“Members Only” (Bobby “Blue” Bland)

A ceremony for the love-less desert of relations. Whether you’re “red or yellow, black or white,” you’re already a member of the “party” constituted through loss. Never melancholic, and a dirge that’s only for “tonight.” The swaying and swooning before, via Nancy, letting love’s movement call to thought through its lack (and excess) of completion.

“(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” (Righteous Brothers)

If, one day, space aliens ponder the history of histrionic, twentieth-century love songs, they will wonder whether the Anglo-American world went completely mad in the postwar period. Boys particularly seem to have been in some form of competition to claim the most complete and greatest love of all, and oftentimes it got pretty squirrelly. Listen to the Righteous Brothers claim: “Without you, baby, what good am I?/You’re my reason for laughing/For crying, for living, and for dying.” Huh? You’re my reason for dying? Is this what a girl wants to hear? Let’s start by doubting this claim: in the first place, no one has a reason for dying. In fact, it’s entirely unreasonable and quite mad that we start dying on the day of our birth. You can’t choose it. No one ever wished to be born. (Or, if you’re in an emo mood, you might cheat and claim your parents as your reason for dying, but, remember: they weren’t acting reasonably when they conceived you.) So perhaps the love-struck Brothers Righteous are saying: you’re the only reason I continue with this suffering called life. Yes, “you’re my reason for living.” Without you, in other words, I’ll kill myself. Again, just what a girl wants to hear. Now she’s been made hyper-responsible for the continued existence of this big lump on the couch. So as soon as you hear a boy break into song, don’t try to be reasonable. Laugh.

“Continuum” (Jaco Pastorius)

Via Cantor’s logic, a finite set is never equivalent to its own subset(s), while all infinite sets are. Equality, then, only appears amid infinite particularities without exhaustion. Given this, a continuum properly thought must have no limit point, no possible incarnation or subjectivity to mark either terminus. Repetition of root braces the four-note ascending figure in multiple registers (whose only differences are in timbre and vibrato). Improv section approaches relation via timing (phrases eventually beginning in the last quarter of the bar, for example). Track ends with root and harmonic ringing out simultaneously, with the latter endless—proving that the note, physically, is a node which initiates relation by remaining still (and in the middle). Presence, presently, registers positionality and not (proximal) possibility.

“Holy Ghost” (The Bar-Kays)

Staged as an alternative Pentecostal worship service, with the lover’s love (as language) containing the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it’s more a question of how such love can be transformative. It certainly has to do with voices/voicing, phrasing, and articulation–see the bass’ varied attacks and effects. It’s also about translation: a love that puts a “tremble” in the singer’s “talk.” (There’s no glossolalia or xenoglossy here. While we’re at it, there’s also no sense of baptism in the strict sense: there’s no “experience” of the lover/god, only their effects. And no trinity; only two multiplied by all potential listeners.) The lover “ought to be ashamed” of his/her power, but there’s no “in itself” here. Love/listening is between and referred, and nothing outside of this.

“Eruption” (Van Halen)

The solo that launched a thousand (hair) bands, it’s also a mythologized piece used to legitimize rock guitar playing more generally. But even nine-year olds are getting in on the act, and kids can play this trax with startling proficiency. Maybe all of this this is a human version of Moore’s Law dealing with human performance. The trax is mainly about technique, with the whammy-bar dives and two-handed tapping coalescing in what’s supposed to be a new form. We shouldn’t forget Steve Hackett’s tapping from Genesis or Eddie Cochran’s tremolo strategies, though. Discussions of Eddie Van Halen’s early classical training occludes this indebtedness, and popular texts instead redirect toward the trax’s strategic allusions in order to elevate the sonic repurposing. Also important are the effects used, including echo and phaser. Even so, this prosthetic humanness is a helpful lesson. Innovation as a recursive structure, and newness as a function of articulation (not a progressive temporality). All the rest, including Moore’s Law: profit motive.

“A Horse With No Name” (America)

The journey into the desert represents a politicized movement to get under the problem of naming and interpellation. The desert not a wasteland, but a place with teeming “life underground,” seeking out “heart” below the process of subjectification. Resistance which does not neglect the fundamental exclusion: the anthropological foundations of the “political.”

“Revolution 1” (The Beatles)

Renounces violent legal and institutional change in the present, in favor of a preliminary project of individual moral reformism (“free your mind”): the final, most sinister implication of the doctrine, “All you need is love.” Backing track downshifts the impulse to “rock” toward quietistic, contemplative, shooby-doo-wop shuffle. The famed altered lyric in this White Album version, “Don’t you know that you can count me out/in,” amounts to a bit of pandering, really, toward all self-styled revolutionists. Let’s compare it to Marx (Groucho, that is), and his more general allergy to community and inclusion: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” Marx will have none of it; Lennon, on the other hand, doesn’t want to be bound to the insurgency and its strictures, but would like to continue to serve as sniping, spiritual advisor from the sidelines. Coming off more than a bit Fabian in inclination (and no, not Fabian Forte), it’s useful to remember that the Fabian Society was named after the general Fabius Maximus (280-203 BC), known as the “Cunctator,” or the “Delayer.” Putting off revolution while remaining comfortably glum.

“East-West” (The Butterfield Blues Band)

From the liner notes: “‘We’re gonna get together and hate the notes.'” Difficult to know which ones. Attempted hybridization of musical “worlds” results in slurring, sitar-like guitar and feedback, while drums anticipate growth of Fusion. But droning bass ostinatos allow Bloomfield to glide on the foundation for the middle seven minutes, sliding evenly between multiple nodes. Still, the problem lies in hemispheric penetration and the production of worldliness. Kind assimilation, but (buried) glimpses of borderlessness.

“The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness” (The Feelies)

Every time you look to an adjacent dwelling, there’s the potential of seeing another “you.” This could be unsettling or, more optimistically, revelatory in certain ways. Building through a one-minute intro, the trax follows a domiciled narrator, water dripping in the background, the kick drum like a heartbeat, and the first of a repeated, single-note guitar figure (in half-time as compared to the ending’s double time). Through a ploddingly fast beat, we learn that the “boy next door” (who is also the singer) is ushering in a new form of averageness: “he doesn’t plan to work too hard” and, unlike “boys” from the gauzy past, he won’t “make [his] parents proud.” Indeed, “this one beats ‘em all.” What are the “bigger” and “better things” that the both the neighbor and singer are into? A general hostility to parenting and a discrete sense of identity that romanticizes teen angst as lovable irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility—to one’s self and to those enclosures that promote it—as first principle in a gesture toward promising, shared identity.