The Rumpus.net » Albums of Our Lives

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE

Helena Fitzgerald — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:01:33 +0000

I’m seventeen, and my Dad and I are on a train between Boston and New Haven. We’re visiting colleges, and we’ve rented a car to drive up and down the Eastern Seaboard. This plan, however, has been derailed by a snowstorm, which is how we’ve ended up on a train between Boston and New Haven one desolate, snowy February afternoon. In Boston we stopped at a record store where I bought a Counting Crows album while my Dad made friends with the Nick Hornby character working at the register and I, being a teenager, did my best to ignore them. Now, on the train, my dad hands me a stack of CDs he’s bought. “Here,” he says. “This is important. Don’t talk to me again until you have an opinion about Bob Dylan.”

I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that it’s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. But if I’d listened before, I’d never noticed. I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and I’d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.

Blonde on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. Although I know I’m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-Didn’t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.

But my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.” Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. He didn’t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they can’t understand, doesn’t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them.

The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. Everyone was getting stoned — Dylan, Dylan’s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasn’t everybody. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having.

In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why it’s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. I had never done any of these things. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted in. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.

I liked the complexity of the songs. I liked that I didn’t get it. I liked that it didn’t seem to want me to get it. I liked that Bob Dylan didn’t seem to like me and seemed annoyed that I liked him so much. I listened to that album every night as I fell asleep the entire year before I left for college, not to mention in my car and in my room and on my headphones walking around while awake. It became the language for the new world of adulthood that was approaching,that as far as I was concerned couldn’t come fast enough.

Arguably, the defining experience of adulthood is falling in love. Dylan is disdainful of or resigned about or angry at all the Louises and Joannas and Maries and women-who-are-probably-Joan-Baez in the first thirteen songs on the album. He launches a whole host of emotion at women, in general and in specific, but it’s not until the final track that he deals with the central experience of maturation: Falling in love. Knocked on your ass, whole life given up to another person. Gone, surrendered, fucked, whatever you want to call it. Falling in love.

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is eleven minutes and twenty seconds of infuriating, boring, indecipherable music that has been accurately described as the greatest love song of the 20th century. For the length of an entire side of a record (as it was originally released), Dylan does nothing but list nonsensical attributes of the woman to whom he’s singing. The lyrics are even more opaque than most of his songs. The music has no variation, dragging around and around in a circle. It feels like the end of the night, after the party’s been dismantled and the bar’s been closed and everyone’s gone home except one last drunk couple, half-asleep and slow-dancing to music only they can hear. The song is a closed experience, and feels the way it does when, in loving one person, you are happy to shut down and ignore the rest of the vivid, pointless, crowded world that isn’t them. It’s not for the people listening, the people buying the album, playing it in their homes, playing it at parties and on the radio. It’s for one woman. The list is an accounting; in love we want to gather the object of our feeling to us, as though if we could know them well enough, could list them comprehensively, we could finally fully possess them. The repetition, starting over again and again, shows how we never quite do, how we always fail.

I grew up, got into college, left home, moved to New York, got laid, got stoned, fell in love, betrayed people, left people and was left, hurt people and was hurt. Eventually I did all the things Dylan whines about on Blonde on Blonde. I never stopped listening to the album. When I finally did get stoned, it never felt enough like “Rainy Day Woman No.s 12 & 35.” Every time I take any kind of drug, I hope this time it will. But it never has, and being in love has never felt quite like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” either. Not that the songs were incorrect about the experiences, and not that the experiences have been unspectacular or lacking. But that, spectacular as they may have been, they never lived up to the Dylan songs that had first imagined them for me.

I tend to share albums and songs with the people I date, and therefore tend to lose a lot of music in breakups. I have ruined every single song and album and band and artist I have ever loved by associating it with a relationship. Every single one except Blonde on Blonde. Perhaps that’s happy accident, but I don’t think so. My relationship to the album is already a complete relationship, in and of itself. Not only does it not need a flesh-and-blood relationship to link itself to, I don’t think it has space for one. I think the things we love most, we don’t want anyone else to understand. We are selfish with them as with the people we love, feeling that we will dilute their importance through sharing.

The way Blonde on Blonde sounds is what we miss about the people we love but choose to leave anyway, what we never get over about them. A friend of mine would say, much later, Bob Dylan made her feel like she’d known her Dad when he was young. When she told me this, I’d realize, perhaps just a little, why my Dad had bought six CDs on a train ride from Boston to New Haven and told me not to talk to him until I had an opinion about them. This is literally the music of my parents’ past, but it’s also the music of the things we can’t quite share with people, the attempt to make someone part of your past despite the fact that they can’t ever quite understand your past because they weren’t there. This album makes me feel like I knew my parents when they were young, and at the same time reminds me how much I didn’t, how much I can’t ever know what their life was like before me. When you love someone, it becomes painful that you weren’t part of their past, that they weren’t part of yours. This album is the attempt to make someone part of a past experience by telling them about it, the attempt to enter someone’s past by listening closely enough to the stories about it. We build our expectations of love, of getting stoned, of any life experience, from someone else’s stories. Those stories are always fictions. When we encounter the actual experience in our own life, the distance between it and the expectation is always present. This album manages to be an expression of that omnipresent distance, the ache and comfort at the center of it, raucous and elegiac, passed down imperfectly through generations.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: TO THE EXTREME BY VANILLA ICE

Seth Sawyers — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:01:56 +0000

We all had braces. When we smiled or laughed, we flashed steel and colored rubber bands. We shared a language. We talked about tightenings, fittings, about which brands of gum were safe to chew, and about how you had to be careful when you kissed a girl because your two sets of braces might get stuck together and then you’d have to call the orthodontist. Braces went with the feeling of being too tall for your body, of having the first few dark hairs on the upper lip, of furious wanting, of not knowing where to put your hands. Suddenly, we didn’t know what to say around friends’ parents, around girls. We couldn’t avoid our braces. They were the first thing you saw when you looked in a mirror. You wished they didn’t belong to you, that they did not convey something deep and true. But they did. They were our awkwardness, made real, in the middle of our faces.

Still, I got a girlfriend. Her name was Violet, and she was in the sixth grade, and she had braces. I knew that calling girls was a big part of having a girlfriend. I didn’t know how to do that. But I knew how to study for tests and how to do book reports and how to read sheet music, and so when I got home, I got a Post-It note from Mom’s desk. On it, I wrote out a list:

• band
• homework
• movies
• braces
• Vanilla Ice.

Vanilla Ice was a good one. She’d have something to say about that. Later that night, after dinner, I called. I was hoping for a busy signal, but it rang. I thought about hanging up but then a girl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Violet?” I said.

“Yes.”

“This is Seth,” I said. “From the eighth grade.”

“I know,” she said.

And then I just talked. I told her about what I’d just eaten at dinner and after that it was just words. When I went to bed that night, my stomach still felt small, but I remembered that I’d talked to a girl, that I’d actually done it, and then I felt better.

***

We were laser beams completely taken with songs: these little brightly wrapped packets of sugar from which our gazes could not waver. One at a time, like movies at a single-screen theater, songs appeared, dazzled us, and died. We were efficient filters, holding on to only that which lodged. The songs came and went.

In the eighth grade, it was Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.” It was a song of rhyming tough-guy words built around a simple bass line and beat and it tasted like concentrated Kool-Aid. When the DJ at Friday dances played it, girls screamed and boys formed big circles. We chanted the lyrics, not knowing what they meant but sticking to the words as if they were scripture. For two months, there was no room for anything else.

Or was it less than that? Only six weeks, or four? Because, soon, the top-40 station in Cumberland stopped playing it every morning and instead only played it every other morning. Soon, kids groaned when it came on and, like that, the spell was broken. The song was cheap. It was like eating butterscotches. You sucked and chewed and ate another and another until your stomach felt bad and then you had to stop.

And Vanilla Ice would have gone away, except that Mom had heard about his tour and bought tickets. When the day came, we met one of her friends from work and her two kids. The boy, about ten, had a mop of hair. He was quiet. His sister, with dark, curly hair, was in the sixth grade. She was pretty. They lived in Mount Savage, a tiny, hard mountain town where the boys were tough, where everyone hunted deer. The girl looked me up and down and said, “You don’t look tall enough for the eighth grade.” Still, I liked her.

Our moms talked but the four of us, squeezed into the back seat, headphones clamped to ears, bobbed our heads. I sat next to the girl. Her name was Jill. Sitting next to Jill was easier than sitting next to Violet. There was no pressure to do anything. I could just sit and be.

It was pouring when we got into Johnstown. We had enough umbrellas to cover all six of us, if we walked slowly and bunched together, but we still got wet. The rain was cold. We saw, as we rounded a corner, a line of soaked people. We got in line and immediately, bunches of kids, teenagers, got in line behind us. The line wasn’t moving. We huddled under our umbrellas but the rain splashed up from the sidewalk and soaked our jeans. Just in front of us was a girl. She seemed much older than me but was probably 18 or 19. She wore a lot of make-up but it had begun to run down her cheeks. She and her friend didn’t have an umbrella or even a raincoat. They wore cotton flannel button-up shirts. I could see the outlines of their bras. Water dripped from their noses.

“Hey,” one of the girls said to me.

“Hey,” I said. She was, I realized, pretty, through all the make-up.

“Would you mind?” she asked, pointing to my umbrella.

I looked at Mom.

“Sure,” Mom said.

I handed the girl my umbrella and then moved closer to Ryan. We waited. My teeth chattered and my legs shook. A great murmuring rose up and after that the line moved quickly. We walked at first but then jogged, to keep from getting swallowed up by those behind us.

Inside, the air was humid and smoky. Many years later, I’d come to know this smell, the smell of rock clubs, of certain dark bars, the armpits and breath and sex. People were bumping into us in the near-dark, but we found our seats, halfway up. I leaned over the railing, to watch. A lot of the guys had long hair and many of the girls wore glow-in-the-dark necklaces. As they waited, they held lighters in the air, like the crowds did in MTV videos. In the dark, the flames looked like a hundred candles afloat on a choppy sea. I didn’t see any other kids sitting next to their mothers.

A man came out and everyone cheered because we thought it was Vanilla Ice, but it wasn’t. Then there was a burst of music-like noise and a group called The Party came out. We stood at first, but it was hard to stay excited. They did a few songs, and danced, doing a lot of sprinting back and forth. When they left the stage, everyone cheered. We waited another twenty minutes and then the emcee came out. Everyone screamed. He left. Two guys dressed all in black came out and everyone screamed again but they only tweaked the microphones. Finally, the arena lights went out and everyone screamed, even louder. Mom yelled into my ear, “Are you excited?”

There was a tremendous explosion of light and sound and then, through the smoky air, a green laser shot out from somewhere above the stage. It scanned over our heads, back and forth, very quickly, until finally it spelled the words, “Ice Ice Baby.”

A sharp wave of sound hit my chest. Mom covered her ears. Ryan, mouth open, stared. The dancers ran out first, pumping their fists, gyrating. They wore what looked like baggy track suits with reflective, shiny strips along their sleeves and pants. Then another cloud of smoke rose from the stage. A shadow appeared on the smoke, a silhouette. The silhouette stepped forward. It was Vanilla Ice. Everyone recognized him at the same time. Everyone screamed. I screamed. He went into the first song, and it was not “Ice Ice Baby.” We sat. He sang another song that also was not “Ice Ice Baby.”

And then we heard the bass line we knew so well. The arena shook from the noise. We stood again. The people behind us shot us dirty looks. Vanilla Ice rapped his lines and the four of us rapped along. Then the song was over. It had sounded almost the same as it had always sounded on my Walkman.

After that, for a long time, the dancers faked humping each other. I glanced at Mom. She looked confused, mildly interested. Vanilla Ice ran and jumped across the stage, from side to side, pausing at certain points to thrust his hips. His hair was blond. It had been shaped so that it pointed forward, like a baseball cap. He looked cool, but I was uneasy. I felt out of place, either too young for this concert or too old. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be having fun or not.

The music got softer. Vanilla Ice stood in the center of the stage, holding the microphone very close, as if he were trying to eat it. We sat. The dancers stood in groups to the sides, heads bowed and hands clasped in front of their crotches, as if in deep thought, or prayer. Then Vanilla Ice smiled a big smile. “Y’all know what’s comin’ next,” he said.

“What’s he talking about?” Mom asked.

I shrugged, but I knew.

“Awww yeah,” Vanilla Ice said, as a beat thumped. The dancers inched closer.

The song he was going to sing was about sex, and a specific kind of sex. “I thought she was an angel and soft as a cream puff, Until I seen her come out with the whip and the handcuffs,” he said. I couldn’t tell if Mom could hear the lyrics. But I knew them. I knew every lyric on the album.

And then it was over. The big lights came on and then, for the first time, I could see the arena clearly. Some of the advertisements around the boards were hung crookedly. As we filed out, I looked down. There, on the arena floor, trampled and wet, were mesh baseball hats, half-smoked cigarettes, broken umbrellas, and a whole slice of pizza, cheese-down.

Out in the concourse, the six of us gathered. Mom put a twenty-dollar bill in my hand. I wandered toward the souvenirs. A man smoking a cigarette stood in front of shelves of T-shirts, pencils, posters. It became clear to me what I’d do. I’d buy Violet a poster, take it back to Cumberland, give it to her, and then we’d kiss. Then she’d put the poster on her wall and think of me when she looked at it. There would be more kissing. There would be closeness and warmth, and it would happen because of this poster.

I gave it to Violet a few days later, before school. She said thanks but she was in a hurry to get to homeroom, and so she shoved it into her locker. A few weeks later, we went to a birthday party. It was late, the lights turned low, parents grabbing coats and ushering kids out to waiting cars. Sitting on an upholstered chair, I pulled Violet onto my lap. I could tell her friends were watching us. I knew I was supposed to say something, and so I said, “You’re beautiful.” She smiled and said thank you and then I leaned in and put my lips on hers. Her lips were dry. She smelled of Big Red gum. Our lips touched for a second, maybe two, and our braces didn’t get stuck together, and then it was over.

That night, sitting in the front seat of our minivan, Mom driving, I was glad I’d done it. For the millionth time, I hoped only that the next day might bring ease, just and only ease. I could picture this sense of ease and it looked like swimming effortlessly against a strong current. It looked like flying, above the rolling mountains, above the muddy rivers, and I was good at it and everyone liked me, and there was warmth that lasted forever.

Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.

William Boyle — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:00:14 +0000

The news of Jason Molina’s death came to me in a storm. I was about to teach a class when I saw the first posts announcing that he was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I almost cried in front of my students. The wind started howling and it sounded as weary as Molina’s voice. The rain followed, whipping the windows and drumming the roof of the shitty science building where our class meets. I tried to tell my students about Molina and what he’d meant to me—how his music carried me when nothing else could, how loving music the way I loved his music was a different kind of marriage or brotherhood—but none of them knew him and it felt horrible to be around people whose lives wouldn’t be any different after the news.

I let class out early and walked through the heavy rain back to my office. Soaked, I sat at my computer and put on “Farwell Transmission,” the opener on Molina’s Magnolia Electric Co. album. He sings: “I will be gone, but not forever.” I finally cried, sitting there at my desk, one of my favorite songs rattling from tinny, overturned speakers. I listened to the rest of the album and cancelled my afternoon classes.

Something that had built up in me over the last decade collapsed. Molina was always writing about his sickness—stuck somewhere between “getting better” and “getting behind,” as he sings on “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost”—and he helped me deal with what I saw as my own sickness. The black depressions I fell into in my early twenties. Long bouts of heavy drinking and fucking up. I didn’t know what it meant that he was gone. I’d lived inside his songs for years and they’d changed how I viewed the world. I didn’t feel betrayed. I was just frightened. Sore afraid. Molina hadn’t made it out.

I first heard Molina in early 2002 when I bought Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain at 33 Degrees, my favorite record store in Austin. I’d purchased it on a whim because I liked the cover art and titles. The next day I was back to buy whatever other Songs: Ohia I could: The Lioness, Ghost Tropic, Impala, Axxess & Ace, the split EP with My Morning Jacket. The rest I ordered from Secretly Canadian. I ghosted after tour CDs, 7 inches, and other rarities.

Almost immediately I ranked Molina up there on my list of favorites with Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Shane MacGowan, Neil Young, Nick Cave, and Will Oldham. I copied Didn’t It Rain for my buddies. I wore out my copy of Mi Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma and had to order another one. I preordered Magnolia Electric Co. in early 2003 and couldn’t wait for it to show up at my doorstep. There’s a picture my friend Simon snapped of me the day it arrived, putting the CD in the stereo, as if I were showing off something I’d made.

***

The tenth anniversary of the release of Magnolia Electric Co. earlier this year passed with little fanfare. Other than Autumn Bird Songs, a long-in-the-works EP released in the fall of 2012 as a soundtrack to a book of William Schaff’s artwork, Molina had pretty much fallen off the map.

Before all the silence, Molina was one of the most prolific and underappreciated songwriters and performers around. As Songs: Ohia, he ratcheted out album after album of low, dark howlers. Didn’t It Rain (2002) signaled a shift in sound, a fuller gospel wallop. That sound developed into 2003’s Magnolia Electric Co., a rumbling train of a record, a thrashing blur of lightning and concrete and pedal steel. Recorded live by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studios over three days, the album would be Molina’s first as Magnolia Electric Co. It was released on March 4, 2003, and that same month—in keeping with the spirit of the stylistic shift he’d made—Molina decided to drop the Songs: Ohia moniker he’d been recording under since 1996.

Most people considered Magnolia Electric Co. the final Songs: Ohia record, and you’ll find it labeled as such in reviews and even on Secretly Canadian’s website. However you view it—as the end of Songs: Ohia or the beginning of Magnolia Electric Co. (I see it as both)—Molina’s prayer for restoration to simplicity swings with weariness and anguish and hard-luck authority.

“Farewell Transmission,” the epic seven minute opener, easily my favorite first track ever, kicks off like this: “The whole place is dark / Every light on this side of the town / Suddenly it all went down / Now we’ll all be brothers of the fossil fire of the sun / Now we will all be sisters of the fossil blood of the moon / Someone must have set us up.” You’re listening to a rock song, sure, but the lyrics—the way Molina turns a phrase, his concerns with darkness and sound, with blood and history—and that wilting country wail signal that you’re involved in something more beautiful than you could’ve imagined. And you are involved, deeply, totally. You’re pulled up in the strong wind of it all.

Some lyrics on this album run through me like blood. “Farewell Transmission” features this ghost breath of a line: “Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws.” “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost” arrives and departs with blinding economy, Molina singing: “I put my foot to the floor / To make up for the miles I’ve been losing / See I’m running out of things / I didn’t even know I was using.” One of my favorite songs ever, “Just Be Simple,” has this Haggard-perfect observation: “Why put a new address on the same old loneliness?” Later in the song, Molina says: “If Heaven’s really coming back / I hope it has a heart attack / When they see how dangerous it is for guys like that” and “Everything you hated me for / Honey, there was so much more / I just didn’t get busted.” Trembling closer “Hold On Magnolia” feels like something dying and coming back to life in your hand: “Hold on Magnolia to the thunder and the rain / To the lightning that has just signed my name to the bottom line.” I feel all these lyrics more than I understand them. It’s an album rich with images, ferocious in its approach to balancing hope (getting better) and hopelessness (not making it out).

Molina was fascinated with the moon and stars, flowers and trees, deserts and trains, static and silence, leaving and staying, the city and the country, birds, darkness, the heart, history, blood, resurrection, sickness, change, ghosts, the Midwest, doubt, heaven, the blues, thunder, and the highway. All of these things found their way onto the album, and when you listen you can feel Molina—his voice somehow illuminated by lightning—guiding you through an earth-shaking storm.

I used to think that this was the kind of record truck drivers must listen to. Never mind that I’ve never really known a truck driver. It’s probably more truthful to say that it’s the kind of record people who don’t know shit about truck drivers imagine truck drivers list. Part of that’s not my fault: Secretly Canadian billed it, on its release, as an album sure to be embraced “by the world’s truck drivers, sorority chicks, and hockey players, alike.” The record, they continued, had “more than one song that could be played at a strip joint or monster truck show.” If there’s a stripper out there who strips to “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost,” I’d like to know her.

But, mostly, the attempts to classify the album as “working class rock” or “white soul” always fell flat and just seemed like a weird marketing ploy to me. No matter how accessible the songs, Magnolia Electric Co. was never going to be embraced by a mainstream audience. Molina claimed to be going for a “1950s sound, ancient echo techniques on the voxs, doo wop backup singers, [and] dirty guitars,” and that provides us with probably the best description of the record we’ll get: it’s raw and heartfelt, never falsely retro, always striving to sound like something coming across a great distance.

***

In my house, we celebrated the anniversary of Magnolia Electric Co. by spinning it on repeat all day, my wife and son dancing around the living room, the windows heavy with the kind of guilt and triumph only this album can elicit from us. To me, it just doesn’t get old. It’s my go-to on long walks on cold nights when a Molina moon brightens the sky. I was listening to it the day before my son was born, and I used to rock him to sleep to “Hold On Magnolia.” There’s a crossroads in Gardiner, NY, where I remember belting out “Just Be Simple” with my wife as the wipers cleared the windshield of a heavy rain. Driving through the Bronx on summer afternoons, I pumped “Almost Was Good Enough” with the windows down. “John Henry Split My Heart” was in my headphones when my mother and I sat in the hospital with my stepdad a few weeks before he passed away.

In Mississippi, where I live now, I’ve cleaned the house and knocked back whiskeys on the front porch with friends and played with my son while “Farewell Transmission” gusted from the speakers. I’ve carried the record with me to France and Italy and Spain and New Orleans and Seattle and Kentucky. I’ve listened to it when I was high with happiness and booze-shaky with fear. It’s been there for me to get healed by when I feel the old sadness coming back.

Molina was always making peace with the fact that terrible things awaited him, and it’s somehow uplifting. On “Farewell Transmission,” he sings: “The real truth about it is there ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross / I’ve really known that all along.” But on “Almost Was Good Enough,” we get this: “Did you really believe / That everyone makes it out? / Almost no one makes it out / I’m going to use that street to hide / From that human doubt / To hide from what was shining / And has finally burned us out / But if no one makes it out / How come you’re talking to one right now / For once almost was good enough.”

For Molina, there was always the struggle of falling back into the darkness, but there was also always a way out, something to hang hope on, and this ability to walk the rail between despair and faith marked so much of his greatest work.

Then there’s the majestic cover art by William Schaff—a cloud throwing lightning, a crying owl with human hands, and a magnolia, all backed by a long darkness and a strip of deep blue—that pins itself to your memory. You look at it and you listen and you forget that Jason Molina’s gone now. You forget everything else you love.

This album can be a dusty slant of light in the corner or it can be bones you’ve dug up from a riverbed or it can be the sounds of birds or it can be talking to the devil or it can be skimming your sickness like fat from milk in the worst of winters or it can be kneeling in front of your wife and kissing her elbows or it can be all you’ve ever learned about death. For me, what Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is to the 1990s, Magnolia Electric Co. is to the 2000s. It frames the decade, makes sense and meaning of years of feeling lost and fearing sadness and holding steady and putting the hammer down.

This morning I drove my mother, who’s been visiting us for the past week, to the airport in Memphis. After I dropped her at the terminal, I got in the car and blasted Magnolia Electric Co. so loud that the speakers went buzzy. I needed to grieve. I opened the windows and let the cottony wind climb in. It wasn’t storming anymore. I let Molina’s voice thunder against the sounds from outside. I crossed back into Mississippi and saw the magnolia on the welcome sign.

Magnolias flashed on the license plates in front of me. I was home in the Magnolia State and that felt right. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t want the drive to end. I listened to other Molina—some of Nashville Moon and Didn’t It Rain, two tracks from Trials & Errors, the North Star Blues Session, “Heart My Heart,” “Whenever I Have Done A Thing In Flames”—but Magnolia Electric Co. was what I turned to first. I’m listening to it again right now. Molina may have crossed the bridge, but he’s still riding with me. He always will be.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL

James Rickman — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:01:28 +0000

It was a cassette copy with no case, and my dad gave it to me a couple of years after he’d moved out. I was about nine. I knew enough about the album to yelp “This is priceless!” as I ran to my bedroom. Under the gaze of my Michael Jackson posters—ever since Thriller, I had both idolized the man and sensed that werewolf-Michael was spending his nights outside my bedroom window—I put the tape in and pressed play.

The line “Jack’s on Jay’s dick” turns up ten seconds in, before the first beat drops. Apparently, that hadn’t fazed my dad, who’d listened to the tape on the drive up from LA. To him, albums and movies didn’t have to be kid-appropriate; they only had to be interesting. Why else would he enthusiastically rent Saturday Night Fever for me and my pubescent friends? What made him think that The Rapture, which sticks in my mind as a cross between The Omen and a Cinemax After Dark titfest, would be a good thing to watch with his girly-voiced son?

Maybe he knew what I’m just realizing now: dicks aside, Raising Hell is a kindie-rap masterpiece. The lyrics are about nursery rhymes, sneakers, basketball, food. Sure, there’s some PG-13 sex stuff, and in “Walk This Way” Steven Tyler screeches “Just gimme some head!” But it’s easy to gloss over, especially if you have no idea what they’re talking about. Very little is needed beyond the two tightly intertwined voices and the beats, but then there’s this middle layer of cheesy guitar riffs, canned horns, and bonehead piano lines—some of which crackle with vinyl noise, just like my parents’ records. Somehow, Raising Hell was hugely relatable to a white, suburban fourth-grader—one who briefly thought Run-DMC came from a mythical land called Rock-a-Rhyme. (I misunderstood the conjunction in a line from “It’s Tricky”: “Or spend some time and rock a rhyme…”)

No less surprising, my dad liked them too. My dad: a Western Kentucky depression baby who moved to Hollywood in the seventies, then took his young family (and their records: Sgt. Pepper, Between the Buttons, Stardust, An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer…) to Santa Cruz, where I was born. He moved back down the 101 around the time Purple Rain came out, alone this time.

He was equally unfazed, two years after Raising Hell, by another tape of mine, one that featured a white guy yowling about “niggers” and “faggots.” I had swapped Michael Jackson for another androgynous idol, and I was too smitten with Axl Rose to take the slightest offense at “One In a Million.” Neither parent seized my copy of G N’ R Lies; all I can remember is my dad mimicking Axl’s snake dance from the “Patience” video (complete with theatrical pre-outro “shhhhh”) and suggesting that he’d ripped it off of Jim Morrison.

Around that time, he taught me “Satisfaction” riff on the bottom string of his Epiphone acoustic. Before I knew it, I was making the same sounds I’d heard on a record. The happiness I felt then—I probably won’t know that feeling again until I have a child of my own. I played those three notes past dark, until a blister welled up on my right thumb. My dad took me to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee.

* * *

My Raising Hell tape survived about fifteen years, the last of them spent in a milk crate between the front seats of my band’s van, clattering around with Appetite for Destruction, This Year’s Model, Against the Grain, In It For the Money, Master of Puppets, 13 Songs. My band: now here was something my dad could get behind, even in our unlistenable high school years. When we started playing LA, we’d stay at his house in the Valley with his second wife and my two newer sisters. In the mornings, over mountains of pancakes, my dad would test our cultural acumen with questions like, “Anybody seen Boogie Nights?”—“boogie” pronounced like “loogie,” part of a mysterious, half-conscious habit of mispronouncing things. (More recently, he’s asked about Napoleon Deenamite and tried to go veegon.)

Whenever I played him a new recording we’d made, he’d want to hear the lyrics. I remember a Northeast roadtrip, the two of us looking at colleges. No one had told him that I’d passed through a brief drug phase, although he must have wondered why I’d stopped dyeing my hair (Manic Panic, Pillarbox Red) and started writing terrible, terrible straightedge lyrics. I recited some of these on that trip, and, like the teacher and writer he is, he gently urged me to focus on story and characters instead of lines that rhymed “rationalize” with “fucked-up lies.”

With the band, what mattered to him wasn’t our shifting styles or our stabs at seriousness; what mattered was the fact that we jumped around a lot (I’ll just tell you now that we were a ska band), we bantered with each other and the audience between songs, and we generally played like kids who had grown up together. Or, as my dad still puts it, with the same italics every time, “You guys were a tight band.”

I’m not saying we got it from Run-DMC. But it’s hard to imagine a tighter band, in both senses of the word: tight like they traded lines at top speed—“He’s the better of the best, best believe he’s the baddest / Perfect timing when I’m climbing on my rhyming apparatus”—and tight like family. They rapped about each other; they rapped a whole lot about the voiceless Jay. They were as regimented as a gang, and as distinct as action figures: Run short and fiery; Darryl tall, cool and bespectacled; Jay, the wizard behind the curtain. In a sense, they were childhood gods, lining up right after Luke, Han, and Leia. But at the same time, they were just some guys cracking each other up. All of which somehow fits inside “Son of Byford,” DMC’s 30-second autobiography: “It’s McDaniels, not McDonald’s / These rhymes are Darryl’s, those burgers are…” and here, Run pauses from his beatboxing to shout “Ronald’s!”

* * *

I missed out. Last year, when my dad was in the hospital having a tumor removed, I should have made him a mix of stuff we’ve listened to together, from Raising Hell to Rabbit Fur Coat. It’s hard to picture him listening to “You Be Illin’” in that white room—the iPod lost in the blankets, the headphones tangled up with the tubes—but not too hard. And of course it wouldn’t have had the impact that Run-DMC had on me, twenty-five years earlier, but it might have shortened the years and miles between us for a minute, the way music does. It might have stood in for the words that never quite seem appropriate, words that even now we tend to mutter at the end of phonecalls—uhluuuhyou—if at all.

God, this sounds like a eulogy. It isn’t. But everything I’ve mentioned here, I still listen to. And I think that’s thanks in large part to my dad, his subtle nudgings, his eagerness to listen, his sense of what lasts.

Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine

Tobias Carroll — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:45:30 +0000

It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris. “He flooded the land, then he set it afire/ He said, ‘Fear me again, you know I’m your father/ Remember that no one can breathe underwater.’”

The melody, already rapid-fire agitprop in the style of early-80s Billy Bragg, intensifies, and a drumbeat. “So bend your knees and bow your heads/ Save your babies, here’s your future.” And then Harris is screaming, “Yeah, here’s your future,” and the guitars get loud and the drums get loud and if heads aren’t already nodding, they probably are now.

For me, The Thermals’ “Here’s Your Future” has one of the most riveting openings to a punk rock record I’ve heard in the last ten years. It’s also lyrically clumsy, politically ham-fisted, and rarely approaches subtlety. And I rarely go a week without listening to some part of it.

***

The core of the group, Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster, had played together in groups before this one; listening to The Thermals beside, say, the duo recordings they released under the name Hutch & Kathy, it’s pretty clear that the same sensibility is at work. 2006’s The Body The Blood The Machine, the album that “Here’s Your Future” opens, honed a particular direction for them, towards more thematically focused works; the album as meditation on a particular topic. The two albums that they’ve made since then, 2009’s Now We Can See and 2010’s Personal Life have both taken on larger conceptual frameworks but done so more elegantly, without some of the ham-fistedness that shows up here. Here, The Thermals have set these ten songs in a near-future United States overtaken by a particularly conservative and bigoted strain of Christianity.

The collages that dot the album’s artwork — an aesthetic descendent of Dead Kennedys collaborator Winston Smith and the juxtaposition-prone John Yates — are not subtle as they evoke rote Christian imagery and Bush-era culture clashes. The cover features Jesus with his eyes covered by a black bar, and other art features the Ten Commandments overlapping the Capitol’s architecture, a heavily redacted document with “ATTENTION ESCAPISTS!” at the top, and a car’s rear-view mirror where surging flames are visible.

Over the course of The Body The Blood The Machine’s ten songs, some of them frenetic in their tempo and others content to proceed with a stately chug, the society described on the album is delineated; the narrator of several of these songs vacillates between wanting to run from this society and (in “A Return to the Fold”) embracing it. If you’re thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four here, you’re in the right ballpark. There’s more than a little fascism in the society described — from the references to a “new master race” in the opener to the mention of “Nazi halos” in “I Might Need You to Kill.” Listening to these songs, it isn’t clear if Harris and Foster are suggesting that this is the end point of modern conservatism or if they’ve opted to go for a worst of all possible worlds, one where a kind of Christian Identity-based state has arisen. In the end, it might not matter — The Body The Blood The Machine is a powerful album, but it isn’t a particularly nuanced one.

***

I’ve never been sure why this album has gripped me as much as it does. I have friends who experienced in their youth a give-and-take between fundamentalist Christianity and punk rock, and others who have told stories of faiths that aren’t too far removed from the borderline-fascist creed referenced here. This year, I’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s terrifying account of growing up in a repressive branch of Christianity in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? I’ve read the political writers Will Saletan and Ross Douthat discuss the evolution of Christianity, and the ways in which it’s been adopted by the politically conservative.
This has not been my experience with Christianity. I grew up Episcopalian. There wasn’t much in the way of repression to be found there: no fear of damnation, no conflict between the books I read and the messages I heard in church on Sunday mornings. And while I can remember driving home from church with a Bad Religion tape playing on my car’s stereo, I never found much transgressive about my listening habits and the faith I’d been raised in, even as I got more and more into punk rock. About the only part of this album that really resonates with any vestige of my younger self is Harris’s line in “A Pillar of Salt” about “our filthy bodies,” though that (for me) had little to do with any concept of sin and desire.

***

For all that I find some of the imagery and wordplay here heavy-handed, though, there’s no rule that punk rock needs to be subtle. For every Against Me! playing textual and narrative games with their lyrics to a smart poltical end, there’s a Team Dresch, who well understand that the best political critiques are often the loudest. (“Hate The Christian Right” is an utterly brutal attack on a specific series of conservative politics; it’s loud and savage in its sentiments, and it’s impossible to forget.) The Body The Blood The Machine isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s not like it needs to be.

Even so, that doesn’t explain why this album hits so close to home for me — there are plenty of punk records that hit on a visceral level, but haven’t wormed themselves into my head the way this one has. My own mild philosophical differences with Episcopalianism seem insufficient grounds for my gut-level appreciation of such a gut-level attack on Christianity.

And yet, for all that I would probably point a newcomer to The Thermals to Now We Can See or Personal Life, it’s The Body The Blood The Machine that I return to again and again, looking for that same thrill and that same rush. I don’t think that this is an example of the tired old “punk rock became my religion” trope, but I also worry that it isn’t far from it, that my attraction to this album suggests that its fears of the allure of an all-controlling religious devotion are more resonant than I might like to admit. Alternately, as Harris sings with equal parts elation and terror: here’s your future.

SONGS OF OUR LIVES: JOY DIVISION’S “LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”

Joshua Harmon — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:01:01 +0000

Ben, a cellist, sold copies of our ’zine, Sketch Fifty-three, for a quarter to the other kids in the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra—most of whom, though their moms drove them to rehearse Haydn or Mozart on weekend mornings, and though they toured Japan with Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein, seemed to know at least as much about punk and post-punk as Ben and I did. To try to stay ahead, we bought more records, wrote more reviews, wandered the brick factories past Institute Park taking more photos, published more issues. “[O]ne gets the impression that they are four college graduates who decided there are more important things to do than chase currency,” Ben remarked about Mission of Burma. “Propelled by a soaring intro, ‘Something Must Break’ climaxes with Stephen Morris’s cataclysmic drumming and [Ian] Curtis’s despairing vocals,” I observed about Joy Division. (“You’re only seven years too late,” complained an anonymous letter to the editors, written by someone who’d presumably discovered Joy Division the year before we had.) Ben’s orchestra friends gave him buttons advertising Boston bands, and sent me mail—my address was printed on our ’zine’s back page.

One girl—I’ll call her S.—became my pen pal: our correspondence began with her questions about my review of Public Image Limited’s Paris au Printemps LP, and my response, including a cassette with some songs from First Issue and Second Edition. I don’t want to romanticize letter-writing, or compare it favorably to e-mail, instant-messaging, texting, Skype. Still, the forty miles between S.’s house and mine meant that the post office delivered our letters—which we soon wrote each other almost daily—only a day or two later, and that slight but significant lull granted me whatever eloquence my sixteen-year-old self could muster. I ignored my homework, rummaged kitchen cupboards, scrawled in a spiral on a scavenged paper plate, then folded the plate in half, stapled the dimpled edge, inked S.’s address onto that crescent, and pressed a 25¢ stamp on it—about what AT&T then billed for a minute’s long-distance conversation, yet another reason we wrote letters instead of, as with local friends, tying up the family phone all night in those pre-call waiting years. Or, I used a brown lunch bag as an envelope, and filled it with small handwritten notes and pictures I’d scissored from magazines. S. mailed bulging, half-sized stationery envelopes in pastel colors. She told me about her sister, her annoying neighbors, her appreciation for the music of Kitaro. I cataloged my complaints and described my hometown ramblings. She drew cartoon sketches of herself. I sent more mix-tapes. Within a few months, in the middle of a five- or six-page letter, she wrote that she loved me.

“She said she loves you but she’s never even met you?” a friend said in the cafeteria the next day, when I bragged about it. “She’s a psycho!”

I’d recently acquired my first car—a 1980 Mercury Bobcat station wagon, paneled in fake wood and adorned with three bumper stickers I’d unpeeled on the back window: the PiL logo, the radio pulses of the neutron star from the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures LP, and Newbury Comics’ grinning idiot—and driving to S.’s house meant making my first solo trip on the Interstate. Bridge and overpass construction funneled the Mass Pike traffic into single lanes, and I sped through narrow corridors of Jersey barriers, chucked change into the basket at the Newton tolls, then took Route 128 to Route 2.

S. and I didn’t call it a date: only parents used that word. But my hormonally-electrified fantasies about our meeting were mostly the obvious ones. “Is she cute?” I’d asked Ben: it seemed information as crucial as the bits of our lives S. and I’d confessed to each other all that spring. Her family’s house was a huge, shingled Victorian on a shady street that wound up a hill: my paper plates and postcards had gone here? I angled the tires against the curb, pulled up the parking brake, checked my mirrors one final time, and got out. S. already stood on the porch. “Hi,” she called, looking at me and then away. I probably did the same. Was she cute? She wasn’t not cute.

We walked through her neighborhood, looking at root-tilted squares of sidewalk and each other’s scuffed sneakers, asking awkward questions and mumbling answers. Breezes swung new leaves, and ragged shadows shifted over the pavement: had I been walking alone, I would’ve mentioned it in a letter to her, omitting the guy pushing his lawnmower who seemed to stare at us as we passed. Then her mom gave us a ride to the Alewife T station and we took the train to Harvard Square.

A sunny, pollen-scented Saturday in May: even we were roused by the Square’s finals-week energy to look at each other over sandwiches in a tiny café. S. slid vintage dresses along a rack at Oona’s, but didn’t buy any. We walked up the ramp at The Garage, wandered through displays of leather jackets, suede creepers, and Doc Martens at Allston Beat, and ended up at Newbury Comics. It’s tough to talk when you’re looking through so much vinyl, and impossible to make eye contact: I hunched over an imports bin. S. wandered away, maybe to the Kitaro section. I left the store with four or five new records, among them Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

The Red Line rattled us back to Alewife. There was no goodbye kiss, no damp hand shyly held. I have no idea whether my actual presence disappointed her, too. After that day our correspondence continued, for a little while, and we politely lied to each other about our meeting, but, in the absence of any sustaining fantasies, what else was there to say? S. and her family toured the northeast looking at colleges that summer, and she described these campus visits to me. I went door-to-door for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, asking people for money and signatures to stop a planned solid-waste incinerator, but I didn’t want to write about that experience to anyone. I got off work at ten each night, then hung out with friends at a late-night diner, or, if no one was around, listened to records. I already knew the Joy Division song, but now that I owned the single, it helped frame my summer: “And we’re changing our ways / Taking different roads.” I always preferred the B-side’s tauter version of the song, without the guitar flourishes, which meant I listened to “These Days” a lot, too: “We’ll drift through it all / It’s the modern age.” Like countless others before me, I both yearned for and cursed the affliction of modernity, and brooded over my mediated, irreconcilable, incomprehensible selves (incomprehensible to me, at least: my first day at MASSPIRG, a slightly elder co-worker took one look at me and said “I bet you like Echo and the Bunnymen and the Jam”). Ian Curtis may have been singing about his failing marriage and the affair he’d been pursuing, but that didn’t mean his lyrics couldn’t dramatize my own teenaged disquiet about “touching from a distance, further all the time.”

Sketch Fifty-three’s final number, published that fall, included—among illegally-reproduced copies of Kevin Cummins’s photographs of Joy Division looking serious among the concrete structures of Manchester, and Ben’s and my photographs of ourselves looking serious among the concrete structures of our own post-industrial hometown—a poem by my new girlfriend. I’d met her over the summer: she stood outside a liquor store, cursing and shouting at the clerk that had refused her fake ID, and then she noticed—I swear—the Unknown Pleasures sticker on my car. In a last record review, in an act of unwitting self-awareness, I claimed that Joy Division’s 1979 single “Transmission” was a song “dealing with alienation, hypocrisy, and confusion.” I can’t remember if I ever mailed S. a copy of the issue.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: NEKO CASE’S MIDDLE CYCLONE

Ryan Werner — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 22:00:28 +0000

The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.

I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.

There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself.

* * *

The year my record collection was expanding in the direction of genres with hyphens, Neko’s album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was new and garnering attention from nearly everywhere. But I had no way of justifying a listen, couldn’t be bothered to look into what I assumed was another minor cultural fascination—music for girls with stupid glasses, tolerated by their boyfriends with stupid haircuts. NPR with teeth, which is to say, guessing at a closed mouth.

I eventually listened to an earlier album of hers called Blacklisted. It was a collection of dark, simple folk songs. Colorful chords and a big voice, layered to taste. I liked it and listened to more of her albums, got a sense of how she was growing. The Virginian, her debut, was a lot of silly twang, an endearing shout. Her next, Furnace Room Lullaby, began heaping on the residual pangs of murder and heartbreak that would show up in full-force on Blacklisted. When I finally got to Fox Confessor, I found that she had nearly completely pulled up her roots and moved on to make the sort of music that is definitely pop—pretty songs designed for consumption—but the painful kind, inflected with jokes and jazz and other sneaky things that ruin everything with truth, rebuild it with better lies.

An announcement of a new album by Neko Case came at the end of 2008. It was to be called Middle Cyclone, and its arrival, for whatever reason, became a point of blind devotion as motions of stability took their exit from my life.

* * *

I searched daily for a leak of Middle Cyclone. Once the track-list was released, I searched for the titles, too. “This Tornado Loves You” and “Vengeance Is Sleeping” and “Magpie to the Morning.” I wasn’t sure what it all meant. The album cover was revealed: Neko brandishing a hand-and-a-half broadsword, kneeling in an attack-pose on the hood of a 1967 Mercury Cougar. I made it the background on my computer.

By the time the album turned up, it was mid-February and beyond cold. Wisconsin in the winter is both a literal and figurative state of ice. Live here for as long as I have and you’ll figure out why so many people believe in a vengeful God.

The first song started with a low, wavering tremolo guitar and then picked up with a full arrangement. It wavered, broke itself down with descending organ and vocals that steamrolled from the background in a manic echo.

Lyrically, it was set-up almost as a prompt: what would happen if a tornado loved you? Death and destruction, obviously. As I listened and re-listened to the song, I realized that the question could be broadened and the answer would stay the same. What would happen if anyone loved you?

Death and destruction. Obviously.

My love, I am the speed of sound.
I left them motherless, fatherless,
their souls dangling inside-out from their mouths,
but it’s never enough.

I want you.
[“This Tornado Loves You”]

* * *

I had sex on Christmas night in 2008 and then not again for over a year. We stopped somewhere in the middle because she was crying. I asked her why and she said I don’t know, which is the long way of saying It’s you, which is the long way of saying nothing.

We wouldn’t officially split up until early spring of the following year, but the relationship was over. After we were done, I had a brief, ill-fated, and mostly secret fling with one of our mutual friends. I can’t stress those qualifiers enough. It took nearly no time at all for that relationship to prove itself as a non-starter, and the trading places of who was mutual to whom begat a gauntlet of shame that ended, aside from the remaining balance of confusion to be paid in full at a later date, rather poorly and to the suspicions of no one.

I spent a year alone listening to Middle Cyclone. When I finally met another girl—a redhead, coincidentally—it didn’t work out. We dated for a few months and then one day she said, “It’s like you don’t even like me.” I thought about it, and, though I liked her just fine, her point stood: What I am giving you is not equal to what you are giving me.

It was then that I noticed that I had fully developed the partitioning and distribution of my qualities both good—I will listen to you and I will make you laugh—and bad—I will talk endlessly about inconsequential things and I will eventually let you down. Everyone gets a little, occasionally in the form of too much: faux-bravado as satire, exaggeration for comic effect, casual conversation at unnecessary volumes.

Like any other pre-constructed thing, personality or otherwise, this idea is designed around an approximation of damage and its impact.

I listened to Middle Cyclone on repeat, dozens of times. I realized that I will always keep the majority of myself for myself.

I can’t give up actin’ tough,
it’s all that I’m made of.
Can’t scrape together quite enough
to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.
[“Middle Cyclone”]

* * *

I am confused, incessantly, by how to balance desire with respect. Often, the best I’m able to do is one or the other. This is the opposite of balance, and thoroughly bad.

When I say that I can’t balance those two elements, desire and respect, I don’t mean to say that I turn into an abuser when caught up in a state of yearning or a militant second-waver when I want nothing. All I mean is that I cannot tame the animal I am: I either just am or am not that animal.

It took writing a heroic crown of sonnets—a task of formal poetry akin to waterboarding as therapy—about a fabricated relationship with Neko to make me understand that about myself. Neko, as presented on Middle Cyclone, is the sort of women worth both respecting and desiring: impetuous, loud, wrong, afraid, honest, incomplete, and terribly—truthfully—human.

This means, of course, that she is every woman, and, as such, is worth both respecting and desiring.

Even before Middle Cyclone, Neko addressed the proximity of fear and females from both sides and to much better effect: “Deep Red Bells” deals with the Green River Killer of a 1980s Pacific Northwest and “Pretty Girls” is about young women waiting alone in an abortion clinic. But never before has she done it like on Middle Cyclone, with such an admiration for animals and nature, two things I take a general disinterest in, but whose relevance through her gaze become a manifesto on which I’m willing to sign my name, tattoo on the backs of my eyelids.

It’s made me understand that nobody deserves to feel threatened, that the world itself is a natural threat and needs no help. On the street, in their homes, alone, in public or in any other configuration of place, women deal with different problems, and the problems of theirs that are the same as mine—a man—are dealt with from a different angle.

I won’t claim to understand the anomalies exclusive to females, and though Middle Cyclone hasn’t fixed very many of my personality flaws, it’s opened up a gateway of empathy. I respect fear. Mine, yours, his, hers. I am as feral as anything that breathes.

Pick up that rock, drink from that lake.
I do my best but I’m made of mistakes.
Yes, there are things I’m still quite sure of:
I love you this hour,
this hour today,
and heaven will smell like the airport.
But I may never get there to prove it,
so let’s not waste our time thinking how that ain’t fair.

I’m an animal.
You’re an animal, too.
[“I’m an Animal”]

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: PETER GABRIEL’S SO

Nancy Davis Kho — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:20:33 +0000

Whenever I felt the waves of homesickness approaching during my semester abroad in Vienna back in 1987, I knew what I had to do: button up the grey scratchy Tyrolean jacket I’d bought at a flea market, tuck my yellow cassette-playing Walkman into its breast pocket, and press “PLAY” on Peter Gabriel’s So. I’d never been a fan of Genesis growing up; on our family radio dial, my sister held down Country, I ruled over New Wave, and my brother’s territory was All Things Rock. We were gleefully opposed to each other’s tastes out of principal, and liking anything by Genesis or Gabriel would have felt disloyal to the Cult, Echo and the Bunnymen, and New Order.

But one high school summer during which I worked as a camp counselor, far from a radio signal, a Peter Gabriel mixtape lettered in my brother’s handwriting somehow ended up in my canvas duffel bag. I played “Solsbury Hill,” hit rewind, played it again, and again, and again, stopping only to listen to “Biko” and “San Jacinto” a few million times each. By the time So came out in ’86, I was one of the first people in line at the college record store to buy the cassette.

As a person who had decided at 14 that she would have a career in international business, I was as surprised as anyone to realize during my junior year in college that I hadn’t ever been abroad. My German was passable and Vienna seemed more exotic than Munich, so I found a program there and moved academic heaven and earth to make it happen for spring semester. My advisor let me know I’d have to double up on required courses before and afterwards, but while I was in Vienna I could coast with electives like Viennese Opera and Austrian Artists of the Viennese Secession.

Predictably, the first three weeks living in Europe were thrilling, a mélange of new challenges and strange customs and easy classes and, it being Vienna, toothsome pastries. But reality arrived in a rush of record-breaking winter storms, short-tempered sales clerks, expensive groceries, and an accent that scoffed at my textbook German. That my landlady rented out the single bathroom in our flat to Turkish guest workers who needed a quick bath only added to my sense of isolation.

The only thing that could put me back right was a long walk in the cold along the Danube, with Peter Gabriel singing in my ear. The first bars of “Red Rain” always coincided with my hasty departure from the apartment, which was on the top floor of an ancient building with no elevator. The wide, unheated concrete staircase was always dark, and you had to hit a timer light on each level to see your way down. I’d smack the light switch and pound down the stairs in time to the driving beat of the song, cursing the stupidity of the Viennese for not installing proper lights, by which I meant American lights that stayed on. Through the prism of time I can now appreciate this energy-conserving lighting system, but at the time? “This place is so quiet, sensing that storm…” I was the storm, baby. I was the mother-effing Red Rain.

I’d plunge into the cold and walk a few blocks to the icy Danube cabal, and by the time I descended to the walkway that ran alongside it, “Sledgehammer” was playing. There’s not a better song to get the blood pumping, warming up the digits and exposed facial skin that the Viennese wind was trying furiously to frost. My gait to “Sledgehammer” was the ultimate defiance; I would not let Vienna ruin my study abroad experience.

And then ethereal Kate Bush would chime in with Gabriel to chide me gently. “Don’t Give Up,” she’d sing, “you’re not beaten yet.” It was usually at this point, fifteen minutes or so into my heart-pounding walk, that my shoulders would lower and my jaws unclench. Not quite ready to lay down my bag of self-pity, maybe, I would at least start looking around me instead of at my pounding feet.

As “That Voice Again” and “Mercy Street” flowed past, I began to notice the details: the charming punk couple walking their dachshund in its little green coat. The apartment building with Viennese
Secessionist embellishments that reminded me of something our art professor had told us about Otto Wagner. Graffiti written on a bench in German whose irony I actually understood. I’d execute a pivot step here and start heading back for home.

You cannot listen to “Big Time” without an inward smile at the blowhard narrator, who’s praying to a big God as he kneels in his big Church. It’s a song that reminded me not to take myself too seriously.

So studying abroad isn’t perfect. So the landlady offered you a tray of home baked cookies that you devoured, and only realized in watching her recreate the recipe later that she formed each ball of batter in the palm of her fresh-licked hand. So you blew your entire food budget for the month on a pair of pony skin leopard combat boots. If nothing else, I was collecting good stories.

I’d be nearing the steps to climb back up to my street when that hundred pound gorilla of a song, “In Your Eyes,” came on. As any woman who was a teenager during the ‘80s will tell you, the sight of Lloyd Dobler holding his boom box aloft for Diane Court to hear this song pour out ruined us as romantic partners forever. Unless a guy comes up with a line as stunning as “In your eyes, I see the doorway of a thousand churches” (which one might reasonably argue is an unattainable task) he will always be a little bit of a disappointment.

Yeah, so maybe I’d gained the Viennese Twenty thanks to the wurst stand and the gelato shop that I passed on my way to school, not to mention the “Herzlichen Glückwünsch” cookies that conveyed “Best Wishes” and about 3,000 calories each. But up here in my eyes? I’m a freakin’ cathedral, man, with stained glass and kneeling benches of emotion.

Right before I left for Vienna, I ran into a classmate of mine for whom I pined, at a frat party that was coming apart at the seams at three in the morning. So was on the stereo, and when “In Your Eyes” came on, he silently put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me to the center of the empty dance floor, its perimeter marked by drunken students flopped on couches. Maybe this guy saw my basilicas! We swayed into one another through the very last note, and it became our song even if I left for Vienna before there was time for an “our.”

So even today when I hear “In Your Eyes,” I send a silent Herzlichen Glückwünsch out to my classmate, and to Peter Gabriel, for giving me a reason to keep going.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

Colin Rafferty — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:01:53 +0000

Elizabeth and I took our first road trip a few months into our relationship. As the miles went by on the interstate, I changed CDs, one hand on the wheel while the other one slid the discs into and out of the 24-disc wallet I’d used for a decade.

Elizabeth fidgeted in her seat, a move that I’d come to recognize as signifying agitation and discomfort.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You keep changing the music,” she said. “On trips, I just leave the same CD in the whole time.”

“The whole time?”

“The whole time.”

***

As we went on, from dating to engagement to marriage, I learned this about Elizabeth: she would listen to the same CD, sometimes the same song, over and over and over. For me, a former record store employee with a music collection that overtook an apartment wall, music was about discovery, the chance to hear something before anyone else, the chance to love a band or singer-songwriter at ground level, to say you heard them first.

But Elizabeth taught me there was beauty in repetition. Listening three times in a row unlocked nuances in albums I thought I already knew. A fourth listen made the experience transcendent; a fifth sent it back down to its most human core.

Elizabeth loved Bruce Springsteen more than any other artist. She’d go through phases with single albums; for a long time, she played Born to Run. (Once, as the CD started over, I reached for the eject button. Over piano and harmonica, Elizabeth grabbed for my hand. “You don’t fuck with ‘Thunder Road,’” she said.) On a trip to Arizona, she discovered our rental car had satellite radio, and we listened almost exclusively to E Street Radio. For birthdays and anniversaries, I bought her CD copies of the albums she’d grown up listening to, and we’d listen to them together, arguing about whether the live version’s energy surpassed the studio version’s precision. We decorated our first Christmas tree while the video of Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 played, Springsteen in his stocking cap our version of Saint Nick.

***

For our second wedding anniversary, I bought her 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen’s first album after his breakthrough with Born to Run.

Elizabeth loved the album, and it took up permanent residence in our car. We sung along wherever we went, sometimes skipping ahead to our favorite tracks: “Badlands,” the album’s opener, with its “whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa” lead-in to the chorus; “Racing in the Street,” a sad lament of lost hopes and dreams denied. “Candy’s Room” was my favorite song, because the rush I felt when Max Weinberg’s drums kicked in as Springsteen sang, “We kiss / my heart’s pumping to my brain” reminded me of the first time Elizabeth and I had kissed, a moment all nerves and passion, the kind of chance for glory that so many of the songs strove for and never found.

Going by number of plays, the final and title track, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” was Elizabeth’s favorite. Springsteen had followed his “four corners” approach, in which each side started out bright and hopeful, and then closed with that hope unraveled. In the dark, as we drove home, hope twice unraveled, Elizabeth would softly sing. “Now some folks are born into a good life / Other folks, they just get it anyway, anyhow,” she whispered over Springsteen. She claimed she had no talent for song, but as the miles of the interstate slipped by on our return to our home, I loved the sound of her voice more than anything else in this world.

***

I got the phone call about her brother at a departmental end-of-semester party on a Wednesday afternoon. Unconscious, the voice on the other end said. We don’t know what will happen. By the time we’d gotten packed and shuttled the dog to the kennel, we knew that we were driving down to say goodbye to him, that at the end of that road from Virginia to Alabama was a bed surrounded by machines to be switched off one by one.

We loaded our suitcases into the trunk and laid the garment bag with a black suit and black dress on top of it. I sat in the driver’s seat, and as I turned the key, I pressed the button to switch from CD to radio. I knew that whatever we listened to for the drive would forever be the Music We Listened To On the Way There, and I wanted not to ruin the album for Elizabeth.

From the passenger seat, her voice tiny, she whispered, “Thank you.”

We drove, our soundtrack the top-40 stations of the Southeast, I-95 to I-85 to I-20, hoping to stay ahead of a winter storm coming in from the west. We listened to music that would vanish in six months. I had never been more grateful for the disposability of pop music. We pulled into the hospital parking lot at three in the morning, and in the moment between shutting off the car’s engine and opening the door to her waiting father, there was a brief moment of silence, the first I’d heard in hours.

***

We sold that car a few months ago. We hadn’t really driven it since it developed some problems that no mechanic seemed able to diagnose, and we’d bought a new car. I cleaned out the old car, pulling out the detritus of a hundred trips. Dozens of maps, brochures from historical sites and national parks, stale Cheetos. I found four pens between the passenger seat and door, lost as Elizabeth worked on trips while I drove.

Under the center console, I found Darkness on the Edge of Town, the CD case sticky with spilled soda. Springsteen still stared out from the cover, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, window behind him. We hadn’t listened to it since the day before the phone call, seventeen months earlier.

We haven’t listened to it since, either.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE’S EVIL EMPIRE

Logan Adams — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:01:55 +0000

I grew up on eighty acres in a hollow outside of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Reader’s Digest’s “Best Place to Raise a Family” in 1995. The front forty was flush with cedar and pine, the back forty, deciduous. The whole thing was a quarter-mile of gravel drive from the road that edged the country block my family shared with neighbors, some who farmed alfalfa fields and others who had backyards crowded with rusting stock cars.

When my younger brother, Gaar, and I played outside we changed our names to our G.I. Joe alter egos, constructed lean-to forts against fallen trees and chased each other in our own game of war, the turning point usually coming with a well-timed swing on the rope dangling over the babbling creek that bisected the property.

One July afternoon we dammed the stream with lichen-spotted rocks from its bed. The water rose six inches. We felt powerful.

***

A year later I was in seventh grade. 1998. It was a Saturday in my friend’s basement. We were seated in a circle playing Magic: the Gathering when Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View ended. Reuben got up and opened his backpack that had been lying crumpled on the olive green recliner. A classmate had lent him an album. Something called Evil Empire.

The first track, “People of the Sun,” started like this: Yeah, people come up. Yeah, we better turn the bass up on this one. Check it… and kicked in.

The wailing alarm of a guitar pick scraping steel strings. Syncopated lyrics—sharp as semi-automatic fire. Funky, angry bass hammers. Drumming that sounded as if the skins and cymbals were being battered with bottles and rocks.

My mouth watered, my head instinctively bobbed, my spine alternated in waves of heat and chills. It was as if the dynamo at my core was stuck on, spinning faster and faster, my body barely keeping it from tearing through my chest. There was no going back.

I folded my cards, moved to the Pioneer, and stared through the plastic window of the CD tray, the disc’s concentric black and white circles spinning, hypnotizing. We listened to the album straight through. When it finished I looked at my hands. I’d kept them balled tightly for all forty-five minutes. My fingers cracked when I unfolded them, as if the joints had begun to fuse.

I saved the allowance I earned by mowing my parents’ three-acre lawn and sorting garbage to burn or haul to our rural township’s recycling center. After a few weeks, when I had fifteen bucks in my dresser drawer, I tagged along with Mom on a grocery run into Sheboygan. I bought my own copy of Evil Empire at the Music Den on 8^th Street, a block from the corner of Erie, where five years later I, with dreadlocks poking from beneath a hand-knit cap, would protest the impending invasion of Iraq.

***

I spent my eighth grade year in my room—surrounded by posters of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Gary Payton, and Alonzo Mourning, as well as a painting I’d done in art class of a Nike-outfitted snowman. I listened to Evil Empire on repeat. When the batteries ran out in the middle of “Tire Me,” I replaced them. When it was dinnertime I left “Revolver” and the black and white circles spinning on pause. When Gaar asked me if I wanted to go outside and play war, it was over “Vietnow” that I answered, “No.”

With florescent lights flickering overhead, I read the lyrics along with the music. For every decipherable, is all the world jails and churches?, there was something baffling like, NAFTA coming with the new disaster/and, yes, we in with the wind and the Plan de Ayala kin. Even “People of the Sun,” the song with which I’d first connected, had references to the year 1516 and Cuautemoc.

The songs’ meanings were a mystery, like alcohol or, when on a school field trip three years earlier, a friend and I found a plastic grocery bag of Penthouses hidden under the rocks along the Sheboygan River.

Besides lyrics, the inside of Evil Empire’s booklet included a centerfold picture of books, laid out as if they’d fallen from an overturned shelf. I copied the titles and took the list to the single-story library in Kiel, the nearby and close-knit 3,000-person town where I went to school, hoping they would prove the Rosetta Stone for Rage’s lyrics.

The Anarchist Cookbook, Joe, The Black Panthers Speak, Rebellion form the Roots, The Media Monopoly, A Race for Justice, Power at Play, Tropic of Cancer, Hegemony and Revolution, Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy is in the Streets, The Wretched of the Earth, 50 Ways to Fight Censorship, Marx-Engels Reader.

I searched the stacks, ran my fingers across the Dewey Decimals tags taped on the spines of the library’s dusty books. I took my list to the librarian. They had none of them.

They don’t got to burn the books/they just remove them.

***

I sat in the sunlight at a wide, composite table in Sheboygan’s Mead Public Library with a pile of books before me and a spiral notebook opened. My mother had dropped me off on her way to work that August day. Before I got out of the car, we’d idled for a minute in the parking lot and she’d looked at my list. “Everything but the Communist Manifesto,” she’d said and handed it back to me. After she drove away, I’d added it, though suspicious.

First I flipped for pictures. Photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a gravel lane. She was on fire. Photo of mustached men wearing sombreros on horseback. Photo of a cellblock, black faces and arms sticking from between the bars.

The tables of contents in these books listed chapters with the phrases: US hegemony, US tyranny, US intervention, war machine, military industrial complex, revolution, revolutionaries, New World Order.

I checked them out.

I read about anarchist cooperatives, the Zapatistas, the US’s meddling in Chile and Iran, the radioactive wasteland in parts of in Kuwait and Iraq—sand contaminated with degrading depleted uranium shells, a result of Gulf War I.

They rally round the family, with pockets full of shells.

I stared through the pages, my hands on my head, shocks of hair spilling between my fingers and thought about school, which started in a matter of weeks. We hadn’t covered Che or Zapata, Chomsky or Zinn at Kiel Middle, and I just knew we wouldn’t at Kiel High, either. These were histories that would be left buried.

We hadn’t dashed around the playgrounds hemmed in by cornfields pretending to be Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, or AIM freedom fighters. We were cowboys. We were soldiers. We were CIA.

With dial-up Internet freshly installed at my parents’ house, I tore down the posters in my room and replaced them with images from websites: Evil Empire’s cover, a hammer and sickle, Che, broken chains with the words “All we have to lose,” a closed fist. I sat under the flickering fluorescent light, my chest heaving, taking the images in, feeling like I finally understood.

Then, right before 2001, Rage Against the Machine broke up.

***

I searched Napster for any Rage I hadn’t heard. Rarities. Live tracks. My mother reassured me from the kitchen. “I know how you feel—I remember when the Beatles broke up,” she said.

Clearly, she didn’t understand. “The Beatles weren’t about anything important, Mom.”

“Oh yeah? We have all kinds of anti-war stuff,” she said, and fished out records from the cabinet under the stereo.

I blocked out the pops and hisses of Joan Baez and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with my headphones—Evil Empire spinning in the D: drive as I continued my search. Through mislabeled files and fan sites, I found other political bands, like Propagandhi, Crass, Choking Victim, and Dead Kennedys. Some were new, some old. I found that Zach, before fronting Rage, was in a punk band called Inside Out. I imagined him with a stereo, instead of a computer, hearing Minor Threat for the first time, feeling like me, learning about a war that had been raging since before he was born, a war without media scrutiny. A war on the voiceless.

These punk bands crafted music that was more simplistic than Rage, but it was just as angry. I listened to each new track with my forehead against the screen, my hands pressing the headphones against my ears until they felt hot. In these songs Rage’s funk was replaced with speed. Rap replaced with snarl.

I assembled these new songs into my own albums, each time trying to capture that same on-edge feeling I had in Reuben’s basement. Fingers twitching. Neck sweating. My stomach’s bottom falling out.

Without CD burning technology, I held a tape deck to the speakers and recorded from magnet to magnet. When I got a decade-old Nissan the tapes spun on endless loops in the stereo, the watery quality was like something captured on reel-to-reel when the world was at war.

Those last two years in the Wisconsin countryside I drove to that soundtrack, past farmers waving from tractors and shopkeepers sweeping outside storefronts, to school, to political rallies, and anti-war demonstrations.

The microphone explodes, shattering the molds.

***

Stephanie, with her big blue eyes and toothy smile, asked me to help her with the announcements. It was a Tuesday. She’d inherited the responsibility from her cousin who was absent that day. She said she’d gotten the okay from the principal.

This was the opportunity to act that had been building since Reuben’s basement. To make my whole school think about the world differently.

To change something.

The rungs torn from the ladder, can’t reach the tumor.

Stephanie and I walked into the office at 7:58. It smelled like the secretary’s hairspray and the pumpkin scented candles on the ledge behind the copier. Mr. Pomerening was waiting for us by the announcement phone, comparing his watch the school’s clock above him. He was a short man with a large nose and salt and pepper hair slicked back like he was always walking into the wind. At 8:00, he smiled at us, picked up the phone, and pressed the “all call” button.

“Hello, this is Mr. Pomerening, principal of Kiel High School, where we expect greatness. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and the rest of this morning’s announcements,” he said, handed Stephanie the receiver and walked into the hallway to corral the tardy. Stephanie handed it to me. I felt the entire school holding its breath.

I shifted in my Chuck Taylors, rubbed my matted hair, and launched into the Pledge, reciting it correctly until the end when I paused and used the words from the back of a NOFX t-shirt, “With liberty for just us, not all.”

I handed the phone back to Stephanie—her eyes open, shocked irises twinkling with the bright office light—and walked out. In the hallway a teacher stood at every door, waiting. For a moment I thought they had formed this receiving line to thank me for liberating them.

So make the move and plead the fifth, cause you can’t plead the first.

***

I went to a Jesuit university, one that advertised itself as an institution rooted firmly in service and justice. Got involved in student organizations with names like, JUSTICE, Students for an Environmentally Active Campus, CommUNITY. Met guys with beards, a guy that hiked mountains, a few that traveled to Kenya and secured funds to build a library there, and another with “The Thinker” tattooed across his back.

On Wednesdays, these guys—my friends—and I got together in an apartment above Murphy’s Bar and had Guys’ Night. Mostly we sat, drank, and bitched about two dubious presidential elections, two condemnable wars, the PATRIOT Act, the government’s response to Katrina, the state-by-state “protection of marriage,” the war on women’s rights, Rick Santorum, etc. etc. etc. We had this roiling suspicion that something deeper, more fundamental, was terribly fucking wrong.

Sometimes a movie like A Few Good Men played in the background and during the commiseration we reminded each other to drink each time an actor said, “Sir.”

Around 10pm, before we went down to a packed Murphy’s for karaoke, we put Rage Against the Machine into the stereo and air guitared. Most of them had come to Rage later than I. But when they did, the lyrics didn’t surprise them. Their high schools and their own reading had made them aware of alternative histories. It made me wonder: if Reuben hadn’t put on Evil Empire, who would I have been?

But I didn’t talk about that after 10. Instead we jammed and shot fireworks from the windows and kicked over trashcans and leapt from couch to chair to coffee table to couch.

Bulls on parade.

There’s a picture—my favorite picture—of Mike and I on the kitchen bar. I’m headbanging with my invisible Fender P-Bass, he’s bent-over-backwards, wailing on a broomstick Stratocaster. Beside us is our drummer, pounding the IKEA end table he’s propped on his thigh.

That drummer now works for a Republican politician. A few years later, when I visited him and his wife in D.C., he told me that his boss had Rage in his iPod’s workout mix.

It was fall and we were sitting on the edge of the Reflecting Pool. Brown and yellow leaves tumbled across the mall in a cool wind. When he saw the surprise on my face he put his arm around his wife and said, “Everyone can relate to anger.”

***

I joined Teach For America after college. The organization got me a job in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, teaching mathematics at a low-performing, high-poverty middle school where most students were children of color.

By this time I no longer glowed with indiscriminant indignation and frustration. I’d captured and harnessed it—compressed it into a cinder that I implanted beneath the part of my heart devoted to my students. There it boiled the blood and soul I used to push through each day, teaching children disadvantaged by birth.

On a hot day during my third year of teaching, the hall was crowded with students pulling at the front of their blue uniform polos, fanning themselves. I was leaning against my doorjamb when I saw one of my students, a tall and slender fourteen year old, Barry, standing stone-like in the hall, forcing the rush of students to flow around him on their way to lunch. Another student of mine, Chris, was swimming through the crowd toward Barry, his jaw clenched. Chris was coming from science, a class he struggled in, often telling me that, “I don’t get why it matters,” or “I don’t get what the teacher’s saying.”

Chris bumped against Barry and said, “Get out my fucking way.”

“Make me,” Barry said, stepping into Chris, pushing him back on his heels.

I waded through current with my arms over my head—navigating flustered students fighting to find a way through the bottleneck of lockers. When I got to Chris and Barry, they were bumping chests, staring at each other. I looped my arms through theirs and pulled them into my classroom, just as the last of the students trickled into the adjacent hall. I sat them in desks, all three of us with wet faces, as they jawed and I decided how to handle the situation.

“This boy needed to move.”

“I can stand wherever I please. You ain’t telling me nothing.”

I sat on a desktop by them and straightened my tie. I waited until they were both quiet and I could hear the lights hum. I touched my toes together and thought about how I had handled myself at that age and when my brother and I had dammed our own stream.

How our mother had come out of the house and down to the water’s edge, watching us marvel at how we had made the water rise and flood an upstream section of lawn. I remember how she tucked her curly hair behind her ears, crossed her arms, and said, “You two aren’t the only ones that use that stream, you know. You’re going to put the rocks back where you found them.”

I remember standing in the water, dripping and bewildered. Rivulets still squirting between the few cracks we hadn’t yet caulked with grass clippings. After she spoke, she didn’t turn and walk away. She stood there, arms crossed and feet pigeon-toed, until we began dismantling the dam—sliding each of the rocks back under the surface. Because who were we?

I looked up at my students. Barry had pulled his mp3 player and earbuds from his pocket and was turning them over in his fingers. He looked despondent. Though we didn’t allow electronics, I said nothing. The backs of Chris’ cheeks pulsed as he gritted his teeth, his arms tightly crossed. I took a deep breath and felt calm.

For the boys, I started talking about the hallway, then how we could move forward together. What all three of us could do to make a difference. To change things. To get it right.

It’s coming back around again.

The Rumpus.net » Albums of Our Lives

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: TO THE EXTREME BY VANILLA ICE

Related Posts:

Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL

Related Posts:

Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine

Related Posts:

SONGS OF OUR LIVES: JOY DIVISION’S “LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: NEKO CASE’S MIDDLE CYCLONE

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: PETER GABRIEL’S SO

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

Related Posts:

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE’S EVIL EMPIRE

Related Posts: