#388: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (1985)

No one who worked in Music thought the job was cool, but most everyone who worked in Music was cool. Our manager played bass in a local punk band. One of the clerks played bass in another local punk band. Another clerk played keyboards in a Thrill Jockey-esque band. I didn’t play anything, but I could at least talk the talk with them in between stocking the racks and ringing up customers.

I worked in the music section of the downtown Seattle Barnes & Noble in the late 1990s, the perfect time for the job. The bookstore chain (and its main rival Borders) offered city dwellers and suburbanites a replacement for the libraries that, at least in Seattle, seemed to have been ceded to the homeless. Come in, they said. We’ve got coffee, and comfy chairs, and you don’t have to buy anything. Male booksellers wore collared shirts and ties, and the two floors of the store allowed for enough space to stock plenty of books. The chain aspired to be a money-making machine dressed as a haven of intellectualism, an ersatz Viennese café culture based on sales of bestsellers.

The music section worked the same way. The national corporation had enough buying power that we could stock the shelves with our obscure favorites, but no one bought them. Instead, our jobs were buoyed by a raft made of middle-aged favorites: pop opera stars like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, throwback acts like the Squirrel Nut Zippers (who we actually liked, too) and the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack, and international CDs, usually the Putamayo series, which each featured a brightly colored cartoon cover. Napster was still a few years off, and the iPod, much less the iTunes store, had yet to exist. People came in and bought music, and we stocked a ton of CDs.

Armed with a label maker, I took it upon myself to organize the racks to an obsessive degree. No longer would there be simply a “Bach-Piano” card; now there would be a “Bach-Goldberg Variations” and “Bach-Partitas” and “Bach-Concerti,” and within those, any artists with three or more discs in stock would get their own cards, too, so “Bach-Partitas-Gould” and “Bach-Concerti-Brendel.” It passed the time, and working full time, I had a lot of time.

I worked through Classical Composer, then Classical Artist, then Classical Vocalist. I moved on to Jazz and broke out dozens of artists. Then I reached International.

At the very beginning of the section, a few hundred CDs were jammed into a section with a single card at the end: “Africa.” Armed with the label maker and a few books I’d snagged from the bookstore side, I set to work. And I suppose this might be the point of this narrative where I do the standard “white kid is amazed by the scope of African music, thereby recognizing his own limited worldview” and where the discovery of a compilation called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto proves to be the catalyst for a lifetime of discovery. But that didn’t happen. Either the store didn’t stock it or I passed right over it in my mania for organization. I wouldn’t hear that particular album for years.

But here’s the thing: I could have found it then. I could have picked it up, wondered at its cover, looked at the back, used my 20% employee discount, and listened to it that night at home. My world would have expanded a little bit more a little bit sooner. Or I could have found albums by King Sunny Ade or Miriam Makeba or Abdullah Ibrahim and listened to those. Or I might have found discs in “Argentina” or “Greece” or “Middle East” that could have changed me.

A few years ago, Barnes & Noble opened a store in the town where I teach, in a space vacated when Borders went under. They followed their new store design, which has plenty of space for books and DVDs, games and toys, and a café, but there’s no music section any longer. The stores that still have music sections have shoved everything into the space that Classical Composer used to occupy.

Sure, the indie record shops are still there, but there’s something about the vanishing of the corporate music sections—at Barnes & Noble, at Best Buy, at a dozen other giants—that I miss, because what I love about places that sell music, even the uncool ones, is that somewhere in those stacks and racks might be the record that will change my life. Electronically, I go directly to what I want, but physically, I browse. Somewhere in that pile is the sound I want to hear, indestructible, waiting for the needle to land in the groove, waiting for the heads to read the magnetic tape, waiting for the laser to strike the first ones and zeroes, waiting for me to hear it and say whoa, what’s this? or this seems interesting or simply yes.

—Colin Rafferty

#389: Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence" (1989)

I’ve come to my parents’ house to write about Don Henley.

It’s not the house that I grew up in, even though the address is the same. They’ve recently purchased a new sofa and redone the carpet in the TV room, which was once a porch, then my parents’ room, then my room, then my brother’s room. The pictures on the wall are different, the little ceramic things that decorate various shelves have rotated through the years. Their record collection, though never very large, is now whittled down to a few college recordings that live next to the photo albums. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the First Edition, Simon & Garfunkel, Harvest—all the records that once made me realize my parents were young, before me—all gone. It’s their house now, though I’m still trying to find what I once knew here, something to cling to.

After a purge a few years ago, none of my things are here any longer either. I came to pick up a tub of mementoes, and proceeded to shove the tub whole hog into a closet in our new house, 40 minutes down the road, to be pored over in whatever free time I could muster. In it, I know, are multiple giant rolled-up posters from my walls, notebooks from various classes I took with scribbled doodles in the margins, band names gracing various surfaces. There are postcards from a trip to Europe, grandparents’ birthday cards from when I turned 10 (a nice round number), and a duck purse given to me in college by a famous DJ. The kinds of things that live in tubs in closets.

How do we decide what belongs to us as adults and what must forever reside in the closet tubs that are our youth? I’m constantly trying to contextualize music with memory. There’s no other way around it. I hear songs today that used to turn up at school dances of yore, when we curled and sprayed our bangs and wore puff-paint shirts and Guess? Jeans and lined the walls of a community center room, the lights dimmed, the DJ playing the hits, waiting to get up the nerve to ask Todd to dance even though you know he’ll probably say no.

I did get to dance with Todd once. It was an awkward song for dancing—something a little bit fast, something like “The End of the Innocence.” It probably was “The End of the Innocence.” Difficult to slow dance to, but we had no choice: Todd said yes. Out of obligation and politeness, but yes. I was short, but he was short too, so I was able to reach my hands up just enough to link around his neck. I remember that his hands barely touched my waist as if he was merely holding his hands out to show the size of a fish he’d caught, and I happened to be there in between them. Instead of moving side to side as most people did at middle school dances, Todd’s legs simply bent at the knee—left, then right, then left—without his feet ever leaving the ground.

It was magical.

What did that song mean to someone who was an adult back then? Was she out late, driving her truck home from her boyfriend’s house, window cracked to let out the smoke from a cigarette, while I was awkwardly slow-dancing in a community center with Todd? Was she ecstatic, or sad? What did those words mean to her?

I’ve come back to Ohio as an adult. I’ve tried to contextualize everything around me differently. It’s where I grew up, where my childhood memories took place, but I have to form new relationships with everything as an adult, with roads and restaurants and landmarks. Trying to find that space between my memory of something and my current experience of it.

I live here and watch my parents get older, watch them purge their things, the things that were my youth. I meet and befriend women who are younger than my mother, but older than me, and realize they could be that woman in the truck that I imagined. They were the ones those Don Henley songs were written for; they have a love of Don Henley from being there, not from remembering him in a nostalgic haze. But with this nostalgia comes a different love, the love of a romantic distance, of an imagined woman driving a truck late at night listening to these songs.

What does Don Henley mean to me? Back then he was an older guy in a suit who made songs that were just too fast to slow-dance normally to. I’d never heard of the Eagles; they weren’t a part of my parents’ record collection. To me he existed in the late 80s just as he was, hair long, as if held in aspic. It’s the same way we first heard David Bowie and Mick Jagger: two older dudes dancing in the streets in suits. They were all wearing suits and singing bluesy pounding power ballads over synths. We had no other context in which to understand them. We weren’t there for Ziggy Stardust. We weren’t there for “Satisfaction.” (To us, that was the Justine Bateman/Julia Roberts movie.) We weren’t even there for Hotel California.

Of course, after the suits came off in the 90s and we stumbled our way through adolescence and into high school, we came to Scary Monsters and Sticky Fingers, and then, probably more recently, like reaching full adulthood, we finally arrived at the Eagles. We’re all listening to it, eating up old concert footage on YouTube, dipping our toes in a lake of 70s nostalgia as if it can bring us back to a time when our parents were young, even as we watch them age. Listening to the Eagles is like looking at that photograph of your mom in an old photo album with a beer bottle in her hand, hair tied back in a scarf, tan, glowing, before you. Or your dad without a gray hair, loose-limbed, goofing off on a beach, before you. My generation and the generations that followed now call this music “Dad Rock,” it’s become associated so extricably with our parents, or with being a parent. But we have no memories of being there ourselves. Everything we know about Don Henley and David Bowie and Mick Jagger is in the context of hindsight. We know their full stories: their arcs. We came to them when they were already established, acclaimed. But the late 80s stuff: that was always part of us. Like The End of the Innocence.

I love this album now. I love that it’s nostalgic for me, even though I only experienced it liminally. I love how the lyrics of the title track describe something intangible in the past…

Remember when days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn’t have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standin’ by

…how the soprano saxophone sounds like another time. How Henley sounds weary, his voice lived in. He sings the blues over broad new-agey synth chords. None of it made any sense to me back then—how on earth is a thirteen-year-old supposed to understand “all these trumped up towers, they’re just golden showers” or relate to “there are people in your life who’ve come and gone, they let you down and hurt your pride”?—but now it’s everything. At its heart, The End of the Innocence is an album about America’s false love affair with capitalism, which I understand much better now, but to me it’s also become an album about growing older. Because of the context in which I knew it then, because so much of the past is embedded in it, and yet because its lyrics require me to be older to understand them. It exists in a world between then and now, and is everything that I am: a combination of then and now and all the times in between. (And so goes a certain bridge: Time, time, tickin’, tickin’, tickin’ away…)

I can own it now, understand it. Life makes everything clearer the more we live it. We may offer up our best defenses, but we’re adults now. We’re getting older. Our parents are getting older. We own the past romantically, remotely, but it’s still a part of us, even when relegated to closet tubs. And, at the heart of the matter, that’s a good thing.

—Zan McQuade

#390: The White Stripes, "Elephant" (2003)

What I remember now is not Jack White’s voice but my steps changing tempo song to song to match Meg White’s steady percussion, walking to and from school every day, listening to Elephant on a bright yellow Discman. I listened incessantly until all the sound that once crashed me like a cymbal dissolved into background noise, until I made it familiar. The album was, in turns, tender and violent, like a kid who scribbled crayon on a white wall. It contained its opposites. It made me feel braver than I actually was.

I particularly loved “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”—though it’s meant to be a breakup song, it was for me a song about identity, a concept I didn’t understand how to navigate. To me the lyrics reinforced that it was okay not to know, and that it was permissible to be restless and uncomfortable with not knowing. It’s a Burt Bacharach cover, and it doesn’t totally surprise me to learn now that it was Meg’s idea to include it.

We replay music we love over and over, and once we’ve moved past the possibility of possession, the repetition has turned it into something different—a little boring, a little tired, but sweet—a shadow of ourselves.

*

In high school I was cripplingly shy around people who didn’t know me well. I couldn’t look new acquaintances in the eye. Whenever I gave presentations, my notes shook in my hands, which in turn caused my knees to tremble, which in turn prompted me to speak so fast no one could understand me.

All the words are gonna bleed from me and I will sing no more.

Meg White is perhaps as famous for her shyness and her anxiety—her anti-public profile—as she is for her drumming.

Even writing this feels like an intrusion.

*

In middle school I’d watched what happened when people made themselves public, which is to say, vulnerable. Someone printed out a series of AIM conversations with a girl who divulged a lot of personal information. The conversations were quickly circulated throughout the school, the girl’s social life ruined. Early versions of blogs sprang up, devoted to trashing different students—essentially online smear campaigns. It wasn’t lost on me that girls were mainly the ones in the line of fire.

But my cautiousness also kept me too reserved, too unwilling to share anything about myself. Once when I mentioned one of my favorite albums was Elephant, one of my best friends stared at me and said, “You know that album?” as if it was beyond her recognition that I even had taste in current music. I had no idea how to articulate myself to myself, let alone to other people.

I don’t what do with myself, just don’t know what to do with myself.

*

Around the time Elephant came out, some friends and I made LiveJournals for fake personas so we could follow the journals of other people at our high school but avoid the vulnerability that came from writing our own. We created entire narratives—fake crushes, fake friends, fake parents. Fake (but very palatable) drama. We masqueraded as these fabricated friends to comment on each other’s posts to more thoroughly build this pretend social circle.

Eventually, the entries turned into a LiveJournal parody, and then, an Internet-diary soap opera. Damien, one of many love interests, was murdered by Jamie’s grandmother’s aunt’s daughter’s cousin’s grandchild/mailman. Jaime writes that Jenna is pregnant, though Jenna refutes this via comment on the accusatory post. The principal is sleeping with someone’s mom.

It did not occur to me then that I could modulate my own identity—and therefore, how others saw me—through writing my own blog, perhaps because I thought “being seen” would allow misinterpretation, which conversely led, in my mind, to a loss of authority over myself. The lines between the interior world of the self and the exterior world of anonymous perception were too confusing, and I didn’t want those spheres to cross-pollinate. So I kept those worlds too definitive—which is to say, limited.

*

YouTube video, “Meg White – I’m Quiet,” uploaded Feb. 24, 2013

Jack White: “Meg, can you finally tell the whole world, once and for all, that people who think I never let you talk during interviews, can you tell them? . . .”

Meg responds, “I’m quiet.” She’s almost inaudible, and Jack laughs, saying, “She can’t even answer this question!” (Though she did.) Her speech is marked with subtitles. I find this somewhat insulting though it’s true I wouldn’t be able to understand her otherwise.

“So for the record, you mean to say that Jack doesn’t always hog the interviews . . . or talk over you?” Jack refers to himself in third person as if Meg is a child watching Sesame Street, and as Meg attempts to respond, “I will say that for the record, I will say that for the record,” Jack, incredibly, raises his voice over her and continues, “What would you say about this—”  here he touches her on the shoulder in a gesture of I’m talking, stop responding to my question—“people who say Jack won’t ever let Meg talk, what would you say to that?”

Silence.

“I would say that you have nothing to do with it,” she laughs.

*

A pause—a stretch of silence—is another kind of beat, of percussion. When used well it can communicate as much as a noise can. (Though of course, the intent of that silence can be dangerous—more open to interpretation than words are.)

*

Because as a kid I thought I wanted to be a musician, I was in a couple pretend bands growing up. By “pretend,” I mean that these bands had names and I recruited my friends for different roles and we wrote weird songs for fun, but didn’t take it seriously since none of us actually owned the required instruments. In my fourth-grade band, the Sisters, I played drums using chopsticks on an exercise ball. I long now for this sort of play, this sort of performative indulgence in whims, which is no longer as acceptable, or perhaps just no longer enjoyable in the same way.

I always wanted to play the drums—drummers were the loudest members of the band but the least visible. The spine of the band, the glue, the one tucked in back that got the least attention.

The least attention, unless you’re a really fantastic drummer.

*

John Bonham always appeared to be losing control during his drum solos: in videos of old Led Zeppelin concerts, his jaw seizes open and shut, his head tosses like a flower on a stalk in a storm, his arms flurry over the set. But of course, what he’s really doing is keeping the beat precise, controlling the rhythm.

*

Many people have criticized Meg’s drumming as “primal,” minimalistic. In response, she’s said: "That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic."

*

If Meg White is on one end of the spectrum of public profiles kept by famous musicians, Taylor Swift is on the other.

In a recent piece on Swift’s 1989 World Tour for the New Yorker, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote, “If there was a single millisecond of spontaneity in Taylor Swift’s live performance, I missed it.”

I’m fascinated by female performance, because I feel on some level we’re always performing. And what’s wrong with an absence of spontaneity? I guess I’m uncertain if true spontaneity exists in performance, when often the way we enact it becomes its own kind of choreography.

As a former figure skater, I think about this a lot. Through rehearsal— repetition—complicated steps turn to familiar ones. The challenge is keeping something familiar imbibed with energy. Michelle Kwan did this so well, especially in her highly-choreographed footwork—by the time she performed these sequences in competitions, they were pure rote movement, but the joy she experiences while skating them is so genuine that it almost makes her performance seem improvised. Her intimacy with her choreography allowed her to let some part of herself go.

In high school, spontaneity was valued above all else. Pulling over in a parking lot, throwing the car doors open, and having a dance party. Swimming in a public fountain at three in the morning. Spontaneity has a certain Kerouac-ian charm. If used well, it makes one irresistible. But I’m suspicious of spontaneity. When I think back at the times I have done something spontaneous, it arose out of a desperate boredom, an urge to be spontaneous—spontaneity is so often a curated impulsivity.

Like stars that are only really bright when you look at them askance, an action ceases to be entirely spontaneous once it is named so. Otherwise, it’s just a beautiful moment.

One of the most powerful things a performer can do is give the illusion of spontaneity when they’re actually in control.

*

“When [Swift] floated above the audience in her high, high heels on that lighted dock, facing a stadium of sixty-eight thousand people,” Sittenfeld writes, “how could she feel anything except either a messiah complex or profound loneliness?”

Many things perplex me about Taylor Swift, but this passage seems misdirected at best. Those are really the only two emotions one could imagine her feeling? What about pride at the image she’s built for herself? Can a woman be powerful and proud without being accused of the highest form of narcissism?

And can she be reserved without being equally shamed?

*

YouTube video, “Jack White urges Meg to speak louder,” uploaded January 1, 2012

Backstage after a show, Jack sits on a couch wrapping cords back up. Meg says softly from the other room, “Sorry, I wasn’t really on top of my game tonight.”

“‘Sorry,’ WHAT?” Jack asks. She repeats herself, softer this time, as she walks into the room. Jack yells, “Nobody can hear a goddamn thing you say!” He’s smiling, like maybe he’s sort of teasing her, but the whole exchange is cringe-worthy. The clip is from a documentary, and he’s clearly putting on a little act for the cameras.

“She doesn’t say it loud enough, then you ask her to repeat it, then she won’t repeat it,” he says to whoever is filming, throwing his hands up.

“So . . . I can tell there are two cameras here,” Meg says, and it’s unclear whether she means she doesn’t have to repeat herself because the cameras will have picked it up, or if she doesn’t want to repeat herself because she feels vulnerable with cameras around.

“When there’s cameras on you and someone asks you to repeat it, you even MORE SO should repeat it,” says Jack.

There’s no home for you here, girl, go away. There’s no home for you here.

*

Like Meg, I’m usually not a loud talker, largely because I don’t want to be overheard by someone for whom the conversation isn’t meant—I feel like it trivializes it.

It’s true there is a joy in learning how to be loud, how to share yourself with others, to accept misinterpretation—of course, all of this makes you stronger because you learn how you can see yourself despite how other people see you. This is what I’d tell my shadow, that fifteen-year-old girl walking to school, wearing out the White Stripes on her yellow Discman. But of course there’s a joy, too, less acknowledged, in keeping yourself for yourself, in removing intention or obligation to perform your self for other people.

I’m glad that I listened to Elephant so much. I’m glad my body so thoroughly absorbed Meg’s drumbeats. For such a quiet person she was so loud, so fierce and steady. Steady, which can also mean: confident. Reliable. There is power in that. This is why I loved figure skating, too: it allowed my body to be loud. It was another way of talking.

Just now I curled my hand under my jaw, and my pulse announced itself against my knuckles. Oh, I thought, no wonder I love the drums.

*

But there’s this image that endures. The cover of Elephant features Meg wearing a white dress, facing away from Jack, who looks in the other direction up and off to the distance, like some Meriwether Lewis figure dreaming of westward expansion and the power that comes with it. Meg has her hand to brow, as if she’s crying. A length of rope tied to her ankle.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#391: Jackson Browne, "The Pretender" (1976)

    It was hard to abandon
    My History of What Might Have Been
    (I was well into the ninth volume)
    But when I looked out the window one morning
    To see the hands had fallen
    From the clock tower
    And lay still as Zeno’s arrows
    In a bed of heliotrope
    I knew I had no choice but to leave unfinished
    My lifelong study of regret
    And begin work instead on this
    Short history of the present.

—Prologue to A Short History of the Present by Erik Reece, Larkspur Press, 2009
 

On one of the last properly brutal summer days in Kentucky a few weeks ago, I was working the beer tent at a street fair in my neighborhood, sweating, smiling, getting sunburned, talking with old friends and drinking for free all day. I went to grab a couple of big bags of ice from the cooler and ran into a young gal I’d worked with before. We helped each other slam bags on the concrete to break up the ice and chatted perfunctorily about how there was a good crowd at the flea market, how it was nice to see everybody out, but damn, this heat. After a while, and apropos of nothing, she looked at me—like, looked me up and down, noting, I’m sure, the stiff white whiskers that streak through my beard these days and the low-profile pleasure-craft ball cap I’ve inexplicably started wearing— and said, “Are you a dad? You look like somebody’s dad.” I wasn’t surprised by this because it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. It happens all the time, actually, because somebody’s always telling me how much I look like my dad. And I do; I look exactly like my father, who’s a good man and a comrade. He’s intelligent, generous, and even-keeled in ways that I aspire to be. I’m always flattered by the comparison.

I told the girl that no, I wasn’t a dad, but I sort of knew what she meant, and that it was sweet of her to say so. I said, “It’s sweet of you to say so,” then I humped the bags of ice over my shoulders and walked back to the beer tent feeling sort of pleased but tender, and a little confused.

A buddy of mine, a guy I played in hardcore bands with in the 90s, always referred to artists like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, America, Linda Ronstadt—any Levi’s-boot-cut-desperado-jams—as “Dad Rock.” While it certainly collated and glossed over important particulars about craft and approach, I recognized some truth resonating in the quick pejorative the same way that one can understand intuitively, almost by touch, that “Yacht Rock” means acts like Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald, and that “Lawyer Rock” gestures up the turnpike toward Billy Joel and Steely Dan. While the jagged, shorthand judgements of youth against age are never entirely inaccurate, they necessarily suffer from an as-yet incomplete survey of the territories, the world falling off the edge of a map.

My buddy’s assessment of Dad Rock had less to do with being a father, than the vague presentiments—inherited by every generation—that, beyond the next ridge, in the realms of adulthood, some nebulous, debilitating compromise looms like a storm front over an arid desert of mediocrity. He has a ten-year-old son now, and to my knowledge has not come around to Jackson Browne, still preferring Fela Kuti, the Fat Boys, Devo, et. al. I’m thirty-eight with no kids, I don’t feel particularly grown up, and I don’t sense that I’m deflating into some senseless obscurity. I have to confess that the fears of adulthood we discussed as young men, fears of complacency and unfulfilled designs, about the prospect of a slow attrition of the will, are still very present; it’s bleak stuff, and it scares the shit out of me actually.

It’s these sort of predictable, broad-spectrum anxieties that were Jackson Browne’s lyrical coin in trade through the entire decade of the 1970s. Seriously, you can drop the needle into pretty much any groove on any of his records at the time and count on hearing one variety of sentimental, aphoristic presentiment or another, coddled inside his signature thoughtful melodies and breezy cadences which are propped up against existential dilemmas, most frequently, “How the hell did I get here, and what am I supposed to do now?” Don’t turn it into a drinking game; it would be lethal.

What’s aggravated me so much this week as I’ve listened to The Pretender again for the first time in a while, is that while it stimulates my youthful distrust of ambivalence, I’m also powerless against its treacly, sentimental pap—thick and sweet as condensed milk, bearing the faintest whiff of a stink—that I understand fully. It bugs me that I understand this record so clearly.

There’s always some low-octane uncertainty in the lyrics of Browne’s pre-1980s records.  It’s another entry in the soundtrack of nostalgic regret that, as a young man, I took as received wisdom, drank up like cough syrup and smeared on my chest like Vicks VapoRub. There’s always some pensive reflection on not knowing what the future holds, or discomfort with past decisions. There’s never a shortage of presentiment from the Slim-Fit Introspector General, and his sentences hinge on negations like can’t, hardly, haven’t, won’t, never; they issue forth from a language of scarcity and are spread over root-deep bass lines and a constant stream of bottleneck slide guitar. Jackson Browne’s always sitting down by the highway somewhere, running down the road, or staring off into “a long distance loneliness blowing out over the desert floor.”

    No matter where I am I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away from where I want to be.

Browne’s narrators are uncertain. They’re starting to wonder if there’s any such thing as trajectory. They gaze deep within themselves, shrug, and try to play it cool when they discover large, airy, empty caverns there. They’ve drunk the pool water at the Hotel California and have learned to disguise their mediocrity as ambivalence, pretending until they forget they’re pretending, like undercover agents who’ve gone native: boring-native, given-up-native.

    I'm gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender
    Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
    To the heart and the soul of the spender
    And believe in whatever may lie in those things that money can buy
    Though true love could have been a contender
    Are you there? Say a prayer for the Pretender
    Who started out so young and strong only to surrender

Assessing the fakers who are faking it all the way to the grave, into the arms of Thanatos itself, it sometimes feels like Browne’s observant narrators may yet be exempted:

    Everybody’s going somewhere, riding just as fast as they can ride.
    I guess they got a lot to do before they can rest assured
    That their lives are justified, pray to god for me babe, that he can let me slide.

Look, The Pretender is not a very good record. To borrow an interpretive mode from John Sullivan, “it fails to be excellent.” It is an interesting record, though, because it demonstrates, almost as an object lesson, the paradoxes of incautious, youthful genius speculating  on what could follow. The roots of The Pretender’s in-excellence are addressed directly in the record itself: it’s a mediocre record about avoiding mediocrity, and it tries, at times diligently, to distill an antidote from its own poison. Sometimes it’s like we’re watching Browne or his narrator claw at the walls.

    Though the years give way to uncertainty
    And the fear of living for nothing strangles the will
    There’s still a part of me, though it’s sometimes hard to see,
    Alive in eternity that nothing can kill

All of the fears addressed in Browne’s 70s catalogue—loss, failure, death, etc.—are inextricable from the human psychic make-up, they’re standard issue, totally fertile if well-trod ground for poetry and song. My real dilemma, my new dilemma, is not any fault of Jackson Browne’s in particular. I think of him, at the tender age of twenty-eight, juggling with the same fears that I and my buddy fretted over during cigarette breaks at band practice. My questions about Jackson Browne speak to a larger, newfound suspicion of the entire misty-eyed nostalgic trajectory of Sentimentalism and Romanticism. One that telescoped, directly and necessarily, from the 18th century through and beyond the earnest, milquetoast, singer-songwriters of the 70s who were in so many ways my schoolmasters. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this is the first time I’ve ever really questioned or scrutinized capital-S Sentimentality. It’s about damn time, I guess, and I sort of object to it; I think I’ve had enough, I think I’ve absorbed the lesson fully. I’ve recited my catechisms faithfully, and now I have a toothache.

I spent some time the last few years considering the economies of nostalgia in pop music. I put my thinker on the best I could and became convinced that the pervasive presence of nostalgia in our culture was, at the very least, some type of popular engagement with the past, some expression of historical imagination, and that there was an almost medicinal effect of the pathos and longing, that it moored the present to the past. It’s a claustrophobic chronology though. I’m unconvinced of its usefulness now, and that feels like a good thing to me, like progress finally, like maybe I’ll hear some new songs, songs that seek to address this present moment. This one, right now.

—Joe Manning

#392: The Beatles, "Let It Be" (1970)

I stopped having fun the day I learned to count, when moments became finite and routine thrust me forward. Two more bites. Bedtime in five. I’ll tell you when you’re older. But when the needle landed on my father’s turntable, melodies sat suspended in the air. No fast forward, no pause, no screen to scold how little we had left.

Music is an attempt to manipulate time, stretching and crumpling each second. The right song can take you back to that state of mind, before anticipation spoiled everything. The right song can free you from increments.

I was never introduced to the Beatles. From birth I was saturated, predisposed to a decades-old mania. Born in the 1950s, my mother and father came of age as the band did—the shift from wanting to hold your hand to just… wanting you. I grew up in a house with Beatles posters on the wall, coffee table books, Yellow Submarine clothes hangers, and of course, the records, a shelf of original pressings I was not allowed to touch. Beneath blue suburban skies, the Beatles joined us for Christmas mornings, tooth fairy visits and after-school snacks. I heard the music, but I never heard the story.

My childhood impressions skew quite a linear narrative—by and large the most significant evolution in the history of song. My eight-year-old self could hear the difference between “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Love Me Do,” but she couldn’t tell you which one came first and why that mattered. The Beatles were just the Beatles, wide-ranging, but a constant nonetheless.

Like someone who grew up in the church finally reading the Bible cover-to-cover, I’ve listened to all twelve studio albums in chronological order, tracing the progression, trying to pinpoint exactly when the THC kicked in (1965, Rubber Soul: those inhales during the chorus of “Girl”). The story of John, Paul. George and Ringo has been told and retold, cataloged by the song, by the day, by the haircut. A basic plot has fastened, beginning at a church garden party in Liverpool, England in 1957. But the ending is not as clear. Scholars and fans disagree on which album should be considered the band’s final; Abbey Road was the last one to be recorded, Let it Be was the last one released. Does the narrative lock when a song is sung, or when it is heard?

My father, an accomplished air pianist, always points out a sore chord in the final verse of Let it Be’s title track (at 2:59, on the word mother). What he calls a “mistake,” I call a dissonant variation in harmony. In 2003, Paul McCartney released Let it Be…Naked, a cut of the record stripped of Phil Spector’s overwrought production, supposedly the album Paul intended to make in 1970. The Naked tracks mean to revise the last chapter, guide us back to the place we once belonged….and leave us there. In the stripped version of the song “Let it Be”, the rogue chord is gone—the progression in the final verse matches the two that that came before it. My father owns Let it Be…Naked on CD, but he hardly plays it, favoring the original, slightly scratched LP. For him, the story had already been told.

The film Let it Be, though currently out of print, is available on a Japanese streaming website near you. Along with raw footage of tense recording sessions and implied bickering, the documentary captures the Beatles’ last live performance, an iconic surprise concert on the rooftop of Apple Records. The camerawork misleads us as it flashes back and forth between close-ups of the band and a flabbergasted crowd forming in the London streets, suggesting an intimate exchange. But the impromptu stage sat atop five stories, their view obstructed by the surrounding crop of skyscrapers. The band couldn’t see their audience, and their audience couldn’t see them. In their final performance, the Beatles could superimpose whatever reaction they wanted. At least in that moment.

There’s a story I’ve been telling myself for years, about a ten-year-old girl who sang “Let it Be” in the fifth grade talent show, to an audience of schoolyard bullies and mean girls. I write myself as a victim, vindicated to the dismay of those kids who teased her for liking “parents’ music.” (Basically the plot of every episode of Glee.) I wore a much-too-big evergreen gown, its straps hovering like handles over my freckled shoulders. Squinting in harsh lighting, I craned my neck up to the microphone. I sang:

“When I find myself in times of trouble…”

But it isn’t really a story, is it? It’s a moment, a moment I’ve jammed into a cheesy formula. The narrative crumbled once I sat down and realized what really happened: sure, I sang a Beatles song in my elementary school’s talent show. But the audience wasn’t entranced; it was a freakin’ elementary school talent show. They were monitoring the paper programs in their laps, counting down the acts until it was time to go home. I vaguely remember applause, though I’m sure it was out of politeness and not awe. The action only rises and falls in retrospect. I still got teased afterward. Mother Mary never came.

But even without a lightning strike of redemption, I still feel pride and triumph when I hear the opening chords of “Let it Be” descend. Perhaps I’ve framed this moment with delusion, but I take comfort not in what came immediately before or after it. Sixteen years ago, for three minutes, I sang loudly to the white void in front of me, superimposing whatever reaction I wanted. I forgot about endings.

—Susannah Clark
Recorded by Dillon M. Hawkins

#393: M.I.A., "Kala" (2007)

“A sense of belonging.” A phrase used so often, yet honestly, I don’t even know what it means, or if it even means something good. When did “belonging” become synonymous with the idea of comfort?

For some, knowing what really belongs to you, or what you belong to, is something that only becomes clear once someone forcibly takes it away. What really awakens the anger and passion can be not just someone taking it away, but someone taking what’s yours, then making it “theirs.” The struggle that then ensues, to take back what was once yours, without the feeling of a need to make friends along the way—now that’s a feeling.

It was early on in my childhood that I came around to understanding what I belonged to. A child of immigrants, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina in the early 90s, there was no lack of opportunity to be reminded of my “other-ness”. My fierce mother made sure that though our peers didn’t see us as one of them, as Americans, we would learn and know exactly what it meant to be Nepali.

Perhaps it was a false sense of belonging that Maya Arulpragasam felt, successful internationally due to the amazing response to her first album, Arular, and settled and comfortable at her second home in Brooklyn. So one can imagine the rush of anger and confusion that flooded her mind when she couldn’t even pass through a security clearance at the U.S. embassy to obtain re-entry access to return to her adopted home.

For any kid educated in American public schools, the concept of colonization is taught under very rosy pretenses. It’s what the British did to us Americans, they’d say. And proudly, they’d follow: we knew better. We declared our independence.

But colonization still happens, Those who were colonized are doing the colonizing. It’s seeped through land, and now materializes in fashion, music, language, food, design—you name it.

Something as small as tika, a cultural adornment worn by men and women alike in the Hindu community, to signify a “third eye” representing spiritual sight, has been neatly packaged by Western capitalism. It’s flashy, it’s oh-so-exotic. Give it six months and the entire capitalist food chain will soon present its finished product to your nearest Urban Outfitters: a pack of colorful and glittery, stick-on tika for only $9.99. Kind of ironic to think that it was probably processed in some discrete factory, shy of any labor codes, tucked away in a street corner in Mumbai.

Next thing you know, it’s 1996 and Gwen Stefani is wearing one on stage, and I’m confused.

So what is Kala to me? It’s what I think Kala was to M.I.A.: an angry and emotional response to the colonization of sound, of the culture of the global south. It’s a big fuck-you to the first world authorities that tried to colonize her and limit her movement. But, most importantly, it is an act of reclaiming what belongs to her, and what gives a sense of belonging to me.

Big on the underground / What's the point of knocking me down? / Everybody knows / I'm already good on the ground.

The quick tabla beats in “Bird Flu” and the sampling of an old Bollywood film in the album’s “Jimmy,” paired with a flash of soca, creates a spiraling record that showcases sounds proudly put together by contributing DJS and instrumentalists, and M.I.A. herself, who all tapped into their version of belonging to create belonging for listeners like me. It’s comfort in all the right ways.

“Kala” means “art” in Sanskrit, but then again language is a curious thing. Translating can be tricky: how can you derive the purest meaning of what a word means in another language that perhaps cannot even grasp the idea for which it stands? The closest interpretation I can come up with is a “melodious expansion of the eternal potencies of the fine arts.”

Kala itself is more than just a piece of art—it is a symbol of the eternal nature of the global south’s music and culture, and M.I.A.’s appropriately abrupt, angry, and enlightening call to the world to wake up and reclaim what was once ours.

I wonder if all those kids yelling the lyrics to “Paper Planes” in the club on a Friday night know that.

—Prarthana Gurung

#394: Randy Newman, "Good Old Boys" (1974)

Growing up in Virginia, you end up spending an inordinate amount of time walking through battlefields. If your father possesses even one iota of interest in the war between the states, or if you see your grandfather even semi-frequently, or if you attend public school, you will, not just periodically but frequently, take a stroll through some battlefields. Again and again and again. Sometimes the same battlefields, reading the same numbers and names on the same bronze placards and even though they will feel the same always, they will always be slightly different. Because you will be slightly different. Every time. If you’re a savvy enough southerner, you can start charting your maturity based on battlefields.

I grew up and later went to college in Virginia, didn’t make it out of the state until after graduation, and for my last two years of higher ed, lived in a big white house three blocks from a battlefield. It meant nothing, and when I took the time to walk through the thing, it meant everything. About who I was, about what I thought I stood for, about what I thought could and couldn’t creep me out. One Sunday my senior year, mid-nap, cannonfire shook my house. The windows clattered like in a hurricane, the walls vibrated, the sound felt catastrophic. Between the second and third blast, I finally found online (by Googling my city’s name then “cannon” and the day’s date, of course) that cannons were going off just down the street in celebration of the battlefield’s birthday. Of course. Two more percussive explosions, then respite. It was like living near a battlefield. Because I was. And the land couldn’t not keep reminding me.

Nostalgia’s a mighty funny thing, the way it recolors and warps. Growing up in Virginia, you end up walking through a lot of battlefields—and for what? To remember. To remember what? The fallen. Who fell for what? And on and on. It feels icky to question it, but that’s all part of the game, isn’t it. To “live” history is to do the heavy lifting of understanding its undulations and patterns, of finding themes throughout the way you would of Faulkner. So what are we learning walking through battlefields? What undulations are we working to understand? For me: the limits of my patience, and not much more.

When Randy Newman began work on his important, unimpeachable Good Old Boys—my favorite album most days these days--he was thirty years old. Thirty years old with nostalgia like a Civil War vet, none of whom would have been kicking even then, in ‘73, but you get what I mean. By and large, the record’s a topical melange, but its A-side is purely conceptual: one southern man’s voice in all its recognizably backwards, whip-smart, purely glorified glory. Prideful and proud—not the same word exactly, but close—and heavy with great stories for the telling. From “Rednecks” to “Guilty,” again and again and again we hear the voice of the fictional Johnny Cutler, a character invented for the record but abandoned by name in the early goings. Instead, the thing came out just sounding like Randy Newman. Because was there ever any way around it?

Thanks to the nineties, Randy’s now got that Pixar sound, rather than the other way around. Rather than spicing up some animations with heavy irony and subtle winking wit, all we’ve got now are generations raised by Uncle Randy’s gentle bullfrog voice. And where’s the harm in that? If all goes well, one day those kids get curious and buy some Randy off iTunes for the hell of it and discover his perfect foursome of sardonic, beautiful early records. And Good Old Boys is the diamond on that crown, so full of careful, consummate songwriting, so big-hearted and dark-hearted all at once.

Why does its second side begin with a three-song concept suite based on the life and musings of slimy and brilliant Louisiana governor Huey P. Long? There is no answer, other than that that’s what Randy wanted, and that’s what he pulled off. They sit right there alongside a song called “Naked Man,” which is, yes, about the travails of a naked man just looking for love in a terrified world. And that sidles right up to “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” a song so funny and so romantic and so twisted you won’t know whether to laugh or weep or turn it off. But, no, I’m short-changing it. It’s better than that.

Here I am, trying the best I can to write something coherent and worthy of Good Old Boys, almost certainly the greatest southern record of all time, and very likely one of the few absolutely perfect albums ever put to wax. How does one do such a thing? Maybe by talking about walking through battlefields.

So look: listening to “Rednecks”—the opening track, for god sakes—is a little like walking through a battlefield. Every feeling you’ve felt about growing up a Virginian at heart and by blood but with a brain that sees all the history’s filthy bits, sees the petty anger, sees the rebel flags still waving in the front yards, sees everything you love existing only because and despite of all the bits of it you want to tear apart—every feeling is a part of it. All those bits are the same as all the good ones, the prideful and the proud conversing like a potluck. And can’t that be the whole point? Maybe history needs to be history, and that doesn’t mean maybe it should go away. Maybe it needs to stay real close, right here, next to the songwriters and the poets and the terrible men, too—always men—who want to hoist up all their evil like a shield that will forever protect them against the songwriters and the poets. Maybe that evil’s not a shield: maybe it’s a mirror. And maybe that mirror needs a good cracking every once in awhile. And maybe other days you need to let it catch the sun and glare.

—Brad Efford

#395: LCD Soundsystem, "Sound of Silver" (2007)

Is it fair to love an album for its last song?

I’m not saying that I don’t like the rest of the album, or even that “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” is Sound of Silver’s definitively best song, but it’s certainly true that my particular positive feelings about the album hinge entirely on that song. It’s a song I listened to late at night or in the early morning or on long and quiet afternoons. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, when I first encountered it. There was a blog I read by a girl who lived in New York—she was funny and charming and smart and literary-minded, and I looked forward to her posts, and I’m almost positive it was in one of those posts that she linked to the song, wrote some things about it. It seemed, then, like a song I should know—she talked about it as if it were common knowledge. Probably because it was common knowledge, I thought. LCD Soundsystem seemed like a big band among people who knew more about music than I did.

There’s something about being lonely in a familiar place. I was getting my Master’s degree in a fifth year, after four years of undergrad at UVA. Most of my friends had graduated the year prior, and left town. Charlottesville is nothing like New York, that’s true. It’s smaller and brighter and cleaner and less anonymous. There are a lot of people there who all look the same. The girls had shiny hair and North Face jackets and Hunter boots. I loved it dearly but also resented it. I loved it dearly and thought I should be happy but wasn’t, exactly, happy, and wasn’t sure why.

I had a poetry teacher once who explained the meaning of ambivalent. People often use the word in conversation as if it’s synonymous with apathetic, to denote something they’re indifferent to, something they don’t care much about either way. But that’s not what the word means. If you feel ambivalent about something, it’s making you feel two opposing feelings—love and hate, say—simultaneously. Belonging and isolation. Fear and joy.

When my teacher taught us this, it blew my goddamn mind. There was a word for it! For that thing! That nameless restless thing. That in-betweenness. Call it complexity. Call it life.

I was in love. (I am always in love.) I mention it only because love really lends itself to that sort of thing. I also wanted to be a writer. (Sometimes, now, I feel like a writer.) I mention it only because language really lends itself to that sort of thing. Both of those longings—the love-longing and the language-longing—come, I think, from a very human sense of isolation. There has been no reason, not really, for me to feel so other for my entire life, and I knew it, and yet. And yet. And yet!

“New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down.” Could there be a more perfect way to describe living in a place like that? A place where everything is both amazing and terrible. The crowds! The dirt! The subways! The choices! A place where you can do anything at any given time would sometimes be exciting and sometimes be paralyzing and probably, often, be both. If you had to pick just one place on this planet to exemplify ambivalence, it would be New York City.

And the song is the anthem of that feeling—this thing that is so great is also terrible. Here I am, feeling melancholy about a thing that brings me such joy. I’m sure I’d feel that way if I lived in New York, but I love the song because I’ve also felt that feeling living in other places. It’s not just about where you live, though. Other songs on the album embody a similar emotional register—a wistful loneliness, an isolation you don’t have to be alone to feel. Is my life what I wish it was? They do this, often, by using refrain to great effect. Sound of Silver is a repetitive record, but the repetitiveness within the songs fulfills a function, and culminates quite purposefully. This happens both lyrically and musically.

“And it keeps coming, and it keeps coming, and it keeps coming ‘til the day it stops,” in one song. In another: “Where are your friends tonight?” The same notes pounded over and over on the piano. The same synth beat. Of course, all songs repeat, but the shortness and simplicity of the sequences repeated draws real attention to them. This is, of course, purposeful.

This manic repetitiveness also embodies the chaotic, frenetic environment of New York City (or even just of a busy life, a busy brain—isn’t it remarkable how New York becomes a metaphor). And the songs have a lot of components layered on top of one another—so even if the components are simple and repeated, the multitude of them and the ways they rub against one another creates tension and complexity.

I went to a poetry reading recently where the poet, in his in-between-poems banter, addressed the ways he’d edited his poems and the manuscript comprised of them, and he cited specifically a couple of decisions he’d made to “weird things up,” which had ultimately made the poems more successful and the manuscript publishable. I have tried, sometimes, in my writing, to make less sense. To be stranger and less linear. I’ve never quite managed to be successful in that endeavor. But I enjoyed hearing him talk about his process precisely because I haven’t, yet, figured out what about that makes things work when it works. And I so much respect art that makes good use of chaos—that knows how to harness it.

LCD Soundsystem unquestionably does this on Sound of Silver. The songs are upbeat and melancholy in turn, and through the successful deployment of chaos manage to embody an entire range of simultaneous and opposing emotions. And so, it is fitting that the album concludes with “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” a song that does all of these things—that really embodies, to my mind, what the album is doing as a whole. The song starts melancholy and gains energy, and crescendoes to chaos—everything gets louder, the piano more emphatically pounded, the drums going crazy, James Murphy pushing his voice to its limits. And then, after a brief pause, a little musical interlude serves as denouement—a simple, reigned-in melody to bid us goodbye, on a composed note. Like tidying the room after you’ve thrown a tantrum. The reestablishment of boundaries, rules. Life continuing. Terrible sometimes and wonderful sometimes and only life, after all.

—Katelyn Kiley

#396: Roxy Music, "For Your Pleasure" (1973)

The band history of Roxy Music lends itself to a number of those “what if” scenarios historians and others alternately deplore or ponder. What if Robert Fripp had selected Bryan Ferry as King Crimson’s vocalist? Roxy may never have existed and, also, what would a Ferry/KC have sounded like? What if Eno hadn’t left Roxy after For Your Pleasure? How different would the ensuing albums sound? And—to reference a scene from This is Spinal Tap—what if For Your Pleasure’s cover had featured Amanda Lear on a leash held by Ferry instead of Lear walking a chained panther with Ferry looking on as a boyish chauffeur? To extend the Spinal Tap (il)logic, there’s such a fine line between clever/stupid and sexy/sexist. Yet, fine lines are one of the things For Your Pleasure is about. It constantly shifts modes, tones, melodies, and boundaries—and rarely in the manner one might think.

There are those who consider Roxy’s first two albums their most ambitious or best, with For Your Pleasure serving as the better of the two. I am one of those people. Opinions on music, as with all art forms, are highly subjective, however I happen to think the objectivity of my perspective on For Your Pleasure benefits from the facts that it appeared before I was born, that no one I knew listened to Roxy, and that I heard it for the first time over two decades after its release—amid the grunge/techno/rave menagerie of the mid-1990s. I believe this temporal remove is largely responsible for my own reactions to the album often seeming at variance with those of music critics from the 1970s/80s.

Critics of previous generations, for example, have celebrated or at least recognized a sexiness of sound and appearance. I experienced neither. I’m not sure I can define a “sexy sound” in music and although I find Amanda Lear beautiful, the album’s cover shot is not unlike what one might glimpse inside the pages of any number of fashion magazines in a doctor’s office waiting room.  Another discrepancy is that while earlier critics focused a great deal on Bryan Ferry, I had never heard of him before. The only musician name familiar to me was Eno and I remember wondering if he was in fact the same guy who was making U2’s albums sound progressively weirder. So much for Generation X backtracking and ignorance.

On the positive side of all this, I think if a person comes to an album with virtually no prior knowledge of it or the band and comes away impressed, then chances are there’s something rather unique and distinguished about that album. Such was my reaction to For Your Pleasure. Listening to it for the first time over two decades after its initial release, my observations, in no particular order, broke down as follows: 1) This singer reminds me a lot of David Bowie, only with stronger pipes; 2) The rhythm section really drives the hell out of these songs when it wants to; 3) This lyricist has some convictions and something serious to say; 4) The guy working synth and effects is incredible. Looking back, I think the last of these points is the most interesting. Hearing Eno’s work on that album for the first time during an era in which a lot of his innovations had been incorporated into digital machines for rap, techno, and trance music, it amazed me how ingenious, warm, and alive his effects sounded using comparatively primitive analog equipment.

For all the glitz and sexiness critics seem to have associated with Roxy and, especially, Ferry, For Your Pleasure, as a whole, is a rather dark, haunting album. The song “Beauty Queen,” for example, laments how the lovers “never could work out” and that even life’s patterns are drawn in sand. Moreover, despite bearing the label of artsy pop band, no single was released from For Your Pleasure, though the album rose as high as #4 on the UK charts. Lastly, it’s the only Roxy studio album that contains a nine-minute song, the end of which includes a Judi Dench voiceover.

Like a lot of strong writing, much of For Your Pleasure’s musical power and achievement stem from its contradictions. The listener does indeed experience pleasure from the songs, even though the lyrics themselves hardly speak of it. Ferry’s usually conventional melodies are alternately complemented or foiled by Eno’s sonic experiments (it is unfortunate, though not surprising, the two found it impossible to continue working together). Even selecting Amanda Lear as the cover’s female sex symbol is misleading, given that she was born a male and spent time performing in various European transsexual clubs. The album also reveals a sense of humor, however macabre, as underscored by its love song for an inflatable sex doll (“I blew you up / but you blew my mind”).

There’s a traceless quality to good enduring art, regardless of the medium, which eludes articulation. Based on the slick Chris Thomas production quality of the album and not having glanced at the liner notes, I remember during my first exposure thinking For Your Pleasure must have been recorded in the late 1980s. So there I was, listening to the album in the mid-1990s, assuming it was from 80s, and subsequently shocked to discover it had first appeared in 1973.

Sitting here, absorbing the album in 2015, I’m struck again by its timeless innovations and contradictions. Roxy would move on to make other strong albums. Even Eno himself admitted his departure allowed the band to become more focused and commercial. I agree. More focused and commercial? Yes. More artistically innovative and ambitious? No. It’s also no coincidence Eno would move on to work on what I consider David Bowie’s best albums: Sound and Vision and “Heroes.” What Roxy lost in Eno became the gain of numerous others.

As guitarist Phil Manzanera recalls of the album’s development, “We found ourselves being successful and having a lot of expectation. We said: let’s go and do something different, something weird and wonderful. Let’s explore.” And, for what may have been the final time, the band did just that. Don’t believe me? Go listen to it—for your pleasure.

—Casey Clabough

#397: Massive Attack, "Blue Lines" (1991)

continued from #438: Boy’s Don’t Cry

I must’ve gone snooze again ‘cause I wake up in the kitchen sink now, water dripping down the crack of my ass and a gat jammed in my temple, some Tricky Kid with a rainbow grill slobbering in my face.

“Whar da soz’s at?”

Through slumbering head clouds I don’t rec the speak but don’t see him a tealeaf anyhow. “Hey pal, wallet’s yours. On the table,” I say, bargaining seconds like a turbaned bazaar vet, reaching back quiet for the wire scrub brush—for that caked on grease, so the dame in the pitch viz says anyway.

“Oi, ain’t inerest’d inat. Gettin’ a Visa card nowadays isn’t hard.”

I acknowledge his point with a shrug before bringing my arm around hard and jamming the brush in his eye; my other fist swinging pendulum-like wrapped ‘round a sudsy mug I picked up München way back. My souvenir stein crashing into his mouth and twisting his face up into a bloody tunnel of budding orthodonture; 52 pick-up with many-hued teeth.

“Feckin’ murderin’ bastard,” he screams through eyeless/toothless agony and I push myself out of the sink onto the floor where I land a kung fu chop to his solar plexus, followed by a knee to his now bent-over noggin, messing my slacks with some ocular leavings. With the pain and the blow to the head, he’s out. I tie him to the kitchen chair with some cord from the cupboard, wipe the sweat off my brow and walk over to the window, lean out into the drizzle, hands on the sill. A Blue Razr parked across the way speeds off. I nod to myself, tuck back out of the rain, spark a Morley’s and puff, collecting on my next move.

*

“Hey Momma,” I say into the vizcon. Trendy Wendy stares back though a brick wall of mascara: ‘coons must be the new thing in Dogtown. “I got a package for ya,” nodding my head at the drifting bloody dingbat leaking on the formica.

“Creepz Bobby, what’d he do?”

“Boy interrupted me from my Palmolive usings whilst waiting on a client. Damned hard to reach spots and streaky drying. Chapped my hands.”

“You sure enough did a number on ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, dukkha. I was hoping you could send one of your boys down for cog and disposal. Remove some toenails, Guantanomize, the like. Get to the prize of this particular Cracked Jack.”

“Sure thing Bobby, Judo Jonny be over in twenty, no problemo. Let you know what we find. Who’s the client anyways?”

“Some rich dame, who knows. Eyah Brusha here coulda been looking for her or come in her place; I’d reckon the former, making it more complicated than the easy few Cs I was counting on this gig.”

“Ain’t that always the case.” Trendy Wendy blows a kiss and signs off and I sit down to wait for Judo Jonny, smoke a fag or two, and meditate on the grievous prospects ahead.

By the time Judo gets the boy cleared out and bleaches the floor, I’ve gone through a pack of Morley’s and a bottle to boot. I lay my buzzing head down and finally drift off as the sun peeks out between the curtains, dreams of falling into a huge sandstorm, a bloodied Arab, an endless caravan, sand spinning ever ever ever.

*

The buzzing vizcon shatters steamy harem visions, perking me out the cot. Have to bend over sideways to take a leak.

“What is it,” I scream from the loo. Trendy’s on the screen again. I catch her grin tweaked and me covering my privates as I race by, her face made up in some newday perversion.

“Why good morning sailor,” she says, laughing. “Just wanted to let you know what we found out about One-eyed Willy here… Not much.”

I grumble from the commode.

“But, and fair warning on this one, he appears to be one of Ter Mojave’s goons.”

I raise my head and peak out the loo. “Ter Mojave?”

“Yup.”

“Damn, that do plant a tick in my tenders don’t it?”

“You could say.”

I zip up and walk over to the screen. I can see now Wendy’s latest trip: a diorama of raised scars and implanted hillocks make a map of her face.

“Cute look.”

“You like it? It’s the newest thing from Ney Tokyo.”

“Sure thing babe, cheers for the data.”

Winsome Wendy, lips bearing curious around new bolts and designs into concern, “Hey Bobby, just get away with dem gangsters, we don't want it.”

The screen goes black.

*

Ter Mojave has a Cadillac the size of an aircraft carrier, TV antennas in the back, sunroof top, and a collection of 30 Eurasian twinks whose only job is to spit shine the windows. Restricted to a diet of aloe and lilacs, their sputum makes clean and fragrant. This Sally who paid me a visit the prior eve not one of that lot, obv. Ter’s business spiderweb in need of as many toughs as poofs.

Dig this scene: rumor is Ter’s a mutant. Nobody seen his face since the aughts when Mommy or Daddy covered his egg with a burlap sack and shoved a sawed-off in his tiny mitts. Wound up the toy soldier and pushed him into a Circle-P whereby he enacted his first, of many to come, criminal enterprise. Such compassionate education led predictably into pimping and usury, drugs, arms, a whole sandbox of toys for the bobbing babe. He’d ditched the burlap some years back for a more fetching skintight balaclava, but lingering rumors of mutation persisted, facial deformities, wolf eyes, cleft palate. Still he stands tall.

If my visitor was one of Ter’s cast of characters, and he was after my client, a dame I’d seen but the one time she come strutting and waving her sallow Benhameens, I had more trouble than I thought. I guess I could forget the whole shebang, take a trip down Barbados for a few weeks, live life as a fever dream of shuffleboard and piña coladas, but she’s already left a deposit after all. A man’s gotta do.

The place to start if Ter was involved was the Sheik Mansour Supper Club, a posh joint in Lil’ Da Nang for the hoi polloi and layabouts of the sweeter set. After a pot of coffee and a round of cigs, I put on a dinner jacket over my gat and stride out to catch a Johnny Cab. It’s early yet, but the lunch crowd at the Sheikh Mansour would be a little easier to handle; no need to go in all musket balls and ramrods.

*

Elvis Phơưng’s doing a soundcheck up on stage, while lunch patrons slurp phơ and smoke black Gitanes. Bạn không là gì, nhưng một con chó con chó săn, đung đưa tất cả các thời gian. His voice more gravel than his namesake, guitars jangly and loose. The maître d’ in his monkey suit looks down on me like King Kong perusing an abused gaggle of Skull islanders on a lunch buffet.

“Could I see your identification sir?” he says over the backbeat and slurps. I feign chagrin at his thinking me heat all duded up and all. His face shines no sympathetic crag.

“Hey hey,” I shuck, “don’t call me an officer. This ain’t official business or nothing.”

The beefcake is unimpressed and I flip a card on the podium like some Lost Vegas card sharp. He continues unimpressed and disdainfully tweezes it between two grinding meatsticks, peering quizzical at the raised Lucinda Grande on Bone Alabaster. Tiki Taka falling deaf on the ogre, I go Route One.

“I’m looking for Ter Mojave.”

“And your relationship with Mister Mojave.” Not a moment’s breath and all focus on the Mister.

I harrumph and jaw, “We’d a been book club pals, Edith Wharton and whatnot, come what may. Err… boy’s school locker room hi-jinx, some youthful experimentation if you get my drift. Snapping towels, rape-lite. We go way back, the Mister and me.”

His meaty nostrils flare a meat minute, clenching up fists the size of my sorrowful bean. Eyes protuberances of ripe fruit peeling away layers of sweat and melancholy. I momentarily reckon perhaps my tactics were in error.

“Yers a greeby fuckstain ain’t ya?” his door manners dropping like trousers in a Re-Orleans nutlounge. “May I oughta learn yous a thing or two bout…”

I don’t wait to suss his teachings and instead plump my Taze-o 5000 up under his equally greeby armpit and let go a mean buzz. All hmmsss and hoiiisss, he burbles to the floor spurting pee and snot; Elvis and his cohorts carry on uninterrupted. I straighten my dinner jacket and step over the hulking island at the foot of the podium—the harder they fall—scanning the room for Ter Mojave.

Horus Birdface joins Elvis on the stage and they duet something nice.  

Light at day, the lady’s lay,
Broken, cray, this baby’s pay to play,
Marzipan love and sugar pop dove,
She stove my heart with a hearty shove.
The big wheel do keep its turn
Unfinished and unsouled.
Will be for all time,
The end of time,
All time.
End time.

Up on the stage, one man struggles, another relaxes.

—Erik Wennermark

#398: ZZ Top, "Eliminator" (1983)

“Them weeds growin out them cracks must live off coolant or some shit.”

“You reckon? Oil just as good a juice as any.”

“Ain’t no way, thicker than sorghum and slick as a good time, ain’t no way nothin’ll catch hold in that.”

“Well either that or we got ourselves a new breed done come loose.”

“Coolant at least got some water innit.”

“That’s true now Marty, that’s true. But I still got my doubts.”

“Like hell you do. Pass me another one a them suds hey Cole?”

“Mmhmm.”

Normally there wouldn’t be no drinking this early in the day or ever for that matter but today there was no bosses to swing nothing so there stood Marty and Cole having a couple in the late morning sun. It was that pale kind of light that starts to fall when September moves into its later parts and leaves are all in a rush to lose their luster, just the right amount of breeze and the early-to-deathers falling in slants across the sky and spinning as if whisked wherever the wind catch. It was the type of day where folks feel genuinely thrilled to be alive and waking. But leaves, trash, and the occasional scavenger aside, Muscle Mike’s Used Cars and Garage was without patronage.

Marty coughed and swirled the last contents of his Schlitz before knocking it back. Clearing his throat he pressed a loose fist to his mouth and turned to Cole.

“You bring that radio again?”

“Mmhmm”

“How’s bout fixin it so we can hear some music?”

“I reckon that can be arranged. But don’t go funny on me.”

Cole rose from a squat and sauntered to his truck, knees popping and cracking with each step. Marty doubled back into the open hatch of the garage towards the fridge and swung back the door, removing two more bottles from the breath cloud of cold air.

“Hey we may need to make a run here in a minute if this here don’t pick up,” Marty shouted from the back of the garage as Cole fitted the radio’s plug into the orange extension cord usually reserved for the shopvac.

“Well I brought the last sixer so you gon have to do somethin bout them next few,” Cole said, as he adjusted the frequency knob with hands coated in yesterday’s grease. Marty came up beside and leaned over Cole’s shoulder to read the numbers on the dial, then shifted his weight and motioned towards the cigarette pack in his front left shirt pocket. Extracting one and placing the filter to his lips, he lit the tip against the wind as Cole centered in on a station. Drums and guitar cut the silence.

“You ain’t still smokin, are ya?”

“Only when I’m drinkin.”

“But you always drinkin.”

“You sure got a keen set on you. How ya say bout once this place tucks in we head on up 18 to…”

Just then tires rolled in onto the gravel, cutting Marty short and shaking dust over the lot, then lulled to a stop. Marty took a long drag and exhaled into the coming cloud and placed the butt filter and half the white on the edge of Cole’s radio. The opening riff of ZZ Top’s “I Need You Tonight” came through as the engine noises faded and Marty winced and Cole stood up and removed his cap to rub the sweat away from his receding hairline with a worn blue hankie. A V of geese passed over heading southeast as a man walked out from the dust haze and caught sunlight.

“Mornin fellas. Hope I’m not interrupting nothin here but there’s an awful funny sound I’d sure appreciate for one of y’all to take a look at, if it’s not putting you out none,” the man said, removing his sunglasses and tucking them into the front of his denim shirt, pulling his beard aside to do so.

“Not at all mister, Cole here wouldn’t be put out none to see what’s the matter with your vehicle, ain’t nothin getting past him today.”

“Pull ‘er on in and let’s get ‘er up,” Cole said, casting a sideways glance as he placed his cap back on to hide his eyes.

Marty crouched and fit the filter tip back into his mouth as the bearded man got back into his truck. Engine noise filled the air again and the tires moved into the empty bay and came to a halt. Marty exhaled a plume and moved a coarse hand through his thinning hair. The radio played on in the background. The bearded man slammed the door shut and exited the garage towards Marty. The radio played as they stood.

“The darndest thing, I was out at Mel’s yesterday, having a few and visiting my girl Evelyn and this same song came on all ghostly like out of that jukebox. Can’t say I’d heard it before since who knows when.”

“What you mean ghostly?”

“Like I says. Like it don’t need money to play no music. It just plays what it will.”

Marty shifted his weight, holding the smoke in the right corner of his mouth, palms suddenly wet.

“You never been out by Mel’s off highway 18 near the Citgo? With the haunted jukebox?” the bearded man asked Marty as he moved his hands to his back pockets.

“Well sure. Cole and I have been known to take up residence there from time to time.” He didn’t recall no haunted jukebox.

“Mostly a haunt for drifters and such, but helluva fine establishment.”

“Well I’ll be. But now you says you know Evelyn?”

“I should say I know her, she’s fixin to be my wife here before winter. She said she’d always fancied herself an autumn bride.”

“You don’t say,” Marty stooped low and stubbed his cigarette out amongst the loose bits of gravel. He rose slowly, placing a hand on the weatherproof siding of the garage in an effort to keep his balance. He felt faint suddenly.

*

Truthfully it had been a long while since Marty and Cole had been out to Mel’s on account of the last time they’d all been in. On account of how Marty’d composed himself. He had had more than a few, this is without debate, and it had been that type of day where neither Marty’s mood nor drinks was sitting well with him. It had also been after Evelyn had said she’d rather not go round with Marty no more.

They’d come through Mel’s on Marty’s insistence. Approaching the empty bar, Marty craned his neck back to where a 40-watt bulb hung illuminating the storeroom and right then Cole knew he should’ve steered Marty elsewhere. A caged ceiling fan spun overhead filtering the traces of cigarette smoke curing in the air above them. Marty lit up and put his wallet on the bar. From the back came some rustling and soon enough Evelyn strode elegantly into the afternoon light. Her steps tapered as she recognized the patrons. Cole braced himself. A few loners drank in silence.

“Hi Cole. Marty. What can I do for you boys?”

“Ma’am.”

“Evelyn! After looking at this asshole all day you my dear are a welcomed sight!”

“Easy, Marty.”

“Easy yourself! How ya been sweetheart? You always look better than I picture you. That dress holds you like I used to.”

“Marty, look, maybe we should…”

“A beer for my friend here and a taste of something special for us. What’s your poison, Evelyn?”

“Marty easy, stop yelling.”

“I’m not Cole I’m not! Can’t a guy buy a pretty lady a drink? What’ll it be? Huh, Evelyn? Huh?” Marty stood abruptly and caught his foot funny on the barstool to his left and went down hard. The few day drinkers paused and looked towards the noise. Sprawled and screaming, Marty cursed high and low. Across the way a light flicked on in the old Jukebox and CD’s shifted and “I Need You Tonight” came blasting through at full volume.

“Get him outta here Cole!”

“Marty, come, let’s get.”

“Fuck off me, Cole! Our song, Evelyn! It’s our song!”

*

ZZ Top finished up and gave way to a commercial about fabric softener. A car sped past on the interstate blasting the same advertisement, yellowed leaves trailing in its wake. Back in the garage the hydraulic lift kicked on, lowering the car back to ground level and Cole stepped into the now high sun.

“Just some loose bolts. Nothin a couple turns couldn’t fix.”

“You’re shittin me? Well if I’d a known I wouldn’t a troubled ya. What’s the damage?” the beard said, sliding his fingers along his wallet chain until they found purchase. Marty took out and lit another cigarette, turning away from Cole and the beard towards the road.

“Well with time and labor should be bout…”

“Don’t worry about the bolts mister,” Marty interrupted, staring into the distance where the long-passed car glimmered faintly beyond the county line.  “It’s on Mike.”

—Nick Graveline

#399: Tom Waits, "Rain Dogs" (1985)

LETTER TO CASEY WAITS

This is the month we turn thirty. We’ve never met but our parents were pregnant at the same time so maybe the first sounds we ever heard were the same. Maybe our mothers weighed the same with us inside them.

The year we were born your dad was making a record in a vault in Lower Manhattan. How the city has stretched and grown inside itself in the thirty years since has been well documented by all kinds of great minds. I’m on the train uptown to see my father for the first time in nine years, which nobody else’s research has prepared me for but your dad is growling at me through the headphones. His yell is almost protective. The decade of our birth lays itself over this one like a long grey transparency.

Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans.

Going up to 86th & Lex with an iPhone in my purse.

At least September feels right for a birthday, the trees in their back-to-school clothes. My nine-year estrangement is a fourth grader. Something about this being the truth makes it seem less like my own life, like a poster on the side of a bus. Is that what it’s like to have a famous father? I tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past. People like to bring that up to him, don’t they, that he sang that once.

When I bob my neck and slap my thighs along to “Big Black Mariah” on the train the lady next to me moves away. Thunder that the rain makes when the shadow tops the hill. I hear a hurricane hit the coast in 1985 and three days later I came.

Thirty—how’s it sitting with you?

You and I both know what 1985 was really like: impossible to remember. It disappeared behind big grownup hands. The leaves fell when we were born. Ships skated out of their moorings and a bass drum tumble stowed away on the back end of the beat. Tumble-stow, tumble-stow. The two people who experienced my birth most closely never worked with their hands. When the rain came they got indoors to wait it out. Your mom co-wrote one of the songs on the record, “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” and my mom had a tape of your dad’s in her car. One time she said it wasn’t appropriate for kids my age, which is our age. Maybe the rain came down hard that year too, like a tarp thrown over all this.

Our parents’ activities in January of 1985 made me this kind of a person and you that kind of a person and Lower Manhattan the home of a vault where your dad made a record. I grew in a regular way tucked behind the reference desk at a medical library in Connecticut into a person who imagines you grew underground at the rate of nineteen tracks per album per year. What about being young led you to hit stuff with other stuff for a living? How blue is music as a job? My parents were musicians once, they met that way, over music, which is exactly also how we met only we never have. I think the lady who wants not to be sitting next to me on the train must not know anything about music or being almost thirty or fearing recognizing yourself in a much older man on the steps of an austere museum or listening to your favorite record by someone’s dad who could have been yours. I like stomping my feet in public. Could I have been a drummer? Do you have any idea what your parents were thinking? It hums in the front inside compartment of a life like an engine.

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen.

What weird alchemy it must be to expand like that in an instant, making a kid, making a record. To go underground and emerge with something somebody else will eventually hopefully fall in love with, with something that will sneak into other people’s homes, ride the train without you, meet you for a drink 29 years later. These are things we need to consider at our age, Casey. Will the kids we might in time make ourselves be loveable? And yet the older I get the better I understand that it’s ridiculous to claim my age as a justification for anything I think I know.

None of us want to be remembered for our fathers no matter how great and some of us don’t remember much about them anyway but what I like most about this record is that it’s easier than the uptown errand I’m on. It’s like a laughing anger lumbering. I can take anything laughing but my father doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t get the joke which is that we’re related but you get it don’t you Casey? We were made at the same time as each other and as this record so we must be connected. It makes about as much sense as that we should be connected to the people who made us, their studios, the myth of their having existed in any other form before the leaves fell and we came into being. Anyway to be connected to anyone ever is to brave the assumption that you can understand them enough to say how you’re connected and you and I understand this much: that drummers and poets are magnificent failures at keeping it all together.

There’s a joke about this. It goes

Q: What’s the difference between a pizza and a drummer/poet?
A: A pizza can feed a family of four.

You and I are connected because about you I can say whatever I want. About my parents I can say almost nothing.

Where is the straightforward exposition of this errand I’m on? What’s a deft description of the circumstances? My father left me is a sentence I have no practice writing because I’m pinned like an insect to accuracy. That I left my father is no more direct a hole through the center of the apple, the brain’s guts get everywhere.

This is a joke too. It goes

Q: What do you call it when two people leave and stay exactly where they are?
A: All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes.

But if you have the temperament and the means you’re soon up and over the border of your little life with great relish. The countries that took me in after were full of stories and I could pick whichever ones I wanted off the shelf. In this one we’re partners, Casey, we grew up together like cousins in different cities, we had the best jokes and the same dark curls and long summer visits that came around just often enough to learn what it feels like to have to miss a piece of your own family, which is how you learn there are some things inside of you that are also outside of you, which is how you learn you are a you and not something entirely different. Those were good summers, just before the leaves began to fall. I’d watch your parents back out of the driveway with you in the backseat banging with chopsticks on your father’s headrest like a drumset and try to remember what missing you felt like so it wouldn’t take me by surprise this time, so this time I wouldn’t cry.

—Laura Eve Engel

#400: The Temptations, "Anthology" (1995)

In graduate school, a common seminar move was to say, “I think we need to talk not about [singular noun] but about [plural noun]”—not sexuality, but sexualities; not the public, but publics, etc. In that spirit, I think we ought to speak not of the Temptations’ Anthology, but of Anthologies. The Temptations’ Anthology exists in three different iterations: a triple LP from 1973, a double CD from 1986, and a revised two-CD package from 1995. The three versions have different artwork, different formats, different contents. Five post-1973 songs were added in 1986, and the 1995 set switched out about 25% of its content. My hunch is that the listmakers at Rolling Stone did not carefully collate the various editions but simply chose the one that was currently available.

Their inclusion of Anthology (an Anthology) acknowledges the greatness of the Temptations and lets them bow in the direction of Motown, a label that produced scores of immortal songs but no memorable albums before What’s Going On. (I see that Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Going to a Go Go is ranked #273 on the big list, but I disagree.) We used to fret a lot in high school about whether Best-Ofs counted as “real” albums, but without such compilations a lot of hugely important and justly beloved music falls out of the canon. Even with compilations, the Rolling Stone 500 is missing much Motown: no “Money,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “Shop Around,” “My Guy,” “Dancing in the Streets,” “Shotgun,” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “I Want You Back,” etc.

We need to speak of Anthologies, too, because the original Temptations Anthology in 1973 was part of a series of triple-album anthologies released by Motown after its sale and removal to Los Angeles. These were lavish affairs: double gatefolds with glossy booklets and generous song selection. (Sometimes too generous. Six sides are a lot to fill, and “lesser” artists who got only four sides sometimes benefitted.) The look was somewhat standardized. The covers all had the word Anthology at the top, with the group or singer’s name below it, encased in a lurid, oblong rainbow of green, yellow, red and purple. The covers were color coded: yellow for the Marvelettes, blue for the Four Tops, orange for Jr. Walker and the All Stars, etc.. I bought a few of the Anthologies, although it was usually easier to find cheap, used copies of the older Motown “Greatest Hits” LPs from the mid-sixties, which had less filler. The Temptations had two of these Greatest Hits: Vol. I (1966) and Vol. II (1970).

Thus we ought to speak not of Temptations but of Temptationses. The Temptations, too, existed in different versions, marked not (as Joni sings) by lovers and styles of clothes, but by producers and lead singers. There were the early, jaunty, lovelorn Temptations, with David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks singing lead and Smokey Robinson writing and producing (e.g., “The Way You Do the Things You Do”). And there are the later, angry, socially conscious Temptations, with Dennis Edwards singing lead and Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong writing and producing (e.g., “Ball of Confusion”). There’s plenty of overlap, however, since Eddie Kendricks and his crazy falsetto straddle both periods, and Ruffin and Whitfield collaborated in the middle (e.g., “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”). There’s great music from all phases of their career, or at least from the first, golden decade of it, but it’s hard to find a through-line from “My Girl” to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

Here’s a question we didn’t ask much in graduate school: how good is this work of art? How does the music of the Temptations[es] hold up? Is it better or worse than other music? These are questions that I sometimes waver on with respect to the Temptations and Motown more generally. I’m never quite sure if we undervalue or overestimate Motown. For certain rock critics, particularly Dave Marsh, Motown is the pinnacle of black popular music. When I discovered soul music in the early ’80s, however, I preferred the rawer, churchier Atlantic/Stax artists: Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, etc. The funkiness of the Funk Brothers was hard for me to hear, especially on those early, hand-clappy, finger-snappy, tambourine-happy Motown recordings like “Jimmy Mack” and “Baby Love.” And I was scornful of the subsequent Motown revival, sparked by The Big Chill soundtrack and the California Raisins, limited as it was to a few, overplayed songs. But there are riches in the Motown catalogue—plenty (I suspect) that I don’t yet know about. And re-listening to the Temptations this past week, I was reminded that they have a deep and deeply soulful repertoire.

I’ll single out two songs. “Since I Lost My Baby” (1965) has an aching lead vocal from Ruffin and a clever, economical lyric from Smokey Robinson describing how a happy world looks through the lens of heartbreak: “But fun is a bore, and with money I’m poor.” The arrangement is stately, and the vocal is restrained but no less impassioned than anything Otis Redding recorded. Three years later, they released “Cloud Nine,” their first song with Dennis Edwards singing lead. It’s a crackling, taut recording with a fierce, communal vocal inspired by Sly and the Family Stone. It’s presumably an anti-drug song, only pretending to praise the singer’s escape from the pains of this world: “I’m doing fine / On cloud nine.” But unlike many later songs on this theme, it avoids preachiness; if the singer is deceiving himself, he is capable of deceiving me as well. And then when I go on YouTube and see their clothes and choreography, it makes me think I’d give all my Anthologies to have seen them perform it in person.

—Will Pritchard

#401: Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication" (1999)

A normal day, just home from school, I’d dumped my backpack in my bedroom and was in a hurry to get to the basement, the unofficial sanctum of my burgeoning pubescence, so I could cram in a few hours of Ocarina of Time on my N64 before dinner. I was thirteen, drumming on my chest as I walked through the house and singing the only way a thirteen-year-old knows how to sing—with earnest—in a voice that can only belong to a thirteen-year-old—a dysphonic collision of pitches and tones reminiscent of a bagpipe in the hands of a boxer.

Dream of CaliForrrnicAationnnnnnn…
Dream of CaliForrni…caaaaaaaa…shunnnnn…

My father, sorting through bills and junk mail at the table, paused and turned to address me. “What did you just say?”

I was guilty of something unknown and quickly looked to defer blame. “It’s a song,” I said. “I didn’t write it.” As if my not writing the words precluded my having said them.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“I don’t know, like, people want to go to California on vacation?” I offered. That was honestly the only thing I could figure, despite the song containing the lyric everybody’s been there and I don’t mean on vacation. Such was my obliviousness.

“It’s saying something about sex,” my father said. “Fornication is a word for sex.” He shook his head. “Don’t let your mother hear you saying it. Or your sister.”

Confused but exhilarated, I continued to the basement, where instead of flipping on the 64 and puzzling through the Water Temple, I popped in the Californication CD, pulled out the booklet, and began listening with new interest. Something about sex…well, sure…with lyrics like hardcore soft porn; young Kentucky girl in a push-up bra; live to love and give good tongue. But where else was sex hidden, and more importantly, what else was hidden with it?

*

I was ignorant, but not without good reason. Themes of this nature were totally absent from all of my previous experiences with music, as I’d pretty much only listened to—and again, in pretty much the only way you can listen to it, with earnest—Christian rock. Bands with songs titled “Hey You, I Love Your Soul,” “Straight Shooter,” “Superfriend,” “Super Good Feeling,” “Mighty Good Leader,” “Good People,” “Good Stuff,” “Love Liberty Disco,” etc. The message was pretty clear cut: You love Jesus and Jesus loves You and if Everyone would love Jesus then Everything would be totally overflowing with super awesome goodness. Granted, at thirteen I lacked any real perspective on worldly problems and didn’t have much to complain about, myself, but I still recognized that I didn’t feel like I was as good or super or awesome as those bands proclaimed was possible, and given everything I’d ever heard about “the difficult transitional period of the teenage years” I didn’t expect to feel that way any time soon. In fact, I desired this difficult transition, these changes that would happen, were happening, which would introduce a life that wasn’t so clear-cut and clean.

And what I found in Californication wasn’t clear-cut by any means, but instead an increasingly complex intermingling of the forces that compose reality. Sex was definitely present—the songs “Around the World,” “Get on Top,” and “I Like Dirt” practically pulsing with the sexual energy that made RHCP famous—touting the tangible mish-mashing of bodies that set the thirteen-year-old mind a-fervor. But paired with them were songs that presented a visceral pain within that sexual desire. “Scar Tissue” with its broken jaw and waving goodbye to ma and pa and with the birds I share this lonely view. “Emit Remmus” with cuss me out and it’ll feel all right. “Purple Stain” with to finger paint is not a sin / I put my middle finger in / your monthly blood is what I win evoking menstrual flow followed by black and white and red and blue / things that look good on you / and if I scream don’t let me go hearkening a sort of eagerly anticipated love-bruise.

But there was more than sex. There was drugs and addiction with “Otherside,” “Porcelain,” and “This Velvet Glove,” and within that examination a possibility of release from the turmoil through suicide. But what was most powerful was the yearning for understanding, a searching for meaning not only within the self, but as part of the collective conscious. See “Parallel Universe”:  Staring straight up into the sky / Oh my my, a solar system that fits / in your eye…Microcosm. Yet even within this recognition, there was a question, a longing to abandon what is present in hopes of  attaining what is real—see “Easily”:  throw me to the wolves because there’s order in the pack / throw me to the sky because I know I’m coming back. For the first hundred or so listens, I admit I would skip track twelve, “Savior,” simply because the first line, Dusting off your savior…, implied too much of a departure from the world I knew. Eventually I listened and found not a song about separating from Jesus, but resolving a troubled relationship with a father, and as part of that resolution, an embrace of all the good and bad in a manner that allowed true freedom: A butterfly that flaps its wings / affecting almost everything / the more I hear the orchestra / the more I have something to bring / and now I see you in a beautiful / and different light / he’s just a man any damage done / will be alright.

At thirteen, I didn’t know about sex or drugs or rock ‘n roll, hadn’t quite lived long enough to fathom what would be most difficult about becoming a real person in the real world. If anything, the album left me feeling that the looming changes of life would be more complicated than I could even begin to understand. Nonetheless, and perhaps all the more so, it seemed like the stirring doubts and worrisome questions were part and parcel, were in fact necessary for the transition out of youth to begin.

*

I don’t believe I made a conscious decision to turn away from the relentless opti-posi-simplici-tudes of my Christian-swaddled rocking, but a natural drifting occurred. And I hadn’t initially sought out the Red Hot Chili Peppers because I thought they held answers from beyond the pale veil. What first got my attention was actually an appeal to my very juvenile sensibilities, through the video game-inspired music video for the album’s title track. The video depicts the digitally-rendered band members passing through a series of quasi-Californian trials and tribulations—Kiedis punching a shark in the San Francisco Bay and ramping a convertible through (R)Andy’s iconic donut; Flea dodging murderous lumberjacks felling redwoods and a teenage bride with a baby inside; Frusciante stumbling through sci-fi/soft porn Hollywood basement studios; Smith snowboarding the Golden Gate Bridge—only to plummet through a ripped-wide San Andreas fault onto a subterranean platform where, transforming back to flesh, they receive both a “game over” and an option to proceed to the “next game” to which, before the screen cuts out, they select Yes.

As a kid, I perceived a set of crazy-cool wild adventures that made the music video entertaining, but as an adult, knowing the well-documented real-world hardships the members of RHCP underwent, I can’t help but interpret some connection between the video’s antics and their own transition as a band into a new realm of possibility and understanding. Some crazy shit went down…and we’re still here! What strikes me as most interesting though, is the end of the video/game. GAME OVER it says, not LEVEL COMPLETE. Failure, not success. And yet, the band members appear joyous to be united. And yet, the option for a NEW GAME appears. And yet, they choose Yes. And perhaps that’s the main difference between my Christian rock upbringing and the realm of Californication: the ability to ascribe a super good feeling, not in spite of, but because of the complex criss-cross of pleasure and pain, life and death, self-loathing and self-discovery, not judgment within in a dualistic realm, but appreciation as alternating currents within the same existence. Perhaps Californication presents its own brand of earnestness, not a whitewashing of the past and separation from the present, but a devotion to the complexity of everything and all as necessary constituents for life.

The chorus of the last track on the album, “Road Trippin’,” says, These smiling eyes are just a mirror for the sun. As the song ends, as the album ends, it fades out on an open-ended version of this line: These smiling eyes are just a mirror for…your smiling eyes are just a mirror for… For…for…for… For this and this and this and this. For everything and all.

—Colin Lee

#402: Nas, "Illmatic" (1994)

The closest that Illmatic offers to an ars poetica: "Genesis" sets the stage with a sample from the street's disciple, but right before the album starts in earnest with "N.Y. State of Mind" you can hear, real low, "I don't know how to start this shit."

The story goes that Illmatic debuted at a time when The Source was in its pomp and didn't want to give perfect scores to anyone, let alone some unsigned twenty-year-old. But with the advance release of Illmatic on their system, the editors let go of the old rules, and called it what it was: five mics.

There's another album and another story that keeps coming back around from that time: The Chronic represented everything agenda-setting about hip-hop at the time. Rolling Stone makes the claim that The Chronic is, at #138, nearly three hundred places better and/or more important than Illmatic. But The Source knew right away what the score was. They gave a young Nas the five mics—the declaration an album was a supreme classic, benchmark, institution—where they didn't opt to break the policy for The Chronic. There's a reason for that.

And a big part of it has to do with the crew of NY legends doing sublime work behind the beats; and it's got something to do with the rumble of the train passing through; it has to do with the jazz solos and it has something to do with the album's author, his block, and the meeting of history and future in his sound. The young Nas overlaid atop the Queensbridge projects gives a prophetic sensibility to the album cover. Everything about Illmatic represents.

Jeff Weiss, writing in 2013 for Pitchfork, says that the album doesn't leave the block, but if you listen close, all the hoods and crews show up. The phrase repeated on "Memory Lane" is, after all, "comin' outta Queensbridge." As in it starts here, but there's no telling where it ends. Nas himself says he always knew he was born to leave the block, to travel the city, to hear and see what everyone else was up to. "And I'm from Queensbridge, been many places," he says. The block matters, but the orientation is towards the world. The curiosity gives the album a big force against sadness. Ill will may be gone, but there's a big world out there, and life left to live.

The five mic award has got to have something to do with the fact that Nas plays something of the role of, not reporter, but real-time-historian perhaps. He relays traumatic events and damning allegations alike with neither hyperbole nor judgment, but always as they relate to the arc of the block. He is in Queensbridge, steeped in its history, but always makes his way around town, and the sound he's cultivated is richer for it.

Played back-to-back against Illmatic, The Chronic sounds a lot less groundbreaking, earth-shattering, and cry-it-from-the-hilltops than the constant eulogizing suggests. And that's not to say that some of what came next for Nas didn’t sounded like pop next to his early work (not to say that "Hate Me Now" isn't great pop). For that reason, maybe it makes sense to keep them far apart. But make no mistake: Illmatic raps with a razor under its tongue. Who looks good next to that?

Certainly, we're not trying to say there's no place for pop in this world. But when someone keeps shit that real, arranging not just beats, but big questions, big opposed forces? When we argue with others, it's rhetoric, but when we argue within the soul, it's poetry. That's what Yeats says, anyhow. I reckon we got to call Nas' sensibilities poetic in that regard. Pure, molten intuition.

Satisfaction with the world comes only from the elements of the line falling delightfully—unthinkably, even—into place. Fragments arranged against the unanswerable, if you want to call it that. The menace and the tangible sense of mortality run deep; the sense of wonder is charged up; the rhymes are tight. There's no calling this pop.

Here's why it matters: let it run through your ears. Use headphones, or find somewhere you can listen: first, put on the big, loping, saccharine hooks of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys in "Empire State of Mind." Now, get Illmatic. "N.Y. State of Mind."

Seriously, try it. "There's nothing you can't do, now that you're in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. The lights will inspire you."

"The city never sleeps, full of villains and creeps...I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death." The closest he offers to a final thought can't touch "Empire State of Mind" for sheer vacuity and the normal empty platitudes thrown at the City of New York on a regular basis. All Nas wants you to know is that "nothing's equivalent to the New York State of Mind."

Nas's New York is devoid of pop-savvy swagger, devoid of claims to glamor. It's downright bleak at times. But with Nas there's no irony, no condemnation, no shame, no plastic reveling, no glorifying. Instead, Nas observes, thinks, offers subtle prescriptives, wrapped in the rich flow that he was known for. "The streets had me stressed something terrible," he says.

There's no lights to inspire where the young Nas is at—he lets us know "I'm livin' where the nights are jet black."

So what keeps the despair from taking over? What steers a line like "life's a bitch and then you die" away from trite pessimism?

Whatever it is, it's a fine line. There's a richness to the production and to the lines themselves that never falls far out of reach. Nas didn't invent jazz-rap. He just did it best. And he did it when everyone was trying to do G-Funk. For his troubles, he couldn't get an album deal. So finely was it balanced that the reasons for passing on Illmatic that keep coming up contradict each other: he was too hard, and he was also too meshed up in the soft, old East Coast sound.

What's a record executive good for, anyway, if we're in the age when they have no room to sell what they acknowledge as good, but not market ready? The world has passed a record exec by, but Nas tells you on the intro track, "Genesis," that when the shit is real, you do it without a contract. The thoughtful quality that informs the lines throughout each of the album's nine tracks suggests that he means it.

The speaker is thoughtful as hell, even as he recounts moments of crisis—running through the building lobby, "probably full of children / I couldn't see as high as I be"—in the active world and prone to moments of detached revelation—he's certainly no mere reporter. He reveals with evenhandedness, but there’s too much familiarity, too much resignation—he’s too close to just report, no matter how flatly the words themselves fall into flow.

If we talk a lot of shit about Jay-Z for "Empire State of Mind," we can also add that he's got some of the great one-liners to add enough introspection (only just): "Like God give a fuck: I'm just a crook on a song." But Nas has always pondered deeper while rhyming harder: "Woke up early on my born day...my physical frame is celebrated cause I made it one quarter through life some Godly-like thing created."

—Aaron & Jordan Fallon

#403: Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd" (1973)

This essay wasn’t supposed to be an essay. When I started writing, I had grand ambitions: a short story about a trucker and a girl he meets on the road, a girl whose not-uncommon beauty (it is the beauty of a young and slender girl) he can’t help but notice, even though she’s not much older than his own daughter. The attraction and the resistance of the attraction wouldn’t be the point of the story, but it was the tension I was going to begin with. And I was going to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and start with her hitching a ride and see where it took me.

But these posts have deadlines, and I am not, primarily, a fiction writer, and I didn’t realize how long this sort of thing can take, how difficult it can be to conjure lines of dialogue and learn your characters through them. I mean, I knew, I guess, but every time I start a project I think for some reason it will be easier this time, and it almost never is. All of this is to say: there is a tension in the songs in Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd that reminds me of driving a long way in the night and wanting things you feel uneasy wanting, of the way that, no matter how you try to repress it, you can’t ever escape who you are.

This evening I made, for the first time, a fruit crumble. I tossed chunks of nectarine and raspberries in sugar and then I added some shredded coconut and chocolate chips. As I added them I thought, there’s a chance this will overcomplicate things. I tried it anyway. It overcomplicated things. I didn’t ruin it or anything; the dessert still tasted good. But the surplus of flavors made it less immediately identifiable as what it was, and if I make a crumble again (which I probably will—what could be easier than tossing fruit in sugar, massaging cold butter into flour and sugar and salt), I will make it the normal way, the fruit and the dough and nothing else to distract from it, except maybe a little whipped cream.

You get where I’m going with this: Lynyrd Skynyrd is the good crumble, the conventional crumble, the one I did not make. Having fewer elements (I’m talking, here, mostly about how the album was released in 1973, before digital, computerized components manipulated music as they so often do today) somehow opens a space for a purer sort of complexity.

But I’m not here to assess the value of Lynyrd Skynyrd; time has already done that. I listened to the album in its entirety for the first time when I started this project, and I knew half of the songs. Not in a “oh I think I’ve heard this before” kind of way—I knew the songs. I wouldn’t call myself a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan, and I’ve never sought out their music. This album was released 13 years before I was born. And yet, I know those songs, just from being a person living in America. I bet you do, too.

What kind of wild and ridiculous success is that? I mean, wild. But also, ridiculous. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a band that still exists even though almost none of its original members are alive. I am a little confused but also delighted by this fact. They are, essentially, a cover band for themselves. There is an audacity to this but also a naivete, a simultaneous inhabiting that parallels the way their music is so sincere it descends into camp. They are so much the southern rock band that they’re bordering on a parody of southern rock.

I worried that writing about a trucker would be too obvious and unsurprising—that maybe it would be silly, to choose a character so clearly associated with this kind of music. Truckers and factory workers, blue-collar men who wear boots and drink whiskey and work long days, men whose lives are hard on their bodies. Men who own rifles, men who are more affectionate with their dogs than their wives, men who speak few words and never admit to crying. Rough men and terse men, men who know how to bellow. Men who never doubt their own ability to build a bonfire.

But these characters are the characters of the songs—they match the image the band has cultivated, the ones they market to, and so it seemed right, in a way. To worry about being too much when it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd we’re talking about is counterintuitive. And anyway, there’s something I love in those men—how they remind me of my grandfather, maybe, even though their music is something I know my grandfather would have dismissed. But maybe that’s not it, not really. I think it might be because there’s always some sort of crevasse between the image of the man and the man himself, and no matter how narrow it is, it is always deep.

I find this crevasse appealing; I want to peer over the edge. I want to build a bridge across it, or jump in, fall down through a tunnel of ice. I can never know it in others the way I know it in myself, but I want to, and this, maybe, is one of the things that makes me a writer. There’s a tension, I guess, wrought by that familiar adage: He’s not what he seems. And so, we come to expect that this is what literature or wisdom will show us as we get to know a character. I think it’s pretty rare that people aren’t what they seem. People, generally, are what they seem to be. It’s just that, often, that’s not all they are.

So, my trucker would be a trucker and the hitchhiking girl would be just that. The crumble that I didn’t make would’ve been only a crumble, fully inhabiting its crumble identity, and it would’ve been better. So I guess this is all my way of saying, I can’t think of a way to describe Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd beyond identifying it as southern rock, because it so fully inhabits that category. And I love the songs, I do, even as I don’t know how to feel about that love, even as I want to laugh at myself for loving them. The songs can’t help being only what they are. They also can’t help being more.

—Katelyn Kiley

#404: Dr. John, "Dr. John's Gumbo" (1972)

Cicero argues that great rhetoric should do three things to its audience: move them, instruct them, and delight them. Sir Philip Sidney steals this schema so he can define the fundamental operations of great poetry. And now I am stealing it to talk a bit about Dr. John's Gumbo. I understand how perverse it sounds to use extant categories to talk about an album whose very title refuses any easy reduction to its constituent parts. By the same token, I understand the joys that go along with certain kinds of perversity, as well as the simple fact that reading a recipe for a dish is never the same thing as eating that dish. And so I divide my essay into three parts, in order to give three glimpses from slightly different angles of this marvelous stew served up by Dr. John and his band.
 

To move: "Let the good times roll"

It's worth stressing that on Dr. John's Gumbo (or in it, maybe) "moving" means more than just the private feeling of a sublime whoosh. One might "move" literally, by dancing or joining the party for which the music serves as metonym. The aforementioned whoosh is a collective whoosh, a whoosh of participation rather than isolation—not that sublimity connotes isolation, but often we talk of aesthetic experiences as though they are exclusively private, a perspective which would make it impossible to talk about an album boasting nineteen musicians and performers, and featuring almost exclusively songs Dr. John himself didn't write. The "good times" here move, they roll, we are invited to join them and thus we in turn move, as in a parade, or a dance, or history itself.
 

To instruct: "We're gonna mess around"

If asked to make a list of "didactic" pop artists from the 1970s, I probably wouldn't think to put Dr. John on it. I don't think anyone would. And yet Dr. John's Gumbo is a crash course in the musical history of New Orleans, a collection of the good doctor's favorite standards newly rendered in the studio by him and his band. Dr. John composed only one of the album's twelve songs. Does this make the title's possessive a cruel joke? Or is it a way of foregrounding what I've already called the collective imperative to participate in the music? Is this Dr. John's property, this gumbo, or is it something he has prepared to share with his audience? I'm inclined toward the latter, even as I can't quite give a full account of the complicated position Dr. John occupied (and occupies) with respect to black musicians and songwriters, in New Orleans and in the US more broadly. The "gumbo" is part of a larger party, and it gives back the results of its "messing around," it doesn't try to act as if it spontaneously appeared. Indeed, the liner notes to Dr. John's Gumbo, written by Dr. John, candidly detail the histories of the songs covered, as well as explaining in what ways Dr. John and his band decided to mess around with those songs. It's complicated, like I said, but we learn that this music didn't come from nowhere and it certainly didn't come from Dr. John alone. It, too, is historical; it, too, rolls, and through messing around Dr. John facilitates that roll. No one ever said pleasure was straightforward.
 

To delight: "Ha ha ha ha"

I deliberately chose a non-lyric to head up this section, the phonemes-that-don't-signify that form part of the call-and-response in the show-stopping "Huey Smith Medley." Dr. John's tribute to the great blues pianist is interesting mostly for reasons not having to do with the words (or the sounds made with mouths), but I use this to point out that the overall "delight" of the album is one that strategically avoids articulation or statement. If you were to comb through the lyrics, you would find numerous invocations and descriptions of joy and pleasure, of happiness and general well-feeling and being and feeling. But if this were all it took for an album to "delight," everything would delight, all pop would be the same pop. For Dr. John, the delight is that we can repeat stuff that's already been done, that repetition is not a death sentence but an enabling and liberating gesture. No wheels need be reinvented, no great sadness need occur about the death of the possibility of newness, when one can do a version of a song that's already there. That version, moreover, will never be exactly the same as the song it takes as its ur-text; "copying" or "covering" is simply an excuse to fail at doing something else that's already been done. The space of that failure is the pleasure of imitation and of tribute. We hear Dr. John's continuities with, and differences from, Huey Smith and Earl King and numerous other great artists everywhere on Gumbo. This, and the freedom to do it, the freedom of the impossibility of becoming someone else, underlies the delight in the album.
 

Volta:

But these are not three separate things. No movement without instruction; no instruction without delight; no delight without movement; and so on. The three categories usefully isolate aspects of a total machine, a whole, even autonomous (but not autarkic!), work of art. Dr. John's Gumbo excites not because I can check the boxes off as I'm moved, instructed, and delighted, but because listening to the bundle of sensations and perceptions that comprise the album invites me to participate in the process. I can't dance and right now I'm in a Westport, CT, Barnes & Noble, so that's out of the question; but is not writing about something a part of the process? And, knowing that what I've written will not be the same as listening to Dr. John's Gumbo, have I not done something analogous to recording a cover version of another song? I guess the takeaway from this album, other than that I want to listen to it again, is that the onus of having to start from scratch is a false one, it doesn't exist in the first place, and all there really is to do is go back and do something again in the hopes that something wonderful may happen. In Dr. John's case, something definitely did.

—David W. Pritchard

#405: Big Star, "Radio City" (1974)

Brooklyn Masonic Temple, November 18th, 2009.

There’s a beat-up white sedan parallel-parked on Clermont, three grown men sitting inside with the windows rolled down, even in this bracing November night air, and “Back of a Car” tipping out of their stereo. We’re walking to a bar before the concert, and we pass this car, and I make a note in my mind of these three grown men in their car, listening to Big Star. The voice of their hero, seeping through a tinny car stereo, into the ears of buddies, uniting them in the moment. This was life on that late November evening, on the verge of winter, picking up our thoughts from the ground where they whipped around in the wind with the fallen leaves.

Sitting in the back of a car
Music so loud can't tell a thing
Thinking 'bout what to say
I can't find the lines

We come back from the bar tipsy and buzzing, watching our breath appear before our faces, short-lived. It’s still cold inside, the vast hall filling slowly with concertgoers blowing into their hands to stay warm, lining up at the bar. We order beers and find seats in the balcony; I sit on the edge of my seat. My heart tingles as they arrive on stage. Alex is wearing a coat; he fiddles around in his pockets, pulls out a pair of reading glasses, then folds his coat and tucks it behind the guitar amps. I take a picture of this moment, finding it impossibly endearing - one of those moments that are so simple in life, a little bit of nothing, but the nothing that make up the majority of our existence here. Fiddling in pockets. Folding a coat. This is existence.

The photograph is out of focus; you can see the blur of my excitement, my hands shaking, alive with anticipation of the show ahead.

When Alex plays he prefers to stand towards the back of the stage, he’s almost shy, laughing while looking down at his shoes. No showboating. He’s uncomfortable in the spotlight, happier to live through his fingers as they travel up and down the neck of his guitar. Happier living through music. The consensus in later reviews of this show was that it was a little sloppy, a little careless, but in a way that made it a real Big Star show. Most people there were just happy to be there, to share the same space with a band that seems to never have really existed at all, that came and went, and then came back again, alive once more.

I take another photo that night of Alex; in this one Alex is blurry, walking back after the show to collect his coat again. It looks as if he’s barely there: as if he’s liminal, on the edge of life. A ghost. It’s a trick of photography, how cameras capture light, but of course since then I’ve attributed a far greater meaning to it.

Alex died almost exactly four months later.

You better not leave me here... How could you leave me here?
 

I didn’t really intend to make this an essay about death. This album isn’t defined by Alex Chilton’s death: it’s punctuated by it. It’s an odd, errant drumbeat. A closed parentheses on a footnote in the liner notes. It shouldn’t even matter. I set out, in fact, to write the precise opposite: I wanted to make it an essay about how alive everything is when I listen to this album. How underneath Jody’s drums on “Back of a Car” I can hear the hiss of summer insects outside the car windows, how there in Alex’s voice is a sunset, a good one. Sitting on a hill above a city, any city, your city, the sun setting, the car stereo on, your heart beating hard because you think you might be falling in love. That’s what this sounds like. Like those moments in life when you feel so alive and so head over heels in love with the world that you can’t imagine ever leaving it. I love you too.

Life is a messy tangle of shitty and awkward and boring moments, too. The whole album sounds to me like this kind of living. Like sloppy, honest-to-goodness real living. Drunk sex and vinyl booths in bars (“Mod Lang”) and the feel of your pillow on your cheek the next morning (“What’s Going Ahn”). A photograph of a bare lightbulb and a sex position poster in a blood red room. The crumpled up love letter that is “Way Out West.” Folding a coat.

And then, after all these moments, after the shitty and the boring and the euphoric, we go. Everything is here and then not here: those insects hissing in the background are only around for one season, before their song fades and we’re left alone to ponder what comes next. The leaves go brown and crisp and fall. We see our breath in the air. And there it is: mortality. Humming underneath everything. Reminding us what Alex sings in “Daisy Glaze”:

You’re gonna die. Yes, you’re gonna die. Got to go.
You’re gonna die. You’re gonna decease.

That’s it. That’s life. That’s being alive. The lyrics belie the music: that soaring guitar, those urgent drums. He makes dying sound so alive. Because that’s exactly what being alive is about: we butt our heads against our own mortality, and when we strike against death hardest, with the most urgency to live: that is when we feel the most alive.

Alex Chilton bumped around the universe, believing in astrology (of course he believed in stars!), fighting to stay alive himself some nights, drunk on couches, in booths at TGI Fridays, fucking and passing out. I like to think that when we die our atoms become a part of the universe. I like to think that these songs belong to the universe. That these songs make our universe. Those handclaps on “O My Soul” and “She’s a Mover” and that sloppy harmonica on “Life Is White”—they have entered the world, stirred the ghosts.

A haunting.

We should be terrified: we should be quivering in our shoes, waiting for the grim reaper to descend. I think he’s there most of the time. But I swear to god even Death stops to listen too when “September Gurls” comes on. I loved you; well never mind. And in that moment of carefree carelessness we’re so alive, and Alex Chilton is suddenly so alive, that we terrify the grim reaper himself, life fills our chests, and nothing matters in that moment. Not even death. Death is background to living, a hiss under the drums. End parentheses. Nothing matters, and at the same time everything—fumbling through coat pockets, waking up, seeing our breath in front of our faces—matters now more than ever.

—Zan McQuade

Photography by Zan McQuade

#406: PJ Harvey, "Rid of Me" (1993)

Last time there was a working bulb in that socket, I watched her through the mirror, in the shower, as she tossed her head back and around the way women know how to do. While sloughing off  the water hung up in all that hair seems like the primary intention of this motion, it’s just a secondary effect of a much more engaging ritual. A mystery is demonstrated when a body traces one momentary arch in space, there’s your primary purpose: the translation of subtlety into raw power, the way women know how to do. The Greeks talked a lot about furies and passions.  She knew the difference, and conflated them per her whim, blazing and terrifying as retribution and then the lightbulb blew, and then the light just went out. The explosion feathered tiny shards of glass onto the tile like moths. It was an unimpressive sound, I know, but noises get louder in dark bathrooms and the report felt like we were tied together and shot out of a cannon into night, like a release, like somebody putting a fire out.

Nobody ever changed the bulb, so I piss in the dark by echolocation now. Hand planted on the tile above the commode, tapping out a rhythm as though there’s a song in my head or I’m waiting. Sometimes I mumble melodies and words: “Show yourself to me and no one else. I’ll believe you.” But there are no words, no signs. Nothing. “Speak,” I’ll say, “I’m listening. God’s Truth. I’m not lying.” Nothing but the sound of a guy with his dick in his hand, listening for that pitch in the water—deeper in the middle than at the edges, like a tympany—that means you’re hitting your mark, finding some center, finally and for the first time in who knows how long. “Mary. Jane. Pollyanna. Where are you hid?”

She slept sometimes. After fever, after hair doused in gasoline got set alight and set free, and with all the blizzards and demons cast out noisily, then fury calmed, menace hibernated, and passion remained like a halo. I watched the moon come up through the window once. It laid a hazy, gauzy pall on our skin as it eclipsed behind the pendulous arm of a street lamp outside. Those high-pressure sodium vapor bulbs generate this ricking, tacking buzz; the same molecules that float in the ocean excited into a glow that, my hand to God, is the closest synthetic approximation of moonlight you’ll see.

In all the old ballads, everybody’s pure, virginal skin is described as lily white; she slept as I watched the earth’s only satellite swing through the sky, and as I thought of a Cold War and of Yuri Gagarin, and as I wished that I could follow him as he chased Apollo who never knew that the sun could even set, and as I saw the moonlight and the streetlight on our skin, I saw that we were not lily white, that we were less than lily white.

Tonight at the foot of my bed there are stars at my feet. Outside, through the threadbare strokes of the mad sextet who practices infrequently and poorly down the hall, I heard a human howling. I was quickened and terrified by what sounded like someone actively, violently, removing their own leg in a panicked effort to forget a terminal, aching fever in the head.

That night, as she swung from the ceiling, she told me some things. Damn your chest-beating. Please just stop your fucking screaming. Good Lord, you never stop. I’m bleeding. Just you stop your screaming. She screamed this at me and called me by my name, Henry Lee, until I knew her words by heart, until I felt my heart become bigger, until I learned how to walk again with tenderness and rage in me: loud, and with a reason, with passion and fury and ecstasy. Ekstasis: outside of one’s self; so said the Greeks.

And I thought that maybe I had never come back after that light bulb exploded, and so I dressed and went out into the street.

Somebody was playing a Bob Dylan cover somewhere which should have been more pleasant, but which sounded like something breaking hard. I walked in the dark in wide train track circles under security lights. I crawled on my belly beneath a fence to the creek where storm-water overflow runs in miles of concrete basin. I watched ripples in the darkness for some time from the brush and bramble, and a snake wove between my legs, and I was reminded of what I’d heard: that our pre-human ancestors, the ones with acute vision, our ancestors who were better at seeing things like snakes in the grass; they were the ones who didn’t get bitten, who didn’t die from snake bites, and who had children, and by this winding, generations-long mechanism, human vision, the ability to see danger in dim light, increased. I thought of the return of the Year of the Snake and of the divinity of calendars, the divinity of wide wide arcs transecting space, and that you could stand still, for a lifetime, and take solace knowing that at least you’d ridden on the back of something, measuring the length and breadth of thunderstorms and birthrights, standing on the shoulders of a fifty-foot queen who has demands of her own.

I crawled under the fence, came back from the wastelands, and a dry smoke in the streets obscured my vision again, though it could have been the fog of morning that I caught in the face, that moistened my eyes. I wandered in the direction of home as the sky blushed through all the shades of dawn—peach and plum and Rose of Sharon—I saw a woman alone at a bus stop, gesticulating close to her chest, palm up, then pointing, as if in needful conversation with a confidant. As I drew near I saw a shawl, and a familiar calico, and, because it was day now, and not the night, the street light went out, the sodium vapor bulb given rest and repose, just as I walked behind her. I was unrecognized as the pretender. In answer to a question posed by her companion, whom I could not see, I heard her say this, only: …No. I’ve missed him.

I agreed, and I thought to myself, “Yes, I have missed him too. I too have missed him.”

—Joe Manning

#407: The Clash, "Sandinista!" (1980)

1. The Magnificent Seven: Wonderful. A high water mark for this entire album and such a promising start. Still, the song hints of the tragedy to follow, particularly when Joe Strummer rhymes “mobster” and “lobster.”

2. Hitsville U.K.: A Phil Spector-style rock and roll song. It is great. Legit great. Using pop forms to satirize is something the Clash was always good at. But doesn’t it just sound a bit too polished? I mean, when you have the means to record a song like this and your homage is this good you probably learn to see the world as the monster you’re mocking.

3. Junco Partner: Our first look at Clash-Dub. This is a mild success that, unfortunately, is a bellwether for the far worse experiments to follow. The Clash were always advocates of reggae/dub, so this development shouldn’t surprise anyone. Unfortunately, instead of taking dub elements and crafting them into the Clash sound, the whole enterprise sounds more like blue-eyed reggae phoniness. It’s Pat Boone doing Horace Andy.

4. Ivan Meets G.I. Joe: A Studio 54 reference in a song about nuclear war. It may have seemed revelatory in 1980 but neither of those subjects have aged well in the agit-pop department.

5. The Leader: A totally suitable Clash rockabilly song. If one were to play a game and attempt to reduce all 36 songs on this album to a more tolerable 12-15 songs, this would surely make the list.

6. Something About England: We are currently 1/9th of the way through this thing. If listening to this record start to finish were a family vacation, by now we’d have had a huge outburst at our annoying kids and be sitting in a too-silent car feeling wave after wave of guilt wash over us. Sandinista made us bad parents.

7. Rebel Waltz: I will bet $100 that this was the first song Wes Anderson ever heard. He was in SoHo, in a tiny shop that sold nothing but leather elbow patches and doll furniture.

8. Look Here: The first song that feels more like a rave or gag than anything serious. As a listener, you need to draw the line when bands do this sort of thing. Because someone definitely told them not to record this. And where once they might have felt humility and said, “Yeah, this is a waste of people’s time,” now arrogance pushes them forward. Ugh, you can just hear them all cracking up at how funny they are.

9. The Crooked Beat: The story goes that the Clash fell asleep in the studio holding their instruments and this is what they recorded. It became the inspiration for the “Found Footage” genre of movies which, by and large, are better if for no other reason than they don’t take so long.

10. Somebody Got Murdered: Somebody = the Clash’s legacy.

11. One More Time / 12. One More Dub: No reason to separate these two songs into two, individual lines. “One More Time” is great but then here comes more dub. And there is even a sort of skit on there. Because let’s face it, the thing that makes good albums great is always skits.

13. Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice): Parenthetical in the song title. WATCH OUT.

14. Up In Heaven (Not Only Here): Oh hey, look at that, another one. Probably a coincidence and not someone being clever. Incidentally, this is another awesome Clash song.

15. Corner Soul: And here, on a pretty bad album, is just a stunning piece of music. Bands do this to fuck with you. The brilliance of the song keeps you coming back to the album because, well, a few songs are good so maybe you’re just wrong about the others. “Corner Soul” absolutely shines at the midpoint of Sandinista. This is The Clash finding success with Dub. Topper Headon’s drums skitter, mimicking reverb echo. Strummer’s lyrics evoke rather than dictate and that gives the listener space to bring something of themselves into the song. It is the type of track that really gets you to wonder if you missed something in all the clunkers that surround it. It’ll make you second guess yourself. Maybe you just need to grow into it? Nope, Sandinista is a solid EP with 28 bonus tracks.

16. Let’s Go Crazy: This is a Prince cover. Check it out. It is good. (It isn’t either of those things.)

17. If Music Could Talk: If this music could talk, it would beg to be put out of its misery. Seriously, Clash sax? Like, smooth jazz Clash?

18. The Sound of Sinners: A gospel tune. You know where Bono learned to be a self righteous windbag with absolutely no self-awareness? He learned it from Sandinista.

19. Police on my Back: THE CLASSIC CUT. I feel bad for this song. It should be on a better album. It wouldn’t be too out of place on Combat Rock which, for the record, is a much better album. But here it is, withering. Consider this your last supper...things will not be this good ever again.

20. Midnight Log: Your basic rockabilly Clash song.

21. The Equaliser: Even a blind dub squirrel finds a dub nut. Hey, a broken dub clock is still right once every 36 songs.

22. The Call Up: This is proof of concept for Sandinista. If they took care and made everything as good as “The Call Up” or “Magnificent Seven” or “Corner Soul” I would be writing about one of the best albums of the decade. Something about the moment when 70s myopia exploded into 80s excess.  Instead, I have to march down, way down, way, way down, to goddamn "Washington Bullets"...

23. Washington Bullets: Joe Strummer wakes from a feverish sleep wrought with dreams about human tragedy and the modern condition. Frantically, he reaches for his bedside notebook and scribbles; “Washington Bullets = Basketball Team...but also Washington Bullets = actual bullets and American army guys.” He draws some boobs, too. Then falls back to sleep.

24. Broadway: This song drove me to drink...paint thinner. Also, another little skit! This one actually foreshadows a song to come. I bet it was all Paul Simonon’s idea.

25. Lose this Skin: Tymon Dogg, the singer on this track, was an old roommate of Joe Strummer, had an eclectic and varied career as a musician and would go on the play in the Mescaleros and so, it is with a heavy heart that I say his voice sounds like a helium fart.

26. Charlie Don’t Surf: Originally, I wanted to set this up as a big Heart of Darkness riff but, given the Apocalypse Now reference herein I felt like maybe I should take the high road...so I wrote that fart joke on “Lose this Skin.” #pulitzer

27. Mensforth Hill: I’m sure some of you are upset that I am taking huge cheap shots at the Clash. Well, this song is the reason. This is the entire reason.

28. Junkie Slip: I am now ready for the end times.

29. Kingston Advice: I say, “I got some advice for ya.” And then I squeeze a whoopee cushion.

30. The Street Parade: In here, somewhere among all those delayed guitars, is a pretty good song by the British band the Clash. They say if you look into a mirror, light a candle, put a picture of your crush into your pocket and then play this song, your student loans will double.

31. Version City: The Clash pretty much stop trying from here on out. “I’ve never seen such funky country” is a lyric they wrote. Surely, at least one band member was thinking, “I need to quit this band,” while all this was going on, right? And if not, were they all 100% onboard for the harmonica solo AND rehashing the “Magnificent Seven” riff?

32. Living in Fame: It just feels like the Clash decided to include a song by another band here. The focus of the song? Well, I am glad you asked. The focus of the song is that the Clash are a good band.

33. Silicone on Sapphire. “Let’s bring back that xylophone from 'Washington Bullets'…” - the Clash

34. Version Pardner: An old, old computer wrote this song based on listening to the previous 33 songs on the album.

35. Career Opportunities: OK, different versions of songs with reworked or repeated motifs on a record that is HEAVILY influenced by a burgeoning dub/sample culture? SURE. FINE. You stink at it...but fine. So what is your excuse for including a Kidz Bop version of one of your best songs from your first record, Mr. The Clash? The lesson here is that if you’re someone who thinks you’ll never fall off the rails, that your life will be good forever and the world is a wonderful, kind place...just remember...the original “Career Opportunities” was released in 1977 and this version dropped in 1980. It only took the Clash three years to go from alpha to omega.

36. Shepherds Delight: So, why are we here? What does it all mean? What have I done? Is there a God? Why did I basically trash an album that is, at worst, widely agreed upon as a top 500 record of all time? Well, because sometimes things can still be absolutely awful and totally essential. What a huge pile of crap. Dig in.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski