Author: Lara Avery

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. This is the third entry in a series called “Chaos.” If you’d like to read from the beginning of the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Marie,” Randy Newman

When you hear the name Randy Newman, you probably think of a toy cowboy with the name ANDY scrawled on his boot in crayon, and the lazy, molasses-sweet baritone of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Or at least those were my associations. It was only recently I found out how prolific a composer he is, penning music for everything from The Natural (1984) to Seabiscuit (2003) to Marriage Story (2019). Newman has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards for his scores, winning two for original songs off the soundtracks of Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Toy Story 3 (2010). His career as a solo singer-songwriter is less commercially successful, though no less artistically interesting. Interesting, that’s the word. Interesting in the same way that you walk past some profane graffiti that seems unintelligible at first, and you pay it no mind. Then you stop half a block away and realize what you just saw. That’s Randy Newman’s solo career.

The chords and arrangements don’t fall too far from the beaten path, mostly sweeping and cinematic, at times bluesy or rocky or dabbling in big band swing. As a lyricist, Newman is an exaggerator, an impressionist, a satirist, a bleeding heart, a clown. In the tradition of country or folk, his narrators range from bigots to historical figures, from barflies to politicians, all of them speaking to the systems that created them. Each song from Good Old Boys (1974)—arguably the best of his albums—serves as a mouthpiece for a range of voices from the Deep South, stepping gingerly between offensive hyperbole and near-broken sincerity, unearthing racism and patriarchy as verbs, as spoken and semantic things, tumbling through families and conversations and stories like hereditary traits. Though his characters speak from the South, Newman also implicates the rest of a country that claims its betterness, the hypocrisy of regionalism and its heartbreaking effects. Each image and plea holds a whole nation’s worth of complexity. Just when you think the songs from Good Old Boys are something you can lose yourself in, some rhythm or voice you recognize, the lines turn and reveal themselves, much like a “good old boy” dog-whistling his true beliefs under honeyed politeness. In “Marie,” the narrator claims to be a lover. But of course, if you listen closely, he might be something else entirely.

“You looked like a princess the night we met,” Newman’s speaker sings. He begins by praising the object of his affection by conjuring royalty, luxury, spectacle, a title all little girls are taught to desire. While there’s power in being a princess, there’s also distance implied. Princesses are often in towers, in dungeons, under spells, deprived of freedom and love until the very end of their stories. Combined with the past tense in “looked,” and the minor key, there’s already a sense of loss. Then, we learn the speaker is not only drunk, but he’s “got to be,” adding another layer between him and the love to whom he speaks. Without intoxication, he tells Marie, he would never tell her what she means to him. “I loved you the first night I saw you,” the chorus declares, its slowed-down waltz cloying, almost excessive next to the half-spoken vocals. “And I always will love you, Marie.” It could tear your heart out.

At first listen, I thought the off-kilter tone—the words of affection next to the tragic, descending chords, or the polished strings next to Newman’s defeat—might mean that this song is actually an entreaty, an apology, some supplication for being a bad partner. “Sometimes I’m crazy but I guess you know,” Newman’s speaker says in a laundry list of self-criticism. “I’m weak and I’m lazy and I hurt you so. And I don’t listen to a word you say, and when you’re in trouble I turn away.” The logical next step would be the apology itself. A request for forgiveness. A pledge to be better. Instead, the song simply opens back up to the chorus. “I loved you the first time I saw you,” the singer repeats. “And I will always love you, Marie.”

He wants nothing, perhaps. No atonement or a new way forward, but merely to express himself, the longevity of his love. But is it love, what Newman’s narrator is giving? I guess it depends on your definition. The origins of this particular description are already dubious. Though “love at first sight” is a common concept, the phenomenon that occurs is probably more accurately labeled as attraction, or fascination, or delight. But love shifts for the people that live it, so, sure, let’s say Newman’s narrator “loved” Marie the first time he saw her.

He then admits, “I don’t listen to a word you say,” and, “I hurt you.” This doesn’t sound like very caring behavior, but then again, lots of couples hurt each other. In fact, loving someone means that you are more often hurt by their actions. And of course, listening is a problem for so many people in love. But it’s a problem that’s fixable. While you can’t always control how or when you hurt someone, you can change your habits, even after all this time. The narrator of this song may not listen now, but surely if Marie asks him to listen to her better, he will.

This is where, for me, the love train hits a wall: “When you’re in trouble, I turn away.” Not only does the narrator not listen to Marie, not only does he hurt her, but he doesn’t help her when she needs help. Is this love? When you take away communication, care, and loyalty, what’s left? Affection, perhaps. Certainly for this narrator. Like lovers of auld, he compares her to the beauty of nature: “You’re a flower,” he sings. “You’re a river, you’re a rainbow.”

Newman’s critique slips in the cracks between rainbows and hurt, between what love promises in songs and what it’s truly capable of. We don’t how Marie receives his admissions, but the pity the song inspires could be one step away from disgust. This is Newman’s brilliance, his distinctly red, white, and blue sleight-of-hand: “Marie” is a song that uses the word “love” more than any other word, but it’s not really a love song.

What good is this kind of love? What good is it to receive words of flattery without a listening ear on the other end? What good is being called a princess without the speaker’s loyalty, his care, his support when she needs him most? Maybe Marie knows, and we don’t. Maybe we don’t know him like her. Maybe he’s a brash, bold speaker. Maybe he tells it like it is, and she likes that. Maybe he tells her that she deserves more than she has, that she’s better than the rest, that he’ll build her a wall to keep out the bad people. Maybe he ignores her pain because it’s not his fault, it’s never his fault. Maybe he tells her everyone else is wrong. Maybe he tells her that if she stopped pointing out problems, there would be less of them. Maybe when he calls other women dogs, she knows he’s not talking about her. Maybe she lets him do it because he’s a celebrity. Maybe when he says he loves her, he’s lying through his teeth. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is love. Maybe it is what it is.

 

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. This is the second entry in a series called “Chaos.” If you’d like to read from the beginning of the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.

“Going to A Town,” Rufus Wainwright

At seventeen, I convinced my parents to let me take my 1995 Chevy Blazer to City Market in Kansas City, where Rufus Wainwright was opening for Ben Folds. It was mid-August the night of the concert, and when Rufus took his seat at the grand piano, I was sweating through my favorite yellow shirt. You know that feeling you get when a musician sings to a crowd but it feels as if they’re only singing to you? A friend in my program once called it “babyness.” At home, I could only listen to Poses whenever the rest of my family was out (we didn’t have speakers that could accommodate headphones, so whatever music any individual chose, the rest of us were subject), and no one seemed to like Rufus’s operatic piano rock as much as I did. My brother called him “the moaner.” I didn’t care. At City Market, I closed my eyes and swayed on the asphalt as the artist played and sang so hard he had to stand at the keys.

Later in my senior year, when I learned Rufus Wainwright was gay, I was hurt in that girlish way, before you learn the difference between wanting to marry someone and loving the way their work makes you feel. Even if I was the kind of person Rufus Wainwright wanted to marry in 2005—in his case, a full-grown man—the United States would not have allowed him. When the chorus of “Going to A Town” asks, “Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for being loved?”, he was asking people like me. I lived in Topeka, site of the Westboro Baptist Church, a conservative Christian community responsible for one of the grossest continual expressions of public homophobia in American history. But as I soaked in Rufus Wainwright’s voice, I wasn’t thinking of the neon signs, or the fact that later that weekend, I would be walking past them on the way to the church my parents and I attended, the pastor of which denounced the Phelps’ methods but not their views. Every morning I was driving to school blasting “Greek Song,” all the while laughing off the brazenness of this ragtag group in their funny clothes invoking Sodom and hellfire next to the Sonic Drive-In, looking at their daily dehumanization of not only my favorite singer but my friends, and rolling my eyes.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is normal for citizens of a country that touts freedom as its core value, all the while preventing its citizens from fully participating in that freedom. I don’t rest the responsibility of decades’ worth of human rights violations on my seventeen-year-old shoulders, but while the song is making clear Rufus Wainwright’s resentment for the United States’ policies—“They never really seem to want to tell the truth / I’m so tired of you, America”—I think he is also dragging the banal, everydayness of our two-faced culture.

The everydayness of violence and beauty juxtaposed. The idyllic, small town-ness of it all. The scenic drives to a school that prioritizes students based on their performance on standardized tests rigged against non-white kids. The walks to church under leafy trees through neighborhoods that reflect decades of segregation, redlining, and housing inequality. A beloved Christian pastor finger-pointing gay people for ruining marriage in a congregation that has a higher divorce rate than other non-Christian faiths. After-church brunch, bacon and eggs and biscuits at a restaurant that is allowed to pay a single mother a $2.13 an hour server’s wage in some states. “I’m going to read it all in the Sunday Times” refers to London Sunday Times editor Andrew Neill denying the existence of AIDS, but you can easily picture headlines featuring Reagan spouting the same harmful BS; the American patriarch in his sunny kitchen, reading and nodding along, morning after morning, while thousands of people die. This kind of self-soothing leaks beyond our borders, too—“You took advantage of a world who loved you well,” Rufus sings: cardigan on your shoulders constructed by child labor. Gas in the tank bought from the company that makes us fight their wars, pollutes our oceans. White picket fence painted by the friendly handymen, immigrants who the president calls rapists and criminals. This is our town. These are the internal contradictions Americans wake up and swallow every day with their morning coffee—in some cases, we have to. I can’t afford most things made by ethical factories in my own country. In order to see my loved ones, I fill my car up with oil that comes from exploitative and environmentally disastrous companies. I will soon join the teachers and administrators working to correct the inequality of public schools, but we can only do so much limited by low salaries, over-crowding, and an administration who wants to privatize and eliminate what level-playing field still exists. Imagine living in a society that punishes ethical choices, if not blatantly by the justice system, then by isolation, by lack of resources, by lack of meaningful and well-paying jobs. The United States is a sick animal that smiles through its pain instead of going to the doctor, because the doctor costs too much.

Sometimes when I’m thinking about all this information—the harmful truths under every street, every choice, every product I own—I feel as sick as my country. I don’t want to get out of bed. Sometimes I wish I could go back to being seventeen and ignorant and happy, casting my unrequited cloud of desire over Rufus Wainwright as I let the music wash over me on that August night. I see people on the news, gathering with their red hats, holding up signs, shouting obscenities, pointing guns at people who disrupt their little cloud of stories. They are willing their lives to go back to ignorance, back to whiteness being an invisible norm that reaps the benefits of every system, back to no one making a stink. Back to the town that tells itself bedtime stories about its goodness, its democratic ideals, its God-given hierarchies. What they don’t seem to acknowledge is that their town, as Rufus sings, has “already been burnt down.” The fantasy world they are trying to preserve never existed. The harder they grip on to their delusion, the more painful it will be when the world changes. When I say “change,” I don’t just mean the election, the policies, or even the attitudes of Americans. I mean the bittersweet mechanisms of nature, of limited resources, of technology—the things we’ve put into motion that are now out of our control, no matter who we vote for.

We are small in relation to the giant, wild, chaos. Sometimes I can be grateful. I have life, I think, and whatever that is, it’s so much better than the opposite. But most of time, the swoop of my stomach is too much to bear. Pain and poison are everywhere. I get dizzy, figuratively and physically. To fight this dizziness, I’ve quieted my life. I consume fewer stories, so I have time to feel what I need to feel, so I can do something to help. I look harder at what I put in my body and the places I allow my mind to go. Rather than trying to hold the world at large, I look at my own little world, my own little ecosystem of texts and glances and disagreements and love languages. The study of one’s hurt and one’s habits, like vocabulary on flashcards. When you have words for people’s actions, including your own, you start to see the words in the world, too. As a very imperfect person in a very imperfect world, this can be satisfying or horrifying or a combination of both. But knowing what to call things means you’re one step closer to knowing what to do to make them better, whether it’s something big or nothing at all.

Transitioning from the literal criticism of “Going to A Town,” I would like to examine what’s going on in few different little ecosystems among the songs that follow, to try and name the resemblance these individual relationships have to larger systems. I don’t want to paste the word “allegory” to the parallels quite yet, but perhaps we can let it camp with us as we explore. We’ve got to stroll around the meanings of these songs carefully; they might scuttle away back into the subconscious, where they bury and take root all over again.

 

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,” 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 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 also share the song’s original title, “Cease to Exist,” written by none other than Charles Manson. 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.