#428: The Police, "Outlandos d'Amour" (1978)

Listening to Outlandos d'Amour at the Office, 2015

8:59 am, “Next to You”
A strong, upbeat start. Pleasingly repetitive, driving guitar. To my left, a group of twenty-something women are talking about baby rabies—not, like, babies getting rabies but women getting rabies for babies. Meaning they’re insatiable, and they want them. What can I do? All I want is to be next to you. The Police make me think of my mother, and I wonder if she ever felt the way we feel in our twenties, but then I remember she’d already had two babies.

9:35 am, “So Lonely”
After a team meeting, we retreat to our desks and stuff in our earbuds. Sting sings falsetto over a reggae beat. No one’s knocked upon my door for a thousand years or more. We reply. We forward. We reply-all with emoji sign-off, and, for a minute, we feel good.

10:17 am, “Roxanne”
A client call went bad. Or it went good. Sometimes the hallway laughter sounds the same. The laughter at the beginning of “Roxanne” was supposedly caused by one of the Police accidentally falling butt-first onto the piano. I picture Stewart Copeland, cigarette in his mouth, bleached locks flying.

11:28 am, “Hole in My Life”
My inbox is full again. The chorus of this song is catchier than I want it to be: hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, yeah, yeah, yeah. In an old Rolling Stone review of Outlandos d’Amour, the critic writes: “Sting can't make us see that there's anything special about this generation, because he knows there really isn't.”

Graphic by Marie Sicola

11:34 am, “Peanuts”
Before I found out my mother couldn’t name a single Police song, I thought she’d love “Peanuts.” Certainly she’d resonate with the Police: don’t wanna hear about the drugs you’re taking, the love you’re making, the muck they’re raking. Years ago, we’d seen Sting on TV, in a sleeveless, rhinestoned shirt, and she’d said what a “very nice looking young man” he was. She said that about others, too: Byron Sully, the tomahawk-throwing, also-sleeveless boy toy of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman; Jim Brickman, the clean-cut pianist; John Wayne in chaps. But this time she’d said it with feeling, like he was someone she used to know, in the intimate way all girls know their crushes.

12:30 pm, “Can’t Stand Losing You”
I think a bird has gotten inside until I see a guy doing bird calls in front of the window. I mute the music and someone’s talking about Appalachian mamas putting Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles and rotting their teeth away. Someone else mentions something about justice in America: I can’t stand, I can’t stand losing you.

2:01 pm, “Truth Hits Everybody”
One thing my mother always has loved is the truth—all kinds of little everyday truths, old wives’ tales, Women’s Day articles, and biblical, capital-T Truth. Recently, she moved back to the mountain country she was born in after thirty years in sheet-flat Iowa. For weeks she felt altitude sick. I got that way, too, when I visited, as if being too close to the sky makes your lungs give out. When I first hear Sting say, “Truth hits everybody,” I think he’s saying, “Truth hates everybody.” I can’t get that out of my head.

2:05 pm, “Born in the ‘50s”
At a tech company, none of us were born in the 1950’s, not even our bosses. Maybe our grandmothers were getting baby rabies about then, clutching our mothers to their chests when President Kennedy died and blaming it all on the Communists, just the way Sting says.

3:40 pm, “Be My Girl—Sally”
The first half of the song is just monotonous background noise as I watch a pair of co-workers over in Quality Assurance dancing under a parrot piñata. But then, out of nowhere, the Police break into a 2-minute, sporadically iambic spoken-word poem about a blow-up doll named Sally, who’s like a rubber ball, served up in the morning deflated on a plate, and it becomes clear my mother would hate everything about this.

4:53 pm, “Masoka Tanga”
People are zipping up, but the Police are in the Caribbean, ad libbing and jamming away. Ma wa ba wa ta la throw awa, to ma ba sue le dah, oh! Clearly they’ve got something to prove. I just want an ending that feels more final than dissipating drumbeats, but, this time, that’s all there is—the fadeout, and that nagging, unexplainable feeling of wanting to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

—Lacy Barker

#429: Brian Eno, "Another Green World" (1975)

—but what point is there, I often wonder, in even trying to assign meanings, in bothering to try to understand mysteries: things happen, things don’t happen, and who (not me, usually) can say why, and who knows the sum of everything I don’t know (have never known; will never know) that informs those happenings and non-happenings, and how would knowing alter what’s already transpired: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” reads the first of the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards Brian Eno designed with his friend, the late painter Peter Schmidt, and which Eno used extensively in the composition and recording of Another Green World: generous advice for any artist contemplating one’s next move, because whose life can proceed without full respect given to one’s countless errors, without at least pretending (or accepting) that one meant some of them: but is meaning even anticipatory, or only retrospective? That evening—all those evenings—I wandered Hooker Avenue looking at footprints in concrete sidewalk squares and the etched plexiglass of bus shelters and crows inscribing dusk and chain-link fences orange with rust: everything seemed marked—there seemed a necessary link between my next move as an artist and my next move as a person: the poems I’d begun writing in response to the maddening, endless, meaningless rattle of an idling Ford F-250 diesel engine on an otherwise beautiful sunny September morning because I felt if I didn’t write them I might never write anything else, and in one of which I encoded my debt to the moods Eno’s music offered me as I wrote—“the extant daydreams of the man ironing / a pair of trousers and wandering some greener world…”

Still, if I ever thought that Eno’s music might offer me meanings, a record such as Another Green World, with its sideways pop songs accompanied by small instrumentals, confounded that belief: making meaning and evading meaning is one of the primary tensions of this LP, famously composed (or improvised and then edited) in the studio rather than being planned, and anyway, as with most pop music, meaning resides less in these songs than in whatever experiences we connect to them—as Eno said, “meanings can be generated”: or, as in “Sky Saw,” the first track on Another Green World: “All the clouds turn to words / all the words float in sequence / no one knows what they mean / everyone just ignores them…”

The fretless bass and “Anchor Bass” and Jaki Leibezeit-style drumming (by Phil Collins!) that begin “Sky Saw” would have, had I heard them in my teens, meant nothing I wanted to be involved with—too proggy and noodly, too excessive—but the “Digital Guitar” and “Snake Guitar” (such fanciful instruments fill the LP’s liner notes) and John Cale’s seesaw viola line that ends the song, well, sure, those would’ve always sounded great to my ears. But by the time I bought this record, in grad school, I could appreciate this song—even if I still preferred the short instrumentals on the LP, musical fragments that rarely resolved and onto which I could project whatever feeling I liked: sometimes, I’m pretty sure, I could listen to an hours-long loop of “In Dark Trees” or (other times) “The Big Ship” (“My intention,” Eno wrote three years later, in the liner notes to his record Ambient 1: Music for Airports, “is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres”)—

—but I never finished my idea that Eno’s seventies solo LPs seem to concern middle age to me, or mean more to me in my own middle age than a lot of other records, or than they did when I was younger, even though Eno was himself a young man when he recorded them—“On Some Faraway Beach,” yes, but, on this LP, “St. Elmo’s Fire” (“Brown Eyes and I were tired / we had walked and we had scrambled / through the moors and through the briars / through the endless blue meanders…”) or “I’ll Come Running” (“I’ll find a place somewhere in the corner / I’m going to waste the rest of my days / just watching patiently from the window / just waiting, seasons change, some day, oh ho / my dreams will point you through that garden gate…”) or “Everything Merges with the Night” (“Rosalie, I’ve been waiting all evening / possibly years, I don’t know / counting the passing hours / everything merges with the night”) or especially “Golden Hours,” which begins with Farfisa chords (“Choppy Organs”: the song also credits “Spasmodic Percussion” and “Uncertain Piano”) so lush and familiar that—because I heard this synthesizer sound throughout the pop music of my childhood and absorbed it environmentally—it triggers a near-unconscious nostalgia in me, even before Eno starts to sing lyrics that explicitly reference perceptions of time and age and discordant piano notes ring low in the mix:

“The passage of time / is flicking dimly upon the screen / I can’t see the lines / I used to think I could read between / perhaps my brains have turned to sand / oh me, oh my / I think it’s been an eternity / you’d be surprised / at my degree of uncertainty / how can moments go so slow? / several times / I’ve seen the evening slide away / watching the signs / taking over from the fading day / perhaps my brains are old and scrambled…”

At that point, Robert Fripp’s sparkling guitar and a background voice sighing like John Lennon’s in the middle of “A Day in the Life” animate the song’s dreamy order before contrapuntal overdubbed vocals (“who would believe what a poor set of ears can tell you?”) and John Cale’s rich, romantic viola slide the song toward its fadeout.

And if I sit here on a mid-May morning in 2015 listening one more time to Another Green World—the album both background and foreground—while outside my window winds swirl hurricanes of hundreds of maple keys, and feeling still almost certain that events I experienced in 1995 happened, say, just a few years ago and that 1975—well, those things happened a long time ago, of course, I was a tiny kid then, but it wasn’t forever ago, it’s not history, I’m not that old—and maybe now this all sounds as noodly and self-indulgent and excessive to you as “Sky Saw” once sounded to me, one more dude’s self-pitying moan about how mystifying life feels from his own compromised and minor point of view: but maybe I’m not totally wrong, since, as theoretical physicist Paul Davies has written in Scientific American, “We do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time.…the flow of time is subjective, not objective”—and there’s always another world and it’s always a greener world, and maybe middle age means admitting that that world’s (or this world’s) as much a daydream as the buzzing, humming, twinkling textures in “The Big Ship,” building and shimmering and cresting and fading, so many hidden intentions disguised as errors—

—Joshua Harmon

#430: Vampire Weekend, "Vampire Weekend" (2008)

Dear Fifteen-Year-Old Me,

It’s two in the morning right now and I’m worrying about what I should invest in for college (Mace? A lifetime supply of laundry detergent?), and how I’m going to leave everybody and everything I’m comfortable with behind in a few months, and if I’m going to find a roommate who I can actually get along with for a whole year, and why I can’t just go back to being a fifteen-year-old. I didn’t have many problems when I was you—your problems extended as far as worrying about how much junk food you could hide in your room without Mom finding out or how long you could get away with avoiding your chores. Fifteen is naïvety and ignorance and, just like Taylor Swift said, there's nothing to figure out.

Do you remember that time you sat in your room at some after-midnight time—the house quiet save for your iPod blasting Vampire Weekend’s brilliantly-named first album, Vampire Weekend, at full-volume like any ‘normal’ teenager would. That night was the first time you said “fuck,” which, of course, was the best part of “Oxford Comma” to any fifteen-year-old goody-goody. It was the first ‘fuck the system’ song you’d ever heard. But when the word slipped out you smacked your hand over your mouth as if you’d just said the most horrifying word known to man. You were so afraid somebody was going to hear you. But what if someone had? What if you had been out with your family? What would have happened then?

Do you remember the only answer you could come up with?

Nothing.

And you started listening to more Vampire Weekend, and you started to feel powerful. And at fifteen, power is hard to feel. While your friends were dealing with eating disorders and school stress, you were listening to “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)” feeling that you were Blake—you were the one with the new face. And I’m going to let you in on a little, awful-but-true fact: When everybody else is going through rough patches and you’re sitting there with a genuine smile on your face, the power escalates. Your power radiated across the school and people came to you for advice, and because you were basically a teenage life-coach (Exaggeration? Please define the word. No, you were definitely a life-coach. You should have been paid for your killer services), the power you felt boarded a rocket and landed on the moon. In simpler terms: You were invincible; nothing could touch you. Just like Blake, the moon had a new face and that face was yours.

You became Johanna in “A-Punk,” stealing power as she stole the ring from His Honor’s lilywhite hand. But a reformation is coming just for you, by the name of “M79.” It's going to take a little time / While you're waiting like a factory line—those first two lines will hit you like a baseball going at ninety-three miles per hour. Because you pretty much believe in geocentric theory, except more to the point that you specifically are the center of the universe, you will believe that you, too, are waiting in a factory line. You are following the path of your fellow sophomores: going through the motions of high school, being conditioned for college, comparing friendships and pasts, etcetera. But as long as you’re in that factory line, what power do you really have?

So you’ll become less of a teeny-bopper drama queen—all thanks to Vampire Weekend and their cleverly-named first album. No longer will you dwell on the past or present, but you will begin to look toward the future and milk it for all it’s worth. And no more gossiping, either. When you desperately want to shit-talk, you’ll ask yourself WWEKD (What Would Ezra Koenig Do)? Because, after all, nastiness will cause your doom.

But that’s something to talk about in another letter, to Sixteen-Year-Old Me.

Do you remember going to the Bahamas for winter break sophomore year? “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was how you spent your time there. At the gym, at the beach, in the hotel room, wherever you could bring your iPod—the music was rushing into your head, flooding your senses with its frenzy.  You didn’t understand the song’s meaning, and I’m pretty sure I don’t either, but it was catchy and that’s all that mattered to you.

You know, when I think about it, fifteen was like a giant shrug of a year. You’d listen to “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” and just shrug along to it because you didn’t have to stand a chance against anything. You were under the radar; you were a speck on a windshield. You were small and unimportant and, no matter how much you denied it, I know you loved it. There were no big decisions, and you didn’t have to worry about the pin-striped men of morning or denying romance. It was just a happy tune that you were happy to listen to.

I remember how “Campus” and “Mansard Roof” were your favorites, though. You made a separate playlist just for those two songs and you’d sit there, listening to them go back and forth for hours. At fifteen, you sought freedom, and that’s what those two songs gave off. Sleeping on a balcony? Count you in. Walking on the tops of buildings? Perfect. You pictured yourself in those songs. You were on a campus; you were seeing Argentines collapse in defeat. But the song would change and you’d be back on the couch ignoring the dirty dishes. Far less exciting stuff.

But now? Now I’d choose dirty dishes over this album. I don’t need exciting stuff anymore. The only song I still listen to is “I Stand Corrected,” since I stand corrected: I do not have any power, and more things matter than catchiness, and I have to face-off with so many big decisions, and complete freedom is not what I want. Koenig puts it best when he says No one cares when you are wrong / But I’ve been at this for far too long. I’ve been wrong for about half of my life, and nobody has really cared. I was young and naïve, what could anybody say? But it’s time I make some right moves now. I can’t afford to not give a fuck about an Oxford comma when it may affect my grades and I can’t afford to fuck the bears out in Princetown when it may affect my safety (and health and relationships, if you’re really thinking about it). I’m not you anymore, no matter how much I wish I was.

I know that seventeen is very close to fifteen and I am still a little baby of a human, but adult problems have started popping up and I’m just a little baby of a human. How am I supposed to deal with emotions and boys and college and…I don’t know…taxes? Adulthood is ominous and looming ever closer, ever taller. And I’m sorry to break it to you, Fifteen-Year-Old Me, but you haven’t grown at all. We’re still 5’3”, so most things seem giant and scary, but adulthood takes the cake—no doubt about it. Remember how Six-Year-Old Me had to have the closet doors closed for fear of monsters? Well now it’s kind of like that except the doors are creaking open and there actually is an undefeatable monster in there: adulthood.

Do you want to switch places? I long to be you again; when I was you, I had nothing to figure out and life was dumb and fun. But now, life is stressful and I have too much to figure out. I don’t feel ready.

I’m not sure why I started writing this letter. You can’t write back, but I figure that since we’re the same person, you could help me in some way.

So. Do you have any advice, Fifteen-Year-Old Me?

Please tell me something other than that I should start adulthood by asking myself only one question: WWEKD?

Love and miss you,

Seventeen-Year-Old Me

—Nicole Efford

#431: PJ Harvey, "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" (2000)

As a young girl, my life was full of firecrackers, flickering television screens, stolen lipstick, and whiskey. It was full of boiling Irish blood, broken bones, and grudges, full of smoke and poker and cutting dresses out of magazines, slick shaven legs and dirty feet. My sense of self rested somewhere between flowery chalk drawings in the driveway and late-night basketball games, between period blood and motorcycle grease. My family was full of vocal men and silenced women and I never wanted either for myself and I never understood why it had to be that way…How could that happen? How could that happen again?

*

I am fifteen years old, in the car on a road trip to my grandparents’ house in Illinois. I have been listening to Pixies, Nick Cave, the Cramps, and know all the words, but I’m sick of women blurred in the background. At this point in my life, I don’t know how to articulate any of this, but I do know I want to see myself more in the things I love, want to see a young woman with her head up, smiling, but don’t know where to look.

I put my older sister’s burned copy of PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in my portable CD player. I don’t know what to expect because I only know the name. I press play. The disc spins under the plastic. I hear the frantic power of a woman’s guitar, a woman’s song.

*

When I started playing guitar, I was eleven. I played and sang the songs I knew best from childhood and any songs I was taught. Country songs about men in love. Folk songs about women dying beautifully. I’m watching from the wall. I sang the male experience, soaked it all up as the only kind of experience worth putting into words. One day there’ll be a place for us.

*

I hear a woman’s song and it is as if the words were meant for me. It is the year after my father left home. Things I once thought unbelievable in my life have all taken place. I saw it coming, but I am still heartbroken. All around me people bleed. We are no longer speaking. This world all gone to war. I lean my head against the car window’s cold glass, and listen with all my heart.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

*

This is the year I write my first song. Keep the walls from falling on me. And learn every PJ Harvey song I can. Just give me something I can believe. The year I learn to growl like a woman. I was in need of help. I am in need of articulation. It will take years and the help of many more women for me to be able to say I only need myself, and mean it.  

*

This is the year I meet my first love. We act like lovers. Speak to me about your inner charm, and how you’ll keep me safe from harm—I don’t think so. We hold hands and kiss—speak to me—he tells me he loves me—the language of love—so I write him into my songs—the language of violence—where I know my voice can dominate. I tell him they are all fiction.

*

When I write my first song, I feel connected to her and every other girl picking her guitar up to play, every other girl learning, for the first time, to use her voice—to speak for herself.

I start wearing leather with my lace, playing power chords. I show my first boyfriend the music video for “This is Love” on a school computer. He says she has a mouth like a ripped pocket. Sometimes I can see for miles. I start exploring the dark places of a woman in love with a man.

*

When I was fifteen, I heard a woman singing like I have never heard a woman sing before. Her voice, strained but powerful. Her P’s popped. Her H’s hissed. I learned her melodies and words by heart, and kept them close. Set myself free again.

When I think of her now, what she meant to my girlhood, I think of a stomping heeled shoe, the honesty of her womanliness in flux, her rough edges—feminine grit. It was for me. My small life, growing. Guitar strings and calloused fingers, and PJ Harvey in my headphones.

​—Amanda Bausch

#432: Brian Eno, "Here Come the Warm Jets" (1974)

One weekend afternoon c. 1984, when I was in eighth grade and pop music had supplanted almost every other source of potential meaning in my life, some DJ at WBCN 104.1 FM Boston—which I received in my bedroom forty miles west via a five-foot T-shaped gray plastic antenna I’d thumbtacked to my bedroom wall, only partly disguised by the early U2 posters I’d also hung there to cover the dark wallpaper and faux wood paneling—played the title track from Brian Eno’s second LP, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). My stereo then served as the primary conduit through which the external world reached me, but that external world—as represented by music, anyway—had yet to confound me so deeply. I can recall few first-time-I-heard moments as well as this one: my spruce-shaded bedroom in the upstairs corner of our house, the door shut against anything that might disturb the haphazardly rigorous self-education underway; my walnut desk with built-in bookcase and fluorescent light that my father had brought home from a yard sale; my mattress and boxspring on the floor beneath the window because I thought it looked cooler than having a bedframe; and these familiar quarters dismantled by what I understood as the willful strangeness of Eno’s song. At that point, I’d heard some of the odd, sometimes artsy whimsy of the Sixties—which I despised with a zeal appropriate to my age—and the artsy gestures of the new wave and post-punk I was discovering with an equal intensity—but I had no template whatsoever for this ballad’s plaintive lead guitar, mellow piano, and chorus singing about oh, how they’d climbed. I laughed at how absurd the song sounded, as the facts that much of Eno’s music deliberately entertains absurdity and irrationality, and that the bands I was learning to love owed overt and covert debts to his records, whooshed right over my unschooled head like the wind noises punctuating the song.

As much as I wanted to dismiss the song—it was old; it was weird, but not in a cool way; it was quiet and slow; it was unsettling and unfamiliar in ways I wasn’t ready for—I couldn’t. “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” bothered and beguiled me for years, even as my tastes got weirder and older and quieter and slower and more unsettling, and though I didn’t buy that LP, or any other Eno LP, for even more years, I never forgot that song, either.

*

“I was talking to David Bowie about…the records that first affected us and I said that the first one that I can really remember being awestruck by was Get A Job, by the Silhouettes, because I’d never heard doo-wop or anything like it, so it was a mystery, and really thrilling as well. He said it was either Eight Miles High or Mr. Tambourine Man for him, that sound just made him shiver.

“As you get older, you get fewer and fewer of those kind of thrills because you learn what the context of things is, so I can listen to the Silhouettes now and say ‘Oh yes that’s New York doo-wop,’ or whatever… and just being able to place it like that immediately reduces it, knowing that it’s one of many similar things, rather than being this strange singularity. I said to avoid that I suppose one of the reasons one becomes a composer is that you want to recreate that thrill for yourself. You want to do something that makes you say ‘God, where did that come from?’”

—Brian Eno, Melody Maker, “Energy Fails the Magician,” January 12, 1980, interviewed by Richard Williams

*

I heard Eno’s name invoked with respect (and occasional disdain) in the context of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, which he produced the same year I first heard his own music. I learned he’d been involved with some of the early Roxy Music tracks on the cassette my mother kept in the car (though I hadn’t yet seen his fantastic feathers-and-bell-bottoms glam shot inside the gatefold of For Your Pleasure)—and that he’d produced a bunch of the Talking Heads records I knew well. Eno reappeared when a friend dubbed Bauhaus’ cover version of “Third Uncle” on a mixtape. And when I discovered that there was much more to David Bowie than “Space Oddity” and “Suffragette City.” And when Eno said that My Bloody Valentine’s song “Soon” was the “vaguest piece of music ever to get into the charts.” By college in the early ’90s, I’d heard most of his solo recordings, and by the end of the decade I’d finally accumulated all the LPs, but still, it took middle age for me to appreciate Eno’s work as fully as I might, and once again it was a slow burner of a piano-led ballad that arrested me—“On Some Faraway Beach,” from his first LP, Here Come the Warm Jets:

Given the chance / I’ll die like a baby / On some faraway beach / When the season’s over / Unlikely I’ll be remembered / As the tide brushes sand in my eyes / I’ll drift away / Cast up on a plateau / With only one memory: / A single syllable / Oh, lie low, lie low…

Though Eno never wanted his lyrics to mean much—“Essentially all these songs have no meaning that I invested in them. Meanings can be generated within their own framework,” he once said, or “the words on the first album are just there to give the voice something to do. Just arbitrary sets of words which didn't add a dimension to the music”—sometimes even in middle age a pop song feels mere mirror to the same way it did at fourteen, and I see myself more in them than elsewhere (Borges: “I recognize myself less in [Borges’s] books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar”), and I don’t want to write about the title of Eno’s first solo LP or his famed sexual exploits or his tiff with Bryan Ferry: I want to talk about myself and that mirror, and two days: one circa 1984 in my boyhood bedroom, and one I can pin to June 17, 2009, thanks to a date written in a notebook, an evening I walked along Poughkeepsie’s Hooker Avenue just past South Grand Street, watching boys standing outside a 7-Eleven and composing in my head some lines in a poem while I listened to Here Come the Warm Jets on my iPod and thought about how even my plans to leave the town I hated depressed me, and maybe tried to make that feeling substantial by giving it the language of a poem and the soundtrack of a song that suddenly collapsed that fourteen-year-old self letting music make meaning for me and the middle-aged self who felt a growing awareness of just how precisely any of the meanings I try to make for myself are unlikely to be remembered amid a life that so often, even when I’ve learned the contexts for things, feels mysterious in my efforts to understand it—

*

Or, as Lester Bangs wrote about Here Come the Warm Jets in his review for Creem, “Don’t miss it; it’ll drive you crazy.”

—Joshua Harmon

#433: George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass" (1970)

In college, a friend told me I was a “dark horse,” a phrase I thought made me sound very compelling. This label transcended the perception I had of myself: fairly shy, quiet, boring. Or rather, I was interesting to myself—in the way, I suppose, that everyone is—but assumed my reserve came off as dull to others, which in turn made me worry that perhaps I really was dull. I rarely spoke up in public settings and classes, and I didn’t really open up to someone until I felt I could trust them, which usually took a long while. I was unsure sometimes whether my timidity was a hesitancy to speak my mind or if it was a symptom of having nothing to say.I was the sort of person who longed to be spontaneous because I recognized it as a desirable character trait, but struggled going along with last-minute changes in plans. It seemed all my friends were extroverts, and though they often pulled me out of myself, I also occasionally felt lost in the sea of their personalities. All of this to say, it was hard for me to reconcile my shyness with my self: who I knew I was, versus how I felt I must appear.

But maybe what I liked best about being thought of as a “dark horse” was the implication that I could exceed people’s expectations of me—that someday, terrifyingly, I could even blow my own expectations for myself out of the water. And there was something exotic about being the dark horse, so for awhile I used this term as an explanation, as a crutch. Instead of pushing myself to be more open and outspoken, I imagined myself sloshing with rivers of ancient wisdom. I dispensed advice to close friends with worldly sage, trying to lend the impression I had already lived a hundred lives before this one.

The moniker also put me in mind of my favorite Beatle, George Harrison, who was often called the same (and even had an album and a song called Dark Horse, which later led to his eponymous record label). Growing up, I had always identified with George because he was marked the “quiet one,” but maybe this comparison was wishful thinking on my part. I wanted my still waters to run deep without being sure they actually did. Regardless, it was comforting for me to have a shy person to look up to, especially one that was successful. I absorbed the fact that perhaps I could succeed at something I loved, even if I found it unbearable to be in the spotlight.

In popular imagination (or maybe just in my imagination), George was also the wise Beatle, the one who cared more about chasing inner peace than drugs and women.  In an interview with Guitar World, George’s son, Dhani Harrison, talks about a letter George wrote to his mother when he was young:

He was on tour or someplace when he wrote it. It basically says, 'I want to be self-realized. I want to find God. I'm not interested in material things, this world, fame—I'm going for the real goal. And I hope you don't worry about me, mum.' He wrote that when he was twenty-four! 

I remember stumbling across that quote when I went through my own teenage Beatles frenzy, four decades after actual Beatlemania, and thinking how wise George was, and consequently, how real. But as I get older, I’m not exactly sure what being wise means. I haven’t really thought about the Beatles in a long time. I still listen to them occasionally, sure, but I haven’t considered them outside of the context of their music the way I did when I was a teenager and obsessively read up on them, so the rather simplistic image I had of George when I was fourteen has been preserved for over a decade: reserved, self-effacing but brilliant, striving toward enlightenment. And then I started doing research for this essay.

A few years ago, Martin Scorsese produced a documentary about George Harrison, and Harrison’s ex-wife Pattie Boyd published a memoir. Between the documentary and the memoir, I find myself, via multiple tabs of Google search, wading through the more unsavory details of George Harrison’s private life. How in his inner circle of friends George wasn’t thought of as shy so much as bitter and cocky; how he cheated on Pattie with Ringo’s wife, Maureen, and how Pattie once returned home to find them locked in the bedroom together. Did I know these sorts of details when I idolized him? I don’t remember. And if I did, why did I overlook them, instead favoring a more flowery and innocent version of Harrison?

It startles me, how upsetting it is to read those details about George’s private life, even when I haven’t actively looked up to him in years. Of course, it’s always discomfiting to find that someone you once idolized is not only imperfect but somewhat abominable. But if I had admired George for his guitar playing or his singing, it would be different. Instead, I admired him for his alleged wisdom, his success despite his shyness, traits which turned out to be much more complicated than they appeared.

During the time of my life that I most identified with George, I also took the most comfort in his lyrics, which told me that everything was impermanent, constantly changing. Listening to “Within You Without You,” for example, temporarily reminded me not to take myself so seriously (“and to realize you’re only very small / and life flows on within you and without you”), though it didn’t do much to make me consider why it was that I took myself so seriously. I actively sought out adages, going to bookstores and flipping through banal quotable cards (“Life is a journey, not a destination”; “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain”) to hang on my wall. In the same way I craved a label such as “dark horse,” I loved platitudes because they made more comprehensible a life I still found overwhelming and roaring in its uncertainty.

The most popular song off Harrison’s solo album All Things Must Pass, a title that is itself a platitude, is “My Sweet Lord,” a song about longing for communion with a higher power. The beauty in this song doesn’t belong to the lyrics (all of which express exactly one sentiment: the desire to be one with God, and the fact that it takes a long time to do so) but in the sound. Or maybe the beauty is in the fact that the melody makes its incredibly mundane lyrics beautiful, which distracts us from the fact that it isn’t saying much at all.

Platitudes—and song lyrics—that act as placeholders for deep thinking, designed to placate pain or discomfort, are not bad exactly. But I’d argue they aren’t good either--sometimes discomfort shouldn’t be placated. So: what does it mean to be wise, and does real wisdom actually exist?

I don’t know. The version of me who liked being called a “dark horse” would say yes, because I felt then that wisdom was attainable; it was the only currency I felt I ever had a chance of owning. I thought wisdom could make me interesting to other people, and so I believed in it. But I hadn’t lived long enough and didn’t know anything. (A fact which is still true.)

Is this what George thought, too? That creating around himself a constructed aura of sagacity would help him stand out in the wake of the more colorful, witty duo of John and Paul? Do we always have to bend to other’s perceptions of us? Are we just making shit up as we go?

William James said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,” which I like. It implies a certain meditative quality I think George would embrace: a calm mind in the face of too much information and too many details. But it’s also yet another platitude—in my mind, this quote marches in rainbow-colored text across a white-square card. There is no escape from boiled-down bits of knowledge, advice, guidance. This is because, to communicate knowledge, it must first be put into words, an action which inherently simplifies thought. There can’t be wisdom without simplification.

But of course we can’t have wisdom without recognizing contradictions, either, acknowledging that too often opposing characteristics coexist. Such as the ones in George, the ones in all of us: the public and the private. And sometimes there is no answer for the questions these inconsistencies raise. This is something I couldn’t see when I was younger: that I could be both quiet and loud, introvert and extrovert, successful and a failure, an interesting person yet, like everyone else, alarmingly mediocre. That I could be both a dark horse and one waiting for the light, impatient for the paddock door to open and let me be seen.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#434: Big Star, "#1 Record" (1972)

“I was outside at this bar on the nicest day of the year so far, and there was this little boy—I don’t know—how old are little kids when they’re about two and half feet tall and can’t walk right yet? You know, when they run around on tip-toe with both arms out like little birds because they don’t have any balance—what’s that, three or something? It’s so fucking cute, they just instinctively sense that if they put their arms straight out they might not eat it, but this kid ate it bad--BAM—and busted his nose, howled for like ten minutes. I heard his mom say it was his first bloody nose. Can you imagine? First Bloody Nose: that’s a damn mile-marker. He got scooped up, his mom wiped his face, and then he went after it again, arms out, like Ain’t no one goin’ to turn me ‘round.”

“When I first heard Big Star, I was in college in Ohio, far from home. My friend slid the CD into the car stereo, and I asked him whether Big Star was named after the grocery store. He looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew Big Star first as the place my teenaged sister disappeared most nights to work as a cashier, where she pushed carts into tight rows under the street lights’ incandescent glow, to pay for the car she’d totaled almost immediately after it showed up in our driveway. When I heard the opening of ‘Feel’—”

“—Yeah, that first, nasty, descending progression of ‘Feel’—the cheap guitar tone of fucking champions; that’s the strut of dudes who are pretty certain they’re going to rule, guys who figure the words Big and Star as reasonable, even just, descriptions of the endeavor, a logic that extends to the title #1 Record: this the unassailable logic of untried champions. Yeah, that guitar part sounds like Manifest Destiny as discovered in somebody’s mom’s basement—”

“—When I first heard ‘Feel,’ when I first heard Big Star in my friend’s car in Ohio, it was like sliding back into Memphis in an instant: that winding Midwestern road disappears and I’m in the backseat of my mother’s car, six years old. We’re pulling into the Big Star parking lot to pick up my sister—sixteen-years old, so wild and mysterious—from her night shift. Those neon lights, those warm, brilliant opening chords of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’ slide over my skin and I’m in Overton Square in 1972, and everyone’s at a show at TGI Friday’s or out on the street, traffic blocked up in all directions. All I can feel is all that promise, the energy of all those crowds on that street which would be abandoned in ten years’ time, the buildings left empty and shuttered.”

“In its most fantastic moments, you get the sense listening to Big Star that, in the trans-Atlantic ping-pong match of bad-boy blues rock that occupied so much of the sixties and seventies, these boys from Memphis had actually learned something. Like really bright kids at school, they’d paid attention, and learned something useful, something they could practically apply. The delivery on #1 Record is so assured because there’s no prior experience to diminish their certainty and that’s heartbreaking in hindsight. There’s a tenderness buried beneath the bluster that makes it actually infectious—”

“By the time Big Star chooses their name, sitting on the curb, staring at the Big Star grocery store’s neon lights, Alex’s voice is completely transformed: he’s in his twenties when he records the vocals for ‘Thirteen,’ and he sounds his own age, maybe for the first time. His voice is stripped down and vulnerable but never precious, more aching than sweet.”

“Agreed. Not precious, not even a little. ‘Thirteen’ is in essence, not just a perfect pop song, but it manages to sound actually sincere and un-self-conscious, like the artifice is inseparable from the experience. It’s fantastic and devastating. There are moments on the record that are eerie and almost uncanny. Jesus, why is that, that when rock music is accurate, like clinically accurate in its description of heartbreak, when rock music is so accurate, so representative of human affairs, that it’s always conducted by the hands of children? They were kids!”

“For Alex, thirteen was the year before it all took off, the year before he stopped showing up to classes at Central High School and his deceptively gruff voice, sounding decades older than it was, started showing up on the radio. While other kids went to school, Alex showed up in televised, lip-syncing performances with the Box Tops. They mime playing at the organs and guitars, making faces at the camera, improvising bizarre dance moves, barely keeping up the guise. Alex can hardly hold eye contact with the camera but he’s trying, his hair hanging lank over his sharp-angled face, lips curled into a grimace that might be hiding a grin. And that’s him, too, later—Big Star was always the thing pushed right up against its opposite: ‘Thirteen,’ both ode and elegy to adolescence. The band name and the album title both suspended somewhere between a sincere boast and an ironic joke. Jody seemed worried that calling the album #1 Record might jinx them. But each track was—is—so inarguably good, so irresistibly catchy. Like you said, infectious…”

“Yeah. It’s the incautious enthusiasm, the novel understanding of defeat, the way a thirteen-year-old knows defeat. I know it’s impossible, but their first record sounds like a near complete absence of self-consciousness. I know that can’t be true in fact, but it feels and sounds like some moment of innocence, some little hermetically sealed chamber, with the lid taken off. Like pop music was still capable of being un-self-conscious.”

“Listening to Big Star now, I still somehow manage to dream up a new ending, where the records sell the way they were supposed to, where Chris Bell doesn’t die at twenty-seven years old, where Alex Chilton doesn’t die at all, ever, but keeps making weird, perfect music that seems somehow new each time I hear it. In this imagined ending, I can mention Big Star in a room full of people and everybody knows them, where everybody argues over which Big Star song they love most.”

“Listen to Third/Sister Lovers. It’s the lonesomest record in the world, not just on its own, not just because there’s defeat practically oozing out of the speakers, but because there was a beginning in #1 Record and a middle with Radio City and Third is the end. I just don’t know how to talk about Big Star without talking about the whole run. They were a perfectly narrative band: beginning, middle, end. It’s like Plato’s house band or something. I think about that kid outside the bar—for him, that bloody nose was still just an aberration: get a bloody nose, pick yourself up, run around some more. Big Star makes a great record that eats shit, they get up and make another record, and another, figuring next time maybe they won’t get a bloody nose. What I want to know is, would Big Star have done it if they knew how fucking bad it was going to hurt?"

—Joe Manning & Martha Park

#435: Nirvana, "In Utero" (1993)

Kurt has promised to keep an eye on the baby while Court runs out for groceries. The baby is asleep in the middle of her parents’ king bed, splayed out and vulnerable, eyelids shuddering intermittently. Her onesie is striped purple and white, and bears a small spit-up stain just below the collar. In this context, it seems to say, Yes, I am able to eat, but I will not hold it all in simply because you expect it of me. In fact, just because you do, I will not. Blech.

Kurt lies next to Bean flipping through an old Cosmo he’s not sure why he has. He’s vaguely certain he took it weeks ago from the doctor’s waiting room. His gut burns, as usual, but today it is a mild burn, more like bad gas than death, and as a result it barely registers. The magazine’s mostly only getting flipped through, though every now and then Kurt stops long enough to black out the eyes of the ad models with a Sharpie whose butt he chews between vandalisms. There is nothing to this day. There’s not a lot of sun coming in, and the apartment is quiet but for the phantom riff in the back of his head; he’s not sure if it’s his or from a new Nike commercial.

Kurt’s been thinking a lot lately about who he is. Sometimes he’s certain he’s suffering from amnesia. He knows he is a father, and he knows he knows himself best, can feel himself most vividly, when acting dadly. Or in ways he assumes dads act: jet-plane mashed pea delivery, constant hum-driven cradling, bathtime, storytime, patience. But all the in-between parts he gets fuzzy on. What’s he done himself, and what’s he read or heard elsewhere about his life? He makes music sounding mostly like all his favorite music, not trying, not really, to make it better, just trying to do it justice. He sings and sometimes screams. He loves his wife and sometimes wants to kill her. He knows the feeling’s mutual, and he knows it’s what’s keeping them both alive. His name feels amorphous, his gender irrelevant, his future ultimately idle. He’s not so into the cameras, the interviews, the hoopla, but he remembers wanting it constantly only years ago. He is a prehistoric beast caught mid-motion by the meteor: more spectacle than human, more already dead than just thinking about it.

Bean stretches, turns, puckers. She is dreaming about her dad as a skeleton, the kind from the old Mickey Mouse cartoon, the bones that sing and dance in sync. In her sleeping mind, she laughs and claps her hands together, applauding his movements, very much digging the thrill of live performance, the goofy way her daddy moves in clatters. Bone-on-bone, one-step, two-step. She is unafraid; she loves this man.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

In a few days, Kurt’ll be off to a soundstage to make the music video for his band’s next single. The song’s not about anything, not really, but if it has to be, it’s about Courtney. About how he hates her, fears her, loves her. About her vagina and his daughter and his mother. Actually, maybe it isn’t so much about nothing as it is about a lot. The video will be red and hellish and feature a Christ figure in a Santa hat crucifying himself in the first 30 seconds. Kurt feels about the concept the same way he feels about the new record: he isn’t sure how much of it is him taking his fans to task—laughing in their faces, waving his money around—and how much of it is genuine. Only one more way he’s lost track of where he begins and where, if anywhere, he ends.

He is both thrilled and neurotic about this new album, about the number of ways a number of people are bound to hate it, but he tries not to think too much about it. Court would tell him to stop being such an asshole, a narcissist, a total buzzkill. He knows she’s right, and so does she. Their daughter makes a little gurgling sound, so Kurt gently picks her up and holds her against his shoulder, rubbing her back almost imperceptibly. He sings “SOS,” the ABBA song he can’t stop playing as of late, and his voice is quiet and sweet even when filling in all the guitar parts.

Sometimes he can’t help but see himself beyond himself and wish somehow this image could get out to the rest of the world without the image itself imploding. That is to say: the secret little life he and this smaller half-he on good days get to experience. Mom at the store, the band doing their own thing, whatever it is he doesn’t even start considering. He isn’t bored, isn’t bent double, isn’t hiding. He is sitting on his unmade bed and listening to his daughter dream about nothing but him. He has weighed his life and found himself mostly OK. No idol, no rock star, no artist, but OK. In this low light, this new person’s weight laid restless across him, he is happy, or could be. No: is, most certainly.

​—Brad Efford

#436: Beck, "Sea Change" (2002)

The Golden Age

I drive home from Tennessee in gusty rain, caught in a storm of semis, trapped in narrowing highway traffic. Overdone by the stress of driving, flashing back on our accident, I get off at Newport and wind my way up into the leafy mountains. Pop in a mixtape and listen as Beck croaks: “Put your hands on the wheel, let the golden age begin.” The grades are steep. Detour at a downed bridge. (“Window down, the moonlight on your skin…”) I get lost in the drizzle and fog: passing for miles tumbledown barns and lonely horses in corners of tiny fields; a fast-filling river studded with fly fisherman. (“Treacherous road with a desolated view...”) Electric again on the switchbacks, I allow the music and rain to wash me raw. (“Drive all night just to feel like you’re okay…”) By the time I come to the turn for Hot Springs, I have returned to an earlier self, pre-accident. I sing along, yearning for stasis, to be content with simple things, wishing hard to come back. (“Doesn‘t even get by, I don’t even try, I don’t even try…”)
 

Paper Tiger

Fight or flight, my therapist tells me. (“Just like a paper tiger…”) That root impulse. Cellular tug. But how often are you really in danger? Hardly ever. (“No more ashes to ashes, no more cinders from the sky…”) Though I want to wrap my hands around that driver’s neck. To slam my car into the back of his sedan. Yell fuck you or throw a punch. And the hot flashes of shame and self-loathing? What of those? Where do I go then? Where are you in your body? Can you feel your feet? (“All the laws of creation, tell a dead man how to die…”) Too busy coaxing myself out of that oak outside the window. Unable to differentiate branches and feelings. Can you follow your breath? I nod. I can do that. (“…the desert down below us, the storm’s up above….”) And I walk a few steps in this way and, after a while, drop back down into my body (“Like a stray dog gone defective, like a paper tiger in the sun…”)—tired, sore, sad, scared. (“Like a broken diamond…”) Ok, I say, I can do that. (“Hold onto nothing…”)
 

Guess I’m Doing Fine

I woke this morning to birdcall and a far-off train. (“There’s a bluebird at my window, I can hear the songs he sings…”) No subway rumble, bus hiss, traffic clamor. I lay in the dark and assessed my condition. (“Oh the jewels from heaven they don’t look the same to me…”) Left hip tight. Body stiff and achy the way it used to be a year out. Right leg a little weak, dull pulse in the femur at each break. (“I just wait the tide’s to turn, oh I yearn to leave the past behind…”) Left foot a block, stiff at the ankle, like someone has strapped tape over the top of my arch and pulled tight. (“Guess I am doin’ fine…”) Even my ribcage makes itself known here and there—with a tiny blare of pain at the sternum where it hit steering wheel. Must have been all those cement sidewalks, hundreds of subway steps. (“Rest my face up against the window, see how warm it is inside…”) Everything about New York takes extra effort, someone said. I can take this soreness, this tightness. (“See the things that I’ve been missing, missing all this time…”) I can take it.
 

Lonesome Tears

As we moved through our recovery, away from the wreckage, month after month, I relied on a trick of thought to get through the difficult hours. Would say to myself: Another hour, then sleep. Two more days ‘til the weekend. Another few weeks and… (“I don’t need them anymore…”) Like smoking a bowl or turning on an afternoon episode of Mad Men. Walking along an endless turn that never straightened out, always peering around the bend. (“Lonesome tears, I can’t cry them anymore”) Now, wanting life to return to its normal cadence, to re-inhabit it hour by hour, I have become immensely restless—like a night traveler stepping out of his car in some lonely gas station stretching, (“I don’t need them anymore…”) drawing in a few deep breaths before folding back into the car and driving again. (“Lonesome tears, I can’t cry them anymore”)
 

Photograph by Marie Sicola

Lost Cause

(“Baby you’re lost, baby you’re lost, baby you’re a lost cause…”) Not the abruptly slowing cars ahead, or the way traffic snarled to a standstill, not inching forward as the right lane merged with the left, (“Leave you here, wearing your wounds…”) not the blinking lights ahead, nor the ambulance sprawled sideways across the lanes; not the men and women huddled in the breakdown lane, not even the one automobile, turned over on its hood, door ajar. (“They see you coming, they see you go…”) None of it stirred my son and his friend from their video game cocoon, never once looking up to see. And on the way back from the match, late afternoon light cutting sideways across the lanes, visor down to block the blare, I passed the exit for 221, the road we crashed on at just this hour, heading up to Spruce Pine for a weekend getaway. (“There’s a place where you are going you ain’t never been before…”) I kept us straight on 40, letting the quiet music carry me forward; and as we headed up the mountains, (“No one left to get your back now…”) the stench of burning brakes from the trucks coming down, with the sun now bright and triumphant behind the Black Hills calling out the oncoming night in trumpeting reds and yellows, (“I am tired of fighting I am tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause…”) even I didn’t look up from my cocoon of driving and notice all the potential wreckage, even I didn’t flare up in my own body or lose hope for the future. (“Baby you’re lost, baby you’re lost, baby you’re a lost cause…”)

End of the Day

I remember the first time after the accident I stepped tenderly into my own shower. After months in a wheelchair, then lugging a walker, then a cane…I hadn’t had a real stand-up shower ever since the wreck. (“I have seen the end of the day come to soon…”) Free standing, head down, floating around the little steamy bubble like a sunflower, the water just a notch under scald…(“Not a lot to say, not a lot to do…”)…letting myself hope, maybe for the first time, that I’d get back to my old life, my old body, taking a peek of the night’s show on tiptoe…(“…Depression dogs beset after you, wasted time…”)

Round the Bend

I walk the river trail from parked car to community garden. A few summers back I’d toiled there before giving in to the weeds. (“We don't have to worry, life goes where it does…) The day is warm, finally, after weeks of cold, and the breeze arranging the treetops whispers hoarsely of rain as bamboo rustles and clacks. (“Faster than a bullet from an empty gun…”) I hoped the old ceramic Green Man I’d planted in the center of the plot would have remained, but only new rows lined by straw, an indent in the clay. (“Loose change we could spend”) The garden cabin porch is empty except one woman typing away on her laptop. The garden cat’s a shadow slink in the periphery. Some students are heading out to the river. Others gather round a fire-pit. I watch as someone pours out tea in mismatched cups to a circle of friends. A dog sniffs my pant leg then wanders off.  I sit on a stonewall overlooking the garden and write abandoned garden plot. A pair of crows argues up in branches. (“Turn”) I write: Green Man ceramic pressed into the earth. Gone.

Already Dead

The young woman who takes my ticket throws me a suspicious look. I stroll absent-mindedly through the aquarium, green lights and tanks on all sides. (“Time wears away all the pleasures of the day…”) Kids crisscross the space in random routes; adults converge in the corners. I hate so much about the place—the rows of bored sleepwalks drooling at the exhibits, the trapped fish—despise all the little expected surprises. (“Already dead to me now…”) Still, I can’t help circling back to the schooling fish exhibit: entranced by the cylinder of silver fish that revolves endlessly in a loop, bright scales flashing in and out in an aquatic weave. (“Because it feels like I am watching something die…”) There is a pad of stones beneath them, a whoosh of air from above like a mini carousel. There’s no leader, a kid points out to nobody in particular. I want to lean over and sneer: That’s right, kid. Get used to it. But I keep staring at the fish in school. (“On the edge of nothing more…”) The children wander off. I am left with the fish, their attentive, horrifying faces pressed against the smudged and scratched Plexiglas.

Side of the Road

At the back of a paperback pulled off the shelf, I find a few fragments of marginalia jotted years before. (“On a borrowed dime in different light…”) I have no recollection writing them. (“In a random room…”) He asked her to meet him in a strange city, at such and such a hotel, on the last Saturday of August. She hadn’t promised she’d come. But, if she did, he was sure it meant that everything they’d shared—all the unspoken glances and sparks between them—would bloom at the designated moment she walked into the hotel lobby. (“Kick an empty can across an empty floor…”) How strange to find my shadow version, no longer alive, sloughed off like a coat of snow. (“Let it pass on the side of the road…”) And, on the back page: They’d done all they could to salvage it; there was nothing left but to untangle their libraries. (“What a friend could tell me now…”)

—Sebastian Matthews

#437: Lil Wayne, "Tha Carter III" (2008)

At 3.8 million units sold and counting, Tha Carter III has got to be the best selling comedy album of all time. Leaked in 2007, then released as an official/unofficial mixtape later that same year, then officially released in 2008, this kaleidoscope vision of Wayne’s world (party on) is one of the most creative, fun, lazy, funny, frustrating, bizarre, etc. albums ever made. It’s a nasily laugh at a hip-hop industry begging Wayne to make good on the trending maturity of the first two Carter albums. They wanted an opus and they got a rubber chicken. Wayne wrote a relationship song where the metaphor is police brutality. He told us he was from Mars. He wrote, “Swagger tighter than a yeast infection.” I don’t think someone trying to carry hip-hop on his back as a serious artist writes that. Upon release, Tha Carter III defied expectations. It would go on to influence a generation of hip-hop by showing MCs how to be stupid again.

Take, for example, this lyric: “I do this shit for my clique like Adam Sandler,” or the fact that he tries to summon Beetlejuice by saying his name three times. Wayne sings the hook to Rihanna's “Umbrella” and, at the start of “Got Money,” arguably the album’s biggest club hit, Wayne screams, “I need a Winn-Dixie grocery bag full of money right now to the V.I.P.” On any other record, these could be isolated riffs on humor or just symptoms of good times and too much Promethazine. But in 2008, the release of Tha Carter III held the attention of an industry. Remember when part of the album leaked a year early and Wayne’s response was to add some tracks and release it as an official EP? Everyone wanted a piece of III and the demand was so huge, Wayne knew he could throw out tracks from the session at will and still have a hit. A ton was riding on III. People legit expected Lil Wayne to save hip-hop. And then Wayne raps, “I’m a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed.”

Yeah. He did that. And made it work about as much as you could expect a line like that to “work.”  The album sold millions and left everyone enthralled. It also disappointed people who were banking on Wayne finding that next level. Face it, Weezy isn’t in top form on Tha Carter III. I won’t break it down bar for bar, but just listen to “3 Peat” and “Mr. Carter.” These two tracks make up the messy, underwhelming introduction on Tha Carter III. The awkward monologue that starts “Mr. Carter” is an especially low low-point. On it, Wayne makes sure to let us know that when he says he feels big, he doesn’t mean that he feels heavy/fat. He means like, you know, size-wise. Well, thanks for that. Compare this to “The Mobb,” the five-minute coronation that opens Tha Carter II. No contest, “The Mobb” wins every time.

And the inconsistency pissed a bunch of people off. Reviewers were baffled. Fans, myself included, felt cheated. Now, looking back, it is almost fun to listen to Wayne phone it in on “Phone Home” and just not give a shit on  “Lollipop” (C’mon, the joke of “So I let her lick the wrapper” is so bad. It is a dad joke). Throw in Auto-Tune and David Banner’s insane beat for “La-La” and you wonder if Wayne’s been listening to Dr. Demento. (You could probably make a pretty rad beat out of Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads” though.)

Who does this? Who produces this kind of album when the world is watching? It isn’t as simple as a squandered opportunity or wilting under pressure or running out of ideas….Tha Carter III is loaded with ideas. I’d like to think the album came together like it did because Wayne believed he was the best and he was going to have a good time. The joy of just removing filters and notions of cool and getting down. This music became the ultimate bravado move and ushered in a half-decade of “I don’t give a fuck” wanna-bes who clearly, desperately GAF. Tha Carter III might be that rare album where Wayne slipped one past the label, past the press, past all of us. Where the mess made just enough sense.

Much of the clutter doesn’t hold now. Today, Tha Carter III feels an order of magnitude more self-indulgent than it did in 2008. Back then, Wayne’s pedigree was enough to make you second guess your ears. But his post-Carter III output—Rebirth (good lord, this thing), I Am Not a Human Being, Tha Carter IV, I Am Not A Human Being II—are all wildly uneven or downright bad. People aren’t anticipating Wayne records or clamboring for leaks anymore. No one is wondering if he’ll redefine the genre again. Wayne stopped caring what we thought until we stopped caring entirely. Has it gotten so bad that he needs a “comeback” album? Probably. But the beat on “A Milli” was the beat of the decade for 2000-2009. “Lollipop” is one of those songs that was so crazy I remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time. And “Let the Beat Build” is a very high high-point. They’re certainly enough to make you miss that summer of 2008, when Wayne was everywhere, laughing at it all.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#438: The Cure, "Boys Don't Cry" (1980)

“Killing an Arab” details the beach scene in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, where the main character Mersault somewhat inexplicably murders a man who earlier had a confrontation with Mersault’s acquaintance. Many misconstrued the song’s message and intent, and some copies of the album had a warning sticker, not for explicit language, but literary provenance, no doubt providing a point of entry, for many, to an exemplary angsty-young-man novel. The most direct influence on The Stranger, according to Camus, was James M. Cain’s classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.

---

I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

—Albert Camus, The Stranger

The streetlight streaked the rain puddled on the pavement in long dull stripes like scrapes on a wounded tyke’s knee. Johnny Simile had been playing stickball down by third and Lex, took a dive into second, dinged himself up good, ran home and wailed bloody murder to Momma. Momma’s good for wiping away errant tears and the smooching of booboos; some momma’s good for rye and water and kisses elsewhere too, but that’s another story. Now just the salty street caressed by sodium dance.

Not a soul to be seen in this dismal drizzle save your faithful hero: some dunce of a cat not smart enough to step out of the storm. A habit I might’ve picked up in the war ducking around mildewed trenches, but I lived through it didn’t I, so I guess I ought to have been doing something right, despite Sarge McGrady’s many hard words otherwise. Me and Patches got nine lives, sure; Sarge was a real asshole. In the present deluge—Niagara Falls gushing from the brim of my cap, feet squishing in drenched, holey socks—I was coming back from meeting with Ol’ Joe Louis, an infantry pal from the Argonne, now local fuzz down the 16th precinct. We were rapping on a closed case from last winter, loose ends needed tying, shuffling papers on the table like so many spades and diamonds. Case was a real freakshow went by the name of Spiderman who was up and eating folks left and right. Creepy twink had a tagline even: “Don’t struggle like that or I’ll only love you more,” he’d say to the victim right before tucking in. We got wind by way he recorded the damn thing: a sight I’ll not once forget. Real sicko, that Spiderman. As luck would have it, slug between the eyes from my .357 got the worms eating him. Turnabout, I say. A thousand million shivering furry holes. We got some real sick shows in this town all right.

I ducked my head into my collar and quick stepped up the stairs to the front door of the brownstone and let myself in. My office’s on the third floor and I was huffing and puffing as I pushed past the stack of papers inside. I nabbed the top one off the pile and threw it on my desk; headline splay: Fire in Cairo. Same ol’, same ol’. I sparked a Morleys and stared out the window into a translucent haze, puffing away contented as a dragon perched on his booty. Dirty soles smudging the storied ink of our grey lady, relaxed and easy. It’s a life.

The name’s Bob if you were wondering, Bob Smith. Some right unoriginal saps pushed me out into the world; makes for a real gyp in the Yellow Pages, you better believe. Have to shell out for an 1/8 page ad to stand out from all the other yokels. Picture of a gat and a smile, Bob’s your Uncle, no case too strange, no offer too small. Olly olly oxen free. Spécialité de la maison: divorce and blackmail jobs. Yeah, yeah, you sussed it right, I’m a PI, a Private Dick, and somebody has to pay the bills around here (that’d be me), Yellow Pages included. Samsara’s a real bitch. This particular spin of the demon wheel all started last winter. This dame come in the office all bluster and misgiven accuracy. So what. Yeah, till she plunks a couple of C-notes down on the desktop and I’m all ears. Right foxy bird too. The lady and the tramp, that’s us. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Same old sob story but boys don’t cry, we just stamp our feet and scream a little.

Turns out this broad was summering over in Algiers—I checked the atlas, smart guy—and ended up putting a couple holes in a local cabana boy. Some accusations this way and that, but a lonely beach and just the two of them; the sand don’t speak. Well-heeled she was, they got it straight enough to get her repatriated. But now she’s spooked, see, thinks she brought home a little more than her souvenir Aladdin’s lamp and a notch on her gun belt. The boy’s soul in her hands. Nothing concrete: noises, flashes, feeling she’s not alone. Echoes of footsteps following close behind. That kind of thing. That’s why I’m sitting in my office wet as a duck’s ass rather than down at Ed’s Tavern drowning in something else entirely. Bills, remember?

I must have got some shut eye quick because when I wake up the rain’s stopped, just the tap dripping in the other room. Where is this dame? Ten-fifteen Saturday night and the tap drips, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip…

To be continued

—Erik Wennermark

#439: Sam Cooke, "Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963" (1985)

The middle school dance is full of velvet and glitter and white kids dancing to soul music.

The middle school dance is a kaleidoscope of weeping under the water fountain.

The middle school dance is a school of fish that are getting their friends to get his friends to ask him to dance.

The middle school dance is a faith.

The middle school dance is a pin in the wrist, a bone corsage.

The middle school dance is from 4-8 pm.

The middle school dance is a drag.

The middle school dance is a fold in the very fabric of time on the ample rump of the middle school’s front office secretary, Pamela Hadler.

The middle school dance is framed by chaperones.

The middle school dance is, contrary to popular depiction, completely punchless.

At the middle school dance cans of warm soda and travel-sized bags of chips are for sale for $1 to benefit the cheer squad’s newest set of uniforms.

The middle school dance is on its tiptoes, peering into the backyard of the high school, where it is still only afternoon and the marching band and the football team vie for practice field space as in cars high schoolers vie for each others’ skin under their thin jackets.

The middle school dance shivers.

The middle school dance is so ready.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

The middle school dance walks across the practice field to the high school on Mondays and Wednesdays for Calculus.

The middle school dance is weeping in the bathroom stall while its girlfriends whisper through the thin metal It’s okay, I had a hamster who killed himself, too.

The middle school dance won best dancer in the whole entire 7th grade for twisting the night away. It didn’t even know it was entered in the competition.

Someone had entered the middle school dance as a joke.

The middle school dance is a belly digesting.

The middle school dance is a crossover hit.

The middle school dance knows whose parents are smokers and whose are late and whose are separated and asking around about if Stephanie McMannis’s recently widowed mother is ready to “get back out there.”

Whether or not it is dark at the end of the middle school dance depends on the season.

The middle school dance folds up easily to transform back into a gym.

Therefore the middle school dance has a climbing rope but no one quite knows where it comes from, if it descends from somewhere or if someone makes his way to the rafters and ties it in place.

The middle school dance is highly legal, in fact, encouraged, as it helps keep kids who like to dance off the streets.

The middle school dance is growing older as it pulses. Sometimes it dares to think of itself as a cabin by the sea.

—Laura Eve Engel

#440: The Pogues, "Rum, Sodomy & the Lash" (1985)

Why do I like the Pogues? Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is a great pop album, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it; but it adorns itself in the most degraded ornaments of historical defeats, as if to say that in this defeat we can still have a good time. That's a notion as ubiquitous as I am suspicious of it. I mean, I don't want to admit historical defeat, who does? I'm on the cusp of quoting Joyce or maybe Yeats, so perhaps I should stop. Even so, everything on this album happens decidedly after a moment of excitement and possibility. It's Belacqua, from Dante's Purgatorio: sitting at the foot of the mountain too lazy to ascend, saying as much to our esteemed poet and his even more esteemed tour guide through the cosmos.

At this point even the initial question seems implausible. Do I like the Pogues? Keston Sutherland says that favorites are complicated objects, and that things become our favorites for a host of reasons that aren't necessarily the best possible ones. I take him seriously, find his insight generative, and would like to think that Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is an object lesson in how disgust and delight intermingle, at least for me. I can't avoid the album's machismo, or its celebration of a series of political defeats as just another day where we end up at the bar; but I can't ignore how from all this the Pogues manage to give pleasure, a pleasure significant enough that I have undertaken to write about it.

Pleasure can't redeem anything, of course; the Pogues still must face up to the long nightmare of history, which they try to wake up from again and again by borrowing the folk conventions of the murder ballad and the drinking song to find a form for feeling inert and useless. But I think pleasure has a Utopian edge to it. In part because, as I just said, the feeling here is one of purposelessness. How hard it is to comprehend having no purpose these days, when everything must either account for its utility or perish! How wonderful the dream of some sort of collective social being, even if only provisionally and only in mutual acknowledgment of suffering! Again, these don't change what I don't like about the Pogues, but they make me want to listen to Rum, Sodomy and the Lash repeatedly, where glimpses of the opposite of everyday life make themselves felt even if only in their falling away from possible realization. Thus "Wild Cats of Kilkenny," with its opening vocalization of a cat's shriek, might also be the sound of saying no! to legibility and, indeed, to purpose itself. What if we were like wild cats, what if we could live pleasurably, or even freely?

At the same time, opposition holds sway: this song, and all the others, are pop songs, they reiterate a pattern of conventions that we recognize and that return us to a state of objective unfreedom. It's like that Wallace Stevens poem, "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," in which music no longer functions as it once did, as a "mode of desire, a mode / Of revealing desire," and instead comes to figure absence and a chance for future fulfillment. The uncapturable aesthetic experience brings us back to the very capturable, and captured, social world we inhabit. Stevens wants a music—which for him means also poetry—of the future. I think the Pogues wanted a pop music of the future; in "Dirty Old Town," the speaker kisses his lover "by a factory wall." The town's dirt implicitly relates to the factory, which in turn brings to bear a host of associations about labor and the time of labor, as well as the demands made by the fact of labor on everyone. Does repetition in a pop song say something about labor and what it does to the landscape?

Even if it does, in the throes of mass culture such an insight doesn't mean much for us. It's part of being in the thrall of the culture industry. No matter how rhapsodic I might be in describing something, that fact remains the same. But Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is a childish album in ways that supersede the sometimes hackneyed attempts to read rebellion into the flailing and hissing of punk. It does what children do when they want to figure something out: it imitates, it causes trouble and steals wantonly from everything around it. The result is degraded but compellingly so. If it still sounds like I hate that of which I speak, I would only point out that Samuel Beckett's favorite character in Dante's Divine Comedy was, in fact, Belacqua. And if we take Beckett as giving us the most realistic description of life in the 20th century, then maybe degradation seen as a fact rather than a moral impugnation can organize how we approach such difficult but, to my mind, rewarding albums as Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Maybe saying so is pointless. Maybe that ends up being the point.

—David W. Pritchard

#441: Suicide, "Suicide" (1977)

for Frankie Teardrop

Angie Angel and me was selling broke down trivia machines back then, not such a bad deal if you can get it. Ain’t so hard neither, just get a fellah to sit down there a spell and he’ll sure enough be hooked. Trivia machine ain’t just got trivia you know, but all kinds of games for folks of any sort of persuasion. Say he’s a real sharp kinda guy, a real brainiac type, well then maybe he’ll like the trivia for a while, but when he get tired of playing that they got all sorts of other words games and such, mixing up words and that sort of thing them guys like. Then there’s them other kinda folks ain’t so keen on words and such, so you got some games that can be real entertaining, real fun diverting type games. Like they got one with this crazy old polar bear playing ball with a fish! Hard to believe, I know, but I tell you I play that one sometimes myself and I get a real kick out of it. If you get tired of it, they got some pirates or something and you run a hamburger store and make sure all the folks is happy and got their burgers on time. That’s pretty nice too.

We got the work just kinda by falling down into it. Angie Angel’s daddy ran a side business in jukeboxes and sundry, he picked up a load of broke down old trivia machines from a fellah in some bulk arrangement and there I was back there tinkering around in the warehouse and it just turns out that I got a knack for making them suckers work again. God’s will, I says and Angie Angel’s daddy agreed. Problem is, once a spot got one trivia machine, they ain’t got much use for another, so we was moving around a lot always on the look out for new buyers and whatnot, Angie Angel and me, traveling the countryside pawning them off. I was feeling pretty good about it, both the machines and being with her out there on the road. Angie Angel did too, I just know it.

I got me a right fine automobile—’72 Ford LTD convertible, darn near mint. I saved up since I was 11 years old, chucking my soda pop money in a jar with her picture pasted on the side. Cherie’s her name and, besides my Angie Angel, ain’t nothing in the world as special to me. Not a finer sight than Cherie hauling a trailer filled up with trivia machines and us and the highway, the hot wind blowing up on our faces. We didn’t have no car radio though, so Angie Angel would make do by singing those songs of hers, which I like better than even Travis Tritt. There she’d be next to me, hair flying up all over the place, and singing out like one of them mermaids on a rock in the middle of the ocean and that’s what it felt like too, alone with each other and her song in the wind. Angie Angel could carry a tune real good; I often thought that if we’d ever get into the karaoke machine business she could give a real dynamite example to them buyers about what it was they was buying, you know? She was about the prettiest thing too, my mermaid singing all the while. I bought me some fine new shades from the rack in the Sunoco cause with the sun and her song it was like our future was so bright.

Yes sir, that girl was something else. All the boys back in school were always pawing all over her, tripping over themselves asking her to dance and such. You could tell that look in those boys’ faces like I had something holding over them, on top of them, you know, like Angie Angel was my girl and alright, maybe they get a dance or something one day, but I was the one that get to pick her up for school in the mornings she wanted to go and take her home in the evenings she didn’t have no cheerleading or extracurricular activities or meeting with Mr. Saunders, who she was often fixing to see. I guess that biology was a real bear. Sometimes even if she did have cheerleading at least, I’d just sit there on the bleachers by the field waiting for her to be done with her practicing so I could take her home then. I’d see her down there on the field and sometimes her friends would be pointing up at me and laughing and such and then I’d see Angie Angel setting ‘em right, saying about how I was her boyfriend and they best not be pointing or messing around none. Even that Joe Rogers on the ballfield too, except not with the cheerleaders but with the football team ‘cause he was our quarterback. Yeah, sometimes Joe Rogers would talk to Angie Angel and I’d watch them up from the bleachers and I’d see Joe Rogers leaning in close and Angie Angel laughing, you know, probably about what kinda dumb stuff that Joe Rogers talking.

Standing on her momma’s porch clutching a grip of white flowers and her momma answer the door and her momma saying honey don’t you know Angie Angel ain’t here she gone off the city with her cousin ‘till the weekend and I’m sorry honey let me get some water for those pretty flowers and do you want a nice cool glass of sweet tea and thank you ma’am but I oughta be heading off and Angie Angel not saying a word about it when it is I see her next neither, the white flowers I know her momma keep in a vase waiting for her to get back from the city which she did after a month of time when them poor flowers already dead.

I guess when I think back on it was when Cherie broke down and I was fiddling with her engine that things went amiss. Angie Angel was in the ladies and disappeared for longer than I thought requisite and I start getting a little itchy about it, you know, even her not coming back after I found the troubles and fixed it up easy which must have took a half hour at least and still she wasn’t back yet. I went poking around the racks of potato chips and seeds and whatnot looking for her but she wasn’t there neither so I ask the fellah behind the counter if he seen Angie Angel and he give me a funny look and say no he ain’t and I say thank you sir and he say ain’t nothing son and kind of laughs like a horse and I just keep on poking around. I was getting might frantic by this time as you can well imagine so when I got back to the car darn near give up on her and Angie Angel is sitting shotgun humming a tune like nothing at all and I ask her where you been and she don’t say nothing but give me that sweet grin like she did way back when, like she used to when she was just a girl, like she always done, you know, and what am I to do but get in the car and keep on driving what with a trailer full of merchandise. Trivia machine don’t sell itself.

I get back to the car and Angie Angel sitting there looking just about sweet as ever, so what am I supposed to do, throw some kinda fit or something? I just flip down my shades and drive off into the sun, Angie Angel not saying much of anything but crunching on some sugar candy. We was driving and I put my hand out the window and felt the hot air against it, Angie Angel humming all along. Short time thereafter I felt the blade pushing up on the back of my neck. I could tell in the rearview he was a big mother-effer, and I ain’t a big guy no but I been in a couple few scrapes in my day and I ain’t afraid, but he had that blade and me driving, what am I gonna do? He tells me real rude to pull over so I does. When I look over at Angie Angel he tells me all cussing to look straight on again but I don’t listen right away and there she is sitting there with a sugar candy in her teeth, won’t even look back at me. I try to tell her something then but the guy presses the blade into my neck nicking me some and tells me to get the eff out the car so I does. I take off my shades and squint into the dust Cherie kicks up as Angie Angel and the fellah drive off in my vehicle and my trailer full up of machines, half of which I ain’t even got around to fixing yet. I stood there for a while looking on down after them, then I put up my thumb and got a ride back into town whereabouts I bought me a bus ticket home.

—Erik Wennermark

#442: Devo, "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" (1978)

> WELCOME

> WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

Brian

> WE ARE GLAD YOU HAVE ARRIVED, Brian

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go back to sleep

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE, LET US HELP

1. Put on attire
2. Make sustenance
3. Relieve self
4. Watch television news

Breakfast

> YUM

> WHAT DO YOU WISH TO MAKE?

Oatmeal

> OATMEAL INTAKE SUCCESSFUL

> OATMEAL IS VERY HEALTHY

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Put on clothes

> WHAT TYPE OF ATTIRE DO YOU WISH TO WEAR?

Business clothes

> GOOD CHOICE, BUSINESSMAN

> BUSINESS CLOTHES SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go to work

> HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET TO WORK?

Walk

> SORRY, UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> LET US HELP

1. Personal automobile
2. Public underground transportation
3. Commuter bus

Car

> GREAT

> PERSONAL AUTOMOBILE REQUEST SUCCESSFUL

> WORK ARRIVAL SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> EXCELLENT

> DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Take smoke break

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> YOU MUST WORK MORE FIRST

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> EXCELLENT

> FURTHER DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR EMPLOYER HAS COMPLIMENTED YOU!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Take smoke break

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE, LET US HELP

1. Thank employer
2. Compliment employer’s choice of tie
3. Inquire about employer’s stance re: sports team
4. Crack wise re: female co-worker

Compliment tie

> YOUR EMPLOYER HAS THANKED YOU

> YOUR EMPLOYER HAS MADE COMMENT RE: WIFE

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Laugh

> LAUGH SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR EMPLOYER HAS GIVEN YOU A RAISE!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Take smoke break

> SMOKE BREAK SUCCESSFUL

>WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go back to sleep

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Invite female co-worker to lunch

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE LET US HELP

1. Input data
2. Converse with male co-worker re: college
3. Shoot paper ball at trash can
4. Relieve self

Relieve self

> RELIEF SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> FURTHER DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR DATA INPUT APPARATUS HAS STALLED!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Pretend to input data

> FALSE DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Talk to male co-worker

> CONVERSATION SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR MALE CO-WORKER HAS GIVEN YOU NOSTALGIA!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Cry

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

High-five male co-worker

> SLAPPED HANDS SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go home

> HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO RETURN HOME?

Memories

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO RETURN HOME?

Car

> PERSONAL AUTOMOBILE REQUEST SUCCESSFUL

> RETURN HOME SUCCESSFUL

> WELCOME HOME, Brian!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Watch television news

> WATCHING TELEVISION REQUIRES A BEVERAGE

> WHAT BEVERAGE WOULD YOU LIKE?

Ice water

> SORRY, UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE, LET US HELP

1. Fermented ale
2. Rye whiskey
3. Vodka martini
4. Light fermented ale

Beer

> BEVERAGE INTAKE SUCCESSFUL

> TELEVISUAL ENJOYMENT SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Kiss wife

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

Kiss children

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

Call mother and father

> SORRY, UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> LET US HELP

1. Watch sports
2. Pleasure self
3. Debate strangers on Internet re: female physical attributes
4. Eat baked corn snacks

Pleasure self

> GREAT

> PLEASURE SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR ENERGY HAS DECREASED!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go back to sleep

> SLEEP REQUEST SUCCESSFUL

> WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE PROGRAM?

No

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

No

> SORRY, UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> LET US HELP

1. Yes
2. Yes, tomorrow

Tomorrow

> TERRIFIC

> SEE YOU TOMORROW, Brian

>

>

>

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

> WELCOME, Brian

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Delete program

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

End program

> SORRY, UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> LET US HELP

1. Put on attire
2. Make sustenance
3. Relieve self
4. Watch television news

Watch TV

> TELEVISUAL ENJOYMENT SUCCESSFUL

> YOU HAVE LEARNED WEATHER!

> YOU HAVE LEARNED TRAFFIC!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go to work

> TO GO TO WORK YOU MUST PUT ON ATTIRE

Pants

> PANTS SUCCESSFUL

Clothes

> ATTIRE PLACEMENT SUCCESSFUL IN TOTALITY

> ARRIVAL AT WORK SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Leave

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

Go home

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE, LET US HELP

1. Input data
2. Relieve self
3. Converse with female co-worker re: weekend plans
4. Converse with male co-worker re: weather

Talk to female co-worker

> CONVERSATION SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR FEMALE CO-WORKER HAS NO WEEKEND PLANS

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

Talk to male co-worker

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> HERE, LET US HELP

1. Invite female co-worker to dinner
2. Touch female co-worker on shoulder
3. Crack wise re: female co-worker’s appearance

Invite her to dinner

> DINNER REQUEST SUCCESSFUL

> YOUR FEMALE CO-WORKER HAS DENIED YOUR INVITATION!

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Take smoke break

> SMOKE BREAK SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Step onto busy highway

> UNABLE TO COMPLETE REQUEST

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Input data

> FURTHER DATA INPUT SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go home

> WOULD YOU LIKE TO RETURN HOME IN YOUR AUTOMOBILE?

Yes

> RETURN HOME SUCCESSFUL

> WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?

Go to sleep

> SLEEP SUCCESSFUL

> WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE PROGRAM?

Tomorrow

> TERRIFIC

> SEE YOU TOMORROW, Brian

>

>

>

—Brad Efford

#443: Cheap Trick, "In Color" (1977)

It was summer and the koi were dying. Almost before we realized we were losing them, they were gone—in a metaphysical sense, that is, because the truth is they lingered terribly, “like an ex-boyfriend,” Cam said, popping her gum. She’d know, because her mom, Ms. Stacy, had three, and an ex-husband too.

We were kneeling at the edge of the koi pond Daddy and I dug before he left, staring at their bloated corpses, shining like the nibs of old highlighters beneath a layer of grief and scum.

“Shit,” I said, and that just about covered everything.

*

We broke the news to Mama in the worst way possible—with a rusty shovel handle through the gut of her favorite gnome. We’d been levering the soft bodies in a fugue, sweating from the sun and their curious weight.

“These fish wouldn’t make it to the underworld,” Cam said. I turned to squint at her through the triangular window at the top of my shovel. Over her shoulder I could see Ms. Stacy’s lace bras drying on the line in the next yard over.

“Whattaya mean? We’re putting ‘em in a hole, aren’t we?”

“Not that kind of underworld.” She sloshed a fish into the grave we’d dug, wrinkling her nose at the squelch. We’d soon churned up a muddy broth in the basin, splashing a terrible soup over the fish in our haste to unburden ourselves. “In Ancient Egypt, they weighed your soul against a feather. If it weighed more than the feather, you didn’t get to go to heaven.”

“They had heaven back then?” I asked. I was pretty sure we’d learned something very different in church, but Mama always said the Bible was open to interpretation. She said “Jesus Christ” when she saw the shattered gnome, and started tutting at us, until I showed her the grave. Then she said “Oh, baby girl.” She let Cam stay for dinner.

*

The truth was, I wasn’t very interested in the underworld, koi or no koi. The pond had been Daddy’s idea; he said fish were “grounded.” I think that was a joke, because it always made Mama laugh when he said it. I’ll bet neither of them ever pictured those great wet beasts in dirt.

Cam and I preferred heights, because Daddy was a climber. Not a social climber, like Ms. Stacy was always chatting on about becoming, but a real one. He travelled all over the world conquering mountains, and then he’d come back to us, wind-chapped and lean all over, like a wolf. Wolves eat fish, I think, but he loved these koi. He said they looked like the sun did shining down on you when you were close enough to touch. He said the sky was just an ocean, and you could swim up it, and break the surface. “Up there,” he’d told me, “all you breathe is stars. That’s all you need. Just starlight.”

*

Mama let Cam stay past dinner, too. We put in a movie, the latest “chick flick” Ms. Stacy brought by. She was always trying to get Cam to wear prettier things, and to go by her given name, Camilla. “Because you’re my perfect baby,” she’d coo, which always made Cam blush, then scoot, faster than any fish I’ve seen driving for the shallows.

The film wasn’t too good. It was called 10 Things I Hate About You, and we ran it on the VCR, the dark, translucent reels feeding sluggishly through the ancient player we’d wired beneath the T.V. That machine was just as likely to eat your tape as it was to play it, though if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to risk it. There was no way out but through.

Well, I sat through it, all right, but things didn’t get interesting until the end, when the man and the woman are kissing outside the car and everything’s lit up in that koi gold, and the music is swelling and you know it can’t last forever, but even just a little while is good enough. Then the camera jumps, and this band, Letters for Cleo, is playing high up on a rooftop, and my heart started thumping, because I knew Daddy would like that, all those people making music up where the air’s so thin.

After Mama found us with the fish she called Mr. Hollander’s garden shop, where we’d bought them. According to his son, who ran the shop when Mr. Hollander was ill, our koi must have suffocated, which is a fancy way to say they drowned. He told Mama they got too big for the pond, so they used up all the oxygen. I wish I’d never seen her face, when she heard that.

*

“Bill,” she’d always say to him. “Bill, you take care out there.” At this point, she was usually crying. Daddy would take her long blond hair and run it through his fingers, so it split into beautiful golden strands, like beams of light.

“I promise.”

“I just worry,” she’d sniff. “I miss your voice. How can you call for help up there? The air’s so thin. You couldn’t even—oh, baby,” she’d sigh. “You couldn’t even call for me by name.”

Then he’d heft her up, like she couldn’t weigh more than a feather, and tumble her into his arms. I knew if anyone was getting into heaven it was those two. But I was so worried they wouldn’t wait for me. They were two balloons, ready to float off the moment you dropped their strings.

*

“Let’s put rocks in her pockets,” Cam said when she woke up and found me crying. “Dirt in her shoes to weigh her down. Your Dad’s too, when he comes back. Where is he now? Peru? I don’t think they’ve got mummies in Peru.”

They don’t. What they have got in Peru is mountains.

We snuck downstairs to the den, where the T.V. screen had lapsed to blue, painting the whole room like it was underwater. Cam and I crouched before the VCR to roll the tape back by hand. In the screen’s blue wash I restrung time in reverent loops and whorls. When we’d gone far enough, we tipped the flap, inserted the tape, and played the final song again, this time silently.

Letters to Cleo were rocking out on a rooftop to “I Want You to Want Me,” while a camera slow-panned past Seattle to the sea. The lead singer tossed bleach bright hair to a soundless rhythm, twitching around in a little black dress Ms. Stacy would’ve killed for.

Even though the T.V. was muted, I could hear her clearly. She was strutting her stuff, working this gorgeous wail, and above her the sky was this wave of color and light. Suddenly, I got the feeling she could see us—that even from her terrible height she knew the dirt under our nails was fresh from burying. She had seen us in our unspeakable hours. She had to know, I guess, but there she was, still singing.

“Hey,” Cam said, after a little while, when the tape had run down again. “You wanna bury me?” She crawled up onto the couch and showed me how the mummies from Egypt lie, and how they cross their hands over their hearts like they’re cold or something. I felt a pang for those dumb fish, without hands or heartbeats or anyone to sing at their funeral. And the one person who loved them so far away he couldn’t hear anything but maybe his own thoughts.

When I knelt over Cam I could feel her stomach trembling, and she was breathing funny, something drawing out of her like a riptide.

“I don’t think I can lie as still as them,” she whispered. The mummies or the koi? But I didn’t ask.

“Stop trying,” I said instead, and squashed down beside her. If I closed my eyes I could pretend the darkness was really dirt, closing us in its warm fist. “We’re safe now.” But inside all this I could feel my heart beating, wild and scared as any dying thing.

—Eve Strillacci

#444: War, "The World is a Ghetto" (1972)

Kept alive only by his alternately strengthening and unraveling adrenaline, Armand has barricaded himself inside the bar. Like a couple of last-call drunks too gone to make it home on their own, two vinyl booths thankfully unbolstered to begin with now lean against the windowless wooden front door. Armand has seen enough movies: he’s made sure the door opens inward, and he’s stacked every box of backstock liquor on the booths until they’ve made a tower he prays is strong enough to last. Daylight struggles through the old tinted windows, enough that he doesn’t need the lights on, enough to sit motionless beneath a table but for the crying and the heaving that every now and then overtakes him.

It’s mostly quiet outside. No: it’s entirely quiet. Eerily quiet. Like, sure, yes, wind, if you listen hard enough, but even that could all be in your head. Armand is past the point of hearing anything at all. Or, conversely, all he hears is wind, constant gusting against his eardrums. He can’t be sure. He tries not to think too much about it. The floor is sticky and his neck is numb from its turtled positioning. His legs are drawn up into an awkward pretzel and after thirty fruitless minutes of hunting for the shotgun he assumed the owner of this bar must have somewhere, anywhere, he is now hugging tightly the aluminum bat he settled for instead. He is too afraid to move, not even to shut off the music. Besides, by now it’s become just another part of his psyche, the soundtrack to his unlikely, hysterical demise.

Either in the process of the end or sometime before the end began, the bar’s CD player was placed on single-song repeat. Who even uses CD players anymore? And who even uses the single-song repeat function? Whose maximum enjoyment can only be achieved with the assistance of a hands-free reliving of one song over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again? These are questions—and there are a hundred more just like them—which Armand stopped pondering hours ago. By now, this song simply is. It no longer angers him, or tires him out, or has him wondering if all of this—if any of it—is real. He does not know what the song is called, but “Where Was You At” seems like the best guess: the line’s repeated at the end of each verse and several times again during the chorus. The drums are a 1-2 kick-snare devotion to generic beat-keeping. It’s a drum part that would hypnotize you if you weren’t careful; Armand is aware of this possibility because several times since last night it became a reality. There’s a harmonica solo that reminds him of Sesame Street, a memory to which at one point he latched on in a desperate bid to find some semblance of meaning in his situation. It’s kind of a funk song, and kind of a slice of white bread. Somewhere in between.

Armand is very cognizant of the fact that the song is the least of his problems. But again, no: problems have solutions, or are meant to. This is not that. The world outside the bar no longer resembles any sort of world Armand once knew. To say hellspawn now inhabit its terrain is maybe only partially correct. To say everything logical, safe, expected has ended is entirely the case. Armand watched the ground split and watched unspeakable acts occur and watched himself react thanks only to his sometimes strengthening, sometimes unraveling adrenaline.

So he found the bar, made it in, and in the bar he sits. Waits. Clutches the bat. Listens to the maybe-wind behind the song that will never quit recycling.

He must have fallen asleep, exhaustion the only possible explanation, because a sound like a car wreck awakens him. He moves too quickly, slams his head on the underside of the table, stifles a yelp. “Where was you at?” the song keeps asking. “Where was you at?” Armand has no clue for a moment, then remembers. There it is again: the sound, echoey, metal on metal, near the front of the bar, everything much darker now as the day mutates into night. He whimpers and leans forward just enough to catch in his sight the edges of the booths keeping at bay whatever lies beyond the door. Then the bang again, and yes, he confirms it: the booths rattle, shift from their places just a little. The harmonica solo is ending. The drums are not drums, but his heart starting to seize. He can’t tell if his pants are wet or his legs asleep; he isn’t really thinking about it.

The bang, the booths shift, the two false starts to signify the song has begun anew. Where was you at? If Armand were a bolder man, a person with gumption, he’d shake himself loose from under the table, take the bat firmly in both hands, and await the inevitable on his feet. He could run, too—the levels of valor are flexible, and survival would seem to mean just about everything in situations like this. If he were bolder, better, unstricken.

No. Armand is not prepared for this. The world has already ended. He is too late. Where was you at? Where was you at? Where was you at? Where was you at? The door finally comes apart to one last deafening crash and our hero still hasn’t quite figured out the answer.

—Brad Efford

#445: Steve Miller Band, "Fly Like an Eagle" (1976)

Before we took the money, before we ran, the days floated along hazy-like. We got high in Billy Joe’s parent’s basement and drank cans of Schlitz that we nicked from his dad’s side of the fridge. We cut school and played records: Alice Cooper, Ramones, the Stones. We watched TV: All in the Family, Baretta, Columbo.

In the basement, homemade orange and brown plaid curtains hung on either side of the glass door that led to the backyard and we closed them against the view of dead grass, the tiny bit of sky beyond the fence. We liked the way the Texas sun glowed through the curtains and made the room hot. We baked in there. We held lukewarm cans of beer against our wrists, our foreheads, our necks. We kissed the salt off each other’s top lips. We played the same records again and again. Our weeks went by in lazy orbit.

Then one day, we decided to cut loose.

Billy Joe’s dad was asleep on the couch upstairs and we crept past him, slipped his car keys off the hook near the front door. We got into the old GTO and the sunbaked leather burned the backs of my thighs. Billy Joe started the car and we cranked the windows down. The scrub brush and cracked ground blurred on either side of us and I put my fingers out the window, let the wind whistle through them. When I looked over at Billy Joe, he was smiling down the highway and I could see the chipped tooth that made his smile look like it was winking.

*

We ended up in El Paso, in one of the richie-rich neighborhoods on the outskirts of town. We drove through the mansions, the manicured lawns, the fountains with open-mouthed stone swans spurting water. I knew that people lived like this, lived like kings and queens, but knowing that and seeing it were two different things. A small dog on a chain barked at us as we drove past as if he were protecting his castle from us, two dirty bums in a borrowed GTO. That little dog probably ate out of a silver bowl. I bet his hair cuts cost more than mine.

When I squinted my eyes down the row of mansions, they blurred together and looked like blinding icebergs in the sun. We were adrift, Billy Joe and I, floating between them, looking for our own little island where we could land and make a life. Since I could remember, I had been anchored in a dusty patch of nothing. “Billy Joe,” I said, “We’re not going back.”

He looked at me, and the flash of surprise in his eyes hardened into something I’d never seen before. He pulled into the next driveway and cut the engine. “Whose house is this?” I asked.

“I don’t know. All these castles are the same. They all probably stuff their pillows with hundred dollar bills.” He leaned over me and I could smell his skin smell: sweat and dust, marijuana and something a little bit fruity—strawberry, maybe. He opened the glove compartment and took out a gun. Before I could say his name or ask what he thought he was doing, he had the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and he had opened the car door and started walking toward a mansion. I watched the back of his white t-shirt, the muscles rippling beneath it as he clenched and unclenched his hands into fists. He approached the door and, to my surprise, the knob twisted and gave. He disappeared into the open door’s dark mouth.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

Even with the windows open, the GTO grew hot quickly. When I shifted in my seat, the backs of my legs squelched against the leather. I reached up to the rearview mirror and adjusted it so I could see out behind me. The neighborhood was still in the stifling midday heat. Minutes passed. I held my fingers on the burning dashboard until they blistered.

Then I heard the gunshot.

*

I barely saw the heavy curtains, hardly felt the plush carpet sponging my footfalls as I ran through the house, looking for Billy Joe. I finally found him upstairs, still and silent, before an open safe tucked back in a closet. I whispered his name and walked up to his back. His shirt was drenched with cool sweat. When he turned to look at me, he was shaking. The gun was still in his hand. “What did you do?” I asked.

He shook his head and turned back toward the safe. I looked inside and covered my mouth with my hands. Money stacked like bricks reached all the way to the back of the safe, just like on TV. I had never seen so much money in my life. I hadn’t known that stacks of bills like this really existed. “Oh my god,” I said.

A siren keened above us and I heard Billy Joe swear under his breath and start pacing. I could feel his frantic energy searching for a way out behind me. He didn’t realize the answer was right in front of us.

My hands tingled and I started grabbing money and stuffing the bills into my pants. I worked quickly, steadily. I stuffed money into my boots, and then I gathered all I could in my arms and started running for the front door. I heard Billy Joe murmuring a steady stream of “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” behind me, but his words gave way and soon all I heard were the sirens and my boots clacking against the concrete as I ran for the car.

When I reached the GTO, I opened the door, and threw the money inside. I looked back and saw Billy Joe standing at the threshold of the mansion. He shook like a small, scared animal. “Get in the car,” I screamed. I dove into the driver’s seat and revved the engine. Billy Joe still wouldn’t move. I banged the wheel with my open palms and yelled at him. “We have to go.” My heart pumped so fast I felt like my head was going to pop off. I could barely catch my breath. I looked at the pile of money beside me on the passenger seat. Then I looked at Billy Joe and shook my head. I put the car in reverse and started backing down the driveway, never taking my eyes off him. The sirens echoed across the valley. Any second now we would see the flashing lights. I reached the end of the driveway. I saw Billy Joe look in the direction of the sirens and his knees began to buckle. Before he fell to the ground, he caught himself and ran toward the car. I opened the door and as he slammed it back shut, I pounded on the gas and we screeched away.

I drove as fast as I could. When I looked over at him, Billy Joe was sliding his fingers along the edges of the stacks of money. I knew that he was thinking about the person he left in the house, the person he left dead. “Hey,” I said, “I love you.” He glanced up at me then, with the newly hardened eyes that I hoped time would soften once again. God knows they changed quickly enough the first time.

This day began the same as our days always did, and then we altered our lives so fast we didn’t have time to think about it. We didn’t plan, we didn’t strategize, we didn’t think of the repercussions. We could only let the blazing sun burn black stars into our eyes as we followed it down the highway. We could only let ourselves be drawn by the magnetic pull of gun to flesh, of fingertip to money. More than anything, we could only sync our strange and beating hearts together, take hands, take the money, and run.

—S. Price

#446: MC5, "Back in the USA" (1970)

We all shared a love of hot rods and big-assed engines.

—Wayne Kramer, Please Kill Me

I’m a regular guy, ya know. I want to find a pretty girl. I want to play great music. And I want a fast car.

—Dennis Thompson, Detroit Rock City

I. HOT RODS

Cars are sex: Pistons, oil, leather seats, grinding gears. Glass, steel, electricity. Gas up, turn on the lights, top down, an orgasmic screech of tires. Cars are America: Industry, chaos, and speed. Some of the greatest American songs about cars are not about cars at all, but about sex (“Little Red Corvette”), some of the greatest American songs about sex sound like they were written to sound like cars (“Lust for Life”), and some of them are quite unapologetically very much about both (“Paradise by the Dashboard Light”).

I don’t know how you could listen to MC5’s Back in the USA and not hear two things: sex and automobiles. The music coming out of Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s was conceived in the back seat of a Cadillac; it was the sound of rubber tires on asphalt, hubcaps shining and spinning: the automobile and the road and the slick of oil, dark and foreboding. This is a cleaner album than its predecessor, Kick Out the Jams, more compact and self-contained. Jon Landau’s heavy production hand is obvious, and the band ended up sounding like the engine of a Corvette shoved into the body of a Chevette. It belies the music at its heart, that powerful engine and thrust of the distortion at its lowest end. Listen to live versions of the same songs that appear on Back in the USA—“Tonight” or “Teenage Lust” as recorded at the Saginaw Civic Center, January 1970, for example, or Wayne Kramer’s guitar wailing on “Looking At You”—and you can hear the release, the shift to fifth gear, the cracked glass, the bending steel. Listen to the live versions and you can hear the entire engine-revving soul of Detroit blowing up and burning out.

The whole album is only 28 minutes long: fast and furious. Like a hot rod. Like a drag race. Like an assembly line. Like a quick screw in the backseat of a car. I mean, holy shit, that’s Detroit.

Holy shit, that’s America.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

II. THE AMERICAN RUSE

The American dream being sold in the mid-20th century was the ideal of a family, a house, and an American-built car. Detroit fed that dream off the assembly line, and as MC5 (which, fittingly, started as Motor City 5, the most Detroit of Detroit band names) had front row seats for the exposure of the man behind the curtain as they watched the auto industry crumble around them.

In the 1950s, automobile jobs started to be shipped overseas, and the mostly white middle class fled the city to the suburbs. They left behind a city they considered to be broken, and the remaining citizens were considered to be casualties. This, when combined with the civil rights movement (culminating in the 12th Street riot in 1967, during which 43 citizens were killed and more than 7,000 arrested) and growing frustrations with politics and war, left a city scarred by fear and destitution throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. The country was on the verge of deficits, industrial meltdowns, inches away from an oil crisis that would put the final nail in the coffin on Detroit’s industry, and the weakening of unions during the 1980s. Detroit was a microcosm of American issues, the canary in the coal mine. And “The American Ruse” was that canary’s song.

“The American Ruse” is about civil rights and war and awakening, but it was fed directly by the Detroit metamorphosis from capital of industry to impoverished rust belt city.

Sixty nine America in terminal stasis
The air's so thick it's like drowning in molasses
I'm sick and tired of paying these dues
And I'm sick to my guts of the American ruse

Phony stars, oh no! Crummy cars, oh no!
Cheap guitars, oh no! Joe's primitive bar, nah!
Rock 'em back, Sonic!

MC5 themselves would eventually be swallowed up by the ultimate loss of the American dream: the heroin epidemic, that potentially deadly hangover from the drugged-up 1960s that would eventually tear the band apart.

The wheel well was beginning to rust, eating away at that beautiful hot rod left out in the rain.

III. BACK IN THE USA

The album is notably flanked by two covers: a fast, balls-out rendition of Little Richard’s romp “Tutti-Frutti,” and Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA” closing out the album. It’s an odd song to end the album: a feel-good song, jingoistic. Though I can’t help but think that it’s tongue-in-cheek: Rob Tyner singing I’m so glad I’m living in the USA amidst the riots and the poverty and the corruption is a giant sad wink at where the country seemed to be headed; listing those cities that had been duped by the American dream - Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge - was like calling out the names of the dead or dying.

Underneath the wink, however, these songs are driving the band’s engine: to MC5, they're the classic cars, the rides they coveted as kids. When MC5 made a little money, they all bought themselves the dream: a classic American-made car. According to Wayne Kramer in Legs McNeil’s account of the birth of punk, Please Kill Me, Fred "Sonic" Smith “bought a used Corvette, Dennis [Thompson] bought a Corvette Stingray,” and bassist Michael Davis “bought a [Buick] Riviera.” (Kramer’s own dream car was a Jaguar XKE; obviously, he didn’t buy into the ideal enough to deny himself a British import.) This act got them tossed out of the White Panther Party, the anti-racist, socialist party the band belonged to, which had been co-founded by the band’s manager, John Sinclair; buying fancy cars went against the party’s socialist beliefs.

But they wanted their classics, their very own “Maybelline.” To deny them that would be un-American.

IV. KEEP ON ROCKIN’

The city of Detroit partially left behind its car obsession, but it’s still humming underneath the hood: Detroit’s not dead. Detroit today, depending on who you talk to, is a once-vibrant city trying to climb back again, an urban prairie, a blank canvas for foreign investors, home to a revitalized stretch of hipster restaurants, an experiment in urban development, a haven for artists and writers, the carefully tended garden plot of a community of volunteers, a rainbow of colorful paintings on abandoned houses, the hardened and determined faces of those who stuck around.

Detroit is being rebuilt. You can still hear the roll of the wheels out there on the road, like a heartbeat, its soul, not yet lost, not yet rusted away on cinderblocks in the front lawn. Still purring away.

—Zan McQuade

#447: Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, "Getz/Gilberto" (1964)

“Smooth” is a pejorative word in jazz. It’s what we call the numbing muzak in our elevator purgatories. It’s what we call Kenny G and John Tesh, who have inexplicably made careers by making music no one likes. It’s the stereotype, the simulacrum, the straw man for people who hate jazz, or don’t know jazz, or once heard a song with too much horn when they had a headache and thought will someone please turn that shit down.

But what else is there to call Getz/Gilberto, the landmark 1964 album by an unlikely team of collaborators, but the birth of smooth? Stan Getz’s tenor sax melodies are so slurred and reedy that he wills us into a Don Draper lounge fantasy. Antonio Carlos Jobim’s piano chords are legato, coy. The sparse drumming by Milton Banana (what a name!) is wispy, incidental, barely there. Joao Gilberto weaves the whole thing together, as his inimitable guitar comping supplies our only semblance of a bass line and propels each tune’s distinct Latin rhythm. His vocals, and that of his wife Astrud—an intuitive and airy singer—unify each musician’s efforts and solidify the album’s sexiness, even though their heavy Brazilian accents render certain lyrics unintelligible.

Getz/Gilberto might be the only record on earth where there isn’t a single song, not one track, that you can crank. Someone would tell you it didn’t sound right. Someone would tell you to turn that shit down.

*

We played no jazz during the first two years that I was a member of my high school jazz band. Having switched school districts just weeks before I started ninth grade, I flocked instinctively to the small cadre of misfits who used the ensemble structure as an excuse to noodle and jam. Whenever a school concert loomed, we’d get our collective act together and pick the least offensive charts out of the school’s sheet music cabinet so we could play two or three tunes—mostly pop-rock songs from the seventies—for our parents. I don’t remember much of my first year apart from wishing that the guitarist would hurry up and graduate so I could take his place and make the switch from trumpet, an instrument on which I came to project my frustration with my own musical limitations. My most vivid memory from my second year is the session where I had to explain over and over again that I would never get the Shaft riff to sound right because I didn’t own, and couldn’t afford, a wah pedal.

It wasn’t until my junior year that the school hired a young Marine trumpeter to serve as a part-time jazz instructor. His presence, coupled with my switch to bass, gave me my first real taste of jazz from someone who had a working knowledge of, and passion for, the genre. Most of us heard Miles Davis and John Coltrane for the first time. Our drummers experimented with brushes, while our horn players explored how to manipulate their sound with mutes and plungers. Vindicated, our urge to rock roared out when we traded eights on “Watermelon Man,” which was our reward for muscling through Brubeck’s “Take Five” in its quirky 5/4 time signature. After years of music education in the public school system, this crash course in jazz was finally teaching me the power of subtlety, the nuance of tone, and the importance of responsiveness. Our jazz man only lasted one year (Was the pay too low? Did that party where he let us watch Stripes get too rambunctious?), but my conversion was complete. While the Jansports genuflecting before narrow lockers wore patches for Cake and Garbage and Third Eye Blind, I spent my senior year consecrating a new catechism. Wes Montgomery. Herbie Hancock. Sonny Rollins. Stan Getz.

*

When did the sixties begin? 1959 sank and 1960 dawned, sure, but for those of us who didn’t live through those years, it’s hard to reconcile the tumultuous political upheavals and hippie clichés that eventually emerged with the bobbed hairdos, bikini beach blasts, and bubblegum doo-wop that bled over from the previous decade, oblivious to our fiction of time. I suspect that the Kennedy assassination in 1963 was the chief catalyst for the various social and aesthetic transformations now thoroughly engrained in our national iconography and myths.

On March 18th and 19th, eight months before that grim day in Dealey Plaza, Getz, Gilberto, and Jobim sat in a cramped New York City studio and made a jazz masterpiece in 48 hours. The lone black-and-white photo gracing the album’s inner sleeve captures the scene: three clean-shaven men in early-middle age with dark cropped hair and collared shirts. Getz is the only one without a tie. They look like accountants at tax season who, working late one evening, took an impromptu break to relieve their mounting stress.

In the original liner notes, Getz wrote that “unpretentiousness, spontaneity and the poetry of honest emotion belong back in jazz.” Read in context, it’s clear that he’s grinding against the impulse for harder bop and stargazing improvisation. The critic Gene Lees remarked with prophetic authority in these same liner notes that the record captured “a strangely appropriate blend” and that “anything so valid had to survive.” Even though it arrived during a smallish bossa nova fad, the purposefully sensual ambiance of Getz/Gilberto rejected the larger trajectory of the moment in which it was made, and its very rebelliousness make it a sixties record. And yet, its reinvigoration of the simpler melodies and relaxed tempos that marked cool jazz nearly a decade earlier make it nostalgic for post-war normalcy. Like all great art, Getz/Gilberto defies easy categorization and remains a kingdom unto itself. Like all great art, I marvel that it exists.

*

One Saturday morning I refused the groggy pleas for cartoons. My young sons—then two and four—sensed in the pre-dawn haze that I was hardly vertical, and that anything I said was likely to come out as a growl. My wife, obliterated and finally sound asleep, had been ripped awake a half-dozen times throughout the night, cajoling our little tussler to quit whimpering and please, give it up and rest. So we three boys exchanged nothing but a few telegraphic whispers. I turned the blinds for light that wasn’t there. I lit some candles. Lucky Charms. Orange juice. My mug made dull clinks as the coffee spoon swirled cream and sugar into steam. Standing by my clunky, gargantuan turntable—the one my father bought from his father, a Sears salesman, before I was born—there was only one record I wanted. I wanted it low, barely audible, an atmosphere. I wanted its warm hiss to bring us back.

—Adam Tavel