#337: Jethro Tull, "Aqualung" (1971)

Days after I moved to Minnesota for college, my roommates and I sat in a circle on our dorm room floor and shared our testimonies. Wrapped in animal-print fleece and brightly colored pajamas, we’d just finished a box of Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese, toast, and grapes we’d proudly shopped for and prepared ourselves. After dinner, we sat in a circle and conjured up the holy emotions we were supposed to feel when invoking the divine. We’d been taught that to share your testimony—to talk about when you accepted Jesus, how it made you different and how you stayed the same—was to glorify God. Sharing felt like a big deal then, but it was nothing new. I’d shared my testimony at youth group overnighters, Cheeto dust still on my fingers; before bunk beds of girls in lantern-lit camp cabins; on mission trips around the world, in Mexican migrant camps and Czech orphanages and South African slums, where we’d used flannel graphs and face paint when words didn’t work. I’d done it again and again, with reverence, even as I trembled.

It’s a long road that brings a kid to that place on the floor. It goes back all the way to diaper days and feels as natural as breathing. You hear the same story every week, you trace the rims of hundreds of plastic communion cups, and you believe.

I don’t remember what I said that night to my roommates, but I remember, for the first time in my life, being afraid I had nothing to testify.

*

Many people call Jethro Tull’s Aqualung a concept album, and although the band itself doesn’t approve of the label, the themes are plain: God vs. religion, the corruption of the church, Christian hypocrisy and idolatry—all familiar topics I’ve wrestled with a lot over the years. As a convalescing Baptist, you can never really get away from them. But lately, if I think about them at all, it’s with a quiet acceptance.

Maybe that’s why the spiritual songs on Aqualung don’t resonate with me nearly as much as the ones that land on the human side of the divine. “Cheap Day Return,” one of the shortest songs on the album and a departure from the overall style, is a tiny acoustic snapshot in which Ian Anderson stands at the train station after visiting his father. Then you sadly wonder, does the nurse treat your old man the way she should? She made you tea, asked for your autograph, what a laugh. And though it sounds like the story should continue, there’s only a short instrumental break before the song tapers off, and you’re left, mercifully, wondering what’s unsaid.

*

A block from my apartment in Roanoke, Virginia, there was an old southern church building, all brick and triangular, with a neon red sign overhead, simple capital letters that read JESUS SAVES. The church was on top of a hill and the sign was visible from far enough away that I could see it every night driving home. Sometimes it said JE US SAVE or ESUS AVES and sometimes the lights flickered. It was always the important parts that burned out.

In some of the album’s most memorable lyrics, Ian Anderson sings: If Jesus saves, well, He'd better save Himself from the gory glory seekers who use His name in death. But between save himself and the rest of the line, there’s a break just long enough for the chords to strike and for you to imagine all the things Jesus better save himself from. The first time I heard it, I wished they’d cut it off at the break. Every time after that, I wished for mystery just a little bit more.

*

Sophomore year of college, I drove my roommates to Iowa for fall break. About 30 miles outside my hometown, a multi-car pileup on I-380 stopped all traffic and we were stuck in my Volkswagen Beetle for more than an hour, gridlocked with the headlights off. Although it was cold for October, we opened the sunroof to let the stars in.

We started talking about the semester and about Jesus, and ended up on the topic of how much we wanted to say the word fuck. By then we’d completely adapted to our sterilized campus. None of us had realized how much we’d needed out, or, for that matter, how inconceivable and ridiculous it was to have spent nineteen years avoiding all profanity—especially fuck, the big kahuna. So right there in the midst of all those stopped cars, we breathed deep and screamed it into the night. Fuck this and fuck that and fucking fuck and motherfucking motherfucker, too, just for good measure. Jesus doesn’t fucking care if you say fuck! one of us said in joyful revelation, or at least one of us meant to.

*

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Wond’Ring Aloud.” It’s a simple love song, the kind I’m a sucker for, where you can picture the scene exactly as described, down to the buttery toast, and it’s so damn sentimental in the best possible way. But when Anderson sings, We are our own saviors, you can’t help but take what might be a throwaway line in a different context as significant within the framework of the album. Here, it’s not God who saves—it’s you, it’s me, it’s the love we have for each other, it’s the crumbs left forgotten in the bed.

—Lacy Barker

#338: Big Brother & the Holding Company, "Cheap Thrills" (1968)

// She knows this goddamn life too well so we best listen up. But what’s a rasp really good for? Can a breathtaking break in a woman's voice cast glass, shatter spells, shake off sadness? Let me stop myself right there, save us from overanalysis, let me just say this: yes.

The kind of person who doesn't like a little mess in their magic is the same kind of person who, beaten down by their sterile-voiced dentist, insists on drinking Sunkist orange soda through a bendy straw. If you listen to Janis at a certain time of before-morning with the right amount of sugar in your tea you will be transformed, transmogrified from distracted to superlative; you'll become one of those stubborn numbers you always envied—the ones greater than or equal to something else. Well, here are four gentlemen and one broad, as the emcee calls her, who'll make you feel like a story problem that is finally solvable. Close your eyes and clench your throat. Feel her warble wiggle in your toes. Each little vocal catch a catechism, every breath and every cataclysm whistling past the bones of your own nose. She says she needs a man to love and maybe you're not feeling man enough right this minute, or maybe you're no man at all, but still, don't you think you could be what she's moaning over? Don't you want to screech this little blues rock thing and be a man to love, just now, just for a moment this morning? Let her make and re-make you over again, into a sleek and elegant thing, into a chapter in a charming adventure novel, a refined equation that is more than the sum of your paltry, mismatched parts.

\\ Janis isn't making anyone, no one's making Janis. The scream queen. What we dug “rasp” up for in the first place. What we hear on entering heaven, on spelunking deeper into hell. She is both, the dichotomy materialized, a freshman year college course on duality. Which is to say: human. She is human. A gut-feel for the blues and the strange insistent blackout of the turn of the decade, the terror and love and anger and love and war and peace and love and love of the upside-down America of the sixties. Not without the hat-tip to Tina Turner, to the girl groups, to the stage show semi-freakouts of Elvis and Little Richard and the incomparable Mr. Dynamite. She says living’s easy in the summertime and we’ve heard it a thousand and one times before and we’re hearing it for the very first time: that’s how sublime, how twisted she’s got tradition, and history, and this goddamn broken broken-record decade. You can say it again, it’d stay the same: if she ain’t the voice of the generation, she’s no doubt one of them.

No. Bullshit. She’s the voice of the whole generation. Stationed out satelliting in an orbit around the romance and the distrust. No one’s making Janis. How could they? How’d that work? You think she’s susceptible? You think she’s a product? Sure we’re all products, but you think she’s a product? You think she’s from Earth? Serious questions, all with answers, no good ones.

There is a tortoiseshell shorthair your little brother’s leashed with your father’s old belt and set on fire for the hell of it. Watching it squirm is beautiful and awful and nothing you’d ever want to see again. It makes you sick. It makes you mad. It ignites. Janis isn’t making anyone.

// Let's not dress her up too pretty, then. (She favored grubby men's shirts and tights.) Let's not fancy her a posthumous god, as gods don't generally overdose when they're twenty-seven. Seems like we need our “voices of generations” to be so hungry they falter, overdo it, fuck up a little more and sooner than anybody meant them to.

But let's get one thing clear: the effect her sound has on us is not just because she didn't live long enough to lose the gut-fire and cut a lifeless 80s record. If you crack open some stuffy biography you can bet your ass it says despite her untimely death, Janis….and in another book that same sentence begins with because of. Yes, she was drenched in duality, heavens and devils swallowed down like medicine and fired back up gleaming and twisted as one. But let's call her singular, too. Janis didn't die because she sounded so good and she didn't sound like that because she was bound to die. She wasn't startling just because she was the antithesis of Judy Collins. Listen—she'd have startled anyone in any age throughout space and time. She was just a regular young human who could sing, in some ways; yes, we can hold off on the hagiography.

Maybe make is the wrong word, but Janis was capable of causing things: causing a mosh pit, causing a car wreck, causing a punk kid to pause in the middle of a subway tunnel and cry. She had duality but also singularity. Singularity, as in a distinctiveness so distressing as to be beautiful. And also as in the spacetime kind, when the quantities used to measure a body's gravitational pull become infinite in a way that does not depend on a single goddamn thing.

\\ How smart is it by the way to frame this thing as live? The people lost it at Monterey watching Janis and her Holding Co. tear through tunes like a wet chainsaw, so much so that it was infamous that day, that minute, even quicker. Some groups, when they hit the stage, they just don’t got it. No heat, no noise, no soul. Not so with Janis, not so with the whole Holding Co. We got the Internet. The whole thing’s down on tape.

“Combination of the Two”’s got the whole band sharing vocals, woo-woo-ing down there all together, Janis howling an octave above the boys, taking the rightful spotlight every time she opens her mouth. “Ball and Chain” they even ripped live for the record, that’s how magnetizing. That’s how possessed that voice, that spirit. And look: I just clicked the wrong thing, got sent to the clip of the band reunited, sans Janis, at Monterey in ‘07. That’s 2007. It is not good. It is old-blood bar-band covers of the blues. The new Janis has the rasp, but she is not Janis. Obviously. Without the hunger that comes with being 24 years old, being strung out, being raised in the Texas high desert, being one with the time, the people, the black magic incantation the wizard recited to give it all to you, to take it all away: what even are you?

Shit. I fell again into the sermon. Look: listen. The music, it speaks for itself. All the rest is feedback echoing the vibes that were good enough—no, better—the first time around.

—Eric Thompson & Brad Efford

#339: Tom Waits, "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974)

Side 1

    “New Coat of Paint”

My mother still swears by a color of paint she calls “Hubert’s white,” a mixture of white, yellow, and gray, which a man—named, appropriately, Hubert—used to repaint the house my parents and I lived in when I was a child. It was a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac within walking distance of Lake Michigan, a real Midwestern idyll of a place with a trim front lawn, a wooden play set, and a back deck for entertaining. The house was dusty blue when we bought it, with cream trim and a front door done in demure red. I half think my parents picked that house because of its massive basement, which we would never have had in England. Basements are far less frequent there—something to do with flooding, I imagine.

Our immigrant story isn’t exceptional. We moved for my dad’s job when I was small. I must have asked where my grandparents were, or when we’d see them next, but I was too young to remember much of anything and there wasn’t really much to miss. England is fairly close to the U.S., culturally if not geographically. I had watched different television shows than my American friends, and read different books, but at least we spoke the same language. I learned early on that I said some words “wrong” and I learned to correct myself. By the time I was nine, I was indistinguishable from any other solidly middle class Midwestern schoolkid, and I was peeved that my parents wanted to repaint our house, then sell it.

We were moving again, this time to Virginia, once more for my dad’s job. As a nine year old I could name all 50 states, but I wouldn’t have been able to point to Virginia on a map. Being 4,000 miles from my hometown in England didn’t mean anything to me when I was four, or five, or even nine, but the 800 miles between our home in Wisconsin and our future house in Virginia was a real gut-wrench. I was used to weekly phone calls with my relatives, to recording all our birthdays and holidays on film for our grandparents as my sister and I aged, but I couldn’t conceive of my life without my friends, or the tree outside my bedroom window, or our blue house.

My parents insisted that the house would need to be painted for it to be sold. Dusty blue didn’t look fresh enough in a market that was already chock full of saleable homes in sensible neighborhoods. Enter: Hubert and Hubert’s white. Hubert’s son and his other assistant were kind to our dog, and to my sister and I, so they were okay by us. We would play outside near where they worked when we could, but we liked to pretend to be scared of Hubert, who was Polish and had a strong accent. I think my mother gravitated toward him because he was also foreign, and we pretended to fear him for the same reason. The painters finished their work and the house sold not long after we moved.

Of course, Virginia was nothing like Wisconsin, because I wouldn’t let it be. At age 10, I was insistent that my childhood was done. Our new neighborhood’s 4th of July parade had nothing on the ones we used to go to. In Wisconsin, we got to play in fire trucks that reeked of carnauba wax and diesel. We ate our first hot dogs and waved our first American flags. There was a big picnic and we got to drink whole cans of Squirt and gorge ourselves on homemade fudge. It was as American as me mishearing “for which it stands” as “for Richard Stands” in the Pledge of Allegiance, then convincing a friend that my version was right. This Virginia 4th of July was one long parade of oversized trucks filled with middle-aged people I didn’t know, throwing Tootsie Rolls to the people watching by the roadside, cheering for something I didn’t know or recognize.  

Side 2

    “Fumblin’ with the Blues”

I want for The Heart of Saturday Night to gel with my memory of life in Middle America, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel much of anything when I listen to this record—no “haunting innocence” or “restlessness,” as Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden experienced when he reviewed the album back in 1974. When I hear The Heart of Saturday Night, I’m waiting for a chord Waits never strikes—one of sincerity. More than 40 years of music has been recorded since, and maybe it’s the worn out cassette tape sound that’s getting to me, but putting these particular clichés on repeat hasn’t gotten me any closer to the sentiment of this album. I’m fumbling with something, but it’s not “the Blues” or even sadness. I want for Waits’s Midwest lonely to feel the same as my Midwest lonely.

It amuses me that this record went Gold in the UK, a place that I also think of as home, full of people whose lives are far away from Tom Waits’s, as far away as I feel from this album. The sound and the lyrics must have come together to ring something like true to them. I wonder if they heard “The Heart of Saturday Night” and thought about apple pie in truck stop diners and believed that’s what the United States was, that this was the quintessential “American experience” that everyone talks about. Being both inside and outside American culture, I feel strongly that there’s no such thing. Maybe distance is what allows us to cozy up to something outside our own experience, and to love it, without looking too closely.

It’s not as if Waits wrote with me in mind. The album was released almost exactly 16 years before my birth, and it’s for folks whose memories are places full of road noise and truck stops and past-midnights. Beyond sheer time and geography, Waits also cites Jack Kerouac as one of his major influences, a rootless misogynist with little regard for anything outside the narrow lens of his own experience (read: women’s lives and feelings). For all that I feel I’m always attempting to broaden the scope of my compassion, my heart really flatlines when I hear Tom Waits sing about women on this album. It’s not a delight to hear about his women, rendered, as they are here, in two dimensions.

I wanted this album to mean something to me. I wanted “Midwest dreaming of a Wisconsin bed” to be about my life, and my differences, and my desire for music to be the puzzle piece that bridges the gap between my feelings and experiences. All the classic barriers to entry are present in this album: I’m not a man, or old enough to consider myself an expert on any kind of sadness, or working a blue collar job—a rare instance where my circumstances are a hindrance rather than a gateway. But I struggle to think of anyone for whom this record could ring true. The closest I get is that someone out there must feel the same way about night driving and cigarette smoke hanging in the low light over a bar as I do about fire trucks and grapefruit soda and the 4th of July.

—Helen Alston

#340: Black Flag, "Damaged" (1981)

Smoke swirling off the tip of Jay’s Marlboro Light coats the plywood on the floor. It soaks into the leather couch and blankets the walls of the studio, mingling with rows of framed concert posters, oil paintings, one-shot cutouts. Jay takes a long drag then a heavy step towards the palette on his left. He mixes the flesh tones with his paintbrush, exhales and adds broad strokes to the skate deck canvas. Inhale, step, exhale, mix, paint, repeat.

Each 185-pound step causes a ripple in the unfinished flooring; each ripple causes the needle of the record player to skip. I was born with a bottle in my mouth. Skip. Six Pack. Now I got a six so I’ll never run out. Skip. Six Pack. Jay sings along, obviously not annoyed enough by the skipping to step lighter in the garage-apartment-turned-art-studio. I’m annoyed, but not annoyed enough to pick up my magazine proof spread across the couch and relocate from the studio back to our house.

“Oi, red or black background on this one?” Jay turns toward me and asks, the long ash from his cigarette drifting to the floor without even a flick of his wrist.

“Black.”

His nod turns into head-banging, his unspiked mohawk and worn leather jacket syncing in movement to the inflections in Henry Rollins’s voice.

I continue watching the rhythm of the smoke, the painting, Jay’s movements, before going back to looking for the rhythm in the fine art and design magazine I’m editing: Local Hotspots, Global Reach, Traveling Exhibits. Inhale, step. Exhale, mix. Paint, repeat.

“Should the text be larger on this page?” I ask Jay, who shakes his head no while singing: I know it will be okay. I get a six pack in me, all right.

This song was easily Jay’s anthem when we first met in fifth-hour freshmen biology thirteen years ago. My earliest memory of him: a drunken cheek-piercing episode during class that led to a punctured facial artery. As I watched him run out of the classroom bleeding that day, I had no idea that five years later, we’d begin dating or that thirteen years after that, we’d still be together, living in a house long made a home. He ran out of the classroom that day yelling, “Everything’s fine.” He had a six pack in him, and he was all right.

Jay doesn’t have a six pack in him now as he stomps to the back of the studio to grab black paint—the needle skipping, skip, then gliding through the grooves to bring about a fast, heavy, melodic bass line from Chuck Dukowski. These days, Jay only drinks a fraction of what he used to. The drumbeat mirrors the bass’s established rhythm and leads to a guitar build up. This feeling haunts me. Behind these eyes, the shell seems so empty. Though I wonder if anything lives inside. I finish making my edits to the Hot Spots layout.

Just as “Six Pack” commemorates a fair portion of Jay’s youth-to-earlier-adulthood experiences, the song “What I See” represents a fair portion of my hormone-filled teenage years spent flipping through pages and pages of journaled emotions of self-angst. Now, I simply flip through pages and pages of magazines, newsletters, and other publications for which I write and edit.

In one month Jay will be featured in his fifth art show (he sold out at two of his last four), I will be finalizing edits with the design team for the second issue of the magazine I oversee, and Henry Rollins will continue to write articles for LA Weekly, speak out in regards to the 2016 presidential race, record podcasts, tour internationally, and star in a new movie. Thirteen years ago Jay was constantly drunk and doing reckless things. Thirteen years ago I was self-destructive and looking for an outlet. Twenty years prior to that Henry Rollins was loud, aggressive, combative, and recording the album Damaged. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers don’t recognize that they will one day get older, possibly even grow up. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers just think they’ll be dead by twenty-seven. Then one day they turn twenty-eight.

I move on from editing Local Hotspot to Global Reach. From Global Reach to Traveling Exhibits. Jay moves on from painting the background to clear-coating the skate deck. The needle moves on from “TV Party” to “Thirsty and Miserable.” From “Thirsty and Miserable” to “Police Story.” From “Police Story” to “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.” Jay and I both look at each other when we hear the drum hit it off with a one, two, one, one, two. One, two, one, one, two. Jay burned this song on a CD for me right before we started dating. We used to drive around fast, the music turned all the way up, seeking out a liquor store that would sell to us even though we were underage. We used to sneak into abandoned buildings and discuss conformity. We used to scale fire escapes and the rooftops of vacant buildings and share the things that bothered us. We needed an angry yet empathetic voice.

A lot of punk icons died before they hit Jay’s and my current age. Darby Crash: suicide. Sid Vicious: drug overdose, possibly intentional. I’m sure that’s the route a lot of family members thought Jay and I were going when we were fifteen. I know a handful of people from when I was fifteen that went that route.

Jay steps back from his painting, two-thirds of the way through “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” where the guitar and bass halt and leave just the drums and Henry Rollins’s voice. “I think I’m calling it,” Jay says, looking at his finished piece.

“It looks really good,” I say, honestly, nearing a stopping point in my evening’s project. The needle glides to the end of side A before the arm of the record player automatically picks the needle up and moves it to the side of the vinyl. Jay signs the bottom of the painting. We both decide to head back to the house. We have more work to do tomorrow. We’ve watched throughout our years as Henry Rollins has continued to do more and more work. We turn the light out behind us before locking the studio, not flipping the record to side B because we’re already there.

—Angela Morris

#341: Moby, "Play" (1999)

I grew up with Premium Cable. We had HBO and The Movie Channel and later Starz and Cinemax. Today, a trip back to my parents’ house features many of those same channels but with added on-demand functionality and HD/Non-HD streams. Movie channels were always a luxury my parents allowed themselves. As a result, in a pre-Internet world, I spent night after late night of my early teens up late, watching movies.

I remember watching the premier of the 1993 thriller Sliver. I may have confused its self-seriousness for good filmmaking and hey look, breasts. The first time I saw Kids, it was on cable and either preceded by or followed by a short “discussion” vignette wherein the cast, filmmakers, parents, etc. all weighed in on the film’s subject. My 14-year-old brain’s takeaways from that movie were as follows: skateboarding beatdown was awesome, the Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” was a good song, Jenny = new type of hot.

There was something intensely relaxing about flipping to the “guide” channel and watching it slowly scroll the 80 or so available networks. When the “guide” channel was a new, novel invention, half the screen was covered with static advertisements with bland, soft jazz playing in the background. Eventually commercials and even scripted content would come to fill this space. But once upon a time, that channel really was just there to show you what was on.

While most of the premium channels’ time was booked with marquee movies like the aforementioned Sliver or Kids, late late at night they allowed the level of experimentation in their programming to grow as the overall quality of the films dropped. This created a solid block from midnight to around 4 a.m. where you could find risque but relevant movies like Single White Female followed by horror schlockfests like The Refrigerator followed by foreign darlings like Delicatessen. Gregg Akari’s Nowhere comes to mind whenever I think about the pure shocking joy of watching something my mind was totally unprepared for. This would have been around 1997/98 so I’d already seen plenty. But even then, this colorful, aggressive, hyper-sexual and moderately star studded examination of west coast madness truly surprised me.

I bought it on VHS and forced friends to watch it. It became something of a trend. This happened for a few reasons. One, I wanted to understand the movie better. I spent my teens constantly worried I just wasn’t getting something. Bouncing these bizarre echoes off my peers was a kind of calibration. It felt good to ask, “Wasn’t that fucked up?” and have them answer in the affirmative. Two, I did not want to be alone in seeing these things. Along with the inferiority associated with seeing but not understanding, there was the guilt of having witnessed. I wanted to spread things around to either prove I wasn’t messed up OR to mess other people up with me. This trend peaked in the early 2000s when I ruined a perfectly good party by forcibly screening a bootleg VHS copy of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo. I am sorry, everyone.

Now, to say every night was filled with exciting, challenging films would grossly misrepresent my experience. Most everything I watched was garbage. I have clear memories of mainstream bombs like Hackers, The Temp, No Escape, and The Good Son in equal measure with hours and hours of B-grade horrors on par with Phantasm III, Night of the Demons 2, and just about everything in the Puppet Master series, including a tremendously awful Puppet Master spin/knock-off called Demonic Toys. Horror was such fertile late-night programming I think I’ll just name more movies because so many of them are worth noting if for no other reason than no one ever notes them: The Mangler (killer laundry machine), Screamers, Return of the Living Dead 3 (first instance of a goth zombie?), Maniac Cop, Castle Freak, Sleepwalkers, Carnosaur. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

These nights ceased to be special around the year 2000. The Internet all but destroyed any joy I took in passive viewing and replaced it with a manic need for active information. I’ve managed to easily translate this need across several generations of technology from playing Starsiege: Tribes on a dial-up Internet connection with USA Up All Night on in the background to, 18 years later, half-heartedly watching Star Trek on Netflix while frantically refreshing 4-5 apps on my phone. Just saying it now makes me loathe myself. And though I love Twitter and I’m always up for seeing what kind of hijinks your new babies are up to, I do sometimes wish for the peace/calm I felt sitting alone in a dark living room at 3 a.m. watching an awful movie. The remote control only had 12 buttons. The screen on the television was round and deep. When I shut it off to race the sunrise to bed it crackled in this way that made it seem as though the television had been under tremendous electrical strain. The machine ached so that I might watch Alicia Silverstone try to murder someone with a hive of bees in The Crush. For that, I am forever sad and grateful.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#342: Depeche Mode, "Violator" (1990)

Can the whole of a life be held in nine songs? I think it can. When Violator was released in March, 1990, I had just turned sixteen. I’m forty-two now, and I’ve never let it go. In a box in my bedroom closet, there are two cassettes of it. Both have wound to the end. I’ll start there, and press rewind.

9. “Clean.” An end to the tears / and the in-between years. When I saw Depeche Mode live for the first time in September, 2013, I had been clean for nine months, almost ten. My yellow Narcotics Anonymous key tag, the one that said “Clean and Serene for Nine Months,” was indented with bite marks, from all of the frustration of living without pills, of living without the escape. I had had fantasies of being close enough to the stage, and throwing it to Dave Gahan, one recovering addict to another. Instead, I wept when Martin Gore sang “But Not Tonight.” The key tag was rough in my hand, a talisman I hadn’t planned on. I’m still clean three years later.

8. “Blue Dress.” Put it on / Please don’t question why. It was an anonymous Sunday in the winter of 2008-09. I pulled a black dress from H&M over my head; adjusting it, smoothing it out; thinking that the cleavage was too low. I was preparing to meet my lover at a cheap motel in a neighboring town. I lied to my mother, saying something about a “coffee date.” The motel was next to a bowling alley, and across from an ice cream parlor, promising air conditioning and HBO in its rooms. My lover always paid for the hours we spent there. It was a routine: he would go to the office, and I’d wait in the car. A man coming out of a room saw me sitting there once, and gestured to me with his mouth. The dress was flimsy; too thin for winter in Connecticut. I had too much lipstick on. Once we were in the room, my lover appraised me. “You dress nice,” he said.

7.  “Policy of Truth.” Never again / is what you swore / the time before. The first time I experienced withdrawal sickness, I told myself that it was stress brought on from trying to sell copies of my first book. Or it was a twenty-four-hour virus; a fluke of summer. But another voice whispered to me. The prescription ran out before it was supposed to. You know what this is. I shivered in an apartment with no air conditioning at the end of June. Dramamine helped me sleep, but didn’t keep the nausea away. I wondered if my intestines would last. But then, it passed. I could file the experience away, making the promise that it wouldn’t happen again. I’d be more careful. But I wasn’t. I was never careful with pills. When I saw that the count was low, I would start gathering my supplies: chicken soup, ginger ale, Imodium. The voice that whispered to me had a smirk in it: You’ve got this all under control, don’t you.

6. “Enjoy the Silence.” Pleasures remain / So does the pain. In September of 2009, I met a man that I wanted to talk to all night. And frequently, that’s what we did. We quoted Woody Allen’s Love and Death to each other. I turned him on to John Cheever and Richard Yates. We both loved Violator. “It’s ear porn,” he said. After he left, about five months later, I couldn’t listen to it. The words had been written and burned into our bodies. I drowned out his absence in other ways, wondering if the album would mean something different when I listened to it again. In the silent space that my ex inhabits, it does.

5. “Waiting for the Night.” When everything is dark / keeps us from the stark reality. I guess I’ve never cared for reality that much. When I was sixteen, and listening to Violator repeatedly, I would rewind “Waiting for the Night,” so that Side One wouldn’t have to end. I would turn off the lights in my bedroom, sinking into Martin Gore’s voice. I could imagine that I was someone other than a suburban Connecticut teenager who had already spent some time in psychiatric hospitals. I could imagine that one day, I’d write something that would make me famous.  It was there, in the journal I kept, bound in black fabric with tiny pink roses. In the summer of 2012, I waited for the night for different reasons. I would sit on my couch, waiting for the painkiller to make its slow way through my bloodstream. I would try to fight off the nod out, but I couldn’t. I’d wake up at three in the morning, still on the couch, shoulders and neck aching from having been in the same position for so long. I’d shuffle out to the kitchen, promising myself that it would be one pill less that day; that there would be fewer false nights to wait for. It never worked out that way.

4. “Halo.” You wear guilt / like shackles on your feet / like a halo in reverse. Dave Gahan can make guilt sound like something you’d want: a secret to be shared with a lover, or the small thrill of a lie gotten away with. In a former life, not so long ago, I was a thief, a taker of all things. Sex, drugs, money. As a teenager, listening to this, guilt sounded almost romantic. As an adult, I realized that guilt is jealous; it doesn’t want to let you go, whether you’ve anything to be guilty about or not.

3. “Personal Jesus.” Feeling unknown / and you’re all alone. I love the way that Johnny Cash’s cover of this song takes it away from the pounding synths and the dark smoothness of Gahan’s voice. I want to like the original, but Cash wins me over with his way of speaking/singing it; rough-hewn and sort of pleading. It seems more intimate, somehow. Less a fantasy.

2. “Sweetest Perfection.” I want the real thing / not tokens. I sat on the edge of my bed, unfastening the two buttons at the neck on the back of my dress. I wanted my former lover to do it, but he just sat there, maybe watching the action. I wondered if we were just using each other to assuage that real thing, loneliness. It felt like it. This was a token, some kind of transaction. After we were done, I told him that I went somewhere else during sex. It was neither good nor bad, just away, separate from myself. My body was a token, no longer real.

1. “World in My Eyes.” Nothing more than you can feel now / That’s all there is. I remember being sixteen and listening to this album incessantly. I wanted to be initiated into its mysteries. To listen to it then was to sink into a black pool, over and over, and never mind the drowning.

It’s a pretty rare day, now, when I don’t hear at least one song off of Violator. Depending on my mood, I’ll whisper its words like a mantra, or I’ll think of it as background music, the spell it had on me broken. In the CD liner notes there is a picture of a rose, an almost-x-ray of the rose that adorns the cover. The stem on the cover is broken in a few places; the flower inside is whole. All I ever wanted, all I ever needed.

—Sarah Nichols

#343: Meat Loaf, "Bat Out of Hell" (1977)

Every five or six weeks, I kill a celebrity. It’s usually a former child star or an aging rocker. Almost always a man. They have to be indisputably famous but not too relevant—otherwise people won’t believe it.

So I start celebrity death hoaxes in my free time, so what? I’m an architect, an engineer. I’ve been at it since even before social media. Did you ever hear that Steve from Blues Clues overdosed on heroin? Yep, that one was mine, my first opus, composed in the cafeteria at Rivercrest Middle School.

These days, all it really takes is a tweet, but I like to go the extra mile, screenshotting the CNN homepage and photoshopping in a banner headline: “BREAKING: Macaulay Culkin Dead in Car Accident.” Car accidents and drug overdoses tend to spread the fastest. People don’t even need a link to click on, the image is enough. I’ve whacked Cory from Boy Meets World, Eddie Murphy, the Taco Bell chihuahua. I measure success by the time it takes for the story to get debunked on Snopes. If it doesn’t make it to Snopes at all, I consider it a failure. I rarely fail.

My ex-girlfriend, bless her rancid heart, inspired this most recent hoax. I wrote her a drunken e-mail last night, asking if she wanted to get back together. I told her in boozy earnestness that the flame in my heart had gone out. Her response: “You sound like a character in a Jim Steinman song. Fuck off.”

She establishes dominance by throwing obscure pop culture references my way. Or at least she tries to. And yeah, I had to look it up, but when I realized who she was talking about, I felt no shame. Jim Steinman, the guy who wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” He invented Wagnerian rock: sweeping, raucous songs with mythical characters and karaoke-defying vocals. And we have him to thank for Meat Loaf.

What Jim Steinman did for power ballads, I want to do for celebrity death hoaxes. So why not use the same muse? After crafting and tweeting the screenshot, I log on to one of my many dummy Facebook accounts and create a page: R.I.P. Meat Loaf. “On Tuesday, March 28, 2016, Meat Loaf passed away from a heart attack at the age of 68,” the description reads. “ Like this page in remembrance of one of the top selling artists of all time. Leave your condolences below.” I click “Invite Friends.”

Before you ask: No, I don’t ever feel guilty for toying with the emotions of thousands of strangers. For one, they’re strangers. And two, they’re dumb strangers, dumb enough to accept a friend request from someone they don’t know, dumb enough to believe what they read. It’s not that the story is hard to disprove—a quick Google search will do it—it’s that people don’t even bother to verify. It’s their own damn fault if they’re heartbroken. And another thing: a death hoax is the best thing that could happen to a washed-up famous person. When was the last time you thought about Meat Loaf? The man, I mean.

Twelve minutes after the launch: the posts have started.

“RIP mr. loaf”

“ : ‘ ( “

“I would do n e thing 4 luv”

“I knew he would have a heart attack. All that cocaine and yo-yo weight loss…”

“finally, Meat is resting in paradise at the dashboard light.”

“heartbreaking.”

“First Lemmy, then Bowie, now Meat? 2016 sux.”

“ \m/ “

And so on. I’m reading Meat Loaf’s Wikipedia page when I discover that the dude’s cheated death like five times—surviving a car crash, a shot-put to the head, two broken legs after a stage dive gone wrong, and an emergency landing after a gear in his private jet failed. And oh yeah, he has a heart condition, something called Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome (lucky guess on my part). Yet time and time again, he emerges intact, a bat out of hell indeed. It hits me what a landmark achievement this is, getting people to believe that Meat Loaf actually died this time. Meat Loaf was my Holy Grail, and I didn’t even know it.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend caught me logging into one of my fake Facebook profiles. I told her about my hobby and she flipped out, calling me a loser, a creep, a sociopath. But really, I’m just a storyteller. Does a rumor not have artistic value? Aren’t novelists and playwrights and songwriters lying all the same?

Like a proud parent, I revel in every share and retweet. The story hits Snopes within three hours. The post includes a comment from Meat Loaf’s rep, and a tweet from @RealMeatloaf:

“not dead yet, thx 4 the luv. now that i have your attention: new record out sept 16”

20k likes, 6k retweets. I gotta start charging for this.

“It’s a hoax guys,” someone posts to Facebook, linking to the Snopes article. I delete the tribute page before anyone else can post their relief.

Three hours to Snopes, that’s a new record for me. I take another swig of Jack Daniels and log in to my real account, the one that bares my actual name. No new notifications. None for weeks.

—Susannah Clark

#344: Lou Reed, "Berlin" (1973)

I

Caroline says, “I love you. You know that, don’t you?” She cracks the passenger-side window and flicks out her cigarette. “I do love you, but sometimes love just isn’t enough.”

“I know you love me,” I say. “And I love you, but you’re right, it isn’t enough.”

Caroline and I are at the end of seven years—college sweethearts who later became residents of Oklahoma as I started my graduate career. But now, as we occupy the latter halves of our twenties, and after all those years together, the unit we once were has slowly bifurcated. I want to get married, and she doesn’t; I want kids, she prefers a life without; I’ll be starting my PhD in the fall, committing five more years of my life in this great state, while she has a career and a new job opportunity waiting for her in the District come December. With these last few weeks, Caroline and I are going to make the best of it, enjoy our time together, and when December arrives, I’ll drive her back east and we’ll become intimate strangers because love isn’t enough.

“Here,” she says. “This is the exit.”

We pull into Frontier City, a western-themed amusement park outside of Oklahoma City, just as the gates open. It’s a few days before Halloween and the kids are dressed in costumes. Princesses, superheroes, pirates and ninjas, some ghosts. The park itself is adorned in cheap K-Mart decorations and some of the attraction names have been changed—scribbled over in fake blood—to puns. On the Brain Drain grounds is a makeshift cemetery. An assortment of latex arms and heads burst up through the ground. The mechanical cowboy musicians that entertain and bewilder children and seniors are decorated with cobwebs and rubber guts and organs, with foam skulls and bones resting at their feet. They are now billed as the Rolling Bones.

Caroline and myself spend a few minutes looking at the park map and decide to ride Silver Bullet. The attendant for the rollercoaster is dressed in a werewolf costume, the irony lost on no one. In line I listen to the teenagers in front of us discuss their rollercoaster photo game plan. Billy Bob is going to do this when the rollercoaster passes by the coaster cam, and Mary Sue will do that. I remember doing the same thing when I was their age, coordinating outrageous and humorous poses with my friends as the rollercoaster passed the camera. But we never accomplished our goals. No matter how many times we discussed the plan, we were never ready. When the rollercoaster shot off or took its first plunge, we all reacted with terror, some with delight. We would watch the rollercoaster while in line, know its dips, turns, and screws, but when we were actually in the moment, our plans faltered.
 

II

Caroline says, “Lou Reed is dead.” She slides her phone into her purse and we walk through the turnstiles and onto the rollercoaster platform. We take our seats three cars behind the teenagers. I buckle into my seat and pull the bars down across my lap and then the rollercoaster slowly clinks forward.

As the coaster climbs, ascending to the drop-off, the point of no return, I think of Lou Reed. He was my favorite musician throughout high school and college. Growing up in a conservative blue-collar family of coal miners and truckers in West By God Virginia, I always felt like the outsider. I connected with Reed’s transgressive lyrics and themes. He was my hero. I listened to “I Wanna Be Black,” read Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” and considered myself an American existentialist, much like Reed. His view on American culture and its losers and misfits created a sense of belonging for me.

When I first started dating Caroline, I would sing Reed songs to her. I sang “Caroline Says,” but only once. “Why are you singing a song about an abusive and doomed relationship to me?” Caroline asked. From then on I refrained from Berlin songs, relying instead on tracks from Coney Island Baby: “You’re the kind of person that I’ve been dreaming of. You’re the kind of person that I always wanted to love…”

I would drive over to her house after class in those early days and we would crawl into bed together, becoming a mess of sheets, me singing to her: “You really are a queen...” And then I would leave and she would call me and say, “I can smell you in the sheets still.” I would turn my car around and return to her house and crawl back into bed with her, becoming a mess of sheets again, crooning, “And you, you really are a queen, oh such a queen, my queen…”

But now Reed is gone. I had read about his liver transplant earlier that year and the string of cancelled performances in the months following, all signs of an ailing musician. The truth still hits hard. I wasn’t ready. It seems like a silly thing not to be ready for, a musician I never met.

After exiting Silver Bullet, Caroline and I walk to the booth selling snapshots of the ride. I pull out my phone and read the responses to Reed’s passing on Twitter and Facebook. Caroline looks to the booth and then to me. “You’re fucking ridiculous,” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but then I see. In the photo, everyone on the rollercoaster is screaming or laughing, the teenagers in front of us especially, except me. I look like I’m watching Sarah McLachlan’s SPCA commercial at 60 MPH.
 

III

Caroline says she’s ready to go. We exit the park and return to the car. I listen to music on the ride home, she reads. As we turn off the interstate and pull into Guthrie, still thirty minutes from home, Lou Reed’s “How Do You Think It Feels” comes on the radio. Caroline looks up from her book and laughs. “Look, Lou is communing with you from beyond.”

I chuckle, too, and Caroline returns to her book. After a minute:

“Hey, Caroline?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know Reed’s Berlin was derided by critics when it was first released? That Rolling Stone called the album a disaster? And that thirty years later they had a change of heart, turned around and called Berlin a minor masterpiece? Did you know that?”

“I think you might have told me, once or twice. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it.”

Caroline nods and closes her book. Lou Reed gradually fades out and I reach over and turn off the radio. We sit in silence for the most of the ride back to Stillwater until Caroline turns to me and says, “Dillon?”

“Yes?”

“You know I love you, right?”

—Dillon Hawkins

#345: Talking Heads, "Stop Making Sense" (1984)

A few years after Stop Making Sense was born, I was.

Before that, as my senses started to sharpen, I was thrown around inside my happy mother, dancing and singing to her favorite band, Talking Heads. I came into the world instantly comforted by the sound of David Byrne’s voice, like the coo of another parent. The tickle of sounds produced by Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth must have felt as familiar as the percussion of my mother’s heartbeat—as the strum of breath and laughter.

A few years after I was born, my brother Gabriel was. Though my parents aren’t religious people, he wasn’t named by accident.

Gabriel was born less than a year after the death of my sister—he gave my family the first breath of joy we were able to take in a long time. During his childhood, he made sense of how wheels work by playing with wooden trains; he stared out the window in his car seat, asking how Christmas wreaths were attached to 30-foot light posts; he studied sharks and dove into other obsessions, collecting facts about the world to make sense of how it worked. Though he’s traded trains and sharks for other questions, he’s still making inquiries of order.

The six years I lived before Gabriel was born feel like a life separate from this one. When he was born, we became a new family, with a different order—different members. I think of this when I consider the differences Gabriel and I have in approaching the world—that maybe the only way a six year old could experience the death of a sibling was emotionally—that maybe I’ve never known how to approach anything any other way since. And maybe because Gabriel was born into the shadow of that loss, he worked out another kind of logistics. But as I’ve gotten older, I realize it is more than our experience that makes us move differently through our lives. That Gabriel was born wondering, asking questions and taking every inquiry seriously.

These variations in us have sometimes frustrated me. Growing up, I have wanted straight-forward affirmation and love from him. I have wanted him to be able to see the wooden train and love instinctually before he figured out how it worked, measuring its worth. I have wanted him to experience the loud range of emotions that have made my version of this world appear in technicolor—but those are colors you can’t see, can’t categorize. But mostly: I have just wanted him to love me as much, irrationally and unreasonably, as I love him. Every time I have ever looked at him, I have felt before thought.

Despite the differences in our experience and our nature, Gabriel and I share Talking Heads. Whether we learned to love the music that colored our childhoods or inherited it from our parents, we have this in common.

I often listen to Talking Heads and try to make sense of why it calls to Gabriel. The lyrics, appealing to his love of the ironic, require the investigation so natural to him. And they’re just really good. In our childhood home, we grew up dancing frantically to Talking Heads. As we’ve gotten older, dancing has become the most natural expression of love. Physically, he is not far off from David Byrne—their long, bony limbs look jointless when they dance—like they’re filled with water. And though when we grab each other by the elbows and jump, we are often singing the lyrics to “Psycho Killer” or “Life During Wartime” to each other, this is our sibling love language.

When I’m not around him, which is most of the time now, I listen to his favorite Talking Heads songs, searching for some answers in the lines or some kind of Morse Code message in the drum beat. Among my brother’s favorites is “Burning Down the House”—one of his favorite lyrics: “dreams walking in broad daylight.” I play out different ideas of what that may mean to him. Maybe a spotlight on the unconscious? Maybe materialized desires, or fears? I have spent a lot of time trying to extract his emotional life from such few words.

Another of his favorites—my favorite—is “This Must Be the Place.” I imagine him listening to it in his dorm room as I listen to it in my apartment 300 miles away. Us both singing along to the opening line: Home is where I want to be.

I don’t mean to say that my brother doesn’t experience emotion—that is grossly inaccurate. And I also don’t mean that I don’t ask questions and expect to spend my life in wonderment, as evident here. I think it’s just that I want to see logic move aside from time to time. And I do: when we dance to Talking Heads, I do. I am just greedy for his happiness—and to bear witness to it.

On this day, March 21, Gabriel was born. I wonder often if he realizes that he saved us on that day twenty-one years ago. When my mother went into labor, my grandparents picked me up from my kindergarten classroom. I remember running down the hall of my elementary school in light-up tennis shoes to meet him. As vivid as a six year old’s imagination is, he was, and is, so much better than I could have imagined.

I picture him now, with the quiver of “This Must Be the Place” in his earbuds, walking from one philosophy class to the next, where he works to make sense of this world he was born into. I wonder if he realizes that he is still saving us, but I hope he doesn’t preoccupy himself with that.

In less than a week, we’ll both be heading home to celebrate his birthday. At some point, our parents will put on Stop Making Sense. We’ll turn it up so loud that we won’t even be able to hear each other singing: “Love me ‘til my heart stops, love me ‘til I’m dead!” We’ll only break when at the end of each song, the crowd cheers.

—Elise Burke

#346: De La Soul, "3 Feet High and Rising" (1989)

Maybe the best way to consider De La Soul’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, is to skip past it entirely, to their sophomore effort, De La Soul Is Dead. While 3 Feet High is a fun, ambitious intro to the group’s bright, mindful style, De La Soul Is Dead—released just two years later—works double-time to burn that all to ashes. Within the first few minutes, the group (a) announces its death, (b) trashes both Vanilla Ice and children, then (c) moves headlong into a low-bass track about the emptiness of success. It’s an incredible album: a loose-ended, pissed off kind of brilliance; label-forced image rebellion as commercial art. Every ultra-positive track on 3 Feet High finds its perfect devil’s advocate here. Oh, you liked “Me, Myself & I?” Here’s a new track about an abused child who shoots Santa Claus with a hand cannon. Oh, you like how warm and sweet “Eye Know” is? Cool, here’s a track about how getting what we always wanted sort of means we’ll never have an authentic relationship again. As a whole, the album amounts to a very real, existential distress call. Everyone! We made it! And it is fucking awful!

If you grew up on early 90s hip-hop like me, it might be tempting to call what happened to De La Soul between their first and second albums a dark turn, or the moment the founders of hip-hop’s neo-hippie D.A.I.S.Y. age broke for good, and turned cynical. The rationale makes sense. 3 Feet High is, on its face, a brash force for good. It samples Schoolhouse Rock! and Hall & Oates and Steely Dan. The group prefaces nearly everything with their vibrant brand (“Da La heaven,” “De La style,” “De La orgee”). They call sex “buddy.” There are skits. A whole track is dedicated to listing people who need a haircut. One of the group’s emcees named himself “yogurt” spelled backwards.

And yet, for all of that unspoiled joy, 3 Feet High is just as cynical as De La Soul Is Dead or any other of the wonderfully bitter, hilarious albums they released over the next two decades, projects that increasingly distrusted the rap industry, their place in it, and sometimes, the point of hip-hop at all. The part of cynicism 3 Feet High speaks to, though, is the part non-cynics never talk about, something that broadcasts to most ears with the unheard frequency of a dog whistle.

But not for me. I hear it. I’ve been hearing it clearly my whole life.

*

“Do not be cynical,” was how Conan O’Brien closed out his six-month run as host of The Tonight Show in 2010. “I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” I get what he was going for: O’Brien’s run on that show ended in an ugly, public way, sabotaged by a network that had supported him for over a decade, and he wanted to leave on a note of defiant resilience. And yet, as a lifelong, often reluctant cynic, I winced. Not because Conan had attacked my philosophy, but because what he’d sent out to the world at that moment, tears welled, was the misguided message that cynicism, above all things, is a choice.

Cynicism tends to read as patently simple (everything = bullshit), an assessment rivaled only by the simplicity with which it’s often regarded (cynics = assholes). At worst, non-cynics tend to avoid us at all costs. At best, we become a social afterthought; a depersonalized mascot to our social groups. The embodied safety of the known quantity. I’ve been called “Eeyore” and “Male Daria.” I’ve been told with scorn that I have “poisonous thinking,” or to “keep it pos,” or to do yoga. Even the most well-meaning people seem to approach my cynicism as a fundamental programming error. “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” a friend asked recently, and when I said no—because of course I didn’t, because holy hell, why would I volunteer to build myself an opportunity for certain failure and heartbreak—she said “I thought you might say that,” then tried to change my thinking, proposing simple, executable resolutions, like “I will read two books and learn a new word.”

I don't know the origins of my cynicism. It could root from something as formative as my upbringing in a Midwestern mill town turned obsolete by American industry, or from something as pissy and shallow as how I thought I loved someone as a teen and she didn’t love me back (boo hoo). Either way, it’s a part of my makeup, which I was lucky with, at first. I came of age as a cynic during a time where I could bark it out at the world and the culture would bark it right back at me. There was De La Soul, yes, but also Janeane Garofalo, and Marc Maron, and the Dead Milkmen. My generation’s avatar appeared on a Rolling Stone cover wearing a T-shirt that said CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK.

But my cynicism has aged, and badly. Now in my late thirties, I have a catalogue of utter social failures, where my innate distrust and tendency toward a certain dourness has been made as obsolete as the dead town I hail from, and the ghosts of those failures haunt. One moment among many: after my wedding ten years ago—an event my wife, also a cynic, dreaded as much as I did—I sat with a very cool, rosy coworker, sharing my photos from that day. This is us at City Hall, because fuck a church wedding, I said. Here are my relatives, who almost seem to want to be there. I liked my coworker, and was truly excited to show her all of this. Our wedding was fantastic and surprising in rich ways neither my wife nor I were prepared for, sparking something new and alive inside us that we were only just beginning to understand. But how could I explain any of that without first showing how achingly low our expectations were? What we feared the most?

“You’re awful,” my coworker said, before I could get any further.

Her eyes were hard, face flushed.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked me, then never spoke to me again.

Who, exactly, would choose to have those kinds of interactions?

*

So I’ve come to understand my cynicism as less of a doomed prism through which I view the world, and more of a perpetual, internal conflict where blasts of bright hope meet a wall of doubt, and lose big. But there are rare times, like my wedding, when that hope wins, which is where 3 Feet High and Rising comes in.

The album’s charm lies in its wild joy, but also in its complete unsustainability. Now looking back at 3 Feet High, it’s easy to see that De La Soul’s spirit was meant to break, which it did. The album was produced during an era in hip-hop where sampling was a free-for-all (see also: the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique), and it became a warning shot of deep caution to hip-hop artists of the end of that era as well. But it wasn’t the Steely Dan or the Hall & Oates samples that did De La Soul in. Instead, it was a tiny, twelve-second sample of the Turtles’ “You Showed Me,” that appeared fleetingly on “Transmitting Live From Mars,” a French-spoken, minute-long interlude of utter silliness on 3 Feet High that, by 1991—just months after the release of De La Soul Is Dead—ended up costing the group close to two million dollars in copyright violations.

One might understand the impulse, then, to burn everything to ashes.

But 3 Feet High is still there. That untamed joy exists. I can download it, carry it with me, access it whenever I want, which is what I think of often when my expired sensibilities tend to alienate non-cynics, or when I can’t figure out a way to communicate that beneath the mountain of distrust and fear I’ve been cast with, there is something warm and renewable and dumbly hopeful that's hard to show—a longing almost, to return to an unbroken moment of goodness and purity that I fear might not have ever existed in the first place. But with 3 Feet High, it does. It’s proof of the truer underside of cynicism, evidence that the outlook I’ve been shouldered with is built of more layers than many may think. The album’s existence is a strong argument for the theory that every expression of cynicism is, at its heart, a desperate, unending callback.

Maybe that’s the case with De La Soul, too. In 2014, after twenty-plus albums and other projects that explored cynicism as an art, they gave it all away to anyone who wanted it, no charge. Then, in 2015 they announced a new, crowd-funded project laced with the kind of raw ambition and bigness that 3 Feet High trafficked in, with no small measure of the caution, wariness, and reactionary distrust that came in their work after. “For the first time, we’re going to sample ourselves,” they announced, then invited heaps of musicians in for long studio sessions designed to produce an unending archive of original sounds for De La Soul to wade in, chop up, and make their own for new, independent efforts, bound by almost nothing.

In other words: They’ve found a pathway, maybe, to get back to something pure again.

It’s an experiment in music, but also in philosophy: a massive act of fully realized cynicism, both sides of it working above-ground, and in concert. I’m watching it all closely, and having so much fun with what might happen. I’m aching to know the results, but at the same time I know now, as a weathered vet of this racket, that this excitement and uncertainty is the best part of the hand I’m dealt. In that sense what De La Soul is making now is a tiny experiment for me and my cynicism as well—something workable, not unlike the types of New Year’s resolutions my friend proposed. Nothing about what De La Soul is doing right now is bullshit, and I’m enjoying the wide possibility of sitting with these full, open moments, however small, when none of the tiny joy I'm feeling can find a way, yet, to be forever unmade.

—Mike Scalise

#347: Pink Floyd, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1967)

The first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I drove to the store, bought a pack of smokes. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I bought a pack of Camels and drove down to the river. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone: I tried not to cry until I hung up the phone. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was to go down to the river and look up at the sky, at the stars, and I remembered, at first, not the photo you once took of Sagittarius, but the picture that accompanied it, the picture of the beach at night, the camera set on a tripod and tilted back to see the sky, the empty chair beside it—that empty chair. No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: how? No, the first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: why?

*

This is an essay about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Or maybe this is a short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is not an essay or short story about the night that my parents called me on the phone to tell me you were gone. This is not an essay or short story about how the next morning I woke up to the news that you had killed yourself. This is also not an essay or short story about how later that week, I heard that you had died from an accidental drug overdose, nor will this be an essay or short story about how, later still, that same week, a mutual friend informed me he’d heard something else, something, something hotel, something, something, unknown. This will also not be an essay or short story about how sometimes I still Google your name, the name of the city in which you died, and “suicide,” or “murder,” or “death,” or “investigation,” not because I need to know what happened, but because I can’t stand not knowing. No, this is an essay or short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The album begins with a song about space. About planets and moons and stars. You were into Astrophotography. When I started writing this essay or short story about Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, how could I not think of you?

*

When visiting your mother in Costa Rica, you went to the beach at night. Maybe there are answers in that. You took a tripod, a camera, a chair. Probably some other things. You said you took three trips over two nights, spent ten-plus hours. All between sunset and sunrise. You took a picture of the stars and posted it on Facebook. You said that the photo was of the center of the Milky Way, the constellation Sagittarius. You explained that, deep inside, there is an astronomical radio source called Sagittarius A*, which is believed by many to be a supermassive black hole around which our solar system revolves. Lately, I’ve been thinking that we all know a thing or two about how it feels to revolve around supermassive black holes. Something tells me you knew, too.

*

When I listen to “Chapter 24,” on Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, I think about you. The song is about mysticism, is about the I Ching. Because you are gone, I think maybe there are answers here. There is something in the song about return, but that something is inscrutable. Syd Barrett sings, “A moment is accomplished in six stages / And the seventh brings return.” What does return mean? It doesn’t mean return from the grave. I know that. But in the song, the idea of return feels comforting, as if speaking of some kind of victory, or a return to normalcy perhaps. I begin reading about the I Ching, its twenty-fourth chapter, segment, section, whatever. That’s how little I know about mysticism and religion—I don’t even know what to call it. I learn that the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching is known as “Fu,” or, in English, “Return.” Its symbol, or hexagram, or whatever looks like this:

I don’t know what any of this means. I keep reading and find this line from the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, one of the versions that Barrett’s lyrics are said to most closely resemble. Parts of Wilhelm’s text look like poems. Other parts look like prose. Here is the part from Wilhelm’s translation of the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching that looks like a poem:

RETURN. Success.
Going out and coming in without error.
Friends come without blame.
To and fro goes the way.
On the seventh day comes return.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

Here is an excerpt from the part that looks like prose: “After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.” He also writes, “…the winter solstice, with which the decline of the year begins, comes in the seventh month after the summer solstice; so too sunrise comes in the seventh double hour after sunset . . . In this way the state of rest gives place to movement.” Something about the return of a banished light and the lengths of days, sunsets and sunrises. I still don’t know what any of this means.

*

I can’t help but think that Piper at the Gates of Dawn is an album obsessed with the unfathomable, with impossible mysteries, with the inscrutable. Barrett’s songs, here, lean wildly into the unknown, the uncertain, the beyond. To myths and folktales and fantasy. Listening to these songs, I’m not surprised at the trajectory of Barrett’s life, at his odd behavior in Pink Floyd that led to his mental breakdown and dismissal from the band, at his becoming a bald recluse who spent his days painting and gardening in Cambridge, at his quiet death in 2006. That is the life one expects from a man whose songs so desperately were trying to understand the world around him through mysticism, mystery, fantasy. I can’t help but think that the truth of your demise is unfathomable, an impossible mystery, inscrutable. Unlike Syd Barrett, I can’t look at the arc of your life and make sense of suicide, or a drug overdose, or something, something, hotel, something, something, unknown. I will never know why you’re gone. I will never know how you left.

*

The more I look at the name of the twenty-fourth section of the I Ching, the more it stops looking like “Fu,” and begins looking like “F-U.” Maybe this is because I find everything that I’m reading difficult, vague, frustrating. Or maybe I’m just lashing out.

*

Here are the things I know: There are no answers to be found in the I Ching; There are no answers to be found in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found in writing an essay about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found in writing a short story about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; There are no answers to be found from your family; There are no answers to be found from your friends; Years after he left Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett had no hair; You started losing your hair when you were young, but you were nothing at all like Syd Barrett, I don’t think, but then, I never met Syd Barrett; The I Ching says, I think, that some sort of renewal or rebirth occurs just after the winter solstice; You were born three days after the winter solstice in 1978—I think that means something, but it probably doesn’t; You are the powerful light that has been banished but you will not return.

*

In the message you sent me after your trip to Costa Rica, you told me you were seeing a psychologist. You told me that you didn’t want to kill yourself because it would hurt too many people, but that you sometimes didn’t want to exist anymore. You said you were working on it, though, that things were looking up. I trusted you.

*

There’s one more thing I know: flipped upside down, Hexagram 24 looks like one of the Recognizer ships from Tron. This seems silly, I know, but it’s not. We used to talk about Tron. You once told me that Tron was one of the things that made you interested in computers, which became your life’s work. I remember visiting you in the computer lab when we were undergraduates. You showed me one of your animations in which a man fought with a parking meter. The parking meter won.

*

The night you took pictures on the beach in Costa Rica was in early June. You posted the pictures on June 24. Maybe you were on the beach the two nights before that? June 22 and 23. The 2015 summer solstice in Costa Rica was June 21. If Pink Floyd and the I Ching say that the winter solstice marks the end and beginning of one cycle, does the same hold true for the summer? I picture you under the stars, in awe of the infinite night sky, and maybe that was the beginning of something that couldn’t be stopped. I wonder, did you know, then, that you’d be gone before the next solstice?

*

But none of that matters. None of these things are connected. I know that. But where else am I going to find an answer? The first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: how? The first thing I did when I heard you were gone was ask: why?

*

I look at the upside down Recognizer ship from Tron, or the right side up Hexagram 24 from the I Ching—whichever, they’re the same. It speaks to me, says “F-U.” Sometimes, now, I scroll down your Facebook wall because it’s the closest I can come to seeing you. When I approach June, I hold my breath, wait for your picture of the Milky Way, of Sagittarius, of Sagittarius A* to slide up my screen. I wait for the tripod and the empty chair and remember what it feels like to be orbiting around a supermassive black hole.

—James Brubaker

#348: Muddy Waters, "At Newport 1960" (1960)

The attentive reader will recall my vexed relationship with the abstraction of "The 1960s." And surely the attentive reader will not at all be surprised when I bring that vexation to bear on an album whose title announces the decade it greets, At Newport 1960, a live recording of Muddy Waters's set at the Newport Jazz Festival from that year. It's an album that has everything to do with the decade about to unfold, and nothing to do with this or that grand narrative of the decade itself. And yet, the attentive reader will interject, to say that an album speaks to the decade that follows it necessarily implies some narrative of that decade, whether I want it to or not. This point is well taken. It is so well taken, in fact, that I must admit it leaves my whole aversion to "The 1960s" in a somewhat dubious place. By distancing myself from this abstraction in this way, don't I just allow myself room to construct another, equally abstract "1960s," just in terms of the particular elements I personally want to highlight? The short answer to this line of questioning—presumably originating in my attentive reader—is, well, yes. And the only thing for me to do is take back everything I've said. And lest the attentive reader turn into a hostile one, and accuse me of so much postmodern frippery, I should now admit that this gesture of taking back everything I've said is of a piece with At Newport 1960, whose strangeness has something to do with the way it, itself, takes back everything it's said at the end. The only difference between the album and me is that the album doesn't announce its recanting.

To begin at the end: the last song on At Newport, "Goodbye Newport Blues," is sung not by Muddy Waters but by Otis Spann, the pianist in Waters's band and a veritable bluesman in his own right. The lyrics, according to a number of things I read, all of which seemed to agree and all of which seemed equally vague, were written that day, on the spot, by none other than everybody's favorite Popular Front poet, Langston Hughes. He wrote the words—so the various online accounts say—after finding out that the directors of the Newport Jazz Festival had decided to acquiesce to the demands of the city of Newport, RI, which had called for the concert to be canceled after a riot broke out the previous day. This isn't entirely clear just from listening to the song or to the lyrics; they sound like, well, blues lyrics, at least at first. An opening verse that treads familiar territory—"It's a gloomy day at Newport / everything is sad, sad, sad"—gives way to a second, more unsettling one, full of questions:

What's gonna happen to my music?
What's gonna happen to my song?

Even knowing that these lines respond to the immediate predicaments of the Newport festival, I still can't help but hear in these questions a response to the general situation facing black blues artists. On the business end of things, record labels infamously lied, cheated, and stole—not much has changed, has it?—to make sure bluesmen saw as little of the money their music made as possible. And in terms of aesthetics, white rock and roll, the archetypal "1960s" genre, took whatever it wanted and without so much as a second thought from black artists. It makes total sense, then, that one would ask, "what's gonna happen to my music?" And it's a marvelous coincidence that this sentiment would weave itself through the immediate breaking-up of the Newport Jazz Festival, as if the latter event were a particular demonstration of the sentiment's broader truth, its basis in a racist reality.

But there's more to it than that, even. Langston Hughes, one of the greatest North American political poets, penned these lines in July of 1960, a year after he helped compile his own writing for a Selected Poems that included none of his most politically radical verse in it. This editorial decision on Hughes's part has a lot to do with his general feelings after his House Unamerican Activities Committee hearing in 1953, which led the author of such brilliant (and explicitly communist) poems as "Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria" to downplay his previous political commitments. How is this not part and parcel of the worry over "what's gonna happen to my music?" The great sadness in these lines issues forth from a fear of what the future will bring, whether its new-born babe will be wrapped in the red flag of Revolution, or if it will continue asking, "are you now or have you ever been…?"

If there's a good reason not to take back everything I've said, then, as I suggested I might do at the beginning, it's because of this very ambivalence on Hughes's (and Waters's, and Otis Spann's) part. "The 1960s" doesn't quite make room for this sense of quiet defeat, maybe because it is a tone in keeping with "The 1950s," but maybe because it doesn't quite fit into the idealist narratives of the nostalgic chroniclers I here tendentially oppose. Am I saying, then, that this album is a sad manifesto for a decade of defeat? No way—no such quietism and retreat in the blues. In fact, it's important, if not decisive, that Hughes's lyrics aren't in his attractive Collected Poems volume. They're not a poem. They're lyrics to a song. They're nothing without the music that accompanies them.

Thus the uncertainty, however personal it may be for Hughes, however specific to one event it may be in scope, brings with it the possibility of a collective response. Hughes doesn't get up and read his words. He hands them over to Otis Spann, who sings them and plays the piano, while Muddy Waters plays the guitar, and the rest of the band plays their respective instruments. A crushing loss becomes, suddenly, an occasion for collaboration, for people coming together and working together. The contingency of the thing—the duration of the song—doesn't really matter so much as the thing itself, that it happened, which means that it could conceivably happen again. How many other events could we tackle as a group? How many other things could we respond to in so beautiful a way?

If I have spent the entirety of this piece writing about one song, then I have done so because the contours of its situation say something about the rest of At Newport, which is very far indeed from a contemplative, melancholy reflection on state repression and the fate of political consciousness. It's a party, a celebration, a group of people—band and audience alike—who seem quite fond of one another, and quite happy to spend the time they have together. Why else would Waters and co. play through "Got My Mojo Working" twice? And why else would Waters change the lyrics to "Hoochie-Coochie Man" in the last chorus, rewriting a declaration of individuality ("you know I'm the hoochie-coochie man / everybody knows I'm him") into a statement of hope and defiance and most importantly of collectivity, one that lies at the root of many of the accounts of "The 1960s" I have taken peculiar aim at? It's a couplet worth closing with, as a gesture of both reconciliation with and continued defiance of "The 1960s," and as an announcement of that Utopianism that, if nothing else, "The 1960s" usefully summarizes and reminds us to find everywhere and in everything, and to struggle in the service of on the daily. And so I give the last words to Muddy Waters:

you know we are the hoochie-coochie boys
the whole United States knows we're here

—David W. Pritchard

#349: Jay-Z, "The Black Album" (2003)

When I was six years old, I would wake up, dress myself in mismatched outfits and admire myself in the mirror, eat breakfast with my mom, and go to school. My teacher would guide us through math and science, but my favorite part of the day was Reading Time. Our librarian would sit our class of 25 little kids in the corner of the library and read us a story. At the end of the day, I’d go home and my parents would help me with my math. I’d play with my dolls, and after dinner my family would sometimes watch a Disney movie. I loved the princesses; I always wanted to be one. Then, I’d pretend to fall asleep and my dad would carry me up the stairs, where my mom and dad would both tuck me in, kiss my forehead, and turn out the light.

When I was six years old, Jay-Z’s The Black Album was released. Every morning, I admired myself in the mirror and saw in me a princess. During Reading Time, our librarian would read us books of little white boys and girls playing, learning, growing, and I saw myself in them. When my dad got home every night, he would be able to help me with my math. All of the dolls I played with were white. All of the Disney princesses I watched were white. I was able to fall asleep knowing that I was safe and loved, even after my parents turned out the light.

I got through middle school with my head in a book and with a close-knit group of friends, and we were all very dramatic. She said this, he said that, she did this, can you talk to her for me? We were preoccupied with each other and with running out of sight from the creepy security guard who would say our shirts were too low-cut and our skirts were too short and that he’d make us change into our gym clothes. But like so many kids at that age, we were too preoccupied with ourselves to notice how 80% of the students in our classes were white. Or how the school administration brought in police and K-9 squads to sniff weed out of student lockers. Or how the next day, a handful of minority students were gone. We didn’t notice any of it, because they weren’t in our classes to begin with. We hadn’t known them. And so we continued, saying we were scared of a quiz or of gaining weight or of the drugs that we knew the popular kids (all white) were getting into. But we weren’t really scared. We knew we were safe.

In high school, my freshman year class was quickly amid scandal as three boys were caught passing around sex tapes, not only of them having sex with three freshman girls, but without the girls knowing they were being filmed. The boys were expelled and only one of the girls’ names got out. She transferred in weeks. Some said the boys got community service, others said they got off with a warning. Nobody knew for sure, but by the end of the month, we did know that the boys were at private schools nearby. Sophomore year, my gym teacher made all of us line up and do yoga, except he only taught us upward and downward dog, and he would walk behind us, down the lines of fifteen-year-olds with our pubescent hips high in the air and his eyes on us all. “Move your hips up, more toward me,” he’d say, and we did because what else could we do? Nobody said anything, and we did as we were told. Eight years later, I’ve just learned that the same coach yelled at a black basketball player for being too slow, saying he’d mop the floor with the boy’s dreadlocks. But still, nobody said anything, not even to other students, and for that reason most of us didn’t know what he’d said. Gossip stayed localized to our cliques; he said, she said, do you think our gym teacher is kind of creepy? Much like our middle school honors classes, our high school APs had fewer and fewer minority students as we neared graduation. In all the time I’d been there, we’d had countless pep rallies and dances, but not a single Black History Month assembly. A year later, I heard they tried to shut one down after it was proposed. The students fought hard and took the issue online, and they were finally allowed an assembly. In the end, a student somewhere in the crowd yelled out the n-word, and everybody talked about it on the way back to their classes.

By the time I went to William & Mary, I enrolled in classes and subjects I was never presented with before: Psychology as a Social Science, Language and Culture, African American Literature. I hadn’t realized it before I went to college, but the amount of African American lit I was required to read in my entire life was miniscule—the only ones I can remember were Frederick Douglass’s narrative and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, both of which were optional. So I swam in the words of Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and so many more. First, I cried; then, I got angry. Angry that the only black doll I saw in stores when I was young was a single American Girl Doll, costing more than a hundred dollars. Angry that my middle school brought in police to take away minority students with weed in their lockers but didn’t persecute the popular white kids who were passing pills around in the cafeteria. Angry that my high school protected the teachers who preyed on children, who tried to silence the Black voices who were calling for some recognition of their culture and history. Angry that underneath all of the sexualized wrongs I felt through my life, racist wrongs were right there and I hadn’t noticed. Angry that I had gone 19 years without being angry. Angry I had lived my whole life not seeing what was going on around me. And then, amidst all the anger, a new sense of resolve. A sense of intention that I was and still am grateful hit when I was only 19.

The first time I heard The Black Album, I didn’t listen. I mean really listen. I heard it and moved on to the Jay-Z album I knew better, Watch the Throne, which was much more prevalent in my generation. Parties played “N***as in Paris” and “Who Gon Stop Me,” and we all danced and drank and didn’t listen.

Now, every time I listen to “Moment of Clarity” I feel even more anger and resolve than I did as a nineteen-year-old, given all of the hate that’s come to light in the four years that have passed. In the past four years I’ve kept my eyes open and receptive to everything that feels wrong, even if only for a second. Jay-Z poeticizes:

Fuck perception! Go with what makes sense 
Since I know what I’m up against 
We as rappers must decide what’s most important 
And I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them.

I cannot help those who don’t understand what’s really going on—the discrimination and pain Black people and other minorities are feeling—if I don’t try to understand it myself. It doesn’t matter what we perceive to be true. There were no Black dolls when I was six years old, but there were little Black girls who wanted them. There were no Black princesses, and so some little Black girls didn’t see themselves as princesses, even though they all are. We believed our school administrations would protect us, but they employed men who sexualized young females like myself, persecuted minorities and silenced them, and let the white students who committed serious crimes amongst their peers walk free. Little I perceived made sense in the end, and only now that I’m in my early twenties am I understanding that we need to decide what’s most important, because we’re up against systems that will continue to skew our perception if we let them. If we’re comfortable knowing that what we see isn’t real.

—Nicole Efford

#350: The Yardbirds, "Roger the Engineer" (1966)

Writing about music from the 1960s invariably involves writing about "The 1960s." I place the decade in quotes because of the mythical qualities that attend the writing about it, as if it were the decade, the one where everything happened that made us in the present (many of whom perhaps were not alive in the 1960s) into the animals we are. Something like that. I hate this abstraction but I don't know how else to talk about an album like Roger the Engineer, which was released on July 15, 1966. It is a month before the Beatles would put out Revolver. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is one year old, and Rubber Soul is going on eight months. I could go on and on laying the groundwork of creative foment that no doubt the Yardbirds were involved in and responding to. But I am less interested in this endless teasing out of an archive in the name of the grand abstraction of "The 1960s" than I am in the amazing accident that Roger the Engineer dropped the day after Bastille Day.

Focusing on the French commemoration of their bourgeois revolution seems a bit odd, but I like the way it frames a lot of what goes on in the 35 minutes of Roger the Engineer. For instance, the album begins and ends with two halves of a whole proposition about quantification: "Lost Woman" starts with a familiar count-off of the beat on a cymbal, and "Ever Since the World Began" fades out with Keith Relf singing "you don't need money" over and over again. If you listen through the whole album and start it over again immediately (I recommend this, even if you are unconvinced by this stuff about money), suddenly the cymbal-counting trope, one of the most ubiquitous and pleasurable of rock tropes, seems inextricable from this denunciation of the thing that organizes most of our social life around the activity of counting.

Between these two bookends, the Yardbirds elaborate a celebration of life. Why not focus on that, then? Well, I will. Or I am. But without setting up the role that money plays here, it's hard to see the celebration. You might see "The 1960s," but then miss the trees for the forest. Or some forest, not the one I see in the 60s—which is to say if we're going to talk about the 1960s, better to do it in terms of revolutions (French or otherwise: and it's worth noting another French "event" is on the horizon; Roger the Engineer came out in 1966, two years before the May 1968 riots and demonstrations) and opposition to the tyranny of money than some vague Geist or another. After all, the refrain of "you don't need money" appears at the end of a song that uses "Satan" as a symbol for human greed and the profit motive that have lorded over the world since the beginning of time. Leaving aside the historiography here, the transition from a droning, nasally-sung passage that practically invents Black Sabbath's aesthetic in a single gesture, to a danceable, major-key hook in "Ever Since the World Began" makes it hard to ignore the importance of money for Roger the Engineer. The Satan of la société de consommation has to appear so that the Yardbirds can respond to it.

The response we get is not quite the storming of the Bastille, or the occupation and transformation of the Sorbonne into an "autonomous university." It might, however, give pleasure in ways that are consistent with the positions that begat such revolutionary foment. The album's big single, "Over Under Sideways Down," is a case in point: an insouciant call and response between a shout of "hey!" and a guitar riff builds into a song whose lyrics we might summarize as a simple and indolent plaint about not wanting to do anything, were it not for the appearance in the first verse of wages as the thing that keeps civil society and its various compulsions moving. It's not just "laughing, joking, drinking, smoking," but it's all this "till I've spent my wage." It is no accident, then, that in the second verse another quietist sentiment—that we should just go enjoy ourselves rather than argue about it with others—appears alongside a recognition that fun "is all for free." Obviously these are complicated, circumscribed sentiments, but it's interesting to think about them in light of a more overtly politicized structure of feeling.

Of course nobody listens to the Yardbirds—or any rock music for that matter—solely for the lyrics. If they tell you as much they're lying. And the music here is quite the opposite of the indolent tone of the lyrics. It's up-tempo, energetic, improvisatory, even hopeful. Jeff Beck is determined to prove that he never met a rhythm section he couldn't build a riff around—is this an allegory for mutual aid, some kind of Utopian vision of human cooperation? That would be very "The 1960s" of me to say, wouldn't it? But then I suppose it's worth conceding to the hagiographers of 60s rock the point that, in whatever ways it could, this music attempted to develop a way of seeing the world not beholden to money.

Not that we need a hagiography to get at this kernel of truth. We have songs that do the work of expressing it for us. And they don't necessitate a turning away from the world, but rather an indignant and perpetual confrontation with it. "I want somebody to tell me why there's always smoke up in the sky," sings Relf in "What Do You Want," in a way that suggests that the anti-cash conclusion—"you don't need money"—is not merely crudely idealist. Or, if it's crudely idealist, its crudeness and idealism have their roots in a serious concern about the world, whose basis in some antipathy toward money has a striking resonance for us in the present. What better slogan for our present situation could there be, than "you don't need money!" And where better to be reminded of this than in the songs of the Yardbirds.

—David W. Pritchard

#351: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979)

There is an old house down in the hollow where there is a dim light. You almost don’t see it. But then in winter on a certain day when the sky is gray-bright and you are walking on the ridge opening your eyes to everything in the spaces between the trees, you will see it just sitting there like it has always done. Empty, hollowed out. You will see it, a house of ancient boards and slanting rusted roof the color of the red oak leaves that carpet the ground. Having no door, it is neither open nor closed. It is part of the hollow, and you go down to it because you are neither home nor away and why not in the hollow then.

There are no clocks ticking inside the house, only the sound of light rain patter on tin roof, same as rhododendron patter that has quieted the ticking in your mind as you have been walking all day. But you stop and listen here and it is not the same patter after all as that on the waxy leaves. You close your eyes. It is a higher rust-note, and it makes you want to sleep here, for many days and nights. You imagine all the shades of dim light and of darkness through which you could dream, rain pattering on the rough tin above you. You sink in deeper, more to the place you have been trying to get to, and you think, it is ok, to sink in this way, to let your chest cave in the way it wants to.

You close your eyes and listen: the sound of rust. Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished.

The earth caves in this way, into these hollows and sinkholes. Stones yield to water and time, soil yields to stones. Iron yields to rain and salt and air, oxidizes. Be more like this, you think. Neither open nor closed.

*

I have been learning of the Japanese practice called wabi-sabi. It is a beauty-seeing practice based on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It celebrates impermanence, the natural condition of all things.

While the words wabi and sabi do not translate easily from the kanji written language in which each word is a pictogram, a body of complex meaning and visual form in itself, wabi can be defined as “the loneliness of living in nature” or “a quietness,” while sabi is the beauty that comes with age, the impermanence that is suggested in the wear-and-tear of an object.

There is a phonological and etymological connection with the word sabi to the word rust, that natural reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water, that rust that is a corrosion of machines and steel and human-made things: barbed wire, roofs, gates, gutters. Latches, hinges, nails. The things that hold our houses together, enclose them. Keep the wild animals and weather out. All rusting. Latches that fasten our doors, that we might close out the rain and the wind, be guarded against them. Nails that fasten the boards.

*

You would like to sink further in. You think of his face whom you love, cannot stop loving, the lines around his eyes, light in the irises like that in rotting oak leaves. Your chest caves no different than this soil. You run your hand along the weathered boards, smooth-rough against your palm and fingertips. You notice the colorful lichen that have found their way into the grains and cracks and are spreading and flowering out. Beautiful, you think. This decay. Sometimes you let go like this, in rare moments like these. The light is changing. You feel chilled standing in one place. You keep walking, neither leaving nor not leaving the house. Sometimes you will see it sitting still and empty, in among the bare trees. Sometimes you will not see it, on your way somewhere, walking past.

—Holly Haworth

#352: Dire Straits, "Brothers in Arms" (1985)

On the fourth of July my mother would take my brother and me to watch the fireworks behind the technical college near our house. The year I was umbilically attached to my Walkman, probably one of the last years we sat and watched the fireworks as a family, the sun was setting on the 90s and most people I knew spent their allowance on CDs. I didn’t get an allowance but the radio was free. As it got dark and we waited for the show to begin over the treeline I listened to “So Far Away” on a cassette of songs I’d taped off the radio. When it was over I’d rewind the tape and begin the song again.

*

Nostalgia has its roots in the word “homesickness.” It smashes together the Latin words for “return home” and “pain.” Nowhere in its definition does it mention the brothers Knopfler.

*

An album directed at the early CD-buying market, Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million copies on CD, which became the primary medium of my own music consumption until well into college. It is the very definition of pop music to people who were buying CDs at full price in 1985, and not engaging in primitive piracy or rooting through the used bins as I would come to do—that is, people who were the age I am now, caught between their first adult salary and some future moment when they’d have something more pressing to spend it on, someone to save it for. Young professionals with money to burn.

*

“Money for Nothing” was the Billboard #1 hit the day I was born. I want my MTV. Now the “M” in “MTV”  doesn’t stand for anything.

*

Here I am again in this mean old town / And you’re so far away from me / Where are you when the sun goes down / You’re so far away from me. This song belongs in the pantheon of songs about rock musicians on tour. It shares its DNA with Journey’s “Faithfully” and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.” So far away from me / So far I just can’t see. And yet my experience of the truncated version of the song that I wore out on my Walkman under the exploding Virginia sky was terrifying in its bigness, stultifying in its ability to create out of nothing a longing for longing. I didn’t have any sense of what it’s like to desire someone across a great distance, let alone how it feels to be a Knopfler on the road, and yet the gravity of that feeling was physical and delicious and without object. I missed, and was nostalgic for the feeling of missing.

*

In the 1980s, the British Phonographic Institute launched a campaign that insisted “Home Taping Is Killing Music (And It’s Illegal).” Referencing a precedent set in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., where the Supreme Court ruled that recording TV shows on Betamax constituted fair use, and in order to protect the rights of music listeners to tape whatever they wanted off the radio, the non-profit Home Recording Rights Coalition was founded. While the website HRRC.org still exists, their account has been suspended. The pirates have moved on to vaster, deeper seas.

*

My adolescence was generally unremarkable in that I could often be found in my room with my headphones on, trying to get as far away from home as possible. The #1 hits of the last 30 years were about as far as the radio could take me, and by pressing record I could acquire and hoard the ones I loved. We didn’t have cable so I never watched MTV. College and grad school were an embarrassing blur of pretending to have seen music videos I hadn’t seen, of gushing over hidden gem tracks I hadn’t heard. I’d spend long post-party cram sessions on YouTube so the next time these songs came up at the bar, I could say, and by a technicality truthfully, I remember.

*

Somewhere in our usage of the word nostalgia, a sense of longing for things past got involved. The further one is from the longed-for object in time, the more powerful the sentiment: at least, that seems to be the implication. This definition isn’t particularly helpful in understanding how the pace of progress can create a longing for the recent past, or how a longing for the past can be experienced by a child with no real past to speak of. How a person can come to own a thing she didn’t earn.

*

I’m watching the video for “So Far Away” in my office in the dark—something I’ve somehow never done—and it bums me out. I hate that they’re smiling. I hate their over-zealous, skinny white guy swagger. They look like the rock ‘n’ roll caricatures their caricature of a blue collar worker is on about in the album’s second track, the ones getting all that money for nothing and those chicks for free. This video is the very definition of something that hasn’t “aged well” though it is, as I am, only 30 years old.

*

When Brothers in Arms came out, Rykodisc, the label that released it, couldn’t get CDs manufactured fast enough to meet the worldwide demand. I still have all my CDs but I no longer have a way to play them.

*

If I could define nostalgia I’d say it’s the precise feeling I have when “So Far Away” gets to the part where the radio version would’ve faded out but because it’s years later and I’m a grown-ass(ish) woman streaming the album version on Spotify the song continues its slow fade for another minute and a half. Still I know where that moment is and where it would have been, it’s in my body and it feels like the fourth of July.

*

Perhaps a secondary definition would be that nostalgia is the phenomenon of living in two moments at once: the present moment, and a more distant moment that, with the help of some stolen triggering agent, some ancient tension belonging not to you but to the vast network of souls that came before, comes back to inflict itself on the present.

*

This year I’ve been listening almost exclusively and inexplicably to records that were released the year I was born, albums I had no contemporaneous experience of, and yet somehow feel gravitationally drawn to, as if they belong in some way to a collection of events that make up my life. Maybe this is an attempt to run into the arms of a long-lost parent, to root out an empirical connection I have to these albums that was forged on the day I was born and that will bridge some perceived gap in my history. To provide evidence of some kind of lineage, another home to return to, to run away from. To explain what I’m missing when I’m missing nothing.

*

What remains unstated about nostalgia and its authenticity is the importance of ownership: that what’s lost to you in time must, at some distant point, have been yours. Brothers in Arms hit the syndicated airwaves and splintered into millions of pieces. Some of those pieces found their way to me years later as shrapnel, collateral, long-delayed derivatives of the original. What keeps me returning to that July evening in Virginia in my childhood has nothing to do with Dire Straits. I can’t miss Brothers in Arms because it isn’t missing. What’s lost and therefore longed for is how I’d hover over the stereo as the radio DJ’s voice disappeared beneath the swell of those first familiar notes, anxiously waiting to press record.

—Laura Eve Engel

#353: Kanye West, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010)

I started listening to Kanye West during a time when I was trying very, very hard to exercise regularly. For probably a year of my life, Kanye was the closest thing I had to a workout buddy. I’d cue up My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as I stepped onto the machine and lurch into action when the intro of “Dark Fantasy” gave way to the actual song.

Lately I’ve been trying to reestablish a regular workout schedule, and the last time I went to the gym I listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy for the first time in years. I’ve been listening to podcasts lately instead of music when I exercise, because there are several I really like and only limited hours in a day and something’s happened to my relationship with music as I’ve gotten older—it feels busier, doesn’t fade into the background as easily as it used to. I don’t remember music being something I had to actively listen to, the way I feel like I need to now. Or maybe it’s my relationship with quiet? I’ve become more comfortable with quiet, would rather read a book or write something or think without any additional noise. (I am only 29, how is it that I’m thinking of music as noise!) At any rate, I was floored at what listening to the album did for my workout.

Part of it was muscle memory, I think—I was on the same type of machine I used to use regularly all those years ago, an elliptical-type thing that I heard someone refer to as a “grasshopper” once, although I just tried to google it and couldn’t find anything—anyway, my body remembered the machine, how you have to push from your core and keep your strides strong to move it in an elliptical motion, or else it’ll just go up and down like a stair-stepper. I liked it, still like it, because of that immediate tactile feedback—if you’re lagging, you can really tell.

So, yes, my body remembered the machine, but more than that was the music. It felt like the music was powering my legs. I felt like I wanted to dance while exercising. The hour flew by, the energy of the songs carrying me through it, the energy of the songs and the energy of a particular kind of nostalgia.

Around the time we graduated, my college boyfriend and I broke up. It wasn’t the first time we’d broken up, but it should’ve been the last—he was moving to Washington, DC, and I was moving to Richmond, Virginia, and we had no plans to live in the same city ever again. I mean, that’s the logistical reason, but there were also a lot of other reasons—ones that I can see now, but was not willing to see at the time. We broke up and we should’ve stayed broken up, but we didn’t.

Instead, he came down to visit me. I remember one particular weekend in late fall (it was cold in my rented room in the old drafty house in the funky neighborhood where I lived), a weekend where we were on the verge of getting back together but weren’t quite yet, so everything was a thrill. Being with him was a continual rush of adrenaline, and a sort of puzzle—I wanted so badly to be what he wanted, which is a thing that happens, I think, when you’re young and not sure of who you are. I can’t be sure which of us put the album on, but we were in my room, so in my memory it was me. I was delighted when I found out that he, too, had listened to the album, and liked it. We’d come to it separately, and that we both liked it seemed a sign.

This is, of course, in many ways ludicrous—My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a huge album, both popular and critically acclaimed. But I didn’t typically listen to popular rap music, and neither did he. And, really, the thing is this: he usually didn’t like things I liked. Which is not to say that we didn’t like many of the same things—but typically they were things he came to first, things he introduced to me. I felt so proud of myself, that I’d found something he thought was good without him having to direct it to me, like it legitimized my tastes, demonstrated I had something to contribute. It was only a good feeling at the time, a glow—even though, looking back at it, I see how ridiculous that was, that the times I felt appreciated as a legitimate person with legitimate things to contribute were so few and far between.

It’s funny, because my memory of that weekend is a good one—I felt warm next to him, happy to be getting what I wanted, happy to be with the person I most wanted to be with. Even loved. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something I associate with the good parts of a relationship that I now realize was mostly not very good for me. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I wish you’d have some backbone, he told me once—and it hurt because he was right. It hurt because I didn’t have enough power in the relationship to ever have backbone, we weren’t ever on an even enough keel—I was too afraid to lose him, though I shouldn’t have been.

It’s strange to me now how much I labored to maintain a thing that made me so unhappy. I would never have admitted it made me unhappy at the time, couldn’t even see it—that’s strange to me, too. But I guess that isn’t fair to the memory of the relationship, or to my past self. There were things that were good about it. He did introduce me to a lot of music, shape my tastes, and it was good. I knew him in that remarkable way of knowing someone you love—the way he breathed while he slept and the smell of his hair in the morning. I learned the one-liners he’d quote, absorbed them into my own vocabulary, quoting movies sometimes that I hadn’t even seen. I’d read books while he and his roommates watched sports or action movies. There were times we’d lie on his bed and listen to the rain, times we picnicked on his balcony, and when he had to go to jury duty he read the book I told him I thought he’d like while he waited (I guess a lot of jury duty is waiting), and he liked it. I knew what he liked to eat and I knew what he liked to drink and I knew he worried about how much his mother loved him. I thought he was funny and I thought he was handsome and he loved me, I think, in his way. Sometimes he looked at me with astonishment, surprised by his own affection. I do believe it was the best way he knew how to love at the time.

But looking back, I suspect much of what kept us going was actually fear. Fear of the unfamiliar, fear of the unknown, fear that there wouldn’t be anything better. And this week, as I pumped my arms and legs in an endless cycle with that strange sense of ease that came from listening to these songs for the first time in forever, I saw finally the shadow of that past fear when I got to certain songs, to “Blame Game,” or “Runaway”—I regard them so differently, now, from how I did then. It’s fear that keeps you in thrall to someone, that makes you talk about your involvement with a romantic partner as if you have no control over it. I used to feel sympathy when I would listen to those songs, and I thought sometimes people can’t help but do hurtful things. I used to think I can’t love you this much was an okay way to feel in a relationship, unavoidable, part of the thrill and part of the beauty. I was with someone who often said he didn’t know why he treated me poorly, and I think it’s a sign I’ve grown that, now, when I listen to those songs I think: Those couples in those songs are struggling in ways that seem unpleasant, they don’t seem like their relationships bring them enough joy, and that kind of perpetual conflict is not necessary. They’d be better grieving the broken thing and moving on. Because if the rhythm of the thing is the only thing keeping you going, that’s not enough.

But on the first day we listened to those songs together, we couldn’t see our own weakness. We were young and neither of us knew we deserved more than those brief pockets of happiness—and for that weekend, we were happy. We were happy to see one another after a long time apart, and we went to the great restaurant across the street from where I lived and, after, spent the night drinking wine, my face flushed with joy, and I believe he was happy, I believe we both genuinely were happy, on that day we learned we both loved a Kanye West album and couldn’t yet see that our love was the sort of thing a person doesn’t want forever.

—Katelyn Kiley

#354: Billy Joel, "52nd Street" (1978)

I was going to do it. Honest, I had all the sound bites rehearsed—of relationships running their course, of it’s-not-you-it’s-me, of better-off-friends.

But then her cat died.

And then it was her 29th birthday.

And then she had to console her best friend who got cheated on.

And then I got the flu and she brought me soup, damnit.

And then we started watching Gilmore Girls and I thought if I dumped her she’d change her Netflix password.

Then Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years.

And now it’s fucking Valentine's Day and she got us Billy Joel tickets.

She has a thing for over-the-hill rock stars, like she was born in 1956 instead of 1986. She’s dragged me to see Springsteen, Dylan, Simon without Garfunkel, Neils Young and Diamond. Dudes whose influence I can’t deny. But that's the thing about influence—it’s a death notice. The writers kill you off, making way for the person who sounds like you but younger and more attractive and with a Snapchat account. The day a critic calls you “influential” is the day you should stop making music, because everything you produce from then on out will be considered shit, even if it isn’t.

“He’s still got it!” she always says, and I wonder which Instagram filter she’s using, because all I see in front of me is a burlap sack of a man, jowls wiggling with rasp. She told me once that she likes this music because it reminds her of her father. Maybe I hate it because it reminds me of mine. Or maybe she just has really shitty taste in music.

Lucky for me, they’re all starting to die off now. At least I’ll never have to see the Eagles.

So here we are, in line at the baseball stadium. Billy Joel, this one is especially troubling. The guy whose biggest hit is an ode to why he’s too good to be playing at dive bars, a song I only hear at dive bars. I just paid 120 bucks to see the musical equivalent of thousand island salad dressing.

I’m reading Gawker articles on my phone about how uncool Billy Joel is when she taps me on the shoulder.

“Jack!” she says. “This guy just invited us to the front row!”

“Oh, I just meant you,” said the security guard, earnest in his regret. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were with someone. I’m afraid I can’t let him in.”

“But why?” she asks.

“Billy likes to have pretty girls in the front.”

She faces me. “Well then, no thank you.” But her disappointment is obvious.

“Go ahead,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?” And we waffle for a few more rounds, both knowing she’s going to end up in the front.

“I’ll be fine in the back.” I tell her. “This is your big chance. Honestly.”

“You’re so selfless,” she says, pouting her lips. “I’ll text you.”

Sitting alone in section 436, row X, I’m back in planning mode.When breaking up with someone who’s done you no wrong, you have to strike when the iron is cold. She’ll have a post-show glow, that’s going to set us back at least three days.

My phone vibrates. She’s tagged a photo of us on Facebook waiting in line, cheeks pressed together, smiles aligned. Her caption: “We’ve been waiting...For the Longest Time! lol.” We look happy. God, everyone must think we’re so happy.

I flick the screen, scroll more selfies. She is pretty, Billy Joel’s security guard has a point.

“Are you here alone?” A Long Island accent from above. A 50-something woman with crispy bangs and an “I Started the Fire” T-shirt is in the seat directly behind me.

“Oh no, my girlfriend’s actually in the front row.” I say, pointing to the closest of six jumbo screens. I can’t actually tell which girl is her though—they all have long brown hair. Not a blonde in sight in this post-Brinkley world.

“It’s okay,” Long Island says. “I’m here alone too.”

The lights go out and the crowd erupts over a layer of manic piano chords. And for a minute, it sounds like a carnival.

But then, the bass kicks in and Billy’s before us, bobbing his fat bald head, whining: I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

I ask myself, as I have so many times before, what the fuck I am doing here.

I know, I’m here for her, doing what the boyfriend is supposed to do. Her happiness should make me happy.

The set goes on, some songs I recognize: “Uptown Girl,” “New York State of Mind,” that song Elton John ripped off for the Lion King soundtrack. I promise you, I’m trying. Trying to acknowledge the cross generational joy around me, trying to gleen some kind of greater cultural insight out of this experience. I got nothing.

At least this time I don’t have to put on a show for anyone. Not for her, not for the world wide web. She’s told me before that she wishes she’d grown up in the 1960s and 70s, that she could have heard the records released in order and watched rock ‘n’ roll turn the world to technicolor or whatever. But I wonder who she’d be without likes and shares and retweets. I wonder who we’d be.

Now she’s posted a video to  Vine—the “ack a tack ack ack ack ack” from “Movin’ Out” looped over, over, and over again. Grating.

“Get off your phone, young man!” Long Island digs her hot pink nails into my shoulder. “You’re missing out on a legend!”

He’s singing another moany ballad, called “Honesty,” which I only recognize because she made me listen to the Beyoncé cover on the ride here.

Hoooooooonesty, is such a lonely word.

C’mon man.

Hooooooonesty, is hardly ever heard.
And mostly what I need from you.

I hear him. I have to end it, tonight. No more delaying, there’s never going to be a good time. It’s only fair to her.

Billy gets up from his baby grand and moves to the synth stage left. It’s time. The familiar riff reignites the crowd.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray….

Like a vision, she appears on the Jumbotrons, smiling 30 feet across, her woo streaming back on thousands of shiny rectangles in the stands. She doesn’t notice at first, but when she does she looks right into the camera. Hi Jack! she mouths.

“That’s my girlfriend!” I shout, jumping to my feet. I turn around, and Long Island is methodically reciting eight decades of American history at the top of her lungs, tears streaming down her face. I don’t catch her attention.

Rock and Roller Cola wars, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!

I get a text. “did you see me??”

I swipe to Twitter. Breaking: “Netflix Announces Gilmore Girls reboot in 2017.”

I can’t do it.

—Susannah Clark

#355: The Yardbirds, "Having a Rave Up" (1965)

My dad always called it—like, when he was talking about my mom—“playing tapes in your head.” Hearing what you want to hear. Living off muscle memory instead of reality. When you look at someone new and can’t get a clear picture because of all the ghostly layers in front. It’s like relationship cataracts.

*

I needed new glasses. We were about one year in, and I’d already learned not to open myself up to your judgment. But I wanted someone to help me choose new glasses. (Just like I wanted someone to help me pick work heels—slutty—and a new winter hat—you look like an eraser—and a dress for my friend’s funeral—at least we only have to see you in it once, aw I’m just kidding, no but really….)

In the store, I hooked a pair of roundish brown tortoiseshells over my ears. I looked for you. You were in a corner, on a pouf, looking at your phone. I moonwalked over and began to vogue in front of a mirror. When it got nothing, I leaned over and vogued on your face, making you pretty, making you hot, crowning you the king of the ball, Benny Ninja from America’s Next Top Model, granting you a coolness you didn’t even know existed, all those square halos around your head.

You didn’t like them. (The glasses.)

You thought they looked like yours. They were different shapes and sizes, but it’s true both pairs were brown. Which I guess is an unusual shade for eyeglasses. (Although not in Brooklyn.) You stormed out of the store, hissing that looking like me was the last thing you’d ever want to do.

Anyway, later that night, we met your friends for drinks. It was almost your birthday. The story came up and I told it in a funny way, making both of us the heroes and the glasses the villains. I cast the whole thing as hapless and funny: me Diane, you Woody, and my new specs the runaway lobsters. You both had black glasses before, your friends said. Who cares if they match again now? You said, wasted and honest, Because she looks better in them than I do.

I see the disappointment in your friends’ faces and I hang my head in shame—for both of us, for different reasons. And I hear the Yardbirds….If you've ever been to New York City / You know what I'm talking about, yes you do / Well, if you've ever been to New York City / You know what I'm talking about / They got such pretty little girls in that big town….

*

Round about two years in, you said a terrible thing to me. The funny thing is, I never thought about leaving. (Remember what made me do it, finally? It was Matt’s text about a chicken-flavored lollipop.) That terrible thing you said, my worst fear, the most awful and damaging thing a man could say, didn’t make me think of leaving. When you insisted on starting the laundry at 10 p.m. on Sunday nights, I thought about it then. Thought about it when you went out with your best friend, who you’d once slept with, and slunk back too late, whiskeyed up and giggly. Other times too, of course. But not then, when it was obvious.

That fact hurts more now than what you actually said. Although I can still hear those words rolling across the floor of my brain and tocking into each other. Like fat, heavy, blue-veined marbles.

Anyway, I didn’t let you touch me for a month. When I gave in, you had sex with me on the floor (this was at the old apartment, on 38th Street, the one where the next-door neighbor remixed his own techno tracks and the dog walker stole a thousand bucks cash the day before we moved out) and honestly, I don’t think you noticed I stared into space the whole time. I just looked at the ceiling and wondered if this was what it felt like to do a rape scene in a movie. And in my head, while you were recording yourself into my memory, a tape played: I'm a man / I'm a full grown man, yeah / A man / I'm a natural-born lover-man / You don't talk about / A man.

You cried when you were very, very drunk. Got weepy over how much you loved me. Sometimes on the subway. Sometimes at a bar. Sometimes you would vomit and the next morning, doing a Clorox douse that lit up my entire nasal passage, I would wonder what I was cleaning. Was it 90% puke and 10% evaporated tears? 85-25? Less? What percentage should I be hoping for?

I used to read about domestic abuse on a bulletin in a bathroom stall in my first-year dorm. They tacked it up a few weeks after we moved in. Does he put you down in front of your friends? it said, black block letters on a purple background. Does he make you feel less than? Does he say that no one else will have you? That no one else will put up with your crazy? That no one else will ever want to fuck you? Does he think that he’s a man / a full grown man, yeah / a natural-born lover-man, but really he’s….

Three and a half years in, I thought to myself—you are living stereotypically. You are a pamphlet. Take the mental questionnaire. Fill it out honestly. If you answer yes even once, tell a Resident Advisor or the Dean of Students. (Except this is adulthood, where the closest thing you come to true authority is a good therapist and when you find one of those, you almost want to get the fuck out, because at that point they’re so achingly close to being the parent you always dreamed of that you can’t stand it.)

I never took the questionnaire. Because I love you / Just the same / And I want you / To remain / By my side. It’s a bizarre feeling when you realize you’re re-enacting something from a piece of purple paper you used to shit in front of.

*

We broke up because you walked slowly from the subway to our front door the time I got food poisoning from chestnut soup during restaurant week. I thought I was going to lose it in my pants, and you—the one with keys—took the tiniest steps home. Like your feet were bound. Like someone was watching and you didn’t want to seem like a man in a rush. Eventually, I yelled at you. Then I snatched the keys and ran up the four flights of stairs, sphincter loosening with each step.

We broke up because I made dinner and put a bowl down in some grease on the stove. You leaned in close to scream at the side of my face, keeping your arms straight and your body far away. If I’d turned 90 degrees and kissed you, we would have looked like two very chaste cartoon figures, two strawberry shortcakes sweetly smooching. She’s so respectable / she’s so respectable / did you love her / no no no / did you hug her / no no no / did you squeeze her / no no no / did you kiss her / no no no

I walked into our second bedroom and sat, choking down gummy Velveeta mac ‘n’ cheese. Moments later, you followed me in. You wanted me to eat dinner in the living room. I started crying. Why did you yell at me, I said. I didn’t do anything to you, I said. Your eyes softened. I ate my cold dinner in the living room. Because honestly, four years in, it felt ridiculous to sit by myself in the dark.

*

I’m a year out. I thought I left you behind, the tapes shredded in my car, shiny brown guts spooled all over the passenger seat, but I wonder when I can have myself back again. I wonder when I’ll get over wasting half my 20s. I wonder when I’ll stop instinctually adding, then removing, your favorite foods from my grocery cart.

Anyway, I almost recorded a football game for you the other day. I tried to cure myself by taping it and watching it alone. I have no idea if it worked. It's hard to tell because, you know, I still hum them. The sad songs of smart women.

—Molly Seltzer

#356: Randy Newman, "12 Songs" (1970)

12 Songs is a brutal listen. It is almost unthinkable that this is the same Randy Newman who would go on to write sweet songs for Pixar. And it’s a difficult album to critique because of both the artist who created it and the pedigree behind it. Robert Christgau famously called 12 Songs “a perfect album,” and Newman is widely regarded as a smart, acerbic songwriter who rarely makes his intentions explicit. That said, in 2016, a song like “Yellow Man” is tough to take.

Now, if you haven’t heard “Yellow Man,” go ahead and click here and give it a listen. On the album, “Yellow Man” follows Newman’s cover of “Underneath the Harlem Moon” and reads, more or less, like a 1970s update of “Harlem Moon”’s downtown racism, just swapping out Harlem for Vietnam. Contemporary critics lauded this choice, crediting Newman with sly swipes at the disgusting side of the American psyche. Yet, by the publication of the original RS 500, when it came time to write about the album, the couplet of songs is ignored entirely.

Look, if you buy what Newman is selling, this is great, deadpan satire. A joke so close to its target, they become the same thing. And the gag is propelled further by a comic who just isn’t interested in signaling to the audience where the punchline is. Newman simply plays his songs and lets the listener parce out intent from the patchwork of images and melodies. The sequencing of the tracks is a clue. As is the placement of “Old Kentucky Home” immediately after “Yellow Man.” Newman gives the listener a huge dose of American racism, both from the North and South, and leaves it at that.

But I just don’t buy it. I don’t think Newman is racist. I just think he misses badly. The fulcrum of the joke that lets “Yellow Man” exist in a way that makes listeners comfortable hinges on listening to “Harlem Moon” and thinking “Wow, that’s horrible what people wrote about African Americans way back when.” Only to have Newman swoop in one track later with an updated version using contemporary racist attitudes towards Vietnam as the fuel. “Boy oh boy, we sure do look foolish,” we’re meant to think. “That witty troubadour Randy Newman sure gave us what for!”

Call me a killjoy but that just isn’t enough. There is truth to it, yes. But I can’t help the feeling that there were far too many people giggling for all the wrong reasons before, during, and after the song’s release. This is all speculation, but I feel a certain sense of “getting away it” layered in some of these 12 Songs. And believe me, Newman knows there are people like me out there who will write reviews like this. Years later, with the release of “Short People” he’d find out what a real miss looks like.

But it isn’t just too-bold swings at stereotypes that make 12 Songs so uncompromising. The song “Suzanne” is, musically, one of my favorites on the record. Lyrically, it tells the first person story of a man who finds a woman’s phone number scrawled on a wall and plans to stalk her down and rape her. In what may be another sly sequencing joke, “Suzanne” follows “Mama Told Me Not to Come” which is one of Newman’s most joyous, paranoid, silly and ultimately great songs.

12 Songs is a nasty record. And it has to be up to each listener to decide if the tricks Newman is pulling are working or if you can see a little too much of the man behind the curtain to believe the illusions. So many critics hail these types of risks as bold or unflinching. But those platitudes really hinge on if you think the risks are working. Personally, they don’t work for me. So it’s difficult to salute the effort.

Newman would go on to release a truly great string of records throughout the 1970s. And to appreciate them it is a good idea to cozy up with the monsters in 12 Songs if only for a few listens. It doesn’t work all the time. And the record is far, far worse for the wear than anything thus far seen on The RS 500, but there is value in making the call yourself. And even within all that nastiness there are still a few genuinely perfect songs. “Mama Told Me Not To Come” is still the best anxiety-ridden nerd anthem anyone would write until the Talking Heads showed up. And “Suzanne” is “Frankie Teardrop” levels of terrifying. Try out 12 Songs. It is ok if you hate it.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski