3/5

elliott vanskike
on
bronski beat, “ain’t necessarily so”

(march fadness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Bronski Beat Repeat by Elliott Vanskike

The song I was repping in the 2022 March Faxness tournament, “Ain’t Necessarily So” by The Bronski Beat, didn’t even really belong in the pool of songs to choose from. I think the tourney grandees made an exception for a song that got nowhere near the charts in the U.S. and was not the same type of cover as the other 63 songs. Fifty years after “Porgy and Bess,” I don’t think you “cover” George and Ira Gershwin. You just do your version of an American classic.
I never expected to win my first-round matchup. For starters, I was up against a well-known song whose video had been on MTV in heavy rotation in the late 80s and early 90s—Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane”—and, in Lorraine Berry, I was up against a really talented writer. If I entertained any notions of an upset, they quickly faded when I started reading the essay arrayed to the left of mine on tournament day. Berry is a deft, incisive writer, her quick-hit vignettes somehow accruing to much more than the sum of their parts.
Don’t misunderstand: I like the essay I wrote, but—compared to Berry’s—mine plods where hers soars. I methodically hit all the points I wanted to: the tragic crucible of AIDS and how it shaped the Bronski Beat, Jimmy Sommerville’s voice as a means of transcendence, the band’s choice of “Ain’t Necessarily So” as a piss-take aimed at conservatives and the religious right, and my suspicion that art can help us survive but not ultimately vanquish insidious cultural and political forces. But my essay moved in one direction, where Berry’s sparked myriad associations, which is what the best writing does. I was happy to lose (though not getting trounced would’ve been nice), because—cheesy as it sounds—I made a writing friend. I actually made several writing friends from that Faxness tourney. I’ve bought and loved Jillian Luft’s novel, Scumbag Summer. I bought and loved Temim Fruchter’s novel City of Laughter. I even got to see her read from it and share a hug.
In truth, my essay’s methodical plodding did lead me to a place that caught me off-guard. As I mention in the Bronski Beat essay, my mom always mangled the lyrics to songs and—in the case of “Ain’t Necessarily So”—she completely excised any words but those three. This struck me as funny, and I thought that’s how I’d deploy it in the essay. But as I researched and wrote about the AIDS crisis in Britain and the U.S. and reflected on the friends I’d lost and how the terror of that time shaped those who survived, my mother’s blithe disregard for the religious critique at the heart of “Ain’t Necessarily So” began to rankle. She was homophobic in the hypocritical evangelical way: she would never have angrily confronted a gay friend of mine, but she was certain they were going to—and belonged in—hell unless they repented. My mother had been dead for 15 years when I wrote that Bronski Beat essay. I always loved her, even as I shed all the beliefs she raised me with and put necessary distance between us. But I’m not sure I’d reckoned with the admixture of unmitigated love and unbridgeable distance we shared until I framed the last few paragraphs of the essay. I wish now I’d asked her how she saw our relationship before she died. But on her deathbed she made my sisters promise to witness to me and bring me back to Jesus, so maybe I already know. —Elliott Vanskike

Elliott Vanskike on Bronski Beat’s “Ain’t Necessarily So”

I didn’t intend this piece to be an elegy. I wanted it to be about transcendence, and I think we’ll still get there. But we need to start with elegy. Steve Bronski, the man who gave his name to Bronski Beat and played keyboards and drums in the band, died in December 2021. Another member, Larry Steinbachek, had died of cancer in 2016, leaving only vocalist Jimmy Somerville still alive from the original synthpop trio that formed in London in 1983. That lineup released a lone album, Age of Consent, in 1984, before Somerville left to form The Communards. All three members were openly gay, and they wrote songs about the struggles of being gay men in the repressive environment of Thatcher’s England (or Reagan’s U.S.).

Age of Consent is often described as a political album. But “No More War” is the only overtly political song on the record. Most of the other tracks cover time-tested pop music themes: teen rebellion, love, and lust. What renders the songs political is that they are explicitly about homosexual love and were released at a time when homophobia was the societal norm and had the tacit backing of the state. Gay sex was only made “legal” in Somerville’s native country of Scotland in 1981, and the age of consent for homosexual acts remained 21 in the U.K. until 1994. (Hence the name of the album. The inner sleeve printed the age of consent in the U.K. and other countries around the world, driving home the point that the U.K. was out of step with its neighbors.) Violence against gay men was commonplace in the 1980s. When Age of Consent singles “Why?” and “Smalltown Boy” mention bloody fists or fighting for love or being pushed and kicked, these aren’t metaphors. If you were gay, your mere existence was a provocation for attack.
The other violence that’s a necessary backdrop for “Ain’t Necessarily So” was less overt but more insidious. The first person to die of AIDS in Britain died in 1981. But it wasn’t until 1984 that scientists understood the disease was caused by a virus and another two years before HIV was isolated and identified. In the intervening years, all we knew was that gay men were dying protracted, excruciating deaths because they had sex. By the mid-1980s in Britain two people a day were dying of AIDS. Amid this pandemic that affected only a stigmatized minority, Thatcher—much like Reagan—resisted efforts to educate the public and clung to a calculated morality. Most people were as squicked out by sex as she was, her thinking went, so if she could just pretend AIDS wasn’t a problem, the British public wouldn’t associate her with either the deaths or discussions of unprotected sex. Public health experts in Britain were ultimately more successful than their U.S. counterparts in getting out messages about HIV prevention, but there can be little doubt that hundreds of gay men died because Margaret Thatcher didn’t want the word “condom” printed in government leaflets.

Given this context of violence, suspicion, and death, it’s hard to imagine three gay men in London in the 1983–1984 making anything other than a political album. And the first song on side 1 does start with Somerville’s searing a capella cry of protest, “Tell me why” followed by “Contempt in your eyes/When I go to kiss his lips.” “Ain’t Necessarily So” is the second song on the album and might initially seem to break from the personal-is-political tone established by “Why?” This is a cheeky song from Porgy and Bess, a musical written by George and Ira Gershwin 50 years before Age of Consent was recorded. In the musical, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is sung by Sportin’ Life, a gambler and coke dealer, in the middle of a church picnic. Sportin’ Life uses the song the same way Bronski Beat do: to skewer the uptight morality of the surrounding community. His target is the hypocrisy of people who sit in judgment of his dice game and his drinking but are gullible enough to believe that Jonah survived for days in the belly of a giant fish. For Bronski Beat, the stakes are much higher. Sportin’ Life is mocking self-righteous church folk to carve out some space for his illicit business. Bronski Beat are fighting for their lives.
For Bronski Beat, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is an extended piss-take on those who think gay people are hell-bound because of some hoary stories about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament. Each verse of the song mocks the credibility of the Good Book by pointing out how ridiculous its foundational stories are. Do you really believe that Moses, the man who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, was placed in a basket of woven reeds after his birth and set adrift on the Nile, only to be found by Pharoah’s daughter who raised him as an Egyptian prince until Moses discovered his true heritage and then led his downtrodden people to freedom? Doesn’t that sound a little bit like a terrible soap opera plot device? Are we foolish enough to take the Bible’s word for it that a scrawny Jewish teen killed a well-armored giant with a slingshot? Most incredible of all, we’re just supposed to swallow that as a punishment for disobeying God, Jonah was thrown overboard, gobbled up by a great fish, lived inside the fish for three days, and then got vomited back up onto land, no harm, no foul?
By forcing ridiculous rhymes, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics underscore the outlandishness of the stories. David “shot Goliath who lay down and dieth”; Jonah “made his home in a fish’s ab-DOE-men.” George Gershwin’s music adds to the lampoon, because it takes the shape of a gospel hymn, including a backing choir. The song recounts well-loved Bible stories but does so in such a way that it’s hard to gainsay the chorus’s conclusion: “Things that you’re liable to read in the Bible ain’t necessarily so.”
In a lot of ways, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is a departure from the songs Bronski Beat were known for. It’s not a dancefloor banger. The first sound you hear after a descending bass line is the bottom register of a sinuous clarinet. What follows is jazzy—an extended clarinet intro backed by downtempo keyboards, almost like a post-club chillout track merged with “Rhapsody in Blue.” The song remains cool almost until the very end. The massed voices that have backed Somerville after the first chorus begin to sound slightly frenzied as they repeat “ain’t necessarily so.” But it’s not until the final time he sings “ain’t necessarily so” that Somerville unleashes the piercing falsetto that was the band’s signature element from the very beginning.
Steve Bronski is said to have known the band would be a hit the minute he heard Somerville sing. Listen to Somerville’s backing vocals on the final chorus of Fine Young Cannibals’ “Suspicious Minds” and you can see why Bronski was confident of success. Most male rock, R&B, and pop singers have a falsetto range they can use. Some slip into it gracefully and with confidence. Think of Prince in “Kiss” or G.C. Cameron on The Spinners’ “It’s a Shame” or Paul Heaton on The Housemartins’ “The World’s on Fire.” Some howl and swipe in their upper register like Journey’s Steve Perry or The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. The former type hits the notes cleanly, but usually with little force; the latter type blasts away, but with little finesse. Jimmy Somerville doesn’t reach for his falsetto notes—he lives there. His entire range is falsetto, and he puts incredible force behind his delivery. Just listen to the thrilling vocal crescendo that leads into the key change in The Communards cover of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” or Somerville’s singing on the last minute of “You Are My World” when he seems to tear a hole through sound itself.
With Somerville’s voice, at last, we’re getting to transcendence. Transcendence is art’s job. In its striving for what’s beyond, what we can imagine but not yet touch, art moves us. Along with architecture, singing might be the art form that is best at evoking transcendence, at moving us outside of ourselves. This is why religious worship—which asks us to shift our focus away from ourselves and onto ineffable things like the soul, the meaning of life, eternity—leans so heavily on singing. Transcendence is the point of worship and singing is its killer app. The subjects Somerville was singing about amid the carnage of the AIDS epidemic cried out for transcendence—some way to elevate gay men’s struggle for acceptance and survival, to show that something better was possible. Somerville worked with ACT UP during the 1980s and continues to speak out about the denial of basic human rights LGBTQ people face (especially in the developing world) and about the need for funding for HIV prevention and for the care of people who have AIDS. Ongoing activism from members of the gay community has saved countless lives from the early years of the AIDS epidemic up through the current day. But in addition to the work, you need a work song, something that lifts your spirit above the humdrum toil and imagines a brighter day.
In “Ain’t Necessarily So” Somerville’s crystalline countertenor provides that spiritual uplift. Across the course of the song, his voice tracks upward from the baritone that’s the bottom of his range until he hits the final iteration of the title with the full force of his startling upper register, knifing through the foolishness of these ancient myths from a book that says he’s irredeemable.
I’ve loved this song since I first heard it in college. That was almost four decades ago, but I’m pretty sure my initial enjoyment had as much to do with my mother as it did with Bronski Beat. Two things about my mother are relevant here: she hilariously (and not on purpose) butchered the lyrics of songs, and she was a full-on born again evangelical Christian. This meant both that she sang John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as “Leaving on a Jet Train” and that, along with the full suite of religious intolerances and hatreds, she loathed gay people. Or, in that nifty evangelical dodge, she “hated the sin, but loved the sinner.” One of the songs she loved to sing around the house was “Ain’t Necessarily So,” but she would sing only those three words over and over. I don’t think she even knew the rest of the song. When I returned home from college one summer and asked her if she knew the phrase that preceded “ain’t necessarily so” in the song, she was upset to learn that it was “things that you’re liable to read in the Bible” and dismayed at the delight I took in telling her that the song she’d been singing for years was actually blasphemous.
I loved my mother then and I never stopped loving her, even when it became clear to me that her religious devotion led her to hateful and abhorrent views. If she’d ever seen the picture on the sleeve of Bronski Beat’s “Ain’t Necessarily So” import single it would’ve made perfect sense to her that a wholesome picture from “The Wizard of Oz” was disfigured with a devil’s head. Homosexuals were evil, so why wouldn’t they do something so perverted? It’s hard to justify or explain how I could go on loving a person who thought some of my best friends deserved to spend eternity in hell. I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn politicians and religious leaders for holding the same views my mother held till she died. But love endures conflict and
complexity; we make allowances, we rationalize.

Songs, of course, are also memory’s killer app. “Ain’t Necessarily So” invariably takes me back to a time when my gay friends were terrified and angry (my best friend’s boyfriend would later die of AIDS), but also to a time when it became apparent that the rift between my mother and me was unhealable. The death of a vital part of that relationship only merits a lesser elegy, but there’s a profound sadness wrapped up for me in Bronski Beat’s version of “Ain’t Necessarily So.” Until the last chorus, when Somerville launches his pure, exquisite cri de coeur, the song is subdued, nearly mournful. Transcendence at the end, but transcendence dragging the dead weight of elegy.

Elliott Vanskike is a writer and editor living in Takoma Park, MD. His book and music reviews have appeared in Raygun, CMJ, and the Washington Post. His poetry has appeared in Electric Literature. His dissertation only appears in the library of the University of Iowa. Find Elliott at @twonnet.