Once at Englewood High School my English class was given an assignment to compose a poem. We each had to stand up in front of the class and read what we’d written. One of the girls was the first to go. She stood up at the blackboard and started explaining what she’d tried to do. “This is a poem about—” The teacher cut her off right away. “Stop,” he said. “Just read the poem. Don’t tell us what it’s about.”

At the time I only heard it as a practical injunction related to what I was going to have to face a few minutes later. But it stuck somewhere in the back of my head, and to me it’s a decent summation of the way art works in general. You don’t need to know anything about art. You don’t need anything to be disclosed in advance. You just need to experience it.

The point isn’t that art is universal, except to the extent that all human societies make it in one fashion or another. There are still barriers and ambiguities, aspects of any given instance that some people won’t be able to understand or engage with. But you can’t explain art. It simply doesn’t work that way.

I find that the less I say about my music, the better. If I say anything, it tends to be oblique or oracular: words meant to jar the listener out of the complacency of expectation. Then it’s on you to come to the sound curious and open-eared to hear what you find.

*

There is an expectation that an artist’s autobiography will function as a primer, providing “explanations” of the art. But this book is not a listening guide. If anything, it is an extended defiance of that expectation. If it’s meant to teach you anything about my music, it starts with the lesson that you need to relinquish that desire for transparency. Music is about listening. Nothing I can say can mean anything once you start to listen. It’s about the sound, not about the words I might be able to pin up to preface or accompany whatever the sound does to you when it goes in your ears.

If you really need to know, I can tell you—for whatever it’s worth—that anything can go into my music. I get ideas from all sorts of sources. It might be going to the theater or looking at a painting or just watching a tree branch outside the window. It might be reading about the muddy intricacies of trench warfare during World War I or poring over The Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi’s seventeenth-century book on sword-fighting tactics) or looking at the novels of James Joyce or Heinrich Böll. Anything can seep into the music.

I’ve always been intensely engaged with the music of other composers. But even if I sometimes glean techniques I can adapt, I tend to get my information on another level. I get more ideas about music by looking at a sculpture or by watching a dance than by listening to other music. I go elsewhere: that’s how I get informed. But that doesn’t mean the music is about any of those other things, or that there’s some key source that, if you were aware of it, could unlock the music for you as a listener.

Rather than providing subject matter, these kinds of things shape my music through a kind of loose formal extrapolation. Say I’m reading about trench warfare. It might focus my attention on the way you can have multiple levels of engagement: some things going on above ground and other things happening in the tunnels.

As I saw firsthand in Vietnam, tunnels can be hidden mazes—they’re networks that give you ways of getting from one place to another without being seen, without exposing yourself. Trenches are territory lines, too: a crude calligraphy of advancing and retreating forces confronting each other across a no-man’s-land. And they end up being social spaces, too, where you sleep and eat and smoke and pee and write letters home. You could even say they have their own temporality. A trench is a whole emotional atmosphere with a palette of its own, from apprehension—Is that a rifle barrel I see poking out from that crevice?—to silent pools of boredom.

But I’m not thinking about all these things to write music about the historical experience of a soldier in World War I. Instead, the process involves a kind of transposition: how can a piece of music work on multiple levels in a similar way, or suggest that sort of emotional ambiguity? The parallel is subtle—a matter of intuition—rather than straightforward and mechanistic. (In other words, working on multiple levels in music doesn’t just mean using a mix of high pitches and low pitches.) The transposition makes me think about musical structure in a different way.

Not everything is everybody’s business. The elements that factor into my artistic process are part of that process, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the impact of the finished artwork on the listener.

*

People always ask me about my song titles. “Keep Right On Playing Thru the Mirror Over the Water”—what does that mean? “Salute to the Enema Bandit,” “Spotted Dick Is Pudding”—what in the world are you referring to? “To Undertake My Corners Open”? Why are your titles so cryptic? “Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket”? They assume too quickly that titles are always descriptive or programmatic: clues about content. That might be the case for some composers.

But I use song titles as another source of stimulation. They might have roots in my artistic process—in the sundry stuff I encountered as I was making the work—but their function isn’t to suggest that the music can be reduced to those sources. For the listener, they function as a spark. The language is meant to spur your own thought process as you listen. You don’t need to know what I might have been thinking about. Instead you need to start with this material I’ve thrown on the table in front of you and figure out your own reaction. What now? What does it make you feel? What does it make you think about? Take me out of the equation. You’re the equation: your ears, your blood pulse, your own sound world, your own predilections. Now what do we have?

*

Experimentation is at the heart of the creative process. What sets art and science apart from every other domain of human endeavor is that they are formalized realms for radical experimentation. For taking chances. Areas of activity where conjecture and risk taking are privileged and failures and dead ends are accepted as part of the game.

This is the reason there’s perpetual tension between musicians and record companies: experimentation doesn’t go well with commodification. The same sorts of tensions can arise in science, with the funding of research that seems too theoretical, too far out, too removed from any practical application or patent potential.

To expel myself from my proclivities, sometimes I have to let my mind slip into another world. Then it’s hard to fall into habit, into the same old ingrained ways of working. Sometimes I have to destroy my own process to get to something new.

In the winter of 2009 I had a residency at the Copland House in Cortlandt Manor, the town up the Hudson River from New York City where the composer Aaron Copland lived in the last decades of his life. Copland called it his “hideaway.” You’re up there alone in this beautiful house in the woods. I was reading some of the books I found in his collection there—I came across a copy of Ulysses and started rereading that—but I was also just looking out the window. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

One day I noticed a vine outside the window in the den that should have been dead. It was December. All the trees were bare. But there was one bush that had a vine coming up through it that had attached itself to the brickwork on the side of the house, and there were a few leaves on it. I started sketching the vine from different angles—just sketching the structure, the three-dimensional distribution of what was in front of me.

When I looked at it carefully, I realized how complex it was: some parts of the vine looked dead, and then there were these sections with leaves that seemed like these little residual clumps of stubborn life. A little bit of green that seemed determined to hang on—wind and snow and ice be damned. Wow, I thought. Look at that.

I didn’t have a plan. It just piqued my curiosity.

I would check it out every morning, and then I started to appreciate the ways it was changing. A leaf might fall to the ground during the night. The composition kept altering itself, and there was a rhythm to the changes, even if I couldn’t predict exactly what was going to happen when.

I woke up one morning and saw that two clumps of leaves had fallen off. They had already lost their color, and the intensity of green of the remaining leaves on the vine seemed heightened in contrast to the brown around it. There was less green left, but that made the color seem even more vivid.

None of this is surprising from a botanical point of view. Changing seasons isn’t like flipping a light switch. Nature is filled with peculiar little pockets of resiliency and resignation: some things that seem determined not to die, and others that seem to let themselves go prematurely.

But this mundane insight affected my compositional process, because I started playing with contrasts between areas of activity in the music I was writing, too: shifting contrasts between developments in the foreground, the middle ground, and the background of the soundscape. Motifs that lingered “too long” until they came to be highlighted in relief against their surroundings.

This is to say that for me, musical experimentation isn’t a matter of finding new content—I was never trying to depict the falling leaves in sound—but is instead a way of finding a formal instigation from an entirely unrelated source through a simple practice of observation. Making myself look elsewhere. It was as though watching that bush provided a way of making my mind go out on a limb.

*

Once a journalist asked me about the title of my tune “Jenkins Boys, Again, Wish Somebody Die, It’s Hot” from the record Carry the Day. “What difference would it make if I told you?” I replied. I can fill in the background, sure. The title alludes to something my great-grandfather told me. In the cotton fields the only way you could get a day off is when a white person would die. Then everybody would get a break for the funeral.

Working in the fields on sweltering summer days, my great-grandfather told me, folks would look at each other and say, “I wish somebody’d die.” It was a code: I can’t take this shit anymore, it meant. Not a solution, but a way of acknowledging a shared predicament. Slyly veiled hostility, an aspiration for release, passed softly to the person next to you along the row of cotton. The overseer would be standing there but he didn’t know what they were talking about.

And in Illinois, whenever it got really hot my Grandma Gertrude used to proclaim: “That’s the Jenkins boys.” It was what they used to call a heat wave so vivid you could see it hovering like figures on the horizon.

So those different histories—those experiences, those ways of seeing the world, those way of speaking—are knotted together in the title of the tune. But what does it help you to know that? The song’s not a description of that. Listen to it. It’s not an ethnographic portrait of labor on the plantation, or a family memoir.

I think that ultimately the listener gets more when the stimulation is not explained. Then you have to take it in as you listen, letting the language resonate with the way you hear the music. It’s when you don’t know exactly what it means or where it comes from that its full implications come into play. Stifling heat. Airlessness. Murderous thoughts, muttered low. A certain lingering menace. Them boys again.

In the way they play off each other, the combination of language and music might suggest the desire to get free of something. And in fact, for me, that was the real mathematical problem in that particular composition. That’s what inspired it, that compositional question: How do I exit here? Or better: How do I break away from the situation? There has to be a situation—the song sets up a situation—and then I have to extricate myself.

__________________________________

From Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards. Copyright © 2023. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

“Sweet dreams are made of this.”
–Eurythmics
*

If your life was made into a movie, or better yet, a multiple-episode limited series that people could stream whenever they liked, what would be the soundtrack? What music would set the pace and mood of your story? As the opening credits fell away and the first scene faded in—overhead shot of a car on a narrow, straight country road—what song would provide the overlay? Would you pick something like “Indiana” by the Samples—“I remember the first time I drove through Indiana/ Thinking to myself how big this land really is / Amber waves of grain, from a highway / Who lives in that house so far away?” Just guessing, but I would say, probably not. Still, the question remains: What lyrics would flood you with memories of your own, or ignite an emotion buried under the dormant embers of time?

I remember cruising in the passenger seat of Stephanie Lake’s Subaru on a summer evening in high school, many of my best friends packed around me singing Prince’s “7” to the road signs and cornstalks standing tall as we passed by. “No one in the universe will ever compare…”

I remember reclining at my fraternity house on a perfect, lazy Sunday afternoon in April watching the Masters golf tournament on mute with the windows open, Trey Anastasio of Phish extending an invite to “come waste your time with me.” I remember an overcast, bone-chilling February, the kind of Midwestern day that makes you think you live at the North Pole, when my college roommate and I decided that instead of going to class, we had to take a road trip south to New Orleans.

Neither of us had been to Mardi Gras. That was as good a time as any. We borrowed a car and mapped out a path, eleven hours and thirty-seven minutes, give or take time for gas stops and a meal or two. Not long after jumping on Highway 37, we realized we’d left the stocked CD case on the roof of the car, so we drove all those hours listening to Janis Joplin, the CD already in the car, confess that she’d “trade all her tomorrows for a single yesterday.”

Flash-forward to a night in Chicago with my roommates, having just one more drink while marveling at the tight California harmonies of Brian Wilson’s band. “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations.” Then zip ahead again to that moment on the way to the hospital for one of my surgeries, Bob Marley assuring me that “every little thing gonna be all right.”

Those nuggets of life represent a past that has built the present and will hopefully shape a small corner of the future.

For most people, the first lick or two of a song will trigger a memory like the ones I’ve just described, a warm shower of feelings linked to a lyric or a beat. Songs are like pages in a scrapbook, each igniting an emotion from the past. But when that person whose life is laid out in those pages can no longer hear—when the sounds that jar the memories slip away like a friend’s voice in a passing car—the scraps within the pages of that book suddenly stop. One page is filled with vivid recollections. The next is vacant and white, all the “misty watercolor memories / of the way we were” faded like photos in a ceaseless rain.

Deafness is hard to describe because it’s impossible to simulate. Ears don’t have eyelids. You can’t remove your auditory receptors for an hour or two just to experience what it’s like. Deafness is unique among the senses in that respect. If you want to know what it’s like to be without sight, you can put on a blindfold in the dark and bump into things for a while. You can also get a shot of Novocain and marvel at the weirdness that comes with losing your sense of touch.

If you have contracted a virus, there is a chance you lost your sense of taste or smell. Being deaf is different. You can simulate hearing loss easily enough. Put in earplugs and don a noise-canceling headset and you will muffle most sounds, but if lightning strikes a tree nearby, you are going to hear something. Even in your quietest moments, there are sounds: SUVs lumbering down your street, neighbors mowing their lawns, dogs barking, or the hint of a breeze rustling the Bradford pears around you.

Go indoors to the quietest place in your home, and you will still hear things: the patter of your own footsteps, the rasp of your own breath, or a late-morning growl from your stomach alerting you that it’s lunchtime. Even if you pause those bodily functions, you might still hear the hum of electricity pulsing through wires. The point is, no matter how quiet you make things, hearing people hear, which is great. However, that makes it harder to appreciate those who can’t.

Deafness remains foreign to most for good reason. Almost a million people in the United States can’t hear anything. Those are the people who, without an assist from technology, couldn’t hear a cowbell if you rang it behind them. That may seem like a big number, but in a country of 330 million, it’s far enough down the list that it’s reasonable to have never met anyone who is deaf.

It’s also worth noting that more than half of those who are completely deaf are over the age of sixty-five. That is quite different from “hearing loss,” which affects well over 466 million people worldwide, with the number continuing to rise. Hearing loss falls on a wide spectrum, and you know plenty of those people. It’s the guy in the office next door who has hearing aids that you never noticed until he pointed them out to you. It’s your mom who is tilting her head and saying, “What’d you say?” more often than she did a year ago.

It could be the girl on your daughter’s soccer team with a quarter-sized disc attached to the back of her head and a wire that runs somewhere. You’d love to know more about her, but it’s awkward to stare and scary to ask, so, like most people, you do nothing. All of them and many more live under the roof we label as “hearing loss.”

Like millions of people in the world today, I live on the edge of that roofline, a world where the promise of technology keeps hope alive while the frustrations of loss tap me in the shoulder like a steady rain.

Everyone who lives inside the hearing-loss community feels walled off and lost at times. There are the sounds, for example, that the totally deaf rarely hear no matter how advanced the technology. Even with the miracle of modern cochlear implants and other artificial hearing-enhancement devices, a deaf person has trouble with words that lack hard consonants. If it starts or ends with the tick of a T or has the kick of a K, it’s easier to fill in the blanks.

Throw out a soft, swirling sentence and, even with the best technology on the market, the sounds come out like a lullaby in a foreign language: lovely, earnest, and meaningless to the person on the receiving end. In one of the many ironies of hearing loss, a question like “How’s your hearing?” has no hard handles on which to grab. For many, it comes across as something like “awe ooh zee.”

Since no hearing person can relate to total deafness, living in a world where you can’t hear the soft snores of the person you love or the hard cheers of thousands for your favorite football team, try to ponder something simpler. I ask again: What would be your soundtrack?

I first pondered that question in my twenties, because I had to cope with the realization that I might never again experience the feelings of piling into a buddy’s Jeep while Glenn Frey went to his upper register telling me about “a peaceful easy feeling.” I created my soundtrack once Glenn and his bandmates began to fade like the light of a setting moon.

My objective in telling this story is to help others find their own connections within the quiet places of life; to hopefully make you ponder the moments, the relationships, and the feelings you never want to forget. If the rest of your life had to be lived in silence, what sounds would you want to remember?

For me, it was everyday sounds like the high-pitched growl of a chain saw as it bit through the trunk of a poplar. I wanted to remember my mother’s voice calling us to dinner, and the folksy wisdom of my father, a woodshop teacher who gifted his homespun nuggets to my big brother and me growing up. I wanted the laughs of the ones I love to always be embedded in the folds of my mind.

And I wanted to remember music, the catchy hooks that stick around in the brain for decades, like the baritone beat of Waylon Jennings as I played in the driveway, riding my Big Wheel and spinning out. “Just some good ol’ boys / Never meanin’ no harm.” Dad would always holler at me (in southern Indiana, kids heard a lot more hollering than yelling, the former being a raised voice, the latter an angry one), because the Big Wheel left black streaks on the sidewalk.

I also needed to recall those moments in my youth when bad news marked a turning point, the feeling in the pit of my stomach when an otherwise quiet car ride was broken up by Bob Dylan knowing just the right words. “Tangled up in blue,” indeed.

Of course, there were first dates, first kisses, the first flutters of love seared into my brain with the Verve telling me, “It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life.”

Then there were the tender minutes a man has no words to describe. Can you imagine losing all memory of your own voice whispering a beautiful baby to sleep? “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly…”

Those moments are more than a playlist: they represent the pieces of a life no one wants to lose. For those reasons, I set out to create a soundtrack of my life, a “Matt’s Greatest Hits”—not songs by me, but songs that connect me to moments I never want to forget.

Hearing loss is seen by most people as a physical disability, or “challenge,” as it’s known in the newest lexicon. There’s nothing wrong with being deaf. Deaf culture thrives throughout the world. People everywhere find fraternity in their shared, silent experiences. That just wasn’t my culture. Not only had I never met anyone who was deaf, the closest I even came to knowing anyone with hearing loss was my grandpa Earl, whose huge tan hearing aids remained unused and unmoved for a decade in the drawer next to the green rotary phone on his desk.

Even when my hearing wasn’t great, I felt comfortable in almost every room I entered. New people and things, new interactions; it was all like a movie where someone sees Las Vegas for the first time, wide-eyed and smiling. Fear of losing that connection proved to be a powerful motivator. My soundtrack was a way to “hold on loosely, but don’t let go.”

This is also a love story, one with an unexpected focus on the “in sickness and in health” part and a dash of “for better and for worse.”

There is a good chance that it is your story and your journey, too, whether or not you have all five of your senses. You don’t have to lose your hearing to feel like you’ve been dealt a bad hand. Staying a step ahead of the terrifying darkness taught me that you don’t always have to play the hand you’re dealt in life. Sure, sometimes you’ve got to “know when to hold ’em / and know when to fold ’em.”

But sometimes, in life, it’s okay to ask for new cards.

__________________________________

From Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life by Matt Hay. Copyright © 2024 by Matt Hay and reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

Marlon James agreed to do this interview about Bob Dylan by phone from New York in the summer of 2022. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, with its brilliant kaleidoscopic voices, is a book that stays with the reader a long time. The story unfolds partly in 1976 during a turbulent time in Jamaica, and the intense many-sided narrative circles around the iconic artist Bob Marley.

I wanted to interview Marlon because it was clear how a musician’s impact was felt deep inside the lives of his characters—and I wanted to talk to him about his thoughts on another musician.

The writer Robert Polito had, a year earlier, asked me to write an essay for the Bob Dylan archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That essay initiated the idea of starting a new book of essays and interviews that I am currently writing on Dylan. It will also include interview transcripts of various artists—Odetta, Steve Earle, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Robert Creeley, Gillian Armstrong and others—from an earlier independent documentary I made with two friends.

In this interview, Marlon was generous and spontaneous, and had wonderful insights about an artist as mercurial as Dylan…

–Griffin Ondaatje

*

Griffin Ondaatje: I noticed in an interview back in 2016 you mentioned that you are a fan of Bob Dylan. When he won the Nobel prize that year there was that sort of strange reaction where some writers didn’t think he should’ve won. One of the people I interviewed in 2002 when making my documentary, Complete Unknown, was the poet Robert Creeley.

I remember asking him twenty years ago: Do you think there’s a reason why an artist like Dylan couldn’t ever win the Nobel Prize? And he said: “Well, the only reason is the social imaginations of hierarchy that exist in the arts.” I wonder if you would agree with that. How did you feel about it when Dylan won?

Marlon James: Well I think, you know, without getting…I wasn’t gonna start out getting racial in it but let’s get racial in it. You know I found very few, if any, black writers who had a problem with Dylan winning the prize. And I think it’s not necessarily a racial point so much as two things I don’t think happen with black artists. I don’t think we rank art. I don’t think because you are a folk singer you’re more important than me a rapper who’s more important than me a poet. Which is why we can have these type of creative meetings where those people are all there.

I also think that there’s no separation with us between the so-called Great American Song Book—which is mostly people singing blues—and everything else. Music has always been a gateway to self-expression and self-expression’s always filtered its way through music. I don’t think that distinction is there between us.

Also, you know, the Nobel was pretty clear that it was for how he expanded the American songbook. I don’t think songwriting is poetry. I don’t think lyrics are poetry. But I do think lyrics are literature. And I think that most of what we consider literature came out of song.

GO: I like that. And so—

MJ: —And a lot of people were like: He’s not even the best songwriter! But you know that’s like saying John Steinbeck is not the best writer because he won the Nobel Prize. If we’re gonna use that as a standard I can always find somebody better. That’s not the standard. The standard is the kind of impact he’s had. And he’s had a profound impact on literature. He’s had a profound impact, certainly, on black literature. He’s had a profound impact on song. You know if it wasn’t for Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke couldn’t have gotten a social conscience.

GO: You mean with Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” being partly inspired by “Blowin’ in the Wind?”

MJ: Right. So I agree with Creeley that it’s the sort of the intellectual distinctions and the kind of intellectual snobbery and so on that would’ve stood in the way. I’m glad the Nobel committee (at the time) didn’t have it. But, even in my own work, I mean I wish I could say I was as influenced by books as I was by music. And I wish I could say I was influenced by quote unquote serious music as much as I am by pop music. I’m just not highfalutin and brilliant enough! [laughs]

GO: I grew up with five older brothers and sisters in a household that always had music playing somewhere. So I think, for me, it became like this all-embracing art form. I wonder though, Marlon, do you remember the first time hearing Dylan when you were a kid?

MJ: Oh yeah. The first time I heard Dylan I didn’t know it was Dylan cause it wasn’t Dylan singing. Like a lot of people—certainly in Jamaica—I thought “I Shall Be Released” was a Jamaican song, you know? A lot of the old Dylan songs I heard was not Dylan. It was reggae and ska artists covering Dylan. The first time I actually heard Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” I thought he was covering the Jamaican song. You can hear how much of Jamaican ’60s popular music drew from Bob.

The second time I think I heard him was probably in Church. Talking about how people segment music… for a lot of people Bob Dylan’s sort of Christian phase was a nadir for them. That’s when he was in the wilderness. But a lot of times when black musicians talk about Bob Dylan they’re talking about that era, you know? They’re talking about “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

GO: And other great songs on Saved and Shot of Love being part of that era?

MJ: Yeah. But the first time I heard Bob Dylan on the radio… it was “Hurricane.”

GO: You heard it when it first came out? How old would’ve you been?

MJ: I was gonna say it might’ve been when it came out….I’m trying to remember when “Hurricane” came out.

GO: It came out in 1976… so you would’ve been around six years-old?

MJ: That would explain… I was six! And I heard it because Bob Dylan had such a profound influence on Bob Marley—by extension people wanna hear who Marley listened to. “Hurricane’s” a pretty stomping pop track. I pretty much heard what everybody else heard because I was listening to radio.

GO: I remember, in the liner notes of Biograph, Bob Marley says he liked Slow Train Coming and Saved… He especially liked “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And he said something like: “If you’re an artist like Bob Dylan… it doesn’t mean anything to you that people might not like what you’re doing.” So when you moved to Minnesota, Marlon, you were already a fan of Dylan in a deep way?

MJ: I was a fan of Dylan long before I came to Minnesota. I mean I didn’t come to Minnesota till I was thirty-six. And I think the first Bob Dylan album that I bought… I’m trying to remember… it might’ve been Oh Mercy. I mean I am an ’80s kid. I don’t know if it’s the first album of his, though, that I just couldn’t take out of the CD player. For me eventually listening to Oh Mercy made me want to find all his stuff. I can’t remember what album “Jokerman” was on…

GO: Infidels.

MJ: Infidels—and listening to Infidels of course there is a reggae song on it. I mean I liked Bob, but Bob didn’t click for me till I went even further back and heard Blonde on Blonde. Blonde on Blonde which I love—and I never learned Bob in order—Blonde on Blonde led me to Bringing It All Back Home which is probably still my favorite Dylan album.

GO: I read somewhere that you really like the song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

MJ: Hmm-hmm.

GO: What was it about that song in particular?

MJ: It is one of my favorite songs. I think because I like being haunted by a song. That song has been with me through some pretty rough times. And it’s been with me through some pretty cool times. I mean you know in Jamaica reaching—in Church we call it the end of myself—you know, struggling with my identity and struggling with being a writer and not being understood and feeling alone and listening to that song. It’s weird how listening to songs that can seem despondent can make you feel hopeful.

And I love that it didn’t try to make its point in two-and-a-half minutes, and then get out of the way. A Dylan song ends when it damn well ready to end. The singing, the chords, the sort of moodiness and kind of sadness of it. You know, if you’re into Dylan there’s always “that song” that made you get into Dylan.

GO: That song somehow… when you talk about it helping you through hard times… It seems also a song that helps inoculate you to some of the world. He says in one lyric: “Advertising signs con you… meanwhile life outside goes on all around you.” And also just the chaos that’s going on inside him—and the irony that he’s talking to his mom as if to reassure his mother.

MJ: Yeah. I think that’s it as well. You know terms like “songs speak to you” we can appreciate for a reason: because they do. And sometimes it’s not necessarily opening you up to something new so much as… The thing about Dylan is he can make you look at things you’ve already seen…in a different way.

GO: There was an interview you did after A Brief History of Seven Killings and the success of the Booker Prize. You hadn’t gone back to Jamaica at that point and you were saying a certain kind of reaction was inevitable, good and bad, back home. You were saying something like: I can’t pay attention to commentary or trolls, because if I did I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning…

MJ: Hmm-hmm.

GO: …and I was thinking of a line in Dylan’s song “Up to Me”: “If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’ / the heart inside me would’ve died.” Like Marley’s insight in Biograph that Dylan doesn’t pay attention to what others are thinking—I remember there was an interview with Marley in Talkin’ Blues where he was saying how he overcame a lot of negativity in his career, too. In the creative process, is it important for the artist to disappear for a while and avoid all the clamor of what people think about them?

MJ: Yeah… I mean, when my books come out, I may read one or two reviews, usually. And then I don’t read any more.

GO: Why is that, do you think?

MJ: Well… because I already did my part! I also think a review is a conversation, sometimes, between readers… but sometimes a review is just a conversation between reviewers. Like I’ve seen reviews of mine that aren’t even reviewing the book, they’re reviewing the reviews. It’s kinda like when somebody gets a lot of [attention] and then, one week or two week, or sometime after, somebody writes the “take-down.” And you realize this is not a take-down of the work, it’s a takedown of the reviews. Which is fine, if that’s what gets you off.

But I’ve never considered it a healthy conversation for an artist to take part in. I’ve never actually come across a review that helped me to write. You have to shut out a lot of noise, the more attention you get is a lot of noise—and the easier the temptation to have to simply respond to that. And I think for better or worse you’ve got to follow your own muse. I mean not every Dylan record is good. Some are outright atrocious.

GO: Like “Down in the Groove” or whatever…

MJ: Oh god, back in the ’80s before Oh Mercy it was tough going for a while… but it’s a necessary thing for an artist in whatever medium you’re doing to follow your own creative impulse. The work that’s in your head has to be the thing that either comes down on the page, or comes through your guitar, or piano, or so on, without expectations interfering with that transfer.

GO: I think it’s interesting that Dylan at age nineteen, arriving in New York from Minnesota, was already creating personas. It provided a certain armor… so that he could evolve as an artist. Like he lied that he grew up with carnivals in Gallup, New Mexico etc… He told all sorts of stories… it just gave him a bit of a head start and freedom not to be defined by things.

But I wonder if in today’s world—with things like social media—where everything is “fact-checked” in two seconds… he couldn’t have gotten away with that sort of process back in 1961. Not that it matters…

MJ: But… I mean authenticity has absolutely nothing to do with the making of good art. And by talking “authenticity” I’m not endorsing theft. Cause I’m not part of that whole sort of ‘I’m using this, this, and this—and I made Art!’ You didn’t create: you curated. Which is fine, that’s a skill too, that’s being creative too.

But there’s a difference between being a creator and a curator. But to come back to Dylan—I think a lot of that was also playing with people’s expectations. The fact is, once people feel that they find you they reduce you. And why not? Because we actually add a certain virtue to it, you know? People think the concise version is the best version.

People still say in my [university] classes: You know, a good book is your last draft minus ten percent. I said: That don’t apply to me… most of my books are bigger than my first edit. You know?

This sort of idea of a process of reduction is a process of getting the truth and authenticity—it is of course utter bullshit. Even authenticity is kind of a pose…anybody can do it! You know? [laughs]

I put on my t-shirt and jeans and don’t comb my hair and listen to some really, really, really sad anti-pop by some white guys who really need a bath. I think for [Dylan] if people really are going to talk about him, he’s going to spice up the conversation. Or he’s gonna, in some ways, direct how people talk. But I also think that if he said “I was raised by some blind nun in Mexico…” To an extent it is kind of true, because he’s saying it. Next week he says: “I was raised down south like Elvis”—actually it is kind of true, too.

I’m a big believer that the formative moments for me, when I have listened to something or read something that made me want to write, that that was kind of a birth. The first time I read Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters—it’s a novel set in the Philippines and I still think it’s the greatest novel about Jamaica ever written—even though it’s set in the Philippines I found myself there. And that was kind of a birth.

I could’ve said: “Yeah man, literary awakening began in Manila.” I never been there. But I also think that Dylan realized from the get-go that if he sortof fucks with his audience, then the audience can’t necessarily screw him over.

GO: He’s got control.

MJ: Yeah. And I think that’s it. It’s in some ways a better play…it’s as good a play as when David Bowie said he was “gay.” Grace Jones used to do it too because Grace Jones used to tell people that she couldn’t leave her house in Jamaica because she’d walk outside and lions would eat her! [laughs] ’cause she knew how ignorant people were.

And I think part of being an artist is being kind of a charlatan… kind of playing with, and toying with, audience. And so keeping them guessing. I think [Dylan] realizes as well that once people figure him out, then they start to reduce him. Oh: You’re a folksinger!

GO: But I’m wondering… With some artists like Dylan, who’s absorbing a lot of different musical styles, different ways of writing lyrics, other artists’ stuff… do you think he’s just really good at that? Better than most other artists?

MJ: Well, he’s better at it than most people. I think Dylan… I think the thing about Led Zeppelin and the Stones is that they dig music—particularly black music—after the fact. The difference between them and Dylan is that Dylan digs culture as it’s happening. And I think that’s a big difference. It’s why Talking Heads sound like Talking Heads, you know?

Another band that’s influenced by black people, you know, Aerosmith sounds like Aerosmith. Not digging black culture as it’s happening… they’re just digging it after the fact. I also think Dylan has something interesting to say to add on top of that; or else he would never be influencing people like Sam Cooke. He would never be influencing all these black musicians. Because I’ve yet to meet a black musician who go: “Man that Stones record really made me want to make music.”

Which is not to put down the Stones… but c’mon. Whereas, you still hear people talking about Bringing It All Back Home. Or you hear people talking about unlikely stuff that has influenced—that Rolling Stone is never gonna praise—like Saved. Or even, before Saved, the one that hinted he was going that way…

GO: Slow Train Coming.

MJ: Yeah. I think he does it better than everybody else. That’s why he’s Dylan and we’re not. He’s just a better writer than everybody else… considering that sometimes it looks like the only book he ever read was The Bible.

GO: Was there any other album that you think of as one of your favorites?

MJ: I really like Time Out of Mind. I don’t have an American context…so I didn’t know why people hated Self Portrait so much.

GO: You mean like the old Marcus review?

MJ: Yeah. [laughs] I read his thing “What is this shit?” and so on. But, you know, I came to that album after listening to bands like Pavement. You know, if I’m listening to bands like Pavement or Railroad Jerk or even Captain Beefheart or listening to Devendra Banhart and all these ’90s folk… with Self Portrait I’m like: Yeah! So I actually quite like that record.

But if you’re asking me what my second favorite Dylan album is, it would be Desire.

GO: I love that album. Something about the violin… and Emmylou Harris’s voice is so great too… It’s everywhere.

MJ: Yeah! It’s also why Rolling Thunder Revue is my favorite re-issue of the re-issues so far. It’s Bob Dylan at his most collaborative. It’s Bob Dylan as a band leader. I don’t know if he can actually be, again, that loose and that brilliant at the same time.

I was teaching “American Women Writers” at Georgetown last fall when my students proposed adding Taylor Swift to the syllabus. Like most of the humanities courses I teach, it was mostly composed of white women—there wasn’t a single man enrolled. The course drew on writing from the 20th century to today—Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado—to discuss the intertwinement of national and personal identity. I was most interested in asking my students how American culture prescribes an “ideal” life path for women: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in the baby carriage.

I wanted my students to consider this life path as a genre. They were game. Only, they called for a more expansive canon. Midway through the semester, one student wanted to add Beyoncé Knowles-Carter to the lineage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the next wanted to add Taylor Swift.

Teaching towering artists of contemporary culture like Knowles and Swift is no small feat for anyone. It’s an even greater one if you’re a member of their target audiences and have attended their concerts as a fan. Their work refuses to stay in the lane of two, or three, or even four genres; it also transcends different forms of visual and literary culture. They’re both talented artists and strategic businesswomen.

As a PhD student in visual culture, I TA’ed multiple courses that taught Knowles. They taught me how to orient her work within a history of visual culture—for instance, by placing “Lemonade,” her visual album, within the Southern Gothic lineage.

Swift hit different. I’d never TA’ed a class that included her on the syllabus. And, as a white American woman two years younger than she is, and who, admittedly, has bought into the parasocial bit over time, she and I go way back.

When it comes to identity, humanities academics can be both dismissive and self-serving. At our worst, we find the rhetoric we need to promote or dismiss whatever feels affectively good to us; we also find the rhetoric that makes us look good to the colleagues who have the power to promote and pay us. A dismissive uproar followed the news that both Swift and Knowles have been assigned their own press corps. Academics need to consider, with nuance, what is going on here.

Last fall, I was determined not to be dismissive or self-serving. I wanted to approach Swift as a teacher, a member of her target audience, and a critic. Keeping in mind Jennifer Nash’s proposal that the critic is engaged in “a loving practice rather than a destructive one,” I wanted to think about what it meant for so many of us to have grown up alongside her—to have watched her, in real time, capture American culture. I wanted to ask my class some questions: Does Swift represent the “ideal” American life path of romantic love, marriage, and parenthood? Or might we trace a different course underlying her oeuvre?

*

A student opened our Swift day by presenting on taste hierarchies. She asked “Do you feel shame when talking about the media that you enjoy which revolves around love? Is your shame dependent on the audience present?” She also asked: “Do writers, particularly female writers, have a responsibility to write about a variety of topics to be considered valid artists?”

Then she led discussion. One student referred to “Miss Americana” as “a feature-length commercial.” Another brought up the environmental impacts of Swift’s jet; another brought up the controversy surrounding her use of the term “fat” in the “Anti-Hero” music video; still another brought up a now-scrubbed homophobic lyric.

We turned to textual analysis. On the projector, I played “Bejeweled,” which Swift wrote and directed. It opens with camp queen Laura Dern playing the evil stepmother, the Haim sisters playing stepsisters, and Swift playing Cinderella cleaning their “sick from last night” off the floor.

Students knocked on their desks when they saw a Gothic element—women’s shared domestic space, a castle, 18th-century dresses. Dern states the story’s driving tension: “I simply adore a proposal, the single most defining thing a lady can hope to achieve in her lifetime.”

Swift is a fallen woman. But “Bejeweled” is about upward mobility, and she finds a way out. Not so subtly, Swift fantasizes about entering a skyscraper elevator. At the top she meets the queen, a Black woman who forces a white prince to propose. Swift winks and then ghosts; she gets to keep the castle, though.

It’s a music video that combines elements of British imperial fiction, the Gothic genre, and the fairytale. It’s also a prescription for moving up in American culture. Swift instructs: “Don’t put me in the basement when I want the penthouse of your heart.” While she of course sings to an enormous audience, the implication is that she’s addressing her former fiancé.

For Swift—who officially became a billionaire in November 2023—these kinds of fictions generate wealth. At the same time, they give us a different path, even if it comes with drawbacks. Historically, moving “up” has, for women, relied on them marrying up. But here, there’s no question what will bring her capital: it’s singing about her dating life, again and again and again. Swift’s knowing wink at the end seals the deal; she knows exactly what she is doing.

Swift invites her audience to indulge in the feelings that the Gothic has always encouraged: anxiety, lust, relief. But if home, in America, is where we invest our assets—both emotional and material—what does it mean that the home shared by women is in an old, dark basement? What does it mean that the “penthouse” Swift’s character aspires to is in an expensive-looking skyscraper, with a wealthy, white prince, played by Jack Antonoff, at the top? What does it mean that the Black queen, played by the iconic British makeup artist Pat McGrath, forces the white prince to propose?

Walking out of class, I wondered whether Swift also compels us to ask whether the big emotions incited by patriarchal genres can be traps, seducing us into structures that might harm us. If the “first comes love, then comes marriage” lifespan is a genre prescribed to American women, who wrote that prescription? Who, exactly, does this prescription serve?

*

Suddenly I was using the “us” pronoun: like my students, I’m a woman younger than Swift. While I don’t consider myself a Swiftie, I sometimes find myself, in jest, calling her “Mother” to my Swiftie friends, as they do (and as Knowles’ fans also do). I know she addresses me when she sings “the penthouse of your heart.” Since Swift evolved from a country artist to a pop star, I have felt, as a woman younger than her who loves pop culture, that her siren song is directed at me. She’s been a fixture in my life since high school, when the “Teardrops on My Guitar” commercials appeared in my family’s living room. (I remember really disliking them.) How, even with all her flaws and complications, did she seduce me?

I only began to warm to her music in 2012, when Red came out: enjoying it at parties, especially when “22” came on. That fall, I was a newly minted 20-year-old, relieved to have left my teenage years behind. I remember spending a lot of time being anxious about drinking. My friends had begun turning 21, and I wouldn’t legally be allowed at bars until senior year. I loved, though, that “22,” which joked about “dressing up as hipsters,” played so often at parties at my hipster liberal-arts college. I couldn’t go to bars, but I could go to these parties. l loved that my friends, both men and women, took their shirts off when they danced to it.

My next intense memory of Swift was attending her concert. When I was 26, I got tickets to her Reputation stadium tour in Chicago. Watching the tour as a visual-studies PhD student fresh off her first-year evaluation earlier that afternoon, I could see its issues. Earlier that quarter, I had written an article for The Atlantic about the literary tradition of white-woman narrators putting themselves in close proximity to Blackness in order to “grow up” and embrace their burgeoning sexuality.

The album’s troubling stuff—Swift’s filch from the Black-created genres of gospel and hip-hop—was pronounced at the concert. Suddenly, Swift’s backup dancers, which, up until Reputation tended to be a mix of genders and races, were mostly women of color. There were lots of snakes and other references to hell and “badness,” both visually and rhetorically. The relationship between Blackness, badness, and sexual rebirth reached its climax during “Look What You Made Me Do.” Tiffany Haddish suddenly appeared on a screen behind Swift to state the song’s most famous line: “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now—because she’s dead.”

I wish I could pretend that I hated the concert, that its problems made me walk away. Instead, I woke up the next day, sore from dancing. The truth is that Reputation is as compelling as it is troubling: an irrevocable installment in our collective “growing up” as racially diverse Americans, as women, as consumers of mass media.

The album and tour monetized the past on a number of levels. There was what was happening with Scooter Braun: in 2019, Scott Borchetta sold her music to Scooter Braun, a man she hated, without her consent, even though she asked for the opportunity to purchase it herself. There was also what happened with Kanye West: in 2009, he got onstage at the VMAs to interrupt Swift and announce that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” In 2016, with the assistance of his then-wife, Kim Kardashian, he recorded a phone call with Swift, doctoring it so that it appeared she granted him permission, in his song “Famous,” to use the lines: “Taylor and I might still have sex, why? Because I made that bitch famous.”

Lastly, there was Swift’s yearlong departure from the public eye, after the media-storm of these years. Her writing about the exodus eerily resembles Echo’s departure from Narcissus: with Swift playing echo and the public eye playing Narcissus. Swift, herself, references Ovid’s tale in her poem “Why I Disappeared,” which was introduced, at the Reputation tour, in a Swift-spoken word video clearly influenced by Knowles’ “Lemonade,” which came out a couple years prior. (Plath also frequently referenced “Echo and Narcissus” in her work.) Swift, eschewing poetry’s place in hierarchies of taste, then sold the poem, in a magazine attached to the Reputation tour, at Target: a home-goods store catering to white women, for more profit.

Reputation was also influenced by traditions of American celebrity. Lauren Michele Jackson’s White Negroes—her title a reference to Norman Mailer’s essay about the original hipster— observes that “while black girls are grown before they hit puberty, white women must find creative ways to own that maturity for themselves.” Jackson demonstrates that white popstars who are “native to the industry as little girls and young women,” must “go ‘primitive’ in ways that whiteness doesn’t afford.”

Jackson quotes Hilton Als’ White Girls, highlighting yet another artistic tradition Swift’s work takes up. Als’ “You and Whose Army” is a fictional piece, written from the perspective of Richard Pryor’s sister—who is, herself, a (fictionalized) voice actress for porn. “That black bitch by definition tells a white bitch who she is,” Pryor’s sister says. Pryor’s sister maps out the dynamics at work behind the Black queen’s approval of a white-woman artist like Swift in “Bejeweled.”

Swift sheds light on the stakes of “putting on one’s face” to make it through the workday by casting McGrath—a Black makeup artist, whose star text best reflects the cost of this burden—as the queen. Through Queen Pat’s body, Swift also gives herself a Black-woman stamp of approval. While Swift’s cynical engagement with Black culture evolved slightly from Reputation to Midnights (the album on which “Bejeweled” appears), it erupts again in the “Bejeweled” video. This time there is a knowing wink at the end.

*

As the artist herself acknowledges in her recent hit, “Anti-Hero”—“I’m the problem, it’s me”—Swift has made her fair share of mistakes over the course of her career. She’s also provided invaluable lessons to her immense, fervent following.

What did Swift’s work teach me as I grew up alongside it? I’ve learned that it’s much more satisfying to use the inner workings of your body as a tool—to perform for three hours, run a marathon in under four, write a dissertation chapter, stay up late talking to a friend—than as a quiet surface for others to admire. I’ve learned that sometimes you have to assume that whatever you do will treated in bad faith, or with a dismissive glance, by those who wield power over you. You have to try to make a living while doing your very best to act in a way that you hope your future self will be able to stand behind.

This all feels “too much.” I know I sound breathless, like a fangirl. Just as I don’t love that girls’ fandom is often described as “mania,” I don’t love that women’s personal writing is often labeled “confessional.” The genre label removes the fact that writing—just like giving birth, just like raising kids, and just like teaching—is work, even if it doesn’t pay well. Terms like “mania” and “confessional” mobilize the gendered history of pathology to dismiss girls’ expertise, and women’s labor.

*

As a Swift fan and critic, I tried to get publicity tickets to Eras over the summer. After expressing my interest, I received a kind email from Tree Paine, Swift’s iconic redheaded publicist, saying I would need to apply with my media outlet. In the succeeding months, I learned that Paine gave access to fans rather than critics. (One student from the Women Writers course procured tickets through the following she built on TikTok.) While academics and media outlets need Swift to do their work, she doesn’t need them to do hers.

Instead, I got tickets for opening weekend—with my own money—for the Eras film. I’m a film scholar after all; this, I thought, would be a timely article hook. That night, I dressed “as Red,” celebrating the moment I began to enjoy Swift’s music. I wore my “A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT” sweatshirt, honoring our shared status as eldest daughters; red press-ons; and a too-tight friendship bracelet my sister made over the summer that spelled “KELLY” in small, white beads. With me that night was one of my closest friends; before the film, we sat on my bed as she French-braided my hair.

I got tickets a state over, in Virginia; I didn’t want my students to see me in my costume. The cinema was filled with cliques of girls—mostly 4 to 6 per group, elementary aged, middle-school aged, and high-school aged—some mother-daughter duos, and a few gay couples. Unlike Taffy Brodesser-Akner (who attended the concert in hopes of writing a Swift profile for The New York Times, even though she, too, failed at getting publicity tickets), I didn’t notice any husbands, but I bet they were there.

As the show continued, the girls congregated under the screen like they were at the concert. Initially, they danced in their cliques. But by the end they were a mass. I didn’t see anyone close to my age down there. Seeing this particular mob scream “karma is my boyfriend” and “karma takes all my friends to the summit” on a Saturday night in Virginia was really something.

Maybe it’s my fandom, but the situation at the theater struck different from the other mediascapes I study, especially today. It felt capitalist, and it felt suspiciously prosocial.

*

When I think back to Swift on stage, sweaty and working during the film’s finale, I also think of Plath, in her early thirties: tall, at the height of artistry, with long, wavy-brown hair and bangs. Plath, at this point in her life, had left her mother and brother behind in the US to be closer to her husband’s family in the UK; just after she had their second baby, he left her for another woman. At the time of her death, she was also struggling against intense economic duress, social isolation, and postpartum depression. (It is our culture’s dirty little secret—even and especially today, post-Dobbs—just how dangerous pregnancy, labor, and the months after can be.) She woke up early, before the babies did, to write about what led her to such a place. This was the work that won her the Pulitzer after her death.

The writing industry, like Plath’s husband and his family, profited from her labor. But neither paid her enough to support herself in return. And Swift, like Plath, grapples with being desired but not cared for: a labor structure that, under the guise of “love,” will dispose of you the moment you show that—just like your romantic partner or employer—you have needs, too. Both write about marketplaces women navigate on a daily basis—the sexual marketplace, feminized (aka low paying) jobs outside of the home, the artistic work that happens in between—that dangle the carrot of care in exchange for low-wage labor. These jobs often have a contingent pay structure, even if they aren’t framed that way at the offer stage.

“Bejeweled,” instead, shows Swift breaking away from the labor structure prescribed to American women from the beginning. She creates a different path. In contrast to Plath—who did her best to support herself but who, in the mid 20^th century, did not have the privilege or support that Swift does—Swift has taken over the global economy; she will be just fine. (When I emailed an early version of this article to Peter K. Steinberg, the editor of Plath’s letters, he responded: “First of all, who is this Taylor Swift you’re writing about?”)

Unlike both Plath and Knowles, Swift has reached her mid-thirties with no husband or children in sight. For decades, we have watched her repeatedly turn down the lifespan of “ideal” labor in favor of another kind of labor. It shouldn’t be radical for Swift to foreground this labor structure in such a public forum, but it is—especially post-Dobbs. Like Knowles and Plath, Swift (based on the subtext of “Bejeweled”) had a choice to take a life of marriage and babies, a life of business-conscious artistic work, or both. She has repeatedly turned down marriage in favor of the other.

Knowles took both paths, and when her husband, like Plath’s, cheated on her, Knowles spun the betrayal into artistic gold, and into money for herself. (Just like all women, Knowles needs money—her own money—if she wants to leave a situation that is bad for her.) Plath was offered both paths as well, but taking them came at the cost of her life, and for American culture more broadly. Even though I wouldn’t have thought this ten years ago, I’d rather be seduced by Taylor Swift than Ted Hughes.

Just like every other woman in the American dating market, these artists’ proximity to straightness and whiteness (including Knowles, who is blond) played a role in their ability to procure these options. In contrast to Swift and Knowles, Plath, who attended Smith College on scholarship, pursued and chose a college education. But the degree didn’t protect her in the end. In return for her labor, she needed money to live. Her husband didn’t offer that to her, and neither did her industry.

While Plath’s oeuvre is structured in a clocklike fashion—a series of deaths and rebirths—Swift’s is almost exclusively a story of births. As my colleague Margaret Rossman points out, Swift encourages fans “to become part of her story” through inviting them to look back on their own. Her work, in other words, compels the audience to look back on past versions of Swift and themselves: to see their journey as a series of rebirths. And this comes as American culture tells women in their early thirties that the clock is ticking, that the only way to find care—the only path to womanhood—is through the work of becoming a wife and mother.

Swift, troubling that script, has more important work to do. And her oeuvre tells other American girls and women that they probably do, too. At the same time, she, rather than a future spouse, lets us revel in the pleasures of the prescription before it goes too far.

Indeed, Swift writes frequently of women who break off engagements. In “Bejeweled,” rather than ending with the marriage plot, Swift shows that the diamonds in her eyes can lead her up an unexpected path. The marriage proposal is the ultimate job offer for an American woman, the diamond a signal to the world that you have been chosen, picked up from the basement. To be in proximity to a diamond, much less possess it, is to move up in society.

But a diamond isn’t a girl’s best friend. It isn’t the friendship bracelet—like the one I wore to the Eras film—made with sturdy string and plastic beads, by a woman who has always seen you. Swift shows that America’s prescription for women flattens the longer, more-complicated span of their lives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Plath separated from her spouse, in addition to Toni Morrison and Carmen Maria Machado—those other notorious American women writers on our syllabus. Diamonds are hard to look away from, and they are meant to be. They trap and redirect light.

Swift shows that maybe, only once your life has been refracted by the diamond—only once you are living in a penthouse with your husband and mothering a baby that has his last name rather than yours, only once you have procured the lifestyle America has pledged contains all of the answers—does it become clear that this fairytale may not live up to its promise of care, in return for your work.

It’s too late at this point, though. You have a baby who needs you; you have said vows and signed a contract tying your finances with your husband’s; you have likely already scaled back on paid hours at your job outside the home—beginning with your doctor’s appointments, if you are lucky enough to be able to afford them—in favor of working for him and the baby. You have likely begun to leave your friends and your own family behind too, in favor of showing up more for your husband’s family of origin.

Even though our culture, especially in its post-Dobbs era, doesn’t give American girls a prescription for becoming women, Swift does. She offers American girls and women a model of contributing to the economy on their own terms: she is creating more jobs rather than more babies.

Her work is not without mistakes. It is, of course, uniquely enabled by her whiteness and sex appeal. It is, of course, cynical: Eras markets her music (her old, own music), to a new generation of girls. And yet—as an eldest daughter, as a cultural historian, as a teacher of Gen Zs, as a loving critic—I am so grateful for Swift’s work, for her successes, for her mistakes. I can’t wait to see what she makes next.

___________________________

I’d like to thank my sisters, Meghan and Aileen, for everything.

Since the term nostalgia first became common currency, no area of life has been associated with it more than popular culture. From Alvin Toffler onward, intellectuals frequently drew on revivals of past styles in music and fashion or used films and television series set in the past as examples to substantiate their claims that nostalgia had become omnipresent.

At the same time, film, music, and fashion critics drew on nostalgia to explain the existence and appeal of pop cultural revivals. The two lines converged in the discussion of the “nostalgia wave” in the 1970s, which, to a large extent, was inspired by a revival of 1950s rock and roll at the time. The 1970s also generated a new term for revivalism with retro.

Originating in France in the debate about la mode rétro, discussed later in this chapter, the word soon entered many other languages. Quickly the two terms, nostalgia and retro, became conflated to the point where they were used almost interchangeably. What Fredric Jameson called the “nostalgia film” drew on examples also discussed as retro, a term he used as well, and the same holds true for Jean Baudrillard.

Simon Reynolds starts out by distinguishing between retro and nostalgia only to end up equating them: for him nostalgia is complicit in—if not responsible for—pop culture’s full-on plunge into “retromania.” By contrast, art historian Elizabeth Guffey, in her overview of the history of retro, calls for differentiating between the two terms because “retro is not nostalgia.”

While both concepts can appear in a positive or neutral way—there is no dearth of radio stations, TV shows, and shops sporting either the word nos­talgia or retro in their titles—in intellectual discourse they, and nostalgia most of all, usually carry a negative, pejorative connotation. Similar to the critics of nostalgia discussed in Chapter 1 and the critics of conservatism discussed in Chapter 2, critics of pop culture use the term nostalgia mainly as an indictment.

More specifically they use it, as we will see, first in an emotional sense, implying that people returned to the pop cultural past because of a personal, sentimental attachment; second in an aesthetic sense, synonymous with kitsch; and finally in a temporal sense, to denote an orientation toward the past and an inability or unwillingness to go with the times, forsaking innovation and originality for imitation and repetition.

The last aspect, which the pop cultural critique shares with the other critiques, is the most important one, and as in the other instances, it was based on an implicit modernist understanding of time. Pop culture critics tend to conceive of time as homogeneous and linear, as a straightforward timeline. By contrast, the word retro implies a cyclical temporality: every style (or aspects thereof) returns after a certain number of years.

One of the first to observe this process, or, at any rate, to put it into writing, was the British curator and historian James Laver in his 1937 book Taste and Fashion. “Laver’s Law,” as his scheme was later dubbed, stipulated that a garment was subject to a distinctive cycle: ten years before its time it was perceived as indecent, then as shameless, until it finally became smart, only to quickly fall out of fashion: perceived as hideous after a mere 10 years, it took a good 150 years for it to become beautiful—or back in fashion—again:

Indecent: 10 years before its time

Shameless: 5 years before its time

Outré (daring): 1 year before its time

Smart: —-

Dowdy: 1 year after its time

Hideous: 10 years after its time

Ridiculous: 20 years after its time

Amusing: 30 years after its time

Quaint: 50 years after its time

Charming: 70 years after its time

Romantic: 100 years after its time

Beautiful: 150 years after its time

The cyclical nature of retro does not fit in with—contradicts even—the modern understanding of time: if there is no progress, there must be decline for the pop culture critics. Reynolds even dates the exact point from which pop culture declined, when he notes an “absence of revivalism and nostalgia during the sixties” followed by a period in which “nostalgia became steadily more and more bound up with popular culture.”

Gradually increasing—or rather worsening—this development reached its peak with the new millennium: “Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‘Re’ Decade.”

Reynolds’s chronology, however, is dubious on two counts at least. For one, it can be accused of nostalgia itself, as the 1960s emerge as a dynamic, nostalgia-free golden age from which pop culture began its decline in the 1970s and reached its nadir in the 2000s, at the time of writing.

Worse still, it is false: as Raphael Samuel notes, revivalism has been a “leitmotiv of European culture ever since the quattrocento’s discovery (or rediscovery) of classical antiquity.” Laver’s law bears this out for the area of fashion. “Pastiche and nostalgia have been pervasive in popular culture throughout the twentieth century,” historian Elizabeth Wilson, too, argues.

This chapter takes up these objections. Starting with the 1970s debates about the nostalgia wave and la mode rétro, it then jumps back to the 1950s and the 1960s to show that many of the issues at stake in these debates were—contrary to Reynolds’s claim—already present in the preceding decades. Indeed, this chapter shows that if any decade could be said to have invented retro, it was not the allegedly nostalgic 1970s but the supposedly future-looking 1960s. The chapter then continues with the 1980s, tracing the development of the debate up to the present.

Jumping between decades and tracing elective affinities between them, the chapter hopes to break up and complicate the established chronology. Positioning itself against the cliché of retro as imitative and derivative, a mere replica of past styles, it argues that looking back is a source of inspiration rather than a sign of stagnation. In following these various strands of revivalism and the critique of them, it examines the role of the concept of nostalgia in how they are perceived, explained, and criticized and thereby how nostalgia’s meanings changed and shifted.

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The 1950s Revival of the 1970s

For many observers, one of the most surprising things about the beginning of the 1970s was the degree to which they seemed enthralled by the past. The past, and the 1950s specifically, was felt to be “charging back at us,” bringing the present up to the “edge of nostalgia shock,” warned the Saturday Review in 1971. In a 1972 cover story titled “The Nifty Fifties,” Life reported, “It’s been barely a dozen years since the ’50s ended, and yet here we are again, awash in the trappings of that sunnier time, paying new attention to the old artifacts and demigods.” “In the grand sweep of American history,” Newsweek declared a few months later, “the 1950s were one of the blandest decades ever.

But now a revival of those very same quiet years is swirling across the nation like a runaway Hula-Hoop.” Obviously, Newsweek had its doubts about the revival, evoking such “grim memories as Korea, Suez, Hungary, Sputnik and economic recession” to counter it, but to little avail. “Must we be nostalgic about the fifties?” writer Thomas Meehan also wondered—obviously, many Americans were because, in his words, “an enormous number” of them were “looking back on the decade as a shimmeringly serene and happy time.”

The return of the 1950s was not limited to the United States. In Britain, too, the “‘fifties and all the cult heroes associated with that period, again became high fashion,” as the Evening Standard put it in 1972, confirming a year later: “The ‘fifties revival has definitely come to stay.” Drawing on some of the same examples as American and British writers, the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch in 1973 observed a “nostalgic wave” resurrecting the 1940s and 1950s—although the 1950s revival would not really take off in West Germany until the end of the decade. In 1978, the weekly Der Spiegel led with “The Myth of the 50s: The Yearning for the Miracle Years,” reminiscent of Life’s earlier issue on the “nifty fifties.”

Initially, the 1950s revival was mainly a revival of 1950s rock and roll. Suddenly, rock veterans like Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard, some of whom had fallen on hard times or slipped into obscurity by then, found themselves in demand again. In histories of rock, this development usually begins with the Rock Revival at the Felt Forum in New York in 1969, allegedly the first ever revival concert. However, developments in Europe predated those in the United States.

At the low point of his career, returning from touring US Army bases all over Germany, Haley played a triumphant concert in Paris in 1966, where audiences welcomed him with banners and cheers, and this enthusiasm repeated itself shortly thereafter in Amsterdam. Two years later, he experienced an equally raucous welcome when he toured the United Kingdom, with his signature song “Rock around the Clock” even returning to the charts. “A good many of our bookings come from many parts of the world where people want to be nostalgic about rock & roll,” Haley explained. “We have always been defenders of rock and now we find ourselves showing how it is played, describing it to people and generally keeping it alive.”

Entering middle age, Haley had transformed from a menace of middle-class society into a gatekeeper of rock and roll lore, passing it on to the next generation. Happy about his unexpected comeback, Haley seems to have been at ease with his new role as elder statesman of rock. Other performers were more critical: they did not want to be antiquarians, playing their old songs over and over again, but taken seriously as contemporaries with new material to offer. Audiences, however, saw the performers of the 1950s as just that, expecting them to play the songs they were best known for.

To some extent the rock and roll revival was the brainchild of Richard Nader. Born in 1940, he had grown up listening to rock and roll, turning his hobby into a job by becoming a disc jockey. During the “British Invasion” in the 1960s, he resolved to bring back the acts he had grown up with during the 1950s. The task was more difficult than he had assumed.

It took him over four years to get the show off the ground because tracking down and convincing the performers of that era to participate was not as easy as he thought. In 1969 he rented the Felt Forum in New York, quickly selling out its 4,500 seats. One year later, the revival had gathered enough momentum for Nader to move his show to the 20,000-seat auditorium of Madison Square Garden.

He continued to organize revival concerts throughout the 1970s, in both the United States and Europe. At the outset, these concerts were aimed at people like Nader himself, people who felt, as he said, the “world isn’t the one they were brought up in, and they’re not quite comfortable with the new thing. But the Revival gives them that womb again, it gives them that security, that escape.” Though he did not use the term nostalgia, what he said fed into how critics perceived the revival.

Quickly, however, the shows attracted a new constituency: the adolescent rock fans of the present. They flocked not only to Nader’s revival concerts but also to their British equivalent, the London Rock and Roll Show of 1972, which was released as a concert film the following year. Organized by brothers Ray and Ronald Foulk, who had previously staged festivals on the Isle of Wight as a kind of British Woodstock, it took place at Wembley Stadium. The London Rock and Roll Show featured much the same acts as its American predecessors: Haley, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others.

Despite its all-star lineup and the crowds of people descending on Wembley, the show received some criticism. “It’s a fossil scene,” said Mick Jagger after the concert. The Guardian called it an “extraordinary historical peep show” and “a treat for teddy boys, fifties nostalgics, and musical archaeologists”; the Financial Times expressed “relief that this was (hopefully) a once a decade overdose of nostalgia.” Such hopes soon proved to be wrong: revival concerts quickly became a regular part of the pop music circuit.

Although the show attracted older people, who had been reared on rock and roll and saw the concert as a chance to revisit their youth, the audience mainly consisted of younger fans, as both the film and pictures of the audience bear out. They mainly show people in their twenties, clad in the long-draped coats with velvet collars and other garments worn by the Teddy Boys in the 1950s. Indeed, it was not the former Teddy Boys, as the Guardian thought, but younger people who adopted their style and updated it who were the main constituency of the rock and roll revival.

But where did the Teddy Boys and Girls of the 1970s get their authentic-looking gear? Flea markets and secondhand shops were essential. As was the boutique Let It Rock in the King’s Road, run by a flame-haired art school graduate called Malcolm McLaren, who was still relatively unknown at that point, and his equally unconventional girlfriend Vivienne Westwood. Repelled by the hippies frequenting the surrounding boutiques and attracted to the tough-looking and tough-acting Teddy Boys, McLaren and Westwood copied their look.

When they took over the shop in the King’s Road, they turned it into a time machine. McLaren designed the interior to look like an “imitation of a kitsch fifties front room,” decorating it “with authentic Festival of Britain-era wallpaper” and the paraphernalia of the decade, such as “a period fridge painted bubblegum pink and black, teak sideboards and formica display cabinets. Rock ’n’ roll blasted from a jukebox.”

McLaren and Westwood sold whatever apprentice Teds needed to feel authentic: “Brylcreem, novelty socks decorated with musical notes, plastic earrings and black leather ties with see-through plastic pockets,” as well as “handbills for fifties films and secondhand records from that time.” Mainly, however, they sold period clothes. As these were often not in the best of shape, Westwood started to repair them. Soon she made entire outfits herself. A schoolteacher with no formal training in tailoring, it was here that Westwood’s career as a fashion designer began. In the film about the London Rock and Roll Show, McLaren is seen hawking her T-shirts; Westwood remembers, “We sold quite a lot of stuff that day and made over a thousand pounds.”

Westwood and McLaren may have been pioneers, but they were not alone. “Fashion has been flirting with the ‘fifties for months now,” reported the Evening Standard. “Many fashion houses, boutiques and department stores are stocking up not only on the actual clothes that were popular then,” News­week told its readers in 1972, “but also on a new line of ’70s clothing featuring ’50s accents.” Starting out in one area of popular culture, the revival quickly branched out into others. As it did, Westwood and McLaren got bored with the Teds. Says Westwood, “They weren’t such rebels after all.”

Roughly the same age as Nader, they took an interest in the 1950s because identifying as Teds was a way to rebel against the hippie counterculture that dominated the scene in the 1960s. In 1974, they renamed their shop SEX and made it a hotbed for the burgeoning British punk scene—the Sex Pistols, named after it, were conceived largely as advertising. Backward-looking as the 1950s revival may have been, it fed directly into one of the major cultural innovations of the 1970s: “There is a paradox right at the heart of punk,” Simon Reynolds observes: “this most revolutionary movement in rock history was actually born from reactionary impulses.”

After all, punk was, as Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, declared, “just real good basic rock & roll… real basic fifties and early sixties rock.” She may have been overstating things, but the rock and roll revival of the early 1970s doubtless inspired and instigated the emergence of punk as one of the major new styles of the era.

It also introduced a completely “new breed of entertainer”: “contemporary groups that dress, perform and sometimes live like their ’50s predecessors.” The most famous of them was Sha Na Na, a group of undergraduates and PhD students from Columbia University. Initially performing rock songs from the 1950s on campus during the student protests of the 1960s, they soon attracted larger audiences.

Thanks to Jimi Hendrix, a fan, they appeared right before him as the second-to-last act at Woodstock in 1969. The documentary film shows how audience members watched in disbelief as the golden-suited dancers went through the motions of “At the Hop.” Greeted with skepticism at first, Sha Na Na left the stage to loud clapping and cheers. Later that year they performed at Nader’s Rock Revival concert, where they “excited the crowd the most” of all performers.

Sha Na Na specialized in rock and roll and doo-wop songs from the 1950s but rearranged them and performed them at a faster speed (their version of “Rock around the Clock” was thirty seconds shorter than Haley’s). With Sha Na Na, the outfits and show were as important as the music—if not more. Their success “always hinged more on their style than their sound.” While their “greaser look”—slicked-back hair, ducktails, and black leather jackets—was reminiscent of the rebels Marlon Brando and James Dean had played in 1950s films, the same could not be said of their golden jackets and pants—and even the greaser look they exaggerated for comic effect.

Furthermore, the style did not at all fit the music they were performing because doo-wop groups of the 1950s usually wore evening suits. Still, the group often served as proof of 1950s nostalgia: the Life issue on the 1950s revival devoted an entire page to them, and Jan Hodenfield from Rolling Stone called them a “brilliantly crystallized dream from the past.”

The band itself, however, rejected the association with nostalgia. “They’re role-playing,” their manager told Hodenfield. “They don’t like being regarded as quaint curios of the past or being limited by nostalgic bullshit. Generally, the Fifties themselves are irrelevant to them.” Alan Cooper, one of the lead singers, stressed their creative approach to the repertoire they performed: “We’re cleaning it up, making it tighter, the sound is clearer….We’re giving the old songs a contemporary impetus….We are not regressing,” he insisted. “I really don’t think it’s escaping into the past,” concurred bandmate Richard Joffe. For him the revival was not motivated by nostalgia, as “most of the kids who are involved in it have no memory of the ‘fifties as they were children or unborn at the time.”

As these quotes demonstrate, Sha Na Na rejected the term nostalgia: neither they nor their audiences longed for the 1950s or wanted to escape the present. As a band they combined different cultural influences and styles of music and performance without direct historical referents. Their act was a collage of elements, taking selected associations with 1950s pop culture and often exaggerating and updating them for contemporary tastes.

As a result, they produced something that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s and that was entirely of the 1970s. Sha Na Na also disproved those critics who saw the “nostalgia wave” of the 1970s as a backlash to the revolutionary 1960s: not only did Woodstock and the Rock Revival happen in the same year, in Sha Na Na they shared at least one act—retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

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Excerpted from Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia by Tobias Becker. Copyright © 2023. Available from Harvard University Press.

It’s a tried and tested ploy by small record labels who have acquired the rights to a chunk of the catalogue of a band with one big song to their name, to whack it all out on an album with that same big song as its title, for maximum marketability. And so, with minimum imagination, the first Cure album to be released in the USA, on the PVC label, was called Boys Don’t Cry.

It’s debatable, however, whether Boys Don’t Cry counts as an album at all, in the traditional sense. It’s essentially a cut-and-shut compilation of extended highlights from Three Imaginary Boys (which had not been released in America first time around) with non-album singles and B-sides.

The songs which survived from Three Imaginary Boys were “10.15 Saturday Night,” “Accuracy,” “Grinding Halt,” “Another Day,” “Object,” “Subway Song,” “Fire in Cairo” and “Three Imaginary Boys.” (Those omitted were “Foxy Lady,” “The Weedy Burton,” “So What” and “It’s Not You.”) And parachuted in from elsewhere were “Plastic Passion,” “Killing An Arab,” “World War” and of course “Boys Don’t Cry,” sitting in classic budget compilation style at the very top of Side 1.

In later years, when Elektra reissued Boys Don’t Cry on CD, some tinkering was done with the tracklisting. “Object,” of which Robert Smith is not a fan, was removed and replaced by “So What.” And Three Imaginary Boys outtake “World War,” which Robert deemed “a nonsense,” was also removed from most CD releases, “probably (possibly) because I hate it,” he told Cure News.

The album was released in the States on February 5, 1980. Its artwork, itself a blown-up detail from the Three Imaginary Boys sleeve, is a vaguely Pop Art approximation by Bill Smith of an Egyptian desert scene, with a pink pyramid rising above three green palms against a bright blue sky, as a reference to the song “Fire in Cairo.”

It eventually slipped out in the UK in the August of 1983, Robert’s craziest year, allowing newcomer fans of “The Walk” and “The Lovecats” to catch up on some of what they’d missed, but was drowned out somewhat by all the other Smith/Cure/Banshees activity at that time, though it did eventually go platinum (and also went gold in France).

Robert Christgau, originator of the “capsule review,” wrote about Boys Don’t Cry in his Consumer Guide column in Village Voice. Despite awarding it a B+, he sounded underwhelmed.

The sound is dry post-punk, never pretty but treated with a properly mnemonic pop overlay—I can look over the titles and recall a phrase from all but a few of these 13 songs. Intelligent phrases they are, too, yet somehow I find it hard to get really excited about them. What are we to think of a band whose best song is based on a novel by Albert Camus? Granted, I prefer “Killing An Arab” to The Stranger—the idea works better as a miniature—but that book defined middlebrow for me before I knew what middlebrow was, back when it was holy writ for collegiate existentialists. And the last thing we need is collegiate existentialist nostalgia.

In Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen also highlighted The Cure’s adolescent literary pretensions, writing that the record “proves they can transcend their Comp. Lit. 201 (Elementary Angst) scenarios.”

Hindsight has been surprisingly kind to Boys Don’t Cry. Despite not really being an album, it has twice made it into Rolling Stone’s list of the four hundred greatest albums of all time. And, in his book Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco, Garry Mulholland drily called it “the ultimate in morose sixth-formers, intellectualising their inability to get laid” and “the most fun you can have without ever having a hope of taking your clothes off.”

It emerged in 1985 that the title track was Andrew Ridgeley from Wham!’s favorite song of all time. And if you think that piece of trivia was crudely bolted together with the rest of this entry, with no consideration for sequencing, now you know how Boys Don’t Cry was made.

Boys Don’t Cry (song)

“Toxic masculinity.” A widely understood phrase now, first coined by author Shepherd Bliss and developed via the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s, but non-existent when The Cure wrote “Boys Don’t Cry.” The concept is that societally enforced masculine norms of behavior are damaging not just for people of other genders but for men themselves. A strand of toxic masculinity runs through a certain type of Englishness: stoicism in the face of emotional trauma, the “stiff upper lip.”

Lol Tolhurst, on the BBC Radio 4 series Soul Music, posited a direct connection between “Boys Don’t Cry” and the growth of a healthier attitude towards such matters. “The Cure are totally responsible in my mind for boys being able to get close to their emotions and feelings…As anyone who grew up in 1960s/1970s Britain knows, emotion was not really on the table. It was ‘stiff upper lip’ stuff…Most teenage boys in the seventies were repressed in lots of ways.”

Robert Smith, speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, confirmed that this emotional repression was behind the song. “When I was growing up, there was peer pressure on you to conform to be a certain way. And as an English boy at the time, you’re encouraged not to show your emotion to any degree. And I couldn’t help but show my emotions when I was younger. I never found it awkward showing my emotions. I couldn’t really continue without showing my emotions; you’d have to be a pretty boring singer to do that. So I kind of made a big thing about it. I thought, ‘Well, it’s part of my nature to rail against being told not to do something.'”

The idea of social pressure to suppress tears was not new in pop. The Four Seasons, in 1962, gave it a feminine twist with “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” In 1975, the breathy female voice of Kathy Redfern on 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” urged singer Eric Stewart to “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry…” The Cure took that idea and, as Smith told Rolling Stone, railed against it. At the Reading Festival 1979, before a super-fast, double-speed rendition of “Boys Don’t Cry” (as if Lol was dying for a piss and wanted to get it over with), Robert pointedly dedicated the song to “all the macho men in the audience.” (He pronounced it “makko.”)

“Boys Don’t Cry” had been a weapon in The Cure’s armory for a long time. It was one of the four songs on the demo tape recorded at Chestnut Studios, paid for by Ric Gallup, that got them signed to Fiction by Chris Parry in 1978. They recorded it as part of their first Peel Session in December that year. And it is documented as the opener of their live set as early as February 9, 1979 at the Nashville Room in London, four months ahead of its single release. At that gig, a gang of skinheads turned up intent on violence, but their leader was pacified by “Boys Don’t Cry” and calmed everyone down, proof that The Cure’s music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

An irresistible and instantly memorable piece of pop-punk, it was The Cure at their most Buzzcocksian (as Mat Snow of NME noted at the time), but the inspiration went back much further than that: Robert, in Cure News, called it “an attempt at a Sixties pop song.”

The song’s basic narrative—losing a girl by being a dick, living to regret it, desperately wanting her back—is not exactly uncommon in The Cure’s oeuvre, nor in popular music as a whole. But it’s the chorus—pitching Robert’s emotional vulnerability versus received ideas of masculinity—that really resonates.

The B-side, “Plastic Passion,” was based on the same chords as “A Night Like This” but sped up, and included the word “hyoscine” (also known as scopolamine or Devil’s Breath, a drug used for treating motion sickness), most likely a leftover from Lol’s chemistry studies. It started out, Robert told Cure News in 1991, “as a pastiche of early Roxy Music (‘Pyjamarama’-style).”

The single’s artwork featured young soldiers, fear in their eyes, marching off to war. The reverse, to depict “Plastic Passion,” featured an advertisement for a blow-up sex doll (“HELGA Never Says No!”). The runout grooves bore the inscriptions “But Bill does” on the A-side (a reference to Parry) and “From the land of a thousand microphones” on the B-side (referring to the number of mics needed to record Lol’s drums).

One press ad featured a Vietnam War soldier with the following text printed sideways:

Nowadays, terrorism is a plague happening all over the world. An elite troop, made of commandos, coming from the American army, is training to fight terrorists. The general commandant says “We will be there to kill.”

Another ad for the single, with accompanying tour dates, was published in NME and featured an action shot from a boxing match, with informative tickertape up the side:

Red Cross Boxing at the Empress Stadium, Earls Court…2nd round Kilrain retired with split eye…

Warfare and macho (makko) sporting pursuits: it all connected, somehow to the battered and bruised emotions of the song’s protagonist.

The single was warmly received by critics on its release in June 1979. Giovanni Dadomo of Record Mirror and Ian Birch of Melody Maker both compared it to the Beatles. Phil Sutcliffe in Sounds called it “their untypical Undertones manque single.” Even NME’s noted Curesceptic Paul Morley (see Desperate Journalist) wrote “This is magnificent,” and his colleague Jon Savage called it “a genuine find” when it appeared on Polydor’s 20 of Another Kind, Vol 2 compilation (“Killing An Arab” had appeared on Vol 1). Decades later Bob Stanley, in his book Yeah Yeah Yeah, called it “Palitoy Power Pop” (Palitoy being the manufacturer of tough-guy boys’ toy Action Man).

Despite all that critical goodwill, it failed to chart first time around. However, it was to receive a second chance. In 1986 The Cure needed a single to promote the Standing On A Beach compilation, and “Boys Don’t Cry” was given a “New Voice—New Mix” reboot.

There are various notable differences between the 1986 version and the original. On the newer version, the four-chord intro is strummed rhythmically rather than struck, filling the gaps. On the second and third choruses, there is no gap between the words “boys don’t cry” (as compared to the lagged “boys…don’t cry” on the original). At the end of the bridge, on the line “thought that you needed me more,” the word “more” is sung once and allowed to hang, given a bit of echo (as compared to the repeated “more-more-more” on the original). The drums are also slightly more prominent.

The 1986 12-inch is more complex than either of the 7-inch versions. It starts with just bass and drums for a few bars, before the guitar intro plays for a few further bars with added guitar embellishments, so that it’s almost ninety seconds before the vocals come in. The second verse is Robert’s voice and Lol’s drums only, then Lol’s drums on their own for a while then an echoey chorus, then just the guitar on its own, then the drum comes back in, then the “I would break down” verse, then a penultimate chorus, half of which is just Robert’s voice and guitar, then the bridge, then an instrumental section…until the song has become twice as long, but somehow manages to be half as satisfying.

Strangest of all, after going to all that effort, neither the 7-inch nor 12-inch edit of the 1986 version made it onto Standing On A Beach, the album it was intended to promote. For that album, the 1979 original was used intact. (In the US, “Let’s Go To Bed” was re-released to promote the album instead.)

For the 1986 single’s B-sides, no new songs were written. Instead, they delved back into the archives for two songs as old as “Boys Don’t Cry” itself. One, on the 12-inch, was the daft disco folly “Do the Hansa” (see Hansa). The other, on the 7-inch, was “Pillbox Tales” (originally called “Listen”), which was recorded in 1979 for Hansa but thus far unreleased. The latter is not, as one might suspect, a drug song but a reference to the time Lol Tolhurst and his girlfriend Sarah snuck out for a midnight tryst in one of the hexagonal World War II machine gun emplacements, known as “pillboxes,” built across Britain in anticipation of German invasion, of which there remained dozens in the fields and woods north of Horley. (Pillbox Tales eventually became the title of a Belgian bootleg compilation of early rarities.) Robert, in a 1991 edition of Cure News, dismissed both B-sides as “a nonsense.”

A video, directed by Tim Pope, was made for the 1986 version. The Cure—the original trio, bassist Michael Dempsey having been brought back in for the day—appear in shadow form only, with glowing red eyes, behind a backdrop onto which “The Cure?” is briefly projected, with day-glo gloves popping up at random (in a possible call-back to the socks in “In Between Days.”) In front of the backdrop, three young boys perform the song. “We saw these three boys playing football in the school playing field,” Robert told Les Enfants du Rock, “and thought they looked remarkably like us at that age.” Another version of the story is that various kids were invited to a dance studio to audition, and asked to play drums. Lol picked someone to look like the younger him (“but he flattered himself”), and they each did the same. In any case, the three children make it a brilliantly effective video. Following their moment of fame, the boys often went to Cure shows and met the band. Only one of them subsequently pursued a career in showbusiness. Mark Heatley (the young Robert Smith) went on to star in the 1988 TV movie Infantile Disorders before leaving the acting industry for a successful career in IT, though he made a return to acting in 2020, voicing the character Mavic Chen in a CGI recreation of a lost episode of Doctor Who.

As well as the video, the single was promoted with a round of television appearances, including one in France with the band all wearing dresses (this, apparently, was Lol’s idea). And it became a hit at last, albeit a minor one. Chris Parry was convinced the original would reach the Top 10, but “It didn’t get there because Polydor stitched us up,” Robert Smith, promoting the new version, told The Hit magazine. “In a perfect world, that would have been No.1.” It reached No.22. (It made the Top 10 in Ireland, and also New Zealand, where it had already reached No.22 first time around.) Nevertheless, it proved to newcomers that The Cure always did have pop songs up their sleeve, before the hits came. It’s just that the world wasn’t listening yet.

“Boys Don’t Cry” has had a significant cultural afterlife. It’s one of The Cure’s most-covered songs, with versions by Scarlett Johansson, Miley Cyrus, Hell Is for Heroes, Reel Big Fish and Razorlight among others, plus a truly horrible breathy rendition by Grant Lee Phillips. In 2016 it was sung in a blind audition on the French version of The Voice by Antoine Galey. (He came third.)

The Cure themselves rarely leave it out of their setlist (it is their second most-played song, behind “A Forest”), and as well as the two single versions, recorded an acoustic take for MTV Unplugged. “Right,” said Robert with a wry twinkle in his eye, “this is the, um, definitive version of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’….”

The title has been repurposed many times, including a 2021 novel by Fiona Scarlett, a 2010 novel by Malorie Blackman, a 1999 film by Kimberly Peirce, and a magazine published by Frank Ocean in 2016 to accompany his album Blonde, which was released on his own label, also called Boys Don’t Cry. The song has been used in countless films, including The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Friends With Benefits. It has also been used, played backwards, as catwalk music at the end-of-year show at the Antwerp fashion academy. And in 2022 English singer Louis Dunford recorded a song supportive of male mental health issues called “Boys Do Cry.”

The song lived on as a touchstone of male sensitivity for the emo generation, and Robert Smith believes it has something to say in the context of LGBTQ+ culture. “I was singing [‘Boys Don’t Cry’] at Glastonbury,” he told Rolling Stone, “and I realized that it has a very contemporary resonance with all the rainbow stripes and stuff flying in the crowd….”

As long as toxic masculinity exists, “Boys Don’t Cry” will be there to help with the detox.

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From Curepedia: An A-Z of the Cure by Simon Price. Copyright © 2023 by Scott Simon. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The first thing you notice about Laurie Anderson is her voice. Straight-forward and matter-of-fact, folksy and familiar, it is the voice of Middle America, earnestly asking what is happening to America.

Like many people, I first encountered Anderson’s voice in the song “O Superman.” Recorded in 1981, it features haunting snippets of plain-spoken electro poetry influenced by the recent hostage crisis in Iran. The song was as addictive as it was poignant, with Anderson’s heavily-processed voice saying “Ha” on a seemingly endless loop, layered over bird sounds and synths to create a hypnotic, almost childlike beat. Fellow artist B. George released the single on his small independent label, and it became an unlikely hit in the UK—and a favorite of the staff at WKCR.

Anderson grew up outside of Chicago and might have pursued a career as a concert violinist, but her curiosity brought her to New York, where she studied sculpture at Columbia University. In the 1970s, she began to make a name for herself with her experimental violin pieces and could be seen busking at the city’s subway stations, wearing ice skates attached to frozen blocks of ice while playing her violin. When the ice melted, her performance ended.

I met Anderson just as she was moving into a new loft space on Canal Street. Perhaps welcoming a distraction from unpacking boxes, she was warm and chatty, sitting crossed-legged on a temporary, fold-up chair. She was working on an upcoming project called United States, which she would stage as a vast, two-night, eight-hour show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

*

B. WENTZ: Before turning to music full time, you earned a graduate degree in sculpture here at Columbia.

LAURIE ANDERSON: I had a studio on 125th Street and was making stuff with polyurethane and polyvinyl. I got really sick doing it because of the fumes. It’s really toxic stuff. Lose a lot of brain cells that way. You have to wear a mask, gloves, and an asbestos suit, have exhaust fans going, and even if you are really careful, the fumes still get to you. So I stopped using that and started making things out of paper, crunching up the day’s newspapers and making it into a kind of brick papier maché—projects like that. I hated art school. I was asked to leave three times. Kicked out, reinstated. It was a really checkered career. I couldn’t stand it!

BW: You grew up in the suburbs west of Chicago, where you studied both visual art and violin. Did you stop playing while you focused on science in college and art in grad school?

LA: Yes, I started playing the violin when I was five years old.

Then when I was sixteen, I quit entirely. That’s one of the few things in life that I am really proud of—just being able to stop cold turkey—because I realized I was becoming a kind of technocrat, just learning to play accurately and very fast. It didn’t leave much room for anything other than practicing all day. There were other things I wanted to learn, so I stopped. Totally.

When I returned to the violin years later, I modified a lot of violins and used them as a kind of ventriloquist dummy or other kind of voice. I built one with a speaker inside and played it by itself. One has a battery-powered turntable on it, so I cut records for that. The needle of the record player is mounted on the middle of the violin bow and is lowered like a tonearm on a turntable.

BW: What does that sound like? Do you move it back and forth like a bow?

LA: It sounds pretty bad. Like barking seals. It’s very unpleasant. I also modified violins so they worked like tape instruments. I mounted a tape head on the bridge of the violin, and on the bow, instead of horsehair, there’s a strip of recorded audiotape, so you play that back and forth over the head. That allows you to create sounds that are backwards as well as forwards.

BW: What sort of music could you play like that? Is this the violin you invented?

LA: Bongos, saxophone, piano—whatever was recorded on the tape that I used as a bow. Generally, only a few phrases of those instruments. But by moving the bow, you can establish whole other kinds of rhythms. It’s just like editing tape—going back and forth until you find that sound. And I engineer a lot of my own tapes, so moving from that editing motion to the motion of playing a violin is not a great jump.

BW: It’s difficult to say what genre of music you make. You can’t say, “I make pop music” or “I make avant-garde music.” What do you call it?

LA: I think performance art. I thought that term was very clumsy when I first heard it. But it has the advantage of being very nonspecific. Nobody has a clear idea what that is. The closest definition of performance art is to say it’s a hybrid of a lot of things: images, language, gesture, sound, not quite theater, and not quite other things. Each time somebody does something within that general area and calls it performance art, it redefines the term in interesting ways. So I like it because it’s loose.

BW: In performance, you use these tapes and then add your own voice as well?

LA: Right. For violin, some are just tape sequences. The tapes I make for performances tend to be very dry. In other words, I don’t add reverb, and I don’t mix them in ways that are complicated at all—they are very simple rhythm tracks in which to make combinations. Making a record that exists only on audio tape is a very different process than performing. It’s a different way of thinking. Because without the pictures and the spatial aspects of the performance, you make different decisions about the music.

BW: Were you influenced by electronic music composers like Milton Babbitt, who also worked with atonal rhythms but on synthesizers? Or Harry Partch or George Crumb?

LA: I don’t like music made by machines that much. I prefer some kind of real signal to a filter. But at the same time, I try to have a balance between something made with a machine—magnetic tape—and something made by a human—a violin.

Electronics has filters—I don’t have the same feeling about it as electronics straight from the machine. A filter will act like a window, which shifts all the way up and looks at those harmonics and exaggerates them and brings them into the limited range of human hearing, so there are things you can guess at that are suddenly within your range, and that function of electronics is wonderful.

BW: I was amazed to see “O Superman” released on vinyl after hearing it performed at The Kitchen in Soho. It reached number two on the UK charts. Do you see this sort of popularity as a step forward?

LA: It’s hard to say. In the last two or three years, I’ve noticed a change in the audiences that come to see my work. They tend to be a very mixed group. There are some kids now, which I like a lot.

In terms of performance art being presented in a more pop way, I think it’s a mistake to try to nudge it into pop culture if it doesn’t have any kind of place. On the other hand, it has always been my fantasy that American artists could think of doing something like that because the avant-garde has been very snobbish. The whole history of it is generally a kind of ghetto of museums and art galleries and publications and a downtown scene, whether it’s clubs or venues or things like that. A certain attitude that involved a certain snobbism. Artists haven’t wanted anything to do with pop culture because it’s typically made for a ten-year-old brain, and most artists aren’t interested in working on that level. Why do it? Particularly here in the United States. Take pop music. It’s just a very tight system that is regulated by what the average listener wants to hear or what the average listener will be willing to put up with hearing. It’s not a DJ reaching into a bin and saying, “Well, here’s a record I’d like to play for you,” unless it’s like a college station. And it’s not that way in Europe. European radio is much more open. Particularly in Germany and England, people are freer to experiment in terms of what goes on the air. That makes a big difference.

I’ve gotten letters from DJs from big pop stations here in New York that said, “I just want to let you know, I did play your record and I received this photocopied letter from the station manager that says, ‘There is no playing of unauthorized material, i.e “O Superman.” ’” It’s very strange. Unless it’s on the playlist, it is not on the air. So you can produce whatever you want, but unless it falls into a certain category, only a limited number of people will hear it.

BW: Has the response to your music been greater in Europe than in the United States?

LA: About half the work I do is in Europe, and that’s been the case for about six years now, since 1976. It’s much easier to work there. Europeans care about things in a different kind of way. The audiences tend to be more general than here. You could never picture an American audience made up of as many different kinds of people as you see in Europe. The New York crowd does not mix. In Europe, you can see the Peking Opera and Robert Wilson on the same night.

BW: Your music seems to be very conceptual, in an American kind of way, with the things you say and the phrases you use. Avant-garde music tends to be conceptual too. But you use phrases that appear in everyday language—very direct and very American.

LA: Most of my phrases come from eavesdropping. I travel a lot, so I meet a lot of different kinds of people. My main goal is to use ordinary material so you can feel somebody is really talking to you, and not through any kind of music filter or lyric filter. One reason why I don’t typically use ABAB in verse-chorus arrangements is because real speech doesn’t fit very well into those structures. I like to create a stable, rhythmic ground that doesn’t move. It moves in a very limited way, over a very static ground and over which the language travels at its own speed. So you feel all the hesitations and riffs that you do when you talk. Talking is like improvisation, really, and those rhythms interest me much more than any kind of musical phrasing. So it is spoken language that dictates the shape of the music.

BW: In the seventies, you wrote art criticism for magazines. Do you still do any writing? I saw your book Hotel, which seemed to be excerpts from dream-like states.

LA: I have published a few texts from performances, and I have written things that are more or less notes for performances. I used to write the work first and then incorporate it into the performance, but I found it very static. So I tried to figure things out just by talking through them and then see how that felt. I worked on them by speaking through them.

BW: What are you working on now?

LA: The piece that I am working on now is called United States. It’s the result of being in Europe a lot. You sit around and have dinner with people who are going, “How could you have elected that guy president?” And you go, “Well, uh . . .” You have to come up with an answer, and I try to make up some good answers, but I realize that I have to think about it a little bit more. The final version will be produced next fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I wanted to play with some of the parts since I’ve been working on them since 1979.

BW: Some of us have seen parts of that piece at The Kitchen. I recall some visuals—big maps and lights. Will those be included in the BAM performance? Or will that strictly be a piece of music?

LA: A combination of both. And I hope that it doesn’t seem to be more of one than the other. I try to work sort of simultaneously on things, so for me, the danger is in being illustrational. You write a song and then you realize, wouldn’t some pictures be nice? It’s very tempting to just sort of illustrate the song rather than let the pictures have a whole other meaning that will add to the song rather than just sort of repeat it in the visual world. For me, that means working a lot slower because I go back and forth a lot between how the song looks and how it sounds. I’ve been working on United States for three years, and I had hoped that this would be the final version of the work, but I’m finding that I’m really more interested in adding parts to it than in sort of going back and perfecting things I’ve already done. So I’m frantically writing some new things for it now. I guess the best way to describe it is songs and stories with pictures. The whole thing is an attempt to describe a country, really.

BW: What will you use on stage?

LA: There will be a great big screen, 30 x 40 feet, because, to me, it’s very important that the image is very bright and visible from every place in the hall. So there’s a whole barrage of projectors: one that turns around and one that goes up and down, and a film projector and several slide projectors that have other kinds of motions to them. It’s a way of making a still picture move in ways other than you would normally do with film so that it has a kind of slower movement. If I take longer with a song, I’m not locked into the length of a film that accompanies it. So the technicians can, in a way, do a kind of collaboration with me in terms of the timing of it because it’s all done live and not in a studio and then put on film.

BW: Will there be any electronics involved? Or actors?

LA: I’d like to sort of feature the electronics rather than hide them, so they all sort of sit in a mound in the middle of the stage. And I do a lot of the turning of the dials myself, which is good because sometimes you can feel a little bit like a puppet if suddenly the whole electronic situation changes. So I like to have a certain amount of control of that. And there will be, I guess, ten people who will be in it, as well as me. There will be two saxophone players, a percussionist, and a bagpipe player. And a soprano, a keyboard player, and some people who talk, and some people who walk.

BW: How would you define avant-garde or /new music today?

LA: The nice thing about the word avant-garde is that it is constantly updating itself, and so is new music. For me, in a totally personal way, what I like the most is music that makes me feel most awake. I don’t care whether it’s new or not. An old Captain Beefheart album sounds newer to me than something I heard in a club last night.

___________________________________________

Excerpted from Transfigured New York: Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980-1990 by Brooke Wentz  Copyright © 2023 Brooke Wentz  Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

“We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn’t look this strange and new without some barrier being broken.”
–Andy Warhol
*

Lou Reed: When we were working with Andy, we were doing our shows and we weren’t even making enough money to put the show on the next day, so Andy would go and do commercial art things constantly to get money to put on the show. That’s how we stayed together. It was all down to Andy. Because for a lot of bands in the Sixties, it was a lot of fun because they could all get signed and those record company people had no idea what was happening, so they were just signing everybody.

Unfortunately, it happened after the Velvet Underground, so we didn’t get any of the big money. We got, like, nothing and then after us, all of a sudden, all these bands were getting millions of dollars. It would have been nice if we’d got something, but we didn’t.

On March 12, 1967, in the US, Verve finally released the Velvet Underground’s first album; parts of it were almost a year old. Lou Reed said that they were signed by MGM not because they were so enamored with their music, but because Warhol had already agreed to do the cover. The record wouldn’t be released in the UK until November. The US cover marked a spectacular breakthrough in the commercialization of music, while also looking like a work of art. Warhol elevated the humble banana to icon status, just like he’d done with Campbell’s soup cans in 1962. The original album also came with a sticker over the banana (and was almost certainly a reference to Warhol’s film Eat, made in 1964). The instructions were “peel slowly and see,” and when you did you found a pink fruit underneath. It was saucy, and it was autonomous, having nothing at all to do with the band. Warhol’s alternative design was going to involve images of plastic surgery procedures—nose jobs, breast jobs, “ass jobs,” etc. On hearing the final album at the end of 1966, the record company decided to postpone its release by several months, unsure exactly how to market it. They’d paid for it, but they hated it. When it eventually did come out, it met with a disastrous combination of disdain, indifference, hatred, and bewilderingly awful sales. Because of the nature of the lyrics, many record stores simply refused to stock it.

In 1966–67, people didn’t write songs about buying drugs, which is why “I’m Waiting for the Man” was so transgressive. The song was sonically advanced too, not least the way the instrumentation echoed the sound of a train heading to the intersection of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, East Harlem. It was gritty, challenging, and almost cinéma vérité, a paperback short story.

“Heroin” was equally shocking, seven minutes in which Cale’s shrieking viola shrouds the scene while Moe Tucker’s heartbeat drumming replicates a dream-like state. Ditto “Venus in Furs,” the title taken from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella of the same name, a copy of which Reed apparently found on the street. At the time, sadomasochism wasn’t just never discussed, even its existence was called into doubt. It certainly wasn’t the subject of pop songs.

After listening to the first acetate, producer Tom Wilson thought the album lacked a discernible single and asked Reed and Cale to write a new song for Nico to sing.

Written by the pair in the early hours after a long Saturday night, “Sunday Morning” (a candy kiss with a kick in it) was almost a lullaby. But while it was certainly commercial, Reed decided to sing it himself, relegating Nico to background vocals. In the studio, Cale played a celeste rather than a piano, giving the song an eerie undertow.

Verve’s press ads for the album were beyond embarrassing. They read as though they had been created by someone with no knowledge of a) pop culture, b) youth culture, c) advertising: “What happens when the daddy of Pop Art goes Pop Music? The most underground album of all! . . . Sorry, no home movies. But the album does feature Andy’s Velvet Underground (they play funny instruments). Plus this year’s Pop Girl, Nico (she sings, groovy). Plus an actual banana on the front cover (don’t smoke it, peel it).”

Lou Reed’s favorite review of the album, which he used to repeat to anyone who would listen, was: “The flowers of evil are in bloom. Someone has to stamp them out before they spread.” Reed had been vindicated.

Lou Reed: Andy made the Velvet Underground possible. By producing that LP, he gave us power and freedom. I was always interested in language, and I wanted to write more than “I love you—you love me—tra la la,” you know? He wasn’t the record’s producer in the conventional way that when record company people would say, “Are you sure that’s the way it should sound?” He’d say, “Sure, that sounds great.” That was an amazing freedom, a power, and once you’ve tasted that, you want it always.

David Bowie: The Velvet Underground was a life-affirming moment for me. I think “I’m Waiting for the Man” is so important. My then manager brought back an album from New York, having been given it by Andy Warhol. This was months before it actually came out, it was just a plastic demo of the Velvets’ very first album. He was particularly pleased because Warhol had signed the sticker in the middle. He said, “I don’t know why he’s doing music, this music is as bad as his painting,” and I thought, “I’m gonna like this.” I’d never heard anything quite like it, it was a revelation to me.

It influenced what I was trying to do—I don’t think I ever felt that I was in a position to become a Velvets clone but there were elements of what I thought Lou was doing that were unavoidably right for both the times and where music was going. One of them was the use of cacophony as background noise and to create an ambience that had been unknown in rock, I think. The other thing was the nature of his lyric writing which for me just smacked of things like Hubert Selby Jr., The Last Exit to Brooklyn, and also John Rechy’s book City of Night. Both books made a huge impact on me, and Lou’s writing was right in that ballpark. It was Dylan who brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting but then it was Lou who took it into the avant-garde.

Jimmy Page: When I eventually heard the album it was exactly as they had sounded when I saw them. I’d never heard music go into those areas before, and it all made sense on record. The material on the first album is almost cinematic. Each song is so different, each song has such a strong identity. The crafting of it is absolutely incredible. The musicianship is just groundbreaking. There were just so many ideas on that album. Lou Reed doing “Sunday Morning.” There were just so many layers and so many colors. Even if all the colors were dark.

David Bowie: The first track [“Sunday Morning”] glided by innocuously enough and didn’t register. However, from that point on, with the opening, throbbing, sarcastic bass and guitar of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” the linchpin, the keystone of my ambition was driven home. This music was so savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn’t care if I liked it or not. It couldn’t give a fuck. It was completely preoccupied with a world unseen by my suburban eyes.

Jon Savage: The first Velvet Underground album is such a concentrated package that it is not surprising that pop culture took twenty or so years to catch up. The Velvet Underground & Nico straddles pop and the avant-garde with the decisive quality of a preemptive strike. Encoded within the record are references to authors like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed’s teacher, whose In Dreams Begin Responsibilities is the definitive account of the immigrant experience in the first quarter of this century.

Best of all was the way the thing looked: a blurred picture of the group with five separate shots underneath, so lit that you could hardly tell which were the boys and which were the girls. This severe androgyny went further than English attempts at the same game, which had the innocence of childhood. Here the deadpan, blurred look is matched by lyrics about matters that were not hitherto the subject of pop songs. Underneath everything is John Cale’s viola, penetrating enough to bring down the walls of Jericho.

At one stroke, the Velvet Underground expanded pop’s lyrical and musical vocabulary. This was deliberate and gleeful: contemporary interviews had Reed blithely discussing a Cale composition “which involved taking everybody out into the woods and having them follow the wind.” Reed was in love with the doo-wop that we’d never heard in Britain, the Spaniels and the Eldorados, intense, slow ballads with a lot of heart from the early/mid Fifties. Sometimes, these songs would slow down to the point of entropy—an oasis of calm and a refusal of the harshness of ghetto life. The simple fact is, to hear the record in 1967 was to be let into a secret world, once you’d got past the first frisson of pure evil. Like every other great pop record, it changed your life.

_____________________________________

Excerpted from the book LOADED: THE LIFE (AND AFTERLIFE) OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. Copyright © 2023 by Dylan Jones. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Shane MacGowan, the legendary frontman of The Pogues, died yesterday at the age of 65. It’s hard to write about MacGowan’s death without alluding to the hard-drinking lifestyle he embodied, both in reality and song, but whatever talent he had for excess was nothing compared to his mastery of the song-as-story.

MacGowan was that rare storyteller who could switch registers with ease between the gothic, the mythic, the farcical, and the romantic. Taking his subject matter wherever he could find it—in history, legend, last night’s bender—MacGowan used the rough grace of his poetic gifts to create short stories in miniature, distilling entire lives into a verse or two.

As for that hard-living label, MacGowan did own to it. Here he is in a 1993 interview with Q Magazine. (As surfaced by Hanif Abdurraqib on Twitter yesterday.)

“I believe in pleasure. I love seeking pleasure. I like finding it even more. But if you’re a hedonist, you also have to have a social conscience because you can’t enjoy eating a beautiful meal and drinking beautiful drinks and taking drugs that make you feel great if right outside where you’re doing it, people are starving to death on the pavements.”

MacGowan filled his songs with the beautiful losers of the world, wrote with tenderness and anger about the damned and the forgotten, and seemed constitutionally unable to root against the underdog. His own story was their story, and he told them all brilliantly. With that in mind, here are seven of my favorite Pogues’ songs that would also make great short stories.

*

“A Pair of Brown Eyes”

This is probably my favorite Pogues song (I will sing it in full if you buy me a drink). It is quintessential MacGowan: a man drinks and remembers, searches for grace amid the ruins of his life and almost, but not quite, finds it. I’ve always read the story as an encounter with a very old man in a bar sunk deep into whiskey-tinged memories of WWI and the girl he left behind (the soundtrack to his recollections dates the scene to the late 1970s). The grim details in the first verse, of war’s intimate brutalities, demand of the listener forgiveness for the drunkard’s sentimentality; as he so often did, MacGowan seems to be asking us all: “Who among you hasn’t succumbed to self-pity’s bittersweet reveries?”

“In blood and death ’neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around.

Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed and bled some more.

And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts one to three
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me.”

*

“Fairytale of New York” (written with Jem Finer)

The Pogues best-known song, “Fairytale of New York” has become a barroom holiday classic, a diasporic anthem that showcases MacGowan’s talent for scuffing the shiny varnish of sentimentality with the right amount of grit. A duet with the late, great Kirsty MacColl, “Fairytale” is the story of young lovers who wash up in New York City with little more than their faith in the so-called American dream; and though things inevitably go badly, the final verse aches with the perfect tenderness for what could have been. (MacGowan’s lines in bold.)

“I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I built my dreams around you.”

*

“The Sickbed of Cuchulainn”

In which MacGowan inhabits a sentimental antifascist drunkard fighting and drinking his way around the chaos of 1930s Europe, ending up in civil war Madrid battling fascist Blackshirts in the streets. Though the chorus invokes the mythic Irish warrior, Cuchulainn, MacGowan ends the song in customary fashion, kicked out of a tavern, bereft in the streets.

“When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone
Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids

At the sick bed of Cuchulainn, we’ll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil’s in the chair.”

*

“Rainy Night in Soho”

This is perhaps MacGowan’s most purely romantic song. The simple verse structure and swooning shifts in temporal perspective conjure early Anna Akhmatova, as MacGowan evokes what it means for love to endure over time while at the same instant revealing one perfect, soft-focus night in London, madly in love.

“I’ve been loving you a long time
Down all the years, down all the days
And I’ve cried for all your troubles
Smiled at your funny little ways

We watched our friends grow up together
And we saw them as they fell
Some of them fell into Heaven
Some of them fell into Hell

I took shelter from a shower
And I stepped into your arms
On a rainy night in Soho
The wind was whistling all its charms.”

*

“Lorca’s Novena”

MacGowan often populated his songs with men he admired: Frank Ryan, Brendan Behan, and in this case, Federico García Lorca. A fairly simple song, “Lorca’s Novena” tells the terrible story of the poet’s death at the hands of Spanish fascists in 1936. The rank brutality MacGowan despises in the specific here—thoughtless, bigoted fascists cruelly murdering a great poet, murdering beauty, in effect—is what he rages against in many of his songs. The world may be irredeemably ugly, MacGowan so often tells us, but what small grace it grants is more precious than gold.

“The killers came to mutilate the dead
But ran away in terror to search the town instead
But Lorca’s corpse, as he had prophesied, just walked away
And the only sound was the women in the chapel praying

Mother of all our joys
Mother of all our sorrows
Intercede with him tonight
For all of our tomorrows.”

*

“The Old Main Drag”

This song, about a young man who quickly falls between the cracks after arriving in big city London, lives somewhere between the two Den(n)is’ (Johnson and Cooper) as a down-and-out parable stripped of redemption. Aside from giving voice to the otherwise reviled and marginalized, “The Old Main Drag” is MacGowan at his technical best, approaching Cole Porter levels of perfection in meter and rhyme, through all six verses.

“One evening as I was lying down by Leicester Square
I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls
Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled
And they ruined my good looks for the old main drag

In the tube station the old ones who were on the way out
Would dribble and vomit and grovel and shout
And the coppers would come along and push them about
And I wished I could escape from the old main drag.”

*

“The Body of an American”

As a son of the diaspora (MacGowan was born in Kent), the scattering of the Irish across the world was often a topic of Pogues’ songs. Not surprisingly, “The Body of an American” is particularly popular on St. Patrick’s Day in Boston (and New York, and Philadelphia) as it describes the wake of a mythic (and fictional) Irish American boxer, Big Jim Dwyer, and his posthumous repatriation to the old country. Best played loud, this song is a rollicking delight (if you’re not careful someone will order you an Irish Car Bomb).

“But 15 minutes later we had our first taste of whiskey
There was uncles giving lectures on ancient Irish history
The men all started telling jokes and the women, they got frisky
By five o’clock in the evening every bastard there was pissed

Fare thee well, going away, there’s nothing left to say
Farewell to New York City, boys, to Boston and PA
He took them out with a well-aimed clout, we often heard him say
‘I’m a free born man of the USA’.”

*

“Kitty”

The other Pogues song I can, and will, sing in its entirety if drunk, is “Kitty.” Though the writing credits include the whole band, I’m putting it here anyway as it features all the hallmarks of a MacGowan ballad: doomed romanticism, defiance of authority, outlaw heroism… I’ve always interpreted “Kitty”* as a romantic rebel song—a man bidding farewell to the woman he loves before going into hiding from the British—but the narrator could very well be a criminal on the lam. It doesn’t really matter, it’s a classic.

“Oh Kitty, my darling, remember
That the doom will be mine if I stay
Tis far better to part, though it’s hard to
Than to rot in their prison away.”

*Not least for its passing invocation of Kitty O’Shea.

In late February 1972, President Richard Nixon made a historic trip to China in an effort to ease long-term tensions and hostilities after years of diplomatic isolation. Not only did this visit strengthen Chinese-American relations, but it also served to encourage progress with the USSR.

I was driving Colonel Parker from Los Angeles to Palm Springs as we listened to a radio broadcast of this event, live via satellite from China. The Colonel’s mind went into overdrive as he learned about this new technology, which would allow people to hear and see someone around the world on radio and television. He blurted the first thing that came to his mind.

“What a great way for people everywhere to see and hear Elvis!” he said.

He knew a show by satellite could make entertainment history and Elvis was the perfect worldwide star to pull it off.

But how do you achieve something that has never been done before? I have been around lots of wealthy and influential people. Many of them come up with great ideas such as these, but 99.9 percent of them never get off the drawing board. If they do, there is a team of people doing the nuts and bolts to pull it off. Colonel Parker was a one-man show. He was among that .01 percent who worked tirelessly to realize his vision. This idea, he felt, could be very big… but it would need some more thought.

The world was changing, and so was Elvis. Elvis and Priscilla were separated and talk of a divorce was making headlines everywhere. He had been living under the age-old male belief that the husband could play around, but the wife was to stay home and remain faithful and raise their child. Despite Elvis’s infidelities, Priscilla had remained faithful for years. She’d finally had enough and told Elvis she was leaving him. He did not take it well, but he was about to meet the wonderful Linda Thompson, who was his main girlfriend for the next four years. Linda and I are friends to this day. Linda’s brother, Sam, had worked as a sheriff’s deputy before he became Elvis’s bodyguard in July 1976. Sam was a trusted friend of Elvis’s, and the two men spent hours singing gospel songs together on tour.

After Elvis’s passing, Sam attended law school and became a very successful lawyer and judge. Later he became a member of the Nevada Transmission Authority and the Public Utilities Commission. Sam was also a warden of a prison for a spell, which is ironic because he’s the sweetest guy in the world. He and his wife, Louise, are close friends of mine, and we stay in touch and travel together to Elvis-related events. After his legal career, Sam started a record label with music impresario David Foster, which they later sold to Warner Music. Linda and Sam were two of the few people in Elvis’s inner circle who did not do drugs and tried to help Elvis with his addiction. Sam believes, despite all of Elvis’s success, deep down he remained humble if not a bit insecure.

“Elvis used to sit up nights and wonder why he had become the King and someone else had not—someone like Jerry Lee. He really did ponder on this issue cosmically: ‘Why me?’” Sam said. “He knew he was talented, and he was good looking, and at the right place at the right time. But there were a lot of others out there too. He truly felt humbled by that. He never truly came to grips with it.”

The relationship between Colonel Parker and Management III Productions was growing strained. The Colonel was aware that Weintraub was using his power with the Elvis tour to promote his own artist, John Denver. The Colonel insisted that no other artist ever ride on Elvis’s coattails, and Jerry was really pushing the boundaries. The Colonel often spotted Weintraub stepping outside the offices and conducting business that had nothing to do with Elvis. Weintraub also invited other artists he was trying to sign to Elvis’s concerts to show off his relationship with the star.

In the world of show business, what Weintraub was doing was an accepted practice, but that did not fly with the Colonel. He was growing more agitated with the situation and Weintraub’s swelling ego.

When on tour, Jerry was often on the phone handling his personal affairs and not taking care of business. When their private jet was ready to leave, they’d have to wait while someone ran to get Jerry off the airport phone. The Colonel was also getting reports that Jerry was difficult. The Colonel waited until the tour was over to make his move.

The contract for Elvis’s winter tour in November was signed on September 12, listing only three names: Elvis, the Colonel, and RCA Records. Management III Productions was not going to be involved.

With his load lightened, the Colonel was free to think. And he was thinking a lot about turning the satellite idea into reality. He contacted NBC president Tom Sarnoff about selling the show to countries all over the world, and Sarnoff got it done. The eventual tally was thirty-eight countries plus the British protectorate of Hong Kong. The special was not broadcast in Russia, China, Africa, South America, the Middle East, or South Asia.

Parker and Sarnoff set a tentative concert date for November 18 at the end of Presley’s winter tour, but it was scrapped at the request of MGM president Jim Aubrey. Wisely, he wanted to avoid the special overlapping with the theatrical release of Elvis On Tour, which was scheduled for November 1. He wanted to protect the $1.6 million investment his studio made, which won the award for Best Documentary Film at the 30th Golden Globe Awards the following year. The Colonel agreed to push the special back a few months.

A date was finally set for the satellite show on January 14, 1973; a charity was announced (the Kui Lee Cancer Fund), and a name was given to the special: Aloha from Hawaii.

The special also came with a hefty paycheck: Elvis was paid $900,000 (equivalent to $6 million in 2022) from NBC for a one-hour concert.

Before the historic concert was announced in September 1972, at a press conference in Las Vegas, Colonel Parker issued an announcement that outlined several of what he called historic “firsts” for the broadcast:

This would be the first live concert to be broadcast in its entirety worldwide via satellite.

This would be the largest audience ever to witness a concert, with expectations “in excess of one billion people.”

This would be the first time in the history of the record industry that an album would be released worldwide simultaneously.

Elvis made an appearance at the press conference with RCA president Rocco Laginestra, who flew in for the event.

“What are we going to say, Colonel?” he asked.

“Rocco, you’ll think of something when the time comes,” the Colonel replied.

The afternoon conference took place on the Hilton’s thirtieth floor inside the Crown Room, which boasted a panoramic view of the entire western Las Vegas valley. The small stage featured a floor-to-ceiling display of fifty of Elvis’s Summer Festival straw hats, each with the name of a major foreign country. The media attending the event had no idea what it all meant but would soon find out.

Elvis, sporting a white high-collared suit, aviator sunglasses, and longer-than-usual hair, sat next to Laginestra with the Colonel off to the side. Rocco announced, using RCA’s recently unveiled GlobCom satellite and accompanying technology, that Elvis would appear live in Honolulu, Hawaii, and would be seen in virtually every major country in the world either live or on tape delay. Laginestra caused quite a stir when he announced to the attending media this special event would draw more than a billion people from around the planet, instantly making it one of the biggest entertainment events of the twentieth century.

Colonel Parker had scored another first and was giving the world an opportunity to see the world’s number one superstar without ever having to leave American soil. Elvis was sweaty and looked distracted.

“How do you pace yourself, so you’re up when you need to be up?” a reporter asked.

“I exercise every day, and I vocalize every day,” Elvis replied. He may have been slightly exaggerating on that first part. He was tipping the scales at a hefty 195 pounds at that point, which didn’t go unnoticed.

NBC named Marty Pasetta as the special’s producer-director. He had produced broadcasts of the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys. He had also helmed The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, The Andy Williams Show and Don Ho’s five TV specials, which were highly popular in their day and also filmed on location in Hawaii.

Pasetta did his homework and attended Elvis’s Long Beach concert on November 15. He walked away from the show disappointed, feeling Elvis’s performance was flat and uninspired.

“He stood there like a lump,” Pasetta remembered. “He didn’t do anything. I went back to NBC and said, ‘Hey, guys, what am I going to do with this guy? How long is the show? Ninety minutes? I can’t tap dance that much. It doesn’t look like he’s going to move.’ They said, ‘That’s your problem.’”

When Pasetta finally met Elvis at Graceland, with his armed bodyguards hovering close by, they spoke for nearly four hours. He spoke about his vision for the show, which included an eighty-foot runway six feet off the ground so Elvis could walk down the center of the audience and have women coo at him. But that presented a problem, not with Elvis, but with the Colonel, Pasetta recalled.

“The Colonel always had the stage ten feet above the floor, and he had guards across the front. He didn’t want to have anybody touch his boy,” Pasetta said. “When I told this to the Colonel, he had a fit. He said, ‘I’m not lowering the stage. I’m going to have my guards there, and he can stand there and sing.’ I said, ‘That’s not going to work on the tube for an hour and a half show.’ He said, ‘No. I won’t do it. You can’t do the show.’”

But Pasetta said Presley loved his ideas and, in one of the few instances in his career, he overruled Colonel Parker.

“Elvis said to me, ‘The Colonel controls my business. I control my creativity and my music and my show. He has nothing to say about it. That’s your rule. You will deal with Joe Esposito,’ who was sort of a go-between,” Pasetta said. “I talked to Joe, the Colonel…everybody. But I tried not to deal too much with the Colonel. I had enough problems getting the show on.”

One of the last things Pasetta told Elvis in their marathon meeting was that he needed to drop about twenty pounds. Pasetta said the room went eerily quiet.

“He [Elvis] sat straight, and the guys on either side of him took out their guns and laid them down on the table,” said Pasetta. “And if you don’t think I was scared, you’re crazy.”

Pasetta needed Elvis skinny because he was going to film him up close, from his neck to the top of his head. He said he was shooting close because it would capture Elvis’s true sex appeal for the camera. All well and good, but he still didn’t know how Elvis would react to his bluntness.

“He jumped out his chair. He grabbed me, put his arms around me and said, ‘You’re the first person who was ever honest to me,’” Pasetta said.

But the goal was easier said than done. A decade earlier—no sweat. But now Elvis was thirty-eight years old, and his metabolism had obviously slowed. But he gave Pasetta his word and Elvis planned to keep it.

Elvis immediately went on a strict diet where he drank lots of protein drinks and boiled minuscule portions of protein and vegetables in hot water. He also went on long daily jogs and extended karate workouts. The diet also included daily injections of protein taken from the urine of a pregnant woman to burn up fat in the system. He wasn’t allowed to use anything with fat in it, including lotions, shaving creams, and shampoos.

To Elvis’s credit, he stuck with the regimen and lost the weight, about twenty-five pounds in all. He looked great, and he arrived in Hawaii a few days before the concert in fighting shape. All he had to do now was get a tan, not a problem in the Aloha State.

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Excerpted from Elvis and the Colonel: An Insider’s Look at the Most Legendary Partnership in Show Business by Greg McDonald and Marshall Terrill. Copyright © 2023. Available from St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.