“Bi” (Living Colour)

“Bi” could be an indication of psychopathology (if it appears after and even before a declaration), an original state (Freud), a natural proclivity (Mead), a set of desires beyond the binary (Garber), or a final, evolved status (after the churn of taking sides). (And there are at least least eight types of social scientific characterizations that discursively circulate, each with varying degrees of a subject’s investment/praxis.) On its face, it’s a neither/nor; with “tensions and the passions double amplified,” bisexuality is non-dispositive at its limit. Over life, decisions accrete, tendencies seem to appear, and behavioral scales are developed. Amid all the anxiety over a proper diagnostic, we actually need a “closet for the whole world to live in.” The stakes, then, haven’t been made high enough to avoid the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” But, contra MLK, it’s about “making [un]real the promises of democracy.”

“Any Other Way” (Jackie Shane)

Jackie Shane had three strikes against him as he entered the sixties music business: he was queer, cross-dressing, and Canadian. Here, the singer’s friend has been sent to find him by his ex-girlfriend, in order to suss out how he’s doing since she dumped him (she’d love to know he’s miserable and repentant). Even his erstwhile friends are laughing at him behind his back. And Jackie actually is on the verge of tears, but not for her. “Tell her that I’m gay,” he suggests, and here he’s right on the line between “carefree” and “homosexual” (how you heard it, in 1963, depended upon whether you had queer ears). “Tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way,” however, is the key construction here. The implication that boy-girl love/sex is an “other way” subtly and slyly seeks to overturn the logic of the primary and secondary, the normal and the pathological. Yes, he’s out, but this is “it.”

“Soily” (Wings)

At the height of Wings’ fame as a live act in the mid-70s, Paul McCartney would end stadium shows with this unreleased “Live and Let Die”-style, brassed-up rocker from 1972. It’s a call to the audience to look at everyone around them, left and right, and figure out what sort of a makeshift group they might constitute. McCartney calls out some ostensible social identities: doctor, lawyer, artist, farmer, priest. There are different national and geographic identities, too: Italian, Indian, and “jungle chief.” And then a parade of oddballs: “Hitler’s son,” a “commie with a Tommy Gun,” and a “plumber with a fattened hog,” for example. Their commonality, according to the singer, is that they’re all “soily” and “oily.” Soily: dirty, no-account, or crusty. Oily: parasitic, drunk, smoking, and sweaty. Yup, that about covers it. We’re in the muck up to our necks. All of us “born deceased.” Weak, violent, untrustworthy, and utterly soiled. It’s a mortal storm out there in the cheap seats, and not nearly as posh as one might expect for a concert involving rock royalty. As for the “cat in satin trousers” who chimes in, it’s no doubt a nod to glam and the satin togs of Bowie, Bolan, Roxy, the Sweet, and Slade. But it’s also McCartney himself, who’s wearing black satin pants in the video clip and clearly wants to position himself nearby this community of mud without ground.

“Ripple” (Grateful Dead)

At one point, an argument for the holiness of music, which comes from a “fountain” that’s “not made by the hands of man.” Given this, a self-dismissed admonition as well, questioning originality as it pertains to our “hand-me-down” thoughts. Seeking movement without initiation, as “leaders” in a representative democracy are really just shills. Sitting tight, not knowing where anyone is going to or coming from. Sluggish hippie Bacchanalia celebrating folk music as sustenance. Freedom of consumption.

“Colossal Youth” (Young Marble Giants)

Band name and song title refer to ancient Grecian stone figures, simple to the point of abstraction, faced toward the sea. Lyrics dispute fundamental assumptions of rock alienation, denying the possibility of the absolutely singular and solitary. Sketchy bassline and roller-rink keyboard in hole-istic arrangement suggest it’s easy to be otherwise, half-formed openly-outward.

“Rock Around the Clock” (Bill Haley & His Comets)

When I.G. Blanchard and the Reverend Jessie H. Jones penned the most popular American labor song of the nineteenth century, “Eight Hours” (1878), they imagined a hard-working man as having “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,” and eight hours to “feel the sunshine” and “smell the flow’rs.” But this successful demand for limitations on the length of the working day can only be deciphered from within capitalism’s prior imposition of clock time, and it’s this root cause which rock’n’roll disputes without overcoming. “Rock Around the Clock’s” surreal twenty-two hour shift (with breaks at noon and midnight) leaves no time for the great outdoors or contemplation. It’s a serious business, this constantly jumpin’ at one’s leisure.

“Litany (Life Goes On)” (Guadalcanal Diary)

Life, for sure, goes on. And not necessarily in a set of repetitive devotions. In one way, think Whitman’s “uncut hair of graves” that eventually become “mother’s laps” for us all. And born into a life, it’s understandable to wish for an alternate, infinite identity projected into past and future. This claim to/of the past, small as it is here, voids itself as mortality serves to fertilize now and for the (unforeseeable) future. “Surprise” grows, “voices” contribute, we will be “all together,” and the song we sing is “ever-growing.” Pulsating and throbbing, the track still conserves its energy and maintains a managed growth investment strategy. Escape hatch: an “ever-changing song” with no particular place to go.

“Verlier Nicht Den Kopf” (Deutsch Amerikanishe Freundschaft)

Literally “do not lose the head” and, in racier terms, don’t stay buried. Of course, “closeted” comes to mind, related to the inverse: the convincing conniving of staying “forever young” and unblemished. The figure behind/below this twink-ish character (who’s pocked by longings of ornateness produced amid a (arrested) futurism) demands a controlled willfulness. Stay young for this future’s/relationship’s burial and emerge willing (never ready).

“Voyage” (Family)

Ah, the eternal questions: what is “truth,” “and where do I look for proof?” More specifically, do the phenomena of time and color exist in the world, or only inside of me? It is my “whereabouts” that are at stake as I sail along on this strange voyage called life. It appears that I cannot find my bearings without another: “who do I ask and what do I say?” But there’s no great guru waiting on a hilltop. Instead, there’s the problem of her truth and his truth and my truth. Listen closely: each time the trax scales up toward “truth” the tape is slowed down, torn, and cut off. We’re on the far side of knowing, it seems, which leaves us in a seesawing, group jam that hints at both a unified cosmos and chaos. But, importantly, neither here nor there.