by Steve Almond
6. Toby Keith
How to Get Rich, the Toby Keith Way:
Respond to 9/11 by singing, “We’ll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”
When asked six years later if you supported the Iraq War, respond, “Never did.”
Shill for Ford Trucks.
Do a pro wrestling show.
Remember not to laugh.
7. Kurt Cobain
Back in the early nineties Axl Rose twice asked Cobain if Nirvana would open for Guns N’ Roses. Kurt responded by telling reporters how pathetic and untalented GNR was. It’s hard to out-asshole Axl Rose, but you, dead sir, have done it!
8. Johnny Ramone
“Punk is right-wing.”
9. Ted Nugent
George W. Bush once took the Nuge by the shoulders and said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” What action was the former president endorsing?
a) Introducing the phrase “wang dang sweet poontang” into the cultural lexicon
b) Shitting in Saddam Hussein’s bidet
c) Suggesting an animal rights activist be clubbed like a baby harp seal
d) Failing to pay child support for a kid he’s never met and taking legal custody of the seventeen-year-old girl he was bedding
e) Please don’t make me think about either of these men
10. Scott Stapp
Jesus has agreed to forgive the former Creed singer his drug addiction, gun fetish, and domestic abuse if he stops making records.
5. As I write this, it occurs to me that I’ve forgotten one configuration, the radio, which dominated my early childhood. I can remember listening to KFRC for hours, waiting for my favorite song to come on, and how ecstatic I was when the DJ finally played “The Things We Do for Love,” or “Undercover Angel.” Playing the records myself never felt as special. See, what I loved was that I’d surrendered to fate, which made the songs, when they finally arrived, feel like gifts.
What Songs Do
As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling. Every form has its merits and demerits. Paintings, for instance, work fast and require no moving parts, yet are hard to steal. Films are easy to watch and enveloping, but carry the risk you will see Philip Seymour Hoffman naked. The only thing wrong with music, as far as I’m concerned, is that you cannot eat it. From a purely emotional standpoint, it remains far more potent than any other artistic medium.
I remember the exact moment this dawned on me. I was watching Late Night with David Letterman. Willie Nelson was the guest. This was the watered-down Willie of the eighties, the stoner cowpoke in dusty pigtails. Dave was giving him a hard time. “Why don’t you sing something for us?” Dave said, almost tauntingly. Willie sat there for a few seconds. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing and the sound of his voice—that glorious, battered baritone—sucked every bit of irony out of that room. Letterman looked stunned.
This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose.6 They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I’m basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let’s get this McJihad started. I feel these things despite the fact that:
I am not Irish
The song actually advocates pacifism
I still wish U2 had eaten one another
The same thing happens with “Sweet Home Alabama.” I don’t exactly get psyched to join the Klan, but I do get this powerful desire to drink beer and drive a pickup truck and maybe shoot off some guns and most of all to not be looked down upon by some fucking overeducated, nigger-loving Yankee such as myself. Intellectually, I recognize that the song is shallow and racist, in that it advances the notion that former Alabama governor George Wallace—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—is an American hero. I also get that if all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were still alive, one or more of them would be members of the Republican congressional leadership team. But I can’t help it: “Sweet Home Alabama” makes me feel a deep yearning for my home and my kin and the swampers in Muscle Shoals who pick me up when I’m feeling blue, even though these same swampers would possibly kick my Jew ass sideways if I ever sidled into one of their taverns and ordered me a Chablis.
Songs take us deeper into ourselves by taking us away from ourselves. They expand our empathic imaginations. When we listen to “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor we become empowered sisters showing our abusive exes the door, and when we listen to “Rocket Man” (or maybe, in your case, “Space Oddity”) we become astronauts blasted away from our loved ones into orbits of lonely obligation, and when we listen to “Jack & Diane” we become teenagers sucking on chili dogs and reveling in the fleeting ecstasies of green love. And God knows, we’re all homesick travelers when we hear “Homeward Bound,” even when we’re at home.
I’ve cherry-picked songs that most people know. But like any other Fanatic I’ve got an endless list of obscure songs that induce the same kind of weirdly gratifying identity crisis. “When I Was Drinking” by the band Hem makes me want to be an alcoholic. It makes me want to be an alcoholic involved with another alcoholic. It makes me pine for the perverse safety of all the self-defeating relationships I’ve ever been in. That’s how beautiful that fucking song is. (I’m fairly sure the heroine of “When I Was Drinking” used to date the guy in the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular,” though the songs were released two decades apart.) “Taj Mahal” by the Canadian band Sam Roberts has a nearly opposite effect. I listen to this organ-drenched ode and feel a completely unwarranted sense that love is a form of destiny impervious to time. “Listen Here” by Eddie Harris makes me so mellow I briefly become Buddhist.
When people complain about how crappy most commercial pop music is, what they’re really angry about is that particular songs don’t take them anywhere. We may have some kind of involuntary limbic reaction to the tune and beat, but they stall out as emotional transport devices. Sometimes, this is because the listener is unwilling to give the song a chance. But often, it’s a matter of the aesthetic choices that have been made. They’re too easy, too obvious in their desire to manipulate our feelings.
I am thinking (without quite wanting to) of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a song I was forced to sing in my fifth-grade chorus and which I necessarily repudiated with many retching sounds in public, but which I also privately adored, often staring out the window of the room I shared with my brothers and softly imitating Debby’s dewy vibrato, even tearing up as she soared toward the climactic line, It can’t be wrong when it feels so right. The song was all I thought about for several months. It inflamed my desires. I wanted to devote myself to Christ and feel up Debby Boone, ideally at the same time. And then, just as suddenly, I began to hate the song, its sappy lyrics and synthesized strings, the confused yearning it revealed in me.
We all do this, of course. We develop brief, blinding crushes on songs like “You Light Up My Life” (or “Candle in the Wind” or “Say You, Say Me”7 or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”). Then those crushes end and the musical artifacts we took to be genuinely inspiring and heartfelt and even redemptive reveal themselves as repetitive and crass, a kind of emotional propaganda, and we feel like suckers.
No Depression-or, Actually, Check That, Fuckloads of Depression
And that’s fine. That’s okay. For the Drooling Fanatic, life is littered with these vulgar infatuations, because of our sensitivity to the dramatic capacities of music. We’re ready to fall in love, one song at a time. This is something I failed to note earlier, when I was talking about the pedigree of our breed. And it’s maybe the most important in
dicator of DF tendencies, which is that we’re chronically emotional people who have trouble accessing our emotions.
In my own case—though I suspect this is broadly true—repression was our family religion. I didn’t admit to anyone else that I was feeling sad or frightened or angry because I saw little hope of being regarded or soothed, and a good chance of being mocked. And so I started to hide these feelings from myself; they burrowed inward and took cover under a sarcastic bravado. When I wanted to numb myself out, I watched TV. But songs had the opposite effect. They became a secret passageway to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself.
The earliest example I can offer takes place in the summer of 1971, when, at age four, my twin brother and I were transplanted from the suburbs to a commune in the rolling hills of Ukiah.8 My folks were hoping for a rural utopia. What they found was an unsupervised summer camp. The tenor of those feverish months is best captured by the episode in which a man known as Big John wound up dropping acid, then climbing into the bathtub with Mike and me, despite being fully clothed. More than any particular moment, though, what I remember of that place is the song “American Pie,” which was always playing and to which people were always singing along. I didn’t understand certain words—What was a levee? How could one drink rye?—but I got that it was a story about saying good-bye to something lovely and doomed. It was the moment, so common in American social movements, when a dispiriting present gives way to nostalgia. There must have been other songs playing (this was 1971 after all) but I was four years old and this was the one I needed to make sense of what was happening around me.
I’ve always been drawn to songs that make me feel bad and that make feeling bad feel good. These songs—Depression Songs—allow us to slough the small emotions that compose our defense mechanisms for the large emotions that make us feel genuinely alive. They convert self-pity into sorrow, anxiety into fear, grievance into grief.
To clarify: Depression Songs don’t make people depressed. They articulate a preexisting depression and, when they’re really cooking, they ennoble that depression. They offer tremendous relief to those of us otherwise prone to wallowing. Nearly all the songs I return to, the ones that have come to represent entire eras of my life, are Depression Songs. Everybody has his or her own set list, because the main ingredient in the construction of a Depression Song is you, the depressed listener.
If you play the song “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O’Connor, for instance, my wife is instantly transported back to 1990, managing the cosmetics section at CVS, a shy fifteen-year-old mooning over one in a series of mulleted cads to whom she had pledged undying love. It’s all there: the knot in her throat, the heavy bands of blue eye shadow, the mocking promises on the glass bottles of nail polish it was her job to shelve.
My time-equivalent Depression Song—I confess this with little pride—is “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, which you might remember as the one with the video where the comely lead singer Michael Hutchence wanders morosely around Prague and then, right at the end, accidentally hangs himself while masturbating. It’s an addictive soul song built around synths, a quartet of plucked guitar notes, and various dramatic pauses. The vocals are overwrought in the best way. Hutchence tells his lover that they could live for “a thousand years/But if I hurt you I make wine from your tears,” and rather than questioning how that would work, or how such a wine might taste, or what, exactly, it would mean that you might want to use the tears of your lover to make an alcoholic beverage, my intuitive reaction is to think, That is just heavy. This was certainly what I was thinking as I staggered across the soggy lawns of my college campus, having just enjoyed a one-night stand that I assumed would last for a thousand years and produce oceans of Chardonnay. My inamorata had a slightly different take. She cringed when she saw me the next day. We were not going to last a thousand years. We had barely lasted a thousand seconds.
And then there’s the song “Hello, Mary” by David Baerwald. The melody alone is enough to put me on a crying jag, but the part that slays me is three minutes in, when the hero, who’s been talking to an old lover, trying to play things cool, suddenly blurts out, “I was looking at a picture, it was me and you, I think it was 1982, and you were sitting on my lap and my hand was on your breast and we were staring into each other’s eyes” and on this last word his voice rises into a helpless falsetto and you realize that, though he’s not in love with her, he’s still in love with that moment of loving her and he’ll never be rid of that feeling. That I was obsessed with “Hello, Mary” throughout my first failed love affair did not dawn on me as significant. I was twenty-one years old.
As for “We’ve Never Met” by Neko Case, I can’t listen to that one without drowning in the anguish of my first year in Boston, getting dumped by women who were only doing what I asked them to do, which is why I listen to it all the time. That weepy steel guitar and Neko’s velvety alto and Ron Sexsmith’s whispered harmonies. It sounds exactly like what I always wish Patsy Cline will sound like, but never does. You were golden and I was blind, now it’s like we’ve never met. I have yet to find a better definition of unrequited love.
All the Lonely People
These examples all derive from the predominant genre of Depression Songs, the Heartbreak Song, to which we might add several thousand without much effort, including “Tired of Being Alone” by Al Green, “The Sun Is Gonna Shine” by Aretha, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Have I forgotten one? Oh yes, “Missing You” by John Waite.
Not every Heartbreak Song is a Depression Song. “Song for the Dumped” by Ben Folds offers the exuberant refrain, “Give me my money back, you bitch.” It’s not designed to bum us out, but to make us laugh (a bit ruefully) at the rage we throw in the face of rejection.
Depression Songs actually work better when they’re about something other than depression. This is why “Eleanor Rigby” is so much more compelling than “Yesterday.” Paul McCartney found a story, with actual characters who were able to personify a condition of solitude, whereas “Yesterday” is really just Paul whining.
“Eleanor Rigby” also has a more ambitious arrangement. George Martin recognized the song’s symphonic possibilities: the constricted moan of those strings, the rueful countermelody of the cellos, the squall of the single violin that trembles across the chorus. These decisions don’t just contribute to the mood of collective isolation; they are the mood.
On the other hand, one of the best Depression Songs of recent years, “Down the Line” by José González (an Argentine based, confusingly, in Sweden), includes nothing more than a voice, a couple of guitars, and a drum loop. González has a delicate voice, and he seems to be addressing a friend about an impending breakdown. But he chops at his guitar with a nervous urgency, and the melody keeps struggling against its own foreboding. “Don’t let the darkness eat you up,” González sings over and over at the end of the song, and you want to believe his pal is going to be all right but you also know, without wanting to, that he’s not, and that González knows he’s not. It’s a song about trying to save the unsavable, and it about ruins me every time I hear it.
On the other side of the coin is “Dance Music” by the Mountain Goats. The song is two minutes long, with a peppy piano riff. It’s the kind of ditty that would make Trent Reznor break out in hives. But it’s actually way sadder than anything Reznor has ever written because John Darnielle, the singer, has the guts to reveal the tragedies of his life without hiding behind enraged slogans. He recounts a scene in which his stepfather throws a glass at his mother’s head. Darnielle then dashes upstairs and leans in close to the record player on the floor. “So this is what the volume knob’s for,” he sings. “I listen to dance music.” It’s a Depression Song about why people need happy music.
Reluctant Exegesis:
“Fade to Black”
This section started out as a lengthy riff mocking the lyrical shortcomings of Metallica, as well as depressed teen
agers who play Dungeons and Dragons. This is pretty asinine behavior, in particular when you happen to be married to an ex-D&D geek who, at sixteen, learned the entire lead guitar part (solos included) to “Fade to Black.”
I wasn’t aware of this last fact, because my wife avoids talking about her teenage years. It’s a painful subject even now, though I didn’t realize how painful until she read my lame exegesis and began to talk about what “Fade to Black” had meant to her.
So let’s travel back to East Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1986. Erin is twelve years old, a shy sixth grader at St. Christopher’s. Like most budding DFs, she lives in the thrall of an older sibling, in this case Rob, two years her senior, handsome and popular and unruly, a badass with big hair. One day, Rob plays her a tape of a band called Poison. The album cover confuses her—are the members women or men?—but the music slices through her like lightning. Before long, she’s moved on to the heavy stuff—Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica. Posters go up on her wall. Her hair rises skyward in a fusillade.
Her parents, strict Catholics, are aghast. Erin has always been the good one, studious, pliant, the kind of kid who memorizes the lives of the saints. Her mother has developed the sweetly deranged fantasy that her daughter will someday play violin for the Hartford Symphony. Erin’s announcement that she is quitting violin to take up electric guitar serves as a formal declaration of war. Her father is dispatched upstairs to tear the posters from her walls, to confiscate all records deemed offending and redact the rest. Her mother will later carry a tape of Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil into the backyard and smash it to bits with a hammer.
