first round
(10) Midnight Oil, “beds are burning”
dried out
(7) Oran 'Juice' Jones, “the rain”
270-109
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 3/8/23.
lisa nikolidakis on “The Rain”
This isn’t an essay about O.J. Simpson. It’s not about domestic abuse, exactly, but it’s not not about it either. It won’t dare mention the state of 1986: [The Challenger, The Bears, Reagan or Nancy (or Tipper, for that matter), the first MLK Day, Halley’s Comet, Iran-Contra, Bird/Parish/McHale/Walton, Pan Am Flight 73, L. Ron Hubbard’s death, “Walk This Way” (or that kind of icky collab by Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald that came in 4th for the year overall, even though I, too, “believe in love”) or Top Gun].
It’s not concerned with which words anyone can or cannot pronounce. The video will not be discussed. It won’t even mention squirrels.
It's about The Rain, bro.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way—the refrain—because we all know the speaker “saw you (and him) walking in the rain,” which is enough of an offense that the speaker will henceforth “never be the same.”
Okay.
(beat)
(hawk screech)
(beat)
Okay. That’s some serious handholding. Like, world-class/gold-star/trophy-earning handholding. With that level of handholding, you’d assume a newsworthy union occurred—something we’d have seen on the cover of the National Enquirer or featured on 60 Minutes. I actually can’t imagine handholding of that magnitude, and I once dated a guy who said someone told him he must have a rich inner life—that’s how close to greatness I once stood!
[indistinct chatter]
But it’s not just the handholding, right? It’s that she dared hold hands with another man in The Rain.
Tvtropes.org links romantic rain to The Big Damn Kiss, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Love Confession, Umbrella of Togetherness, Sexy Soaked Shirt, Wet Sari Scene, and suggests we see also: Snow Means Love, Underwater Kiss, Electric Love, and Shower of Love. I really just wanted to type that many phrases in a row that could be so many things at once (chapter titles, band names, A.I. attempting sexy, Etsy paintings I don’t want to buy, an incredibly odd filing system) because I’m drawn to things that’re hard to pin down—I get it, I do—and I’ve learned my lesson this time, so, Emotionally Available People: you’re cleared for landing.
Point is that’s just TV. Add in literature/music/greeting cards/theater/a very specific musical/you know the one/there’s a lamppost?/no?/fine, Kubrick?/ugh: that tells me so much about you. This is why we’re not dating. Gah! Point freaking is: lots of links, man. History. Space-time. The Rain makes love happen according to All The Things.
But.
(ha-ha: butt)
But I’ve been on this planet forty some years, and once—ONCE—in all that time, The Rain made a moment with another person more romantic. A weekend trip to Boston, unseasonable warmth, sudden deluge, a scramble into an underground bar with five stools and The Beta Band’s “Dry The Rain” humming on cue, which at the time seemed like it meant everything, but that night, a metric tonne of Guinness and Jamie later, he passed out while going down on me, so, you know, you don’t win ‘em all.
I don’t know when to mention that I genuinely hate holding hands, so I’m sticking it here for now because it somehow seems important. I guess we’ll see.
If we agree that time is basic nonsense and do a months-long dive into theoretical physics, we’d conclude that all the songs about The Rain have sort of always existed, and always will exist, but also maybe never existed, or do and don’t exist simultaneously. But I suppose that means it’s sort of always raining, and will always rain, but also maybe never rained, or is and isn’t raining simultaneously.
But then that would mean that we’re sort of always holding hands in The Rain, and always will, and never, and so on.
Handholding in the rain is suuuuch a fuck-you to The Rain, btws, but The Rain believes Barthes was right, so he knows what happens once an audience gets involved is out of his control. It just is.
The Rain is, like, really working on himself.
Because it’s a lot to be part of “a dark and stormy night” and present for so many romantic tropes and seasonal affective disorder, and The Rain is just sayin’. Maybe lower the expectations a grain.
He’s already worked through Annie Lennox. How do lovers talk? That was a big one.
Consider the word slick. It’s full-on gross. It’s a snake licking. Ssssslick. It contains honest-to-Bob ick. That’s what holding hands in the rain is: two newts wrestling for dominance. Impossibly unromantic. Creeps, the lot of you.
Obligatory: The lyrics are so obviously fucked that I shouldn’t really need to point out that stalking isn’t cool. People can hold hands. Shit ends, man. But you can’t stalk and threaten violence and be so paternalistic you should forreal be embarrassed. Like, verbally attacking someone isn’t okay.
Boy, the ‘80’s sure were different, huh? Say that. Louder. Slap someone’s back while you say it if you can. Not a stranger, though. Be cool, bro.
A Very Pretty Human Man I dated a long time ago once shoved me onto a gravel parking lot in The Rain, and it’s weird that it surprised me, that anything can, but what I remember most isn’t the surprise. It’s that I loved The Rain so much more than him that I chose The Rain in that moment and almost always will choose The Rain because I don’t know what any of these clowns are doing out here in the wild, but it ain’t great.
Also, as my friend asked last week, “What if it was, like, her cousin?” Not the point, but fair, right?
I remind my students all writing makes an argument.
Choose The Rain. Never stop choosing it, which according to theoretical physics is, well, complicated. Choose The Rain even if you think handholding is infantile/juvenile/fraternal, made slick (and so much worse) by The Rain, who gets that Barthes is probably right, yeah, but The Rain is just out here trying to help plants grow. Grow plants not possessive, damp love, ya jagweeds.
Curtsy.
Lisa Nikolidakis is the author of the memoir No One Crosses the Wolf (Little A, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Hunger Mountain, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing, makes a lot of art, and won't stop collecting fossils. You can find her on Twitter @lisanikol and on IG @lisanik.
keith pille on “beds are burning”
1. The song itself
It’s incongruous that this song is even on this list. It’s a freak fact, an artifact of the top 40 charts; to classify Midnight Oil with Taco feels like a category error. If you were a young musichead in the late 80s and early 90s, Midnight Oil were an immensity you had to reckon with. When Blue Sky Mining came out in 1990, it was a major event that we all anticipated and luxuriated in; I remember MTV going into one of their occasional “this is an album YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT!” cycles. And it was a major event, of course, because the success of 1987’s Diesel and Dust and its breakout single “Beds Are Burning” put us all on notice that this was a band to keep an eye on.
And there’s the rub. “Beds Are Burning” was a pretty big crossover hit. In the normal course of things, Midnight Oil were giants within the fevered niche of what we then called alternative rock and absolutely unknown outside of it. This one song, soaring on the fact that it fucking rocked and carried an urgent message (probably leaning harder on the “fucking rocked” side) crossed over out of the alt-rock world and into the top 40. Viewed from within the alt-rock world (and the successor “indie rock” world most readers of this tourney inhabit these days), Midnight Oil were titans; but viewed from within the top 40, they were a weird band who had one modest hit. It’s that Kenobi thing: many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.
Back to the fact that the song fucking rocks; we wouldn’t care about it so much if it didn’t. It opens big: BAH-BAH BAAAMP! The horn stabs! A brief quiet pause, and then the rhythm section gets rolling. The bass and drums on this song are something to marvel at (when I brought this song into a bass lesson in high school, the slippery Peter Gunn thing they have going on absolutely defeated my teacher, who was otherwise peerless at working out parts for songs I brought in). They kick into a chugging, ticking engine that manages to sound organic and mechanistic at the same time. A heart, maybe?
Peter Garrett starts singing; it’s a singular voice, quavering and close to monotone (in the early going, he’s just moving between a few notes) but also somehow authoritative. And he’s telling us a story! “Out where the river broke…”
I don’t want to turn this into a livetweet of walking through the song; you can (and should!) listen to it and decide if it clicks for you. I just want to establish that it grabs your attention upfront and holds it throughout. And that it’s produced in a way that doesn’t much like anything else we were hearing back in 1987. Again, this thing opens with horn stabs that serve as a repeated hook through the song. The instrumental production is wide-open, clean and spacious, and it kind of has to be because there are a *lot* of instruments competing here: the aforementioned bass and drum parts, those recurring horns (including what sounds like a French horn taking a solo! Let me be clear: you do not hear a lot of French horn solos in rock and roll), synths, guitars, Peter Garrett’s voice (often multitracked). The balance of “there’s a lot going on here” and “but it’s produced so cleanly that none of it clashes” makes one think of late Pink Floyd, except that instead of indulgent and overwrought, this one’s just sincere and good.
In the absence of all context, this song is good on its own merits. But nothing exists without context; and there’s all kinds of interesting stuff here at different levels of focus.
2. Personal Context: The Australian thing
In the late 1930s, my grandfather was a baseball prospect in central Iowa; a scout from the Cubs invited him to come to Chicago to try out. But his father nixed the trip because he needed all of the help he could get on the hog farm, and the chance passed (the Cubs would subsequently take 77 years to win a World Series. Connection? You decide). A couple of years later, my grandfather was drafted into the US Army Air Corps and stationed in Australia, where he fixed planes, played baseball for a team in Sydney for a few years (family legend, which I want to believe but can’t really commit to, has it that he was called the “Lou Gehrig of Australian baseball”), and wooed a girl from Brisbane, who he eventually brought back to the American Midwest and had 11 kids with.
What this means is that growing up I (and all of my many aunts, uncles, and cousins) always had this weird Australian identity thing going on where, like of course we were American and GO USA! but also we were pretty into Australia and being Australian. This meant watching Crocodile Dundee a *lot* more than was really necessary, but it also meant being hipped to the fact that Australia really seemed to punch above its weight, population-wise, in terms of producing cool music. AC/DC, Men at Work, INXS; all bands I could feel a shiver of “they’re on *my* team” pride whenever I heard them on the radio.
And of course Midnight Oil was part of that pantheon, as I was sliding from listening to whatever the Omaha classic rock radio station happened to be playing to listening to stuff *I* was choosing on tape. But Midnight Oil was different from all of the other Australian bands. AC/DC ruled, but they were gloriously dumb (this was, in fact, part of why they ruled). Men at Work weren’t dumb, but they felt slight (maybe they shouldn’t have, given how heavy a song like “It’s a Mistake” is, but at the very least their production made them sound slight). INXS, it still pains me to admit, were really pretty close to as gloriously dumb as AC/DC, just presenting it in much more stylish wrapping (I say this not to shit on them; they rule. But most of their songs are written from the point of view of Michael Hutchence’s junk). Midnight Oil, on top of rocking, were clearly not dumb. They sounded really smart, and they had stuff to say. Stuff to say about important topics. This seemed especially big in the late 80s, when R.E.M. and U2 (and more on them in a moment) were establishing that to be a capital-letter Important Band you had to have stuff to say about important topics.
3. Music scene context: The Right Honorable Peter Garrett
The one giving voice to all that stuff to say about important topics, of course, was Peter Garrett, the band’s lead singer. Garrett fascinated me in 1987 and he fascinates me now. His voice, as I mentioned, is distinctive, and his point of view doubly so. But so is his physical presence: six and a half feet tall, skin bald, athletically built, and given to dancing in a way that wasn’t that unlike Martin Short’s comic character Ed Grimley. Midnight Oil videos used him to great effect; consider how often the video for this song is content to show him in silhouette, knowing that this is as arresting a visual as they need.
But let’s back up and talk about his point of view. It was taken as a given in the late 80s and early 90s that Important Bands must, as a condition of their importance, weigh in on the political matters of the day (I remember a sad conversation where a friend and I, acting as the world’s lamest revolutionary tribunal, concluded that it wasn’t OK to like Soul Asylum because they put too much energy into trying to be funny and not enough into making the world a better place). R.E.M. did it. U2 did it. Midnight Oil did it (foregrounding indigenous concerns in a way most of their peers didn’t, which we’ll be circling back to before long). But over the long haul, Garrett took a step further than pretty much any of his 80s alternative-rock peers: he stepped down off the stage and got in the actual fucking game.
Garrett served two stints as the President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, from ‘89 to ‘93 and then ‘98 to ‘02 (this means that he managed to kick absolute ass on Blue Sky Mining while in office), with a term on the international board of Greenpeace sandwiched in the middle there. In 2004, he was elected as a Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives, and was subsequently named Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts and then Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, eventually leaving government in 2016.
I’m not plugged into Australian politics well enough (or at all, really) to know if Garrett was effective in these posts; knowing the nature of politics, I’m sure he accomplished some things but was often hemmed in by larger structural forces. He no doubt had to compromise frequently in a way that doesn’t live up to the rhetoric you can drop from a stage. But I’m absolutely in awe of the fact that he got into the game. As much as I respect Michael Stipe, he was never willing to go that far to back his words with action (as far as I can tell, the most politically active member of R.E.M. seems to be Mike Mills, who to this day still does absolute yeoman’s work owning reactionary dickheads on twitter; activism can take many forms). And it’s a damn sight better than the empty posturing of Bono, who yammered endlessly about liberal causes while doing photo ops with George W. Bush and later turning up as a lunch partner in Jared fucking Kushner’s memoir.
I’m reminded of a bit in Tom Perrotta’s Election when student Lisa Flanagan asks Mr. McAllister why the pundit George Will never actually ran for office, and McAllister dismissively says that a knob like Will knows deep down that he’d get smeared if he ever had the guts to actually try to put any of his opinions into practice. Bono reeks of George Will here; Garrett had the guts to wade into the fray.
4. Political context: It belongs to them
I keep mentioning that the song has important stuff to say. Let’s circle back to that.
For listeners who aren’t listening to more than the chorus (especially people who aren’t super imprinted onto the video), I think the song could land as a not terribly specific statement of urgency: how can we dance when our world keeps turning? How can we sleep while our beds our burning? These are great lines on their own, and they could easily attach themselves to any situation that’s in need of urgent action. In 2023, if you heard them without context, you’d think they were talking about climate change.
But they’re not. Australia is a land whose current residents are predominantly made up of descendants of Europeans who moved in and displaced or outright removed the people who’d previously been living there. This was an ugly process that involved a mix of outright murder and theft mixed with land-transfer agreements negotiated in bad faith by the Europeans. The members of Midnight Oil, touring through the Australian backcountry, saw the conditions that members of Australia’s indigenous people were experiencing, and it made them angry. Hence this song. The time has come to say fair’s fair. To pay the rent, to pay our share. In other words, at the very least, honor the fucking agreements, stop the ongoing exploitative behavior, and try to remediate what’s already been done.
I said earlier that I’m not plugged in enough to Australian politics to know if Peter Garrett was any good as a politician; along the same lines, I’m not conversant enough in Australian history and racial politics to catch all of the nuances in this song. But here’s the thing: I don’t really have to be to get the emotional drift, because the United States is every bit as much a case of Europeans moving in and stealing an entire continent. In the US (and I would be shocked to learn that it’s very different in Australia), the standard line is that well, that all happened long ago, what’s done is done, everything’s OK now; you only have to be minimally aware of the news to know that this isn’t the case. Oil companies are allowed again and again by the government to build pipelines across native lands, over the protests of tribal governments who say—rightly—that oil pipelines leak all the time and the leaks will put petroleum straight into their water supply. It’s a crock of shit, and it needs to stop. Honor the fucking agreements. Stop the ongoing exploitative behavior. Try to remediate what’s already been done. The song resonates because the problems it speaks to are both very specific and depressingly widespread and timeless.
It's worth asking: is it right for a bunch of white musicians to write a song that tries to give voice to indigenous communities? And that’s not a thing I can answer with much of a rhetorical leg to stand on, being a white person myself (and one from another country at that). It would have been wonderful if there had been an Indigenous Australian band in a position to have a hit singing about the shit deal they’d been given. But the structure of the music industry, especially in 1987, all but precluded such a thing. In the meantime, Midnight Oil was there and did have a platform. To me, at least, this song does feel like a sincere effort made in good faith; Garrett and the Oils (that’s what we hep insiders call them, by the way) never claim in this song to speak for indigenous Australians. The song’s lyrics are constructed to clearly always be colonizers addressing other colonizers: “it belongs to THEM, WE’VE gotta give it back.”
God knows that white people trying to involve themselves in indigenous concerns can go very badly; more often than not, it winds up feeling like their (our?) point is just to center themselves. “Stay in your lane” is a common piece of advice for a reason (and a quick aside here: “The Dead Heart,” another Diesel and Dust track, is written from a Native point of view and did draw criticism for it, especially for furthering a “primitive” stereotype; the band eventually decreed that all royalties from that song be given to indigenous groups, which was probably the right thing to do but also does feel like a lame after-the-fact “oopsie!” response). On the other hand, if you have a platform with a lot of visibility, and a chance to elevate an issue that you sincerely care about, maybe it’s not a bad thing to try to put the spotlight on it, in a way that doesn’t make you the main character? As an American, I’m much more conscious of Australian indigenous issues than I otherwise would have been, thanks to the music of Midnight Oil, especially this song. That has to be worth something. On the other hand, it’s arguable that not much in the way of actual real-world improvement has happened because of that consciousness, which I guess should factor into exactly how much it’s worth. On the other other hand (we Australian-Americans are known for often having three hands), that awareness has undoubtedly filtered over into the way I view American Indigenous issues, in a political sphere where I theoretically do have some minute influence as a voter, donor, and general loudmouth. Who knows? Advocacy is a land of contrasts.
Again, if the song’s concerns transcend the specific and move up to the general, in 2023 America “Beds Are Burning” always makes me think of the Land Back movement. I can’t pretend to know every detail of the Land Back program; and I have to imagine that, as with any large movement, you’re going to hear widely different goals and methods depending on who you ask. But what I understand as the basic goal—return lands that, per existing agreements, should belong to tribal nations back to those nations (the Black Hills being a prime example)—just seems like the morally correct thing to do. Honor the fucking agreements. Stop the ongoing exploitative behavior. Try to remediate what’s already been done. At the very least, have the conversation and move the Overton Window.
Two summers ago, in northern Minnesota near some tribal land, I saw graffiti on a rail bridge that made me think of “Beds Are Burning.” It said “WHITE PEOPLE: THIS IS OUR LAND. BUT WE’LL LET YOU STAY HERE IF YOU TREAT IT NICE.” It feels like we should be able to do a little more than that, but that seems like a good starting place at least. The time has come; a fact’s a fact.
Keith Pille lives in Minneapolis, unless he has frozen to death by the time this essay has run. Assuming he is not currently entombed in a block of ice, he writes articles and newsletters, draws cartoons, and makes podcasts (one about music, one about sea monsters). He shares his ice cave with his collage artist wife and a comically huge dog.