first round
(14) Amerie, “1 Thing”
shook
(3) Outkast, “Hey Ya”
492-488
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 3/9/24.
OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” by Robert Puccinelli
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “Progress is the realization of Utopias.” With “Hey Ya!” OutKast realized a dancefloor Utopia.
The idea of Utopia was already present in the names of the early clubs from which disco would emerge. Frankie Grasso (acclaimed as the first DJ to ever beat match, using two turntables to blend the end of the last song with the beginning of the next one) began his career at Salvation in 1967. In 1969 he transformed an abandoned New York church into a safe space called The Sanctuary. The underground club often acclaimed as the greatest of them all was The Paradise Garage in Soho.
The underground made its way into the mainstream with 1977’s Saturday Night Fever: working stiff Tony Manero submits to the 9 to 5 grind in order to make enough money to escape into the weekend. His regular Joe existence is forgotten each Saturday night as he dons the polyester finery his labor has paid for; his crown a coiffed pompadour. At the 2001 Odyssey Disco, Tony reigns as royalty, an aristocrat with no obligations beyond keeping time with the beat. In losing himself to the rhythm, he finds himself.
Frankie Knuckles, the DJ at the “abandoned” industrial Chicago warehouse that gave House Music its name, recalled that when his all-night dance parties ended on Sunday mornings, his patrons would be leaving as services at the nearby Old St. Patrick’s Church were ending and the congregations would briefly mingle. “The Warehouse was our church,” he said, meaning a place where community was forged. For those ostracized for their sexual orientation, new families could be found and new connections made in the sweat and heat of the beat.
On August 25, 2004, the street where the Warehouse stood—at 206 S. Jefferson—was renamed Frankie Knuckles Way in his honor. That evening the Godfather of House spun a set at the Spirit of Music Garden. All the old househeads came to celebrate, a few in flamboyant finery flapping their fans to ward off the heat like Spanish flamenco dancers. When storm clouds gathered Knuckles played Eddie Kendricks’ “A Date with the Rain” so that thunder was coming from the speakers as well as the sky. Umbrellas bounced in unison to the beat. I was there. My skinny jeans, Chinese Red Army T-shirt, and hippie hair were drenched with perspiration even before the rain came. I was dancing amongst a bevy of divas as one of Frankie’s newfound disciples. You could feel the love. We were all one. Music had united us.
I appreciate adulterated pleasures, the complexity of irony, lyrics subverting music and vice versa. But on a dancefloor, I prefer to believe in possibilities, in a common humanity, in the notion that we can all get along and accept each other. The goal is the annihilation of self-consciousness. Amy Poehler said, “No one looks stupid when they’re having fun.” When your body is moving and being carried by a groove, the experience feels transcendent. You are leaving your worries behind, shuffling off your mortal coil, ascending to a higher plane. You are a whirling dervish communing with God, a Krishna in a kirtan falling into a meditative state, a lone dancer on ecstasy at a rave feeling connected with everyone around them.
“Paper Planes” by M.I.A. is a masterpiece, but I don’t want to think, when I am dancing, about how “some I murder, some I let go.” Or how “all I wanna do is … take your money.” Dancefloor Utopias are for hugging, not mugging, for escaping reality and visiting Utopia for a few hours.
Like Jimi Hendrix (who he portrayed in the 2013 biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side), OutKast’s Andre 3000 is a Utopian. In the Sixties, he’d have been called a hippie. His new album, his first solo endeavor, has no rapping but lots of flute solos and ambient soundscapes to yoga to. It certainly won’t sell as many units as an OutKast record, but Andre enjoys his newfound anonymity: “Being famous sucks. It’s so unhuman. There’s a classical pianist who said it’s detrimental to a human being to have so much admiration because it actually changes the way you think.” Andre’s always been a searcher. When he and Big Boi formed OutKast, their first hit was “Player’s Ball”, about a gathering of pimps in their hometown of Atlanta. By the time of “Hey Ya!” Andre was finding inspiration far afield, in The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Smiths, and The Hives, bands certainly not considered traditional inspirations for hip-hop. He told Rolling Stone that “Hey Ya!” features the first guitar chords he ever learned.
I’m old enough to remember the sterile wasteland that was popular radio in the early 2000s. My 1995 Saturn had a chandelier (as in the light dangled down from wires when it detached from the roof), but no tape or CD player, so I was condemned to the homogeneity of the airwaves. One day while driving on the expressway, “Hey Ya!” burst out of the speakers like a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence searching for signs of life. I was teleported to church, to that Sunday morning gospel service that was happening as Frankie Knuckles was spinning his last jams at the Warehouse. I was in the congregation, the spirit filling me. “Beyoncées and Lucy Lius” were invocations of Gods, the syllables that comprised those names filled with a musicality and meaning I’d never detected before. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I wanted to take my arms off the steering wheel, hold them open, slam the accelerator to the floor, and ascend into the light. I rushed to a record store, bought the album, copied the song onto a mix tape, and sent it to the love of my life who’d just dumped me, as if to say, “This song is who I am! Can you hear it? Can you feel it? This is the joy we could be having! Don’t you want me?”
Apparently, my reaction to my first hearing of the track was far from typical. According to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, when the song was released to radio:
a company named Arbitron was testing a new technology that made it possible to figure out how many people […] switched channels during a specific song. [Listeners] hated it so much that nearly a third of them changed the station within the first thirty seconds of the song. […] It didn’t sound like other songs. […] Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard
Therefore, we “unconsciously crave recognizability” and that recognizability makes a song “sticky,” something that won’t jar us and prompt us to change the channel.
The challenge for the record company and for radio was to make something fresh feel familiar: “To become part of an established listening habit, [… ‘Hey Ya!’] had to be camouflaged,” meaning that . … “DJs started making sure that whenever ‘Hey Ya!’ was played, it was sandwiched between sticky songs that were already popular.” Tom Webster, a radio consultant, explained that, “‘It’s textbook playlist theory now […]. ‘Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.’” Sometimes they’d even play the exact same song before and after, as if “Hey Ya!” was the nutrition in a Wonder Bread sandwich. The originality of “Hey Ya!” forced the creation of this new paradigm. (One mark of the single’s seeming strangeness was a recent internet trend claiming the song’s time signature is 11/4. When people tried to play along with a click track or a metronome, the timing would change, messing them up. This happens because the three bars of 4/4 time are followed by a single bar of 2/4 time, before reverting back to 4/4 for the final two bars.)
Matthew White and Sara Whiteley’s academic essay “‘Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance’: A cognitive approach to listener attention in OutKast’s ‘Hey Ya!’” argues that the lyrics present a depressing view of relationships: “We’ve been together, / but separate’s always better / when there’s feelings involved,” not to mention, “If what they say is / nothing is forever / then what makes love the exception?” These analysts’ argument is similar to that made about Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Lyrically, the song is dark, addressing war, joblessness, and loss. However, musically the song sounds patriotic. The drumbeats are martial, the guitars ringing, the chant of the chorus defiant and triumphant. To my ears, “Born in the USA” encourages persisting in the face of troubles, pushing onwards, and striving to make your country into what you envision it to be. It’s a song about the lies we’re sold, but it’s still a song of faith in the possibilities of the American Dream. The way Springsteen sings his mantra of a chorus, being “Born in the USA” is a blessing, not a curse.
When my heart got smashed to smithereens by my “soul mate”, I found solace in Kate Bush, who seemed to accept me in ways my ex could not. I played her song “Eat the Music” over and over again: “You put your hands in,” Kate sang to me, “And rip your heart out … Insides out / All is revealed / Not only women bleed. … Insides out / He’s a woman at heart / And I love him for that … All emotion … Eat the music.” Lyrically, “Hey Ya!” may be read as cynical and pessimistic, but it takes the pain of the end of a relationship and replaces it with faith in what is still possible, in all the other people out there, in the happiness that awaits if we are brave and free enough to share all of ourselves. That optimism may be partially obscured by the lyrics, but it’s vividly visible in the music. Andre told VH1, “I think it’s more important to be happy than to meet up to somebody else’s expectations or the world’s expectations of what a relationship should be.” The song seems to be saying that you can choose happiness and find it almost anywhere if you are willing to look.
After my breakup, I escaped to Cuba. On my way, I made the unfortunate decision to visit a resort highly recommended by my brother and his girlfriend on the island of Cozumel. Nursing my broken heart, I discovered there was not another single person there, only couples on honeymoons. “Hey Ya!” blasted out from a private wedding party into the starry night taunting me. The next day I was so lonely that when I swam with a dolphin, I felt like she was consoling me—at least this beautiful sea creature likes me!
“Hey Ya!” seems to reflect on the breakup of Andre’s relationship with Erykah Badu. They loved each other, they had a son, but that was not enough to keep them together and “the thought alone is killing me right now.” As he sings, “Thank God for Mom and Dad / for sticking through together / because we don’t know how.” Mom and Dad are an example of what is possible—happy monogamy despite the inevitable travails. Andre is in turmoil, but he expresses his divided consciousness so rhythmically that the rhythm seems to be lifting him out of his misery. His stuttering exclamations are so infectious you can probably hear them in your head as you read: “You think you got it, oh you think you got it, but got it just don’t get it.” “So why oh, why oh / why oh, why oh, why oh / are we so in denial…?”
The lyrics may be articulating problems in relationships, but then Andre points out that nobody listens to the words: “Y’all don’t wanna hear me / —you just wanna dance.” Maybe he shouldn’t be listening to the words either? Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “excessive consciousness is a disease”; sometimes we need to escape the prisons of our minds. Blessedly, the groove is taking Andre out of his head and into his body. Things are getting primal: “Don’t wanna meet your mama. Just wanna make you cumma.”
At a party someone once told me that being cool prevents a lot of fun from being had. Andre asks, “What’s cooler than being cool?” “Ice cold” is the answer. But being ice cold proves impossible in the heat of this intoxicating beat. In syncopation Andre snaps “alright” 14 times in rapid succession as if dismissing “cool” as a worthless façade. He saves his real advice, his most profound scripture, for the “ladies”: “Shake it. Sh-shake it. Shake it. Sh-shake it.” We are moving beyond language. Let us all twitch together. HEY YA!
In the music video, Big-Boi, the other member of OutKast, plays a Brian Epstein figure, an entrepreneurial managerial type encouraging his partner to “act like you got some sense.” Key and Peele have a skit where Big Boi refuses to collaborate with Andre 3000 because he’s turned into a freak who dresses in leprechaun clothes and speaks in different voices. “We was a team,” Big Boi says. “We were on top. Then you went and lost your mind.”
“Look into the pinwheel with your third eye,” Andre responds, “and everything will be revealed.”
Even when the duo formed, they were different from other groups; they chose the name OutKast because they didn’t fit in. By 2003, 3000 was getting weird, leaving hip-hop regalia behind and embracing a freaky, out-there persona, becoming more Prince-like, flirting with androgyny, and designing his own clothes. As he told Rick Rubin:,
I designed [the green tartan trousers for the music video] using fabric I found in my hometown. I got a seamstress to sew them up for me. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as royal green, but that’s what I like to call it. It was fun for me to draw my costumes. Liberating. It became intriguing to me that [my style] pissed a lot of people off, so I kinda just dug in the whole way and started fucking with people. Playing with androgyny, playing with wigs. We felt like we were not of this planet. We were making music that was otherworldly. Let’s look like the music.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in light of these pre-existing differences, Big Boi and 3000 famously split their album in half. BigBoi’s disc, Speakerboxxx, is all rap. Andre barely raps on The Love Below, his half of the album. As he told Fader, “I’m singing around the house, and Erykah’s like: ‘That sounds great. Why are you not doing it?’”
The music video for “Hey Ya!” references the Beatles’ debut appearance on Ed Sullivan, when the USA tuned in their televisions to see a musical revolution. Some of their female fans have argued that Beatlemania was one of the sparks that lit second-wave feminism; in their monomania, groups of girls had found each other and discovered that they were a force that couldn’t be stopped as the baffled authorities tried to control the hysteria of girls gone wild for four men with hair that was far too long to pass as fully masculine. The Beatles’ androgyny (invisible to us now, since long hair on a man is no longer shocking) is evoked as Andre 3000 flails his long locks. OutKast reverses the Beatles’ trip across the pond as the duo performs in London to an audience comprised entirely of screaming ladies, no males in sight. Ryan Phillippe plays the Ed Sullivan MC and introduces the band on black and white television. In sartorial splendor, 3000 plays eight different roles, from Possum Jenkins to Johnny Vulture (“yes ladies, he’s still single”) to drummer Dookie (shirtless but wearing a crown) and the Love Haters (jockey outfits) backing singers. In his persona as lead singer, his hair is thrice the length of the Beatles’ moptops. Just as with Beatlemania, women are fainting, overcome by the presence of The Love Below.
The smash success of “Hey Ya!” helped Speakerboxxx/The Love Below become the best-selling rap album of all time (13x Platinum). I guess one could argue that “ya” means you, but slang.net (and I) disagree: “Ya is slang for ‘Yes,’ a laid-back way to answer in the affirmative, often used in texts and online, may also be used verbally in-person.” Antonym: Nah.
For me, the “Hey” opens space for a question. “Ya!” is the answer. A gospel call and response. A “Ya” is both a “yeah!” and a “yay!”
John Lennon said that when he visited Indica gallery to see an exhibition by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, there was “a ladder which led to a painting hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. I climbed the ladder, looked through the spyglass, and in tiny letters it said, “Yes” (thebeatlesbible.com). If the word had been “no,” he asserts, he never would have met her.
George Harrison recorded an album of kirtans (a form of call and response devotional singing) for the Radha Krishna Temple: “Hare Krishna / Hare Krishna / Krishna Krishna / Hare Hare’ is sung like a mantra. In his song “Awaiting on You All,” George explains the purpose of such meditative repetition: “Chanting the names of the Lord will [set] you free.” One of the neglected songs in the pool for this contest was Armin Van Buuren’s “In and Out of Love,” where in three minutes Sharon den Adel sings the word “love” 27 times. In OutKast’s kirtan, we hear “Ya!” 24 times.
Andre 3000’s affirmation in the face of a collapsing romantic relationship and all the negativity in the world is like Kate Bush singing, “Mmmm, yes” over and over in her song “The Sensual World.” This insistent assertion is as defiant and as liberating as Molly Bloom’s litany of Yes-es at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Out of the depths of confusion and romantic pain comes clarity and hope for the future. So “get on the floor…. / You know what to do.” Surrender. Let the spirit possess you. Start speaking in tongues. Start shaking like a Polaroid picture. And see what develops.
Robert Puccinelli earned an MFA at DePaul University with his thesis Remote Viewing starring Joe Swanberg. He’s just completed his first play, a romantic comedy, has a director attached, and wants your help finding a venue to produce it. If you want to be interviewed for his current documentary, let him know. He’s completing his first novel and has been published in The Brooklyn Review, Lit Hub, and The Chicago Reader. His alter ego performs standup (Zanies and The Improv). He played the lead role in Maggot Brain (https://vimeo.com/268491213). He sings and plays keyboards in the band Happy Nice People (upcoming EP to be released during the 2024 general election). He’s eaten saltah in beautiful Yemen, studied drumming in Cuba, and climbed the pyramids in Egypt. On YouTube you can see him dancing in Myro's video for the song "Sugar" (https://youtu.be/1XLMoz45uoI) or see his photos in the Wayne Nelsen videos "With" (https://youtu.be/I59sGSKm2L4) and "Regiment" (https://youtu.be/BMC1JrDqLeQ). His website needs work (https://www.robertopuccinelli.com/). He wonders who wrote this bio.
serious joy: Sejal Shah on amerie’s “1 thing”
This one thing, but I’m not telling you what it is—and it’s the secret ingredient in the secret sauce—the secret ingredient is what makes the secret house. I looked it up, the lyrics, and what Wikipedia says, but with music, it’s how it makes you feel, not what others say about it. Still, here are a few things I want to say about Amerie’s “1 Thing”:
What I remember is dancing to this song in the house in the northeastern corner of Iowa, the driftless area, I rented for the academic year from a professor who was away in Copenhagen and in their little buttercream-colored house I danced at night. I was lonely. Nah nah nah nah nah oh (uh-uh). Was I going to find an academic job? It’s this 1 thing that got me trippin’. Is an academic job the way to happiness or a book? This one thing you did. For me it was neither, but I didn’t know that at the time. This one thing I want to admit it. I was dating the professor’s younger son. Ooh-wee, it felt so serious. I had also been out on some dates with a painter/chef at the local bistro. This one thing and I was so with it. It was hard to figure out. This was a town of 8,000. Blink and 20 years go by. Nah nah nah nah nah oh. Days go by. That was another song I was thinking about. What gets you tripping? The past is a head trip.
This one thing—what is it that makes a person right for another person? What’s the thing that makes a relationship last? What’s the thing that you can’t get over? And it’s exactly what I would say is not working in a student poem or story. Or one of mine. Here’s what I would write: “Thing” lacks specificity. It’s a thing. Can you be more specific? And yet, there is something about the thinginess of a thing. What’s your thing? What’s mine?
Looking at Some of the Lyrics:
Trying to let it go
(this is me, in everything I write, this one thing, trying to let something go)
This one thing, your soul made me feel it
(What thing is it?)
Hey, we don’t know each other well
(No, that’s what makes it interesting)
Memories just keep ringing bells
(a song unhooks those memories, unfastens them, silvers them, sounds them)
I’m hoping you can keep a secret
(What’s the secret except this 1 thing?)
This one thing you did—when it’s something that someone has done to me, it has the whiff of the unforgiveable. But what if no one did anything and dancing is only another way to write?
While working on my story collection, I found myself listening to songs on repeat and dancing alone again in my house—it was the pandemic- and who could have imagined this one thing that kept us afraid and apart was also this one thing that drew us together as we tried to figure out what the next best step was.
I danced once to “Days Go By.” This is an essay, though, about “1 Thing.” I danced to many songs including “1 Thing.” This 1 thing I want to admit it.
Amerie singing at the top of the hill and I sat and danced in the yellow house on the hill, wondering what one thing it would be—a job or a person or event waiting to happen, which would give my life direction, a ballast. Things did happen. I got a job in New York. I didn’t marry either the painter/chef or my landlord’s son (also a painter), though he said he would have. I didn’t realize for a long time that he was serious (the landlord’s son). It’s not that I wasn’t serious, it’s just that I didn’t think of myself as having that 1 thing for someone else, being that it was easier to be aware of that 1 thing in someone else.
I didn’t realize for a long time how much I admired painters. This one thing and I was so with it. They say if you admire it then you should try it. I’ve been trying (this one thing) painting some watercolors. I didn’t get tenure. The times we never even got to speak. I left New York.
It took me a long time to see this one thing is whatever you make it. I couldn’t find it outside of myself. The song always surprised me, made me wonder—what is everyone else thinking the one thing is? Or is it just the hook and the beat and the danceability of it and no one really cares what that 1 thing is or is it that there’s some mystery and anyone can fill it—magic, that you are a painter or a chef or a 6’1” teacher or that dancing alone in a house on a hill can bring you some magic and that can be the one thing that keeps you going when you don’t know what comes next in your life—and let’s be real not one of us does. Dancing can keep you going when you are writing a book, and you don’t know if someone is going to ever publish it. It’s a romance. I did marry. Not the chef-painter, not my landlord’s son, but a middle school teacher, years later. He coaches tennis and champions my writing. What is the 1 thing? It’s the turning toward each other instead of turning away when it gets harder. I think that’s the 1 thing. That’s a thing, anyway.
What are some things I will remember?
Dancing at night in the house, before there was wi-fi so I was near my laptop, which was plugged in.
Oh, been trying to let it go
Why is it so hard to let anything go?
Trying to keep my eyes close
Should it be closed?
Trying to keep it just like before
Before, before, I can see before (painter/chef)
The times we never even got to speak
The time before you know it’s going to work out with someone—
Don't wanna tell you what it is
Then when you know when it’s not going to work out, no matter how much you want it.
Do you even know what that 1 thing is?
I’m here to argue that we don’t. We just come up with reasons after—
Ooh-wee, it felt so serious
These things are serious! Even dancing alone is serious, because dancing is serious joy—
Got me thinking just too much
What is writing, but a different way of thinking?
They, we, are all of us married now. One to a psychiatrist, one I don’t know.
Na na na na oh (uh-uh).
I am writing this essay about a song, about how there was some joy in dancing even when lonely. More than writing a book, but if you are dancing while writing a book
Hear voices I don't wanna understand
Here I am talking about some thing
My car keys are jingling in my hand
Here I am telling you a story about two painters and a story collection
My high heels are clicking towards your door
And a tennis coach. It wasn’t a door, the way out is always on the dance floor, dancing, or toward a window, your eyes looking up
It's this one thing that got me trippin' (you did)
This one thing and I was so with it
Dancing with myself on a January night, not knowing what comes next, not knowing what the 1 thing was til I became the 1 thing
Trying to keep it just like before
There is no going back, but there’s always dancing, let me say that’s one thing that won’t forsake you.
Dancing is the secret house, is the way to write your secret book, is the way to make it real.
Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press on May 1st, 2024. This hybrid book came together through a lot of dancing. Her essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was a university common read, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and named in over thirty most-anticipated or best-of lists including Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, and PEN America. She lives in Rochester, New York. You can find her online @sejalshahwrites.