first round

(13) Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill (a deal with god)”
OUTPACED
(4) Harold Faltermeyer, “Axel F”
296-124
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/23.

Electric Cool: Seth Sawyers on “Axel F”

 Middle school band room up in the Appalachians, 1988, everywhere hair gelled to spikes, bangs sprayed stiff, fanny packs, tri-color Africa medallions, everyone hoping, all the time, for an hour of cool, a few minutes, even just enough of a smell to be able to fake it.
The band teacher has already chosen two of our songs for the big concert—the big concert’s always there, just over there—and now he’s seeing about the third. First we’ll bang our way through Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” from the movie Beaches. It’s a song our moms like, a ballad, nothing but big fat whole notes for us trombones in the back, nothing too fast or tough even for the flutes up front. The band teacher picks up his baton, and we go. The clarinets, the saxophones, the trumpets, we nervous preteen goofball trombones, all of us do our slow thing slow enough.
The second option, when we pass around the sheet music, is something else. It’s “Axel F” from Beverly Hills Cop, a movie we were too young to see when it was in the theaters. But the song had been a hit a few years prior. Our older brothers and sisters had played it endlessly.
There are no words, just cool electronic sounds, as if made by a softly glowing translucent computer in Ray-Bans skiing down a mountain. It’s a song from the future. It’s cars that fly, conveyor belts instead of sidewalks, houseplants made of metal, food in through ceiling tubes, everything shiny and silky and humming, like vibrating chrome, like electric mercury. It’s possible we, way in the back, trade a smile. This is the song we want to be playing. This is the song that might make playing in the middle school band just a little bit cool. 

What’s perpetually cool? I doubt it’s a long list. There’s black leather jackets, the early-90s rap with all the jazz samples, dinosaurs, jeans that fit right, the act of accelerating fast and smoothly from a red light, David Bowie. You’ll have one or two more but it’s not a list that goes on forever.
Was “Axel F” cool? Absolutely it was, for its time. The only thing harder than describing a song in words is describing a song that has no words, but “Axel F” comes from a moment of electronic, slick, smirking keyboard stuff. It’s a genre called synth pop. If synth pop were a single instrument it would be a keytar, if an animal then a sleepy cat staring through you, if an object then a Swatch watch.
It’s music made of pure circuitry, like the keys and drum machines in a-ha’s “Take on Me” or Nena’s “99 Luftballons,” the delicious darkness in the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” the grimy London nightclub melancholy of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” the seedy sex of the Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls.” Most of it is dance-y, most is high hair full of goo, and, it must be said, almost all of it is very European and very white.
But all those other synth-pop songs have words. Not Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F,” which is somehow the most uncut 80s cool of them all. Can you recall the synth thing that plays during the Chicago L scene in Risky Business, by German electronic group Tangerine Dream? “Axel F” is its younger cousin that’s just had two Jolt colas. In a 2014 interview, Faltermeyer described “Axel F” as having “no padding, nothing, just minimalist, just patchwork-y kind of sounds.” It’s pure electronic pulse, pure silvery quivery sunglasses-at-night mood, pure 2023 as imagined in 1984.
Faltermeyer was big in synth pop. He did the whispery tikka-tikka-takka and then the bell-like gong in the opening of the Top Gun theme song, and also the sad one that plays after Goose is killed, too. He was no one-hit wonder. He worked on the soundtrack to Midnight Express and then he did Beverly Hills Cop II, The Running Man, Tango & Cash. He produced Behaviour by the Pet Shop Boys. He won two Grammys. He composed Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff” and wrote Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” too, but mostly he’ll be remembered as a professional and accomplished maker of cool keyboard stuff from a certain kind of big-budget 80s Hollywood movie.

Up in that middle school band room, it’s baton up, woodwinds up, horns up, and we go into it. Right away, “Axel F” is faster than the Bette Midler song, but maybe it’s too fast, because before we really get into it, it all goes wrong, everything crashing at terrible angles like a ladder suddenly missing all of its nuts and bolts. We not yet halfway through before that baton at the front goes down. We’ll be doing the Bette Midler. We’re a middle school band. We’re not good.

Was “Axel F” cool back then? Eleven-year-old me says: It was awesome. It was rad. It was even sky-rad. It was my brother Jake’s gel that I squirted onto my pale palm, the soundtrack of my walk into homeroom, all the cool I wish I had but which I could, if I was lucky, only very briefly touch. It was everything we, in that band room, thought we could be if only we could get our hair to do what we wanted it to do, if we could get the second-chair saxophone to smile at us, if we could only trade places with our cooler older brothers just long enough to figure it all out, to stop gnawing at the insides of our cheeks until they tasted of metal.
So is “Axel F” cool now? Probably it’s cool in the way that things were cool once but now feel squarely of their time, like lava lamps, disco, Trapper Keepers, baggy jeans. Harold Faltermeyer, after all, talented as he was, has a name like a Senior Manager of Finance. If you squint your eyes, the bloodless cool of “Axel F” is extremely 1980s. It borders on clinical and clean to the point of soullessness. You can imagine that certain people have listened to it, very loudly, while doing cocaine from glass-topped coffee tables and it could also pass as mall music. Of course, “Axel F” and all its cousins were meant to accompany. In the movie, it plays as Eddie Murphy runs across Wilshire Boulevard to stuff bananas into the tailpipe of the car being sat in by some Beverly Hills cops. It’s a song that had a job to do, and it sounds like the time in which it did that job.
But, still. For one little moment, let’s not be cynical, not all the way. Because in 1988 up in the ancient rusting Appalachian hills, these electronic beeps and claps are in my head, and they’re still there on the long bus ride down U.S. 220, and they’re here, right now, and I almost always don’t hate it when it’s bopping away, over and over, round and round, all those keys, all those wires. Because it’s what I want to be and what I am not, which is myself but only a little cooler, myself but right over there, just over there. I can touch it, I think. Just a single fingertip, and maybe that’s all we ever get, and maybe that’s enough. Probably it’s cool we get even that.

Seth Sawyers’ writing has appeared in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Southeast Review, The Normal School, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Literary Hub, The Millions, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore, with his wife, who is cool. He’s online at https://sethsawyers.wordpress.com.

If I Only Could: alison stine on “running up that hill (a deal with god”

I was twelve or thirteen when I auditioned for the children’s choir. The director sat my mother down in his office and said very seriously, as if he had been waiting for just this moment, just this child to walk into his mildewy, Midwestern church basement: Everything about your daughter is perfect vocally.
Except there was this one thing. I couldn’t hear.
The moment recalled an earlier time when I had been banished outside to wait as an audiologist explained patiently to my mother, She can’t hear herself. People were always telling my parents things about my body as if I wasn’t living right there in it. Her kidneys will need to be tested, as ears develop the same time as the kidneys. She may have trouble with balance. I was born with no hearing on one side, my left. Due to a congenital issue, the mechanism simply wasn’t there inside my head. At least, that was the way it was always explained. It was called a fluke. I was called abnormal.
With the limited hearing I did have, I did okay. I had to; I was instructed to pass and pretend. No one else in my family is deaf, and I met no other kids or adults like me. I had no access to sign language. I read lips, never disclosing to most people my disability, never even knowing—for a long time—words like disclosure. There was a problem, though. I loved music.

Do you want to feel how it feels?

I was two or three when my father gave my mother a player piano for her birthday. It was a big deal, a surprise. I came in the door with her, having been sent off on some pretend errand. Upon our return, there was a party, people gathered in our house around the cumbersome, glossy wooden instrument, as high-backed as a whale. My babysitter sat on the piano bench. A wicker basket held the key fronts that had fallen off. It was an old piano, bought as much for its value as a historic piece of furniture as for its musical ability. It would have a hard time staying in tune. I would learn some notes because of the dried gray glue stuck to the keys, making patterns like raised scars.
Everyone screamed in delight, my mother cried. She had always wanted to learn to play. But she didn’t, not then. Her practicing would wake my baby sibling up from naps. She couldn’t get through her lessons because I would insist on sitting on her lap and banging on the keys. At least, that was the way it was always explained. No one thought or had the money at the time to get me lessons. Not the deaf girl.
My father says he used to carry me around on his shoulders and I would make up songs about everything we passed, my treehouse which would be crushed by a tornado, the creek below the highway bridge, the dog snuffling at the tulips. We lived in remote Indiana, our white house an island in an ocean of corn fields, but I would sing in the front yard, performing for no one. Every rise of the dirt road gave me hope. Maybe someone was coming, maybe a car from the city would stop. I would sing when we went to fast food restaurants, sing as we waited in line.
My father interested me in female musicians like Laura Nyro and The Bangles. I went to sleep every night listening to my Mickey Mouse suitcase record player. Once I found Tori Amos, it was all over. I started recording the songs I wrote onto cassette tapes via a handheld player, tapes which I gave to my best friends. They traded them like cards.
In college, I sang at open mic nights, but quickly dropped my performance major, switching to English. It seemed safer, better suited to what I believed I was, what I had been told. Half in silence, I dipped my toe into a river of sound but I couldn’t swim it. I didn’t know it or understand it. You write things most music majors wouldn’t think of, my piano professor said, in the same breath childing me again for failing to count, for being so sloppy. Someone so musical should be better, he told me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him: I heard differently. I heard less. I heard as if I was buried underground, shouting for the living to come find me.
After college, I dated a drummer who had a Fender Rhodes set up in his basement practice space. While he cooked dinner upstairs, I would perform to the darkness. In the shadows, I imagined an audience who didn’t know about my deafness, who couldn’t hear it in my voice, or who didn’t care.
The drummer said my disability interfered with my confidence, and he was right, though it wasn’t disability so much as it was ableism, how I was described by others as everything from stuck-up to flighty when I didn’t answer them. I lived in fear of my name being called. When I couldn’t follow conversations, which was often, I dropped out. You need a life not in your head was another wise thing he said. But only in my head could I hear music perfectly and be received by the world as if I belonged there.

Tell me we both matter, don’t we

Being drawn to a thing that will never love me back—it’s like a bad relationship, which Kate Bush lays open in “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).” It’s the bargaining stage in that song, which is a stage of grief. I will reach God, I will deal with him alone. And it’s the definition of empathy. If only you lived in my body, then you would understand. You would not treat me this way.
I moved backward through Kate Bush’s discography, discovering 1996’s The Red Shoes first, the year of its release. I went to the record store specifically to buy that album. A teen, I had read about it in a newspaper review. I have a vivid memory of plucking out the CD, can see its cover of red pointe shoes even now. It rested in the front of the new releases and I drew it from the bin like it was meant for me.
Here was a girl who had started by playing an organ she found in a barn. Here was a woman giving everything, giving her all every time, who didn’t care how she sounded—and who sometimes sounded rough, coarse, ugly. She barks in “Hounds of Love,” snarls (with sword) in “Babooshka.”
And in “Running Up That Hill,” she pleads. It’s vulnerability that comes through. It’s also loss. “If I only could” implies that you can’t. You can’t ever. You tried and didn’t work. You tried and tried and are so tired of trying. You will not make it up that hill without divine assistance—and that kind of help isn’t coming. Not anymore, not for you. You are your first and only help.

There is thunder in our hearts

You talk yourself out of things, but the world talks you out of them too. The older I got, the less it seemed feasible, this music thing, even as an amateur. I had a kid. Parents don’t go to open mic nights, sing in beer-soaked bars. Single mothers definitely don’t. I wasn’t going to waste babysitter money to embarrass myself. I lived in New York and my then-husband thought I was being too loud with my keyboard, so I stopped playing it. We lived in the same building as a professional guitarist and I would sometimes find his guitar picks in my laundry. I collected them like stones. If I could have made a path with them. If I could have picked a quieter instrument. If I only could.
Last December, I got sick. Not with COVID, with another respiratory infection, the kind I’m prone to. But this one settled itself in my ear. I felt the world switch off as the hearing I do have diminished. I lived life underwater, waiting for the steroids and antibiotics to work, and the whole time, I kept thinking, music.
The worst part about getting older is that it feels too late to switch lives. In many ways, becoming a writer was the path of least resistance. You write alone in your room. No one has to see you. No one has to hear you. Many people don’t know about my deafness unless I tell them, and sometimes even still, they don’t believe me, the curse of those whose disability is often hidden. If I only could switch places, not with someone who could hear, but with someone brave. Brave enough to go on stage, not knowing for sure if their name has been called, not able to hear any comments from the crowd, any feedback. Swimming without being able to sense the depth of the water, feeling only its darkness and its pull.
I think of Kate Bush as the bravest artist I know. Going for it with the costumes, the dancing (the miming!) and the openness. To be so raw. To give so much—and then to go away. Fans of her know what it’s like to love someone you probably won’t experience in performance. In a way, that makes the music even more precious. It exists in this form in your hand alone. To sing like a secret. To have the courage to go for it, then to go away back into yourself and the private mystery of your song. I understand it. I do.
I have never heard and likely never will hear “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” in stereo. But still in mono, it shines. It gives me a bright flare of hope every time: maybe I can change. Maybe there is still time. Maybe I can run up that hill, over that building, get on that stage, and sing with no problems.

Alison Stine’s most recent novel Trashlands was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the Philip K Dick Award. Also the author of three books of poetry, her next novel Dust, about a partially deaf girl who must convince her remote community a second Dust Bowl is coming, will be published by Wednesday Books/Macmillan in 2024. You can find her on Instagram or playing the keyboard and singing as long as no one is home.