“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.

“Scatterbrain” (Jeff Beck)

Look here, it’s King Crimson. Over there: Herbie Hancock. Then, The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Underneath, it’s George Martin. The album gets more involved, too, with Stevie Wonder giving two tracks to Beck, while Phil Chen sits in throughout. For a performer used to being stuck the middle (between Clapton and Page in The Yardbirds, for example), it’s not unthinkable that these citations could be so much dross. But a scatterbrain isn’t a dimwit in this case. The outro is introduced by a climbing, John McLaughlin-like run jumping one step upward with each repetition. A quick blues figure pivots, transitioning to the finale. A skittering, palm-muted jog segues to a pinch-harmonics-punctuated solo over the re-emergent McLaughlin line. On top and beneath–as a solo artist indebted to the generosity of others–this scattered-ness is given over and eventually gives out. Like the harmonics, one “sounds” only after the note has struck. Overwriting the underwritten, and agreeably obliged.

“Negro Observers” (The Butthole Surfers)

Preemptively establishing a dislocated, disaffected white subjectivity (which doesn’t even know a “they” or the difference between “thick or thin” blood), track transitions to a more attenuated voice. The Negro observers are “big and strong” but evidently “don’t know what goes on” and must attempt to make sense of the (literal and moral) vacancy of white spaces. Longing for a studious (and continually impos[ed/ing]) Black estrangement, then, undergirds anti-racist visions; overblown saxophone is on to this formulation, signing off its observance of this phenomena.

“Do It Clean” (Echo and the Bunnymen)

In the verse/chorus tension/release, an inkling of how to defuse or short-circuit pragmatic calls. “Where?” for example, is answered: “here,” “there,” “everywhere,” “nowhere.” Deictic dislocation, and absolute dissemination without position. And what did you “do with it” (whether a “handful” or a “barrel”-full)? “I did it clean.” In other words, he did it all, every drop, to the bottom and the limit, with no instrumentalist attachments.

“Summertime” (Lena Horne)

Porgy and Bess opens with this lullaby, in which Clara’s child is lulled to sleep with promises of ease and security. In the context of the opera, we know that none of this is true: the craps game is about to begin, Clara will die, and the baby will be passed on to Serena. It will become just another child leading a life of danger and contingency on Catfish Row, staged within Gershwin’s sociological imaginary. But cut off from the larger work, and sung as a stand-alone standard, we can hear something else in “Summertime,” and it’s slightly more comical: eutopian plenitude (cotton and catfish, and generalized wealth) cannot prevent the intrusive, raw desire of a bawling infant (and praise be that, someday, it will be off on its own). Life itself interdicts its own perfection.

“Volunteered Slavery” (Rahsaan Roland Kirk)

Nothing is solved by acts of congress/Congress. Gendered (and racial) performativity experimented with, demonstrating how, for example, singer’s claim that women “be free” “by spending all day in bed with me” eventually leads to his plea of “don’t take it away”: supposed volitional freedom creates distraction, indicating failure of the performative without clear direction. “We all know” this, and double-instrument solo, at its end, produces screeching white noise underpinned by spaced-out, staccato jabs. Single-ness and identity will always know its place.

“The Passenger” (Iggy Pop)

Theory of the tourist, rather than the refugee. Monumental egotism of the world as possessions: both the sublime stars and the picturesque city in ruins. All “under glass,” behind a window, consumed from a moving position of absolute privilege and safety.