vol #5: technicolor decline
Including Uber's rise, the eyes of Randy Travis, a rock opera about King Lear, and an odd fact about the year 2009.
Welcome back to 3x3. We do these occasionally; you can find the explanation of the format here.
Ah, April: cruel-coded month; you’re really going to mix memory and desire? okay—um, if it was me I’d drink coffee and talk for an hour, but go off. Anyway—what’s up big dogs, it’s Jacob. Sorry about that.
I am deflecting with bad humor, and a bad poem quote, because the more genuine truth is...been a rough few months. The easiest way to explain my absence is that I got hit by a moped a little under a year ago and work got busy. The harder stuff to explain—weird shit! and confounding (and still ongoing, of course)—is worth a beer, sometime, if you want to hang. Always down to hang. Always down to chat. During the maelstrom, I’ve been thinking a lot about this Neil Young lyric from his song “Walk On”:
Some get stoned, some get strange
But sooner or later, it all gets real.
It does get real. And I think I got strange. Oh well.
(Here’s a playlist of songs with “Walk On” in the title—all of which I really like but a special shoutout to Reba, the underrated country queen, whose track “Walk On” I think is an underhyped delight.)
In any case, warm weather returns, perhaps, and here is spring with a blooming sense of possibility: We’re bouncing back. Willfully or not.
Before I dive in, some random stuff I didn’t write about: I listened rather obsessively to “Fire in Soweto” by Sonny Oksun for a while; banging. Almost every morning in winter, I listened to a version of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”; I highly recommend doing that. And then, I meant to write about this, but I played Gary Stewart’s “Drinkin’ Thing” non-stop for a few weeks somewhere in there and god that song felt important. (Read this sometime.)
Alright, some thoughts about some music. (Jack did not need longer comments for these songs, because the comments amount to that that he does not particularly like any of them—even though there is something “kind of undeniable about the confident stupidity of the riff” of “Midnight City” and “Don’t Be Cruel” has “an immediate groove.”)
M83 — Midnight City
A few years ago near Thanksgiving, Jack, my friend Will, and I began to make what felt like an important playlist: 2009 Party.
Every song from my teen radio memories, it seemed, was released in one year. “Feed the Animals” by Girl Talk? 2009. “Daylight” by Matt & Kim? 2009. The most vivid songs I can remember from Phoenix, MGMT, Kid Cudi, and Girls? 2009. “Fireflies” by Owl City!? 2009!
A sign from the gods. Or, simply, a product of our exact age. I was born in 1994; all this music would be when I was 15, and, therefore, adhere to my brain. Whatever the case, 2009 Party bumped from our speakers as we ate a baked ham I had made for Thanksgiving and marveled, in nostalgic glee, at this coincidence. I felt great. (The playlist now stands at 83 songs and over 5 hours to date. Our collective pyramid.)
In our felicity at these discoveries, we ended up listening to a song that I, genuinely, have no opinions on and that has over 1 billion streams on Spotify and that was (can you fucking believe this?) Pitchfork’s song of the year in 2011: “Midnight City” by M83.
It was one of the few tracks, it seemed, that did not fit our theory of collective 2009-ness. The track by the French group was released in 2011 befitting its title as Pitchfork’s best song of 2011. As we marveled at the nothing-ness of this pulsing song, I did the unthinkable for M83’s “Midnight City” and actually listened to the lyrics:
Waiting in the car
Waiting for a ride in the dark
Drinking in the lights
Following the neon signs
Waiting for a word (Word)
Looking at the milky skyline (Skyline)
The city is my church (The city is my church)
I have bolded a few key points. In Pitchfork’s hailing of the track as the 2011 song of the year, they wrote: “You can listen to it a ridiculous number of times without needing to know what Gonzalez is even singing about.”
I’m sorry, but I completely disagree. That is flatly wrong. Because I listened to it once for the first time in over five years and had a strong, intense question about the lyrics: Is this song about an Uber ride—in fact, one of the first Uber rides?
Here are the facts as we know them.
UberCab was created in 2009. And then, in 2011, it began expanding into New York City and Paris. From what I can tell, there’s a deleted blog post from 2012 on Uber expanding into Los Angeles in 2012.
In interviews, M83 Anthony Gonzalez has said that the song was inspired by driving in LA at night. (See the 3:20 minute mark here.) Specifically, he says that he was coming back from soccer practice (we get it, you’re European!), and he was driving through LA—the tall buildings around him so different from provincial, small-town southern France—and it felt “futuristic” and like “science fiction.” So, he wanted to “make a fun song for city lights.”
Interestingly, despite the provenance as a driver, his lyrics call out to the passenger. “Waiting for a ride in the dark,” Gonzalez sings. Waiting for who? For what? Gonzalez’s ode to the city imagines a taxi in the future and, in some way, waiting for it instead of hailing it, arm in the air. Even if not about a literal Uber ride (but maybe it is! maybe he rode one in Paris or New York City!) “Midnight City” was propelled into the zeitgeist by the same feelings of freedom for young millennials in urban settings; it is of that same time, in a way that’s instantly recognizable. Interestingly, then, it has a feeling of looking back on someone imagining the future. In a way that is only coming into view now—and is perhaps darker than we realized—there is a Jetsons-like quality to the music of hopefulness about the future of the city.
Whatever the case of “is this about a Lyft/Uber ride?” one thing is obvious: It must have felt incredible, in 2012, to ride in a taxi you called from an app and listen to M83 and think to yourself: “The city is my church (The city is my church).” And then think, yes, the skyline is “milky,” just like Gonzalez says.
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry — Randy Travis
Look at Randy Travis’s eyes. His clean-cut face and the chin, cleft. Travis’s face appears, somehow, caved in. It is as if the simple emotions of life—the loving, the working, the family—have done to his visage permanently what we are afraid to admit: it beat him down. It pushed him in. And his face looks like clay held down by hands into a formed, and deformed, normalcy. Those sunken eyes; the overhanging eyebrows—and the craters of shadow.
As part of the New Traditionalists—a band of country singers in the late 1980s and 1990s who brought back the classic tune and moved away from the pop and rock sensibilities of a newer Nashville—Travis said he always wanted to sing from his heart. This cover of a Hank Williams song shows the power of that movement. And its basic premise. He’s leaning into Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with the verve of someone who grew up on it. Country music has always self-mythologized about traditions but by the era of the New Traditionalists, these were, genuinely, their traditions—the songs over which they’d grown up and cried over first heartbreak. If country music began as a taking of folk tunes to the radio and commercializing them then, oddly, this was a case of a commercial tune becoming, over time, the folk tune: “I’m So Lonesome” was as much a part of life for young boys like Travis as any fiddle reel for the generations before him. For him, it was just about putting the emotions of his life back into the song.
''I do try to sing with as much feeling as I can,'' Travis told the New York Times Magazine in 1989. ''I lived a lot. I did a lot. I got started early, doin' a lot of things. That's some of what I learned from Hank and Hag and Jones—because when you listen to them sing a song, they can just make you believe everything about it. They just sing to you like it really happened to them. And to me, that's what singin's all about.''
These appeals to the real over the created never quite work for me on an intellectual level. It belies what for me makes country music fascinating: the heavy construction and routines. Hank Williams isn’t all brute-force sentiment. This isn’t beat poetry—man. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Travis’s wails of heartbreak in this version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” are held within a stable structure of a tradition, and a song. And, in turn, that gives his voice power. It echoes the way that we all must deal with our overflowing, stupid emotions while living in a world unsuitable for such casual and unearned pain. (Isn’t the making of emotion into a suitable vehicle, also, the basic premise of art?)
Also, I just do not believe that everyone does not, deep down, understand that all the effort makes the emotion work. You can see that in even the use of one word: “whippoorwill.” In Travis’ most famous song “Deeper Than the Holler”—and one that recently caused me to sob in a grocery store when it came on and I thought about my ex and how I fucked it up (classic country music stuff)—he sings:
My love is purer than the snowflakes
That fall in late December
And honest as a Robin on a springtime window sill
And longer than the song of a whippoorwill
There’s a lot of mythology about these birds, harkening to country homesickness. That was present in early 20th-century country tunes. But, by the 1980s, country musicians were singing it in reference to Williams and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Listen to the way that Travis sings in the above cover:
Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome, I could cry
You can listen to “Deeper Than the Holler” and not know he is calling on the past, and speaking in tandem with Hank Williams. But, if you do hear it, the song’s power makes sense. Why is this simple song so overwhelming?
It is because in “Deeper Than the Holler” Travis is overcoming—or at least imagining a way to overcome (“My love…[is] longer than the song of the whippoorwill”)—the absolute devastation of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He is saying he does believe in love despite the heartbreak that can be part of the process. To hear Travis sing so forcefully of that pain, and know he hopes beyond it; well, I think that’s so beautiful and I guess: I’m so lonesome I could cry.
Don’t Be Cruel — Billy Swan
“He was great, but he was also weird, and I kept my distance.…Elvis contained more of America—had swallowed whole more of its contradictions and paradoxes—than any other figure I could think of.” — Greil Marcus
Elvis enthralls. The hips. The music. His technicolor decline. You can see the pills coming out in the sweat. The appeal runs deeper because we are a ridiculous country; our totems are funny uncles and yet we must say something of their grave importance. Elvis was “great” but “he was also weird.”
20 years later, here is another man: Billy Swan—so balding it seems he never had hair despite the remnants of it; a monk’s face and dressed like the type of hippie who created Sesame Street.
His version of “Don’t Be Cruel” (a cover of Elvis covering someone else) begins as a Church-laden drone. A roll on a drum. The bass line. “Well, you know I can be found…” His eyes offset, his teeth poor, his beard unworthy. “I’m sitting home all alone…” The voice clear. The song slow. “Don’t be cruel”—a guitar wobbles and walks past—“to a heart that’s true.” It is not like much else in Swan’s catalog, or, I believe much else music I’ve ever heard.
One story said Billy Swan got paid to guard Graceland and that is how he met Elvis. But it’s a bit more wayward. In 1963, after writing a few songs, Swan, 20, moved to Memphis to make music for Bill Black’s label.1 If you trust an interview published in Australia the tale goes that from there he headed over to Graceland, befriended Travis Smith, Elvis’s uncle, who was a bodyguard—and then, hanging out with his friend Travis, Swan spent some time “minding the gate and attending Elvis’ late-night visits to cinemas and funfairs.”
Eventually, Swan would go to Nashville in the 1970s, living with Kinky Friedman—a cult country act of parody act, who often delivers dead serious satire2—in a ramshackle house with two other musicians named, Willie Fong Young and Fred Burch.3 They were members of Friedman’s original version of his touring band, the Jewboys.4 Like most genres, country is much funnier than it’s given credit for by outsiders.5 (Another joke, from Jerry Jeff Walker’s rollicking “Pissin’ In the Wind” includes Swan; the song begins by Walker gruffly saying: “I’d like to dedicate this song to Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash, and Billy Swann, and funky Donny Fritz…Pissin in the wind!”)
In 1974, Billy Swan released the album “I Can Help.” It contains his Nashville ease and his Memphis roots and, in many ways, shows the weird present tense of country music at the time. Go look at the cover. Swan stands in a verdant field, above—and yet behind—a porcelain bathtub that holds a swan. The album’s title is taken from the lead single, not an Elvis cover but a song that Elvis would cover.
The gem of the album is “Don’t Be Cruel”—a ur-rock song. It is one of the first song Elvis Presley’s publishers bought for him; it is the B-side to “Hound Dog.” It was written by one of the architects of rock ‘n’ roll songwriting: Otis Blackwell, a somewhat successful R&B singer and quite well-known song writer. (He penned Little Willie John’s “Fever”.)
All of these criss-crossing paths and pathos of American music are here in “Don’t Be Cruel”: A song that then, so oddly in Swan’s version, sounds nothing like history and all like heart. The power of his rendition is it appears so separate of all the time and space you can hear in the rest of his music, in every Elvis song, and in the other versions of “Don’t Be Cruel.”
For example, compare Swan’s “Don’t Be Cruel” against another great version. There is a great 1987 performance from Blackwell of “Don’t Be Cruel” on “Late Night with David Letterman'“; of the man taking back his song. This is an era of early Letterman, something impossible to describe—his casual suspenders, playing past midnight on a weekday. Paul Schaffer on piano, before he became a parody of himself. Blackwell sits on the chair and then casually saunters over to the band. His version of “Don’t Be Cruel” is upbeat. And it is glorious but remarkably different. Blackwell’s does not shorn off the anger that Swan endures—the stinging sadness. The tightness of rock music shines here. You can actually begin to see why this constriction mattered.
At the end, Blackwell flails his arm back, as if it is both relief and catharsis to finish the song. It never roars over itself or goes out of the rhythm. There is something in the politics of the era in which it was written, in this conformity, I think, we find in early rock ‘n’ roll songs, and we will never understand the power this new music had because we never had to wear a suit so tight; it is something that we can only glimpse. In the 1950s, in America, to create this gem of concision, and power; to create a product of the marketplace that still feels like it threatens but belongs. The decades after would be about artistic explosions, and freedom. The 1960s with its heady and flowing California ease in rock; all the “free” eras of the 1970s. But the 1950s, and rock ‘n’ roll, is still so hard to understand until you watch Blackwell. Look at his arms at the end. Look at how they move back. To have to contain oneself and to feel so much—to be bursting.
And then past that release, a freedom, or a nothingness, and a slow sadness with Swan’s version—a weird emptiness like heartbreak.
Black is a helpful figure to understand “rock n’ roll”—as a genre, and by genre I mean music within a discrete time and place, not as a whatever “rock” might mean now. Black played honky-tonk by slapping an upright bass; listen to “Smokie pt. 2” from his trio. And he operated his label, which was fundamental—beyond just Sun Records—in releasing rock. You can hear directly in these tunes, from Black but Memphis more broadly, the meshing and creation of a new kind of music: Jazz, big band style; hard-driving guitar from the South; a bit of blues. Chuck Berry perfects this, Elvis continues it. And yet Black helps us see the shift because of that worrisome bass. Look at that fucking upright bass in a rock band! It’s like the myth of Polish horses riding up to the German panzer tanks. Here is modernity as it’s made in half-truths.
Burch, from Ketuncky, and Young, from Arkansas, worked on a rock opera version of King Year during this time; the Times in 1974—in an article written with a bit of new journalism flair—explained their pursuit in an all-caps subhead that read: “THE IMPROBABLE BUT TRUE STORY OF HOW A GOOD OLD BOY FROM PADUCAH KENTUCKY. AND A RED‐NECK CHINESE FROM HUGHES. ARKANSAS, CAME TO WRITE A COUNTRYROCK VERSION OF ‘KING LEAR’ THAT IS HEADING FOR BROADWAY.”
Again, like I said: Friedman is a whole story to himself. He’s Jewish, and that matters a lot to understanding him, if that helps get you started.
Jack says this often about rap.