Author: Lara Avery

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. The first playlist was called, “Lovestuck.” This one’s called “Chaos.” If you’d like to read from the beginning of the playlist series, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Never Learn Not to Love” by The Beach Boys

“Lovestuck” was an exploration of the interior: the inside of our homes as we sheltered-in-place, the swirling power of memories, influence, and emotions, and the inner battle between hope and despair. (We’re no longer asked to be inside, though perhaps we should.) As the summer wanes, we look outward, toward the world and the stories we tell about it, those fabricated to make this chaos more bearable and knowable, those told in an effort to keep it from crumbling. We begin, as we did with the last playlist, with the end of the 60s, but this time I would like to talk about Charles Manson.

The Manson murders, or as journalist and author Tom O’Neill refers to them, the Tate-LaBianca murders, signaled to many the end of an era. Like O’Neill, I’ll quote Didion: “…The Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.” In the wake of this brutal, drug-fueled massacre, it seemed that dropping in and tuning out was no longer an option. But the abruptness of this ending is not quite accurate, O’Neill points out, and I agree. There’s also Meredith Hunter’s murder in Altamont later in 1969, or the repeated targeted harassment, manipulation, and murder of members and allies of the Black Panthers by law enforcement throughout the late 60s, or we can definitely factor in the 1968 murder of Ann Jimenez in Haight Ashbury, epicenter of the hippie movement. From the shore, it’s easier to point out the crest of a wave than the forces underneath it, and either the Tate-LaBianca murders were certainly one of those crests. O’Neill’s book CHAOS swims out, dives under the white water, and stays there.

I’ll let you seek out the finer points this sprawling, meticulously-reported epic yourself, but suffice it to say O’Neill’s major task is proving that the widely accepted narrative about the Tate-LaBianca murders—based mainly on Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s bestselling “true crime” account, Helter Skelter—contains wide holes, baffling inconsistencies, and a generally impossible sequence of events. What began as O’Neill’s basic human-interest piece about the crime’s 30th anniversary became a decades-long search for answers to some incredibly obvious questions; questions posed not only by O’Neill, but by the victims’ families, local law enforcement, and Bugliosi himself. Frustrated as I was by O’Neill’s churchmouse unwillingness to make conclusions based on his mind-blowing research, the author’s obsessive adherence to documents, corroboration, and facts is a model for detangling and contextualizing any singular story we tell about American history.

No doubt that Manson, a dangerous and cruel man, is at the center of the crimes; O’Neill is not interested (nor am I) in discounting his nefarious role in these deaths. But there is enough evidence to suggest that Manson’s actions before and after the murders, as well as the subsequent crazed, counter-culture cult stereotype that has seeped into our collective consciousness as a result of his infamy, did not spring out of a vacuum. For one, the spaces Manson inhabited during the crucial period in which he gathered followers—spaces that range from the office of his experimental criminologist parole officer, to a clinic in the Haight Ashbury occupied by Dr. “Jolly” West—were monitored and funded by the same shell organizations that funded Project MKUltra, the CIA’s now well-documented, highly unethical program testing the ability to weaponize psychological manipulation and mind control. On the fringe of the Manson case, O’Neill has also found evidence among shadowy figures that slip in and out of court documents and memories to suggest ties to another covert operation, COINTELPRO, an FBI-led effort to infiltrate, agitate, and dismantle leftist and Black power groups from the inside. 

Like a fraudulent tax-evading, racist reality star running one of the most powerful and diverse nations in the free world, O’Neill’s findings seem stranger than fiction. America is not alone in allowing its government to commit secretive and heinous acts in the service of its national security and economic interests, but O’Neill’s work is a reminder of our county’s uniquely powerful collective ability to prioritize entertaining stories over facts. 

Our leader, a constant and flagrant liar, just recently told us to fight a pandemic by eating medicine endorsed by a woman who believes in demons and aliens. Those of us who acknowledge science are shaking our heads, but secretly, we all love this sh**. When you think about it, our love of sensational stories is in the DNA of our colonial roots. (See: The Witches by Stacy Schiff, the painstakingly thorough and endlessly fascinating curation of accounts from the Salem Witch Trials.) DJT is not the first racist conman we’ve rewarded, both for their lies and the fascinating stories their lies create. (See: Bunk by Kevin Young, the rich and confounding history of America’s racially-motivated love affair with snake oil salesmen, hoaxes, and fakes.) We’re all fed fiery nonsense, and we’re all complicit in its effects. Media companies owned by the same five or six men told us parallel and opposite stories about our country, and as they made money off of advertisements, we chose which lie we liked best. (See: this excerpt from Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, specifically the survey about Democrats’ and Republicans’ perception of the opposing party.) We love stories so much, we are now in the process of using technology to offer up the marketable story of our very selves, at the cost of our time, mental health, and personal relationships. (See Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, a masterfully incisive collection of essays about selfhood and delusion in the Information Age.)

This latest playlist, named for the state of our country as well as the book (and yet another CIA surveillance operation), opens with The Beach Boys’ “Never Learn Not to Love,” released in 1968 as a B-Side to “Bluebirds Over the Mountain.” The American euphemistic way of talking about this weak sauce is that musically, “this is not one of the Beach Boys’ more remarkable songs.” Sure, there’s a weird reverse recording of a cymbal at the beginning that sounds like the gong at some ancient execution ritual. And sure, Dennis barely hits the final notes, perhaps to strike an intentionally desperate tone, or perhaps because of his cig-shot vocal cords. But with the Beach Boys’ trademark angelic harmonies and tambourine-driven percussion, it’s dressed up and pretty enough for the party, right? Then, you listen to the lyrics. “Cease to resist,” Wilson sings, and later, “Submission is a gift.”

It turns out the released version of this song is allegedly scrubbed to protect the image of the Beach Boys. The lyrics “cease to resist” used to be “cease to exist”, which share the song’s original title. The story is that one day in 1968, Dennis Wilson picked up two hitchhikers, young women he took back to his home Pacific Palisades who told him all about their friend and mentor, Charlie. Charlie was a musician, philosopher, ex-con, anybody who Wilson wanted him to be, really. God and the devil. Shaman and pimp. Family. Eventually, Manson even came into the studio with the band, but he wasn’t as talented as his hubris made him seem. “Give up your world, come on and be with me,” Wilson sings as Manson’s proxy. The lyrics take on a new, chilling significance when you imagine them out of Manson’s mouth. “I’m your kind, I’m your kind, and I see,” he wrote. He seems to sing not only to everyone who ever believed his lies, but to all of his fellow liars—all the powerful men who pretended he wasn’t a threat to get access to the young women who followed him, the California parole boards and jails who mysteriously released him over and over, the government that stood back and watched him just to see what he would do. And now me, who proliferates his myth.

What happened between Manson and the Beach Boys may be based in fact, but I can’t pretend I was drawn to this story, this song, or even to CHAOS merely by the truth. Nor was I ever one of those people obsessed by the Helter Skelter story. I wanted to see the gap between facts and fiction grow wide and dark. I wanted to see the liars dressed down and brought to their knees. I assure myself I would never buy the snake oil, but I’d be present when they put the shackles on the salesman. In the Salem Witch Trials, I would have been one of the gossips in the town pubs. Like crime, virtue, too, can be made into a spectacle. And I wonder if consuming either means I have to keep myself at a certain distance, or if to see what I want to see, I am somehow taking part.

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the final post about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Great Day,” Paul McCartney

You’ve probably picked up by now that I’m interested in the playlist as a rhetorical exercise. Playlist as balm, playlist as advocate, playlist as stimulant. A sunset with Willie Nelson’s “Buddy” in the background is a different sunset than one soundtracked by Bjork’s “Lionsong.” Some combinations of songs fit a moment, others sour it. (Not that Bjork would sour a sunset.) I guess I’m making it a hobby to write about why. But why why? Why am I so compelled to pick apart my own inventions? Have I over-sentimentalized a process that Spotify has perfected?

The other day I was listening to a design podcast called 99% Invisible, which specializes in short inquiries about the origins of design. Architecture, toothbrush handles, parks: all are intentional constructs we can trace back to the decisions meant to ease or influence the human animal. One episode that particularly caught my ear was about an app called RjDj that uses the sensory tools of your phone (camera, mic, GPS, etc) to read your environment and cater music specifically for your surroundings. Because of the nature of “reactive music” projects this developer has worked on, the music you would hear in the app was more likely an ambient reaction to a space rather than a thematic one, i.e. as you stand next to a river, you would hear flowing, watery sounds rather than Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.” This strikes me as an effort to mirror and highlight the very act of listening itself; exaggerating the features of a soundscape, or any mood’s associative noises, in order to foreground what had previously melted into the backdrop. It’s like the sonic equivalent to zooming in on the wood patterns of your cabinets.

The app didn’t work out (at least not in its intended form) but it made me realize all the human complexity present in the act of soundtracking our lives—perhaps it’s not merely formulaic or reflective. While RjDj’s immersion in sound alters one’s perception, it (probably intentionally) avoids one of the main reasons why people listen to music as they drive or walk or socialize: to place themselves inside cultural narratives. Now, of course, we’re constantly receiving invitations from streaming behemoths like Spotify to occupy the sonic spaces they have built through data mapping. They offer playlists for moods, for seasons, for situations. Their sophisticated algorithms make judgments based on our listening habits, making recommendations and creating personalized collections. It’s beautiful, what Spotify does. Very sleek and quick.

And yet. I don’t think it can yet do for us what we can do for ourselves. It doesn’t have the reactive power we have (and RjDj tried to have). We have to tell it who we are, where we are, and what we want to hear. We tell the algorithm what kind of impression we want to form, and it can merely reflect that impression back to us. And Spotify doesn’t have a direct interface; the world is harvested first by smell, sight, touch. The art of the playlist reflects the functions of the body: reacting, processing, choosing one thing and not the other. Even now, after most of us have graduated from recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes, making playlists is still a physical act. Typing search terms, listening for a moment for the perfect sound, clicking through to a different one, moving tracks up and down to find the right order. A playlist is about consumption, but it’s not passive. It’s collage, but it’s about reshaping reality rather than fragmenting it. It’s art using other’s art, recontextualizing, projecting, making connections across time and category, creating conversations between artists who never thought to speak to each other. I’m obsessed. I’m grateful to artificial intelligence for the help, but I could never give up this task wholly.

The idea to make a shelter-in-place playlist was spurred by this song, “Great Day.” Sometimes, when I am overwhelmed by emotions—positive or negative—I think about my freshman year of high school, when I was so saturated by feeling I could barely eat. I was starting a new school, I had just started to browse beyond the young adult section in the library, and I was deeply infatuated with a sixteen-year-old who kept lending me CDs. People often describe children as sponges, but they rarely recall what it’s like when you are aware of your spongeness. My skull was cracked open to the wind, my skin felt porous. Sometimes—and I’m ashamed to say it—I would literally start trembling when this kid would talk to me. It wasn’t just him in relation to me, it was also him as a doorway, all these new portals he was opening for me to music and books and film. And when we “broke up” (reader, we went to Dairy Queen three times over the span of six weeks), I knew I couldn’t go back into my own smaller world. I had to keep going, to keep exploring, or else he would know how hurt I was.

I didn’t know why then, but among all of those new discoveries (David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen), I was very into Flaming Pie, a 1993 album by Paul McCartney that received middling reviews. Looking back, I suspect this more contemporary album represented a small step forward from my Beatles and Oldies 95 ouvre, but still allowed me to find solace in the familiarity of Paul McCartney’s voice. The song is so simple, too, with just one repeating verse, and a chorus of one line. It turns out McCartney wrote it from the comfort of his home, describing it now as “an acoustic number that he and [his late wife] Linda used to perform ‘sitting around the kitchen or when the children were dancing’,” and they even have memories of singing it together by candlelight as a hurricane raged off the coast of Long Island. Beyond the warm image of Paul strumming to keep out the wild night, there’s something very cute yet profound about the limitations of its lyrics.

“While you’re standing there,” McCartney requests, “get up and grab a chair.” Logistically, this is nonsense. If the person to whom he is singing is standing, there’s no need for them to “get up.” But the message is clear cut: have a seat. Nothing makes sense, so sit on down. It might be a while. “It won’t be long,” the chorus repeats, never evolving into any more certainty than that. There’s no answer to what will come after this period of waiting or not waiting.

I remember putting Flaming Pie into my little off-brand player with tinny speakers. I remember zipping up my Catholic uniform and looking at myself in the mirror, trying to see myself as everyone else saw me, and always failing. I remember the nostril-cut of the acidic perfume I put on to make myself seem older. As everything outside my window was shifting like a storm with my perception—new knowledge revealing cracks in its facade, new landscapes, dark corners and sensations—I was stuffing my backpack, humming along to the sweet, protective lie of “Great Day.” Now I’m in my thirties, moving across the country by myself during a pandemic.

Somehow its message wasn’t lost as I carried on at fourteen, scared and sad, punch-drunk on the strangeness of growing up, and I hope that’s still the case. Songs stay with you, especially the hummed ones, even as you step outside to find the world changed.

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the seventh entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Walk On By,” The Beach Boys

Usually a song about heartbreak towards the end of a playlist means something wistful and sad; today it doesn’t. I’m just tickled by this arrangement. And from the rollicking doom of “Sunny Afternoon” to the Lennon-esque bask of our next song, the Beach Boys cover of this little Burt Bacharach number—made famous, of course, by Dionne Warwick and later Isaac Hayes—acts as a musical bridge. Against its more chart-topping counterpart, this originally unreleased Beach Boys version is significantly slower and less crisp, missing not only a majority of the lyrics of the original song but a lot of the pride, too. While Ms. Dionne seems to dismiss her pain with a veil of commanding elegance, Brian Wilson’s falsetto reads more like an erasure poem about despair.

This morning, I kept listening to the two versions back to back, trying to figure out what exactly is so off. It’s not just the harmonies on the beautiful, bleeding edge of dissonant, as usual with Wilson’s ear. It’s not just the syrupy tempo, either. Then I found a possible answer: the piano is out of tune. Or at least not tuned according to the traditional A-above-middle-C. After doing some digging, I found some very interesting speculation: according to a couple different message boards, Wilson had his piano tuned strangely on purpose around the time the Beach Boys were recording 1967’s Smiley Smile. No one could confirm this, but the general story, which allegedly comes from Brian’s ex-wife Marilyn, is that Brian asked a piano tuner to come over and adjust the piano according to his own hummed pitches. Many are skeptical that this is even musically possible, but there is no doubt that the scales are a bit sideways in “Walk on By,” as well as on Wild Honey‘s “Let the Wind Blow” and “Country Air,” also recorded in 1967. 

This reverbed, off-tune sound pierces me to the bone. Growing up we had an old upright in our house that all the kids were too impatient to practice and thus never formally learned. On summer days, though, I liked to play with it purely as a noise machine. I didn’t care that it was out of tune. I probably had no idea. I liked to loosen the reverb all the way and press my ear to the walnut, feeling the vibrations of each key. Then I would tap the mute pedal, delighting for a bit in the muffled clinks, only to dive back into the deep sea echo of notes bleeding together. As I got older, I taught myself songs by ear, practicing raw, fragile imitations of “Let It Be” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” until my brothers got annoyed. I bet there is a version of this off-key, experimental instrument in many households. I imagine it’s not just me for whom Wilson’s choice signifies the sweet, messy plunk of a home piano, playing for the sake of noise and nothing else. Read the message boards—just like me, people are mysteriously drawn to the sound.

My favorite measure is under the wash of that chorus of “cry.” The arpeggio is so gentle and simple relative to the blast of harmonics, like a kid coming into the dining room during a dinner party to see why all the adults are being so loud. With this sweet, slightly confused tone helping us along, we’ll soon hit the apex of this playlist with Angel Olsen’s “Spring.”

Join me in running your finger along the thread between past and present, between Wilson’s 1967 front room and Olsen’s 2019 masterpiece of a ballad, featuring a piano sound which Steffanee Wang at The Fader calls “gently warped.” Do you hear how, despite its imperfection, it carries the song?

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the fifth entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

Are you seeing a pattern yet? Lonesome, surrounded by a menagerie of glittering links to the past, to other worlds. Inconsolable except by the stars. Though I will focus on the lyrics, my favorite part of “Cosmic Dancer” is the sound of Marc Bolan’s guitar. Based on what I hear, I believe (I can’t confirm with a cursory Google search) that these riffs are actually being played backward. The conventional electric guitar is a piercing, jagged sound; people love it because they can practically see or feel the notes penetrating the air. But backward, the riffs of “Cosmic Dancer” sound like they’re being sucked back into the void whence they came. The edges are rounded. Eroding, retreating. Leaping like a gull call back to the beginning of each note.

“Cosmic Dancer” is off of T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, an album that contained the one and only hit to cross the pond with American listeners, but funnily enough, the hit wasn’t today’s featured song. Beyond the DJ-favorite “Bang a Gong (Get it On),” the popularity of “Cosmic Dancer” has climbed only in recent years, or at least its use in soundtracks has increased. I first heard the song backing Todd Haynes’ 1998 box office flop Velvet Goldmine, a beautiful, strange, borderline melodramatic retelling of the birth and evolution of glam rock, an aesthetic musical movement of which Marc Bolan was a part. With a plot that’s two parts Citizen Kane, one part Almost Famous, we follow a journalist and a rockstar (a David Bowie-inspired character; so close, in fact, that Haynes had to rewrite the script for fear of a lawsuit) in intersecting vignettes, watching the blooming spirit of British queerness and camp travel in currents from Brian Slade (a la David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Jobriath), to Curt Wild (a la Iggy Pop, Lou Reed). Just as the aesthetics of glam-rock transcend sexuality, the movie is about more than the illicit affairs of its characters. Velvet Goldmine‘s “Rosebud” is a piece of jewelry owned by Oscar Wilde, given from the Iggy Pop character to the rock journalist as a kind of talisman. With this moment as its climax, the movie also seems to be about homage, carrying a legacy of those who live and create outside of convention. Specifically, British and American convention, and more specifically, Haynes’ focus is on the creators who are white men, with the exception of a nod to the late Little Richard. (Speaking of those influenced by Little Richard, I would love to see a version of this homage story with Prince at its center.)

Back to T. Rex: this song strikes me as the melancholy heart of glam rock, the melancholy heart of camp.* If camp is about any style that thumbs its nose at societal notions of “good” or “tasteful,” then “Cosmic Dancer” is about the loneliness of the uncommon. To perform camp, one must be both joyfully accessible and intentionally repulsive. One must beckon eyes and ears with spectacle, but remain impertinent, impenetrable. “I danced myself right out the womb,” Bolan’s speaker narrates in nasally, tremulous tones. A truly camp-y image: the tiny Marc Dolan, soft-shoeing between his mother’s legs, a universal experience that is somehow met with almost universal disgust for its viscera. And there’s loneliness here, too. He danced himself right out. No help implied. A similar solitude hangs over the other mentions of dancing, “when I was out,” and “when I was eight.” I see an eight-year-old boy, alone in his room, swaying—please tell me you see it, too. Just as I see myself when I am a kid, imagining an enraptured audience as I leap about with my chubby body, transporting myself into fantasy scenarios with trips and turns.

*This paragraph is working with a more general definition of “camp” as laid out Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp.” However, Sontag was wrong: the origins of “camp” cannot and should not be extracted from queer culture, especially from the communities and code invented by queer and trans people of color. Read Moe Meyer’s response to Sontag in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, this 2018 essay by Chi Luu, or check out this excellent overview of the history of camp by Erika W. Smith.

 

Like Velvet Goldmine, and matching the tone of “Cosmic Dancer”—i.e. “What’s it like to be a loon? I’d like it to a balloon”—the whole Electric Warrior album questions the origins of one’s perceived strangeness. Brian James writes in Pitchfork, “With the incomparable aid of producer Tony Visconti, Bolan sketches a vast, empty room, where, after the party’s over, he resides alone, wide-eyed and desperate.” I can imagine it, this dark room James conjures, abandoned by the tastemakers, the dotted disco lights rotating around the speaker like the swirling, indifferent cosmos. But I can also see him get up, start to sway as he did when he was a child. While questioning the strange, “Cosmic Dancer” also embraces it, especially considering the speaker dances through life all the way to the end. The mention of “tomb” is paired with heavenly strings, and a sense—as I said about the backward-seeming playback of the guitar—of the sound rewinding. “But then again,” the speaker says right before the final chorus, “Once more.” Once more through life, indefinitely.

Six years after Electric Warrior was released, Marc Bolan died in a car crash. While his human body expired, the lovely, strange worlds created by T. Rex live on. Or maybe, like the wishes of his glam-rock counterpart David Bowie, it isn’t just music that is still with us. “I always had sort of a repulsive need to be more than human,” Bowie once said. Perhaps Bolan is still here in the form of some astronomical material, some benevolent particle that floats through our houses, that gets kicked up with the dust as we dance.

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the fourth entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Coin-Operated Boy,” The Dresden Dolls

I positioned Panda Bear’s “Take Pills” next to “Coin-Operated Boy” motivated by both sound and theme. We ended the last song on a train; we open this song with a similar staccato rhythm. After the staticky revelry of a 303 sampler, the dreamy travel of Monster Rally, and the grand hiss of the locomotor carrying us god-knows-where, we are plunked back indoors for a live performance, featuring the unmistakable tink-tink of toy piano. Yes, in this playlist as in life, we are always compelled back inside. Almost nothing is subtle or mysterious about the four walls of our own homes; almost nothing is subtle or mysterious about the instrumentation of this Dresden Dolls song. As the song builds, the percussion can barely keep up to the speed of the singer, crashing down onto the circus melody like a stack of Tupperware from the highest cupboard. Its chord structure plays out dizzy and circular, up and down the stairs like a sea shanty.

Like “Take Pills,” “Coin-Operated Boy” is about using artificial means to find joy. “Sitting on the shelf, he is just a toy,” vocalist and composer Amanda Palmer sings in a wistful, conversational tone, “But I turn him on and he comes to life / Automatic joy / That is why I want a coin-operated boy.” Pardon me while I get NSFW for a second: many listeners wonder if this “automatic joy” is referring to certain machinations of self-pleasure. While I can follow the logic of this reading, the Dresden Dolls themselves refute this in an old, archived FAQ, and I choose to believe them. For the purposes of this playlist, in any case, the coin-operated “automatic joy” is prescient of a much broader force in our current lives, a monetized, ever-ready dopamine-dispenser, the prevalence of which 2007 Amanda Palmer could have never predicted. I am talking, of course, about our devices.

“Made of plastic and elastic, he is rugged and long-lasting…” Though not long-lasting enough not to strategically break so we have to pay to update our models every year, the time we spend with our phones and tablets is likely more continuous than the time we now spend with flesh-and-blood people. Before the pandemic, this was somewhat by choice. Now it’s the forced norm of leisure time, especially for those of us who live alone. Sure, I take walks, have socially distanced picnics, read books, throw things in a pan. But the majority of my connection with others is mediated by screens, the mechanics of which are designed to keep my eyes locked on something or someone while a tax-evading company collects data for targeted ads. When you realize the “coin” of this “coin-operated boy” is paid unwillingly via sleight-of-hand, the dark carnivalesque trilling of the Dresden Doll’s piano becomes all the more appropriate.

The “boy” of the “coin-operated boy” is the promise of love and care behind the tricks. Though I resent my reliance on technology, I still use it to reach people. I feel genuine warmth when I see my friends’ and family’s faces on screen, when I hear their voices on the phone. This kind of technologically-induced joy is real, body and soul, and will endure even after in-person visits are not a risk. New relationships, on the other hand, are a different beast. I admit, on nights when the sitcom on the big screen isn’t enough to keep my attention, I go to the other, smaller screen and root around in the ol’ dating app. The situation for single people during quarantine is a sad kind of funny, or funny kind of sad. For my part, the irony is the worst. Just as I was ready to enjoy my new, post-grad school free time and maybe even find love, it becomes borderline illegal to go on dates.

And yet, there’s a part of me who shares the resignation of the speaker of “Coin-Operated Boy.” Perhaps it’s simpler this way, to keep humans at arm’s length while I enjoy the simple give-and-take of Netflix and The New York Times Tiles game (seriously, Tiles is so fun and relaxing, I highly recommend it). Entertainment on my schedule, according to my whims, adhering to my limits, for mere dollars a month. Nobody else’s dirty dishes in the sink, nobody’s farts to smell, no one’s taste to contend with, no giving up my shows for some organized crime drama, no boring talky podcast blaring from someone’s phone while I’m trying to read. This is lonely, but it’s also “love without complications galore.”

As Amanda Palmer begins listing the benefits of romance with a robotic boy—“Many shapes and weights to choose from / I will never leave my bedroom / I will never cry at night again / Wrap my arms around him and pretend”—her declarations begin to reveal the desperation of the speaker’s circumstances; “I will never cry at night again” seems more like a wish than a certainty. Just as the health and wealth and desires of a real boy might change, so, too, do the joy-giving capabilities of technology. Mirroring a stuck record, the song begins to repeat, “…and I’ll never be alone.” I agree with Genius contributor Matthew Durant: “Palmer’s broken record repetition of this line suggests something breaking down, like stuck clockwork. Despite all the benefits of a mechanical boyfriend, he’s still only a machine, easily broken – and she knows it.” Perhaps our pleasure-giving devices are subject to failures both mechanical and existential because, after all, they were invented by humans with their own existential and mechanical failures. 

Though the song’s predictions laid out how seamlessly we can begin to eschew messy, everyday meatspace and instead occupy ourselves with coin-operated systems, the emotional breakdown and general self-convincing tone of Palmer’s lyrics also suggest there will never be a satisfying substitute for loving a real, live person. What Palmer couldn’t account for, however, is the seduction of control in the midst of chaos. Pressing play and swiping left ensure that automation and algorithms stand in for the risk of failure, the vulnerability of choice and consequence. Sure, randomness can sneak in, but when it does, there’s always a back button. Always a back button on the micro level, that is.

Globally, we’d probably all like to press rewind on the last three months. Then we’d know how to prepare. Protect loved ones. Isolate cases. Gather supplies. Pressure our politicians to shut the country down earlier. But we can’t do that. So, I press play and let the four walls of my house disappear into the four sides of a screen. I watch people laugh and hug and fight and kiss. I let my attention drift from one screen to the other, where someone is on the other end, reaching out in the best way they know how. I type something in reply, bracing as I send, knowing I can cut him off at the first sign of anything disagreeable, anything that might interfere with my reality.

Meanwhile, on the other screen, romantic miscommunications are being cleared up. Rivalries turn into allyships. Wounds heal. If I’m worried my attention is too split, there’s no need. When I miss something important, I can always go back.

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the third entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Take Pills,” Panda Bear

We’re all hermits now, to a certain degree. I grew up a musical hermit. While the village of my peers went about their errands singing along to Mariah Carey and N’Sync and Ludacris, I lived in a hobbit hole on the edge of town, listening to oldies. (Maybe you can remember the bumper from your local oldies station. Mine is Good times and great oldies: Oldies 95! To-PEE-ka!) Notes and riffs from contemporary tunes drifted past my cave door, and some like OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” and Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” drew me out to dance, but for the most part I was busy in the dark, dusting off relics from Motown and psychedelic rock and the British invasion.

Whether my hermitude was a product of actual preference, or simply an effort to be in harmony with my chauffeur, who refused to listen to anything past 1973 without a skeptical grimace (hi, Dad), I don’t know. With this listening partnership came an ear for bricolage. Riding in the front seat along the capillaries of Midwestern interstates, I was taught to appreciate the components of songs just as much as the sum of their parts; the vocal techniques, the chord progressions, the out-of-the-ordinary instruments. At fifteen, the last year before I got my learner’s permit, we had a morning drop-off ritual: two cereal bars to-go, windows down (weather permitting), and George Harrison’s “Apple Scruffs,” one of my favorite songs off tour-de-force solo effort All Things Must Pass, as well as a lesser-known Beatle single called “The Inner Light,” also written by George. My dad always says that among the post-1970 solo efforts of the Fab Four, Harrison took most advantage of what made the Beatles special (the genius sound engineering of Sir George Martin, for one*), and that All Things Must Pass feels like a logical continuation of The Beatles (the White Album) and Abbey Road, with its sweeping orchestral ebbs and flows and an emphasis on instrumentation and quality, like a chef who prioritizes his ingredients over his personality. (It should be noted that The Beatles’ first whiffs of instrumental experimentation on Rubber Soul were partially inspired by the sitar artistry of Ravi Shankar, The Kinks [who we’ll cover later], and Donovan, who, according to my mother, also belongs on this playlist. You’re not wrong, Mom!)

The deconstructed ingredients of Beatles songs, the drop-off rituals and highway music lessons, the hermit’s cave echoing with the rotation from Oldies 95: all led me to a deep love I didn’t know I had of repetition, of song structure and production. Following the breadcrumbs of the familiar, I began to creep out of the 1960s cave. It started with The Grey Album, the hip hop masterpiece by Danger Mouse, combining samples from Jay-Z’s Black Album (itself a sample-heavy work) with the White Album. Then there were the beats of De La Soul, Danger Doom and Madvillain, Gorillaz, and even Girl Talk, an understandably divisive mash-up artist who combined contemporary hip hop and dance tracks with classic rock. This would soon expand into a general enthusiasm for sampling and electronica, indie psychedelia, and atmospheric albums, anything with some sense of patchwork patterns, anything where the sound is recognizable but slightly estranged. Like the acoustic guitar, beat looping, and clandestine recordings of The Books, or the distorted synth, Beach-Boy-harmonies, handclaps, and off-kilter rhythms of Animal Collective. These artists poked windows in the hobbit hole, letting the air of the moment in, swirling the dust motes of past and present, blurring memories and genre.

Now, in a different kind of hermitude, I try to remember to open my doors and windows every once in a while to avoid stale air and malaise. Those of us with depressive or anxious brains might find the refrain of “Take Pills” familiar. “Surely there’s no substitute for company,” Animal Collective member Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) sings, and advises himself, “Take one day at a time / Everything else you can leave behind / Only one thing at a time / Anything more really hurts your mind.” Inspired by his difficult relationship with the dull blade of anti-depressants, Lennox used a 303 sampler to make Person Pitch, “inspired by hip-hop producer Madlib’s work under the Quasimoto moniker… which eventually birthed the swirling, chromatic hues.”

The sampled percussion is also a vivid, echo-y slice of the mundanity of being inside. The song opens with what sounds like a fuzzy recording of some sort of machinery, a whispering hiss and click that resembles the quiet chorus of appliances in a still house, the hums of fridges and gurgling of coffee makers. Eventually the hushed clicks build and break, morphing into an upbeat, layered menagerie of cowboy backbeats, staggered choruses, muted explosions.

As “Take Pills” fades, we hear a train leave the station. Like anyone struggling with their mental health, and all of us uncertain of the future, we might try to “take one day at a time,” to not let the weeks slide so quickly past our windows. From some distant corner of my musical cave, George begins to sing with the sarod, shehnai and pakhavaj: “Without going out of my door, I can know all things of earth. The farther one travels, the less one knows.” And Panda Bear’s train plods on into the next song, its sounds muddying the difference between inside and out. We’re invited to wonder where we’re going, and if we’ll ever find the familiar again.

*A reader (…okay, it was my dad) pointed out that this makes it sound like George Martin produced All Things Must Pass, and he’s not wrong. I meant to say that George Harrison kept up the multi-layered, cross-category feel of Martin’s production style though, yes, it was Phil Spector who produced All Things Must Pass. 

 

 

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the second entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Cherry Blossom,” Monster Rally

Image courtesy of Monster Rally’s Bandcamp page.

From the beaches of California, we travel to the non-place of exotica. Adjacent to Mike Love’s longing for escape through suggestive nostalgia, the nostalgia of Monster Rally is quite literal, constructed through producer Ted Feighen’s sampling of his “collection of [old] records, combining his interests in Hip-hop, Exotica, Tropicalia, and Soul.” From this combination, exotica has always stood out to me. Birthed from a 1957 album by Martin Denny, virtual record store Hip Wax calls exotica “a narrow slice of popular music or mood jazz, means very specifically tropical ersatz: the non-native, inauthentic experience of Oceania (Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Southeast Asia).” Inauthentic is a key word here. Musicologist Phil Ford says exotica “sounds like movie music without the movie,” and without the the movie, there are no images to anchor the imagination, no real setting or people through which to trace the sounds. Now, we can look up the sites of appropriation, finding the roots of exotica’s “variety of instruments: conga, bongos, vibes, Indonesian and Burmese gongs, boo bams (bamboo sticks), Tahitian log, Chinese bell tree and Japanese kotos.” When first produced, however, Ford poses exotica as an invitation into the colonial white imagination, a place that can “conspire to make a kind of ethnographic pulp fiction” if not checked. It is the poison of vagueness when speaking of cultures with real people with real histories. It is the power of self-soothing delusion in music form. All brightly colored and warm as a bottle of spray-tan.

How to handle the pleasure I get when listening to Monster Rally, or even one of the original exotica offenders like Les Baxter, I do not know. How to curb the need to escape into fantasy when it feels as if the world is getting smaller. The saccharine siren song of this particular exotica is cut with actual tropicalia and hip hop beats, so at least it’s pulled from its original othering context, distorted, dressed up new. At least its collage is visible, I tell myself, and it doesn’t pretend to be a singular truth about the non-Western world. Those who needed no erzatz for tropical places made exotica music, too. Take the work of Yma Sumac, born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, a Peruvian colorotura soprano.

I was once in love with a man who was obsessed with the music of Les Baxter. Seems fitting the love was unrequited. Now whenever I play “Cherry Blossoms” or anything other exotica-inspired tunes, I try to stay put, let the track weave through where I am. Let us repurpose and make the world out of the ceiling. This is the soundtrack for drifting and touching things absently, not being afraid to turn a carpeted floor into a dance floor. My friend told me that lately she realized she hasn’t stared off into space so much since she was a child. Me either, I told her. Newness can be achieved through stillness. I never knew how many things in my very own house have a texture. A smell. A sound.