round 2
(2) Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman”
court martialed
(7) MARTIKA, “TOY SOLDIERS”
140-102
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 closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 13.
Siân griffiths on “i am woman”
One of my earliest memories is of a protest march in Athens, Ohio. I am perhaps four or five years old, and while my little sister rides in an army green backpack carrier, I am walking, and tired of walking, at my mother’s side.
But we’re not just walking. Together, we are marching—marching for equal rights. This distinction is important. My mother believes that this day, this action, will affect my future. She is a member of the League of Women Votes, and they have organized this march. ERA NOW proclaim the bold blue buttons on every woman’s chest. Athens is hilly and my legs ache and I don’t want to march or walk or move. “This is important,” my mother tells me. “We have to keep going.”
*
I got my first stereo after I got my first job. I was seventeen and the guys I worked with called me “Biscuit Babe” and “Hot Pan,” shouting for more trays as we worked our early morning shift at Hardees. The job paid minimum wage, $4.25 an hour, but a few months’ savings allowed me to order a stereo from a JC Penney catalog that contained CD, dual cassette, and record players. In my car, I played Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, but at home, I raided my parents’ stack of long unplayed LPs, taking the Best of the British Blues (John Mayall, Eric Clapton), the Rolling Stones’ Big Hits Volumes I and II, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, the White Album, and Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. Late into the night, I would play them in turn, setting out cards for solitaire as I sat in front of the speakers, absorbing.
*
When people in my family say I have a good memory, what they mean is, I remember the details. I hold the word “remember” in question. I suspect the details are largely inserted by imagination. Even so, I tend to be right about the broad strokes. The ERA march is a fact as well as a memory. The stereo had a laminated fake oak cabinet, where the records leaned like smokers in an alley.
*
I’ve heard people complain that Reddy’s one-hit-wonder is too soft and lyrical. It’s not forceful, they say, under which I hear, it’s not masculine. “I Am Woman” is a distinctly female anthem. It doesn’t shriek or rant. It doesn’t demand. It doesn’t shove or hit or proclaim. Reddy’s song calmly and lyrically states facts: she is strong; she is wise; she is invincible. These things are as inarguable as a brook or a sky or a songbird.
*
When I teach literature surveys, I give slide show-based lectures summarizing the historical movements of each era corresponding to our Norton anthologies. When we reach the twentieth century, I ask my class, “When did the U.S. Congress pass the Equal Rights Amendment for women?”
They usually stare back, unsure. We are in territory the history books didn’t cover.
“I’ll give you a hint,” I say. “The 14th and 15th amendments, which granted equal rights to men born or naturalized into the U.S. regardless of race or skin color, was ratified in 1870.”
My students guess the women’s rights must have passed in 1890, 1990.
“I’ll give you another hint,” I say. “Women got the right to vote in 1920, and the ERA was proposed in 1923.”
My students guess the 1930s, the 1940s.
“OK, last hint,” I say. “The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.”
They guess the 1960s, the 70s, the 80s.
“Tell us,” they say. “Tell us when it passed.”
*
Even in her depiction of strength, Reddy uses distinctly female imagery, invoking birth itself. Her wisdom is born of pain; she is still an embryo. Childbirth is the benchmark of physical pain, yet when creating icons of strength, popular culture conjures men like Rocky or Rambo. Mothers are low on the list, associated instead with home and love. Only when dressed in the trapping of those tough guys, as Sarah Connor was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, are they able to transcend. In the American imagination, mothers are where we turn when vulnerable. They are places of safety rather than strength. Reddy implies they are both.
*
The light scratching on my mother’s record created a warmth each time I played her records, a kind of sonic hug. As it spun, it was if she wrapped her arms around me and lifted me to her hip. It was as if it said, tired as we might be, we have to stand, to march. We would support each other and move forward.
*
It never passed, of course—the ERA. Not at the national level. Any equality that women have has been fought for in court, not written into law by the United States congress. Any equality we have is fragile. Any equality we have is not actually equality at all.
*
2016 was a year of deaths: Elie Wiesel, Muhammad Ali, Janet Reno, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Gene Wilder, Jim Harrison, William Trevor, Fidel Castro, Florence Henderson, Umberto Eco, John Glenn, Carrie Fisher, Prince.
My mother’s death that March did not make any headlines. She left the world quietly.
*
Some songs take the world by its throat. Some drumbeats kick their listeners in the gut. Some guitars scream until you listen. Some singers growl, some shout, some taunt, some plead, some rant. For most of my life, I gravitated towards those singers, thrashing my way through metal and grunge. Helen Reddy was an exception. Her anthem, pulled from my mother’s collection, makes me go still, reminding me that power can take different, more feminine forms.
Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah, where she teaches creative writing at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and American Short Fiction (online), among other publications. Her debut novel Borrowed Horses was a semi-finalist for the 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel Scrapple and her short fiction chapbook The Heart Keeps Faulty Time are forthcoming in 2020. Currently, she reads fiction as part of the editorial teams at Barrelhouse and American Short Fiction. For more information, please visit sbgriffiths.com
MALL AT NIGHT: GABRIEL PALACIOS ON “TOY SOLDIERS”
Your ears are not tricking you, there really was one single synthesizer used by virtually every pop artist in the 80s, it was called the Yamaha DX-7, and I bought one, around the millennium, for $350 cash at Chicago Store with my minimum wage earnings from KB Toys. I’ll never forget how the guy in the keyboard department snatched the bills right out of my hand as I was counting them, because he’d grown impatient with my slowness. It felt emasculating, but apparently not as emasculating as the prospect of leaving without the keyboard A-ha used to craft “Take On Me.” The DX-7 is all over Martika’s “Toy Soldiers.” Musically, it’s a genuine 80s artifact: frigid instrumental backdrop, however complicated by its uncommonly committed vocal, which is not without a certain wondrous and unanticipated measure of bluesiness and soul, even. To hear it now, those synth flourishes and Martika’s vocal, casting cold, digitally reverberating trails, it all adds up to a stirring hollowness. It feels like music fit for gazing at abandoned malls.
As it turns out, dead mall gazing, judging by the scores of YouTube channels dedicated to the past time, has already claimed a soundtrack of its own: Vaporwave. Vaporwave music consists mostly of preexisting 80s tunes not so much chopped/remixed/sampled as lifted wholesale, then slowed down, and made distant by a veil of digital decay. I’m not sure I buy it as a musical form—more like a setting, a parameter, a preset on some machine. Nevertheless, whenever I hear it, and especially if I happen to be staring at the label scar of a shuttered Pretzel Time, I’m convinced. It really does capture the cavernous indeterminate roar of our abandoned glass and brass temples. And maybe what I find moving in “Toy Soldiers” is half Martika’s vocal talents, half the essence of the shopping mall in its late 20th century prime. The mall when it was still alive, but after hours, air still thick with ghosts of slamming registers and Reebok footsteps squeaking on the waxy checkered tiles of day.
Before she sang “Toy Soldiers,” I had come to know Martika as Martika Marrero, a member of the teen cast of Kids Incorporated, an early Disney Channel network success. It was a musical variety show. Other cast members included Fergie, Rahsaan Patterson, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mario Lopez, and Shanice—Shanice went on to sing “I Love Your Smile,” and where I’m from that’s a classic love song, like “Angel Baby.” Martika left the show in 1986, and meanwhile the world of child stardom, the shitty teen day job Martika left behind, raged on, and gathered casualties: the Coreys for sure, along with all the other the less remembered denizens of Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, the first teen night club for young stars which lasted 86-89, which roughly corresponds with the period in which Martika was out of the spotlight. You can read about Alphy’s Soda Pop club if you want to, but I wish I didn’t. What it represents for me is a crass fetishization of youth in popular culture that didn’t begin in the 80s and didn’t end there, but might have reached a fever pitch of predatory there, right in that spot in Hollywood. You can see footage of the kid disco on YouTube.
Elsewhere on YouTube, there exists a genre of videos called shred videos, in which flubbed notes, out of tune singing, and grunts are overdubbed onto live footage of well known musicians. Visually we take in all of the emoting and heroic poses that we expect from rock stars but what we hear is a lot of plink and squawk. It’s funny. To some extent, if you’re not a sucker for its pathos the way I am, “Toy Soldiers” might feel like that—a failure of “Toy Soldiers” could be its overreaching, the divide between its bubblegum ingredients (Martika’s voice in moments recalls “Cool it Now”-era Ralph Tresvant) and the rangy depths of its despair. I guess what I’m describing is melodrama, which I happen to value in popular music. “Can You Stand the Rain.” “Town Without Pity.” “Blue on Blue,” heartache on heartache, blue on blue, now that we are through. When you’re all done sulking underneath a streetlamp in the rain you’re cleaner than you were before. You breathe easier. It might heal you to howl into a food court solitude and maybe I never would have known it had Martika never taught me.
Is the lyrical mention of addiction a red herring? Think about the title, the children’s chorus… Is this a Christmas song? Toy Soldiers was originally released November 15, 1988, in what may have been a cynical Black Friday plot to hook the children of my generation on murky, untraceable, or repressed sorrow.
Because the pain in “Toy Soldiers,” the suffering feels real, but is vague, unnameable—I don’t know, unearned? The lyrics give up no specifics. Addiction gets at something, it’s a flavor, but La Croix flavor, essence only. And the video’s not much help, though I enjoy it. It has that videogranular washed-outness you’d recognize from the opening credits of the original Melrose Place.
After “Toy Soldiers,” Martika went on to release Martika’s Kitchen, a more eclectic, and quite fine sophomore collection of songs that includes “Love, Thy Will Be Done”—lyrics composed by Martika, music produced by Prince. Maybe you know that one. The original Prince demo appears on the 2019 vault release “Originals,” and legend has it none other than Jay-Z lobbied for its inclusion.
Which maybe means I can consider forgiving Hov for this.
Following the release and promotion of this album, Martika once again went underground.
Almost ten years later it was Christmas, pre-Y2K, the last day of summer for the shopping malls. 8:45 for me meant time to power down and gather the mechanical playthings of the display table at KB Toys. Cut the stiff little puppy mid-yip, mid-convulsion, turn the penguin escalator off, flick the switch on the ball that yanks a furry weasel tail like a wild comet. Pull everything inside of the gate so we can lock up. As I tidied things Paul, the manager of this store, would perform his arithmetic, prepare the night’s bank deposit. Across from us at Spencer Gifts worked two unflattering doppelgängers. The manager of Spencer’s was a hairy, Bluto-looking guy, his neck burned with a small tangle of glistening medallions. He’d stand one hand on his hip the way a pirate would, leering. His other hand rested on the shoulder of the mousey, little teenage guy who worked under him, and it was to be assumed these gestures, the familiarity of them, meant something paternal, unofficially father-son. There was never any good reason or emergency to compel me to learn either of their names, still, we’d wave to each other across the sea in these quiet moments. There was no one else to wave to.
We’d work late. Around Black Friday, we might be there until midnight, and my dad would have to pick me up since I didn’t yet have a car of my own. I was 19. But you can understand how putting on your shoes to leave the house at 1 AM to retrieve your grown kid, the one who skipped college in order to work late at a ridiculous toy store mall job and buy synthesizers, and self-assured in this choice the way a first round draft pick would be, how the overall experience must fall short of some expectations.
What do they have you doing?
We have to unpack boxes and stock. And take inventory.
What’s this manager’s name?
Paul.
Is he married?
The landscape of this remembering vignetted, ringed by burning, drinking, demolition, construction of a Walmart.
Years and years later, during the era when Martika was no longer Martika, I was visiting my friend Andrew at the Emeryville, California office where he worked as a booking agent. He had recently received the press materials of a new band called Oppera, which he shared with me. Oppera, from the looks of it, was a full-on gothy-pop duo, and it was made up of Martika and Michael Mozart, her husband. The transformation was startling. They looked to me like dark faeries. You know, faerie sightings at one time were exactly as widespread as UFO sightings. I think you might detect hints of those gothic sympathies if you go back and watch the “Toy Soldiers” video, and this progression, though dramatic, checks out to me as authentic. Who knows how we end up where we do. But lately I hear she’s Martika once again, touring now and then in the 80s nostalgia revues with the likes of Tiffany, all over the world.
Gabriel Palacios lives in Tucson, Arizona and his poems live there but also in the hotel lounge, the world's fair pavilion, places never meant to be settled in.