MUSIC BOX NO. 2
memories, buffalo bill, and five childhood favorites.
Note: apparently this is too long to fit in an email, so you’ll need to read it in browser if you want to see the full text. Happy reading!
Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress, and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.— Jane Kenyon, “Evening Sun”
ONE. IT NEVER ENTERED MY MIND, MILES DAVIS.
I would be lying if I said I remembered most of my childhood. It’s fragmentary, tending to be non-linear and patchy, full of shockingly vibrant moments interspersed with holes where something was but isn’t anymore. I tell everyone that my first memory was getting a stuffed bear from my grandparents because it’s easy; I was three years old, I still have Cocoa Bear, and it was witnessed by other people and can therefore be corroborated, meaning that it’s not some figment of a scene I invented (which happens more than you’d think). It’s the safe choice. It’s the nice choice. I wore a yellow dress and twirled under the now-removed tulip tree in the backyard, and the heat of the summer turned the world sepia. It was one of those moments where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
My actual first memory— which isn’t nearly as pleasant and tends to be much more difficult to explain— is the image of bright white fluorescents in a ceiling, the sound of high-pitched ringing, and the feeling of extreme cold and discomfort. The lights were flipping past me as if I was lying face-up on a cart moving down a hallway. The vagueness and slight surreal quality means it could have happened at literally any time after I was born. The only thing that I’m completely sure about when it comes to this memory is that it was real and that it happened before I got my bear. Other than that, the source of this memory, the time it took place, and the possible situation that could have made me so dramatically cold and uncomfortable are completely lost to the recesses of my brain.
There’s a fascinating psychological impetus to memory. Research published by the neuroscience department of UC Davis in 20161 leads us to believe that what the brain does and doesn’t remember is directly linked to a reward system, with the participants in the study consistently remembering the objects associated with a higher reward more frequently than the objects associated with a lower reward. There’s several more theories surrounding why we remember some things but not others— the information in the memory is deemed as something that will come in handy later, we were particularly invested in the contents of the memory, the event in the memory had an incredible emotional impact, etcetera. None of these fully explain my memory of the lights. There’s a chance I’ve forgotten how I felt in that moment, but when I recall it, there’s a distinct sensation of nonchalance despite the pain, bordering on outright boredom. What’s my reward for remembering this? What do I gain from carrying this image of suffering with me? Why have I held this memory so close for all these years, even though there’s no purpose to it?
Beats me, man. Hemming and hawing about the intention and message behind my first memory is one of those philosophical-type searches that eventually yields a single question to answer all the others— does wondering about it change the facts of the event or my perspective of the event in any way? Nope. And the search for some indistinguishable and potentially nonexistent truth about the nature of my existence stops before it even starts, because I’ve traveled that road enough times to know it’s a circle.
So my first memory is clinical discomfort and my second memory is all warm and fuzzy. Who cares? The important memory is my third one. I’m lying awake in my bed, watching the passing headlights dance across the dark ceiling. The walls are that cool-toned lilac purple— the name of the shade was “Moonstone”; the walls haven’t been that color for years— and I know this without needing light to see them. A Miles Davis cassette is in the boom box. In addition to the song itself, I can hear the breathing of my sibling from across the room, the cars passing outside, and the mechanical whirring of the tape being spun. The song playing is indistinguishable from all other jazz but I’m actively listening, letting myself be soothed and intrigued by it. Now, with my current knowledge of Miles Davis and the way my memory works with sound, I recognize the song playing in the memory to be It Never Entered My Mind, specifically the part from 2:19 to 2:50.
Now there’s something to dig our teeth into. How the fuck was I able to remember a full thirty second soundbite of a Miles Davis song? Was the memory, which feels pretty emotionally neutral, really so impactful that it could get a toddler to remember the specific compositional elements of a song belonging to a notoriously unpredictable genre? Did the rhythmic flashing of the passing headlights manage to hypnotize me into remembering a visceral amount of detail? Full grown adults— myself included, sometimes— tend to have difficulty recollecting non-verbal music unless they’ve actively studied it or listened to it so many times that it’s ingrained in their brain. In what world is this sudden and vibrant ability possible, much less in someone who couldn’t have been older than four at the time? Was I briefly possessed by an unknown version of selfhood, carrying a message from the future in the form of a Miles Davis song?
I’m naturally inclined to skepticism. It just doesn’t come naturally for me to not have doubts about the nature of the reality I witness, no matter how normal or fantastical it may be, which probably ranks pretty high in the list of my stupidest traits. I have every reason to be a full-blown believer in basically anything, considering the variety of my life experience so far. Imagine having dreams about life-altering events happening, watching those dreams be fully realized to the last detail, and then turning around and saying you don’t really believe in psychicism or fortune telling. It truly takes a special degree of idiocy to be able to do that. They should give me a damn medal.
Out of all the unexplainable things I’ve witnessed, the things walking the line between psychosis and visions, this is by far the one I have the most questions about. The others can at least be somewhat explained, in my opinion— there’s some metaphysical stuff I can get behind, and having an extreme form of déjà vu can at least be corroborated by other people’s own experiences. Suddenly having adult brainpower as a toddler makes zero fucking sense, though, despite the fact that I lived it and can literally remember that startling moment of clarity and serenity in my bed.
There’s two answers to what could have made that possible, in my opinion.
One— does wondering about it change the facts of the event or my perspective of the event in any way? No. No, it does not. I think it’s strange and sort of wonderful, and even if someone can give an explanation so perfect it’s like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, that doesn’t change that it happened or that I think it’s strange and sort of wonderful.
Two— that’s just the power of Miles Davis. The piano knows something you don’t; the trumpet only answers to a higher calling, something beyond our mere mortal comprehension. If anyone can bend physics and time using only a jazz quintet and the sheet music of a musical from 1940, it’s the Miles Davis quintet.
And honestly? My money is on Miles.
TWO. NATURAL BLUES, MOBY.
You’re four years old and sitting in the semi-dark of a van that smells like old cloth, sweat, and burnt air. Your family is currently hurtling through the open plains of southern Idaho at over 100 miles per hour, and it’s hot out. It’s really, really hot out. Late August, heat-that-kills, second-degree-burns-on-your-fingers-when-you-touch-the-window type of hot. And this is a borderline-defunct 1999 Volkswagen, so no, there’s no air conditioning. The only way the interior of the van can be cooled, even just a little bit, is by speeding with the windows open, which is why your father is gunning it in a way he would typically call “destructive”. Speeding is not the only way that traffic laws are being disregarded right now— you and your sibling aren’t buckled in. Instead, you’re sitting on a cooler as close to the open window as possible, trying not to fall off or let your legs stick together.
The sun is going down. The only reason your parents are letting you sit by the window is because it’s just gotten dark enough that any potential cops wouldn’t be able to see you two out of your seats. Despite that, there’s still a few beams of sun shattering into your eyes and turning the hair whipping around your mother’s head into cotton candy. Your sibling’s face, inches away from yours, shines like a penny in the light. It’s difficult to conceptualize the sheer flatness of rural Idaho if you’ve never seen something that’s properly flat. Nothing is there— no trees, no houses, no mountains on the horizon, just the scrub brush and asphalt and yellow grass and the endless line of telephone poles, standing like soldiers against the night.
There’s a certain sanctity to the flattest parts of America. I mean, if you want to talk about the Wild West, this is it. You’re on your own, kid. Cops are completely useless out here. Besides being miles and miles away from the nearest town, there’s nowhere big enough to conceal a car and make a proper speed trap. Emergency services only come when someone directly requests them. Your parents know this, of course, which is why you’re going so fast here, of all places. Your sibling knows this, even though they’re only seven. Even you know this, despite being four. No cops where it’s flat. Cops bad. No matter where I went or what part of the family I stayed with, the police were always the monster under the bed.
They say a deer has the same amount of consciousness as a four year old. I find myself wondering if deer have bogeymen, too. Because I was very little, and it was very hot out, and my sibling’s leg pressed against mine was very sticky, for some unknown reason I was sitting on that shitty cooler with my head out the window staring at something beautiful and feeling compelled to think about the cops and the bills that were waiting when we got home and all the people in my child-life who were so sick that they couldn’t stop getting well. Don’t nobody know my troubles but God.
It was 2009. The speakers of the van might’ve been terrible back then but they did their job, and that job was blasting Moby’s 2008 album Play & Play B-Sides right into my four year old ears, specifically the eighth track, Natural Blues.
Yeah, that’s right. Moby. Techno DJ/producer, devout Christian, hardcore vegan, punk band frequent flier, and notoriously bald-headed Moby. Don’t know who that is? Yes, you do. If you listened to the radio, watched that one How I Met Your Mother episode about New Years (otherwise known as the only episode of that show I’ve ever watched), or were just alive and semi-conscious in the 2000s, you absolutely fucking know who Moby is. Well, maybe you don’t— there’s a chance I just heard it in the car so many times as a child that I think he’s way more popular than he actually is, in which case I feel sorry for you, because Play & Play B-Sides changed the trajectory of my life forever. There are a couple albums out there that permanently altered the way I view music, whether it introduced me to a new genre or were experimental enough that it reminded me music can be whatever the artist wants it to be; Play was one of them.
Originally released in 1999 with no B-sides attached, Play was an unexpected surprise hit. Moby’s previous album, Animal Rights (1996), had been a disaster both critically and commercially— at that point he had dropped several studio albums, all in the greater techno/electronica genre and all to good reviews within the techno scene. I would list a more specific number of albums, but he faced issues with a past record label releasing albums of his older work without his consent, so the officially recognized chronology of his work is difficult to parse out. Regardless, the vegan rage of Animal Rights strayed from his previously established blend of house and ambient, making a return to the metal and punk sound he loved as a teenager. This did not work out well. Despite the album garnering praise from the likes of Bono and Axl Rose, it flopped hard enough that Moby was considering quitting music altogether and going to school for architecture. Play, which Moby began creating in 1997, was mixed and produced at his home studio in New York. He planned on it being his last album before he ended his career.
It wasn’t like the songs of Play descended from the heavens and a multi-platinum album just fell into his lap. Recording and production were delayed for years due to Moby’s frustration with the mixing, which was originally done by himself, but then he “wasted time and money” at two other studios before he finally made a mix he was happy with back at his house. The trouble continued from there— he had been dropped from his label after the failure of Animal Rights, and struggled to promote the new album, even going so far as to play a show in the basement of a Virgin Megastore, which was only attended by about forty people. Play got almost no airplay on radio or television, meaning the album was effectively invisible.
Moby and his management needed a way to get eyes on the album, and so they concocted what might be the most successful advertising campaign ever. Every single song on Play was sent to advertisers and film companies, asking for them to license the songs off Play for use in commercials, TV, and film. The licensing offers began rolling in shortly after, and eventually, the entire album was featured in a variety of filmed media, including ads for American Express, Volkswagen, and Nordstrom. Slowly but surely, Play started getting airtime and climbed up the charts.
“The week Play was released, it sold worldwide around 6,000 copies. Eleven months after Play was released, it was selling 150,000 copies a week. I was on tour constantly, drunk pretty much the entire time and it was just a blur… Suddenly the journalists who wouldn't return my publicist's calls were talking about doing cover stories,” Moby said in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone. “It was a really odd phenomenon.”2
An odd phenomenon, indeed. As of today, it’s the highest-selling techno album of all time, and certified multi-platinum in most countries, the highest being 7x platinum in New Zealand. All this to say that you had to have been completely unaware of your surroundings in the 2000s if you don’t at least know Moby’s name. But I’m not here to talk about that.
The success of Play sound-wise is, in my opinion, entirely indebted to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the box set of folk music recordings he released in 1993, titled Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta, which was a compilation of Lomax’s work in the Southern USA. I don’t want to go on for too long, but Lomax is one of the most important figures in music history— a radical leftist, multiculturalism advocate, and the director of the Archive of American Folk Song, his collection work is commonly known as what inspired both the American and British folk revivals and brought artists like Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives to public attention. It’s no stretch at all to say that without his work in preserving blues, jazz, and folk songs from all over the world, we wouldn’t have many of our most beloved present-day musicians. A friend of Moby’s had lent him the Lomax’s CDs, and from there, he used the vocals of songs from the likes of Bessie Jones (featured on Honey), Boy Blue (featured on Find My Baby), and Vera Hall (featured on Natural Blues) to add depth and hooks to his recordings.
The integration of these samples was met with incredible critical acclaim. Robert Christgau, writing for the Village Voice in 1999, even went so far as to say that the integration of Lomax’s field work “honor[s] not just dance music but the entire rock tradition it's part of”,3 a sentiment I find myself agreeing with. There’s a Björk quote out there about the importance of having a balance between techno and nature, which comes to mind when I think about Play’s tribute to the Black artists that invented and inspired rock and roll. Most of Lomax’s southern field recordings were done in the 30s and 40s, before all the fancy tricks of modern-day music were invented. They were also often recorded in impoverished areas where the equipment that did exist wasn’t available— the only equipment Lomax used in the 1930s was Presto instantaneous disc recorder and a film camera, and in the span of three months, he reportedly used around 250 discs and 8 reels of film.
This brings us to Natural Blues. In 1937, singer Vera Ward Hall recorded an entirely acapella track, Trouble So Hard, with Lomax. In 1948, he invited her to perform at Columbia University’s American Music Festival. “Her singing is like a deep-voiced shepherd’s flute, mellow and pure in tone, yet always with hints of the lips and the pleasure-loving flesh... The sound comes from deep within her when she sings, from a source of gold and light, otherwise hidden, and falls directly upon your ear like sunlight,” Lomax later said, discussing the power of her voice. He hit the nail on the head, to be honest. I’ve talked about it before so I won’t go into detail, but as someone who’s obsessed with duende, her work is like a goldmine. That “my life is hard” sort of posturing that’s present in today’s music is completely absent. Any fatigue and sadness in Trouble So Hard comes from lived experience, not trying to claim false poverty valor. Maybe it’s petty of me to say that, but I don’t care— I’m so over rich people trying to pretend they’ve ever been poor.
Following blues tradition, the lyrics rely on heavy repetition of a few lines, with a couple brief non-repeated phrases as verses. For our repeated lines in Trouble So Hard, we have “ooh Lordy, my troubles so hard” and “don’t nobody know my troubles but God,” both of which are extremely evocative in a way the written word cannot convey when sung by Hall. These phrases constitute about two thirds of the song. In between them, we have “went down the hill/other day/my soul got happy/and stayed all day,” and “went in the room/didn’t stay long/looked on the bed and/brother was dead”, which are only repeated once each. Every phrase adds another layer of complexity and worldbuilding to the song, despite there being so few lines. What we can glean from the song is a) that the singer’s life is difficult, b) that they are desperately seeking any sort of joy they can find, and c) they were unable to stay in a room with their dead brother, either from nonchalance or such unbearable grief that they couldn’t stand to see his body. Trouble So Hard is ten lines maximum, but managed to create an incredibly visceral and haunting depiction of sorrow. You just don’t see songwriting like that anymore.
Then, in 1999, Moby added a rhythm section, a piano, some synth, and these distant vocal riffs that almost sound like someone is crying in the next room. Sound-wise, it continues the ethereal, narcotic wash of Play with shocking delicacy for a techno song, creating a sonic landscape where it feels like you’re the one that’s desperate for respite from sorrow, half-ecstatic and trapped in a world where you’re inescapably exposed to the grief of the people around you.
My perspective of the world as a four year old was limited and lacked depth, as the perspectives of all four year olds are. It’s difficult to conjure an accurate representation of the sensation of childhood. I don’t know what it’s like to be four, nowadays— I’m not four anymore. The only thing I remember about being that age is the shocking amount of emotional nuance involved. Due to having practically no lived experience, every single event— every scraped knee, every cool bug, every bit of joy and sadness— is felt with a depth and sensitivity that simply cannot be conjured in adult life. I didn’t know much about the world, and I still don’t. I had never truly met grief at that point in my life. Listening to the weariness of Hall’s voice, though, awakened something in me. It stoked the powerful emotional fire that only a child has, expressing something that I knew was completely incommunicable— a moment of grace, a moment of transcendence, something bigger than myself.
And then, as quickly as it came, the wind dragged it away and I was left with only the sorrow, the setting sun, and the suffocation of the Idaho heat.
THREE. READ MY MIND, THE KILLERS.
I don’t like my maternal grandmother.
I’m not sure what exactly has made me dislike her so much from such a young age. There’s this nasty little part of me that sniffs out people’s weaknesses and deems if they’re worthy of my attention or not, I think. I have no idea how to stop it or shut it down. The fact is simply that if there’s something you’re deeply insecure about, a gap in your armor, or a way you can be exploited, I will find it and I will never forget it. I won’t do anything with it; I’ve got enough self awareness to know that weaponizing that soft spot can have a devastating effect on someone’s life, and there is pretty much nothing in this world that could make me angry enough to use it against someone. Regardless, I will find it, because I’m kind of an asshole like that.
This analysis takes place within the first few minutes of meeting someone. I can typically tell if we’ll get along because there’s an evident hardness in their soul, a center of gravity or solid foundation that things are then built off of. It’s independent from any insecurities— you can absolutely despise yourself, you can hate the way you look, you can be completely off your rocker and still have that stability in your soul. I think what it comes down to is that I can’t respect softness or sweetness. Maybe I’m intimidated by it, as someone who doesn’t have a lot of either. Maybe I just don’t feel like I have common ground with people who do have those traits.
It’s a one question evaluation. Can the center hold?
The other reason I don’t like sweetness and softness is because it’s typically a sign of rot. In the case of my grandmother, no, the center does not hold, and that rot is why.
She is, as most of us are, a product of her environment— delusional, narcissistic, deeply ashamed of how she looks, cruel because of it, and worst of all, happy to hide all that nastiness behind a smile and debutante manners. Men can do no harm in her book; on the other hand, every woman needs a man and if he harms her or does something that frightens her, she’s the one that made him do that, even if they’re strangers passing on the street. The difference in how she treats my father (her son-in-law) and my mother (her daughter) is astronomical. In my grandmother’s eyes, my father might as well be the handsomest man in the world and my mother needs to lose weight so she can finally start deserving him, despite them both being considered incredibly attractive by societal standards. These traits and opinions have made her practically impossible to be around, even before the Alzheimer’s started whittling anything remotely good off her brain and leaving her with only the bad things.
Some sympathy is required due to the environment she’s a product of. Born and raised in rural Alaska to an alcoholic father and an extremely neurotic mother, she was the youngest of four and had to watch her hometown of Valdez get destroyed in the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. Her graduating class motto was “always drunk and half alive/we’re the class of ‘65”— a chillingly literal phrase, as many of her classmates were killed by the tsunami that followed the earthquake. One of the things she’s proudest of is that she was voted the most beautiful girl in town before half her competition died. Her older sister suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their father. She herself suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, who was about ten years older than her. Although she hasn’t regressed so far into her history as to advertise it, she still considers him the great love of her life, and I still have no fucking idea if my aunt is a child of incest or not, or if anyone but me knows about her brother. She married a cop when she was nineteen, popped out three kids by the time she was 23, and then proceeded to constantly bankrupt the family until her husband died in 2004, which left her in a state of grief she still hasn’t escaped today. She’s an alcoholic. She’s got terrible body dysmorphia. She’s got massive amounts of PTSD. She is, at her core, a victim of a bunch of horrible things nobody should have to live through, but that by no means validates her cruelty. It’s a complex situation, as all things are.
Part of why I dislike her is because I know she passed all that trauma and rottenness right down to me, youngest daughter to youngest daughter to youngest daughter.
My parents never fully trusted her with the care of my sibling and I, but every summer for about a week or so, they would drop us off wherever she and my aunt were living at the time. My aunt worked full time to support them. My grandmother, once she closed down the lingerie store she ran, just cashed her dead husband’s social security checks. Money was tight, but we still went out for breakfast at the bowling alley at least once during that week.
I can’t say with good conscience that it was all bad. Even though I also never trusted her with the care of my sibling and I, we were relatively self-sufficient from years of watching out for each other, so her inability to care for us was never actively harmful. She didn’t feed us, but we never went hungry because our parents always left us with a bag of fruits, vegetables, and oven-ready frozen goods that we could make on our own.
I remember there was always hot chocolate in the mornings.
The one remotely edible thing my grandmother could make was breakfast, which was burnt toast, greasy bacon— at that point, both my sibling and I had developed a love for raw and undercooked meat, which she saw no problem with indulging us in— and multiple cups of hot chocolate made with heavy cream and topped with mini marshmallows. The days consisted of playing browser games on her computer, walking on the beach to collect shells for the jewelry she never made, letting her dress us up like dolls, and driving around the town she lived in, up and down the coast and onto the ferries and into the forest.
One of the other good things about her is that she was a massive, massive fan of the Killers. I don’t think I ever heard her listen to music that wasn’t the Killers— at least while she was still relatively sound of mind, that is.
When it was released in 2006, the Killers’ second studio album Sam’s Town received notoriously mixed reviews, something that I continue to find deeply funny. The bad reviews are some of the most foolish criticisms I’ve ever read—the New York Times said they evolved too fast; Rob Sheffield, writing for Rolling Stone, even went so far as to say the band was “try[ing] to get heavy by copying Bruce Springsteen. Yes, that means glockenspiel solos. Yes, it means anthems about the road and looking for America and girls named Mary. No, it's not a good move,” and then rated it two stars4. What a stupid thing to say. Oh no, they have different instrumentation and moved on from über-glam indie rock to creating stadium-worthy anthems. Boo fucking hoo. Maybe I’m just a really big fan of Springsteen, but in my opinion, a heartfelt creation about craving change and trying to escape the history that haunts you is always successful in one way or another. Even if I don’t like the album, the artist still made something that came from a sincere place, which is a hundred times more important than my actual enjoyment of it. Thankfully, the album has become a cult classic since then.
The thing, though, is that I like Sam’s Town— I really, really do like Sam’s Town, and it’s not even remotely because it makes me feel nostalgic about my childhood or whatever. Quite simply, it’s because it’s a good album.
There aren’t many ways to properly describe the American West. I think the main thing you need to know about what it’s like over here is that it’s not like that at all, but that it used to be like that until it wasn’t, and now we’ve made our home in the bones of the dead thing that was-until-it-wasn’t. What do you think of when you think of the West? California, cacti, cowboys? How much do you know about Buffalo Bill, who did for the West what Jesus did for Christianity? Can you put on a show? Can you run fast on a horse without falling off or getting a side cramp or losing your gun? Can you sit in a suburb that’s completely identical to every other homogeneous suburb in America while asking yourself these questions?
I’m dead serious about the Buffalo Bill thing, by the way. The bones that we live inside are the bones of Buffalo Bill. All the kitschy museums and old Western films are his Bibles; every decorative antique gun, rusty horseshoe, and taxidermied creature is a cross in his honor. And we can move past that as much as possible, erecting identical houses and chain stores and shiny-grimy gas stations, but the bones we live in are still the bones of Buffalo Bill. Unless you’ve actively studied the massive diversity in Native American cultures across the West, the chances are pretty high that the mental image of pre-colonial America in your head is still tainted with the imagery of indigenous life that Our Lord Buffalo Bill developed, which is only half-true and fully just from Plains tribes. But who cares, right? Whatever gets the tourists off.
Part of what makes Sam’s Town so good is that it knows all of this— it knows that our idea of the West is a showman’s illusion with a dark underbelly. It’s a glamorous piece of fiction made to make us feel better about our past. The noble feats of cowboys were based in settler violence. The idea of the hyper-masculine American gunslinger hearkens back to post-Revolutionary War propaganda that we made to make the British look like pussies, not the truth. But at it’s core, Sam’s Town is an album from the west the same way that I’m a girl from the west, and you can hear it. You can see the bones of Buffalo Bill all the way through it.
Read My Mind was the third single off the album and the one that received the most praise. The Killers’ lead singer, Brandon Flowers, called it the best song he’d ever written. Sonically, it could be something from the original New Wave movement— although Sam’s Town took a hard left turn away from the 80s super-synths and vocal effects of their previous album, Hot Fuss, they bring the synths back in a much softer way here. Lyrically, it really is a descendant of Bruce Springsteen. As a child, the lyrics always seemed like some sort of code, and I have no desire to break that particular illusion for myself, but the gist of the song isn’t hard to understand. The protagonist is trapped in a small town, maybe in a relationship that’s starting to go sour. They want out. They haven’t gotten out quite yet, but they want out. Do you know what they mean? Of course you do, because everyone has something they want to escape. The promise and illusion of the West operates almost entirely on the principle. Compositionally speaking it’s pretty simple, and while that’s usually a turn off for me, it works in their favor, cultivating this very personal, tender feeling. Hope! The singer is going to turn this thing around!
Honestly, my fondness for the track relies less on genuine music criticism and more on the chunk of the SR-20 that goes through Anacortes, Washington. There’s this one stretch of that road, probably about a mile or so long, that we called the Green Cathedral due to the way the trees arch over the road, painting the entire world green and yellow for a minute. When she could still drive, my grandmother had this piece of shit Mercedes SUV from 2001. It was that weirdly dull color of dark green that no cars come in today, probably because it’s an incredibly unflattering color (especially on a car that’s already falling apart). It was a green piece of shit that had a sunroof and nobody— not my grandmother, not my sibling, and not me— cared about traffic laws.
Sam’s Town is in the CD player, because it always is. The sunroof is open, because it always is. Nobody else is on the road, because it’s always mid-morning during a weekday and everyone who can drive is at work. Read My Mind is playing. The second we hit the treeline, my sibling and I crawl out of the backseat and stand up through the sunroof, letting the wind wash over our faces and torsos. It smells like the ocean— Fidalgo Bay is a stone’s throw away. You can see the water peeking through the flush of green. If you close your eyes to it, it almost feels like you’re flying. Sorrow is not as big as its shadow. Decay will not take us for many years. And somewhere out there, I’m sure that the stars really were blazing like rebel diamonds. It’s easy to believe things like this back in the place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
I still don’t like my grandmother, but she gets a pass for some things.
FOUR. CRY ME A RIVER, JULIE LONDON.
There was a certain degree of anachronism in my childhood. I don’t know why. Maybe it was just the era, with that massive and constant influx of new technology, or maybe it was the stubbornness of my parents and the ideas about that new technology, which revolved around the certainty that these new things would be more effective at melting your brain than the notorious brain-melter of sitting too close to the TV. Regardless of the reason, my family’s integration of technology— aside from cellphones and laptops for the adults, which had quickly become necessities— stopped at the invention of the MP3 player. At the time, it was deeply annoying to me. How was I supposed to waste time on girlsgogames.com if I couldn’t access a computer when I wanted to? What if I wanted to watch Netflix, back when Netflix was still decent? Looking back, I’m actually really thankful that I didn’t have access to any of that. I don’t naturally have an addictive personality, but if something that fucked with dopamine levels the way screens do had come into my life before I was a teenager, who knows what could’ve happened. Nothing good, I assume.
The anti-tech attitude still applied when it came to listening to music. We got an iPod Nano in 2013, but I was lowest in the pecking order due to being the youngest, so I didn’t use it until my sibling moved out about seven years later. That was the most up-to-date music device I could (kind of) access until my parents conceded to my pleading and got me a secondhand iPod for my 14th birthday.
I turned 14 in 2019, by the way. All of my classmates— and that’s not hyperbole, I talked to everyone in every single class I was in— had a smartphone by that point. I couldn’t even text people on that iPod Touch because it was so old, God rest its little soul, but I loved that thing like a child.
This is just to say that from ages 5 to 13, my sole device for listening to music while on the go was a bright yellow 1988 Sony Walkman. At the time it was pretty devastating that I couldn’t listen to a lot of my favorite songs— all discovered on YouTube via a library computer— because nobody gave any Panic! at the Disco cassettes to the local thrift store. Looking back, it absolutely ruled. Maybe I couldn’t listen to anything new, but it did introduce me to music that none of my classmates knew, as well as giving me a lot of street cred during the 80s renaissance that began when Stranger Things started airing. It did mean that I totally was the guy who followed up a mention of any pre-2000s band with a “but you probably wouldn’t know them”, which was kind of valid because nobody at my school did know who the fuck I was talking about, but still an annoying trait. Anyways, the point is that any music I wanted to listen to at night or outside of the house had to be on a tape, which means I was constantly looking for cassettes.
Now, when I was about 10 years old, my grandmother indoctrinated me into pageantry. Nothing official, no competitions or anything, but it was lots of post-World War II era etiquette lessons and instructions on how to dress oneself properly. This spawned an obsession with all things vintage, especially music. The only thing I would listen to for about six months was big band, swing, or jazz, much to the chagrin of my parents, who were getting tired of hearing the same Elvis songs over and over. Due to my limited range of listening devices, I was dead set on finding a tape with some older hits on it, and I eventually succeeded. There was a 1993 compilation on a shelf in a Goodwill titled Heart to Heart: All The Music America Loves Best!, which had literally none of the music America loves best on it, as the world had moved on from swing several decades ago. What it did have, though, was a bodice-ripper style cover and a bunch of hits from 40s and 50s, which is exactly what I wanted.
That tape was my first introduction to stars like Judy Garland, Doris Day, and Dinah Shore. It was also my first introduction to Julie London.
Julie London— what a name! Fake, obviously, because nobody used their real names back then, but that’s irrelevant. And while all the other artists on the tape were big-voiced and backed by entire orchestras, Julie London just had a thimbleful of a voice, a bass player, and a guitar player. Let Me Go Lover by Joan Weber was the song before it, and while it is a pretty downtempo song, there is no one on that tape that has a more different voice from Julie’s. Joan’s story is actually pretty sad— although not much is known about her, what we do know is that Let Me Go Lover was recorded while she was pregnant and her record company dropped her after the baby was born, leading her to a very brief career before living in seclusion and eventually being institutionalized for unknown reasons— but she had a lovely voice and probably the most vibrato I’ve ever heard. Julie, on the other hand, is famous for her smoky and intimate sound.
I was convinced I was in love with Julie. Convinced. I knew nothing about her except her name and the sound of her voice, and I was in love with her, and it was serious, and nothing was going to be done about it because she was probably dead. She died before I was born, actually, but it didn’t matter. I had no sexual or even romantic intent towards her; I was just in love with her. Why not be in love? How could you not listen to a beautiful song sung by an undoubtedly beautiful woman and not fall in love, even just a little bit? What else is there to do in this miserable world but be in love?
I wish I could remember listening to it for the first time or my emotional reaction to it or anything like that. I wish I had something informative to say about it— some background or a biographical paragraph or something, but I don’t. All I have is my juvenile love for her. A torch I still carry, frankly, because I’ve never gotten over the softness of her voice.
There’s this song from 1945, originally composed as the theme for the film Laura of the same year. Obviously, It’s called Laura. It’s only four lines long— “Laura is the face in the misty night; footsteps echoing down the hall/the laugh on a summer night that you can never quite recall/and you see Laura on a train that is passing through; those eyes, how familiar they seem/she gave her very first kiss to you, and that was Laura, but she’s only a dream.” Julie covered it on her 1955 debut album, Julie is Her Name. You’ve never heard silence so deliberate. My idea of her has completely succumbed to this song; I have no desire to know anything about her because it would only interfere with her voice, her voice within the misty night, her voice that’s a laugh I can never quite recall.
And that was Julie and my love for Julie, but it’s only a dream.
FIVE. ARMY OF ME REMIX, BJÖRK AND SKUNK ANANSIE.
In the previous Music Box post while discussing Radiohead’s cover of Unravel, I called it my second-favorite non-remix Björk song. The day after I published it, I got an anonymous ask on Tumblr wondering why I was so specific about my ranking of Björk songs. I never answered it, but I hope that anon is reading this post because this song is why.
(For those interested— if we’re including the remixes, my top five Björk songs in order are the Skunk Anansie remix of Army of Me, The Anchor Song, Unravel, The Modern Things, and Mouths Cradle. If we’re not including remixes, the order moves up to include the version of All Is Full Of Love from her Greatest Hits compilation album at number five, because the trip-hop percussion adds so much to the song.)
Like many people, the first time I heard this version of Army of Me was when I watched Zach Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch. Now, there’s a lot that can be said about Sucker Punch. Yes, I have seen it at least a dozen times this year alone. Yes, it is on every single “worst films of 2011” list. Yes, it is undoubtedly one of my favorite movies. Beat me! Take my blood! I think it’s one of those films that, although almost entirely misunderstood by the audience at the time of release, will age incredibly well and receive the critical acclaim that it deserves once a few decades have passed. The positive reinterpretation of the message has already started— I don’t really watch Mike’s Mic, but he did make a video about Sucker Punch that I watched, and it’s possibly the only review of it I’ve ever agreed with.
I was eleven years old when I first watched it, but I really got into it when I was twelve. It was like a miracle. For reasons I have no desire to go into detail about, that year was easily the worst year of my life. Nothing was within my control. Life spun out before me like a ball of yarn, unraveling faster than I could rewind it, plunging into the depths of a monster-infested darkness. To phrase it politely, it was the year I started looking at the knives in the kitchen a little too long. I didn’t feel like I was a preteen— I felt like I was being married to a king who was planning on killing me tomorrow morning, and I wanted to live. I wanted to live so badly that I lied to pretty much every single person in my life, constantly rewriting the truth to put myself into a place where I was strong enough to defeat the evil.
People will say that Sucker Punch is one of the only Zach Snyder films that isn’t an adaptation, but they’re wrong— it’s just not an intentional one. This is present day Scheherazade. I won’t spoil it in case you haven’t watched it, but the way the film nests dozens of tiny fantasy-realities inside of each other mirrors the story of Scheherazade almost perfectly. What do you do when you’re trapped in a place where you will inevitably lose? You start telling stories. You manifest the harm you’re facing into a tangible enemy and then you make yourself a sword and a gun to fight it with. You glamorize it to make it bearable. You create a story in which you survive, and that story enables you to either triumph or reach a place where your loss is still a triumph. And you’re still getting fucked over while that’s happening, you’re still put into heels and a miniskirt and three pairs of false eyelashes because that’s what the viewer wants, but you learn to work within the bounds that have been given to you and you find that victory.
A modern adaption of a story that is, at its core, about female survival in the face of gendered violence— and Carla Gugino in a wiggle dress saying “you have every weapon you need; now fight”— was exactly the leg up I needed at that period of my life.
With that came the soundtrack for Sucker Punch, which is pretty fucking legendary. Music being incorporated into cinema is something I can get incredibly argumentative about— you do not want to get me started on the way soundtracking is treated these days, with creative directors just throwing in a bunch of songs pulled off of TikTok or an 80s pop playlist. It’s dismal. It says nothing about the film, it has no relation to the plot, and oftentimes it’s horrifically obvious that they’re just throwing it in there so people will say “hey, at least it had a good soundtrack!” But it never does have a good soundtrack, because quality soundtracking is not equivalent to how much synthpop is in there, no matter how much fun it is. Now, Sucker Punch does technically have synthpop in there. You wouldn’t know that from listening to it, though, because nobody expects a three minute Eurythmics song to get turned into a five minute epic that’s rife with sonic motifs present through the entire soundtrack, sung by the lead actress, and timed in a manner that follows the movements of the characters.
The other songs on the soundtrack get a similar treatment— most of them are several minutes longer than the originals and sung, as much as possible, by the cast of the film. Sitting halfway between soundtrack and score, they roll through multiple ups and downs per song. Most importantly, though, every single song is perfectly synced to the events of the scene. Speaking on the massive fight scene that takes place while Army of Me is playing (you can watch a relatively spoiler-free version of it that cuts around the dialogue here), the song is timed to the actions our protagonist, Babydoll. The guitar squeals every time she fires a bullet (3:40), the sound of her sword harmonizes with the percussion (4:10), the song ends with the thump of her landing back on the ground (5:00)— it’s just gorgeous work. It fits the scene rhythmically, it fits the scene lyrically, and besides all of that, it’s a fucking incredible song.
It begins on March 5th, 1995. Björk releases an EP for Army of Me, containing four separate remixes of the song. One of them, titled the “Sucker Punch Remix”, features the heavy metal band Skunk Anansie. It’s 4:39 long and packed to the brim with wailing guitar and booming drums. The best aspect of the song, though, is that the vocals are not the original vocals— they’re a more intense version that Björk recorded specifically for this remix, and the shrieks she does reverberates through the song like, well, a sucker punch. On May 4th of the same year, Björk and Skunk Anansie made an appearance on Top Of The Pops to perform their version of the remix. It is, without a doubt, one of the most electrifying live performances I’ve ever seen. There is no universe where I don’t get chills listening to Björk and Skin scream in harmony. It’s harrowing. I’ve had the entire upper half of my body hanging out of a car going 90 miles per hour, and listening to their vocal performances still gives me more of a thrill. Then a little over a decade later, Tyler Bates and Marius de Vries are hired to do the music for Sucker Punch, at which point they pulled this out of Björk’s discography and remixed the remix, smoothing out the production and adding in a whole bunch of things— synth, more distortion, strings, a whole additional back half, bigger drums, the list goes on. It was transformed from a raw diamond to a cinematic knife.
And there I was, twelve years old, listening to what might be the greatest vocal performance in the history of the world while watching a platinum blonde Emily Browning kick ass in a tiny, tiny skirt. The next day, I got to walk into school with the Army of Me remix playing on that 2013 iPod because my sibling let me have it for the day. For a moment— a single, beautiful, glistening moment— I felt exactly like Babydoll facing down her demons, impossibly small but completely powerful.
We can knock it all we want, you know? We can critique the idea of feeling “in power”, we can investigate our definitions of the word, we can rule it out as a totally useless thing outside of arbitrary social structures, whatever. I don’t care. I literally don’t give a shit. I listened to this song and felt like I could grind all the evil men in my life into dust, which was more valuable than gold.
It wasn’t an easy way out. It wasn’t a quick fix for a nasty situation. But Björk and Skin escorted me to my locker and told me that somewhere within me I had every weapon I could possibly need.
Now fight, they said. And I fucking did.
BONUS TRACK. TALK TONIGHT (MTV UNPLUGGED 1996), OASIS.
For the most part, I don’t believe in luck, good or bad. Things just happen. All events are neutral, devoid of any positive or negative intent. But there are a couple events in my life that make me reconsider the existence of luck, and one of them is my mother coming home from a trip with Oasis’s 1996 MTV Unplugged show on vinyl.
My mother doesn’t know jack shit about Oasis. If you ask her about Oasis, she’ll call herself a fan, but in reality she only knows a couple songs off of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory and that the Gallagher brothers are feuding constantly. That’s where her knowledge of them begins and ends. She also travels a lot for work, typically popping off to another country for a week or so every few months. She went to London about six months ago, and while digging through a record shop trying to find anything Britpop— I had mentioned the genre offhandedly a few times, and she hadn’t yet figured out I can’t be won over with presents— she came across the MTV Unplugged vinyl. She picked it not because she recognized its worth and incredible rarity, but because they didn’t have any other Oasis albums available.
It was £20. I am now in possession of one of the only vinyls of this show in existence. In fact, the vinyl release of it is so rare that I can’t find any information about it online except a single listing that verifies the pressing was from 1996. How’s that for luck?
I’m going to be vulnerable and say something embarrassing— when I was fourteen and absolutely obsessed with Oasis, I printed out a picture of Noel Gallagher’s face and had it taped to a pillow. I wasn’t even trying to make out with paper-Noel or something, I just had his face taped to a pillow because I liked to look at him before I went to bed. It’s a miracle that my sibling, who I shared a room with at the time, didn’t find it; I would’ve gotten bullied about it for the rest of my existence. Hours and hours of my adolescent life were spent sitting next to the CD player with my head pressed against the speaker, listening to Don’t Look Back In Anger (the only Morning Glory song Noel has lead vocals on) and Cast No Shadow (my personal favorite off the album) over and over again. When I tried listening to that CD a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even play all the way through those tracks because of how worn down the disc was.
All things considered, I think I did an incredible job of keeping my cool when my mother got home and passed that vinyl, along with Blur’s Parklife, over to me.
For those of you who aren’t into Oasis like that, there’s three very significant reasons the sleeve boasts that it’s “legendary”. Number one— Liam, the lead singer, had a “sore throat” that day which meant that Noel, his older brother and the songwriter of the band, was the one singing. It’s debatable if Liam actually had a sore throat. Although that was what Noel told the audience when he went onstage, along with saying that tonight they’re “stuck with the ugly four”, multiple sources said it was actually because Liam had gotten completely wasted the previous night and was throwing a tantrum, which leads us to the second reason.
Two— Liam obviously didn’t fucking have a sore throat, because he was sitting in the audience heckling his brother throughout the entire set. The vinyl politely cuts around most of it except for a moment before Cast No Shadow where there’s a yell from the audience, which Noel chuckles at and then says, “Oh, there you are. Shut up,” and then immediately introduces the next song as one that he wrote, despite having written all the songs. I don’t even know how to describe Noel’s tone of voice. Thankful? Exhausted? Petulant? Happy to see his brother semi-coherent, even if he’s publicly booing him? More questions arose from Liam’s heckling though, mainly around why he wasn’t performing.
(On the back of the sleeve, there’s a single photo of Liam tinted red, contrasting with the blues and purples of the pictures of Noel singing on the front. He sits slumped in the first row of seats, glaring at the stage as if he’s infuriated by his face not being on the front of the album. I’m dead serious when I say I think about the deliberate artistic choices that went into those photos of them every single day. He was there. Why wasn’t he onstage?)
Reason number three— this is the moment many fans point to when talking about knowing Oasis was fated to break up. They don’t say it was the night they actually broke up after Liam smashed Noel’s guitar, or when Noel hit Liam over the head with a cricket bat, or the dozens of other (occasionally violent) fights between the brothers. So what is it about this show in particular?
It wasn’t the heckling. It wasn’t that Liam not showing was a nuclear-level disaster before they went onstage. If you look at the pictures on the front of the sleeve, it answers all the questions for you.
This show was the lynchpin of the Oasis breakup because Noel, notoriously surly Noel, is smiling.
Of course, there’s a reason behind that reason. This show is typically regarded as the moment where Noel realized that he doesn’t need his brother to be the mouthpiece for his writing, a theory furthered by the fact that the show was a smash success, drawing massive amounts of critical acclaim. No one knows what was going through the Gallagher brothers’ heads that night— no one knows if Liam saw his brother blooming onstage and felt threatened, or if Noel felt unshackled by not having to rely on Liam. The only thing we can say for certain is that Noel was smiling through the whole show, and that Liam wasn’t there with him.
That brings us around to present day. Imagine me, well and truly a Noel-girl, receiving one of the most important pieces of Oasis history that’s also one of the largest collections of Noel vocals in their whole discography. On vinyl, no less. From my mother who knows nothing about Oasis. I finally understood exactly why Simon and Garfunkel said that “the words of the prophet are written on subway walls”. I mean, I felt like I had been sitting in the darkness for years and a stink bug just handed me a matchbook. I was casual about it, though. I said my thank yous, walked up the stairs at a normal pace, calmly opened and closed my bedroom door, laid down on my bed, and screamed into a pillow so nobody could hear me. Then, in my haste to listen to the record, I accidentally started it on side two— something deeply taboo in my opinion, since all albums should be listened to in the proper order like the artist intended, but I didn’t even care. That’s how excited I was. It’s possibly the most excited I’ve ever been in my life.
Track one of side two is Talk Tonight. Originally an acoustic B-side to Some Might Say sung by Noel, it’s considered one of the best love songs Oasis has ever written, and it’s got a backstory that’s equally as hilarious as it is tragic and sweet. After arriving in the USA in 1994, the band played one of the worst gigs of their career in Los Angeles’s famous Whisky A Go Go venue. About three days before the gig, the band had accidentally snorted crystal meth, thinking it was cocaine. Big fucking mistake. Chemically speaking, cocaine is on the lighter side of the hardcore drugs— not saying it can’t destroy your life, because it absolutely can, but it’s metabolized much faster, meaning that it causes a very quick, intense high. Crystal, on the other hand, is literally what they give to soldiers to keep them awake for multiple days. As someone who’s dabbled in both, I would rather shoot myself in the head than touch meth again, so keep that in mind.
Due to the sheer amounts of meth they had consumed, by the time the Whisky A Go Go gig rolled around, the band hadn’t slept for three days and were still high. On top of that, the setlists had gotten mixed up, meaning different band members were playing different songs at the same time (and yes, all 54 minutes of that disaster is on YouTube for our viewing pleasure). They did shockingly well at that gig considering the circumstances— it certainly helped that Oasis is just one of those bands that have such a massive presence you can overlook a lot of things— but that didn’t stop Noel from freaking out. Understandable, considering that the entirety of the US media corps was present, due to it being the first show of their US tour. He was considering leaving the band permanently.
Instead, he caught a plane to San Francisco, where he stayed with a girl he had met at a previous show. Her name is Melissa Lim, but she’s more commonly known as “The Girl Who Saved Oasis”— capitalization included. She took care of Noel for the duration of his stay in San Francisco, making sure he was eating, taking him to the park where she played as a child, and buying him strawberry lemonade Snapple. According to the sleeve notes from The Masterplan, a collection of Oasis B-sides, she “talked him off the ledge” and soon he rejoined the rest of the band with Talk Tonight freshly written.
I’d heard Talk Tonight before, but I hadn’t listened to it. Do you know what I mean? There’s a line between hearing something and actually listening to it, full attention. You can tell where the line is because suddenly, like a jigsaw, it just slots into place. The song expands around you. It swallows you. You’re so, so aware of just how close the brain is to your ears.
I sat there with my face pressed against the speaker, a mirror of my fourteen year old self, listening to Noel Gallagher sing about a girl who saved his life. And then when the song was over, I picked up the arm of my record player and put the needle back on the beginning of the song. Then I did it again and again and again.
It took me a month to get around to listening to the full thing because every time I was in my bedroom, the record would be on the player, turned to side two, and I would be compelled to listen to Talk Tonight a thousand times until I forced myself to stop, scared that I was going to ruin the song by overplaying it. I’m almost glad I was doing this on a turntable and not an app— this would’ve fucked up my Spotify Wrapped in an devastating way. (Let’s do the math here. I would spend about five hours on average every day for the whole month of March listening to Talk Tonight, which is about 4:23 long. Five hours is about 300 minutes. That equals roughly 70 plays per hour. If we multiply that by the number of days in March, that’s about 2,100 plays of Talk Tonight. Not including the occasional days since then where I’ll put it on repeat again, just for funsies. Jesus.)
It’s a sweet song. It’s a really, really sweet song, almost to the point where it kind of pisses me off how sweet it is. I would punch a hole in the wall of my bedroom, but it’s an old house with plaster walls, so I would be more likely to break my hand than make a hole. Lyrically, it’s surprisingly literal— it’s clear why this was considered one of Noel’s most vulnerable songs up to this point. The lyrics make clear references to the events of San Francisco, with mentions of “dreams [made] of strawberry lemonade” and “walking to where [Melissa] played when [she] was young.” The chords are typical Oasis chords, but it’s Noel writing it, not Noel&Liam, the imaginary amalgamation of personhood that Noel cites most of Oasis’s discography coming from. It’s secular.
Lucky, lucky find. There’s a lot of noise on social media about healing your inner child, and if anything has done that for me, it’s having the Oasis MTV Unplugged show on vinyl. My fourteen year old self would’ve died for this record. My present self would die for this record, honestly. Hearing these lesser-heard renditions of some of my old favorites feels like a throughline back into the past, anchoring me to some sanctimonious spot I had forgotten about, and bringing me back to somewhere with steadier ground. Holy ground.
It’s not forgetting about the past or trying to go back to the place I was at before the more unsavory events of my life happened. There’s no ignorance here. I’ve always been the same person, no matter how many versions of selves I’ve had. And I had a dream about a week ago where I was on stage at the Royal Festival Hall in London singing Talk Tonight into the audience where my fourteen year old self was sitting, and I took it as a sign.
You saved my life. You and me see how we are.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/memory-replay-prioritizes-high-reward-memories
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/play-10-years-later-mobys-track-by-track-guide-to-1999s-global-smash-80650/
https://robertchristgau.com/xg/cg/cgv799-99.php
https://web.archive.org/web/20061017042417/http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/11738772/review/11755516/sams_town