only noise – Page 2

ONLY NOISE: Playlist Memories

In a clever bit of self-effacing paid content, The Guardian’s Stephen Armstrong delves into the mixtape vs. playlist debate – on the behalf of Spotify. While I’m no fan of sponsored content on principle, I have to admit that the piece is well written and funny, and it poses an interesting question: “Were Mixtapes Better Than Modern Playlists?” Although I make them on a regular basis to accompany cheeky articles of my own, I’ve had a tenuous relationship with playlists… especially as services like Pandora and Spotify have rendered the medium.

Like me, Armstrong doesn’t sound entirely sold on the idea of playlists besting good old fashioned reel-to-reel. He waxes nostalgic, saying that with mixtapes the “maker controlled the rise and fall, the moods and motion. It was a democratised concept album with a very particular, personal story.”

Though wooed by Armstrong’s prose, I can’t help but smirk at Spotify’s cunning little bit of advertisement. It is almost as if the streaming platform is saying, “We would never deny the importance of analog compilations, which do have so much heart… but click here to start a FREE 30 day trial of unlimited music now!” And yet so far in Armstrong’s piece, the brand has made no clear advances on the reader. It lays back, sponge bathing in irony.

I begin to feel hypocritical. Who am I to resist an op-ed in which a middle-aged man speaks fondly of music ephemera? No one, to be exact. But then I smell the marketing; “Playlists, conversely,” Armstrong insists, “allow us to luxuriate in the infinite possibilities of self-expression.”

There it is: the hook. The heart of the paid content, if you will.

“Self-expression.” Everyone keeps talking about “self-expression;” ways to convey your “truest self ” – which of course can be done through products. And to an extent, I get the hype. Babies are practically born with a brand these days. Clip the umbilical chord, measure and weigh, make it an Instagram account. “You need to work on your personal brand” was something I heard relentlessly in college. “Do you have a logo?” is something I was asked the other day.

But must this corporate branding creep into every aspect of our lives? When it comes to fusing music and personal marketing, I just can’t get into it. For me, enjoying and sharing music has never been about “self-expression” (whatever that means) or at least not since I was 13 and wanted the whole world to know that I was VERY punk rock.

In fact, music has always offered me the exact opposite of self-expression. It has been a borrowed skin to step in – something that placed my problems into the hands of great poets and sufferers who might better know what to do with them. Sometimes these deities presented answers, other times, simply a new noise to embrace.

“My mixtapes were usually made for one person,” Armstrong continues, “– a girl I was trying to snog. It was a carefully curated voyage through an idealised version of my soul and included more than a few tracks that I didn’t actually like but thought would impress her. Like anything by The Smiths. They were love letters, in other words, as painful to hear as any adolescent poetry.”

I’m amused and appreciative of his honesty, and (very) British self-deprecation. However, when I made mixtapes as a kid, they weren’t forms of self-expression, nor self-idealization. They weren’t even for another person…they were for me. These were consolatory notes-to-self, because there certainly weren’t any Stephen Armstrongs writing me love letters on the J cards of Maxell C90s. I wrote love letters to myself from imaginary suitors, instead. It would be years before I received my first mixtape from a boy, and by then I no longer had a cassette deck (I still haven’t listened to it).

The closest thing I ever received to a mixtape was more in sync with my generation – a mix CD. Only a few weeks into dating my first serious, post-high school boyfriend – let’s call him Mark for privacy reasons – I was gifted a silver platter with the words “For Madison” scrawled upon it in sharpie. Its contents were love songs; the kind my tween heart longed for years prior. Mark’s mix opened with Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which bowled me over with its measured melodrama.

It continued with Edwyn Collins’ “A Girl Like You,” Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and “Golden Years” by David Bowie, each song making a downy nest in my brain. It was an impressive compilation, and an important marker in our courtship. I’d like to say that being moved by a man’s swell musical taste is something I left behind in college, but that would be a bald-faced lie. Years later I am able to hear songs like “Oh Yoko” and My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” without thinking of Mark’s sonic love letter – but I’ll never forget how I first heard them.

And that is something a Spotify playlist can’t stack up to – that nerve connectivity to real events that happened in real life.

Scrolling through Spotify’s human-and-algorithm curated “Genres & Moods” playlists, I can’t help but be reminded of box hair color. Names like “Poolside In Your Mind,” “Lazy Chill Afternoon,” and “Sunshine Smoothie” bring to mind as much soul as Feria’s “Chocolate Cherry” and “Power Copper” hues. It is copy – as far from a love letter as words could run.

The description for the “Early Grey Morning” playlist (which I originally read as “Earl Grey Morning”) is particularly barfable:

“A warm, tasty cup of tea and this soothing mix playing in the background will have you well on your way to a perfectly harmonious morning.”

Am I the only person who finds this creepy? Am I an incorrigible curmudgeon? Do I hate tasty cups of tea and harmonious mornings? Not inherently, but there is an issue of sincerity here. For instance, I would love to meet the person who actually clicks on the “Broken Heart” playlist post breakup. “You know what I need right now?” they might think. “A corporate curator’s perspective on my rejection.” No – the pre-fab playlist seems all too impersonal for a sap like me. Where’s the conversation in a title like “A Mellow Indie Odyssey”?

What does one talk about in, say, a coffee shop – the last bastion of IRL human interaction?

I can assure you that we music nerds desperately seek ways to talk to other people about music. We pray for the moment someone will notice our t-shirts on the subway, and strike up a convo about Bauhaus. Our roommates, families, even best friends don’t want to hear about the latest Nick Cave record, so where can we turn? Even at gigs, places that confirm we are all there for the same band, you’d be hard pressed to actually chat with someone (in New York at least).

So when you enter a coffee shop, and a great, unknown song is playing – a song, that could only have been selected by the sole employee in the establishment – a captive employee, who cannot runaway from your prodding questions, as they are trapped behind a very small counter, you ask, all too eagerly: “WHO IS THIS SONG BY? IT’S REALLY GOOD!”

The barista blinks. Shifts their vision from side to side, perhaps pondering an escape route. You lock eyes; aware that you are about to partake in the most fulfilling music banter you’ve had since you got into that argument with a subway busker about ABBA. “Um. I dunno,” they reply. “It’s a Pandora station.” They lean back after shoving a mug in your hand. The little latte heart they’ve crafted is broken in two.

A line from Armstrong’s article might drift into your head around then:

“These days, playlists are rarely true love letters.”

ONLY NOISE: Creatures of Discomfort

A few nights ago at a bar, someone asked me a reasonable but difficult question: what do I want to experience when listening to music? What do I look for in a band? I floundered briefly, rattling off some vague declaration about placing a “good song” above any technical music ability.

“What do you mean, a ‘good’ song?” my interviewer prodded (this person is a reporter by day). “You can’t just say, ‘good’ song; obviously you prefer a ‘good’ song – but what makes a good song to you?”

Touché. I stewed over the question momentarily, thinking of other forms of art I’m drawn to; imagining the display of fleshy imagery covering the wall above my home desk – a collection many houseguests find revolting. Boobs, hairless cats, cadaverous feet, Hans Bellmer’s doll. Nondescript, pink perversions.

I thought about my lifelong gravitation towards objects and subjects of disgust; the numerous occasions my parents would come home from work asking what I was watching.

“Confessions of a Serial Killer: Jeffrey Dahmer,” I would reply, munching a Cheeto. My dad still recommends movies to me by saying, “We just watched this really depressing, fucked up film – you’d love it!” without an ounce of sarcasm. We also have a game in which we text each other when famous people die. First to text wins.

I considered my fondness for bitter, astringent, and blazing flavors; my love of rare and raw meat; my affinity for unsettling (but funny!) books.

Looking back at my inquirer, I delivered the most succinct reply I could muster:

“I just want to be assaulted,” I said.

Sonically assaulted, of course…but what does that mean?

Last year, while still working as a panty designer for a big company called, let’s say, Veronica’s Privacy, I found myself in need of a date night…with me. I scrolled through concert listings in search of something unexpected. If there was one thing I was not in the mood for that evening, it was “good old fashioned rock n’ roll.” I did not want dream pop, nor chill wave, nor beach wave, nor dream wave. I craved something dour and unpleasant, like ya do.

Sifting through gigs by Sunflower Bean and Shark Muffin, I paused on a vaguely familiar name: Glenn Branca. Where had I heard it? Something about the name commanded respect. Though I was mystified as to why, an air of provocation and intrigue hung around those two words. I bought a ticket immediately.

Taking a seat at The Kitchen in Chelsea, I glanced around. The only other solo-goers were middle-aged men who looked like they used to be in bands. Silver hair. Black Sonic Youth t-shirts. Sensible, manly shoes. Leather belts. The low stage was set with a drum kit, a bass, and three guitars. When Branca and Co. sauntered onstage not a word was spoken before they crashed into a belligerent wall of sound. Fumbling for my complimentary earplugs (courtesy of the venue), I felt bathed in distortion – baptized in cacophony. Discomfort. A hail of splinters. Railroad ties and metal siding. It was all being hurled at us – and we loved it. Were my concert mates likeminded gluttons for punishment? Did they too adore unlistenable, violent music at all hours, even in the wee, small, pre-coffee hours? I left The Kitchen feeling like I’d been in a boxing match – no – like I’d gotten the shit beaten out of me by a biker. Boxing is too clean and dignified a sport for how I felt. And yet there was another sensation spread all over me like cream cheese on a bagel: elation. For lack of a less annoying word: transcendence.

There are entire message boards full of people who want to be tied up for fun. Fetishists get shoved into bags, closets, vacuum-sealed plastic. For many, there is pleasure in physical discomfort. Factions of the sex accouterment trade cater to such needs. So what about auditory discomfort? Where be the cottage industry for audio-de-philers? (see what I did there?) Where is the safe space if you’re looking to be cleansed by rage and mayhem and high decibel levels?

I’ve certainly found my fix in Branca and his No Wave ilk – John Zorn, Steve Reich, and John Cage, to name a few. Then there is Girl Band, the Irish foursome I’ve been admiring for the past year. The Dubliners are fresh on my mind as I just saw them live a few nights ago and felt intoxicated after their antagonizing set. Screaming? Odd time signatures? Squealing guitar? Weaponized bass? Yes, please. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside just thinkin’ about it.

Two nights ago I was speaking with an artist friend of mine. A brilliant photographer, she also curates at the Museum of Sex, and has a keen eye for the odd and outcast. “I’m always looking for art that is standing on the ledge and about to step off of it,” she said, her head bobbing over a goblet of frozen margarita at Dallas BBQ. I nodded in agreement, nursing brain freeze and thinking about why I’m so enamored of grotesque and furious things. Her mention of the “ledge” intrigued me. Is that where the fascination lies? Perhaps music and art that seems “out of control” is in fact the most controlled, as it assures us we can still keep it together while staring at the messiest aspects of humanity.

Girl Band is a prime example of this, in fact. The group’s singer Dara Kiley suffered an intense psychotic episode in the lead up to their debut release, Holding Hands With Jamie. Understandably, much of that record’s lyrical content was inspired by the event. You don’t have to listen closely to realize that Girl Band’s music sounds like a psychotic breakdown – or at least what you would expect one to sound like. If you’re drunk enough, sleep deprived, or maybe just malnourished, giving Holding Hands With Jamie a spin can make you feel like you are going crazy – but you probably aren’t. And maybe that’s the amazing thing – that someone like Dara Kiley can survive psychosomatic hell and then channel his agony into an unconventionally beautiful record with the help of bandmates. Perhaps some artists stand on the ledge, so we don’t have to.

ONLY NOISE: A Can Of Earworms

It is unrelenting. Circular. A clump of chains I can’t untangle. It is like that hedge maze in The Shining: I cannot get out of it. I am trapped. Trapped in the ceaseless sax solo from George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.”

But why? Why is it stuck in my head, in a perpetual loop? What part of my frontal lobe – a locality so full of things that are not George Michael songs – has weakened in just the right moment for that slithery little woodwind to slip in? And furthermore: where did I even hear it in the first place?

Maybe it was playing in my corner bodega…or was that the new Drake single? Was it the jingle gracing my gynecologist’s waiting room? Oh, no, that was “Nasty Boys” by Janet Jackson (true story). Surely I didn’t hear it at a party…or did I?

I am mystified by how these things happen; I don’t listen to George Michael (RIP) – not yet anyway. And while it has been on my to-do list to “go through a George Michael phase,” I didn’t even know “Careless Whisper” was called “Careless Whisper” until I Googled “George Michael saxophone song.” So why is my mind rapt with it today?

For several hours the saxophone has persisted. It will not stop. To make matters worse, I can’t quit vocalizing the sax riff: “Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh- Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh” again and again and again. This is partly why I do not listen to classical music – the irresistible urge to sing instrumentation. It was because of people like me that phrases such as “shoobie doobie doo-bop” and “walla-walla-bing-bang” were created: so that we wouldn’t ruin the guitar solo by trying to sing it. But “Carless Whisper” hath no “walla-walla-bing-bang” to shout; therefore “Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh” we must!

George Michael’s wriggling little number is not the first unwelcome “earworm” to invade my brain – an earworm being defined as “a tune or part of a song that repeats in one’s mind” by Dictionary.com. Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone,” U2’s “It’s A Beautiful Day,” and that godforsaken new Ed Sheeran single have all been contaminants in my auditory cortex. Perhaps the strangest occurrence of these spontaneous earworms (never prompted by actually hearing the song in question) was the handful of times I woke up with Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” stuck in my head, after not hearing it for over a decade. That ditty probably hasn’t even been on the radio in that long. Had I dreamt about Shania? Had I dreamt about my friend’s mother, with whom I used to sing Shania songs? Did I feel super, extra, especially “Like a woman” upon waking, as the lyrics might suggest? No.

I’ve tried to battle these unwanted worms with “good” music; music the culturati and I regard as “worthwhile,” “respectable,” or “hip.” This cannon of “good” music can be repurposed as an arsenal of songs to deflect the “superficial” melodies holding our heads hostage – right?

Not necessarily. In an attempt to quell the writhing earworms, I’ve tried everything; all the songs I claim to love. “Still Ill” by The Smiths; “Outdoor Miner” by Wire; “Palimpsest” by Smog. I sing them on repeat, feeling every word leave my lips; begging them to stay a little while longer. But they just crumble. None of these songs – songs I deem “better” than the earworms – none of them have the fortitude to withstand the stab of “Careless Whisper’s” sax solo. One sticky note from that hunk of curved brass, and all “interesting” music buckles at the knees. Go ahead. Play “Careless Whisper” and Suicide’s “Girl” back to back. Let’s see which one gets stuck in your head.

Is this the triumph of practice over theory? Beauty over brains? Wonderbread over homemade, whole wheat? Is the micro-phenomenon of a song getting lodged in your brain representative of some greater, macro-phenomenon, like the longevity of certain music? Aren’t there scientists who can answer my questions?

Of course there are! Particularly the researchers whose study title will not get stuck in your head: Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery. Catchy! All jokes aside, I was pleased to discover that this question had plagued others to the same degree: why do certain songs get stuck in our heads, while others float away? What makes an earworm an earworm?

According to the study’s lead author Kelly Jakubowski, the “findings show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content.” A few factors are at play when a song is riding a relentless carousel ‘round your brain. Familiar melodies, simple lyrics, and upbeat tempos are often proponents of the earworm, as well as unexpected intervals or jumps in the song, which add jusssssst enough interest – but not too much!

Given this formula and over 3,000 survey responses, the study compiled a list of the nine most earwormish songs out there:

Lady Gaga: “Bad Romance”
Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
Journey: “Don’t Stop Believin’”
Gotye: “Somebody That I Used to Know”
Maroon 5: “Moves Like Jagger”
Katy Perry: “California Gurls”
Queen: “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Lady Gaga: “Alejandro”
Lady Gaga: “Poker Face”

While “Careless Whisper” didn’t make the cut, Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is too perfect for words; so perfect, that I can’t help but wonder if Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis had earworms in mind while penning the lyrics… Regardless I’ve learned two things from this list:

Lady Gaga is Queen of the Earworm, given her monopoly.

I loathe almost 80% of this list – Kylie and Queen being the exceptions.

I’ve also learned that you can’t control what songs get stuck in your head, no matter how hard you try. So you might as well relax, sit back, and enjoy the…

“Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh- Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh.”

ONLY NOISE: Big Sister’s Clothes

Who are the great musical influencers of our lives? Lovers, friends, parents, librarians. The people who were in close proximity when our cultural preferences were still small, squishy, and developing. Their impact on our taste was indispensable and unforgettable, as they passed down songs to us like cherished family recipes. Rare is the record collection built solely from autonomous discovery – because that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it?

But what about that other person in your life? The one who got the bigger bedroom, the better car, and all of the boys? The keeper of crucial adolescent information, such as the definition of words like “Phat,” “wangsta,” and the meaning of Limp Bizkit’s LP Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water? The wearer of JNCO Jeans and “candy” bracelets. What about your big sister?

Until recently, I might’ve excluded my big sister – one of them at least – from any Pop Culture Sherpa accolades. But that would’ve been a great injustice. Older siblings are often our first reference points for culture and cool – or perhaps they were before children had handheld access to the Kardashian lifestyle brand 24/7. But our crib didn’t even have dial-up…until several years later, when everyone was on that high-speed shit already.

Our household was always a stride behind the times, and the only window to the cool kid world was through my big sister, Miranda. At five years my senior, she wasn’t always thrilled to share her secrets with me, however. Pleas to hang out in her room, watch her play AOL chat, and borrow any article of clothing were frequently denied. The latter was a pretty fair decision though, as an eight-year-old might have looked questionable in pleather snakeskin bellbottoms.

Her closet and clique of friends were off limits. Music, on the other hand, served as diplomatic territory, although I was never sure why. Maybe Miranda just needed an audience for her carefully choreographed dance routines to the pop gems she exposed me to. The moves for Ace of Base’s “Don’t Turn Around” for instance, featured literal interpretations of the lyrics: turning around, grabbing and “breaking” her heart, a bicep curl to show that she was “gonna be strong.” This was nuanced stuff, I tell ya, and I ogled over her creativity and grace. She was always better at dancing; had a long, lean dancer’s body that must have come from her biological father. My own frame couldn’t be more disparate: short and hippy with an inexplicably large ass. We look almost nothing alike.

Miranda was my mainline to the cool world. Her dance performances were sacred ceremonies that were known to us alone. Whether it was this consecrated exchange, or the music itself, I loved everything Miranda played for me…and singing along to that breakout Ace of Base record The Sign is one of the earliest memories of sisterly peacekeeping I can recall. We fought a lot, but so long as a pop song was playing, a ceasefire ensued long enough to dance and sing.

If there is one artist I associate with Miranda the most, it has to be Mariah Carey, whose 1995 masterpiece Daydream dominated our living room sound system. My sister knew every word, and therefore, I knew every word – kind of. “Always Be My Baby” and “Fantasy” were our favorite cuts, the latter inspiring many a dance performance. If I slipped up on the lyrics, I could always resort to the many “Sha-da-da-da-da-da-da-doos” throughout, while Miranda hit those “freestyle” high notes (with more passion than pitch per se). “One Sweet Day” was also a big one for us, as it was Mimi’s collaboration with another childhood staple: Boyz II Men. Listening now I realize “One Sweet Day” is about a dead person, speaking to Mariah from behind the grave, embodied in the sultry voices of Boyz II Men. But at the time we embraced it as a syrupy love song, and that was enough for us.

Those were the early days – when pop felt innocent (as we all say when we get older). Our favorite songs were about heartbreak, staying strong, dancing, and loving ghosts. Kid stuff! In a few years the pop paradigm would shift however, sprinkling our newly complicated lives with subversive content. By 1999 Miranda was a teenager, and I was an awkward 10-year-old completely adrift in a post-divorce family. My big sister was engaging in increasingly hazardous behavior, and our relationship was often on the rocks, to put it lightly. But despite our tumultuous sisterhood, I never stopped wanting to be a part of her clan. Sure, she may have been hanging out with the “bad kids” at school, and maybe she was even doing “bad things,” but she still looked fabulous.

I distinctly remember a trip Miranda, my mom, and I took to Southern California during spring break of ’99. We were visiting my grandparents, who lived a stone’s throw from the ocean in Huntington Beach – a place rife with all the beautiful tan people we didn’t have in rainy Washington State. There were swimming pools, and beach days, and ice cream trucks. We went to the glamorous South Coast Plaza mall, which had an Abercrombie and Fitch! Miranda procured a pair of purple pleather flair pants that fell low across her hipless body. I think they were from Spencer Gifts, or maybe Wet Seal – high-class establishments we had limited access to in our hometown. God I wanted those pants. It was as if Miranda knew that pleather was about to be the number one fashion look – because spring break of ’99 wasn’t just monumental for us – it was a big moment for Ms. Britney Spears, too.

Our grandparents had something we lacked: MTV. For years we didn’t even have basic cable, so it was a treat visiting Grandma and Grandpa, who were apparently much cooler than us. Few music memories are as clearly etched as sitting on their couch that trip and watching the video for “Oops!…I did It Again,” which mesmerized us. The pleather. The lip-gloss. The weave. The shoddy space narrative. The pleather!

It was a massive turning point in our musical education. Britney was “not that innocent” anymore, and neither were we. Our minds were further infected with pop’s sex appeal – for it was the same week that Pink’s revenge-tinged “There You Go” dropped, as well as Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin,’” Crazy Town’s “Butterfly,” and of course, Sisqo’s “Thong Song.” Sisqo’s hit especially appealed to my young demographic, as “That thong-thong-thong-thong-thong” were super easy lyrics to remember. What a time to be 10.

Thanks to pop, and Miranda’s dutiful descriptions, that was the week I learned what a pimp was, what “come” meant (as in “Butterfly’s” “Come my lady, come come my lady”), and that letting your thong rise above your low-slung (pleather) pants was really cool. And called a “whale tail.”

It wasn’t long before I acquired my own pleather snakeskin pants, began anointing my forehead with a bindi a la Gwen Stefani, and for reasons I’ll never understand, started putting shimmery blue eye shadow on…my eyebrows. It was a sweet spot of time when my interests intersected with Miranda’s. Punk hadn’t quite entered my life yet to temporarily obliterate my love of melody. Back then, I loved everything she loved, simply because she loved it. I wanted to be the Monica to her Brandy in the video for “The Boy Is Mine.” I wanted to put on living room lip synch concerts to No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs” and Aaliyah’s “Try Again.” And I must say – I still do.

ONLY NOISE: Kill Your Idols

Bob Dylan is finally going to accept his Nobel Prize…with a taped lecture. Ed Sheeran is losing his “nice guy” status and getting called out as a blatant misogynist. Even in death, Chuck Berry can’t escape his reputation as a scat-loving pederast.

We listen to them. We love them. We live for what they do. Hell, I make my wages writing about them. But let’s face it: musicians can be massive assholes.

Entering adulthood, we all experience the humanizing of our parents. The great gods of early childhood, those people who said that yes, you could watch Beavis and Butthead, but, no, you could not watch Pulp Fiction; those adults who taught you “right” from “wrong” and “cooking sherry” from “sipping sherry” – they are just people. As we age, their humanity – with all its foibles – comes into better focus, and we forgive them as they relinquish their post on the pedestal.

So if we’re able to endure the humbling of our own parents, why are we so devastated by the mortal trappings of the famous? Furthermore: why do we put rock stars on a pedestal to begin with?

Because: Fandom. That temporary (or life-long) insanity that made teenagers convulse for four mop-topped Brits, and grown women sexualize teen Bieber.

I was thinking about the word “fan,” which I suspect is connected to the word “fanatic” etymologically. And sure enough, my Googles confirm that “fan” is in fact, “a late 19^th century abbreviation of fanatic.”

And what about “fanatic”?

“…The adjective originally described behavior or speech that might result from possession by a god or demon…”

We’re not Beliebers. We’re possessed by demons. In truth, a lot of fan-related content surrounding Bieber does resemble Pentecostal seizures.

But there is a difference between being a fan and a demon-possessed Belieber – right? Perhaps that gap is smaller than we assume.

I’d like to think of myself as someone who is rationally distanced from celebrity gossip, and for the most part I steer clear of tabloid rags – but what do you do when it’s your favorite artist under fire, and for good reason? You feel the pain of betrayal. Like when Mariah lip synched her way through New Year’s Eve.

A couple of months ago the erudite and envelope-pushing Brian Eno released his ambient record Reflections. It was but another stroke of brilliance from a man who’s had a seismic impact on most of the music I love – as both a producer and an innovator. My adoration for Brian Eno (or, as I referred to him in my head alone, Bri-Bri Eno) reached its zenith in 2015, when he delivered the distinguished BBC Music John Peel Lecture. His voice: so soothing. His scalp: so shiny. He even (kind of) made jokes! I had what you could call a serious brain crush on Bri-Bri Eno. There was a calm wisdom emanating from him at all times; a breed of serenity mirrored in his ambient soundscapes.

And then. Reporter Simon Hattenstone ran an interview with Eno in The Guardian that changed my perception of the artist forever. What began as a genial convo about art turned into sizzling vitriol spouting from the mouth of an unmannered diva. After merely asking a question about the history of Eno’s bizarre, long-winded full name (Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno), Hattenstone was met with outrage from the artist: “God, are we going to do any interesting questions? This is all bollocks. I’m not fucking interested at all in me. I want to talk about ideas. Can we do any of that?”

Rude. From then on the interview oscillated between forced diplomacy and whacky, insolent outbursts from Eno. Hattenstone kept his composure throughout, and rather eloquently defended himself against Brian Meano.

I was in shock. On the one hand, I felt a sense of solidarity with a music journalist just trying to do his job in the presence of a genius. On the other hand I was an enormous fan of Eno’s; a crushed fan who couldn’t believe that one of my favorite artists was, well, a belittling asshole. Of course that appraisal isn’t entirely merited by one messy interview, but my reaction was. The one-sided contract between the fan and the famous had been breached; he’d shown his toothy, human side – and I didn’t want to see it.

This must be a common phenomenon. The fall of icons. That crazy sense of betrayal we feel when someone we have never met does something we can’t stand. But is the Judas effect any more bonkers than the fact that we allowed ourselves to fall in love with a famous stranger to begin with? Probably not.

Any fan of Morrissey knows treachery well. A charming man indeed: his sex appeal, sensitivity, and bookishness (those glasses) made people crazy for decades. I mean, when I was 20, I waltzed into a salon and told them, “I want Morrissey hair.”

But what a dick?! This is the man who screwed his hardworking Smith-mates out of large sums of money, called the Chinese people a “subspecies,” and more recently issued a t-shirt with James Baldwin on the front reading: “I wear black on the outside ‘cause black is how I feel on the inside…” And then there is “Morrissey” written on the bottom left – smack on Baldwin’s shoulder.

No. Just no.

I wondered if I was the only sad bastard who actually felt hurt by rock star fuck-ups. It’s an absurd dilemma – but a real one nonetheless.

A favorite example came from fellow music journalist Allison Hussey, who covered a Sun Kil Moon gig for Indy Week in 2014. Like a good, I don’t know, journalist, Hussey reported the truth, which was sadly that SKM frontman Mark Kozelek was an insufferable prick the entire set. Hussey, of course, used far kinder words in her recap, stating that, “because the show was at the Lincoln Theatre, people were chatty, as all Lincoln Theatre crowds will be. Kozelek was displeased with this, and let the crowd know it by demanding that the ‘fucking hillbillies’ shut the fuck up before he’d strum a single note.”

Instead of ignoring an unflattering review like most artists do, Kozelek then “wrote a song about me where he called me a bitch,” Hussey recounts. “It was…an interesting roller coaster.”

Even my dad had a tale of rock star boorishness, though his was not of a beloved musician, per se. My dad has spent most of his life working in the music industry, whether as a record store owner, a musician, or a pro audio salesman. During the latter vocation, he crossed paths with a certain Guns N’ Roses guitarist.

“Slash was a total egotistic d-bag,” he relayed. “Spent an entire afternoon around him at a music show in Ventura, California around ’88 or ’89. He pranced around and acted like he was King, and everyone else were serfs.”

Ok, so Slash being a douchebag isn’t exactly breaking news, but you always hope that in the face of all odds, he might deflect his own stereotype.

In all of my crowdsourcing for quotes about artist meet-and-greets gone wrong, there were tales of Joe Jackson being “cheap and pompous” to a server, a comment about Puddle of Mudd’s Wesley Scantlin being a “jerk,” (shocker) and damnations of Madonna. But amongst the slew of dirt, one friend piped up to say that, “all the [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][musicians] I’ve met were very nice, especially Ric Ocasek.”

So I guess there’s hope, after all.

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ONLY NOISE: Welcome to the Workless Week

Rihanna is doing everything I am not.

“Work, work, work, work, work, work/You see me I be work, work, work, work, work, work,” she barks through the café sound system – as if she knows.

Another sunny day in the neighborhood. It is loping along at a drowsy pace. Parks are barren – full of empty benches. There is no line at the post office, and my favorite corner in the local coffee shop is dutifully awaiting me. I’m not dreaming. I’m not lucky. I am unemployed. And it’s just a weekday.

As luck would have it, I’ve been laid off three times in the past three years. Downsizing, outsourcing, budget cuts, project fulfillment – I’ve seen it all, and yet each time it hits me like an uppercut…like getting dumped when you thought everything was going awesome. And everything was going awesome…until it wasn’t anymore.

Another song comes on: Elvis Costello’s embittered “Welcome To The Working Week” off 1977’s My Aim Is True. I envision Costello back in the early ‘70s, working as a data entry clerk for Elizabeth Arden and hating every minute of it. “Welcome to the working week,” he sneers. “Oh, I know it don’t thrill you, I hope it don’t kill you/Welcome to the working week/You gotta do it till you’re through it, so you better get to it.” The irony of course being that it is the workless week(s) I have to get through now.

But this time ‘round I am not alone. It wasn’t long ago when I told my friend M that everything was “going to be ok!” M had recently been laid off from her job of five years, and I assured her that she needn’t self-flagellate for collecting unemployment.

“The idea that going through a period of unemployment is being lazy or counterproductive to society is bullshit,” I argued. “That’s just a false, capitalistic construct that a lot of developed countries don’t abide by. Look at Sweden! They get artist grants on the regular! Paternity leave! No one calls the Swedish lazy!” I consoled M with fervor, hoping to empower my hardworking pal who’d fallen on hard times. “You’re going to LOVE unemployment! Hell, I wish I had been on it longer!”

Somewhere in the distance, Riri sang and wagged a finger, “When you a gon’ learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn”? Before I could answer, I was plunged into joblessness. Again. I turned to find that ardent part of myself, the one that I’d dispatched to boost M’s confidence. She was nowhere to be found.

On Monday, in broad daylight, M and I sat on her couch; updating resumes, drafting emails, and calling the New York State Department of Unemployment Services, which has constructed a densely layered multiverse of automated menu options, dead-end key commands, and spontaneous call terminations. Dante himself could not have imagined this many circles of hell. The Specials’ bristling cover of “Maggie’s Farm” bleated from M’s tablet. I repeatedly punched zero in the hopes of being delivered to a real-time human, but was escorted back to the beginning of the menu options instead.

Veterans of creative industries get it. Writers, actors, magicians, poets, clowns, and yes, musicians; it’s a hard life making a living. Like Rihanna and Elvis Costello, Dolly Parton knew all about werk when she wrote “9 to 5,” singing the sour truth in that sweet, sweet voice: “Workin’ 9 to 5, whoa what a way to make a livin’/Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’/They just use your mind and they never give you credit/It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.”

In this time of uncertainty, I tell myself that it’s important to have historical perspective. It’s crucial to remember that bitching about work (or lack thereof), is as human as bipedalism, and has likely occurred since the dawn of occupation. While Rihanna today sings, “You see me do me dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt,” a 12^th century blacksmith has surely larked, “You see me do me smelt, smelt, smelt, smelt, smelt, smelt,” and so on and so forth. Throughout history, where there has been work, there has been animosity; where there has been unemployment, there has been languor.

Hating your job is a time-honored tradition. So too is fearing eternal joblessness, and, as Bill Callahan sang in the ‘90s, longing “to be of use.” But why are we reduced to this? Why is our identity plastered slapdash around a core of employment? They don’t live like this is in Italy, right?

Perhaps philosopher Henri Lefebvre explained it best in his 1968 page-turner, The Sociology of Marx: “– man loses himself in his works. He loses his way among the products of his own effort, which turn against him and weight him down, become a burden.” Or, as Morrissey sang, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve held/It pays my way, and it corrodes my soul/I want to leave, you will not miss me/I want to go down in musical history.”

I think about how Morrissey once worked as a hospital porter, and, perhaps annoyed that everyone around him was more miserable than he, quit and went on the dole. The Smiths frontman then used the bulk of his unemployment benefits to buy concert tickets. Morrissey sings about jobs more than most pop stars, and has certainly had them, making his claim in 1984’s “You’ve Got Everything Now” that he’s “Never had a job/Because I’ve never wanted one,” only half true.

Jeff Buckley was a Hotel Receptionist. Alanis Morissette was an Envelope Stuffer. Looking through a list of “51 Jobs Musicians Had Before They Were Famous” makes me feel better for some reason. Ian Curtis worked as a Welfare Officer. Chuck Berry (RIP), a Beautician. Rod Stewart dug graves. Henry Rollins managed a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop in DC.

I wonder if, while scooping equal portions of Rocky Road and Butter Pecan into a waffle cone, Henry Rollins was thinking of a passage from The Communist Manifesto: “…labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce…” “Much like this sugary, frozen treat,” mumbled the pre-Black Flag muscle man. While dipping the high-piled scoops into a vat of rainbow sprinkles, Häagen-Dazs Rollins must have pondered Marx and Engels further, noting that, “…the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine…”

But let’s face it, ice cream Henry – we’re all appendages of the machine with or without those pesky day jobs – no matter how you scoop, sprinkle, or dip it. If you look to The Jam’s lay-off-themed “Smithers-Jones,” you’ll hear the tale of an obedient, white-collar worker who gets the axe. The suit-wearing title character arrives at his long-term office job one Monday only to be told, “There’s no longer a position for you/Sorry Smithers-Jones.”

And then there’s good ‘ol Morrissey again, who famously sang, “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job/And heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Oh, c’mon Moz, it ain’t alllll that bad. When talking to my sister about my recent loafer status, she assures me that things could be much worse. At least I don’t have to dig graves like Rod Stewart. At least I don’t have to work in a slaughterhouse like Ozzy Ozborne. I have friends and family who love me, an awesome part-time writing gig, and, unlike my sister’s new puppy, Darwin: at least I don’t have eczema on my butthole.

So I got that going for me, which is nice.

ONLY NOISE: 50 Shades of Sade

Something smooth is afoot. Suddenly, as if surfacing on the pop charts for the first time, Sade is played, sung, and mentioned in nearly every room I enter. “The Sweetest Taboo” slinks across my favorite coffee shop. “No Ordinary Love” sashays through my kitchen. “Smooth Operator” blares from restaurant speakers…or comes as close to blaring as a song like “Smooth Operator” can.

Have I missed something here? I feel like I’m unhip to some universal punch line – as if the town around me has burst into a choreographed dance routine and I’m the only one who finds it strange. Was there a neglected memo? Has a viral Snapchat eluded me? There must be a reason that only a few months ago, a friend on Facebook posted this ambivalent comment:

This acted as a double Sade nod, as her name was praised both by my friend and the good people at East River Tattoo. Several months later, this surfaced:

These posts were not isolated incidents of Sade-dom. It seemed that overnight everyone was digging these soft, jazz-rock fusion tunes unanimously. Everywhere I went: it was Sade all day. All the livelong Sade.

Not long after the Facebook posts above appeared, my eldest roommate J began playing The Best Of Sade on repeat while cooking, cleaning, rolling joints, and smoking joints. He had installed a groovy lighting scheme that synced with his iPhone a few months back for “ambiance.” As Sade whispered the words to “Jezebel” he would sink the lights to a sensual blue, recline on the couch, and blow a beam of smoke across the living room. I was almost annoyed when a mysterious, hat-wearing saxophonist didn’t appear from behind one of our large floppy houseplants.

I still didn’t connect the dots between these separate instances of Sadephilia – until my other roommate started playing her.

H, my youngest roomie, is hardly ever home. She has a demanding job and a fruitful social life, and rarely plays music through the subpar speakers in our kitchen…the kitchen being the hub of our household mingling. A few weeks ago, H was making a salad. In need of a soundtrack, she hooked up her phone to our shitty kitchen speakers, and out poured Sade’s sultry “Is It A Crime.”

“That’s it,” I thought. I asked H if she had heard J playing Sade not too long ago, or noticed the singer’s sudden ubiquity this year. H could offer no explanation, and I remained puzzled. I grew suspicious of this sudden trend; as I do with all things that I feel, well, left out of. Was Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious at work? Had Sade just collaborated on a fashion line with Kenzo? Did she have a fragrance now (perhaps…Eau de Sade)? Though I’d never discovered why every “hip” Brooklyn bar was playing New Order from 2008-2012, or why every restaurant was playing T. Rex in that same time period, I would damn well find out why everyone was swaying to Sade in 2017.

First, I turned to Spotify – to the record cover I recognized the most; that blue-filtered photograph where Sade is poised au natural, smirking into our souls under twig-thin eyebrows. The Best of Sade.

It was early in the morning, and I pressed play, my mug of un-sipped coffee in hand. About to take the day’s first tipple of holy caffeine, “Your Love Is King” blasted into my ear buds at top volume, its wailing, metallic, sax riff nearly causing my coffee cup to vault across the room. So far, it was the least smooth start to the day I could imagine.

I didn’t know how to feel immediately. This was music, in which the saxophone could be described as passionate, and I hated that…but I didn’t hate what I was hearing. Sade makes the kind of music I’m supposed to dislike, on paper at least. It is oppressively pleasant – the most jarring component being that damn saxophone squawking in and out of measures. Yet on a closer listen, a song like “Hang On To Your Love” stands out as a bouncy pop number, and I find myself anticipating its hooky chorus throughout. Sade’s vocal proficiency has never been questioned, but I realize – perhaps decades after everyone else in the world – the subtle chops of her band as well. But suddenly recognizing the quality in her music doesn’t explain the Sade renaissance. I had to know more.

“Why is everyone into Sade all of a sudden?” I ask J, the roommate fond of fancy lighting fixtures.

“Is everyone?” he asks.

“Yes. Everyone. What happened? Is it the twentieth anniversary of her death or something?”

“What?”

“Didn’t she get shot? And there was a movie? J Lo?”

“That’s Selena.”

“Oh.”

Now that I knew Sade was not in fact gunned down by a rabid fan, I flocked to Google for answers.

“Why is everyone obsessed with Sade in 2017?” yielded no solutions on the search engine, but it turned out that this very question was asked a few years prior.

The Guardian and The Vulture had the most info, the former running articles like, “Why Sade is Bigger in the US than Adele,” and “Why Does Sade Have Such a Poor Reputation in the UK?”

In 2011, The Guardian printed another story entitled, “Behind the Music: The Secrets of Sade’s Success.” The paper interviewed Sade’s first producer Robin Millar, who said of the singer, “I’ve always thought there are certain voices that make people feel better: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. And when I first heard Sade I really felt she had it … She also had an amazing effect on people in the studio, both men and women – her charisma and how she looked.”

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t tell me anything. Feel-goodery couldn’t be the only explanation for Sade’s unofficial comeback. “Feel-good” does not = hip, and right now, Sade is hip as fuck.

But why now? She hasn’t dropped an album since 2010’s Soldier Of Love, and she certainly doesn’t crop up for interviews or public appearances on the regular. For this reason Sade is often compared to reclusive pop queen Kate Bush.

In 2010, Vulture published a story about Sade’s influence on rappers, citing remarks by likes of Missy Elliott, Rakim, and even Kanye West. Apparently the smooth crooner made big waves in the hip hop scene. Souls of Mischief’s Tajai claimed that, “When I was young, her record was one of the few my mom would play that I would enjoy, too. As a kid, I’d want her to turn off her music so I could hear LL Cool J or someone like that, but Sade and Luther Vandross were two records I dug, too. Sade transcends the age gap.”

Could it be Sade’s mere timelessness that resurrected this smooth jazz siren? I had to admit that no one’s current interest seemed to be a side effect of irony…was millennials’ attention to Sade as sincere as her music? After all, Sade was the woman who sang words of pristine devotion, like “I want to cook you a soup that warms your soul”– how could she possibly inspire sarcasm?

And then, in one final Google search, I found my answer. At the top of the page read:

“Sade Supreme t shirt.”

So this is what it’s all about, eh? The wildly popular skating brand is retailing the screen print tee for well over $100 as part of their 2017 Spring/Summer line. Emblazoned on the front is a vintage black and white photo of the singer, with a gold, “handwritten” message proclaiming:

“To Supreme

Your Love Is King

Sade x”

Mystery solved? I hope not entirely.

ONLY NOISE: Lost and Found

I take the same path to the same coffee shop every week. Down DeKalb Avenue, a right on Franklin Avenue, a left on Greene Avenue, and a final right on Bedford Avenue. My gait is calculated and mechanical. A determined trudge. There is nothing romantic about this habit, and while I’d like to applaud its efficiency, I haven’t actually done the math to prove that this course is the fastest. In truth, I take this route because it is the one I first took to the coffee shop. It is repeated out of reflex and muscle memory and stubbornness. It is firmly rooted in a strong longing for routine.

This path is so engrained that my body dictates every step while my mind is free to think – something I do best while in forward motion. Walking puts me in a trance – alert enough to dodge oncoming vehicles, but rapt in layers of thought. So rapt, that I nearly missed the fat Fela Kuti box set propped up against a wrought iron gate on Greene Ave one Spring day. I stopped abruptly three feet past where the box of vinyl rested, then ambled slowly backward looking left to right to see if anyone was watching me. This I am sure, did not look suspicious at all.

The box was over an inch in depth. It was black and white with a banner of teal across the front reading “FELA” in block letters. I couldn’t help but crouch down and open it immediately, praying that its owner wouldn’t come bolting down the stoop of his brownstone to reclaim it. Perhaps an angry lover had left it on the sidewalk along with other prized vinyl from his collection…like, that Fat Boys LP right next to it…and, that…Kajagoogoo maxi single…

Ok, these records were probably left out on purpose, but I still couldn’t believe it. Lifting the box’s slightly scratched lid I found an alarming amount of Fela Kuti records. I was expecting three, maybe four LPs, perhaps with some booklet taking up a majority of the box’s real estate. Instead I found a seven record pileup, each one opened yet minimally played and well cared for.

There was Zombie, Fela Ransome-Kuti and The Africa ’70 With Ginger Baker Live, Roforofo Fight, He Miss Road, Alagbon Close, Ikoyi Blindness, and Everything Scatter – a glorious heap of his recordings. I was in shock; seven intact, fabulous albums, the collective price of which would have been well over $100. It felt as though I’d stumbled upon a treasure trove, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would ever abandon it.

I grew paranoid again, remembering a time when my dad and I found a handsome sack of toys in the woods behind our house. At seven I was overjoyed at this discovery, but also puerile and hesitant, imagining the sad kid who’d lost their bag of wonders. My dad assured me that finders were keepers, and it was on our property anyway. To ease my concern he assured me that if the toys’ proprietor came looking for them, we could hand them over.

And that’s just what happened. The neighbor girl was ecstatic when reunited with her pink satchel of toys. I felt devastated but virtuous by returning it. To this day I cannot remember what was actually in the sack – just the absolute thrill of stumbling upon it in our mossy forest.

By the time I was halfway down the block my paranoia had dissipated, but I still clutched the Fela Kuti box tightly to my chest just in case. My sense of elation was difficult to unpack – I am by no means a believer of fate or the “universe” gifting me anything…but I surrender to the sensation of it from time to time. I have come across some of my favorite things this way – finding them while looking for nothing.

I first discovered Will Oldham because a neighbor left a stack of CDs in the hallway of my apartment building a few years back. It was in one of many fruitful “free piles,” a name my roommate and I thought we’d coined. The album was an oddball EP recorded with Rian Murphy called All Most Heaven. It had one of the worst album covers I’d ever seen, but something about it shouted “What the hell? Take me home!” It was eccentric, no doubt, but I loved it nonetheless. Its four twangy songs eventually graced a small road trip to upstate New York one summer (our car only had CD capabilities). Opening its jewel case now, the silver disk is nowhere to be found. It may still be in that car, but my only hope is that it has found a way into the music collection of anyone who would bother adopting a stray CD in 2017.

In our age of Spotify Discover Weekly and record subscription services and pre-programmed radios and playlists tailored to every hyper-specific situation we can dream up, coming to music organically and spontaneously is uncommon. It seems rare enough to exchange music between two people in the same room, let alone find one of your favorite records in the street. I wouldn’t suggest the scavenger lifestyle as anyone’s sole source of musical discovery, but I will say there is a taste of destiny in it. I don’t believe in destiny either, so anything that conjures a sense of it feels pretty damn nice, if not fleeting.

The other week I had finished my book and was looking for a new one to read. I had just spoken to a friend about how I’d oddly never read Hunter S. Thompson, which is strange as he fits the profile of my favorite writers (depressed, debauched, wry). Days later I walked through my basement, past a stack of books an old roommate had left three years ago when he moved out. I was drawn to a turquoise spine peeping out from under a couple of Bret Easton Ellis tomes. It was The Rum Diary, Thompson’s first novel. I am enjoying it tremendously, and can’t believe it has been waiting silently under my nose for three whole years.

Come to think of it, it was that same roommate who provided me with another bout of serendipitous discovery. When he moved, I upgraded to his bedroom after five years in the windowless cavern next door. His room had not one, but two windows, and he’d left his superior mattress and an enormous credenza that was far lovelier than anything I’d ever allow myself to buy.

I took my time moving in – I set up my haphazard bookshelf. I stuffed my 500 pairs of underwear into one of the credenza’s many drawers. I arranged my desk with reference books and a quantity of pens that would suggest I was deeply concerned about a imminent global pen shortage. After deciding that all of my portfolios from college would go in one of the credenza’s large cabinets, I opened the door and found around 80 forsaken vinyl records leaning against one another. I believe my mouth truly dropped open. This pile of albums ended up doubling the size of my collection, and included some true gems. There was Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, Roxy Music’s Manifesto, Prince’s Controversy, Talking Heads’ 77, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies Of The Canyon, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Lou Reed’s Transformer, and dozens more. It seemed like luck, or at least something like it, and I took it as a good omen – something I also do not believe in.

I hauled the LPs I didn’t love (Donovan, Heart) to the nearest record store and swapped them for a $25 dollar credit, which I used to pad my collection with bizarre French funk punk records, Peel Sessions, and anything I could find by Prefab Sprout. Puzzled by my fortune, I still couldn’t understand why someone would desert a collection that had clearly been accumulated over a few years…but I was more than happy to give it a new home.

ONLY NOISE: Backstreet’s Back

An email has landed in my inbox. It is an arrow, shot from my childhood – and aimed at my heart. Piercing deeply, it stings me with eight simple words:

Backstreet Boys Las Vegas Residency Starts Next Wednesday

I am reeling, as if a long gone relative has risen from the dead. Backstreet’s back?! ALRIGHT!

To be painfully honest, I was already planning on writing about Backstreet Boys eventually. The email plugging their Vegas comeback was a serendipitous bonus. But was it really a bonus? Or a sign?

A friend recently asked me what the first record I ever bought myself was. I hesitated to answer. While I’d like to join the tradition of music journalists at least claiming to be born with good taste, my first record was not by The Smiths, or Stereolab, or even the fucking Beatles. Sure, I had an older sister down the hall – but she wasn’t exactly listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain, and even if she were, she wouldn’t have let me in on the secret.

I was a victim of Top 40 radio like all pre-internet, rural eight year olds. Despite a few quirks like an aversion to Beanie Babies, Pokémon, and sports, I pretty much liked what everyone else liked. Yes. I too loved Boy Bands. The first record I ever bought myself was not by The Dead Boys, or The Beach Boys, or The Pet Shop Boys. It was Backstreet Boys, by The Backstreet Boys.

I was an avid supporter of BSB. So much so that when fellow Floridians NSYNC cropped up on the scene slightly after, I leapt to the Boys’ defense. It seemed that they had invented the boy band, and I’d be goddamned if some nobody named “Justin Timberlake” was going to steal thunder from my beloved Nick Carter. My loyalty to BSB over NSYNC was an amalgam of childish polarity, Scorpion dedication, and a fear that giving in to NSYNC would count as some sort of infidelity to the former.

This feud didn’t just live in my head. The BSB vs. NSYNC debate was a very real thing, and a quick Google search will liquefy any doubts you have of its existence. I managed to get into several heated disputes regarding the matter in second grade. It wasn’t that I didn’t like NSYNC’s music – I now acknowledge its superiority – but I felt BSB had been flat ripped off. The five-man structure? The cute blonde, the “freaky” one, the sensitive one, the semi-normal-looking brunette, and the one no one will ever be attracted to? NSYNC had photocopied the pages of BSB’s playbook, and like all eight year olds, I hated copycats. But it was ok. I knew in my heart that BSB would rise to legend status. NSYNC would end up in the novelty hall of fame. That guy Justin Timberlake wasn’t going anywhere, so I wasn’t too worried.

When I wasn’t busy asserting BSB’s superiority over all boy bands (don’t even get me started on 98 Degrees!), I was listening to their music – namely, that first record. While my taste was nothing to brag about, my habits as a music listener were well-formed by then, and Backstreet Boys was on heavy rotation on the boombox. Favorite songs included “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart),” “As Long As You Love Me,” and “If You Want to Be a Good Girl (Get Yourself a Bad Boy),” which in its defense sounds like an off-brand Prince song. Not the worst thing. Oh but there was so much more! “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back) with that unbearable “spooky” music video, or “I’ll Never Break Your Heart,” which an eight year old could really relate to. When Brian sings, “Ooh when I asked you out/You said no but I found out,” it was just like the time at school when I labored over a hemp necklace for Jake Allen, but then he gave it to that bitch Katie Summers. At least BSB understood my pain.

The truthful hero of my boy band days was my dad, however, who sat through every spin of my Backstreet Boys’ CDs and not only tolerated the music – he pretended he liked it. My mom and I lived in a much larger house than the tiny log cabin my dad and I inhabited. At my mom’s I could tuck away into my room to rehearse choreographed dance moves to “We’ve Got It Goin’ On,” out of sight and earshot. She was also smart enough to not have a CD player in her car. But dad had to hear it all. I have one distilled memory of us sitting in his car one winter morning before school, waiting for the windshield to defrost, and playing “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely,” off of 1999’s Millenium. He claimed to particularly like that song.

Although I remember purchasing Backstreet Boys more vividly than Millenium, I recall their equal significance. This presents me with an odd internal struggle I am embarrassed to admit. In weighing the importance of these records, I’ve uncovered a shameful desire to appease the “cult of cool.” Translation: for a split second, I somehow created a hierarchy of Backstreet Boys albums. As if their first LP – their early stuff – has more clout in the same way say, the first Wire record does. Jesus.

I’m learning more and more that in order to write about this kind of music, or simply to fess up about it, you have to suspend disbelief like you would at a play. As much as I am tempted to prescribe critical analysis, or nostalgic rose tinting to the music of Backstreet Boys, the best thing I can do is flatly say that I enjoyed it, and that I still enjoy it. This isn’t just nostalgia at work. Nostalgia didn’t preserve a fondness for Nickelback or P.O.D., both of whose CDs I owned. There is simply no logical explanation for why some music tugs at well-hidden heartstrings. It’s the magical pop alchemy we spend our careers trying to understand. I mean –Backstreet Boys actually have a lyric in their arsenal claiming, “You hit me faster than a shark attack.” I can’t rationalize that! It just is. It just, is very bad. And I love it.

And yet, my snobbery is almost as deeply ingrained as my unabashed enjoyment of BSB. I long to tell you that during my Backstreet Boys phase, I was at least more into AJ. I’d love to tell you that I didn’t just want Nick like everybody else. I want to say that I was the quirky, original girl who dug Howie. But I wasn’t. I wanted to be Baby Spice, not Ginger. I wanted things that were blonde and pink. I wanted Nick Carter. Twas his face, torn from the pages of Tiger Beat, lining my bedroom walls in carefully arranged clusters of blonde mushroom cut. I was just like everybody else.

ONLY NOISE: #NotMyPresident’s Day

You remember it. You know you do. Every morning, at 9am sharp. Standing. Hat off. Left arm, stiff at your side. Right hand resting on heart – reluctantly. All together now:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

There came a time in my elementary school life, when this routine incantation became unbearable to perform. Naturally, this sudden sourness coincided with the election of George W. Bush, and his subsequent invasions and monstrosities. As we approach our first President’s Day under Donald Trump, I imagine school kids everywhere are experiencing a similar sourness during the assemblies leading up to the national holiday, the songs and pageantries one has to perform in public school, K-12.

During these morning customs, I mainly recall feeling so disillusioned with what felt like a national disease; I couldn’t bring myself to touch my heart and recite the Pledge – let alone stand up. The religious overtones of the poem always made me uncomfortable anyway, so I remained seated instead, fixing my gaze on the floor.

This did not go over well.

I lived in a small Republican lumber town – a town of many Carhart jumpsuits, many pickup trucks and several conservative teachers. What were the latter to do with their blue-haired, straight-A student who, by pleading the First Amendment, wasn’t actually breaking any rules? I relished in their visible frustration when they were unable punish me. They couldn’t even win outside of the classroom, as they knew calling my parents would amount to jack shit.

I was lucky enough to have parents who intrinsically distrusted institutional authority – or any authority for that matter. These were parents who routinely arranged “hookie” days to take me to the zoo, or on a ferry ride, or any of the multitudinous activities more educational and interesting than grade school. My political idealism was the least of their concerns; my dad admired it, and my mom was just happy I wasn’t injecting drugs. It was a win-win situation.

Years on, I can sift through all of the mornings, all of the assemblies and pep rallies I sat through, firmly planted on bleachers during the Pledge, the National Anthem, and that cruel excuse for a song, “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood. Perhaps you were of the lucky lot whose school did not require its students to stand and, hand on heart, sing the putrid, nationalistic, country-crossover, garbage heap of a “song” that is “God Bless the USA.” I suspect that everyone in my graduating year could deliver its lyrics with rapid snaps of deeply ingrained memory at its opening chords.

“If tomorrow all the things were gone/I’d worked for all my life/And I had to start again/With just my children and my wife”

Ok, this is already getting problematic for a crowd of school children to be singing.

“I’d thank my lucky stars/To be living here today/Cause the flag still stands for freedom/And they can’t take that away.”

Who the fuck are they? This song was written in 1992. Somehow within seconds Lee Greenwood had married off and impregnated an entire gymnasium full of children, and put the paranoid words “they can’t take that away” into our tiny mouths. That’s creepy. It was a song that sounded born of wartime – where any one of us could be shipped off to the battlefield to fight “them,” and we would never see our Beanie Babies again. Looking back, it was absurd to make a school full of elementary students sing this. A rhyme reciting the Constitution or the Bill of Rights might have proven more useful.

What strikes me most when revisiting these memories isn’t the immense satisfaction I felt while refusing to stand, or the disgust with singing Lee Greenwood’s song…especially that chorus:

“I’m proud to be an American/Where at least I know I’m free/And I won’t forget the men who died/Who gave that right to me/And I gladly stand up/Next to you and defend her still today/Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land/God bless the USA.”

What really bugs me is that despite my efforts to resist, despite my repulsion with these mandatory rituals, these songs and pledges and poems have been effectively lodged into my psyche forever. I will never be able to reclaim the chunk of brain tissue “God Bless the USA” has set up camp on forever. This is the beauty and the beast of music, however; the bad can be just as memorable as the good… like sex.

But what if, in light of our current President, we could sing different songs at our assemblies? There are dozens of songs that have been written about Presidents over the years, and while Mr. Greenwood was one of the chosen musical failures to play Trump’s inauguration, doesn’t a President in 2017 deserve an update? Here are a handful of President-related songs one could modify for public school assemblies nationwide. Or, if you homeschool or pay for private school, use the originals! You’re kids are going to learn the word “fuck” no matter what. I promise.

Lily Allen, “Fuck You”

There’s nothing I love more than a catchy pop song with cruel lyrics. Lily Allen wrote this for George W. Bush (as she confirmed at a concert in Brazil in 2009), but it works remarkably well as an anti-Trump number.

“Look inside/Look inside your tiny mind,” chimes Allen. “Now look a bit harder/Cause we’re so uninspired/So sick and tired of all the hatred you harbor.”

It’s perfect!

Grade school modification: Change “fuck you” to “fudge you.”

Radiohead, “2+2=5”

Also written in the Bush/Cheney era, “2+2=5” nods at George Orwell’s 1984 – which is currently enjoying an upswing in sales as the public turns to it again for answers. The equation is brilliant for its simple and effective message, which connotes the intentional peddling of misinformation. The song also includes Radiohead’s album title of that year (2003) Hail To The Thief – a spoof on the traditional, President-praising anthem, “Hail To The Chief.” You couldn’t ask for a better President’s Day song this year!

Grade school modification: make sure the children do not walk away thinking that 2+2 actually =5.

YG and Nipsey Hussle, “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)”

Kids love rap, so this will be an easy assembly sell. With a few modifications, you can Martha Stewart this shit up and have a catchy fight song for your little resisters.

“Yeah, fuck Donald Trump/Yeah nigga, fuck Donald Trump/This is for my grandma!/Yeah, yeah, fuck Donald Trump, yeah.”

Grade school modification: change “fuck” to “funk,” don’t say the “N” word. Ever. Keep that “grandma” bit in. Someone is getting extra dessert for that.

Bright Eyes, “When The President Talks To God”

This one’s great for kids. They will learn about xenophobia, the prison industrial complex, and consonants. There is a line about “dirty coke” but you can just pretend it is the cola variety. This song may have also been written about G. W. Bush, but as you can hear, it is still relevant – unfortunately.

“When the President talks to God/Do they drink near-beer and go play golf/While they pick which countries to invade?/Which Muslim souls still can be saved?/I guess God just calls a spade a spade/When the President talks to God.”

Grade school modification: change “bullshit” to “doodie.”

The Honey Drippers, “Impeach The President”

Simple, funky, and more relevant than ever. This will be a fan favorite. Kids will learn all about the impeachment process and the transformative power of funk. Pretty much the only words are “impeach the president,” which can be easily integrated into preschool programs as well.

Grade school modification: none.

Happy President’s Day y’all. And don’t forget, #Fuck/Funk/FudgeDonaldTrump.

ONLY NOISE: Only The Lonely

When Beyoncé so wisely instructed “All the single ladies” (ALL the single ladies) to “put your hands up,” it was a different time. It was 2008. A year of innocence. We had elected Obama. Beach House had released Devotion. And single ladies everywhere felt empowered by Queen B’s anthem for autonomy. I’d just moved to New York, 18 and wet behind the ears. I couldn’t wait to have my own fashion line, a loft in Soho, and to party with The Strokes – all of which happened in rapid succession. (#AlternativeFacts.)

Back then, 99% of my friends were single, and we relished in seasons of not giving a fuck about it. Our lives were spun of work, college, fun…and the impending recession. But still! Life was good. Lovers came and went like party guests. Some stayed longer than invited. Others left before even taking their coats off.

Nearly ten years on, paradigms have shifted, and rightly so. People met cute and moved in. People got married. Some got babied up. Hell, even Beyoncé, Ms. Single Lady herself, got married to Jay-Z – and I hear it’s going really well!

Naturally, my single friend percentage declined. It is in the single digits these days…like, in the 1-3% range. Which begs me to entreat: “All my single ladies (All my single ladies!) Now put your hands up!” All six of them. All six of your combined hands. Put them up, for the love of god. I guess with my hands we have eight. Strength in numbers.

Did anyone ever stop to ask: why are we putting our hands up?? Maybe Beyoncé wanted all the single ladies to put their hands up – because they were about to be shot by a firing squad? Maybe that’s what that song is about…elimination of the single ladies. She did marry Jay-Z that year after all. Perhaps it was meant as a kindness…to put us single ladies out of our perceived misery.

Ok, that’s a bit extreme, but I can’t help being wry. As we approach Valentine’s Day – the preferred holiday of single people everywhere – the commodity of coupling up can be oppressive. The polyester teddy bears lining shelves at Duane Reade. The lingerie ads. 50 Shades Darker.

Valentine’s Day is perhaps the most polarizing commercial holiday; the holiday that cruelly bisects the population into those with, and those without. Those who will dance together in the kitchen to Joni Mitchell’s “A Case Of You” – and those who will sob to it over a box of self-gifted Russel Stover’s. Those who shall feast upon prix-fixe dinners of lamb chops and heart-shape chocolate cakes – and those who SHAN’T!

Parks and Recreation may have given us stags “Galentine’s Day,” and I’m sure Pinterest is rife with “fun alternatives” to drinking an entire bottle of wine in front of the mirror while cry-singing Cat Power, but I say fuck that shit. We don’t need alternatives. The single ladies don’t need saving. I don’t wanna go to the club with “gloss on my lips/a man on my hips,” as per Bey’s example.

Instead, all my single ladies: let’s dwell. Let’s lament. Let’s feel the pain. Love does hurt after all, and so does its absence. But that’s all right. This shit makes the world go ‘round. This Valentine’s Day, I want you to imagine all of the songs that have ever been written. Yup, all of ‘em. How many of those do you reckon are love songs? A pretty big portion I’d say. Finally, think about how many of those love songs are happy love songs, versus the ones that spring from raw, unbridled agony.

You see my point.

Would Roy Orbison ever have written “Only the Lonely” if he were just peachy and happily married? Would Stephin Merritt have written any songs, ever? Would I have any sad bastard music to listen to at all?

No.

Some of the best music comes from good old-fashioned anguish. So when you’re feeling unbearably lonely, remember that you’re in good company – albeit the miserable kind.

I admit: there is a time to “put your hands up” and feel emboldened by solitude. I do it every day, when I eat my lame yet efficient dinner of sandwich meats, mayo, and hot sauce wrapped in a plume of romaine lettuce. Standing up. By the sink. I celebrate the fact that I can make the decision to do so without the democratic process. Without having the “What are we doing for dinner?” conversation. I can eat my sad lettuce wrap in peace. Blaring Pulp and singing along, still chewing. There is always a time to champion sad salad wrap singing, and 2am laundry doing, and in-bed pizza eating. And there is also a time to pour yourself a carafe of merlot, put on a depressing record, and be alone with everyone who’s ever written a song.

This Valentine’s Day, let’s get dismal. Just for one night. No one will even notice! (Because they will be on a date!)

Let’s start with Morrissey’s “Please Help The Cause Against The Loneliness.” A bubblegum number to the uncaring ear; but listen closer: sweet, sweet isolation! Leave it to Moz to wax desolate – this bouncing tune scrutinizes the pity cast upon the unwed…and who better to scrutinize than the infamous asexual himself? “Please help the cause against the loneliness,” Moz croons, as if there is a charity handout for our kind (if only!).

Next turn up some Liz Phair, who knew that you could still be completely alone while lying right next to someone. Phair’s snarky “Fuck and Run” is the quintessential opus for bad decisions. A sloppy, pitchy, honest, pathetic, undeniably brave song. This is diary caliber realism – all about that forbidden bed you keep crawling back into. Phair really hits it home when she asks the simple questions, like:

“Whatever happened to a boyfriend/The kind of guy who tries to win you over?/And whatever happened to a boyfriend/The kind of guy who makes love ’cause he’s in it?/ And I want a boyfriend /I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas.”

While we’re reveling in emotional immaturity, let’s listen to “I Don’t Want To Get Over You” by the barons of broken hearts – Magnetic Fields, the band that truly did “make a career of being blue.”

As we’re discovering, a bit of wallowing can be cathartic. Despite all of the song’s clever imagery, one line says it all for me:

“I could leave this agony behind/Which is just what I’d do/If I wanted to/But I don’t want to get over you.”

And haven’t we all been down that dark hallway?

If love’s impact on the history of music, film, art, literature, and war (I’m talking to you, Helen of Troy) isn’t making you feel at one with your solitude – may I throw but one last metaphor at you?

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to Paris: the city of lights and love and innumerable sauces. She regaled me with tales of part-time lovers and fine meals. At the end of one such fine meal, she chose a dessert to cap off the perfect dinner. She chose framboise surprise. Raspberry surprise. Ooh la la! To append an American dish with “surprise” usually suggests catastrophe (tuna surprise), but the French weren’t gonna fuck this up! It would be exquisite; mountains of frothy pink mousse encasing shortbread and sorbet, the whole thing crowned with gold-dipped sugar lattices. Quelle surprise!

When the dessert was gently placed on the table, raspberries there were. The surprise however, was missing. It was 12 raspberries, up-ended on a plate. 12. Fucking. Raspberries. That’s it. C’est tout.

My point is: sometimes love is all that frothy pink mousse and more. Sometimes a relationship is a rich and mysterious and delicious dessert, worthy of all the pain, paintings, opuses and arias. And sometimes – it’s 12 fucking raspberries on a plate. That you just paid 10 Euros for.

Either way…there’s bound to be a song about it.

ONLY NOISE: The Art of Dissent

If you are paying attention to the political sector right now – and I’d be concerned yet impressed if you’ve managed to escape it – every day may feel like a battle. Those who have suffered depression will be uncomfortably familiar with this sentiment. The difference being: now we experience distress as a collective whole. Shared unrest can at least make us feel less solitary, but it comes with its own set of side effects. A sense of widespread and impending doom, for instance.

In times like these, it is easy to write off seemingly frivolous forms of catharsis. To put away pleasure and fortify yourself with facts instead. To bury the arts under a headstone reading: “Trivial.” I’ve certainly found it difficult to appreciate art at face value lately. How could I dare enjoy something pretty amidst the calculated intolerance being issued by our new government? Surely I’m not the only one who feels guilt and futility lest I’m actively educating myself on the matter or combatting it – on foot or on paper.

And then, as if she could feel our hearts breaking, our shame and impotence triumphing, a respected member of the New York music community wrote a post on Facebook urging artists and musicians:

“DO NOT BE AFRAID OR FEEL ASHAMED to spread your work, or promote your shows amongst this chaos! It is in no way selfish. The community you build with your work, and the shows you’re playing are helping people heal, and find togetherness, and give people a moment of goddamn peace. Do not let Drumph oppress your work. Artists, you are SO IMPORTANT especially in times like this. Use your magic.”

She was unassailably right, and I try to remember that statement every day. In a rare moment of optimism, my hope is to push her words further. To highlight that while dialectics and dissent and physical resistance are all of utmost importance right now, so too is the creation and support of art. To learn from previous art and make new work that addresses our current despair.

It is my personal belief that the best art is birthed from conflict, internal or otherwise, and not necessarily from a pure urge to depict beauty alone. This, incidentally, leads me to liking a lot of “unpleasant” music, literature, film, and visual art, as my friends and family could tell you. Otto Dix’s depictions of the First World War, Hemingway’s accounts of The Spanish Civil War, the IRA drama The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Thatcher/Reagan era punk music, and of course George Orwell’s 1984.

The latter two have a special relationship for me, and given 1984’s recent resurgence in popularity, I found it an apt tie-in to the importance of embracing the arts in trying times. This isn’t the first instance post-publishing that 1984 has been all over pop culture. Its sales spiked 5,771% after Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s phone tapping secrets to the world. 30 years prior, punk bands of the late ‘70s and ‘80s found its text all too applicable to Margaret Thatcher’s reign in Britain, especially groups like Subhumans, without whom I may have never read 1984.

Subhumans’ 1983 debut record The Day The Country Died is essentially a 1984 concept album, with dystopian themes throughout. Specifically, Orwell’s masterpiece is referenced in the opening track “All Gone Dead” (“So long to the world, that’s what they said, it’s 1984 and it’s all gone dead”) and “Big Brother,” which makes references to the novel’s voyeuristic telescreen spying on its citizens. In hindsight, the record and the novel reveal eerie premonitions: today, a majority of the United Kingdom is monitored by CCTV cameras (1 for every 32 people, as The Guardian reported in 2011).

Currently sales of 1984 are up 9,500%, the novel reaching the top of the Amazon best-seller list in the days after Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway stated that Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave “alternative facts” when discussing the number of those in attendance at President Trump’s inauguration. This paradox uttered by Conway immediately reminded thousands of Orwell’s terms “doublethink,” which refers to “reality control” and “newspeak” – the eradication of independent thought.

What I find most remarkable, is that in spite of this shitstorm we’re facing, people are actually trying to better themselves in every way possible; taking time out of their weekends to schlep to JFK and resist Trump’s immigration orders, creating and signing petitions, and even simply reading a piece of relevant literature – swapping out fantasy fiction for something radical, political, and “unpleasant.”

The fact that the arts are intersecting with politics at a volume that hasn’t occurred in decades, to me marks the end of cynicism in the creative world. When pop stars like Sia and Grimes donate tens of thousands of dollars to the ACLU and CAIR, when countless performers turn down a large paycheck for the sake of their political integrity (the star-studded scoff at the Inaugural Ball, I mean), when commercial singers like Janelle Monae and Alicia Keys and Madonna show up at the Women’s March on Washington – you know there is a paradigm shift at hand.

It is a sign that art can be radical. Music can be radical. I am not saying we should all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” I am saying we should hold our fists in the air and sing Pussy Riot, and keep making music that is topical, and angry, and full of conflict. We should read Orwell and Marcuse and Debord, but we should also write the next 1984, and the next Reason and Revolution, and the next The Society of the Spectacle.

It seems to me that if we could focus all of our efforts – especially artistic efforts – with a critical and productive lens, if we could make every atom of our reality about discussing and re-shaping what we can no longer accept, then we have a shot at real progress. There is a time for art that perceives itself (but isn’t actually) in a vacuum. There is a time for post-modern distraction, and the navel-gazing art of identity politics, and artistic fetishizing of antiquity. Now is not that time.

ONLY NOISE: Air Piano

I have considered writing this many times – but I never felt it was ready. It would be ready, I thought, when my mastery of the piano was complete. Or more realistically, when my proficiency at the piano was deemed certifiable. Certifiable by whom, I was never sure. I now realize how silly that would be. The story would never be told.

Two years ago, during a period of prolonged illness, I spent two months in my native Washington State. Words minced: it was a difficult time. A time in which there were few relaxing moments. I was preoccupied, even obsessed with the state of my health, as were the family members who surrounded me in a big, fuzzy love net. One such family member was my nephew-in-law, L, who to this day feels more like a smarter little brother. During some of the most trying moments of my condition, he would by force of habit or tremendous intuition, settle at his family’s piano and begin to play. Improvise, really.

L has been playing since he was tiny, as the framed photo atop his family’s piano depicts. In it he sits – no older than 4 or 5, examining the keys with his grandfather. Due to his musical education, as well as an abnormally elevated intellect, L is a bit of a virtuoso on the keys. He sits at the piano when no one is really paying attention – when everyone is absorbed in work, or a book, or a Twitter hole. When it is the most quiet.

Yet during intensified phases of my malaise, when everything was far from silent, his stunning melodies would split the chaos and fill the room with loveliness. The sound would completely pacify me. It entranced me. L’s compositions are entirely improvised, but somehow sound like oeuvres that have been labored over for months. At the same time they sound effortless. The astounding thing about these arrangements is that they materialize from thin air. The devastating thing is that they are gone as swiftly as they are played – never recorded on paper or garage band.

L’s playing so moved me during those months; I wished I could hire him as my in-house pianist. Though I would never get anything done if he accepted the job. Piano hypnotizes me. If L begins playing while the rest of us read or knit, my activity halts when the first key is struck. My eyes slowly close. My chin drifts upward as if waiting for some higher revelation. I am bewitched.

It wasn’t simply a newfound fixation with piano music that sprouted from my time at home. There also grew an intense desire to play the piano – to command the magical instrument itself.

The latter infatuation lay dormant for months after I returned to New York. I can’t remember if I consciously thought about learning piano. But when I heard the dizzying compositions of Nils Frahm for the first time, I knew that was it. I spent my lunch breaks scouring Craigslist for keyboards, and an affordable teacher. Despite my highfalutin cravings for something fancy, like a Fender Rhodes or a Juno, my budget afforded me a $200 Kurzweil Ensemble Grande Piano, which is a pretty rudimentary model. Within two days of hearing Frahm’s music, the Kurzweil was mine. She’s a sturdy one, and I named her Girtha on the account that she weighs, oh, about 500 pounds.

Locating a compatible instructor seemed even more important; you only pay for the keyboard once, whereas each lesson will strip you of money. I came across a guy named Andrew. He was one of the few teachers who included pictures in their listing, which gave me a sense of ease. I could size him up a bit first. He looked lanky, and a bit like Tom Verlaine from Television – minus the whole heroin-chic thing. At $50 per session the price was right, plus, a bonus: he conducted lessons out of the gorgeous San Damiano Mission in Greenpoint. I was eager to start. New hobbies are a love of mine yes, but I also knew that learning piano would make me a better music journalist…because then I’d be a failed musician too.

On a sweltering August Wednesday, we began.

Andrew was in his early thirties, and hip to the music canon, but he eschewed all of the arrogance often associated with such traits. To pay rent he played church services and taught, the rest of his time spent on various musical projects and writing plays. He was patient, genuine, and kind – albeit a touch awkward. I constantly tried to distract from my musical inadequacies with jokes. This never worked.

I remember on one particular occasion Andrew was demonstrating a technique, and began playing Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” on the church piano to illustrate his point.

“You working that one up for church?” I asked.

“Whaa?” He looked genuinely concerned. When I assured him it was merely a joke, he laughed nervously and turned back to our lesson.

At first I learned piano quickly. The rush of a new pursuit – and a determination to achieve maestro status by the time I was an old lady – had me practicing for one to two hours daily. I was getting the basics down, and nailing my first song (Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms,” which ain’t that hard, by the way). I wasn’t quite a pianist yet, but I sure was learning piano.

But within months, practicing piano suffered the same fate of every discipline I’ve ever attempted, bar writing – it became a chore. I would halfheartedly cram the night before my lesson and resentfully play pages from the piano book; I much preferred improvisation, which always felt better than it sounded. At my lessons I would use tricks to skip playing from the book, as my sheet music literacy was declining. Asking a lot of questions typically worked.

I became nervous even before practicing at home – afraid my fingers would betray my ears. What was once cathartic and inspiring had become a little prison, built with the absurd standards I hold for myself.

This past August I got laid off from the desk job I hated. It was a bittersweet thing. I was tickled to say buh-bye to the 9-5, but that also meant cutting all recreational spending: i.e., piano lessons. I’d stopped regularly practicing sometime before, but swore to myself that the second I could afford it I would get back in the habit and recommence classes. Andrew understood, but warned me that he might be teaching elsewhere when we next met.

“The friars are renting the church out for concerts and events more and more, so I might have to find a new spot.”

“Wait a minute,” I pressed. “Andrew, it sounds like you’re getting gentrified out of the church!”

“HA!” echoed high to the ceilings. I’d finally gotten him to laugh.

I must admit that the most piano I have “played” since then has been air piano. It was what saved me during some rough turbulence on the last flight I took. Like many, I am terrified of flying, and usually try to knock myself out with merlot as a remedy. But, seeing as my flight was at 8am, even I felt too dignified to get tipsy.

Fortunately, the good people of Delta Airlines now have free, decent music aboard. I listened to Olafur Arnolds’ latest LP Island Songs on repeat, as well as a Bill Evans compilation several times. The piano, once again, took me over and soothed me – especially when I fervently “played” along. I kept my performance underneath my blanket however; just so other passengers wouldn’t think I was a complete nutter.

When I was recovering in Washington, before my lessons ever began, L would sometimes invite me to join him at the piano. “Just play the white keys,” he would say as I fumbled with the naturals. “What happens when I play the black keys?” I’d strike a sharp before he could answer, wincing at its sourness. Eventually I shied away, feeling far too vulnerable in front of someone who has been playing most of his life.

You’d think after a year of piano lessons I’d be less timid, but nothing has changed. My sister constantly offers the piano for me to practice when I visit. A songwriter and music teacher, sis claims that no one in the house minds, and that she uses it for “mediocre piano hour” all the time.

But I can’t do it. I become rigid, stewed in anxiety. I am not proficient. I am not a performer. And I’m certainly not a virtuoso.

But I can play one hell of an air piano.

ONLY NOISE: Marching Songs

It may be difficult to remember what politicized youth culture looks like. Some of us weren’t born in time to witness it at full wattage – in the student-helmed anti-war campaigns of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement that marched for the cessation of our own domestic race war. The efforts of second-wave feminists to seal with mortar the gender gap that has plagued most of human history. The Reagan-era LGBT activists, who effectively fought the religious right’s claim that AIDS was solely God’s way of eliminating the gays. Or the more widespread fury Reagan’s cabinet stoked in the poor, the disenfranchised, and the mentally ill when they binned the Mental Health Systems Act just as they were settling into office.

All of these efforts found their way into youth culture, whether directly, or just as an undeniable force of the time. Film, fashion, literature and music reflected the political unrest of their respective era in one way or another. And because youth culture and pop culture are all but synonyms in this country, whatever the “kids” liked was as pervasive back then as it is now.

Despite their history, politics and pop culture have an unsteady relationship. When we look specifically at music and politics, there lies an on-again, off-again affair that is as fickle as a middle school romance. From a zoomed-out, perhaps overly simplified lens, the pattern of their union seems to ebb and flow, with en vogue factions of politically incensed music followed by complacency and nihilism.

The anti-Vietnam War activists were emboldened by the music of Bob Dylan, Edwin Starr, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, to name a few. Seeger and Baez’s politics in particular overlapped with their support for the Civil Rights Movement. While the latter effort inspired the likes of Nina Simone, Gil Scott Heron, and Marvin Gaye, among many. The Black Power Movement and Black Panther Party found an odd ally in the likes of Detroit radicals the MC5, and the proliferation of politico punk during Regan’s reign is undeniable.

Punk was one of the few musical styles that seemed to morph its focus within the same genre. The substance-fueled hedonism of the mid-to-late ‘70s (Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Dead Boys, The Germs, etc.) eventually gave way to the more substantive and topical songs of bands like Reagan Youth, Dead Kennedys, Youth Brigade, and Crass.

Arguably, the latter camp’s music is less lauded on a critical level, but both have their place in political and sonic history. While first wave punk certainly had many things to rebel against (The Eagles), it was also sprouting out of a time in which youth culture wasn’t as politicized. The Ramones weren’t exactly partisan revolutionaries staging protests and forming their own Weather Underground. First wave punk was more cultural rebellion than it was political rebellion, despite what Malcolm McLaren would have liked you to believe about his Sex Pistols, or his New York Dolls, whom he steered into a phony, late career Communist phase. It was more shock marketing than an actual political statement.

Second wave punk, despite being less inclined to smuggle interesting pop melodies, jazz, and a love of Doo-wop into its songs, had a whole hell of a lot to rebel against. Of course, everybody still hated The Eagles, but the onslaught of Reagan’s conservative policies, the oversold, underperforming promise of a suburban utopia (let alone an urban one), and the apolitical punk movement just before, left more to be desired.

The very aimless debauchery of previous punks inspired D.C.’s Straight Edge Movement, helmed by Minor Threat, whereas bands across the country needed only speed as an impetus for changing the game. Once showing its component parts of rock n’ roll and other beloved genres, punk had grown a thicker skin and put on a war helmet. When hardcore emerged with bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains, it somehow morphed what punk meant for generations. It had literally been hardened, and shined like a weapon. No longer existing for the sake of its own exploratory purposes, but as a vessel for discourse and agitation.

And it wasn’t just the punks who were getting political. The Reagan administration saw criticism from musicians obscure and mainstream both. Let us not forget that despite Reagan’s misuse of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.,” as his re-election campaign score, the song is in fact a damning reprimand of Reagan’s mistreatment of American veterans and his economic policies. Even His Purple Majesty Prince used music to criticize Reagan in cuts like, “Ronnie Talk to Russia” and “Sign o’ the Times.”

Sadly, none of this has happened in my lifetime. Though it may not be entirely true, I feel as though I have lived in a time period without its own protest music. I was too young to understand the relevance of ‘90s rap, let alone remember it as it happened. Only now, with detached hindsight can I see that it too was protest music, no matter how much the media tried to demonize it. I remember a smattering of artists, mostly smallish in name, condemn the Bush administration in the early 2000s…but I also remember that when a mainstream band tried to be critical, they got panned.

I will never forget how unexpected country sweethearts the Dixie Chicks nearly lost their fan base when in 2003, singer Natalie Maines spoke out against Bush at the Sheperd’s Bush Empire Theater in London:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

I didn’t start immediately loving every song the Dixie Chicks put out, but I was sure as hell proud that a mainstream country act would risk the bulk of their followers to speak their mind.

There has long been a lull in political music. The eight years of Obama’s presidency have left us complacent – and they shouldn’t have. There is always something to improve. Just as the second crop of punks made the genre their own; just as the second wave feminists worked to continue what the first wave had laid for them; just as the Black Lives Matter movement has taken the still blazing torch from the Civil Rights activists; it is the turn of the artists, the authors, and the songwriters, to match the task at hand with cultural inspiration. Fiona Apple knows this, as she’s already given us two anti-Trump tunes. There was of course her Christmas parody, “Trump’s Nuts Roasting on an Open Fire” released just around the holidays. But her new song, “Tiny Hands” is one to march to.

ONLY NOISE: All The Rage

High school. The quivering minutes before debate class. Perspiring and wobbly at the thought of blurting my tenth-grade arguments to a room full of…seniors.

There was only one way to properly cull my nerves before a debate: get furious.

While anger might make some frantic and unhinged, it has long been a friend of mine. Though I may never have realized its cathartic, downright productive abilities had it not been for debate class – and the horror of public speaking as a high school kid.

“Make me mad!” I would goad my classmate, Kim, moments before the great Bloom v. Luker debate of 2006, regarding the legitimacy of the Iraq War (guess which position I took).

“How? What should I say?” my sweet classmate would ask, utterly baffled.

“Talk about what a wonderful president George W. Bush is. Say Evangelical Christian stuff – like how homosexuals are going to burn in hell.”

Kim didn’t become any less confused, but I won that damn debate. Most of the damn debates, for that matter. But had it not been for that little boost of fury, I’m not so sure I would have.

Long has anger been a stigmatized emotion – more so for women than men, unfortunately. What is an incensed woman to do when she is told for decades that 12 Angry Men look like passionate, dutiful citizens, but one angry woman looks like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?

For the better part of my life, I’ve had an alchemic relationship with anger. What many saw as an unpleasant reaction, I viewed as a primal tool made for navigating the world differently. Getting amped up on adrenaline before debate class didn’t make me an irrational font of diatribe – it calmed me, gave me clarity, and the steadiness of a well-wielded scalpel. After discovering this effect, I naturally found a companion in angry music.

But what does “angry music” mean? I’m not exclusively implying topical music, like the Regan-era politico-punk of Dead Kennedys (though it is all the more relevant these days). What I find significantly more purgative is music that embodies wrath in sound alone – that weaves an aural tapestry of rage. The aggressive guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca’s The Ascension come to mind, as do the sparse yet sinister pieces from George Crumb’s Black Angels album. These records show emotion rather than speak of it, and while anger may not have been the impetus for behind them, it is how I appropriate the work.

Branca’s compositions in particular, especially when experienced live, create an all-consuming force field of sound that overwhelms in a similar way to being bathed in outrage. His incredibly loud, distorted and relentless cacophony of guitars verges on sounding stressful…but in a good way? And yet, after confronting that taxing sensation for a good hour: tranquility ensues.

For quite some time I figured that this off-brand “enlightened” reaction was solely an attribute of my own idiosyncrasies. Perhaps it was a fucked up feature of my being. I’m the person who considers The Exorcist to be one of the greatest movies of all time, after all. I was the kid who would watch tacky, History Channel documentaries on unsolved murders and serial killers after school. Maybe my relationship to anger and its musical spawn was messed up, even unhealthy.

But then, science rushed to my defense! In spring of 2015, Australia’s psychology school at the University of Queensland published a study entitled; “Extreme Metal Music and Anger Processing,” which countered the longstanding assumption that listening to “angry music” increases the listener’s level of anger. The researchers conducting the study found 39 “extreme music listeners aged 18-34,” who were “subjected to an anger induction, followed by random assignment to 10 min of listening to extreme music from their own playlist, or 10 min silence (control).”

The study found that “hostility, irritability, and stress increased during the anger induction, and decreased after the music or silence. Heart rate increased during the anger induction and was sustained (not increased) in the music condition, and decreased in the silence condition.”

The researchers concluded that “extreme” music does not in in fact stoke extreme behavior or delinquency in listeners. “Rather,” as their report claims, “it appeared to match their physiological arousal and result in an increase in positive emotions. Listening to extreme music may represent a healthy way of processing anger for these listeners.”

Finally, there was a demonstrable argument for my fascination with one of our most feared emotions. I no longer feel the need to explain to people why I am unlikely to bop around to the Go-Go’s when in a foul mood. It seems more fitting to thrash around to Merzbow, or Girl Band, or Throbbing Gristle.

I mention all of this, in part because I find it inherently interesting; my fascination with the link between music and mood isn’t going anywhere. But I also mention it in the hopes of arousing the reexamination and repurposing of a sentiment that is so prevalent today. Last week I spoke about how Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer feels that “Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” which would be a function of channeling our collective fury into an art form – something that humans are pretty good at doing.

So as we get closer to inauguration day, and to the nationwide marches in resistance of it, I hope we can remember that anger isn’t always such a bad thing. I hope we can remember that when focused and sharpened like a fine, diamond point, our anger can split the awaiting air, and get us to our destination sooner. Despite what those in power would like to convince us of: anger does not mean violence, just like angry music does not mean delinquency.

Don’t be afraid of your own rage.

ONLY NOISE: Hopefulness

The first words of the New Year can be a daunting thing to write. Even I wouldn’t be ok grumbling about the sham that is the Grammys or those horrible things Kim Burrell said right off the bat. I also have no interest in penning some twee, “New Year, New Me” laundry list of goals for 2017, and the music that somehow represents said goals. Entering 2017, I stand conflicted…ambivalent, above all else.

When we begin a new year, we don’t simply light a brand new fire. We also sit in the ashes of the annum past – we experience time more as an unbroken string of events than something parceled out neatly in weeks and months. On a personal level, 2016 was a pretty great year for me. I somehow procured a dream job. I met interesting people. I loved a lot. But looking outside of my own experience, the year was an utter shit storm.

I have spent the past few days trying to reconcile the rift between the fate I’ve enjoyed and the impending global doom that hovers above inauguration day. It ain’t easy. 2016 was the paradoxical year in which Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize for literature, but Donald Trump was elected president. It was the year that gave us Blackstar, and You Want It Darker, but killed David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, among several others. And while many may find solace in the grace of god, Pilates, or hard drugs, I turn to music as if it’s religion. I look to my records like I am reading tea leaves – and in them I find hope.

So while I have no enduring optimism for humanity, the future of music is a still-bright horizon to set my sight upon. And because of that, I have no catalog of musical new year’s resolutions – no goals etched into stone. But I do have a list of hopes.

I hope to be continually moved by musicians who endlessly reinvent the song, like Michael Gordon and a throng of producers did on Timber: Remixed, one of my favorite releases of 2016. It seems that Brian Eno may be ahead of the curve on this one, as he released his one-track album “Reflection” on New Year’s Day. The 54-minute song is whirring and pensive. It is ceaseless and ever expanding…pacifying and hypnotic in a way that only Eno can achieve. The fact that Eno eschews pause throughout seems both simple and groundbreaking simultaneously – an unrelenting wall of sound that inspires constant focus. The opposite of the high turnover, two-bit pop song.

It was a great way to start a scary new year. Fortunately, I am fearless regarding the state of music to come. Bonobo will release his new record, Migration, on January 13. The album’s leading single “Break Apart” (featuring Rhye) is a twinkling, somber lullaby merging R&B and ambient balladry. In February, New York’s coldest and cruelest month, we will at least be warmed by the experimental pop melodies of Xiu Xiu, who will drop their 11^th album, FORGET, on February 24. The blissfully melancholic band helmed by Jamie Stewart, teased the single “Wondering” in late 2016, and will embark on a nationwide tour just before springtime. That is certainly something to look forward to.

This year, I hope that in addition to pushing the boundaries sonically, artists will continue to use their work to further political and social discourse the way Solange did with A Seat At The Table, Anohni with HOPELESSNESS, and Common with Black America Again. Some believe that the imminent political nightmare we face will only acclimatize artists to sincere, topical music. Protest music. ‘You need pressure to make diamonds,’ etc. One such believer is Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer, who recently said in a press conference that, “Frightening political climates make for really good, real, authentic art.”

Palmer went on to liken our current situation to Weimar Germany and the cultural renaissance that flourished there in trying times:

“But being an optimist … there is this part of me – especially having studied Weimar Germany extensively – I’m like, ‘This is our moment.’ Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again. We’re all going to crawl down staircases into basements and speakeasies and make amazing satirically political art.

If the political climate keeps getting uglier, the art will have to answer. We will have to fight.”

It seems a tarnished silver lining, as I’d gladly trade a punk rock reboot for affordable healthcare, stable foreign policy, and a safe nation for minorities. But maybe Palmer is right – maybe she is just being the dutiful optimist she claims to be, and at times like these we could all use a little optimism.

I hope that this year, we lose fewer artists. Zero, if possible. But if we must bid them adieu, I hope that they get a chance to say their farewell with a magnum opus in the style of You Want It Darker and Blackstar, because I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye.

I hope that somehow, we do not lose any music venues this year. 2016 robbed us of Manhattan Inn, Cake Shop, Elvis Guesthouse, and Secret Project Robot (don’t even get me started on the Record Shop fatalities), and it’s sometimes too depressing to think about. I hope that in 2017 new, adventurous venues open their doors to us. Or, at the very least, I hope that no more close their doors for the sake of new Tex-Mex joints, or high-end clothing stores, or luxury condos.

I hope to be perpetually amazed by this crazy, nonsensical thing we call the music industry, potentially the only market in which physical media, like vinyl records, can outsell weightless digital downloads in the year 2016. Maybe it’s just a temporary spike sparked by a fad, but it feels like for once quality is winning over convenience. Even if consumers are mostly hanging LPs on their dorm room walls, I’m simply happy that wax is here to stay – for now.

More than anything I hope that in 2017 we persevere. Culturally, politically, personally, artistically, socially, and of course, musically.

ONLY NOISE: A Love Letter to Nils Frahm

I like many used to work an insufferable desk job. To most people, it sounded very interesting, but it was not. It was bland, canned stew disguised as top sirloin. To paraphrase a brilliant Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon: I grew tired of clicking things all day. My only refuge was that given the oppressively repetitive, brainless tasks I was to perform, I could listen to music for nine hours straight. So in a sense, without 40 plus hours of weekly tedium, it is quite possible I would have never heard the stunning music of German composer Nils Frahm.

It was Thursday, August 6^th, 2015. I was dutifully at my desk, clicking away, and occasionally writing down the names of any great bands I heard on BBC 6 Music, which I frequently listened to. There was much talk on the radio about The Proms…it was Promming season after all. I remembered The Proms, as just two years prior I had been in attendance. The Proms is an eight-week summer streak of daily classical music concerts in London. Founded in 1895 with a heavy emphasis on strict classical, The Proms of today are far more hip, featuring contemporary composers and even deviations into the world of ambient/electronic music. When I attended, the compositions of Phillip Glass were the focus of that night’s performance at The Royal Albert Hall.

Although it sounds fancy, The Proms is one of the most democratic music festivals out there – an appraisal the world of classical music desperately needs. Provided you don’t mind lining up for a little while, you can snag a standing position on the Hall’s balcony for only £5, and hear some of the most renowned orchestras in the world.

Unfortunately, I was no longer in London for the 2015 Proms. I was at my desk, remember? But listening to the BBC broadcast, I pretended I was there. I closed my eyes, and smelled the musty carpet of the balcony floor, and tasted the less-democratically priced gin and tonics my friend Alice and I acquired at the downstairs bar. And as I drank in this memory, I heard something so sparkling and beautiful – the creeping in of quiet piano keys, building and turning over with waves of synthesizer crashing atop them. This was, as I later learned, Nils Frahm’s Proms performance of “Says.”

I was dumbstruck and intrigued, and as it goes with intrigue: I wanted more. I devoured everything I could find that Frahm had recorded. Having never in my life been this passionate about instrumental music, I surprised myself in this devotion. Writers find solace in words, and yet I had finally found something that was all the better for their absence.

At first, I merely listened and followed up with watching countless videos of Frahm performing live, which absolutely did me in. Watching Frahm play is almost like watching an athlete. What other pianist works up a literal sweat during their set? He is dynamic, often hopping between a grand piano, Juno synthesizer, and a Fender Rhodes keyboard, all of which he specially mics and prepares for each individual set. In this 2013 video performance of “Toiletbrushes” and “More,” Frahm is mouthing some unheard gestures, looking a bit like he is in pain…like he is not playing the song, but birthing it. His tendons and muscles are visibly strained as he plays like it’s an extreme sport.

But the most characteristic detail is that he plays half the set with actual toilet brushes, used to bang on the exposed strings of the open piano. This reminds me of two things. 1) That the piano is after all, a percussive instrument, and exploring that aspect can open a world of possibility, and 2) that Frahm is aiding in the democratization of classical music and the piano itself. His approach is curious, inventive, and entirely unpretentious. Whether he is melding the worlds of classical and electronica, or discovering that an overlooked household object can be the perfect mallet for a grand piano, Frahm is truly one of a kind.

At this point in my discovery, I knew very little about Nils Frahm the man. But his compositions so moved me, that within a week of first hearing him I had purchased a keyboard and booked my first piano lesson.

Few things have stirred me to such an extent. When I finally got a gym membership it came from a place of motivation, but not of inspiration. Watching certain movies makes me want to write a screenplay – but I never actually do it. At the most, I will buy up every record an artist has released within a short amount of time…but picking up a new instrument at 25? I was possessed.

After a year and a half of closely following Frahm’s career (and SLOWLY learning the piano), it seems as though the composer’s raison d’être is to captivate listeners to the point of great emotional response. As he told The Quietus in 2013:

“I’m interested in how human beings react in certain situations, and what music does to people’s emotions. How we can change people’s attitudes with tones. After I’ve played a good concert, people leave the room happy. This is something we can give back to the world. When people feel down and like it’s all going to shit, at least we can give them some music and change their attitude so people don’t think it’s all shit.”

It is rare to find such idealism spouting from the mouth of a professional musician. But Frahm’s optimism seems wholeheartedly sincere, and it is reflected in his actions. In March of 2015, Frahm gave us Piano Day, which celebrates his beloved instrument by sharing its immensity with the world.

In a statement on his website the pianist poked fun at his own fixation with the ebony and ivory:

“Beloved planet,
Don´t think I am completely pathetic, but I am here to tell you about a new holiday.”

Frahm proceeded to explain that Piano Day existed to celebrate any and all things Piano, and encouraged participants to create anything in that realm of possibility.

“Please dress up that day (don’t play any guitar) and prepare some presents for us all and don´t forget to share them with us. Any piano related creative idea will be honored and seen by the lovely people around here and myself. Thanks for your participation and spread the word, in a couple years I want PIANO DAY to me more important than Xmas and more stressful than Thanksgiving.

Anyways, enjoy this little present of mine, it is a snippet for more to come.

Yours,
Nils Frahm (has lost it completely)”

Frahm’s “present” was a free release of his 2015 album Solo. I realize now, listening to his annual, hour-long Xmas mix, that Frahm often gives music freely to his fans. It is something he has always done and it has probably been a partial cause of his steadily growing fan base.

The mix is more wintery than Christmas-y, but cozy nonetheless. Snippets of recordings by Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Lee Hazelwood, and Marlene Dietrich seamlessly float in an out, enveloped in the warm crackle of a record playing…or is it a slow burning fire? Either way, it is toasty to the ears.

I’ve been sitting on this desire to praise Frahm in long form for quite some time now. “Should I wait for his birthday?” I ask myself. “What about a new release? How can I make this relevant without simply sounding like a wide-eyed, drooling fan-girl?” But it was the Xmas Mix that did it, because it seems to represent the simple, fervent mission Frahm has of sharing music, and that moves me as much as his playing.

It is evident that this is a man hopelessly in love with music, and devoted to sharing it, whose career reflects a monastic approach to “success.” In 2015 Frahm spoke to Resident Advisor of his booking process:

“I only want to play if someone invites me. Don’t ask for shows.” I don’t want to use the piano as a money-making machine. This is what I tell my whole team: when someone asks, be nice, but don’t try to push people with my stuff.”

He continues by telling aspiring musicians that they shouldn’t focus on getting successful; they should stay at home, get really good at what they do, and wait for someone to notice their hard work.

In his typical, philosophical manner of speaking, he wrapped up his Quietus interview by saying:

“The only thing we can try is changing people’s attitude, but not with words. I don’t want to be Bob Dylan, I can’t express it through words but I can express it through emotional experiences. All the answers you need to know you have inside yourself and all you can do is inspire these sorts of answers, perhaps by conversation or by music or by looking at a piece of art. I only have one lifetime to do it and it feels way too short!”

ONLY NOISE: Cover to Cover

“What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process.” In her latest memoir M Train, Patti Smith speaks of W.G. Sebald’s After Nature with bibliophilic hunger. She is seeking inspiration and therefore turns to a favorite work. Smith continues:

“I read and feel the same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.”

As I read her book with a similar hunger, I realize that I’ve felt this way before, in the precise way she has described it – when I listen to the music I love. “The desire to possess” what has been written, played, and sung. This desire is so strong that it ventures upon wish fulfillment; I often feel as though I am taking communion with the music…eating it, so to speak. For a split second, I near convince myself that I have written it. That it is mine.

I often wonder if this is a personal quirk (a hallucination) or if others experience the same phenomenon. I wonder if it is perhaps the subconscious impetus to cover songs, even. What if instead of mere flattery, or tribute, possession also informed Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” or Jimi Hendrix’s take on “All Along the Watchtower?” They certainly made both songs their own. I do not mean a jealous possession, necessarily, but an attempt to be “one with” the song, at the risk of sounding faux-metaphysical.

Cover songs as a genre get a bad rep, it seems. Covers = karaoke, or worse, Covers = Cover Bands. It was after all a throng of home-recorded cover songs that launched Justin Bieber’s career. But cover songs lead a double life. In their pop/rock identity, it is often considered a lowbrow, unoriginal form – sometimes even an attempt at latching onto the search engine optimization of the artists being covered. But in a cover song’s blues/folk/country life it goes by another name: a traditional. Throughout countless genres that could be filed under the umbrella of “folk” or “roots” music, artists recorded their own versions of songs passed down by performers before them.

Much like the poems and fables of oral history, it was common for the original authors of traditional songs to remain unknown. Take for instance the trad number “Goodnight, Irene,” which was first recorded by Lead Belly in 1933, and by many others thereafter. But the original songwriter has been obscured from music history. There are allusions to the song dating back to 1892, but no specifics on who penned the version Lead Belly recorded.

Lead Belly claimed to have learned the song from his uncles in 1908, who presumably heard it elsewhere. “Goodnight, Irene” was subsequently covered by The Weavers (1950), Frank Sinatra (1950, one month after The Weavers’ version), Ernest Tubb & Red Foley (1950 again), Jimmy Reed (1962) and Tom Waits (2006) to name but a few.

The reason so many artists (I only listed a couple) covered “Goodnight, Irene” in 1950 was because that was the way of the music biz back then. If someone had a hit record – like The Weavers, who went to #1 on the Billboard Best Seller chart – it was in the best interest of other musicians to cash in on the trend while it was hot by recording their version of the single. Not as common today of course, but in a time when session musicians were rarely credited and hits were penned by paid teams instead of performers, it made sense.

The history of traditional folk songs or “standards” is a fascinating one because it is like a musical game of telephone. The songs’ arrangement and lyrics change with the times, the performer, and the context. And that same model of change can be applied to both the artist’s motive for covering certain music, and the listener’s reaction to it.

For years I quickly dismissed cover songs, finding them boring at best and unbearable at worst. But in my recent quest to become more open-minded, I have revisited many covers…and become a bit obsessed in the process. The first cover song to move me was The Slits’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” which in itself is a pop traditional as it has been covered by everyone from Marvin Gaye, to Creedence Clearwater Revival, to The Miracles. Gaye’s version is the most widely recognized, however, making The Slits’ rendition all the more fascinating. Their 1979 stab at the Motown classic was what taught me that a cover song could be more than just a karaoke version of something. It can become a completely new medium of expression when the artist tears the original apart and stitches the pieces into a new form. The Slits did this so effectively, to the point that theirs and Gaye’s versions are incomparable.

The Stranglers achieved a similar result by reconfiguring the Dionne Warwick classic “Walk On By” in 1978, morphing the lounge-y original into a six-minute swirl of organ-infused punk. Another master of pop modification was the one-and-only Nina Simone, who somehow took the already perfect “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen and managed to make it…perfecter. I remember a friend playing this cut for me three and a half years ago, and I haven’t gone so much as a week without putting it on since. Nina’s phrasing can make Dylan’s seem predictable, and she dances through Cohen’s poetry in a way that astonishes me to this day, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. I feel that her version is, dare I say, better than the original, though I love both dearly.

But of course, not all covers exist for the purpose of possession. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one: that a cover is an opportunity to pay tribute, not ironically, but with reverence. Of course, even artists performing the best reverent covers make the songs their own. Take Smog’s version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Beautiful Child,” which is such a gorgeous recording that I was heartbroken to learn it was a cover, and disappointed upon hearing the original. Ditto Bill Callahan’s more recent take on Kath Bloom’s “The Breeze/My Baby Cries.” Bloom’s take isn’t short on oddball, winsome charm, but Callahan brings a barge full of sorrow, which always wins in my book.

In similar form, Robert Wyatt somehow out-Costello’d Elvis Costello when he covered “Shipbuilding” in 1982, which reaches another dimension of despair with Wyatt’s wavering vocal performance. Another favorite is Morrissey’s interpretation of “Redondo Beach,” an oddly bouncy rendition by the King of Sad.

Though I once turned my nose up at cover songs, I seem to fanatically collect them now. I often dream up cover song commissions that will likely never come to fruition: Cat Power singing Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time” or King Krule doing “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes. I’d pay them to do it myself if I could damn well afford to. Until then, let the covers of others stoke your desire to possess.

ONLY NOISE: Sex Music

Some might say that sex without love is like music without soul…but what is sex without music?

It seems natural enough that someone who obsesses about aural pleasure and its many applications on the daily, would also wonder which sounds best suit oral pleasu– you get the idea. But all puns aside: if I am to write about the personal, idiosyncratic links we have with specific music, how can I respectfully gloss over musica sexus? Which is fake Latin for “sex music.”

It is a worthy genre, and not only for those of us who live our lives thinking up Top 10 lists for every possible occasion. I’ve heard many say that they don’t like to have sex to music; perhaps they don’t think of it, find it distracting, or can’t take the DJing pressure in such a moment. Others like my good friend Fletcher* say it “feels cheesy” and that it was something he “did more in high school.”

And I hear that. High school was when you were still figuring out how to navigate the difficult, terrifying and oft-taboo world of sex. You had little to no prior experience, and most likely based your moves off of those you saw in movies. So you stood outside your love’s window, goliath boom box foisted above your head blaring “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. It worked so well for John Cusack in Say Anything! Or perhaps you put on “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers after watching Ghost. Maybe you even got out some clay and a pottery wheel. You didn’t know any better!

At the unromantic end of the spectrum, sex music was just practical back then. You needed something to mask the coital cacophony you and Kateigh were making from your unsuspecting mother down the hall. Sadly few New Yorkers have escaped this sound barrier reality, as playing music while boning is a frequent necessity when living with roommates. It doesn’t actually work though.

But I refuse to accept that shagging to a soundtrack is only for teens and broke city-dwellers. Despite how “cheesy” and juvenile some might find it, I’m always down for some rock n’ roll in the hay…provided it’s awesome.

The foreplaylists (sorry!) that have intrigued me the most came when I least expected them to. A personal favorite was when a nerdy, socially inept and tame lover put on “Girl” by Suicide right before he pounced on me. The sounds of “ding!” abounded in my head as his points accrued for a) liking Suicide and b) knowing this particular song would light my fire. It’s not the kind of ditty you would think to diddle to immediately, given its eerie, ominous tenor and bouts of murderous screaming – one might wait at least until the second Tinder date – but I loved it. That was probably the only good thing he did in the relationship, and I commend him for it.

Another beau had the genius idea to screw while the entirety of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine played in the background. A song is great, sure, but if you can find an entire record to listen to instead, you’re golden. An LP ensures adequate length and a consistent atmosphere. Loveless is perfect because it is gritty and romantic all at once, and you can’t understand a damn word anyone is singing, which is even better (you’ll find out why later).

Another record I have a fond, sensual affection for is Television’s Marquee Moon, especially the title track itself. I can’t point out any specific factors as to why other than the back catalogue of my personal spank bank, but that’s good enough for me. All of these songs, paired with their role in my sex life have so swayed me behaviorally, that when I hear them I get turned on. Which is kind of kickass.

Though despite these triumphs, partners have not always been victorious in the erotic disc jockey department. The same man who was wise enough to put on “Girl” later selected a track to lesser applause. It was 1991’s “Bitch Betta Have My Money” by rapper AMG. A song bursting with such poetic lyrics as “there ain’t nothin’ like black pussy on my dick” and “you can suck the dickity-dick but I’m gonna charge you a nut.” I bear no issue with this cut musically, but no one ever got a woman into bed by telling her to “suck the dickity-dick.” Sorry, AMG. You can kiss my assity-ass.

Another snafu occurred when the most loathsome person I ever dated put his iTunes on shuffle pre-coitus. There we were, rolling about on his poly-blend sheets, when Tegan and Sara’s “Back In Your Head” boomed out of his speakers. I jerked away from him, so very confused by his Tegan and Sara fandom, and thoroughly enjoying how mortified he was. He scrambled to his desktop and switched his “uncool guy” music to his “cool guy” music, which was “Uncontrollable Urge” by Devo.

I learned many things that day, namely that denying your love of Tegan and Sara does not make you manlier. But I also learned that no moment hinges more upon mood than the moment before sex. One should be ever so careful to ensure the music is not on shuffle.

And what about sex for a vinyl lover, such as myself? If you think putting a condom on is “awkward,” try committing coitus interruptus when the first half of Daydream Nation finishes up, or worse, skips. Out of bed, to the turntable to flip sides or frantically dig through records in search of something else. Who knew high fidelity audio could be such a cock block?

Despite certain studies on the matter of sex music, some of which claim that classical tunes are the best thing to get freaky to, what I’ve learned is that one can’t rationally explain why some songs work and others don’t. It’s like the mystery of attraction and fetishes; there isn’t always a 1+2=3 answer. “Love songs” are rarely what get me in the mood. Songs about sex are often laughable and cringe worthy when you’re about to actually have sex. And I’m sure some people would be horrified if I scored their sexcapades with what I prefer. Nick Cave anyone? The Cramps? Or what about “Cold Discovery” by Smog (the Peel Session please!)? Not for everyone I’m sure.

I was finally able to get an answer from Fletcher about what he used to put on for “a romp sesh” in high school:

“’A Punch Up At a Wedding by Radiohead’ was my favorite,” he admitted.

I give it a listen for the first time in years and realize that this song will never be the same for me again. I cannot unlearn what I have been told. Just as my own intimate history augments the songs I love, so now has his. Images form, and I don’t necessarily want them to.

I guess that you can have sex without music. But I am now near convinced you cannot have music without sex.

*Name changed for privacy.

ONLY NOISE: Punk Rock, Patrimony, & Pyrotechnics

Pardon me for mumbling. I simply haven’t released my *facepalm.*

In the past few months I’ve been following allegations that multimillionaire Joe Corré – spawn of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and late Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren – would set fire to roughly $6,000,000 worth of punk memorabilia. That’s right. Six. Million. Dollars worth. Or five million pounds worth, if you’re across the pond.

Corré’s pyro-maniacal threat was sparked in response to Punk London, an admittedly cheesy, year-long cultural celebration of punk’s history supported by the likes of former London mayor Boris Johnson, The Heritage Lottery Fund, and other emblems of – as Corré stated in an interview – “the establishment.” Whatever that means. (Does it mean white, multimillionaire males, perhaps?)

I wasn’t sure if Corré, who is also the founder of exorbitant lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, would follow through with the burning. It was doubtless a publicity stunt, but would the match be struck? Apparently so. While we were still trippin’ on tryptophan this past Saturday, Corré, who hired a PR firm promote the event, took to the River Thames with Westwood in tow and burned the artifacts on a boat; complete with flaming effigies of David Cameron, Theresa May, etc. Flames engulfed everything from rare Sex Pistols recordings, punk-era merchandise, and clothing that belonged to Corré’s famous parents. The date, November 26^th, marked the 40^th anniversary of the Sex Pistols single “Anarchy in the UK,” which is super hilarious because I imagine Corré must have had to get a permit to set fire to things on a boat in the fucking Thames river. Or maybe he just paid the relatively small fine of 5,000 pounds to get out of trouble. That must be chump-change for a man with millions of pounds to actually burn.

Corré’s actions and statements are all so conflicting, hypocritical and ironic, it is difficult to know where to begin untangling such a knot; almost as difficult as figuring out how to get the hell out of an Agent Provocateur “playsuit.”

Where do I begin?

The first problem with Corré’s “thesis” is one of timeliness. To say, as he told The Guardian, that “the establishment” has “privatised, packaged and castrated” punk, and that the movement has become a “McDonald’s brand … owned by the state, establishment and corporations,” is wildly funny to me. Because: no shit. Is it really news to anyone over the age of 12 that punk has been commodified like every other branch of subculture that has ever existed? Where was Corré with his torch in 1988 when the first Hot Topic was opened? Where was he in 1992, when mum Vivienne Westwood accepted her Damehood from The Queen of England, or again in 2006 when she accepted another such honor from the Prince of Wales? Corré has stated that one of his issues with the Punk London affair was its affiliation with the Queen, but I don’t see him setting fire to his mom’s $100 t-shirts over her affiliation.

Another problem is Corré’s warped notion that punk was ever anything philosophically aspirational to begin with. Politico-punk didn’t surface until long after punk was officially declared dead, long after the nihilistic first wave in the ‘70s petered out, which had nothing to do with providing answers for lost youth. And as someone who believed in the “ethos of punk” so much that I had an entire cigarette burned into my left wrist because I found it “symbolic” – that is still hard for me to say a decade later.

Punk is music, sprung from boredom and disenchantment with a previous era. It is a reaction, a notch in history’s belt that is perpetually replaced by the next one. Jerry Lee Lewis. Dylan. The Stooges. Wu-Tang Clan. Nirvana. They all disrupted a previous form, but no one ever wrote a manifesto. To think that punk ever existed in a vacuum safe from historical cause-and-effect is beyond naïve.

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LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 26: Joe Corre, the son of Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols creator Malcolm McLaren (not in picture) burns his entire £5 million punk collection on November 26, 2016 in London, England. Joe Corre burnt the rare punk memorabilia in protest saying punk has no solutions for today's youth and is 'conning the young'. (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images) — *Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images*

The fact that Corré chose the 40^th birthday of “Anarchy in the UK,” is doubly hilarious because he seems to forget that the Sex Pistols were a marketing tool…an entirely fabricated band – fabricated, by his dad.

Corré’s remark that punk is now a “McDonald’s brand” is undercut by the fact that the Sex Pistols were, from day one, a McLaren brand. The late manager and former owner of SEX – the clothing store that first began co-opting punk culture – was entirely divisive when putting together Rotten, Vicious, and co. In Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s famed punk oral history Please Kill Me, McLaren explains his motives for the Pistols:

“Richard Hell was a definite, hundred percent inspiration, and, in fact, I remember telling the Sex Pistols, ‘Write a song like ‘Blank Generation,’ but write your own bloody version,’ and their own version was ‘Pretty Vacant.’”

“I just thought Richard Hell was incredible. Again, I was sold another fashion victim’s idea.” “He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn T-shirt. I don’t think there was a safety pin there, though there may have been, but it was certainly a torn and ripped T-shirt. And this look, this image of this guy, this spiky hair, everything about it – there was no question that I’d take it back to London. By being inspired by it, I was going to imitate and transform it into something more English.”

Perhaps hypocrisy is all Corré knows, given the conflicted business legacies of his parents, both of whom have profited heavily on punk. Vivienne Westwood’s fashion empire is wholly at odds with her “activism.” I noticed this especially when I interned at her Battersea studio in the summer of 2013, straight out of college.

Interning is regrettably unavoidable in the fashion industry, and companies often depend on the free labor they exploit. This is certainly the case at Vivienne Westwood Gold Label, where unpaid interns trace and draft patterns, cut fabric, sew samples, run errands, create technical sketches, and perform numerous other invaluable jobs. I once made a tulle skirt as tall as me with something like 30 meters of fabric. It took about two weeks. The studio was littered with plastic buttons, which we sometimes had to make, emblazoned with slogans like “Climate Revolution” and “Global Warming;” the unsustainable material of the buttons themselves completely betraying such phrases.

I wasn’t the only person to notice the hypocrisy of a high-end fashion brand hiding behind faux ethics. In 2013 a sustainable fashion publication called Eluxe Magazine, which claimed after one of Westwood’s fashion shows that:

“The sheer number of outfits (there were literally dozens of looks) and obviously petroleum-based materials shown on the runway seem to have already violated both her ‘cut out plastic whenever possible’ and ‘quality vs quantity’ points, proving that the Vivienne Westwood label is not eco-friendly.”

It has also been mentioned that despite Westwood constantly urging consumers to “buy less,” her company produces nine full fashion collections per year. The hypocrisy is rife.

But I digress. More infuriating than Corré’s blatant hypocrisy is his cynicism. His arrogance. His flagrant assholery.

To torch five million pounds worth of anything, even, say, toilet brushes, is an insult to all of those who cannot afford such pointless, teenage acts of “rebellion.” Corré’s actions reflect his superior economic status. It reminds me of one of my favorite fashion history facts:

Prior to the French Revolution, it was en vogue amongst high court and the aristocracy to powder one’s skin and hair to a shade of ghost white. We’ve all seen the rococo paintings, but do you know what they used as powder?

Flour. They used food, while hoards of peasants were starving to death. But what did Marie Antoinette care? She had plenty of cake. And Corré has plenty of money.

And he didn’t torch toilet brushes. He set fire to cultural artifacts – to patrimony. I feel like there was a group of people in the 1940s who used to burn items of artistic heritage, like, maybe books? I just can’t remember what they were called…

Outside of all of these issues, the saddest thing to me about Corré’s bonfire is he could have done something constructive with his inherited, entirely un-earned wealth. There have been numerous suggestions, including the request that he sell the lot and donate the proceeds to charity, to which Corré replied that “the job of the state is now taken up by the charity sector. We have charities where people are earning £250,000 a year to sit on the board, these things are becoming corporations in their own right.” What a convenient response.

My personal suggestion to the pompous Corré, the punk heir and lord of overpriced panties, would have been to donate the materials to a non-profit, anti-capitalist organization such as The Archive of Contemporary Music (ARC) in Tribeca. The ARC’s sole purpose is to preserve our audible culture, and all media related to it, for the sake of posterity and education. Highbrow, lowbrow – it is all worth preserving regardless, because its very existence teaches us about ourselves as creative beings.

But as destruction is the opposite of creation, perhaps Corré can’t wrap his head around that.

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ONLY NOISE: Memento Mori – Leonard Cohen

No one really wants to be a curmudgeon all of the time – not even me. If Only Noise leans more towards the darkness one week, I strive to be more upbeat in subject matter the following week. But in addition to the numerous tragedies that befell us last week, including the election, the death of Leon Russell and the election, we also lost one of the greatest poets of all time, Leonard Cohen. His name has now been added to a long list of the year’s casualties. The enormity of the musicians 2016 has robbed us of – David Bowie, Prince, Alan Vega – is seemingly colossal, as if the stars were perfectly aligned for the fall of giants. I fearfully wonder who will make it through the year, and dare not speak a word for fear of cursing anyone.

When David Bowie passed in January, I was distraught with the rest of the world. Having just pitched an article to The Guardian the night before his death investigating what Blackstar could teach contemporary musicians about longevity, I felt cosmically complicit in his death after the fact. Imagine the spook I felt waking to “RIP David Bowie” tweets the following morning. That night I sat at my desk, staring straight ahead at the wall, until my phone buzzed, and I boarded a cab to Sunset Park. I entered a sweet-smelling, steamy apartment that felt like it was in another city – in a house perhaps, with books and scraps of paper everywhere. The man who lived there offered me seltzer water and Oreos. A framed Leonard Cohen poster hung to the right of his bed.

I could barely express the overwhelming sadness I felt from the loss of Bowie that night. My companion was less distressed, but had witnessed such mourning all day long as his work was a scant block from Bowie’s SoHo home. “It is sad of course, but honestly, I’ll be more upset when Leonard Cohen goes,” he said gravely.

Ten months after we lost The Thin White Duke, I found myself slowly ascending the escalator of a theater in Times Square, meeting the very man with the Sunset Park apartment for post-election, action movie distraction. Tweets suddenly flooded my phone: “RIP Leonard Cohen,” “Now Leonard Cohen! Fuck this year!” and the like. I was already wobbly from the political climate, but I nearly fell off the goddamn escalator at the sight of such news.

It is only now I am learning that Cohen himself suffered a fall the night he passed, which directly contributed to his death. As the press release from his manager said, Cohen’s death was, “sudden, unexpected and peaceful,” which contradicts the songwriter’s claim in an October interview with The New Yorker that he was “ready to die.”

When Cohen’s parting masterpiece You Want it Darker came out last month, I thought of another pitch idea – one that never made it into an email but that I’d mentioned to friends and family. It went something like: “Is You Want it Darker Leonard Cohen’s Blackstar,” insinuating that the aged poet, like Bowie, knew his fate before we did, and was saying goodbye in the best way he could. Given this pattern, I am now convinced that I am slowly killing my favorite musicians by way of my unsuccessful pitches, which is depressing on numerous levels.

We have lost a songwriter, yes – a poet, of course. But we have also lost an invaluable translator of human emotion, in all its unperceivable complexities. When I came to his music in high school, his abstract yet exacting lyrics left me stupefied. I believe that his words truly altered my approach to writing, and while I am not and never will be anywhere near the caliber of a writer he was, I know I am all the better for being exposed to him.

And isn’t that the point of pop music? Of any kind of music, or art? To better know ourselves, in ways we couldn’t imagine were possible. Cohen’s art, his words particularly, cut so sharply to the core of human experience that you can’t really feel the incision until after his knife is removed. It is a clean cut – the effect of a specter whose impression lasts far longer than its presence in the room. He was a subtle legend. A quiet titan.

As with most musicians who have altered my perception of what makes great art, there is typically one or a few people that I directly associate with the artist. With Leonard Cohen, it is no different. One friend who is much older than I am bears an eerie resemblance to a young Cohen. He was the person who played me his music, despite the fact that a copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen had been nestled in my dad’s record collection my entire life. So when I heard “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” for the first time, and it effectively floored my soul, that album was waiting for me right at home.

I called my old friend as soon as I could upon hearing of Cohen’s death, and asked him what the poet had meant to him. This friend, who often speaks in florid non-sequiturs, said that to him Cohen seemed like “the standard for effortless grace…you can listen to him over and over and it just keeps opening up. He really is a sort of sacred ground that’s vast, elusive, and hard to talk about.”

It is perhaps even harder to speak of for my friend, who was sired into the lugubrious cult of Cohen by his mother in the ‘70s. Not long after, his mother died when he was only 12, and I sometimes wonder if Leonard Cohen is a signifier for her in the same way that Bowie is for my mother. Memory cuts deep and clean just like a perfect song.

Leonard Cohen, though enormously different than David Bowie, was similar in the sense that he never tarnished. In his decades of writing and recording, he remained at his own golden standard, one that few others have touched. Despite his grave, death-welcoming remark to The New Yorker last month, he adjusted his statement in a later press conference, smirking and clutching a cane with his right hand:

“I said I was ‘ready to die’ recently, and I think I was exaggerating. One is given to self-dramatization from time to time. I intend to live forever.”

Regardless of Cohen’s dry humor as he spoke those words, and the uproarious laughter that met them, there is a peaceful truth within them. Yes, it is eerie that Cohen died not long after redacting his pact with death, but I think he knew exactly what he was saying. And who’s to say that he hasn’t lived forever already?

Perhaps true immortality lies in the ability to look death in the face and acquiesce to its beckoning, imparting one last gift to the world as you leave it.

ONLY NOISE: The Day the Country Died

“Do not despair. You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to move to Canada. You may feel out of place in the United States today. You may feel like you’re surrounded by fundamentalist-church-going, gun-hugging, gay-bashing, anti-choice Bush voters. But you’re not.”

This was a portion of the cover Seattle’s culture rag The Stranger ran in November 2004 when George W. Bush was reelected. I remember it well. I remember it well, in part, because that cover page has been framed and hung on the wall of my sister’s house since. The remainder of the text encourages Seattleites by reminding them “Kerry got 61% of the urban vote…got 80% of the vote in Seattle,” essentially praising the power of the “urban archipelago,” which some might consider a flaccid pat on its own back. A warm glass of milk while the world burned.

I remember this well because leading up to that day I had followed my dad to every political event we could find. To a Howard Dean rally in the months before Kerry’s nomination, to speeches by Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and the venerable Amy Goodman. I remember it well because it was the period of time I was more involved in and educated about politics than I have ever been. All hope was on Dennis Kucinich in our household, who seems now like an early, less successful incarnation of Bernie Sanders. I remember it well because in the years leading up to Bush’s reelection, politics had hit a lot closer to home.

We lived in a small town. My Dad owned a mercantile in an even smaller town – one of 97 people, to be exact. One of those people was Justin Hebert, an exuberant teenage boy with wheat colored hair and a wily smile. He used to sweep the floors of my dad’s shop as an after school gig, and I, from a young age, had a massive crush him. Justin, like so many kids in my hometown, came from meager economic resources and couldn’t dream of being able to afford college tuition, despite his enormous desire to attend university. So, he joined the army, which plied him with the lure of travel and $50,000 towards college upon discharge.

As his obituary reported in 2003, “his flight to basic training was the first time he was ever in an airplane.” Justin was 20. He was the 250^th American to die in the Iraq War, and the 52^nd to perish after Bush so hubristically declared the war was over in May of that year. You remember that “Mission Accomplished” banner, don’t you?

I do. Like it was yesterday. Because that was my induction into politics. That banner searing into my brain as I heard the news of Justin’s death. That was the turning point for me. I carried the newspaper clipping of Justin’s obituary in a little hardback book that listed the Amendments to school every day, and would use it as ammo when scolded for not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. All I wanted to talk about was politics from then on, an unpopular pastime for a middle schooler. In eighth grade I wrote a paper (much to the pride of my father and chagrin of my teachers) entitled “The Day the Country Died” as a simultaneous nod to the Bush administration and a Subhumans record by the same name.

The paper is now lost, likely in a dusty box in my dad’s garage somewhere. It was written by a 13-year-old, and is probably not very good. But in the fallout of what has transpired with this week’s election – and I know that was a lengthy preamble – I am reminded of that seventh-grade sentiment. That burning, sickening and powerless feeling. This is perhaps the first time in my life I have felt history seemingly repeat itself…like I am slumped in a parallel universe across from my thirteen-year-old self, asking with a quivering voice how this could possibly happen again.

I am no political analyst. I am no sociologist. I am not even a political journalist. However, it would feel irresponsible and delusional to write about anything else today. So I will write about it, with as much knowledge, honor and honesty as I can offer.

In my years of being scorned for wanting to discuss politics, the past several months have brought me so much joy, because, for the first time in so long, people were willing to talk again. They wanted to shout, even. To see folks my age so thrilled to support the Bernie Sanders campaign moved me in a way I’d never felt before, and I will continue to revere that memory. But after Bernie lost the DNC nomination to Hillary Clinton, I saw a kind of regression within the allegedly “progressive” peers all around me.

I cannot tell you the number of people I met, who so arrogantly snorted that they weren’t voting at all. These were educated, middle class, privileged people, such as myself. One woman, whom I met at a bar in Brooklyn, haughtily blurted that her “morals were worth more than stooping to the farce this election has become.” This woman was an educator (guess what programs consistently get cut first by conservative administrations?). She then went on to describe the magical utopia that is Burning Man.

One thing I have consistently encountered lately is this misdirected idea of how things actually work. You can go to Burning Man all you want if you can afford it, but you still live here. In reality. In the U.S. of A. And as of this election, you now live under the Trump administration. And it’s important to say that, no matter how difficult it is to hear. Because burying our heads, drinking ourselves numb, doing molly, and thinking this is only going to be a four-year thing, is the last thing we want to do right now. We must remember that whatever force was summoned to try to stop Trump from winning this election, needs to be amplified exponentially to make sure it never happens again.

Of the 44 pre-Trump leaders this nation has elected, less than 12 have been one-term presidents. The model tells us that incumbents almost always win reelection. So I would like to encourage all of us, four years in advance, to remember that, and to never have the thought “there’s no way that could happen!” again. Because it can happen. It just did.

It is a harsh reality we face today, tomorrow, and beyond. But I will not leave you on this note. If you’ve been kind enough to read this far, you’re due a bit of optimism. Optimism is not the atheist’s game. Many of you may believe in God, in the afterlife, in reincarnation. I have never believed in reincarnation on a metaphysical level. But I do believe in reincarnation on a historical level. The movements left unfinished from one era recur in the future, hopefully, closer to achieving their original goal with each wave, each rebirth.

The Suffragettes (and I am HEAVILY paraphrasing) carved a path for feminists in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and so they did the same for the contemporary feminist movement, which, let us not forget, took part in getting the first near-win for a female presidential candidate ever. From the abolition of slavery to the Civil Rights struggle, to the Black Lives Matter movement – it is a continuum that is unfortunate but necessary to keep improving the quality of human life in this country, especially when those in control consistently deny that there is a problem to begin with. So while I say that today is “The Day the Country Died,” please know I believe in its eventual rebirth.

In addition to all of the things I am not, I’m no historian. But if I had to propose a historical theory of progress, it would be this:

Progress seems to me like a hamster ball, moving along a horizontal axis. We humans are the hamster, the ball itself being micro-history: the events that occur within a generation’s lifetime. The horizontal axis being macro-history, meaning all the events that have ever happened and will happen in this big clusterfuck we call human history.

So. I envision that as the hamster fervently turns its ball, producing a dizzying amount of rotations, it cannot tell that it is simultaneously moving forward along the horizontal axis. It feels only the wild revolutions, the ups and downs, the unrelenting cycle of positive acceleration and negative regression in our shared history. But in fact, in tiny, infinitesimal increments, it moves forward along that horizontal line. It cannot go backward.

So please. Wither not. Do not let your education, your influence or your rights fall prey to your own cynicism.

Let’s push things forward.

ONLY NOISE: Music For Airports

When Brian Eno first got the idea to make Ambient 1/Music For Airports, he was indeed within such a place: the Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany, to be exact. His goal was to make music to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular” according to the record’s liner notes. This music would be “as ignorable as it is interesting,” ultimately neutralizing the chaotic and tense microcosm that is an airline terminal, or as I like to call it, hell on earth.

The record itself is many things: soothing, transcendent, gorgeous, subtle…adjectives which today, almost 40 years after the release of Music For Airports, are light-years from capturing the foul, soul-sucking, hyper-capitalistic essence of even the “nicest” plane parking lots.

Eno, completely aware of the hectic, complex world of the airport, wanted to make music that addressed the specific needs of such a space, and he didn’t mince words when explaining those needs. In an interview from a few decades ago, he describes his inspiration in greater depth.

“It came from a specific experience. I was in a beautiful airport…Cologne Airport, which is a very beautiful building. Early one Sunday morning, the light was beautiful; everything was beautiful, except they were playing awful music. And I thought, ‘there’s something completely wrong that people don’t think about the music that goes into situations like this.’ You know, they spend hundreds of millions of pounds on the architecture, on everything, except the music. The music comes down to someone bringing in a tape of their favorite songs this week and sticking them in and the whole airport is filled with this sound. So, I thought it’d be interesting to actually start writing music for public spaces like that.”

While I personally feel that Eno achieved the perfect score to flight on Music For Airports, I can’t say that such an approach has been applied to actual airports. While we may no longer endure the cheesy corporate muzak or “elevator music” of the 80s and 90s (now reserved exclusively for healthcare company hold music), the sonic output of terminals remains troubling in a whole new way. Take for instance my experience at Chicago O’Hare International Airport a few weeks ago, whereupon sitting on the toilet in the Gate B bathroom I heard not Enya or Brian Eno, but “Stars of Track and Field” by Belle and Sebastian.

Come again?

This set off another memory. I was on a Delta flight to Brazil, and, being bored with the pre-takeoff formalities, decided to scroll through the in-flight music they offered. To my surprise, they not only had The Queen is Dead by The Smiths, but also Post Pop Depression, Iggy Pop’s latest record, as well as other albums by what marketing experts would deem “indies.”

Though I shouldn’t have been, I must admit I was surprised. Air travel is the last bastion (aside from perhaps hotel services and high-end dining) of the old-fashioned, uniformed business structure; the security, composure of the flight attendants, the caste system set in place by the boarding/seating matrix…the whole ambiance makes it a bit strange that they would supply passengers with Iggy Pop singing about Gardenia’s “hourglass ass.” Even though I found it both convenient and pleasurable that such tunes were available, I was also disturbed by it. Isn’t it slightly insulting to stick me in seat 23 B back by the shitter, make me pay for stale pretzels, and then pretend that you, Delta Airlines, knows about Iggy Pop?

But contrary to Eno’s airport in the ‘70s, it must be said that airlines today overthink about what is playing aboard. It isn’t breaking news that airports, which are basically glorified, overpriced shopping malls, picked up on the same marketing strategies that make us feel cool when we buy a certain brand of soap over another. The reason Delta Airlines has the new Iggy Pop record is the same reason American Airlines replaced schmaltzy muzak with “indie rock” to score-boarding and landing periods.

It’s the exact principle laid out in Commodify Your Dissent, a collection of essays from The Baffler addressing how the initial emblems of counterculture rebellion (i.e. rock music, leather jackets, tofu) have now become the tools of advertisers, CEOs, and the like. In a brilliant essay by Dave Mulcahey entitled “Leadership and You,” the author quotes Andrew Susman’s book Advertising Age:

“The inter-relationship of advertising and programming increase because customer tastes and preferences are known in advance. Programming and advertising become interchangeable, as consumers are living inside a perpetual marketing event.”

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Perhaps Mr. Eno could resurface to make us a new beautiful record entitled: Music For Living Inside A Perpetual Marketing Event. If he’s too busy, here are a couple suggestions. When you consider what might be appropriate music for airports or airplanes, you must consider a few factors.

Flying sucks.

Traversing the cattle parade of the airport, from checking in, to schlepping through TSA, to finally sitting in your tiny, miserable seat: all of it is an absolute nightmare. No one has described this form of middle-class torture better than professional rant machine Henry Rollins. In “Airport Hell,” a cut off his 1998 “spoken word” record Think Tank, Rollins goes into gruesomely accurate detail about the avoidable blunders people make while traveling.

“I think it’s the mentality of lines,” barks Rollins. “Standing in lines, peoples’ IQs plummet…No one can figure out how to sit down in 13A. They walk in the aisle, they’re holding their little boarding stub like it’s delicate information and they look hopelessly lost. They look at it, and look up. Look at it, and look up.”

This is of the milder portions of the diatribe, but I’d say it’s worth the 15 minutes of listening to “Airport Hell” in full. While it may only infuriate you further, it will at least bolster your sense of humor and self-importance as you sprint through JFK with one shoe on and the other in your hand, dodging small children and tourists with their cargo ships of luggage on lopsided carts.

2. Increased fear of dying.

I have been flying since before I can remember, and from age 0 to 24, have had no such fear of it. I was so unafraid, that other passengers’ fear was comical to me. At 14 I was at peace with my own mortality and powerlessness. If the plane would tremble, I would liken it to a roller coaster. If it would drop slightly, I would rest assured that my death would matter not in the grand scheme of things, and even if it did, I still couldn’t stop it. Ahhh, the sweet smell of young, nihilistic liberation!

Enter my 25^th year, during which I, through no rational explanation, cultivated an intense, out-of-the-blue, bowel-shuddering fear of flying. I know not its point of origin nor its psychological ramifications. I only know it exists. I know this by the sweat on my palms when the plane takes off, by my nervous glances when flight attendants start to hand out anything for free, especially booze. It is a condition I have tried to treat with music (and wine), though my approach has been flawed. I initially thought that dosing myself with “up” songs (and wine) would do the trick. My column from a couple of weeks ago, “Shiny Happy Pop Songs Holding Hands” was written at Chicago O’Hare as an attempt (along with wine) to battle my own aviophobia. It did not work. Perhaps the jubilant tone was my misstep. As I look back to the vintage interview with Eno, I absorb his unique angle on the mood of ideal airport music:

“I was thinking about flying at the time because I thought that everything that was connected with flying was kind of a lie. When you went into an airport or an airplane they always played this very happy music, which sort of is saying, ‘you’re not going to die! There’s not going to be an accident! Don’t worry!’ and I thought that was really the wrong way ‘round. I thought that it would be much better to have music that said, ‘well, if you die, it doesn’t really matter.’ So I wanted to create a different feeling, that you were sort of suspended in the universe and your life or death wasn’t so important.”

Losing Altitude: Songs to Die To. Considering we can’t have free booze or even decent food (let alone free decent food) perhaps the good people of these airlines would allow some sort of in-flight access to any and all of the music you damn pleased. In the case of a loss of cabin pressure: Nils Frahm. Unexpected rough air: Kate Bush. Bird-in-propeller: Richard Hell. At the very least, airports could give spinning Music For Airports a go, because I’d sure as shit rather face my imminent mortality to that than the goddamn Lumineers. After all, Brian Eno made it just for us.

ONLY NOISE: Holla-Ween

It would be an injustice to the season and my family not to make this week’s installment of Only Noise all about Halloween, the greatest holiday on earth. The only holiday that you aren’t required to sit at a large table with family you may or may not enjoy being around, stuffing yourselves with unnecessary amounts of food, or packing into a cheesy restaurant to eat a pre-fixe menu priced double the everyday value, or pretending you are extra in love with your partner.

On Halloween you can be vulgar, clever, “slutty” (whatever that means), non-participatory, an adult-child, and more importantly, anything you damn want to be. In 1989, my parents got married on Halloween, only 15 days before I entered this mortal coil. My dad didn’t do it up for the holiday, donning slacks and a tweedy sports coat, while my mom wore an emerald green tunic with florid gold embroidery at the chest. She topped it off with beads, fake gold jewelry, and a dangly chainmail headband. It wasn’t a costume per se, but it certainly wasn’t a wedding dress. But the piece de resistance of their wedding in my humble, nostalgic opinion was the cake. It was a black cake. A black bat cake, with orange icing script.

Growing up I never equated my parents’ anniversary with Halloween, but now thinking back it makes a little more sense as to why they celebrated the day with such zeal. Halloween seemed wildly more important than any other holiday in my family, even more so than Christmas, which to many of the evangelical occupants of our rural town, must have made us seem like pagans. Maybe we were.

My parents, sister and I would spend days vandalizing the house with lengths of cotton fiber “spider webs.” We’d hang a sheer, fine mesh net from the ceiling and toss plastic spiders and centipedes into its canopy. We’d make a big paper tree to go up the wall adjoining the living room and kitchen, and affix bugs to that as well (bugs went on pretty much everything). Stuffing my father’s gardening clothes with newspaper, we’d prop a carved jack-o’-lantern on the makeshift scarecrow to greet guests.

With the help of a children’s cookbook entitled Gross Goodies – one of many finds at the school book fair, my mom and I would belabor an enormous menu of foul-looking treats such as “Pumping-Heart Tarts,” and “Open Wound Teacakes.” The party was a potluck, but the menu was exclusively Halloween-themed, putrescent looking food. Our table’s centerpiece was a miniature guillotine made by a family friend. Lying upon it was a decapitated Barbie doll – not the first in our household. She wore a green gown, with red nail polish encircling her open neck. Her blonde head rested in a basket before her.

But what is a party without music? In the same way the Christmas season makes some people want to go caroling, Halloween made my family want to do “The Time Warp.” My mom, a longtime fan of the 1975 musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, made it an annual tradition that when the clock struck midnight, all guests would meet in the living room to reenact the synchronized dance moves for the film’s most famous song. I didn’t actually watch Rocky Horror until I was in fifth grade, which is a strange age to take in something like that with your mom, but I knew every wink, step and bar of “The Time Warp” since before I can remember. I don’t recall being taught it, just doing it.

Our playlist often found inspiration from other movies as well; cuts from The Nightmare Before Christmas (my mom’s motivation for leaving the Halloween decorations up until X-mas), “Jump in the Line” by Harry Belafonte for its association with Beetlejuice, and the bizarre numbers from a beloved little claymation flick from the ‘60s called Mad Monster Party. The film’s voiceover cast includes Boris Karloff, Phyllis Diller and Ethel Ennis. The songs are odd to say the least, but the animation and performances are ace.

In retrospect, I don’t think I’ve been to a Halloween party as kickass as the one’s my parents used to put on. Not even in New York, where Halloween invokes top-notch competition (like with everything else), and costume contests turn into battles of wit, obscurity, accuracy, and outlandishness. I remember my first Halloween here the entire city was frenzied with a Hitchcock theme. I saw several Tippi Hedren’s in the skirt suit and pillbox hat, eyes jabbed out by the fake sparrow on her shoulder. Even better was the man dressed as Psycho – who rigged up a bloodied shower curtain around his seemingly nude body.

Maybe it is just the adoring lens a child sees her parents through, but I still really think they did Halloween the best. But even after the parties ended, Halloween continued to be the supreme holiday in my life. I always knew what I wanted to be November first, and would count down the 364 days between my costume and me. These days I have less time to obsess over costume details as I used to, but the excitement is still there. I still spend October watching as many horror movies as possible (The Exorcist is always on heavy rotation) and listening to the likes of Bauhaus, Nick Cave, Throbbing Gristle, The Cramps, and just about anything spooky I can get my hands on.

In the few times I’ve lived abroad, I remember being thoroughly bummed that Halloween was not really a thing in Europe or the U.K. It was a classic case of not knowing how much you’d miss something until it was gone. In the same week that Hurricane Sandy was revving up to rip New York a new one, I was in Milan, cutting class to work on my Halloween costume for the tiny, American-filled party my roommate and I would be hosting. In was such an insignificant little party, held in a country that didn’t really give a fuck about Halloween, and that made it all the more important. I spent hours hand sewing fake intestines, a heart, a liver, two black lungs with real cigarette butts stitched on…I was some semblance of the internal organ system, with a brain sewed to the top of a bowler hat.

The party lacked decoration, the only autumnal thing being the mulled wine I drank too much of. It was a far cry from the all-out parties that my parents used to throw, but it was a stab in the right direction. So even if you’re nowhere near your ideal Halloween this year – I will be spending mine at a wedding – here’s a playlist to spook you through the greatest day of the year.

Tag: only noise