Let Me Photograph You In This Light: My BEAUTY MATTERS Summer 2016 Mix-Tape
Hi friends,
I’m working on my third of three audio specials on various giant philosophical concepts. There was ON LONELINESS and ABOUT COURAGE, and now there will be BEAUTY MATTERS. I always knew this one was going to be the hardest.
And by “working on” this, I mean (as I always do) not doing anything that would be visible or discernible or appreciable to anyone outside myself but rather walking around a lot listening to pop music and having thoughts that seem brilliantly incisive at the time but crumble like dust in the wind the second I try to nail them down. Because this, apparently, is being a writer which is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be. Oh it’s a terrible fate indeed!
When I write about music, or poetry, or movies, what I want is for us to have a shared experience that can be a basis for empathetic conversation. I want you to have seen the same thing I have so that we can approach it from our differing perspectives. I know this is one of the ways in which beauty matters. So I made this playlist, for us!
Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee”; 1971
So many facts about this song: that it was released posthumously, that it went to Number One posthumously, that it was Janis Joplin’s only Number One song, that Kris Kristofferson apparently didn’t know she had recorded it until after she had died.
Them’s the facts. This song is beautifully written and interpreted: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose/and nothing, that’s all that Bobby left me” is basically an example of what happens when everything is going right in the world and gives me faith that poetry really does exist. I love the sassy backing band and of course, I love how Janis attacks the vocal. That this song was written by a man about a woman and is sung by a woman about a man, with equal and possibly even greater result, is reason to believe in the power of art to expose our truest selves the selves that live on a plane above identity and into sheer experience.
I think we can use that here and now, in America particularly, and this is a sheerly American song.
DeBarge, Rhythm of the Night; 1985
“When you feel like/the world is on your shoulders/and all of the madness has got you going crazy” oh MAN does this song get me where I live!
It’s only recently in my personal development that I’ve realized that I am not actually solely responsible for the well-being of the world and everyone in it. I’m growing up. But I’ll probably always be the type of person who worries beyond her lot about things like, restaurants with no easily accessible recycling bins and, the destructive impact of the Target-brand tank top I’m wearing. It doesn’t make me happy or actually change anything, which is why I try to manage it.
Anyway, when you feel like the world is on your shoulders, you CAN go dancing! So says Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter who wrote this early in her career. This is a search for beauty, again in the guise of shared experience, but also in the way of relief.
Rihanna and Calvin Harris, “This Is What You Came For”; 2016
And if you were to go dancing tonight (which you should), you might very well hear this song which is very popular these days. For those of us who follow celebrity culture, this song is significant because it represents a secret collaboration between Taylor Swift and her now-estranged lover the techno-pop whiz Calvin Harris. If you know anything about Taylor Swift’s music, which a surprising number of the people who comment on her actually do not, it’s easy and fascinating to hear her influence on this song (which she wrote under a pseudonym). And it’s also fascinating to hear Rihanna’s vocal which doesn’t sound at all like Rihanna until you realize it’s her trying to do her best Taylor Swift impression — which, given Rihanna’s continuing weight as a pop-cultural symbol as well, is all fodder for someone’s dissertation which I can’t wait to read someday so call me.
In any case, like any decent pop song, this works on multiple levels. I can analyze it until I’ve lost sight of the sun on the surface, or I can just groove along to that “yooo-ooo-ooo-oou” whilst I enjoy being alive here in the summer of 2016.
My Dear Disco, “White Lies”; 2007
I’m including this song on this playlist both because I’ve been listening to it a lot these past few weeks and because it’s one that you’re not likely to have heard before. The band is one I knew from my early days of college; they were just a bit too early for the resurgence of the disco-influenced sound.
The great and the challenging thing about putting together this thing called BEAUTY MATTERS is that to me, it is everything. Any song I love could be on this playlist because any song I love I love because I think it is beautiful. However! However. I am aware that beauty isn’t value-neutral; that not everyone structures their life around the pursuit of beauty; and that beauty is not the only valid criterion on which to assess something. “I’ve had time to think about it and/you’re so wrong, don’t go/everything will just fall back in place. . .”
Fleetwood Mac, “I’m So Afraid”; recorded 1997
Oh gosh, I am. I’m afraid you won’t know what I’m talking about and that that will have been a failure on my part. I’m afraid to be too abstract and theoretical and I’m afraid to betray my own intellect by dumbing myself down to appeal to more people. I’m afraid that I need to appeal to people to be worthwhile to myself. This is the conundrum not only of beauty but simply of being seen.
Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Didn’t You Know (You’d Have To Cry Sometime)”; 1969
But here we go. As a poet one of my main frames of reference for analyzing anything is the situation. I really admire the construction of a good situation and this, my friends, is an excellent situation — so all praise necessary to the (lesser-appreciated but still fabulous!) Motown team of Ashford & Simpson for writing this and to (living soul goddess and legend) Gladys Knight for interpreting it so well.
The situation is this: Gladys (it must be Gladys) is speaking to her former lover, who has come to her for comfort after experiencing what seems to be his first major heartbreak. “I know how it feels now because I feel it,” he says to her. And she offers him no sympathy other than telling him that he’s entered into a universal experience.
The truth and complexity of this song simply blows my mind. Haven’t we all known the person who cannot understand the pain of others until that same pain happens, specifically and directly and finally, to them? Didn’t you know, didn’t you know. . .
Cher, “You Haven’t Seen The Last Of Me”; 2010
K so, I almost didn’t include this on this playlist. I thought, “no I can’t, it’s too squishy and emotional, that’s a song I can listen to in private and not in public, no!”.
But then I realized, I was doing the same thing to Cher that so many people wrongly do to Cher which is loving her in the dark and only when we, selfishly, need her. The “guilty pleasure”. The great and beautiful and enduring thing about Cher is that she doesn’t have any mode other than on all the way; she cannot be other than what she is, she doesn’t know her place, and she sort of blithely continues on through life infusing people with a distinct mix of admiration and irritation simply by the sheer force of her own self-belief. This is related to femininity. Femininity is intimately related to beauty. More from Amy Wilson’s Ongoing Anti-Capitalist Feminist Major Defense Of Cher As A Self-Determined Cultural Product is available upon request.
(This song was also written by Diane Warren. And sure, it goes on a bit too long there at the end — but if you see it in context in the 2010 film Burlesque, you’ll feel it too.)
4 Non-Blondes, “What’s Up”; 1992
This song is also about femininity in a certain reading, but I think bears particular resonance in today’s cultural moment which to my perception is us collectively having reached the point of acknowledgment that what we are experiencing is beyond reason or control, is racing away without us if we let it, is madness but not necessarily always in the bad way. We were here.
Adele, “When We Were Young”; 2016
“Let me photograph you in this light/in case it is the last time that we might/be exactly how we were before we realize” is a line I was so struck by when I first heard it that I couldn’t stop wanting to hear it again and again, until I memorized its twists and turns. To me it is such a beautiful summation of what you acquire when you’ve been through some ups and downs in life, which is the complicated knowledge of time’s effect on human relationships. The desire to preserve and understand a moment, both knowing that your perspective on it will change and not knowing exactly how. It’s poignant. It’s lovely. It’s dramatic. It’s emotional. It’s emotional.
Fleetwood Mac, “Seven Wonders”; 1987
“I’m So Afraid” captures Fleetwood Mac’s live energy, their technical prowess, and Lindsey Buckingham’s relentless talent in a way that this song doesn’t. “Seven Wonders” is SO very 1980s and it so very much makes me want to wear a scrunchie and do some Jazzercise. I love the way Stevie attacks the line “it’s hard to find/someone with that kind/of intensity” — feel you on that so hard Stevie!!
Like all great soft rock the lyrics to “Seven Wonders” seem to make decent enough sense until you actually listen to them, which I think is charming. And the inclusion in this song of things like rainbows and the Wonders of the World really appeals to the watery, romantic side of myself that I am currently trying to incorporate into my vision of the whole. That’s part of what’s been challenging about BEAUTY MATTERS, is getting past my vision of myself as largely a rational, practical person (which depending on how well you know me may surprise you to hear or not). “I’m a poet, yes, but not THAT kind of poet,” I would say. “I’m an artist but not THAT kind of artist. I’m obsessed with the search for meaning, beauty, truth, and love but trust me, I’m also normal and down to earth.”
Why was, why is, that so important to me? Is it because of intellectual trends that thoroughly vilified the concepts of meaning beauty truth and love as we moved through a post-post-modernist 20th century? Is it because we think that art can’t coexist with real life and because we live in a capitalist reality that reinforces that belief? Is it because beauty is soft and the love of it is presumed to make a person soft and it is presumed to be bad to be soft?
I don’t think beauty is soft. I haven’t found it to be that way. But I do believe it matters, and I want to understand why.
I made this playlist for you to enjoy, understand, and experience in your own way.
You can follow me on Facebook if you’d like to be notified when BEAUTY MATTERS is released.
