second round

(10) Godley & Creme, “Cry”
SADDENED
(2) Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t Worry Be Happy”
300-290
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/17/23.

AARON BURCH ON “DON’T WORRY. BE HAPPY”

In 1988, I’m ten years old. I have almost no worries. I am—by both nature and circumstance—almost always happy.
I’m a good student, a good kid. I generally do what my parents tell me, follow rules, never really get in trouble other than sometimes picking on my younger brother too much. School comes easy, I get good grades. I play soccer and baseball, am a Cub Scout. My dad is my coach and my Scout leader; my mom packs me my lunch every, takes turns in the neighborhood carpool. They both go to PTA meetings, parent-teacher nights, generally dote on my brother and I.
We live in a small house with a big yard, kind of on the outskirts of Lakewood, WA. It’s a pretty idyllic neighborhood. We moved here for a handful of reasons, but one of those was to be closer to my grandmother, my mom’s mom. We go over to her house all the time: for family dinners, just to visit. She watches my brother and I when our parents go out for date night or do whatever else they do that means needing a babysitter.
My entire life is very 1980s Leave it to Beaver.
It is into this world and life that Bobby McFerrin releases his one and only hit single, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The song is simple, kitschy, catchy, all in ways that could be described as cheesy, at best, and grating or obnoxious or worse as you move down from “at best.” The bulk of the lyrics are the title, sang and repeated over and over, between upbeat whistling. “Don't worry. (Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh) Be happy. (Ooh-ooh-ooh) Don't worry, be happy. (Ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh) Don't worry. (Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh) Be happy. (Ooh-ooh-ooh) Don't worry, be happy.”
The song comes accompanied with a music video that is funny, charming, lighthearted. Alongside McFerrin himself, it stars Bill Irwin, who I recognize from guest appearances on The Cosby Show and also as Ham Gravy in Popeye, which I didn’t really get, because it’s a Robert Altman movie and I’m ten, but also I loved, because it’s Popeye and because it starred “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”’s other star, Robin Williams. The three dance around, goof off, just generally seem like they’re having fun.
It is perfect for a ten-year-old in that maturing gap somewhere between kid songs and, let’s say as one example, Nirvana’s Nevermind, that is only three years away and will change everything, both in the wider culture but also personally. It is almost as if the song has been reverse-engineered to be aimed at me as its bullseye.
The song either captures or seems to inspire my entire ethos.

*

Warning: I’m not sure that I have much specific to say about the song itself, to be honest. If that’s what you’re looking for, my apologies. I like the song, but I wouldn’t say I love it. Certainly not like when I was ten, although even then, it was more a very popular song that was constantly in the ether that I liked and enjoyed than a personal favorite. I’ve barely thought about it in the intervening years. For the last few weeks, whenever I, sort of perversely, try to get it stuck in my head to make myself think about it for this essay, my brain keeps mis-queueing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds (Don't Worry About a Thing).”
I don’t have much interest in researching it. I’m not that curious why he wrote it, under what circumstance, his thoughts about it or its popularity, either at the time or now, in reflection. When I think about or hear it, I smile, and I don’t really want to complicate it any more than that.
I also don’t have any interest in arguing for or against its merits. Love it? Great! Think it’s a horrible, obnoxious scourge? That’s fine, whatever. That has as much (more? Probably!) to do with me than the song or McFerrin. I don’t have much interest in arguing for or against anything. I generally avoid and have little interest in conflict.
“Here’s a little song I wrote,” the song starts. “You might want to sing it note for not. Don’t worry, be happy.”
It’s just a “little song,” no big deal! You “might” want to sing along… but you might not! That’s ok. Like what you like! Dislike what you dislike! Enjoy your life! We only have one. Don’t worry. Be happy!

* 

As I’m writing this now, I am about to turn 45. I went to the doctor this week, for the annual physical I hadn’t gone in for in three years. He asked me if there were any new medical issues in my family, and there are, I’ll be flying west in a few weeks when my mom gets a kidney transplant, but I knew that wasn’t what he was asking. “No, I’m not sure, I’m adopted and so I don’t know,” and he said he’d make a big note of that in my chart so he doesn’t ask again every time. Later, in the middle of small doctor-patient chat about my eating, drinking, and exercise habits, he reminded me, while rubbing his own similarly shaved, bald head, “Guys like us, we need to wear hats or at least sunscreen. Minimum 30 SPF. Every day.” At the end, he gave me a referral for the colonoscopy I am due for this year. Annual physical mostly as reminder of the tolls of aging.
I’m seven years older now than McFerrin was when he released “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in 1988. I’m two years older than my dad was that year. I’m only three years younger than my grandmother was when I was born, only twenty-two years—less than half my age!—younger than she was when she passed away. 38, 43, 45… these ages all seem so old when you’re a kid. And 67? That was elderly, that was grandparent-y old!
Now, of course, I don’t feel old. Other than the Gastroenterology referral and reminders to take care of my skin, my physical showed me to be in surprisingly, enviably, good health. And 67 looks practically right around the corner. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it now, but I don’t think I’d so deeply realized until now how young that is, just how young my grandmother was when she passed away from cancer. I miss her all the time. More than anyone else. My ex had two grandmothers live into their mid-90s. That’s another thirty years! She would still be alive if she’d made it to that age. She would have seen me graduate college, start a literary journal, go back to school for my MFA. She would have loved that I became a writer. Would have loved the person I’ve become, that I grew into a life I love. Would have loved that I discovered a passion I didn’t even know I had until after she passed away, that I’ve pursued and chased dreams of that passion and built a life around these things I love and that bring me joy. I’m getting choked up now, thinking about how much she would have loved all of this.
I’ve been doing this more and more as I get older, calculating how old I am now vs. how old others were when vs. how old I was then vs. how old others are now. I do it so often, I’ve written versions of that sentence in at least three different personal essays. Maybe double that. I keep trying to find new ways of saying that same old thing. The calculus of getting older. The algebra of living a life.

*

In the last few years, I’ve gotten divorced, published my first novel, have settled into a job that for years I assumed was probably temporary, have figured out what it means to stay and make a life in the Midwest state I left my beloved Pacific Northwest and moved to for the woman who is now my ex. Like my job, a large part of me thought this Midwest life would be temporary, though I have now lived here longer than I lived in Washington when growing up. And then all of that shifted again when a global pandemic happened and changed what life meant for everyone.
After getting divorced, I joined dating apps, a kinda wild experience to discover in your 40s. I’ve been writing bios for short fiction published on online literary journals for twenty years but felt weird adapting that idea to dating. I included in my note about myself that I am “kind of a Mr. Peanutbutter,” mostly because it made myself laugh, the reason behind a surprisingly large percentage of my life decisions, but it ended up a kind of perfect little bio inclusion—something of an inside joke to those who had also watched BoJack Horseman; a conversation starter for those who hadn’t and asked what that meant. “You really like peanutbutter?” “No, he’s a character from BoJack Horseman. A kinda doofusy, good-natured Labrador retriever primarily defined by being always cheerful. He’s not great at dealing with conflict, but he mostly just wants everyone to be happy?”

*

Something else I’ve found myself doing more and more as I get older is think about the nature vs. nurture of a person. My novel is about two brothers who have little in common and not much of a relationship and, for various novelistic reasons, get pushed into trying to figure out why not. My own brother and I do not have much in common, we aren’t very close. I spent years saying that I never even thought about this, though every now and then someone would remind me of the central conflict in the novel that I’d spent so, so many years working on.
Why are we so dissimilar, why not as close as some siblings? Because some differences in our DNA formed two such different personalities? Because our parents raised us differently? Because I’m adopted and he isn’t and so our DNA is literally different?

* 

A few summers ago, I was at a writer retreat and fell into something of a monologue about my life. I like telling a good story, and think of myself as a good storyteller, and the weird positivity of my life has become one of my favorites to tell. It feels a funny counterpoint to most other writers I know. I sleep well, I have almost no anxiety. I am teased sometimes for being so smiley. I’m a Mr. Peanutbutter!
There is likely some part of this attributable to my DNA, to whatever factor of “nature” that I got from my biological parents. But, too, there is that “nurture” part of my upbringing, my childhood. “My parents,” I tell people. “They were almost obnoxiously loving and encouraging. SO supportive. It’s almost gross!”
From as young as I can remember, they supported and encouraged every interest my brother and I had. My dad couldn’t care less about sports, but he coached my little kid soccer and baseball teams, he took me to countless Tacoma Tigers and Seattle Mariners games growing up. They bought my brother and I art supplies for every Christmas, encouraging any and all artistic interests. They always encouraged us to pursue jobs and careers that would make money, noting that money often made life easier, but also if our interests lay elsewhere, we should pursue those! Enjoy life, they both told and modeled for us.
I was a little embarrassed and bored by this upbringing for a long time. Feared it made me less interesting; it gave me fewer stories to tell. Over the years, I’ve grown into not just appreciating my parents and this life they gave me, but enjoying the narrative of it too. A little like the life version of a writer starting out thinking they needed to become one kind of writer before figuring out their own voice. Which happened to me as a writer as well. Most of my stories are about nostalgia, growing up; they’re often quiet and earnest, without falling over into sentimental (hopefully). Blurbers and reviewers have said about my novel that it “no lie, makes you want to be alive,” “is a novel of substance by a large-hearted writer,” is “melancholy and hopeful”; “It’s a book about memory and the past refreshingly devoid of easy nostalgia,” “A beautiful, big-hearted novel,” “It feels both intimate and familiar; a work of wisdom and heart.” I hadn’t really thought of myself or my writing in these ways—I often wish I could write weirder, experimental, more out-there bonkers shit—but also these descriptions mean the world to me. I like this positive, hopeful, big-hearted writer and person I’ve become.

*

OK, a small handful of pieces of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” trivia, all of which could easily be found on Wikipedia, but I’ll share here lest you be disappointed to read all this about me and not have learned at least a little bit about the song itself.
Before being included on McFerrin’s fourth album, Simple Pleasures, and released as the album’s first single, the song was included on the soundtrack for Cocktail, the 1988 movie where Tom Cruise takes a job at a bar to help pay his bills and ends up becoming something of a famous, superstar bartender. (The 80s were wild!)
The song includes no instrumentation, made up entirely of sounds and vocal parts by McFerrin himself. It was the first and only a cappella song to ever reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
When it reached number one, jumping up from number four the previous week, it replaced Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Two weeks later, it would be displaced at number one by Def Leppard’s “Love Bites.”(Again: the 80s!)
It would go on to win the Grammy for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
George H. W. Bush used it as his official 1988 U.S. presidential campaign song, until McFerrin protested the use of his song, even removing it from his live repertoire to help make the point.
In 2005, 17 years after its release, Blender rated it number seven on a list of the “50 Worst Songs Ever,” writing “it’s difficult to think of a song more likely to plunge you into suicidal despondency than this.” A few years later, in 2011, it was number one on The Village Voice’s “The Seven Worst Songs Of All Time,” where they added, “This hard-to-listen-to easy-listening "classic" always makes me worry! And retch!”
My one piece of non-Wikipedia, more subjective trivia: there’s a moment, two minutes and sixteen seconds into the music video, where Robin Williams smiles into the camera in a close-up that is pure, contagious, mood-altering joy.

*

I’m not arguing in favor of this… ethos or mantra or personality or whatever you want to call it. In part because, as stated, I don’t really get into arguments. And in part because, well, that tendency toward never really getting into arguments has its downsides.
In that Blender list that cited “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as the seventh “worst song ever,” they also drew special attention to the lyrics. “If your landlord is indeed threatening you with legal action, you should not under any circumstances follow McFerrin’s advice, which seems to involve chuckling at him and saying “Look at me, I’m ’appy” in a comical Jamaican voice.” It’s true, there are plenty of things in life, from struggling to afford living expenses to countless life and societal problems, both larger and smaller, that warrant worry, that should be reacted to with stronger, more actionable responses than just being happy.
Like reasons for moving, divorce is always a culmination of a lot of factors, though my inability to deal with conflict would be one of them. I hold things in, I don’t deal with them; I often hide from them under a blanket of prioritizing happiness over worry. Between a life full of lots of privileges and a kind of “live, laugh, love” mentality, I’m often not as empathetic as I could be, as I wish I were. I’m not great at dealing with grief. I wish I’d been more present, both physically and emotionally, when my grandmother passed away. There are other examples, though that’s probably the biggest. 

*

A few years ago, one of my writer friends told me I was “one of the only actual punks I know.” How much that meant to me when he said it, and how much I’ve thought about it since, and how much I’ve always wanted to be punk, to capture that energy, to be thought of as such, all probably disprove his point. All that on top of everything else about me that no one would ever see or describe as “punk.”
“But probably don’t see yourself,” he added, before I could say as much myself. “In ethics and drive and DIY,” clarifying and supporting his claim.
I’ve been thinking about that lately in relation to thinking so much about McFerrin’s 1988 single. If my closet full of J. Crew and my rule-following, boundary-avoiding rather than -pushing personality could be punk because of my DIY ethic and drive and because I generally tend to make decisions because they’ll entertain myself, couldn’t, too, a pop song that eschews instrumentation and encourages us to worry less and enjoy things more? In 1988, but maybe even more here in 2023? And in the culture at large, but maybe even especially in a literary landscape of tortured artists full of anxiety and terror, self-doubt and imposter syndromes?
So. I know I said I didn’t have much in arguing for or against the song, but here’s one claim to disprove. One argument for the song:
“Don’t worry, be happy”? Possibly the most punk one hit wonder of the 80s.

* 

A few years ago, I was contacted by an adoption finder, told that the mom who had given me up for adoption was looking for me. That is a longer, different story and essay, but what is important here: I had never reached out, never gone looking myself. I had never felt the kinds of abandonment issues I know some adoptees do, I’d never been that curious at all.
I don’t remember being told I was adopted, because I remember having always been told. And it was only ever presented as a blessing, a gift. Also that if I ever wanted to seek out my bio parents, they’d support me; and if I didn’t, they’d support that too.
I had never really worried about it; I’d been too busy being happy.
Being sought out, rather than doing the seeking, wasn’t something I was prepared for and it freaked me out. I didn’t do anything with this news for a long time but then, ultimately, two or three years after that initial contact, I finally reached out and sent my biological mom an introduction email. Since then, we have stayed in minimal though semiregular email contact—birthday and holiday well wishes, mostly; occasional big life updates. I told her when I got divorced; she emailed me the afternoon her eldest son (well, other than me) died in a car crash. I’m not sure exactly how old he was though, of course, younger than me. Younger than me now, younger than me then.
The algebra of life includes a lot of variables of grief, it turns out. I’m admittedly not great at solving for those. But I try, the best I know how. Be supportive—of everyone, but maybe especially those in your life, your family, both biological and chosen, your loved ones. Be kind to those around you. Embrace and spread and encourage joy. It feels cheesy to write it down like that, but I believe it. It’s maybe what I most believe in. It’s something, at least. Maybe it’s everything? Try to not worry about the things it doesn’t help to worry about? Try to be happy?

Aaron Burch is the author of a novel, Year of the Buffalo; a story collection, Backswing; and a memoir / cultural-appreciation / booklength essay about the novella that was the basis for Stand By Me, Stephen King's The Body. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, tweets too much at @aaron__burch, and has a website that he updates too infrequently at www.aaronburch.net

In It for the Vibes: kathleen rooney On the Ecstatic Trembling of “Cry” by Godley and Creme and Miami Vice

Some people are night owls. Not me; I’m a lark. This fact has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with biology—I am incapable of sleeping much past 5:30 am. My brain stirs around dawn and makes me wake up, fully and irrevocably, no matter what I’ve done the night before. Consequently, I’ve never been a nocturnal partier. On the few occasions that I have stayed up from dusk to daybreak without at minimum a couple hours’ slumber, I have wanted to die.
Or at least to cry, which is the subject of this essay: the English soft rock duo Godley and Creme’s bravura 1985 song “Cry,” about which more soon. But for now, suffice to say that my identity as a morning person means that—despite my abiding affinity for music and all its power—I’ve never been one to hang out on the dancefloor until sunrise.  
This lack of lived experience of nightlife has left me ignorant in certain areas, including the function and expertise of DJs, those crepuscular people who—with their crates of records or bins of CDs or laptops of digital audio files or whatever—play recorded music before a live audience.
I didn’t realize it last January, but 2022 was destined to be the year that I finally understood and subsequently appreciated what it is that DJs do exactly. After decades of thinking that they just sort of threw together a playlist and played it, I apprehended that their role is more metaphysical. I mean, I now know that they use mixers and crossfaders and cues to align beats and craft transitions and manipulate rhythms and tempos and so forth, but my epiphany relates more to their manipulation of vibes—the responsibility they take for a non-stop flow not merely of music but of transportive feeling.
In true lark style, I came to this knowledge not by encountering it in person under cover of darkness, but by reading. Late in June, I served as the interlocutor for my friend Andy Farkas at Madison Street Books here in Chicago in support of his fantastic essay collection The Great Indoorsman. A deliberate self-conscious artificiality characterizes his work, and when I asked for some of his recent reads with similar traits, he recommended Sphinx, the 1986 debut novel by the French author Anne F. Garréta.
Andy has taste worth being influenced by. I devoured the love story’s 152 pages, pages in which Garréta reveals the gender of neither her unnamed first-person narrator, nor the narrator’s lover A***, a feat which helped Garréta become only the third female member of Oulipo—the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, meaning the “workshop of potential literature”—a loose collection of primarily French-speaking authors who use linguistic and mathematical constraints to create their work. [1]

Through a macabre plot twist best left unrevealed, the protagonist blunders into the position of DJ at a prestigious and decadent 1980s Parisian night club. There, they are shocked into the insight that “To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult.” As they practice this mystical craft, they discover that:

Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try—utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure—to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy, nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song), subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill.

In other words, DJs rely on shared instinctive feeling. And what is a shared instinctive feeling if not a vibe?
The noun “vibe” originates in 1940, short for “vibraphone,” which itself is a 1926 hybrid of “vibrato” and “phone,” with vibrato arising in 1867 and meaning “a tremulous effect in music” from the Latin vibratus: “to turn, to vacillate, or to tremble ecstatically.” 
All these variations relate to the word “vibration,” cropping up in English in the 1650s from the Latin vibrationem: “a shaking, a brandishing, a setting in tremulous motion.” The word vibe’s denotation of an intuitive signal about a person, place, or thing became popular in the late 1960s (think of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” [2]) but has roots as far back as 1893, when Frank Earl Ornsby's astrology text The Law and the Prophets used the expression “good vibrations” to mean “positive energy.” [3]
In August, not long after I became a Sphinx enthusiast, I participated in a one-off show put on by my friend Andrew Tham (these Andrews—they know what’s hip) and his ever-evolving project/band big TEEN, a Chicago-based DIY arts scene concerned with live music and performance. At the end of the evening, a DJ—Andrew’s buddy Chris, then performing as Donna Somersault, but whose actual DJ name is Disco Crystal—did a 15-minute set during which he challenged himself to play as many vinyl records as possible during the allotted time. He did 13, and probably could have done more, but when he put on Gloria Gaynor’s Spanish-language version of “I Will Survive,” everybody danced in such goofy ecstasy that he let it play in its entirety as the set’s conclusion.[4]
Experiencing Chris’s work reinforced—physically, empirically—what Sphinx had taught me about the athleticism and mysticism that combine in the labor that a DJ executes. Dork that I am, I recommended Garréta’s book to Chris afterwards as I delivered my compliments.
To round out 2022’s unexpected DJ-appreciation trifecta, in October, I read Ed Caesar’s New Yorker profile of the DJ Mladen Solomun, the so-called King of Ibiza who plays the island’s oldest night club Pacha at least 20 Sundays a year, cultivating a cult-like following.
In a passage in which he quotes Ed Frenkel, a Berkeley math professor and Solumun devotee, Caesar writes:

“He never played the same way,” Frenkel recalled. “It took me some time to realize that he actually had a much stronger bond with his audience than most d.j.s did.” It wasn’t that Solomun gave listeners exactly what they wanted, Frenkel said—he simply knew “what channel of communication was open with this particular audience and would operate along that channel.” A Solomun set, he told me, returns us “to that space we had as children, mesmerized by music, mesmerized by looking at the starry night sky.” He went on, “The function of the d.j. is to preside over the ceremony. He is the priest, or the shaman.”

Solomun himself says, “I want to have fun. If I’m not having fun, I can’t transmit the happiness.” And what are vibes but the transmission of emotion from a source, as well as an emotional reaction to the transmission of that aura? [5]
The aura transmitted by Godley and Creme’s “Cry” with its minimalist melody and massive bassline is unsettling and tense, pentatonic and propulsive, simultaneously melancholic and soaring, a sobbing rhythm appropriate to its title and owing much to the production of Trevor Horn from The Art of Noise [6]. “Cry” captures more than its simple lyrics suggest—that people in love often cheat and lie—and it does so on the level of emotion more than intellect. As John L. Walters writes in the Independent, “If you were looking for a sound, a single note, to sum up postwar Western pop music, the long, high, crying G-sharp at the end of the line would have to be a contender.” Apparently, Godley and Creme are admirers of Debussy, which makes sense because Debussy too dwells in the realm of transcendent ineffability, given his status as arguably the first Impressionist composer.
Outside of their previous band 10cc’s oeuvre (the standout of which is perhaps 1978’s yacht rock classic “I’m Not in Love,” with its ethereal multitracked backing vocals), “Cry” became Godley and Creme’s only Top 40 hit in the United States, making it to Number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. They also directed the innovative video for the song, a black-and-white masterpiece featuring a series of diverse faces lip syncing, mixing and fading into one another by way of dissolves and wipes.

This virtuosity in what was still, in the 1980s, a relatively novel genre proved significant to both Godley and Creme, who directed over 50 of that decade’s most important music videos, including “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock, “Don’t Give Up” by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung, and “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran to name a few. As Glen Levy writes in Time, “The entire medium of music video owes Kevin Godley and Lol Creme an enormous debt.”
Even if they depict distinct characters and narratives, what the best music videos are “about” more than anything else is vibes: a moodboard to support the sentiment of the song. Vibes in videos—and everywhere else, really—are atmospheric, miasmic. A smell almost. A room spray for the mind. Operating in a lyrical mode as opposed to a sequential or argumentative one, vibes express and evoke idiosyncratic emotions. They make an audience get the vapors. They—like the lover who doesn’t “even know how to say goodbye” in Godley and Creme’s hit—can make you wanna cry.
Given the song’s chart success and the ubiquity of the video on the not-yet-five-years-old MTV, I must have heard “Cry” unwittingly somewhere in the background over the course of my lifetime. Yet neither commercial radio nor cable television are how I recall first encountering “Cry.” No, that encounter came as a result of “Definitely Miami,” the twelfth episode of the second season of Miami Vice, an episode which premiered on January 10, 1986 in which Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs must take down underworld figure Charlie Basset, played to icky straggly-haired perfection by the also icky-in-real life Ted Nugent.

Being only five years old myself at the time, I also did not encounter this episode when it initially aired, but rather as a result of my being married to esteemed March Xness co-competitor Martin Seay. A Michael Mann afficionado, Martin had recounted many a thrilling detail of the show to me over the years. I was intrigued. Miami Vice sounded less like a plot-driven cop show and more like a tone poem—an ode to the sun-drenched, cocaine-dusted decaying Art Deco milieu of a subtropical city when greed was good and Don Johnson thought he had a shot at a music career. In short, it sounded like a show that was mostly about vibes.
The origins of Miami Vice are the stuff of elevator pitch legend. NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff (apocryphally anyway) wrote a two-word napkin memo, “MTV Cops,” signaling his desire to cash in on the triumph of the channel. Memo recipient Anthony Yerkovich, a writer and producer whose work included the award-winning police procedural Hill Street Blues, drew inspiration from a recently passed asset forfeiture law that allowed law enforcement agencies to seize property from the criminals they prosecuted and use it in departmental operations. Yerkovich drafted a script about a team of Miami-based vice cops trying to stop the influx of narcotics into their metropolis.
In a crucial development for vibes everywhere, and possibly the very invention of the 80s themselves, the pilot episode, “Brother’s Keeper,” features Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” playing over an indelible scene of Crockett and Tubbs driving around the neon-lit city at night, one of the first instances of a pop song being woven into a show in this manner. For all its implication of a narrative, “In the Air Tonight” is really a song about vibes, because implication is all there is—we get a huge mood but we don’t get the whole story.
Shot on location and adhering to executive producer Michael Mann’s dictum “No Earth tones,” the show was broadcast in stereophonic sound, a newish development which allowed Miami Vice to incorporate a move that—along with the palette—made the show stand out from its competitors: the assertive inclusion of pop music to enhance and advance the action to the point where each installment is basically a 46- to 49-minute music video. These high production values meant that each episode cost about $1.3 million to make, 30% more than the average cop show, a sum which appears to have been spent almost entirely on vibes.
Obviously, when Miami Vice became available on Netflix in 2014, Martin and I watched the hell out of it, savoring the pastel t-shirts worn under white linen suits and the sharp-dressed cartel bosses and the speedboats darting across aqua waters and the suitcases full of money and the Ferraris driving intensely around at night, all set to the most iconic popular songs of the era, not to mention the numerous cameos by musicians including Willie Nelson and Sheena Easton and Little Richard and Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen and Barbra Streisand and too many more to list exhaustively here.
In a show that saturates itself with vibes, “Definitely Miami” is super-saturated thanks to its last six minutes being set to Godley and Creme’s “Cry,” a pairing that the Miami Vice Fandom Wiki tells me “is considered by many fans to be one of the defining scenes of Vice as a show and among the best endings of the second season.” It totally is.
When the theme of this year’s March Xness tournament—one-hit wonders of the 1980s—was announced, I vowed to write about “Cry.” Tragically, my number did not come up in the lottery; however, I care enough about this song that I wrote a whole essay about it for an out-of-competition spot. Talking about “Cry” and its immaculate vibes and the use of those vibes in “Definitely Miami” means that much to me. But then. In an expedient plot development befitting one of the later and admittedly less impressive seasons of Miami Vice, someone dropped out, a spot opened up, and here I am, applying my powers of persuasion to gain your votes—to “play the game” as the lyrics have it.
Over the course of their investigation into Basset/Nugent’s malfeasance, Sonny becomes romantically involved with Callie, a beautiful French-accented bikini-clad blonde who claims to be trapped in a bad marriage but is really Baset’s moll.
Many an intricacy pops up in solving this crime, but these intricacies are not the point. They are merely the set-up to the culmination in which “Cry” plays during the satisfying scene in which we watch real-life NRA shill and racist sleazebag Nugent get his violent comeuppance, and Sonny sees to it that his seductress—whimsically wearing an outfit with mermaid vibes and serving faux-innocent vibes by building sandcastles on the beach—gets arrested by helicopter for reasons unknown, reasons which seem mostly designed to let Sonny stop and gaze soulfully at the vehicle as his faithless lover is led away. This exquisitely soundtracked sequence is, as the kids say, a whole mood.
Watch it again; I’ll wait.
The way that Callie mistakes Sonny for Nugent before—in a wipe effect reminiscent of the original “Cry” video—she recognizes who he really is? The grace with which Sonny slides his sunglasses over his eyes, closing his face to Callie the same way he’s closing his wounded heart? His windswept pout? All those little points of light dancing on the crests of the ocean waves? The show may as well have been called Miami VIBES.
Gestures and movements, outfits and accessories. Suggestions, not statements. Insinuations not ideology. A misty glow more than a resolved shape. Vibes!
Yet some people don’t like them, or don’t find them enough at any rate. French New Wave film, for instance, like music videos and Miami Vice, is also largely “about” vibes. A cinephile friend of Martin’s and mine who showed us many filmic treasures over the years could not stand Jean-Luc Godard. This friend is a smart person, but thought Breathless was dumb. Boring. At the time, I couldn’t explain to him why it was neither dumb nor boring to me, but now I see, wit of the staircase-style: vibes.
This friend also hated the oeuvre of David Lynch, which again now makes sense, because every Lynch movie is vibes up to here.[7] Relatedly, this friend claimed that he could never “get” poetry, and—knowing I’m a professor of it—frequently wanted me to explain it to him, which past a certain point I could not do, because ultimately, poetry is often also very much about vibes. A vibe-oriented approach encourages and enables the audience to do what it wants in terms of its experience of the work, whatever its genre or medium, instead of insisting on particular rigid interpretations. Alas, some people just can’t let themselves vibe to that.
Another cinephile friend, fellow March Xness essayist Robert Puccinelli recently wrote a perceptive review of George Franju’s elegant and upsetting 1960 horror movie Eyes Without a Face. His final paragraph about the film’s conclusion captures the essence of the lyrical apprehension produced when an artist turns from the hardness of narrative to the softness of vibes: 

The poetry of the ending doesn't make any concrete sense, but it does make poetic sense. The feeling of loss and desperation is simultaneously suffused with a feeling of acceptance (you don’t have to understand; just follow your intuitions and be) which feels like a form of freedom, of release for the viewer. You leave the movie feeling strangely exhilarated, almost uplifted: artists have worked on you and filled you with an unnamable longing. This longing can never be satisfied, but its beautiful desperation doesn't feel like a lack because the film that gives it to you is whole and complete and perfect and perfectly beautiful.

Intuitiveness and being—yes. Vibes! They are less about sense than about sensation. They afford a poetics of feeling, if you will. Vibes tend to be more closely related to poetry and music than to story or philosophy for how they use rhythms and images as ends unto themselves, not necessarily to advance a narrative or point.

You can catch a vibe like you can catch a ball, a thief, or a cold—actively and enthusiastically, aggressively and with great intention, or passively and unwillingly. Sometimes with a bad vibe, you’re curious—you peek at it suspiciously through a door held shut only by a short brass chain, but it seeps in anyway. Other times, a vibe hits you like a convulsion and you want to be rocked. Music is a way to choose what vibe you want to invite in, or to let somebody else offer that vibe up for you.
In Veronica, her novel about the hedonistic milieu of fashion models in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill captures music’s superb function as a conduit for vibes. At 17, Alison, the protagonist, says:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next—songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

Significantly, before she stumbles into modeling, Alison aspires to be a poet [8]. As a character, she’s drawn magnetically to vibe-centric pursuits.
As I bid farewell to 2022, year of my discovery of the magic of DJs, I doubt that I’ll be catching vibes on late-night dance floors. Luckily, I can catch them in a lot of other places. I can keep vibing over and over to the last six minutes of “Definitely Miami,” for example. I can cue up “Cry” again and again like a spell that Godley and Creme have put out there for me and for everyone when we need to cast a peculiar enchantment over ourselves, permeating everything with emotional intensity, becoming the vibesmiths of our souls.
In 2015, I noticed that my DePaul student Jireh, an awesome poet and artist, always signed their emails “vibes.” I liked that a lot, and so with that I will leave you.

Vibes,
Kathleen

[1] High-fives to the translator Emma Ramadan for getting the book’s genderlessness and atmosphere of sex-and-death—its vibe!—to shine in English, too.

[2] Brian Wilson wanted to call the song “Good Vibes,” but lyricist Tony Asher argued that doing so would be a “lightweight use of the language” and that the full word would sound less “trendy.”

[3] One hundred years later in 1993, producers Quincy Jones and David Salzman launched the hip hop and R&B-focused magazine Vibe.

[4] Gratitude to this show for starting at 5:30 pm and therefore ending comfortably before my preferred bedtime.

[5] Steve Hulme, Pacha’s booker, pursued Solomun for the club’s Sunday slot because, as he put it, “It was the kind of music girls liked. There was just a vibe about him—there was a vibe about the label, the name Solomun was really cool.”

[6] As followers of Xness may remember, The Art of Noise is a band I like whose collaboration with Welsh nonpareil Tom Jones I wrote about last year for March Faxness.

[7] For instance, this music video interlude in Mulholland Drive where Rebekah del Rio performs a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” is one of the most mesmerizing covers of all time.

[8] While we’re in the neighborhood, Frank Báez has a fantastic poem called “Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ” that examines the similarities and differences between the two vocations.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in September by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.