Existential Party Music
Cabaret
11
C. Travis Webb
Start by admitting from cradle to tomb
āØIsn’t that long a stay
āØLife is a cabaret, old chum
āØIt’s only a cabaret, old chumāØ
And I love a cabaret
One could pick any verse of Kander and Ebbās classic and bullseye an existential theme. The song is seductive, irresistible, dark, and the musicalās lead character, Sally Bowles, is an electric dipole of ruddy animal want and ethereal aspiration.
Liza Minnelliās evocation of Bowles is the most iconic for a reason. Her earnest play to āsuck out all the marrow of lifeā takes on a grave irony as the song advances, and her she-doth-protest-too-much jouissance amplifies the storyās dread.
Life is a cabaret. Life is a cabaret. Life is a cabaret!
Cue the Nazis.
This is perhaps the most difficult of truths, the one that sends otherwise reasonable adults quivering back into adolescence to become humorless zealots cosplaying at wisdom.
The world is absolutely irretrievably brokenācleft right down the middle and severed all the way to the root. On one side are all of our fine feelings about ourselves and our loved ones, and on the other side are history, biology, and physics.
And, yes, you can reconfigure the world, move the pieces, redistribute the leases, and build a better mousetrap, but in the end weāre just a thirty-second spot for vanityās five-thousand-year run.
Our life is the cabaret, and itās short, and probably garish, but thereās some good food, and a good shag now and then, and sometimes you turn in a really, really great number and people applaud.
I Love to Boogie
10
C. Travis Webb
You rattlesnake out with your tailfeathers highĀ
āØJitterbug left and smile to the skyĀ
āØWith your black velvet cape and your stovepipe hatĀ āØ
Be-bop baby the dance is where it’s at
Michael Throās 1996 essay āApollo vs Dionysus: The Only Theme Your Students Will Ever Need in Writing about LiteratureāĀ is the academic equivalent of David Ellisās movie Snakes on a Plane.
The title of the essay crystalizes its theme: the single most effective way to teach the humanities to non-specialists is by using it to tap into the fundamental forces that shape the universe.
Why did Odysseus struggle for so long adrift on the āwine dark seaā? What brought the Assyrians barreling into Africa to smite the Kushites in the 8th century BCE?
Order. Civilization thrives on order. Laws and manners, rituals, taxes, titles, degrees, grammar, by violence or by convention, order is civilizationās essential element.
But thereās another force in human historyāa Dionysian impulse. That impulse is often libidinous, usually cathartic, and always a threat to order.
Thro calls it Chaos, but I prefer to call it enthusiasm (from the Greek enthous āfilled by a godā).
Marc Bolanās āLove to Boogieā invokes that enthusiasm. With its nonsense lyrics, and catchy hook, it summons you to abandon your work and revel. To dance mindlessly in the rain, to fiddle while the city burns, to make a life out of the dust.
My Adidas
09
C. Travis Webb
My Adidas heard the sound of a foreign land
āØWith mic in hand, I come to commandāØ
My Adidas and D close as can beāØ
We make a mean team, my Adidas and me
Got a pair that I wear when I’m playin’ ball
āØWith the heal inside, make me ten feet tallā¦āØ
We started in the, alley, now we chill in, Cali
At least since Odysseus planted his winnowing oar in a far-off land where men knew ānothing of the sea,ā explorers and poets have believed in the power of objects to tell stories.
Things arenāt always just things in the human world. They can be imbued with power, animated and alive.
The first single released on Run-DMCās third album, Raising Hell (1986), āMy Adidasā signaled the beginning of hip hopās power to shape mainstream contemporary culture. It is the near genesis moment of sneaker culture and is as illuminating as Max Weber in revealing capitalās transcendent aspect.
Essentially winged, Adidas are not simply a material aspiration. These are not mere shoes. They carry the story of African-American cultural ascendance.
No longer a marginalized community used by the Euro-American community to define itself, Afro-American culture became a vital element of the cultural center. Their symbols of transcendence became national symbols of transcendence.
The consequences of that displacement are still reverberating. The narrative potency of their objects still reshaping the world.
Passing Through
08
C. Travis Webb
I was with Washington at Valley Forge, shivering in the snow.
I said, āHow come the men here suffer like they do?ā
āMen will suffer, men will fight, even die for what is right
Even though they know they’re only passing throughā
Historical consciousnessāthe awareness that our present is a product of our pastāis, ironically, too often hobbled by history.
Sure, the past is an indispensable part of understanding the present, but so too is the future.
Someday weāll be the historical bumpkins intruding on an enlightened present. All our virtues and high-minded virtuosities will at best appear quaint, but probably narrow and mean on balance.
History doesnāt begin or end with the present. We arenāt the first to be appalled at the worldās iniquities. Nor the last to be indifferent. Not the first to feel indignation burn in our chests. Not the last to fail our better aspirations.
Although unique we are not new.
All of the things we mean, or think we mean, or donāt want to mean despite our best efforts will be simplified, then caricatured, then forgotten altogether.
Written by Dick Blakeslee in 1947, Passing Through is often included in song collections dedicated to political action and social justice. Itās a precious reminder that the struggle for righteousness is old and long and no one will ever be āwokeā from it.
Baby It's Cold Outside
07
C. Travis Webb
My mother will start to worryā¦
My father will be pacing the floor⦠/
The neighbors might thinkā¦
Say what’s in this drink⦠/
I ought to say, no, no, no sirā¦
At least I’m gonna say that I tried⦠/
My sister will be suspiciousā¦
My brother will be there at the door⦠/
My maiden aunt’s mind is viciousā¦
But maybe just a cigarette more⦠/
American culture isnāt the first to be terrified of a womanās sexual appetites. Humans are forever concocting new idioms, fashions, and rituals to curtail womenās access to their own pleasure.
Circumventing those mores has always been an elemental expression of liberation, and this song captures that expression with playfully exaggerated theatrics.
Frank Loesser wrote this song in 1944 and performed it regularly with his wife Lynn Garland at parties throughout the post-war era. It was, by Garlandās account, an instant success.
Loesser and Garlandās performance contemporized the same dynamics that animated Romeo and Juliet and in another key Annie Proulxās Brokeback Mountain.
Every member of the womanās social world is wary, anxious, and worried about what she might doāall alone out in the big, bad, cold world. But the gag that propels the song forward is that they know exactly what she might do.
And so do we, no matter what we pretend.
Randall Knife
06
James Bielo
I need the thing heās haunted.
May 17th, 2016. I was in Copenhagen when I read the news: Guy Clark is dead.
Not certain what my exact bodily response was, but I think it was something like this: leaned back in chair, exhaled, grimaced, tapped finger, nodded. Itās a strange sensation, to feel heartbroken by the death of a person you never met. Perhaps thatās one thing great artists do, illuminate unforeseen emotional terrain.
There is no favorite Guy Clark song for me, only different songs perfectly suited to particular moments. āRandall Knifeā may be the one Iāve listened to most of all. Itās a sparse, honest song; a rumination on death and loss and grief, and the start of reconciliation. I could imagine healing without this song, but it would be exponentially more difficult.
The song observes the porous border between memory and sensuous materiality, the bodyās capacity to know. And, it observes the power of stuff to exceed mere commodity, to be enchanted objects. āRandall Knifeā celebrates human relationshipsāfragile, precarious, and tender as they areāas the pulse we check to know we are alive.
Thank you, Guy. You are missed and you are remembered.
Your Temporary Custodian
05
Seth Perry
What an extraordinary thing it is to be this ordinary thing
A phenomenal nominal common all aleph-null nothing
This is what it’s like… we will not be saved
We went looking for the sublime
We find only the inane
This is what we are… and we will not be changed
You can look for unseen order
You’re gonna find that chaos reigns.
John Congleton, who records as The Nighty Nite, was the writer, composer, and voice of a band called The Paper Chase, but heās best known as a producer. According to an NPR feature, āchances are his production credit is on a record you love.ā
His own music, however, is considerably less popular. Itās not that Congletonās music isnāt listenableāwhen the man sneezes he writes a hookābut his lyrics are bleak. An auteur of found sound and eccentric production, Congleton spins dark lyrics and sunny hooks with, say, the grunts of rooting hogs into a cotton-candy of what people mostly hear as despair. But Congleton has made plain that he doesnāt think his music is despairing: he calls it āwry and sardonicā and simultaneously āheartfelt and⦠important.ā
As humanists from Diogenes to Voltaire have known, the enunciation of this ambivalence is the purest affirmation of human life. Itās the opposite of despair because there are only two truths that define our existence: we are going to die, and weāre not dead yet. And that is an āextraordinary thing.ā
Poor Song
04
C. Travis Webb
āCause people will say all kinds of thing
That donāt mean a damn to me
āCause all I see is whatās in front of me
And thatās you
Well, Iāve been dragged all over the place
Iāve taken hits time just donāt erase
And baby, I can see youāve been fucked with too
But that donāt mean your loving days are through
Every globe-trotting religion says weāre broken.
Weāre so rotten Jesus had to die to redeem us. Weāre so prone to suffering the Buddha had to teach us how to escape from life. Weāre so thick-headed that God had to send a third prophet called Muhammad to leash us to His will.
Even though itās trueāhuman beings are swollen with selfish regardāI suppose I donāt care too much for stories that send us begging for absolution.
Sure, living kills you and everyone else you know, but Karen Oās defiant croon doesnāt make time for redemption.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahsā debut album is unapologetically raw. And this hidden track captures the messiness of modern love and then spits it back with some swagger.
We might all be broken, beaten up, busted, lusty and craven. But here we areāright in front of each other.
Ready to be loved until weāre gone.
Libiamo ne' lieti calici
03
C. Travis Webb
Among you I dispense   Tra voi, tra voi saprò dividere
my ays with delight;Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā il tempo mio giocondo;
All is folly in life       Tutto è follia nel mondo ciò
that brings no pleasure.Ā Ā Ā che non ĆØ piacer.
Giuseppe Verdiās La Traviata is the twenty-first centuryās most performed opera so far, and its brindisi, or āDrinking Song,ā is its most famous piece.
This songās lively tempo remains accessible almost one hundred and seventy years after its premier in 1853 because celebrations, libations, and love still fire the imaginations of ruddy monkeys the world over.
Hedonism gets a bad rap because buttoned-down scolds fail to understand pleasureās deep complexities.
Centāanni!
Big City
02
C. Travis Webb
Been working everyday since I was twenty
Haven’t got a thing to show for anything I’ve done
…
So, turn me loose, set me free
Somewhere in the middle of Montana
Merle Haggard wasnāt the first to key into this kind of lament, but he captures the pitch of it perfectly.
This one take hit single co-written with Haggardās life-long friend and driver, Dean Holloway, doesnāt just play out that old, false rural-urban antagonism. It recalls Sisyphusā predicament and Roy Battyās keen.
The complaint is not that all of our works and days amount to nothing. Itās that we traded wonder and play for the dull procedures of an utterly managed life.
And When I Die
01
C. Travis Webb
Give me my freedom for as long as I be
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me
ā¦
And all I ask of dying is to go naturallyā¦
A nearly straight line can be drawn from Emily Dickenson to Laura Nyro, who sold this song to Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1965 when she was only seventeen.
This version benefits from BS&Tās horn section, whose cri de cÅur conjures the shofar, and every howling petition since Gilgamesh.
I decided to marry my wife the night she played this song for me.