ve burned some of his CDs and can’t stop listening. Oh yeah? he says. I love that stuff. Simple as that.

Late spring in Montana is early summer elsewhere. The snow’s mostly melted by Memorial Day, and though the nights still bluster, it’s a far more familiar flannel-and-jacket kind of chill, warm enough at least to have a beer on the back deck and pick at your guitar. Which you know a little bit about, because it’s exactly what you do. Your roommates, four women, current or ex-trail maintainers for the state’s Conservation Corps, very funny, very badass, want you to play something they can sing. No, not just something: John Prine’s “Paradise,” a sort of “Big Yellow Taxi” for the far more jaded. Someone brings out her laptop to get the chords and lyrics just right, another her mandolin to play along. You don’t like to sing, hardly play music for anyone in any form much anymore. But this is a good song and these are good people. The backyard chickens peck at the ground, the housecat stalking them with questionable intentions. By August you’ll be gone, back in Virginia at summer’s end, and yes, it’s true: grad school bound. But wouldn’t it be nice to stay like this forever? Sitting here, ensconced by mountains, stumbling through folk songs and turning slowly, happily into your father? Wouldn’t it feel right to keep growing old forever?

—Brad Efford

#453: EPMD, "Strictly Business" (1988)

1. October, 2004 / Annandale, VA

There is much more preparing to be done than you once would have expected. You’ve rewired a half-busted mid-size Marshall so you can play a mini practice amp straight through it. This is to say, when you modulate the smaller unit’s treble knob, the sound emanating from the Marshall is a dying ghost horse, a 5-0 cruiser with a shattered siren, an infant from the seventh circled recesses of Hell. Amp-fed feedback driven in a loop through a series of cords you have to diagram to be able to have any chance of replicating. It’s Metal Machine Music with some semblance of slight direction: you tie a rope onto the practice amp so you can sling it around your neck and play it like a bona-fide instrument. Like a real musician. You try it out, twist the knobs, revel in the squealing, invent your own kind of rock star, be him for a minute.

The show’s outside on a cold Friday night in November. Some senior with a back deck and parents in absentia. Like usual, there’s no game plan. You’ll go, improvise noise, get the crowd writhing, shout non-sequiturs through a microphone. Your crew’s got certain prereqs that have led to certain notorieties: always play first, never play for longer than fifteen minutes, let join anyone who wants to, make a lot of fucking noise. The other bands on the bill are both local and visiting, a mix of the familiar and unknown, which means half the kids here have experienced your shows before, and half have no clue what they’re in for.

For what it’s worth: Ol’ Dirty Bastard has just died of an overdose of cocaine and tramadol. You are sixteen years old and spend most of your time either working at a record store, buying CDs, or poring over liner notes. Sometimes, you make lists of your favorite albums or manipulate walls of feedback in your room until your stepmom pounds on your door. You’ve discovered Merzbow and Captain Beefheart, Ayler and Fahey and Kool Keith. And 36 Chambers. You debate the verses every chance you get, pick apart ODB’s the most. His death is unsurprising but enormous. It leaves a hole that you know can probably never be filled; such is the way with iconoclasts.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

You’re new to hip hop, but gobbling it quickly, finding the pockets that stick with you the most. Post-Rakim crews and duos, mostly, EPMD to Tribe to the Pharcyde. Very soon, your band will largely forsake the trappings of noise for turntables and samplers and a used 808, sometimes writing rhymes, sometimes improvising for the hell of it. You will never excel at this—at any of it. You’ll think back fondly to the anarchy of this show, of tonight.

There is no beginning, in any logical sense of the word, to tonight’s performance. A guitar is strummed to make sure the amp’s on. You push a button on the toy casio you’ve been assigned for the night to get a generic pre-programmed drumbeat going. It might sound something like a samba in any other context. Someone’s on the amp-to-amp feedback machine you helped craft just nights before—it starts up, and the volume is enormous, almost hair-raising, undeniably electrifying. You’ve taken over the high back deck while the crowd mingles on the lawn below, some laughing, some strained, some slamming together in some semblance of a mosh pit. For the next ten minutes, you will change the drumbeat with no discernible pattern and play notes when or if ever you feel like it. What you do, mostly, is irrelevant, though necessary, the structure of the band such that the only implied rule is to do before thinking, to follow the stream in any direction. For a sixteen-year-old, it’s nothing less than magic. And somewhere around the midpoint of the show, the rabbit’s pulled straight from the hat.

It begins benignly enough. A new beat has settled in behind glistening guitar feedback and a running tape of animal sounds, a slower beat, if not danceable then definitely, maybe, grooveable. Your best friend and frontman gets on the microphone. All right, so you know that this is all about ODB, he intones, pausing only long enough for you to catch the invisible cue to start playing a worthless two-note keyboard riff. So we’re gonna rip up one of his joints right now.

He gives it another beat, leaves the crowd waiting—most trying to decipher what he was saying through the cacophonous mash, perhaps—then starts in viciously on “Shimmy Shimmy Ya.” From any other angle, it must make no sense: a band of unshowered high school no-ones either utterly without talent or the desire to use the talent they do possess toward anything resembling artistic linearity somehow drawing cheers from a crowd by covering a forgotten semi-hit from an early nineties hip hop collective spinoff who had all but become a depressing clip-show joke before dying far too young only days earlier. And it works somehow. And it makes no sense.

The show itself—four or five bands on the bill, at the start of the evening—is over after all of ten minutes. The cops have circled the neighborhood a couple times and are now at the front door. On the tape, afterward, you will listen again and again to the chaotic winding-down of this moment. Two squad cars just drove by, someone says, the sound of his voice mostly masked by a gauze of noise. Turn it off. Then suddenly frantic: Turn it off! You try, but hit the wrong button on your Casio, accidentally initiate a telephone-ringing sound effect. The other instruments are quickly shut down, but the telephone keeps ringing; you can’t figure out how to silence it. A bandmate, mic in hand, latches on, hollers, Hello? Hello?! Is this the five-oh?!

The absurdity of it hangs in the air. Kids laugh: the ones on deck and those bound to the lawn below. The party’s host is now inside conversing with uniformed officers, and it feels good to let the squealing after-effects of the last ten minutes nestle into your ears and just laugh. Later, years later, you will flex DJ leg-work on a level beyond improvisation, scratching and sampling and listening again and again to all the old albums that continue to shake your brain, never quite succeeding, having the time of your life despite it all, but tonight will always be a monolith. The night you brought back ODB, brought tumult to the suburbs, blue fuzz and all.

—Brad Efford

#454: Alice Cooper, "Love It To Death" (1971)

It would be nice to walk upon the water, to talk again to angels on my side.

—Alice Cooper, “Second Coming”

My grandfather once told me about trick or treating when he was a child. There was one house that gave out king-sized candy bars, and the way he tells it, he and his friends would spend Halloween night changing from one costume to another so they could keep going back to that same house. The way I imagine it, he has to walk up and down the sets of rolling hills that characterize Cincinnati—butterfly hills, I used to call them, for the feeling they made in my stomach. I can picture my grandfather at twelve, trudging up hill after hill, carrying a plastic pumpkin just like I used to, filling it with king-sized candy bars. First he’s a pirate and then he’s a ghost and then he’s a mummy and then he’s a farmer. At the end of the night he has twelve costumes and twelve candy bars. I wonder why the people at this house never noticed it was the same person returning again and again, but maybe the point is that they did notice, and they didn’t care.

My cousin drowned when he was nineteen. It was Halloween night, or, to be more specific, the early morning hours of the Day of the Dead, and he jumped into the Mississippi down in New Orleans, where the river is so wide it carries ocean-faring ships and is hardly recognizable as the same river that flowed past my house in Minneapolis when I was growing up. Sometimes, in my head, he jumps off a bridge that looks suspiciously like the Golden Gate. Sometimes, he runs along a rickety dock and dives off the end. An old man is fishing, and stares after him in surprise. At this point, I no longer remember which of these scenarios—if either—is correct. I know that he had taken acid. I know that he had given his dog to a friend to take care of. I know that I was in eighth grade and had just come home from school when I found out. I was eating the last of the fall crop of raspberries off the bush in the backyard, and my mother came outside and told me. I had a raspberry in my mouth, and I started crying, and even as I cried, there was a part of me that thought how interesting it was that I could go from one emotion to another so quickly, that a person really could suddenly burst into tears.

I visited the ruins of Troy, in Turkey, when I was in college. The ancient city is more like a town, with crumbling walls overrun by grass and weeds.  A large wooden horse stands near the visitor’s center. It has a house on its back with windows, like a tree house, and children clamber up and down the wooden steps and wave from the windows to their parents. I wonder what the Trojans would think of the joking way we refer to their plight. A man approached me as I was standing outside the gift shop, getting ready to leave. I’d become distracted by the litter of stray kittens climbing in and out of cracks in the stone walls. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me! I heard you speaking English.” This is what I hate most about traveling, I have found: the men who will use any excuse they can find to tell women of their beauty, to ask for their number, to ask for their hand in marriage. I prepared to ignore him and walk away. “Excuse me,” he said again. “I am hoping you can help me. You speak English. I have always wondered—what is it, the difference between ‘Oh my God’ and ‘Oh my gosh?’”

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Maybe there’s some sort of lesson here, about trusting strangers, about not closing yourself off to an experience before it’s occurred, about how reality doesn’t always match up with what you imagine. When I imagine my grandfather, when I imagine my cousin, I’m nowhere close to what actually happened. And when I think I know what a stranger is going to say, there’s always room to be surprised. Maybe this is what life is always trying to tell me, and I should listen more closely.

I watched a video of Alice Cooper performing during their Love It to Death tour in 1971. The video quality was poor, the picture grainy, with static bursts every few seconds that broke up the chords. When he sings “Second Coming,” Alice braces himself against the stage wall. His mascara creates tears on his cheeks, and he holds one hand to his head, as though he can hardly bear what is happening. “Have no gods before me, I’m the light,” he cries, his voice barely audible over the guitars, and then he staggers back from the microphone, his hands pressed to the sides of his head. He stumbles off the stage, almost falling, looking as if something inside of him has broken. When he returns, he’s in a straitjacket.

I don’t remember what I told that man in Troy. I probably said something about how saying “Oh my God” can be considered taking the Lord’s name in vain, and so people use “gosh” instead, out of fear of offending someone, be it God or a human being. That, I feel, is a fairly accurate answer to his question. But I wish I hadn’t explained that. I wish that I had told him that there is no difference, that they are both ways of evoking the sacred, of marveling at or bemoaning life and its always-fluctuating circumstances. I wish I had told him that it didn’t matter.

The closest I’ve ever come to walking on water is over frozen creeks and lakes. In places, the water freezes so clear you can see through to the rocks that line bottom. You can see weeds, suspended in ice, looking as if they might break free at any moment and continue to bend and sway with the current. It’s disconcerting, and sometimes, if I stare too long, it makes me dizzy.

I am not a person who searches for the larger meaning in the things that happen to me. I don’t read the myths and apply them to my own life. Because the fact is, the city of Troy would have had a sentry set up at night, and he would have noticed the Achaeans climbing into that wooden horse, and he would have woken someone up. And maybe my grandfather did return over and over to one house in search of king-sized candy bars, and maybe it’s just a story he told us because we were children and would believe anything. The cold, hard facts are that my grandfather will not live much longer, and the city of Troy is in ruins and I no longer can remember what I thought of as I toured it, and I will never be able to appreciate Alice Cooper the way people say I should.

But what I have instead is this: one of the last times I saw my cousin, we were in the Colorado Rockies. We climbed up a small mountain, one of the mountains with a wide path and steps carved into its side, with lines of people making the trek from a visitor’s center just a few hundred feet below the summit, up and back down in the span of an hour. My cousin would be dead just four months later, but of course we didn’t know it then. There’s a picture of him and me and my younger sister at the summit, all giving each other bunny ears, my sister and I on tiptoes to reach the top of my cousin’s head. Shortly after the picture was taken, at my cousin’s suggestion, we ran back down the mountain. We leapt down the shallow steps, let the air rush past us, traveling at top speed from above the tree line to just below it, from thin air at altitude to a place where there was oxygen aplenty, past tourists who waited until the last minute to leap out of the way, our mouths open and the wind carrying away our laughter, and when we reached the visitor’s center, for a few minutes, none of us could breathe.

Oh my God, we said. Oh my gosh.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#455: Los Lobos, "How Will the Wolf Survive?" (1984)

Maybe there was such a thing as pure lust. Ally’s heart had been broken and she would never love again—never!—but there was no getting around the almost surreal fineness of Tito, the grill guy at Burger King, where she worked. He was tall and thin with black almond-shaped eyes, long eyelashes, and a long thin nose. His hair, suppressed under his BK hat, was black and wavy. He had a perfect ass and the way his forearms rippled when he flipped the burgers made Ally understand the cliché about going “weak in the knees.”

He didn’t talk to anyone much and was two years older than her—he should have been a senior but had dropped out of high school the year before, gotten a GED and was now taking some classes at a community college. He called her Little White Girl when he talked to her, which wasn’t often until she figured out his weak spot, which was a white cassette tape that he kept every day tucked into the back pocket of his black work pants. She spent a fair amount of time staring at that particular spot and one day she made out the lettering across the top of the tape: SLASH.

“SLASH Records?” she said, jamming a bunch of medium lids into the medium lid holder.

It was her first night to close, her first night to see him take off his brown and orange polyester work shirt to reveal a gray T-shirt with the arms cut out down to the waist so that she could see the muscles all the way up his arms and the way his ribs gave way to stomach muscles that actually rippled—they rippled!—under his soft brown skin when he poured hot water over the grill and pulled the water down the surface and into the drain with a steel squeegee. He stopped and glanced over at her. “What?”

“Your tape says SLASH. That’s rad. X is on that label, and the Germs and the Blasters. What’s the tape? Violent Femmes? Del Fuegos?”

He pulled it out of his back pocket and rounded the corner to the manager’s office.  She heard Monique yell at him, but he returned with a tiny boom box that he plugged in and set atop one of the fryers. “Los Lobos,” he said, popping in the tape.

“I’ve heard of them,” she said.

“Really?” For the first time, he looked straight at her and took her in, what there was to see. She was exactly what he called her, a little white girl, scrawny and sixteen, barely five feet tall with no boobs, a bad perm, and bad skin. She squirmed under his gaze—he was even hotter when he looked her in the eyes. She had told her friends, Shandra and Meg, about him and they had embarrassed her by coming in last week and leaning over the register to get a look at him on the grill to the left of the front counter. If he’d noticed their giggles, he hadn’t let on. “You know you’re hot when you look good in brown and orange polyester,” Shandra said, while Ally, mortified, had shushed her and begged them to leave.

“It’s so weird the way they put SLASH and SST records in the import section—I buy anything on those labels. I’ve looked at How Will the Wolf Survive? a couple of times.”

“Well, now you can check it out.” He hit play and a straight-ahead, thumping groove spilled into the room. Tito’s right foot tapped as he scoured the grill. The chorus reassured her,“Don’t worry baby, it’s going to work out fine.” A positive sentiment? She wasn’t used to hearing anything like that, and since the lead singer’s buttery, amber voice immediately ventriloquized Tito for her, she pretended that sweet, comforting line was Tito himself taking an interest in her well-being, even thought she knew it wasn’t true.

Los Lobos were MUSICIANS, like, for real. It was no part attitude, no part fashion, it was all music, and as the tape played on, its sound tinny and small on the cheap boom box sitting on the fryer, she grew quietly impressed with the band’s range. There was pure rock, some country stuff, bluesy stuff, even mariachi music. They sang in English and Spanish. They rocked out with an accordion—an accordion—which seemed like the aural equivalent of Tito looking hot in brown and orange polyester. By the time she Windexed the windows, she had given in to a little hip sway.

“You like it, huh?” Tito grinned at her. He was even hotter when he smiled. “Imagine it on a good stereo system,” he said. “What would that be like?”

She gave him a thumbs up, her stomach flipping too hard for her to trust herself with speech.

That night, after they hit the lights and headed out the side door, with Monique griping at them about food costs, Tito, wearing a black motorcycle jacket, walked over to a brand-new red 1985 Z-28 that had been parked in the side lot for almost a week. He peered in the windows.

“It’s so weird he hasn’t come back,” she said. She had watched the Z’s owner, a guy in his twenties who had just ordered a shake in the drive-thru, jump into a car with a girl and ride away.

“Having a good time, I guess.” Tito strapped his shiny black motorcycle helmet under his chin and walked toward his motorcycle, parked next to her cheap tin can of a car by the back dumpsters. “It’s got a sweet stereo.”

After the restaurant closed the next night, Tito got out his Los Lobos tape again and they listened while they went through their closing duties. They didn’t talk, but she felt enveloped in the music with him. She sat on top of the drive-thru counter while he mopped. At one point, he looked up at her and said, “This one’s about you.”

She nearly stopped breathing. What part, what line? It was about a girl named Evangeline. Was it a compliment or not? As if he knew what she was thinking, he sang out loud the line, “She is the queen of make believe, Evangeline.”

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

She thought about it and decided he knew she had a crush on him and thought it was cute, the way little girls dreaming of handsome princes is cute. She kicked the stainless steel cabinets with her heels and looked out the drive-thru window at the red car glinting under a streetlight. She would never love again—never!—but if Tito would take her seriously—oh, Tito. It could never work. He was a high school dropout and she was on the honor roll, but his blinding hotness was something she sat in school and looked forward to all day long. She had volunteered to close on the nights he closed just so she could see him in his gray T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. If only she could do something to convince him she wasn’t a child. Then she had a thought, clear and simple as two plus two is four. “We should break into that Z,” she said.

He leaned against his mop and laughed. “You’re a little bandita, huh?”

“You said it has a great stereo.”

He stopped mopping and stared past her, out the window at the shining hood of the car. “You know how to hot-wire a car?”

Ally laughed. “Right.”

“I do,” he said, and gave her a wild, conspiratorial grin that caused her to slide off the counter like her bones had all turned to mush. He drew close to her and whispered, “Tomorrow night, bandita!”

The next night they waited until they saw Monique’s Cutlass disappear into traffic, and then they crossed the lot to the car. Tito pulled out of his jacket an unbent coat hanger and a couple of other mysterious pieces of metal whose purpose she couldn’t visualize. “You keep an eye out,” he said, bending to his task. She stood on the other side of the car and watched the traffic rushing by on the street outside. In the distance, she could see the state capitol, a pump jack lit up on its lawn, bobbing up and down through the night. She was paralyzed with a strange expectation, part fear, part wild joy. In a few minutes, he was in the car. She stayed outside watching until she saw the tail lights come on, then she jumped into the passenger seat. He ejected a tape and set it on the dash. She looked at it. “Gross,” she said. Quiet Riot.  

Los Lobos kicked in and filled the car. Tito fiddled with a magnificently complex-looking equalizer lit up like a spaceship until he had lifted the bass and done something to the treble so that the guitar work came toward them like delicately wrought suspension bridges glowing in the dark air. But something had happened to her the moment she slid into the car. Bandita, she thought. Not me. She was thinking about how Tito knew how to break into and hot-wire a car, how surprisingly unsexy that was, almost as unsexy as being a high school dropout. He smiled in the dark, looking out over the dash at the vacant lot next door. Closer to him than she had ever been, she smelled the animal fat in his clothes and studied his sublime profile. When he turned to look at her, she realized he was about to kiss her. She felt her jaw lock and her throat close. She didn’t want him to—she didn’t know why, but there it was. “I can never love again,” she said out loud.

He hesitated a moment, shaking his head.  Then he popped the tape and stuck it in the inside pocket of his jacket.  They had barely gotten through the first song. He reached down below the steering wheel, feeling for the wires, and the car went dark and still. “We should go,” he said. “I work a double tomorrow.”

—Constance Squires

#456: Marvin Gaye, "Here, My Dear" (1978)

At a pivotal moment in the great horror movie Pontypool, protagonist Grant Mazzy asks, "How do you take a word and make it…strange?" Our question now is similar but with a twist: how do you take a pop album and make it bad? I don't mean Marvin Gaye has made something unlistenable with Here, My Dear, but that the album sets itself the task of being otherwise than a pleasant or delightful, fun listening experience. It's complicated even to say what I want to say about it—that it's "bad" and therefore great—and already I have wandered dangerously into the territory of the "so-bad-it’s-good" crowd, so I will tread carefully.

Perhaps it's best to start over: Marvin Gaye makes a divorce album. It is "about" the end of his marriage to Anna Gordy Gaye. It is also a fact of that relationship, as he would have to give half the royalties from the album to Anna as part of their settlement. An album of defeat, but one of ruthless experimentation. You can't do much reading about Here, My Dear without running across the glorious couplet "Somebody tell me please / why do I have to pay attorney fees?" It's as if I could stop there and that's, as Keats says, all ye need to know.

But I haven't even begun. Calling the album, as I started by doing, "bad," seems to be a provocation, and it's an old tale told every time someone has a bone to pick about cultural capital. You throw your favorite thing into the mud, really grind it down, then pull it out and in the course of several paragraphs clean it off so it glimmers, authentic as the monument you have now proved it to be. I don't like this kind of writing about things because it's as dishonest as it is ubiquitous. I like Here, My Dear because it seems to be about that very kind of "dishonesty," in a different register, a pop song register, where Gaye doesn't seem to trust the kind of song he is so good at writing to affect anyone anymore. Gaye looks out at the world and sees only himself, consumed as he is by a divorce, and like Catullus mourning the loss of Lesbia, he can only write about sparrows. Well, one sparrow.

The album is myopic, wandering, lazy, monotonous, and far too long to listen to in one go. I've done it twice today, and I don't want to do it again. But an album can do that on purpose, can't it, and what do we do, how do we account for that without first saying, "This thing that seems like trash, it is actually glorious and authentic!" How indeed. To start with, we might invoke Marvin Gaye's previous works, albums further down on the RS500 list and with much more cultural clout, albums like What's Going On, that establish him in the public imaginary as a truly great musician and artist. And I mean, he is, listen to him sing. But there is not so much vocal dexterity or even artfulness of arrangement or anything really as complex as the hits Gaye has produced on Here, My Dear. It is straightforward, with repetitious instrumentations and vocals dubbed presumably to hide the fact that they are half-hearted and wounded-sounding, they sound like a wound, that is, Gaye sounds less like he is singing about being in pain than he does like he is actually in pain. And this is what is exciting about this "bad" album: it is "bad," it is all the things I've said in the preceding paragraphs, because it grasps fairly astutely the structure of feeling of going through a tremendous, relationship-ending process like divorce. Gaye sings, not just "about" divorce, but in a manner adequate to the banality of heartbreak.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

I should probably explain myself. Much typing has been expended on what is basically the sublimity of popular music, the way it invigorates and thrills, all that stuff—sound familiar? So does most pop music. I'm not in the business of making moral judgments, but I'm trying to make a distinction. Here, My Dear sounds like this, and it doesn't. It starts off with the slow build, the layering of instruments, the vocal tracks coming in slowly, the harmonies that devastate and remind you this is the guy who sang "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "I'll Be Doggone." But it doesn't have a narrative, it doesn't go from point A to point B and grow and swell and explode and simmer and fade out. It just starts, and then it stops. It calls attention to its plasticity rather than the swooping swerve of Being; it's Apollonian rather than Dionysian, a beautiful and crafted record even as it sets out not to be a pleasant one. And this moves me, and it stays with me, because it makes for a listening experience that makes one uncomfortable and bored, even frustrated, with the artist. It does not ask for sympathy or identification, just time. And when you're done, it's not like you have gone on some kind of redemptive journey. You listened to the album, and there you have it. Glad that's over with. Now what? Gaye refuses even the subtlest hints of narrative, so that the tracks do not develop, they accumulate. Heartbreak, pain, does not have a narrative. It just repeats. That seems to be the great insight here, and it lays bare the repetition at the heart of pop music while turning it against itself by making of that repetition an instrument of antagonism (by the artist, toward the audience) rather than one of pleasure and easy listening. And when I say this, I don't mean that this is a "deep" album, requiring intense and art-competent listening. I mean that it is actually difficult to listen to, the experience of listening to it takes effort and gives little in return. All the fantasies of the enlightened and thoughtful listener are set aside. It just happens, and keeps happening.

Maybe there isn't any good way to write about Here, My Dear without sounding like I'm puling about authenticity. Gaye doesn't bother to put on an act, he doesn't affect feeling, because he knows that doing that would only make it an album about the act he put on, rather than the actual feeling. It's hard to talk about dissimulation in an album so self-involved as to worry about how its maker won't get any of the royalties because of the divorce. What's the point? asks Gaye, with none of the grandiosity of punk, or the sly hopefulness of the 1960s. At the end of Pontypool, Grant Mazzy intones dramatically, "It's not the end of the world. It's just the end of the day." Imagine Mazzy's talking about heartbreak and you've got a good summary of Gaye's album.

—David W. Pritchard

#457: My Morning Jacket, "Z" (2005)

My name is Z. I have been here some years. I cannot say how many revolutions. There was a time when I counted those things.

If one’s life is a series of ripples radiating outward from, and back into, an original centerpoint—that is, a series of widening circles drawn around a dense and mysterious core, some “I” that blossomed forth from an unknown origin-point in the cosmos—I am now walking the outermost, and widest, circle. Beyond it, there is an unknown space, darkness raveling out into more darkness. That same darkness out of which I emerged, in the beginning.

I came here for the azure sky, the winter light. When a man undertakes silence, he needs a great deal of distance into which he may cast his thoughts, as casting a line into the sea.

The thoughts are not bait, not a hook. They are the line, reeling out, nearly invisible against the blue. There is nothing to catch. It is merely the action of casting and reeling that interests me.

I remember a day long ago, before I came here, when I was very ill. It was a cold, bright day. I was walking down the street. There was a man I came across, in faded denim, hair to his shoulders. He asked me for money and I gave it, knowing as I placed the coins into his palm that I could never repay him for the blue of his eyes, that flood of desolation. What was washed clean inside of me.

I would that I could become threadbare and held to the light, that the light might strike my skin as a golden husk.

I have been thinking of the fields of goldenrod in August, the corn huskers lotion that my father used on his face and hands, his worn flannel shirts. The smell of leather, the horse’s hair pulled taut and bowing across a fiddle’s strings. The sun that struck the horse’s mane, the dust of barns, and of the grain silos filtering almost vertical beams of light through golden wheat. Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

There are so many selves, each one peeling away, translucent as the skin of a snake. I no longer remember who I was, if remembering is re-inhabiting, which it isn’t. Remembering is trying to apprehend the form of a ghost in one’s house. It is peripheral, sliding along at the edges, the sensation of something behind you, a shift of the air. Let us not say remember, then. Let us say that the past is a presence of a different substance, an unusual quality of light.

Past selves are smaller circles within the radiating ring of circles that make a life. All of the past is encompassed, then, within the present. Between each circle there is a distance (a death?). An axis (+) that transects each circle at four points; these are paths that lead into and out of each circle. One cannot travel these paths, from past to former self, with the corporeal body. One must travel these paths as a spectral form of light. One must travel the dark tunnels of time as a ghost travels up and down a hallway.

When the sun begins to sink in the evening, I have to be out in that light, moving across the ridge. I like to see the distances closing in, pale yellow washing the horizon, bright flare of orange, that fast slip of light in the West. (Do the distances close in or grow greater?) I walk, watching the vesper sky, until dark, when diamond stars begin to shine forth as dancers leaping onto an empty stage, and seeing becomes a kind of listening. Coming back across the ridge, I hear the sound of my boots against the frozen earth, as a shadow in my ear, cracking.

In the winter of his 35th year, severely ill, Vincent Van Gogh went to the south of France for refuge, to the city of Arles. He was enchanted by the light of Arles. He washed the somber earth tones from his palettes and mixed new colors. There, out moving in the light each day, he painted his most illuminated pieces, dappled in yellows, mauves, and ultramarines. Van Gogh wanted his work to lead to God.

I wonder if he heard a great silence, before severing his left ear with a razor.

Afterwards, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy (a former monastery), in the last months of his life, he composed his heart’s masterpiece, “The Starry Night,” that painting with so much darkness and music in it.

I want to point a finger at the moon, then cut my finger off.

Nights, I dance with the paradoxes. Dawn is as a great weight pressing down upon me— I struggle mightily under it.

This winter my thoughts have turned to the sea. Once, when diving at the old shipping port, off the coast of where I lived for a time, I saw an eel hunkered beneath the concrete wall of the port. I descended towards it. It crept out, moving like a slow tremor. It looked at me, swaying back and forth like an electric wire ungrounded. Its eyes were the black sparks of the sea. The eel and I looked at each other for long minutes there, a kind of silent music between us, far under the shimmering surface, where tumultuous light was breaking among the waves.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

I should like to revisit the sea, to submerge myself in the salt water. To hear, again, that rhythm, the steady swell and break, earth’s metronome, as an uninterrupted and endless sigh. I remember long winter days at the shore spent swimming. Not swimming but floating on top of the rising waves. How I was lifted up and over them, the weightless drift of my body. A continuous effortless motion. And inevitably, when the tides began to shift, how I would find myself suddenly swept into the trough of a wave, how the body would struggle for one brief moment against it then give itself over to the pull. It was a blinding surrender that was not without fear but was surrender nonetheless. How the body, then, would be taken away—to give in to that, how I would lose myself completely to the wave, to be rolled and rolled into it, that ecstasy of union, to lose my footing, my direction, then to be pummeled and knocked against the sand, to come up on the shore breathless, as so much seafoam.

I have not, as some say, abandoned the world, but in fact am plunging myself deeper into it.

Van Gogh’s paintings from Saint-Rémy, his last and most beautiful paintings, were full of swirling. The edges of the individual, separate marks of color that distinguished his earlier paintings began to soften, swirls of light merging into darkness. Boundaries between cypress, field, mountain, and sky became blurred. He painted what he could see from the cell windows of the asylum: golden fields of wheat with skies of blue above, birds flocking. He wrote to his brother: “I do not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” Also that he was entirely absorbed “in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea.” He died soon thereafter.

It is said that no man is an island.

On my walks in the evenings, when yellow light is seeping in behind the bare branches of the woods, I have seen an elk hulking between the trees, standing still, brown as the bark on the tree trunks. I have seen the elk as one sees an elk in the trees: as a remnant, or future, self.

I am the alpha and the omega. But there is something else: a movement that precedes the first letter, a shadow trailing off behind the last. Something at the edges, wordless.

Another memory of long before I came here, before I took the vow: walking in the back alley, where starlings would gather in the tree of heaven, quiet as seedpods rustling on the branches. When I walked underneath the tree, how they would disperse on the air in one great tumbling wave, rolling across the sky, all together, as if swaying to some silent music. How they plunged and swirled into circles and arcs, and I would feel the trembling of the air on my upturned face. Their small singular bodies formed a swelling symphony the beauty and grace of which even they could not understand, and I knew then that the world was not just graffiti and couches with broken springs and the pungent juices fermenting in the bottoms of garbage cans but that it was this, too. This swarm of wings, held together and cleaved apart in each moment by something unseen, unknown, mysterious.

I feel I am coming to the end. I do not consider myself at the edge of the world but rather in the dense center of it.

—Holly Haworth

#458: Elton John, "Tumbleweed Connection" (1970)

Are you kidding? You’ve placed Tumbleweed Connection above Armed Forces and I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight? You’d take Tumbleweed Connection rather than Elton’s own Caribou or Don’t Shoot Me? Who loves this album? None of its songs are on Elton’s Greatest Hits (#138 on the Rolling Stone 500), and none of them get played on classic rock stations. Somebody somewhere must have strong feelings about this album, though, and had I owned it at a more impressionable age (I picked it up in my twenties), I can imagine it would be dearer to me than it actually is. I love Elton John more than you do, but even I don’t think this a terribly successful album.

At what is Tumbleweed Connection trying to succeed? It seems to be a loose “concept album,” the thematic thread being westerns or perhaps the Confederacy. Various phrases evoke a nineteenth-century American setting: “chain gang,” “kin,” “Deacon Lee,” “river boat,” “New Orleans,” “Yankee,” “cornfield,” “East Virginia,” “stagecoach.” The shadow of the Band looms large. “Country Comforts” (singled out by some as the album’s standout song) revisits and sentimentalizes the uneasy small-town encounters of “The Weight.” Crazy Chester has turned into Old Clay, and “The Weight”’s alienation and sense of burden have turned into an uncomplicated yearning for “any truck that’s going home.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” gets rewritten as “My Father’s Gun,” and a line from “Across the Great Divide” (“bring your children down to the riverside”) resurfaces almost verbatim in “Burn Down the Mission.”

There is so much of this that one is tempted to suspect parody. Perhaps Tumbleweed Connection, released in October of 1970, was a satiric spoof of recent back-to-the-country albums like The Band (September, 1969), CCR’s Willie and the Poor Boys (November, 1969), CSNY’s Déjà Vu (March, 1970), and the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead (June, 1970). The cover art suggests this possibility. In sepia tones it depicts Elton on the cover (and Bernie Taupin, lyricist, on the back) waiting at a deserted train station that seems to possess that “old-fashioned feeling” he sings about in “Country Comforts.” Looking closer, however, we see that the old-timey placards on the walls of the station advertise British products: Cadbury’s chocolates, Mazawattee Tea, Huntley & Palmer’s Ginger Nuts. Perhaps, then, we will be getting a deliberately British and ironic take on Americana, as we would the following year with The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies (1971)?

No, that’s not what’s happening here. After the weak drug pun of the title (weed connection), there is not a joke in sight. It is the self-seriousness of Tumbleweed Connection (I keep wanting to call it Tumbleweed Junction) that most clearly distinguishes it from the effervescent work Elton would soon produce. Compare the earnestness of “Talking Old Soldiers,” a dramatic monologue in which “old mad Joe” shares his tragic, drunken wisdom to another fellow in the saloon, to Don’t Shoot Me’s satiric “Texan Love Song,” in which a redneck rails at the hippies with their “communistic politics and them negro blues.” It’s easy to blame the somber tone on Bernie Taupin, but it’s also true that Elton had not yet learned to imbue Taupin’s more soppy and sentimental lyrics with his own campy sensibility. He also had not yet assembled the crack band of his 1972-1975 heyday: Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass, Nigel Olsson on drums. On “Amoreena,” where three quarters of that lineup is in place, things rock much more persuasively. Much of Tumbleweed Connection now sounds overproduced, however, burdened by lugubrious strings, cumbersome background singers (couldn’t they have found something better to do with Dusty Springfield?) and even an occasional oboe.

Still, this is Elton approaching his prime and therefore not to be sniffed at. Along with “Amoreena,” the best cut on the album is “Burn Down the Mission,” which closes side two. The last-resort agricultural incendiarism of this number again echoes the Band (“King Harvest Has Surely Come”) and CCR (“Effigy”), but the music is wholly original and unexpected. Bassist Herbie Flowers (he of “Walk on the Wild Side”) plays on this track and commands attention. Drummer Barry Morgan contributes stirring fills on the chorus and fuels a couple of manic interludes between verses. Most of all, Elton has given the lyrics a complicated, florid musical structure that they hardly ask for. The song opens with Elton’s solo piano moving (twice) from G major to E minor to an unexpected Bb major. The verse repeats this trajectory, then leading us through Eb major and eventually back to G. Next comes what appears at first to be the chorus (“Bring your family down to the riverside”), which follows a well-worn harmonic course: F major, C major and back to G major. That section ends with the return of that odd Bb major chord, on which we linger for a couple of measures, until we reach the actual chorus and are sent soaring with a glorious and unexpected Db major chord (“Burn down the mission!”). Db major is as far as you can get harmonically from G major, but the song makes it feel as joyous and liberating and necessary and inevitable as an act of arson. Nothing on the album is more satisfying that moment, and nothing could be.

—Will Pritchard

#459: The Drifters, "The Drifters' Golden Hits" (1968)

There are ways the world can slip up from underneath you and then, you know what I mean, a regular Saturday morning with your son in his Batman costume, shrieking at his own shadow, and your husband grumbling at the TV, turns sideways and then all the way upside down—you're a bat now in your own life and it's wonderful. 

Your family’s apartment is every song sung by the Drifters that you ever loved. The furniture itself and all the empty spaces between are filled up with the whole sound of the Golden Hits album.

    Everything I want I have
         whenever I—

You stretch, accidentally burn your wing on the hot plate of the coffee maker, but the sudden delight of wings and your super sensitive giant bat ears make the burn so forgettable. Pain is trivial when you can fly, when you look like a mouse married a dragon and delivered you into the universe: a bat.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

    Everything I want I have
         whenever I—

You open the refrigerator for eggs and milk, let the shame and pleasure of this much plenty flicker through you like electricity or the sick feeling after a hundred bowls of your favorite ice cream. The music keeps playing. The rubber seal of the refrigerator door pulls open and the light comes on in its cold interior like a lit stage. Dare anyone to believe that the neighbors can’t hear it, too, the refrigerator singing,

    the ferris wheel ride isn't turning around anymore
        …but I've still got some sand in my shoes    

You reach for the old loaf of sourdough bread, crack the eggs into a wide bowl, add milk, vanilla, and cinnamon. Stir. The routine of it comforts. The whisk slaps through the eggy mixture. Frustration starts melting away or dissolving into something else. You’re making French toast, but this Saturday morning feels like when you put the sugar and the water in the saucepan on the stove and stir to make caramel.

    There’s some kind of wonderful.     

You want another sip of your coffee, but don’t reach for the mug because maybe actually you don’t want it. Your son somersaults across the length of the rug. Your husband’s still growling at the news. You reach for your coffee. You’re still not used to your wings, your furry feet, your little paw claw. You spill your coffee.    

    your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire proof

You say something vile at the TV, something that expresses vehement agreement with your husband. You don't do it because you agree or even because you want to be agreeable or make his day. You're going for the startle effect. You're hoping he'll grin. Or better: he'll giggle. Or better still: he’ll like you more.

Why? Because you called that TV talking head a nasty word and because you're a bat now. People love bats. They’re enchanting. Your son knows where he came from—part man, part bat. None of it is costuming. Your family is a team sport and you’re all starters. There is no bench. Like the cheerleaders in your high school used to chant at pep rallies, “You gotta want it to win it. And we want it bad.”

“Don't curse,” says your husband. And now you're like the sugar and the water in the saucepan when it gets too hot, been in too long, not stirred enough. You’re burning. You’re burnt. You’re somebody’s ruined dessert.

Don't curse? As though you couldn’t have said something so much worse. You could have asked him why he was too tired last night, again. Started that fight in front of your four year old. If you wanted a man to lecture you, you’d get divorced and go be single again, spend your Saturdays at coffee shops on blind dates listening to some stranger go on about brake fluid, and your husband could sing “I Count the Tears” to himself,

    na, na, na, na, na, na, late at night

You whisper in your husband’s ear something even more vile than what you said to the TV. You intend for there to be a joke in your voice, an unmistakable playfulness.

Instead it comes out like you mean it or maybe, best case scenario, it sounds sarcastic, acerbic. Then you start thinking maybe that’s what you’ve become—a complete miscommunication. A failed joke. You’re not even funny. You’re mean. Disingenuous, on a good day.

Don’t go there. Stop the thought loop before it starts.

Still, when did you become so full of rage and judgment? Strangers deserve respect. Don’t be cruel. Anything else is better. Be didactic, moralistic, silly, sentimental, gross, whatever—be anything else. Don’t invent strangers just to be condescending to them. Your car seems like it really might need new brake fluid. Your husband disagrees, probably just to be disagreeable. There you go again. Throwing rocks. Is that who you are? A rock thrower?

This is supposed to be a wonder-filled upside down Saturday. Stop ruining it. Sing “This Magic Moment” to yourself. Or hum it, at least. Cut another piece of bread off the loaf, and slice right back through all that self-involved I’m-so-terrible talk, find your way to your own beating bat heart and the lovely angry man in front of you.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

“I didn’t mean it like that,” you say. You wait a moment, over-soaking the French toast, and it occurs to you that maybe he meant what he said as a kind of joke, too, and you didn’t get it, didn’t want to hear it, chose not to. Maybe you’re both doing the same thing—flipping flirting into fighting like two people stuck in a lazy old habit. “Still, don’t tell me what to say,” you say to him.

He looks over from the TV. He could laugh the whole thing off, but why? You slide the soggy French toast onto the griddle and listen to it hiss.

“We want it bad,” he says and laughs.

Oh. We’ve had this argument before, been all the way upside down and laughing. You flap your bat wings and give that man a kiss, while your shrieking son pounds his fists on the floor and roars for the two of you to tell him and tell him now, “What are you guys talking about? And why are you so loud?”

Your husband makes up an answer as each of you balance a breakfast plate on your head. You and your baby Batman son take your husband by either hand, and the three of you fly away from the broken news on TV to eat breakfast up on the roof. Rise up above all that rat race noise, the tired beat feeling, the stale heat of it all, and head to the only place I know where you just have to wish to make it so. We’re almost there, now. I hope I made enough toast. Everything I want I have whenever I—. Our neighbors have found their way to the rooftop, too, thank God.

You better believe the sun is shining, and the day is good. Each of us sings to the others, darling, you can share it all with me. We cozy in, rest.

—Annie Mountcastle

#460: Hole, "Live Through This" (1994)

Where the fuck was she, anyway? If Tess were home, Lauren would be hearing Live Through This coming from her bedroom at the end of the hall, but all was quiet. There was no way she overslept—Tess was a strangely early riser for such a partier, and it was already 9:00. Lauren opened Tess’s bedroom door and peeked in, saw a hairy leg hanging over the bed, and closed the door. If she was sure it was Keith, she’d wake him up, but with Tess you could never be sure, and that could be embarrassing, calling to the wrong dude. Lauren hoped the sound of the shower would wake whoever it was and he would be gone before she emerged from the bathroom.

She had just finished rinsing the shampoo from her hair when she felt the blast. The sound had jagged edges that ripped the air like tissue, shook her eyes in their sockets, instantaneously liquefied her bowels. She leapt from the shower to the toilet while her and Tess’s toiletries flew from the shelves. Baby powder, toothbrushes, and two pink birth control cases fell on her head. The medicine cabinet flew open and aspirin and vitamin bottles dropped into the sink. Then it was quiet. She wrapped herself in a towel and turned off the shower. She looked out the bathroom window, fully expecting to see a passenger plane sticking out of the ground in her backyard.

She heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Lauren?”

“Keith. Are you okay?”

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know. Where’s Tess?”

“She took my Bronco.”

“Where?”

“She needs a copy of her social security card before she can start the new job today. I’m not sure where you go to do that.”

“Downtown,” she said. “The Murrah building.”

*

That night it rained. The bombing site was lit up like ten football fields and its light poured down streets and alleyways like a spreading infection. A helicopter thumped overhead. Keith sat in the passenger seat unfolding his rain poncho and wrestling with it as he pulled it over his head. Lauren parked in the empty parking lot behind the First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, a few blocks away from the Murrah building. The tall, stained glass windows of its sanctuary had been blown out, and from the sidewalk, Lauren could see the shadowy ceiling of the inside of the church, unprotected. Glass crunched beneath their feet as they walked, jewel-toned shards glittering like a bloody ocean under moonlight. A police car appeared from an east-west road a couple of blocks down and came toward them. They ducked behind a dumpster and waited for it to pass.  “We’ve got to be careful,” Lauren said.  They peeked out from behind the dumpster and continued on, dashing from parked cars to recessed doorways to stay hidden until they found the perimeter, yellow tape stretched as far as they could make out. On the other side of the barrier, they saw figures on guard. “I feel like a criminal,” Kevin whispered.

“We just need to know,” Lauren said. “If your car isn’t there, we’ll know she’s okay.”  Lauren thought of all those times Tess had come close to starting a real job—getting some credit in the straight world, as the song said—only to panic and take off, sometimes for a day or more.  One time, Tess had taken the bus to Dallas to see Pavement instead of starting work at a vet clinic. Let it be something like that. All day long, as the body count climbed on the news, and national news crews streamed into the restaurant where she worked, she told herself that Tess had just flaked out again. So they would have a look around, they would satisfy themselves that Keith’s Bronco was not there, and they would go home and wait for Tess to return from whatever wild-hare adventure she had taken.

They rounded a corner and the building came into view a half a block away. “God!” Keith grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her into his chest. She pushed away and turned to look. She had seen it on television a hundred times that day, white and torn and crumbling, like a layer cake that someone has ripped in two with bare hands, and she recognized what she was seeing as the same sight she had beheld all day on screen, but there was no comparison. The addition of depth made the sight hard to take in, hard for the mind to assimilate. The visual field regressed into the bowels of the building, into exposed rooms and dark crannies behind overturned desks and dangling potted plants. What looked like crumbs hanging from cake on television, were car-sized chunks of concrete in real life, straining to fall toward the crater in the middle of the building. Despite the rain, the building still appeared to be smoking. Was it steam? Whatever it was, it gave the wet concrete debris the look of a live animal, a being whose entrails steamed and strained to fall even further from the shattered shell of the body that had held them. Her body quailed as she tried to pick out where the floors had been, looked into the rooms imagining the fate of a tender human body amongst all that hard matter. Tess could be in there. The floors of her mind crashed in on themselves and she bent over and vomited. Keith had turned away from the sight of the building, his hands over his eyes.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

“What floor was the social security office on?” Keith asked in a tight voice that she could barely hear over the loud hum of a nearby generator truck.

She wiped her mouth with the bottom of her poncho. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s not do this,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

The building was lit up like the middle of the afternoon. She could see every zit and hair on Keith’s face, his eye sockets cast in shadow. “Come on,” she said.

Through burned air, they walked toward the building, moving through groups of fast-moving people wearing ponchos and other rain gear, FBI and ATF logos everywhere apparent. Police cars, Red Cross, and news trucks crammed the space. A crane towered overhead. The building was writhing. She squinted to understand what she saw. As she drew closer she realized that it was crawling with rescuers, people moving inch by inch through the rubble, looking under every piece of debris. As they approached what had been 5th Street, she began seeing cars. Some were burned out. Some were melted. All were covered with a layer of cement dust, now wetted to mud. She nearly stepped on a big man sitting on a curb, weeping, his shuddering back to her. As they passed him, Lauren felt ashamed for intruding into the work of dying that was going on under that rubble, so private and unexpected, for intruding into the taut and fragile headspace of these rescuers who, on television, seemed like people far out over a mental tightrope suspended above deep space, people who could be knocked off their thin wire of duty and purpose by the slightest disruption to their concentration, and who, Lauren could see now, were victims themselves, in the middle of a catastrophe that was ongoing.

“This way,” she said. Keith nodded and pushed ahead of her, but suddenly she had to put out her hands to keep from running into him. He had stopped. She stepped up next to him and saw what he saw. She couldn’t make out the green paint under all the debris that had piled on top of it, but the boxy shape was right and through the open space where the windshield had been she could see the shark tooth necklace that always hung from his rear view mirror. It was Keith’s Bronco.

*

They were silent most of the way home. As Lauren turned into her driveway, she said, “She could be alive. They’re still searching.”

Keith nodded. “Remember last week? The one-year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, how sad everyone was?” He laughed. “One guy. A suicide. I don’t mean to say it wasn’t sad, but—” he sucked his teeth.

“I know,” she said. Death. Death. Death. “Let’s get fucked up.”

At the front door, she saw a light inside that she didn’t remember leaving on. Then she heard something. Behind her, Keith made a choking sound. She turned the key. Yes. Fucking Hole. Fucking “Doll Parts.” Someday you will ache like I ache. She flung the door open and they rushed into the living room, looking down the dark hallway to the source of the music. Then light flooded the hall as a door was flung open. Tess shuffled into view, scratching her head. “Hey baby,” she said, looking up at Keith. “I’ve got some bad news about your car.”

—Constance Squires

#461: Public Image Ltd, "Metal Box" (1979)

“The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.”

            —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

Amid the Internet’s endlessly accessible, archived, overlapping present tense, our DVR’d, rewindable, pausable now, I miss most the sense of the inaccessible but very recent past and its foreclosed possibilities. My own childhood felt full of the just-missed-out-on, the overlooked-until-it-was-too-late, the taken-for-granted. I’m speaking of music and other consumable forms of pop culture, sure, but also friendships, experiences, places: the overgrown lot a few streets away, where my mother and I picked wildflowers and where teenagers broke beer bottles in circles of sooty stones, all bulldozed for a brick condominium by the time I turned ten. None of this is in any way catastrophic—especially as Adorno’s use of that word inevitably implies the Holocaust—though perhaps it gets at Adorno’s sense of the past as irredeemable, discontinuous, unnarratable. Still, we might read  “as if destroyed” as a warning against a romantic, nostalgic view of the ruined, fragmented past. At thirteen, fourteen, I watched bands pose and prance on MTV and wondered what the world wasn’t offering me so easily as I unwillingly committed to memory, say, a Howard Jones keyboard solo or a Mr. Mister melody: the cultural present, as I experienced it, was awful. A year later, I loved rummaging the import bins at Al Bum’s, loved studying cryptic post-punk LP covers. It seemed easy to confuse one band and another, because all of them felt equally mysterious—because the world felt mysterious. Still, the most interesting narratives have always been the ones I can’t quite piece together, don’t quite understand. The past—my parents’ past—bored me. But the recent past intrigued me because it seemed destroyed, irretrievable except through these records, which lingered in those bins for months until one day they’d vanished. Eventually I realized I’d stop mourning their absences only if I brought them home myself.

This unattainable past occupied my frequent what-if? alternate history fantasies about my life. All fantasy is intrinsically selfish, and my own historical contemplations never essayed much beyond the limits of my own vaguest memories. If the present moment disappointed me—and, when I was a teenager, it invariably did—how easy to ignore it by pondering other selves I might have been but wasn’t, by projecting myself into other places, houses, families, friendships, talents, bodies. I wanted less a better past than to possess a better present via the past.

This superior present I imagined was pathetic, as if a shade of difference in my social or economic status or my physical appearance or my cultural knowledge would have transformed me in any way. Jah Wobble, PiL’s bassist on First Issue and Metal Box, referring to his younger self, his younger friends, puts it more succinctly: “I think we were all emotional cripples back then.” Wobble’s friends included one who, in January, 1978, rejected his own recent past by exchanging safety pins and torn clothes for tailored suits, the name Johnny Rotten for John Lydon, and a role as frontman of the U.K.’s most infamous punk band for an ostensibly more democratic position in Public Image Ltd. As the reinvented Lydon told Tom Snyder in a disastrous 1980 television interview, PiL “ain’t no band. We’re a company. Simple. Nothing to do with rock and roll. Doo-dah.”

“It seems to be an old-fashioned format,” guitarist Keith Levene elaborated haltingly a few minutes later, as Lydon and Snyder smoked cigarettes, “to go on stage with guitars and play loud music.… John said something in an interview: everyone’s really preoccupied with going backwards, and I think the reason it’s a good idea not to be a rock and roll band, and to concentrate or direct our energies as a company is because—” at which point Lydon and Snyder simultaneously interrupted him and Tomorrow with Tom Snyder went to a commercial break.

 

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

“I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer.… I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.… Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!”

            —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I’ve never listened to Public Image Ltd’s classic 1979 three record set Metal Box. Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition, on the other hand, I’ve spun endless times. By the time I came to PiL c. 1987 or so, those metal film canisters had vanished into that recent past I couldn’t touch or acquire, and I didn’t see one until 1990, hanging on the wall at Nuggets Records in Kenmore Square and, despite some rust spots, priced way above my meager means. Lydon, Levene, and Wobble, PiL’s three mainstays when Metal Box came out, never intended it to be an easy release: the deep-bass, wide-groove 45 RPM 12˝s meant that four of the six sides held only two songs each, and that Metal Box began with a side-long, ten-minute dirge. “It effectively deconstructed the idea of ‘the album,’” Simon Reynolds claims, “encouraging people to listen to the tracks in any order.” Beyond that, Levene noted, “We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out.”

Virgin changed the track sequence, omitted a lock groove, and compressed Wobble’s basslines into a cheaper-to-manufacture double LP packaged in a more standard gatefold sleeve: Second Edition appeared three months after its original iteration, early in 1980. When I was sixteen, copies remained easy to find in record stores. Even this diminished artifact felt important: it sounded strange in a way almost no other record I owned sounded strange: circuitous, trebly guitar riffs; stumbling basslines that all seemed to be played on the E and A strings; vocals punctuated by all kinds of groans, moans, shrieks, hiccups, howls, trills, and whines. The entire effect felt harrowing, and listening to this album, for me, both summoned and relieved the distress it articulated. Speaking of his guitar sound, Levene said, “It could be really thin glass penetrating you, but you don’t know until you start bleeding internally.” Or, as Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”

“[L]isten to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post-Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins.”

            —Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

A friend and I recently admitted to each other that we laugh out loud while rereading Minima Moralia. He loves the passage “where Adorno turns his blinding interrogation light on banality—how casual conversations with strangers on a train make us complicit with murder and atrocity, how throwaway expressions like ‘Oh, how lovely!’ testify to just how unlovely existence is, how going to see a movie (no matter how vigilant we are while watching it) leaves us stupider and more corrupt, etc.” (In this fragment, “How Nice of You, Doctor,” Adorno observes “Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other.”) I laugh at “Articles May Not Be Exchanged”: “Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort.… The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.”

When I discovered PiL, I would have been unable to make much of Adorno’s sometimes dense rhetoric—just as PiL’s dismantling of traditional rock song structures made their work initially incomprehensible to me—but Adorno’s relentless critique throughout Minima Moralia would have spoken to me then at least as much as it does now: like Lydon, I’ve always been a cynical bastard. In 1978, Lydon told an interviewer his new music involved “misery, depression, self-indulgence, all those trite little obsessions.” Years later, on MTV, he confessed, with a shrug and a laugh, “I’m just permanently agitated by everything and anyone. I cannot help it. It’s the way I am!”

I wasn’t, at sixteen, laughing at Lydon’s lyrics throughout Second Edition: I was hoping someone would recognize my rueful agreement at what then seemed his percipience, a posture Adorno would have loved to mock: “Ready-made enlightenment turns not only spontaneous reflection but also analytical insights—whose power equals the energy and suffering that it cost to gain them—into mass-produced articles.” Lydon’s physical beatings at the hands of patriotic mobs throughout the Silver Jubilee summer of 1977, his pain over the deaths of his mother and his friend Sid Vicious, his paranoia and isolation in the Chelsea house he shared with bandmates, friends, and hangers-on in 1978 and 1979: all distilled into the moans he musters throughout the dozen tracks of Metal Box, then pressed into vinyl records in an edition of sixty thousand.

A decade later, I finally saw Public Image Ltd live, at an outdoor venue with the Sugarcubes and New Order. Lydon sauntered onstage wearing baggy Day-Glo clothes and scarlet hair extensions, and shouted into the microphone: “Here’s your Uncle Johhhhnnnny!” The crowd cheered wildly; I cringed. His band, anonymous session musicians since Wobble’s and Levene’s departures years earlier, played the hits. I remember little of this show beyond the water-squirting flower headband Bjork wore, but I’m pretty sure PiL played “Public Image” as well as the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” or exactly the sort of tired rock-star stuff Lydon had once sneered about. Whether his foray into punk nostalgia was rejection or celebration of his recent past, it only confirmed that I’d once again arrived a few years too late for something vital and forever lost.

—Joshua Harmon

#462: R.E.M., "Document" (1987)

In the summer of 2012, I was finishing up my job coordinating an after-school arts program for children living in public housing, after a year of working with the world’s most cynical boss (“Most of these people,” this person once said to me, “are lazy scum”), while also housesitting for a friend who was in Greece with his family, watching his two dogs, two cats, and his daughter’s Chinese water dragon. Despite the lack of air conditioning in the house, there were perks: he had the nicest kitchen you could imagine, and one of the biggest vinyl collections I had ever seen. One afternoon after coming home from work, I sat in the den and poked through one of the stacks of records: Kate Bush, Paul Simon, Men At Work—I had found his 80s section. But I settled on one, Document by REM, because I had heard only one song of theirs up to that point, “Losing My Religion,” and because I wasn’t in a Kate Bush kind of mood.

*

Sometimes I jokingly tell friends that my goal in life is to live comfortably in contingency. If I believe in any sort of agency at all, in any kind of control we can claim over the world’s waves, I believe we find it only when we acknowledge how little of it we truly have. And listening for the first time to “Exhuming McCarthy”—I loved it for its disconcerting poppy-ness, its sharp irony, its explicit criticism of the burgeoning sense of American exceptionalism during the Reagan Administration (Peter Buck, who felt the country under The Great Communicator had turned into an amusement park, had suggested an alternate title for the album: Last Train To Disneyland. While I’m taken by the sentiment, I think we can all be glad the title suggestion was vetoed. )—I could only think of my boss one morning telling me that Bill O’Reilly “spoke the God’s truth on his show,” and that government interventions like public housing and food stamps only served to imprison folks and overtax the people who really made this country tick.

I’m sure we all know the old arguments: welfare either equals the playing field, or it acts as a debilitating crutch; that big government is working to protect this country’s most vulnerable, which is the bedrock of any democracy, or it’s an insult to the principles of self-governance upon which America was founded—but when talking about poverty, I don’t think the question posed is about Republican vs. Democratic values (though I think it’s clear at this point where I stand between the two poles). When talking about poverty, I think we’re talking about agency: what do we have to do, what do we need, to be able to live most freely?

*

The turn in Document, to my ears at least, occurs on “Fireplace,” where the unbridled, seemingly blind optimism of the first half of the album gives way to something a little heavier, a little more unsettling: the song opens with Michael Stipe rather bluntly chanting, “Crazy, crazy world / crazy, crazy times.” And it’s true, in 2015 as it was in 1987, when the album was first released: we’re living in a crazy, crazy world, in crazy, crazy times. Instead of the Iran-Contra Affair, we have ISIS; instead of the Berlin Wall, we have Bobby Jindal’s (fabricated) “no-go” zones. Last month, writing to a mentor about how dismal everything had seemed recently, he responded: “I find myself fighting depression over the state of the world, despite also feeling tremendously lucky. But there are moments when things fall together and meaning and hope preside.” I sent off a quick response, taken from one of George Oppen’s letters that my mentor had reminded me of: “I think there is no light in the world but the world, and I think there is light. My happiness is the knowledge of all the things we do not know.”

*

There are no all-encompassing answers to the questions I’ve raised—and I suppose if I were serious about living in contingency, I wouldn’t aspire to any. But there’s a distinct difference between rejecting all-encompassing answers and rejecting answers in general. Says W.S. DiPiero on John Keats, whose Negative Capability George Oppen is surely alluding to:

We travesty Keats’s inquiring, sensuous intelligence, however, if we cite him as an endorsement of the unwillingness to pass judgment, to evaluate, to assert or deny. Negative Capability is no counsel for failed nerve. Keats was advising himself to be patient in the quest for definitiveness. It is counsel of patience of the imagination.

*

Coming to a close with the album, on what must be my 50th or so listen in the past couple weeks, the lyrics seem more and more prescient, despite—or perhaps because of—Michael Stipe’s typical, obfuscating style:

Oddfellows local 151 behind the firehouse
Where Peewee sits to prove a sage to teach
Peewee gathered up his proof
Reached up and scratched his head
Fell down and hit the ground again

Pewee the sage is left scratching his head; Peewee the sage finds himself ultimately deposed and grounded. Rilke might say he’s been forced to “live the questions”; and much as I’ve repeated that little quote like a balm against my own confusion, I’m reminded now that, despite how comforting Rilke means to be, living the questions is at the end of the day uncomfortable. Agency, contingency, Negative Capability, questions: no, no, no. Or, maybe, maybe, maybe.

You see, at the end of the day, in whatever psychic or existential discomfort I find myself in, I rest assured for some reason knowing that I can say “end of the day.” End of the day, at least Peewee can fall down and hit his head on the ground. End of the day, I’m thankful and, like my mentor, feel tremendously lucky knowing that at least there’s a ground for Peewee to hit. I’ve got no answers—how do we live most freely?—but if any virtue is forced onto us, it’s patience, and I guess I’ve got some time.

—Christian Detisch

#463: Echo and the Bunnymen, "Heaven Up Here" (1981)

My favorite scene from the movie High Fidelity takes place during a busy day at Championship Vinyl, a record shop owned by Rob (John Cusack) and staffed by Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso). In the scene, the three characters are each given a moment to do what, for me, is the best part about being into music: they get to turn someone else on to a band they like. They each have their own methods. Rob, store owner, maintains a respectable distance by playing The Beta Band’s Three EPs over the store’s sound system. He scans the room, watching people slowly start to nod their heads. Dick, shy and soft spoken, awkwardly chats up a girl about Green Day and segues to a discussion of their influences, ultimately stopping with The Stiff Little Fingers. Finally, Barry aggressively drags a customer around the store piling records into his arms each time the man admits to not having heard something. After finding out the guy doesn’t own Blonde On Blonde (RS500 #9), Barry hands him a copy and embraces him, assuring the customer that things are going to be OK. It is great. I suggest you watch it here.

I love how this scene depicts one version of discussions I’ve been having with my music-loving friends for decades. I know people who absolutely hate the way Dick and Anna immediately jump from Green Day to the Clash, as if those two entities can never touch. And for a long time I took issue with the idea that, somehow, the Jesus and Mary Chain picked up where Echo and the Bunnymen left off. After all, Echo dropped an album in 1997 and JMC did in 1998. It doesn’t seem like the passing of a torch, does it? But what I am leaving out is that, until 1997, Echo was on indefinite hiatus and JMC, with a newer, sleeker sound, did put out two record albums, 1992’s Honey’s Dead and 1994’s Stoned and Dethroned. Now, I’ve played those records and to me they don’t have a single thing to do with Echo’s big, soaring anthems. But it feels like I can engage this dialogue like I wold actual people.

Like the best talks about music usually do, the one in this scene clued me in to bands I’d never heard. And one of them was Echo and the Bunnymen. When this film was released in 2000, I’d certainly heard Echo songs. They feature prominently on both the Pretty in Pink and Lost Boys soundtracks. I loved both of those movies. So, yeah, Echo was around, but I wasn’t paying attention. But Barry’s manic insistence, his force when discussing music lineage, got me thinking. It planted a seed. Then, in 2001, I saw Donnie Darko, and that movie's use of Echo’s “The Killing Moon” in its opening scene took me a step closer. Then, finally, around maybe 2003, either an uncle gave me a mix CD with “Villiers Terrace” on it or he gave the CD to my sister and I stole it from her, but either way once I heard that track it clicked, and Echo became a band that I really liked. It took time and I had to get pushed from a few different places, but I found my way to something good.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

That same year, 2003, is when the original RS500 dropped. My dad saw a copy at the grocery and gave it to me. I was 22 and home from school for Christmas and, being home with little to do, I obsessed over it. I read every review twice, I circled albums I wanted to hear by bands that seemed interesting. The issue was especially important then because by 2003, I had reached peak snob. I was really into punk and hardcore and shows in basements. I am sure you know the type. If my present self sat at a table with my friends from 2003 I doubt I could keep up, so insular and specific was our world. The RS500 started to chip away at a lot of my pretensions and gave me context for not only the music I loved, but also the music I hated. And sometimes context is enough to make a Honky Chateau or At Budokan seem listenable. This was good, I needed to lighten up or I might have turned into someone like Barry...only I would have been so much worse.

The scene in High Fidelity is three minutes long. In that short time, the dialogue references Echo and the Bunnymen, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Bob Dylan, Green Day, the Stiff Little Fingers, the Beta Band, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Serge Gainsbourg, and Joni Mitchell.  There are also clearly visible record covers from Bad Brains, the Mummies, Motorhead, and the Minutemen, and these are just the ones I can identify. It’s hardly a 500-album compendium. But it stuck with me. I got a nudge. Maybe without it I don’t vibe with “The Killing Moon” and maybe I’m not here right now typing this. It gets harder and harder to stay stoked on new tunes. So if you’ve heard something good, let me know. And if you see that Echo/JMC connection you’ll have to enlighten me, because it doesn’t make any sense at all.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#464: Def Leppard, "Hysteria" (1987)

Out of touch, out of reach, yeah, you could try to get closer to me

A puffy ginger mullet, braces, freckles and acne, garish Jams shorts, a Quicksilver T-shirt, high-top white Reeboks, a stonewashed jean jacket, loitering the aisles of Kemp Mill music at Tysons Corner mall. Mooning over Karin D., my first unrequited love, calling up DC101 and requesting “Love Bites.” Googling her now, over 25 years later, it appears she is teaching kindergarten in the same town, perhaps corralling children down the same hallways of the same school where we (I) first fell in love. I’ve moved probably fifteen times since then: five countries, as many states. When I move on I often wonder what I leave behind: a sense of connection, the slow establishment of relations, resources, comfort; each stop chalking up a few new acquaintances to have them drift away after the next move or the next next. I’ll see you when I see you. A fading cipher in suburban DC, Denver, New York, Baltimore, Tuscaloosa, Chicago, Rome, Saigon, Colombo, Hong Kong.

This album is not holding up at all. When I’ve listened to Def Leppard in the past ten or twenty years, I’ve opted for Pyromania, the album previous to this and possessed of a drummer with two arms and a full band unaware of danger, unconcerned with coming drug overdoses, not yet ensconced in Bible study, just ready to fucking rock. “Photograph,” off Pyromania, is the only Def Leppard song that still seems to have any value to me; its paean to longing, the impossibility of the woman in the picture; the cliché of a preteen boy and a lingerie catalog. While Hysteria’s “Women,” couched in Christian creation myth, is a disassembling of the woman into hair, eyes, legs, thighs; a KFC orgy, the photograph cut apart and reassembled in a cubist collage. Ahead of its time I suppose, “Women” is “Photograph” as Photoshop.

Oh, I get hysterical, hysteria, oh can you feel it? (Oh can you feel it?) Do you believe it? (Do you believe it?)

According to the Internet, female hysteria was a not-uncommon malady that afflicted women for a period of approximately 2,000 years before its unaccountable disappearance from the medical rolls about a hundred years ago; its early manifestations caught the scholarly attentions of Plato and Hippocrates. They attributed its cause to a “wandering womb,” as the woman’s uterus strolled throughout her body wreaking havoc upon internal systems like a collection of unruly droogs. Treatment varied from a hysterectomy—complete removal of the offending organ—to a doctor manually stimulating the afflicted woman’s genitals, bringing about “paroxysm” and a calming of hysterical tendencies. It is thought that a doctor’s fatigued hands occasioned the invention of the first mechanical vibrator.

Karin doesn’t appear to have a Facebook page. Is it under her married name? What the hell, Karin? Could you have saved me from this? Could I be at the Vienna Inn right now eating a Chili Dog with the boys? (I’m pretty sure the Vienna Inn closed down; it is now either a Chipotle or a Starbucks.) Could we go down to Neighbors on Sunday for some brews, wings, and the ‘Skins game? Would our children be playing Little League baseball at the old field, sponsored by Auto Zone, PetSmart? Would they be skateboarding in the drainage ditch by the community center? Enacting pyromania in the woods by the bike path, as Matt S. and I did, throwing fireworks into the trees, panic as the creeping tongues of fire spread, the wail of the siren. Matt’s mother believed that we’d just stumbled upon it; mine, less so, seasoned by my early mischief and affinity for fire.

I saw a picture of Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen on Dave Mustaine’s—Megadeth guitarist and singer—Twitter the other day. I follow Mustaine for comic value; he has become a caricature of the caricature that is Ted Nugent: guitar god, right-wing hysteric, 9/11 conspiracy theorist, though “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due” is still a ripping tune (as is “Stranglehold”). Dave Mustaine reminds me that turning into a reactionary asshole is the prerogative of all aging white men in this world, feeling hemmed in by a changing society they do not understand. Dave makes me feel a little better about my dad’s transformation in recent years: from a fiscally conservative, mostly sensible Republican to a man living in utter terror of anything outside the realm of his immediate influence. ISIS terrorists piggyback Ebola-carrying immigrants into his middle-American garage—they conspire against freedom while engaging in sordid homosexual acts under a tattered and soiled American flag in the substantial bed of his American-made pickup. In the picture on Dave’s Twitter, Phil’s head resembled an unnaturally distended birthday party balloon with a pageboy wig.

I gotta know tonight, I feel alone tonight, can’t stop this feeling, can’t stop this fire

Like hysteria, nostalgia was once a disease, though men were the primary sufferers of this particular ailment. The Internet tells us it was first discovered in the mid-1600s among soldiers sick for the comforts of home; the phrase “homesick” is derived directly from the word nostalgia’s Greek roots. Treatment ranged from the sensible: slowly monitored withdrawal from the object of affection, to the monstrous: live burial. During the U.S. Civil War, the preferred treatment was abasement and repeated insinuations of unmanliness: a boy’s favorite schoolyard taunt: “fucking pussy.” The diagnosis of nostalgia was carried on through the Great Wars.

I watched this movie Murderball recently, about the Paralympic Wheelchair Rugby team. Not to spoil it, but the team loses a match to their rival Canadian team at the 2004 games, making their best possible result the bronze medal, a great disappointment for a team that expects gold. The scene after the match is one of sadness, with many of the athletes and their loved ones crying. A dad stoops down to his son’s wheelchair and hugs his boy and cradles his boy’s head in his hands and tears flow from both men as the father tells the son he is the greatest son a father could ever hope for, that he is so very proud of him and loves him so very much.

It’s such a magical mysteria, when you get that feeling (When you get that feeling), when you start believing (When you start believing)

I had a crush on a Paralympic gold medalist once. She won medals in both the summer and winter games in wheelchair basketball and skiing. I remember one night in a Tuscaloosa bar—a place where the occasional “Pour Some Sugar on Me” would not be out of place, soused dudes and chicks pumping fists to the chorus—and I was tanked and the Paralympian and I got into a shouting match about something the specifics of which I do not recall, our foreheads pressed hard into each other’s, my unfocused eyes reflecting hers. Out of the corner of my beleaguered vision, her (I guess) boyfriend watched sheepishly, horrified across the room. Exhausted by my foolishness, she pushed off the barstool, into her wheelchair, and was gone. I watched her many continuing victories on a scratchy Internet feed from Beijing, 2008. One of the guys on the men’s team was in my Early American Literature summer school class at the University of Alabama; I do not recall him as a very good student, though I do remember an embarrassing moment when I asked him when he would be out of the chair, thinking it was a temporary injury. “Uh, never,” he replied.

Oh babe, Hysteria when you’re near, come on closer, closer to me

—Erik Wennermark

#465: The Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (1999)

Queen of the Savages / I Think I Need a New Heart

It does not often snow in Virginia. Rain does not often freeze. When you wake to a front porch enrobed in ice, you are not quite sure how to approach it. You think, Salt. Some people would have put down salt. And you look at the bag of trash in your hand that needs, somehow, to get to the can on the curb, and you look at the eight steep steps that stand between where you are and where you need to be. You know you cannot walk on something that shiny, just walk without both hands on the handrail.

Here is what seems best: to throw the bag of trash to the sidewalk, and labor your way down to meet it. You try to throw it gently, but it lands on its side and a bottle breaks and you are shocked, for a moment, by the noise, the disorder—though, once it happens, you think: What else could I possibly have expected?

Kiss Me Like You Mean It / It’s a Crime / Epitaph for My Heart

I don’t know what it means, not really, to write something off as bad debt. I can, of course, infer: a write-off means you pay less in taxes, right? And bad debt will never be repaid. (Well that was a bad investment, you said once when I told you I wanted only you, & had for a long time been with no other men.) Bad debt will never be repaid & so the government says, we will counter this wrong. You owe us less this year, they say, because you have faced a hardship. You owe us less this year because life handed you something unfair. Is that right? I don’t know if that’s right. Maybe that isn’t what it means at all. But if I were guessing, that’s what I’d guess. It was bad debt, we say, shrugging. We asked them to pay & they wouldn’t. We asked them to pay but then they were gone. They owe us but it doesn’t matter. Just bad debt. Some, & a little more.

Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing / Love is Like a Bottle of Gin

The first time I kissed you I thought: there will never be another man I will kiss as well as this. There are so many, many true things that don’t matter one bit.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

Two Kinds of People / (Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy

I have a friend who is a professor. He is very very handsome and very very kind, and because of this one of his students thought he might love her. He’d done nothing to deserve this, her waterfall of assumptions, the angry things she said to him when he, tactfully and professionally and, still, kindly, set her straight. But when he told me, my first reaction was not to sympathize with him. Instead, I said, unthinkingly, Oh. That poor, poor girl. He looked at me, surprised, as if I were accusing him of something. And I felt bad, seeing his confusion, but felt worse, still, for the girl, oh that poor girl and her aching heart and her bottomless want and her endless human striving for a life that, if it could just go right for a few minutes, would feel like something more.

All My Little Words / The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be

Are there more varieties of heartbreak, or of love?

The Things We Did and Didn’t Do

He poured a shot, & another.

I poured a shot, & another.

We took the shots & took more & walked to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes & came back home & poured more shots. We took the shots because when we took the shots suddenly things got less complicated. We took the shots & I picked a card & he lit a piece of paper towel on fire, blew it out, & rubbed the burned parts along his forearm until they dissolved—the ashes stuck, left a 3 and a C marked emphatic like a tattoo & he said was it a three of clubs & I said yes. By then we are outside, it is cold, more cigarettes, his car parked right out front. He showed me the mark where someone keyed it long ago—his ex, he used to think, he said, but he doesn’t anymore. & I think it probably was her, I didn’t tell him but I think it: he is the kind of man who’d drive a woman to extremes. So we turned the music louder than it ever should’ve gone & we took the shots & when we danced in the living room his hands were on me & he said what is a song that’s made you cry, & I said, I don’t know, none of them, though the truth is all of them, & then we were kissing & I pulled back, said, Slap me. He did. I put my face very close to his face. Slap me again.

—Katelyn Kiley

#466: Coldplay, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" (2002)

The last time I really listened to Coldplay, I was seventeen years old, which is probably the perfect age both to listen and then to stop really listening to Coldplay.

That, at least, is the cool thing to think—Coldplay being a band that has never been cool to love, though based on hushed conversations I’ve had with Friends Who Shall Remain Nameless, I suspect that most people have secretly loved Coldplay at one point or another.

On Rolling Stone’s Best 500 Albums List, the little blurb beneath A Rush of Blood to the Head reads, “Coldplay churn out bighearted British guitar rock on their second album – what Chris Martin aptly called ‘emotion that can make you feel sad while you're moving your legs,’” which is hilariously meaningless and vague, because exactly how is that any different from any other type of music? This, it seems, is also part of the reason why people hate them: their banality, their overwhelming, soupy blandness.

Despite “Clocks” insistent presence on the radio and on television shows circa 2003ish, the music video for “The Scientist” was my gateway into the rest of Coldplay’s oeuvre. I was at a friend’s house, sprawled across her sofa in the sort of sprawl specific only to fifteen-year-olds, watching television, when the music video appeared: a close-up of Chris Martin’s face filling the entire screen. “The Scientist” was the first video I remember seeing that didn’t involve a boy band or girl group dancing against a bright red background (note: I did not have cable growing up. I was deprived), and Chris Martin walking backwards over walls and through forests and floating leaves was the Most Beautiful Thing I Had Ever Seen, the revelation as he reverse-jaunted up a hill and past his apparently dead onscreen girlfriend to the site of a horrific car accident hitting me like a thousand beautiful bricks, each one finely crafted for me and me alone.

I was recovering from a car accident myself, one so bad it put me in the hospital with several broken bones, a new titanium rod lining the muscles inside my leg, and a morphine drip in my arm for a week. When, after a month, I finally returned to school in a wheelchair, my friends liked to steer me through the hallways at breakneck speeds, which I allowed if only for the change of pace.

It was an accident with no one to blame: I had stepped out in front of a car moving through a busy intersection. The bus in the first lane had stopped to wave me on, concealing the sedan in the next lane rushing up. I didn’t see the car, and the driver didn’t see me.

I spent a lot of time rewinding the sixty seconds of that one afternoon attempting to see what went wrong and when. With their video for “The Scientist,” Coldplay made me feel my minor tragedy—that the very concepts of tragedy and danger in general—could be romantic and compelling, rather than things to sensibly avoid. This of course is an iffy premise to buy into, but one that later would make the Twilight novels so popular. I was hooked. Their music became a receptacle for me to wash my own experiences clean of nuance and reckoning.

Coldplay’s music is manipulative. But it also manages to be impotent at the same time. “You’d practically expect the band to show up at your doorstep with a wilting bouquet and a Hallmark card,” the online music zine Pitchfork wrote of Coldplay’s single “Yellow.” Yet I can imagine that, to me as a teenager, a boy showing up with a card and flowers—who even cares about the state of them—sounded pretty ideal. And indeed, this was exactly the sort of sentimental crap—flowers, cards, candies—that made me feel better at a time when I inhabited a body completely foreign, with all its broken bones.

I spent weeks struggling down the length of my living room with a walker, and learned how to inch down the front steps on my butt with the help of my parents hovering at either side. I wasted days at a time in bed.

My life did not feel incredibly romantic or exciting. Hell, most of life is not incredibly exciting. But back then, this brutal fact enraged me, especially when I was stuck inside the house and relearning the basic concept of walking. I was fifteen and hormonal and the needle of my emotional odometer swung wildly from I’m fine to best day ever to I hate my life. The smallest thing could set off a melodramatic internal storm: brushing the arm of a crush in the hallway, an offhand glance from a friend, my father crunching his cereal across the breakfast table.

I preferred the dramatics of X&Y and Viva La Vida to Coldplay’s earlier albums, though it strikes me now, re-listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head, how much more personal their earlier music seems. I mean, not that much more personal, because let’s face it, Coldplay never really got beyond generalities. But still, in their first two albums you can hear a band rather than a faceless, over-produced machine. There’s a lot of distance between their later music and the listener, perhaps because their songs, through increasing popularity and overplayed Apple commercials, were becoming so very public.

I cannot imagine Coldplay’s music as a shared and communal experience, though such an experience is arguably fundamental to the very roots of music itself, because my teenage relationship with them was solitary and internal. For me, they embodied emotion itself. The minute I imagine Coldplay as a band that can be heard and scrutinized by other people, I can hear how they actually sound: cheap and sentimental.

“If nothing else, [Coldplay’s music] is harmless and pretty. Unfortunately, it's nothing else. If that's what you look for in your music, by all means, go for it. If you want substance, I suggest moving on,” sighs Pitchfork on Parachutes. Condescension aside, this is Coldplay’s Great Flaw: their music is emotion that they don’t bother to negotiate or refine.

“If your teachers suggest that your poems are too sentimental,” the poet Mary Reufle writes, “that is only the half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?” Coldplay does not try to be a stone.

The suggestion that harmless, pretty sentimentality automatically negates substance sounds wrong to me. I want to believe that the willingness to embrace such sentimentality must be indicative of something other than laziness or emotional unintelligence—of what, I’m not yet sure. And we all contain the potential, the capacity, for unrestrained sentimentality within us—it just doesn’t overwhelm as often as it did in adolescence. But it’s hopeful to imagine that it’s still there, growing and living and waiting to unfurl.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

To be as affected as I was by “The Scientist,” you first have to put aside the logic lacking in its music video. If you replay it so that it runs forward, Chris Martin essentially leaves his lover in the field to die—which is actually the most unromantic, fucked up thing ever—healthily strolls out of a totaled car and past her into the woods, pauses to lean on tree trunks and gaze forlornly into the distance, and comes to rest, for reasons unascertainable, on a mattress in the middle of a sidewalk. It’s nonsensical and utterly constructed.

These rather obvious hiccups would not have even occurred to me back when I was a teenager governed more by emotion than reason. Coldplay, the “most insufferable band of the decade,” managed to also become one of the most popular precisely because they embody our insufferable, bland, and banal emotions. We like to think we are different from other people, but really we are just as unique as everyone else. And we disdain sentimentality because it makes us vulnerable to this knowledge, though saccharine language is often the most straightforward—if the most unartful—way to get our sloppy, over-the-top feelings across.  

Ten years later, I am sufficiently cynical enough that the flaws in logic almost negate for me any emotional power that the video for “The Scientist” held over me, though on some primal level I still feel it’s a beautiful song. Why do I find it beautiful even when I know it is ridiculous?

I wish I could still recklessly love Coldplay—part of me would love to be as naïve and un-self aware as I was at fifteen. Growing older has meant that I no longer need to listen to music the same way as I did back then—obsessively, maniacally, with my entire body, hunkered into the passenger seat of my mother’s minivan, the sweep of trees past the window registering only as an extension of chords. Crossing the street with headphones in and barely noticing my own surroundings until it’s too late.

Ten years later, Chris Martin’s voice is still as familiar yet distant to me as my own bones inside my skin. Even now his singing slips into a vein, like the IV my nurse used to pump me up with morphine, numbing my body with a dumb high of hyperbole and madness. In this same memory I’m now rewinding myself into, I can see my father leaning over me in my hospital bed. He’s holding my hand, and crying for the first time, and I know there is nothing more sentimental than this, and nothing more goddamn true.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#467: Bruce Springsteen, "Tunnel of Love" (1987)

My mother listened to Springsteen’s “One Step Up” when she left my father.

Or, that’s the story I made out of the story she told me.

I was too young to remember their parting, only old enough to cache living at a house with him and, later, living at another without. It was as sudden and easy a break as waking from a dream—one life into another, each in its own place.

I don’t know what time of year it was, if we left in the night or while he was at work. If he was pleading with her to stay or telling her to go. I don’t know if we stayed somewhere for a while, or if we moved into the little white rancher my grandfather bought for us.

I don’t remember fights. I don’t remember crying. I might have told my father goodbye, or I might have not.

Maybe I didn’t know I needed to.

I couldn’t even tell you how old I was, or what year. It’s the divorce after the separation that I remember—his old partner moving in and my mother asking me to keep secrets, crying in a dark classroom while my fourth-grade teacher knelt on the floor so that she was my height and bigger than my grief.

A few years later, when my mother bought a couple of used Springsteen cassettes to play in her Volvo named Vicky, I remembered the song. I think I even knew some of the words. (Or, maybe, it’s that I know the words now when I’m remembering this, so it feels like I knew them then.) Even before she told me this was the song, it reminded me of my parents together—something that I don’t really remember as an image but an ambience, how silence breaks over bodies rather than an empty space.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

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My life these last six years has been made of one loss after another, of overlapping shadows. Death, many deaths. Cancer.

Before all of this, when my husband and I were first dating, I told him one night in his car that I felt like I was due for great loss, because I’d had a relatively stable life—or so it seemed—up until then. I felt then like grief’s hurricanes had all turned back out to sea.

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When I listen to Tunnel of Love now, I have a hard time listening to it all the way through, not because  I can’t keep it together or something, but because it feels like multiple albums. The title track feels like a single, and so it’s that late-80s reverbed, sensitive pop Americana track that stands alone, dividing the (mostly) throwaway opening tracks from the bittersweet quartet of “Brilliant Disguise,” “One Step Up,” “When You’re Alone,” and “Valentine’s Day.” When I listen to Tunnel of Love, I either listen to “Tunnel of Love” or the last four songs.

Because of my listening habits and my associations with the songs, Tunnel of Love doesn’t feel like a whole album. It feels like the air inside a room, a checking off of time, like looking at a photo with someone cut out of the frame.

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Mostly I wonder if it actually means something that my mother listened to “One Step Up” when she left my father. If it means something to me. Or about me.

My mother also revealed I was conceived to Ravel’s “Bolero.” Could your conception song—or the songs your parents met to, or split up to—have something to do with you, with who you are? Are there those who believe that songs have the same sway over us as the stars, who would say “One Step Up” and “Bolero” are just as important as the fact that I’m a Cancer and a Fire Rabbit? That it’s part of the nurture that made me into who I am, like the fact that I was raised where I was raised with the money we had, the language we spoke, and the education I was given.

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Tunnel of Love doesn’t mean what I want it to mean, what I feel like it should feel—a swell of grief, a touchstone in loss. But it wasn’t my soundtrack for leaving—I don’t even remember leaving. It’s music for coming back, for trying—for almost—remembering.

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My father’s coming to visit at the end of this week. I’ve been listening to “One Step Up” on repeat all morning, and I can’t help but wonder if he knew this song as the one that soundtracked my mother’s departure. If he would ask me to turn it off if it came on the radio. Or if he would act like nothing bothered him. But most of all, I wonder if he had a song. I wonder if I know the words. I wonder if we ever sang it.

—Emilia Phillips