first round game

(11) Kate Bush, “Moments of Pleasure”
DIMMED
(6) Brooks & Dunn, “Neon Moon”
99-67
AND WILL PLAY ON 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 3/7/26.

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Years Ago All the Diners Had a Neon Border: Cooper Dart on Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon”

I've been around 55 years. I never heard of a neon moon.

Neon lights are made of all the noble gases that exist in the universe. You can take it from there. You can make anything out of it you want.

I put the Arby's sign up on the boardwalk on Coney Island. I'm dying to write a book or an installation manual to teach anybody how to put up signs.

Neon, it's the night. It's the city. It's, it's the bright lights alluring. You know, neon itself is sexy. You know, you know, you know, if you go into a bar and there's a neon sign in the window, nine out of ten times you're gonna sit in that window right next to that neon sign.

I’m not a big country guy.

Best is a funeral home person. A pleasure, a pleasure to deal with. Their money comes in very easy, comes in good. They're professionals, they're not going to fuck around. They want it done.

Have you ever gone to a museum? I know you have. That's art. Okay? That's generally considered art. What most people are doing in neon is not art, okay? It's good craft, okay? And it's colorful. People love it so much they call it art, but it's not art, okay?

You’re asking me what I think of the moon? Really?

I know a bar owner here who only wants red neon because he said, I've always ordered red, and I've never ordered any other color, because red makes your whiskey glow the right way.

No, man, there’s nothing sad about neon. Except maybe when it doesn’t work.

It's a substitute for the moon because you're in the bar, you know, you go to the bar for different reasons. Not everybody goes there that's happy, you know? So. You know, it's the neon moon that's glowing on this poor guy, and it's what he sees, and it's what he's relating to it.

Who’s that guy married to Gwen Stefani?

You know, I've made a lot of moons over the years in neon, and I can tell you that probably seven out of ten of them are blue. They always kind of go with the blue moon.

Of course, you know, in the industry, Italian imported ruby red is kind of second to none.

I, yeah, the song is sad, but, you know—I don't know, we are kind of just excited that they mentioned neon.

People love the moon.

How much neon you got in your area?

Call her but don't tell her I gave you her number.

I really like that song, and I, I love that they reference neon. And when I think about it, I have a neon moon that my husband made for me, and I have it in a little sculpture base at home, so every time I hear that song, I think about that neon moon, but I also think about the glow of major streets, how they used to be, like West Colfax and East Colfax, with all of the glowing neon and how that would, you know, kind of be like a glowing neon moon on nights, how they used to be.

You know, and the face of the moon doesn't say anything about sadness, but sitting in a bar where you're lonely, breaking up, with the blue moon in the sky, it's kind of a substitute for, for being outside. For having a moon.

There’s really nothing.

So, what do you need from me?

You’re not going to believe this, but I'm in a supermarket down in New Mexico. I bought a house here. I've been coming down here for 20 years, so I know the place. And this past January, not this one, but the one before that, I had a heart operation, four arteries, and I tell you, I feel freaking great. I never felt this. I never felt this good in my life. You know what? The people down here are wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. They will remember your birthday.
I'm not kidding. They will remember your birthday.

But you know, Italian ruby red is probably the color that you'd have to say is hard to beat in this business.

You have to get all of the impurities out of the tubes.

You know, people love a blue moon. They want the sliver, the blue moon with the man in the moon face on it. That's the one we make. It looks real good. You put it up real high in your living space and it looks like a moon that belongs up there. And it has a nice blue glow across the room and that all, you know—it's the old mystic of it all.

We're here in the coldest day of the year right now.

I got 200 neon signs that are here right in Chicago. Walk in, take a look and just feel the illumination. It's not a white light in here. The whole place just glows with sex in the air.

But the neon itself isn't, isn't sort of a sad aspect of the song. I don't think so. I think it's that I'm missing you and just sitting in a bar by myself. And just looking at the neon as a light in the night, similar to the moon.

The neon never dissipates. It never goes away. As long as electricity flows to it, it will always glow. It's the same with the moon. Right? So there's this permanence to it, which I love, and I don't think a lot of people know or appreciate or understand that, again, as long as the tube is intact and there's not a crack to the glass, you know, we have signs in our collection that date back to oh, God, 70, almost 80 years.

What do you do besides write books or whatever you write?

So, since neon has been around forever, and I'll watch a lot of movies, they have neon in them.

A little piece, a big piece, when we watch a movie, I'll always look for the neon. Oh, look, they had, they got the neon. So you'll see the neon, you know, in the movies, like you see the neon in life, where you see the neon in good times, you go to a, a bar, you'll have a great night, you know, the neon’s by the pool table, the neon beer signs, the neon outside. Or you'll go to the same bar and the neon will be flickering, it'll be broke, and, you know, like, like your broken dreams, right, from the song?

You call it a sad song; I call it emotional.

It's very relatable to a lot of old master paintings where you see sort of a solitary figure outside in nature under a large, you know, under the sky, whether that's daytime or nighttime, and this is taking that sort of natural landscape painting and creating it in a different environment, which is obviously a bar. And instead of the moon, this is the glow of neon.

When I talk about neon, I have someone picture themselves in the 1950s driving from LA to Las Vegas, and there's nothing but huge, vast expanses of dark black sky. And what neon was at that time, you could see neon from five, sometimes even 10 miles away, because of that blackness. And, and if there were few cars on the road, you'd see that orange glow. And for a lot of people, that orange glow meant, this is a place of rest, this is a hotel. This is a bar, this is a restaurant. In many ways, that orange glow is an oasis.

Neon is a place, I think, like an image is a place.

Neon is a place to come out of the desert. A place to get off the road and be with people. There's a visceral, emotional response to neon because, again, it means you're not alone 

Is that what it means? 

Yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit of a sad song. It's about going.

I hear, oh, this is my grandfather's neon, this is the neon somebody gave me, and, you know, relating to the song, it's like, it's like that's life, you know, you start out as a kid, and you go to a party and they got the neon sign outside, and then when you’re adolescent and you go into a bar, there’s the neon, and you go and you get married and you go to the catering hall, that's the neon, and then you have, you know, all through life, your parties and this and that, oh, look at the neon, look at this, look at that. So it's, it's a part of life. And what I hear people say is that it's a part of life.
It's a part of their, you know, it's a part of their world that they're not going to give up.

It does hum. It does have this visual and auditory drone. Like blood through a body, in a sense, the hum.

I was walking by my town’s theater just the other day, the Liberty Theater, with its big red and blue and green neon sign declaring LIBERTY over Main Street which they turn on when there is a show inside. They’re doing Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I walked under the marquee and I heard the hum and I wanted to cry, I think, hearing that sound. The way it means more than itself. The hum opens and I was seven and the lights were on outside and I was watching Frog and Toad with my school and in the play Frog and Toad were fighting and Frog came down the aisle with a picnic basket and I was in an aisle seat and he stopped at me. He held a microphone to my mouth and asked me what he should do to make up with Toad. The answer he wanted was a picnic, right? To take him on a picnic. To take him to a field with flowers and wind and bread. (Frog and Toad is about two people loving each other, isn’t it?) But I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t say a thing, the whole theater was listening and I just froze and hundreds of people stared at me and Frog was waiting for an answer for far too long from a boy who was obviously just not getting anywhere. I knew the answer was picnic, okay? I knew the answer was to take Toad somewhere nice under the sun. I just couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say a thing. 

(I know Frog and Toad’s author, Arnold Lobel, worked in advertising to make ends meet. I do not know if he ever made signs. I know a boy I worked with on a mountain far away had a tattoo of them—Frog and Toad—and every day it made me think of baskets, of wind, of apology. I know we spent a day together with the rest of our friends in a house with an outdoor shower and heavy silverware. We blew glass in the basement, cooked chicken over a fire. I know Arnold Lobel used his drawings of animals to try to make friends in the third grade, though I am not sure how well it worked, if at all. I know that Lobel never wrote Frog and Toad calling each other on the phone because it would cut into the world that I have created in some way that I cannot exactly articulate so Frog is over there and Toad is somewhere else altogether. I know that what we’re really seeing when we see two people loving each other is one of them sitting alone at a table for two. That Lobel would at times have an awful feeling that Frog has another, closer friend than Toad.)

I just finished a neon art piece. Well, my COVID piece. There's two guys on a bus, and one guy's got his head on the other guy's shoulder, and they're looking out the window.

Think about neon, the history of it all, too. It was in funeral homes; it was in churches.

As I'm re-listening to the song again and again, I'm getting this mental image of a guy sitting against a tree, at the water's edge at night. But I can hear, from the neon, I can hear crickets.

I have a cross right now. It says JESUS SAVES and flashes. And it's not about happiness right there. It's about salvation. It's about, you know, loss in a way.

When you walk into my store you see a lighted cross from an old funeral home that I have.

I had parents ask me to make their dead kid’s name in neon, in blue neon.

(I won’t force a connection between Frog and Toad and “Neon Moon,” but I will say Lobel himself said the best children's books—perhaps like the best songs—are not delightful.)

The moon was blue.

100% the moon in the song was blue. They don’t say it, but I don’t have a doubt.

“Toad, Toad,” shouted Frog. “Wake up. It is spring!” “Blah,” said a voice from inside the house. “Toad, Toad,” cried Frog. “The sun is shining! The snow is melting. Wake up!”

Dance in and out of the beams.

“I am not here,” said the voice.

But the fact is that there ain't that much neon out in the environment anymore, you see, but people remember it. So they think that there is. I hear it all the time. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There used to be a ton of neon here, okay? Not anymore. People will come into my shop and say, "Isn't it nice how much neon there is out there?" And I'm like, "Well, there isn't any anymore." But they remember it. It's turned into a reality. They think it's reality.

That's the thing. They think it's still there. 

I think of two young lovers.

Okay?

We've done blue moons, we've done gold moons, white moons.

Movie marquees were spectacular.

“I hope that if I bang my head against the wall hard enough, it will help me to think of a story,” said Toad.

I'm writing you a poem, babe. My wife wants to know what I'm doing. I'm writing you a poem.

I do not think I need a story anymore.

Years ago all the diners had a neon border going around the top of the building facing out, and the transformers would malfunction. They would arc and set the storefronts on fire. There would be fires all over the city. Little lights, little lights. People would show up for breakfast, and there’d be nothing left.

Cooper Dart yearns. His work can be found in The Rumpus, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He wants a neon sign that says ESSAY. It would be Italian ruby red. He would also take a neon sign that says DON’T YOU REALIZE OUR BODIES COULD FALL APART AT ANY SECOND. That one would be blue. More on Cooper at cooperdart.com.

Just Being Alive, It Can Really Hurt: cheryl graham on kate bush’s “moments of pleasure”

To be a Kate Bush fan in America in the 1990s was to be a lonely, long-suffering apologist waiting, seemingly in vain, for a new album. Before Stranger Things, before TikTok, before 3.1 billion streams on Spotify, Kate’s highest-charting single in the US, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” had peaked at number 22 in 1985. Though it was the song that would return her to the spotlight 40 years later, achieving a level of fame unimaginable when it was originally released, without a US tour or public appearances to support it, Kate’s meager foothold in the country almost slipped away. Her 1989 album, The Sensual World, made some noise on the alternative charts in this country, but by 1991, grunge was competing with heavy metal for supremacy, leaving the idiosyncratic British artist in its wake.
Kate Bush fandom wasn’t much different in the 80s. Which was okay. Kate was not for everyone. Or perhaps everyone just hadn’t caught up yet. She was weird. She was extra. Her 80s albums, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, were esoteric and difficult, full of vocal histrionics, heavy on piano and otherworldly sounds. Not to mention the obscure literary references and what one reviewer called “off her trolley lyrics.” If you were prepared to spend time with the records, though, and willing to be taken wherever Kate wanted to lead, the rewards were abundant.
In the late 80s, if you found another person who knew the deep cuts, not just the one song, you’d found a kindred. A poet I worked—and sometimes slept—with was such a person. I was but one of the many women in her orbit, beguiled by her inscrutable quietude, absurdist sense of humor, and the tan lines criss-crossing her back. Her steadfast aversion to monogamy frustrated me, but our love of Kate Bush became our lingua franca. We’d leave lyrics scribbled on the chalkboard at work, cryptic messages for one another to find, and stay up nights scrutinizing every track. I once got through a busy shift at the coffeehouse by making an alphabetical list of every song in my head.
While our love for Kate was pure, it was not blind; we weren’t above criticism when it was warranted. That one slightly off note in the 1986 remake of “Wuthering Heights,” for example or, well, the whole idea of remaking the song in the first place. There were rules about which albums we could play at work (The Kick Inside and Never for Ever) and the ones reserved for late-night listening (The Dreaming, obviously). My poet friend, who incidentally was also named Kate, was naturally more of a lyrics person, while I was (and still am) someone for whom the music comes first. We drifted apart eventually, both of us settling into altered states. LSD for her; for me, graduate school in Ohio.
Then came the 90s, an altogether unforgiving decade, in which I found myself adrift after grad school with no career, no partner and, owing to my habit of pulling up stakes just as things were getting comfortable, few friends. When, in 1993, I learned there was a new Kate Bush album coming out, it felt like that alone could put things right. Though I listened to grunge, Britpop, hip-hop, R&B, and industrial music, none of it matched the singular genius of my musical touchstone. (Though, like many Kate Bush fans during the fallow years between albums, I clung to Tori Amos as a worthy stand-in.)
A woman I worked with that year, named Liz, had a friend who procured a leaked version of the forthcoming album’s first UK single, “Rubberband Girl.” The friend had gotten it from a guy in England who sent it to him via dial-up, a transmission that took all night to complete. He transferred the digital file to cassettes and distributed them to his circle of equally dedicated friends. Liz and I listened to this contraband several times on our lunch break, trying to decide if we liked it. It was different. For starters, it was very poppy, and—what’s this?—Rock guitar? Horns? A conventional song structure? When she vocalizes the stretching sound of the titular item in a dizzying outro, however, a flash of the old, oddball Kate came through. I was cautiously optimistic.
I bought the album the day it was released, of course. It was the first one Kate had recorded expressly for CD, a format that, unlike vinyl, cannot be cradled in your arms on the way home from the record store. I removed the CD from its tiny plastic bag, stripped the cellophane from the case, and eagerly placed it into my portable CD player. The album in question, The Red Shoes, was—how do I put this?—disappointing. There were flashes of the wacky brilliance I’d always loved (and I’m using “wacky” as the highest compliment here), but there were also quite a few head-scratchers. Where previous LPs had felt self-contained, with a unifying theme or concept, The Red Shoes was wildly inconsistent. Moreover, because it had been recorded on a digital console, the overall sound was brittle and cold, and contained glitchy artifacts that would later be contested and dissected on fan forums.
I was willing to entertain the notion that I was the problem. Maybe the album was really good, and it just happened to be released during a year in which I found it hard to feel joy. Maybe I just needed to spend more time with it. Or maybe I couldn’t like this album because I’d burdened it with the impossible task of changing my life.
I didn’t give up on it—how could I?—and there were quite a few songs that are just as good as anything on its predecessor, The Sensual World. Namely, the Madagascan rhythms of “Eat the Music”; the sensuous “Song of Solomon”; “Top of the City,” a heartsick ballad with an explosive chorus; “Lily,” more of an incantation than a song; and the frenetic fairytale of the title track. Then there is “Moments of Pleasure,” a deeply personal, elegiac song, full of memories and specters. Thirty years on, after countless listens, I still don’t know how I feel about it.

Every Old Sock Meets an Old Shoe

Sometime around the turn of the decade, Kate and longtime boyfriend, bass player, and engineer Del Palmer split up (romantically, that is—the two continued their musical collaboration). Around this same time, Kate’s mother, Hannah, fell ill with cancer. She would die before The Red Shoes was released. Michael Powell, the British director with whom Kate had become close, and whose 1948 film lends the album its name, died in 1990. Two of her closest collaborators, guitarist Alan Murphy and dancer Gary Hurst, both succumbed to AIDS in 1989 and 90, respectively. So it’s no wonder the songs on The Red Shoes are some of Kate’s most plainly personal.
I never harbored a fascination with Kate’s private life. It was as if my reverence for her precluded wanting to know anything about her; it would be like speculating what God gets up to all day. Not that I have anything against confessional singer-songwriters, but Kate’s songs were always bigger in scope. “Wuthering Heights,” her unlikely platinum-selling debut, was based on the Emily Brontë book (although, famously, a book she had not read, but had only seen the last ten minutes of the BBC miniseries on TV). “Breathing,” from 1980’s Never for Ever, spoke of nuclear holocaust from the POV of an unborn child. The songs on The Dreaming ran the gamut from Aboriginal creation myths to a robbery gone wrong, to Harry Houdini, to the Viet Cong. “Between a Man and a Woman,” from The Sensual World, sounds like it might provide some insight into Kate’s domestic life, but it turns out it was inspired by a line uttered by Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Indeed, Kate has always resisted personal interpretations of her lyrics. In a contentious 1993 Sunday Times interview she says, “I’m here to talk about my work. My private life I don’t want to let go of. I need to keep it close and tender so that it is still my own.”
Nevertheless, there are songs on this record that are so intimate, I feel almost voyeuristic listening to them. They’re also bombastic and overwrought, with grandiose Hollywood-style orchestral arrangements in which the music hammers home the lyrical content in an entirely unnecessary and cringey way. If we consider her previous work as fiction and these songs as nonfiction, Kate would have been well-served by adhering to the memoirist’s edict, “when the action’s hot, write it cool.” I am so accustomed to Kate embodying various personae in her songs that when she herself seems to be the main character, it’s jarring.
“Moments of Pleasure” manages to sit at both ends of the spectrum. Some of the song’s lyrics are vivid, sensory, and specific to Kate alone, and for that reason, you’d think they’d be impossible to relate to. The chorus, on the other hand, is laughably prosaic: Just being alive, it can really hurt. Okay, sure.
Why is this song, then, one the Sunday Times called “compellingly sad,” and said “makes people cry for no apparent reason”? When the reporter asked Kate, “What was going on in your head” when she wrote the song, she replied, “Er, it's just a very personal song. It's to show just how precious life is and all those little moments that people give you. And that's how people stay alive, through your memories of them.”
The word “moment” bugs me. Specifically, when people say “a moment in time.” A moment is a unit of time; you wouldn’t say “an hour in time,” or “an instant in time.” Perhaps related to this bugbear is my distaste for the title “Moments of Pleasure.” It’s clunky (why not “Pleasurable Moments”?), utterly meaningless, and doesn’t sound particularly sad. It could be the name of an ad campaign for chocolates, or bubblebath, or some euphemistically-named sex aid. It’s the kind of thing I mean when I say Kate Bush fans sometimes have to be apologists. Like, yes, the words are kooky, and yes, the singing is screechy, but—you know what, I don’t care, you don’t have to like her.
Anyway, I looked up the etymology of “moment” and learned it originates from the Latin momentum, meaning movement. Some sources refer to the idea of a particle so small, it would incrementally shift the needle on a scale. It made me think about how moments turn into memories, and how memories are like a song that’s performed differently each time it’s played. An embellishment here and there, sped up or slowed down slightly, a note bent or missed. Moments that flicker through your mind like old movies, bringing the past alive in the present, and arising as insistently as the piano progression in this song.
 

Moments of Pleasure

Moment: A wide-angle scene of lying on a beach somewhere jump-cuts to diving off a rock into another…
Moment: The case of George the Wipe. (George was reportedly a tape-op who either erased [“wiped”] a reel by mistake, or the victim of a practical joke who was made to believe he’d done so.)
Moment: When something isn’t funny at all but you can’t stop laughing.
Moment: A happy reunion with an old friend, but you realize he isn’t well at all, and in the same…
Moment: You notice how the New York skyline looks just like mountains in the snow.
Moment: You remember something your mother used to say: “Every old sock meets an old shoe.” Ain’t that a great saying?
Moment: Gary, who you called “Bubba,” dancing down the aisle of a plane
Moment: Alan, nicknamed S’murph, playing his guitar refrain
Moment: You challenge Abbey Road engineer John Barratt, aka Teddy, to a chair-spinning contest
Moment: Lighting director Bill Duffield, while having a last look around the stage in the dark, falls to his death though an open panel in the floor. Hey there Bill, could you turn the lights up?

Here Come the Hills of Time

In 2011, Kate released Director’s Cut, a reassessment and remaking of several songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Seven tracks from the latter got updated vocals, new mixes, or were entirely rebuilt from scratch. “Moments of Pleasure” was completely re-recorded, restoring the analog warmth lost in the original digital production. In the new version, the instrumentation is reduced to just piano and voice, and though the piano part echoes the original, it’s no longer repetitive, but more languid and expressive. The original over-the-top chorus has been replaced by a chamber choir humming the melody, which adds a devotional element to the composition. The result is an arrangement with breathing room and a quiet solemnity—despite the presence of poor old George the Wipe. With a slower tempo and a lower key to accommodate Kate’s more mature voice, as well as the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 20 years, the song sounds finally, fully realized.
The chorus in the 1993 version starts These moments given are a gift from time, a phrase I originally thought had about as much substance as “moments of pleasure.” To be fair, the lyrics don't always read as great poetry when separated from the music. But then (thanks to the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 30 years), I realized all these years I’ve been misinterpreting both that line and the one that follows, Just let us try to give these moments back. I thought it meant to return them to their rightful owners. Which doesn’t really make sense, but as I mentioned, I’m more of a music person. Now, however, I think the lyric refers to gifts that are given unconsciously. Giving these moments back means reciprocating; we can only hope we give others “moments of pleasure” that keep us alive in their memories just as they have done for us.
I wonder whether Kate eliminated the chorus on the Director’s Cut version because it no longer fit sonically, or because it ceased to tell the whole story. Or both. I was sad in the 90s because (among other reasons) I hadn’t achieved certain personal and career milestones. Every day I dragged myself to a job I thought was beneath me, and came home to an empty apartment in the dark. But I had Liz, my coworker, and together we made toast in the break room and did the crossword puzzle and talked about music. I had Joel, and Wil, and Elizabeth, and others whose names have been lost to time. I had Kate, whose songs made me cry for no apparent reason, or for all the reasons, happy or sad, in the world. “I’m not talking about only pain or only ecstasy,” she once said. “The moments of pleasure couldn't exist without the sadness.”

Coda

Moment: Hiking on Mt. Lemmon, we find a rusty kitchen implement on the trail, which Kate (the poet) holds aloft like a drum major leading a parade. From that…
Moment on, the word “spatula” sends us spiraling into fits of laughter.
Moment: Listening to a bootleg cassette of Cathy (Kate) Bush’s teenage demos with Liz, and after a long, well-considered …
Moment, she says, “It makes you wonder what was going on in the Bush home.”
Moment: Kate Bush spinning in the air on video.
Moment: Liz riding her bike to work in the snow.
Moment: Kate (the poet) sews a parsnip to her sweatshirt and wears it for several days until the vegetable shrivels and falls off. It isn’t funny at all. 

Cheryl Graham does not miss the 90s, but often misses that hair. She lives in Tucson and writes a Substack about mixtapes.