first round
(4) Love and Rockets, “so alive”
SAT DOWN
(13) Ta Mara and the Seen, “everybody dance”
249-136
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.
reid dossinger on ”so alive”
I’ll fight you on this: the late 80s were a cultural low point.
Place the blame where you want. Reagan and Thatcher, yuppies by extension, postwar opulence and comfort, boomer’s nostalgia and rockism, the VCR, Max Headroom and Clara Peller. Consumerism in short, I guess. Whatever went into the stew of greed, the ultimate taste was blandness. Pop culture had the cleverness strained out. Nothing existed in layers. Everything was what it was: sliced severely along demographic lines and served accordingly. Occasionally, blissfully, there was more than surface, but rarely.
More to the point, the late 80s were not a sonically adventurous place. Cymbals were banished. Bass was mixed like it was an embarrassment. Hi-hats had the door slammed in their face with a laughing, “Disco is over, man”. Compression ruled and its reign had no place for dynamics and those awful, human mistakes.
“Maybe,” you counter with more charity than I deserve, “you feel this way about that period because you were a lonely, self-isolated, confused, anxious teenager at the time. And you were that kind of kid in a bland, consumer-heavy city. Maybe that colored the way you took in all the TV and movies and music of the time?”
Sure, fair enough. But I’ve been revisiting the music of 1985-1989, and while there’s plenty of amazing music (there always is), it’s remarkable how even most of the rock and post-punk bands of the time couldn’t resist the clean, sterile sound that the modern studios offered them. Artists couldn’t resist using the then-new techniques to fix the flaws that frustrate any musician when they listen back to their recordings, which I totally get. It’s hard not to see, though, that lack of willpower to resist polishing recordings to perfection sucked the humanity out of so many could-have-been-great songs.
But the late 80s were the glory days for one thing: the sellout single.
I don’t mean this as a slight. It’s endlessly impressive to me when an artist makes a decision to purposefully write (or at least rework in the studio) a song that’s meant to appeal. It’s what pop music does all the time (hell, it’s what pop music is), but it’s great when a band not known for pop does a pop song in their own style and nails it.
The Cure did it the best with “Just Like Heaven”. R.E.M. did it perfectly with “Stand” and then horribly with that song that I won’t even mention by name. Talking Heads with “And She Was”, Pixies with “Here Comes Your Man”, Bob Mould with “See A Little Light”, the B-52s with “Roam” (while the goofier, more B-52s-ish “Love Shack” turned out to be the bigger and more enduring hit), Elvis Costello with “Veronica”, Echo & the Bunnymen with “Lips Like Sugar”. None of these acts were ever a stranger to a good hook, but all these songs seemed purposefully accessible; not necessarily meant to soar the pop charts (though if it did…oops! We weren’t trying, we swear!), but maybe at least expand the fan base by softening the edges and condensing the song into a beginner’s guide to the rest of the catalog.
Which brings us to the deciding point: Is “So Alive” a sellout single? How much was it just another song in Love & Rockets’ catalog that soared higher than its album mates vs an intentional step to take advantage of an era that suddenly allowed slightly darker, weirder hooks to hang out on the pop charts for a little while?
I have to pause here for a fun little bit of bias acknowledgment. Before the s/t Love & Rockets record that brought the world “So Alive” were two albums that played pretty big parts in my music nerd history. Express and Earth, Sun, Moon were little gateways for me; a couple of the musical breadcrumbs that lead me out of the narrow path of my conservative town, high school, and family and down a route to a wider palette of styles and worlds. Those albums were among the first I listened to that I felt challenged by, and Love & Rockets were one of the first bands I felt like I found on my own instead of just choosing from the offerings of the radio, MTV, or peer pressure.
So when “So Alive” hit the charts, I not only got a little taste of sweet “I knew them before you did”-style snobbery, but I could cherry-top it with a disappointment that was both genuine and an indulgence of said snobbery. “Oh, this isn’t as good as their early stuff.” You know you said it, too. And if you didn’t, you missed out. It was pretty fun.
My verdict on “So Alive” here and now, after all these years? Sellout single. There weren’t any thrilling psychedelic twists like in “Kundalini Express” and “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)”. It stuck on a single groove and had a repetitious chorus that still strikes me as a conscious hook device, and the backing vocalists are a dead giveaway.
But it’s a successful sellout single; a just-enough refinement of their sound to give them a huge hit and maybe be the kind of gateway to quality for other morose suburban kids the way that their previous albums were to me. And they did all that and were still good. The comparisons of the song to T. Rex (it’s practically a tribute) didn’t make sense to me at the time, but now they do, and I’m all slow-clap-and-smirk in my admiration at their cunning. Taking the formula that had been a genuine love and influence for them to cast a spell that shot them up the charts? Genius, fellas. Genius.
And, reader, this story has a happy ending. Sellout singles are no longer a thing. This century has found the joy in celebrating pop. An artist reaching for hooks that are meant to be enjoyed has zero level of shame now as they were expected to have in the 80s. Smoothed, hookier versions of an artist’s style is maybe described as “more accessible”, but everything from pop to experimental is judged on the same merits. Those albums that we snobs looked down on are now often held up as the classics; the high points of their artist’s careers. Shows how much we knew. Idiots.
But we can still have arguments about late 80s culture (yes, this is an invitation).
Reid Dossinger has been a music nerd for [redacted] decades, and will talk your ear off and/or pepper you with questions to prove it. In fact, he feels a strong measure of pride when he’s told “you think a lot about this”. Goddamn straight. He also flings musical likes at https://www.tunemine.com.
“Everybody Dance” by Kay Keegan
In twenty years I have had four students who could listen with superhuman attention. All of them were dancers. —Sarah Manguso
Ta Mara and the Seen’s “Everybody Dance” is an underrated single from 1985 that encapsulates a specific sonic era. Its rhythm carries remnants of seventies disco while its lyrics and synth-wave instrumentation evoke time spent at the roller rink, or the mall, and the prevalence of youth-based consumerism that exploded in the eighties (rewatch Stranger Things if you weren’t alive during this decade). Most importantly, “Everybody Dance” makes your butt wiggle.
Songs commanding the listener to get up and dance are nothing new and could be contained in their very own subcategory of pop. Chic’s “Everybody Dance” (1977) shares a title and persuasive core with Ta Mara and the Seen’s single, and by fast forwarding to the early aughts, Lady Gaga’s 2008 breakout hit, “Just Dance,” features the same demand. If you prefer Gaga’s “Poker Face” though, with a keen ear, you might detect that her pre-chorus filled with growling, busty “Oh”s resembles the melody of Margie Cox’s coquettish “Oh”s of “Everybody Dance.”
*
Writing about a song that’s titled “Everybody Dance” and then showing nobody dancing just doesn’t make sense. For extra credit, I ask my college writing students to record themselves dancing to this song. Poor attendance is a problem, and to incentivize dancing, I promise to expunge 2 unexcused absences from their fall semester attendance records. After almost fifteen weeks of place-based academic writing, not having to create a works cited page or consider the Rhetorical Triangle sounds pretty enticing. I frame the extra credit assignment as collaborative art to avoid an accidental FERPA violation. The students know that if they submit a video, there’s nothing stopping me from sharing it.
*
I do not have the standard backstory of the typical dancer. Instead of lessons in preschool, I started ballet when I was sixteen. I would have started sooner, but I was too scared to broach the subject with my parents. Ballet lessons cost money, and we didn’t have any. Somehow, my mom scraped together enough for the first year of tuition, and when I wanted to resume lessons the following year and there was no money left, my ballet instructor turned out to be a benevolent goddess who said I could be a part of the work-study program: scrubbing toilets and refilling paper towel dispensers for ballet lessons at reduced cost. Like most ballet instructors, her hard-ass reputation preceded her, but I always liked the teachers who were no-nonsense, and they always liked me in return. I wasn’t a kiss up. I was a good listener who liked rules.
Ballet drew me in with its sense of order and discipline because my teens were filled with chaos. My parents were separated-and-not-yet-divorced, and they fought nearly every day—to the point where the police showed up on occasion. My mom was jobless and battling clinical depression, staying in bed for days at a time while my dad got in the habit of blowing off work on payday and spending most of his earnings at nearby casinos. The house I grew up in was in the process of being foreclosed since we were in the middle of the housing crisis and my parents’ poor decisions and suboptimal mental health didn’t help either. That’s about as concise as I can make this weird saga without incriminating anyone.
Ballet held my interest for so long because it was an athletic activity that supported my eating habit and required laser focus. A ballet studio is not a place where the mind can wander. If I didn’t pay attention to basic instructions, it was too easy to get lost and look like an idiot. I loved the intense concentration that was required because it meant I had to wipe my brain clear of anything that cluttered my mind prior to class.
*
Ta Mara and the Seen formed in Minneapolis, about two and a half hours southeast from where I grew up in Minnesota. In a short interview with Dick Clark on American Bandstand, the band’s lead vocalist, Pegi Ta Mara, aka Margaret Cox, aka Margie Cox, looks and speaks like the prototypical Dairy Princess—blonde hair, blue eyes, straight teeth, and like many Midwesterners, her voice sounds the way the rolling plains of Minnesota appear. All measured undulations, no steep peaks or valleys, content with long pauses between both places and sentences.
Margie Cox can really sing, and her vocal prowess is more apparent in her collaborations with Prince. Margie can be seen performing as a back-up vocalist in grainy video footage of one of Prince’s first Saturday Night Live appearances. She’s wearing what looks like a bedazzled police cap and a black leather jacket over a skimpy-sexy gold dress. “Everybody Dance” is an earworm, to be sure, but it doesn’t smolder like “Electric Chair” or scorch like “Standing at the Altar.” Cox remarked on her “Everybody Dance” vocals in a 2013 interview: “My singing was light and airy because that was the style then. If I would've sang with my funky Chaka [Khan] voice or Aretha [Franklin] voice, it wouldn’t have fit the tune. You know? So, I sang it a little lighter and ‘airier.’ That worked. It went with the song really well. It was a stylized song. (Jesse Johnson) wrote that by himself.”
*
When I introduce this optional extra credit assignment in class, dancing for a better grade, essentially, I play Ta Mara and the Seen’s song at a loud volume that surely annoys my faceless colleagues in the adjacent classrooms, and I dance like an idiot. I don’t care. My teaching methods are unconventional and dancing in front of college students does not faze me. A decade ago, my first real teaching job was as a dance instructor and wearing only leotards and tights as standard work attire shaped the rest of my teaching career not insignificantly. Basically, my barometer for what’s embarrassing (and what’s not) is broken.
As an instructor, I revel in improvisation, and I go where the learning is happening. My lesson plans look more like lesson suggestions, and I don’t think anyone is all that surprised when I start dancing.
Teaching is just another kind of performance and I feel called to give my writing students thirty seconds of unabashed foolishness by dancing in front of them, demonstrating how I never ask students to try something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself.
*
In the fall of 2012, and no more than 24 hours before my first day teaching jazz dance to eighth graders, I take a turn at an intersection too sharply while riding my bike home from campus. My heavy backpack laden with books flies over my head, launching me over the handlebars. A large red pick-up truck slows to a dead crawl so the driver can watch my bicycle accident in real time without braking to ask if I’m okay. The house I share with five other college girls is only a block away where I dress my wounds at the kitchen sink. My palms and knees sting under the wash rag. Pink, soapy rivulets of water and blood run down my bare legs and soak into my white socks.
The next day at the dance studio, I look like a wreck. The fresh scrapes on my knees bleed through their bandages and my tights while I teach. It doesn’t help that I unwittingly wear an old pair of tights with a ragged hole in one ass-cheek that I can’t hide under my leotard.
The following week, when I return to teach, I wear a pair of new(ish) tights I inspected for runs and holes underneath a standard black leotard, leaving more to the imagination. My knees are properly scabbed, and I don’t bleed out on the dance floor.
One lovely and lanky student with scoliosis declares that I was put on this earth to teach her how to dance. Her positive endorsement probably helps prevent me from getting fired.
*
I start taking ballet lessons again after a 4-year hiatus. The leotard and tights still fit. The outfit is more forgiving than one might think—a good leotard will stretch to fit the contours of your body while offering light compression to tuck in the bits of yourself you might not like. It’s just Spanx.
Here I am, thirty-one, with a brain that houses everything I need to know to get through a ballet class and a body that can no longer articulate simple combinations and sweats abundantly. I never used to be a sweaty person. Once, I needed a whole decade to glide through a single stick of Old Spice deodorant. What happened?
The combinations the ballet instructor asks the class to execute all make sense from the neck up. From the neck down, my body does not possess the supple fluidity from a decade of lessons. Just as I predicted, after years away from a dance studio, my technique is shit.
*
While researching Ta Mara and the Seen, I find Margie Cox on Facebook. She’s a singer in a funk band, Dr. Mambo’s Combo. The band has a Gmail address. I send a brief query asking to interview Margie. I wait a week, a month, four months. There’s no reply. I know there’s a phone number for the bar in the Twin Cities where Dr. Mambo has a standing weekly gig. I hate using the telephone. I’m convinced nobody has enjoyed using the phone since Alexander Graham Bell patented it in 1885. I know I should at least call the bar, pursue the interview subject, even if nothing comes of it, and I want to die. This is why I didn’t study journalism.
I talk myself out of it and I hate the cowardice that seizes me any time I face social interactions with strangers. Dancing? Fine. Public speaking? Fine. Dialing ten digits and waiting for someone to answer? Give me Xanax or give me death.
*
A writing student says, “The song actually isn’t that bad.” The closest sign of approval from someone who wasn’t even alive when “Everybody Dance” was released. To be fair, neither was I, but I know a bop when I hear one. I play the song again at the end of class. The guitar solo screams into the hallway through the open door. How often do students get their own exit music?
*
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity. —Sarah Manguso
Kay Keegan teaches writing at the University of Memphis. Her prose can be found in Essay Daily, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and New Ohio Review, and her photography has been featured in The New York Times. She’s currently writing an essay collection on female rage, a novel about horny vampires, and is trying to get better at roller skating.