SECOND round

(13) Electric 6, “Danger! High Voltage”
fried
(5) robyn w/kleerup, “with every heartbeat”
194-116
and will play in the sweet 16

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 at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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Elliott Vanskike on Robyn’s “with Every Heartbeat”

Me, Not Dancing

The Beatles cover of the Isley Brothers’ cover of The Top Notes’ “Twist and Shout” was released in March 1964 and hit #2 on the Billboard charts in April. The pace is slower than The Top Notes’ amped-up R&B workout and faster than the Isley Brothers’ strut and stroll. Lennon’s voice sounds desperate, slightly unhinged, as he shout-sings the song’s imperatives (shake, twist, shout, work it on out, let me know you’re mine). Dictating the moves, like good dance songs do.
I was born a few months before The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” was released in the U.S. At some point in early 1964, my mother wrote in my baby book, “The Beatles are the rage. They are singers.” My mother didn’t really keep up with music, which maybe explains that understatement: Beatles = singers. The top 5 slots in the Billboard chart in the spring of 1964 were all Beatles songs. Even someone as out of touch with pop culture as my mother could not have been ignorant of a cultural force as totalizing as The Beatles in 1964. Still, she devotes more space to the “big fad” of hootenannies (“folk singers get together and sing and play their guitars and banjos”). If folkies jamming at hootenannies loomed larger in my mother’s mind than The Beatles while “Twist and Shout” was tearing up the charts, it would explain the vexing relationship I’ve had with dancing for most of my life.

Me Square Dancing, Slow Dancing

If you spent time in gym class in the 1970s and 1980s (and maybe other decades) you probably endured the dorky indignity of square dancing, which was not really dancing but was decidedly square. There were really no moves to learn—square dancing in gym class involved only bowing, walking, and turning around—but there were new terms to learn. Do-si-do, allemande, promenade. These commands, accompanied by fiddle music, would squawk from a record player on the gym floor. Cowed, most of us just did what the record said as unenthusiastically as possible, waiting for the period to be over. If the activity was uncool, the cool kids still took the opportunity to pair up, picking each other in the ruthless ritual that separated the beautiful and the athletically gifted from the social outcasts—wrong clothes, weird hair, bad breath, too poor, too smart, too dumb, weird name. It was excruciating and we hated it. The best outcome was being picked by someone you knew as a friend, so you could just get through it together. The worst was having to partner with one of the cool kids, who somehow ended up with you, and would roll her eyes and complain to her friends as you held hands and allemanded around the square.
Worse by far than square dancing was slow dancing. Slow dancing was what happened when the gym teacher didn’t want to do his job that day. It was worse because it was sprung on us unawares, worse because you had to partner up and dance close, worse because the gym lights were turned off and the music was slow. I was raised in a strict religious household and was not allowed to go to school dances, which made the idea of having a slow dance on a random Tuesday in a darkened gym before lunch period all the more dread inducing. I had no idea what to do at a slow dance, but I knew it would be humiliating and it invariably was. The relief that flooded my endocrine system when—having been excused for a dentist appointment one day—I showed up with 5 minutes left in gym class and realized it was a slow dance day was strong enough to buckle my knees. By mere happenstance, I had dodged a slow dance—one day struck from the series of the most embarrassing days of my teen years. Surely, I could just take a seat, wait for the period to end, and go to my next class. But no, I could not, for the gym teacher told me I must dance. When I said there was no one to dance with, he pointed me toward a girl sitting on the far side of the gym and issued the imperative, “Ask her.” I approached the girl and realized as I got within a few feet that it wasn’t a classmate but a college senior who had been student teaching in the girl’s gym class. She accepted my invitation to slow dance and tried to put me at ease with conversation, but there was no side-stepping the gym teacher’s bait and switch or the burning shame I felt.

Me Dancing, Finally

Somehow, I put the humiliation that defined dancing behind me and finally began to dance in college. And by “somehow” I mean alcohol. And by “dance” I mean combine idiosyncratic moves that were located somewhere on the spectrum between Elaine Benes’s hitchhiking spasm lurch and Elvis Costello’s knock-kneed Frankenstein lurch. But it kind of worked, as long as I didn’t care what I looked like, which is, of course, where the alcohol came in. Even buzzed, I was never outside my own head—never just surrendering to the music or allowing the rhythm to get me or letting myself get down. I needed to plan my moves, so I had to know the song. I was no longer getting orders from The Beatles or a square dance caller or my gym teacher, but I had internalized the imperatives. The call was coming from inside my head.
Some of this dancing was solo, seeking. Years before I heard my first Robyn song (“With Every Heartbeat,” which I swear I’m getting to) I was dancing on my own at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. I would put on a thrift store suit, wear dress shoes with slippery bottoms so I could whip my ankles around (a signature move to this day), drive to the club, drink a few beers, wait for a song I liked (“How Soon Is Now?” was guaranteed to get me out on the floor), dance near a group of people in the hopes of dancing with somebody, and invariably leave on my own after going on my own in the hopes of meeting somebody (but I’d skip Morrissey’s crying and wanting to die).
The other place I’d dance was at the Holiday Inn by the regional airport near my parents’ house. This wasn’t as depressing as that sentence makes it sound. The bar could be lively. The dj played a lot of  80s FM staples (Duran Duran, Human League, Loverboy) but also some disco and R&B. During summers home from college, a friend and I would get dressed up, drive there, and she would wait for me to get inhibitionless enough to be able to dance. When a good song came on, we’d do a weird mix of couples swing dancing and trying to copy each other’s solo moves. We were by far the youngest people in the bar and sometimes the only people dancing. Maybe the older folks who mostly just sat and drank were easily impressed, but we were often asked if we were trained dancers (whatever that meant). Mostly, I just think we were energetic and into the music, and I was buzzed enough to cut loose (but with a plan). My collar would get sweaty, I’d loosen my tie, and flare my jacket as I spun. The Holiday Inn bar by the regional airport near my parents’ house was probably the most fun I’ve ever had dancing.

“None of These Boys Can Dance”

But even when dancing was at its most fun, I could tell I wasn’t having the same experience as other dancers—the ones who didn’t need to become unselfconscious before they could dance because they were too absorbed by the music and how their bodies felt to worry about what they looked like. They were in the moment, not in their own heads. From the outside looking in, dancing is ecstatic, emphatic. It’s driven by passion and extinguishes ambiguity—what else can you do but dance?
Here, finally, is where Robyn comes in. Very few of her dance songs give themselves over to hedonistic abandon. The bpms make them dance songs, but they’re not all heart or booty. You can cut loose, but the lyrics cut against you. As Jayson Greene points out, in her most delirious songs, “Robyn brings an element to the cresting wave that is less common: melancholy.” (One of my favorite reaction videos, has a guy listening to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” for the first time and saying, “This could be good at like a rave or something . . . maybe. I think raves are more happy than this.”) “In “Hang With Me,” a bright, galloping disco number, Robyn describes a friendship poised on the point of tipping into love but seems to suggest it’s better to keep things murky:

And if you keep it tight, I’m gonna confide in you
I know what’s on your mind, there will be time for that too
If you hang with me.
Just don't fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me ‘cause it’s gonna be
All heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity if we agree
You can hang with me.

The ambiguity of that friendship–relationship line comes up again in “Be Mine.” If it ever existed, the love is in the past (“you never were and you never will be mine”) and, in a spoken interlude, Robyn describes a chance encounter with her maybe-ex and his current girlfriend: “You had your arm around what’s-her-name. She had on that scarf I gave you, and you got down to tie her laces. You look happy . . . and that’s great. I just miss you, that’s all.” The song doesn’t go all in on resentment or despair. It acknowledges a fraught situation. Someone she loved is in love with someone else. He’s happy, she’s OK with it, but she misses what was or might have been.
The more you look at Robyn’s catalog the more you realize that she writes about relationships from a place of ambivalence more often than not. In addition to “Hang With Me” and “Be Mine,” Robyn’s huge hit “Call Your Girlfriend” has the speaker coaching the guy she wants to be with that he needs to take an important step before they can be together (“it won’t make sense right now but you’re still her friend”). In “Do It Again,” the couple is having sex but are stuck between starting a real relationship or staying friends (“we should not be friends, we’ll just do it again”). A whole subset of Robyn songs are about robots with human feelings who are in love (“Fembot,” “The Girl and the Robot,” “Robotboy”), exploring the uncanny valley between human and machine. Taken together, these songs suggest that Robyn isn’t writing about relationships that are ambiguous; her theme is the existential experience of being unsettled or uncertain and relationships are just her chosen metaphor. All those songs of in-betweenness are dance songs, but many of them come with spare, acoustic versions accompanied only by piano. So, there’s a tension between floor-fillers like “Hang With Me,” “Be Mine,” and “With Every Heartbeat” and their somber, down-tempo shadows that just compounds the tension that already exists between a hard-charging anthem and lyrics that emphasize the muddledness of living. In Robyn’s world, you can have bangers, but they come with some Sturm und Drang.

“None of Them Move My Intellect”

“With Every Heartbeat” isn’t Robyn’s most popular song. That would be “Dancing On My Own,” a song that is single-minded in its defiance: Nobody wants me, my world is trashed, I’ve tried as hard as I can, fuck it, I am dancing all night. The song starts off with an insistent bass line and the intensity builds until 2 minutes and 40 seconds in, when Robyn sings the pre-chorus a cappella followed by a solid measure of rapid-fire snare hits, and you feel ready to cry or explode with joy or slam yourself into something really hard. But “With Every Heartbeat” pulls off something just as cathartic, but more dizzying. Robyn marries a propulsive tune and production with an atmosphere of ambivalent resolve. She’s uncertain but she’s pushing on. Here was a song that brought the overthinking to the party. I finally felt like I’d found dance music that was for me. That said, the video for “With Every Heartbeat” isn’t much to speak of. A miniature Robyn walks backwards and then runs through a stark landscape of geometric shapes until she’s apparently squashed at the end. The production values are low-rent enough that you keep waiting for her Pony Pal Pokey to make an appearance. If not for the fact that Robyn’s short, angular haircut caught my eye, I might not have turned up the speakers on my laptop enough to hear a song I’ve listened to more than maybe any other over the last 15 years.

But when I did, I was greeted by a four-on-the-floor beat with, floating above it, a hollow, minor key buzz that cycles through a descending pattern before Robyn’s fragile-sounding voice hesitantly enters with the first of the song’s many tentative statements: “Maybe we could make it all right.” When she gets past the second “maybe” and is on the third “could,” the bass kicks in with pulsing 1/32 notes, and the sense of steady movement in the music becomes irresistible. Except that the song doesn’t progress lyrically. It stays mired in “maybe”s and “could”s and in Robyn’s repeated assertion that things won’t change and she won’t look back. There’s no real chorus in the song, which contributes to the listener’s disorientation. We’re in a maze of recursive statements that don’t seem to be moving us through familiar song structures. We’re not getting anywhere, and Robyn is walking but she’s dying with every step she takes. And then all the trappings of a dance song drop away, and we get a 20-second string interlude that yields to producer Kleerup’s beloved arpeggiated synths. What comes next should be the chorus. The drums and bass kick in again, and the cycling pattern of buzzes is replaced by bright, popping synths. But what this all builds toward is just the same line sung over and over and over again: “And it hurts with every heartbeat.” That insistent line has the title of the song embedded in it. It’s accompanied by the reasserted swell of the music and it’s where an uplifting chorus should be. But in place of a soaring resolution, we get a continual reassertion of Robyn’s wounds. The more she walks away the more hurt she gets and it hurts every time her heart beats. The song clocks in at 120 bpm—the rate of a human heartbeat—to drive home the inescapable tempo of her suffering. Ariel Rechtshaid, whose producing credits span Madonna, Vampire Weekend, and Charli XCX, captures the wrenching tension of “With Every Heartbeat” when he observes, “There’s, like a pain met with euphoria in that song.”  

For years, I’ve been trying and failing to set my brain aside and just dance. But overeducated, overthinking me didn’t notice until I sat down to write this piece that “With Every Heartbeat” is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story from Greek myth. If you don’t remember your Bullfinch’s (or haven’t seen “Hadestown”), the story goes like this. Orpheus is a gifted musician who plays the lyre and sings so gorgeously that no one can resist the sound. His wife, Eurydice, dies and is taken to the underworld. Orpheus ventures to hell with his lyre to rescue her. He plays so beautifully for Hades that the god tells him he can take Eurydice back to the land of the living, as long as she walks behind him and he doesn’t turn around. Orpheus is about to reenter the sun-warmed earth with Eurydice just behind him when doubt creeps in. He loses his nerve and turns around. His final view of Eurydice is of her being snatched back into hell for eternity. Orpheus begs for death so he can join his beloved. The gods grant his request, but with a cruel twist. His voice is too beautiful to lose. His body can return to Eurydice, but Orpheus’s head must stay with the living so he can continue to sing his beautiful melodies.
Of course, unlike Orpheus, Robyn stays the course and doesn’t look back. But her reward is pain. Orpheus’s steps guide him toward resolution and redemption (if he can only persist). Each step just brings Robyn more heartbreak. There’s really only one track on Robyn’s most recent album, “Honey,” from 2018, that even approximates a dance song—the lead single “Missing U.” But it’s more of a wind-down, the kind of song a dj plays toward the end of the last set to ease you off the dance floor. It burbles along in a sad, detached way, but there’s no peak, no contrasts, no catharsis. The second song on the record, “Human Being,” is an invitation to dance, but it’s a desperate ask, like someone clinging to flotsam after a shipwreck:

I’m a human being
Where to go?
The streets are so cold
Stay in my arms
Dance with me

The music backing the words is blasted and bleak, showing the influence of dubstep’s cavernous sonic nightscapes. Given the forlornness of the music, Robyn probably doesn’t need to drive the point home, but the lyrics push on into the uncertain darkness:

There’s no resolution
No honey gold
There’s no final union
There’s no control

Rather than the heedless abandon of dancing, the song evokes an almost existential feeling of abandonment. The thirteenth time Robyn sings “I’m a human being” and begs her partner “don’t give up on me” we don’t feel any closer to connection, ecstasy, relief or any of the things dancing might deliver.

Elliott Vanskike is a writer and editor in Takoma Park, MD.

@twonnet on Twitter
@twonnet.bsky.social

ANDREA PANZECA ON ELECTRIC SIX’S DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE

Don't you wanna know how we keep startin' fires?
The lyrics to Electric Six’s “Danger! High Voltage” are sung by two voices. That one contributor’s identity could remain a secret for years is a relic of the pre-stan (verb, not song), pre-fancam, pre-dox era. The secret contributor, Jack White, himself kept the nature of his relationship with bandmate Meg White a secret. Can you imagine, in 2023, two people claiming to be siblings when at any moment someone could post receipts of their marriage (at least one witness, right) and put them on blast? This was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone. This was the age of LiveJournal and MySpace.
The closest maybe one can come to keeping a secret today is Orville Peck, obscuring his face with a fringed eye mask. (Within seconds one can look it up, but that’s research—a word I’ve recently qualified with “not the Trump-voter, anti-vax kind”). 
Each rotating member of Electric Six adopts a sort of drag name—an alter ego like in roller-derby or wrestling or American Gladiators. The gender-bending duet reminds me of Peck and Trixie Mattel’s cover of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson,” itself about a fire-seeking couple.
It’s my desire!
In the “Danger! High Voltage” video, White’s voice, like Mattel’s, is female-embodied, bra-clad and tits ablaze. Having recently rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey (though obviously the on-the-go edit: fast-forwarding the space-opera shots to get to the dialogue), I thought: Hal looks boob-like (like how Nope’s Jean Jacket’s vagina-coded).
Or Hal (singular) is more crotch. Singer Dick Valentine (Tyler Spencer)’s codpiece glows, the mound of a male ballet dancer. I did want to see the pussy! on! fire!, a phrase thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race that’s been in the lexicon for a decade. I wanted to see it lit for representation. Female gaze. 
When they make out—“when we touch, when we kiss, when we touch”—it’s not exactly sexy. It is in that oh-yeah-I-have-genitals sorta way. Feeling that vasovagal nerve connection from brain to lungs to heart to gut and yes to genitals, now aflame with another’s touch. The costumes signal the campiness: the making-out overlong like maybe they are siblings. Elbow sex with sibs Magenta and Riff Raff.
It’s Janet and Frank-N-Furter in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” though musically closer to “Hot Patootie.” Surrounding the two, canoodling in the creepy parlor (easily an interior in the “Frankenstein Place”) the sad portraits portend, like the tombstones and skeletons at the queue of the “Haunted Mansion” ride: you’ll die.
Danger! Danger!
It’s a choice to remind a dancing crowd of death when certainly some had not forgotten. But that’s why it’s important to dance—to suspend thoughts of mortality for a night (or at least a few minutes a time).
Learning my great-grandfather died in a fire, when my grandmother was 16, only deepened my ancient fear. Epigenetic. I remember seeing my dad fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand, the very thing that took out the grandfather he never met. When I was 24, my dad died of a heart attack—a surprise but not really, since he always “ran hot.” His own grandson, my nephew, never got to meet him. 
I moved to New Orleans, site of these traumas, in 2008, comforted by the higher likelihood of flood than inferno (though increasingly marsh fires are common, and for dozens of days this summer temps topped 100).
High Voltage!
I’m a fire sign—one friend said I even kinda look like a lion—but my rising and moons signs are water. I’m drawn to it physically—I like to swim—because I too “run hot.” I’m prone to fainting. Once in a yoga/meditation circle, an athlete noted the warmth radiating from my hands, said I “could charge for that.” I burned these same hands, at five, when I grabbed too close to a sparkler’s fire.
In 2001, my friends at the time, junior year of high school, liked to do “the hippie trick”: slice a lamp wire, maybe wet your heels (with spit?), squeeze them and the wire together. Hold hands: connect. Plug in. Voltage! Add people to the mix: 10, 12, the current maybe becoming fainter the more circuitry. You might hear, “I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid.” 
A friend asked an electrician coworker if it was safe. Probably. No one ever got singed, fried, burnt, smoked, blown like the Jurassic Park kid from the electrified fence. The hippie-trick-house family’s dad, at NASA, might have been adjacent to the O-ring disaster; the Challenger explosion (Y-shaped flame a reference for Jean Jacket’s final form).
When we touch!
Before the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, the UpStairs Lounge fire in the French Quarter, in 1973, was the deadliest attack at a gay bar in US history. 32 people died. Although my dad told me about it when I was a kid, only when I moved to New Orleans as an adult, 35 years after the tragedy, did it become widely commemorated. At the time, mere years after Stonewall in 1969, the city government offered no condolences, churches refused burials, and many of the victims’ families didn’t claim their children’s bodies.
So it’s a choice to remind people they could die at any moment, especially while squeezed into a small space, maybe with cheap tinder-like decorations, maybe with obscured doorways, maybe with only one stairway as egress. And did you know your vision fades when oxygen’s low, at least when you’re about to faint. Eyes require a large oxygen load, and when it’s in short supply they’re not strictly necessary (though certainly advantageous when trying to flee). Body pulls the system’s plug like Dave methodically (spoiler alert) disconnecting Hal’s higher capacities: “I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
In 2023, since a pandemic, panting and sweating in a ventless space with so many bodies hits different. But maybe you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb; you maybe give yourself over, to absolute pleasure.
Fire in the disco! 
Those opening riffs of “Danger!”High Voltage” beep (beat) like a funky smoke detector. I think of Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks,” also lyrically anxiety-minded, maybe more with talk of running. “Danger!” claims the space. Like Beyonce’s “Freedom,” it inspires me to move manically (as I’m inclined) and yet there’s little movement in the video, a contrast both appealing and instructive. The couple in the “Danger!” barely move. They make out. One room. 
The song was released in the US three days before Bush declared war on Iraq. The last generation with internetless adolescence had a taste of chaos with 9/11. But the federal assault weapons ban wouldn’t expire until 2004, so mass shootings weren’t yet on the reg. 2003 was four years post-Columbine, four years pre-Virginia Tech. 
[Sax solo]
“Danger!” lore wasn’t limited to (ultimately-confirmed) Jack White vocals: it was also rumored Bill Clinton played sax. Early-internet hijinks! Maybe a music biz thing: Kate Bush was rumored to have vocals on “Hilly Fields (1892)” in 1982. Turns out, nick nicely (Nickolas Laurien) couldn’t remember the real Kate (Jackson)’s last name, only credited “Kate.” 
The sax in this song isn’t tacked on like in “Baker Street,” or obligatory like in “I Will Always Love You.” It’s more integrated, closer to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours” or Tupac’s “Shorty Wanna Be a Thug,” maybe the first to sample Hank Crawford’s “Wildflower.” I honestly even like bad sax; like pizza they say. 
Fire in the Taco Bell!
In New Orleans, a few years post-Katrina, there was a blighted building, once a Taco Bell. One day from the ground sprouted contractor signs. In response a warning, spray painted on the building: If this isn’t a Taco Bell, “expect arson.” It became a bakery, famous for adjacency with the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. One night, some years later, a grease flame, though extinguished at 9 pm, reignited at 3 am. The spray-painter relented: “This was better than a Taco Bell.” Today the building, again a Taco Bell, reminds us like “Danger!” and many a dance song: live más. 

Andrea Panzeca is a writer and teaching artist in New Orleans.