first round
(1) Beyoncé, “Single Ladies (put a ring on it)”
stopped
(16) The Faint, “Agenda Suicide”
197-56
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/24.
hea-ream lee on beyoncé’s “single ladies (put a ring on it)
Recently I have been writing my marriage vows, and so I am rereading one of my favorite manifestos: “Against the Couple-Form.” This is a piece of writing I first stumbled across as a young adult, probably through Tumblr, and have returned to at various points in my life. I have read it in college as I was regularly getting my heart absolutely wrecked on a beer-lacquered frat house dance floor, in my 20s as a long-term relationship unraveled itself one doubt-drenched thread at a time, and now at the cusp of my wedding to the person I hope to know until I die, an event that is perhaps the ultimate culmination of the couple form. This essay, written by the mysterious Clemence x Clementine, posits a feminist and Marxist critique of the idea of coupledom. They are ardently and passionately against couples (and by this they almost entirely mean cis het couples, to their argument’s detriment) and the way that society has elevated the pursuit and maintenance of the couple above all other relationships. How society enshrines political, cultural, social, and financial power within romantic relationships. As they say, “Patriarchy and capitalism thwart any possibility to love in a way that liberates oneself from the logic of the couple or from one’s own oppression. To liberate love necessarily involves the abolition of patriarchy and capitalism.”
I’ve also been thinking about this essay because I’ve been listening to Beyonce’s 2008 hit, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” This is a song that you have probably heard. You may have seen the incredible music video, or one of the many parodies it spawned. If you’re me, you have danced to it at your junior year homecoming dance and at countless other parties and functions, in various contexts, throughout the years. It is, indubitably, a bop. The production is delightfully weird with a lilting, bouncing beat, hand claps, bleep-boop trills and grandiose synths. Beyonce’s voice floats above, doubled, tripled, calling and responding to itself, triumphant in some moments, teasing in others, always maintaining its trademark virtuosic range and palpable warmth. It’s basically impossible not to dance to it. I’m dancing to it at my desk right now.
I think this song often gets read as the battle hymn of the republic of girlbosses. In a Refinery29 article about the song for its 10th anniversary, the writer asserts that “Single Ladies'' is an “empowerment anthem, encouraging women to forget about their trash exes and live their best lives.” I think it’s a fascinating text, tonally kaleidoscopic and slippery in its address, heartbroken and venomous and hopeful all at once.
We start with Beyonce’s call to the titular single ladies. In the verses she’s at the club after breaking up with an ex of three years, an ex who is also at that club noticing her dance with another guy and is now jealous and angry. There’s a hint of vengeance as she sings, “I can care less what you think. I need no permission, did I mention?” The ex is the ‘you’ in the chorus, the person she taunts with the statement, “if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” To me, this song is about marriage. If you liked it, you should have proposed to me. If you liked it, you should have committed to me. You should have wanted to marry me. You should have wanted me in the way I wanted to be wanted. You should have seen me as worthy of cementing our relationship with a legal contract. Now I’m with someone else and you’re mad, and fuck you.
If you’re me, and you’ve been writing your marriage vows and thinking a lot about what one person can reasonably promise another, about the beauty and the struggle of fitting a form to a feeling, then you can’t help but read in this song a full investment in the couple form. It’s in the idea of the marriage proposal as trophy, an accomplishment, something that is obvious and that we are entitled to. It deeply troubles me, this idea that the final and highest expression of love should be in the form of the romantic couple. That the achievement of this status should supercede other achievements, that other forms of love, other forms of family and community, are less valued and less real than forever couplehood. The way that being in a couple atomizes you, separates you from the world.
My reading of ‘Against the Couple Form’ has changed over the years. I find its treatment of gender overly simplistic, its description of power dynamics lacking in nuance, no discussions of race, class, or disability. Apparently Clemence x Clementine’s thinking has also changed. Four years after the original essay was published, they released a follow-up. In it, they respond to some of their original points, like “we consider the abolition of the boyfriend and the husband part of the historical movement superseding capitalism and patriarchy.” While they stood by their original thought that the couple is a privileged form and can be one of many ways of hiding from true community, from real struggle (“We are still sick of couples and coupley people. We think you are boring and pathetic”), they essentially walk back one of their main ideas, writing, “The denunciation of the couple, the boyfriend, the partner, the plus one may be a form of projection. A way of banishing those things we are afraid to see in ourselves, making them properties of the couple.” I read in the follow-up a turn towards nuance, towards the tenderness and knowledge of self that love can bring. If you are searching for a political argument for romantic love, maybe it’s the way your love for a person can open you up towards other kinds of love, can deepen and enrich your thinking, can help you practice care and solidarity and tenderness and extend them to others. That you can actively cultivate this part of your love together, guard and tend the ways your love flows outwards as well as inwards. It makes me feel hopeful to think about this now, on the verge of something that feels so momentous. It makes the pursuit seem worthy, something to aspire to together.
There’s a moment in “Single Ladies” that I love. It’s in the bridge, when there’s a sonic and lyrical shift. The ‘you’ of the song changes from her ex, to the person she has now fallen in love with. “Here’s a man that makes me, then takes me, and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond. Pull me into your arms, say I’m the one you want.” In the bridge, I hear a version of Beyonce that doesn’t feel like a tragic victim of the couple form like the rest of us, but someone who believes in love as an animating force. That care and tenderness exist in romantic relationships and beyond. That love in all its forms enriches her life and teaches her about herself, inspires her towards action and away from isolation. That to want to love and to be loved is a brave thing, that this vulnerability makes her a better artist, that she is so much more than a half of a whole. And that to continue to believe these things, and to recognize these beliefs and honor them in another person, is maybe the truest thing we can vow to each other.
Hea-Ream Lee is a writer and teacher living in Tucson. Hea-Ream’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, Popula, and others, and her work has been anthologized in The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023). She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Wormfarm Institute. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona, where she edited fiction for Sonora Review and where she currently teaches writing to undergraduate students. Hea-Ream also serves as a faculty mentor for the Carson Scholars Program, a graduate fellowship in science communication.
fuck manifesto: john melillo on the faint’s “agenda suicide”
“You could follow logic or contest it all.”
Fuck the office.
Fuck the office within.
Fuck management.
Fuck the manager within.
Fuck this time spent on bullshit. (Assessment matters.)
Fuck the lies we tell ourselves that the job is fine.
Fuck operations.
Fuck budget cuts.
Fuck presiding over.
Fuck presidency.
Fuck the extraction of ourselves (for them) by ourselves.
Fuck “playing the game.” (You’re compromised.)
Fuck realism.
Fuck collaborating. (Collaboration with what evil invading force?)
Yes, do do shit together.
Yes to doing shit that matters. (Love is a good start.)
Yes to care.
Yes to doing nothing (productive). (Start a band. Do it in Nebraska or wherever you are.)
Yes to dancing.
Yes to making.
Yes to meaning.
Fuck euphemisms, PR, double talk, and lies.
Fuck the loss of human life. (In all the ways it’s lost.)
“Did I waste my time—I think I did, I worked for life”
Fuck treating other humans like marks and idiots.
Fuck the bad faith.
Fuck the office. (Did I say that?)
Fuck administering administration.
Fuck the organization.
Fuck pretend scarcity.
Fuck busy-work. (And its whole life model.)
Fuck the alienation leeching down to your deepest self.
Fuck the way of working where you’re just trying not to work anyway. (Go home.)
Fuck being there.
Fuck trying to make it work.
Dance like your fucking life depends on it.
Dance like you’re in Nebraska, in a dirt-patch off the highway and the music is playing from the car stereo.
Dance like you’re in the cul-de-sac of an unbuilt suburb burning lumber soaked in gasoline.
Dance like you’re at that show where everyone around you is dancing and they can’t help it and you can’t help it.
Dance like you’re exorcising all this death.
Fuck all this death.
Fuck approved death for some (most).
Fuck perspective.
Fuck necessity.
Fuck a “way of life.”
Fuck the money.
Fuck the factory.
Fuck extraction.
Fuck desecration.
“Did I waste my time—I think I did, I worked for life”
Yes to stupid simple pleasure.
Yes to this moving body of moving bodies.
Yes to keeping alive just for this. (Moving, shaking, doing, fucking)
Yes to shaking out hell.
“The element of progress that you mention is gone”
John Melillo is a writer, teacher, and musician who lives in Tucson, AZ. He performs under the name Algae & Tentacles.