American Crisis Playlist #14
Thematic unbalance
I’ve been feeling a bit off lately, like I’m trying to stay balanced on the curb, but I keep stepping off into something busier. Or maybe it’s like the tree pose in yoga, and my limbs keep falling, try as I might to keep my focus steady.
I suppose I watched too much Woody Allen in my youth, and so whenever I feel a new pain, I think of doctors and CT scans and all that can go so dreadfully wrong. My wife reminds me,
“Well you know you do have that ever-so-slight hypochondriac streak in you.”
“Hhhhm. What are you saying?”
She smiles and reassures, and then heads out for a kayaking lake crawl — she’ll float along and restore herself, and I’ll sit at home and read my students’ creative nonfiction, where I’ll discover just how petty my puny problems are. For I was never molested by someone I looked up to.
And then I’ll put on some music and prepare the snapper creole for us that I’ve been craving ever since my brother and I talked about those foods we most need in these alien times. Thanks to reading Jessica Lee McMillan, I remembered some of the bands I’ll list below and picked up a few new ones. Read her latest playlist here: https://readmedium.com/the-summer-wasting-1e4e114d333d,
and pay particular attention to Little Dragon’s “Feather.”
The humidity has dropped and in this moment I sense fall, my favorite season, and something like hope feels possible again. Should be getting our Biden/Harris signs soon, speaking of hope.
And now, with hope for all, here’s this week’s
AMERICAN CRISIS PLAYLIST (#14)
- “Skyline,” Broken Social Scene, from 2017’s Hug of Thunder. We were watching some of the U.S. Open last night, and while I’ve lost my taste for tennis, I still long for New York. I missed who was playing whom, but I managed to glance up every time the blimp showed the skyline of Manhattan, daytime, nighttime, and from such a distance life seemed so normal. So I got up, put on this gorgeous, dreamy song, and measured the upcoming days with a soup spoon.
- “Myriad Harbor,” The New Pornographers, from Challengers (2007). We always end up in the city, seeing the sunsets in the sky. And from the sky. I’ve loved this band for almost 20 years, and I, too, would love to walk into my favorite music store and ask for an American anthology. I guess, though, such a work would mean different things to different people. The myriad reflections of who we are, and whom we pretend to be. My record store is open, though my turntable has long been closed.
- “It’s My Life,” Talk Talk, found on their Very Best from a place in the 80’s when all we had to worry about was Reagan, AIDS, and our human rights violations in Central America and elsewhere. More than anything, though, this songs puts me in mind of my old lost friend David Bloomer. If anyone has seen him or knows about him, please tell him that our lives meant so much to me, and I wonder why we’re lost now. He loved this song. And he loved to play tennis with me, too.
- “Long Live Rock,” The Who, 1979, The Kids Are Alright. “We were the first band to vomit in the bar.” Well now, if that doesn’t say long live rock, I don’t know what does. Every now and then, I ask The Who to fix me up, and they usually oblige, and for my money, Who’s Next is one of the five greatest rock albums ever produced. Rock isn’t dead, of course, because it never will be, and I might be old, but I’ll dance to this one any day. And that, amongst so many other things, separates me from the orange plague.
- “A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy,” The Kinks, 1978, Misfits. That summer before my last year in college, I worked days in my Dad’s jewelry store, listening to K-99, and this song played almost every day, sometimes twice or thrice, as I, and the song’s subject, spent our lives away. Maybe not quite on the edge of reality, but down enough to where I had to turn the volume up and never loud enough to satisfy. Is it weird that I miss everyone at that store, especially those I never said a proper goodbye to, or my Dad, whom I did, but he couldn’t see me anymore? Maybe it has been a fantasy life after all. Love The Kinks for this.
- “the last great american dynasty,” Taylor Swift from this summer’s folklore. Despite our democratic pretensions, Americans love dynasties, it seems. Our neighborhoods are all about continuity, but look more closely, and watch the changes. When we moved into ours, we were young and foreign, and now we’re so established that my wife brings flowers to the newbies as well as to the 90-year old able bodies. Things change all the time, and any dynasty is another way of fantasizing that you’ll live forever. Volume low or loud, but one day, they’ll turn you off no matter who you are or what your family pretends to be. This whole album is worth a new turntable, by the way.
- “I Don’t Know,” Malo, from their out of print third record but available on 2001’s Celebracion. I wrote a good bit about Malo in The Riff’s summer song challenge. See: https://readmedium.com/the-summer-wasting-1e4e114d333d. Maybe because the low humidity reminds me of the west coast, where right now, I’d love to be. Such smooth sounds. That horn section: to die for.
- “Blue Turk,” Alice Cooper from School’s Out, back in 1972. Up through this record, Alice was making music that while some called it hard rock and left it at that, others understood that something more complicated was happening behind the scenes — some jazz, some homage to show tunes. Alice would have been right in time with Berlin Cabarets, and likely would have lost his life trying to explain what he was all about and that the heavy mascara was just for show. Of course, I’m not sure where he fits in now. But I have felt resurrected listening to songs like this one; “You’re so very picturesque, you’re so very cold. It tastes like roses on your breath, but graveyards on your soul.”
- “Whitey on the Moon,” Gil Scot-Heron, from The Revolution Begins, way back in time. Have you been watching Lovecraft Country on HBO? No? Do you know what a “Sundown Town” is? Have you ever heard of The Cthulhu Mythos? Or of “redlining?” You’ll see a dynasty or two if you watch. This song/poem ended episode two, and I won’t say anymore because watching is believing, or at least seeing some of your worst fears, or recent history, come true.
- “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone, from 1965. Well, Mississippi did just free Curtis Flowers after six attempts to execute him for a murder he didn’t commit. Thanks to the intrepid reporters from the podcast In the Dark, another black man wasn’t lynched by the Magnolia State. But rumor has it, or rather Sue Eisenfeld in her book, Wandering Dixie, relates that between the 1890’s and 1978, over 4000 lynchings in the South were documented. Of black people, and these were just the documented cases. Goddam. Why shouldn’t we feel off and unbalanced? And go look what happened to Ms. Simone.
As always, thanks for reading and for checking this site out and keeping us wanting to write. Noah Levy rocks.
