Here in the United States this has been a really frightening week.
It’s hard to know what to do.
How much should I pay attention to what is happening?
How much can I tolerate paying attention to what is happening?
How do you address the current situation in the most effective manner possible?
The protests were beautiful and moving.
How many of these protests have to take place in order to for the current situation to shift?
What else can be done?
Because listening to music has always been one of my primary coping skills/soothing strategies I turn to you Bruce Springsteen, M.I.A., Bob Seger, Joni Mitchell, Conor Oberst, Melanie Safka, Ezra Furman, Ani Difranco, Tom Petty, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Neil Young, Grimes, Zack de la Rocha, Angel Olsen, J Mascis, Liz Phair, etc. etc. etc.
I still remember the first time I saw him. It was by the pool. It was the early eighties, and his tiny white Speedo told me everything about him that I needed to know. He was hip, shared my taste for laid-back, sporty summer fun, and he knew how to make his Coppertone-tanned body speak the language of youthful cool. He was George Michael in Wham!’s “Club Tropicana” video; I was seven and he was. my. man.
The sensual weight of his masculine thigh emerging from his swimsuit awakened something in me. I remember the shadow of soft-looking hair on his honeyed skin and the way his leg muscles rhythmically jiggled as he tapped his foot along to the song’s beat, “fun and sunshine—there’s enough for everyone.” I wasn’t the only one that noticed that there was something different and special about Wham! right out of the gate. That something was George Michael, and he was lusciously, meltingly sexy…to me, to his ostensible commercial target audience of pop listeners, and to gay men. He was certainly my first sexual crush, but his dimples and his playfulness somehow made him more than just sexy; he was achingly loveable too.
This combination of sexy and safe, the PG-13 sweet spot for teenage fandom is what band managers have been trying to get right since the sixties. If you want details, P. David Marshall offers an incisive analysis of this cultural phenomenon in Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (1997). Over the years we’ve seen this recipe play out again and again through boy bands like The Monkees, Menudo, New Kids on the Block, Boyz II Men, and the Backstreet Boys. But George Michael so thoroughly exceeded this musical category that even to my elementary-school self, the mention of these comparisons seemed insultingly dissonant.
Looking back, something I found deeply appealing (that I wouldn’t be able to articulate for a few more years) was that Wham! videos, and later, Michael’s first solo album, told us that it was ok to like sex, to feel sexy, and to enjoy looking at the bodies of beautiful men. Men! …As in, not just women! This was revolutionary in the early years of music videos and MTV. In the eighties we were inundated with images of the sexual woman-as-object, the dehumanized woman, the woman as animal/mannequin/prisoner/toy. Just start with Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” video and see how many others you can count that fit within this trope in under a minute. I’ll throw in some dry ice and shadows and light playing on vertical blinds to help you get going. But when you watch Michael’s videos from the “Make it Big” and “Faith” albums, what you get is a pretty seductive inversion of what Laura Mulvey famously called “the male gaze” in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (1975). In other words, instead of looking through a man’s eyes at the objectified bodies of women, George Michael’s videos let kid-me look through eyes like my own, eyes that found both erotic and romantic delight in every inch of the singer’s face and body. He allowed himself to be an actively-engaged male sex object, happily participating in the coy seduction, offering us the dark allure of his eyes and the ripples of his sleek chest during the Wham! years, and then replacing those with the denim-clad ass-shake of the “Faith” album. I guess the burgeoning feminist in me found this sex-positive objectification of Michael totally thrilling, and what’s more—it allowed me to imagine a future where my own sexual pleasure wouldn’t depend on how I looked in a neon string bikini. In Michael’s videos, women’s bodies just didn’t matter that much, they were much less interesting and received far less airtime than every inch of his own gorgeousness.
Of course, savvy fans already hear the strain of irony in these claims, since Michael’s later solo career was marked by his attempts to undo the iconic sex symbol status he had earned for himself. Setting his “Faith” jacket ablaze in the video for “Freedom ’90” and turning the camera away from him and onto the strutting bodies of supermodels seemed to rebelliously invert the inversion he had accomplished earlier. Moreover, once his LA bathroom indiscretion led him to publicly come out as gay, the complicated roles of women as love-objects in his songs and videos took on new layers of meaning for fans that hadn’t already read between the lines.
But, to me, none of it mattered. I had already spent a whole childhood’s worth of incipient sexuality lusting for one man, with more than a handful of personal milestones matched to the sound of his voice. In the bedroom of my friend’s cool big sister, I learned about what was “in” and played My Little Pony to the tune of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” As part of my fifth grade elementary-school graduation, my friends and I performed our own choreography to “I Want Your Sex.” (God knows what my teachers made of that performance. Perhaps the benign neglect of the public school system worked in my favor in this instance.) In high school my summer camp’s theme song was a Mad-Libs style anthem re-written to the tune of “Faith,” and as a senior I wielded my class status by forcing everyone else in our lounge to listen to “Freedom ’90” on repeat. Years later, in my mid-twenties I recall experiencing a feeling that, at the time, I believed was the closest thing I had ever felt to the sublime. I was driving across the country taking my life and my stuff to grad school and on a pastoral winding hillside in Wyoming, I found myself belting along to the entire “Make it Big” album while the man I loved at the time slept in the passenger seat next to me. I remember the feeling cresting like a wave in my chest that life may never get any more perfect than what I had experienced during that singular album-long moment of crystalized joy.
Memories like these also have helped me understand that although my love affair with George Michael may have begun as a purely sexual one, it was able to grow into something much deeper because of his incredible talents as a lyricist and composer. Michael’s ballads, like “Father Figure,” “One More Try” and “Careless Whisper” live in the ghostworld of haunting regret. He brings an irresistible pop sensibility to the repetitive spiral of raw longing that defines many of our early experiences of love and loss. Combined with the intimate appeal of his tremendous emotional aptitude, was the fact that this sexy-as-hell man seemed to be in the throes of a breakup with someone that the lyrics allowed me to imagine each time as an intelligent and complicated woman. “If you are the desert/ I’ll be the sea/ If you ever hunger/ Hunger for me/ Whatever you ask for/That’s what I’ll be” he desperately croons to the lover who wants a “Father Figure.” Then, in “One More Try” the roles are reversed and Michael, himself, goes from being the father to the child. “So you think that you love me/ Know that you need me/ I wrote the song/ I know it’s wrong/ Just let me go/ And teacher/ There are things/ That I don’t want to learn/ And the last one I had/ Made me cry/ So I don’t want to learn to/ Hold you, touch you/ Think that you’re mine.” My heteronormative teen projections allowed me to consistently picture Michael singing to a woman…maybe some more beautiful, complex version of the woman that I hoped to become, but still, a woman that he seemed to respect and care for deeply. For me these were entanglements worth aspiring to.
Equal and opposite to Michael’s ballads were his playfully upbeat pleasure anthems. Combining openly unchaste lyrics with a kind of puppy-dog tenderness, Michael’s songs always seemed to have coy winks and sloppy licks folded into them—part camp and part youthful bravado. “I’m Your Man,” now a viral sensation from Michael’s groundbreaking car karaoke session with James Corden, woos listeners by insistently bopping into our hearts, “Baby, I’m your man/ You bet!/ If you’re gonna do it, do it right, right?/ Do it with me.” There’s a similar kind of goofy romantic inevitability that courses through “Freedom” from the “Make it Big” album: “But you know that I’ll forgive you/ Just this once twice forever/ ‘Cause baby, you could drag me to hell and back/ Just as long as we’re together/ And you do[…]/I don’t want your freedom/ Girl, all I want right now is you.” Listening to George Michael’s up-tempo hits gave me a new way to imagine adult relationships. It was a way I’d rarely seen represented in other types of pop culture, but it validated my existence as a thinking female person with real emotional and sexual needs. Michael didn’t sing to vapid babes. He sung—happily and eagerly—to women who had rich interior lives and things to teach him. Letting myself fall into the dreamworld of his songs always made me feel like he was mine, like we were a pair of old lovers, messily, irrevocably destined to drive each other nuts with our cuteness forever.
Now in the dark and terrifying early days of 2017, I’m feeling bereft, not only because last Christmas really was the “Last Christmas” for me to enjoy Michael’s perfect twinkling heartbreak wonderland in a pure way, but because we lost one more pop pioneer of gender-bending sexual freedom and queerness in a year when the departures of Bowie and Prince were already too devastating. I’ll keep George Michael and his soulful gravitas with me this year as I seek strength to fight the battles that too certainly lie ahead, but I hope I’ll also find occasions to dance again in that fiercely hopeful and defiantly sexy way that George Michael taught me.
Let me start this love letter off with a couple things I dislike. Isn’t that how all good love letters start? Romance is lost on me.
Anyway, things I don’t like: most remakes and covers. I especially hate the ones that take themselves too seriously. Like, “Oh, look, I can make this song even better than the original because I am just that good!” No. You aren’t, you can’t, and stop trying. Unless you’re Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash. A girl’s gotta have some exceptions after all. Other things I dislike: most heavy metal. Like any other genre, there are some songs I can listen to, and even like, and I can appreciate it purely from an artistic standpoint, but it is just not my thing at all.
This is a terrible love letter. It gets better, I promise.
So when I heard that you, Disturbed, a heavy metal band, had done a remake of the Simon and Garfunkel classic “The Sound of Silence,” I was intrigued and highly (and I do emphasize highly) skeptical. How does a metal band remake a classic folk rock song that’s already damn near perfect? Seems like rock and roll suicide to me. A recipe for disaster. A direct route to alienating your fans.
You see, Simon and Garfunkel is one of my favorite bands. I grew up listening to their records (owned by my parents because I’m not that old) on repeat. There are all kinds of memories twisted up in those songs. And “Sound of Silence,” of course, is an old favorite. This love letter could be to S&G. But it’s not.
I should probably get to the actual love part of this, so having said all that, I’ll just say your version of this song is kind of mind-blowing. I love when I go into something a total skeptic and come out a believer. This song reminds me that no matter the genre, amazing talent and musicianship will always transcend everything. I won’t say it’s an improvement over the original, because I think that’s an impossible achievement, but your interpretation of the song and the way you portray the lyrics made me look at the song in a new light. And that is no easy feat, considering the hundreds of times I’ve listened to this song through the years.
I have to say one of my favorite things about music is when bands do something completely unexpected and completely blow away my expectations. Like when a metal band suddenly gets vulnerable and shows a depth and range we’re not used to seeing. And that’s exactly what this song does. It’s a complete surprise. A thing that theoretically shouldn’t work but totally does on all levels. A rare and bona fide success in today’s music industry.
Going out of your comfort zone and taking a chance on something new and different is never an easy thing, no matter who you are. But when you do and something amazing and beautiful comes out of it, it all becomes worth it. It’s really a life lesson that so many are afraid to learn. As musicians, it’s hard thing to do. As fans, it’s a hard thing to do. As people just trying to live, it’s a hard thing to do.
So thank you, David Draiman and company, for the reminder that some risks are worth taking. Thank you for the reminder that not everything is always exactly as it seems – in the best way possible. Thank you for creating beautiful, thought-provoking music. I hope you win that Grammy.
I wanted to tell you that I was watching the TV program Sunday Morning back in November and I saw you. I don’t just mean that I watched the interview, or that my eyes observed you on the screen while my ears listened to the Q & A. I mean I saw you. You looked…well…like someone who was not doing so good. Or, maybe like Blind Willie McTell said, “like a broke down engine…ain’t got no driving wheel.” Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean for that comparison to be read with a judgmental or cruel tone. I mean it to be read factually. I’m being straight with you Phil. You didn’t look good and the things you said about your issues with your family and your struggles with sobriety didn’t sound good. Again, no judgement. What I’m trying to get at here is that I’m worried about you. And, that you made me sad.
I first became aware of you in late elementary school or early middle school. Why? Because your songs were EVERYWHERE. In the drugstore when I was shopping for glittery nail polish there you were with your horns blasting “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven.” When I was walking through the mall with a friend going to buy Egyptian Goddess incense from this (now that I reflect back on it) strange centrally located head shop/kiosk again it’s you, belting out “You Can’t Hurry Love” with that sick sick early 80s production. At home, playing Kirby’s Adventure (muted) on my Nintendo Entertainment System after a grueling day in middle school while simultaneously listening to the local soft rock radio station “Another Day in Paradise” is played regularly. And finally, the place where I felt as though I always heard your music the most; at the dentist office. Leaving school for the afternoon, sitting on a scratchy blue pastel chair, reading a People magazine, thinking about what color toothbrush I will select after my appointment ends and “One More Night” is worming its way through my earholes. I’m going to be honest with you Phil, because I like you and I feel you deserve honesty. For a long time I categorized your music as “Dentist Office Music.” I labeled it that in my head and also out loud when talking to other people. I was dismissive towards “Dentist Office Music.” I thought it was light, lame and for adults in the midst of mid-life crises.
Ah! But then…later in life…something began to shift. During my college years I had a long distance relationship with someone who was into music and film and there were certain guilty pleasures we would share together such as listening to Meatloaf albums and listening to you. They were considered guilty pleasures for both of us at the time because we were both very into punk music and going to see local bands play small/intimate/wild shows and certainly could never, would never, should never relate to “Dentist Office Music.” I remember driving from Philadelphia to Coney Island on a summer day trip with “Sussudio” blasting via the Hits compilation on compact disc and then on the way home singing along at the top of our lungs to “Easy Lover.” You were good to us Phil, even though we looked down on you. Forgive us for that. We were young.
So here’s how it happened, a couple of years ago, I reached my 30’s and suddenly things clicked. Your music made complete sense to me. I got it. I get it. Life can be really hard. “One More Night”…geez…did you poke your finger through the flesh and bone covering your chest so that you could dip it into the blood in your heart and then use it to write that song? Let the young punks reading this letter laugh at me, “Phil Collins, that guy’s cheesy.” Someday as their lives shift and shrink and crack just like the asphalt does on roads in locations subjected a full range of seasons, temperatures, and weather conditions year after year, I suspect it will become more and more difficult to point the finger and call your music “cheesy.”
I think what I love about you the most is your desperation. You can be so very desperate and I love that you aren’t afraid to expose yourself in that way. Like when you recorded the lyrics to “I Wish it Would Rain Down,” was there anyone else in the studio with you? Because you are basically screaming, desperately screaming, and I wonder how you would do that with other people around. Thank you for sharing your desperation.
I’m also concerned that because of how prolific and popular you are/were that people don’t see you as a legitimate artist. This concerns me. I think part of the problem is that you’re a balding white guy who looks like he would be more at home on a bar stool in someone’s local pub as opposed to a completely badass drummer who is responsible for the beat on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
“In the Air Tonight” is one of those songs that has been so unfortunately overplayed that I think we all forget how amazing it truly is. I see you Phil. You are an artist.
I’m sorry that I know literally nothing about early Genesis. Zilch, zero, nada. Maybe the glories of that band and your contributions to it will reveal themselves to me in the future? Anyway, please excuse my ignorance. I can’t claim to be an expert in your musical career and contributions because, to be honest, they are too vast. I can tell you that for the past week I’ve been trying to convince my husband that maybe it’s you playing drums on Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch” and he keeps reminding me that both of you were in Genesis and that maybe you both like drums to sound that way. My response to him has been “doesn’t that make you wonder where the one ends and the other begins?” Can you explain that to me Phil? Did you both get into gated drums at the same time? I honestly do want to know.
In summary, please consider the following:
I appreciate what you’ve created.
I’m sorry that you were so successful that people grew tired of you. It’s a shame how humans have a tendency to allow and want for artists to work their fingers to the bone and pour out their souls repeatedly only to eventually say “Eh. I’m sick of that.”
I think it’s worth a shot to try to work things out with your family.
You’ve created something that so many people love and can relate to. Other artists do this, but you’re really good at it. Take time to appreciate that if you haven’t already.
“Ages of You” R.E.M. I spent a lot of time this year watching old R.E.M. videos on YouTube. In one from 1982 in Raleigh, they did this B-side, and I was instantly smitten. It was collected on Dead Letter Office, though I couldn’t find my copy—thankfully, it was reissued this summer.
“Mad” Solange
Picking my favorite song off A Seat at the Table was nearly impossible, but “Mad” has such an amazing groove and that Lil Wayne verse: “And when I attempted suicide, I didn’t die/I remember how mad I was on that day.”
“Here Comes the Night” The Beach Boys
I got really into Wild Honey last year, and this spring, my husband found me a pristine used LP copy. I usually start with side 2 so I can hear “Darlin'” and this song—sometimes I don’t even make it to side 1.
“Dorothy” Kevin Morby
This ode to Morby’s guitar was a consistent source of joy all year, once I got over the shock of falling for a new guitar-based rock song sung by a dude.
WYETH
“The New World” X
A song from 1983 that sums up 2016. X capture the feeling of having years of slow social progress and a growing sense of empathy toward marginal voices smashed flat by a comically oversized jackboot, with shoutouts to the dying auto industry along the way.
“Desirée” Blood Orange
Dev Hynes has shown himself to be an artist committed to the projection of marginal voices, and Freetown Sound was one of my go-to listening choices this year. The dusty bass and electric piano groove of this track struck me from the outset.
“Shakedown Street” Unknown Mortal Orchestra
This Dead cover (from the massive Day of the Dead comp) replaces the paranoia and darkness of the original with a chaotic, lustful bounce that happily reminds me of the Purple One at his most giddy. A pick-me-up without the sugar crash.
“Let’s Relate” Of Montreal
Though Kevin Barnes’ emotional firebombing of those close to him has become difficult to stomach, this track shows a gentleness and sweetness towards a new object of affection in simple terms – “I already like you, I like that you like you, I think that you’re great, let’s relate.”
“Tonight” Sibylle Baier
A devastatingly simple acoustic track that transitions from dark to light in the course of a brief interaction between two lovers, where the interior world of thought is affected by the exterior world of touch. This track evokes the feeling of sanctuary that my own home has attained this year with my significant other; while uncertainty and chaos roils outside, there is a peace of mind and body in our little shared space that comes directly from the presence of the other person.
NICOLE
“Where Are We Now?” David Bowie
When I found out that David Bowie had died, it seemed impossible. He wasn’t just a musician. He was a comet flaring through the culture, altering whatever he touched. I had that Tuesday off, so I decided to treat myself to breakfast at a diner near Washington Square. As I sat watching the traffic on Sixth Avenue, this song came into my head. To me, it’s always seemed like a song of making peace, of looking around at one’s life and realizing ‘I’ve got a good thing going here’. “As long as there’s sun… as long as there’s rain… as long as there’s fire… as long as there’s me…. as long as there’s you.” And I felt like his spirit was there, in the spike of the Empire State Building against the bright sky, in the hum of the subway and the crystalline wind.
“Wild Imagination” Kurt Vile
When I first listened to this album, this song didn’t make much of an impression. But I kept the album in heavy rotation through the winter, and the whole thing grew on me—I realized that every song had layers of meaning under that laid-back façade. At the end of April, everything changed. My friend Dan, a fine musician in his own right, died just six months before his twenty-sixth birthday. The fact of his death hit me like a brick wall. How could I get around, or through, or over? “I’m looking at you/ but it’s only a picture/ so I take that back…” People had posted hundreds of pictures of him, clowning around on stage and off. What hurts are the pictures I didn’t take—like the one of him walking up outside the bar on 67th Street a week after I got back to the city, in his Harry Nilsson shirt, looking at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen. For a while, this song was all I could stand to hear. It’s full of longing, but it, too, has a sense of peace about it—a chapter has closed, but the world hasn’t ended.
“Left of the Dial” The Replacements
Having already written about this song and its role in my friendship with Dan, I don’t feel the need to add much more. But that piece brought me a lot of kindness, from people who knew Dan and some who never met him, so I’m grateful for that.
“You Ain’t That Young Kid” Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam
This was one of the only new albums I bought this year. Again, I feel like I’m only starting to appreciate its complexity, but from the first time I listened to it, this song stood out as the heart. Like the others on this list, it’s a meditation on change, loss, growing older. I turned twenty-five this year. I have a full-time job, and some grey hairs coming in. I’ve been through a lot. So when Leithauser croons about “some way-too-long road with some way-too-young folks,” I think I know what he means.
“My Zero” Ezra Furman
This song would be one of my favorites in any year; it has a timeless quality to it, as if I’d always known it. But in this year of so much doubt and disappointment, it’s been an anchor. We all need a ‘zero’—a place (or person), for our hearts to rest on—as our minds and bodies take on this business of living.
When asked what positive experiences I had in this notably sucky year, I thought of the big goal I accomplished with the help of music—finishing my second marathon. Getting lost in a meditative-like reverie when running with music is why I do it. These five songs are now wedded to specific, memorable moments I experienced over those hundreds of miles.
“Birdhouse in Your Soul” They Might Be Giants
TMBG is hard for me to avoid as I’m married to a fan. In trying to gain an appreciation for them, I added some of their songs to my running playlist. Only one failed to annoy me (no offense) while I got caught in rainstorm while running a winding path through a rolling meadow with humming powerlines zig-zagging above. It was pretty dreamy, and with this song’s steady beat and seeming to go on a little too long, I felt like I was floating.
“Dot Dash” Wire
was a band I discovered with my college friend Dana the summer we shared an apartment. At this time, I hadn’t talked to Dana in two years. In December 2016, though, we randomly reconnected, finding that we’ve both been dealing with similar crap and having the same 30-some year old realizations, but mostly just talking about anything and everything—just like we did ten years prior over a bootleg Wire cassette tape.
“Spanish Bombs” The Clash
Between miles 17 and 20 of the actual marathon, I was super cranky. I was so sick of running. I seriously thought about quitting. Knowing I’d hate myself if I did, I forced myself to get into a better groove. This old favorite came on shuffle, and I sang along aloud. Especially the parts in Spanish. I channeled Joe Strummer, who ran the Paris marathon, I dug deep, and I laughed out loud at myself.
“Life on Mars?” David Bowie
In the fallout of one of the many depressing news stories of the year, I chugged along my typical route on a long Sunday run. The neighborhood cat I usually stop to pet wasn’t around. I worried that my niece will grow up miserably in a terrible world. Perfectly timed, one of Ziggy Stardust’s magical songs came on. But, instead of feeling eased, I sobbed. I didn’t stop to catch my breath and wipe my face. I didn’t care if anyone saw me. I just let myself be in that moment with Bowie and thinking, “I really fucking hope there’s life on Mars.”
“Gypsy” Fleetwood Mac
Alone, I chugged along a wooded trail at dusk. I was a little paranoid, hoping a mugger (or worse) wouldn’t surprise me. After tracing a sharp curve, I came upon a doe gracefully leaping into the brush to my right. On my left, two fawn spied me from behind thorny brambles. Stevie Nicks blasted in my earbuds, “I have no fear. I have only love.”
CARL
The frustration and heartache of this trying year cast a long shadow over the music I played. These are the five tracks which stand out in my mind as the songs I listened to the most often in 2016. One is an actual new 2016 release, three reflect a few of the many losses felt by the pop world this year, and one is just a perennial, much needed blast of transcendent rock ‘n’ roll brilliance. In no real order:
“Birth Of An Accidental Hipster” The Monkees
One of a number of tracks I could have selected from The Monkees’ superlative 2016 album Good Times! It could just as easily have been “Me & Magdalena” or “You Bring The Summer.” Far and away my favorite album of the year.
“Life On Mars?” David Bowie
2016 wasn’t even two weeks old when we lost Bowie, and we should’ve taken that as a sign to return the damned year to sender, postage due. Bowie’s passing affected me a lot more than I ever would have imagined, and I started my own blog because I needed a place to vent. I have several favorite Bowie songs—”Rebel Rebel,””Suffragette City,””Panic In Detroit,” and “Heroes” come to mind—but “Life On Mars?” was the one I kept coming back to, over and over, in search of…catharsis. I guess.
“Your Own World” 1.4.5.
1.4.5. was an offshoot of The Flashcubes, my all-time favorite power pop band. Piloted by ‘Cubes guitarist Paul Armstrong, 1.4.5. has encompassed many varying lineups; this track is from the 1987 album Rhythm n’ Booze, and it features the late Norm Mattice on lead vocals. Mattice’s passing was the 2016 death that felt like the biggest, most vicious single punch to the gut. He was one of our own, a Central New York talent who should have been a star, and not a homeless man who died of exposure, all alone, unable to find shelter from the cold Syracuse night. He had friends and family willing—eager—to help him, but it was of no avail. Nothing was. Nothing could be.
“I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” Prince
We’d been playing Prince’s “When Doves Cry” on This Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio with Dana & Carl a bit throughout the first few months of 2016, and I betcha it would have made our year-end countdown even if Prince had remained one of our greatest living rock stars into 2017. His death in April sealed the case for this year’s ongoing infamy. “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” was never a song I thought much about before—if I were going to play Prince, I’d be more likely to go with “When Doves Cry” or “When You Were Mine”—but a request for the song from TIRnRR listener Joel Tinnel prompted us to play it on the show the week after Prince died. And it just clicked with me, suddenly but unerringly. I’ve been playing it ever since.
“You Really Got Me” The Kinks
Always. Especially in a year like this one, a year which has demanded more from us than we’ve felt capable of giving. Turn it up. And I say we attack 2017 before it attacks us.
“Mood” Porches
It’s a challenge to find songs that satisfy the three distinct musical tastes in my household, which include those of a 17-month-old child. The entire Porches album Pool manages to get us all, and this song in particular is a standout.
Hebronix “Unliving”
I am not ashamed to say that this year I started going to a meditation class and I find it really helpful. I’ve really leaned on this song to help me, especially post the election. The opening line “Close your eyes and remember I am not in control,” it was like Daniel Blumberg managed to capture the concept of meditation in a song without pulling some cockamamie tricks involving sitars and/or sampling people chanting or something. There was a period of time where I would listen to this song every morning when I got into my car before going to work. Thanks Daniel!
Micachu & the Shapes “Oh Baby”
I can’t remember if I saw Mica Levi play live in Philadelphia in 2016, or if it happened in 2015. Either way, I believe she is a true arteest and I like how gritty and growly and dudeish she is while being simultaneously melodic and always Beatley. Just tonight I was talking about her and I compared her to Brian Wilson and my husband said, “But she’s not crazy,” and I said, “Oh come on! She’s totally crazy. She’s a genius.” I meant it all as a compliment.
Thin Lizzy “Dancing in the Moonlight (John Peel Session)” Sometimes I get really sick of the music on my iPod and when I put it on shuffle I just skip, skip, skip over tracks. It’s both the pro and con of living in a time period where you can carry around thousands of songs in your pocket. This is a song I never skip….ever. I can’t skip it because it’s just too good. No matter how many times I listen to it I pretty much always laugh when Phil Lynott says, “It’s so goddamn hot!” Also, writing lyrics about getting chocolate stains on your pants, who does that?
Department Store Cassette Company “Personal Power”
It might seem like an easy thing to take samples and put them into songs, but I don’t think it is actually easy at all. I think it is really difficult and takes a lot of time and attention to detail. This song has great samples and the music that binds it together is fun too. I am simultaneously terrified and intrigued by Tony Robbins. If you haven’t watched that “documentary” (which is really a long commercial) about him on Netflix, hop to it.
Tone Set “Out Out!”
This is another song with samples, but the real mind blowing fact here is that this song is circa 1982. How did people sample things then? Cassette tapes? Reel to reel tape? I don’t know. Apparently the audio is from Gomer Pyle which is a show I am aware of, but really know nothing about, and have never watched. This song makes me laugh every time I listen to it. I also have to be honest, I have a penchant for repetitiveness and this song is certainly soothingly repetitive.
Also (I know I’m breaking the rules) but I would also like to mention “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno. I think that song might capture what it sounds/feels like inside of my heart. And, for a wham/bam combination of major sadness and super good production there’s also “Pops” by Angel Olsen.”The Hills” by the Weeknd impressed me as well because there is a part of it that sounds like “Running up that Hill” by Kate Bush and it’s got that dope beat drop. As an aside, I do have some concerns about your mental health/lifestyle choices Mr. Weeknd but I will never question your use of beats. And let’s not also forget….. okay, I’ll stop!
ROSEMARIE
Beyoncé feat Jack White “Don’t Hurt Yourself”
I honestly wish Jack White weren’t singing on this, but he helped write it and damn that music video is everything. Wait maybe I should’ve said Formation. [I mean, Every. Single. Thing. on Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a shattering revelation. oh, Except for Sandcastles. I mean, really.] Recommended pairing: righteous rage. (This is a live performance. . . let’s just watch the visual album right now together real quick)
The Velvet Underground “Candy Says”
I never got this band before. But then. . . I had an experience early this year with this album and since then I refuse to return to the planet. It’s beautiful out here. Recommended pairings: snow, nighttime.
Chance The Rapper feat Lil Wayne & 2 Chainz
“Same Drugs” AND “No Problem”
Hard to pick a track from this album (almost went with Blessings). I’m just so grateful for everything he’s given and is giving us. Praise. Recommended pairing for “No Problem:” driving around with friends. Recommended pairing for “Same Drugs:” driving around after seeing old friends.
Peggy Sue “Fools Rush In”
This is the best cover I have ever heard in my life (okay, barring a few exceptional exceptions) and I listen to this song every single damn day and so should you, maybe particularly if you’re throwing yourself headlong into love, which I sincerely hope you are. Recommended pairing: early morning.
Lizzo “Good as Hell”
This song and music video has helped me reach for joy this year. Recommended pairing: end of workday drink.
JENN
2016 was kind of a hard year. My playlist was full of people I couldn’t believe died, show tunes, covers, and older songs that make me feel not so tired.
Prince (but also Lydia Lovelace’s version is great, too)
“I Would Die 4 U”
Cyndi Lauper
“Midnight Radio”
I would also accept it in pretty much any form, particularly the original Hedwig Boardway recording, Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells
Lin-Manuel Miranda et al from Hamilton
“My Shot”
“I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot.” Oh youth…
Karl Hendricks Trio
“Thank God We Have Limes”
I mean really.
Tori Amos
“The Wrong Band”
Put on your raincoat again.
Them Are Us Too “The Problem with Redheads”
Gorgeous and transcendent. This song, co-written by one of the artists who perished in the Oakland warehouse fire, is what helped me get through the emotions of that close-to-home tragedy.
Nite Ritual “Fornicate with the Dragon”
Solo project from the vocalist of “cholo goth/killwave ” duo Prayers. I’m so in love with this beat.
The Vainest Knives “Whirl My Way” I feel weird about putting one of my own songs on my list, but it’s a very meaningful song for me, and I’ve listened to it repeatedly throughout the last half of this year.
This is a love letter to you, to thank you. It’s a love letter about November 9th, 2016. It’s about how you helped me. How I felt desperate.
Before the election, I first heard the album a few weeks before the election. Hopelessness immediately took me out of my skin and carried me to some beautiful dark rocky cave where I can hear water dripping and I have amethysts for eyes. Nothing has moved me like that in a long time. I was nestled in the back of a van, driving around a foreign country. The song “Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth” is, to me, just like (just like!) an Anselm Kiefer painting called Sternenfall (Falling Stars). He lies bare-chested on a cracked earth floor, looking up at the night sky. The album as a whole reminded me of that Kiefer show, Heaven and Earth. I wrapped myself in the album, I kept trying to convey to others that they should listen to it. Hopelessness is like falling in love with someone else’s broken heart.
[Then, something happened. Something happened inside of me but mainly outside and to other people much more vulnerable than I. I was in an empty bar on election night with my only friend in this new city, in Millie’s Supper Club in Chicago, IL. Just me, the bartender, the chef, and me and my only friend. We thought it would be called early, we thought it would be done. But one by one, things changed, and then I had to get out, I couldn’t see it called. I biked through Chicago, nearly got blown off my bicycle by the wind for my first time. I was like a drunkard whose homing beacon had gone off, I couldn’t think about anything but getting home before the election was called. I thought, he doesn’t deserve to have me as an audience, I shouldn’t have to watch this. But truly it felt like self-abuse to choose to watch it happen. Home, I played Pixies album Bossanova loudly on the record player, while playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer loudly on my laptop, took two sleeping pills, and tried to be unconscious before knowing. before knowing, I wanted to be unconscious. I didn’t make it. I knew. of course.]
I woke up and reached for you. Thank you for being there. Hopelessness became something so large, I still felt like I was in a stone chamber with you, but I also felt like I was doing a dead float out in the middle of a cold salty ocean. I was too sad, too shut down, to accommodate anyone else’s reaction. I couldn’t abide other humans, but you came for me.
I thought it was “expose” but it’s “explode” that’s so hard, Anohni, everything is so hard. So much harder than I thought it would be.
“I have a glint in my eye, I think I wanna die… I wanna die.” I’m sure you’ve spent your whole life listening to people talk about the peculiarities of your voice and how you move people.
I don’t know how to be strong enough for this. I don’t know how to make my grief productive. I know that I have to and that I will.
“I wanna see this world, I wanna see it boil.” This was when I realized something terribly different was happening to me from this album, it was vital that I be hooked up to it all day. It protected me, it was an ice float in the scariest few hours. Alone and sleeping on the floor of a new apartment that had cockroaches everywhere. In the morning light, you carried me. You didn’t force me to feel less numb than I did. You slowly opened me up though. You invited me into your heart and into the world.
I walked for miles, and then I rode a bicycle for miles and miles more. Up and down Lake Michigan, I biked and listened to Hopelessness. You gave me a place where I was allowed to be numb, I didn’t have to shout and scream, I could barely open my eyes let alone my mouth. You washed over me and I fell in love with you again. I fell in love again with your broken heart, you let me love my own broken heart.
“Watch Me” – this is one of the most confusing tracks on the album, I cried for my own daddy. I cried for the childlike wonder of a day that didn’t yet know how terrible it really was.
I have a line of pimples and red raw skin under my nose because I’ve been crying too much. I wish it were colder, to freeze it into a snot mustache. Unfortunately, the day is excruciatingly beautiful and mild.
Why is the music in “Execution” like that? Why do you sing the words “It’s an American dream” like that? Why are you so creepy and sad and also make me laugh a little at how you sort of yelp it out like you’re dancing with you’re shoulders moving up and down.
I couldn’t offer comfort to anyone. I could only look around dead-eyed. I clung to you. Your music was the thing I held onto when I couldn’t feel anything, and also what is carrying me forward today as my heart slowly fills up with unstoppable rage and love. How did you make music for both.
Slowly, moving around this strange new city, I felt your music reaching across Lake Michigan, I started to remember some things. The first thing I remembered is that I have the biggest love, bigger and luckier than I ever thought I could have. We are strong. I can change my life, and I must, to respond to what’s happened. There are so many people who already live in a constant state of emergency in our country, now I am joining them in their fight.
There are so many for whom this election is not a wake up call, because they were already awake. And fuck anyone who writes that thinkpiece today. I’m ashamed at what I did not know. I’m so sorry.
When “Obama” comes on, I suddenly remember how I heard this album yesterday, the days and weeks before, I think of Anselm Kiefer again. I think of the NSA, I think of the fear that surrounds us, the terrifying and wrenching complacency. I think about taking sleeping pills again.
Trauma. Trauma. I’m so afraid of what’s being unleashed. I have small white points of anger. I’m especially angry at these Slavoj-Zizek-bulshitters theorizing the broken system and arguing that Clinton is a more dangerous candidate than Trump. These people who’ve never had a vulnerable body, a vulnerable status as a citizen. These monsters. (me).
“Crisis” is so maternal, explaining with patience that is beyond me, wit that call-to-arms tippity tap drumbeat. Oh, Anohni. I’M SORRY. is it a marching beat, or are they little gears.
All day is like this. I try to feel some more again, I try to reach out. But I can’t. I can’t access my anger and my love, I can only feel afraid and a kind of animal mourning wracking my body. The album is not a triumphant path upwards and onwards, it’s a maelstrom, but somehow, you do carry me up and out of myself.
From “Hopelessness” to “Marrow” you made me feel something…
“We are, we are all Americans now.” the saddest line of all, just as I start to feel, if not hopeful, just able to feel a bit more. It’s the end of the day now, or the end of the daylight. I take off my shoes and I’m standing with my feet in the cold lake water, on one of those very small beaches where the sand is really pebbles and seaglass. We are, we are all Americans now. I press the button to start the album again.
Thank you for sharing your heart, it couldn’t have been easy. For helping me hold my anger, and the anger of others. I will change my life. And I swear I will fucking kill anything that tries to obstruct our way forward. Okay, I’m starting to be able to feel anger again. You made this beautiful world for me to hide in today, but what I’d hoped would be my own shallow grave turned out to be a system of subterranean tunnels, this album you made… You gave me space for fear and cowering, and you showed me how to stand up with a hole in my heart.
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I used to want to be you. I got close one night in 2004.
My favorite quote is, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” As a teen, I was pretty content being who I usually was: a reserved, well-behaved, shy girl with an occasional wild streak. Other than a cigarette here and there, the shoplifted Wet n Wild glitter nail polish, and that time I hung out of my boyfriend’s mom’s SUV and flashed a guy at a stop light, I was pretty tame. I spent a lot of time alone on Saturday nights writing poems and listening to U2. I did my homework on time. I got a college scholarship. I saved my money.
Then I heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell.
Those previous acts were of a curious teenage girl testing limits. But as a college freshmen, that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album took me deeper than simply shocking the suburbs.
The album sounds like what you sweep up after a really good house party—bottle caps, dried cheese cubes, a gob of chip dip, dust bunnies, and a surprising amount of glitter and thumbtacks. You let the dirt pile slip off the dustpan into the overloaded trash can. Then, you realize that you missed a whole section of glitter thumbtack dirt on the kitchen floor. But you let it go because it’s oddly beautiful and you’ve got better things to do, like write a poem.
Fever to Tell boasts fun-drunk yet composed songs arranged in such an order like they’ve grabbed you by the heart and dumped you next to them in a roller coaster car. Right out of the gate is a cluster of minute-and-a-half to three-minute songs that don’t need Adderall to have a good time. Song two, “Date with the Night,” defines how my friends and I spent many hazy nights.
You’re already losing your mind by song four, “Tick” (the way you screech “T- T- T- TIME!!!!!!”!). Your playful chorus on “Pin” is offset by the deceptively demure Nick Zinner’s fuzzy guitar filling in the few blanks between Brian Chase’s speedy beats. “Cold Night” told me that it wasn’t weird or wrong to straight up tell a dude that I wanted to have sex with him. Or maybe it was weird and wrong. Well, Karen O, I wanted to be wrong with you.
By “No No No” the ride starts to hug sharp turns low to the ground. During “Maps” we’re slow dancing. The lights come on with “Y Control.” We’re lulling ourselves to sleep with the mixed feelings and hard reflections of “Modern Romance.” We think we’re dreaming when we hear the sober words on the hidden track. “And, cool kids, they belong together.”
“Modern Romance” is perhaps my favorite Yeah Yeah Yeahs song for the reason I admire you, Karen. I like when pieces of art and people are layered and dynamic. You’re an example of the vastness of a woman. You’re someone I wanted to be like when I was 20 years old.
When I bought a ticket to your February 2004 Cleveland show, I really hoped that you would do “Art Star.” On that sticky and sharp, spit-in-a-stuffy-old-man-face track, your voice is perfect. Slightly off key at the just right moments, sour-sweet yet strong, sensationally gritty when you scream, hilariously adorable when you mutter, “It’s a mad house.” I scribbled, “I’ve been screwing on the tracks of abandoned train stations” inside my dorm room closet. Your persona on that EP to me was the goddess Kali breathing fire on my old idol, Bono.
And the show was awesome, of course. Your pure joy was invigorating and dazzling. You giggled, you growled, you sweat, and got bruises. You went hands-free with the mic by shoving it in your mouth. You were off the wall. And, I loved every ounce of it as I jumped, bobbed, and screamed along with you.
By this time, too, I had traded in the late-90s look of low-waisted, boot cut jeans and crop tops for the post-post-punk, artsy New York City wardrobe I saw you wear in Spin. I had my thrifted red and black striped top, a tight mini skirt, drug store pantyhose I cut into capri leggings, and filthy Chuck Taylor high tops. And lots of red lipstick.
After that show, my friends and I tried to meet you by your tour bus. There was a boy there who wanted to apologize to you for freezing and forgetting the words to “Maps” when you directed your mic at him. He told us he was so embarrassed. But, we assured him it was all good, that you probably didn’t notice, that we were all just having a good time. Rock stars are usually considered cool in a way that you’re not supposed to do something embarrassing in front of them, or in a way that means they’re the opposite of square, that they don’t stay in on Saturday nights.
Personally, I still felt a little stupid milling around your bus. What was I actually going to say? What could I do in front of a person who I was trying to emulate?
I talked my friends into leaving. But, I really wanted to live the Karen O lifestyle, whatever that meant at that very moment. I reapplied my goopy, red liquid lipstick and pinned a big sloppy smooch on the grill of your tour bus. I have no clue if this is actually something you’d really do. It was totally something I would do.
I returned home from that show to learn that I didn’t get the summer job I recently interviewed for. I had no income in the near future. I just spent a bunch of money on snacks, gas, and tickets for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show. Oops.
I brushed off the job rejection and probably wrote some poems. Maybe I listened to “Art Star” or Fever to Tell from start to finish. Maybe I partied that night after working on a final paper due for Monday morning’s class. But, I never became you. I became more of myself.
I like to think I was raised by three things: a mom, a dad and MTV. My parents’ care shaped my character, while channel 14 on our cable box fostered my then-burgeoning lifelong love of music. For much of 1992, my version of an after school special was “Hangin’ with MTV,” a live program that invited artists into the studio to perform and take questions from the audience.
One Thursday afternoon, the show began with a quintet of retro-looking rockers playing a tune in which the singer sang affectionately to a girl he called “Fatty.” I thought, “How wacky is that? He loves her and is calling her such a name?” It was just the sort of slightly off-kilter thing that has always appealed to me in artistic expression.
The rest of the band, all as well-groomed and handsome in a 1950’s kind of way as their vocalist, played coolly behind him. After a commercial break, VJ John Norris introduced this man as Morrissey and explained that he’d be back later to play another song from Your Arsenal At that moment, my main priority in life became owning that album.
“This isn’t one of those bad tapes, is it?” my mom asked. The cassette I’d just pulled from the wall in my local mall’s music store featured a fuzzy sepia-toned image of a man, taut torso exposed, licking his one hand and positioning a microphone near his crotch with the other.
“No, see, it doesn’t have a Parental Advisory sticker on it,” I answered, my 13-year-old mind totally oblivious to the sexual innuendos oozing from the album cover. Even the title was a—ahem—cheeky double entendre. All I saw was this cool, well-coiffed, and mononymous man, Morrissey, who mesmerised me for the first time only days before.
“Hmm, okay. Well, it’s your money,” my mom said. Still slightly suspect, she walked with me to the cash register, where I proudly purchased what I just knew was going to be my new favorite tape.
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I assume that as soon as I got home from the mall, I went directly to my room, popped the tape into my boombox, and listened to it from start to finish. It’s just one of those albums whose songs are so expertly sequenced that they lead you along like a story. Two tough-edged tunes, the driving and surf-like “You’re Gonna Need Someone on Your Side” and the swaggering, “Jean Genie”-esque “Glamourous Glue” kick off the album, which veers down a rockabilly back road with “Certain People I Know” somewhere in the middle, descends into the marvelously mopey “Seasick, Yet Still Docked” and the melodramatic, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”-esque “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday,” and finally resolves with the skeptically hopeful “Tomorrow.”
Overall it’s an album that perfectly melds grittiness with glamor. The toughness of the new backing band, which had been recruited from the London Rockabilly scene, and the sonically muscular production from Mick Ronson (no duh where the Bowie inspo came from!), are balanced beautifully by Morrissey’s fay Britishness.
And it did indeed become a favorite from that day, so much so that I’ve now purchased it in three different formats over the years: cassette tape, CD, and vinyl. It’s never missed any all-time favorite records list I’ve made, and it even influences my own musical output to this day.
So, Your Arsenal, for all the aural pleasure you’ve given me, I “thank you from the heart of my bottom.”
Love Letters to Rock n Roll 