the first round
(4) sheena easton, “morning train (9 to 5)”
crushed
(13) norman greenbaum, “spirit in the sky”
158-73
and will play on 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 closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.
t fleischmann on “morning train (9 to 5)”
How do men listen to music and what is bad?
I started caring about music when I was in the seventh grade, after I got a small CD player for Christmas. I went to a school dance, where I heard the song “Why Haven’t I Heard from You” by Reba McEntire. It captivated me in the junior high gymnasium, and offered a perfect emotional landscape in which to cast myself as I pined over this butch girl in my class, a girl who did not call me on the phone anymore, like how the man Reba scolds in the song does not call her on the phone, either. The next chance I got, I bought three Reba CDs to compliment my only other album, by Ace of Base.
That was 1997, and since, I have maintained just the worst taste in music. I listen to absolute trash, over and over, with little to no variation. Specifically, I tend toward the soft rock spectrum, with lots of lady singer-songwriters from the 1970s through the 1990s. It’s what you hear on Delilah, the radio call-in show that premiered one year before I found Reba, in 1996. To this day, five nights a week, someone calls in like, Delilah, help, my kids have gone to college and my husband doesn’t buy me flowers anymore. In response, Delilah asks, does your husband show you that he loves you in other ways? But she does not listen to the answer. Delilah just mouths a few platitudes and then plays a wildly inappropriate song, maybe in this instance “Pina Coladas,” an absolute banger about getting caught in the rain and infidelity.
In the evenings, all my adult life, I have listened to Delilah play my favorite songs. She plays my Hall and Oates. She plays my Jewel. She gives me my Lionel Richie and my Air Supply, and maybe, if I am lucky, a little pop country, just for the hell of it. Occasionally these songs are “good,” but most often, and even when they are good, they are quite bad.
Hush, I say to my husband as I turn the radio back up after a commercial break. Delilah is back.
I don’t think cishet men listen to Delilah. Not because they listen to good music (I’ve heard what they like!), but I think because they listen to music differently than everyone else. The gloss goes, in a shortage of media that parallels our own experiences of gender and sexuality, the associated gays and women project ourselves outside of our identities, into straight worlds and boy worlds. In a dominant culture in which only men and women sang, I, untethered, sang along to everything. I could become the vocalist or her object of affection, everything in endless gay variation forever. Wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake, where I fly some girl as high as I can into the wild blue. The island and the stream both, I’ve been waiting for a girl like me.
From what I understand, when they listen to music, men just pretend to be the men. This would make it difficult to immerse in most of the Delilah songs, which, even when sung by men, are most often about the emotional lives of women. By men here I mean like straight white dudes with jobs or whatever. Guys who would maybe get a song like Sheena Easton’s ridiculously catchy hit “9 to 5” stuck in their heads, but even then, would never imagine themselves as the woman singing the song. Men, I assume, do not happily sing about how some guy takes another train home again to find me waiting for him. If anything, the song just offers straight men an opportunity to fantasize about going to work and treating a girlfriend properly.
Incidentally, I am confident that straight women do, in fact, imagine themselves all over the radio because straight women are desperate to be any kind of gay. I know this because when I was younger I spent a lot of my time with straight women, and they liked to confess their secrets to faggots, often with a cocktail or cigarette. This happened a lot in the early 2000s because of how the cable station Bravo rebranded itself. And constantly during those years, straight women told me that they wished they were either a gay woman or a gay man. Sometimes they would also confess to playing around at lesbian things. So based on this I’m sure that straight women love singing the boy parts, too.
None of these generalizations really apply to the youth, though. At a protest recently, my partner heard a bunch of kids chanting “Hear the youth calling, gender nonconforming.” I thought this was a horribly embarrassing thing to chant and so I kept chanting it for weeks, around the house and when I was walking to the library. “Here the youth calling, gender nonconforming.” It was catchy. Catchy like my baby takes the morning train, with that nice emphasis on public transport. Like he works from nine to five and then! But even though I think, personally, that “hear the youth calling, gender nonconforming” is not the kind of thing we need to be chanting at rallies right now, I can’t really blame anyone who is chanting it, what with how men have been for so long stuck in their tacky genders, not imagining themselves into Bette Midler songs. The youth are just trying to help, my partner explained to me.
Gender, like music, persists long after it is outdated. Like 1981, when Easton’s literally unforgettable smash hit competed on the charts with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Rick James’s “Super Freak.” Or how straight men still walk around thinking that they are straight in the year 2020.
“9 to 5” is weirdly anachronistic in this way, too—not timeless, but the qualities that make it perfect sitcom sequence music also make it sound more like a late 50s la-di-da than a theme for the early 80s girl of the world. On surface, it’s hard to find a more regressive idea of gender from that year’s pop culture, with everyone from Miss Piggy in the Great Muppet Caper to Joanie Cunningham in Happy Days displaying more liberating visions of heterosexuality than the singer in Easton’s hit. The title even has a progressive predecessor from a year earlier, the Lily Tomlin / Dolly Parton / Jane Fonda movie 9 to 5, where some bad bitches get drunk and kind of kill their boss, a lovely romp.
But the regressive romantic vision that two-hit wonder Easton offers is what is maybe good about the song, or if not good, then bad. Good and bad like the songs on an episode of Delilah. I do not want any of that noxious romance in my actual life, where I react allergically to displays of attachment and coupledom. Disgusting. Yet when it’s Carly Simon’s 1987 comeback hit “Coming Around Again,” I love that shit. I sing it all day long to the husbands and wives in my mind.
“9 to 5,” like this, does heterosexuality, making what is outdated about it catchy (man goes to work, lady doesn’t). And the woman, yes, she is in love with this man. What makes Easton’s song so brilliant, though, is that she only sings half of heterosexuality, the part where the man goes away. In fact, she devotes the lyrics to describing in specific detail what it is that this man’s going-away should be about:
He goes to work every day, and takes public transit to do so.
When he comes home, he gives her sex if she wants it, sometimes all night without rest.
On occasion, he is allowed to take her to the movies, dinner, dancing, or alternatively, to “anything [she] wants.”
She gets his money.
In contrast, the woman’s responsibilities and time are left undefined. She says that she’ll be around in the evening, which seems fine, considering that they sex each other all night long—a reasonable thing to stick around for. And during the day, she thinks fondly of her man, also fine considering the legendary dick he’s apparently giving her, and which she brags about for much of the song. But outside of getting horny for the sex, no part of the singer’s days goes to the man, these days that “seem to last forever,” blank slates through which she can do anything she wants. She does not clean, she does not work, she does not brush her hair. Whatever she does, it’s none of your business.
What a cool bitch.
The way we listen to songs has as much to do with what makes them good or bad as the song itself. Whoever you are, listen to “9 to 5” again, and allow yourself to become the singer. Revel in this glorious song about a man who leaves to earn money, then comes home to give you that money and, when you want it, sex. Imagine, as the chorus returns, all the things you might do if left alone with your days, and relieved of two of the constant struggles in which so many of us live, the labor hell of endless capitalism and the humiliation of tracking down dick to suck. Without these burdens, where else might your time go? Smoke joints and read novels, maybe, or carry on lesbian affairs with your neighbors. Perhaps you would organize your friends into a small group to wait outside of the local prison and help recently released people connect with resources and housing. Maybe you would burn down an oil line, or train yourself to be a very good spy.
Really, it can be anything, la-di-da and catchy like Easton’s song. Don’t worry, you won’t have to tell your man about it, or acknowledge in any way that you have a private life. The man, who only sings along to the boy parts of songs anyway, does not ask. And with how broken the public transit system is in the United States, he might well be gone for ten, eleven hours a day, hours in which you might privately bloom.
This particular cultural, political, environmental moment is as good as any for the people of the mainstream United States to do what should have been done centuries ago, to disrupt the normal flow of events and dismantle the settler state. The consequence of the United States continuing as it has been seems quite clearly to be apocalypse. But still, the horrors of the world screaming, people go on. They go to corporate jobs, drive cars, watch shitty entertainment about straight people, marry, and so on. The men intuit that they should do something different, I think, but still, they are unwilling to stop, as unwilling to imagine themselves as someone else as I am unwilling to listen to music that came out later than 2005. This makes the men seem like pussies but whatever, that’s just kind of how it is. I didn’t ask to believe that Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club is one of the best albums of all time but when I put the tape on, my ears don’t lie.
Easton’s sweet, celebratory, infectious song gives these aimless men something they can hold onto, which is again just to take public transit to work and then give their money to women, and also to satisfy their sexual partners properly.
By the logic of straight men, where the boy parts of songs are what matters, I think that this must feel pretty great. Easton really throws herself into the eroticization of the guy going away to work, and the lady being horny for him. She makes it so that, if you were a guy, presumably, you’d just really want to go along with what she’s talking about. In the music video, she seductively rides her bicycle to the train station, sending you off with a moan, then humps the train itself. It’s kind of silly, sure, but again, I like to pretend to be a femme singing about her lost dyke while I croon along to Vanessa Carlton (brilliant), so no one is trying to judge here.
And, perhaps most beautifully, men do not actually need a Sheena Easton of their own to do this, just like I did not need an actual Indigo Girl in my life, but in fact only needed myself to go to the doctor, mountain, and fountains. There are women all over the world who want money and who have been denied it by white supremacy, and men, single or partnered, can just give their money directly to these women. You simply go to Twitter and search “pay black trans women,” cruise around for a minute with your social media literacy, and then get to it with your Venmo and your Paypal. And just as any person can listen to “9 to 5” and dance around the apartment and think of all the things you might do, unencumbered, while your man is at work, so too any person with a job can do the boy parts of the song. So too can white women, for instance, give their money to black and brown trans women.
Yes, as Easton shows, it feels good to give away the money. And when a man then listens to the radio, he can know that Easton is singing about how good he is, so long as he has given his money to women already. Because women love men who take public transit and then give all their money away so much, they write songs about it. And everyone, literally everyone, wants to be loved by women.
Sexuality and gender never fit comfortably into themselves anyway. I’m sure, for instance, that rat-faced Pete Buttigieg only sings the boy parts, and that Jeff Goldblum pretends to be the lady. And thank the goddess, we’re not left with only the artifacts of the shitty culture these days. The straight lie is weaker, and the youth are chanting. We don’t have to be anyone we don’t want to be. And when we find ourselves burdened with our identities and our habits anyway, still, we can imagine new lives inside of them, as gloriously as I have imagined a transsexual fantasia through the hit singles of the band Chicago.
Because it’s the culture itself that is bad. The state, the family, your job. But if you’re going to listen to the music anyway, Sheena Easton’s “9 to 5?” I fucking love that song. It’s a god damn hit and you know it.
T Fleischmann is the author of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Syzygy, Beauty.
A Convenient Lie: Samuel Rafael Barber on “Spirit in the Sky”
I was fifteen or sixteen, in chemistry with Mr. Malasky, or perhaps pre-cal with Ms. Flores. In any case, the teacher was out sick. In contrast to the school at which I would work a decade later, every single minute of every single day of class was not meticulously accounted for, on a lesson plan or otherwise. Rather than have a social studies or English teacher deliver the lesson without preparation to the best of their ability, we watched Remember the Titans. Rather than work on homework for another class, I participated in its viewing.
Fifteen or sixteen, in chemistry or pre-cal, it was a day of revelation. It was a Monday or Tuesday, to be sure . . . or, now that I strain to really think about it, likelier still a Friday, of course the possibilities of this existential breakthrough having occurred on a Wednesday would be symbolically potent, narratively neat, convincing me that this day I am now recalling in all its granularity thanks to the miracle of memory must have been a Thursday. In any case, I then realized that everything I think and believe and create is fundamentally at odds with the vision of humanity on display in the Boaz Yakin-directed property, that the clear preference for death over life in Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” makes the song’s intergenerational resonance all the more perverse in what it reveals about a culture saturated with an obsession with death it dares not confront, and that the song might be bad, but is also, without question, good.
A portion of “Spirit in the Sky” plays 18 minutes into a property conventionally held to be one of the very best sports movies of all time, as the grown men depicting teenaged boys struggle in adjusting to the interracial bunking policy at training camp, eventually deciding to handle the conflict as those of my gender often do: by attempting (and mostly failing) to beat the shit out of each other. As a white linebacker intimidates the black quarterback from choosing a spot near him, Greenbaum reminds us that, “When I die and they lay me to rest / Gonna go to the place that’s the best.” As Wood Harris and Ryan Hurts brawl, Greenbaum answers the immortal question of what happens when we reach the void, “When I lay me down to die / Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky.” While testosterone and insecurity fly about, causing a ruckus and breaking things, one wonders, contextually, how this song’s usage in this moment of the movie makes any sense at all. Greenbaum, an observant Jew, has insisted throughout his career that the undeniable influence of Christian thought is merely malleable material, clarifying in a 2011 interview with radio talk show host Ray Shasho that, “The song itself was simple, when you're writing a song you keep it simple of course. It wasn't like a Christian song of praise, it was just a simple song. I had to use Christianity because I had to use something.”
All this haunted my mind nearly a decade later, when various clips from the film—including the brawl over bedding—were taken out of context in order to instill teachers new to a particular charter network with the mantras and frameworks of leadership we would recite at the beginning of every four hour block of professional development every Friday afternoon for the next ten months. Iron sharpens iron. We are a united front. Those in charge of training a few hundred of us during these two weeks in the summer of 2018 spent primarily in a high school cafetorium—in advance of a year of grappling with the consequences of housing discrimination amongst other manifestations of Capital segregating people of color to predictably substandard outcomes—were enormous fans of Remember the Titans. Denzel certainly has the gravitas to carry the burden of confronting audiences with a version of racism which elides more or less every reality of how it manifests within the world in which we actually live, it’s true. For telephiles, there's a pleasure in identifying a young Avon Barksdale and Dr. Chris Turk and Randy Hickey and Ryan Gosling (in only his second picture) from among the enormous cast. And so we remember the Titans for the worst of reasons.
Nationwide anti-busing activity was remarkably successful. Let there be no mistaking the disconnect between actual trends and the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night. Schools are more segregated now than when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided. The movie is ostensibly telling the story of integration in public schools, not that you’d notice by watching. One can forgive a viewer of Remember the Titans for not realizing this. For thinking, wistfully, that if we rounded up all boys of all colors so they might give each other brain damage in this manifestation of social-sanctioned violence under the direction of an eloquent black man, racism would be a product of a past in which the median African-American family didn’t possess a tenth the wealth of the median white family.
So I can’t help but laugh, now, when Norman Greenbaum reminds us all over and over again that our lives of strife and conflict will end, eventually. That, sure, think what you will of modern life with its broken representational democracy and oceans warming at a rate equal to five detonating Hiroshima bombs per second, but the best place is waiting for us. If only we might die. And soon.
The case I’d like to make for this song does not rest on its intrinsic badness. Its lyrics redefine repetition—even within the domain of pop—in that the chorus is barely distinguishable from the almost internally-identical verses, to be sure. The case I’d like to make for this song does not rest on its redeemableness in comparison to other similarly-celebrated cultural detritus, either. Its instrumentation, typically-spare compositionally, has nonetheless created a deservedly iconic opening. There are respectable riffs, or at least passable approximations of riffs! This song has plenty of ‘Tude.
No. I humbly ask you to vote for “Spirit in the Sky” because never before has a song with gloomier implications been so co-opted by the toxic culture from which its voice promises blissful escape. There is no better representation of the essential badness of persevering within a perversion of this so-called free country than its cynical appropriation by the very forces who would do anything for a buck but nothing for any other reason.
This is a song almost everyone agrees principally imbues the listener with hope, but a hope denied to them according to the only physical laws or experience of consciousness possible. According to IMDB, since 1984 Norman Greenbaum’s music has been used within 84 commercial properties, almost all of which are thanks to “Spirit in the Sky.” Greenbaum’s delightful website provides its own listing of the song’s appearances, including some fifty films, a handful of television shows, and advertisements for companies including Dodge, SBC (now AT&T), American Express, Toyota, Enron (!), Infinity, Nike, and Gatorade.
As I reflect and write on this, the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.—an avowed democratic socialist who is remembered for having a dream rather than for his anti-war speech regarding Vietnam, which led to his denunciation by one hundred and sixty-eight newspapers in the days that followed and an approval rating at the time of his death that was lower than Trump’s has ever been––it’s useful to remember “Spirit in the Sky” as another example of how Capital will appropriate anything and everything to sell what’s always been sold using packaging with convenient emotional resonance for the demographic priorities of its target audience.
Audi’s 2019 Super Bowl advertisement is instructive. An average white man makes his way across a scene of bucolic beauty. In the distance, the average white man spots his beloved grandfather, registering surprise as he is welcomed home and ushered into a barn. It’s clear from context—the humming of birds, the curious sterility of everything in view—that the average white man has joined his grandfather in death. Some car or other is unveiled from beneath a sheet beneath the barn’s roof, though its reliance upon electric power will be significant. Gripping the steering wheel, the average white man’s stupid grin makes clear that he is happy, finally. Suddenly, he is jolted out of this satisfaction as a single, whole cashew emerges from, presumably, an esophagus. It flies across his cubicle from within the corporate farm from which, against all odds, he briefly believed he could escape. A coworker saves the average white man’s life with the Heimlich maneuver, or, rather, whatever it is we call it now, after Heimlich tired of dealing with a domestic legal scene in desperate need of tort reform to pre-empt the frivolous lawsuits filed when the act bearing his name failed their loved ones.
Everyone claps. Eyes haunted by a return to a workplace and world from which those of his and my generation will never be able to retire, the average white man recalls the state of power in this country: Worker productivity increased 69.6% between 1979 and 2019, though hourly pay rose a mere 11.6%, leaving us to a world in which millennials (median age of 31) own 4% of real estate by value in comparison to the third owned by boomers (median age of 35) in 1990. These boomers owned 21% of all wealth, back then, and though millennials are four years from a median age in which direct comparison is possible, we currently account for a paltry, a scant, a whopping 3.2% of national wealth, with Mark Zuckerberg’s $68 billion fortune alone accounting for two-thirds of the Capital distributed across the seventy million of us. Even Gen-Xers, with their 9% share of national wealth at the benchmark median age, put our conditions in stark relief.
All of these facts and figures rebound and resound in the noggin of the average white man, now gasping for air. Returning to consciousness, the average white man is full of despair. He yearns for release, a return to the grandfather and barn. He yearns to die. Greenbaum’s tune kicks into high-gear as Audi agrees, “A thrilling future awaits.” A beat, as “On Earth” fades into existence, joining this first sentence using an animated text transition straight out of Powerpoint 2002. “One third of all new Audi models will be electrified by 2025” the advertisement ends amidst the crooning.
Never mind that racism is better addressed by dismantling specious single-family zoning policies which enforce modern day redlining. Never mind that electric power includes sources like coal which too must be unequivocally abandoned. Never mind that wars will soon be fought over water, that hundreds of millions of people will require cross-continental relocation in the decades ahead, that 400,000 people already die every year as a result of climate change. Never mind any of that. Shut up, feel the things the song usually makes you feel in a non-commercial context, and lease if you can’t buy.
As I grow older and older with each and every passing day, as I grow wiser and wiser with each and every passing day, certain truths become inescapable. At twenty-seven, I’ve had another revelation. Its profundity remains as self-evident as ever. Continuing to listen to this song while continuing to live in this world while attempting (and mostly failing) to articulate the scope of doom and suffering which await those of us who will live long enough to witness the full collapse of a decaying empire forty years into its inevitable decline, I’ve finally come around. Finally, I too believe we’re going to a better place when we die. Is it the best place? Norman and I might quibble, there, given the theological incompatibility of our understandings of what is entailed within this state. But is it a better place? As I listen to the song on repeat for perhaps the ninety-seventh time while writing this second-to-last sentence, I’d like to think we’ve developed a real psychic bond, Norman and I. I’d like to think Norm and I have managed, against all odds, to reach a kind of consensus.
Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.00000001343724% of the population and the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message (The Cupboard, 2019). He has degrees from Brown, Arizona, and Columbia, and is a PhD student at the University of Denver. His fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 55.1 years.