All The Single Ladies: The Problem with Feminist Anthems

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
December 15, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 18 4 min read

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coverOn The Sexist, Amanda Hess lists the Top 5 Pseudo-Feminist Anthems, and as an introduction to these questionable songs, she declares, “Empowerment has been a convenient posture for pop music to assume.”   This is often true, but I took umbrage with a couple of the songs included on her list, and perhaps with the implicit suggestion that pop songs can and should function as purveyors of messages.  (Wait–isn’t that what Christian rock is for?)   Yes, girls and young women need mentors and positive role models, but might this article be taking that idea too far?   I don’t want a feminist anthem if it requires aesthetic restraint and an avoidance of emotional honesty.

When I was young, I loved Madonna’s “Material Girl.”  This song did not ruin my ability to have a healthy and meaningful romantic relationship as an adult, nor did it rot my sense of self worth.  I am a feminist, and I still like this song.   I also like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” which Hess includes on her list.  She argues:

The sheer awesomeness of this song is almost enough to make me overlook the anti-feminist weirdness. Beyonce looks and sounds even stronger on this track than she does in the more traditionally girl-power songs in her catalog (”Independent Women Part I”; “Survivor”). I mean, she has a bionic arm in the video. What’s not to like?

Well—a few things. Beyonce referring to herself as “it”? Equating herself to bling? Handing herself over to a man who will determine her self-worth through a demeaning, years-long game which can only end with Beyonce emerging triumphant as his symbolic property, or crawling away as a meaningless ex?

I must disagree with Hess’s interpretation of the song, which assumes a lot about the speaker.  Firstly, when Beyonce says, “Put a ring on it,”  she certainly isn’t, as Hess says, “equating herself to bling.”  That would mean she was singing, “If you liked bling you shoulda put a ring [bling] on bling.”  Huh?

The song’s cleverness lies in the instability and elasticity of that word “it.”  One could argue that “it” refers to her finger, but the phrase uses “it” twice:  “If you liked it, you shoulda put a ring on it” [italics mine].  The second use of “it” refers, literally, to her finger–one places an engagement ring on the left ring finger.  But the first “it” isn’t so literal–or is it?  The speaker seems to refer to both her literal body, and thus, her vagina,  but also the “it” that was their relationship, the pleasure of being together, of being close and intimate.   “If you like having sex with me, you should have committed to me,” is the gist of her argument.  (Notice that it’s “if you like it,” present tense, but “shoulda” is “should have”–as in, you missed your chance…maybe.)

Perhaps it’s anti-feminist for sex to lead to marriage, or to desire that.  But why?  Why is it unacceptable for a woman to require commitment from the man she’s sleeping with?  Hess’s brand of feminism prohibits marriage as a viable choice for women, and the goal of feminism–or so I thought–was to give a woman choices.  To marry, or not  marry.  To have sex or not have sex, with whom she chooses.  To have children, or not.  To be a working mother, or a stay-at-home mother.

In “Single Ladies”  I get no inkling that Beyonce is “crawling away as a meaningless ex,” as Hess believes.   She’s in the club (or, ‘da club), singing a final ultimatum.  She knows her lover is jealous, that he’s ruing his past behavior.  She isn’t putting up with his shit any longer.  She admits, “Your love is what I prefer, and what I deserve,” a bold announcement of desire and self-worth.  And–okay–I love when she says, “Pull me into your arms.  Say I’m the one you own.  If you don’t you’ll be alone.”  Yes, the notion of marriage as “ownership” might make one uncomfortable, but, then again, what if that ownership is requested?  If it’s consensual?  There’s the implicit sense that once this man owns her, and her body, she will also own him, and his body.  Here, the “ring” signifies a union of love and sex, and that it will, by necessity, carry with it the whole fraught history of marriage as a cultural institution.  I might go so far as to argue that Beyonce’s playing a little wink-wink game with the notion of wife-as-property.  It’s her mandate, not his, and she’s in control.

One can’t separate “Single Ladies” with its phenomenal video, where Beyonce and two other women dance in black leotards and high heels.  Beyonce’s waist-to-hip ratio and strong quads are out of sight, as are her dancing skills.  This video is actually an homage to Bob Fosse, who choreographed a slightly similar routine for his wife and two other dancers, and also shot on a stage in one take.  Beyonce’s video modernizes this choreography, much in the same way the song itself modernizes, or at least complicates, a traditionally female desire for commitment.   Perhaps “Single Ladies” can’t be a feminist anthem because, to reduce it to a rallying cry, a slogan, does not acknowledge it for the complex song that it is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must head back to the library to dissect Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.”  (Or, like everyone else, maybe I’ll go film a living room-homage to Beyonce’s video and post it on YouTube…)

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

How I Got It: Snoop Doggy Dogg’s ‘Doggystyle’

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
October 20, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 4 min read

I’m not sure how I knew when Doggystyle would be released. The debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg — as Calvin Broadus, Jr. was known before changing his handle to Snoop Dogg, then Snoop Lion, then Snoop Dogg again — came out in November of 1993, and I can’t imagine that I read about it in any of the newspapers or magazines that cluttered my parents’ house. We didn’t have cable TV, so Kurt Loder didn’t tell me about it, a cartoon globe spinning behind his head. I can only assume that my friends were talking it up: “Snoop Doggy Dogg, from The Chronic? I heard his album’s coming out next week.” That was how information spread in 1993. I was 14 years old.

I was also a huge hip-hop fan, with a long and checkered history of signing up for BMG and Columbia House, receiving the first shipment of CDs or cassettes — nine or 10 of them, an impossible bounty — before writing them frantic I’m-just-a-child letters when they later demanded their cash. I would buy whatever I could with whatever money I had — A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A, Tim Dog; it didn’t matter much. And although I don’t recall loving Dr. Dre’s The Chronic at the time, I must have been taken by the then-obscure Snoop, who appeared all over it, his silky nihilism leavening Dre’s stern-uncle delivery and the album’s squealing synths. Or maybe I just got swept up in the hype. Either way, I had to have Doggystyle.

There was a CD store one town over that managed to seem simultaneously new and run-down, as if its owners, after hustling to finance its opening, had been too exhausted to properly set it up. Its interior was heavy on milk crates and cardboard signage. It was open for a few months at most, and none of my old friends remember it; when I bring it up, they frown as if I’m describing a poltergeist. But I know that it existed, and that it was open for business on the week of November 23, 1993.

I usually got my music from a shopping mall a few miles out of town, and I’m not sure why I didn’t go there for Doggystyle. I wouldn’t have faked an illness to stay home on the Tuesday of its release — I only did such a thing once, in the second grade, to obtain a few packs of Garbage Pail Kids’ long-awaited third edition — so I must have waited until that Saturday, only to find that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t hitch a ride to the mall. I had to take matters into my own smallish hands.

I’d only been in the store once or twice before, and I’d never bought anything there, but it represented my best chance at obtaining Snoop’s debut. My father had recently upped my allowance to a Zuckerbergian $20 a week, so I didn’t have to go through the ordeal of scraping up loose change — which I’d once done to buy a Bon Jovi cassette (the unlistenable 7800° Fahrenheit). Cash in hand, I likely lied to my parents about where I was going — playing basketball with friends, not searching for murder-and-misogyny-filled music — and set out.

It was about a mile and a half to the shop from my childhood home, but as I remember it, the walk had an epic, questing feel. I crossed the busy street perpendicular to my own quiet one and proceeded down a hill that bottomed out near the entrance to a soccer field. On game and practice days, the rutted, tree-hung drive to the field fills with cars; you can hear cheers and murmurs from the open space beyond. But it was too late in the year for soccer, and the place was desolate. The drive peters out at the lip of the field, where the trees recede and the sky seems suddenly huge above the expanse of grass. My first burst of vivid memory of that day occurs here: me, alone, walking towards the woods on the field’s far side. When I think of Doggystyle — and even when I think of Snoop Dogg — I think of myself, simmering with teenage need, moving across that empty field.

A slim path wound through a patch of woods into which was hacked the Department of Public Works, its snow plows and pickup trucks parked beside a junk-strewn creek. I curled around an abandoned, graffiti-wracked DPW outbuilding and climbed the metal steps of a bridge that led to a surviving copse of trees. The area had a forgotten, suburban-outlaw feel, the sort of hidden place where ’90s kids smoked joints and ’80s kids got drunk and — if the tabloids were to be believed — sacrificed their weak in praise of Great Lord Satan.

An overgrown path led through a second field — three baseball diamonds the merging outfields of which created another soccer pitch — until I got to the first street, the first real bit of civilization, in the neighboring town. I was almost there. A left, a right, and I was at a car-choked thoroughfare lined with shops. My objective sat wanly on the other side. I crossed the street and entered the store. A little bell might have rung. Of course, I was the only customer.

As I recall, the person behind the counter was a light-skinned black man who wore a tight paisley shirt and oversized glasses, like Get Up With It-era Miles Davis. Though there was never a guarantee of finding what you wanted there, I quickly located Doggystyle — success! — paid, and hurried out, excited to get home and listen to my treasure.

I’d like to say that I recall tearing up to my room, ripping off the disc’s cellophane, and blasting “Gin and Juice” and “Who Am I (What’s My Name?),” but that would be a lie. I have no recollection of actually listening to the album once I returned, or what I even thought of it in subsequent days and weeks. I probably thought, as I do now, that the record was crowded with filler, with too many lackluster skits and too many subpar guests. I don’t know. As is so often the case — as is maybe always the case — the getting of the thing was more important than the thing itself.

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 4 min read
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In Memoriam Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

Lou Reed, Sonic Contrarian

In Memoriam Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
November 4, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 22 9 min read

The first time I ever heard “Walk on the Wild Side” it freaked me out. It was on one of those dark cold New England winter mornings that makes the universe come to a standstill. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. I remember frost chalked across the windows. I was up before sunrise for some odd reason, and the routine blare of the classic rock on my radio had ominously stopped for a few moments and there was this silence in the air. I was already sitting up in my bed before Herbie Flowers’s immortal bass melody suddenly dropped, cooler than cool, and out of nowhere came a voice that held my complete attention without apparently being bothered to try.

Lou’s nonchalant, matter-of-fact vocals, in that melodic mumble he’d always managed to pull off when he wasn‘t shouting or trying to croon, emerged over the guitar and suddenly there was an emcee in the room, drawing back the curtain onto a hidden, seemingly black and white noir world of hustlers, hitchhiking transvestites, the A-poll-o with the go-go-go and someone named Holly in the back room giving head but keeping hers…The really peculiar part of this, at least for me, was that none of it was offered with any kind of comment or explanation. What would be sensationalistic or pushed into the realm of the surreal in other songwriter’s hands was offered without comment, explanation or big conclusion. Here‘s the wild side, kid, the poker face of the voice and the music seemed to say, take or leave it.

It wasn’t until high school that I heard about the Velvet Underground and this mysterious fellow who wore black sunglasses all the time and hung out with Andy Warhol. I remember asking about this apparently infamous band at my local independent record store and having the clerk explain that I really couldn’t just get one record by these guys, you really had to get them all. I ended up buying the box set for about twenty bucks in one of those ridiculous Columbia House deals they used to have and took it home, unwrapping it like a lost scroll.

It might have been “Heroin” that hooked me. Or it could have been the part where they drag the chair across the floor and drop a clattering stack of dinner plates in the middle of “European Son” or the neon-lights-under-glass vibe of “Femme Fatale” that won my heart, I couldn’t decide either then or now.  And that’s before I delved into White Light/ White Heat or the spiritual anguish and throbbing eroticism of the eponymous third record, or the sparkling charisma of “Loaded,” which would have gone platinum were there any justice in the world. I remember realizing that I was probably the only person in my small town who had spent his entire afternoon listening to “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Before I knew it, I was the proud owner of the t-shirt – black, of course – with the first record’s cover emblazoned on the front. Mercifully, it was a long time until I found out that people called me banana boy.

There’s just no question that the Velvets, and Lou’s decades of solo work, changed the game for anybody who met them even halfway on their own terms. It wasn’t just an aesthetic choice, either. Most of the personal tributes I’ve seen don’t just talk about how great a musician Lou Reed was but how his fine, fine music literally changed their lives. It’s not only because he stayed true to his vision, no question about that, but because, well, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. His tastes were varied enough to incorporate pretty much everything – literature, film, garage rock, the classical avant-garde, doo-wop, love, drugs, sex, death, and wearing sunglasses at night while sporting a rather undeniable mullet. Somehow, in the way that only truly great artists can manage, Lou Reed managed to tell the world exactly how and where to go fuck itself while assimilating as many aspects of it as he possibly could.

Lou loomed large, he contained multitudes. His songs could be as expansive and lyrically obscure as they were blunt and almost minimalist. He was a legendarily hostile interview subject who had the sincerity to name one of his less-remembered solo records “Growing Up in Public,” a lover of free jazz and Dion and the Belmonts, a connoisseur of epic orgiastic rave-ups who could also remix an entire set of already painfully naked and honest songs down to the point where his vocals dominated the mix and still sounded like a quivering whisper coming from a locked room. The same guy wrote “I’m Waiting For the Man” and “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Sweet Jane” and “Perfect Day“ and “Walk On the Wild Side.” By his own admission, he did Lou Reed better than anybody. It might be the New York thing coming out, but I’ve always noticed that everybody, fans and enemies alike, always called him Lou. Of how many other certifiable rock stars could this be said?

He had a knack for finding mentors, too. As an undergraduate at Syracuse, he became one of the student acolytes of Delmore Schwartz, a now-overlooked poet whose appetite for conversation and booze was matched only by his obsessive passion for the life of the mind. He wrote the introductory short story for the Partisan Review in 1937, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, an absolute line-by-line masterpiece entitled “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Read it today and see exactly how every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Saul Bellow wrote his Pulitzer-winning “Humbolt’s Gift” about him and his maniacal mentorship and called him “a Mozart of conversation.” John Berryman lamented the loss of the days when they would walk through Harvard “warm with gossip” and dedicated poems to his “sacred memory.”

As legend has it, if you spent any time at all with Schwartz, you would hear him give spellbinding readings of Joyce and Yeats and Shakespeare and whatever else struck his fancy until he burned himself out, as he eventually did. Lou was understandably quite devoted to him and would refer to him years after he died as “the first great man I ever met.” One thing Schwartz told Lou was that whatever he did, he needed to write truly and honestly and never betray himself. If he didn’t, he would haunt him from beyond the grave. And haunt him he did, if the tender “My House” from 1982’s deeply confessional The Blue Mask is any indication.

And then there’s Andy Warhol, who evidently asked for little else out of life but to listen and watch. Lou himself also said that Delmore Schwartz was the smartest man he’d ever met, until he met Andy. They called him Drella, a mix of Cinderella and Dracula, the monosyllabic son of Pittsburgh and Tiffany’s who made soup cans and atomic bombs and Elizabeth Taylor equally glamorous. Andy saw them as a nothing bar band in the Village and realized he needed a house band for his factory of beautiful freaks. This was beyond spectacle. Don’t forget that the people mentioned in those songs, the Chelsea girls and smack heads and lonely debutants, were based on real people. Think about it, how many other groups essentially started playing as the rhythm section of an entire improvisational art project, literally providing the soundtrack to the glowing, pulsating film above their heads? Then you’ve got the whip dancers and Nico the singing Teutonic goth statue and the strobe lights and the cellophane balloons and speed. And why not flip it around and imagine if, say, Jackson Pollock had a house band? They made a point of touring in places where they were hated. Seriously, who does that?

Conflict of all kinds – internal and external, alone in the dark night of the soul and in the bright lights of NYC, as cosmopolitan a place as you could ask for and whose avatar he was for a time – wasn’t just his theme, it was his muse. It takes a certain kind of genius to make a classic like “Transformer,” revive a sluggish solo career in the process, bask in the glow of due appreciation from the likes of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and then unleash forty five minutes of incomprehensible noise entitled Metal Machine Music and admit that, yes, no sentient being has actually been able to listen to it all the way through (much less its maker) while closing his label-demanded liner notes with the boast that “my week beats your year.” He was probably right, too. Less than a year later, he shape-shifted into a 50s radio deejay of the mind playing at the prom and makes Coney Island Baby, as accessible and sentimental a record as he ever made.

Only he could have brought out the burnished despair in the almost melodramatically desolate Berlin and turned off more or less his entire fan base while he was at it, only to revive it thirty years later in a triumphant live show and concert film and see it listed among the greatest records of its time. For my money, his greatest solo accomplishment is the eleven minute 1978 epic “Street Hassle” precisely because it does so many things at once and yet remains sui generis, a Lou Reed joint if there ever was one. Surging cellos accompany a three movement structure that fuses pretty much everything between ecstasy and agony while maintaining some indefinable, yearning balance between hopefulness and fatalism, degradation and exaltation, bad luck and Bruce Springsteen.

For better or worse, Lou made a career out of being a sonic contrarian. He challenged you as a listener because he challenged himself as a performer. If you got it, you got it, and if you let it get under your skin it stayed for a lifetime. Andy Warhol told him that however many songs he did, he needed to write more, because the most important thing in life was work. Some of his best records, in different phases of his career, were with the great John Cale and apparently each man repeatedly swore they’d never deal with the bastard ever again. Warhol himself once called him a “rat.” Lester Bangs did some of his best interviews while insistently provoking and antagonizing him, and wrote some of the most gloriously obsessive music criticism of all time about what his music did to his imagination. As Thurston Moore put it, Lou Reed’s music provided you access to fantasies you never even knew existed. And not just the dirty ones, either. I strongly doubt that Jonathan Richman had so much as smoked a cigarette when he listened to “Sister Ray” and found his life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll.

And if sexual fluidity was your bag, then Lou was your, er, man. He wrote openly about sadomasochism and gender bending before anybody else in rock ‘n’ roll had the nerve to, and did indeed seem to practice what he preached. It has been suggested that Lou either coined or at least popularized the term “coming out of the closet” in Transformer’s bouncy little ditty “Make Up.” He was perfectly happy to squire his transperson companion Rachel around for several years. At the end of Coney Island Baby he dedicates one of his most poignant and romantic songs to her, in a voice that gets me every single time. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the fact that he married different women and lived happily ever after with Laurie Anderson invalidates or undermines this at all. The disturbing fact that he underwent electroshock treatment for “homosexual inclinations” as a teenager and wrote the harrowing “Kill Your Sons” about the experience is proof enough that the rock ‘n’ roll animal was no dilettante or poseur when it came to what used to be called alternative lifestyles.

I met him once. I understand it’s a little presumptuous (not to mention name-droppy) to use this term given the nature of the interaction we had, but there it is. I think I was a sophomore in college, which would make it late 2000. He gave a reading at a Barnes & Noble in Union Square because, as we all know, you never know what you’re gonna find there. Pretty big crowd, mostly middle aged suburban guys. I came late and missed the reading but I lined up with everyone else to get the new edition of his collected lyrics signed. I came prepared – I had a copy of his book and a copy of Delmore Schwartz’s selected poems for him to sign. I had some ridiculous idea that this would impress him or something. One was for me, the other was for my best friend. The booksellers handed out large post-it notes so you could write what you wanted your dedication to be. They stuck out of the side of the book, under the cover. I saw one older guy ahead of me with a sticky note that said “Hey Bob! Take a walk on the wild side!” I looked away and tried not to kill myself.

As I approached the great man’s table, he was in the process of calmly flipping someone off. His back was turned and he was smirking bemusedly at someone on the staff who’d made some kind of comment or dropped something. I plunked the books down in front of him with an idiotic flourish and asked him if he’d do a dedication. He noticed the books, changed his smirk to a scowl, and fumbled through them, as his scowl turned into a scrawl. For the collected lyrics, he flipped to the title page and wrote above the title in big black letters HELLO and, beneath it, LU. I have always treasured the compliment. After the crowd thinned out I went into the corner and tore out the two pages he’d signed, stuffed them in my pocket and put the books back on the shelf. To this day I’m not exactly sure if I was channeling Tony Soprano or Dead Poet’s Society but I throw myself to the tender mercies of booksellers everywhere when I say that it was my walk on the wild side, and it was all right.

Bonus Lou Reed YouTube Playlist:

“I’m Waiting for the Man”
“All Tomorrow’s Parties”
“The Gift”
“Candy Says”
“Pale Blue Eyes”
“Stephanie Says”
“New Age”
“Rock n Roll”
“Satellite of Love”
“Make Up”
“Berlin”
“Caroline Says II”
“Coney Island Baby”
“My House”
“Street Hassle”
“Dirty Boulevard”
“Magic and Loss”
“Set the Twilight Reeling”
“Sweet Jane” (Live)

In Memoriam Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 22 9 min read
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Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

Icelandic Charm School

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
June 9, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 4

Do you know the band Seabear?It is possible that you do and you do not know it if you’ve seen the strange and enthralling Michel Gondry movie The Science of Sleep (kind of a cross between The Life Aquatic or Rushmore and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth), which featured Seabear’s song “I Sing, I Swim.” But the song that had me at hello was “Arms,” of which there is a delightful homemade video on YouTube. I dare you not be taken in – by the song itself (“you left your dark horse in the stable”), by Ole saying “banjo” and Inga’s rolling of her “r,” and by the anonymous little Martha Graham in the background. (It is a desolate soul that doesn’t have a nook for Seabear.)

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 4
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18 comments:

  2. Agreed – I always interpreted the message of this song as, “We could’ve had a life together, I could’ve loved you, but you lost your chance because you would not give me what you need.” The song felt similar, in message, to the other songs that Hess references (“Survivor,” “Independent Woman”) rather than disparate, because Beyonce was proclaiming that if the relationship did not fulfill her emotionally (as well as sexually) than she wouldn’t stay with the man. “If you liked it than you should’ve put a ring on it” was her way of playfully saying, “you missed your chance at something good. Because I didn’t get what I deserved from you, you have lost as a companion.”

    I didn’t know that the music video was prolonged Fosse reference – that’s very interesting.

  4. Thank you, Stephen and Kaelan!
    Catie, thanks for your comment. There used to be a full video of the original Fosse return, but I can’t find it anymore. A friend told me there’s a Beyonce-Fosse mash-up, which, when I find, I shall post. Unless my friend (hi, Doug), does it first…

  5. Pingback: Bites: Bolaño and Borges, Nin on LSD, Nick Cave Photoshopped, the Greatest Metal Tour EVER, and More « Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  6. Love your argument and I completely agree with you about the use of the word “it” in Beyonce’s lyrics.

    The only slant that I can see where Beyonce could be seen as anti-feminist is her over-sexed image in many of her videos. The sexualized image is not just targeted to “All the Single Ladies” video but her overall image. Frankly, not just Beyonce, but other pop performers as well.

    I would love to see some of these performers where a baggy sweatshirt, some loose jeans, a t-shirt…not just tight clothes all of the time.. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the video, but I would just like to see more sides of a female performer rather than just the “sexy” side.

  7. I always thought the line was “Say I’m the one you WANT.” “Own” would certainly take it into anti-feminist territory. Bouncy is very much a Southern black woman with many of those traditional gender views on display (said as a black woman who grew up in the northeast and has lived in the south for a decade). An underlying theme of her songs is that a man should provide and pursue.

    I don’t think the song is particularly feminist or anti-feminist though. Party A wanted a commitment. Party B didn’t. Party A left. Party B is upset. And Party A says “Too bad. So sad. You missed your chance. And I am angry for you for not loving me the way I love(d) you.” Swap the genders in any combination, and it’s the same story.

  9. Tiffany, you may in fact be right about the lyrics–though “own” makes the song a wee bit messier, which is always more exciting to me! And thanks for the link–it’s great!

    Tracie, you make a good point, and my friend Christine recently echoed a similar sentiment. It’s true, Beyonce could do far more. Being sexy is what she seems most comfortable with, and, beyond her obvious singing and dancing talents, perhaps that’s what she’s best at, performance-wise…? I do wish she would get a little more exciting in that regard.

  11. Wait wait wait – a song by a married female-bodied artist pronouncing heteronormative patriarchal desires and a prescription for groups outside of her current experience (“single ladies” and “men in the club”) is all about choices? Beyonce ain’t empowered here – hell of a dancer, but not an empowering role model.

    In response to “What if it’s consensual?” Cultural pressure and coerced consent to patriarchy is not simply something that makes me uncomfortable, but rather it reinforces a narrow mode of thought that touches off on many other issues that I find carry towards distressing and unhealthy experiences for all parties involved. I agree with Hess: this is a portrayal of pseudo-empowerment for commercial appeal with no real radical analysis. Again, though – wish I could dance like that.

  12. Thanks for your comment, Trevor. I think you make an excellent point about Beyonce speaking for groups she’s not a part of–I hadn’t thought of that.

    I take issue with faulting her for having “heteronormative patriarchal desires”–it seems to impose a reading on a song that’s not intended to be a feminist anthem. And, again, the reading suggests that a straight woman who wants to be involved with a straight man cannot ever be a feminist. That excludes a lot of women from the movement, and it places requirements for behavior on women, which seems to defeat the purpose of feminism in the first place.

    I’m not so sure Beyonce’s “consent to the patriarchy” is “coerced”, either. I guess, overall, I don’t think anyone can really duck out of this patriarchy, or that this patriarchy is a static, monolithic structure. We just can’t say, “No thank you, Mr. Patriarchy.” That shit is everywhere, and we are all participating in it, in one way or another, even if it’s in rejection of it.

    On a side note, this reminds me of a line from Margaret Atwood’s wonderful novel The Robber Bride:

    “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? …Even pretending you aren’t catering to a male fantasy is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair, unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman”

  13. You are completely wrong. It’s anti-feminist because she’s using her body to get back at the man. She’s handing herself out to some stranger to enact revenge. She shouldn’t even be trying to get revenge in the first place, it’s childish and immature. Still she objectifies her body, like a possession, and hands it around to see how some guy that didn’t want her feels. She is desperate for marriage. She wants to marry a guy who doesn’t even want her. She’s begging to be taken, to be domesticated. She wants to be owned. A feminist song? Give me a break.

  16. ps. yeah the whole intention of the song is muddled. She wants to be all strong and break away from her previous relationship? dont ‘Say I’m the one you own” or break up with a dude simply to run to someone else. Be single for awhile!!

    Perhaps he ‘didnt put a ring on it’ because you kept nagging him to.

    and besides, isnt beyonce married to Jay – Z? the song is completely redundant.

  17. Pingback: In the News: Politicising Beyonce. « The Early Bird Catches the Worm
  18. Pingback: Politicising Beyonce. | The Scarlett Woman

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Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

I Found a Way to Enter: Diving Into Writing

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
November 26, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 3 5 min read

It’s like a heartbeat, the opening bars of Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor” – the first song in the Canadian band’s new project, the one that sets the tone and the refrain: “It’s a reflection.” It’s the thirteenth song if you count backwards, the bridge between the two halves of the double album. It’s the mirror. My pulse quickens. I am alive. “We fell in love, alone on a stage / In the reflective age.” I am not alone here. I wait for it, the rhyme in the second stanza between the French and the English. This is the sublime: “Entre la nuit, la nuit et l’aurore. / Entre les royaumes, des vivants et des morts. / If this is heaven / I don’t know what it’s for / If I can’t find you there / I don’t care” (Between the night, the night and the dawn. / Between the realms, of the living and the dead). I drink the pairing of “morts” and “for” – I am giddily outside myself and deep in the beauty of the bond, if for a moment, between the two languages, the dead (“morts”) and the preposition of the future (“for”) – which in the fifth stanza transforms into the exquisite almost overlap of “morts” and “more.” I am free of the anxiety of not writing.

I love that this song is about trying to find “a way to enter” – to find a portal, a connector – which one can read as the passage to the Underworld that Orpheus seeks in order to attempt his rescue of Eurydice (there are two tracks in Reflektor that make this theme clear, one named for each ancient Greek figure). I also read the song as seeking the throughway for creativity, for getting on with the act of making something. But “Reflektor” does not promise safe passage: “I thought, I found a way to enter/…I thought, I found the connector.” But I didn’t. Even the false promise is assuring. I want to look for my entry onto the page, into a line, an image, a something. I am afraid. I am in the middle of a rough descent, choppy in the air and in need of a pocket of smooth, a glide. The seven-plus-minute “Reflektor” has become a ritual these days. Blast it louder and maybe the portal will appear. Will I dive in?

I am dancing in the backyard under the Brazilian pepper tree, the almost full moon keeping me company. But my movements are small, so I go inside, into the room where I work at my computer, and I dance around the desk – I turn up the music and it pulses through the wires into my ears – I am still too timid to blast the notes into the nakedness of night, or morning, the way I did when I was a teenager in my attic bedroom, or in college away from family and anything familiar. My new roommates knew what the Bjork loop meant. A litany of song to lift another day. Then I moved onto Radiohead. Then the Chilean hip hop band Tiro de Gracia and their first album Ser Humano (human being/to be human).

Many writers, those attempting to write, like to talk about what helps them get in the mood, the zone. The organization of the objects on the desk, a particular pen or writing machine, the ritual reading of a specific text, a stack of books at the ready, music playing in the background. Maybe it’s not working and everything must be reversed: no music, no books, no wireless connection, no flesh and blood people nearby, no. I am pulled in by pairings, duets, correspondences. Elizabeth Bishop’s letters to Robert Lowell and his replies, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando doubled as male and female, Maria Bethânia’s covers of Vinicius de Moraes’s songs in the album Que falta você me faz (how I miss you, or, more literally, what an absence you do to me).

But beware! The guide to the portal of creativity could be unreliable, even dangerous. When I started to read the work of Clarice Lispector, I took in one book after another, after another – I became immersed in the modes of her tragic heroines, their epiphanies seismic, but rarely conduits to change. I needed an epiphany in my own life. Lispector, and Bishop, hurled me to Brazil – that was the portal, for a time. Then a Brazilian scholar of Fernando Pessoa warned me that those who study the Portuguese poet put themselves at risk of uncanny episodes, darkness that cannot be returned, not least of all in The Book of Disquiet. Home again, Wallace Stevens hypnotized me out of writing. James Merrill and his Ouija board made me nervous.

I mishear lyrics and when I realize that I am wrong, I keep singing them that way, an incantation gone slant, a twist that might do the trick. “Reflektor” begins: “Trapped in a prism, in a prism of light.” Over and over I sing: “Trapped in a prison, in a prison of love.” Is there a difference? My favorite misunderstanding lies in the middle of the song, the repeated refrain: “Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection / Will I see you on the other side? (Just a Reflektor) / We all got things to hide (Just a Reflektor).” And always, always, I sing in the spirit of how the phrase sounds when its iterations are layered on top of one another: “Just a reflection of of affection / of of affection / of of affection.” I am consistent, at least, in the theme of my misreading.

What kind of love is this? Who is the “you” sung to? “If this is heaven / I need something more / Just a place to be alone / ‘Cause you’re my home.” If it is Orpheus, then Eurydice is the recipient of song; or, vice versa. If I am the one to sing, then it’s the person or the thing, the book or the phrase, that will help me find the portal, dare me to dive in, to begin. In “Then Ends Where Now Begins” – an essay in the stunning collection Eros the Bittersweet – Anne Carson writes: “For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal ‘beginning’ that is a soul.”

I am still here, now sitting at my desk, earbuds pressed into my ears. I have listened to the song too many times to say. Nothing yet. Let’s play again. I stand up to dance. I remember my Chinese teacher who made us do jumping jacks while counting to eight in unison. That’s what I remember, always eight, infinity: 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 She also told us that we had to be friends with our Chinese characters, spend time with them, talk to them, love them. Only then would they love us back, be there for us when we might need them instead of hiding in the silence. I begin a series of jumping jacks and they morph quickly, by number three, into something else all together. I shake my fists, I stretch my arms, I pull at the air above me. It seems that I am here now, I have fallen, I have entered. “Will I see you on the other side?”

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 3 5 min read
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Reviews Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

The Kid Is Alright: On Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Reviews Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
February 13, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 1 8 min read

1.
J: What r u doing tomorrow night want to go to a concert with me at Madison sq garden?

Me: No plans as of yet. Quite possibly? What concert?

J: One Direction. Don’t laugh! But I can’t think of a person who I would have a better time at a 15 year old Brit boy band concert with. Think of it as anthropological study!!

Me: OH MY GOD YES.

Me: NOT BEING IRONIC.

A few weeks before Christmas, a friend invited me to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden. There were two distinct groups in attendance that evening: fans, ages 7-17, with a little wiggle room on either side, glowing and jumping and shrieking their hearts out, even when there was no one was onstage; and chaperones, ages 35-55ish, fondly exasperated and slapping down $9.50 — the price of a Bud Lite — on concessions counters across the arena with an extreme sense of purpose. For me, it was all a little surreal, I guess. I am 28 years old.

But wait — it’s probably best to pause straight away and unabashedly reject any lingering embarrassment over attending the concert: I sang along, I danced a bit, and I cheered enthusiastically, though I found myself physically incapable of matching the testing-the-limits-of-the-human-hearing-range screams of the assembled crowd. The boys put on a good show. For the uninitiated, One Direction (1D!!!) are a classic Simon Cowell product, a quintet of teenagers packaged together from individual auditions for The X Factor in 2010, and in the past two years, through the force of collective charisma, catchy pop singles, frankly spectacular hair, and a skillful marketing juggernaut, they’ve become the most successful group in the world. When I asked that same friend whether I needed to explain the band here, she wrote in a Facebook message, “haha no. they are the five most beautiful brits on earth.”

It’s both short-sighted and a little curmudgeonly to sit at a One Direction concert and marvel at the “kids these days,” though I’ll admit that when I was ages 7-17, I’m pretty sure that I never felt like any of my peers were literally about to fall to pieces over the Backstreet Boys, or Hanson — though maybe I just had the wrong friends. The night at MSG felt more like the Ed Sullivan Show with laser lights and balloons full of confetti — girls cast in black and white, trembling and jittery and ear-splittingly loud as they swooned over The Beatles, The Stones, and all those bands that never made it past 1964. One Direction plays up their Britishness — their new album cover involves a top hat, a bow tie, and one boy hoisting another up onto a red telephone box — which partly feels like a nod to (or, perhaps, a pale imitation of) the transatlantic sensations of half a century ago. Mick Jagger recently drew those comparisons himself: after watching a One Direction concert on television, he said, “It reminded me very much of our early concerts, when we were pushed around among the audience and we would kind of float. [T]hey were like, floating above the audience, and they looked like, really distinctly uncomfortable…It was a very funny moment, because it was very similar to the things we’ve been through.”

So it was fitting, then, that just a week prior, I’d gotten drawn into watching Crossfire Hurricane, the new HBO-produced documentary about The Rolling Stones. It was entertaining all along, but for me, one segment was extraordinary: half an hour in, after a rapid-fire montage of clips of the early Stones and commercial images of the mid-1960s, we come to a young Mick Jagger in an ascot, sitting smugly beside a vaguely German man who’s theorizing about the singer’s rapturous fan base. “When these girls pounce upon Mick and seem to want to tear him to pieces, it’s not essentially an act of aggression,” the expert suggests, “but rather an act of devouring him. They want to incorporate his essence. It’s a sort of fetishism which has more in common with people collecting the relics of saints, as they did in the ancient past. There’s really no break with the ancient tradition — it’s just a question of form.” The camera cuts over to Jagger, and the look on his face is inscrutable for a moment, before he hunches down to light a cigarette, and the expert goes on, “I’ve seen this with the most marvelous, dramatic intensity, with two or three thousand young girls in Manchester, and these girls, they wept, they were possessed by the spirit — and I may add that all their little panties were soaking wet at the end. I mean, the complete physical and mental absorption.”

The camera’s back on Jagger as he smirks at the last bit, agreeing with the assessment, but then he spins the analysis away from fan girls. “I think what’s more interesting is that in this country, the audience is indeed all girls and they do behave in this way, but in the rest of the world, this isn’t true. In lots of places, they’re nearly all boys. With the boys, it erupts, you know, much more aggressively. And they use it to have a great fight with the police. And they just beat the police up. As a show of sort of strength. Or a show of dissatisfaction. Or something.” Underneath it all, the first strains of “Paint It Black” start pulsing through, until they cut away, to shots of young boys pounding the stage, half gleeful, half infuriated.

If there is one thing that’s pretty damn hard to find at a One Direction concert, it’s boys. And even harder to find there, amongst any gender, is a show of dissatisfaction.

2.
If Britain has conquered the early-21st-century boy band, we’ve got the indisputable solo prince of pop here in America. Well, actually, Justin Bieber is Canadian. I could claim him for North America, but that doesn’t really seem necessary. Bieber is an American product: after the small-town childhood and the single-mother upbringing, he was a near-overnight YouTube phenomenon at 13 — a phenomenon carefully fostered and orchestrated by recording-industry superstars. Bieber’s success is staggering but strangely focused: he wholly absorbs his target demographic, without much penetration beyond. A decade or two removed from that fan base, I know him for his fame alone — the only song I could’ve sung along with before starting this piece is the one that repeats the word “baby” about 500 times (title: “Baby”). And this is coming from a person who really enjoyed a One Direction concert.

But maybe that ubiquitous fame is all that really matters. That’s where we start with Teddy Wayne’s new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, whose eponymous protagonist is clearly drawn from a Bieber archetype — sometimes the satirical masking feels so light that it’s hard to imagine that reality is much different. The superficial details of his life match his counterpart: raised by a single mother in St. Louis, he, too, was discovered on YouTube and promptly snapped up by a major record label. We meet him in the middle of his second tour, which doesn’t seem to be going as well as his first, with his mother and manager, Jane, and a small cast of handlers — bodyguard, choreographer, and tutor, the latter of whom helpfully assigns Jonny a series of slave narratives to read. The strictness of his regime is painfully clear from the start.

At only 11, Jonny is a good deal younger than your average teen pop icon, which serves to make the impact of his megastardom all the more extreme. His general confusion reads like the classic child star narrative, pre-adolescence deeply muddled by fame: he has more knowledge of the adult world than any child ought to have, but in other matters, he’s achingly clueless. He prides himself on his accuracy pinpointing adults’ exact ages and weights — and between stringent calorie-counting and pre-show vomiting, it’s clear he’s got an eating disorder himself. His only frame of reference for friendship seems to be the single good friend he left behind in St. Louis, and he has to substitute his good-natured, middle-aged bodyguard for both best friend and father figure. He relies on a video game, “The Secret Land on Zenon,” for distraction and as a template for making sense of the world. And when he speaks, mostly in internal first-person narration, we get a mix of normal, if slightly awkward 11-year-old boy and strange corporate recording-industry drone — a walking embodiment of a marketing plan presented to him, “JONNY VALENTINE 2.0 BRAND-EXTENSION STRATEGY” — parroting adult voices with hollow certainty. It’s this juxtaposition that gives Jonny poignancy. When he returns to St. Louis for the first time, he pauses before an interview on a national morning show:

Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them.

Jonny is quick to scrub away self-pity with self-chastisement, and it all works to make him a deeply likable and thoroughly heartbreaking character. He is being mismanaged on every level, and whether that’s a critique of the personal or the professional is impossible to sort out, because they’re so intricately entwined. Much of the blame should land squarely on the culture at large — and that, of course, is the main target of Wayne’s satire. We get snippets of media, articles that ring uncomfortably true across a range of publications, and we get Internet comment threads full of celebratory snark after a man tries to assault Jonny during a concert. “It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it,” he thinks. “Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start.”

It’s air-tight satire, particularly because Wayne doesn’t have to do much to alter modern-day America — we’re admittedly a bunch of celebrity-sucking vampires, after all, just as so many celebrities jump to bare their necks to us — and as the narrative rings true, the boy Jonny’s forced to mold himself into becomes all the more tragic. He lives a deeply false life, but our complacency in this, whether we’re teeny-boppers or not, lends us that same cheapness. It’s masterfully done, but it does leave us mired in the age-old questions of celebrity and authenticity, wondering what about any of this is new.

3.
And then there are the Latchkeys. The opening act on Jonny’s tour is a four-piece band of 20-somethings, with “literate” and sexuality explicit lyrics and a heartthrob lead singer, Zack Ford, whose female teenage fans overlap with the older end of Jonny’s demographic. Zack plays a lot of roles in the novel: an older brother for Jonny; an idol and a role model, usurping Tyler Beats, the Justin Timberlake figure who looms in Jonny’s mind as a benchmark for enduring pop stardom; a well-meaning bad influence, slipping whiskey into ginger ale under the table; and, occasionally, a homoerotic point of focus as Jonny grapples with puberty. And perhaps most importantly, Zack is a foil, as Jonny haltingly stumbles over questions of authenticity and the definition of success. Because Zack is working through the questions that Jonny can sense but can’t yet articulate: he worships The Clash’s “Complete Control,” to the chagrin of his band-mates. “They said we’d be artistically free / When we signed that bit of paper.”

The Latchkeys are described disdainfully by a minor character as “corporate indie rock for the masses. The Urban Outfitters of bands,” despite Jonny’s defensive protests that they weren’t, in this girl’s words, “cooked up in some music laboratory by a group of record executives to sound exactly like it wasn’t,” just a bunch of college friends that had made it big. But in a way, the distinction no longer matters. And she says as much — when she accuses the band of being “rich white boys” and Jonny talks about Zack’s working-class roots, she says, “He’s rich now. All that matters is what you are now.”

Does it matter to us how culture is made? Won’t we swallow the cooked-up laboratory celebrity just as easily as the authentic talent? And does it even matter if, like Jonny, it’s a case of both? The past decade has seen the conversation surrounding “reality” reach a fever pitch; the children born and raised under the shadow of this conversation must inevitably turn to Jonny Valentine, or Justin Bieber, or whoever else ticks all the right boxes, as brand strategists figure out which boxes matter the most. As long as we take our cues from them, nothing changes.

Mick Jagger, who once said, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” turns 70 this July. Tickets for a string of Rolling Stones 50th anniversary concerts last autumn sold for thousands of pounds online. “Everybody all right in the cheap seats?” Jagger asked at the O2 Arena in London last November. “They aren’t so cheap though, are they? That’s the trouble.” There’s another moment in Crossfire Hurricane, in which an off-screen interviewer probes a black turtlenecked-Jagger about his appeal to young people. The camera stays tight on his face.
Interviewer: Why, then, if you think that most of your work is about dissatisfaction and so on, why do you think you’re so popular?

Mick Jagger: Because most young people are dissatisfied.

I: In what way?

MJ: With the generation which they think is running their lives.

I: What things are you dissatisfied with?

[and here Jagger gazes off-screen for a moment, his brow furrowing in thought, before looking straight at the camera, like he’s telling the punch line to the world’s most serious joke]

MJ: The generation that runs our lives.

Image source: waitscm

Reviews Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 1 8 min read
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Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music

Let Us Now Be Grateful That They’re (Finally!) (Honestly!) (Really Really Really!) Dead

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
July 2, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 9 4 min read

You never forget your first time. My first Grateful Dead concert took place on May 15, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York City. I was a high school senior and my older brother let me tag along with him and a bunch of his long-hair college buddies down from Vermont. The New Riders of the Purple Sage opened the show around midnight ii featuring the Dead’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, on pedal-steel guitar — and then the Dead came on and spent the rest of the night scrambling my brain and changing my life.

I stood along the left wall down by the stage, toking on the joints that kept coming my way. The smoke was so thick in the air it was impossible not to get high. I’d been to plenty of rock concerts by then, but nothing like this, nothing so loud, so kinetic, so loose and unpredictable and alive. I knew a little bit about the Dead, mostly through Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but nothing can prepare you for the physicality of their music. It was like riding a locomotive into outer space, the old theater heaving as everyone in the packed house moved in unison. A huge screen behind the band — it looked like the world’s largest bed sheet — zoomed and squiggled with a stroboscopic lava-lamp light show. When the music finally stopped, we stumbled out a side exit onto East Sixth Street at dawn, where we were serenaded by a bunch of Hells Angels doing wheelies up the one-way street on their Harleys in the wrong direction. Oh, hell yes! Throw out all the rules! A perfect ending to a mind-bending, life-altering night.

Though I attended a few dozen Dead concerts after that one, I never considered myself a card-carrying Deadhead. You know, the fans who go on the road for months at a time following the band, taping the shows, hawking jewelry and tie-dyed t-shirts to pay for gas and bail, eating acid the way ordinary citizens eat Cheerios. My attendance at so many shows had more to do with dumb luck than true tribal passion. My college roommate happened to have a friend who ran the box office at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., a regular port of call on Dead tours, and so we often found ourselves with our feet propped on the edge of the stage, melting into our free front-row seats as the acid kicked in and the Dead blasted off. No wonder I barely squeaked through college.

My roommate owned every Dead album then in existence, and one of them was almost always spinning on the turntable in our dorm room. So relentless was the music that I can remember an exasperated neighbor shouting through our open door, “Please guys, not ‘Sugaree’ again!?” The Dead were not to every taste, as I was learning, and a backlash had begun to build. In time, bumper stickers would appear that proclaimed I’ll Be Grateful When They’re Dead. The music critic Dave Marsh dubbed the Dead “the worst band in creation.”

Fast-forward a couple of decades to a scalding July day in 1990. I was working as a newspaper columnist in North Carolina at the time, and I couldn’t resist the chance to attend a Dead concert at N.C. State’s massive football stadium in Raleigh. It would be a chance to see what my youth looked like as my 40th birthday loomed.

It looked ghastly. What I saw wasn’t mere nostalgia, a bunch of aging baby boomers trying to recapture a glimmer of the good old days, the kind of people you see nowadays at concerts by The Who or Billy Joel or The Rolling Stones, (a.k.a, “the world’s greatest cover band”). No, in Raleigh I saw a whole new generation of fans, young enough to be my children, who were more or less going through the same motions people had gone through a quarter of a century earlier. There were still plenty of “spinners,” those barefoot dancing dervishes. There were still plenty of bandanas, tie-dyes, and patchouli. Only now, that big bed sheet on the stage of the Fillmore East had been replaced by state-of-the-art video screens. There were whole mountain ranges of amplifiers, slick lighting, stands selling expensive souvenir caps, pins, stickers, and tie-dyed t-shirts, plus popcorn at $2 a box. This was the production a very big business, more a corporation than a scruffy, countercultural jam band. In the course of the 1990s, the Dead would become the biggest-grossing tour act in the world. When I mentioned that delightfully crude 1970 light show at the Fillmore East to the Dead’s then-current publicist, Dennis McNally, he told me, “We know better now.’’

I wasn’t so sure. As I wrote in my column, the 35,000 fans who showed up in Raleigh comprised “a huge army of robots going through the same old motions, over and over and over again…a whole new generation of fans who missed the ’60s but learned to mimic behavior and dress that were once outlandish but are now merely old hat.”

Fast forward a couple more decades, and the Grateful Dead is getting ready to put on three 50th-anniverary shows in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend, which they swear are going to be their last concerts ever. The death of the Dead has been reported, erroneously, many times since Jerry Garcia suffered a fatal heart attack at age 53 in 1995 while undergoing rehab for a heroin addiction. But every time the band was pronounced dead, they seemed to revive with a new name, a new lineup. So while I’m understandably skeptical of this latest proclamation of a final set of shows, I choose to be optimistic that this time the band finally, honestly, really really really means it.

I say I’m optimistic for a number of reasons. First, 50 years is a long enough run for any rock band. Second, there’s nothing sadder than watching a performer overstay his or her welcome (cf. Mick Jagger, Michael Jordan, Elvis). And third, since Garcia’s death the band has employed a number of guitarists to try to recapture his inimitable aura (Trey Anastasio of Phish has the thankless job on the current Fare Thee Well tour), and while I’m not one of those purists who sees this as sacrilegious, I do think it’s vaguely creepy and more than a little opportunistic. It’s also a reminder that the Dead long ago became a very big and very rich corporation with a bottom line to consider. That’s not a knock on their success. It’s just a fact.

What a long strange trip it’s been — long and strange and glorious and sad. No doubt about that. But all trips must come to an end, and it’s time — it’s past time — for the Grateful Dead to bid us good night, good night, good night.

Image Credit: Wikipedia.

Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
| 1 book mentioned 9 4 min read
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