#277: Janet Jackson, "Rhythm Nation 1814" (1989)

America turned loose on America -
All living is listening for a throat to open -
The length of its silence shaping lives.

                        -       Claudia Rankine, Citizen

THE MANIFESTO OF THE RHYTHM NATION 1814

A generation full of courage, come forth with me! We are drawing battle lines, with music by our side, to fight the color lines.

Let’s work together to improve our way of life. Join voices in protest to social injustice. Let it be known:

WE ARE A PART OF A RHYTHM NATION

People of the World! Unite! We hereby form THE RHYTHM NATION.

What We Want
What We Believe

We draw together to fight homelessness, drugs and crime spreadin’ on the streets, we fight for the people who can't find enough to eat, for the kids who can't go out and play: that's the state of the world today, that is why we have come together, this is our struggle.

This is the test: No struggle, no progress.

Say it people: NO STRUGGLE, NO PROGRESS.

Lend a hand to help your brother do his best. Things are getting worse! We have to make them better! It's time to give a damn. Let's work together, come on.

MIZ JACKSON
Ministress of Information
The Rhythm Nation 1814

In 1989, when Janet Jackson released Rhythm Nation 1814, I was thirteen years old, growing up in a white middle class household in southern Ohio. And therefore I probably have no right to say anything about Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814.

I’d like to talk for a moment about what just happened in this country. When I started out writing this piece, it was a piece of fiction: the story of Miz Jackson and Black Cat, the runaway white rebel who joined the cause to help her black brothers and sisters fight for the Manifesto of the Rhythm Nation. The manifesto is just as you see it above: mostly from Janet’s own lyrics. Then, in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, as the returns for the American election came in and elected Donald J. Trump, who had run a campaign—let’s be frank now—on a platform of racism and xenophobia, as the next president of the United States of America, I realized how tone deaf this piece would turn out to be. How much it felt like appropriation. How much it relied on my being white, privileged enough to have fantasies about white liberals joining the cause, how much it relied on my readers being so, too. So I scrapped it. (The “Miz” in “Miz Jackson” was borrowed from “Nasty Boys,” intended to be an echo of Trump’s own words in the final debate. It was also a nod to an idealistic liberal white revolutionary, Mizmoon Soltysik of the Symbionese Liberation Army, famous for kidnapping Patricia Hearst.)

But I want to let the manifesto stand. Because, initially, the title song on Janet Jackson’s album was a manifesto, and that has to be recognized. When Janet Jackson made this album after 8 years of Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, she was writing lyrics with sincerity about the struggles of black people in America. I’m sure I understood some of the social issues Janet Jackson was singing about in a distant sense as a thirteen year old, but it’s incredibly likely that I was under the impression that I was changing the world just by listening to a Janet Jackson album. But listening to Rhythm Nation 1814 did nothing to change anything. In the 27 years since her album was released, black men and women are still being imprisoned for Reagan’s war on drugs; and if there is no cause to imprison them, they are simply being shot in the street by police officers.

In my original story, I explained the fourth verse of our very own national anthem, in which Francis Scott Key wrote, in 1814:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

The year of Francis Scott Key’s writing of these words is the reason for the 1814 in Janet’s album title. This was written before the Civil War, before the practice of slavery had been outlawed in the United States. According to some historians, Francis Scott Key was writing in this verse specifically about the Corps of Colonial Marines, escaped American slaves hired by the British to fight against the Americans in the War of 1812 and the Battle of Fort McHenry, about which these verses were written. In this verse, he is actively rooting for the demise of these former slaves. The refrain became our national anthem, sung before ballgames; our national anthem, during which some recently have felt compelled to kneel rather than salute. It’s worth understanding to its complete depths, drilled down to the fourth verse. It’s part of us; just as the slavery described therein is part of us, an undeniable part of the fabric of this country. We as white people need to confront this and own it.

This too: silence is consent.

I’m writing to break my silence.

I read an assortment of Black Panther texts and speeches in preparation for writing the fiction of Miz Jackson’s manifesto. I borrowed—or, rather, appropriated—tone and even a few words directly from their platform. Maybe it was Janet’s reference to the “Black Cat” that pointed me in this direction, but it seemed obvious to me that my fictionalization of Janet Jackson’s call to arms—and especially a white liberal’s interpretation of it—would have parallels to that of the Black Panther Party. They were both equally tired of the murder and the destruction of their communities. The Black Panthers rejected capitalism and promoted a socialist agenda for educating and feeding their children: We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. Janet Jackson wrote pop music that was commercialized and sold but espoused the same message: We fight for the people who can't find enough to eat. Her message was heard in bedrooms across America, but was it heard? How much of a manifesto was it, packaged and sold to little white girls in the Midwest? Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, spoke on April 27, 1969 (seven months before he, too, was killed in a police raid), of the socialist intent behind starting the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program: “We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.”

Manifestos, like Janet’s about breaking the color lines, with no practice ain’t shit.

Wouldn’t it have been easy to write something light about a Janet Jackson album, take you on an escapade? In my story there were soft moments when Miz Jackson read a letter from her revolutionary lover who wrote “I miss you much.” That was predominantly what I took away from Janet Jackson’s album back when I first heard it. Shot like an arrow going through my heart / That's the pain I feel / I feel whenever we're apart. Making up dance routines and squealing when her slick-looking music videos came on MTV. The privilege of dance routines. But I’m 40 now. I’m a white woman living in America where Donald J. Trump was just elected president by 53% of white women, and if I don’t confront the fact that the ease with which I greeted Rhythm Nation 1814 back in the day is an important indicator of the level to which I need to help change things, then I’m doing nothing to break the color lines Janet sang about. Ain’t shit.

I suppose in the end this is, like Claudia Rankine’s “America turned loose on America,” an essay turned loose on a piece of fiction, or: myself turned loose on myself. We write in order to sort through our thoughts, give them shape. I wrote this in order to confront what is happening in this country as well as what is happening inside me, the white privilege I have grown up with and how to handle and utilize that privilege going forward.

There are things we can do with our energies, and things we cannot help but do, and I cannot help but do this: activate my awareness. Join voices in protest to social injustice. For real this time: more than just listening to Janet Jackson’s album in my bedroom.

Huey P. Newton, speaking to The Movement (a leftist newspaper associated with SNCC and SDS) in August of 1968: “I personally think that there are many young white revolutionaries who are sincere in attempting to realign themselves with mankind, and to make a reality out of the high moral standards that their fathers and forefathers only expressed.” Most liberal whites are predominantly unactivated allies. Some of us think we are being allies, but what have we given so far but words? Am I giving more than words here, more than a shallow assessment of Janet Jackson’s own protest? And by giving words, aren’t we just talking over those we need to be listening to?

Here I am, Janet: I’m listening to your manifesto. I’m ready to struggle and cast aside the ease of fantasy I grew up with. I should have arrived here before, fought harder, truly struggled, not just shouted encouragement on the sidelines of the struggle. I’m reaching out to lend a hand like you asked back when I was thirteen, before I knew how to give it. I was listening, but I wasn’t listening.

That ain’t shit.

—Zan McQuade

#278: Harry Smith (Ed.), "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952)

Harry Everett Smith did not die on November 27, 1991. No, Harry Everett Smith disappeared—vanished, seemingly, without a trace in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. The date of November 27 was provided by the missing man’s legal representatives to authorities and creditors as the official date of death after an exhaustive five-month search for the 68-year-old visual artist, self-educated student of anthropology and ethnography, and self-proclaimed mystic ended with far more questions than answers.

In the years leading up to his vanishing, the staff working at the Hotel Chelsea reported seeing Harry Everett Smith carrying boxes to Room 328, his permanent residence at the time, daily, sometimes two or three times a day. The boxes, often overflowing, consisted entirely of his eccentric collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print records—artifacts, according to Harry Everett Smith, that represented man’s complexities and idiosyncrasies. Varying cultures’ manipulations of string for games, stories, and divinations fascinated the ethnographer; the age-long yearning for flight and transcendence found in paper airplanes astounded the anthropologist; the craft, geometry, and superstitions intertwined with Ukrainian Easter eggs bemused the artist and mystic; and the recordings of America’s past haunted the old man.

Management at the Hotel Chelsea feared, though, Harry Everett Smith’s room was becoming a site of hoarding brought about by his compulsive, decades-long ethnographic predilections. However, upon inspection, under the pretense of a supposed water leak in the room directly above 328, a maintenance worker reported that none of the boxes, nor any string figure, paper airplane, egg, or record, were found in the room, just the usual furnishings. Disbelieving this, hotel manager David Reed, pretending to give in-person courtesy calls to all 250 residents of the hotel, visited Harry Everett Smith’s room and discovered the maintenance worker was telling the truth: the room was, in fact, absent any boxes and collectibles. Curious about the final location of Smith’s collection, as he and the staff were sure they had only seen boxes going into the boarder’s room and never any coming out, Reed stopped Harry Everett Smith in the lobby one morning and asked the old man where he stored his collection. Harry Everett Smith simply replied, “Oh, I put them in storage.”

On June 11, 1991, poet Allen Ginsberg visited his close friend Harry Everett Smith at his hotel residence. There, the two men spent the evening listening to records and smoking marijuana while discussing America’s rapid approach towards the new millennium, a conversation that hampered the otherwise optimistic mood of the room. Ginsberg expressed concern about the direction of American poetry, while Harry Everett Smith conveyed unease with the current course of conservation for the world’s greatest treasures. Easter eggs, paper airplanes, and string figures—physical objects—could stand a chance against the specter of time through the adequate methods of preservation, but it was the ephemerality of music and its media that concerned him. Music lasts in fleeting moments. Those moments are often transcribed to physical objects for preservation, yes, but the physical objects of transcription were now becoming as ephemeral as the fleeting moments of music themselves. The relatively young CD technology, for example, with its supposed lossless sound and promised physical longevity, did not convince the collector. Not long after compact discs became available on the consumer market, Harry Everett Smith purchased Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits and was disheartened with the “disc rot” that began to appear over time—the  discoloration, or bronzing, of the disc caused by abrasions or oxidation of the reflective layer that rendered it unreadable, therefore unplayable. And magnetic tape recordings, with their susceptibility to sticky-shed syndrome, did not provide a stable alternative to the crisis of media preservation. Of course, Harry Everett Smith recognized that vinyl records were not without their faults, but the longevity of their form with the proper care, as far as he was concerned, was the proper path forward. He couldn’t help but smile at the idea of Voyagers 1 and 2, launched fourteen years prior, traveling across the cosmos with phonograph records, each containing greetings and salutations in 55 languages in addition to the sounds and music of Earth, and those records reaching the inhabitants of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years. “Who would listen and what would they think of us? Would we be worth their time? Would they want to know us?” were questions that Harry Everett Smith often pondered when he considered the two ambassadors. But with each iteration of media development, Harry Everett Smith feared that music, testimony to the human condition writ large, was on the verge of oblivion. In 40,000 years, the extraterrestrials of Gliese 445 could possibly hold in their prehensile organs the only available recordings of human existence, and upon visiting our blue world, discover us as frauds without evidence or proof of our humanity. Ginsberg, of course, giggling from the pot, tried to comfort his friend with the same kind of humanism that usually consoled Harry Everett Smith: man would find a way, as they always had, to preserve and curate, to carry on. To this reassurance, Harry Everett Smith responded, “I don’t want to think or know about what comes after this, but I have a plan.”

As the evening came to a close, Harry Everett Smith pulled out his six-LP compilation of American folk music, a compilation he curated from his personal collection of 78s and released in 1952 with the help of Folkways Records, and began to play Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator.” Ginsberg complemented his friend on the selection of songs on the compilation, a range of songs, he noticed, that highlighted the American folk tradition exquisitely. The collector thanked the poet for his praise and confided that there was, in fact, to be a seventh vinyl disc in the box set, but it was cut at the last minute during production due to cost. Ginsberg, enthusiastic and wanting to hear the songs that were excised, was told by Harry Everett Smith to return the following evening for another listening party as he needed to consult his archives for the seventh disc to do so. But when Ginsberg returned the next day, Harry Everett Smith was not in his room nor would he ever be in the room again. June 11 was the last time Harry Everett Smith was ever seen.

*

Two weeks after his disappearance, the Hotel Chelsea management closed Harry Everett Smith’s account and was in the process of removing his belongings from the premises, what little effects he had, when hotel maid Esmeralda Díaz discovered the steel 6-foot x 3-foot door in the back of the hotel closet. Upon opening the steel door, Esmeralda Díaz entered a temperature-controlled corridor of approximately 50 feet in length with four doors, two on each wall. Díaz, curious, opened one of the doors to discover a large room with hundreds of rows of shelves. On the nearest shelf, the maid could make out string figures pinned to black felt boards. The maid immediately closed the door and reported the discovery to hotel manager David Reed, prompting an investigation by both hotel officials and members of the Smith estate. By all intents and purposes, the door should not have existed. The head maintenance official could not find evidence of the door, nor the corridor and rooms, in the hotel plans. Dimensionally, and logically, the door should have led to the brick wall facing the back alley of the Hotel Chelsea and the four rooms to the parallel streets north and south of the block. But the door, and its corridor and rooms, were inexplicably there, and apparently, so was Harry Everett Smith’s collection. These rooms were Harry Everett Smith’s archives.

A week after the door was discovered, Henry Wallace, Smith’s lawyer and estate executor, appointed the task of cataloging Harry Everett Smith’s collection to four paralegals. This is what the paralegals discovered when they began the process of cataloging: Each room was devoted to one of Harry Everett Smith’s ethnographic predilections, and in that given room, every iteration of that artifact could be found shelved. For example, in Room A, the string figure gallery, one would discover every variation and permutation of the Apache rug: Apache rugs starting from one inch and intermittently moving up in size by the half-inch, as well as constructed from every material known to man, organic and inorganic. Apache rugs made of cotton twine, sisa, jute, hemp, henequen, coir and other natural fibers before moving to twine of every metallic base. In Room B, one would find a paper airplane in every variant: different sizes and weighted sheets in every imaginable color in the spectrum, from A to Z: Absolute Zero, Acid Green, Aero, Aero Blue, African Violet, Air Force Blue, Air Superiority Blue, Alabaster, Alice Blue and so on and so forth. The same could be found in the vinyl record gallery, Room C: every pressing, national and international, of every given release starting at “Aa” was there, and each album had hundreds upon hundreds of copies to account for the variations in sound inherent in each one—each record’s sound conditioned by the production and handling of the individual record. The categorization of every permutation from A to Z was a mere hypothesis, though. After spending two months in Room C, their days inside increasing each week, the four paralegals had not left the first entry of the library—the first record archived—and there seemed to be no end in sight to that particular record. The same was for the cases of Rooms A, B, and D: the rooms and shelves were seemingly infinite in length with infinite entries. Given Harry Everett Smith’s rigid and precise archival tendencies, the Smith estate could only come to the natural conclusion that the four rooms were infinite archives, his own Library of Babel.

Allen Ginsberg, learning of the seemingly boundless library, and remembering Harry Everett Smith’s request of the poet, posited that, perhaps, his friend was lost in his own library. Against the wishes of his partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg decided to mount an expedition into the library to find Harry Everett Smith. Ginsberg recruited the help of Smith’s lawyer, Wallace, a competent mountain climber and backpacker, and college-student videographer Richard Clark as the third party. The three men entered Room C on August 31 and returned to the Hotel Chelsea nearly three months later, on November 20. All three men were malnourished and unkempt when re-entering the hotel room and in varying states of distress. Ginsberg and Wallace screamed and raved unintelligibly about what they had experienced in the library, while Clark, on the other hand, returned in an almost catatonic state. Clark simply handed over a tape recording of the expedition and retreated into seclusion.

The day before Harry Everett Smith was officially declared dead, members of the Smith family and the Wallace firm convened and listened to the Smith Rescue Expedition tape to hopefully explain the disappearance of Harry Everett Smith and to determine the cause of Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark’s mental declines. This is what they heard: In week five of their expedition, the three men—Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark—could hear the faint sound of folk music playing in the distance, which, to the three men, could only be coming from Harry Everett Wallace. However, after three weeks of trying to find the source, the three rescuers never seemed to get closer: the immeasurable library appeared to be echoing the music off its never-ending walls and shelves, making the music travel farther than the three men were capable of trekking. Taunted by the reverberations of the fathomless archive, in addition to its immense size, the three explorers reached almost complete mental breakdowns. The fact that the three returned to the Hotel Chelsea alive was considered a near miracle.

Immediately after listening to the tape, and under the recommendation of the Smith family and Wallace firm, Hotel Chelsea management closed the door to the infinite library, permanently sealing shut an extensive collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, out-of-print records, and presumably, Harry Everett Smith.

—Dillon Hawkins

#279: David Bowie, "Aladdin Sane" (1973)

The storm’s slowing inland, like a semi truck hitting the steep, hard-packed slope of a down-grade’s emergency pull-off. In the delirium of dark and rain made mirror by the rental car’s windshield wipers and oncoming headlights, I blindly thumb through my Amazon Cloud player for anything that will keep me awake, that can provide a backbeat to the rock-a-bye of the wind gusts rising out of the Shenandoah. I type bo by muscle memory so I can toggle between Bob and Bowie. No sleep with a voice nasal-y and fast talking, I think I’ll call it America, I said as we hit land; no sleep in the heaviest of Bowie’s albums, oh honey, watch that man.

I’m driving back to New Jersey from Lena and Brad’s wedding in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to which I’d driven that morning—five hours down, five hours up. I wanted to stay, wanted to have another whiskey ginger and join the dance floor, but I have a reading tomorrow in Newark I can’t miss, and much grading to do besides. My thoughts seem like the flat line of a heart monitor, a beaded break sliding across the screen. I’m worn out from weeks of travel and work. A few weeks ago, at my gate in Minneapolis, I told a guy that I liked his hat, a black baseball cap with the cross-stitched image of Ziggy Stardust from the cover of Aladdin Sane, red and blue lightning homespun in heavy thread, orange-red mullet, the sharp cheeks, eyes downcast.

“Thanks,” the guy said, smiling as he turned to see who’d spoken. I caught his eyes’ movements, their gaze mirrored in shape by the scar on my cheek, right eye to jawline.

I moved forward, as if my zone had been called.

I’ve been traveling alone a lot lately, on trains and planes and rental cars. I like the me that travels alone, the one that leaves behind my husband at home, my dog, the dirty dishes, the laundry, a couple changes of clothes stuffed in a duffel bag, earbuds in, an order of two coffees from the flight attendant’s cart. In-laws have often made comments about the fact that I travel on my own, that I’m the wife that leaves her husband alone. “Where’s J. at?” my mother-in-law says of a picture of me and a friend in a new city.

Recently, while hiking with my husband along a steep trail beside the Musconetcong River, we passed a young woman, out for a hike alone. It was deep on the trail, way back from the road. We told her hello, and she said hello back, her eyes scanning everyone and everything. After she was out of range, I told J. that I would never do that, never go out into the woods alone.

“I would be worried if you did,” he says, tugging our dog away from some deer scat.

My father, a forensic scientist and former cop, lectured me throughout my childhood about the dangers of girls and women going out on their own. He told me which way to twist an attacker’s wrist, to kick the backs of their knees, use fingernails on their eyes, “and don’t be afraid to give them a hard kick to their privates.” Not until recently did I ever realize what an impact these early lectures had on me and the way I move in the world, the way I avoid being truly alone away from help or streetlights or a phone.

J. once gave me pepper spray to keep on my keychain—I think it was a stocking stuffer. After a while, even though I lived in a city and rode my bicycle to and from the campus where I worked, I stopped carrying it, as if it was an invitation to try me, and I started meeting every man’s eyes as I passed him. I started telling them “hello.”

I’m not sure what changed in me, why I felt this would keep me safe, why I took the risk of not having a defensive weapon. I remembered then something else my father said, that I should never show fear—that is, weakness—in public. Stay alert. Show that you will remember a face, that you will remember who they are, if something ever happens. Traveling alone, although not a hike in the woods, allows me to be in public, in the world as myself, not a woman, a vulnerable target, a person with somewhere to go.

I buzzed my hair off after I was clear of cancer, in part because I was still so afraid it would return and, also, because I’d been so afraid that I would lose my hair in chemo, back when the doctors thought I’d have to go through a few rounds. Thankfully, the biopsy from the third excisive surgery of my cheek let me off the hook of chemo. By buzzing it later, when I was “okay,” or as well as the aftershocks of the anxiety and trauma would allow me to be, I was able to take ownership over my body, a body that had felt de-sexualized, some days even gender-less, when I was sick.

When I went out with my husband to supper, servers often called me “sir” when they walked up behind me. I wasn’t offended. It was like having someone hurl a pebble at me when I was standing behind tempered glass. In some ways, it was the most respect I’ve ever received from strangers in public.

“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a lesbian?” a hairdresser asked me candidly.

“So what if they do—there’s nothing wrong with that. Plus, it’s none of their business,” I said, and she didn’t reply, but I could tell in the mirror by the way she studied the hair clumping up like bales of hay before falling to the floor that she was worried for me.

On Twitter, I say something about how triggering the news is about Donald Tr*mp’s sexual misconduct, and a rando responds that I’m just jealous that he didn’t rape me and that no one would ever “consider me” because I look like a “little feminazi.”

A female friend types to me, “feminazis unite!” but even that hits me the wrong way. The word further problematizes feminism, connecting it to Nazism. I block the rando, close my computer, and go to bed.

Near Grimes, Pennsylvania, a marquee reads:

GOD UNIQUELY & LOVINGLY

CREATED YOU

TRANSGENDER IS      HUMANISM

There’s a telephone number beneath the message, and I wonder who would answer if I called. I’m surprised to see the sign, even though I don’t quite follow its meaning and fear that it has been defaced from “TRANSGENDER IS DEHUMANISM,” since I’m in a part of the country littered with “BLUE LIVES MATTER” and “TR*MP PENCE 2016” signs. If it is as I fear, I wonder if the argument is that God created each person as a specific gender and, therefore, one shouldn’t try to change it. If it isn’t, if it is in support of trans individuals, it’s suggesting that it’s God’s intention to create each individual’s unique gender identity. I hope it’s the latter.

Every time I travel, I lose myself in my head and almost forget that I have a body, except when my hips begin to ache from sitting at the wheel all day or my feet start to swell from a cross-country flight. Tonight, my body reveals itself only in its sleepiness. I’m uncertain if the bodily disconnect is a good or a bad thing, something I should want, something I should even need. Do we need the mercy of being relieved from our bodies sometimes? Does you mean the you I understand myself to be, or the you that others see me as, a body?

When I was a kid, I used to play in drag all the time. I wanted to have all the boys’ roles in playtime: father, sheriff, cavalry general. I wore baseball caps so often that my softball coach called me “The Hat,” and my mother once had to make me a giant fake beard out of felt and brown-dyed cotton balls and elastic so I could wear it for a book report at school. I wouldn’t let my mother refer to my underwear as “panties,” and I loathed the thought of ever having a period or wearing a bra or buying makeup. I hated the color pink and I detested princesses, because I saw them as weak. In truth, I saw all things “feminine” as inferior to explorers and scientists and doctors and cowboys (all of which I envisioned as male) because women didn’t seem to have any agency in their lives, in the world. It wasn’t until I hit puberty that I began to pay attention to, even see value in things I thought were “for girls.” (Estrogen, man.) My feminism seems to have an antecedent in my tomboyishness, in that play-drag. Although I identify as a woman, I want to complicate what that means, how being a woman sometimes means embracing feelings and expressions of masculinity, or what some often think of as “masculine.”

When I became sick, I retreated into those early feelings of gender-inbetweenness, in part, I believe, because I wanted to recover my agency, or at the very least to signal to the world that I didn’t have any agency as a woman over my sickness. My melanoma was sexless, genderless, and it had control over me, my body and possibly my death, as well as my thoughts. It said, hide in yourself, girl. Change who you are and maybe it won’t recognize you.

But accompanying these feelings were the comments—from friends and strangers alike—about the scar that shifted and changed and redrew itself across my face with every surgery. “What’s the other guy look like?” our house mover joked, as if I was one “guy” and I’d been in a roadhouse knife fight with some biker.

A nurse once said, “Once it heals, it will become less noticeable, more feminine looking.”

“Think of it as a beauty mark,” someone else said, without my query.

Although I temporarily felt less feminine, I didn’t feel as if I had gained any agency; I just felt dehumanized. I was the somebody that something had happened to.

It took months, even a few years, before I began to regain a sense of myself as something beyond the cancer, something not defined by it. In doing so, and through therapy, I learned to honor all of me, the androgyny of my mind and my trauma, the way some days I still need to find myself not woman, just me.

—Emilia Phillips

#280: U2, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000)

We could have been friends, but there wasn’t much to me in those days. Bits and pieces, strings of unconnected thoughts, underneath a chaos of fragmented notions. As bad as I seem, I promise I was worse than I am. In all my crustached, lip-smacking glory, refraction of heaven-bent light through my constant excitable spittle, wearing my Dragon Ball Z T-shirt, with notions of the future we were all training our hearts for—in the midst of knowing I was a fallow field of human evolution—I had a locker next to hers, and I wanted so badly to talk to her about this album: All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

When I asked if she’d heard it, though, she held with me the kind of hyper-focused eye contact people make when they realize the person they’re talking to has come a little unhinged. She’s unlucky enough to be closing the adjacent locker—positioned to make a quick escape—and inside a moment’s passing, the thought occurs to her. That’s when she starts to think U2 doesn’t just annoy her. She starts to think of that shit-stain megalomaniacal prick of a singer, running around in his translucent sunglasses, or wearing a gold suit and pretending to be the devil.

She was right to think, hopeless, when she looked at me and saw I was careening into an adulthood where I will still (often and secretly) think of that maniac in the colored glasses whenever I can’t get my locker open. An adulthood in which I will still think, When exactly did U2 stop being cool, and how did I miss it so thoroughly? Why was U2 still cool to me? I’m not the only one still wondering: “When did U2 become uncool” is still a frequently-searched question on Google, which makes me feel oddly comforted.

*

If I had the courage and the time machine to go back to that moment, in our old school, right before she slammed the door shut and turned the combination lock with a quick twist of her thumb and index finger, I’d ask if she remembered the millennium. It feels so thoroughly quaint to talk about now. Back then, though, it was a big deal. The run-up to 2000 seemed to start somewhere in 1997, and it lasted forever. All anyone could talk about was the future. We all felt the stillness of time, looming up suddenly the way an onrushing train seems to slow across the leaden folds of a panicked brain.

If I could go back in time, I’d ask if she remembered the moment of relief she felt at midnight when it all switched over. The devil, of course, wasn’t in anyone’s computers. It wasn’t in the clocks, or the machines stashed down in the bowels of the world’s banking houses. But we weren’t to know for sure, then, were we? The devil is in the details, and such details are always with us.

For U2, the nineties were bookended by Achtung Baby in 1991 and All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000. The creation of Achtung Baby—which was essentially a re-creation of U2 itself, following accusations of self-righteousness, bombast, and tiresome sincerity—took three years and nearly destroyed the band. In writing Achtung Baby, U2 was determined to avoid making the “Big Statements” critics had grown tired of, without doing away big material: the band explored spiritual doubt, personal failings, and tensions of religious and sexual devotion. In the Rolling Stone review of Achtung Baby, Elysa Gardner writes, “Squarely acknowledging his own potential for hypocrisy and inadequacy, and addressing basic human weaknesses rather than the failings of society at large, Bono sounds humbler and more vulnerable than in the past.”

Between Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind, there was Zooropa and Pop, two albums in which the band experimented with their sound as well as with irony, parody, and megalomania. Held up with the rest of their albums, I think these two are a little boring and overdone. But their stylized performances during the resulting world tours were fascinating. Before there was Trump—back in the gaudy nineties, when we didn’t think it was necessary to abandon all decorum to pursue spectacle—there was the Pop Tour, with Bono prancing around on stage, his powdered face all full of makeup, playing the devil.

What should the devil look like, anyhow: agitating, playful, and grim? Smug, calamitous, and shy? Unsteady in his gaze and in his walk, or stony-eyed—moss-bitten, even? Manic Bono found him in MacPhisto—furious, giddy and delighted. In performances in Italy, Bono-as-MacPhisto talked about how he missed Mussolini, and would leave messages for il Duce’s granddaughter, telling her what a great job the old man had done—and that he would have been very proud of her.

Thousands in the audience laughed, unsure whether from anxiety or the release of feelings unspoken. These moments became a hallmark of the church U2 never meant to form. To beat the devil, mock him, and he runs away. To mock the devil, all you’ve got to do is become a pop star. When this was a kernel of an idea, it was charming. Promising. But it always had to come to an end.

*

All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released on a precipice: in 2000, the year the world was supposed to end but didn’t, and one year before the September 11th terrorist attacks that made us feel that if the world hadn’t altogether ended, it had certainly changed forever. Imagine, injected between these two moments in time, an album with lyrics like:

And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if our way should falter
Along the stony pass
It's just a moment, this time will pass

As Joshua Rothman writes in his 2014 New Yorker article “The Church of U2,” classic U2 “expresses a particular combination of faith and disquiet, exaltation and desperation that is too spiritual for rock but too strange for church.” For U2, Achtung Baby might be Ecclesiastes (“What are we going to do? / Now it’s all been said / No new ideas in the house / And every book has been read”), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind is straight-up Gospel (“Because Grace makes beauty / Out of ugly things / Grace finds beauty in everything / Grace finds goodness in everything”).

Post-Pop U2 emerged reborn and fully formed in those reeling first years of the millennium. With All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band arrived at a place just beyond the yearning and doubt expressed in previous albums. In this way, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a kind of culmination of the decades-long spiritual exploration of a rock band that took the devil seriously enough to bring him out on stage. These days, Bono needed to get in and out of Satan’s shoes quicker than before—his lips curling up into that evil grin, and then relaxing into grace.

At the time, All That You Can’t Leave Behind launched U2 back in the spotlight. U2 was back, and they were boss, and more than anything they were ready for the moment they found themselves in: what better band to play the first show in Madison Square Garden following 9/11, than a band that had been formed in the crucible of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a band that could, in songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” sing about terrorism and, somehow, make people want to dance.

*

Since then, of course, U2’s story has changed again. They came back, but then they were all too present: dancing silhouettes in Apple commercials, on their own black and red iPods, and then on everyone’s Music Libraries, whether you wanted them or not. By the time U2 made How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Bono was everywhere, singing “Your love is teaching me how to kneel.” In Songs of Innocence, he sang, “You no longer got a hold on me / I’m out of Lucifer’s hands.”

Maybe the band’s embrace of commercialism lined up too nicely with their increasingly solidified Christian identity. In retrospect, certainty might be a harder sell than all that questioning. Maybe faith isn’t as cool as doubt, after all. But for me and all us weirdos standing dumbfounded in the lonely gust of wind that rushes through a high school hallway, U2’s crystallized faith wasn’t enough to shake our own.

High school—Bono would have shrugged it off. In a little while you’ll be blown by every breeze. Weightless as a notion. Flighty as a turkey vulture, drifting off across the ridge on the updraft, hungry for the smells of all the rotting shit the high schoolers tossed out of their backpacks as they walked to class. When the bell rang we could all walk out of the lunchroom together—me and Bono and the Edge, with Bono dancing up the amphitheater steps and gleefully pointing at the other weirdos. Edge’s steady gaze gives nothing away, or only a mild curiosity.  The moment aches on, and Edge just shakes his head. In a little while, you’ll be fine.

—Aaron Fallon & Martha Park

#281: Mary J. Blige, "My Life" (1994)

         I.

My Life reminds me of all my teenage winters. I can’t remember if I owned it or just listened to it at a friend’s house for hours on end, staying in out of the cold. One way or another, we knew the album in its entirety—every word. It was that way with every good song, every dance that we needed to learn, every party that we needed to find. We always got the message. Everyone’s boyfriend or brother was an aspiring DJ. Everyone had a friend of a friend who had a tidbit we needed to hear. We even wrote each other letters, when it came to that, and it often did. Maybe it’s the filter of memory, but information didn’t seem that hard to come by. No one ever seemed that hard to reach. Maybe because we were always together, or when apart, paging each other with the beepers we painstakingly saved up babysitting money to buy. Maybe it was because the breadth of what we thought we needed to know was not yet that great.

In the way that digging into the past reveals forgotten details, I realize now that the winter I most associate with My Life actually took place two years after it came out. The Blizzard of ‘96 was special because it provided an excuse for squirreled away visits with a boy that took on more meaning than they might have otherwise. The storm ground the city to a halt. School was closed for days on end and absolutely nothing was happening. Somehow the boys had trudged thirty blocks through the snow to come stand in the street and shiver in front of our buildings. A few snowball fights and piggyback rides later, and the most devastating thing that could happen to a 90s NYC teen happened. My guy lost his beeper. There were layers upon layers of snow, and no chance of finding it. Until, days later, the beeper appeared miraculously amid the melted ice. That it still worked was a testament to how durable those things were.

I excitedly set the wheels in motion that would let him know we found it. I was thrilled to be the bearer of such good news, but it must be true that no good deed goes unpunished because the grapevine sent back word that he thought my friends and I had orchestrated the mixup to begin with. It seemed too good to be true that the hands of fate had seen fit to return his pager. I was crushed to discover that the way I saw myself was not the way I was seen. I was still emotionally innocent enough to believe that people would see me exactly as I thought I presented myself.

If that story happened today, in the era of endless memes and tweets about snooping through phones, DMs, and FB stalking, I’d likely be judged guilty by the court of social media, let alone one teenage boy.

         II.

This year, My Life turns 22 years old. That’s just about the age to start looking back on one’s nascent years in wonder, right? Mary J. Blige once described My Life as the album that “reached out and grabbed everyone and said, ‘I understand.’” To borrow a phrase from the kids, “What’s understood doesn’t need to be explained.” What we felt, even those of us who weren’t even old enough to fully understand what it meant, was her pain. The songs were pain, the album was drugs. The embodiment of love that hurts so good. She has said she felt herself slipping away during its making—that there was a “suicide spirit on there.” Rumors swirled about drugs, drinking, bad behavior, rude demands, angry interviews, and a volatile relationship with K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci.

Listening now, the album plays like the stages of grief. Mary Jane. You Bring Me Joy. I’m the Only Woman. My Life. You Gotta Believe. I Never Wanna Live Without You. I’m Goin’ Down. Be With You. Don’t Go. I Love You. No One Else. Be Happy. Still, within the pain in her voice, as she lays herself bare, life remains: “In order for me to heal, I have to talk. I have to write it out. I have to hang it out. I have to talk it out. I have to cry it out. I have to get it out.”

For years people have said, some jokingly, many dead serious, that Mary J. Blige lost her Midas touch once she was drug-free and no longer in a tumultuous—and possibly abusive—relationship. They are rabid for the “Old Mary.” Hurt Mary. Watch old videos of Mary doing press for My Life in 1994—she’s reserved, quiet, tentative. We don’t truly begin to see her spirit come alive until she grabs the mic. She’s 23 years old, a pretty tomboy with a tough exterior built to hide a hurt interior, thrust into the spotlight. Pain hidden behind a shy smile and few words. We have videos of her performances and interviews and articles, but we filled in the rest from the music. If social media had been around when Mary was dating K-Ci, who knows what we would have seen or heard?

She has a new album coming soon featuring a song with Kanye West. It will be interesting to see what those two created in the lab. She who seems to have broken with most of the past that made My Life so painful and yet so pure, and he, who seems to have broken with the past that perhaps kept him safe. In the court of public opinion she has become too happy and possibly too safe, he, too free, and too wild.

I come back to one of Kanye’s epic rants again and again—when he said, “As a man, I am flawed. But my music is perfect.” Full disclosure: I find it fascinating. Short of the craziness of the now infamous interview he gave on Sway in the Morning where he claimed to be Warhol, Walt Disney, and Google—it’s one of his wilder boasts. There’s something beautiful in having that much belief in your work, especially when you know so many people disagree. My fight song is “Everything I Am” from Graduation. I know “I’ll never be picture-perfect Beyonce,” and “I’ll never be laid back as this beat was.” And that’s okay. Kanye has long known how much love/hate he inspires—”They rather give me the nigga please award / but I’ll just take the I got a lot of cheese award.” He knows fans clamor for the “Old Kanye” they believe died when he lost his mother. He addresses it on “I Love Kanye” from The Life of Pablo, and assures us that every Kanye is a Kanye of his creation and we will take whatever iteration he sees fit to present. We will love him, or leave him alone.

Maybe that kind of hubris can only come after experiencing extreme pain.

It’s telling to watch someone engage with change over and over and still be their own biggest advocate. It’s the hope that a focused attempt at self-love and a commitment to artistry can lead to growth. That’s the promise, right? That those risks might lead to glory. The only way out is through, whether the end result is loved or panned. Otherwise we risk relying on our inherently fallible memories of the past, the shadows of people we once knew, the safety we thought we had, and longing for more of the same.

—Lee Erica Elder

#282: Muddy Waters, "Folk Singer" (1964)

It’s her bath that makes Kathleen your friend at first.

She’s one of the few boaters who has a home on land as well as on water. She continued to travel the waterways after her son was born (later she will recount to you, roaring with laughter, how sometimes she herself would crouch and shit in a nappy when the on-board chemical toilet was full) until the challenges of being a parent finally made her seek out the comfort and safety of a house.

She lives right on the waterfront, which makes her home the Charing Cross Station of the local boating community: people pass through to collect parcels; charge their devices on shore power when the washed-out British skies fail to provide adequate solar; hold their grease-slippery fingers under scalding hot water in her kitchen sink, where (unconstrained by the volume of a storage tank) it flows in miraculous, unlimited supply from the tap.

You first meet her round a towpath fire, wearing a green Stetson that casts half her face in shadow and leaning into a burly bearded dude who is her youngest son’s father. You are wearing the floppy black hat that was your “opera hat” in your past life, the one you’ve just escaped. You exchange hats for a moment. She looks better in yours than you do but, on surveying her reflection, she says, “It feels like something very beautiful that I’m not cut out for.” You get that: you weren’t cut out for it either, ultimately.

Later that night she will get drunk and aggressively invite you to dance with her. You don’t like her much, or you get the sense that she doesn’t like you much: because you’re not game, staying resolutely by the fire in your old party-silks while she moves sinuous as the tongues of flame themselves. You have just come out of two years of being condescended to by London’s upper classes, where being soft-spoken in all-silks was the only way to be taken seriously. You are frightened by the raucousness and practicality of your new life, but in those early days people mistake that for you being too good to get your milk-white hands dirty.

But you watch her cruise away at the end of the night, her sharp witch’s nose turned into the wind, biker boots firmly planted on the deck, tiller held loosely in one hand, and you can’t help but feel admiration. She looks like the figurehead but she is the captain, and you’ve never seen that before.

Over the next few months, you cut your hair, donate your dryclean-only garb to charity, spend days with a belt sander—doing more harm than good as you leave a moonscape of gouges in your tongue-and-groove, but gradually, as a film of sawdust settles on every square inch of your new life, you begin to feel more competent and at home. When you bemoan the extent of your filth to Jonathan, he looks at you quizzically like you’ve failed to catch onto an essential piece of information, and then puts you on the back of his motorbike to Kathleen’s house.

Her house looks somewhere between a boat and a Japanese temple: porthole windows and wooden beams painted a friendly red. Two massive wooden dragons flank the door opening to her kitchen: red and snarling, silver and gentle, sun and moon. The windows are lined with thick velvet drapes she stitched together from offcuts; the walls with mosaics from mussel-shells smuggled home from restaurants.

You take to spending long nights in her kitchen, rosy post-bath with your hair slicked back. She reads you the tarot and sneaks skunk into your loose-leaf tea when you turn down the invitation to smoke with her, smiling one of her mischievous-imp smiles. She plays music on an ancient laptop: JJ Cale, Muddy Waters. She likes these deep-voiced men singing about their rivers and their longing for a good love. “One of these days, I’m gonna show you how nice a man can be….”

She dates men who are brutes or children or both. “This is my friend Mark, he has just come out of prison in the Netherlands.” Sometimes you avoid her house for a while as you wait for her to show the next one the door, which thankfully never takes long. When you return, she shows you the paintings she’s working on: a figure with a red-blonde plait holding a sphere, ocean, light and colour rippling out in concentric circles.

She’s from a big, Catholic family, where she learned how to fend for herself in a throng of brothers. Her life is more feral than you can fathom: coming home bruised from a fistfight with her ex’s new wife. You like her long stories about arguing her way to victory (“And I says to him, I says….”). You like the things she likes: the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, whom she admires for being female and yet a successful sculptor. In a different life—one that didn’t keep her busy chasing up the benefit payments that the government seemed to regularly withhold at random—her sculptures, too, would be in galleries. You can’t help but feel angry for her sometimes because of that.

You get to know her children: Aisling, who is a strange combination of listless and creative, pinning fabric to a dressmaker’s dummy in bursts of focus; Dylan, sweet and serious in his school uniform and odd socks, carving spoons and teaching himself poi.

You’ve seen the pictures of Kathleen in her first marriage, white-blonde and hopeful, laughing, peeling potatoes with each leg stuck through the handles of a plastic bag to drop the slivers of skin in. That girl seems very different.

You have one of the happiest moments in two years of grief-haze on Christmas morning, cycling through deserted North London with presents for her children in your backpack. Having somehow been welcomed into this family.

But in the new year, things change. It begins with her furiously rearranging furniture: every time you enter the house the living room is somewhere else after she has enlisted her eleven-year-old son’s help to carry sofas and armchairs up and down stairs.

For months she has been courted by one of her ongoing flings, a pilot with a drunkard’s nose like an angry strawberry in the middle of his face who keeps promising to leave his wife for her. He sent her an expensive guitar even though she doesn’t play, which she told you about scathingly. But then one day you enter the house and he’s there, condescending to you within the first few minutes of conversation. “Alan lives here now,” Kathleen announces from behind you, but when you turn to look at her, she doesn’t meet your eyes.

After they’ve gone out, you walk around the house, looking at his bathrobe hung from the hook in her bedroom like a sloughed-off body abandoned by its spirit: is this really the life she wants for herself?

Before long she stops returning your calls, sending only curt texts: no, tonight’s not good, we’re not in. You hear that they’re engaged. She rings you occasionally to manically prattle about losing weight to fit into her wedding dress, leaving not a moment’s pause in the conversation.

You’re baffled. You think: maybe loneliness has worn her down, the way it wears all of us down, trapped in our own orbit.

Then she borrows Jonathan’s boat so she can take Alan for a “jolly.” In the chaos and confusion of the day, Jonathan’s cat gets lost: they’re too impatient to wait for her to come home before driving off, and moor up in a different place when they get back, which tends to confuse cats. The cat never returns. When you get angry with her about it, she uses it as an excuse to cut ties with you, telling you that she’s “sick to death of you and your opinions.” You wonder if it’s really about the cat, or if it’s about your views on Alan; views which she once shared.

You dream of the two of them, walking in skeleton make-up like a Día de los Muertos parade, like court cards in the deck: majestic and imperious.

Some months later you hear they are no longer together. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Though your expressions of support are politely received when you next cross paths, still she doesn’t quite meet your eye anymore.

As winter draws near, you cycle past her house, looking at the velvet drapes drawn in the bay window, thinking about the dragons and music and mosaics hidden behind them. You miss them; you miss her asking “How are you, Miss Moo?” like in the first few weeks after your father’s death, when everyone else was too afraid to. You miss her kitchen with its cracked-open window, sending the sounds of the blues, wild and sad and strong, out into the tidy Georgian streets.

—Emma Rault

#283: Barry White, "Can't Get Enough" (1974)

I was young but I was never really small. At least, not during the part that defined much of my childhood. That period of my life comes equipped with an “OVERSIZED LOAD” distinction like precarious highway towing. Looking backward, I prepare myself accordingly; lay down flares, hire a small outfit, affix proper signage. The turning radius on that epoch makes for a big swing.

I was a fat kid.

Not at first, sure, but the mechanics were well established. My burgeoning interests in Nintendo and gluttony formed a symbiotic relationship of unchecked hedonism, coiled and wound tighter than knotted wood. Twisting orchid-like around my swelling frame, the incestuous marriage of internal vices grew heel-step with my prodigious bulk. Thus I was inundated.

I was rendered solid, immobile, like a boulder abandoned after a total glacial melt.

At age 11, I was 5’2” and weighed 12 stone.

But it’s not a sad story, not entirely. Although I never felt love at school like I did at home. I was never “piggy” at home. I was safe. From Sam, Curtis, Mike N., Charlie. And this wasn’t even a sophisticated jab, like a Lord of the Flies allusion suggesting that, were we to suddenly fall into martial law as a homeroom, I’d be beaten to death with sticks.

I was “piggy” because in their eyes I was nothing more than a tub of shit. And no one wants to be caught dead playing Mancala with shit.

But I maintain this is not a sad story, although it certainly reads like a tragedy.

Think, for instance, of my idol.

I was a happy child, comedic in the self-indulgent way of fools, often wearing a showman’s hat. With my childhood’s sell by date stamped for the mid ‘90s, I gravitated to Chris Farley like a fellow heavenly body.

He carried more than I did and wore it with aplomb, making it a piece of him. He upset the stasis, challenging the common dichotomy that a fat versus thin binary often conjures. Plus David Spade was never as funny.

That’s my now-speak, obviously, but back then I was his disciple. Whether I was pantomiming my favorite SNL bits or falling into a swimming pool with my clothes still on, I lived for the stage. My family loved and endured me.

Chris Farley died on December 18, 1997. He was sad and did a lot of drugs and I was swallowed by the void he left.

His death preceded one of my many bouts in the wilderness. Less untamed, say, than the expanse left to Cobain junkies, or the feeling of betrayal packaged with a major label release. I was still young, remember. But it had me metaphorically wandering.

I tried Meat Loaf for a while. His grandiose frame mixed like a cocktail with the swashbuckling sexuality of a windblown pirate left an immediate impression. The glitz and glitter of his rings and sequins. The frill of his shirts, that hair. And he had a rocking, dicks-out (now-speak again) aesthetic with the physical heft to back it up.

But ultimately his songs were too long—despite being thematically stirring, pubescent-ly speaking—and his name just made me hungry.

There were several more, after. I burned through fancies like someone on a bender. I whirled untethered, rudderless, my inner fabric stretched thin and flapping in the high winds of my destitution. The nights were dark and I snacked luxuriously.

But then I found Barry.

Suddenly I didn’t have to be manic, to over-gesticulate, to lack grace. There was a better way to reflect life back at the world around me. I could have my cake and eat it too. I didn’t have to be an accepted version of what I was.

With Barry it wasn’t about rocking; it was about the groove. I’d found my savior.

There I was, back on the stage, but this time doing my best Barry White. I had (some of) the moves, affected that baritone—funny coming from a boy with his sack still firmly planted in his perineum—and wore my shirt open so the fans would hit it just right.

*

In seventh grade I reached the apex of my mass. I’d expanded in such a glorious fashion, opting for clothing that stretched and breathed, nothing fitting; I walked everywhere with the audible swoosh of athletic warm-ups (i.e. clothes meant to stretch over other clothes).  T-shirts from that era fit two of me now.

I was no longer in classes with those shit boys. I was no longer “piggy”—although had they been around I’m sure my status would have been reaffirmed as such. I had matured, become more adult in my pursuits.

I had fallen in love.

Hindsight being the sharp grindstone that it is, I know now I was punching way beyond my weight, but adolescent me was blind to reason. I wasn’t the type to draw hearts on my math homework, or scrawl our names out forever in whiteout pen on my trapper keeper. My ambiguous sexual longing lay tightly wrapped inside, writhing to the sound of my wrap-around headphones:

Girl I don’t know, I don’t know why
Can’t get enough of your love babe

We’ll call her Stacy.

She had all the trappings of a quintessential crush: attractive, intelligent; her presence instilled a competing flight/fight response that more often than not just resulted in perspiration. I was not without courage entirely, but it’s a safe bet, were she to comment on me then, her description would read: odd. But I digress.

Let me set the scene.

It was the first dance of that year. I had on forest green swishy pants, a black T-shirt, and a mock silk short-sleeve dress shirt with flames on the front. Motherfucking flames. I felt unstoppable. I’d pre-gamed with Barry White, letting Can’t Get Enough loop back on itself as I piled on generic brand hair gel until my dome looked like a succulent. I was ready. My dad dropped me off at the entrance to the cafeteria and I strutted into the din of voices and music.

From my revisionist vantage point I moved through those rooms crowded with my peers strutting a high quotient of affected cool; sipping a glass of something brown, moving in slow motion like the opening credits of Reservoir Dogs, smoking absently. In reality I shuffled audibly and dribbled Cherry Coke down my front in a rush to reach the dance floor to find Stacy.

The room was a mess of kinetic light. Every novelty light imaginable was mounted to the DJ booth, whirling, pulsing, like a Spencer’s Gifts on ipecac. Clustered around in the semi-lit gloam of the gym my classmates moved with a furtive excitement. There was blood in the water.

Uncharacteristically, I asserted myself to the booth and groped amid strobes and mirror-ball quicksilver for a pen to scrawl on the request list: “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe” by Barry White.

And so I waited. I had another Cherry Coke and some Sour Punch straws to calm my nerves. I shifted my weight, sweated. Then I heard that falling guitar, and the deep buttered voice I associated interchangeably with confidence:

I’ve heard people say that
Too much of anything is not good for you, baby

I rubbed the citric acid into my gums for luck and crossed the parquet, in-bound for Stacy. I had a fanfare behind me: my man, my mentor, my Obi-Wan of rotund beauty and palpable swagger. I walked right over in time to see Stacy cozy up at arm’s length with Mike N. And I thought he was expelled! My night went into a tailspin.

Yet it was still my soundtrack they shuffled to, and I did my best to shuffle, too.

*

Rejection was like a fire that swept the harvest, consuming all. But below it something ancient smoldered, with more prudence. Now awake, it grew in waiting.

In route to the fireworks at Hart Park on July 4th I heard on the radio that Barry White had passed away at age 58. I kept mostly to myself that night as I buried another hero in a pyre of sulfur light and flames.

But I maintain this is not a sad story.

How one speaks about their rebirth is much in the vein of recounting a dream. The intense wonder of blinding light, unfurled explosions and arrays of color that lay textured, cushioning the sound beneath that evaporates like dry ice in the morning. The after-burn of color hanging like reverb in your mental theater.

Though I move through these memories deftly now, it wasn’t always candy.

Chris Farley taught me how to hide my pain in laughter: to be the clown. Barry White made me buoyant, and taught me not to let the Mike N.s and Stacys tarnish my rhinestones. He taught me how to carry my weight, and how to wear it well.

—Nick Graveline

#284: The Cars, "The Cars" (1978)

Rich’s mom used the wall next to the staircase like a human evolution diorama. At the bottom, there was Rich flat on his back in his crib, naked with his legs and arms akimbo. The first time I met Rich’s mom, she took it off the wall and showed it to me. She put her index finger above his supposedly erect penis and bragged about how he was so mature even then. Richard buried the right side of his face with his hand but kept one eye open to see how I reacted. This was the only time I ever saw him naked in the light.

The next photo was him dressed and painted as a vampire in the first or second grade. His face was bone white. The part of his mouth that he didn’t lick off was smeared with the blood of an imaginary villager. One night while we were tangled up in his bed, I asked whether he ever gave the villager a name. He shrugged.

Next to the vampire was two Little League baseball players. The one on the right was Rich. On the left was Henry, his then-best friend. Rich played third until his dad couldn’t afford to have him keep playing. Rich said or did something right after his last game to make sure Henry stopped being his friend.

Rich stood in front of his mom and dad. The department store Christmas tree loomed over them. His mom wore a bright red dress with a wreath-shaped brooch pinned above her right breast. Rich and his dad wore matching suits. Rich’s stomach threatened to cascade over his waistband. Rich’s mom and dad both had their hands on Rich’s shoulders. Their mouths contorted into thin smiles, teeth slightly visible. I knew from my own family that the most important time to lie was during the holidays.

From the top of the stairs, the junior high version of Rich scowled at the family below. The crimson clip-on tie dangled beneath the part of the collar that wasn’t enveloped by his second chin. “He fought like hell to hang this one,” Rich’s mom said. “I don’t know why.”

Rich never fully accounted for the gaps between each photo. I always started asking questions as we lay in Rich’s bed. The first or second time, Rich shut me up by making out with me; I backed off. After we were done kissing, we listened to the ceiling fan whir as it dried the sweat on our bodies until it became a new layer of skin. I pushed him away the third time he tried shutting me up, lay so stiff that Rich finally got the hint. He spoon fed me only as many answers as it would take to cure me back into his arms.

I knew the needle was helping him disappear layer by layer. I knew his body well enough where I could tell when his wrists and waist shrank. The parts of his body Rich would let me touch, I could feel his bones more through his skin. Once, my thumb stumbled onto a scab in the fold connecting his forearm to his upper arm. I decided to stop seeing him or talking to him for as long as I could until he was willing to tell me what I already knew.

After a week, I finally caved and went over to Rich’s house while his mom was working the night shift like she always did. The door crept opened after the second knock. I walked in and found Rich’s mom sitting on the couch. The photos from the evolution diorama were on the living room table. I ran upstairs to Rich’s room before Rich’s mom could say anything. I saw Rich’s bedroom for the first time when I turned on the lights. There weren’t any women pinned to the walls lusting after him. There weren’t any cars either. He treated the floor like a hamper. His comforter was plaid. It was peeled back on the side of the bed he preferred to roll out of. Rich’s mom never said a word as I ran out of her house.

Rich’s face was never stapled to telephone poles or taped to windows. A week later, a “For Rent” sign was staked in front of Rich’s house. I sometimes heard a tap or scrape against my window, hoped it was Rich wanting me to come outside. It was always just a bug or the wind.

—J. Bradley

#285: Stevie Wonder, "Music of My Mind" (1972)

“Would you rather be deaf or blind?”

I always said blind. It was one of the more tame “would you rathers” I asked and answered in childhood. My only impairment was preteen suburban malaise; after outgrowing playing pretend on the playground, we exerted the privilege of imagination on hypothetical dilemmas. Having never met a blind or deaf person, I cited music as a chief consideration for choosing blindness, convinced that words could paint a picture better than an image could sing a song. The key of life was something to be heard.

The absence of one sense often sharpens the others, so it’s no surprise that Wikipedia lists more than 208 notable blind musicians, the most famous being a toss-up between Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. The first album Little Stevie Wonder recorded was A Tribute to Uncle Ray, a 1962 compilation of Ray Charles covers. Only 11 years old, Stevie was pressed to recreate some kind of blind man magic. The album flopped.

Of course, Stevie soon found his own voice, a signed and sealed legacy delivered by the end of the decade. His audience grew from acquaintances to soul mates in the 1970s as Stevie matured from a hit machine to an artist, releasing no less than five inarguable masterpiece albums in a row. 1972’s Music of My Mind marks his first collaboration with a British electronic duo called TONTO’s Expanding Head Band. Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff had invented The Original New Timbral Orchestra (TONTO) just two years earlier, the largest and most capable analog synthesizer in history. Accompanying Music of My Mind’s deep bass lines and rolicking guitar hooks are beeps and hums never before heard in soul music: ambient sounds that defy onomatopoeia. Listeners could not picture the instrument such tones could be coming from. Today, anyone can Google image search to see the curved wall of buttons and knobs six feet high and 20 feet across, but in 1972, the machine was out of sight. These new sounds came from whatever shapes your mind conjured. Music of My Mind is a visual album, but not in the Beyoncé sense. The album cover, on which Steve’s face is reflected in his sunglasses, hints at this deconstruction of the senses. Think you can’t make eye contact with a blind man? Just put on Side A.

The synth began as the academic pursuit of a few white people in the mid-60s; Robert Moog’s genesis and Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach set the tone for Bookends and Abbey Road. For 12 years, Motown Records had been in the business of reclaiming music stolen from black Americans, but this time around, Stevie had taken a white man sound and made it not only digestible, but groovy, expanding heads like no pasty Brit ever could. A semblance of justice.

Now for some hindsight: my stating a preference between being deaf and being blind was grossly insensitive. (Who would have guessed that “would you rather have pubes for teeth or teeth for pubes?” would end up being the less offensive childhood quandary?) It was also generally misguided. I’d imagined that a blind person experienced life in the same way I did when I closed my eyes, but of course it doesn’t work like that. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles didn’t even see the world in the same way. Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, six weeks premature. The oxygen therapy that saved his underdeveloped lungs caused his retinas to detach, meaning he never had functioning eyes in waking life. Diagnosed with glaucoma, Ray Charles lost his sight gradually, from ages four to seven. There’s a community of blind people who have adapted their keen hearing into a form of echolocation, using sound to navigate the structures surrounding them. It’s a perception I might not recognize, but to have spatial reasoning is to see.

I’ve wondered what role Stevie plays in designing his album covers—can the visions in his head be described in words? Can he visualize someone else’s concept? I’d like to think that when Stevie hits the piano, he’s swaying his head to the beat and to the view, something like those sunset rings on the cover of Songs in the Key of Life.

In my early 20s, I went on a date with a man who was born deaf. He had cochlear implants and communicated like anyone else I’d gone on a date with. When I asked him about his favorite bands, he told me that he didn’t care for music, in fact, most of time he found it grating and unpleasant. I didn’t hold it against him, because of course he heard sounds differently than I did, but I found myself struggling to keep the conversation rolling. I realized how much I relied on music as a topic during those getting-to-know-you conversations. We never went out again, and looking back, I wish I’d asked him more about the media he did love—movies or paintings or poems. Without being wrapped up in the background noise, he would almost certainly notice things I wouldn’t have. Why privilege one sense over another? I think if I couldn’t hear music, I’d find it somewhere else. And even if I didn’t, I’d keep looking anyway.

—Susannah Clark

#286: Al Green, "I'm Still in Love With You" (1972)

When Al Green steps off a Greyhound in Midland, Texas, in the winter of 1968, he has 35 cents in his pocket. Everything else he owns is in a cardboard suitcase. His soiled, lime-green polyester suit—hardly adequate in this biting Texas wind—looks like he hasn’t taken it off in a week, and the soles of his imitation alligator loafers are wearing through. For nine months now, he’s been playing lonely roadhouse clubs across the South—“the chitlin circuit”—singing his lone hit, “Back Up Train,” for the ten people who show up each night to hear it. He’s hungry and tired, but his only prospects for a meal and a decent night’s sleep lie at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. So he picks up the cardboard suitcase and sets off down the highway, probably wishing he’d never given up that car-waxing gig back in Grand Rapids.

In his autobiography, Take Me to the River, Al interprets what happened that night the way he’s interpreted virtually every moment in his career since becoming an ordained minister: as an act of divine intervention. Willie Mitchell, an influential bandleader, was headed home to Memphis after a successful West Coast tour. Al, a one-hit nobody, was literally singing for his dinner. Intrigued by his unconventional delivery, Willie bought him a drink after the show (Al exchanged it for a ham sandwich), and asked a question interviewers would be asking for decades: Where’d you learn to sing like that? (“Here and there” was the answer Al gave, coyly glossing over his love for Jackie Wilson, his time on the Baptist revival circuit, and his childhood penchant for mimicking bird songs.) A professional curiosity, that’s all it was. No offer of a record deal, nor a contract. It wasn’t until the night was ending, and the roadhouse owner refused to pay the musicians, claiming that they hadn’t drawn a big enough crowd to cover his expenses, that Al worked up the nerve to approach Willie again. He didn’t have the cost of a bus ticket to Grand Rapids. Would he drive him as far as Memphis?

Two years later, Willie and Al are hunkered down in Royal Recording Studio in Memphis, the home of Hi Records, working on the songs that would fill out Green is Blues, his first for the label, and the precursor to a string of classics, three of which ended up on this Rolling Stone list. The session isn’t going well. Al wants to huff and puff his way onto the charts the way big-lunged stars like Otis Redding, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson did before him. Willie, who came up playing trumpet in a jazz band, wants something quieter and more nuanced. What Otis did with a shout, he wants Al to do with a whisper. Al isn’t quite there yet. The takes are piling up, and still Willie is shaking his head. “Slow it down,” he says. “Soften it up. Feel what you’re singing.” He points at the band, a group of Memphis musicians he's assembled. “Let them be gritty.”

Probably not enough has been said about Hi Rhythm in recent years. Yes, they backed Cat Power circa The Greatest, and yes, their guitarist, Teenie, who died in 2014, was Drake’s uncle. (That’s him mugging in front of a Memphis chicken restaurant in the video for “Worst Behavior.”) But in the early ‘70s they exerted a massive influence on soul music with their lazy, swinging rhythms, their high-powered horn section, and those delicately strummed guitars: what became known as “the Memphis sound.”

The story begins back in 1949, when Willie called on an untested, 14-year-old named Al Jackson Jr. to fill in on drums for a Memphis swing band. “He was the worst drummer you ever heard,” he later told Rolling Stone. But where others heard an incompetent amateur, Papa Willie heard potential. By the time Jackson was in his late twenties, he was drumming for Booker T and the MGs, the legendary Stax Records house band. You might not know Jackson’s name, but you know his rhythms: Sam & Dave’s “Hold on, I’m Coming”; Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”; the MG’s “Green Onions”; all the Otis Redding hits. (That’s his beat Kanye sampled on “Otis”.) That loping, syncopated rhythm buoying “Let’s Stay Together”? That’s Jackson, too. His talents became so renowned that Willie had to get Howard Grimes, another Memphis drum prodigy, to fill in when Jackson’s increasingly lucrative commitments kept him busy. Grimes was good enough that Willie later claimed he couldn’t always tell the difference.

Willie made a habit out of recruiting amateurs. He nabbed brothers Leroy and Charles Hodges, who played bass and organ, from their high school band, the Impalas. Their younger brother Teenie eventually showed up at Willie’s house one night, drunk, guitar in hand, looking to get in on the action. “You play like shit,” Willie told him, before inviting him to move in upstairs. There wasn’t a guitarist in Memphis who played with the kind of restraint he wanted, so he took Teenie into his home for three years and taught him himself. Willie was nothing if not patient. By the time Al got to Memphis, Willie and the boys had been playing together for over a decade.

The lush gritty soul sound that catapulted Al to stardom didn’t happen overnight. You can hear glimpses of it on Gets Next to You and Let’s Stay Together, but it’s not until I’m Still in Love With You that they deliver an entire album worthy of their talents. The emphasis here is on all of their talents, not just Al’s. Of the three singles that cracked the Billboard Hot 100, Jackson co-wrote two of them and Teenie, the third. While Al wrote his vocal lines in a matter of minutes, Jackson would labor over the drum parts for days. Nowhere are those efforts more audible than “I’m Glad You’re Mine,” a good song that Jackson’s inventive drumming transforms into a great one. It’s Teenie though, who is the unsung genius of this record. His sparse style gave Al’s voice the space it needed to get lost in. And his rhythmic sense—second only to Jackson’s—is the motor underneath the album’s hood. That’s his driving guitar lick—a throwback to the bluesy grit of their early records—that propels the album’s centerpiece, “Love and Happiness,” and the 98th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone’s count. (That foot you hear tapping off the count at the beginning? That’s Teenie.) And of course Willie is here too, the magician behind the curtain. His fingerprints are all over I’m Still in Love With You, from the big stuff—the horn sections, the string arrangements, all those jazz chords—to the tiny details: the rich snap of the snare drum, the ghostly warmth of the organ tone.

Enough has been said about Al Green’s voice. His range. That otherworldly falsetto. The world of feeling he can wring from a whispered syllable. If you were born into a world where “Let’s Stay Together” was part of the cultural bedrock—audible everywhere from wedding receptions to Waffle House—it’s hard to imagine hearing that voice for the first time. But for some audience members at this 1972 performance of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” that may well have been the case. It’s a gripping performance, no matter how many times you’ve watched him sing. As the song starts, the lights drop, cloaking the band and the audience in shadow—an effect that lends Al the eerie appearance of being alone in a room full of people. The volume on his mic is turned up so loud—or the room is that quiet—you can hear his lips open and close. Al, always a ham for the spotlight, rises to the moment; he doesn’t appear to sing the song so much as exorcise it from his mouth through a series of facial contortions. But’s it not Al’s face that delivers the gut punch; it’s a kid’s. During the last verse, as Al stretches out that “la-la-la” bit until it’s a kind of whispered trill, the camera swings behind him to reveal a young boy, seated front and center. He is staring up at Al, transfixed. You don’t need to blow the video up to full screen to recognize the expression on his face: it’s the one we all make when something beautiful and unfamiliar floats into our ear drums.

—Ryan Marr

#287: Grateful Dead, "Anthem of the Sun" (1968)

In 1967, recording sessions were done in some kind of orderly form—songs had been selected, arrangements had been made, musicians had been hired, studios were booked, artists came, sang overdubs or sang live, we then proceeded to add and sweeten strings and so forth, went into the mixing stage,

and out came a record. I kept a 10-strip of L hidden in the sleeve. One of those summer nights, fresh out of high school, we dropped and drove to Virginia Beach where one of us had a father with a house where no one slept. We only had reason to let gravity guide us to the shore, to lay down in the stars and sand, invited by the sun and the tide, which would breathe us back in morning time. It was chilly, but not too chilly,

an October morning in Palo Alto, 1963—after stealing a couple hours’ sleep, a young man awakes on the floor in the aisle of a closed movie theater, having jimmied the ticket window open shortly before dawn. He stands and walks into the beams of sunlight that frame the lobby door. It’s okay, he’d say if anyone bothered, a buddy of mine sweeps the popcorn and mops the pop here. He woulda let me in, but he got all fucked up

on burgundy and grass last night, ya dig? Now these guys came along and none of that applied! Didn’t have the material ready, went into the studio experimenting with sound—they were like kids in a candy store with all this great equipment. It was all state of the art, you know, and they were availing themselves of it

and going to school on it. On the East Coast, the sun comes up slow. I’ve seen it rise enough times, it’s a watched pot—not the fiery orange peak we’d painted and set fire to in our minds that night. Every day, like moving under water after dark, we can swim deep and swim deeper, believing there’s a surface bound to come before a breath, but the sun is small and pale on the Eastern horizon

and we had lost our sense of pressure. We were dealing with, yes, a counterculture and, yes, a new method of recording, but also there was the element of chemicals involved here, which never had been a factor with the acts we dealt with, or if it had been it certainly was

under control. Enough times, he hustles rent money busking banjo to pay for a room in a friend’s house for a week or two—always space with a short-term open door, always a friend with a friend who doesn’t know what he can afford next week

on either side of the deal. We didn't speak much on the beach there that dawn. It was the leg of the trip where everyone agreed to quietly recede into the low tides of themselves. I have a photograph—one of a small, out-of-focus handful, no one knew I snapped—of three bodies spread out before me, before the ocean, far from each other

in their silence. These guys were stoned, living in a fantasy world, looking so hard

for sounds that may not even be possible. We each weigh our expectations and their realities in our own and only ways. When we finally leave, we step barefoot from the sand

onto concrete. He climbs out the way he came in, straightens his pea coat, covered in dust and lint, sticky with fountain soda and salt water taffy, crusted continent of spit warm with the scent of spilled beer. He lights a cigarette to catch his breath and squints, smiling through the morning fog. However I find him, I hand him the coins he’ll need to ride through the day.

Thank you, he always says. We are going somewhere else and we will not return.

—Doug Fuller

#288: X, "Los Angeles" (1980)

X's Los Angeles is film noir poetry describing the underbelly of the Beautiful Great Dream City of the West Coast. The album shows us the dark underbelly is the Beautiful Great Dream City. That it’s all underbelly actually. Los Angeles is a landscape that remains beautiful but indelibly marked with the dark sordid textures of skid row violence, unspeakable cruelty full of tortured souls caught in the current of life reeling past them and through them at the same time. Here we find the city of Los Angeles as the fantasy temptress and destroyer of dreams where everything comes at a cost that can’t be measured in dollars.

As a kid, Los Angeles is a dream to me. I am a million miles from anywhere resembling life as it ought to be. This small town rural America hole I am living in is the polar opposite of where I think I want to be. There is a city a mere 70 miles away, but that requires money, a car, a license. Those might as well be a private jet and pilot. I am all adolescent existential crisis. X’s Los Angeles is a dark oasis, like the mythical city of Cibola built on sin, vice, release, and redemption. I am merely wandering my current sociocultural desert until I can descend unto my real people. Thus finds 14-year-old me encountering the darkest record I have ever heard. There are a ton of these stories about music, youth, awakening, and discovery. This one is mine. There are a million squared songs about love and relationships with no end in sight. They keep coming because we never really find a full, complete understanding of the subject that embodies, drives, and haunts us. Thus it is with these personal stories of art and redemption. That’s what all punk rock is eventually: redemption. Redemption from an oppressive state of being. Redemption from stifling burdensome places. Redemption of self. Redemption of others. Even at its angriest, bleakest, and most hopeless, Punk rock is a belief that somewhere, some way there is something more, something better. Punk rock is the hope that something is worth screaming about, while demanding its instantaneous manifestation.

In one furious sweep of musical slate, X wiped away the loud angry punk rock standard spiel with a musical vocabulary that blended more influences than anything before it. Los Angeles melds the bleakness of the Velvet Underground with the ferocious power of the Stooges, the pure  rebellion of Sun rockabilly and the literary sensibilities of Carver and Bukowski. It is literate, contemplative, and observant in an era of punk when almost nothing else was. It redefines the expectations and possibilities of punk. It raises the bar for an entire genre of rock music.

John Doe and Exene Cervenka were emigres to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a collection of observations, experiences, and feelings of the foreigner in a new land that is at once alien, overwhelming, and exciting, enhanced by the discovery and catharsis of the power, possibility, and freedom of punk rock. It is, at turns, dark impulses or redemptive cleansing framed in beauty, fear, excitement, confusion. They were children in a really vicious playground and they reflected that outwardly on this album.

I came to this album a high school punk rocker in a tiny East Texas town when punk rock barely existed outside of big cities on the coasts. Landing squarely in the heart of these songs, they mirrored all the bleakness and confusion of my hyper-adolescent angst and anxiety. Unable to see a road out, no hope on the horizon, I existed in that peculiar teen mental state of dread filled with irrational insanity, where how things are is a permanent unchanging state. Los Angeles was Promethean. I saw a dark disturbing place that was terrifying, exciting, fascinating, ugly. It was full of thrills, dangers, and sexual tension. The Los Angeles of the record was like a punk rock Anti-Oz and I wanted to follow its brick road to this place far away from rednecks, jocks, tiny minds, and tiny souls. If the darkness in this crazy previously unimagined world was as inevitable as the oppression of home then let’s at least add the excitement of a world where something interesting happened.

From the opening track of “Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not” to the conclusion of “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” Los Angeles is a musical equivalent to Bosch’s “Garden Of Earthly Delights.” It all comes down to Sin and Redemption. Los Angeles is a glittering, unflinching look at the worst aspects of the Great West Coast Dream City that always carries with it the hope. It tells us that even though things are terrible, they can be better, showing that the ugly and the beautiful are inexorably intertwined and parasitic in nature. That was a lot to take in as a kid. Like most kids, I took what I wanted and ignored the rest. I’ve carried this album with me in one form or another for the better part of three decades. Its power and beauty have only increased for me over the years. What it has meant to me has varied, morphed, and transcended. It remains through all of that a friend, a yardstick, and a touchstone.

—Bosco Farr

#289: The Kinks, "Something Else by the Kinks" (1967)

There’s this paint huffer named Caldwell who lives in an empty shack in that crap neighborhood behind the mall. Fucking Jimmy likes to visit him and ask him questions like he’s an oracle. That’s another thing about Jimmy—his tendency to romanticize garbageheads like Caldwell. He’s sure they’re the pure ones, that they know shit the rest of us don’t know. Caldwell knows how to get high on acetone paint and that’s something I don’t know how to do, but that’s as far as his special knowledge goes, if you ask me.

I made Jimmy promise we’d never huff paint and he agreed. You’d have to be completely wacked.

“Never,” I said.

“Right-o,” he said.

Last time we visited him, Caldwell was sitting in the dark in that abandoned house with a pile of his own poo about a foot away from him and the paper label from the spray paint can stuck to his chest. Upside down. Krylon Gold Metallic. And it’s so crazy hanging out with Caldwell that the fact that the label is upside down becomes the thing I shake my head over. Like in sci-fi movies where you call bullshit on a character eating a fresh apple in his space pod, meanwhile the premise involving mind-reading aliens, time warps, and sentient, resentful planets is all cool with you.

Caldwell’s just one of Jimmy’s pet losers. There’s also this Vietnam vet who hangs out on the bench in front of the library. He has this riff about how Revelations is talking about the suburbs, the suburbs, man, how the suburbs are the end of it all, people in boxes, mass conformity, and maybe he’s right, but I don’t think you have to be Mr. Observant to come up with that. Just listen to Something Else by the Kinks. They hit it square on the head a long time ago with no biblical shenanigans and they used IRONY. Neighborhoods! Man, the Kinks know from neighborhoods. “Waterloo Sunset”? “Afternoon Tea”? “Situation Vacant”? They know.

I found a CD of Something Else at a garage sale and I was drawn to the title. Something Else. Like, there’s all the usual stuff over there and then here’s us, over here. The Kinks—we’re something else. Me, I’m like that, too, something else, and the CD was 75 cents, and the lettering was kind of green and black and psychedelic, so what the hell? I bought it. That’s one good thing I forgot to mention about Caldwell the Idiot—he’s got a pretty decent old boom box in that derelict house that he plays by running an extension cord to the car wash next door. Not all the time, but when the manager’s not on duty. I grew up listening to country music and whatever’s on the radio, that sort of high-note, autotuned babybaby stuff, so I never heard anything like the Kinks. It’s what I guess people mean by rock and roll. Like, in the pure sense, like as an actual specific kind of music and not just something you say, like, “That rocks!” when you see a cool clip on YouTube or whatever. And I like it. I like rock and roll. It’s smart, unlike Jimmy and Caldwell, and it’s got attitude, but it’s also got heart.

So I figure if I’m going to be hanging out in this sty, I may as well have some good tunes, so I bring Something Else and I start to play it. The first song, “David Watts,” has me thinking, yeah, David Watts sounds like a tool, one of those captain-of-the-football-team douchebags like Jimmy says he used to be before, but, here’s the thing, David Watts actually sounds less pathetic than the narrator of that song, who just wants to be like him and can’t. And then what’s cool and what makes me use the word IRONY, which is an awesome word, is that you can tell the Kinks know their narrator is a loser, even though they’re singing in his voice. Like, how do they make it so I can I tell? They just do. It’s got layers, man. THAT’s rad, but I know better than to try to bring any of it to the attention to Jimmy or Caldwell.

I’ve found a window ledge that’s open and lets fresh air in that smells like soap and car wax from the car wash next door, which can be kind of a nice smell. The ledge is less gross than the rest of the place, so that’s where I sit. White paint chips that are probably lead paint get all over the butt of my jeans, but it’s nicey-nice compared to what’s on the floor—spray paint empties, fast food empties, an ashtray packed like a mass grave, and poo. Human excrement, yeah. Jimmy and Caldwell are crouched there, going back and forth like they’re princes of industry negotiating big deals instead of a couple of drug addicts in Lawton, Oklahoma, settling on a price for some shitty-looking weed.

“Share it with him,” I tell Jimmy, reaching over and toeing his skinny back with my cowboy boots. “Share it with him and he’ll let you pay whatever.”

Jimmy looks over his shoulder at me and nods and gives me a sweet smile for a second. Dammit, that’s the thing. Just when I think it’s all badness forever. Fucking Jimmy—I love the guy. We met in a treatment center a few months ago.

So of course Caldwell gets high with us even though weed is like water to him compared to huffing paint, which he goes on and on about. High for four hours! Intense psychedelics! Then he clues in to the music. The CD is playing “No Return,” which is a really sad song. Ray Davies sings, If I could see just how lonely my life would be if you passed me by. That line is how I feel about Jimmy, which I tell myself is why I keep going on this crazy journey we’re on. Voyage to the underworld, he says. Drug tourists, he says. We’ll jump out just in time! But I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy. Look at poor Caldwell. I wonder who he used to be? I can’t imagine. The song is saying, “And there is no return.”

“Sure there is,” Jimmy says. He’s such an optimist, is Jimmy.

“Bossa nova,” Caldwell says from somewhere deep in his chest. Caldwell looks like a skeleton in filthy jeans and a T-shirt that says “Great Plains Coliseum STAFF” on it. He’s got wispy blond hair like a giant, scary baby, and blue eyes that water all the time. He’s barefooted this visit because he sold his shoes for some all-weather deck paint that he huffed already as we can see by the redwood color that’s all over his mouth and nose, with spray going up practically to his eyes. “That’s a cool bossa nova,” he says, pointing at the boom box.

“Boss of what?” I say.

“That kind of beat,” he says, bobbing his head. “That’s what you call it.”

His face crinkles around his eyes and the rust-colored spatters from the deck paint crack like the surface of an icy pond.

I’m sort of amazed. “Do you know about music, Caldwell?”

Caldwell nods. He points at his shirt. “I was a roadie for twenty years,” he says.

“A roadie?  Did you ever meet any famous people?”

“Nope,” Caldwell says. “I set up the drum sets.”

Then Jimmy says, “Hey, wait a minute, we got you something,” and runs out to my car. He comes back with a can of silver spray paint.

“What are you doing?” I say, standing up from the window ledge. “Where did you get that?”

“Let’s let the pro show us how it’s done,” he says. He’s giving me a smile, but it’s not sweet. Fucking Jimmy.

“Not me,” I say. “No way.”

So I turn around and stick one leg out the window and squeeze my body out so I’m straddling the windowsill with my head and shoulders outside. The Kinks are singing “Situation Vacant.”

Then he had to leave the apartment / And sought a less plush residence. Tell me about it.

I smell the paint and my lungs burn. Over at the car wash, I watch a big-bellied guy wearing a John Deere ball cap pull in with his brand-new, white F-150 and get out to vacuum it. Dashboard cross, hunting rack, head lamps—everything on the car looks like money to me, something you could steal and sell. He’s bought one of those sprays that gives you a new car smell and I lean out far enough to get away from the spray paint smell and I smell it, the illusion of newness. I imagine his driveway and the house he lives in, just like all the other houses on his block. What a loser, I think.

Behind me, Jimmy’s doing it, he’s huffing. Then he’s high, whooping and hollering, and he comes over to me and hugs me around the hips and pulls me through the window. I turn and look at him, and there’s his sweet smile, but it’s covered in silver now, silver all around his mouth and nose and the Kinks are playing “Death of a Clown” and that’s what Jimmy looks like—a clown, or a spaceman, somebody’s child, my love, a dead man, or something—what is it? Something else.

—Constance Squires

#290: Al Green, "Call Me" (1973)

So I’m reading John Landau’s 1973 Rolling Stone review of Call Me, and he starts going on about how Al Green’s voice is like some untamed, wily thing threatening to break loose:

Because the singer disdains most forms of discipline, preferring to let his voice wander into every nook and cranny of the modest melodies he writes, turning phrases inside out, and wreaking havoc with the vocal structure in general, he requires the leveling force of a steady band playing tight, clean arrangements.

With all due respect to Landau as a critic and to all of his work with The Boss, I can’t figure out what the hell this cat is talking about. Al’s voice is a lot of things—warm, comforting, profoundly soulful—but undisciplined? And what does he mean by “wreaking havoc”? What sacred structure did Al’s ever-so-sweet falsetto render unto ruin? When did the gentle timbre of his precise annunciation ever descend into chaos and desolation? Mr. Landau, you ain’t never heard nothing like havoc on an Al Green record. Nah man. You must’ve gotten him mixed up with somebody else.

Near as I can tell, Al, Willie, and the rest of the boys just figured out that good soul music doesn’t always need to swelter. Sometimes you can just let the groove simmer low and slow, like the way the organ slides in on that first verse of “Call Me”—like a lover sliding into bed and grabbing you tight around the belly. And when Al hits that note about two and half minutes in, then lets it just fade away like a sunset….That ain’t nobody’s havoc; that’s some Grandmaster-level soul shit right there.

I think this Landau cat doesn’t really understand how folks listen to Al Green. See, when I need that cry-my-heart-out-longing-for-my-woman-sound, I put that Otis on. When I got that funny feeling, you know, something almost like a hopeful kind of heartache, I reach for that Sam Cooke. When I need to get these tears out, Donny Hathaway makes the song cry. And Marvin, well you know Marvin. That man could sing the secrets right out of your soul. But I always felt like Al had this other thing going on, kind of quiet, kind of like grace. Yeah, grace. Grace like the drink at last call before you go back out into the lonely cold of a winter’s night, or grace like mama and daddy dancing close in the middle of the kitchen on Saturday morning while the eggs and toast burn. That’s what I hear when I put on Call Me: someone singing like he knows how badly we need grace just to get through the day.

Landau wasn’t all wrong, though. Al does crawl all up inside those melodies, bending the pitch to his will and finding ways to make even the simplest sentiments feel newly rich. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” should be the corniest song ever, but he takes that whole sad Hank Williams affair and turns it into an eloquent lament we can feel in our bones. But that was always one of his greatest gifts: he could take a line that would collapse in on itself if sung by anybody else and make it sound like the truest words someone ever spoke. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when Al sings, I always believe him. I believe he means every note. I believe he wants to make us believe too. And I could be wrong, but it seems like we still all desperately need to believe—as much as we did in 1973—that we can be healed.

It’s been harder to write this than I expected. Not because Call Me has lost any of its compassionate gracefulness with age, but because it’s been hard to reconcile the record’s care and restraint with all the rage steadily surrounding us. I’ve had trouble trying to hear its subtlety over so much shouting, so much weeping, and so many bullets. I want to say something hopeful like “Love always speaks louder than fear or hate,” but there are too many bodies in the street for me to really believe that. As good a record as Call Me is, it cannot breathe life into the dead. What it can do is remind us of how good real and true togetherness feels. It can give us just enough healing to go face the horror again tomorrow. For at least a little while, it can remind us that things can be different if we want them to be.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for all the supposed connectedness we have at our fingertips, it often feels as if I’ve never been more alone. A text is not a hug. A “like” is not love. Tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram posts, and Snapchats are not intimacy no matter how magical their mimicry of it. So as much as I appreciate your reading this, here’s what we ought to do instead: Call on me and I will call on you. Let us drink and dance together in the middle of the kitchen like mama and daddy did. Even if they didn’t, even if that image is as much a fantasy as our online, make-believe selves, let us move our hips and shake our asses until we make it so. Let us drink from each other like it’s last call and there’s a storm outside—because there is. Let all of that wrath be swallowed in the embrace of warm, wet lips. Let us sit, breathe each other in real deep, and whisper Al’s incantation: “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).”

—Mikal Gaines

#291: Talking Heads, "Talking Heads: 77" (1977)

The girls in the dorm said Cheryl could do magic. Not like scarf tricks or a rabbit from an old top hat—she could read your palm or tarot, silence an enemy, mix you a perfume to wear on your left wrist that would lure your crush close. Her side of the room was decorated with red string lights and leopard print, bottles and oils, spices lined neatly on a shelf above her bed, a suitcase record player on a small stand near her desk.

The magic was instinct, she told them. Not from a book.

When her mouse of a roommate went to study at the library, she put the Talking Heads on, 77, just loud enough to hear it if you came to her door. She was open for business. The music is the magic, she told them. Melody is ritual. If the spell was complicated, she might play a song a few times; "Don't Worry About the Government" before a worrisome test, "The Book I Read" for a love spell, "Psycho Killer" when a mean girl with straight hair and slipper-pink nails taunted you across the dining hall.

Services were by trade, by trust—a bag of crisps and candy left quietly hanging on her doorknob, a neck massage during finals week. If she carved your ex's name into an onion and buried it underneath his window by a waning moon, you were expected to do the laundry she left outside your door the next morning without complaint.

*

Becky wanted a love spell. There was a boy in her math class, Ryan, who had an Indian tan and strong arms and wild eyes who smiled at her sometimes, but not enough.

Cheryl warned her that love spells were potent, not to be fucked with, best to use as a last resort when he just wouldn’t make that final move. Love spells are more powerful than anything, she said. They cannot be broken. Make sure this is what you want, that you know him well enough to cast this. But Becky begged, and she relented. The spell was cast, his name carved in a slim red candle dressed with rose oil. Becky burned it in her window for seven nights, letting the smoke drift out in a thin whisper. She stared at him in class. Each day he smiled a little bit more.

And on the eighth day, when the candle was nothing but a small stub buried in the forest at dawn, he asked her out. She left a gift card taped to Cheryl's door.

There were flowers and love songs played on a guitar. Champagne on a one-month anniversary, declarations of love every minute of every day. Becky moved into his apartment, coming back to the dorm only to get clothes and say hi. She stopped sitting with them at dinner. The girls in the dorm hardly saw her at all.

But Ryan loved her too much, grew possessive, then violent. He drank hard at parties and shook her when she begged him to call a cab. Checked her phone, demanded to know why she was late coming back from class, told her she didn't need to go to class at all. Brought his father's gun back after Thanksgiving, threatened to kill both of them if she ever tried to leave him. She fled while he was asleep, hid in her old room, refused to come out for class. The girls told her to go to the cops, but she couldn't. He would kill her. No one would believe her anyway.

But a love spell could be broken, right? She pleaded with Cheryl. I warned you, she chided. Love spells are not to be wasted on fools. But she agreed to help. There would be no charge this time.

*

Becky needed a banishing spell. Something strong to keep him away for good. Cheryl played "Psycho Killer" backwards and handed her a vial without a label. Something sweet, she promised. To restore his sweet temperament. Becky poured it into the electric blue backwash he carried to lacrosse practice and sent him out with a kiss, a silent prayer that Cheryl's promise would take action quickly. She didn't have eight days anymore. She wasn't sure she had eight hours.

He collapsed on the field. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Antifreeze, Cheryl said without a smile when Becky told her what happened. Sometimes magic isn't enough.

—Libby Cudmore

#292: Bob Dylan & the Band, "The Basement Tapes" (1975)

Tell the truth. You get tired. Once you did it like that, now you do it like this. If you can bear to do it at all. Maybe you never really heard what you thought. Maybe you’re only here because you forgot how to be anywhere.

This is when you get in a motorcycle accident.

Think about the legend. The one where your body’s brought low but your spirit abides. That kind of thing. Muck it up with the usual bunting. Rivers and bayonets. Foundlings and fire.

Practice silence. They’re going to say you’re burned, disfigured, dying. About at least that last bit, they’ll be right. They know. That’s the way it is. Mrs. Augustus is tired too, and she’s been dying longer than you.

Shelter in the past. Say things like, The old songs. Say it often. At parties. To people giving you the wooly eye trying to find your disfigurement. The old songs. You hear the old songs. Sort of croak it like, so they get the idea.

The idea is that you hear the old songs.

Blame it on the kennel master if you want to play dead. No one will question you if it sounds like a metaphor for war or something. Nobody’s going to accept that you’re turning your back on the endless road. Which is to say: have another kid.

Ah, butterfuck. That made it worse. This damned world. Even death can’t hold it still. You’ve already been the future, and you didn’t like what you made of it.

Ask the mirrors. Give yourself the wooly eye. Say you believe in the wisdom of reflection. The moon’s teeth are like a mirror. You probably said something like that once. Seems like your kind of thing.

You know this.

If someone asked you to name the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, you’d answer with a joke.

It might be the only truth you practice, and it makes a man a liar. You found the formula. It’s all punchline. It’s you and it’s of you. Sometimes it’s Canadians. That’ll happen. Canadians will happen.

What do they know of fighting?

What do you?

The fight is held in bad hands, over bad bodies. The doctor won’t say it, but the mirrors might. Something about knaves at the crossroads. You can’t remember endings because you’ve never known one, so laugh into the wind.

Let’s calm down, Commodore.

God can’t shake a hand without breaking the bones. What does He know of bodies? The definition of Heaven is being without one, but your first memory was hearing a horse’s leg crack. You said that once and now you’re married to that truth.

Never go home.

Hang out underground. But in a normal way. You’re not dying. You’re dying. Burying yourself is the only way to be sure. Don’t tell anyone. Tell Canadians. Not anyone you love.

Do you love anyone? You love the old songs. A curse isn’t a curse unless you sing it. Saw that on a placemat once. The waitress says it’s not that way for her but it might be for you.

Befriend a wolf.

Or if not a single wolf then every dog whose howl holds up the night. Put the math to work for you this time. Call up the money man and see where it stands. It’s never where you think. Once you own one dog every dog owns you. That one’s true.

The old truth.

Fuck Paul Simon.

Keep it to yourself. Maybe tell Levon Helm. He’s cool. You share a sickness. Everyone’s got one. You’ve got two. Time and knowledge. The old sickness. And eczema. Three then. You’ve been worse than scalded.

Like what it came to up there. Alone together, throwing motorcycles at the trees. You couldn’t believe the end times could end anything. You knew guys named Solomon the Earl and Judah Pete. You tried most things twice, but you didn’t change once.

Sing about it. Sing about everything. Do it alone. Do it in bed. Don’t stop. You tried stopping. It didn’t work. Promise you’ll meet again. Count the miles. Make the number so big it might be God. Make the past so gone you come round to it again.

A decade gone, and you have to live it over. Every lie you’ve ever spoke you speak again only this time you have to believe it. Whiskey in a teacup, nothing ever gets so dark. You rise from the Earth but the sky doesn’t invite you higher. Should have never learned to walk if there was only one way to stop. The horse knew that. Ask again.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was a man go blind.

That’s the punchline.

—Adam Peterson

#293: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat" (1968)

You know who Foster Campbell is even if you don’t know him by name. You met him once in a hookah bar, or that time you got lost on the subway, or at an unsanctioned boxing match where you lost 250 dollars on a fight you are pretty sure was rigged.

He’s the guy who’s allowed to bring open containers into baseball parks, the guy who’s been sleeping on your friend’s couch for a month but your friend says he doesn’t know him. He knocked your sister up once. He went to school with your cousin.

I first met him when I was at a house party in this weird neighborhood, which is sort of Foster Campbell‘s natural habitat. Lefty, who got that name by doing things with his right hand you don’t even want to know about, had brought me to the party insisting I would love the scene. I think some things we had done together recently had given Lefty the wrong impression of what I was into, but I went anyway.

There were pictures of Easter Island heads on the wall and beautiful women walked around in their underwear and bathrobes and frowned. I’m not sure if they were hired to do so, or if they lived there and had just not been informed that there was a party going on around them. Neither would have surprised me. There was a guy painting a picture on an actual easel and he pretended not to notice the glue-huffing and dry-humping that was going on right next to him. Lefty ended up making out with this cisgender chick in the front hallway and I sort of hung around the untouched booze that was organized alphabetically on the kitchen table.

None of it would have bothered me too much if that record hadn’t been playing on the turntable. It was either Galaxie 500’s On Fire or a local band who was doing a pretty good impression of the Music Machine’s (Turn On) The Music Machine. Everyone was doing that garage rock thing that summer. The bass was humming and writhing and it sounded like it was recorded in a used Volkswagen. I went out back to sit on the porch and look out over the other buildings and other porches on the block, the ant farm of connected paths, alleyways, and backyards that make up every Chicago neighborhood.

He was already out there when I stepped onto the porch. And by “he” I mean Foster Campbell. I knew it was him, because I had heard he was coming to this party. Lefty might have said something about it, or maybe I heard someone talk about it when we first showed up.

You know what he was wearing. You’ve met him. He had a cool piercing, but not one that was too obvious or desperate. A tattoo snuck out from under his clothes. He seemed rumpled and like he needed a haircut, but he was still great looking.

I could have sat down across from him, but I wanted to lean against the siding so I could look out over the neighborhood and watch other people on their own porches. Something told me he wouldn’t mind if I sat down right next to him.

“I love that T-shirt,” he said. “I saw it when I first walked in. Hilarious.”

“Hey thanks,” I said and looked down at it as if I had to remind myself of which shirt I was wearing, though wearing it had been a very deliberate and tortured decision.

“Got a smoke?” he asked.

“I don’t smoke,” I told him.

“You didn’t come out here to smoke?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting for 30 minutes to bum one.”

“I’m pretty sure you can smoke inside.”

“No one smokes anymore,” he said and sighed the same way my dad did when he lamented how often basketball players traveled.

“I had to get out of there,” I explained. “I just couldn’t take that record anymore.”

“You don’t like the Velvet Underground?” he asked.

“I thought it was the Wipers or someone like that.”

“Naw way,” he said. “It’s Lou.”

“It sounds like they didn’t bother to rehearse,” I said, trying to dismiss the record.

“Who wants to rehearse when you’re in a band?”

The argument made some kind of strange sense coming from him. There was a puzzle-logic to it that made me want to hear the rest of the record. He bobbed his head along to the manic tempo and tapped his thigh to the slapping sounds that constituted the drum beat.

“This is the best one,” he said.

Minute one of “Sister Ray” must have been recorded at the perfect frequency for that apartment because when the 17-minute ode to drugs, oral sex, and obliviousness began it felt like we were on an elevator getting shot into space. My stomach lurched and my mouth dried up. I was sure that when I looked over the side of the porch I was going to see the Earth shrink and disappear. He nodded his head and smiled at me.

That’s when I decided to do it. That’s when I leaned over and tried to kiss him. He pulled back and looked at me with the sad eyes that had made me want to kiss him in the first place, but now made me want to punch him.

“Are you trying to kiss me?” he asked.

“The fact that you are asking me that is a pretty bad sign.”

“I sort of have a girlfriend,” he explained and kept his eyes on me in case I tried something else.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away from him and looking back out onto the labyrinth of Chicago backyards while Lou Reed sought a mainline, “I do too.”

The insistent guitars were my frustration. The cranky, thrumming organ was my embarrassment. We sat with that song playing for a long time. Longer than its Ulyssian run-time, it seemed.

When the record ended someone put on Joe McPhee’s Nation Time and the spell was broken. I looked over at Foster Campbell and smiled. He smiled back, but I could tell he was waiting for me to leave. It was my responsibility to go, I realized. I had been the one who had done something dumb and made everything all awkward and uncomfortable for us both. I stood up and pretended to stretch. He continued smiling, but not in a mean way. He didn’t look like a sly fox, pitying the dogs who could not catch him. He smiled in the kind and polite way you did on Valentine’s Day in third grade while everyone in class stuffed envelopes and tiny treats into the shoebox you had lovingly decorated with construction paper hearts and glitter glue.

I found Lefty and we left the party with a group of cute college kids who claimed to be the West Suburban College Debate Society. I tried to forget about Foster Campbell, but everyone talked about him all the way back to Lefty’s place.

When I think about that record now I always think of Foster Campbell and I wonder what happened to him. I’ve heard he’s working in a railyard in Wilmington and that he maybe owns a consignment shop in Tallahassee. Sometimes I wish I knew for sure. I’d like to ask him what he thinks about the jarring and spliced voices shouting back and forth during “Lady Godiva” or what the hell he thinks John Cale was talking about in “The Gift.” Mostly I just wish I smoked back then.

When you run into him, don’t mention that I was talking about him. He probably knows already, but still.

That party isn’t something I like to talk about all that much. Or even think about. You’re probably thinking, "What's the big deal? Who hasn’t made out with Foster Campbell?"

My answer to that is: Well, me, for one.

—Matt Meade

#294: MC5, "Kick Out the Jams" (1969)

Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet.

Brother J.C. Crawford makes it sound really easy, doesn’t he? Makes it all sound really simple. And I don’t know, maybe in 1968, it was. Maybe you could just look out and see which direction revolution was coming from. Maybe you could just jump into the fight and know which side was which. The old heads I know tell me you could feel revolution: in the sounds and in the streets, in distorted guitars and dropped-acid dreams, in gunshots and soul claps, in zombie kids eating their parents and Rosemary’s devil-born brood, in Tommy and John Carlos’ raised fists, in the Panthers’ growls as they became “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” in people’s tears after the bullet stole away Martin’s dreamy get-down, in the Godfather’s hips when he saved Beantown, and just maybe, you could feel it crackling in the air at the Grande Ballroom on the witches’ sabbath with some crazy white boys from Detroit.

Could be that all of this is bullshit too. Could be that everybody then was just as confused and disillusioned as we feel now. Could be that everybody was too high to remember most of what really happened and so they told the best version of it. Could be that as simple and as sexy as Crawford makes it sound, we don’t really choose in five seconds. We choose and then we choose again, all of the time, sometimes without even knowing. And every one of those small choices takes us a little closer or a little further away from the revolution we think we want.

It’s hard to listen to Kick Out the Jams without nostalgia, without romanticizing it all to hell. And that’s weird because it isn’t even my own past I’m fantasizing about. I’m not old enough to truly claim the MC5 as my own. I’m playing make believe in someone else’s history. I’m stealing someone else’s glorious moment of revolt. Part of me feels guilty for that. Then I think that there’s nothing special about it really. Americans do it every July fourth. Parents hold on to old records usually hoping that their kids will hear a little bit of what they heard when they were younger. Record companies put out reissues betting that they can rope in a whole new audience for what’s essentially an old product. Nostalgia for shit you didn’t actually experience yourself or for things that never existed at all might be the greatest American commodity. In fact, that’s kind of how I discovered the MC5.

I wish I could say that someone passed down a dusty vinyl copy of Kick Out the Jams that I learned to love and cherish, but I’m pretty sure I first heard about them from one of those lame VH1 countdown specials they ran all of the time when I was in college. “The Greatest Hard Rock Songs of All Time” or whatever new reminiscence they were selling that week. I think I watched almost all of those countdowns—really exercises in canon building—because I thought it might educate me more about music. But that was the point, right? They wanted to remind the people old enough to actually remember that their old, beloved stuff was still worth paying attention to and let everybody my age know what they needed to be up on to earn those older folks’ respect.

I ended up back home with my parents for a year after college, working as a line cook in the same small town I had planned to put far in my rearview. I was desperately in need of some rebellious sounds. So you bet your ass that when I saw Kick Out the Jams at the local record store—they still had those then—I grabbed it and cranked the shitty speakers in my ‘93 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera as loud as they would go without rattling the windows too badly.

But as I listen to the record now, with my thirty-sixth birthday rapidly approaching, it feels haunted. Not just by that earlier version of myself or by the sense that I’m appropriating the language of somebody else’s insurrection, but also by doubt about whether I’ve become part of the problem or part of the solution—about whether I have realized my purpose here on the planet. When I hear the righteous recklessness of Brother Wayne Kramer’s guitar or the searing conviction in Rob Tyner’s voice, I’m not so sure.

In a 1994 interview for a Swedish radio station, Tupac Shakur offered a stark proclamation about the prospect of becoming an old revolutionary in America:

In this country, a Black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that’s right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. ‘Cause once you turn 30, it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a Black man, in this country. And you don’t wanna fight no more. And if you don’t believe me you can look around, you don’t see no loud mouth 30-year-old motherfuckers.

I should admit that I was never that big a fan of Pac while he was alive. That was in part because I bought into the corny east coast vs. west coast beef and also because I was never really blown away by him as an emcee. Still, when I heard him talking on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” his words hit me flush on the chin. He got me thinking about how much fight I have left in me, about which battles are even worth fighting, about how much of my heart and soul are still intact. Some days all I want to do is rage, but a lot of the time—more of it than I’d like to admit—I just feel tired and numb.

I watched the video of Eric Garner’s execution by police. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the others. It’s not because I worry that I won’t be able to handle it. I’m worried that I can. I’m terrified that I’ll be able to sit comfortably behind my computer screen, watch someone else who looks like me die, and then go on with my day like this is the way it’s supposed to be.

After I marched in a Black Lives Matter protest, my mom said it reminded her of the sixties, but I’m not really sure what she meant. Was she just talking about seeing black folks in the streets again with picket signs and raised fists? Or maybe she was lamenting that we are still fighting the same fights she did plus a whole bunch of new ones? Probably both. I tell myself that it’s more complicated now. That we know more about how our intersectional identities shape the contours of existence under neoliberal capitalism, that power is really more of an amorphous social construct than a centralized force, that current antagonisms between repressive state apparatuses and the people are just the latest manifestation of tensions inherent to the American experiment in democracy and freedom. And then I think, “What would Pac Say?” I feel like he’d probably say that there’s still “a lotta talk, by a lotta honkeys, sittin’ on a lotta money, telling us they’re high society.”

—Mikal Gaines

#295: Leonard Cohen, "Songs of Love and Hate" (1971)

The first time I listened to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, I never wanted to hear it again. It begins with “Avalanche,” which carries you away right from the first chord, rolling through lyrics like you who wish to conquer pain / you must learn what makes me kind / the crumbs of love that you offer me / they’re the crumbs I’ve left behind. It accelerates down to the chilling last lines: it is your turn beloved / it is your flesh that I wear. A Rolling Stone review called the album “depressing”; another critic said it’s “one of the scariest albums of the last forty years.”

I didn’t want to listen to Songs of Love and Hate because it’s so dark. I try, in much of my life, to avoid exposing myself unnecessarily to pain. I don’t listen to certain music, or watch certain shows, or read certain books because I don’t want to suffer if I don’t have to. There’s enough pain in the world already, I generally think. It will come my way in some shape or form over and over again, so why seek it out?

Sometimes that strategy has gone too far. When sadness has hit, or anger, or some other form of pain, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid it. When certain feelings are brought up by experience or the vagaries of human mood, I try to push them aside for a more convenient time, often by transferring that energy into worrying about nothing. Usually, I’m able get through whatever I need to get through, then end up collapsing in a panic attack after the situation’s over.

I spent years in therapy for anxiety, a condition I’ll always have to some degree. One source of my anxiety is a fear of feeling pain, especially sadness. Sometimes, when I’m sad, I have a childlike worry that I’ll always be sad—that the clouds will never lift, and that I’ll end up depressed. Even though I’ve learned how to deal with my feelings reasonably well, an underlying terror remains that my darknesses will return in the form of all-consuming anxiety. That it’s there, lurking, waiting to pounce.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate feels like a voluntary wrapping of myself in that darkness. I don’t want to take myself to that place. I volunteered to write about this album as a challenge—to see if I could sit through it and come out with something worthwhile. To see if I could come out of it whole.

Every time I pressed play, I found myself wanting to hit mute. Focus on the lyrics, I’d tell myself. This was an opportunity to spend time with Leonard Cohen’s mastery of language. If I could just block that strumming, that dry voice, I’d think, I would be able to learn from Cohen’s extraordinary use of imagery, like these lines from “Avalanche”: When I am on a pedestal / you did not raise me there / Your laws do not compel me / to kneel grotesque and bare / I myself am the pedestal / for this ugly hump at which you stare. Or like this fragment from “Sing Another Song, Boys”: as all the sails burn down like paper /…they’ll never, they’ll never ever reach the moon / at least not the one we’re after / it’s floating broken on the open sea.

I worried that the album’s mood would seep into my bloodstream. If I could just do a close reading of the lyrics, I thought, I’d come out unscathed. Reading, you can put the pages away. When a song gets stuck in your head, there’s not much you can do to get it out.

But this album does not exist for our enjoyment. It intentionally forces listeners into a place of pain. Cohen’s voice assures us from the very first track that Your pain is no credential here / it’s just the shadow of my wound. This album doesn’t exist to make us feel good. Unlike so much popular music, it wants to challenge us. It drags us, kicking and screaming, into an abyss, from the first chords of “Avalanche” to “Joan of Arc”’s fiery conclusion:

It was deep into his fiery heart / he took the dust of Joan of Arc / and then she clearly understood / if he was fire, then she must be wood / I saw her wince, I saw her cry / I saw the glory in her eye / Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

Listening, I worried I would not be able to escape. I worried that publishing this essay on my birthday would somehow curse the year ahead. I worried, like I used to the times I really, truly, let myself feel pain, that it would never let me loose.

I didn’t want to listen to the album because it always brings me back to a fraught year of my life. When I was 22 and living alone in a studio in Washington Heights, I feared that anxiety would swallow me whole. That winter, several things hit at once. I could have handled most of those challenges just fine if they’d come at me singularly, but they collected, one upon the other, like an avalanche. The day after Christmas, I developed pneumonia. My then-boyfriend wouldn’t take me to the doctor, so I sweated out a 103-degree fever for three days before finally hauling myself downtown in a cab.

Pneumonia left me weak for over a month. Usually active, I was too easily winded to walk up the escalators at my subway stop anymore, and had to stand to the side to let people pass. Work, plus the commute, was enough to wipe me out for the day. Weekends, I needed to sleep and sleep. I became paranoid about health, fearing that every time I touched the subway railing I would catch another disease that would knock me back off my feet.

Then, just as I was beginning to really get over the pneumonia, I was rejected for a major grant that would have changed my life. Then, my boss suddenly resigned, throwing my workplace into months of chaos. In the midst of all this, the then-boyfriend cheated on me. I started having frequent panic attacks for the first time in years.

Luckily, I was seeing a therapist at the time. Having a place to go talk things out, it allowed the buildup to slow. And, at times, working with her helped me get the anxiety out. For me, anxiety is often a symptom of other emotions lying in wait. That year, it was a mix: fear of losing my job, anger at the boyfriend, disappointment about the grant, fear of getting sick again, and an overall resurgence of anxiety itself.

The only way to let a feeling out, I’ve learned, is by expressing it. In art, in music, in exercise, or simply by talking. Except, not so simply. Therapy isn’t just talking; it’s forcing yourself to identify and confront feelings you may not want to look in the eye. There were times when I’d end up in a ball on my therapist’s couch, shaking and howling wordlessly. During those moments, I wondered if the pain was going to kill me right there.

But it didn’t. Eventually, I sat back up and made my way home. If there was a fog around my head that evening, it was a little lighter the next day, or the next. Even if a new worry settled, I could remember getting through to the other side of something like it. Tunnels, yes, but also—and most importantly—light.

Or, to follow Cohen’s metaphor in the album’s concluding track, “Joan of Arc,” fire and wood. Except, I learned, I could choose not to be wood. I didn’t have to follow Cohen’s logic of if he was fire, oh then she must be wood. Every time I found myself in a dark place, love would call my name.

I think that’s what’s at the heart of Songs of Love and Hate: love calling our names. “Love Calls You By Your Name” is the fifth of eight songs on the album, and it marks something of a tonal shift. Though melodically it’s not the most upbeat—that’s probably the deceptively peppy “Sing Another Song, Boys”—the song has some hope embedded deep within it. If we look between things, we’ll find love. As Cohen himself once said, the song “searches out the middle place between the beginning and the end of things,” and it approaches a meeting point between despair and hope.

In therapy, I sought that center. Sometimes, I didn’t get there. But other times, I reached that meeting point, or even passed it by, finding hope. It started to happen consecutively. And, as I processed my feelings, the worry and the fear all subsided. I learned how to deal with anxiety: by sitting with the feelings until they faded of their own accord, by learning to calm myself, by reminding myself that the feelings wouldn’t last forever. I recovered from the pneumonia, and, slowly, anxiety’s hold lessened. I began to have panic attacks only once a week, then once a month, then back to the normal few times a year.

Listening to Songs of Love and Hate is one of the most visceral musical experiences there is. It throws you into the physicality of panic and despair, then takes you on a journey through the depths until it—and you—can find a way out. At first, I worried that Cohen’s album would return me to the way I felt at 22. That its melancholy would be able to seek me out. But, every time “Joan of Arc” ended, I went back to my life. The darkness subsided, as it always does.

Songs of Love and Hate is about despair. The combination of Cohen’s lyrics, his baritone, the slow melancholy strumming, and the unnerving background voices of children and women, sends us to dark places. But the album also finds hope in its center, as we, too, must seek the hope embedded in our own cores.

By the next winter, I was edging towards the other side of that anxiety. Though I made it out of that phase stronger, I sometimes still worry when the next long wave will hit, when I’ll next have months in which I’m constantly on the verge of a panic attack. But I try not to let myself indulge those worries. It will come, and I will deal with it when it does, stronger now because I’ve sat through it before.

I worry now that I don’t have anything new to say about facing our own personal darknesses. Cohen says it best: Myself I long for love and light / but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright? Yes, sometimes it must. But I think what I have learned—what Songs of Love and Hate reminded me—does bear repeating. Here, I paraphrase one of my college professors: Sit through the mess, and you will figure out how to untangle it. Sit through the darkness, and you will find a way to make a flame that will brighten, not consume.

—Marissa Mazek

#296: The Smiths, "Meat is Murder" (1985)

Bestiary

Bes·ti·ar·y

noun

A a descriptive or anecdotal treatise on a mythological or real animal.
 

Gen-X

noun

The generational cohort following the Baby Boomers.
 

A bestiary for a Gen-X boy

Get him to quote the Smiths. Quote them back to him with ellipses, a double bed and a stalwart lover for sure….Make him believe that sex is all you think about but never what you ask for, let his need hover in the spaces between.

Wear Doc Martens, own stilettos, paint your lips. Ask him about the books he's reading, the songs on his mixtape. Correct yourself, playlist, and laugh like music. Be the wild-art girl he wanted in college, not the dull-sincere woman he is married to now. You are wanton but chaste, your longing written in lipstick across your breasts.

His kiss is haunted by cigarettes. Meat is Murder but you'd still eat his dick just so long as the hotel room is in his name. But it may never come to such a headmaster ritual. He will love you on Sundays down the page, cut you on Monday in letters scrawled across.

Love is a fork in the road. He will either say three words too often or never, become an anchor or an island. The joke has ceased to be humorous, but you will always laugh. His winter heart craves the applause, the static and spotlights of a happier time. Your affection will be an encore in the theater of his life and in return, he will shower you with praise. You will be brilliant and witty, charming in an age that trades in quick vulgarity.

Expect no promise. This love is going nowhere fast. But trust that he is lying in his tent in the middle of the night with his eyes on the ceiling, imagining brass and leather, red wine and white sheets. He tastes your mouth, conjured from the digital space, from paperbacks printed on cheap ink.

But there is a box in his closet, band shirts and flannel, a pair of jeans soft as tissue that he lied about throwing away. Here is where he stores his heart on cassettes that cannot be replayed, a chess game never finished. Here is where he keeps you, safe from the world.

So you will meet in coffee shops and quiet bars, travel to cities hours away for a moment of badinage with a man who cannot ever be yours. But you will never truly be his either, this love is a black box masquerade, ice in a tumbler. You will say goodbye on a cracked sidewalk, his breath white between you. Well, I wonder….

—Libby Cudmore