#368: Eagles, "Eagles" (1972)

A town is a thought in the desert that goes against the desert’s flatland thinking. It’s probably a bad thought we keep having. A dry thought in a dry shade.

We aren’t even supposed to be here today. Before this we were pretty much just two people. Other people’s loved ones. Suddenly we’re two people in a situation. When the radiator fan splinters into its car-stopping parts, one of its long black plastic pieces curves into a cheshire smile. That fucking Eagles song.

The car breaks down 12 miles outside of Winslow, AZ. There are some real hateful things to say about Winslow, AZ, but why say them? For starters we can see it when we close our eyes. We don’t close our eyes. There’s that one about the cheating side of town.

Though there must be some somewhere, we don’t see any water in Winslow. We see a La Quinta Inn. We decide this is Winslow’s history. Winslow’s history is pretty much up for grabs. The local high school labors under the banner of a white Bulldog. When it seems clear we’re going to be here forever, we take turns posting up near the corner statue of the Man with the Guitar. It sounds like it could be Picasso but it’s the fucking Eagles.

Two versions of the flatbed Ford. The truck parked on the curb is empty, my lord.

If it feels like the Eagles are always playing somewhere it’s because they are. There’s that one where you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave, and then there’s the La Quinta Inn. By the pool we meet a man who has the first name of a fish. He tells us some people believe the lightning has special powers but he doesn’t go in for that Navajo stuff, we’re not those kinds of Indians, he says, and he and the women he’s with shake with laughter like they’re the ground in a hard rain.

That was the desert. This is the desert. The tapwater in Winslow tastes nothing like riverwater or poolwater or other kinds of water. The High Life tastes like High Life.

This is before the rain sealed off the canyon, before the sun came out and dried up all the rain.

We will never be here again.

Winslow is a vortex for feeling like you’re slowing down to take a look—or else being looked at slowly—from a pickup. Everybody’s cover is blown. Everything’s hard to find. Time splinters into its parts like car parts.

On an aimless walk in the low sun we take long hard looks at Winslow without saying anything about Winslow or anyone in it. It’s an approach we both know how to take to a thing that has both of us in it.

In the La Quinta Inn there’s desire, and there’s the desire to get out of Winslow. This is after the tent, which seems like days ago, lifetimes even, and which was like a radiator, in that it flooded, and which was like Winslow, in that it had both of us in it. About what happened in the tent before the radiator, before Winslow, nobody’s saying.

It must be hard, one of us ventures, having seven women on one’s mind. And this not even being the one about our lyin’ eyes. That night we watch a movie we both love without speaking. There’s a consensus about vortexes, about what kind of scarf and shirt combo makes a real musician.

The last part, love without speaking, maybe that’s it.

And just outside of Winslow, all the signs say, there’s some tourist thing we know we’ll never visit. A long time ago a fire in the sky became a stone that hurled itself down, scooped a hole in the earth about a mile wide. Now it’s an empty lake.

—Todd Rodman

#369: The Smiths, "Louder Than Bombs" (1987)

You say: The world will end in the night time. You know this because the world hides truths, is dignified, proud. At night, you say, there will be fewer eyes to see the world fall apart and spill its secrets—you’re not talking about the nickel-iron alloy sitting at its center, nor lava, nor magma, nor magnetic fields; not those kinds of secrets. These are other secrets—things you and me can’t even imagine. When the world ends in the night time, those things will be obscured by shadow, illuminated by only the moon’s thinnest light. So yes, you say—when the world grows weary and ends, it will be at night.

In bed, everywhere around us, we feel the stillness of our house. The quiet. When I shift toward you, you turn to face me and the bed sags a little in the middle. Your face near my chest so I can feel you breathe. My mouth against your hair. I imagine your DNA dissolving in my saliva’s enzymes.

I say: Sleep or sex?

You say: What kind of question even is that?

*

You say: The world will end in the day time. That, you say, makes sense, is when men’s work threatens the very construction of our planet. You say, it is the drills and bombs that will end us all, end everything, that it’s only a matter of time before humans stop the Earth in its orbit and we fall into the sun, or break into giant pieces, become asteroids, circling, circling. And what then, you say? What will become of us all, dying in the day time, all our secret horrors realized—mortality will stop being an abstract, will become a real, tangible thing we will all wear on our faces as we all die in public.

You ask me: are you happy?

I say: No.

You ask me: Are you sad?

I say: No.

You say: Do you remember your dreams?

I say: Not for a long time.

You reach across the bed, grab my hands that have been folded over my chest. You say, You’re cold. You say, It’s that Eskimo blood in your veins.

I say, I’m not an Eskimo.

You say, I meant like the song.

I say, Oh.

You say, I don’t know.

*

You set the needle on the record’s edge and light a cigarette that we will pass back and forth in bed. After an initial first static burst, there comes a harmonica. You go to lift the needle, set it down after the first song, but I ask you to stop. This is our ritual, Side D of the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs, bleary and exhausted, low-lit and smoky. Except “Hand in Glove.” We skip that one most nights, but tonight, I want to hear it.

You ask, Why?

I say, Because the sun shines out of our behinds.

You make a noise that I don’t recognize.

I say, Are you ok?

You don’t answer but continue to make the noise and then I understand you are laughing.

On our copy of the record, the songs after “Hand in Glove” sound gritty, are worn down from repeated plays. Tonight, we don’t notice because God, how sex implores us. We let ourselves lose ourselves.

*

You say: Is there any point ever having children? You say, not just us, but in general. But also us. And in this nighttime world we inhabit.

I say, Are you trying to tell me something?

You say, No. You say, but if I were, what would be the point? You say, This world. You say, I don’t believe in mothers. I can never be one. You say, This world. But, you say, to think of a little boy…

I say, Or a little girl.

You say, No. How could we do that to a child?

I say, Do what?

You say, Raise it.

I say, She could be a poet.

You say, Or she’d be a fool.

I say, That’s Morrissey talking.

You say, We’re all Morrissey when we talk.

*

You say: What I do know is we’re here and it’s now and that’s the only thing, for now and for always. You say, the world will go on, or it won’t. We’ll have a child or we won’t. We’ll remember our dreams or we won’t. You slide over so your body is against mine and pull the top sheet and blanket up to both of our chins. Your head is on my shoulder and you say, Take me, I’m yours.

I don’t know if you mean this or if you’re quoting lyrics again. I say, You mean, take you?

You say, What else would I mean?

And I don’t know if it’s the right thing, right now, in the stillness of this empty house, as winter cold creeps in around the windows, but I feel your warm body beside me and know that it’s the only thing, has always and will always be the only thing. This house feels big, the neighborhood, city, state, country, bigger still. I feel exhausted and I say, This world. I say, I’m tired.

You say, But first.

You say, Please.

I say, Maybe there is another one.

You say, Another what?

I say, You know.

You say, Another world?

I say, There must be.

You say, But here, now.

You say, Please.

I fold into your warmth.

—James Brubaker

#370: Mott the Hoople, "Mott" (1973)

It was getting toward sunset on the Fourth of July when All the Young Dudes hit the deck of the SS RNR CIRCUS for the annual Glam Slam Jam and the air was hot. The boys were dressed in their usual regalia of 70s-throwback-flirting-with-a-drag-show aesthetic that would have made the Thin White Duke tip a coiffed head in admiration. The vessel, a reproduction of an antebellum riverboat, embarked from Mud Island for its usual churn up the Mississippi and back down for a starboard view of Memphis’s riverfront skyline. The crew was equally bedazzled for the event, carrying confetti guns in lieu of armaments, with flares attached at the hip for easy deployment when the night got into full swing. The Captain, who claimed to have spent time roaming beneath the iron curtain with the Starman during his Berlin years, acted as a de facto master of ceremonies. Not to mention he was rumored to have scored the same cocaine listed in the liner notes of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life.

The crowd was the usual smattering of old Memphis rockers and audiophiles who kept original issues of Creem and Melody Maker in plastic sleeves only to be handled with freshly-laundered cotton gloves. Young dudes just delving into the Mott, casting eyes about the planks on the hunt for their very own Penny Lanes. Of course there were tourists, told by their phones that this was the premier paddlewheel-driven rock tribute; all square, their selfie sticks colliding with waving arms and raised bottles, complaining about the heat. Sure they weren’t expecting the rampant drinking and casual open-air drug use, but when you cram enough nostalgia and fervent rock fans together, all dipping into their private stashes to share in the collective revelry of a bygone era, things are bound to get a bit sloppy.

All the Young Dudes, though, were anything but. Each member of Memphis’s very own tribute to the Hoople offered a mixture of underground-famous studio player notoriety and the gregarious swagger of barfly troubadours. More importantly, those dudes kicked out the jams like motherfuckers surging on weapons-grade adrenaline. The Dudes’ Ian Hunter, cutting a jib on the Mason/Dixon of Electric Warrior and Road Warrior, punctuated each lyric with the lit tip of his cigarette, tucking it into the neck of his +-shaped guitar when it was his turn to rip. The rhythm section traded hits and slaps along with a tight roll of medical grade White Light (you know it’s gonna make you go blind) expelling clouds of cannabinoid smoke and working three times harder than all the fog machines combined. Swinging from the lifeboats were young cats from the local scene all looking to catch a bead of sweat as the ship continued carving its path, leaving hissing roaches and guitar licks bobbing in their wake.

While the Dudes continued to hold court aboard the CIRCUS, on the other side of Mud Island a similar vessel at anchor: steam-powered and hell-bent on absolute river dominance of a more nefarious caliber. Where the Dudes were attempting to bask in the warm shroud of the slowly ebbing twilight—somewhere between pastiche and true love expressed through emulation—the SS WAGON WEAL aimed to shoot them down.

Apparently, and this is word of mouth through some of the city’s back channels, the captain of the CIRCUS, the one who rolled with the Starman, had run some bad coke to fund this year’s annual Glam Slam Jam—the premier paddlewheel-driven rock tribute in arguably Tennessee’s real music city. Word about Beale was that the captain had been under pressure from some of the upper-ups around Memphis to bring in more out-of-towners to keep the GSJ in the black after what had amounted to several years of decline. The fat cats who’d been leaning on their thumbs, and subsequently the captain, were concerned that a certain other city in the Volunteer State also built on a river (but not one that Mark Twain really gave two shits about) was drawing not just the majority of Tennessee’s Fourth of July vacation money, but the great middle Southeast’s overall expendable income as well. This was bad news for the captain, and frankly left him in a spot tighter than a drumhead.

What the captain had settled on, and this again is just what so-and-so heard from one of the young dudes working valet at Rendezvous, was that rather than get a bunch of out-of-town amateurs in the mix for his favorite party on no wheels, the captain mixed some of that famous Beat My Brains white with over the counter anti-acid medication and passed it off as pure to some of the less informed powder heads around Shelby County. He was making it hand over fist. What the captain hadn’t accounted for was that one of those less informed heads happened to own the SS WAGON WEAL, a right-down-to-the-bolts replica of a Civil War river gunboat; locked and loaded and twice as long as the SS RNR CIRCUS. Their captain, high on the same shit as Iggy plus generic brand TUMS, hoisted anchor just as the RNR made its up river turn and headed back up towards the city.

As the Dudes called intermission, the captain swung the ship around and came on deck for a state-of-the-union type address.

“Y’all feelin’ alright?” he belted through gritted teeth into a microphone strung up with holiday lights.

“All the Young Dudes, ladies and gentlemen! Man alive, y’all is hot as grits tonight! I wanna thank the Dudes, and all y’all for coming out for what is shaping up to be a memorable evening. Give it up for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen!”

The captain paused for cheers and applause as his eyes caught the approaching gunboat in the distance. With drug-honed vision sharper than a red tail, he recognized the mounted figurehead of General George Pickett as none other than the SS WAGON WEAL approaching at 20 knots portside. This was not a drill.

Turning his back to the crowd, the captain lifted a small mound of that true LFL white into his left nasal cavity and inhaled. Resuming his emcee duties, he gave orders with an air of celebration.

“Hoople heads, I present to you, once again, the Dudes!” Waving his arms frantically to the light booth, signaling the projector, who swung the spots from the captain back to the stage where the Dudes, being amateur professionals, dropped their smokes, and once again it was strictly business. The captain pulled his first mate in close to whisper in his ear, “Get ready to give these bastards hell” as the Dudes launched into “Honaloochie Boogie” with a high-haired, eye-patched roadie stepping in to man the keys. The crowd, running too hot to notice the crew taking up positions along the port side, struggling with crates and what looked like brightly colored mailing tubes, went wild.

As the Dudes kept the crowd rapt and raging, no one noticed the SS WAGON WEAL barring down. At 18-inch increments, the crew had lined the mortars for the nights’ culminating firework display to point outward all along the vessel’s port side. The crew stood at the ready, hushed and smoking, awaiting the command. The captain drummed his fingers on the ship’s wheel in anticipation. In the distance, a flock of seagulls dipped into the rocking wake below the horizon.

“Boys, watch my footwork and get ready to shoulder ‘em,” the captain announced, muscling the wheel, churning the whole CIRCUS to run perpendicular to the approaching WEAL. This happened like lightning. The CIRCUS drifted at an angle of self-defense as the crew hustled to spark the display shells and get them loaded. The Dudes were ripping into “All the Way from Memphis” and just when their Ian Hunter belted out “Forgot my six-string razor—hit the sky,” a wave of explosions lit up the back port and rear of the vessel like a goddam firefight. The crowd officially lost it. The WEAL was not expecting to lose the upper hand of surprise (and muscle), and was effectively caught with their pants down. The display was immaculate.

“Give ‘em hell, boys!” At that, the crew let fly flares and confetti at the scuttling shapes on the WEAL’s deck. In the midst of the barrage, the WEAL let loose a volley that completely missed the CIRCUS’s carousing deck and hull, but managed to blow the lid off the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid off Wolf River Harbor. The WEAL screamed past the CIRCUS in a blaze of pyrotechnics and craft supplies as the Dudes launched into their namesake and their voices filled the night.

“HEY DUDES!” The captain shrieked over the rising chorus, weaving between the Dudes’ call and response, as he watched the WEAL catch fire like dry kindling, the Pyramid ablaze over his shoulder, the wind carrying the smoke as the Dudes carried the news.

—Nick Graveline

#371: Arctic Monkeys, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" (2006)

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not was essentially the mantra of, and definitely the soundtrack for, those middle years of undergrad, which were mostly comprised of cruising around the West Kentucky countryside with friends, looking for a place to get high. We lived in the dorms, didn’t have girlfriends, weren’t old enough to get into bars, weren’t cool enough to go to parties, weren’t smart or involved enough to be occupied, and weren’t boring enough to attend school-sponsored events. So we’d buy a bag of shitty weed, pile into someone’s car, and roll out.

The roads stitched together a patchwork of cornfields and tobacco barns, cow pastures and tiny churches, the main street strip malls and the wooded hills that surrounded Kentucky Lake. Head north on 16th until the town’s lights start to fade; go left at the stop sign onto Cole’s Campground, which will become Walston, which will become Collins, which will loop around onto Airport; left onto Poor Farm back to town. Or catch the 641-spur out to 80E toward LBL; first left onto Bethel; second left onto the no-named stretch of gravel where we once drove off the road and spent hours waiting in the dark for a wrecker with Prentice Duncan, the farmer who owned the land, and his humongous son-in-law, Randy; right onto Elm Grove, back to 80, and back to town. Or take 94 onto Clayton onto Outland School, where one night we got too close to an oncoming truck—three inches to the left and we could have been killed—and the driver’s sideview mirror came through the window in a shower of pebbled glass; quick right onto Old Salem and back to town. Or so on and so forth, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Once the engine turned over, the Arctic Monkeys propelled us onward. From the first pounding drumroll of “The View from the Afternoon” to the last saccharine chord of “A Certain Romance,” we became muddled-up North England clubbers, staggering after taxis, pissing off bouncers, prowling pubs and dancefloors with the dull sheen of indiscriminate hormones in our eyes—just another face in the “queue” the Monkeys might say. True, we weren’t North England clubbers; we were West Kentucky stoners. And while we didn’t know the places and people in the songs, we knew what they were about: the push and pull of personality and circumstance, the tumult of chance and fate, the wide range of selves that appear within that haphazard liminal space between Saturday night hedonism and Sunday morning redemption.

Not to mention, it’s pretty decent rock ‘n’ roll—at turns distorted crunch, house beat thump, or melodic reminiscence, with lyrics offering the even-handed critique of a keen and, for the most part, kind observer. Nothing revolutionary nor particularly transcendent, but an apt representation of the surrounding world and the speaker’s place within it. At worst, an unintentional testament to the torturous luxury of the existential malaise reserved for aimless, extended adolescents. At best, a streamlined frenzy cranked up to eleven, pulled tight between a rhythm section dialed-in to ass-kick, a torrent of lyrics bounding between unreasonable self-assuredness and crippling self-loathing, and a sonorous guitar plucking along at cut-time as if having stumbled into the wrong session—the whole damn thing seeming to fray at the edges, practically bursting at the seams with all the discordant energies inside.

Which again is why we liked it.  Every verse and measure spoke to the yet unknowable, almost uncontrollable self that we were told was our primary responsibility to know and control. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not the album proclaims, but even that’s a far cry from a resounding declaration of an individual identity. Here lies that human tendency to self-actualize through negation. In other words: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not, and it’s not what you say it is.” Not old enough, not smart enough, not cool enough, we told ourselves—but these reasons were only projections of our own insecurities. And so, perhaps more accurate, if not more cumbersome to parse: “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not, and I am not what I assume it is that you think that I am.” The real tensions then, internal of course, between the person we want to become, our uncertainty of how to proceed, and the fear of what we’re becoming in the meantime.

The North England clubbers took to the dancefloor in revolt; we West Kentucky stoners took to the roads. What began as exploration, became a ritual of escape. The clubbers themselves disappeared in the crowd to cut loose, let loose, be immersed within something other. The long country roads, often dark and empty, offered a different type of anonymity, but in effect the same dissociation from self. In truth, we came to know the roads better than we knew ourselves. We knew where we wanted to go and how to get there, at least for the next thirty minutes, the next hour, until the next strum of that last saccharine chord.

Nowadays, when I find myself back in that little town, the car almost steers itself. 16th to Coles Campground to Walston and so on. New blacktop, new sidewalks, new dorms taking over a cornfield, strip mall stores replaced by different strip mall stores, strip mall churches, and so forth. The cast and crew that shared those long days and short years out cruising, now scattered throughout the expanse of adulthood, with military and museum and social service careers, with wives and children and mortgages and mutual funds, et cetera. Oh, how times have changed ad infinitum. But the roads are the same. When I drive them now I remember us, how we were, how we could both lose and find ourselves within the span of an album, how necessary it seemed to escape. Night after night we retraced those routes, the days’ worth of bullshit classes, half-assed extracurriculars, and all the things people said or we thought they said, unspooling behind us. Somehow we always managed to pretend that we wouldn’t have to turn around and follow the thread back home.

—Colin Lee

#372: The Police, "Reggatta de Blanc" (1979)

What I knew of the Police began and ended with their singles, Moulin Rouge’s adaptation of “Roxanne,” and the fact that my mom loved Sting partly because he was a “yoga master,” which is what she told me each time the Police got airplay or came up in conversation: “Oh, I like Sting. He’s a yoga master.” My mother had become, in my adolescence, devoted to yoga, and in the evenings after work, you could hear her practice in the TV room, even with the door closed, her breath whooshing with control and concentration. So much of my mother I know from the sounds of the ways in which she escaped into herself: the whirr of her sewing machine from the basement as she pieced together a quilt, the scratch of a stalk of charcoal as she drew in her sketchbook.

The Police seemed ubiquitous on the radio back then, maybe because my mother was my chauffeur to and from school and skating practice, and we clocked at least ten hours in the car each week listening to MIX 107.3 (tagline: “A mix of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and TODAY”), which kept the Police on heavy rotation, so that now, whenever I hear Sting’s cottony croon, I’m returned to that safe and timeless place of the passenger’s seat before I knew how to drive, the view out the window still limitless, a frame for where I knew someday out there the rest of my life would happen.

It’s telling that, unlike most of the bands I listened to incessantly, the Police are a vehicle for memories that have nothing to do with the Police; they were just always there. They were the background elevator noise, innocuous but faintly tacky, like seashell-patterned wallpaper at a beach house. The music equivalent of a Nilla wafer: perfectly fine, but would you ever champion it as a dessert?

Sting is the same old Sting when I listen to him now on Reggatta de Blanc, but I’m startled by how good he sounds, even though I’ve been hearing him practically my whole life. The Police are still sort of cheesy, but the difference is now I’m starting to actively enjoy them. I’m entering into that dangerous territory, here, of liking what my parents liked. I’m sending out an S.O.S.

The Police’s cheesiness saturates even the smallest details. The title of this particular album, Reggatta de Blanc, is French for “white reggae,” which, aside from being problematic, is also just geeky. Listening to this album, half of me wants to genuinely dance (though it’s impossible not to dance like a dad while listening to the Police—go ahead, try, I dare you), but the other half feels like it’s trapped in a slow-motion nineties dance montage, the kind where the camera rapidly zooms in and out on a strobe light (see, especially: “It’s Alright for You”). Also, please view this video and tell me whether it’s cheesy or awesome, I honestly can’t tell.

As far as I can tell, the Police have always been received with some ambivalence—their corniness isn’t necessarily a quality they’ve acquired over time due to seeming outdated. In the original review of Reggatta de Blanc in Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen wrote, “Sting's lilting mock-reggae wails—papier-màché plaintive though they may be—work like the siren of an emergency vehicle, guiding and warning of momentum. It's a perfect example of why I've always found the Police less offensive than arresting.” Offensive, arresting: it’s a tightrope, and Sting wobbles precariously on top.

And then there’s this fun little jewel: Sting’s real name is Gordon. Gordon. According to a legend told to me in confidence by Wikipedia, the nickname originated from his habit of wearing a black-and-yellow-striped sweater when performing with the Phoenix Jazzmen, his band before the Police. His bandmate, also named Gordon because England is a dark, dark place, thought he looked like a bee: hence, Sting was born. And even this is the cheesiest transformation story of all time.

Gordon all-too-willingly shed his birth name in favor of Sting, once telling a journalist who had called him Gordon, “My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting—who is this Gordon character?” (Necessary side note: is it not sort of creepy that his children call him “Sting” rather than “Dad”?) When Gordon became Sting, he was in college. When the Police got together and Sting-the-bumblebee-look-alike became Sting-the-rock-star, he was about 26, just a little younger than I am now. I can understand this desire to shed off a part of yourself, to go quick and slithering and new into the tall grass. But what to do when you want to shed the old self, and to avoid the one waiting for you? Why do I, as so many others, cringe at the thought of becoming my parents?

Like my mother before me, I’ve taken up yoga. Its physicality—the movement, the stretching, the alignment of the body with the breath—helps me deal with and temporarily escape from a life that, admittedly, isn’t all that difficult, but one that is difficult simply for being a life. (Sting, it should be known, practices yoga for an hour and a half each day, a routine that probably contributes to the stretchiness of his vocal cords.) Yoga urges you to accept your weaknesses, work with them, whether they’re mental or physical, rather than struggle against them. The woman who teaches my classes purrs, If you can’t do this today, that’s okay. Forgive yourself. Take a break. Love yourself.

I roll my eyes reading back over those words because yoga is cheesy, and writing about yoga, even cheesier. Is it because of the earnestness with which it requires you to confront yourself? Is it because it engenders the desire to function well as a human being? These motives are decidedly unhip because they run contrary to the essence of rock stardom: the ability to not give a fuck.

There’s a cultural cliché that parents are stand-ins for cheesiness, that they just “don’t get it,” that they are irrelevant because they care too much or don’t care about the right (i.e. cool) things—and when they do, it comes off as trying too hard. But as I get older, I find myself growing more and more prickly to this trope whenever I encounter it, which is always, in television and movies and books. It’s so boring in how it reduces what could be a three-dimensional character into someone else’s anxiety.

I think it’s not so much that parents are cheesy but that they are subversively rock 'n’ roll: they are now old enough to not give a fuck. If parents at times seem clueless, it’s because they no longer care about hiding their cluelessness, whereas younger people still make a furious effort to cover up their own moments of ignorance, of discomfort. Parents will dance without abandon at your neighbor’s holiday party. Your mother will openly love Sting (and Enya, but that’s another essay). Your father will wear his huge straw hat with a wide, floppy brim on every outdoor excursion, and he will commute to work on a recumbent bicycle outfitted with a long orange flag that sticks right up from the back. Your mother will accidentally (and forever) call John Mayer “Johnny May-May” in public and laugh when you correct her. They will tell their children that they are proud of them at inopportune moments. These things, in their own way, are super metal. Imagine living an entire life, and instead of coming out the other side cynical and hardened, only growing more and more earnest, more and more cheesy. I think I would like that sort of life; I think I would like to be that sort of person.

If I’m afraid to start liking the same things my parents liked, afraid to catch myself parroting the same phrases, playing with my hair the way my mother does, crumpling my face like my father’s, maybe it’s not so much that I’m afraid of being scoffed at for the cheesiness and irrelevance associated with my age. Maybe it’s more my hesitancy to admit that time is passing, that life could be so complicated that I lapse on whatever separate identity I forged for myself, that who I’m meant to become is inevitable, the hours spent daydreaming in vain out the passenger’s window about what shape my life would take while the Police grooved on in the background, because the future was sitting right next to me, lived in the same house with me, breathing loud and clear.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#373: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers" (1969)

When I was a little girl, I was a pacifist, though I used to punch my best friend on the playground when he swore. When I got older, and I saw how many people could not survive the long wait for peaceful reconciliation, I changed my mind. Today I cringe, remember the arrogance with which I declared to a room of friends, “I’d go to war, if the cause were just,” because I wanted to believe I would—I think it would feel good to be righteous, don’t you? It’s the ultimate Manichaeistic fantasy: If I’m good, and they’re evil, nothing I do against them could ever be wrong.

It feels cool, brave, and essentially American to speak this way. Yet the world is full of just causes, and I’m not going anywhere. On the other side of twenty-five, I find myself tossing in my sleep, eyes shut tight against the nightmares on the television screen while the chorus of “Volunteers” rages through my head:

    Look what’s happening out in the streets
    Got a revolution
    Got to revolution
    Hey, I’m dancing down the streets
    Got a revolution
    Got to revolution

Volunteers is a good album, Jefferson Airplane’s sixth, and the first I’ve reviewed for The RS 500 that actually warranted a place on Rolling Stone’s list. The tracks reel with woozy guitar riffs and the kind of folksy, melodic through-lines that make moonshine and skinny-dipping feel like natural epilogues to any Friday night soiree. The album has everything an essayist could ask for—a hidden swear word, a censored title, bed-hopping band members, and a passionate anti-patriotism that loves the people while despising their oppressors.

Released in 1969, and titled satirically after the faith-based nonprofit Volunteers of America (Jefferson Airplane was aiming for “Amerika,” but had to withdraw the name due to objections), the album exudes frustration with American politics in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Now, I’ve a limited enough understanding of present world events to know that keeping my mouth shut is almost always the better option, so I won’t attempt to take on the specific zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, but will merely say that overtly partisan art makes me uneasy, especially when the message is so deliciously destructive as to border on hedonism.

“We are all outlaws in the eyes of America,” promises the album’s rabble-rousing opening track. “We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young, but we should be together.” What a thing to say. Got a revolution, got to revolution.

But revolution is dangerous, and damaging, and plays, again and again, straight into the hands of whatever capitalist war machine taught us that paying our debts in human life is a perfectly acceptable transaction. I mean, wouldn’t Bitcoin be a better alternative?

There’s no way to live that does not place a burden on others, or deplete the larger system—if I write on vellum, I slaughter the beast; use paper, I kill the tree; but if I do not write, the story dies, and is not the story another life? (One that may outlive the herd and the forest.) But there’s a reason the angel guarding Eden carried a burning sword—one that cast light instead of darkness, knocking down shadows with cauterizing flame. It was a blade that healed as fast as it maimed.

The perfect revolutionary does not fear the destruction or death the act may cause. This person knows that a death of principle outweighs a life of cruelty. I admire these people greatly—priests and soldiers and countless, selfless others—a child may display this willingness just as plausibly as a grown man or woman—but I am not among them. I want to live.

So what recourse is left to those who ache for our world yet will not lie down for her? I propose to you, in all seriousness, that the answer is before us.

Volunteers.

Though Jefferson Airplane’s rhetoric was problematically simple, their personal expression of rebellion was spot fucking on. What Jefferson Airplane did to express their own frustrations was much more effective than what they urged others to do: Jefferson Airplane made music. And then they shared it.

Last month my friends and I saw Frnkiero and the Cellabration perform at a tiny venue in Hamden, CT. I’m not sure how The Space stumbled upon its perfect name, but at first glance that’s all the place really is—tucked away in a cramped industrial complex, the building announces itself by way of two neon palm trees, scattered picnic tables, and a quaint, free-standing ticket booth that squats in front like a Hobbit hut. It’s nothing like the chrome concert halls I learned to love in Baltimore, or the dive-bar karaoke I enjoyed tragicomically in Roanoke, VA. You know that gap in between what you think you want, and what you actually need? Yeah, that’s The Space.

You enter onto a landing at the base of a split staircase offering visitors a tantalizing choice: go upstairs, where wait a vintage clothes shop, 80s arcade hallway, and, rather pressingly in my case, the bathroom—or turn right and descend, entering a concert hall that looks a lot like your high school cafeteria, if the administration had served edible food and taken a benevolent eye to punk posters and skinny jeans.

Because The Space does not serve alcohol, kids of all ages are able to see shows. I saw actual children lurking on the stairs, though the majority of the crowd for this concert was high school age, freed from their weeknight curfew because all the public schools were closed the next day for local elections.

A girl to my left, standing a cool head-and-shoulders above the crowd, sported a black bomber jacket with the furious slogan “This is Our Culture” stamped in capitals across the back. On the right sleeve, a mirror-verse American flag patch displayed a trapezoid with a crown where the stars should be. (I looked this up later. It’s a Fall Out Boy jacket. I have three or four of their albums but apparently I’ll always be clueless when it comes to looking cool.)

I wanted to ask her about it—What is our culture? And who is invited to participate there?—but I was too conscious of the decade between us, and kept silent. I spent the rest of the opening acts staring happily into the crowd, cataloguing the fierce joy on the faces of the young women surrounding me. I felt like I didn’t know them, but I used to. I want to know them again.

Finally, the headliners came on. I was really there for Frank Iero, their front man, but the music caught me up, the way live music always does. There’s something about being able to feel the drums straight through the floorboards that always gets me. I’m a poet. My art doesn’t let me reach out to touch.

Eventually, it got to be too much. The vibrations hovered over me, then overtook me. They opened me up, and then my whole body was shaking with it, whatever punk song, whatever occupying force Frnkiero and the Cellabration were churning out for the crowd. There was room in my body for all of us, for me and the music and the company, like suddenly I took up less room than I used to, but I didn’t feel cramped, just surrounded. Every day I grow more and more frightened for myself, and the planet, and the wonderful, terrible, incomprehensible people I share the planet with. But shoulder-to-shoulder with this surging organism of rhythm and youth, I felt momentarily comforted.

On stage, Frankie cradled the mike in both hands. “I hate my weaknesses,” he howled. “They made me who I am.” And he didn’t realize it, but he’d just christened my revolution. Because my crowd? We’re full of weaknesses. But it’s what we make with our weaknesses that matters.

So, my advice?

Make something. When you can’t stomach the violence in the news, or the look on your colleague’s face when a student tells her she’s “too black.” When you take a walk and realize all the bees are gone, and the squirrels and chipmunks are dwindling too….write a song. Put it in a play. Build something. Bake something. Give it away. Wherever you’re creating, there’s a revolution. Jefferson Airplane thinks you should.

—Eve Strillacci

#374: Roxy Music, "Siren" (1975)

What do we want out of music? What do we think it owes us?

These are variations of two questions I’ve begun asking on an almost daily basis the high schoolers to whom I teach English: why are we reading this? Why was it written, and why do we care? Supposing we do at all. Supposing we aren’t just wasting our time.

I think about this problem almost every time I listen to an album, whether for the first time or the thousandth, and it’s a problem that becomes noticeably electroshocked into my consciousness when the album at hand is simply perfectly fine. Not particularly awful, not blowing my mind: just perfectly fine. A-OK. All right by me. When I listen to it, I’m probably shimmying a little, and I certainly like most if not all of the songs. Eric Clapton’s “important” records are great examples of this, as are gauzy singer-songwriter dealies like Tapestry or early Elton. The problem with albums like this—and it’s the same problem I’ve started stressing out my poor unsuspecting high schoolers with—is that they aren’t doing a damn thing to challenge their listener.

But is this what we want out of music? Is this what music owes us?

I’ve just started reading the collected transcripted conversations between David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky during their days together on the former’s Infinite Jest tour. I thought I would almost certainly find the book odorously tedious, but within the first thirty pages, I was unexpectedly struck by something Wallace said about difficult art: “[I]t’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.” To use Wallace’s vernacular, this isn’t earth-shaking stuff—avant-gardeners from Duchamp to Artaud to Merzbow have either stated or proven the sentiment a million times over—but it’s extremely important, I think, for someone to come along and remind us every now and then of its truth. Oh, right. Music should be moving stuff along. That’s what’s precious about it.

All this is to say that I’m both a perfect and terribly wrong person to be writing about Roxy Music’s fifth album, Siren. For starters, when I woke up this morning, I’d never heard it. It’s got some stellar production, the sax solos are smooth as a strobe light from start to finish, Brian Ferry’s crooning along at his Ferryest: it’s a perfectly fine album. At moments, I’d say, it’s even amazing. “Both Ends Burning,” for example, is so much fun, and the groove it builds seems almost impossible. It’s one of those songs for which they’ve invented the phrase “lost in the music.” I dig it, most sincerely. I’ll probably listen to the record a few more times, even. Maybe I’ll close out a mixtape someday for someone with “Both Ends.” But I’ve got to admit: Siren is no Roxy Music, the band’s self-titled debut which is missing from the RS 500, and which is a better record than any Eno-less iteration of the band could ever dream of making.

Preferring to write about Roxy Music brings everything back to my main point: remembering what music should do, what it owes us, what we hope to get out of it. The album isn’t perfect, for sure, but at least it’s exciting, at least it’s challenging, at least, at its highest points, it sets its sights on the hopelessly weird and cuts the brakes. I want to come back later to the opening track, because it’s incredible, and focus instead on the weirdness sprouting up throughout the other nine.

In the bigger picture, most songs on Roxy Music resemble recognizable genres and pastiches—the countrified swing song here, the fuzzed-out space-rock there—but you don’t even have to peer that closely to find the gorgeous challenges behind the veneer. Most of them, of course, can be traced directly back to Brian Eno: glitches, bloops, stereo-panning electronic squelching. Never totally overtaking the songs themselves—which are absolutely Brian Ferry songs, in all the best ways—but instead working fearlessly to spice them up, to reward the curious listener, to get freaky and funky all at once. “Virginia Plain” tosses you a revving engine as soon as the music drops out, then transitions into a static-wrapped bridge just before ending without warning, almost sporadically. Album closer “Bitter End,” with its electro-spoons and pained sax soloing resting peacefully in the way-way background, comes out sounding like the worst vaudeville show you’ve ever been to (in a good way). “The Bob” starts out sounding like Black Sabbath before devolving into a collage of gunfire, static, and detuned synthesizer, then transitions—logically, somehow!—into a romping, clean guitar solo, which shifts, finally, back into the Sabbath durge. It’s fucking weird. And it’s challenging. And, most importantly, it doesn’t suck.

How do you balance all of these qualifiers? How do you come out the other side of weird art with only minor dings? Well, first, I think, you need a mastermind. Roxy had Eno, and when he left, they maintained the listenability that’s all over their debut record—actually, they wildly improved on it—but they lost the bizarre that made them so extra-exciting. Is Roxy Music the most listenable album in my collection? God, no. “Chance Meeting” follows “The Bob,” and it’s tiresome, plodding, and dumb. All the worst aspects of the avant-garde, right there in your face. Is Roxy Music a little difficult, a little fun, even really damn groovy when it wants to be? All of these descriptions are absolutely accurate. Yes. Most certainly.

Which brings me to “Re-Make/Re-Model,” the album’s opener. It is a perfect song. Easily, without question, the best they’ve ever made. It sounds simultaneously, and still today, like both the utter apex of rock ‘n’ roll and the complete debasement of everything we understand rock music sounds like. After a little ambient crowd noise, the thing practically explodes. The drums kick into a constant two-beat that sounds more like a heart racing than anything you’re ever likely to hear again—it’s an overpowering, almost suffocating drumbeat, beautiful in its dedication. The guitar and saxophone start soloing over and through and with each other with what appears to be little concern for harmonic turn-taking or even the one-upmanship we understand soloing is for. The constant noise of these instruments, in fact, feels more Free Jazz than Hendrix; the only even familial equivalent I can muster is the Stooges, but this is gnarlier, more focused. Somewhere in the mix, of course, too, is Bryan Ferry, glamming it up with his Dracula vibrato. The song’s weird enough as it is—without Eno, it would already be bordering on a shut-it-down noise catastrophe. But Eno’s there, crowded by his reel-to-reel and his unnameable, self-invented electronic monstrosities, blooping and glitching and squelching away. By the end of the song, the structure’s mutated into a more recognizable pattern of a pack of musicians taking turns soloing, and by then, it’s a welcome relief, a terrific understanding of what listeners ache for.

And what is that again? To feel afraid? To feel challenged? To get into the muck and come out with our hearts racing, our skin goosepimpled, our life changed a tiny bit for having heard something utterly unlike anything we’ve heard before? I believe this is true. And if it isn’t true, then I’ve lost track of why we do anything at all. Art should reflect humanity: on this issue I think we can agree. But beyond that, art must first understand humanity as surprising and unlikely, at its best when it’s daring to dare us. Sometimes, we want a little Siren. True. But we need a little Roxy Music if we want to move the stuff along.

—Brad Efford

#375: Jackson Browne, "Late for the Sky" (1974)

“Late for the Sky” | Fort Collins, Colorado, 1999

I go back to this basement apartment, the one beneath the blue house on Stover Street, where “awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone and close to the end of the feeling we've known.” I sit at the end of the futon, the golden ellipse of Chardonnay in a glass. Another bottle opened after he has gone to bed. CD cases scattered on the living room floor, the green glow from the stereo a hush. I’m “drifting alone through the night,” staring at the space where the tile of the kitchen meets the carpet, thinking of the frail line between the life I’m sharing and the life I want but can’t name. The curled cord dangles from the wall phone, silent, the way it will be after he packs up his truck in a month while it snows. I set my glass under the faucet and watch the hot water erase the evidence of every sip before easing myself back “into the bed where we both lie.” The lights of passing cars scan the wall like a Xerox machine. He turns over in sleep, sighs.

“Fountain of Sorrow” |  Stillwater, Oklahoma, 1996

Another year, another man, this one calling to say he found the For Rent sign in my yard. The distance between us had set in and settled, a “loneliness springing up….like a fountain from a pool.” And I didn’t know what to do but move away from it. That last night, he sat on the edge of my scratchy brown couch, his left knee bouncing. I handed him a Bud Dry, watched him prop the bottle on his knee as if to steady it. Around us, the truth of taped boxes. We sat close in the low lamplight, and he kept one hand on the bottle and the other holding his bowed head. “What I was seeing wasn't what was happening at all.” And I wouldn’t see it for years, not until he asked to meet, to count it as the first mistake that left him with the “hollow sound of [his] own steps in flight.” I can still see him waving big in the parking lot, smiling, the way he does in the photograph I keep in the bottom of a suitcase. A month later, a stranger found his body on the side of a biking trail in Houston. I carry the loneliness now, and “[He] could be laughing at me, [he’s] got the right. But [he goes] on smiling so clear and so bright.”

“Farther On” | Canton, New York, 2012

I once taught at a small university in northern New York, and there, I met an accomplished man, that year’s Visiting Writer. He lived in a corner house that came with the position, a two-story white clapboard. Many afternoons, I took long walks through the Adirondacks with his curly-haired, graceful wife. When I’d pick her up, he’d step away from his writing room on the second floor and perch on the top step, stroke his trim gray beard while she bundled up against the cold. Often, they’d have me and my young daughter over for dinner, and after the wine had been emptied and the dishwasher churned, he would pass through my recent pages. His pencil marks on each one. He dismissed my writing about my daughter’s father, the man I shared the basement apartment with, the man who came back before leaving again for good. “He left, he doesn’t get to be written about,” he’d scoff while the candlelight flickered in his glasses. One night, he showed my daughter how to cast a fly rod in their living room. Always on those evenings, a Jackson Browne CD on the stereo in the dining room. We’d sit around the table, speaking our disappointments, our desires toward the distance. “They were cutting from stone some dreams of their own but they listened to mine anyway.” We write letters now, look over each other’s shoulders from somewhere farther on.

“The Late Show” | South Fork, Colorado, 2001

Let’s just say a stranger and I skipped rocks in the rain, the river passing us like a bus we had just missed. It was July, a month after I learned I was pregnant, when I drove through the smell of sweet pine to visit a friend. Her neighbor with a beard and a blue shirt stepped into the house and introduced himself. (Long ago.) On the rocky bank of the river, he and I skipped smooth, flat stones into the current. Let’s just say we talked about water, where it goes, if it’s different in Colorado than in Texas. Soon we were too soaked to stay outside, so we hid away on his front porch for the rest of the afternoon. (You know it’s useless to pretend.) I have thought of him many times, his blue shirt, his beard, his long hair in my hands. Maybe I needed to know what I would choose if another reality came into view, like a gas station on a long, empty road. (You’d never know.) I haven’t seen him since that day, when the rain let up and the sun reminded us of people beyond his front porch, when he forced himself to drive at least twenty towns down the road. That night, I snuck back to stand in front of his house, imagined the sound of his truck door shutting. This is the man I always want to go back for, to find “standing in the window.”

“The Road and the Sky” | Stillwater, Oklahoma, 1995

It had always been a dream of his to leave the Wormy Dog Saloon and end up in Mexico, so when he leaned into me around midnight and asked if I wanted to go to Matamoros, I said yes. Five hours before, he had picked me up for our first date, and after buck burgers and beer, we’d wandered over to the Dog before leaving it for Mexico. “All I want to do is ride.” Noon the next day, I sped us toward a gulf hidden behind a gray curtain. “Now can you see those dark clouds gathering up ahead?” We drove toward the darkness, feeling with every mile we were approaching the gates of a carnival that had just left town. But when we crossed the border, all the gloom disappeared with tequila and tacos, gift-shop sombreros and the giddiness of having run away. That night, I stepped off a curb in flip-flops, splashed through deep puddles of leftover rain. When someone called to tell me years later he had been found in Houston, I learned not to “think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet.”

“For A Dancer” | Boulder, Colorado, 2002

It’s raining here, too, and I’m standing in a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, where the woman behind the counter hands me the hot water for my tea, her smooth brown hair falling to shoulder. I’m wearing the brown corduroy overalls I wore every day during the last two months of my pregnancy, and I ask her the story of her name, printed on her apron. Her father, in 1971, had left New Jersey bound for the freedom of the open west in his white VW van, his wife in the passenger seat. The van made it as far as Boulder, so that’s where they had lived ever since, where he drove a taxi to make a living. He named her “Dancer,” for the song. She remembers riding next to him on the nights she had trouble sleeping, the passengers speaking from the backseat, the shadow of his profile against the dark. When I found out I was having a girl, I thought for a time about naming her Dancer, then thought better of it. I didn’t want my daughter to have someone else’s name, someone else’s story. She had her own. I named her Indie. (The world keeps turning around and around.)

“Walking Slow” | Mesquite, Texas, 2015

I run the streets “through my old neighborhood.” Most of my friends moved away or left in other ways years ago, so I run through memory—where Steve Baker’s white pickup sits outside his house, before the year he gambled his way into a debt he didn’t want to come back from. I pass Denise’s house and the afternoon her father dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack and the Saturday, decades later, when her brother, only twenty-two, did the same on a running trail. I run by Leslie’s front porch and the night we all thought she ran away until someone found her on her front porch, hiding. We were all hiding back then, maybe from all that unknowing of youth that bears down, too sudden and too long. I take the extra blocks to Tracy’s. Her parents moved south years ago, their house on the corner a different color from the cream her father repainted every other summer. I once asked if she wanted me to take a photograph of it. She said no need, it holds no meaning for her, nor does the town. But “I'm puttin' down my left foot. I'm puttin' down my right foot. I got a thing or two to say before I walk on by.” Running this sidewalk, I’m seventeen, sitting outside her house in my red Cavalier Z 24, the wine coolers we’ll drink tonight in the trunk of my car.

“Before the Deluge” | Anywhere, Anytime

Somewhere there’s a bar with Jackson Browne on the jukebox, and shadows lean on stools with their backs to the door. I walk in, squint against the darkness and find them all. As each song slides to the next, the man who left us huddles at the bar in a flannel shirt. He empties his beer, stands, then turns toward the back door and walks out. The writer and his wife pour wine from a shared bottle in a corner booth, a fountain pen and a sheet of beige stationery on the table. The man I went to Mexico with waves from behind a pool table just before he drops the 4 ball in the side pocket, a move I watched him do many afternoons at the Dog. He’s got a pitcher of Bud Dry on a near table and motions for me to grab a glass. Steve, Denise, Leslie, and Tracy sit around the curve of the bar, looking like they did in 1988, before life didn’t turn out the way they thought it would, the way it never does for any of us. Still, they’re tossing their heads back in laughter. Dancer’s dad sits in his taxi out front in case any of us needs help finding our way home. And the bearded man, the one with the long hair and the blue shirt, he’s leaning against the jukebox to select the next song. Indie sings along.

—Jill Talbot

#376: Bjork, "Post" (1995)

It seems strange to describe Bjork as an artist who is grating into the microphone for you to get your life together, but that’s how “Army of Me” opens up on Post. Bjork tells us, verbatim, to “stand up / you’ve got to manage / I won’t sympathize / anymore.” This is the same woman who told you all is full of love, but she is not having it today.

It’s offbeat from Bjork, really, but it’s offbeat in the way we now expect from Bjork. I’m not here to gush on how Bjork is this unique, timeless pop star. Post is the album where Bjork tells you how she is doing right now. In 1995, after the politeness of Debut, Bjork smashes that truth and pulls you into her pools of ambition. She dares to cover “It’s Oh So Quiet” by Betty Hutton, brings you to this fairy-tale-folk fable with trip-hop on “Isobel,” and still goes grunge on “Army of Me” to shake your spirit loose and show that she can do more. Post drops and shifts the status quo on how to produce and promote experimental music; it is the album that transforms Bjork into the pop star she is today.

Which begs the question: is Bjork a pop star? There has to be something said about an artist who is able to be as influential as she is today, and still have the amount of creative freedom she has without the heavy commercial cost of being a pop star. She acts in films; works with engineers and scientists on immersive technology; she writes and illustrates children's books. There is this comically, carefully performative identity to Bjork: there are swan dresses, MoMA exhibits, bell dresses (I feel like there’s a theme here), collaborations with Thom Yorke…the list itself could be unpacked in a biography. There is no currency of friendship though, no #SQUAD goals or Instagram feed to scroll through Bjork’s beautifully filtered life. No Twitter hearts, no need to shrink Bjork’s legacy to a single social media screen. She lives the pop culture dream without the pop star vibes: some fame, but with some creative freedom, too. The woman brought a microphone to the beach so she could sing to the sea when writing for Post—what type of rare romantic freedom is that?

There’s that gushing again, but I’m projecting so much onto this album what I feel like my life should be at this moment. In 1995, Bjork went ahead and worked on an album to share what she knew, wholly and honestly, across the spectrum of genre and lyrical ability. This album did not define the landscape of her work, but helped her race seriously and wholeheartedly through her decades of success. Some scandal may have lingered, but it was more often enormous extensions of honing and processing her craft. That requires some new-wave confidence that seems so distant, potentially lightyears away, to even consider attempting in 1995.

Knowing what you want, and saying what you want however you want to, requires another level of confidence that seems difficult to attain and impossible to interpret altogether. I so desperately wanted Post to be this colorful and textured album that would have taken me back to 1995 and taught me exactly, word by word, how to make confidence happen. There’s the day-to-day panic of being wrong; the fear that working hard is not enough (is it actually ever?);  there it is, the fear. I wanted Post to shake fear out of me for a good hour and a half. That’s all young impressionable women want from their pop stars these days, really, to be heavy and celebratory in their attention and praise and performance. Right?

I wanted Post to rescue me from the self-doubt in writing a light-hearted, personal essay. “Rescue” in itself carries so much weight, and perhaps too much expectation to put on an artist you hardly know anything about, except that she wears cool dresses and strives to make new things nearly twenty years after her debut into the diversified experimental music landscape.

I can’t say I want to be Bjork; but, I think, in order to be more and make things new, we are required to embrace the uneven nature of growth: these hills of self-reflection, slight embarrassment, some sadness we hold closer than we would like to admit, and so forth. But what Bjork acknowledges, and sings throughout Post, is that accepting that discomfort and living through it can help us find out what makes us distinct. We remain faithful to ourselves, we stand up, we manage, we keep moving. We try. That, in itself, is full of love.

—Upma Kapoor

#377: John Lee Hooker, "The Ultimate Collection" (1991)

The lessons, after a certain point, were always the same. I’d hand over a CD, tell Simon which track, and wait for him to piece the thing together. He’d mumble, slide the capo around, find the right key easy enough, and eventually get the gist without too much hassle. His fingernails were shaped like guitar picks, thick and nicotine-brown. His arms were so hairy it sometimes seemed impossible. I never knew when I walked into the cramped listening booth of a back room who I’d get: Simon the Patient, Simon the Furious, or, most likely, someone halfway between.

But I really wanted to learn these songs. I was in ninth grade and on day one he’d taught me the twelve-bar blues, so what else was there left for me to care about?

Well, chords. And chords were hard, but I managed. Stuck it out. Learned a Beat Happening song or two and had the shrugging realization: Oh cool. Chords. But barre chords: nothing was more difficult. Even now, with taxes and twelve-hour days teaching high schoolers and planning a wedding and forgetting to ever call home, nothing is more difficult than barre chords. To say that Simon quickly learned my limits is inaccurate. As a teacher myself, I know now that he created my limits by allowing me to give simply zero fucking shits. But as a ninth grader, it was pretty cool to get to learn “I’ll Fly Away” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The buck stopped there, and the buck was my interest in learning to play guitar.

But I did really want to learn these songs. Like every boy bumbling through suburbia in the Western world, it all started with the blues. Oddly enough, for me, the spark wasn’t my parents’ Stones or Zeppelin records (my dad was all John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, my mom all Cat Stevens and Chicago), but Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, adapted from Daniel Clowes’s comic about an apathetic teen falling in love with Depression-era country blues records. There’s a scene in the movie where Thora Birch stays up all night listening to Skip James sing “Devil Got My Woman” on repeat and the next day Steve Buscemi uses its weird mystical power to try and sleep with her. But that last part’s a little irrelevant. The point is that hearing Skip sing in that movie changed everything for me. I went from digging the White Stripes to discovering Son House and Robert Johnson and realizing, of course, that these were just White Stripes songs, but better. And they were better because they were real. And they were real because they were emotional. And I knew they were emotional because….well, I wasn’t sure why because no one is sure why. It’s what blues theorists and obsessives have been trying to pinpoint for almost a hundred years. What I did know was that I wanted to learn these songs.

Simon taught me a twelve-bar blues run in our first lesson and for awhile it was all I really knew how to do. And I wasn’t even any good at it. The strings hurt my fingers, which cramped quickly and led to spectacularly short practice sessions. When I did practice, though, I played nothing but that blues run so fervidly that one Saturday morning, I showed up for my guitar lesson and couldn’t play a lick of anything Simon had asked me to study that week from the method book. I could strangle you right now, he shouted, his face quickly reddening. Even the little of his skin you could make out through his thick weedy arm hair seemed to get beety. That’s how frustrated, how angry.

But after that day, he gave up. I started bringing CDs, telling him a track number, and watching him learn the framework and jot it down for me in my little music-staffed spiral. I taught myself how to read tablature. He taught me basic major and minor chords, and how the capo should hug the fret just so. I quit showing up after a couple months, which was just enough time to build calluses and understand how rhythm works. For the blues, it was plenty.

Because the blues is, at the end of the day, unbelievably simple music. Even punk rock, with its two-maybe-three-at-most-chord structure, is more difficult: the shit’s all barre chords. With the blues, you go C7-F7-G7. Or, if you’re lazy, you can still sound good enough with a solid C-F-G. Or don’t play the thing at all: mute the chords, bang on the body, and moan. Not only is this good enough—in many ways, it’s preferred. People rag on gussied-up blues. Even in Ghost World, the butt of a very funny joke is a bar band called Blueshammer, made up of white bros with frosted tips playing a hyper-amped electric blues song called “Pickin’ Cotton Blues.” It is what it sounds like. And the patrons at the bar absolutely love it, dancing and cheering and knocking poor 78-collecting Steve Buscemi’s beer onto his lap. It’s a scene that’s part insider-satire and part universal: everyone knows the blues is best at its simplest.

And by everyone knows I mostly mean everyone has agreed. Because there is no grand truth about the blues. We glorify its origins in old rare recordings by Skip James and Robert Johnson and a hundred others because we recognize that they inspired the people we really think are dandy: four-piece rock bands bastardizing the “good” stuff in all the right ways. There’s something in simplicity that we’ll always keep mooning over. The way a couple guitar chords and a light boot-stomp can’t possibly mask that mysterious emotion stuff that pulls us right out of our skin, maybe. Or maybe the way anyone can take a week, learn two or three chord changes, and call themselves a musician. There’s definitely that pesky specter of appropriation in the mix, too, the same one that hovers over every single genre of Western music, and the same one that everyone wants someone else to bring up first.

For me, I’m guilty of it all. But I really wanted to learn those songs, and sometimes I even tune my crappy Craigslist guitar and learn a couple new ones. And in this way, this small, stupid way that means nothing to anyone, I guess I’m making music. Unfortunately, there’s just no better way to describe it.

—Brad Efford

#378: Oasis, "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" (1995)

It’s 2015. I’ve just dropped my daughter off at her preschool in the annex of an old white house with ghosts in the windows. Twice a week I walk her to the gate and watch her disappear into someone else’s world. A single palpitation every time.

In my car in the parking lot I slide (What’s the Story) Morning Glory into the CD player so that I can write this story about it. I let it play. It’s one of those perfect corduroy mornings and my mind begins to unspool itself. Across the street, the Miami Community Federal Credit Union is just about to open; a group of farmers in their work clothes mill around outside the front door holding cups of coffee. And then the sun shifts and erases every single thing, and I am not listening to anything at all.

I’m thinking instead about the Clientele, who seem a distant heir to Oasis (or Felt or the Shop Assistants or the Mighty Lemon Drops)—a fifth cousin, maybe, or an estranged nephew. I’m thinking about “Losing Haringey,” about a man who wanders down an unfamiliar street and finds himself sitting in an old photograph, and how melancholy a sound they made, and then it’s 2011 and we’re driving to our fertility treatments and there’s not much to say between the two of us and so we fill the empty space with this music, wispy and pale, inoffensive in the best possible way. Our prospects here are looking bleak and it’s taking its secret toll on each of us. The sound—regretful in reverse, like nostalgia for the future—ameliorates some part of our shared sense of dread. Or maybe it’s the discovery of it—the newness—that is a comfort to us.

And now it’s 2006. My stepdad is dying and I spend a lot of time alone in my head. I go for long walks. I take a drive. There is the cemetery where a portion of his ashes will soon be buried. There’s the white house with the ghosts in the windows where my daughter, who does not yet exist, will one day go to school. Across the street is an empty lot. What does all this have to do with Oasis? Nothing, I suspect. Oasis is irrelevant.

But let’s talk about it. We can talk about “Wonderwall” if you like, but can we talk about Ryan Adams first? It’s 2004 and he’s breathing life into a mummy in a tomb. There’s still a beating heart in that song but he’s excavated its soul and he’s recited an incantation and he’s somehow managed to re-animate the thing, bring it back from the dead. It coughs up dust and opens its eyes.

By 2004, Oasis has more or less disappeared. They’ve made three albums since Morning Glory (and would make two more after that), but can you name any songs from them? Ryan Adams has done them a great favor and even Noel Gallagher has to admit that Adams got the song right, but now it’s 1998 and I’m in the backseat of my friend’s car listening to OK Computer and thinking about the crunch of those guitars—about that spastic shaker in the closing seconds of “Paranoid Android”—and how the whole thing has risen up from the ground like a monster made of garbage technology and human skin and how it has just stomped the absolute fuck out of the nineties and everything from it. This thought finds me there, sitting in the backseat, still riding the apogee of some pretty okay mushrooms, going from a concert in Columbus to my friend’s parents’ house in Cincinnati, and the thought has such weight that it sits down next to me, buckles in and says hello.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory is released on October 2, 1995 and I don’t know where I am in this. I’m in college; I’m playing music in a band and listening to things I won’t admit to here. I’m in a parking lot in 2015 and trying to remember but it’s like opening your eyes in the sea and Oasis is bringing back nothing, but what I do remember is a radio station that I’m just beginning to love, called 97X. They broadcast from a shack in one corner of my tiny hometown—their signal hits the ears of all the kids that need it, and then drifts out over cornfields and into the ether. This is where I first hear Joy Division, first hear the Smiths, first hear the Cure. I hear XTC. I hear Blur. This is where something amorphous in me begins to solidify. And maybe Oasis fails to register because when I listen to their music all I hear are the echoes of these other voices, and maybe it’s only the purest sounds that ring out the longest.

As pure as it is, 97X—like all beautiful sounds—eventually winks out into silence. Their studio is razed; it sits as an empty lot, and on that empty lot some forward-thinking committee builds the Miami Community Federal Credit Union, and now there are ghosts in the windows of that house too.

But let’s talk about Oasis. Let’s talk about the guitars, I guess, but can we talk about Catherine Wheel instead? Can we talk about “Black Metallic?” Because those guitars are the sound of sex and that song is the soundtrack to the drive home after shoving our hands down each others’ pants while pretending to watch Saturday Night Live on the couch in my mom and stepdad’s basement and it’s 1992 and nothing has disappeared and everything is out ahead of us and this is the beginning of all the things that will be fun and complicated from this point forward, and I am astonished to imagine (though how could I imagine it?) that this same girl I’m fooling around with now will one day, years from now, bear the weight of our infertility and will one day, not long after, produce from her body a tiny perfect human, who will one day, yesterday, play a toy piano with her foot.

Do we need to talk about all this? Maybe we don’t. Maybe I should have just stuck to the album, or to “Champagne Supernova,” but this is the album and this is “Champagne Supernova” because everything has its origins and everything lies on a continuum. We probably could have talked about the Happy Mondays, about the Charlatans, about the motherfucking Stone Roses, but all we really need to talk about are the Beatles—because all rivers eventually lead back to the ocean—and all you really need to know about me is this: It’s nineteen-eighty-something and I am a kid. My world is only what I can see, and even less than that. I know nothing—about music, about pain, about sex or drugs, about dreamy nostalgia, about dread, about love. My parents have split and it’s not so bad as you might imagine, but our house is filled with ghosts and those ghosts are us. My brother sits me down. He has a Panasonic tape player and Rubber Soul on cassette, and the beginning of everything occurs when he slides in the tape, puts his finger on play, looks me in the eye and says, Listen to this.

—Joe P. Squance

#379: TLC, "CrazySexyCool" (1994)

About sexual expectations of teenage girls, one of your friends says, “It’s not fair. Why do we have to be the ones to say no? I want it just as bad as they do.”  

“Then don’t say no,” you say. And so it was.

In the foothills of Appalachia, in the mid-1990s, you’re a white teen. Everyone around you at your high school, with the exception of a handful of people (perhaps ten), is white. Many of the white boys you know wear Starter Jackets and baseball caps to the side, b-boy style. The white boys bump their way through the parking lot of the school in Camaros or Mustangs blaring Dre or Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony. Posters of Michael Jordan are in the bedrooms of every guy you know. Rebel flags are prevalent, as are trailers and satellite dishes. Teenage white guys call females “bitches” or “hos.” Your junior year, some students set crosses ablaze on the baseball field in honor of white heritage. The misappropriation of culture is schizoid and selective in nature.

You have AOL dial-up (charged by the hour), you’ve mailed off for information about colleges, and get your hair cut like Winona Ryder’s in Reality Bites. Most of your friends’ parents married right out of high school. Yours hadn’t; they went to graduate school. Your parents are now busy recovering and remarrying after their divorce. You know infidelity was involved. You recover from their divorce in your room, watching MST3K or listening to CDs. You read a lot of Fitzgerald. You think of ways to meet JFK, Jr.

The world is starting to view women differently and you are at your most impressionable. Women are now allowed sexual urges, too. You know this because Sharon Stone made out with another girl and flashed her panty-less crotch to the camera in Basic Instinct, although to balance the equation, her character is a serial killer (but you ignore this). The term “slut shaming” is but a twinkle in some young feminist’s eye.

With all the hypocrisy around you, becoming sexually active seems like the most honest and obvious recourse. It is an outlet for you and your peers, much like occupational therapy for a stroke victim, though there are very few guys in your small town who are not racist and/or super into Jesus. This outlet needs a soundtrack that not only facilitates mood, but promotes a message without stigma and endorses the ability for women to want, initiate, and walk away from safe sex as they wish. TLC speaks to your needs, not to mention Left Eye set her boyfriend’s house on fire. You and your peer group feel her action to be empowering in a weird way, especially when her football-player boyfriend doesn’t file charges. And even if “Waterfalls” mentions AIDS (which is scary to you because Magic Johnson has it and Eazy-E died from it), it still has a sexy bassline and groove and when the horn section comes in for some reason it makes you feel like you could be anything in a few short years. The world outside of where you are is a mystery, but a hopeful mystery. The world will soon be connected like the thick straight lines drawn to connect stars in the constellations, creating a picture. But you don’t know that.

One day, you are thirty-six and drive a station wagon. It makes you feel good that it is a German “sports edition” station wagon and not a minivan. You live far away from where you grew up, but know from Facebook that many of your old classmates are still into Jesus and confederate flags.

You work out at a college gym while your eight-year-old son goes to swim practice, and watch the students sweat and flirt with one another. You have a graduate degree and teach literature. Though you are a democrat, you are more concerned about the wage gap between the sexes than trigger warnings and slut shaming. “Waterfalls” comes up on your phone in shuffle play while you run in place on the treadmill. You remember all the lyrics, Left Eye’s squeaky voice as she flawlessly raps at a warp speed, and recall that she is dead now. Then you try to remember the girl you were. Though the song helps, the memory is too faded and before you know it, the music shuffles to something else.

—Edie Pounders

#380: Toots & the Maytals, "Funky Kingston" (1975)

It’s hard to describe marinara sauce; I could talk about the richness, the warmth that blankets you, the spurts of flavor that flood your mouth. But sauce is something that can’t be described so much as it can be felt. Everybody feels something when it comes to marinara — to any sauce, really. Ask somebody what marinara sauce makes them feel, and though they may look at you strangely, they’ll tell you. I asked a few people, they all said either “safe” or “at home.” I say it makes me feel safe, too.

I’m in college now, where my diet usually consists of Easy Mac and bagels and more peanut butter than I’d ever thought I’d have. But I had spaghetti a few days ago, the pasta overflowing the plate with only an ice-cream-scoop-sized mound of marinara on top. The proportions were all wrong. There were hundreds of other students around me, the music was some Katy Perry song, there was no distinct smell. The environment was all wrong. And then I took a bite, and it was good enough, but there was neither garlic nor bits of jalapeños.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a marinara snob, and I have nothing against Katy Perry. But it was one of the first culture shocks I experienced in college. I wasn’t concerned about studying or getting As, and I was only slightly concerned about making more friends, but the marinara sauce bothered me. See, I grew up with a father who spent hours upon hours poring over our thirty-year-old crockpot, with its green rim matching green leaves that swirled in quadruplets around the pot. It always reminded me of a compass, with one quadruplet pointing north, one pointing east, one south, one west. The pot would be hidden in a kitchen corner, its cream color blending in with the beige walls behind it. But Dad would take up the rest of the counter space with cutting boards and knives and ladles, ladles everywhere. Giant plastic bags of giant orange carrots would lie on the counter, as would half-sliced tomatoes and chopped-up fragments of leeks and the translucent remnants of garlic shells. But my family’s favorite were the peppers — half of the counter was filled with peppers of all colors and flavors. And sometimes the rest of my family wouldn’t even know all this was going on until “Dinner!” was called.

Our home was very tall, with high-up ceilings and four flights of stairs, so the smells and sounds never travelled much farther than the kitchen. Everything was muffled, insulated in one room, and when you were outdoors you’d have no idea what was going on indoors. You could even be in your room and all of a sudden Mom would open the door to ask a question and your room would fill up with the smell of stewing marinara. There was always an initial confusion—you’d be  perplexed as to where the smell was seeping up from—and then it’d hit you: Dad was making marinara. He was having a field day in the kitchen and you didn’t even know.

My dad used to listen to reggae while making dinner; kitchen-wise, he really only specialized in Toots & the Maytals and marinara sauce. The reggae made the marinara seem so much fuller. I find that reggae does that often; when life seems empty, just put on some Toots & the Maytals and life seems soft, rich. Or maybe this just works for me because they’ll forever be associated with my dad and his marinara. I hear the funk start and I immediately picture my suburban father (who was usually still decked out in a tie and starched white button-down) nodding his head along to the beat and dropping everything to start dancing at the parts he felt the most.

That’s what Toots & the Maytals are for me—a feeling. When the brass first blares in their album Funky Kingston, this wash of simplicity rushes over me. Life is absent when the brass plays; nothing exists but me and the brass and the marinara. My blood seems to slow down and warm up, everything is relaxing. Then “Louie Louie” picks up and my heart picks up pace solely because, even from a campus nowhere near home, I can practically hear Dad singing along to the melody under his breath, his face red and glistening from the kitchen’s rising heat, then he’s talking about how he slow-danced to this song once in college, then Mom comes in and they dance together. It’s one of my favorite daydreams: Mom and Dad slow-dancing as the living room swirls with the warmth of marinara sauce. They stop dancing when the music stops and the singer begins talking, then they start swaying when the singer’s words morph into a melody once again. I’d sit on the couch and smile up at them, just observing and feeding off of their little bubble of joy, and because of those daydreams I feel as if I’m on a first-name basis with the band. To me, they are the Toots.

The Toots and their Funky Kingston are an experience. They’re a family of different musics mixing together—reggae, soul, blues, funk. It’s an album that could never be filtered into a single category. A marinara sauce album. Songs like “In The Dark” and “Louie, Louie” and “Love Is Gonna Let Me Down” are the base of the sauce; they simmer and resonate and stop the album from becoming this hodgepodge of noises and flavors. The peppers and onions and carrots and garlic are songs like “Time Tough” and “Pomp & Pride” and “Got To Be There”; they give the album a little extra tang, bringing unexpected pops to the calm, relaxing music. Then there is “Country Road,” which makes everything feel as though it’s coming to an end—it’s the resounding last bite of the marinara.

But Funky Kingston’s last two songs, “Sailing On” and “Pressure Drop,” they’re the spices; they burst the album back to life after the slow wave of “Country Road.” They’re what you remember most. And they’re uplifting and different than the rest of the album—“Sailing On” and “Pressure Drop” are even starkly different from one another. It would be like one flavor being dominated by another, a jalapeño taking over the taste of saffron. “Sailing On” is a slow-dance type song, and “Pressure Drop” is a funky song where you could pull out the oddest dance move and nobody would care. Their flavors are just different, but the difference brings the whole album together, and even though the album is ending, the end makes you feel warm and safe, just like taking that last bite of marinara while watching your parents hug after a slow dance in a room still swirling with the warmth of marinara and Toots.

—Nicole Efford

#381: The Beach Boys, "The Smile Sessions" (2011)

I have a few theories about why my sister loved the Beach Boys:

They’re fun to sing along with.

The songs are happy. And they sound happy singing them.

The harmonies, duh.

They take you to the beach—to a different time.

But I have this other cosmic thought. About Brian Wilson’s sandbox, where he sat in 1966 and 1967 while the anticipated album Smile was periled over and never executed and where Smiley Smile was settled on in ‘67. Wilson, like a child, sat on his simulated beach, composing commotion, ordering the orchestras to stop and start again, the swirl and chaos of hundreds of instruments around him punctuated by the false start of harmonies. I imagine how utterly alone he was, though surrounded by so many people who only wanted to see it all work out. Then I think of my seven-year-old sister outside in the neighbor’s sandbox, being fussed over, loved by so many, attended by even more, back when they were trying to save her. As a kid, she wouldn’t have known, the way we do now, about the pain Brian Wilson was living with back then, but maybe, I imagine, my sister heard in Smiley Smile something recognizable. They shared the kind of isolation brought on by suffering—by expectations you can’t uphold. For both of them, it was not possible to command hope into result. But, they lived for the sound of beautiful, ecstatic things.

*

Up and down the stairs of our home—to sleepovers and hospital stays—my sister lugged with her a large trash bag full of cassette tapes. I still remember the pre-song rattle of the tapes clanking against each other, even the bag’s plastic skin, worn soft by the tapes. Among them were Summer Days, Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile, and a handful of compilation hits by the Beach Boys.

As an elementary schooler in the early ‘90s, her friends were singing into hairbrush microphones to Michael Jackson, Ace of Base, and Cyndi Lauper. Like a strange seven-year-old Santa incarnate, she’d throw her trash bag over her shoulder, walk to their houses and insist to choreograph elaborate dance routines to the Beach Boys instead. She wasn’t just hooked on “God Only Knows,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”—she was a kid into deep cuts. That’s how I know the offbeat, cast-off songs from Smiley Smile. One of her favorites was “Heroes and Villains,” the larger-than-life epic narrative, quite unlike any other Beach Boys single. During one of her birthday parties at this place called Superstar Studios—where you dance, lip-sync and play faux-instruments in front of a green screen yielding all sorts of special effects—she asked for “Heroes and Villains.” They didn’t have that song available.

*

The Smile Sessions came out in 2011, thirty-five years after the forty-one initial recordings were made. Smile, the epic album the Beach Boys labored over and intended to release after the iconic Pet Sounds, was shelved due to ‘internal conflict’ in 1967. Instead, Smiley Smile was thrown together to fulfill their contract with Capitol. Smiley Smile has some overlap with The Smile Sessions, which tells a far more in-depth story of the attempt to bring this life-size—maybe galaxy-size, all-of-time-size—concept to life. On it, you can hear almost a half hour in takes trying to get “Heroes and Villains” right.

*

My sister was diagnosed with a rare form of terminal brain cancer when she was seven years old after having a seizure at school. She was sick, enduring surgeries, treatments and false hopes, for two years. She died when I was five and a half. I have grown up wondering, speculating, what it was about these songs that she attached to. For years I have searched the lyrics for clues—if there was a message provided, straight from Brian Wilson himself. I imagine she lit up when “California Girls” declared east coast girls hip; the boys really digging the styles they wear. I cringe to think of her hearing, asking: Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older… I find solace thinking of her comforted by “Don’t Worry Baby”’s repetition of that line.

But Smiley Smiley’s strange psychedelic songs, many seemingly ironic in their lyrics’ juvenility, don’t lay the path to my sister’s mind. Even though she was young and silly, I can’t imagine my sister around the dinner table singing: I'm gonna chow down my vegetables, I love you most of all, my favorite vegetable. “Little Pad”’s  Dit du du, Da da da do do, dim duh did doo, Did did did doo Dim duh dum did doo Do do doesn’t give many clues, either. There is one song on “Smiley Smile” though, that I know she could relate to.

It hurts to listen to “She’s Goin’ Bald,” knowing she’d known it—surely had it memorized. It is a playful, trippy track with a pinch of their recognizable beachy harmonies at the beginning. Wilson sings, Silken hair, more silken hair fell on her face and no wind was blowin / She's goin' bald / Silken hair, more silken hair lay near her pillbox down at her feet. But the song rockets into a rock opera-esque joke, the punchline its bald subject. On first listen, it feels tacky, tasteless—a “too far” moment for Wilson. But when I think of her hearing it as a child losing beautiful waist-long waves, I wonder if its wildness and bounce, its lack of seriousness and sensitivity, was a relief. That maybe someone far away in space and time was giving her the gift of being the focus of a light, upbeat story—not a sufferer.

*

In 1967, Smiley Smile hit number 41 on the U.S. Billboard charts. It was the lowest ranking that the Beach Boys ever had. Smiley Smile is often regarded as their worst received album to date. By critics, fans, and even members of the band, it was considered a humiliating, cartoonish, plummet for them, especially as a follow up to Pet Sounds. There’s much supposition that Brian Wilson’s mental, physical and spiritual state contributed to Smile’s dysfunctional recording and the chart failure of Smiley Smile. I wonder if this is album he needed to make—one seemingly void of emotional resonance. One not of suffering.

*

Though I remember the oldies that orbited my sister clearly, a lot of my memories of my sister are fabricated, pieced together by clips of home videos or suggested by photographs. This image of her is my favorite: She is on the beach, standing on the sand in front of the boardwalk amusements. A Ferris wheel halos her bare head and she is smiling. The tulip bathing suit she is wearing was handed down to me. By the time I grew into it, she was gone.

I don’t remember this day—I’m not even sure if I was there. But it was a Beach Boys concert in 1993 in Ocean City, Maryland. I think by then the doctors and my parents knew that she couldn’t be saved. They drove her four hours to the beach to see her favorite band, wanting to give her any final, beautiful moments they could.

I envision that day, filling it in with all the things I assume. I wonder if she noticed being one of the youngest diehard Beach Boys fans—that the other kids were not singing along, but building sand castles at their parents’, not ever having considered the other side of life. I also wonder if, by then, she did.

*

The Smile Sessions was released as a box set with almost 400 fatiguing minutes of audio—many 20 second tracks. These clips of chaos and unresolved melodies don’t feel like songs at all. The recordings were made over nine months during eighty different sessions in Brian Wilson’s home studio. Listening to it is an exhausting eavesdrop for those willing to endure frustration for the blessing of bearing witness to these painful, private moments. This album gives a gritty glimpse of why Smile was never produced and its flop replacement Smiley Smile was released instead. Although, it is worth mentioning that since its mediocre reception, many critics and fans alike have recanted harsh reviews of Smiley Smile. Though it didn’t place on the RS 500, it is at least now better embraced.

*

Though I will never know, I decide that my sister initially loved the Beach Boys for the simple, instinctual reasons we love music and that those feelings complicated and evolved as she lived. Maybe the range of high notes warmed by lows offered her heaven-sounds—beckoning her beautifully to a place that, I decide, she believed in.

The Smile Sessions opens with a rough cut of “Our Prayer.” These are the familiar harmonies that I imagine soothed my sister into acceptance. Something that I hope was uncomplicated—just peaceful. As I listen to “Our Prayer,” I sense this is what Brian Wilson was trying to muddle through. That he was trying to coordinate pitches and speed and purpose to find the peace these voices and sounds would offer.

*

I am not sure what Smile would have sounded like if they’d made of it what they wanted. Neither Smiley Smile nor The Smile Sessions give us more than gentle nudges. But here: I am just trying to decode the smiles they provided.

I am not sure what my sister’s story would be if I knew all her truths—why she loved the Beach Boys being only one of the million mysteries I strive to solve.

After toiling toward answers, I realize that maybe I relate more to Brian Wilson that my sister ever did. Like him, I am writing this for a deadline. Like him, I missed it. Maybe in forty years I will be able to release the scribbles of edits, sessions of notes—the evidence that I worked trying to get each of them right.

I think I will always magnify moments of her short life, investigating what was meaningful to her. I will throw together all my labored breaths, re-tries, my visible tensions: the struggled words of trying to do justice to such a gigantic, bigger-than-time story. Smile, Smiley Smile, Smile Sessions—they gave it so many gos. And without shame, I will release my tired 20-second tracks—this is among them. I will try and re-try, making sure like in “Our Prayer”—like in all the tracks— the harmonies synch up and hurt just right. And just like Wilson, through the struggle and strain, in each stab at it I take, I’ll hope for a Smile.

—Elise Burke

#382: The Modern Lovers, "The Modern Lovers" (1976)

What's modern about The Modern Lovers? The question is dumb, but so is the album. So is the building I write this in—it's condemned, full of asbestos, you can't drink from the water fountains, and there's a dead cockroach in the men's room on the second floor. Eventually the building is supposed to get torn down, but for now my office is in it, I hold my office hours in it and I apologize to every student who wonders why the lights are so dim or the stairways so full of mostly dead insects in it. I am pretty sure this building is killing us—me, my students, and now even you, the reader, who has to think about this building and probably knows at least one building like it, or even works in one.

But we were talking about modernism—I mean The Modern Lovers, which amounts to the same thing. Modernism is everywhere on this album, which is one way to answer my opening question. The Modern Lovers is modern because Jonathan Richman's tastes are modern. But that only explains one thing, the tenderness for a womanizing Picasso, the beeline our hero makes for the Cezanne room in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It explains what Richman thinks about a certain way of seeing from the past, a way of seeing that looked at the arrival of a dizzying array of transformations and in a complicated way tried to deal with those changes. Picasso didn't say YES or NO or even MAYBE exclusively, he had a lot to say and in a lot of different ways. At the end of the day he was a painter. Jonathan Richman is a songwriter.

The big difference between Richman and Picasso isn't really their medium of choice, though. It's that "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole, not like you." When Richman sings this, it's not clear who the "you" is—is it me? is it some unknown fictional character based on a real person that the song rages against? is it Richman himself? does it matter? No, it doesn't matter, at least not as much as the way this line registers the limits of Richman's enthusiasm. You can love the modern all you want, but it means loving a lot of people who were assholes (even if they weren't called assholes) and loving a lot of stuff that's just not possible to take up, to do again without some kind of modification. Hence in "Old World," Richman says that the old world "may be dead." He still loves it, but it isn't the same world as the one in which he tells someone, ludicrously, that he will be with her "on the astral plane" if he can't sleep with her in real life.

The sentiment is gross; the expression of it totally inane. And yet it is also quintessentially modern, insofar as it attempts to solve a worldly problem by negating the world completely through art. But rock songs don't quite have the same verve as Cezanne's paintings, and Richman seems aware of this as he repeatedly displaces the great spatial and temporal themes of modernity—the railroad! the city! the large-scale industrial development!—with interpersonal dynamics and songs about romantic relationships. The result is more than a little silly, perhaps even embarrassing, but it's also seriously funny. And this is what I mean when I call The Modern Lovers a dumb album: it's a sentimental album, an album that deals with complex feelings that would cease to be complex—or interesting—if they congealed into a recognizable or fixed representation. That's why there has to be a song called "Modern World" in addition to one called "Old World." That's why Richman needs a girlfriend—or GIRLFREN as the song's chorus spells it—to go with him to the museum, but he and the Modern Lovers have to “make the secretaries feel better" by playing a show at the Government Center. There is no way conceivably to represent what's modern.

So "dumbness" names the tone of the album, not its ineptitude or puerility. Indeed, the only puerile thing would be to ask for a recognizable and complete image of the modern, an enumeration of characteristics that contented itself with closure and completion. The Modern Lovers refuse to try to do this, offering up instead an album about living in the ruins of modernity. They are at all points surrounded by the failures of a century that promised to turn the present into the future with its dizzying rate of development, and they feel strange about it, and they want to say so, but they have only the language of those modernists who responded to this situation half a century before them as an example of how to proceed. The older language is silly, dramatic, and, yes, dumb, but Richman and his band have taken it up nonetheless. They have made it into a series of rock songs, with chugging guitars and siren-like organs, with misspelled words and parodies of the Velvet Underground's drug-addled self-glorifications. They race faster miles an hour on highways that modernity made possible, in an attempt to get away from the consequences of that same modernity. They are alienated, and not just in the colloquial sense of kinda-feeling-strange (although there's that too): seriously separated, and they don't know what to do about it except sing a song that sounds silly because it wants on its own to change the entire world, and it knows it can't but here it is expressing the desire anyway. The Modern Lovers say, to the listener who is willing to hear them, they say, listen, Pablo Picasso was an asshole, but he never got called an asshole, not like you, by which we mean us, but also you, and anyway Picasso is dead, long live Picasso, we are Picasso. To be Picasso, not to be like him: this is the gambit of The Modern Lovers.

—David W. Pritchard

#383: Talking Heads, "More Songs About Buildings and Food" (1978)

We were on a mountain in Switzerland when Beth told me she didn’t think she loved me anymore. I don’t just mean we were on a mountain, I mean we were practically on the top. We’d taken that stupid cog train up that passes through the Eiger and the Monch and then lets you out at some exhibit carved into the Jungfrau, an ice cave, really, with lit-up ice sculptures and fluorescent lights hanging from the low ceiling, and then we’d zipped up our parkas and stepped outside and were standing on top of a metal grate, our mittened hands clutching the railing, looking down, when Beth said it. It was the think that got me, like she wasn’t sure, a child practicing her spelling words, saying, “I think it’s an ‘n’ next, I think so.”

“Jesus,” I said, and she said, “Yeah.” I said, “Is there someone else?” and she shook her head and said, “Just me,” which I didn’t understand at the time.

The night before, in our room in the chalet, she had crawled into bed with me and pressed her cold feet against mine and asked me to warm her up. I kissed her, and she’d said, “Not that way. Do something else.” So I slid my hands under her T-shirt and rubbed them against her stomach and breasts, but she pulled away and said, “Tony, I just think I’m losing myself.”

That was something else that hadn’t made sense to me, and so I’d ignored it, rolled over and went to sleep, and pretended not to notice when she got up and went to the bathroom and stayed in there for half an hour, the thin crack of light under the door marked by her shadow. I thought of that crack of light when we stood on top of that mountain, thought that maybe if I’d gone and knocked on the door, she wouldn’t have said it, but I’ve never been one to dwell on what-ifs.

We had held hands on the train coming up the mountain, but we didn’t on the way back down. We still had three days left in the Alps, and we spent it making awkward conversation about mundane topics. We spent the entirety of the five hours it took us to hike to Trummelbach Falls debating song covers: who did it better, Talking Heads or Al Green, Johnny Cash or Depeche Mode, Beck or Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley or Leonard Cohen. We argued while trekking past clusters of pine trees clinging for life in thin altitude, making our way through cow pastures, always sure to close the gate behind us, stopping every mile or so for water and to snap a few photographs of the view, which to me looked no different than the view the mile before. By the time we left Switzerland, I was tired of discussing music.

When we returned to the States, we stayed together until baggage claim. Beth reached for her suitcase, a big red duffle bag that I had made fun of when I first saw it but that she had said was easy to find in a crowd, and the veins in her arm popped out like she was having her blood pressure taken. She hoisted the bag over her shoulder, said, “See you around,” and then headed to the cab line. I couldn’t follow her, I didn’t have my bag yet, so I just watched as she weaved in and out of people, the red bag occasionally bumping a shoulder, and then I couldn’t even see the bag anymore. I picked up my suitcase and rode the bus back to my apartment. She hadn’t left anything at my place, which made me wonder if she’d known, before we left, that she’d be ending it. All told, it was easy, or at least as easy as a breakup can ever be. Part of me was surprised at how easy it was, given the whole mountaintop location.  I was sad for a few weeks, and then I moved on, or at least I told myself I did.

The truth is, the breakup didn’t destroy me, wasn’t the worst I’d ever had, wouldn’t even still be memorable if it hadn’t taken place on a mountain in Switzerland, which was so goddamn cliché it made me want to vomit. I looked through the holes of the grate at our feet to where the ground dropped away, and heard Beth say she didn’t think she loved me, and a part of my mind went, Jesus, I’m at the edge of the fucking world, literally, and even the thought made me want to cringe at the dramatics.

I don’t think about Beth much anymore. For a while we kept in touch, e-mails to touch base every few months, but eventually those faded. But every so often, that mountaintop comes into my mind. There are some things in life, I’ve learned, that don’t ever leave us, and Beth is one of those. There’s no reason for it—I don’t feel like I have unfinished business with Beth or that she broke my heart and I never fully recovered or that she holds some great lesson I’ve yet to learn—but I’ll hear a mention of Switzerland, or experience vertigo looking out the window of a tall building, and then there’s Beth, standing on that grate, holding her hand out over the railing, palm up, like she’s catching snowflakes or raindrops, even though the sky was clear. I guess you could say she haunts me a little, shows up as a nagging in the back of my head, like that feeling that you’ve forgotten something, only it’s just Beth, saying, “I don’t think I love you anymore,” over and over.

I try to ignore the little Beth voice in my head. When she’s there, when I can’t stop thinking about her, which happens maybe once a year, I try to shut her out. I buy a six pack, and I get drunk watching football, and I tell myself that Switzerland doesn’t matter, mountains don’t matter, and I can get caught up in the game and almost believe it. But after four or five beers, when I close my eyes, all I can see is Beth’s hand resting on the wooden bench of the train, her mittens off, her fingernails bit down to the quick, and as I watch, she rubs her index finger along the side of her thumbnail and picks at a piece of skin that’s come loose, and she tugs at it until it breaks off, leaving behind a tiny dot of blood.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#384: The Who, "A Quick One" (1966)

Most of all, he remembers her scent. When he is driving, he smells only soot and grease, livestock and stale coffee spiked with whiskey. The whiskey, he hopes, will help him forget her scent.

He doesn’t really want to forget her scent.

If he really wanted to forget her scent, Ivor wouldn’t spend so much time trying to remember it—at first, her delicate, floral perfume, easy and light, like he could breathe it in and feel it dancing in his chest, and then, later, that other thing, earthy and humid, like he could breathe it in and feel it dripping, sticky from his ribs. When he’s driving his train, Ivor thinks of her scent and breathes deep through his nose, fills himself with soot and grease, livestock and stale coffee spiked with whiskey, and he can’t believe he ever smelled anything as sweet as she.

*

In the days after their brief encounter, when his train stopped at stations near her town, Ivor asked after the woman. Did her man ever return? If so, did she tell him about what she’d shared with Ivor? How did the man react? Did he leave her? Did he hit her? Did he forgive her for the infidelity? Did she forgive him for leaving? Ivor imagines the man a brute, a cold, callous beast, undeserving of the young woman who had once, not so long ago—but oh, so long ago—missed him desperately and longed for his return. Ivor imagines the woman left her man for having the audacity to leave for so long, imagines her waiting by train tracks, still, after all these years, for the sight of Ivor in his engine’s cabin as the brakes grind.

*

Of course, Ivor knows the man was neither a brute, nor a cold, callous beast. Ivor knew the man from a pub in M_________ they’d both sometimes visit—Ivor, on nights off after delivering freight, the man while traveling the northern half of England selling knives or vacuum cleaners or encyclopedia sets or whatever traveling salesmen sell. Ivor didn’t know the man that well—they’d simply shared a few pints and swapped stories a handful of times. No, the man was neither a brute, nor a cold, callous beast, but that doesn’t mean he was a saint, either. Of the stories the man told Ivor, more than a few involved his occasional infidelities with stray bar maids or customers with whom he was trying to make a sale. Ivor believed the stories for a while, but soon stopped, after the two men, piss drunk after a night at the pub, hired a prostitute to share.

Upon reaching Ivor’s hotel room, after the money had changed hands, the engine driver and the prostitute began undressing and touching each other. Upon noticing that the salesman was sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, still fully clothed, Ivor asked if everything was OK. The man said he wasn’t feeling well. Ivor gestured to his own genitals and said, “Intimidated?” The man, clearly flustered, said, “No. No. Not that.” And Ivor said, “Suit yourself.” The prostitute said, “You want to watch?” And the man said, “I think I should be going,” and then he showed himself out, leaving Ivor to enjoy the prostitute on his own.

When Ivor thinks of that night, he doesn’t think of the prostitute or her scent—cigarette smoke, he thinks he remembers, mixed with something else, something like flat beer—but of the salesman who left and the woman who was undoubtedly the cause of his departure.

*

Because of the drinks, Ivor can never remember if it was that night, or another, on which the man first told him of his love back home, but he knows that the salesman, on at least one night, spoke of his girl and how she struggled with his constant absence, as he was six months into a trip that was set to last for close to a year. When Ivor asked why the salesman needed to be gone for so long without stopping at home, the man referred to travel costs and his desire to make money so the two could marry at the end of the year. But that was just the first time Ivor heard of the girl.

*

After the first time Ivor heard the man talk about his girl, when staying over in towns in the northern part of the country, he’d hear tell of a woman who had grown despondent in the absence of her man. At first, Ivor thought these were different women, all missing their men. The stories placed the women all in different cities and towns across England’s northern half: there was a woman in D______ who had cried for six months straight, her eyes always red, her cheeks slick; a woman in H______ who had grown so despondent that she stopped eating, causing the locals to bring her gifts and food in an attempt to cheer her and keep her healthy; a woman in W______ whose moans of despair had grown so loud, and lasted for so long that, not just the city’s residents but the residents of neighboring cities, grew accustomed to the reverberating thrum of her voice off the buildings and streets around them; a woman in S______ who missed the touch of her man so greatly that her neighbors believed the only way to keep her alive was to find a temporary suitor to satisfy her womanly needs and make her forget, if just for a while, about her absent lover. Ivor chalked these stories up to tall tale and fantasy—engine drivers and other traveling men often tell stories like these when they’re on the road, in part because they like the idea that some young woman might be pining for them, and in part because they like the idea of encountering a young woman hungry for the affections they might offer her.

*

Here’s how Ivor eventually came to know that the stories he’d heard were true, if somewhat hyperbolic, and that they were all about one woman: Ivor was introduced to the woman while staying the night in W_________. He was introduced to the woman, and her eyes were red, and she looked sick, looked weak and, most surprisingly, looked young. Though the stories of the woman were not specific with regards to her age, Ivor had always imagined that, if said stories were true, the women at their centers were old enough to understand the passion and desire they were feeling for their absent men. But this girl—and she was a girl—couldn’t have been a day older than seventeen, reminded Ivor of the Girl Guides he’d seen roving cities in packs, dressed in their blue uniforms, in search of good deeds to perform or whatever it was they did.

Another woman made the introduction, a neighbor and friend of the girl. First, she pointed to the girl across the room, then she informed Ivor that the girl was in need of companionship. Ivor told the neighbor that the girl was too young, that she should seek solace with her family, or perhaps her church, but the neighbor was persistent. Ivor agreed to meet the girl, and the neighbor left to retrieve her.

*

Ivor never told anyone what happened after introductions were made and the neighbor left. Patrons who noticed the pair that night all saw that the girl sat on the engine driver’s lap for a spell. What they talked about, no one knows for sure, because Ivor never told anyone that, once he realized that this girl was, in fact, the love of the salesman he’d spent time with in M_________, he told her that he was certain her man would return to her, and that the man loved her very much.

After an hour or so sitting with the girl on his lap, Ivor led the girl out of the bar and they retired to the room where he was staying.  When asked about that night, Ivor tells people that he and the girl had a nap, nothing more—nobody ever believes him—and then he remembers the way the girl smelled. Then he wonders where the girl is now, what her life has been like. He suspects, but he doesn’t know, that she forgave her lover for his absence and, if she told him about Ivor—and he wouldn’t be hurt if she didn’t, but he likes to think that she did—Ivor suspects, but doesn’t know, that he forgave her for the intimacy they shared.

When Ivor thinks of forgiveness, he is at peace because he believes he has nothing for which he needs to be forgiven.

—James Brubaker

#385: Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft" (2001)

September 11, 2001. There is a giant walking down a highway in Mississippi. He is a hitchhiker. He might be a king. He is working his way to me. The words he has written come to him as music and follow behind him on the air like an invisible cape that floats from his shoulders. He’s not sure they’re his, these songs, once they’re alight in the world, but they came from him, he does remember, the way a spider remembers spinning an egg sack.

He’s inside one of them now, a song grown big-bellied like a world. All of his creatures are there. They are full of roads, are his songs, arterial branching routes of tongues and vines and perpetual reaching after other roads and other songs, songs about someone fuckable and edible and lovable and credible. He is working his way to me. Where am I?  I am at the end, where the needle hits the label and starts to bounce. LOVE AND THEFT says the label, like those are the only two things in the world, a duality that needs no explaining.

But first the road, where his creatures run up to him like children to Santa Claus. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee stop throwing knives into the trees long enough to pant alongside. Neither one gonna turn and run. “The Master’s voice is calling me,” says one to the other but the Master hasn’t said a word, only smiles beneath his white Stetson as their fat little legs give out and he pushes on through Mississippi past picnics and weddings, hot summer days full of hundreds of demons that are but iridescent bubbles blown across a summer’s green lawn and that blink out one by one on the warm air.

The giant is a small man with a pencil mustache like a cartoon villain, and he’s driving the flats in a Cadillac car now, eight carburetors and using them all as he roars out of Mississippi north and west, down boulevards of cypress trees from the heat into the damp. He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine, but I wasn’t where I said I’d meet him. When we finally hook up I see his wizened profile against the yellow streetlights and knock on his car window, saying, “Somebody’s got to climb out of the window and take a look around, somebody’s got to decide where to go next. It’s tough out here.” I float like a mermaid in oily water at an intersection with a church on one corner where he had preached peace and harmony and a police station on another.  I want to treat him kind, to be the one to paddle the car to high ground, to let the worn-out star rest, though there’s high water everywhere.

He wonders aloud, in a voice that doesn’t often admit to doubts, why he made this world. He remembers hot coffee and Mozambique, more hospitable environments, but even those were stories. He thinks how nice it would be to be the sort of person who just lives in the day, lives in his physical environment, knife and fork and car and cable, how that person would feel time like the body of a snake slithering past him, straight and unimpeachable, and would know himself like a sure thing. It was never so with him—when you’re a storyteller, you’re in the stories as much as the stories are in you, and time is like an electron cloud suspended in the air around you, past, present, and future all at once and all reachable. And that’s a pain in the ass. That’s hard. I know. Because reality and the stories intersect and you have to figure out sometimes—is this a story? Or is this real? If I act like this is real, will I look crazy? I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind, but can I tell the difference from the outside and the inside of a story? He thinks about these things as he travels. He travels through a world of people he made but it is the loneliest world.

Restless sleep takes him in the Palace of Gloom under 800-thread-count sheets of Egyptian linen, or in cheap motels with swimming pools outside the rooms casting blue shimmer across the smoke-stained walls and witless, careful art: barn and hay bale, sea and coastline, snow-capped mountain and Alpine cottage. He walks up to hobo camps, shares a bottle and lies down among his new friends on the hard ground. His feet are always cold, he pinches his nose for warmth; he kicks off the covers when it’s hot and sleeps on hilltops for the breeze. It doesn’t matter, his mind flies out when he sleeps and that is when his pity is most fierce. “Poor boy,” he mutters in his sleep. “Things will be alright by and by.” So gentle, but I know what he’s capable of and so I ask: is pity just hatred without the respect? You have to decide with him—it is always something you have to decide.

Maybe empathy is the better word. He empathizes and wakes with images that disappear like writing on a fogged mirror. So he writes them down. Corny vaudeville jokes, sometimes—calling room service to order up a room. Naked and heading into the woods, he’s hunting bare. Get it? Bare? He laughs the laugh of someone who has left home with plenty of money and never expects to return. His laugh extends to the horizon and everything inside it is part of him, free game in his own rage for order, at least until this day. Fuel, fodder, all of it inflammable on this day. But someone else lights the world on fire. It happens in New York and D.C. and in the skies over Pennsylvania. Not him. He just wrote the soundtrack, the last word of the sunset.

*

Stalking over yellow fields, trailer parks, and the kind of small towns with bells that still toll, he carries two songs separate, old songs on their own black and red CD. They’re old songs, some of his oldest. “I Was Young When I Left Home” and “The Times They Are a Changin’.”

“Yes,” I tell him, “both of those things are true, you know.” I visit him in different guises, I fill his tank, his coffee cup, swipe his credit card, trim his moustache. “What do you mean,” I ask, “holding those songs separate like that? Their own CD? To show you how far you’ve come? How good you were and still are? Or, I know, maybe how the more things change the more they stay the same?”

He won’t answer and, I tell you, those old songs fill me with jealousy like what the youngest child feels for the eldest. Why wasn’t I there back then, before the family legends were legends and were instead just what happened today? You could say he was warming up for insulting me way back with “Idiot Wind.” Me with my lack of brains, according to him. I don’t think so, though. Sugar Baby is Sugar Baby, my own diminished thing, the lady born on 9/11. There were ever the great women, Queen Jane, Isis, the Girl from the North Country, but he’s working his way to me and I suffer from the comparison. Like it’s my fault he’s old and can’t believe. Like it’s my fault the world is on fire. I don’t like his attitude, you want the truth. I don’t care for it, but here he comes and I guess we’ll just see.

“Sugar Baby,” he says, “Sugar Baby, get on down the road.”  

“But I am down the road,” I say, “I am the down of the road, your destination. I’m the last song, the last sound on the album. Don’t you remember your own album?”

He tells me I ain’t got no sense, but I say, “Whose story is this? You’re in my story now.”

He’s a giant in a white Stetson, his shadow falls across my face. He says, “You went years without me, might as well keep going now.” So I will, and he will, too, heading down a darkened street under falling ash to what comes next.

—Constance Squires

#386: Steely Dan, "Pretzel Logic" (1974)

Steely Dan is the most uncool band of all time. Even in a post-Yacht-Rock world where Hall & Oates are once again selling out large venues, the kids just aren’t vibing with the Dan. Maybe it’s because we all saw Say Anything, where high school dream date Diane Court’s father, played by Frasier’s dad, grooves HARD to Pretzel Logic opener “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” He is driving to Diane’s high school graduation, gently singing and tip-tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. What a square, man. His car (a new sedan), his music (Steely), his attire (collared shirt) are all juxtaposed with lovable loser Lloyd Dobler's $500 rust-mobile and funky funk-rock (Fishbone?). The message is clear: Teenage Lloyd, beat up cars, loud funk-rock = cool / Frasier’s dad, new sedans, and Steely Dan = uncool.

And though I love Steely Dan, I can kind of see where the movie is coming from. Because if you need music for the uncoolest of the uncool, the hopelessly unhip, the Dan is your jam. And I’m not talking about those quirky, fun, socially malleable people existing at the fringes of culture. Those people are kind of cool, ya know? I’m talking about the uncool of your worst parents. Not parents in the general sense where yeah, sometimes they can be pretty cool, Jimmy’s mom let us watch horror movies and stay up late, she is awesome. No. I am talking about your worst parents. So, imagine your parents, imagine your mother and father, imagine them existing in infinite universes and then find the most embarrassing pair of the bunch. Those two are huge Steely Dan fans.

What we are dealing with in Pretzel Logic is weaponized uncool. The record incorporates all the pomp and schmaltz that irony-fueled tastes can handle. Then the Dan adds additional sarcasm, inside jokes, aggressively inscrutable musicianship and druggy drug drugs. If the Doobie Brothers are the high, Steely Dan is the comedown. Sure, you can have a fun time and dance to Michael McDonald. You can sing that fun falsetto and don your captain’s hat. But if you’re listening to Steely Dan, you have to weigh the joyous musical smoothness of “Through with Buzz” against its actual lyrics. Which are, more or less, about an addict lying to themselves. Your yachty margarita doesn’t taste so sweet anymore, does it?

And with its easy conceit and waiting room piano, “Through with Buzz” might be one of the lighter tracks on Pretzel Logic. “With a Gun” is about murder. My own interpretation of “Parker’s Band” is it’s a song about musical theft and exploitation. The titular track, “Pretzel Logic,” has a verse loathing the American southeast. “Barrytown” is about the rift between progressive students at Bard College and the wealthy townies who occupy the city of Barrytown, NY, nearby where Bard is located. In the middle of the record, the band covers Duke Ellington's “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” which at face value isn’t a grim song, but is made disturbed and clownish by the context of the album.

Murder, class struggles, Duke Ellington, drug addiction, sounds pretty sexy right? Well, don’t worry, because this is Steely Dan. So they’re going to veil all those subjects in metaphor and humor. Then they’re going to compose the most inoffensive, hoaky, and catchy music imaginable. The tunes, sweet as they are, will alienate the young, the cool, and relegate the Dan to niche rock.

One common critique of the Dan and their music is that they play too much inside baseball. This is, by and large, true. One can hardly get through a single sentence in a favorable Steely Dan album review before the author mentions the genius of chord changes, their studio mastery, or the expertise of their session partners. Also, the word Jazz gets thrown around a lot. Ugh, you can def tell these are the kind of people who like Jazz way, way too much. Steely Dan are obsessives. Tale upon tale and story upon story rambles on regarding their intense recording standards and near insane naval gazing. It is fair to critique them for existing in their own bubble. But if you can get inside there, if you can get find a way to approach the contrast between sound and subject, Pretzel Logic is a hugely rewarding album. It is pure, uncut, don’t-give-a-fuck nerd music. A sound to be ignored.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#387: Wu-Tang Clan, "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" (1993)

For a lifelong music learner, the pattern’s almost always the same, familiar at the very least: early on, after you’ve decided music means something more to you than daily soundtracking, after you’ve started questioning your own taste and (of course) the tastes of others, after you’ve clocked a few hours flipping through too much shitty vinyl, too many shitty used CDs, largely useless yet oddly romantic cassettes, after you’ve given in, surrendered, raised the white flag of obsessive collecting without even realizing it….early on, a trustful someone hands you a record and says, simply enough, Here. You need this. And it feels this simple because it is. A few words, a few songs, the beginning of a new avenue so cast until now in complete shadow that you’ve walked right past it again and again without even know it existed.

Throughout my ninth grade spring semester and the following summer months, this must have happened to me two or three times a week. I had made friends with music heads, had started hanging out after school at the record store across the street, spending as much time eavesdropping on what in hindsight were very record-store-y conversations—primarily debates about who or what was better: Parliament or Funkadelic, Springsteen or Leonard Cohen, Fun House or Raw Power—as I was clocking hours alphabetizing backstock and changing out cracked CD cases. (Quick aside: one day, I ejected the CD that had just stopped playing over the store’s precariously-wire-strung sound system in order to put a new one in. The second I placed the old disc data-down on the counter instead of immediately back in its case, all three half-stoned fellow employees hurled some serious obscenities my way. So. It was that kind of place. In short: a record store.)

Anyway, I was a smart enough student during the school day, but the minute I walked into this sacred hole of mysterious carpet stains and sun-bleached Cure posters, I had my education cut out for me, and I knew it. More importantly, I was hungry for it. So I listened. Whether or not someone was talking directly to me, I listened. When Marvin the timid-maybe-zonked first-pressing jazz collector came in for his weekly check up through our carefully tended jazz racks, I listened. Sun Ra. Jimmy Smith. Ornette. Out to Lunch and Electric Bath and On the Corner, the last of which would soon after change my life in that visceral, urgent, grossly unfair way life-changing records all have. When red-eyed beatsmith Rich hunted through a customer’s incoming collection for breaks, studiously lowering the needle on any number of seemingly inglorious records, making notations and great chuckles of joy when the search proved fruitful, I listened. When anyone handed me something on my way out the door at the end of the day and said, Here. You need this, you’re damn right I listened.

36 Chambers wasn’t my first hip-hop record—that would be The Low End Theory, one of three CDs I took home as payment for my very first day of record schlepping, and the one that blew the doors of the genre wide open for me, as well as, yes, about a billion other curious middle class white high-schoolers throughout time—but it was definitely my first unabashedly weird one. First off, the cover was bizarre, with its title and subtitle kind of squished into one corner and its blurry, poorly-cropped photo of masked persons looking largely like it was accidentally selected over the better quality one that must have surely existed, one where everyone made it into the photo and the cameraman’s hands weren’t shaking. When I popped the case open, popped the album in, and the music itself started up, though, the cover art quickly became the least of my worries.

No matter how many times you listen to it, the best part about 36 Chambers will always be the voices. There are nine of them—nine!—and right there on first play-through each is distinct and distinctly really fucking weird. RZA sounds like a furious, unhinged demon, even when just dropping in for the chorus. Method Man’s having a blast, rhyming words together that almost definitely wouldn’t rhyme in any other context, and clearly grinning against the mic. Inspectah Deck sing-songs in ways that sound somehow equally terrifying and rhythmically right. ODB, of course, breaks down every structural expectation, stopping everything in its tracks the minute he starts spitting. And GZA, the Genius, simply sounds like one, last on every track when he’s not flying solo so no one will have to follow. There are the rest, too, obviously—Rae and Ghost pitching high and low, U-God and Masta Killa hardly there at all, really, but leaving scorched impressions in the earth with the time they’re given—but the point is more this: this is ‘93, and we’ve got no guest spots, no cross-breeding, no other voices beyond the Clan, the inducted, the family Voltroning again and again and again. When you consider the size of this particular clan, that’s not just impressive: that’s really fucking weird.

And perfect, somehow, in a hundred intangible ways. The production seems sloppy, but sloppy-on-purpose. The cadences accidental but brilliantly so. Everything about the enterprise feels on the verge of either falling apart or blowing your mind at any given point and it’s a bona fide capital-c Classic because, miraculously, it’s that exact tension where the magic resides. And again, even more miraculously, all of this is immediately clear on first listen.

If you’re inclined toward the damaging, edifying life of a music nut, the pattern’s almost always the same: someone hands you a Here, you need this record, and it changes everything. But here’s what’s supposed to happen next: that record gets you going, introduces you to Horses or Rain Dogs or Free Jazz or whatever the hell, but you grow up and out of these, and the rest of the legwork’s up to you, and it’s the result of that legwork that will really lead you to the gems you possess for yourself due primarily to the thrill of self-discovery, the songs and bootlegs and B-sides you either dub or swap or keep guarded for the rest of your life.

For just about everyone who comes across it, though, 36 Chambers is something else entirely: each and every time you listen, the thing only gets deeper, and better, and way fucking weirder. Chalk it up to the unpredictable production, to the nine voices, to the lyrics that seem to either open up for you or lock all the way down depending on the day you’re listening. It’s not the only album like this, but it’s one of only a few. They’re a special breed, inalienable in the purest meaning of the word: no one can take their power away from you—not even you. Try as you might, you won’t find another record that sounds quite like the Wu debut—not even the first listen will sound like the second, or the eighteenth like the thirty-fourth. It lives, shifts, educates. In a sense, it’s no different from a record store: too many voices that, for the ready and insatiable, always seem like never enough.

—Brad Efford