Boys Don’t Cry: Annivyrsary 2016
ISSUE #340
Ten years now I’ve been listening to Blonde. Whenever I do, it deepens me. That these songs were ever written is still a miracle. There’s no way to contextualize it without bringing up love—a steep style of living, built entirely out of faith—because love, like fiction, is something you can know everything about without knowing it really exists.
Our feelings (worry, sadness; longing, shame) sneak up in subconscious shadows. They bypass all logical and linguistic checkpoints. You start to realize: it’s almost impossible to express what it feels like to love. Firstly, it doesn’t exist until it’s already achieved. Then there’s how famous liars have groomed and groveled for centuries—in their wake, love isolates.
I say all this because the gifts of Blonde—its truth, its humanity, its sacred reflections—are closest, in analog, to marriage and family. It helps us recognize a better way to live. Every second we witness of a soul this vulnerable provides secret, yet universal, lessons. Wisdom is only achieved through pattern. It is impossible without time.
Philosophically, technologically, 2016 was a watershed doom year. It was a terrible existential breaking point. And yet! Even beyond Frank, so much exists in the music—Bon Iver, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Pinegrove—that points to people as feeling, loving, helpless, and good.
Whoops, I’m sorry! Didn’t mean to give you any hope there. Your depths, after all, only exist as far as your neighbor’s level of perception.
Or maybe—we all still recognize a feeling, from any brave soul who will sing it.
I’m subject to a lopsided and very minor synesthesia—I see colors with my numbers. I associate the early integers, 1 through 9, each with a hue. 1 is sunflower, 2 the blue of dusk. 3 is green. 4 is neon fuchsia. 5 is marigold, 6 is midnight. 7 is blood red, 8 is maroon. 9 is pale and jaundiced yellow.
Atlanta has long claimed the symbol of the phoenix. Set ablaze by Sherman in the Civil War, it charged into the unknown to become a city rebuilt. No loss at all, depending on who you ask. There are material benefits to leaving history in the ashes. With the pages all burnt, power rewrites the story.
If there were four horsemen of the 1986 apocalypse, their names were Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and the drum machine. By the grace of god, two are finally dead. The third is, at least, under control in some Western capacity. For the scope of this newsletter, it’s the drum machine we still reckon with—troubled as its legacy may be, even I must admit it’s led to as many triumphs as follies.
For some reason, in 1976, everyone was trying to break into Graceland. In April, Springsteen was escorted off the grounds after trying to jump the wall to see his idol during a tour stop in Memphis. In November, Jerry Lee Lewis was arrested, drunk, with a pistol outside at 3 a.m. He loudly demanded to see the King. Elvis would die nine months later.
Before 1966, the Beach Boys only made surfing music. It didn’t matter that Dennis Wilson was the only member who surfed—neither his younger brother Carl nor his older brother Brian had ever touched a board—the public had a vicious appetite for this promising, carefree California life that was gleaming off the foam of the golden coast.
The first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was written in German, which can neither be completely nor unequivocally translated into English. This sentence, which was written exactly 100 years before 2015, has echoed throughout a century of literature:
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”
I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone,” one of the greatest songs ever written, back in 2005, when it came out. I was a tasteless rube then, with only a few dollars for iTunes singles. No, I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone” yet, but when I did, I felt could have written it. It’s all the 12-year-old me felt at the time: “Hope there’s someone / Who’ll set my heart free / Nice to hold, when I’m tired.”
Sometime in the 1990s, an incredibly rare cultural gag reflex was triggered. This was the first generational challenge of the status quo since the 1960s: queerness, for once, wasn’t necessarily a death sentence, and feminism even had a third wave. The fact is a miracle to this day.
The best adaptation of 1984 actually came out in 1985, and it was called Brazil. That’s how things go—it takes a year or so to process prophecies. By stamping it 1984, Orwell all but assured the powers that be would only mobilize once the year was safely in the rearview.
1975 has officially been sold as the year of the shark and the Saturday Night. These two things were the ones to last. As much as it might make you cringe to say, it’s undeniable: I’m a Brody sun, a Quint moon, a goddamn Hooper rising. A Gilda sun, a Conan moon, a Chevy… agh, you know what, fuck it.
The house where I grew up was two miles from Highway 61. That’s the historic blues highway that Bob Dylan referenced with Highway 61 Revisited, his 1965 album that, in turn, gave the film A Complete Unknown its name from a lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone.”
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
Safe to say three of the most consequential albums of my life came out in 2013, and that list doesn’t even touch the dozen other nearly perfect albums from this year—Trouble Will Find Me, Modern Vampires of the City, Cupid Deluxe, Yeezus… 2013 changed music as we know it, and a lot of the biggest artists today cemented their status or debuted this year, from The 1975 to Beyoncé.
I do remember that this is the year I got a Nintendo Power subscription though. And I do remember one day, flipping through said Nintendo Power in the back seat of the family van, my parents slid a revolution into the CD player. That was the day I first heard Now!That’s What I Call Music! 14.
So for me, ‘93 was the first year of the 90s, and its evidence lies in several places: in the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement and third wave feminism with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”; in Nirvana’s dyspeptic final album before Cobain’s untimely death; and in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the harbinger for the soon-to-be golden age of hip hop.
Some stories of note in 1983: the invention of Detroit techno, as embodied by the single “Clear” by Cybotron; the birth of English indie rock as we know it with The Smiths debut and follow up singles (“Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” respectively); and the birth of American indie rock as we know it with R.E.M.’s Murmur.
If you want a little taste of what 1973 was like, go watch Licorice Pizza, the title of which refers to the old LP, a.k.a. the vinyl record—and boy, was this year firmly the middle of the Album Empire.
It’s time for the first of our Annivyrsaries, my favorite history class, and we’re starting with the sounds of 1963. So naturally, I want to focus on something that hasn’t been touched as much by scholars—the rise of the Surf Song.
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a own way, it did. As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was.
I must’ve gotten my hands on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when I was 10 or 11 years old. Grand Theft Auto maintains a dual reputation as one of the greatest video games of all time as well as one of those Matrix-level Y2K-era youth corruptors.
The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.
At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.
Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.
Ten years now I’ve been listening to Blonde. Whenever I do, it deepens me. That these songs were ever written is still a miracle. There’s no way to contextualize it without bringing up love—a steep style of living, built entirely out of faith—because love, like fiction, is something you can know everything about without knowing it really exists.