second round
(5) Scandal, “The Warrior”
BURIED
(4) Love and Rockets, “So Alive”
270-155
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
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 3/17/23.
The Walls of Heartache, or How I Learned to Like Things: alex berge on “the warrior”
Who’s the Hunter?
Technically, in this case, I suppose I am.
It was deep autumn, 2004. I was home from college for Thanksgiving. The sun set quickly by five o’clock and I was on my way to meet my parents and sister at a local restaurant called the Courtyard that my parents started frequenting just after moving to the Cleveland area and just before I was born. That year was 1984.
I found 106.5, the very controlled eighties and nineties station that played great, safe pop music. I loved 106.5 because it was easy. You know the kind. I turned into the parking lot as Eddie Money was finishing up “Take Me Home Tonight.” Then, without any introduction: boom. The bass drum, tuned low enough to scare off or attract wild beasts, chunks in with the floor tom and cymbals. Crashing and thudding all at once. And then the snare, a gunshot somewhere in the distance. And that was just the first measure. The guitars washed over me, and the vocals bellowed out of my ‘95 Eagle Talon’s speakers like a triumphant siren, as if calling the listener to some new kind of ritual.
I found a parking spot quickly, which is good because by the time the first verse started, I was no longer giving much attention to driving. I sat and listened to the rest of the song, hoping to find out who had done it so I could get back to my dorm room and effectively poison my computer downloading it from Limewire.
Then, some heartache. Phil Rudd’s sticks clicked against the rim and side of his snare. Then on the soft hi-hat. One-two. Then the chords. “Back in Black” started without any mention of the bang bang song I’d just heard. So, like many of us, I remembered as many of the lyrics as I could to search on my parents’ gigantic and arthritic Gateway when we got home from dinner.
That is the long way of telling you that very likely, the phantom tune I had just heard was probably playing on the radio when my parents and sister first started going to that restaurant. That in that same parking lot 20 years earlier, in 1984, nearly four months prior to my gracing the scene, I might have heard those chords and that chorus, somehow. But only if you believe in that sort of thing. I kind of do.
Like many songs now forever etched into my brain, Scandal’s 1984 pop masterpiece, “The Warrior,” found me embarrassingly late, which is not something easily admitted by a person who decided in high school that he would define himself by being an erudite music ingester: not just a listener but someone who went even deeper than simply liking or not liking a song or band. This posture led to an identity of sorts, a dramatic tacit plea for others to think I was smart and cool. I’d have given nearly anything to dip my toe into being mysterious, but I settled. Or at least that was my perception.
But I didn’t own up to the fact that I was—and still am—someone who simply likes what I like and doesn’t like what I don’t. I am no different than anyone else who listens to music, or reads books, or watches TV, or has a hobby, or has been to a mall. Over the last decade or so, I have tried to tell myself the truth: I’m not a music snob, and, truly, I never was because any worthy music snob probably wouldn’t have been 20 years old before hearing the song I’ve been fortunate enough to write about for this tournament. I was never a music snob because I’ve never done the work to truly be one.
Now that I am looking back on that experience of encountering a song that had already existed for two decades, researching and internalizing everything I can about it, there’s something haunting about how after that unwitting introduction, it started popping up more and more, as if I had somehow activated it. This frequency illusion (known colloquially as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon) happens way too often with me—then and now—and that is in no way a brag. I guarantee you, the reader, have had many instances in which you learn something and then it becomes a part of your daily life, pointing out to you that everyone else around you had known about it, except you. For another quick example: ask me about my time with the concept of the “meet cute” mechanism in romantic comedies, one of my actual favorite genres. It’s a wild ride that will seemingly never end.)
The frequency at which I experienced “The Warrior,” which (suddenly) began playing at basketball games that winter, and now plays at every sporting event and eighties night I attend, as well as in the Home Depot on Halsted Street, on TV shows, etc., makes me wonder where this song was my literal whole life? I’m fine not knowing. But I’m glad I found it, because I’d love to tell you all about what I’ve learned about it in the nearly 20 years since that day. This isn’t the only song that’s caused me to perseverate. Not by a mile. But for a pop song from the eighties, this one deserves some extra thought.
Who’s the Game?
Scandal, featuring Patty Smyth.
That’s the band who recorded and performed “The Warrior,” and throughout many lineup changes, Patty Smyth seems to be the song’s heiress, a development that has always perplexed me, and not because I spent a few days confused about Patti Smith’s involvement with the band (none). Scandal only put out an EP in 1982 and a full-length in 1984 before, basically, disbanding. Patty Smyth is still putting out solo music and there is some footage of her performing “The Warrior” as recently as a few years ago. Some of the band members died or went off into other acts, but past that, I can’t get a good idea about what happened from the naming convention to the disbandment. But I did learn a great piece of trivia: Jon Bon Jovi toured with Scandal (ft. Patty Smyth) as part of the promotional tour for the Scandal EP. Wanting to know more, I fell face-first down a fun and unproductive rabbit hole after typing into the Google search bar, “Jon Bon Jovi Scandal.” The first Google headline reads, “Jon Bon Jovi Admits He’s Been ‘No Saint’” and when I saw that, I knew that was the rest of my night. It’s nothing that bad, at least nothing that I can see. But, to my original point, he was in Scandal for not quite a year before starting his own band. His Wikipedia page makes no mention of his time in Scandal, making me think (wish) there was some inter-band drama, which I’m a sucker for. I’m coming to terms with never knowing. There aren’t many videos showcasing his membership in the band, but they’re out there.
Speaking of the band’s first EP, Paul Shaffer (David Letterman’s sidekick) played the sixties throwback keyboard solo on, “Goodbye to You.” While Shaffer’s not in the actual video, this video is stellar and does much more work for the song and band than the video I’m about to launch into now for “The Warrior.”
The Warrior vs. The Warriors vs. Cats vs. Werewolf
Something I’ve done my whole life: Find a song, then listen to it until it’s tattooed onto my brain. Once I found out about this 20-year-old song, “The Warrior,” it found its way onto my many mixed CDs that played at parties and on car trips and in my shower and at night when I was staring at the oven waiting for a pizza to bake.
But I need to spend some time on the song’s official music video. At the time of my discovery, I hadn’t considered it even having a music video. Now, I know I didn’t think about that possibility because I’d never seen it on MTV or VH1 (which, of course), but also because in 2004, YouTube didn’t quite exist. It would be another few years before I saw it. Music videos have become my favorite medium and watching “The Warrior” again recently didn’t hold the ironic laughter it used to when considering its absolutely bonkers-ness. Instead I have been trying to dial into the something I will harp on a lot in this essay, for better or worse: songwriting and performance intent. This video cashed in all its 1980s-vibe chips and never looked back.
At once, the video pulls from many sources, many inspirations, and, potentially some others I can’t detect (would love to hear your thoughts!). This video from a YouTube show Professor of Rock, hosted by Adam Reader, definitely helped keep me oriented. The music video’s director, David Hahn (not this David Hahn, or this David Hahn, but maybe this David Hahn), had a vision that might have been associatively conceived based on Walter Hill’s spectacular film, The Warriors (1979), a brilliant movie I got to, no surprises, way too late in life. There is a familiar darkness, and, to a degree I love, a sensational and riveting silliness. For instance, within the first few frames of the music video, our perceived hero, Patty Smyth, has her goddamned kimono thrashed by an unknown antagonist, thus literally showing us that our hero is in a situation where being a warrior is not only warranted, but deeply encouraged. But it does little to support that idea or the song as it goes on.
Without relying on a play-by-play of a video you probably saw decades before I did, it’s hard to not marvel at the other obvious pillars the director comfortably leaned against. Less than a year earlier, Michael Jackson teamed up with John Landis to redefine the opportunities and limitations of music videos with Thriller (which has just a hell of an epigraph to kick it off; check it out if you aren’t familiar). And yes, you might have already thought it, but given his one confirmed IMDb credit for this music video, maybe Hahn felt that offering a generic, knock-off version of the iconic Broadway musical, Cats, would seal the viewers’ commitment to seeing just where in the hell this story might take them. But more and more, to me, the video’s aesthetic is as follows: “The Warriors” as live-action Cats. Purely to entertain and capitalize.
Watching it again and again, and hearing Patty Smyth talk about it in the aforementioned interview, this video nearly shows us exactly what the song is not about. We see protagonist Smyth singing to the camera as the same dingbat who clawed and probably destroyed her kimono engages in choreographed dance combat with a host of impossibly modern dance opponents, including a gang whose uniform are cargo nets. There’s also another combatant with a traffic-cone orange mask. That is about as thorough of a description as you need because the whole time, the camera keeps returning to Smyth, whose hair transforms and grows and looks more and more unwieldy even though, at this point, we know she is the Warrior, yet one who is watching this silver-toned threat prance around with other equally unattractive combatants only to find a sweet-looking distressed robo-damsel who seemingly needs help. In health or heart? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine, but I am fairly certain he goes ahead and kills her all the same.
Then, without warning or explanation, Smyth’s hair shoots up even higher as we see her face now painted in a red-white-black-and-blue Kabuki-style pattern. Every time I watch this video, nearing now maybe fifty times, I find myself foolishly feeling like we’re finally at Warrior time, that with her new look, not unlike Bruce Wayne sliding down the Bat pole, we are going to see the triumph that will match the song’s triumphant lyrics and music. The makeup doesn’t last long, though. As quickly as this transformation comes, it goes, with the Warrior back to normal-looking hair and no makeup. Sure, for 20-screen-seconds, there is a somewhat erotic dance to represent a fight between our Warrior and this witless, third-rate Rum Tum Tugger, but it ends with a clunky, pre-Dirty Dancing lift. That’s sort of it.
From here on out, the silver stalker stands steady with a one-thousand-lightyear stare as the Warrior continues belting out the awesome chorus. He does step in to help when she inexplicably falls over, neither faint-looking or physically hurt, and while I can’t really decipher that particular piece of choreography, I do wonder if Smyth resisted the makeup treatment in favor of showing her actual face. After all, music videos were created to sell the song, the album, and, if lucky, the band. There’s more to say about this video, of course, but I’ll end this rant by saying that looking back, with the power of knowing what we know now, it is a missed swing that this video didn’t do more work to support the song’s meaning. I think this song is rooted in strength. And, yes, I know it was a four-minute music video from 1984 and I should probably relax. Pop music by its very nature isn’t supposed to be taken so seriously, I know, and I agree there is no reason to shame a music video. Unless we choose to go a little further. Which I will always choose.
The Warrior of the Words
Serendipity strikes again. As if my relationship with this song wasn’t already filled with some quasi-ethereal circumstances, I learned a few weeks ago that of all years for me to be lucky enough to be in this tournament, it is also the year the song’s co-writer, Holly Knight, released a memoir, “I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties,” which I waited to be released before putting the finishing touches on this essay. There’s only one short chapter detailing the writing and legacy of the song, but one thing blisteringly obvious from the book is that Knight really did embody the female struggle in the music industry during that time, and has written figuratively countless hit songs in her career. But “The Warrior” is among the songs she wrote that remained a “theme song” for the rest of her life.
Lyrically, I think there’s a long-term intention and a short-term vision. In the larger sense, this song is aimed at giving the protagonist agency in heartbreak and loss. Its percussive verse lyrics feed into the anthemic chorus, which is what I imagine many listeners have held on to all these years (in 2004 I internet-searched “bang, bang, i am the warrior”). But how far does the feeling go? I have no idea, but I like to think that at least the germ of the song’s idea is rooted in women having not only a voice, but one that is fueled by unapologetic power.
Holly Knight teamed up with Nick Gilder (of “Hot Child in the City” infamy) to write “The Warrior” with no one in mind to sing it. At least at first. Producer and oft-songwriting collaborator of Knight’s, Mike Chapman, wanted a song for up-and-comer Patty Smyth but sat on the composition for a bit before taking it to Smyth (who was the perceived star of the band she was singing for, Scandal) to record. A year earlier, Knight and Chapman co-wrote “Love is a Battlefield” for Pat Benatar, which is richly and thematically foreboding. Chapman and Knight also wrote/rewrote one of the band Spider’s hits, “Better Be Good to Me,” which ended up being a Tina Turner hit. (Holly Knight was Spider’s early keyboardist.) This is all to say, that there was a fateful energy pulsing through these songs and Holly Knight had her hand on the switch, enabling powerful women to sing powerful songs in a sexist eighties climate that seemed tumultuous and terrifying. It never hurts to have women openly resisting the norms outlined by the Baby Boomer generation/all of history.
In NPR’s “The Women Behind the Music” series, Knight’s edition observes that “Knight wasn't just making statements for women. She described the shifting dynamics of relationships, suggesting that it might be better to unite and take on the world as a team. The fight metaphors in Knight's songs are a reminder that all's fair in love and war — and rock and roll.” I have no further questions.
“The Warrior”’s lyrics, a collaboration between Knight and Gilder, are as ridiculous as they are big. Given Knight’s vast songwriting catalogue, I would have reasoned politely that she must’ve penned most of the actual lyrics. For the sake of the song’s success and my grip on this essay, the lyrics are the lyrics. Nothing more. Nothing less. But in her memoir, Knight tells of the lyric-writing process, which she claims was pretty even in terms of word and line contribution. She says, “I told Nick that we needed to write the kind of male-driven lyrics that men were known for, but that a woman with balls could sing instead.” They succeeded because Gilder, after the song was complete, wanted to record it for himself.
But going further: I don’t think great songs need to always be at the caliber of an AOL Instant Messenger away message. Not all the time, at least. But if a song, deemed great by the critics and record sales, only has tangential and inaccessible lyrics, I often think it is a wasted opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, I admire what Max Collins of Eve 6 did with “Inside Out.” Chris DeMakes, of Less Than Jake, had Collins on his podcast (Chris DeMakes a Podcast) and to paraphrase, Collins tells DeMakes that he was never hoping to tell a story in “Inside Out,” rather he was aiming to use words that simply fit well together and propelled the song sonically. For me, at some point, the free association-style of lyric can pull me away from an otherwise good track. Same with poetry; sometimes, maybe a lot, it’s about how the words sound and that is where it ends. The feeling comes from sound, not meaning. I agree that both can be true and to great effect.
Speaking in generalities, for argument’s sake: Folk music lyrics aim to tell stories. Rap and punk lyrics often dive into real-world political and social plights. What do pop lyrics do, and what are they supposed to do? I think about this a lot, and have for years, since the early aughts when boy bands, teen idols, radio rap, and pop-punk/emo (not real emo) bands dominated. Again, in generalities, boy band lyrics intended to make listeners’ dreams feel tangible, band-member archetype by band-member archetype (Justin Timberlake vs. AJ McLean, etc.). Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, members of the teen pop resurgence, sang about being in a position for those dreams to come true even in the face of hardship. Radio rap in the early aughts was big on money and going to clubs and other embodiments of conspicuous consumption. And with a swift kick to my younger self’s glass chin, pop-punk and emo helped solidify that boys are indeed sensitive, regardless of how they look or act. Actually, sadly and unfairly, pop punk and emo songs often sermonized that girls who don’t love these bad/sad boys back ought to sit heavy with guilt. Always a hyper-focused agenda for pop/radio music, it seems, and I think, lyrically, “The Warrior” splits the difference and splits it well: amped-up, firm female empowerment on one side with over-the-top yet vague, big rock song cliches beaming out on the other. Other songs have done it, too, to great success. But since we’re on this specific journey together, here are a few highlights of “The Warrior”’s words.
First, the use of “bang, bang.” Shots fired. At the “walls” of heartache, no less. According to Knight’s memoir, this was a direct contribution from Gilder a little later into the song’s writing. That onomatopoeia sealed this song’s fate for admittance and tenure in the pop music canon. The move sticks with you and, at its core, is genuinely fun. It is a success on that front, without a doubt. Pop music is catchy. I get that.
Now we have imagery of guns. My wife recently said that she’d known about the song for a long time before she met me as well as a long time before I knew of the song, naturally. Her main point with these lyrics is that warriors, as we often think of them in history books and in popular culture, don’t really use guns. The rest of the lyrics, however, adhere to this insistence on the presence of firearms. “Love is a kill, your heart’s still wild,” evokes a sad Hemingway hunting expedition in Africa, not 1200 AD Japan or Mongolia. In the song’s defense, I’d say that being too literal with pop music is a tricky game. The point is as clear as can be, regardless of these nit-picks.
But then on November 2, 2022, I listened to the song in the shower. I have a shower playlist and yes, it is a weird amalgam of songs like “The Warrior” that have stayed with me closely for years. After the shower-listen, something felt different. It dawned on me: the Warrior is neither our protagonist, nor our antagonist. The Warrior, in song and video, is our narrator, our omniscient voice of relatability. The Warrior is telling us about something that has happened and is equally warning against it, but who is the audience? Other potential heartbreakers? Other women who might experience heartbreak? I looked more closely at the lyrics and while there are points of single-volley dialogue, this verse is the coolest sounding and most enigmatic in terms of intent:
You talk, talk, talk to me
Your eyes touch me physically
Stay with me, we'll take the night
As passion takes another bite
Oh, who's the hunter, who's the game
I feel the beat call your name
I hold you close in victory
I don't want to tame your animal style
You won't be caged
In the call of the wild
What, if anything, is this narrator saying? (Though “Your eyes touch me physically” is simply stunning and not in position for critique.)
Then I thought: the Warrior is talking to herself in what might be the most compelling pep talks I think any of us have been able to experience. You won’t be caged in the call of the wild. Clearly not talking to the person who wronged her. She is preparing herself for a fight and—maybe thinking too optimistically—she is preparing herself to never feel this way again. This is a song about empowerment, about getting knocked down and rising up again. If you survive.
Victory
It’s been a fun effort, delving into a song that might stick in your head for a while before sliding out into the comfortable ether populated by other popular music. Deep dives into these sorts of things—songs, books, movies, and so forth—have always kept me dialed in during times when I was untethered. It doesn’t matter that the video is stone-cold bananas, nor does it spoil anything that the lyrics and their meaning are nebulous yet loud. What matters is the feeling we can get from hearing a new-to-us song that we instantly love and then immediately wonder, Where has this song been my whole life? In the many instances I can claim these feelings, the moment always feels chosen, like that the time and circumstance were necessary. That if the moment had passed, my life might be somehow different, even on a minor-minor scale. Songs score our lives and the playlist will always change. Even if you forget about a song, the next time you hear it, it’ll sound different and the same, depending on where you are and who you’re with. Whether you consider yourself a stereo jungle child or not.
Born and raised in a Cleveland suburb, Alex Berge went on to earn his MFA in fiction. He is a current member of Poems While You Wait, a nonprofit writing collective, and is the former Associate Editor of CRAFT Literary. Alex’s work has appeared in Witness. He lives in Chicago with his wife.
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.