Recently, I was given an assignment by Rumpus film critic and friend Ryan Boudinot to write about one of those pieces of music that is so execrable, so thoroughly gangrenous, that it’s nearly impossible to figure out why anyone would like it. This is outside of my brief since a) I am meant to be writing here about independent and unsigned and unreleased music, and b) I very rarely waste my meager scribblings on things I hate. Contempt is too easy. For these reasons, I was dubious about the assignment, though it’s a good one, and I would have shelved the whole notion, were it not for what happened next. What happened next was this: I wrote to Ryan as follows, “Give me an example of the kind of song you’re talking about.” And Ryan wrote back: “Higher Love,” by Steve Winwood.
Now this is a truly bad piece of music. An unredeemable piece of music. Its badness is complete. It is the kind of song designed to force you to submit. It is the sort of song you would hear while riding in a Lincoln Town Car to a conference of proctologists. Let me catalogue a few of the ways “Higher Love” is bad. Well, first of all, “Higher Love” was released during what appears to many right now to be the nadir of the popular song, a moment, when all was tinny synthesizers, bad digital effects, primitive digital mastering, MIDI, and so on, and, to its shame, “Higher Love” partakes of nearly all of these eighties musical cliches. Furthermore, it tries to buy black music credibility by featuring backing vocals from a soul singer for hire, Chaka Khan (also prominently featured in the “Higher Love” video, an MTV staple of the moment, which includes a sequence when Steve Winwood and Chaka back dance together), though upon reflection the song is about as black as a gross box of ivory soap. And—related to the ersatz, faked-up soul of the thing—it has one of those frothy but not much considered lyrics that seems to equate secular desire with spiritual love. Hard to believe, really, that Steve Winwood had to pay some guy to write this lyric for him (specifically Will Jennings who has also written songs for Barry Manilow, Jimmy Buffett, and Celine Dion), when it is the sort of lyric that probably could have been confected on the spot, or perhaps cribbed from a greeting card lying nearby. Oh, and here’s another bit of damnation, “Higher Love” is from an album that won a Grammy for album of the year, which usually in my book means the product in question is bland, conservative, and irrelevant. Sure, I dislike this song, and I can’t really imagine that anyone took it seriously at the time, even if I think of it as one of those heating-the-frog-slowly-so-that-it-doesn’t-know-it’s-getting-boiled situations. I mean, like others I sort of tolerated Winwood’s earlier album Arc of a Diver, when it first came out, because I liked the pacific drone at the beginning of “When You See A Chance,” even though I thought the entirety of the thing was too slick by half. Still, a pop song is a pop song, not to be confused with art, and so I tolerated Arc of a Diver, and I wanted to like “Higher Love,” though quickly it became tiresome, and gave me a headache. I’m guessing others wanted to like it too.
Maybe it was the eighties that bothered me. I hate them in retrospect, and I hated them at the time. I loathed Ronald Reagan. My loathing for Ronald Reagan was boundless. Ronald Reagan kept me up nights hating, sometimes, I hated his fucking hair, which looked to me like the kind of hair that a beaver would have, or some other kind of lower mammal, a rat, or a vole, and I hated his halting, folksy way of talking, and his premature senescence, and I hated his casual love of violence and tyranny, and his racism, and his classism, and his fucking jellybeans, and the flatulent culture of Ronald Reagan, the morning-in-America stupidity, I hated it, and I hated people who bought into it (my parents among them), the poverty of sympathy for anyone who was not white and working for a large corporation, the cynical courting of xenophobic evangelicals that has ruined the country ever since, I hated his non-acting, his bathetic movies, his anti-intelletualism, his wife, with her skeletal, steely exterior, most of their kids (except Ron, who seems like a nice guy), their faux-Wild West ranch in California, everyone in his cabinet, especially James Watt, Ed Meese, and Cap Weinberger, I hated his obsession with tiny little Central American countries that he liked to attack just for the hell of it, I hated hearing about him for another fifteen years after he left office.
And since I believe that the politics of an age affect the artistic productions of the age, I suppose I really do think that Ronald Reagan somehow forced Steve Winwood to make “Higher Love,” even though Winwood is a British subject (from Birmingham, I believe), and could theoretically make any recording he wanted to. On first blush, the theology of “Higher Love” is morning-in-America theology, theology of the kind that leads people to believe that Jesus wants them to make lots of money. Or that Jesus will somehow protect them from death, disease, poverty, bad luck, traffic accidents, and so on. This is Reaganesque, as is the presence of Will Jennings, and the presence of a great number of L.A. studio musicians. The jacket of the album is Reaganesque. The video is Reaganesqe. MTV was, and is now, Reaganesque, has the stamp of Reagan/Bush on it, and I mean both Bushes. Jesus will not insure your prosperity. With or without Jesus, you will watch the people around you die, you will have awful luck, you, personally, will do awful things in your life, things that you can’t believe you did, and later you will rue the day, and you will hate yourself, even if you do wish to behave virtuously and try to love your spouse or significant other, or what have you. The only thing you can rely on Jesus to do for you, if you are such a one as to consider the possibilities, is to feel sympathy for your wretchedness. Now that would make a good pop song.
Speaking of death: part of what interested me about abut Ryan Boudinot’s suggestion that I write about Steve Winwood is death. Back in the seventies, as many will remember, Steve Winwood, composer and performer of “Higher Love,” was the singer and principle songwriter in the British band called Traffic. They got their start in the later sixties, when Winwood was startlingly young (he’d just finished a stint in the Spencer Davis Group, which he’d joined at age sixteen). The band included Dave Mason, who later became a soft rock guy, Jim Capaldi, who drummed and wrote a lot of lyrics, and Chris Wood, a really gifted and interesting player of wind instruments. Their early singles were kind of psychedelic and influenced by that Swinging London period of the Yardbirds, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Pretty Things. I didn’t know anything about this period of Traffic at the time it was happening, and neither did most people in the U.S. But then in 1971, after the first breakup of the band, Winwood owed an album to Island records, and he went into the studio to do it all himself, that is until he enlisted Capaldi and Wood to help out. The resulting album, called John Barleycorn Must Die, was the first genuine Traffic “hit” album, and it was one of the first albums given to me by my sister.
Having an older sister was a really effective way to learn about music that you would never hear when you were in middle school (junior high, as we called it then), where everyone was listening to top forty, like Elton John and Chicago and the Jackson Five. Some stuff trickled through in those days, like I remember that one of my friends from school spoke very highly of Made in Japan by Deep Purple. But basically, I didn’t understand much about rock and roll, the arty non-commercial iterations of rock and roll, until my sister came home on vacation.
The moment was fraught in many ways, because my mother had left my dad just a few years before, and we’d been moving around a bit. I think we were on our third address in three years, and my mom was occasionally in the company of various brokedown men who didn’t last very long. She was, I think, depressed. She was working sometimes, in telemarketing (because she never finished college and had little job experience, really), in an attempt to avoid taking money from my grandfather. My brother and I were home alone in the afternoons quite a bit. I waited for news from my sister, her tales of drugs and boys and freedom, like I waited for few things, because at least she was having some fun. I wasn’t. I was struggling in school.
What my sister brought back from school, in addition to tales of drugs and boys, were three LPs: Led Zeppelin IV, Dark Side of the Moon, and John Barleycorn Must Die. I think she gave me the Led Zeppelin album outright, and in the other the other two cases required that I borrow the LPs and tape them onto worn out cassettes, which I then played incessantly, having only brief intervals in which I was allowed to peruse the album jackets, to try to divine what was there. Each of the three albums had a remarkable impact. It would be a fib if I did not say that the pre-eminent of the three was Dark Side of the Moon. It sounded like nothing else that I had heard, its narcotic tempos, its ominous rumblings and sound effects, its looped cash registers, its eerie, breathy vocals. All very different from Elton John. The very specific lyric that lured me in was the track entitled “Brain Damage.”
If you accept the theory that the trauma of departed Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett’s mental illness was part of the catalyst for the album, then “Brain Damage” has to be exhibit A for this theory, the leaping off point. (The Syd Barrett theme would bear more fruit on the next album Wish You Were Here, another favorite of mine.) The lyrics of “Brain Damage” are, therefore, the sort of thing that would deeply terrify an 11 or 12 year old, whose only real contact with actual brain damage has so far been reading about it in books. “The lunatic is on the grass,” etc. I’d lived next door to a psychiatric hospital very recently, but its unfortunates were mainly seen in the distance walking in and out of buildings. I had no real access to the meaning of mental illness, to the pathos of it, until I began to hear it in the slow, melancholy tempo of “Brain Damage,” and Roger Waters’s understated delivery (when he got all screechy later, it seemed like such an asethetic mistake). “The paper holds their folded faces to the floor:” I spent a lot of time thinking about this and about, and: “You rearrange me till I’m sane.” I would later spend a brief period in the psychiatric hospital myself, and I would later know a fair amount about mental illness, more than I wish I knew, but this was the beginning of understanding it, of seeing how it really felt, how it operated in the lives of others.
It was true of all these albums, these three albums that my sister brought back from school, that they secreted into themselves an idea of mystery, a darkness that had been concealed from me before, even during my parents divorce. With the surging of change that is adolescence, I began to see these darker tones, on “Brain Damage,” and on “When the Levee Breaks,” which was, in fact, like getting pummeled by flood and destruction, and “The Battle of Evermore,” with its ominous mandolin ostinatos, and of course “Stairway,” which seemed meaningful even if you could never say why.
John Barleycorn was more obscure at first. Partly because Steve Winwood, with his soul mannerisms, was just very difficult to understand. Moreover, there was a jazzy feeling to the album, which was something my sister really liked (later she was incredibly passionate about The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, and that album had a similar jazzy aspect). But the song on the Traffic album that lodged in my subconscious for a long time was the title song “John Barleycorn,” an old folk ballad that Winwood apparently heard on an album by the Watersons. It’s a song about cultivating the raw materials necessary for making alcohol, or so it seems to me, but like many British ballads of the really olde variety, the lyric makes a lot of use of personification and anthropomorphism, and, well, of magic. John Barleycorn, himself, is subjected to all manner of tortures—he makes Abu Ghraib look easy—but he keeps returning for more, and in some versions, as I understand it, the people even drink his blood. There’s a bit of Christian allegory here, therefore, lurking underneath the manifest content. But part of the beauty of this dark and violent lyric is simply the language. “They’ve ploughed, they’ve sewn, they’ve harrowed him in.” And so on. To an American kid, in love with the possibility of language, this antique English, rendered in Winwood’s high melancholy tenor, suggested some otherworldly place, some rich past where these old rituals and beliefs persisted. A pagan England, an agrarian England, an England of myth.
All three of these albums, then, connected me, the contemporaneous listener, to forces beyond childhood in the suburbs (for example), and maybe that is just what Jimmy Page’s occult obsession was all about. Led Zeppelin, but also Pink Floyd and, to a more limited extent, Traffic, were trying to get music to summon a kind of reverence and seriousness that nothing else can quite kindle in you. Live theater is supposed to do it sometimes. Film is supposed to do it sometimes. Religion is supposed to do it. And rock and roll was supposed to do it, and that was why people thought rock and roll was the devil’s music. The hammer of the gods, in Page’s often repeated formulation, or the uncanny, in the way it’s described not in Freud but in Ernst Jentsch, meaning “doubts [about] whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.” Page wants to bludgeon you with this dark majesty, the animation of the seemingly inert world. Pink Floyd and Traffic were trying through subtler arts.
Did my sister understand this, at all, the effect that these records had on me when she made them available to me, and otherwise went about her business (when you are 15 you don’t want your 12-year-old brother hanging around too much). I think, probably, that my sister just had good ears, and good intuition, but I can’t ask her now, because she’s no longer living. And the result of her no longer living, however, is that loss has given these albums of sheen, a veneer, of even more mystery. Mystery always adheres to non-being, after all, and this is one of the ways that the dead exert a powerful and ongoing influence over the living. For example, these are among the albums that my sister owned, and which were among her things, after she died. I made a beeline for her CD collection (she died in 1995, and so it was during the ascendency of the compact disc), where I started taking things out and playing them and making various compilations of songs that had her attention. She sure liked the Grateful Dead, but I’m not always sure that what she liked about the Grateful Dead so much was the music as much as it was the ritual, and the creepiness of the band and its willing-to-perish thematic reiterations. She went to see them a lot, but she didn’t dwell on bootlegs or particular shows, the way a lot of her friends did. I remember her boyfriend, after she died, saying: “I know she’s up there with Jerry smoking a joint right now.” This kind of thing could be sentimental, if it weren’t also unsettling.
I say all this, I guess, because this time of year (later autumn) is the seasonal anniversary of my sister’s death, which took place on All Saint’s Day, the day after Halloween. So my niece and nephew had just been out for Halloween the day before (10/31/1995), trafficking (so to speak) in the imagery of the beyond, and they didn’t know that Halloween had this old resonance, in which are called forth the dearly departed. If they were Latin American, it would have been even more uncanny, this strange timing, because then my sister would have died during the Dia de Los Muertos celebration. Anyway, for me now, Halloween always has this very specific haunting as part of it. All the weather has to do is turn cold, such that I am reminded of Indian corn and apple picking, and that feeling comes to the surface of me, that nagging feeling of grief. Some years you barely feel the sensation, and it’s no worse than a hangnail, and then other years, loss is a tempest, and you do what you can just to keep getting on with your affairs. There’s a numerology about this kind of reckoning, a numerology that I find disappointing, but then, on the other hand, in what other way can you allow yourself the gift of remembering?
Well, one way is by listening to these albums. To some extent I can’t listen to them without thinking a little bit of my sister, remembering, for example, the pattern of her bedspread in a certain room in Pelham, NY, or remembering this off-white color she liked in her straight-leg corduroys, or her laugh, or her brand of cigarettes, or her car. And this is, I think, one of the things that music can do, it can help you preserve these bits of life that are otherwise lost, because it adheres to feelings, the songs of a certain moment adhere to the past, and to the feelings of the past, this is well known, and if the feelings are of grief and horror (of, for example, the morning I woke and there were 12 messages on my answering machine and I knew someone had died), then the songs bring forth that time, and you are made better in recollection. And what if in this way music is about some higher love, in that music itself makes this possible, and is thereby consonant with agape, as opposed to eros, a part of whatever that order is, and this is something that we should honor about it. I remember in college reading the first section of Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, wherein he tries systematically to take apart the “Overture” to Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques. Levi-Strauss himself (resquiat in pacem) makes the case that music gives us access to some feeling that writing never can do, or this is my recollection of the passage, and I remember wanting to defend music from the attack of Derrida, even as it became clear that Derrida wanted to lay claim to some of this capability for writing itself, and where would I be, what kind of novelist would I be, if I didn’t feel a little bit that way too, if I didn’t feel that the agape of music is also the agape of literature, if by literature what we mean is prose that has no purpose but to experience itself as a kind of music, a music of memories, dreams, reflections.
Ryan’s assignment was that I try to figure out what people thought they liked when they were liking “Higher Love,” assuming that they didn’t really like that horrible fucking synthesizer sound (I think it’s the Yamaha DX7), or the digital reverb on the ghastly drum machines. Did they like the lyric? Did they like Steve Winwood’s voice? Did they like the fleeting image of Chaka Khan on the song and in the video? Did they like the slickness of the whole thing, the way it steamrolls any uncertainty, going down kind of like Kahlua and milk? I can’t believe they really liked any of those things. In fact, I would be really pleased to hear, in this forum, from anyone, anyone at all, for whom “Higher Love” is one of their favorite songs. In the meantime, I would volunteer the hypothesis that no matter how abject the pop confection is, there is often a moment of the sublime hovering in there somewhere (and a catalogue of songs where the lightweight and the weighty somehow oddly coexist might contain some of the following: “Walk Away, Renee,” “Crimson and Clover,” “Dream Weaver,” “Superstition,” “Sexual Healing,” and even “Beautiful,” by Christina Aguilera), and that Steve Winwood, with his rather thrilling past, his past of greater accomplishment, was calling forth this possibility of music, that it can fuse us to some more interesting set of forces and meanings, something more comprehensive than just what’s happening on the surface. A dreadful song, therefore, with a useful philosophical nugget concealed deeply within. And I would rather listen to “Brain Damage” any day.
62 responses
Spot on, Rick. I wouldn’t have thought there was a shred of redemption possible for “Higher Love,” but you manage it. Maybe for the next column, you can do the same for “We Built This City,” by (not Jefferson) Starship?
Rick, this is an awesome essay. To answer your question about who likes it, my girlfriend says she likes Higher Love, though she doesn’t say it’s one of her favorites. I’m going to try to get her to explain in the comments later. I think she rightfully pointed out, though, that I’m All Out of Love by Air Supply is much worse.
Seth, please please please please please please get your girlfriend to elucidate her thoughts on the song! I need to understand!
A couple of things about this song. I find it funny that it’s the favorite song of one of the more loathsome characters on television right now–Dennis Reynolds of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” He’s the epitome of the ignorant, privileged douchebag who would find “Higher Love” to be rocking–he dumps the song of a guy teaching a spinning class during the second season, I believe.
And this isn’t in defense of the song, but I would like to point out that the Winwood-Chaka Khan collaboration went both ways, as Winwood played keyboards on “I Feel For You.”
I hadn’t considered how Reagan-esque the music was, but I think there’s something to that. Looking at it that way, it’s not surprising to me that the more powerful music from the 80s, at least for me, came out of hip-hop and new wave, which spring from communities which were completely marginalized during the Reagan administration. Not that I was all that edgy–I still have my 45s of “Walk Like an Egyptian” and “The Reflex Dance Mix” to go along with my Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians and Run-DMC’s “Raising Hell.” And we won’t even get into my love affair with prog rock. I’m a very mixed-bag.
But reflecting on the hits from that period, yeah, it’s not even that the music is tired and bland and conservative–it’s that it even lacks the unrestrained joy that a silly pop song can use to redeem itself.
I’ve never been onboard for “Higher Love”, but I do have a persistent affection for “Back in the High Life”. If that’s an acceptable substitute, I can attempt to unpack those feelings — let me know.
To deny the appeal of Reaganesque music is to deny the appeal of Reagan himself, which is understandable but myopic, I think.
Steve Winwood also co-wrote “Gimme Some Loving”.
“We Built This City” is execrable. Thanks for reminding me (and for reviving that particularly pernicious virus). My brother and I would sing that song to annoy each other. I had to leave the room or store or wherever whenever it came on — this happened a lot.
“All Out of Love” and “Higher Love” don’t score anywhere near “WBTC” on the annoyometer. And they really should, because they both have “love” in the title — whereas the title “We Built This City” would seem to promise or at least hint at something a little more interesting.
What “We Built This City” hinted at, according to my father, who grew up listening to the Airplane, was “the real end of the ’60s.” I think “Higher Love” is comparable, since Steve Winwood, like Grace Slick, once had real credibility – something Air Supply never really claimed. “All Out of Love” is just as annoying as the other two, but can’t touch them in terms of disillusionment and betrayal.
Hi Rick, “Higher Love” was on a mixed tape that was sent to me in 1986 by my boyfriend when I lived in Bombay India as an exchange student from a very sheltered California town. That year abroad, in many ways, was a horrible mistake, a wrong, bad detour in my life- not dissimilar to “Higher Love” in form and content. But, I was so homesick I would’ve sooner stuck a knife in my eye than not obsess on that mixed tape for months. Because of that tape, I know “Higher Love” absolutely by heart and I can’t make it go away. I could kill it at Karaoke and I challenge any of you to defeat me. Maybe that would be my therapy session: A lyrical leprosy if you will and a conjugal visit to that fucking song. I could brutalize it once and for all-cut it out and destroy it. And, I share your thoughts on all things Reagan.
This morning, because I am in a La Quinta in Somerville, MA, with I-93 directly overhead, I want to pause over the haiku-like seriousness of the sentence above from “Eakles,” above, which is as follows: “To deny the appeal of Reaganesque music is to deny the appeal of Reagan himself, which is understandable but myopic, I think.” Now, it could be that my situation is as described above, in La Quinta, having waked at 4:15, with my voice nearly gone, coughing as tho shedding lung tissue, but I must be exceedingly myopic according to my interpretation of the above, because I do in fact wish “to deny the appeal of Reagan himself,” every day and in every way. To me, Reagan is like Death himself, Reagan is a laughing skeleton, and I imagine if I am ever approached by a guy with a black cloak and a scythe, come to tell me that my time is short, he will have some of Reagan’s laughing skeleton features. And like Death, Reagan ever persists– in the antics of Boehner, Steele, Santorum, Palin, et al. Liars, power-mongerers, sociopaths. In fact, Palin is almost an exact replica of Reagan, Reagan in hip waders, because you have to have a genuine stupidity admixed with your shark-like shrewdness to do a good Reagan impersonation. Would “Eakles” write the sentence, “To deny the appeal of Palinesque music is to deny the appeal of Palin herself, which is understandable but myopic, I think.” I could never but shudder with terror and dismay at every single word that came out of Reagan’s laughing skeleton mouth. And so: I deny his appeal absolutely, without hesitation, I deny it completely, and I persist in wishing that the country will awake from the dark nightmare of his fell influence. Meanwhile, it might be worth wondering aloud, as preparation for the possibility that Obama might be a one-term president (alas), to prepare for what “Palinesque” music would sound like. Like Taylor Swift, perhaps, or some of that flag-waving Nashville disjecta.
That said, “Eakles,” feel free to defend “Back In the High Life,” if you like. I note, as my friend Tim Bracy observes, that there is a very good Warren Zevon cover thereof. Though in Zevon’s case, as always, there is the possibility of irony, which gives the lyric more tonal colors than in the original, or so it seems to me.
Rick, this was a great piece and connects with a few things that people have posted on the web about music’s meaning the last few days. I’m reading “Tristes Tropiques” now and quoted Levi-Strauss on music when he died. As you say, music connects us with mystery and non-being. I believe that those of us who are passionate about music honor this connection. It is unexplainable and best left that way. If we tinker with it too much the magic will vanish. You are lucky to have a had an older sister who was into music. You will always be connected to her through music’s daemon.
For some of us, music is a way to understand, accept, and interact with reality: it expands our vision, makes us strong, makes us brave. For others, music is a way to blot reality out. For those people, “Higher Love” is just the kind of soma that can pull the shades down for a few minutes. Its blandness is at the heart of its appeal, necessary idiot opacity.
‘Higher Love’ is not an objectively well written song. The lyrics are painfully trite. It would take a great interpreter to put over a convincing version. Chet Baker could have done it. But speaking to it’s defense, well… It seems to have been an interesting cultural moment in the 80’s when there was ton of UK-issue blue eyed soul all over the charts. As is typical of our cultural conversation with pop music in the UK, their take on soul music in the 80’s strikes us as highly idiosyncratic. They have arrived at this odd amalgam of the original lyrical sentiments and musical motifs of Otis and Aretha, coupled with this highly inorganic production. I personally find a lot of this music extremely interesting. The best of it was really good and I think it holds up very well. I think Squeeze was incredible. A lot of people object to ‘Lets Dance’, I know, but I think it’s a great Bowie record. I think ‘Modern Love’ is a legitimately great soul song, rendered in a completely interesting way. But I know that the slickness grates on a lot of people. The Costello records with the Clive Langer/Alan Winstenlay production team were interesting experiments along these lines too. ‘Punch The Clock’ from ’83 was clearly in this mix, and it’s insane sounding. It has great songs (some great songs) but is just dressed up everywhere with crazy horn charts, madcap tempos, and tons of synths and it just sounds like a giant insane machine. And the songs are all these soul pastiches. Very weird. I don’t think, on balance, that it suits the songs very well, but it is not boring. ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ is probably what ‘Higher Love’ could have been in the best of all possible worlds. There is a general assumption that because many of the sounds on these records sound dated- drums, synths, ‘queasy horns’ as Costello I believe once refereed to them as- that this in effect proves that the production choices were a ‘mistake’. I’m not sure I agree with that. I’m puzzled, in a way, as to why it is a demerit that a piece of art demonstrate the obvious hallmarks of it’s era.
Another possible way of looking at it as a lesser- far lesser- sort of evocation of Townsend’s sort of spirituals- ‘let my love open the door’, ‘a little is enough’- with inferior production. But that Winwood can still, at that time, sing the phone book, and that as a trifle there are far worse offenses. I don’t think I have actually heard the song since I was ten years old, but I can conjure it off the top of my head in an instant and not in a fully unpleasant way…
Forgot to mention that I agree with you on Reagan. He was a mediocre Hollywood actor who somehow became a more than mediocre President of this country. I still find that horribly shameful and sad.
As for “Superstition” and “Sexual Healing” being lumped in here, I do not agree.
Fantastic, Rick. Now you’ll have to give me an assignment related to film. Bring it on.
Being about 10 years younger than you, my perception of Reagan comes from a more innocent place. By the time he stepped down, he’d been president fully half of my life. And it may be a symptom of my limited media exposure during the 80s (basically the Seattle Times, Newsweek, and the two television networks we were able to pick up on our TV antenna), but a lot of what you’re calling his racism and general hostility toward anyone non-white totally escaped my radar at the time. In retrospect, I can see how he was speaking in code a lot of the time, with “states’ rights” and campaigning in places in the south with sketchy histories with regard to race. It was only when he was on his way out, when he told the Russians that American Indians really loved their reservations, that I started to see the depth of his dickitude. By then, all my teenage political vitriol was aimed at Bush Sr. And the hatred engendered by eight years of W eclipses anything I’ve felt for any other president. Perhaps you had a similar dynamic between Reagan and Nixon?
Recently a writer friend said he wanted to understand the Reagan era more and I told him he should listen to all those great 80s punk bands from LA, the bands who’d suffered under Reagan as their governor and then as their president. I do remember that every band worth its salt had to have an anti-Reagan tune in its back pocket.
I’m so glad you took the bait with my ridiculous assignment. Be thankful I didn’t suggest you write something about “Kokomo.”
One can dislike the appeal of Reagan without denying it. I’m not saying anyone should feel good about Reagan (or Palin, a fair comparison) — I’m just making the obvious point that something like 140 million people were subject to that appeal. And we have to assume that at least, I dunno, 80 million of them were neither stupid nor evil. Right? So what was that appeal? Don’t ask me, I was in an earnest Mondale household, but it probably had something to do with borrowing from superficial but reassuring signifiers. Which applies to Steve Winwood pretty well too, I think. (In the case of “Back in the High Life”, these signifiers include a mandolin, a nice chord progression, and being back in the high life again; view the video for a hundred other winners, including train tracks and women in large coats.)
This is hardly the highest aspiration for art, we can all agree — but to try to separate pop music from its superficial signifiers would hollow lots of what we love best, I think. We’re all suckers, some of the time. In addition to “Back in the High Life”, I also have a stupid soft spot for the REO Speedwagon song about crashing through the door and rowing the boat back to the shore. I wouldn’t want to unpack this too much, and I’m not saying anyone else should like these particular dippy songs, but don’t we all have our own particular dippy (even Reaganesque?) faves?
We all have our soft spots and moist spots and certainly we’re all suckers, some of the time. The more generic the song, the more it allows us to project — we can insert our own characters into the flimsy narrative and even alter the narrative if we choose. Simple pop songs allow us ample room and we, some of us, set about decorating (especially if we’re young). The more determined and idiosyncratic a song the less there is for us to do to/with it. I think that, for many people, listening to songs and dreaming, imagining about/onto these songs is their primary creative outlet. Many of us have dull jobs and demanding lives — and part of the appeal of pop songs is that they allow these people/us to exert the ignored and/or unappreciated work of the imagination. Pop songs allow us opportunities to escape and to particularize.
I want to thank Tim Bracy for his very thoughtful note about British blue-eyed soul, which initially came to me via e-mail, but I begged him to post it, and I’m glad he did. He too likes, I believe, “Back in the High Life,” as I said earlier.
As I am no long in La Quinta, Somerville, MA, my mood has mellowed some, so I will say only that the 80 million who voted for Reagan must have believed the line they were sold, and they can only have done so if they were not educated in such a way as to perceive the difference between the fraudulent and the genuine. But I do feel, in some way, that power always lies, and Obama is not without fault in this area either. Those of us who voted for him voted for the lofty rhetorical skills, and now we are presented with a middle-of-the-road guy who doesn’t seem inclined to overturn Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, etc. So I suppose we can be just as hoodwinked on the Left.
It is worth listening to punk of the early eighties, as Ryan suggests, to understand this a little more. I remember going to hear the Dead Kennedys outdoors in S.F. the day that Dan White got out of prison. They were playing in the street, as I recall. And then there was the hardcore movement of the mid-eighties–Husker Du, The Minutemen, Black Flag, et al.–and that really did take many listeners to the place where they felt a little actualized in the midst of all the political horrors. Those were some great albums. And basically contemporaneous with “Higher Love.”
“Kokomo” is even more troubling, because you remember that there was a dustup over the Beach Boys in those days, the Reagan days. I think James Watt said they were anti-Christian, and George Bush (the elder) had to step in to defend them.
Seth, I can’t believe you haven’t posted your girlfriends insights here yet. I want to know what she likes about “Higher Love.” Does she also like Phil Collins? Survivor? Corey Hart? Maybe she was prom queen in 1986 and huffed nitrous to Don Henley.
Reagan is no dancing skeleton (though I have shimmied with many who fit that perfect description) but a stinking ghost. Reagan days gone daddy gone. It’s good to look towards the punk rock of that time because where there are political horrors, there is always resistance. And, what better place to look than punk rock? It’s been fun though, dwelling in the rot of “Higher Love” “The Power of Love” (Huey Lewis and the News), “Do You Believe in Love” and many other prizes of the 80’s. May we never regurgitate the fashions and music of that time. Thanks for the memories.
A smartass friend of mine wants to know if you remember “Out of Touch.”
I think he means to say that the fashions and music of the 80s have been regurgitated already and will be again, as fashion and music from any period tends to be revived and remixed again and again.
Re this:
“That the 80 million who voted for Reagan must have believed the line they were sold, and they can only have done so if they were not educated in such a way as to perceive the difference between the fraudulent and the genuine. But I do feel, in some way, that power always lies, and Obama is not without fault in this area either.”
I wish we had the kind of educational system that would permit everyone to be taught critical thinking and argumentation, but we just don’t. We need rhetoric classes, media literacy classes, you name it. But for the time being, much of this information will remain the preserve of people who can afford quality educations — or who have enough leisure time to teach themselves (again money!).
Speaking of money, the political system is fairly dependent on it too. See: lobbyists-healthcare-Genentech, for a recent example. But you know this. People in power very often get there by acting solely or more at the bidding of personal ambition than of integrity.
In politics it’s not a question of who lies, it’s a question of who lies less.
I suppose I should put my two cents in since it seems to have been requested…
I am a big fan of 80s music. As opposed to the author, I am a fan of tinny synths, that “horrible fucking synthesizer sound”. I love it all from Gary Numan and Kraftwerk to Duran Duran and Jeffrey Osborne – in fact I own one (Korg Polysix) and have been in several bands using it – I must say these were not all 80s-esque bands, but various styles ranging from experimental – synth, a keytar and drums – to hardcore/screamo/punk rock bands. I used to DJ occasionally at a few bars with my 80s collection to good response, so I would like to think my taste in music is not terrible…
I believe I was in the kitchen making breakfast and Seth started to play “Higher Love” on his laptop – I think I started to dance around and asked why he was playing it, and said “someone thinks it’s the worst song ever”, to which I quickly replied -“No way, it’s a jam – not my favorite, but it’s alright”. In my mind you could group it with the song “King of Wishful Thinking” by the British band “Go West” (thoughts on this song/band?). Regardless- I am a sucker for 80s cliche jams. And yes, I do like Phil Collins. “Easy Lover” will always be in my top 20 80’s songs. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Sunglasses at Night” are also alright songs – in case Antonia was wondering. I grew up in the midwest seeing 80s bands play fairly often at state and county fairs – these artists hold a special piece in my heart, they are in my blood, if you will… My first concert was the Bangles when I was in middle school.
It is interesting to note, according to this website ; “while the Punk Rock of the 1970s was a retaliation against the government and the “establishment,†the New Wave and Synthpop forms were meant to be anti-corporation in a more experimental sense, both melodically and lyrically”. I would like to think the tinny synths were a rebellion against the Reaganesque corporate mindset of the 80s! Steve Winwood and Chaka Kahn was planning a rebellion with keys and oscillators!
Personally, I really like the upbeat, dancey, synthy 80s songs. I have never been good at describing bands or songs – I ran a venue for a while and was always asked to review and give my opinion. I could never give much more than two to three word descriptions, and I am afraid I won’t be able to give you much more than this song doesn’t suck in my book. I know what I like, and I like “Higher Love”. I have never been a fan of slow 80s nasally ballads, thus why my instant reaction was to list Air Supply as my most hated band – which they are one of. REO Speedwagon is also up there for me. “We built this City”, as previously mentioned, I think is actually defined as one of the worst songs of the 80s due to it’s ridiculous lyrics and bland beat.
I will say only that the 80 million who voted for Reagan must have believed the line they were sold, and they can only have done so if they were not educated in such a way as to perceive the difference between the fraudulent and the genuine.
I dare say that a sizable chunk of 54 million (which is about where Reagan maxed out in 1984) who voted for Reagan would suggest that people who voted for either Carter or Mondale couldn’t perceive the difference between the fraudulent and the genuine, much as many of 2008 McCain/Palin voters would say today of Obama voters. I don’t think it’s always a matter of education–it’s a worldview difference. There are those for whom nuance doesn’t exist–there is good and evil and that’s all there is to it. I was raised as one of those people, and am still in contact with a number of them via Facebook (which makes our conversations more than a little tense at times).
Melissa, you wrote “In politics it’s not a question of who lies, it’s a question of who lies less.” I don’t even think that’s the case. I think it’s more a matter of determining whose lies will either screw you over more or, as is the case with a disturbingly large percentage of the population, whose lies will screw over the “other” in our society more. Poor Republicans are the epitome of the cliché “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
I like when the really smart people come up with the good factoids, so I will accept 54 million as the vote tally for the laughing skull, circa 1984, and, since political platitudes are easy to come by, I will observe that I both agree with the “it’s a question of who lies less” formulation and “whose lies will screw over the ‘other’ in our society more” formulation.
As to Seth’s girlfriend, I admire the courage of conviction. I am going to guess that there’s just a decade that creates the gulf between us. And I’m sure there are guys who were in college in the late sixties who thought the Talking Heads and the Ramones were horrible. Listeners are produced by history and by history’s requirements. But that doesn’t mean that it is not an agreeable thing to try to speak to qualitative differences too.
Yes to this: “Listeners are produced by history and by history’s requirements. But that doesn’t mean that it is not an agreeable thing to try to speak to qualitative differences too.”
Each of us drops idiosyncratic tastes, listening systems (or ears-plus), memories, etc. into the mix when we talk about music. Among many other bands, some of us liked the Clash, Husker Du, Joy Division, Sugarhill Gang, RUN DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Kate Bush, REM, U2, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Madonna (the horror!), Squeeze, Duran Duran, Erasure, Wire and even an occasional Van Halen song. (Factor in my parents’ music, which I also listened to in the 80s: Modern Jazz Quartet, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, the Fuggs, the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, the Dead, Joni Mitchell, the beat goes on….) However, thanks to my brother, much of my time in the 80s was spent listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
Bridge that gap, politics!
Also couldn’t get enough of Laurie Anderson, I’m reminded.
This is an excellent discussion. I thought I would pop my head up because I do genuinely like “Higher Love” and I seem to be in the minority, despite its validity being solely based in being popular. The points you all raise are valid and smart, but as I thought about this over the weekend, I came to the conclusion that they weren’t involved in why I have always happily danced to this song at weddings, its current primary habit. It works for me because it has the following important pop song characteristics: 1. You can’t understand most of the lyrics (or at least I can’t, maybe some of you who hate it are torturing yourselves deciphering it in order to be thorough. The world does not deserve your bravery.) and the lyrics you can understand are huge pop song signifiers “It’s real for me”, “we walk the line and we try to see” for example. I have no idea what he is saying between these. I am a happier person for it. 2. I wish I had better musical vocab, but basically during the second section, where the usual pop narrative complication happens, he breaks out into several conventional musical “asides” for lack of a better word. He’s got like three or four and most songs have one. This is where the dance changeup move would happen or one would fiddle with something in the car if listening by radio. You know, while he’s “lighting the night up with his soul on fire” you suddenly want to smoke (or I do, hmmm). 3. It builds. 4. It is for depressives. It is doing the things depressives love: asking for a little thing and doing it in a debasing way with an epic style. I am also well steeped in Barry Manilow’s oeuvre as well as Air Supply’s (and love them too) and think both serve as warnings of what you can learn if you can hear all the lyrics. And are secretly(?) gay.
Reading this piece, and the subsequent discussion, got me thinking about the cyclical nature of pop culture and politics and in this case the overlap of the two. I work in an office and we have the omnipresent office radio with stations that are alternated on a weekly basis, thus I am constantly reminded of what is popular now, what was popular then and, strangely enough, what is popular in country music. This week happens to be “country week” and, almost on cue, after reading this piece a country cover of Hall and Oates “Sarah Smile” came on, and I began to wonder if we ever really learn from our mistakes. The political connection here being that just over a year ago we had a group of Republican presidential hopefuls meet at the Reagan library to debate who would be the better president seemingly based upon whom was more like Ronald Reagan. I should point out that I live in Southern California, in a part of Orange County that you won’t see on t.v., and the fact is this retreat to things that were awful the first time around is shockingly prevalent. Now whether this is proof positive that the flag draped neo-cons and their musician ilk are determined to drag us back to a time that is best left in the past remains to be seen, but if I hear Toby Keith singing “Dirty Laundry” I’m moving to Canada.
Left out David Bowie — how could I?
When Lucius JT Hofstedder told Bowie he admired his smarts Bowie just smiled and asked him to dance.
I was in college on the late 60’s and I am big on Talking Heads. Caught them live a few times. “Remain in Light” & “Speaking in Tongues” are touchstones for me. The Ramones not so much, but I want to be sedated some of the time too. I’m about a decade+ older than you which explains my dislike of the song vs. the seminal Traffic material.
“4. It is for depressives.” This is an incredibly important criterion for me, and I suppose if, after I am gone, people were to speak of the music that was most important to me, probably they would say that what bound it together was the extremely depressing qualities of much of it. My wife, for example, can barely listen to a lot of it. She thinks it’s too much. However, I would say, pursuant to Deb Travis’s message, that even The Depressing must have some inexplicable and relativistic mystery that is admixed within, because I just don’t find “Higher Love” depressing at all. I find it kind of poppy and upbeat. Maybe if I thought it was depressing I’d like it a little more. Unless I’m misunderstanding and what is “for depressives” is different from what is “depressing.” I think of music “for depressives” being stuff like ON THE BEACH by Neil Young (one of my very favorite rock albums), and SISTER LOVERS by Big Star (which I think is one of the very best albums ever made). The kind of thing which is so dark that it helps me to step back from the ledge.
Yes, that is an important distinction: depressed vs depressing. I meant “Higher Love” works within the emotional register of depression if you think of that register as running from depressed to manic and involving certain unresolvable psychological loops. Neil Young is wonderful in part because his songs have so much actual emotion. They leave you sad and then you depress the feeling or don’t but “Higher Love” doesn’t truck in anything like that. It has longing that is willing to substitute people for things or experience or God, which is not a good sign for the potential provider of the said “higher love”. It has flattened out experience the way depression does. Combining it with self-loathing, like ham and cheese, and creating a place for ecstasy. I see the loathing in “falling behind in what could be” and the line about how we walk blind. It is a little like that moment in some women’s lives (most of the women I went to college with) when they have to decide between joining a church or stripping. This is the stage after waitressing, I think. Both are about a pre-existent self, debased and ungrounded (and a pre-existent idea about themselves in relation to church). I think that is why as much as I try to listen to “Higher Love” to hear the call for God that seems apparent in the title, I only ever hear the call for self-esteem. And who doesn’t like self-esteem? Why did a Sheila Easton song just come into my head?
This is an incredibly interesting note, especially church vs. stripping. Coming, as I do, from a world where there are a lot of people who were once drug addicts, etc., this issue has come up in just this way, but your dialectical proposition is more bold and elemental, and I admire it. I think you might mean Sheena Easton though, right? Or maybe Sheila E.? I can’t think of too many Sheena Easton songs, though I noted that she now lives in Las Vegas, and has been a regular on the stages thereof. Sheila E., on the other hand, had that “Glamorous Life” song, performed with Prince, and was the musical director on Magic Johnson’s talk show. Is the self-esteem ode “Glamorous Life?”
Ah, yes. It is Sheena Easton. The song in my head was “Strut” with visual tinges of women in Jazzercise thongs. I didn’t know she lives in Las Vegas, but I am really going to try and probably fail to not think about her performing “Strut” there at her age under red flashing lights. Sheena Easton also did “Sugar Walls” which Prince wrote and which caused Al Gore’s wife to spit out her coffee one morning while getting the girls off to school. I think that’s why I confuse them. It does make me wonder though if Prince had never existed, and Tipper Gore had never formed PMRC (which seemed to be distracted by one Prince song after another), if Al Gore would have been President. Giving up Prince is a huge price, but a good “Which world would you rather live in?” question.
Did Tipper Gore like this one?
http://s0.ilike.com/play#Prince:Pope:86727:s1154825.10273324.4077037.0.2.124%2Cstd_630315e0a6fd4493b0babed64edaa1ad
First, without reservations, I agree with everything “Seth’s girlfriend” said (her name is Kris, by the way). 🙂
I think it might be a bit of a stretch to say that Reagan was responsible for the blandness of some of the music of the eighties. I’m not sure if it’s a stretch to say that both Reagan and some really terrible music were symptomatic of the same desire for better times that I think is still around today. In fact, if you look at both of their first years in office, there are a lot of similarities. Both were gifted communicators. Both came into office after a very unpopular present and quickly lost their popularity as they found it hard to come through on vague promises intended to cater to different groups that don’t really care for one another. Both made their career out of hope. And I think a lot of eighties music does the same. It does everything it can to cater to large numbers of people, often sacrificing something for it. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily bad — at least when it comes to music. It’s just what’s called for by the times.
Speaking to the circularity that people have been discussing, I was walking near the 16th street BART stop the other day and I noticed that the people I was passing looked like the pedestrians in the intro credits to Beverly Hills Cop. I’d say that’s circularity. Now I realize that if you look at it objectively, Beverly Hills Cop is not the greatest film. But it is a great movie. It was my babysitter when I was in second and third grades — this might explain a few things about me. It even saved me and my mother’s life once. (True story … because of the banana in the tail pipe scene I knew where to look when the car was puttering and my mom insisted on driving. We might have died of carbon monoxide poisoning if I hadn’t insisted she stop (I was eight I think) and found the gravel that was in the tailpipe, though I was disappointed not to find a banana). As a result, I love that song Axel F. I know it’s not objectively a great song in terms of the sort of musicianship you’d find in Led Zeppelin, etc. But I love it. And I hate Led Zeppelin, mostly because I went to UC-Santa Cruz where it was played so incessantly that I can’t hear it anymore without gagging on the memory of the smell of nag champa. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that Led Zeppelin is good in a more objective sense. It just means that music, I think, as some of the commenters have pointed out, is so tied to memory that it’s really hard to have conversations about “good” and “bad” without bringing up those memories. As such, I think that might be why I imagine writing negative music reviews is next to impossible unless something just came out and there aren’t many memories of it yet. (Though I think you’ve done a very admirable job here by invoking those memories). But if I want to feel better, or at home, I would listen to Axel F., not Led Zeppelin. And I think that’s okay.
Ah, see, I went to school with a bunch of Jerseyites and got my fill of Springsteen (though I still like many of his songs).
Memory plays a huge role, doesn’t it? To repeat a simple yet oft-overlooked point: We all bring different associations to the table — not just with music, but with poetry, fiction, art, grocery shopping, etc. It’s the Tower of Babel up in here, a lot of the time. In fact, sometimes I’m amazed that we can communicate with each other at all! And right now, in many ways, I’m preoccupied with what I see as rushes to judgment in communication at large (particularly about global warming, poverty, homelessness, sexism, mental illness, “otherness” of any kind or perceived kind) — and while the web brings us all closer together and is wonderful in many ways it also, as has been pointed out, allows people to discharge anger/frustration without accountability.
In any case, back to music: I have strong memories associated with Zeppelin, but realize, as with most of music that stands the test of time with me, LZ transcends to some degree. I don’t think I could still listen if all it did for me was conjure up musty memories.
BTW, also loved Beverly Hills Cop.
Seth, I was being reduction ad absurdum when I said that Reagan CAUSED “Higher Love,” I hope that was pretty clear, or ought to be. Although I do believe that cultural and historical modalities are shaped by the politics happening around them, and this is why Reagan’s version of hope coincides with Whitesnake and Loverboy and Bush’s version coincides with, uh, redneck country music and that sort of thing. There are other forces in play, but don’t underestimate the effect of cultural posturing at the very top. But Winwood is a British subject. It’s more the case that Margaret Thatcher caused him (and also caused the English Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret,” and Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down”).
As for Led Zeppelin, there are innumerable reasons to hate them, I agree. And mostly those records, for me, are sedimented over with recollections of lunkheads hitting the bong one more time. But hearing them when they first came out–hearing “Whole Lotta Love” on the radio right when it came out? That was a very strange experience. My mother used to turn it off when it came on the A.M. radio, because she thought it was a dangerous song. It certainly didn’t sound like “Rock the Boat,” by the Hues Corporation. Or “Mony Mony” by Tommy James and the Shondells.
And please thank Kris for posting.
Thanks Rick, I will! She may post again. And yes, it was clear that it was reduction ad absurdum — I think I was more responding to the sense that politics and Reagan shaped some of the blandness of eighties music in general, some of this more from the comments than your article. I used to work in politics, so I love to underestimate the effect of cultural posturing at the very top. It makes me feel better about the world, as does leaving the room when the news comes on. That said, I think sometimes there’s a little too much credit given to politicians, be they Thatcher or Reagan or Bush or Obama, when it comes to these things. I think often politicians are feeding off the same public mood that musicians are feeding off of. Though both also help shape that mood. Chicken and egg, maybe …
A love that suffered from higher-order dain bramage.
I’m not sure if I can enjoy songs like this on the merits, or if I can listen to them with a completely open mind, because, like Ryan, when Reagan left office he’d been president for half my life. I barely remember the ’70s, I was the oldest in my family, and my parents’ records ran the hardly exhaustive gamut from the Kingston Trio to Simon and Garfunkel.
I was left to my own devices to discover what popular music was, and what it was for, and if not for an older friend who discovered in 1985 that I had the same birthday as her beloved Bruce Springsteen, I might never have.
I love Steve Winwood, but “Higher Love” is not one of my favorites. I love “Back in the High Life” (and I just played the Zevon cover, which is heartbreakingly sad given the context of the album it’s on, and just completely beautiful), and I especially love “Valerie” and “The Finer Things.”
But that doesn’t mean they’re better than Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd, or Springsteen, or even Traffic. They’re not. But I discovered most of that music later, in college in the early ’90s.
I discovered Steve Winwood and Starship and Peter Cetera-era Chicago in their own time, I was the audience they were for, and it’s not possible for me to separate that hell of an age from the wonderful music playing in the background.
I genuinely love “Higher Love”. I’ve disliked ronald Reagan since I knew who he was (although now, in death, I find that feeling a little dampered). I am also 22 years old.
I think a surprising number of people my age actually like terrible 80s music. I, for one, have been long puzzled over my own affection. I think in general I’ve always liked how earnest some of that music *sounded* (even if the pretense, as your discussion of Chaka’s presence illuminates, is somewhat false). Winwood really seems to want a higher love. And so what if the song’s grasp of any real metaphorical meaning folds under even the slightest investigation of the concept of a ‘higher love’ or its possible complicity with music? I don’t remember thinking about that at all the first (or last) time I heard it. I think what spoke to me (particularly in my only recently departed adolescence) was how clearly (via the vocal sounds especially) I got the impression of yearning–a secretive, shame-making feeling that then (in jr. high and high school) seemed to be at the core of everything in my life.
It may be useful to note (confess?) that I also loved the songs “Private Eyes” by Hall and Oates (which I didn’t know was by Hall and Oates until just now when I looked it up on Youtube) and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. I discovered both these songs in the same way: their choruses and a few stray verses were featured stretches in a kind of endless, twelve-minute melody amalgamation that only really occurs in the repertoire of midwestern junior high school choirs (I sang tenor). I bring this up not only because these songs seem to bookend 80s pop, but also because hearing them like that–in the tentative swelling of seventy young voices of wavering key–seemed to bring out an unexpected earnestness that we, sensing it in the songs, suddenly identified in ourselves. All interpretations of the rise in technology-inspired paranoia that my generation seems to both uniquely embody and accept (it really did feel like, in a gross misunderstanding of those lyrics, private eyes were watching us) aside, the better proof of my emotional-earnestness theory is found in WDSTF. I did not go to a nice junior high. I went to as much of an “inner-city” junior high as the state of Kansas can offer. Nobody, including me, knew who or what any of the things in Billy Joel’s frantic, vaguely triumphant catalogue were (later, even in college, Khrushchev would be [incorrectly] remembered by classmates as ‘the one with the birthmark’). Our–and it was communal–affection for the song came from how it felt to chant-sing the lyrics, how accurately it reflected our own hyper-informationed experiences of life, how much we wanted to proclaim (and believe) that we hadn’t started it. That was the speed and sound of the world for us back then as, to some lesser degree, it still is now.
But to get back to Reagan-Winwood. I was always into politics and history more than my peers, so by the time high school ended I knew a lot about Ronald Reagan, and while a great deal of my retroactive hatred for him sprung from the litany of politco-ethical sins that you have very eloquently explained here, even now I find that one of your complaints is at the heart of why I really do dislike Ronald Reagan so much. Reagan was famously an “actor”, and he always came off as a profoundly fake person to me (which made his popular folksy-genuine appeal particularly frustrating in my learning). While I’m sure a certain amount of this falseness is a manifestation in my mind of all the geo-political double dealings I know he did, it comes to a most direct head with this idea of an actor being president, and it makes me feel like that was the death-marker of the time when a politician was popularly understood as anything else. It might be helpful here to point out that I love Bob Dole. I love Bob Dole for all kinds of reasons (I know him–he’s nice–, his non-presidential library has a sense of humor, including his Viagra commercials on prominent display, his bravery, heroism, etc.) but what strikes me about this apparent paradox is that Dole seems , if nothing else, aggressively genuine and actually folksy. This is probably, in retrospect, why he lost to that performer of all performers Bill Clinton (whom I also love). Whether or not Dole would have made a good president aside, he seems markedly different than Reagan in earnestness (the fact that they’re nearly the exact same age seems important, somehow).
The other half of that junior high choir concert show was a melody of boy band songs. This was supposed to be the choir director’s compromise–one melody of a bunch of songs we’d never heard of and wouldn’t like, and one melody of songs that would be “our” music. But, almost to a person, we loved the 80s melody and hated–to the point of exaggerated mockery–the boy band melody we had ourselves in some large part helped popularize. I think what we hated about the N’Sync and Backstreet Boys songs (and to some extent ourselves) was that they seemed somehow an act, the *performance* of emotion rather than real emotion. When we heard ourselves sing the lines “I must confess” or “It’s killing me” or “I still believe” we felt nothing. Less than nothing. We felt somehow less for having sang such a lie, whereas improbably, in some way, Steve Winwood, channeled via our early pubescent voices, singing that he wanted a “higher love” cut to an inarguable and visceral truth within us. What was that truth? We didn’t know. What was a higher love? We didn’t know. What would we rather beseech someone to bring us? We didn’t know. All we knew was that we were singing with an earnestness that wasn’t so immediately and patently ridiculous (as in, say, later renditions of Britney Spears’ “Hit me baby one more time”), and we weren’t being asked to. Though most of us misunderstood the song, we were enlivened by the dynamics of Hall and Oates’s watching eyes, by the edgy, slightly scary sound of that. And though Steve Winwood may have been a little bit of a fake and really lame and lacking in instrumentative imagination, it was one of the few times I can remember in those years that I felt like somebody was being honest with us, that somebody was singing with the kind of urgency (despite the obvious ridiculousness!) and tonal honesty that let us know there was a higher truth out there in the horribly meta-reflexive, artifice-filled world, and that we could reach it together in song.
To understate it, the Paradise Garage & Larry Levan’s remixes were more influential on me in the early-mid 80’s than anything else. A discussion of 80’s dance music is lame without mention of him and the Garage.
I think a surprising number of people my age actually like terrible 80s music. I, for one, have been long puzzled over my own affection.
I teach people mostly your age–very late teens to early twenties–and I’ve noticed the same thing. I’m Facebook friends with a large number of former students (once classes are over) and I’m always surprised by their excitement over going to see Bon Jovi, or worse, Hanson in concert. But it has occurred to me that–and I realize what I’m about to type will seem sacrilegious to many, including myself–Michael Jackson and Madonna and even Bon Jovi are to my students what Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Yes were to me, namely bands which had peaked before I had been able to appreciate them fully, which belonged to people just half a generation older than I was. On the one hand, I had the advantage of having the music vetted for me–these bands were already considered “classic” by many around me–and the bands were also still putting out lesser work (in LZ’s case, it was solo efforts by Plant and Page, which I enjoyed but which didn’t, for me, reach the level of Zeppelin), so I could still get a taste of what they were doing and get live versions of their best work, even as their newer work disappointed on some level.
I happen to like Higher Love. I can’t disagree with anything here though. I missed living in the 80s by like 4 months so I kind of have a soft spot for it.
I think what I like most about it is how well it works as a time piece, it contains all the important synthesizer movements of a great cheesy 80s piece.
You guys, I have been thinking for a couple of days about Arna’s response and Zach’s response, and the entire notion that “80’s music” in general, and Winwood’s song, in particular, could be esteemed by people (I’m not sure in Zach’s case, but let’s say it’s so for the sake of argument) who were not yet alive at the time the music was first made. In this case, I’m guessing, the music is evaluated primarily against the music of now (indeed, this is some of what Arna’s very thoughtful and illuminating note is about), and in its relative simplicity (when compared, technically, to the rigors of the infinite track capabilities of digital studios), must seem more earnest somehow, and less simulated (there are, after all, “actual” musicians playing “actual” instruments on “Higher Love”). And how does the thematic material, as Arna constructs it, relate to this simplicity, another word for which is Zach’s “cheesy?” I’m guessing that eighties music does seem a little naive, especially in the grim socio-politics of the post-9/11 world. It’s very hard for me to imagine this feeling, however, to imagine exactly “Higher Love” sounds like if you have mainly been listening to, let’s say, Jay-Z, or Taylor Swift, or, even, Animal Collective. (Though I am not arguing, of course, that’s what Zach or Arna are primarily listening to.) In an attempt to imagine this, I traveled recollectively back to my own middle school years, and remembered that at that time (which is almost exactly when my sister came back from school with her cache of what is now (but was not then) classic rock artifacts) George Lucas (for whom STAR WARS was yet a glint in his eye)was in the process of riding the crest of great popular acclaim that came from a bit of fifties nostalgia known as AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Because of the popular acclaim thereof, it suddenly became fashionable, among my pre-teen friends, to know a lot about fifties music. Bill Haley, of course, Elvis, of course, but also Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Little Richard, and so on. This music was, therefore, made before we were born, and made in a very different cultural environment (the early Cold War), and environment radically removed from the volatile late sixties/early seventies, which to us seemed “normal.” The music sounded “primitive,” but it also sounded enthusiastic and passionate and (to me) it still does. It was the sound of a form, rock and roll, beginning to experience itself as a form. Whether that is true, whether it really was an “origin” for rock and roll, is debatable (listen to the blues of the forties, or pre-war Gospel, for example, which is arguably more rock and roll than early rock and roll), but there’s an inherent tendency, I expect, and that’s what I’m sort of responding to in Arna and Zach, to view the culture that came before one’s own time, as more organic and closer to the origin of whatever genre we are talking about, and, similarly, to view what came LATER as more simulated, hybridized, and inauthentic. To people born in the later eighties, then, “Higher Love” is the music of the era of their birth, and the music of the 2020s will seem like rank trash made by frauds who won’t know what they are doing. This is a preliminary lens, therefore, something you have to work against in evaluating things, when going beyond the simple or simplistic responses to music and art, into what is deeper there. Or that’s how it seems, this morning, in a hotel in New Orleans, having watching “VH1 Classic” on the plane yesterday and having sat through a Poison video, “Nothin’ But A Good Time,” a band I reviled when they were happening, I suddenly saw the band as part of a particular milieu (L.A. hair bands of the late eighties), and saw some comedy in them that I couldn’t see before (which is not to say that there’s much to like in the song), and, at least, a likable need to entertain. Maybe I was taking in some of the lessons of Arna’s and Zach’s responses here.
So, do zeitgeist of the time the work was created, nostalgia (real or imagined) and anti-nostalgia (“I lived through this, therefore I *see* through it and know it to be worthless”) have more to do with personal taste than we like to think?
I bump up against this occasionally—in terms of not music but style—at my job, where I work with a designer 20 years younger. Usually we see eye to eye, but this week we were selecting clothes for a photo shoot and she really liked a long brown and tan striped belted sweater with tubular “wooden” buttons (think Diane Keaton, and NOT in “Annie Hall”). . . and I just could not, would not go there.
And, yes, I have had “Higher Love” stuck in my head for a full week now, thank you all very much.
As a child of the eighties, who was all but five years old when Higher Love came out, as someone whose babysitter was MTV, who didn’t understand the passions of, say, Heart or Def Leppard, but was nonetheless entranced by them (ie. nonetheless vaguely carried for many years these passions for one-night-stands and women with large breasts and blonde hair, etc.) as a child of not just the 80s but then the 90s, who took war, American dominance, and unregulated capitalism for granted until, really, 9/11, I love the popular music of the 1980s in a way that I’m not sure can be rationally defended. I will try nonetheless …
I think you miss the underlying point of Winwood’s song, and perhaps most of the popular music of this era: the fallen state of the modern world. (You can find examples from anything from Tears for Fears to Madonna to The Bangles, etc.) And the attempt at redemption via the methods available to apolitical, self-absorbed musicians —synth,Apple 2GS-inspired harmonies, elaborate hair, Armani suits. As such I see some beauty in the grappling with that nagging feeling, like “this world’s so fucked up!, and the complete inadequacy to be able to do anything profound about it. (Yeah, bring me a higher love because I can’t even go get it for myself.) In fact, most of us have this nagging feeling and can’t even write a song like “Higher Love.” That’s the state that the 80 million people who voted for Reagan found themselves in — needing shit to be taken to a higher level, not sure how to get there, thinking Reagan was the answer. And so lacking in courage, looking for something to hold on to, enthralled by the idea of dancing in front of a red backdrop or playing with a video camera’s black&white feature, they (we) listened to /watched and loved Higher Love for whatever it made them feel, hoping that feeling was enough to save themselves if not the world, hoping that maybe they could get a glimpse of, in Winwood’s own words, “what could be.”
Winwood’s lyrics are trite, yes, but the combination of yearning, prescience and banality that defines the lyrics is very comforting. I think that’s what Deb Travis was getting at — depressives, ie, just about any human, need this kind of comfort. I dare say that the combination of yearning, prescience and banality are some of the characteristics of spirituality — that indeed, Winwood’s poor attempt at gospelizing his song might not have even required Chaka. I mean just read these lines at face value “Worlds are turning and we’re just hanging on, facing our fear and standing out there alone. ” Or, “Things look so bad everywhere / In this whole world, what is fair?/ We walk blind, we try to see / Falling behind in what could be.” And let’s not forget that chorus: BRING ME A HIGHER LOVE.
The fault is not that the lyrics aren’t profound enough — think of say, an Otis Redding song, (That’s How Strong My Love Is) and you get something awful like, “Ill be the weeping willow drowning in my tears/ You can go swimming when you’re here/ I’ll be the rainbow when the sun is gone” and on. I mean, yuck! But that doesn’t take that much away from Otis’s superior singing/songmaking abilities. The fault is that Steve Winwood does not have soul and as such I would agree with any criticism of his trying to purchase soul or compensate for lack of soul, though again, I see that as very human…
I’m digressing, but my point is that Higher Love’s lyrics’ essence — their applicability to the injustice of Reagan-era politics, racism, sweatshops, global warming, and yes even romantic love — makes them useful. They are like the high-fructose corn syrup of lyrics — you can put them in anything from ketchup to chicken nuggets. Which is not to say that you have to like high-fructose corn syrup or Steve Winwood’s song, but you have to admit that they’re totally fucking amazing. And quintessentially the products of late American empire.
I’ve been a big fan of Steve Winwood for more than 40 years and the different bands he played with (Spencer Davis Group, Blind Faith and Traffic) and have seen him playing live the last years with his own band and with Eric Clapton.
The 80s were really strange. I think he changed record companies then and the new compnay wanted him to do something like “Higher Love” and also wanted a MTV-video, so he obliged.
BTW: “Back in the high life” is still a fantastic song, Steve plays it often at his concerts. He uses an electric mandolin with this song and the fans usually go crazy when he is handed that instrument because they know what’s coming…
You really can’t judge Winwood by one song, try to get hold of the DVD of his gigs with Eric Clapton at Madison Square Garden in 2008.
In fact, I have heard all of the Winwood/Clapton Madison Square Garden show, and have seen some of the video footage. Excepting the Ray Charles cover, which is just not good, and some intonation problems here and there, it’s a great show. It leans very heavily on the BLIND FAITH album, but there are a few later songs, and at least one good middle-period Traffic composition (“Glad”). All in all, a very satisfying gig, featuring great interplay between the two guitarists. It’s sort of amazing to me that Winwood can hold his own soloing against/with Clapton, but he does. I never thought of him as a great guitar hero, so much as a fine improviser. With respect to the topic at hand, my feeling is that the set leans on his early work because his early work is better. But then it leans heavily on Clapton’s earlier work too. Up to the mid-seventies.
Rick,
I caught Clapton and Winwood on tour in May and was impressed by both of the old maestros. Winwood does play a mean axe, which took many by surprise. I enjoyed your musings on Floyd, perhaps the headiest of the classic stoner rock outfits. Talk about a band with the ability to transport the listener to another place … Regarding you title thread, I think “Higher Love” was one of Winwood’s few commercial hits (“Back in the High Life” included) that despite a high fluff-factor do not entirely besmirch an otherwise excellent track record of one of the champions of blue-eyed soul. Just glad it wasn’t on the set list when I saw him! Here’s to smoking a doob with Jerry.
Most commentaries on Steve Winwood neglect his later, very fine work in the Traffic mold, such as Refugees of the Heart (1990) and About Time (2004), as well as the last studio album he made with his Traffic bandmate, Jim Capaldi (which they released under the Traffic name), Far From Home (1994). Almost alone among the amazing rock generation that came of age in the sixties, Winwood continues to produce unique, high quality music.
A somewhat unrelated thought here: I am honored and pleased to get so many thoughtful replies on this thread. I think maybe we are grazing bottom here, but it has been an edifying and exciting free-for-all here in the wake of the original post, and I’m grateful for it. And for all of you.
Rick, I bookmarked this post ages ago and have finally gotten around to reading it. I laughed at the total dressing down of this song, and then I cried about the loss of your sister, whatever may have happened to her. And a couple other things struck me:
1) My dad was nuts for that Steve Winwood album – I have vivid memories of driving around listening to it in an Oldsmobile (or was it Buick?) Delta ’88, his first company car. I’d call him right now to ask why, but it’s late on the east coast, and such a question would probably irritate him in the wrong mood. But, if I may speak for him, I think the album’s very Reaganness was part of its appeal. (In his defense, Back in the High Life was his favorite song.) At that period in his life, he was in his 40s, he had nine kids under the age of 17, he was smack in the midst of the defining years of his career, and he was actually succeeding. Don’t ask me why he and my mom decided to have all those kids, but I think the Reagan years were tremendously empowering for him – he’d gone from being a socially awkward depressive from a working class Catholic family who vehemently protested his insistence on getting an education (and a double master’s degree in literature and theology, no less) to a guy working two and three jobs just to be able to put food on the table to a rising corporate executive with a house in the suburbs, a company car, full health insurance for the family, and a hard won sense that with hard work and determination you could actually make a better life for yourself. (Whether or not that is the case is debatable, I’m aware, but nonetheless, that was his experience, and it was right in line with the Reagan credo.) So this obnoxious, tinny, relentlessly upbeat album must have come at just the time he was finally able to finally look up from the years of struggle and breathe a small sigh of relief. (By the way, this was also the year of Rick Astley, who he also loved and frequently subjected us to. Thankfully for us, he was balancing it out with Graceland and Sam Cooke at the time.)
2. Love your assertion about older sisters being a great way to learn about interesting music in junior high. Luckily I had an older brother who gave me an REM tape in seventh grade, which started me down a path of music discovery that led me to introduce my younger brothers to the likes of the Smiths, the Cure, New Order, the Pixies and others while their friends were listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff and Poison. I’ve often thought it must have made them better people.
Rick,
Though you tried to shelter your brother from the darker influences of Traffic, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, he drank deeply of the “agape” you were brewing during those lonely suburban afternoons. I can still remember arriving at college and following the sound of an acoustic guitar down a dark dorm hallway, where I found your brother seated on bed, strumming the chords to, as I recall, John Barleycorn Must Die. I believe he was wearing a black leather jacket with preppy plaid shorts, a combination I had never seen. Nor had I seen such hair, which spread out from his head length-wise, like the branches of an acacia. I asked for one of his Marlboros, and thus began my musical education (I was basically a metal head at this point, and still listening to Black Sabbath).
The more we spoke, the more I began to understand that the source of his occult knowledge was his older brother, who he spoke of in whispered tones. After holiday breaks, we would gather in his room to hear the latest thing he had managed to smuggle out of your room—Eno’s Music for Airports, say, or Kate Bush. It all had the feeling of younger brothers spying on their mythical elders, which gave even more of a mystery to this music.
I think it’s time to thank you, a few decades later, for your influence. And for this great essay.
Best
Rick Gray
Sulaimani, Iraq
Hey Rick, that is one amazing note. I guess it’s all one big chain of influence (my sister to me to Dwight to you to, I dunno, your younger siblings?), and that is the way the world works. I often wonder how people find their path to really obscure books, books that never get advertised or spoken about on NPR, and the truth is, I think, that nothing is more powerful than a personal recommendation. Which I guess is what this whole music column is meant to be about: it’s about personal recommendations of obscure items. Music in this case, but it could be books too (for example: everyone reading these lines should go right now and purchase THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD by Padgett Powell).
Please take care of yourself there in Iraq.
I’ve just discovered the Rumpus via my daughter’s friend’s tumblr blog that linked to Rick Moody’s superlative Johnny Cash- traditional music piece. Two hours later here I am at the bottom of the comments on a song I don’t even know, having been la-la-la fingers-in-my-ears deaf to pop music in the hated eighties. I can’t write and I can’t play music, I can only watch in lust and wonder, but I’ve gotta say this post and the comment thread in its entirety has moved me so deeply, reached a place where time and memory, my best friend in high school lost to suicide, my older brother’s letters when he ran away from Basic Training after he was drafted, and all the sacramental rock and roll I’ve ever loved, coexist now with Rick Gray and Rick Moody singing harmony.
I’ll try to find Padgett Powell today.
I remember watching this song on MTV in the summer of ’86 and being thrilled when Chaka came on: her “brrrang me a higher love” boosted the authenticity of the sentiment (at least for 16-year-old me). Chaka had become a personal hero via her version of Prince’s I Feel 4 U, with its stellar use of 80s production techniques only rivaled by Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart. (And her version boasts not only a rap by Melle Mel but a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder!)
But when it comes to getting a dancefloor moving with a contemporaneous white Brit/black American pairing, I’d reckon Phil Collins and Philip Bailey’s Easy Lover is the superior jam.
I read this article a few weeks ago, and then re-read it several times just to savor the words as well as all the comments.
Then watching the Super Bowl pre-game show a few days ago, I was bowled over to see Stevie Winwood (looking 97 yrs old) doing this song. I couldn’t bear it…yet I watched every moment intently—-like seeing a really good wipeout at a race track or the “agony of defeat” ski jumper guy from Wide World of Sports. Ouch.
This truly IS a bad song.
Great piece. Wonderful tribute to your sister. How wonderful, the people who feed us with their love of music.
“[T]he politics of an age affect the artistic productions of the age”
The opposite also applies. To paraphrase Major Jackson’s liner notes to The Roots’ “Do You Want More:” No Coleman Hawkins “Body and Soul,” No “I Have a Dream Today.” Of course, it might take decades to seep through, but the force of the art eventually prevails.
“I suppose I really do think that Ronald Reagan somehow forced Steve Winwood to make ‘Higher Love.’”
Maybe. I see two men, feeling their youthful power erode with the changing times and desperate to maintain their (quasi?-) iconic status, turning to the expert marketers in their respective fields to restore/create their new outward persona of success and relevance.
“I am in a La Quinta in Somerville, MA”
The very one about which a fellow stranded Logan passenger once told me “‘La Quinta’ is Spanish for ‘Next to Denny’s’” (even though that one is not, physically anyways).
I once won a “who has the worst song on their iPod” contest. So I should probably stay out of this discussion….
Hi Rick;
I came to this thread while looking for info about the Jennings/Winwood collaboration, which seems to correspond with the more “positive” nature of his (Winwood’s) more recent work. Does Jennings do mostly lyrics?
I enjoy the hell out of “Higher Love” and most of his more recent work, and I’m puzzled by the contempt shown for it by some here. To compare it to e.g. Phil Collins’ solo work (as opposed to his work in Genesis) strikes me as almost unjust. It seems to have the harmonic and melodic power (cf, e.g. “Freedom Rider”) of his earlier work, and seems to be, in addition, of more consistent quality. It is different, though. Perhaps sometimes not quite as asskicking as, say, “Low Spark”, or “Freedom Rider”.
I’ve always wondered if “negative” art is inherently more compelling than “positive” art. And whether this says more about me than about the works I experience.
It was good to read the article, and comments.
Re Reagan: Under his administration, William Black prosecuted and c o n v i c t e d many of the fraudulent S&L kingpins, unlike Obama’s people with the banks today. This administration (as was Clinton’s) is on that and some other issues somewhere to the right of Reagan’s! (Talk about frogs in initially cool water!) The lyrics of Winwood’s music if I’m not mistaken are consistent with evolution, not complacence.
I was 7yrs old when this album came out and I love it just as much now as I did then. I’m funny abt the music I follow now I pay attention. country music is a joke. Had to say that. There’s nothing new to country style deep southern voice and dnt even write your lyrics to one song on your album. anyways my point is 80s music isn’t cheesy it’s just packed with emotion and feeling. these guys blew mics up singing so hard that’s what I love abt it. unique, personality, feeling of good and bad that’s life.. Today’s music lacks that. Yea todays singers can drop5octaves who cares if they gitta sing a 80s throwback to show their singing skills off. todsys music sucks to me it’s all pop r&b mix and its killing rock music. 80s was all rock I dnt understand why people classify Michael Jackson as pop he had a lot guitar rock in his music. I will say there’s one 80s song that is cheesy. My buddy hates it so I full up his voicemail with It while he’s at work..Christopher Cross Arthur’s Theme that’s cheesy.
Higher love is an amazing tune. How anyone can hate this song.is beyond me
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