“From a Dry Camel” (Dust)

Something about man is best understood as a “machine,” but this is not cybernetics: the focus is not on the brain, but on something lower, between the legs. This simple lever needs tending, but beating off is not enough to “take care” of it. Importantly, however, one can easily suffice without a “maiden”; indeed, a “dry camel,” “one hump or two,” will work just as well, provided that you can get the camel to “lie down on its side” and give you time to rub one out on its back. (It may take you ten minutes, and you’ll have to keep shifting gears around a four-note, descending figure, from slow to medium to fast and back again, with only limited wankery.) This machine aspires to sovereign self-sufficiency: the goal is to “solve your own game” without oil or the lubrication of other persons. Indeed, from this perspective, everything outside the machine-self is merely a tool and therefore for me. “Marion,” the discarded, “dry” maiden, had to go because she tried to “incise” every man she met, cutting into, marking, or draining him. So she’s a tool, too—but just beyond his leverage.

“What’s Going On” (Marvin Gaye)

Solidarity with the “mother” and the “brother,” and a conversation with the (Black?/White?) figure of the “father,” to whom it is recommended: “only love can conquer hate.” But whose hate? White supremacists or those with “picket signs”? Deeply ambiguous referents either signal a deceleration of youth protest or call for White understanding or both. A track, then, that everyone likes, featuring a double dispersal of the political.

“Object-Subject (Breakdown’s Not Enough)” (Keith LeBlanc)

Given the “major malfunction” which was NASA’s Challenger, the breakdown of the subject-object dyad is more like a gross disabler, circulating in finite varieties. The evidence: distorted power chord bass gives voice to dubbish bass roots; “subject-object” repeated in different registers and at different speeds; panning (and sustained) shrieks circle the listener’s head; and precision scratching terminates at the same tonal origin regardless of direction. All mark the tonality of our common “adopt[ion]” which, ultimately, never reaches escape velocity. (Even guns meet this conceptual wall.) A mental atom bomb (depicted on cover) still won’t break the dualism; denying exploration as discovery, the more just breakdown—eluding just more of the same—materializes in the actionable, continual appraisal (and subsequent dissolution) of what’s “here.”

“We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” (Queen)

In his review of Queen’s Jazz (1979), Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh famously wrote that the two-year-old anthem “We Will Rock You” “is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you.” “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band,” separating out “who is superior and who is inferior.” (Marsh’s straight-faced critique predates Pete Wylie’s more tongue-in-cheek approach toward “rockism” by two years). As others have pointed out, however, this trax and its linked partner, “We are the Champions,” are just as easily read as barely-coded gay insurgency. The timing is certainly right: in England in 1977, workplace rights for gays and lesbians were on the agenda for the first time at the annual Trade Union Congress, and the International Gay Association was founded in 1978. Both trax evoke the comic book ad figure of the ninety-eight pound weakling having sand kicked in his face. (The Rocky Horror Show’s “I Can Make You a Man,” from 1973, covers similar territory.) “We Will Rock You” comes with a promise of being “rocked” by the sound of an arena’s stomping and clapping, and perhaps being turned into a piece of granite. From now on, according to the song, you will be hard—hinting at the rise of the muscled, mustachioed Castro clone, and prefiguring Freddie Mercury’s adoption of the look in 1980. Today, the emergence of the figure of the clone is frequently criticized as foreclosing a more diverse, queer seventies community. On the other hand, there’s no doubt a practical side to the practice, since the clone was less vulnerable than the queen on the street. “We Are the Champions” continues the basic theme, but with the added barb that got under Marsh’s skin: “no time for losers.” So are Queen on the verge of genocide? Perhaps it all depends on the status of “we’ll keep on fighting ‘til the end.” If you’re in a fight as part of a community, then of course there’s “no time for losers.” You have to stand up and pick a side, and if you can’t do that you should just go home. If fighting and its necessities are fascistic, then we’re all fascists. Every community and every state is grounded in an unprecedented act of original violence, in “us” and “them,” in risk and sacrifice. And every older community would like to bury this knowledge, and imagine that only the latest dust-ups are existential threats.

“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” (Jeff Buckley)

The funereal as first condition of love, albeit of the “too young to hold on” variety. Inside-out strategy documents this suffering, from the initial sharing of mortality to the infinite indebtedness and sacrifice necessary for pleasure. Huddled and awaiting the invited intrusion which would reinitiate this fateful exchange, singer must confess, accept responsibility, and hurl imperatives functioning as (desperate) invitations. (Reminiscent, really, of Bill Clinton’s putative Putting People First (1992): social support, for too long, has been a “way of life,” but it should really be a “second chance” so that we can “reward work” and “demand responsibility” in the name of reworking desire.) Occasional (and stunted) Leslie speaker intrusions imply a slowed doppler effect: exchange is in the passing.

“Brotherhood of Man” (Robert Morse/Company)

From How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: there already is a club where membership is a foregone conclusion (you’re always already “in,” and it’s “free”), and where everyone is in the space of endlessly “giving” toward the other. It’s called corporate fratriarchy. So, brother, you are “in” (right here, where the theatrical “company,” in choral moments, meets the wicket company).

“Who Made Who” (AC/DC)

It’s in the ream(ing): the taxes and the infinite dependence upon the creation of artificial intelligence (or video games). Facing things “on the level,” sober and mindful, you’ll still get taken in a “one on one”; there’s no use: “look[ing] down,” like transition from apoplectic to sauntering arpeggios, reinforces the state’s economy (roughly, here, consumerism unaware of its own intrusion). Even though the world’s “8-bit” (or 64-bit or 4K for that matter), going beyond conception would still beg for the pristine, virginal demand. The pentatonic scales and the Pentagon are still in the same family, triangulating.

“I, Will Wait” (Pere Ubu)

Sky and sun are our brutish limits. But training your gaze toward the ground may be more rewarding, if only for the lack of some pay(off). Imagine a city—any city—with both the apotheosis of civilization and its requisite nadir simultaneously on display for all to see. In its “cracks” and “in the seams of the world,” there are “secret scenes” or stagings that produce no “doubt.” Orient yourself toward “practicalities,” which are “possibilities” for those that live close to the earth. Commit to imagining perfectibility and “wait,” resisting the labor of literal realization. Set your “I” to “idle,” and will yourself to live downward. Transformative orientation.

“That’s Me” (Theo Beckford)

One can easily conjure the scene. It involves one of the inventors of the ska rhythm—the man whom Skatalite Tommy McCook called “Skavoovie”—a pianist who hasn’t been paid for his last record date and subsequently confronts his producer and draws a line in the studio’s dirt floor. “That’s me,” on this side, and “that’s you,” on the other. We’re not the same, and therefore you owe me: “I want my money” and, when you’re ready, “call me about it.” One might call this trax crass and materialistic (and perhaps it’s no more than a studio afterthought, since it ended up as a b-side), but there’s also something about this crude form of spacing that cannot be wished away. If we could replace “me” and “you” with just “us” or “one,” we might be able to eliminate the daily dilemmas of communication, obligation, and economy. But “we” remain differently-related: even as “I” try to indebt “you,” “I” remain fatally dependent upon “you” to hear my call. Our mortal differences, no matter how slight they seem, are not expungeable, and even when “me” and “you” converts to “I and I” a decade later in rasta-talk, attempting a drastic and equalitarian pronominal reduction, each speaker still necessarily leaves some space open for the conjunction and the second iteration of “I.”

“The Goin’ Gets Tough from the Getgo” (Ween)

The “getgo” can only exist in the “middle of a situation”: there are no beginnings and only a persistent midpoint. The medium of present relation (the “rules”) replicate so that one can only learn the “same lessons once again.” There’s no architectural promise here, only a slum-dwelling within another. Rising bass topples over onto itself; we’ll always lose “time” (and time again) when enmeshed with the “goin’.”