first round

(2) Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”
ate up
(15) Bloc Party, “Banquet”
177-77
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 3/8/24.

danielle evans on lady gaga’s “bad romance”

I am more of a karaoke enthusiast than a person who is possibly tone deaf probably should be. Occasionally though I am unpleasantly surprised by a lyric on screen: startled by an adult understanding of lyrics I couldn’t parse as a child, upset by a mistaken transcription of a song I know by heart, shocked to learn I have been mishearing something every time I thought I heard the song. A few months ago, I summoned my friends to a basement karaoke bar. The bar used the pandemic shutdown to rebrand as a serious cocktail lounge but couldn’t get around having been designed and equipped for private karaoke. I believe it wants badly not to be a karaoke bar anymore but can’t afford not to use the karaoke room space or to renovate which works to my advantage, as a person who enjoys both karaoke and craft cocktails. Ensconced in the orange glow of the largest of the private rooms, I prepared to scream I’m a free bitch baby, with all of my heart, but the screen said I’m a freak bitch baby and I blinked and tried to determine which of us was making the mistake.

*

Freak/ adjective: not natural, normal, or likely

Free/adjective

2d: enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another

3a: not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself

4b: not bound, confined, or detained by force

*

The audio record seems clear that the lyric is free; at least in Gaga’s version there is no hint of a k at the end of the line. Lissie’s slower, sadder cover might possibly be the source of the mistranslation; her version is gorgeous but her voice blurs on the line and the more emotionally ambiguous tone of the song lends itself to the alternate reading. Lissie might well be singing about the kind of bad romance that makes one feel like an unnatural, unlovable freak, but Lady Gaga’s version holds open the possibility of a bad romance simultaneously being a great time.

*

It is a running joke among my friends that I can’t name a romantic comedy. I am familiar with the basic outlines of the genre, but there are classics I have never seen, classics I have seen but categorize as something more like horror than comedy because I can see the exact moment the intended turns into a monster and everyone pretends it hasn’t happened, non-classics that sort of blur together for me such that I cannot remember their titles or leads or plots. When asked I name movies that I think are both funny and romantic: Dirty Dancing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Coming to America, Fools Rush In, Romeo &Juliet but only and specifically Baz Lurhmann’s. Probably only Fools Rush In qualifies by the strictest standards of the genre, and even then, it opens with a one-night stand in Vegas and subsequently involves some ambient racism, an emotionally brutal breakup, and a faked miscarriage. It mostly holds up on rewatch and is the reason I still occasionally make a wish on a state line, but the older I get the more certain I am that the movie’s happy ending is a temporary one, that ten years out the film’s protagonists would be amicably divorced coparents whose mostly well-adjusted child can’t recognize the chaotic romantic pull they nostalgically describe. Even in 1997 I wouldn’t necessarily have called this a bad outcome; a temporary romance is not necessarily a bad one, a familial love can outlast a romantic one.
When I was a child, I thought it was the standard condition of adults to be single, and that most of the married ones had been or would be divorced at some point. Some of this came from what I remember as an urgent and concerned media insistence that this was the case, but much of it came from my own observed life: my parents, my extended family, my friends’ parents. I knew more single and divorced adults than I did married adults and it did not seem particularly tragic or abnormal, or at least, the tragedies and strange occurrences in the lives of the single adults did not seem in any way greater in quantity than the tragedies and strange occurrences in the lives of the married adults, and sometimes they were funnier or more dramatic. Sometimes I got to help my mother pick out a dress and watch her tease her hair and wait up to hear where a man had taken her dancing, and sometimes I got to hear a hilarious story about a bad date and often she did not have a date and she would bring home brie cheese and sparkling cider and we’d have what she called a lonely woman’s movie night until I asked her how she could be lonely if she was with me, and once, I swear this happened, I was her plus one to a fancy formal dinner and as we were leaving the parking lot she noticed in the mirror an attractive man in a tuxedo and she said I bet that man right now is noticing how beautiful I am and writing down my license plate to find me someday, and we laughed hysterically and I made fun of her ego and then a week later, the man, who it turned out was a cop, called her, having managed to track her down from her license plate, which is the kind of thing that as a fiction writer I could never get away with making up. The romance of an adult life for me was not so much about partnership but possibility, freedom.
The death of marriage that the 90’s promised never materialized. I have never known more married people than I do at present, and the rate only seems to be trending upward. In the late 90’s my glamorous single mother met a man who was her partner until she died two decades later; in the early 2000’s my father married my stepmother and they remain happily together. In my late 20’s I joined a Facebook group called All of My Friends Are Getting Married I’m Just Getting Drunk, but then most of my friends got married and the joke wasn’t funny anymore. In the city I live in now almost all of my friends are married or attached to their long-term partners; an astoundingly high percentage of them skipped most of what I assumed was the universal hot mess rite of passage of everyone’s early 20s by meeting their partners before them. Even most of those who didn’t have been paired with the same person long enough to have missed out on more recent dating joys like Tinder. I can count on one hand all of my single friends in this city and all of the friends I remember meeting when they were still single. I have never been so close to so much romance. More people love me than perhaps ever have. I can visit a dozen people’s warm loving houses and go home alone to my own whenever I want. I have never felt so free, or like such a freak. Did everyone else always feel like the point of love was something other than to be a little bit absurd, a little bit unsustainable?

*

Though it’s Lady Gaga’s version I remember most vividly now, it might have been the Lissie version that first made an impression on me.  In 2008 and 2009 I had been busy trying to become a professional adult. I was aware of the rise of Gaga the way you can be aware of background noise without truly hearing it. A few years before The Fame I was having the kinds of 20s in which I might frequently have been in bars or clubs that played its hit singles, but by 2008 I was living in a small city in Missouri, working at my first full time job, avoiding any bar where I might run into my students and dodging an intrepid reporter who kept trying to ask me my feelings about Barack Obama, a question to which I knew there was no right answer and anything I said could and would be used against me. I remember thinking “Poker Face” was catchy and have a vague recollection at some point making a bluffin with my muffin dirty joke to someone, but I can’t think of a single person with whom I might have had the casual intimacy at the time to make it. It was a place where complete strangers regularly showed me kindness, but also a place where I lived in a strange kind of limbo, I was, I thought, embarking upon the permanent part of my life, the part where I would begin making forever choices, but for a variety of reasons, chief among them the campus doomsday preacher, the lack of vegetarian lunch options that were not French fries, and Springfield ladies KKK meeting in the public library, this did not seem the place where I’d be building that particular kind of permanence.
I lived in an apartment building with both a bridal shop and a boutique home goods store in the lobby. The bridal shop opened what seemed to me very early and occasionally I was awakened by a bride beneath my bedroom window having stepped outside to have a private and almost always dramatic conversation. I was editing my first book and because I was teaching four classes a semester then, I was mostly editing it sleep-deprived and in the wee hours of the night. Sometimes I could hear my next door neighbor also awake. He was one of the few single straight men I knew in the city and was occasionally nice enough to drive me to the store, and it was briefly enough to generate a crush, a fleeting (pre-KKK) belief that something might emerge to keep me there, but that crush lasted only a few weeks before I overheard one of my students mention to another that she was in his class and could not get over that her professor looked like “grown up McLovin” and well, after that I couldn’t get over it either.   
I owned one piece of permanent furniture, a red and black velvet chair in the shape of a high-heeled shoe, the one luxury I’d allowed myself to purchase with the advance for my first book. Everything else I owned—a futon, a bookshelf I’d nearly concussed myself assembling because I not so much disregarded the instruction that said it required two people to assemble as wept and wept and couldn’t think of anyone to call. I coveted a beautifully refurbished settee in the home goods store, but it cost more than I could afford to spend on a piece of furniture and was also more furniture than I could afford to move when I left. I spent a lot of late-night time talking to a stranger I was certain wasn’t actually a stranger on AOL instant messenger. He had begun messaging me out of the blue, and I was anonymous enough then and my online presence minimal enough to assume that anyone who knew how to find me online was looking for me specifically, me the person and not me the writer, though they didn’t yet feel like separate enough people for me to make that distinction. I talked to the stranger for hours some nights because I was bored and lonely and because I imagined myself to be Nancy Drew, capable of setting some kind of trap that would force the messenger to out himself. It had to be an ex, I concluded, but which? The one I hated forever or the one I was still loved a little but not in a romantic way?  On bad days I believed it was a stranger I was desperate enough to want to recognize; on great days I imagined it was both of the exes I no longer spoke to, united in their need to know what I was up to. I came to no solid conclusions.
I was lonely and out of place and eventually concluded that redemption from heartbreak would come from becoming famous enough to not need the validation of men I would forget someday. I finished the book, I got a new job, and the summer between Lady Gaga’s release of The Fame and Lady Gaga’s release of The Fame Monster, I moved back across the country to the city I was from. I donated the bookshelf and I left the futon with a friend whom I’d lose touch with eventually and some years later recognize as the anonymous villain in a viral news story. I shipped the shoe chair Fedex; there was no box big enough for it so it was wrapped in plastic; at some point in transit it was stabbed by something sharp and arrived with a rip I’ve never figured out how to or tried particular hard to repair. I still think sometimes about the settee.
 A year later a man I was (badly) flirting with and I had gotten in the habit of emailing each other interesting song covers, and when I heard the Lissie cover of “Bad Romance”, I paid attentive to the growl of its lyrics for the first time. I went back to the original, and really listened to The Fame Monster, feeling seen in what I imagined then to be my willful artistic unlovability. I think I pulled my last few AIM away messages before I got rid of it altogether from “I Like it Rough”, in retrospect an odd choice for the end of decade in which I had not especially enjoyed being hurt, but perhaps the appeal of a lyric like loving me’s like straightening curls made sense given the amount of time during the 2000’s I’d spent sizzling my hair into submission with cheap flat irons.

*

…in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth—and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love. — Stephanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta/Lady Gaga (2010)

*

In September of 2010, Lady Gaga accepted the VMA award for video of the year for “Bad Romance” wearing a dress made of cuts of raw meat. The dress was later bleached and frozen to preserve it for posterity. In October of 2010, my first book debuted. I was told The Washington Post, the paper I grew up with, was reviewing it, but no one had seen the review yet. It went live while I was waiting at the bus stop and my publisher sent a link but my Blackberry wouldn’t load the page beyond the first sentence, which read “I hope Danielle Evans is a very nice person...”. I spent an anxious bus ride across the city worried that the rest of the sentence might be “… because she’s a terrible writer.” But in fact, the full sentence suggested that I would need to be likable to put off the envy that would surely accompany my career. Later that week, the post’s book critic Ron Charles donned bacon on his head in a nod to Lady Gaga’s controversial dress and repeated his praise of my book on tape as part of a video book review feature. My mother felt compelled to share this video with everyone she knew, but also to explain to them, in case they were confused, who Lady Gaga was, and what the bacon referenced, and why she, a vegetarian, was sending them a video of a man wearing bacon.
I am not suggesting that Lady Gaga and I have parallel careers. Lady Gaga in 2010 had the kind of fame that reshaped our cultural sensibilities about fandom and celebrity and its relationship to the internet. I had the kind of fame where when I met her for dinner my mother would introduce me to waiters as “My daughter, the famous writer”, and I’d have to remind her that actual famous people don’t have to be announced as famous. But it is true that in 2010 a thing was happening to my life and my art that I had wanted for as long as I could remember and was in no way emotionally prepared for. I was learning to carry on me at all times the tiny lie that could make an audience fall in love. I was learning which parts of the truth didn’t belong solely to me anymore. In the years since then I have learned a little to belong to an audience and not at all to belong to another person. It is, if I am honest, the life I imagined. Whether it was an imaginative freedom or an imaginative limitation I am yet to determine.

*

The narrative of “Bad Romance” is familiar enough to anyone who has ever wanted a bad idea badly enough to make it feel like a good one, joyful if you’re OK with being periodically liberated from joy. But the narrative of the video for “Bad Romance” is a less literal interpretation and involves no such romance. It is latex and crystal and fire and tears, emerging from a monstrous isolation, being prepared and packaged for a sinister audience, and discovering through your escape that you were perhaps the dangerous one all along, that however loudly you shout it, freedom might always entail a kind of freakishness.

evans bio (definitely had to go with the fishbowl…

mike ingram on Bloc Party’s “Banquet”x

I’ve never been much of a dancer. It’s not for lack of rhythm—I played drums as a teenager, and I take a certain dorky-white-guy pride in my ability to clap on the backbeat to soul music—but I can never quite shake my self-consciousness. At weddings, or parties, I find myself adding little ironic flourishes, like an exaggerated, cartoony version of the Roger Rabbit or the Running Man, as if to say: Look, I know this thing I’m trying to do with my body is absurd. Please don’t judge me too harshly.
Maybe it’s a generational defect. As an adolescent in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, I learned to see a clear demarcation between “pop music” and “good music.” At middle-school dances, the DJ played Tiffany, Paula Abdul, George Michael. Secretly I liked these songs, and an astute observer may have noticed my fingers tapping out their rhythms on my thighs while leaning against the accordioned bleachers and trying to look disaffected. My friends and I listened to Violent Femmes, Teenage Fanclub, Jane’s Addiction, the Jesus and Mary Chain. The term back then was “college radio,” though we didn’t have a nearby college station, so to find new music we had to tape each Sunday’s episode of 120 Minutes and take our chances at Tower Records on compilation CDs with names like Just Say Yes and No Alternative.
The standard line on the band Bloc Party is that, along with a handful of other early-aughts bands—LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture—they gave indie-rock kids permission to dance. I’m sure there’s some truth to that, though when I saw them in 2005, at the Black Cat in D.C., plenty of us were still stuck in our head-bobbing phases. Maybe we let our knees flex a bit, or shuffled our feet. I may have thrown one, but certainly not both, of my hands in the air.
In the 1992 movie Singles, Kyra Sedgwick’s character assures her best friend that even if she gets married, “we’ll always go out dancing.” I didn’t see the movie until the late ‘90s, and I remember being perplexed by that line, which was delivered at an Alice in Chains show at a Seattle club. In high school I went to plenty of punk and grunge shows, and I wouldn’t have used the word “dancing” to describe what I did in those spaces. A bit of head-banging, sure. The occasional enthusiastic leg kick. I never cared for the more violent aspects of a mosh pit, but if the vibe was right I loved the feeling of losing myself in the surge of bodies, letting my own body be pushed one way and then the other, like giving yourself over to an ocean current rather than fighting it.
A choreographer friend of mine says anything you do with your body can be a dance. It’s about movement and expression. It’s about celebrating the body—any kind of body—its relationship to other bodies and to itself. Or as the internet-famous yoga instructor who helped me get through the pandemic would put it, forgetting about what a certain pose is supposed to look like and instead “finding what feels good.”
As a teenager I played drums, but listening to “Banquet” makes me realize I never really played drums. In interviews, Matt Tong has said he constructed the drum parts on Silent Alarm to alternate between fast and slow because he was a smoker and got easily winded, though I suspect he’s being self-deprecating. It’s not just the speed of his hands that’s impressive, but the little surprises and misdirections he manages to insert without losing the song’s danceable backbeat. The combination of those drums with the angular, slicing guitar riffs and Kele Okereke’s shout-sung lyrics—“I can give you life, I can take it away!”—replicate, at least by degree, the infectious, anthemic quality of late-‘90s house music. It gets the endorphins going. The feet moving. With the right kind of drugs, it could be transcendent.
Looking back, plenty of those “college radio” bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s were eminently danceable. Talking Heads were a dance band. The Cure and REM both had some serious bangers. So did the Britpop bands I listened to when I started to grow bored with grunge’s transition into middling, repetitive bro-rock. Though the danceability of those songs never occurred to me until I went to DJ nights in the early 2000s and heard them juxtaposed with ‘90s hip hop, ‘60s garage-rock, and newer tracks by bands like Bloc Party. On those nights the DJ was both entertainer and schoolteacher, reminding us that rock music, no matter what it had become by the early 21st century, had begun as dance music. Though my own dancing remained half-hearted. I liked the music, and the surprising transitions between songs, but I never felt cool enough for those clubs. Even my body felt out of place, too thick for skinny jeans and vintage t-shirts, which at the local thrift store, despite whatever letter was printed on the label, seemed to have always been sized for children.
Okereke, Bloc Party’s lead singer, has since talked about feeling out of place in the indie-rock scene, particularly as a black, gay man. In the band’s early years he hadn’t come out yet, but the question of his sexuality was one that both rock journalists and bloggers loved to pick at. In a 2014 essay for Vice, Okereke says there was a “conservatism in indie rock” that he found stifling. “From 2004-2006, in every interview I was asked what it felt like to be a black musician making indie music—the subtext always being that this was not a genre for the likes of people like me.” The experience, he writes, was why he started DJing, and reconnecting with his teenage love of house music. In that world, “my race and sexuality were not a problem to be hinted at. They were to be celebrated.”
Now that I think about it, in the early 2000s there were a couple spaces in which I did dance—really danced, I mean, allowing myself to get lost inside the music, without worrying too much about how I looked to anyone else. One was at Phish shows. I know the band and its fans are easy to mock, but I’ll say this for the scene: its goofy earnestness was a welcome reprieve from the “too-cool-for-school” posing I’d been trying and failing to navigate since adolescence. At a Phish show, a stranger might give you a high five, or a hug. No one would make fun of your dancing, no matter how flailing or spastic it might be.
I also danced at gay clubs. Not often enough to be any kind of authority, and perhaps I should have felt like an interloper, the token straight guy occasionally invited to tag along with his gay friends. But I felt a freedom in those spaces, an infectious joy. For a period in my mid-20s, I became kind of fascinated by gay culture, to the point where I started to wonder if I’d been living in denial about my own sexuality. I remember looking at handsome men and trying to imagine kissing them, or interlacing my fingers at the smalls of their backs, like we were preparing to slow-dance to Debbie Gibson in the Moultrie Middle School cafetorium. But I could never make the image work. What I longed for, I realize now, wasn’t to sleep with men. It was to throw off the straightjacket of traditional masculinity, with all its rules and strictures about how you’re supposed to dress, and act, and move through the world. An apt metaphor, I suppose, for this essay, since the kind of dancing I was doing in those “straight” spaces I could have done while wearing a literal straightjacket.
Listening to “Banquet” now, it sounds like its era. Though I wonder if that’s about the music or about me. I was in my twenties in the early 2000s, the last period in my life that feels like a distinct “era,” at least in that pop-cultural sense, where your memories are soundtracked to music that was current at the time. The song holds up—the whole album does, really—in a way that plenty of other music from that time doesn’t. I still keep “Banquet” on my running playlist, and when it comes on I can feel the infectious energy of it course through my body. I didn’t start running until my late thirties, and I’m not a natural runner, nor a particularly graceful one. But I bet my choreographer friend would say that running, too, can be a kind of dance. A celebration of the body, and what it can do. How it can surprise you, especially when you can manage to get your self-conscious brain out of its way.

Mike Ingram is the author of NOTES FROM THE ROAD (Awst Press, 2022), and his essays and stories have appeared in publications including The North American Review, Phoebe, and Epoch. He’s one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse Magazine, and currently lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches at Temple University and co-hosts the Book Fight podcast. You can find more of his recent writing at https://mikeingram.substack.com/