(14) CAPTAIN & TENNILLE, ”MUSKRAT LOVE”
shredded
(8) chuck berry, “my ding-a-ling”
357-256
to reserve its spot in the final four

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those of you who will not sing: martin seay on “my ding-a-ling”

“My Ding-a-Ling” was Chuck Berry’s only number-one hit.
I’m going to say that again. “My Ding-a-Ling” was the only song Chuck Berry ever recorded that hit number one on the Billboard pop charts.
Chuck Berry, y’all.
Like a confident litigator who calls no witnesses and simply states that the correct verdict is self-evident from the facts at hand, I am tempted to end my March Badness essay right here. By any metric you can think of—misguided conception, half-assed execution, unworthiness of its performer, unmerited popularity relative to the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, the sweeping systemic out-of-jointness that its success represents—“My Ding-a-Ling” is obviously the worst song in the modern history of popular music. And it ain’t close.
But bad things have much to teach us about where value resides, though their lessons can be painful. To that end, let’s spend a moment with each of the three major elements of the catastrophe:

1. “My Ding-a-Ling” was

2. Chuck Berry’s

3. only number-one hit. 

1 

In each of its recorded iterations, “My Ding-a-Ling” is a song about having a penis.
The version we’re most directly concerned with is the one issued as a single by Chess Records in July of 1972, the one that held the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in October of that year, thereby qualifying for the present contest while causing a couple of vastly superior songs—“Use Me” by Bill Withers and “Burning Love” by Elvis Presley—to peak at number two. In a narrow technical sense this is the best “Ding-a-Ling” on record, in that it announces its aims most clearly and achieves them most successfully. (But should we at this point consider whether we ought to call it the best when those aims are deleterious? When a song is fundamentally bad, shouldn’t we want it to be less effective? Wouldn’t it be better if it were worse?)
The first important thing to note about “My Ding-a-Ling” is that many people are to blame. Sleeve notes always credit Berry as the song’s only author, which he definitely was not; the original was written by Dave Bartholomew, a legendary New Orleans bandleader, producer, and arranger who—along with a small, scattered coterie of collaborators and rivals—determined in the years following World War Two what the next half-century of popular music was about to sound like. (In addition to being an architect of what became known as the New Orleans sound, Bartholomew wrote or co-wrote classics like “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday,” “I Hear You Knocking,” and “Ain’t That a Shame”; suffice to say that “My Ding-a-Ling” is not among his best work.) In 1952 Bartholomew and his band recorded it for both the Imperial and King labels, under two different titles; a couple of years later, Imperial released a new version—now called “Toy Bell,” still crediting Bartholomew as the composer—by the Bees, a group mostly remembered for launching the solo career of singer Billy Bland.
Bartholomew’s own renditions of the song are just straightforwardly dumb. In them the eponymous ding-a-ling is a euphemism more than a double entendre: very little attempt is made to suggest non-penile connotations. The Bees—maybe hoping to attract a larger, more respectable audience by imparting some semi-plausible deniability—were the first to introduce the ironic frame that defines Berry’s hit: the opening declaration that the ding-a-ling is literally a toy bell, and not, y’know, whatever you filthy people might be thinking. This move allows the singer to address a double audience by adopting a childlike faux-naïf persona that matches the baby-talk register of the title phrase, a persona that’s further bolstered by the addition of a new verse set in Sunday school and by the rearrangement of Bartholomew’s original verses into roughly auxological/gerontological order, concluding as follows:

When you’re young and on the go
Your ding-a-ling won’t ever get sore.
When you are old and you’ve lost your sting
You won’t need the doggone thing.

None of these records charted. Like an unexploded mustard-gas shell deep beneath a Flemish field, “My Ding-a-Ling” lurked in sinister obscurity for years. And then Chuck Berry came along.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened. In his deeply strange, often creepy, occasionally amazing 1987 autobiography, Berry writes that he “had been singing it for four years prior” to its ascendancy as a hit single; this curiously specific timeframe is probably an oblique reference to “My Tambourine,” his first documented crack at adapting it, which appears on his 1968 album From St. Louie to Frisco. Although Berry began his recording career on the scrappy independent Chess, and to Chess he’d soon return, “My Tambourine” dates from his lackluster three-year stint on the much larger Mercury; one suspects that Mercury and its attorneys were somewhat less shrug-emoji about intellectual property rights than Chess was, because there’s quite a bit of daylight between Berry’s “Tambourine” and his “Ding-a-Ling”: the central metaphor, obviously, is different, and so is the melody. The end product circumvented legal jeopardy mostly just by sucking in an uncommitted way, and thus not attracting much attention. The copious reverb, probably slathered on to make Berry seem relevant to kids accustomed to heavier rock, doesn’t suit the song; meanwhile, the mambo-inflected rhythm is at least a decade out of fashion, and Berry’s hipster phraseology—“she dug my music and my routine”—seems forced. By 1968 even the tambourine itself had largely passed its moment as a hippie signifier.
Also, the tambourine metaphor just doesn’t work. Penises, while roundish, are not generally wider than they are long; nor, absent certain modifications, do they jingle. More to the point, “tambourine” wasn’t an established code word for much of anything, whereas most speakers of American English would have understood Bartholomew’s anatomical referent immediately. While the entry for “ding-a-ling” in the Oxford English Dictionary does not indicate its usage in print to mean “penis” prior to 1972, this is one of those areas where print lags common parlance. “Tinkle,” somewhat relatedly, was in place prior to the midcentury as an onomatopoetic euphemism for urination; from there, the resemblance of a flaccid penis to the swinging clapper of a bell is a pretty easy leap. “My Tambourine” advantages itself of none of this, and without nailing the anatomical metaphor, the song never comes together. The last verse, in which the tambourine is “linked up” to a tenuously vaginal graduation ring, is a complete conceptual disaster.
But in this version we do find two elements that show a path forward. The first is the rhyme of “grammar school” with “vestibule,” which is actually really good, a move that only a few other pre-hip-hop lyricists of note—Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Bob Dylan, maybe Willie Nelson—could have come up with, and that any of them might have admired. The second is Berry’s adjustment of the original lyrics to amplify themes of preadolescent sexuality and to remove references to senescent impotence, topics that are respectively extremely on- and extremely off-brand for him. “My Tambourine” was a misfire, a venting of steam that hinted at the churn of as-yet-unseen magma; “My Ding-a-Ling” was not done with Chuck Berry, nor he with it.
Flash forward to February 1972, the Lanchester Arts Festival, the Locarno Ballroom in Coventry, England. Early in his career—mostly to maximize revenues, and probably on some level to minimize his personal and professional entanglements—Berry had adopted the unusual practice of touring without a band: he’d tell each promoter to provide him with a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier and a competent local group, he’d show up with his guitar minutes before showtime, and the concert would begin, with no rehearsal, not even a setlist. (Early in his career Bruce Springsteen was in one of these local bands; in a 1987 concert documentary he recalled the extent of the guidance he got from Berry: “I said, ‘What songs are we going to do?’” “And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to do some Chuck Berry songs.’ That’s all he said.”) If the musicians were shaky, the shows could be awful; if they had good ears and were fast on their feet, they could be great. The show in Coventry went pretty well. Chess had had it recorded—allegedly without Berry’s knowledge—and used much of it as the second side of The London Chuck Berry Sessions, an LP released later that year.
These unrehearsed gigs also went better when the audience was enthusiastic, and by all accounts the crowd in the Locarno Ballroom was nuts. Berry was known for playing short sets and doing no encores; he didn’t encore in Coventry, but he did extend his set, feeding off the room’s energy, and this created consternation for the festival organizers. By the time he finished up with a blazing “Johnny B. Goode” he’d run over his allotted time by fifteen minutes; the Sessions LP ends with the crowd chanting We want Chuck! as the emcee pleads with them to settle down so Pink Floyd can take the stage. If you listen closely enough you just might be able to hear the spark of UK punk in that moment.
Anyway, the main reason why Berry ran over his allotted time is that when the emcee signaled him to come off, he instead turned back to the crowd and played “My Ding-a-Ling.”
For eleven and a half minutes.
Seriously. Berry’s original recorded version of “My Ding-a-Ling”—under that title, at least—is ten seconds longer than “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Now, to be fair, most of that runtime consists of Berry’s instructions to the audience and his salacious patter between verses. Then again, to be fair, salacious patter between verses is a huge part of what his “Ding-a-Ling” is all about.
If the folks at Chess knew they had a hit on their hands, there’s no real evidence of it. As Bruce Pegg recounts in his unauthorized Berry biography Brown Eyed Handsome Man, the trip to England didn’t yield as much usable material as the label had hoped: Berry’s microphone blew midway through the Coventry show, rendering most of the audio unusable. (Half of The London Chuck Berry Sessions consists of hastily-scheduled studio recordings that turned out surprisingly well, thanks in large part to the recruitment of three excellent players: keyboardist Ian McLagan and drummer Kenney Jones of the Faces, and bassist Ric Grech of Blind Faith and Traffic.) Had that mic not blown, it’s not clear that “My Ding-a-Ling” would have made the cut.
As the story goes, after the LP came out, Chess began to hear from a few radio deejays—all apparently unconcerned about their job security—who’d been playing “My Ding-a-Ling” on the air in its entirety, to an overwhelming response. In the early days, the Chess brothers had run their business with the understanding that every hit song is on some level a novelty song, and a certain measure of that spirit still remained in 1972; the label decided to take a scalpel to the full-length “Ding-a-Ling” with the hope of locating a coherent single therein. This daunting task fell to legendary producer Esmond Edwards—then Chess’s vice president for artists and repertoire, one of the industry’s first African-American executives—who had previously worked on recordings by Eric Dolphy, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane, among many others, and one can’t help but wonder whether he paused at his console for a moment to ponder the series of events that had brought him to this odd episode in his distinguished career. Edwards’s efforts yielded the four-minute, eighteen-second edit that Chess released in July of ’72, and that’s the one that worked its way inexorably, virulently up the Billboard charts.
A number of technical factors made “My Ding-a-Ling” a hit after “My Tambourine” wasn’t. The first, of course, is the restoration of Bartholomew’s original metaphor. The second, I think, is the freedom that the restored metaphor provided Berry to imaginatively inhabit the song. While Bartholomew’s and the Bells’ renditions are wry, cool, and a little philosophical—describing events in an indefinite past tense, making general observations about sexual potency and the waning thereof—Berry deploys his prodigious storytelling skills to sketch vivid, inventive, particular scenes that emphasize the corporeality of the ding-a-ling, presenting it not as a sexy metonym but as an organ: susceptible to injury, a site of compulsive pleasure. In Edwards’s edit this focus is even sharper, shorn of content that’s slack or redundant. (Edwards had the wisdom, for instance, to cut the Sunday school / Golden Rule verse that Berry had lifted from the Bees’ version, while retaining Berry’s own similar but superior grammar school / vestibule addition.) The pared-down material that remains, while not good, per se, will for damn sure hold your attention: it’s agitated, aroused, and anxious, live in more than one sense.
And that’s the biggest reason why Berry’s “Ding-a-Ling” hit: the fact that it was recorded live. The song’s humor, such as it is, requires an impression of spontaneity that’s antithetical to a studio recording. It also benefits from the presence of an audience, by way of the deeply-rooted human tendency to laugh when other people are laughing, a phenomenon to which innumerable mediocre improv troupes owe their subsistence.
Do we buy Berry’s assertion that he didn’t play “My Ding-a-Ling” live prior to 1968? We do not. Berry performs it like something he’s lived with, thought about, and road-tested for years. His rap with the audience—which is no less rehearsed than the song itself, as the multiple performances available on YouTube that I watched so you don’t have to (you’re welcome) clearly attest—has the feel of material that he developed in the early Fifties, in the little East St. Louis clubs where he got his start. By 1972 this is a song that he knows, that he’s been adding to, subtracting from, tweaking based on crowd responses, and generally making his own to such a great extent that he might have sincerely forgotten that he’d copped it from somebody else.
And, so, yeah, okay, a word about that.

2

“Leonard Chess had explained,” Berry writes, describing his preparations for his first professional recording session,

that it would be better for me if I had original songs. I was very glad to hear this because I had created many extra verses for other people’s songs and I was eager to do an entire creation of my own.

Berry’s autobiography abounds with statements like this. What seem at first like careless bits of self-incrimination are in fact rhetorical moves, gentle suggestions that those who’d accuse him of misbehavior might be using the wrong rulebook. From the outset Berry understood—quite correctly, and probably better than people on the business side of pop music cared to admit—that the distinction between original and borrowed material is not binary. For all his considerable sophistication, Berry thought of himself as participating in a folk tradition, one that includes blues and country and Cajun and calypso and every other music played by and for the working class, in fields and freight-yards and factories, brothels and barrooms and barrelhouses, a tradition that derives much of its vibrancy from being in unrestricted conversation with itself. He didn’t seem to acknowledge a huge difference between inventing something entirely new and just doing something somebody else came up with better than they had done it.
But this formulation gets a bit sticky in the extremely frequent instances when the artist who does the borrowing is doing it from a position of elevated privilege, particularly when that privilege is white. Berry and/or his record labels may have neglected a few footnotes over the course of his career, but he unquestionably gave more than he took, having been ripped off—reverently or cynically, directly or indirectly, with credit or without—six ways from Sunday by a large percentage of literally everybody who picked up a guitar at some point during the past 65 years.
Not all of Berry’s debtors were white, but the most successful certainly were. The story of the dawn of rock ’n’ roll is often told, but worth reviewing: starting in about 1955, the cohort of artists who were achieving commercial success by adapting jump blues into something distinctly modern was multiracial, with Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino keeping pace with Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Berry’s breakthrough single “Maybellene” was in fact the first pop hit by an African-American to outsell the cover versions of it released by white artists, an achievement that for a glittering moment suggested that interracial exchanges legally prohibited throughout much of the United States might yet be accomplished, in some small but significant way, through commerce in popular music. But as the days passed, white rock ’n’ rollers continued to emerge and prosper, while black rock ’n’ rollers generally did not, and within three or so years it was all pretty much over, with Elvis in the Army, Lewis in disgrace, Little Richard back in church, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper dead in a plane crash, and Berry… well, we’ll get to that in a minute. Fare such as “Stupid Cupid,” “The Battle of New Orleans,” and “The Purple People Eater” took over the charts, and for a time pop music went to shit again.
The significance of those rock ’n’ roll pioneers didn’t really become evident until the following decade, and even then you had to know what to listen for. The up-and-coming rock artists who repurposed this early material were generally honest, or at least frank, about citing their sources—to do so was proof of connoisseurship—but for the most part the audiences didn’t care, and without getting demand letters from attorneys the music industry wasn’t cutting anybody any checks. Of the first-generation rock ’n’ roll innovators, no one was plundered more extensively or blatantly than Berry. I’m not talking about Pat Boone covers here, or any other unambiguously cringey instances of whitewashing; we’re after bigger fish. Berry collected legal settlements from both the Beach Boys, whose “Surfin’ U.S.A.” uses the melody of “Sweet Little Sixteen” without attribution, and the Beatles, whose “Come Together” draws music and some lyrics from “You Can’t Catch Me.” While it’s not close enough to land anybody in court, the similarity of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to the comparably motormouthed “Too Much Monkey Business” is also pretty hard to miss.
As you may have noticed, I just named what are arguably the three most iconic white acts of the 1960s—the ones most often credited with Changing Music Forever—which leads me to a point that has gone unstated too long in this essay: Chuck Berry was a goddamn genius, securely numbered among the most consequential figures in the history of global popular culture. This cannot be overstated, and is not in dispute. In the concert documentary mentioned parenthetically above, Eric Clapton explains how “If you were going to play rock ’n’ roll, or any upbeat number, and you wanted to take a guitar ride, then you would end up playing like Chuck, or what you learnt from Chuck.” In 1961, on a train platform in Kent, a young man struck up a conversation with another whom he’d spotted carrying a copy of a Berry LP that was hard to get in the UK; the men’s names were respectively Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. In 1976, when Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan were putting together musical selections for the golden record placed aboard the Voyager deep-space probes—a record designed to communicate the essence of humankind to any extraterrestrial beings who might one day encounter it—the only rock song they chose to include was Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Steve Martin joked about it on Saturday Night Live, predicting the first message that Earth will receive from beyond our solar system:

Chuck Berry was a goddamn genius. Were this not the case, the sordid stupidity of “My Ding-a-Ling” wouldn’t be worth complaining about.
We should, however, try to be specific about of what exactly his genius consists. Strictly speaking there’s no aspect of Berry’s craft that hadn’t been done before; his most-often-cited innovations—onstage showmanship, overdriven electric guitar, two-string leads, pushing the rolling boogie-woogie of jump blues toward the more urgent two-four of Western swing—could all be plausibly claimed by predecessors and contemporaries, from Ike Turner to Bill Haley to Louis Jordan to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Berry’s contribution lay in putting the pieces together better than anybody else, and demonstrating the breadth of what the new form could accomplish.
“Maybellene,” the aforementioned breakthrough single, qualifies as a major compositional achievement even though it takes its rhythm and most of its melody from the Western swing tune “Ida Red.” In addition to his fast, noisy, not-quite-under-control guitar work, Berry supplies a new chorus and verses that establish him right out of the gate as one of the two most innovative lyricists of the 1950s. (The other one, Willie Dixon, happens to be the bassist on the recording.) Berry’s words glide along on the familiar melody, rushing with the music, dancing alliteratively among varying vowels, setting scenes and evoking action in a manner that any novelist might well envy. What’s particularly striking is his confidence, which may be the most rock-’n’-roll aspect of the performance: when he can’t find the right language to make a line work, he just coins his own and keeps going. “As I was motorvatin’ over the hill,” he sings; “motorvating” isn’t a real word, doesn’t mean anything, except suddenly it is and does: not only a word, but the perfect word.
Most importantly, Berry understood that true verbal mastery must always take account of the audience it addresses, and what that audience wants. In one form or another, “Ida Red” probably goes back to the Civil War; it had certainly been widely known for more than a decade when Berry first started playing it and similar material in the clubs where his career began. As he writes,

The music played around St. Louis was country-western, which was usually called hillbilly music, and swing. Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of the country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of the clubgoers started whispering, “Who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?” After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and trying to dance to it. If you ever want to see something that is far out, watch a crowd of colored folk, half high, wholeheartedly doing the hoedown barefooted.

Throughout his career Berry maintained an impressive unwillingness to stay in his lane. Whenever he encountered a pop genre or trend that seemed fun, interesting, or potentially lucrative—not just country, but blues, ballads, calypso, even Latin- and Italian-themed songs that were briefly in vogue—he’d take a swing at it, and an important aspect of his overall bequest to his successors is the modeling of this catholicity. He helped establish rock music as both a potent solvent of social and ethnic barriers and, not coincidentally, as the soundtrack of recuperative capitalism.
Of all the fence-hopping Berry did, the first instance remains the most notable: his discovery that African-American audiences—despite, or more likely because of, the towering legal and practical barriers that kept them separate from it—were utterly fascinated by the culture of their white working-class counterparts. That discovery made Berry a big draw in his native St. Louis, but it also hipped him to the flip side of that phenomenon: the fact that the fascination was no less intense in the other direction.
This was a realization that he needed the help of others to exploit. Here we should note that despite all the mythology surrounding its heroes, rock ’n’ roll was almost entirely the result of economic and demographic factors—i.e. the post-Depression baby boomlet hitting puberty, with the postwar baby boom close on its heels—as well as the rise of technologies that expanded these kids’ capacity to make consumer choices independently of their parents and other authorities: affordable cars, good highways to drive them on, portable transistor radios, and high-powered radio stations. The most important single figure in rock ’n’ roll isn’t a musician at all, but rather deejay Alan Freed, who popularized the term and helped define the sound by playing the records of both black and white acts in huge broadcast markets. (Freed is in fact credited as a writer on “Maybellene,” to which he contributed neither a word nor a note; the credit was a way for Chess to funnel him royalties in exchange for spinning its records, one of the shady practices that would end Freed’s brief career when the payola scandal broke in ’59.)
Musicians, of course, had been listening to each other across racial lines since forever, but these postwar technological advances made it possible for audiences, principally teenage audiences, to effortlessly traverse such lines without leaving the privacy of their homes and vehicles. A big part of Berry’s genius is the fact that he saw this shift coming, and understood what it meant. It’s noteworthy that many of his early songs—“Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B. Goode”—more or less announce themselves as cultural forces: they tell you what they’re doing even as they’re doing it.
Berry’s canny analysis of his young audience’s unspoken desires certainly helps explain why, starting in 1957 and continuing for several years thereafter, he wrote and recorded a series of singles that featured teenage protagonists, often set in schools. While never overtly unwholesome, songs like “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Almost Grown,” and “Little Queenie” were unmistakably intended to seduce teenagers, to affirm and encourage their agency, especially their sexual agency. This begins to seem a little creepy when we consider that Chuck Berry was thirty years old in 1957. Add a little more biographical context, and it begins to seem a lot creepy.
Because here’s the thing: in addition to being a genius, Chuck Berry was also, by many credible accounts, quite an asshole. This is a point that can be easily overstated, because the most-often-cited complaints against him—that he was rude, stingy, cold, mercenary, embittered, distrustful, deceitful, ungrateful, prone to engaging in head games and power trips at the expense of effective performances, and generally just shitty to deal with—can be largely explained, if maybe not entirely excused, by the shoddy and exploitative treatment he got from every corner of the music industry throughout his career, treatment that was often explicitly and just about always implicitly racist.
Some complaints about his conduct, however, are harder to dismiss. Though the consequences were worse than they would have been for a white musician in comparable circumstances, much of Berry’s trouble was at least somewhat earned, and of his own making.
In the early 1940s, if you had asked any resident of the Ville, a prosperous African-American neighborhood in St. Louis, to predict which of Henry and Martha Berry’s six children would go on to have a successful career in music, that resident a) would have known who you were talking about, and b) would definitely have answered Lucy, the third of the six, who was an accomplished mezzo-soprano and a skilled pianist who’d benefitted from an excellent music education at Sumner High School. The Berrys were a bourgeois family in a bourgeois neighborhood: Henry was an independent home-repair contractor and a Baptist deacon, and Martha was a well-read schoolteacher; she named her youngest son after the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The fourth child—Charles, later called Chuck—was known less as a musician than as a charismatic fuckup; he did give a memorable performance of a blues song at a school talent show once, but it was remembered less for its quality than for scandalizing the Sumner faculty, who maintained that such music was beneath the dignity of its pupils. Berry didn’t like school, and got held back a couple of grades, but he was still officially enrolled in 1944, when he and some friends committed and were arrested for a series of armed robberies and the theft of a vehicle. He received a ten-year sentence for the offenses, of which he served three.
This was not to be his last stint in prison. In 1960, just off the height of his fame, Berry was indicted under the Mann Act for transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes” in two separate incidents, respectively involving a white girl between sixteen and eighteen years old and a fourteen-year-old Apache girl. (It’s safe to assume that Berry wasn’t the only well-known musician having sex with teenagers, and therefore also safe to assume that race had some bearing on the prosecutor’s decision to charge.) Although acquitted in the first case—the young woman testified that she was in love with Berry, which the jury apparently accepted as evidence that the couple’s intent wasn’t immoral enough to be illegal—he was convicted in the second, and sentenced to five years. Berry’s attorney appealed based on energetically racist statements made by the judge; the Eighth Circuit agreed, and ordered a new trial, at which Berry was convicted again. This time the sentence was three years, of which he served twenty months at the federal lockup in Terre Haute, Indiana, beginning in early 1962.
As was noted in court and widely reported at the time of his sentencing, Berry was a thirty-three-year-old married man with three young daughters at home, and one imagines some concern around the Chess offices over whether his fans would desert him, just as many of Jerry Lee Lewis’s fans had jumped ship following the revelation that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin. These concerns turned out to be largely unfounded: Berry started recording singles again immediately after his parole, and some of them—including “No Particular Place to Go,” a humorous song about driving a woman around in an automobile with carnal intent, released four years after Berry was convicted of driving a woman around in an automobile with carnal intent—charted impressively, which suggests either that public mores had suddenly changed, or that Berry’s fans had already priced in his misbehavior, that it might even be part of his appeal.
In 1979 Berry pleaded guilty to evading federal income taxes and did four months in the federal correctional institution in Lompoc, California, a period that he seems to have almost enjoyed; according to his autobiography he treated it more or less like a writer’s residency, taking a typing class during which he banged out much of that very book. It was to be his last sojourn behind bars, though not his last brush with the law. In 1987, under circumstances that remain unclear, he hit a woman in the face at a hotel in Manhattan and drew an arrest warrant for assault; he eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and paid a fine to resolve the incident.
That’s not all. In his later years, Berry concentrated on various real estate and other business ventures, one of which was the Southern Air restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb where he had long maintained a sprawling compound. Berry’s first encounter with the Southern Air was a meal that he and his ne’er-do-well friends ate there in the days immediately prior to the crime spree that first landed him in prison; the restaurant was whites-only then, and they were served through a side window. His return years later to buy the place would have been a good basis for a heartwarming narrative of triumph but for subsequent events. In 1989 Berry was the target of a class-action lawsuit by group of women alleging that they had been videotaped without their knowledge or consent while using the restroom at the Southern Air; the prosecuting attorney of St. Charles County was also gearing up to charge Berry with multiple felonies—including child abuse, based on the fact that children had been among those videotaped—and probably would have done so had he not been defeated in his reelection bid. In Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Bruce Pegg argues persuasively that the nationally-publicized Southern Air affair was driven by the animosity and greed of a couple of disgruntled employees, the prosecutor’s political aspirations, and the longstanding racist hatred that many residents of St. Charles County felt toward Berry. What Pegg cannot dispute, and all but confirms, is that Berry had indeed been shooting voyeuristic videos of the women’s restroom. Eventually he paid out a settlement, and the issue slowly went away. Berry remained in Wentzville and continued to play regular gigs until 2017, when he died at the age of ninety.
What’s most disturbing about Berry is the inescapable suggestion that these two major traits—virtuosic pied piper of America’s youth, and sexually compulsive predator—cannot be disentangled: that his genius cannot be easily extricated from his bad behavior, that the latter infests the former to its core. Part of the dangerous, faintly illicit thrill of Berry’s best music comes from the impression of these tendencies circling each other, sparks arcing through the gap between them, achieving an unstable equilibrium.
And part of what makes “My Ding-a-Ling” so awful comes from the impression of this equilibrium collapsing, just utterly showing its ass.

3

Near the end of his autobiography, Berry advances a rather peculiarly-worded vision of a future “when all races and nationalities in the United States will be merged”:

Now, wouldn’t that be real nice? A one-race, normal-face, average-shade, medium-made, balanced-weight, open-fate society with no disturbing variants. […] But there’s no way people would be content with such monotony. It just wouldn’t work.

Read in 2020, that sounds painfully like the sort of optimistic, daydreamy prediction that one might remember hearing expressed circa 2009; I suspect it fell similarly upon the ear when it was published in 1987, evoking a strain of facile, fatuous hippiedom that hadn’t aged particularly well.
What strikes me as interesting is, first, that it’s an unusual idea to see expressed by an African-American musician, given the history of such sentiments being used opportunistically by white people to avoid confronting persistent injustice and unacknowledged injury; black music post-James-Brown has tended to emphasize dignity and visibility, rather than aspiring toward some post-racial amalgamation. Berry’s rise to fame, of course, had been closely associated with exactly this sort of ethnic boundary-blurring, but it manifested in other aspects of his life, too; Pegg, for instance, documents the light-skinned Berry’s early efforts to pass himself off as American Indian or Polynesian, and Berry himself writes with amusement about his use of photographic tricks to appear white in publicity photos. When he wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” Berry reports, he decided to make Johnny hail from Louisiana because New Orleans was “where most Africans were sorted through and sold”—but he also changed the original lyric from “colored boy” to “country boy,” so as not to “seem biased to white fans.” This move—simultaneously evoking and evading the topic of race—is extremely Chuck Berry.
The second (and more) interesting thing about this post-racial vision is the degree to which it’s specifically bodily, and implicitly libidinal. The merging that it posits is presented as purely genetic, not social or cultural, and population-scale genetic merging requires a bunch of promiscuous, procreative sexual intercourse. I mean, it just does. This tendency to understand society in principally libidinal terms is also reflected in the summary of Berry’s heritage that appears in one of his early chapters; it emphasizes his mixed African, Anglo, and indigenous American ancestry, and reads like a softcore adaptation of Genesis 5: genealogy as erotica.
If we step back and look at Berry’s life as a whole—his crossing of racial lines in both music and sex, his disregard for the age of consent, his wantonness throughout his seventy years of marriage, his unapologetic criminality, his refusal of professionalism as a live performer, even his casualness about copyright—a pattern emerges, which is the willful obliteration of distinctions and limits. Given that bourgeois values are chiefly defined by the strict maintenance of distinctions, I would argue that Berry is probably best understood as an anti-bourgeois artist.
Bourgeois values are stuffy as hell, I get that. Berry smashed a lot of extremely tacky shit during his cartwheels through America’s china closet, shit that needed smashing. But the problem with obliterating bourgeois strictures willy-nilly is that a more equitable means of organizing society doesn’t automatically materialize to take their place; in practice, what emerges often ain’t pretty, as any number of early-70s Laurel Canyon songwriters observed. When we cease to regard one another sentimentally, we usually end up regarding one another instrumentally instead, much as Berry seems to have regarded fellow musicians, concert promoters, and the young women with whom he had sex. Viewed from this standpoint, our very personhood recedes, becoming fictional, false.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that Berry’s attitudes were first manifested, and may have originated, in the dynamics of the prosperous household where he grew up: the strict religious parents, the large group of siblings, the praise and local renown accrued by a gifted older sister. Of all the telling anecdotes in Berry’s autobiography, one that describes his rivalry with that sister—years before he had the self-possession to write “Roll Over Beethoven”—strikes me as particularly revelatory:

Lucy, becoming more and more sophisticated in music at school and at home, was constantly gaining recognition for her singing accomplishments. Playing and singing her classical songs consequently gave her priority above any of us to play the piano at home […] which greatly limited by growing enthusiasm for picking out my favorite boogie-woogie numbers. I got so mad at her one day that I broke wind in one of Mother’s old fruit jars, put my hand over it, came back, and set it out on the piano in front of her to pollute her playing.

There you have it, my friends: “My Ding-a-Ling” is the jarred fart of modern popular music. Because, let’s be honest, if it were merely a bad song by one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, it still wouldn’t be worth complaining about. (Few among us, by comparison, spend time and emotional energy bemoaning the existence of Bob Dylan’s “Wiggle Wiggle.”) What qualifies it as the absolute worst is its reach, its power, its demonstrated ability to infect and to spoil.
What’s upsetting about “My Ding-a-Ling”—Chuck Berry’s only number-one hit, you’ll recall—is the fact that it was rewarded so abundantly. Not even that, it’s the fact that it was rewarded so abundantly when it was the worst thing Berry ever recorded, while the best things Berry ever recorded are among the best things anybody ever recorded. It’s almost Lovecraftian in its perfect wrongness: an aperture to a world in which our lofty ideals and principled aspirations are parodied and defiled… or, worse, through which that world has already permeated our own.
Listen to him one more time, cooing instructions like he’s running icebreaker activities at an orgy. Berry repeatedly addresses the predominantly teenage audience as “children,” putting himself in the role of tutor, which would be risqué coming from just about any performer given the nature of the material; coming from Berry, less than a decade out from his Mann Act incarceration, it’s positively squirmy. And the kids love it. Listen to the singalong, the creeping participation, the compliant self-sorting by sex. We want Chuck! To what extent is their enthusiasm sincere, and to what extent sarcastic? Are they laughing with him? At him? Both? To what extent is Berry in on the joke? Does it matter? Those of you who will not sing / you must be playing with your own ding-a-ling! Ha ha ha! Onanism and fucking: there is nothing else.
When we hear a great song—“We’re in the Money,” “These Foolish Things,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “La Vie en rose,” “Bésame Mucho,” “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” “That’s All Right,” “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” “Respect,” “I Want You Back,” “Inner City Blues,” “Águas de Março,” “Mannish Boy,” “Heroes,” “I Will Survive,” “Time After Time,” “This Charming Man,” “Raspberry Beret,” “How Will I Know,” “Check the Rhime,” “You Oughta Know,” “Single Ladies,” “Dancing on My Own,” click the links, listen to that shit, you owe it to yourself—our embodied experience of the world is enriched and expanded, and we’re freshly amazed at what human beings in our best moments can create. These songs leave us more alive, more alert to the present moment and the possibilities that spill from it.
“My Ding-a-ling” does more or less the opposite, suggesting that despite any and all pretentions to the contrary, we amount to no more than genitals schlepped around by motile meat. We not only accepted this message but sought it out, insisted that it be dumped onto our airwaves, demanded through our sheer numbers that it be packaged for individual sale, the better to throw our money at it. We split ourselves in two; we laughed and we sang. We wanted this, and chose it. It is what we are. 

Martin Seay’s debut novel The Mirror Thief was published by Melville House in 2016. Originally from Texas, he lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.

ELENA PASSARELLO ON “MUSKRAT LOVE”

Muskrat mating season begins in March. I doubt Texas songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey knew this when he composed his now-infamous ballad of Susie and Sam—those two muskrats with bewilderingly WASP-y names. According to Ramsey’s misguided and possibly ‘lude-induced lyrics, the coital behaviors of muskrats include: eating bacon and cheese, the jitterbug, and a sort of ambiguous and whirling frottage, all of which takes place by candlelight. In fact, the song we all know as “Muskrat Love” was originally called “Muskrat Candlelight,”—a problematic detail, since muskrats do most of their mating in the water.
If it’s March when you’re reading this, you can bet your ass that right now, in some nearby wetland, a real-life muskrat Sam is hunting for his Susie. Finding her isn’t as mellow-gold as Ramsey imagines it, however, because there are often myriad Sams vying for the fittest Susie of any given pond, fighting viciously throughout the month for the right to mount her. Males choose their queen based on the pungent scent she squirts from the oily glands encircling her anus. Maybe this biological fact appeared in Ramsey’s earlier drafts of “Muskrat Candlelight,” but then had to be cut for time.
The final lyrics aren’t wrong about all the muzzle-nuzzling, though, as many zoological texts list “kissing” and grooming as part of muskrat courtship. But things go off-script with the line about Sam sidling up to Susie and “rubbin’ her toes.” In reality, muskrats possess neither fingers nor toes—they’re more like half-webbed murder-mitts covered in needle-sharp hairs and topped with claws. And since it’s not uncommon for aggressive muskrats to use those claws against rivals, when a real-life muskrat offers his paramour a foot rub, the claws he uses to massage her might still be sticky with the viscera of his enemies.
“How old are you?” skinny Sam might ask Susie while tickling her with his bloody digits.
“I just turned one, so I’m ready to breed!” she’d answer.
“You smell like a hot dumpster. Let’s get it on.”
The muskrat penis is wide and knob-tipped. It probably evolved these features to better maintain its purchase inside the slippery muskrat vaginal canal while the breeding pair “whirl and twirl and tangle” in the water. My favorite thing about muskrat sex (a phrase I never thought I’d type; thanks, Ander and Megan!) is the fact that two muskrats in flagrante delicto will occasionally take the humping to the next level by throwing their bodies onto a passing plank of driftwood, so they can float while they do it. I’m no biologist, but this is obviously some sort of twisted Titanic role-play, the finale of which involves Muskrat Susie pushing Muskrat Sam off the wooden plank, like Rose did to Jack in the movie. As she watches Sam sink to the muddy river bottom, Muskrat Susie climaxes.
Anyway. Sam and Susie’s floating kink—their musk-raft love, if you will—is a risky addition to their mating dance, since bonking on a log exposes the pair to predators. Raccoons pose the biggest threat to muskrats, though humans have also been known to hunt the rodents for their fur or, occasionally, their flesh. Eighteenth-century missionaries along the Detroit River were permitted muskrat during the Lenten meat fasts, and certain sects of the Michigan diocese still honor this with “Muskrat Friday” dinners from Mardi Gras to Easter (I’ve read that the meat tastes better if you drown it in sherry). Michigan’s raccoons are probably pissed that these Catholics keep poaching their food source every March. Unless, of course, said raccoons are Catholic, too.
The male half of the 1970’s duo Captain and Tennille, who isn’t a Captain and whose real name is Daryl, grew up Catholic but did so far away from any muskrat stew, in southern California. Both he and his wife/musical abettor Toni Tennille were vegetarians when they released their hit cover of “Muskrat Love” in 1976. And speaking of 1976—and of raccoons!—that same summer, Tennille went to a coke party at Gordon Lightfoot’s house where everyone was blasted out of their gourds and oblivious to the fact that a large family of raccoons had taken over Lightfoot’s kitchen.
I read this terrifying anecdote in Toni Tennille’s recent memoir, which is stuffed with alarming 70s details like Lightfoot’s trash panda kitchen crew, the risks of early hair transplant surgery, and the time Queen Elizabeth dozed off during a command performance of “Muskrat Love” at the White House (Henry Kissinger stayed awake, but was visibly disturbed). Tennille also devotes considerable page space to the merits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory, but only briefly mentions that she’s never seen an actual muskrat in her life—even though the animal screws its way through her third most popular song.
She says she first heard “Muskrat Love” in the car on the way to a nightclub gig, about a year before she and Captain Daryl got discovered. Given the timeline, they probably heard this 1973 version by the band America, which was both the first recording re-named “Muskrat Love” and the first to receive any real radio airplay. Weirdly enough, the year before, Lani Hall had recorded a soporific take on the song called “Sun Down” for the label that would eventually sign Captain and Tennille. “Sun Down” uses the exact same tune as “Muskrat Love,” but with new lyrics that omit the Susie and Sam storyline, and I fully reject this heinous act of muskrat erasure.
Unlike Lani Hall, the band America weren’t about to remove those titular muskrats; their version keeps all Ramsey’s rodent lyrics intact. This isn’t surprising, since America’s first two albums made notable contributions to the canon of animalian soft rock, what with that one song about the “alligator lizards in the air”—how did they get up there? Did somebody toss them?—and their other song about the horse with no name, which features crackerjack naturalist observations like “there were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America’s take on “Muskrat Love” is peak Yacht Rock: so smoothed-out, it’s borderline menacing. Their rendition sports both an acoustic bass guitar and bongos, plus a double-tracked, whispery voice that sounds like a date offering you a post-coital doobie on his bearskin rug right after he gave you crabs. The band ignored their label’s pleas not to include the song on their third album and, perhaps as a middle finger, they made it the record’s opening track. They also cockily titled the album Hat Trick—an act of hubris made even funnier when it flopped. Guess they shoulda stuck with alligator lizards.
And hey! Since we’re on the subject of lizards, here’s something else I learned from Tennille’s book. Guess what Captain Daryl’s last name is? Dragon! As in somebody looked at a tiny little baby and decided to name it Daryl Dragon. Which leads me (and, I’m sure, all of us) to wonder why in the world these two didn’t call their act the freaking Dragon and Tennille? That’s infinitely cooler! And you know what would be even cooler than that? KOMODO DRAGON AND TENNILLE!!!!
Imagine an America (the country, not the shitty band) where the Billboard Hot 100 juggernaut of 1976 wasn’t “Muskrat Love,” but instead “Dragon Love,” about the erotic thrill-seekers Komodo Dragon Sam and Komodo Dragon Susie. They tie the knot in a badass desert ceremony with live snakes flying about and a basilisk egg dowry, and that night, Komodo Dragon Sam takes K.D. Susie to his lair so they can get busy atop a bunch of direwolf skins, and then she has to eat a raw horse heart in front of him while he makes hungry Aquaman eyes at her and pools of horseblood seep into her white-blond Khaleesi braids and yes, I did rip all those details from the Jason Momoa love scenes on Game of Thrones rather than look up the mating practices of real Komodo dragons because I’ve already Google-image-searched “muskrat penis” like fifteen times to write this essay, so I’m probably pushing it with the NSA as it is. OK fine, I just Googled “Komodo Dragons doing it” and to my surprise, their lovemaking actually seems quite gentle.
But my point here is why in the actual muskrat fuck would Daryl Dragon rebrand himself with some bogus naval rank when his given surname evokes the image of a storied, fire-breathing hell lizard…not to mention Jason Momoa? The answer to this question, my friends, is the 1970s.
I was born toward the end of the 70s, within months of Jason Momoa, which means we both could’ve been conceived while “Muskrat Love” played on the radio. Perhaps many of you reading this were born around then, too, and we The Lost Children of “Muskrat Love” should start a support group. While the particular tune to which our parents got busy is difficult (and awkward) to confirm, we do have plenty of documentation proving that the 70s—the petri dish that grew Momoa, myself and countless other late GenXers—were absolutely insane. All those thick chintzy fabrics and disco boots with goldfish in the heels and Queen Elizabeth falling asleep while a president nobody elected grooved in the chair next to her. People smoked about thirty cigarettes a day—forty if they were on an airplane—and brassieres were illegal. There was too much garbage and not enough gas and folks had basically stopped voting because it no longer seemed to work. Everyone was both alarmingly hairy and disturbingly horny and somebody gave a weekly TV show to a pair of mimes.
Captain and Tennille also had a TV program in the 70s, despite the fact that Captain Dragon often went days without speaking (maybe he was a mime, too?) and reportedly hated: jokes, the camera, dancing, people, and anything else that wasn’t a macrobiotic food product or a bulldog. Their show ran on ABC in the year of the Muskrat, aka 1976, and featured a skit about a bionic watermelon in which Toni portrayed her own arch nemesis, Queen Elizabeth II. They also staged a lip-synched performance of “Muskrat Love” for the show, and it serves as the closest thing to its music video (unless you count this alarming karaoke vid that I found, which looks like it inspired the movie Midsommar).
The TV show clip of “Muskrat Love” features two actors in full-body chipmunk suits who have been shrunk by some analog camera trick. They bounce on Tennille’s shoulders and on Cap’n Drag’n’s famous hat. At one point, they jump off the hat and look like they’re travelling downtown to fellate him, but it turns out they’re just headed to the edge of his keyboard, where they groove with the terpsichorean skills of that guy who spins the Qwik Payday Loans sign in front of my Walgreens.
This video is bad, y’all. It makes “The Bionic Watermelon” look like Citizen Kane. It’s cutesy and cheesy and miles away from the carnal habits of any rodent, reptile, or Momoa. But underneath the terrible visuals, you hear the special brand of Badness “Muskrat Love” offers. And I’ve been thinking about that Badness—delighting in it, honestly—all week. I needed something to distract me from, I dunno, every single piece of news I encountered. You don’t Google rodent wangs for a straight hour unless you’re seriously trying to forget the state of the world for a while.
The only indefensibly bad components of this “Muskrat Love”—what I would erase if I could teleport back 44 years—are the Captain’s post-prod electro-flourishes. With a few rare exceptions, any time a white dude discovers a cool new electronic musical toy, the results don’t age well. Remember when the Monkees learned about synthesizers? Or when John Tesh bought a keytar? Dare I even mention Peter Frampton here?
Most of the Captain’s sonic aggressions are MOOG-related: the rococo flips and gibbers and binary burps that, according to Tennille’s book, were meant to approximate both the dance of the randy muskrats and their eventual petites morts. While it’s true that courting muskrats do chirp and babble while they posture for one another, no muskrat ever sounded like a broken Nintendo farting along to the Deep Throat soundtrack. But to his credit, these noises do add the Captain to a long tradition of pop musicians misrepresenting sounds of the animal kingdom. A robin, be he rockin’ or not, won’t sing tweedlydeedlydeet; the flight of the bumblebee isn’t nearly as modulated as Rimsky-Korsakov imagines it; and even though Prince sounds amazing while screaming it, no dove has ever cried “Skype! Skype! Skype! Skype! Skyyyyyyyyyyyype!” on the A below High C.
But pop music has never really been about accuracy, of course. What’s more, I think pop forms are designed to harbor Badness, and often when a song does, it still has space to do some kind of work. Many of the entries in this tournament could support this. Sure, they’re awful songs, but rarely because they’re tedious (save maybe “Disco Duck” or “Toy Soldiers”). Our bracket is one of Badness that somehow manages to cultivate energy, and I hope we all celebrate the Energetically Bad in our voting this muskrat month. A few hundred listens in, I think “Muskrat Love” retains its energy via the very components that make it so pungently odious: Ramsey’s bestial lyrics, the Captain’s electric wanking, and all the tawdry 70s vibes Tennille’s vocals can muster.
Context plays a part here, too: this song represents an era of Badness we will never experience again: an age of only three channels and snail mail, when coke-addled cultural gatekeepers made unchecked decisions about what got injected into the living rooms and car speakers of almost everyone. “Muskrat Love” is a capsule from a colorful time that managed to be simultaneously puritanical and overheated, family-friendly and gross. The song epitomizes not simply what was wrong about the 70s, but what was spectacularly wrong about them, and thanks to thirty years of Boomer nostalgia, it’s this wrongness that I have been programmed to miss.
Such nostalgia is aided by the general production of this track, which is honestly pretty damn solid. Rather than the acoustic 60’s holdover approach that America took, this “Muskrat Love” sports the mellowest Hammond B3 you’ve ever heard. The lilting chords noodle Ramsey’s melody about in soft pastel drips. It’s a pleasing accompaniment to Tennille’s vocals, which are also on point. Lemme tell you, Toni Tennille isn’t much of a memoirist, but mama knows her way around a ballad. She’s got this wonderful, almost golden, mid-throat delivery that’s raspy and chewy and not only intoxicating; it sounds intoxicated.
Though she claims to have just said no throughout the decade, Tennille sings “Muskrat Love” like she’s orbiting the moons of Jupiter, as do most of my fave voices of the time. Take the river of barbiturates in Andrea True’s delivery of “More More More!” or Neil Young’s coke-boogered crooning of “Helpless” in The Last Waltz, or whatever the hell Minnie Riperton snorted to hit those top notes in “Loving You.” If you asked me to guess what drug yielded Tenille’s “Muskrat” tone, I’d probably guess an eight-ball of physical love. Toni sounds absolutely fucked in this song. You can almost hear the glow in her cheeks as she pulls a satin sheet around her, sits up, and lights a Newport menthol.
Tennille’s signature sound is also ironic, given the offstage coldness of her marriage to the Captain. She writes that though she tried to change him and despite how well they jibed professionally, he avoided showing her affection for over forty years. Can we just stop for a second and take that in? This song that we’ve loved to hate my entire life is the sound of a thirty-six-year-old woman with a Prince Valliant haircut singing like she’s been shagged within an inch of her sanity right next to her husband, who “couldn’t even give [her] a hug,” using whatever that does to a person’s psyche to croon about two horny muskrats. That, my friends, is an aesthetic Rubik’s cube I’ll never be able to click into place.
Tennille’s vocals are a teaser for what’s to come in “Do That To Me One More Time,” her 1979 hit that is so stanky with white-lady coital fervor, it makes “Muskrat Love” sound like “Old Shep.” But here’s the thing: I never want to hear “Do That To Me One More Time” again. I think that song is a different brand of bad—the kind that rarely interests me because its bad aspects are enough to flatten it: the self-indulgent tempo; the monosyllabic, single-entendre verses; and the Lyricon solo that’s nothing short of a federal crime.
For another example of the irredeemably bad, we need look no further than America’s flop album Hat Trick. A few tracks down from their lesser “Muskrat Love” is a song written by the band with a suspiciously similar title: “Molten Love” (not to be confused with “Molting Love,” which I wrote yesterday about Muskrat Suzie getting aroused whenever Sam sheds his winter fur). I just listened to “Molten Love” six times and I’ve already forgotten everything about the experience other than 1) I hated it and 2) someone blows bong bubbles in the fadeout. Also 3) this chestnut lyric from the chorus: “I want to carry you across a threshold of fireflies and violet smoke all alone.” Da fuck?
All this is to say that yes, “Muskrat Love” is rotten, and I hope you’ve all got it topping your brackets, but even if it wins this pantheon of Badness, I’d still take spectacularly bad—loaded vocal delivery bad, 70s doomsday bad—over forgettably bad any day. “Muskrat Love” beats “Molten Love” in my heart forever. Note, too, that I would specifically take Captain and Tennille’s version over the renditions by the actual author, or that lady who omitted the original song’s oddest lyrics, or those hit-maker dummies with their bongs and bongos. Sure, this version has topped Worst Song Ever listicles my entire life, but it’s managed to stay alive. It has rented space in the consciousness of three generations, like the family of raccoons overtaking Gordon Lightfoot’s kitchen.
And lord knows being a modern human can make you crave a ludicrous outlet—like, say, an ode to a pair of insatiable semi-aquatic mammals, or a memoir about the troubled mammalian lounge act who sang said ode. Maybe “Muskrat Love” also sticks because it proves to us how truly bad life in America (the country, not the shitty band) can get. It reminds us that, at certain points, the citizenry has craved the vibrantly ridiculous as some sort of national coping strategy. On both personal and public levels, we occasionally ache to stop and smell the muskrats, which makes this song a Badness life raft. Nimble, loaded, catchy, and gross, it’s a last-ditch transportation device for when we need something stupid to hold close—stink and all—as we float away from the larger things in our lives that make even less sense.

Elena Passarello is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat.