“Exit Does Not Exist” (Modest Mouse)

The whole problem with love is that it must have a sustained temporality and be dated simultaneously (located, engaged with, bound). Lover’s exhaustion in the face of singer’s insistence on documentation and verification contends that lovers never “do” anything really. Hence, loving the other has no otherwise.

“Hard Werken Fucked Over Man/The Reckoning” (Gary Lucas)

Beginning with concert vocals and sustained by a looping, minimal blues ostinato, the trax ends with backwards guitar. Disheveling the live/studio distinction, Lucas makes clear that work pervades stage and studio. Over the ostinato, various guitar solos are deployed (from Tubescreamer-like distortion to wah pedal to tremolo bar to tape manipulation), voicing these works as just technical variations. At two separate moments, all of this is interrupted (by “The Reckoning[s],” one assumes) with its alternating low, high, and midrange repetitions of the same phrase with an open-string drone. Life figured, at its base, as perpetual work. Homespun and high-end reflect this.

“I Cover the Waterfront” (Connee Boswell)

Max Miller’s wonderful insider memoir of San Diego newspaper reporting is turned to song in 1933, but utterly repurposed. At first, it seems a conventional love trax: waiting at the docks for the beloved to sail into port. But something isn’t right: why doesn’t he write, and let her know which boat he’ll be on, and what day and time? Why the need to watch the whole of the sea and its shore continuously? There’s a certain misanthropy at work here (“away from the city that hurts and mocks”) as well as a lurking, water elementalism. Indeed, we’re in close temporal promixity to H. P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” written in 1931: “Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage” among “great watery spaces.” “I’m covered by a starless sky above,” the singer laments, and “I see the horizon, the great unknown.” The last chorus is sung the most forcefully, however, as she begins to assert her rightful place at the edge of posthumanist cosmology.

“With Arms Wide Open” (Creed)

Grammy-winning natal futurism. Hopeful father on birth day envisions the difference that will come, in time, alongside subjectivity unfettered by hate. Title’s prelude to a hug also foreshadows enclosure: education through smothering. The singer’s “one wish”: the son doesn’t turn out “like me.” In love with (tortured) creation.

“Two Tribes (for the victims of ravishment)” (Frankie Goes to Hollywood)

War as sporting event (“a point is all that you can score”), and thereby fit for a kind of anthropological analysis, via the metaphor of the “tribe.” None of this amounts, however, to an anti-war or progressive position: wars are promoted or fought for symbolic point-scoring purposes (see the 2003 Iraq War); and even superpower wars are anthropologically buttressed (see Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations). Thus, this attempt to shame the combatants, or to sway “enlightened” public opinion, unmasks nothing we don’t already know (and might even work as a football anthem).

“Black and White” (Three Dog Night)

Written in in response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and later recorded by Three Dog Night in the aftermath of the school busing case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), this trax seems to be straightforwardly liberal in orientation, emphasizing literacy and integration in equal measure. Most important, perhaps, is the trax’s triumphal relation to Supreme Court decisions and their enforcement in every town, burb, and city in America (“this I the law of ALL the land”). But let’s take a closer look at the scene of inscription: “The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write.” Songwriter Earl Robinson’s original recording had a later, counterbalancing verse (“The slate is black, the chalk is white, the words stand out so clear and bright”), but Three Dog Night removed it. So the message, on balance, is not quite color-blind: instead, it charts a power reversal grounded in a historical overcoming. Our future, here, involves blackness writing its own story onto the parchment remnants of white supremacy.

“Stone Crazy” (Buddy Guy)

Presently positioned as the object of Jimi Hendrix’s affection, it’s also become common knowledge that Leonard Chess initially constrained Guy to sideman status and fairly tame guitar tones. But the beginnings of Guy’s (amplified) overdrive can be heard here in 1962. Restrained initially, the lines/runs slowly become more direct and shrill; in the solos, the distortion emanates from the note’s floor/base and occupies the majority of registers. The narrator’s main complaint: he’s betrayed by a lover who thinks his “little heart is made of iron.” Even his daughter knows this isn’t true, so it’s willful abuse. But this leads to a complaint about labor and location: slinging guitar in the North isn’t compatible with the clothes he’s accustomed to wearing. So, he’s going “back down South.” (But that’s not gonna happen; he’s just started ripping the top off of blues amplification, and the song goes on to be released in different forms on almost 50 different albums/compilations.) Devastated, overwhelmed, and speaking from a contractual/obligatory positioning, seeking an appropriate climate is a luxury. After the plaint: a throbbing, throttling identity whose work—levied at the point of a finger—begins.

“Old Age Pension Check” (Roy Acuff)

The invention of social security “turned this country upside down.” All forms of needless striving dissolve: “drug stores will go bankrupt,” because people will feel well, and women will no longer need “cosmetics” to lure a husband. The attempt, today, to privatize the system is premised on our interest to “own” our own future; concerning this, Bush Redux says: “we’ve got to understand the power of compounding interest, the importance of savings, and the beauty of ownership in the American society” (3/1/02). But Acuff had hoped for a “second childhood” in which responsibility wasn’t premised on possession. Otherwise, we’re all just going back to work (on our leisure).

“Darn That Dream” (Bill Evans)

Borrowing liberally from Holiday’s phrasing, seemingly, piano and guitar jockey for a way to maintain the “one-track mind” needed to live in hope. Piano’s longing to ascend meets with guitar’s ruminations on the (fleeting, legato) heights. The “nightmare” of non-mutuality sustains the critical project, maintaining the precipice (and inclination) of being as the point of lacerating potentiality.

“Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” (Doris Day)

Corporate pop music’s 21^st century message to young women is easy to parse: (1) you are great just the way you are (you are beautiful, no matter what they say!); and (2) you can achieve anything you desire (you are a firework!). You are an amazing being of unlimited potential–a perfect, undetermined sort capable of perfect choice. This is called “empowerment.” But only three score ago, in the mid-1950s, Doris Day was singing to her young daughter: I don’t know if you’ll be “pretty” or “rich.” Indeed, I know nothing about your future, which is absolutely sealed (both opaque and certain). You may wind up in the gutter, or you may die young. It’s possible that there won’t be a “rainbow” in the sky tomorrow, which tinges the trax with Cold War anxieties (the Soviets had tested their first H-bomb in 1953). The phrase, “que sera sera,” is polyglot, and finds first use in English as a sixteenth century heraldic motto, forecasting, at least, a certain shielded defensiveness. In short, and “tenderly,” “what will be will be,” and you can’t fight the future. The (tauta)logic is unimpeachable: tomorrow, one can always claim that “what will be” was. At the joining of such faulty realism and our own fantasies of empowerment, however, there must remain fate and chance, entwined, each the condition of the other’s possibility.