wc100playlist

[wc100playlist]

5. Oasis - Wonderwall

I'm not sure when the "Anyways, here's Wonderwall" joke died out exactly. I haven't heard it in years--not from other people, I mean. Even I don't reference it as often as I used to, for which I'm sure my friends would thank me, though it does lessen the quantity of openings through which to dunk on me. I happen to like "Wonderwall," and like many other white men w/ acoustic guitar, I've (tried to) learn it.

For the uninitiated, "Anyways, here's Wonderwall" came from the stereotype of men being able to play it and nothing else. In my defense, I can play other songs, insofar as I can "play" guitar. I still can't play "Wonderwall."

Men--like me--who enjoy Oasis--the British band behind "Wonderwall," "Don't Look Back in Anger," and "Champagne Supernova," notably--tend to be grouped under an unfortunate category alongside male fans of The Kinks and The Clash and anything vaguely like music from the British scene. This category is the wide umbrella of Male Manipulator music. The British punk-pop-rock genus is related to but distinct from the 80s-woman-pop genus, as well as the jazz-but-mainly-white-artists and the indie-alt-boygenius geni. Despite their differences, the MM family gene permeates each genus and compels the individual male to Manipulate, Mansplain, and Manwhore with an even greater efficiency than unmusically inclined contemporaries.

At least, so the theory has been explained to me. My first lesson in this taxonomy occurred in my Sophomore year of college in the basement apartment I shared with a girl I knew from high school. She and an ever-present mutual friend spent quite a bit of time in the living room most evenings sifting through the fine sands of the internet to find gems, one of which was a devastating meme list of the worst possible bands a man could enjoy. When Oasis came up, the two of them turned in unison to burn a hole in my head with their collective gaze--my frontal lobe was never the same.

It's not that "Wonderwall" itself prompts an MMM mutation; rather, the music is a symptom of the underlying condition. Speaking from a personal theory--because everything else stated has of course been peer reviewed by the most prestigious personal friends of mine--Male Manipulator Music typically embodies aesthetics of emotional integration and vulnerability which the typical MM understands, if only in a rudimentary way. Male Manipulators are empathetic persons who utilize this sense to affect the emotional landscape surrounding them for their own benefit.

A cynical author would point out that big label artists--especially punk and alt bands--follow a very similar playbook, performing complex and potent emotionality to profit from an ever-growing fanbase. A carefully-crafted album that rages against capitalist alienation can result in the same cycle of obsession which love-bombing prompts--at least in my experience. I don't mean to imply that all artists--Taylor Swift; Matty Healy--who release emotionally complex albums--evermore, Folklore; The 1975, i like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it--or very nostalgic music--1989 (Taylor's Version)--intentionally write that sort of music to mask their unethical actions as multi-millionaires and "21st century rock stars"--owning eight homes during a housing crisis, topping the celebrity personal flight carbon footprint leaderboard in 2022; being generally unpleasant about women and non-white people despite in theory advocating for both groups.

But I never said that Male Manipulators manipulate, mansplain, and manwhore consciously or intentionally. Having manipulated, mansplained, and manwhored myself, I can say that I rarely thought about what I was doing while I was doing it--else, I hope I would have conducted myself better. Empathy is a skill, yes, but it can be a deeply intuitive skill, enough so that one needs only a basic grasp to perform it for one's own gain. A basic grasp is, in fact, preferable for the Male Manipulator: it allows them to actually care about women well enough to feel good about themselves and poorly enough to still extort them for all the affection they can wring out.

They don't need to know the full album to do it; they just need to know "Wonderwall."

#anyway here's wonderwall #music #creative nonfiction

[wc100playlist]

4. Plain White T's - Hey There, Delilah

It's 2:23AM and I'm pacing through my father's living room, phone in hand, my eyes bleary. In less than a month, I'll be off to University, where I'll discover how easy it is to stay up for days on end when motivated by caffeine and the rhythm of youth, but for now, I'm nearing my limit. I feel a psychic pull from the room on the right at the end of the hallway wherein lieth my bed with bated breath, brimming with dreams at the thought of my return to it. The tug towards it is terrible, and soon my murky mind turns me to follow it.

buzz

A cartoon ghost rings the doorbell to my phone. I blind myself by blue light to see that yes, it is her. Specifically, it's her hand in a peace sign and a bar of text saying, "He'll probably just text back tomorrow. I'm sleepy. Goodnight." I send black screen with a cursive "Good Night Calypso," which she opens immediately. That empty red arrow sends a shiver up my arm and a realize that sleep won't be so easy a thing tonight.

______________________________________________________________

According to various articles and my personal brand of hearsay, Tom Higgenson wrote "Hey There Delilah" after having a meet-not-so-cute with Delilah DiCrescenzo, a now-nationally-ranked runner, at a friend's party. Apparently, Tom told her he already had a song written about her, and played the track for her the week thereafter. Delilah, having a boyfriend, politely declined his advances. The two remained friendly enough that, when "Hey There Delilah" was nominated for a Grammy in 2007, Delilah herself put in an appearance on Tom's invitation. To my knowledge, their association ends there.

______________________________________________________________

I met her at the tail end of orientation. She was sitting on a rock outside the student union building. She wore bell-bottoms and a hippie T--at least, she does in my head. So many details slip like sand through my fingers and out of my ears, details I I could have sworn would be burned into my mind forever. It is, perhaps, my chiefest regret to not remember fully the scenes that shape the landscape where my soul treads.

I almost walked past her. She had been in the small group of Liberal Arts students in a computer lab ten minutes previous, and something in the way she spoke to the admissions counselor about her planned courses irked me. Unfortunately, I think that's why I found myself talking to her. She scared me, otherwise: she looked like she could look me in the eye and pick out my flaws like a stork plucks salmon from a river. That little touch of roughness at her edges unwound a binding in my brain and let me be bold in a way only fool boys can be--that is, in the smallest way. I said, "Hello."

For the rest of the summer, we carried on the conversation that we started at the rock. I called her Calypso. I'd steal moments during work to shoot off what I hoped was a clever quip; she'd send pictures of her shoes and make wild statements about her day. We'd skip from "how was your shift?" to "what makes you cry?" to "what's you're comfort food?" in about as many texts. I still remember some of her answers, though I expect they've changed since then. Mine have.

Often, we'd stay up late texting. She's an early riser, but her boyfriend at the time rarely responded in daylight hours. I tried to keep her company while she waited, and she didn't turn me away. She considered us friends, and did for a long while, even after our Freshman year started, even after she got to know me in person, even after I told her--via Snapchat video messages, the worst way known to man--that I'd been head-over-heels for her since that damn rock outside the union, even after she had to turn me down. She even managed to look past me asking her to turn me down again twice thereafter, as a reminder of where we stood.

I don't know if we were friends. I don't know if I'm capable of being friends with someone I can't look at without my heart rate rising ten percent. It's not for lack of trying: I gave it a three year run. If I was her friend, I think I'd have let myself drift away much earlier. That might have saved me some heartache, or at least some face. It might have saved our mutuals exasperation, and her the stress of dealing a dumb puppy of a man who lacks the courage and wit to make his exit when the music plays.

I last spoke to her in the Fall of 2022. We walked in the state lands with her dog and said a great many things that matter very little. A better send-off than I expected, honestly. I last saw her Fall 2023; she and her fiance attended the same showing of a stage play as I--a cruel joke by Dionysus on his least faithful priest. I can only hope she didn't see me, or if she did, she didn't recognize me. If she saw me, I hope she only saw a stranger trying not to cry.

#hey there delilah #music #creative nonfiction

[wc100playlist]

3. Queensrÿche - Silent Lucidity

I'm not sure it's my first memory of her, but my most coherent memory of my mother comes from a night I couldn't breathe. It's a kind of asthma, I think: at least, it's a respiratory issue that nowadays only crops up when prompted by heavy allergens. I have no professional confirmation of this medical theory, only personal experience, mind. I don't visit doctors as often as I should.

She wore a bathrobe that night--a teal or light blue, if memory does not betray me. I woke her in the small hours. My parents slept in the same bed in those days, but I do not recall my father responding to or even acknowledging my knock. Mom did, though, and she took me to the master bathroom where she ran the shower as hot as the knob allowed. She closed the door, sat on the toilet, sat me on her knee, and told me to breath in the steam. I did. It helped. For all I know, I fell asleep then and there, my lungs opened to air again, cast against the stable rock that is my mother.

A canyon runs between mom and me. The river that scoured the Earth to dig it runs through my mother and her mother and her mother before her. It runs in me; it has an iron taste. Most days, I'm sure, I can leap the canyon and back without effort. On other days, the gap--so narrow in my mind--grows wide enough to swallow my heart and then the rest of me. Even on the narrow days, I don't leap over as often as I should.

Soon after the turning of this year, I woke from a dream. I'd been on the phone with someone--some hospital employee--who'd informed me of my mother's death. She'd been killed in a car accident in our old hometown: she passed before she could even speak. I saw it, too--that is the cruelty of dreams. It broke my sleep in a jagged edge. In a half-wakened panic, I scrambled for my phone to assure myself of reality. The text from my mother's number in the family group chat informed us that my aunt, her little sister, had passed away.

What shook me most deeply between that day and the funeral two weeks later--really, what's shaken me since--is the steel comb that rakes my nerves when I think of that mortal caesura. My aunt strove against glioblastomas for nearly a year; she saw one of her daughters married and the other engaged; she spent Christmas with her siblings all together after many years apart. I didn't know her well.

Her passing shook me, and--shamefully--not wholly for my aunt's sake. Certainly, the fact of total future absence from a familial face stung my mind, despite our unfamiliarity. Yet that same unfamiliarity which cushioned the loss for me will not serve me, should I outlive my mother. I know her, see: that carved canyon is too fragile a thing to widen far enough that, should the moment happen, all fact and pretense of its width would collapse. If, when my mother dies, I feel I will be far closer to her than I ever have been, and all too late.

And yet, when that murky recollection bubbles in my mind and writhes against my skull more terribly than I can bear, up creeps that nascent remembrance--my mother sitting in a steaming bathroom, pretending Exhaustion to be a kind neighbor--to clutch at my leg and say, "Do you remember not? In I are you two near one." And some days, I shake the childhood recollection off, or kick it away, or walk or run to another corner of my mind. But it never leaves. Even be it bruised, it lingers always where I can see it, or if not see it, hear it by the distant rainfall of an empty running shower.

Once, I asked a friend--whose particular feelings towards me I did not return--if there were a song of which I reminded her. When bid to answer first, I told her ABBA, "Knowing Me, Knowing You." This is the cruelty of fool boys like I am, one I hope will remain distant in my memory. Having taken in my lackluster answer, my friend responded with her own. "Silent Lucidity," she ascribed to me. The further I grow past that boyhood--the further I enter into this world where adults shuffle off the stage as often in my heart and my head as in reality--I realize how her understanding of me ran as deep as my total understanding ran shallow. What's more, I receive again and again all the endless kindnesses she offered to a fool boy through one single song.

It's late. I have, perhaps, lost the point which I set out to express. Thus, let me come to this simple point, which blooms behind these bagged eyes. It's this: that I am constantly astounded by the depths and the affect of the people who love me, despite how often poorly I love them in return.

#queensrÿche #music #creative nonfiction

[wc100playlist]

2. Tracy Chapman - Fast Car

It took me longer than I'd like to admit for me to realize that Tracy Chapman is a woman. In my defense, I first head "Fast Car" audio only and didn't see a picture of Chapman until a year or two after. Personal projection might be in part to blame: I myself have a higher vocal range--or did at the time--and can--could--match the melody well enough, if not adeptly.

I first heard the song in 2017, if I recall correctly. Four years previous, my parents finalized their divorce. I remember distinctly sitting in the backseat of my sister's Honda, seeing the disbelief in my mom's face after telling her, "I think I'd like to stay primarily with dad." I didn't, and I'm better off for it. Living with mom in town gave me a lot more freedom to move than living with dad in the country ever would have, and I've always gotten along better with mom on a day-to-day basis. Whereas mom has grown more accepting of who I am and of the people I care for, my dad... well, he stays mostly the same old American Catholic. But in 2013, I don't think I considered the facts as I do in retrospect. I thought of all the days I cooked breakfast and dinner for dad and my little sister and me, all the times I strove against the endless sink of dishes, all the hours I spent weed-wacking and mowing and watering while dad was at work. I knew the house I grew up in was too much for one working man to keep clean on his own. I knew my little sister would live with mom; I didn't want dad to be alone.

Walking though my father's house these days is like walking through a jungle of old mail and unread books and niche by-order newspapers. The sink is still always full, though the kitchen seems much smaller to me now. Boxes of paperbacks and loose tools populate my old bedroom, and the Lost Cause raises its rebel rag on my old bookshelf. There's more flags in the living room: Confederate, Ukraine, "Don't Tread On Me," all one atop the other, hanging behind the door.

I wonder if it's my fault. If I didn't help him see enough when I was a child. If I had stayed, there's a chance, however small, I could have helped him look up and see new shapes in the clouds. I know it's foolish: if I can't do anything of the sort now, there's little chance I could have then. But that chance was never taken, and it sits in the corner of my mind like a Polaroid in a half-empty toolbox, the kind dad keeps in the garage across from the ghosts of action figures and the bucket of lost LEGO pieces that won't be built again.

Maybe it's a bit more than projection.

#music #tracy chapman #creative nonfiction

[wc100playlist]

1. Hozier - Take Me to Church

I grew up a Catholic choir boy. I’m not a particularly good singer; I never trained to be one. But my mother and my brother both sang in the choir at our church, so, starting in middle school, I gave voice to God in a white-and-red robe once monthly. In high school, I started up a solo career as a Cantor, leading a half-empty cathedral in sung Psalms and repetitive Hymns, praying all the while that God wouldn’t smite me for singing out of key. Maybe He heard me; maybe He didn’t. I don’t pray often anymore.

Once upon a Wednesday, a friend-of-a-friend dredged up her remembrance of Hozier’s debut single “Take Me to Church” for a table-full of former Somethings. Like me, she heard it in high school; like me, she took the song at face value—all of us good little Christians did. And like me, she had to watch the music video to grok what the song was saying. If you’re unfamiliar, take to time to view it. Don’t worry about not catching it: it’s hard to miss.

It’s honey and vinegar to think about all the devout children of God who never quite realize what Hozier’s singing. Between the music video and the exceptionally direct lyrics (“I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies”), I can't help but wonder how some listeners never see the writing on the wall. Having been Catholic myself, I also understand firsthand the lengths one can stretch a textual interpretation until it fits one’s theological frame like a rabbit hide on a tanning rack. A staunch believer scrapes off the inconvenient bits to find the “truth” of the thing, and then soaks it in piss ‘till all the hairy inconsistencies are gone. The craft of tanning text to make personal theology plays out like a farce and pulls laughter to the lip in the viewing.

But as much as I enjoy watching the Everyday Olympics’ Mental Gymnastics, as sweet as the humor tastes, when I swallow, all that goes down is acid. I blink and watch my much younger self on the balance beam, going through the motions. My movements allude to flips and turns and orientations that I lack the training to accomplish. When I “land,” I end up where I started, not ever having moved. My position has changed only in the slightest; I declare myself the champion. When I leave the mat, I have the satisfaction of being tired and the luxury of doing little to earn it.

I do not believe that all religious belief is based on lies. I believe that the easiest ways to foster religious belief is to provide one’s flock with a way of thinking that excludes all perspective but that of blind belief, especially to those who know best the practices of religion.

#music #creative nonfiction #hozier