I mean that in the nicest way. But fuck you. Seriously.
You have somehow stumbled on the formula for making me cry, and it's really not fair.
Genre-wise, it doesn't seem like this entry should be part of the series
Top 40 Nonsense That Makes Me Weeeeeep
but because Netflix is the primary way we hear new music now, "The Night We Met" topped the THR chart for TV songs after appearing on 13 Reasons Why in March.
And so, it plays with the same frequency and regularity on the local Adult Alternative station as Top 40 songs play on the local Hit Radio Station, and as a result: me, cryving home from work.
If you, too, would like to pen a song that brings me to tears, you can play along at home with this handy checklist from today's track:
6/8 time This is a very magical time signature that is like slow dancing and losing your shit at the same time. See my previous post.
Arpeggios This is related to 6/8 time and is the musical equivalent of simultaneously arriving at and departing from the safest and saddest place you have ever been to.
Tight harmony in thirds It's equally basic and epic. Like tying a weight and a balloon to my heartstrings and letting go of both.
E minor Like, come on. Just.
Triple rhyme (aka feminine rhyme) most of you/supposed to do/ghost of you So Extra. Traditionally, it's used in comic verse, like a limerick. But when everything else is so sincere (see all the other items in this list), it's like the twist of a knife in my tear ducts.
GHOSTS They're right there, but you can't touch them. They're a piece of the past, right in front of you. Reaching across the veil, mistily embodying loss, foretelling your own death. Fucking ghosts, man.
Regret/loss/wistfulness/longing/romance And then I can tell myself / Not to ride along with you Sure, Lord Huron, tell me about traveling through time, back to the very moment before the union began that caused you all this pain, and tell me you would choose another path. Go ahead.
Slide guitar The guitar version of crying.
Here's a live version featuring several white guys with matching hair grease and matching guitars. They must have been sponsored by Guild and Layrite.
...I feel a little conflicted. It's hard to call this song--as with some of Rihanna's other work that I really love--nonsense. The song itself is a really nicely done 60s soul pastiche but with contemporary-sounding lyrics that make it feel fresh and immediate, bringing to mind Amy Winehouse in all her glory. Rihanna's performance of this song not only shows off her flawless vocals and expressive range but feels steeped in emotion, like maybe it's personal. Especially when she drops those F bombs, of which there are three. Impressive for a radio single.
Add to my affection for the song the fact that it's right in my vocal range, so whenever it comes on the radio I can belt it out note for note along with Rihanna, like we're on Carpool Karaoke. In my fantasy, we trade off on lead and backup vocals until I'm weeping too hard to continue, and she finishes the phrase for me: "What do I gotta do to get in your motherf***in' heart?" Then I pull over because I don't want to risk cryving off the road, and we hug and wipe mascara off our faces and giggle.
Don't ask me to explain this music video, it's way too deep for me.
Bonus: the moody white boy Rihanna cover the world neither needs nor deserves.
is even more embarrassing than the last. I've been hearing this song on the radio for months and having heart spasms over this guy's breathy head voice. But just now I looked up the video, and it's creepy and douchey and that's not how I pictured Charlie Puth in my head at all. Even with that eyebrow scar he is uninteresting to me.
Regardless. I am a sucker for this song's slick rhythm, catchy melodies, and the longing and vulnerability I ascribe to my imaginary version of Puth, running into his ex everywhere, distraught yet somehow resigned to his heartbreak, half in love with the torture that is her perfume, etc. It's relatable, okay?
And then the song breaks it down, and his voice drops to a hush, and "Got me thinkin' 'bout when you were mine" barely escapes his throat with its note just high enough that his voice almost cracks and I feel the breath catch in my own throat because oh my god he's so emotional he can just barely sing the line. Sometimes I have to hold my chest together with the hand that's not on the steering wheel.
I am giving you not the official video, which I've told you grosses me out, but this studio performance which still conveys the emotion without all the distracting added narrative of his girlfriend smashing up his apartment. Like, fuck off, "crazy ex gf" trope.
Until now, I've mostly written here about pop classics and other music I'm not embarrassed that I like. All that's about to change, however, as I embark on a new series I'm calling:
Top 40 Nonsense That Makes Me Weeeeeep
You might recall from days of 0.00243056 yore that I didn't cry for a year or so because of hormones.
Maybe a year ago, I had another hormone shift and got my tears back in full force. That plus going through some relationship ups and downs, plus driving pretty regularly for work, equals a new hobby for me: CRYVING.
Rural Vermont doesn't have a ton of radio options, but no matter where I roam, I can usually count on finding a commercial pop station playing one of the handful of tunes I've come to rely on for easy tears. It's almost like they're formulated to manipulate my emotions and make me more susceptible to advertising or something.
Today's installation is by Alessia Cara, about whom I know practically nothing. This song begins harmlessly enough by describing an unnamed "she" who might be a fashion model or someone else who values being found attractive. You can already tell it's going to be a Feminism Lite self-worth anthem.
[This video version is a little different from the radio version in that it has people interrupting the song to talk about beauty standards, and it reminds me of those Dove ads.]
But something happens to me when the chorus starts. I hear "But there's a hope that's waiting for you in the dark," and something happens in my chest. At "You should know you're beautiful just the way you are," Cara is singing directly to my soul. Then comes "And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart," and it's all over. I'm sobbing. Because OMG it's truuuuueeee.
So many trans and gender-nonconforming folks get harassed, dismissed, outcast, and even killed because this world wants us to conform to some bullshit gender binary/biological determinism, and we do what we need to do to survive, and also fuck having to do anything to please a cissexist world. And fuck this US regime that is determined to starve us out and force us underground. We've always been here, and we're not going anywhere.
Also this: "I wasn't born in the wrong body, I was born in the wrong world." -Alok Vaid-Menon
This song has been playing in my head all week. When a song is in my head for several days in a row, I imagine it is trying to tell me something, so I try to focus on it and let it speak to me.
Once I had "Footloose" on repeat in my brain for about a year and a half. I listened to it, I read the lyrics, I watched the movie, all in hopes that its message would become clear and so would my head. I guess it just gave up and went away by itself eventually. Maybe I was not the chosen one.
Today's song is from 1993, when most of my music feelings were born. In this World Party tune, the lyrics tell of someone who seems to have a lot of anxiety about the world and eventually gets the hell out and ends up on the moon, where he continues to have anxiety and some existential angst.
But he's not just escaping, he's seeking answers: first by measuring the stars, then by hanging out in Greece, and finally by meeting God in space. But this knowledge doesn't help him feel any better about life:
And sometimes it was faith, power, or reason as the cornerstone
But the furrowed brow has never left his face
I suspect the whole "sad intellectual" trope was invented by intellectuals who thought they were better than everyone else but also wanted to be pitied for their moodiness. Like, "Being gifted is a curse, why can't I be ignorant and content like these poor assholes, etc." But I like this song and its protagonist, and I don't want it to be about a tortured genius. That's boring.
So because this song is catchy as hell and I really enjoy the piano bits, I will imagine that this song's message is more about the search for answers being a lifelong process that doesn't need to wrap up neatly. That maybe being really worried about everything is itself the gift if it keeps you questioning "kings and empires" and looking for solutions to problems.
Maybe I'm thinking too hard.
Also please enjoy this bonus cheesy-effects VH1 version:
In a lot of the horror movies I like, which are mostly of the supernatural variety, there is a spirit that haunts places and people, that terrifies them and kills them in nasty ways. It attaches itself to specific situations and objects--the ring of the telephone, a mirror, a song. And there is a protagonist who has to figure out what that spirit needs, what it can't let go of, how to bring it peace. It's more a riddle to be solved than a villain to be defeated. Solving it requires empathizing with a grotesque, disembodied entity that is terrorizing them.
Certain situations call up a version of my former self which takes over my body and has me feel its feelings, think its thoughts. It's bewildering and excruciating and terrifying. I don't see it coming, and I feel powerless against it. This has gone on for all of my adult life. As a young adult, I thought I was possessed by something that would eventually kill me.
However, lately I feel like I'm in the part of the ghost story where the protagonist begins to see the patterns, is putting together the pieces and clues in order to set the monster free, to help it transform into its benign self, while learning a piece of history from it, often some hidden injustice. I'm learning to love my shrieking nightmare selves and ask them what happened, what they need.
In every horror movie, the cast thins out, falling one by one to the terror, leaving the hero to face the thing alone in the end. I've seen a lot of people come and go in my life, but in these last few years I've felt less alone than ever. I'm supported by a whole cast of characters who help me identify and listen to the ghosts, gather clues, stay alive. Like all the best ghost stories, mine is also a love story.
"Every place I've ever lived is full of ghosts / Every time I leave I
make another one / Everyone I've ever loved is full of ghosts / Every
time they leave they make another one"
OK I guess this might not qualify as a pop song. Note the first two tags on bandcamp are "devotional" and "emo." LOL yep.
Let's face it, I'm always in love. At least, when I feel like myself, when I am the person I want to be, I am falling in love constantly. With the moon, a song, a tree, my friends, a poem, someone I just met, someone I've never met.
It's been a very long time since I was falling in love with someone who was also falling in love with me. And it's magical and precious and devastating and raw. It feels like there is a constellation of stars in my chest expanding in all directions. It reminds me of every love I've had and lost, and it makes me feel like nothing is ever really lost, it just breaks apart and comes back in another form, each one more beautiful.
At the same time, I have a heartbreaking job, and my workload and the intensity of my work have ramped up lately to the point where I'm just barely keeping it together. I know it won't stay at this pitch forever, but for now it's taking all I have.
It's Friday, and there are people out there who I'm working with who are in really tough situations and will wait until Monday until the professionals in their lives--including me--can offer support.
It's Friday, I'm in love.
Holding all these things at the same time is making me think and feel a lot of things about work, capitalism, romance, individualism, privilege, magic, and beauty. You're smart, you can probably guess what a lot of those things are.
Anyway, here's a cover of The Cure by Yo La Tengo, whom I'm seeing in April. It features Georgia Hubley walking expressionless around some really white-looking neighborhoods, oblivious to the twee, hipster apocalypse she has somehow wrought.
I became aware of an interesting phenomenon through my conversations with other trans people taking testosterone. Many of the people I talked to had all but lost their ability to cry after starting hormone replacement therapy. I was pretty baffled, even more so when it eventually happened to me.
In our conversations, some described "cheating" by slicing onions in order to achieve tears. The photographer who took the following pictures may have ruined that method for everyone by showing how the chemistry of the tears might not be the same when tricked out of the eyes by pungent vegetables.
basal tears
tears of grief
onion tears
tears of laughing til i'm crying
Since learning that tears can vary so vastly, I decided to put some of my own tears under a microscope to really understand the subtle chemical differences among the following circumstances:
tears of feeling moody in november
tears of a robot
tears of an ice queen
tears of waving from such great heights
tears of this song is fucking everything right now
tears of gagging while giving head
tears of glitter
If you made it this far, here is your reward for all your scrolling.
When I told a couple of friends I was starting a song-a-day-style blog, they both independently came to the conclusion that I would be posting original tunes. Which is a fabulous idea and maybe a bit ambitious for me right now. However.
"Tightrope" happened over the summer, on a rainy day when I was feeling pretty destroyed and sat in my bed in the dark for most of the afternoon, playing guitar. This song basically just bled out of me, and I recorded it on my crappy Android phone. It's pretty rough--cracking voice and wrong notes and all--but it evokes the shit out of my mood that day.
Today I was feeling so many things at once, I thought my body might explode, so I sat down and played through this one a few times (as well as Sia's "Chandelier," which might have to be its own post at some point). And then I went on a glorious bike ride with no coat on in mid-December because climate change.
I’m walking on a rope
It disappears in black
I can’t see the other side
And there’s no going back
A spotlight shines on my face
1,000 people stare
I thought I saw your arm outstretched
But it must’ve been the glare
There’s no way down but to fall
No net, nobody at all
There’s no way down but to fall
No net, nobody at all
On Sunday I went with a friend to the old abandoned train bridge. Visiting this bridge has been a longtime dream of mine, and I decided to go on a whim. It was a foggy late afternoon that made everything look surreal and mystical.
I'm terrified of heights, but I fucking love train bridges. Walking out onto the old wooden ties above the Connecticut River was so scary I didn't know if I could do it. I thought I might get halfway out and freeze, unable to get back. But I wanted it really bad.
Of course, this is all a metaphor for my life right now. I'm walking through a gorgeous, disorienting fog toward something huge and high that I hope can hold me. And sometimes I panic.
Then today I heard this on the radio:
I gotta be cool, relax, get hip
And get on my tracks
Me too, Freddie, me too! But how? How can I be cool like you?
Evidently it involves riding a motorcycle in full leather gear plus some great big knee pads.
Having to rely on this expensive, giant, heavy machine that burns fossil fuels just to get around? Why is this still a thing?
I mean, unless you're going to fill it up with your friends and drive around Tokyo doing some red vinyl ghostbuster shit while listening to crunchy 90s Britpop. A car is great for that.
I'm just grumpy because my car's been in and out of the shop for the last six weeks, and it's currently broken down, and I can't get to the laundromat to wash my towels, and I've had to dry off with tiny hand towels after showering.
So if anyone is going to the laundromat--or Tokyo--swing by and pick me up. I'll be wearing vinyl and packing my ray gun.
For my job, I do peer support and advocacy on inpatient psych units. Some days it is heartbreaking and exhausting. And some days I feel like I have been allowed into a sacred, mystical space full of magical beings. Not to romanticize extreme states or crises. But some people do experience these times as spiritual or intellectual awakenings, a break from consensus reality that is an opportunity to see into alternative spaces.
My visit yesterday was one of the times when I feel honored to share or just witness the beauty and resiliency of people coping with being in a difficult place. In particular, this one old dude was just soliloquizing nonstop at whoever would listen. For a moment the room got quiet, and he gestured toward one of the strange, heavy lumps of furniture that make up the seating options. He said:
The chair is full of sand
The sand is full of stars
The stars are full of the sea
The safest place is here next to me
Internally (which is where I do most of my crying), I was weeping with joy in this moment. Later he also said, "How long does it take to build the world?"
Historically, crazy is a pejorative label that has been used to discredit and oppress people. It's also been reclaimed by mad communities who are redefining these experiences in our own terms and pushing back against being medicalized and institutionalized.
It is in that spirit that I offer you today's pop song. Prince is notoriously protective of his work, so I can't embed an online clip of his 1984 release "Let's Go Crazy" from the Purple Rain
soundtrack. You will have to figure out how to hear this song if it's
not already so familiar you can just call it up in the jukebox of your
brain.
Because seriously, "we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life ... and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy, punch a higher floor."
The Flaggin' Wagon is in the shop, and my mechanic loaned me a Suburban that is bigger than my bedroom. I have to grab the steering wheel and haul myself up into the seat. As soon as I saw it, this video came to mind.
As the lyrics started on auto-play in my head, they seemed really timely. Earlier this week I observed someone I respect challenging another person to do something they were afraid of, and the next day I found myself doing the same for someone else. In both instances it was done with gentleness and love ("Would you consider doing this thing even though it scares you?") and not in the tough-love tone of the song ("Self-sufficiency, please, and get to work"). And in the case where I was doing the challenging, the other person got something they needed because they took that risk, and told me, "Thank you for pushing me."
I'm pretty sure I'd never actually say to someone, "You're on your own now/We won't save you/Your rescue squad/Is too exhausted," but the sentiment isn't too far off from where I've been this past week, and I appreciate the lessons I'm learning about letting go of the illusion of control, which is about fear, and learning to afford others the "dignity of risk" and the right to fail.
When I was a high school sophomore in rural Minnesota, I was often miserable. It's hard to be 16, you know? The best thing in the world back then, besides play practice (oh yeah, I was a nerd), was a radio show on the Duluth station late Sunday nights. It might have been called "The Edge," and it played only the edgiest alternative rock.
Lying in my bed, I'd record the show on my clock radio/tape deck so I could play it all week. In my basement bedroom, I first heard much of the music that I still love: songs by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sugarcubes, Big Audio Dynamite, and the Lightning Seeds.
I've always thought of "Pure" as one of the world's perfect pop songs. That glorious synth hook (by OMD’s Andy McCluskey), sweet, mellow melody, and bubbly chorus epitomize my teenage hopes that someday life would be simpler, cleaner, "fresh and deep as oceans new."
This week a friend of mine gave me a tape, an original composition, that begins with "Pure" as part of an ambient background to some Casiotone notes. If you're wondering whether you can drone out to your nostalgic age-16 faves, the answer is yes. If you're wondering whether my life feels any more fresh and deep than it did in that 1992 basement, it certainly does. If you're wondering how old I am, I guess I gave that away already.
I just read this review of a new memoir the other day, and I think it stands alone as a critique of the "cis gaze" and how the state regulates gender and sex. Several Facebook posters have called attention to this passage from the article:
So 'transition', 'sex change' or, to some extent, 'coming out' are cis
fantasies. They are cis fantasies that obscure the processes by which
cis people create their own genders. Whether cis or trans or gender
non-conforming, gender is never static. Gender identity has no fixed end
point: it is a lifetime of changing feelings, experiences and
attitudes. If gender is a set of relationships – to ourselves, to
others, to the boxes others put us in – then no adults are the same
gender, really, as when they were born, and in ten years they will be
different genders still.
To show us that even cis guys get the blues, today's song features a gorgeously pensive Roland Gift and a whole cast of hip hop dancers. For a song whose lyrics are arguably kind of depressing, the video to this 1989 single makes me really happy. Also, that catchy James Brown sample! Uuugghhh so good.
Oh, right. Also, happy "coming out" day. I want to live in
a world where there is no need to "come out" because I am not assumed
to be cis and straight until I state otherwise. But until the white
cis-hetero patriarchy crumbles, I'll be singing this song (and occasionally this song).
Welcome to the new location and format of my "daily" check-ins with the internet. If you are familiar with 17aDay, you know that a day with me is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day. So I post whenever the hell I want to, basically.
Today's entry is about how exhausted, overwhelmed, stressed, and cranky I have felt for the last week or so. I have decided I'm merely adjusting to the seasonal shift and shortening days of New England autumn, because that is easier than worrying that I am going to be permanently crotchety and tired. Probably only until May.
This 1982 single is 3-1/2 minutes, which, according to radio lore, is the average length of a pop/rock radio single. (3 min. 30 sec. is equal to 0.00243056 days, whence comes the title of this project.) Also, according to the song's Wikipedia page, Boston alternative rock station WFNX played this as their first broadcast in 1983 and their last in 2012.
But I don't care if you don't
And I don't feel if you don't
And I don't want it if you don't
And I won't say it
If you won't say it first
