E•MO•TIONal Rabbit Hole

A couple of weeks ago, I came across the following tweet:

I hadn’t thought about “All That,” or E•MO•TION, or, frankly, Carly Rae Jepsen in ages. But I immediately clicked the link and started listening. And then I clicked through to the album, was reminded CRJ had the audacity to kick-off the album with the 1-2-3 of “Run Away With Me,” “Emotion,” and “I Really Like You” (I could go on…E•MO•TION is one of those rare “no skips” albums; at least it is to me) and before I knew it I had listened to the album all the way through.

Have you listened to an album all the way through recently? I find I’ve become so conditioned to the slow drip of singles that show up on my New Music Friday Spotify playlist each week that by the time a full album drops I often feel I already know what it’s going to give me.

And on top of that, I’ve always been bad at listening to music. If I’m not too focused on trying to discern the lyrics, I’m ignoring them completely and just getting swept up in the music. I struggle to simply engage with a song on its own terms, find it hard to quiet down that voice in my head that feels like it needs to make pronouncements, needs to define and categorize: good!/bad! brilliant!/stupid! unique!/derivative! worthy/un-!

This impulse extends beyond music and is something I am working on in therapy.

But E•MO•TION does something to disarm that part of my brain. It’s pop music built for summer nights, for pining, for dancing with your friends, for—forgive me—feeling.

While listening to the album, I remembered that Hanif Abdurraqib, a writer I love, has written about Carly Rae Jepsen:

That Jepsen’s music is not the kind of pop music that relentlessly desires a body means that desire itself is the body. Desire is the living thing at the end of the tunnel, waiting with open arms, and to some, I imagine that isn’t a happy ending. Wanting leading into more wanting isn’t exactly a neatly tied ribbon, but it is a certainty. I will surely wake tomorrow with a desire for something I cannot have, and even if I can have it, I will chase the idea of not being able to have it until I find something else fleeting.

Here’s a video of him reading a version of that piece:

Hanif writes so beautifully on desire and longing (and on Whitney Houston), most notably in his viral Paris Review essay from 2019, “On Summer Crushing”:

I can hold a crush longer than most of my friends can hold a grudge. I don’t really need or even want to know whether a person shares my affection. I’m content just letting the situation play itself out at its own pace. I get that for most people, this seems agonizing. But, for all of the agony, what you get in return is the imagined person and not the actual person. Or, if you’re lucky, you get to hold off on the actual person for a little bit longer, until you get to be with the actual person.

Last week he shared a link to his Summer Crushing playlist, which will almost certainly be my summer soundtrack.

I’ve spent the past week listening to the playlist, continuing to rediscover E•MO•TION, and preparing myself for summer crushing.

My lord, all of that from a tweet by someone called @oomfmagazine.

OK, but what are we doing here?

Honestly, I’m not sure. I was recently chatting about books I’ve been reading and TV shows I’ve been watching with a friend and he told me I should consider keeping a culture diary, a document of the ramblings of my culture-obsessed mind. As someone who grew up with a Xanga account for a journal, I am not familiar with the concept of a private diary. So, here we are. And, anyway, I find these things—these films and books and playlists and internet rabbit holes—are more fun when they’re shared.

What else?

Last week, an artist I like just fine released a just-fine cover of “Home” from The Wiz for that soccer coach TV show so many of you love, and I am just to here to remind you that that Jazmine Sullivan’s rendition that she performed when she was 11 years old is the only version of that song other than the original that is needed:

I haven’t been able to stop watching this video of Tina Turner and Cher from 1975:

I haven’t read any Martin Amis, but Erin Somers’ essay on Amis for The New Republic has convinced me to give him a go.

The takeaway from Amis was that people were gross, and even this vastly oversimplified summation makes me laugh. People are gross. They are vulgar, they are small. They are lazy. They are pea-brained criminals who love playing darts. They long to murder or be murdered. No one wants to say it, because it’s rude and implicates all of us. But Amis said it, and he even said it elegantly.

Here’s a video of a My Little Pony singing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from Dreamgirls. I recommend you watch it if you are stoned and/or in need of some nightmare fuel:

And here’s a picture of Divine driving a speedboat, because why not: