(8) chris isaak, "wicked game"
DEFEATS
(16) stereo mcs, "Connected"
107-72

Read the essays, watch the videos, listen to the songs, feel free to argue below in the comments or tweet at us, and consider. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchfadness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 15th. 

MO DAVIAU ON "WICKED GAME"

Several years ago, when I was a performer with a sex-positive storytelling show in Austin, I was gifted a DVD of pornography. This DVD of pornography promised to leave me with the stickiest of fingers, I was told, because the actors were lovers and partners in real life, and the realness of their attraction, and the purity of the love they shared promised to make their copulatory performance all the more honest and therefore exciting. The couple’s deep personal connection shone through as the viewer watched them make sweet, sweet love, or so the back copy of the DVD touted.
     My fingers remained dry throughout the five or so minutes I managed to view this pornographic video. I wasn’t turned on at all. Or entertained. Or into it in any palpable, erotic way. It wasn’t just that the couple was, to me at least, unattractive. Not being part the onscreen couple meant that I remained unaware of the bits and bobbles of their personalities that made them lovable. Both members of the couple had brown teeth. The entire film felt like what it must be like when housekeeping walks in on an old married couple going at it at a cheap, roadside motel.
     Even though I hadn’t seen it in at least twenty years, my immediate mental recall of the video of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” remained fresh: objectively attractive singer and, later, actor Chris Isaak frolicking upon a sandy beach with supermodel Helena Christiansen as Isaak croons his doomy love song in her sand-coated ear. And the song is doomy: “I don’t want to fall in love (this world is only gonna break your heart) with you.” And yet, throughout the 90s, this song was unavoidable, and even, in my estimation, ascended to the heights of #1 sex anthem of the entire decade.
     Because I’m prone to getting into fights with people over 90s music, I will argue that the finest sex anthem of the ‘90s is “Laid” by the band James, but this is a minority opinion. Not everyone shares my taste for men in black eyeliner, and I get that, and so my attachment to the one song that features a male vocalist singing the lyrics “line my eyes and call me pretty,” stems from the rarity of the thing I’m into occurring in popular song, as well as the audacious lyric “she only comes when she’s on top,” which was edited to “she only sings” when the song was played on commercial radio stations.
     While “Laid” remained niche and relegated to the alternative ghetto of MTV’s 120 Minutes, Chris Isaak, with all of his objective attractiveness tempered with David Lynchian eeriness, was ubiquitous. And when I went to rewatch that video in order to write this essay, Isaak and Christiansen’s lack of connection, their glassy-eyed, glossy magazine looks and occasional smile betraying the knowledge that this sexy frolic isn’t going to lead to anything good, made me think of the brown-toothed lovers of the aforementioned pornographic DVD who couldn’t sustain my attention for more than five minutes: they loved each other and knew what got the other off, but had nothing to offer the viewer. Chris and Helena, on the other hand, performed their soft-core ritual to a song that ruled an entire decade. They may have hated each other and spent the moments off-camera rinsing their mouths out with Scope. It didn’t matter. Doom is doom.
     This video is pure fantasy: sexual without the sex, not-rooted-in-reality, clouds-all-over-their-bodies, terribly photogenic people having proto-breakup foreplay. The video is tasteful, the song is four minutes of deep longing, and Chris Isaak, who went on to have a successful career in acting, looks hot in his tank-top style white cotton undershirt.
     The level of eroticism of the “Wicked Game” video matched the erotic intensity of a 1990s-era network daytime soap opera, which is to say that it was entirely appropriate for network television. In the early 1990s, when “Wicked Game” crawled its way up the Top 40 charts, reality television had not yet destroyed the classic soap opera. Romance was not dead on TV between the hours of noon and whenever Oprah came on, and the networks wasted little time grabbing “Wicked Game” and using it as non-diagetic music for televised soap opera promotions.
     “Wicked Game” was reserved for a specific type of soap opera couple: not long-standing institutions like Luke and Laura from General Hospital, or romantic leads that coded as inching close to middle-age, like All My Children’s Susan Lucci. “Wicked Game” was for couples who led lives of danger, whose romances were soon to be torn asunder by various external forces, such as the Mafia, a wealthy former lover seeking revenge, or of a fatal cancer diagnosis that would be taking the life of a too-sweet young romantic lead way too soon.
     “Wicked Game” became the music that illustrated the doomed romance of Sonny and Brenda, a mid-‘90s General Hospital supercouple. Sonny and Brenda were wildly popular with viewers, Sonny a depressed, brooding young man at constant war with his sense of ethics and his devotion to the crime family he worked for. Brenda initially wore a wire to catch Sonny in a sting operation, and this betrayal painted a dark cloud over their romance for years afterward. Sonny and Brenda being soap opera characters, they fell in and out of love, broke up and reunited, and of course, got up to some playful sexy beach romping, a scenic push-pull of desire and loss, only directed by an ABC soap opera director and not someone who had seen and been inspired by David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, the film where “Wicked Game” was first put to work as the go-to song for foreboding eroticism. 
     It was indeed this dark cloud that made Sonny and Brenda the most popular General Hospital supercouple in the mid-90s, after the aforementioned Luke and Laura. Chris Isaak’s radio hit made relationship dark clouds sexy. It was, after all, the era of the sad young man with a guitar. What came after Isaak: Nirvana, Eddie Vedder, and a hundred white guys who sounded like Eddie Vedder. Isaak’s haunting ballad owes at least a little bit to Lynch’s vision of the Pacific Northwest: the quirkiness of Twin Peaks was paired with the piney backdrop of Washington State, and Twin Peaks later helped to create Seattle-as-popular regional fascination, what with those bearded, flannel-sporting sad guitar boys who lived there and made sad music there garnering so much attention for much of the decade.
     “Wicked Game,” like so much that was called “grunge” alongside Nirvana and Pearl Jam, skated by on the specificity of its aesthetic.
     ABC continued to use “Wicked Game” to promote its daytime programming for years after the song descended from the charts, but in the ‘90s, this song never quite stayed in its lane. It’s aesthetic creeped into other art forms, other arenas, and the song itself likely made it onto thousands of break-up themed mixtapes. It was a constant presence in the car of my high school friend Warren, who owned one and only one music cassette in 1994 and it was Chris Isaak’s album, Wicked Game. By 1996, he still had not acquired another music cassette for his car, which perplexed me and our other friends, because at the time, "Wicked Game" was entirely played out, but Warren assured us that the other album tracks were pretty good.
     “Wicked Game” became the socially-acceptable sonic backdrop to gloomy sex, David Lynchian sex, doomed sex, disconnected beach sex, ‘90s sex. I mean, the song isn’t really about sex. “I don’t want to fall in love…with you.” A wicked game is, at least in my mind, something you don’t do to someone you love, but the song is meant to make you feel like you’re falling into some sort of sex quicksand, some impossible-to-free-yourself from disaster of getting sucked into bad shit. Which, in a certain light, is sexy as hell. Or at least it was in the 90s.

Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave, which takes its title from a lyric from a Sebadoh song. She is currently exiled in a remote New England village in the woods, but claims Portland, Oregon, as her home.

steve wasserman on "connected"

“Each angled to its point of flux & so on & with so much its place removed, the leakage in moral sense to the “error signal”, making the rainfall restless, unstable: the loop not connected but open & induced to nothing.”  J.H.Prynne, “Air  (iap  Song”

“Somethin’ ain’t right. Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” Stereo MC’s, “Connected”

Get Yourself Connected #1: “The writing’s on the wall”

A WH Smith newsagent window, Market Street, Cambridge, October 1992. Dissociated-me shoving a Cranks’ Date Slice into my gob, registering but not taking note of the over-saturated colours of this poster advertising an album that has not been branded in any way for my affinities: volcanic eruptions! psychedelic mushrooms! snakes! lubricious orchards and passion flowers! extra-terrestrial transmissions! the band as shamanic explorers pushing through the dubfunkacidtriphop undergrowth, whilst sampling/stealing hooks from more likeable, effortlessly groovy indigenes.

A few months after releasing Connected, the Stereo MC’s would flog both it and the instrumental B-Side (Disconnected) to Carphone Warehouse. The Warehouse, founded the same year I started university (1989), was soon to become one of the largest mobile phone retailers in the UK.

Referring to themselves as ‘Communication Centres’, they would use Connected and Disconnected for a decade or more as the stomping sonic backdrop to their incessant shlock-and-bore advertising, so that the memory of the song is now almost entirely blistered over with irritation and aggravation.

Maybe you’d be watching The X-Files, or Frasier, or Friends, or The Big Breakfast Show, no matter. Wherever you’d be getting your primetime fix, the motivational neurocircuitry of your brain would also be getting “connected”, dosed up every ten minutes or so with the prescient message that virtual association via mobile telephony and this thing we now call the internet was going to be the answer to your most fervent prayers and fantasies.

Something ain’t right? Existential dread and ire? Gotta get yourself, you gotta get yourself gotta get yourself connected, bruv!

GYC #2: “If your mind’s neglected, stumble you might fall.”

It soon became clear to me, even by Christmas 1989, that I was not clever enough or sophisticated enough to maintain the kind of conversational connections that fuelled the intellectual and social life of Cambridge, so I disengaged, bypassing opportunities for affiliation, tucking myself away.

Rather than go to Hall each evening where my cohorts, begowned in their navy blue academic robes with black velvet trim, sparkled and shone with Brideshead Revisited wit and banter, I would eat my main meal of the day at an Indian restaurant, a fifteen minute walk from the University Library which usually shut its stacks at 7.15 pm.

I was particularly fond of the vegetable Jalfrezi, but usually limited myself to a side-dish, a Saag Chana or a Tarka Daal with some basmati rice. I liked the restaurant because it was as disconnected from the grandeur of the University and its social expectations as I could possibly find.

Once I became a regular there, they would often give me a vegetable samosa or garlic naan for free. It was perfectly OK to sit and read my book as I ate my meal, no obligation whatsoever to engage “in wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, with protocols promoting maximum civility…which can be educative at the time as well as lead to further networking beyond the confines of the occasion” (notes on Formal Hall from my college prospectus).

How far through this world could I go without exchanging a spoken word? Without any force, just not actually speaking when you didn’t need to? My record was two and a half weeks. This mealtime routine was one way of dispensing with the pressure to talk, to perform a self for which I had had no prior training up to this point.

So Lent, Easter, and the following Michaelmas Term passed with me living an intensely isolated life, increasingly aware that the profound joy and meaning I usually found in reading and writing (“You’re good at this sort of thing, have you ever thought about applying to Cambridge?”) was progressively being drained away, until finally I stumbled and fell.

GYC #3: “Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick”

That we seek and need to be connected goes without saying, but is connection an end in itself or is the push towards gratification through other people the means to that end?

We don’t like to think of ourselves as inherently selfish which is why a narrative of relational reciprocity (connection for connection’s sake) now dominates the discourse in most fields. But perhaps President Trump and those for whom he speaks and rules might be asking us to revisit an older, Freudian narrative?

In this Connected/Disconnected Story, we begin with some kind of bodily tension, a libidinal impulse for food, sex, or the latest Netflix offering. This then gets converted into an aim or setting (a supermarket, Tinder, or streaming media), where we might look for as well as serendipitously find the object of our desires.

Add to this a set of elaborate defence mechanism to keep more socially unacceptable drives repressed or diverted into harmless activities like writing cultural critiques or watching music videos on YouTube, and you’ve got the transformation of neurotic misery into the more bearable state of everyday unhappiness.

Melanie Klein, the psychoanalytic Mama of the Connected/Disconnected fairytale goes one step further, by splitting off the connective drive and our disconnected resistance into two separate containers: good breast and bad breast. Or in the parlance of popular culture: good cop/bad cop. Or as political ideologies: Hilary and The Donald (if you’re a Trump supporter: The Donald/Hilary).

If connection to the object (person, song, piece of writing) releases our libidinal buildup, we are rewarded with the happy life-sustaining sensation of gushing nutritious goodness. However the same object, or some variant of, can just as quickly flip to a deprecatory position, where our empty bellies and aching needs become projectively identified with the Bad Breast, against which we might hold some pretty intense and destructive retaliatory fantasies.

“Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick,” howls Psychic Baba at Bad Breast, gnashing down on its impervious nipple. A minute later, spotting Good Breast hoving into view, oblivious to the fact that both offer ways of connecting to a caregiver, he turns away from the “Bad” to the so-felt “Good”, humming all the while: “Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” [Slurp].  

GYC #4: “I see through ya, I see through ya.”

I’d now like to say something about Jeremy Prynne’s breasts. Jeremy Halvard Prynne, described by the Paris Review last year as “the mage of the Cambridge School”, but also, in 1993, the Director of Studies at my college. Prynne having thus played an important role in the connective matrix of my academic psyche, a double-breasted Attachment Figure of sorts.

In my drop-out year, I’d pushed myself to read more of the people he liked and admired (Olson, O’Hara, Dorn, Wordsworth, Celan) thinking I might try and write a kind PoMo mash-up so as to make up for being a negligible presence in the two years preceding my stumble and fall.   

This began as a little chapbook called More Games For The Super-Intelligent, the poems emerging from the detritus of all my lecture and reading-for-essay notes that I had spent the last three years accumulating in what seemed to be depressing, and increasingly useless quantities. Working in this way, I could somehow deflect the input of personal preoccupation so that the interior of the poems was sometimes interchangeably positioned with the exterior, there being at some point no clear arbitrated priority between those aspects.

I presented the manuscript of More Games for The Super-Intelligent to the most intelligent person I knew (Prynne), the chapbook at this point serving the multi-media purpose of a script for a play that clearly needed to be performed. The other day I googled the names of the three people who performed More Games with me on 15-20 February 1993 at the Cambridge Playroom (Eva Czech, Dallas Windsor, Natasha Yarker), and not a single LinkedIn or Facebook profile could I find. Was the whole thing a psychotic episode, the poems, the play, me studying at that university in the first place?

Prynne read the poems and in his somewhat mannered and formal way was very kind and generous with his comments. I asked if I could get a discount on photocopying 100 copies to give away at the performances the following month and he suggested I use his non-carded photocopier in the librarian’s office, coming down to open up for me at midnight. I also photocopied a number of A3 posters of myself as Vitruvian Man, the thought of which now fill me with horror. It was the same image used on the cover, a gaudy self-indulgent Gesamkunstwerk in a desperate bid for connection through the warped lens of indecent exposure.

How did I repay Mr Prynne’s kindness? For starters, by stealing a valuable first edition of White Stones from his library (not on the night itself, but later), the college library, which he presided over as part of his duties in a Mother Hen kind of way. But worse than that as far as propagating shame, I then spent the next 25 years selectively remembering Prynne not as a mage but a Wizard of Oz, a kind of impenetrable and frustrating twit.

How in my imagination had he become so lopsidely Bad Breast? What was the empty belly frustration about: his shyness and obtuseness? The resistance and difficulty of his own position? This position was put forwards as a kind of manifesto in an essay Prynne penned his early 20s, an essay describing how the reality of the external world can’t help but be predicated on the resistance it offers to our awareness. “The stone’s hard palpable weight is the closest I can come to the fact of its existence,” he writes, ”and the reserve or disagreement of my neighbour is my primary evidence for his being really there.”

GYC #5: “Ya terrified (I wanna do it again)”

“Humiliation,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum, like other educating experiences, “breeds identity”. He cites Jayne Eyre, whose identity as “unlovable outcast” evolves in response to being locked in a red room for stealing a book that she too cares little for, utilising it as a kind of shield-cum-escape-hatch against the dreary November day and her punitive guardians, the Reed family. “Humiliation isn’t merely the basement of a personality,” notes Koestenbaum, “or the scum pile on a stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for self to know it exists.”

I think he’s right, although I would rephrase that last sentence by saying that humiliation paves the way for “a self” to know it exists: more specifically the besmirched, exposed, shamed self, a self that all of us spend a good amount of time either repressing or covering up, deflecting and sublimating through other selves. Selves that have socially valued skills (I’m a psychotherapist), selves broadcasting their affiliations to groups they want to be included in (“Can I write an essay for your literary magazine?”), selves trying to connect with more powerful selves through the language of “Liking” and “Replying”, a game of Impression Management that make the Carphone Warehouse TV and radio ads of the 90s now look like child’s play.  

I wonder how the Stereo MC’s deal with their tainted selves when the Carphone Warehouse jibes start piling on? Or maybe they’re no longer a trigger for shame, maybe the MC’s did good things for themselves and others with their advertising moolah?

Maybe for them, the shamed self is more liable to pop up like a weed from the soil of humiliation when critics lay into their follow-up efforts with the sadistic glee of Bronte’s truculent John Reed or the castigating clergyman Brocklehurst. “Generic self-help guff,” carps Reed (aka The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey). “An uninspired stew of stale ideas and careless execution” moans Brocklehurst (aka fellow music critic/gravedigger Peter Petridis).   

I can try and neutralise some of my own University shame and humiliation by sending that stolen copy of White Stones back to Gonville and Caius Library, or by writing about the oftentimes puzzling and worrying antics of my younger self as I have done here. But how does one finally lay to rest and meaningfully disconnect from the chiding chatter broadcast forevermore on that exterior searchable channel called Google, as well as the interior associatively connected circuits of memory, the inner-net?

The other day I asked a colleague to EMDR-me-up whilst I sat and read aloud from this text. This involved her, after each segment, waving her fingers back and forth about ten inches from my face, so generating bilateral eye movement, checking in occasionally with my humiliation appraisals via a Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale. Describing and visualising my naked self on that photocopied cover of More Games For The Super-Intelligent gave me an initial SUD rating of about a 9 (out of 10). We got it down to 6.5.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing as kooky as it looks and sounds is a well-respected treatment for meliorating traumatic memories. A more ancient treatment comes in the form of writing essays, short stories, poems, and maybe even slightly naff songs like those on the March Fadness roster. The academy of course frowns on writing-as-therapy, but in the words of Mr Robert Birch and Mr Nick Hallam, Stereo MC’s, “I ain’t gonna go blind for the light that is reflected. Hear me out, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, I wanna do it again, I wanna do it again.”

Steve Wasserman works as a psychotherapist in London. Currently connecting via Read Me Something You Love (a read-aloud, short story/essay podcast) and Gardening/Life (a blog). Twitter: @stevewasserman_