When my Dad was my age, jazz was not respectable. It played in whorehouses not Carnegie Hall. These classics of jump, jive, and swing are all from the 1940’s. “Jumpin’ Jive,” “We The Cats,” and “San Francisco Fan” from Cab Caolloway; “Symphony Sid,” a Lester Young tune with words by King Pleasure; “Tuxedo Junction,” our tribute to Glenn Miller; and the rest, all performed at one time or other by our main inspiration, Louis Jordan, the king of juke boxes, who influenced so many but is acknowledged by so few. Like us he didn’t aim at purists, or even jazz fans — just anyone who wanted to listen and enjoy, reap this righteous riff. –JJ
That’s Joe Jackson’s full “statement of purpose” from the liner notes of his 1981 album Jumpin’ Jive. Now check out the statement from his previous album, Beat Crazy:
This album represents a desperate attempt to make some sense of Rock and Roll. Deep in our hearts, we knew it was doomed to failure. The question remains: Why did we try?
By 1981, Joe Jackson had released three successful (though decreasingly so) albums of spiky, melodic pop with the Joe Jackson Band, music which was labeled “New Wave” and “Angry Young Man”. He’d had an international hit with “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”, and a UK Top 5 hit with “It’s Different For Girls.” So a full album of 1940s swing covers was quite the unexpected move, but looking at these quotes, the choice starts to make a little more sense.
Beat Crazy was the third Joe Jackson Band album, and for all its freneticism, it does have an exhausted quality about it, a sense that the tank is running dry. According to Joe’s longtime bassist Graham Maby, drummer Dave Houghton left the band after that album, giving Jackson the opportunity to choose a new way forward for the Joe Jackson Band.
He decided instead to dissolve that band entirely, dismissing guitarist Gary Sanford and instead hiring three horn players, a piano player (!), and drummer Larry Tolfree. Maby was the only one who stayed. This dissolution became Jackson’s first opportunity to reinvigorate his music by going in a new direction, a trend that would continue throughout his career with departures like salsa music, a symphony, a film score, a concept album, and various points in between. As I’ve written before, Jackson hates to be pigeonholed, and refuses to sit still — audiences had already seen some variety from the jazz, ska, and punk influences of his first three albums, but Jumpin’ Jive threw down a much bigger gauntlet.
Which is not to say that the album comes off like a stiff-necked exercise. On the contrary, it’s incredibly fun! Jackson sounds like he’s having the time of his life in his vocals, and he jumps all the way in on weird character work (like the beginning of “What’s The Use Of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)” and the entirety of “You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business”) and period slang. Every song is alive with exhilaration, the sound of a loving tribute that comes close to a full resurrection.
In fact, some have argued that this album kicked off the swing revival that hit its peak around 1998, when suddenly bands like Squirrel Nut Zippers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra were having hits with songs that came from (or might as well have come from) the 1940s. I don’t see much of a through line there, though. I wouldn’t even say that Jumpin’ Jive predicted the trend, because it’s pretty clear that Jackson doesn’t give a damn about trends. But I will say that this album makes those songs sound better, crisper, and more fun than any of those late 90’s bands ever managed to do. Which is no slam on those bands, just a recognition of Jumpin’ Jive‘s musical achievement.
The key here is that the musicianship on this album is just impeccable. Check out Nick Weldon’s smooth piano intro on “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby”. (So strange to me that Jackson stayed off the keys, limiting himself to “voice and vibes”, but I can’t argue with the results.) Check out Tolfree’s crrrrazy drum breaks in “How Long Must I Wait For You”. Check out the perfectly locked-in and interplaying horns at the beginning of “You’re My Meat”. (Also, everywhere else.)
Most of all, check out the staggering skill of Mr. Graham Maby. Jackson has used Maby at every possible opportunity throughout his career, the only player to whom he’s stayed so faithful, and this album makes the reasons for that loyalty crystal clear. Pretty much every song contains jaw-dropping examples of Maby’s bass virtuosity. In “You’re My Meat” he’s bouncing all over the scales. In “San Francsico Fan” he’s mournfully underlining the melodrama of Fannie’s tragic tale, marching in her funeral parade. The beginning of “We The Cats (Shall Hep Ya)” finds him nimbly soloing before settling into a vivacious walking groove.
It’s pretty impossible for me to pick a favorite Maby moment on this album, but I would put in a word for the iconic beginning of “Tuxedo Junction”, which perfectly sets the stage for the song. He revisits the theme throughout the song, adding flourishes and filigree as the spirit moves him, and makes the entire thing sound so great. Maby had never played this style of music before Jackson invited him to this album, and he rises to the occasion with such incredible aplomb that Jackson pretty much never lets him go from that point forward. I wouldn’t either.
One more note — Jackson gives a shout-out to vintage vocalist King Pleasure in the liner notes I quoted above, but he’d circle back in a much more substantial way much later. “King Pleasure Time”, from his excellent 2008 album Rain, turns the name into the personification of pleasure itself, who “rules the world, but not everybody knows it.” The song extols the idea of pure pleasure as the driving force in life, and if that’s true, Jumpin’ Jive is a pretty good path to get you there.
The Go-Go’s hit the peak of their career with the very first track on their very first album, Beauty and the Beat. That’s not to say that the rest of their work is a disappointment — far from it — but “Our Lips Are Sealed” is simply a perfect pop record. Instruments build in in classic layers as the song begins — first drums, then rhythm guitar, then lead guitar, then bass, and finally Belinda Carlisle’s voice, smooth and sparkling as crystal. Every layer is excellent. Gina Schock sets an ebullient beat, a springboard for the guitars of Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey, while Kathy Valentine’s melodic bass dances through the rhythm section like Carlisle through the fountain in the song’s video.
I’ve heard this song hundreds of times since 1981, and it still makes my hair stand on end, every single time. It captures a feeling both carefree and defiant, with lyrics that make a lovers’ conspiracy against the world seem like the most ecstatic expression of young romance. At least, that’s the mood set by the initial verse-chorus-verse, but then there’s a shift as the bridge comes. The bass slides into minor key territory as Wiedlin takes over the vocal duties with an angelic and maternal tone: “Hush my darling / Don’t you cry / Quiet, angel / Forget their lies.”
As Wiedlin finishes her last word, Schock hits the pinnacle of the song, a two-second drum break that feels exactly like an explosion of joy. Valentine buoys the last stroke as the verse comes back in, but this time supported by that Wiedlin angel from the bridge, echoing questions and reassurances: Can you hear them? See right through them. The band reprises the first verse but enriches it with higher harmonies, ending on a thrilling, jubilant vocal chord.
How do you match that? They didn’t, but some tracks on this album come pretty close. Top among the candidates is the iconic “We Got The Beat,” a manifesto of Go-Go attitude, youth, and musical exuberance. “Our Lips Are Sealed” was the band’s introduction, but “We Got The Beat” was when America really fell in love with them, catapulting the single to #2 and the album to #1 for six consecutive weeks. Astoundingly, they are still the only all-female band who writes their own songs and plays their own instruments ever to top the album charts.
Not only that, it’s not as if they rely on the talent of a single great songwriter. Take a look at the songwriting credits on their 5 Top 40 hits:
“Our Lips Are Sealed”: Wiedlin, Terry Hall
“We Got The Beat”: Caffey
“Vacation”: Caffey, Valentine, Wiedlin
“Head Over Heels”: Caffey, Valentine
“Turn To You”: Caffey, Wiedlin
Wiedlin, Caffey, and Valentine form the core of the Go-Go’s songwriting team, bringing people from outside the band every so often, writing songs solo or in various combinations, occasionally including Carlisle (who has co-writing credit on one song each from Beauty And The Beat and Vacation) and Schock (who co-wrote one Vacation song and two from Talk Show.) Despite the varied personnel, the songs share a consistent musical and lyrical identity: fun, bouncy, affirming, with a swagger that carries just a hint of darkness.
Take Caffey & Wiedlin’s “This Town”, which sounds like surf rock in deep shade, a ticking rhythm guitar part and a stalking bass line underneath bright harmonies. The first verse and chorus sets the tone for a “Yay Los Angeles” lyrical picture: “Life’s a kick in this town… This town is so glamorous / Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us.” But then here comes the second verse: “Change the lines that were said before / We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores / Discarded stars, like worn out cars / Litter the streets of this town.” Not exactly pretty postcard fare.
Similarly, “Automatic” has few words, but what it has isn’t reassuring (e.g. “Angles sharp / Crash together”), and its overall mood is slow and spooky. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the album’s brighter moments. I got the sense that Wiedlin was trying for something hypnotic, along the lines of The Motels’ “Total Control”, but it comes out just kinda plodding. It starts a bit of a lackluster slide in the album, a few songs from side 2 that are just okay, as opposed to the fireworks show that is side 1 plus “We Got The Beat”.
I assigned Beauty and the Beat to Robby because I’d been listening to and loving Talk Show recently. I considered assigning Talk Show instead, but decided it was unlikely I’d be assigning another Go-Go’s album anytime soon, so I’d better pick the acknowledged classic. Funny thing, though — after listening to them both extensively, I actually think Talk Show is overall the stronger album. Though it lacks any single moment that reaches the heights of “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got The Beat”, even its lesser songs feel like classics (look no further than the deeply underrated “Capture The Light.”) The Go-Go’s had a brief and brilliant career (setting aside for a moment their 2001 comeback record), and over the short course of it they became stronger and stronger songwriters, if not hitmakers.
Even so, they absolutely bring the goods for most tracks on Beauty And The Beat. It’s inexplicable to me that IRS Records chose “Automatic” for the third single from the album when there are a raft of stronger contenders. From the rocking and vital “How Much More”, to the whirlwind of “Lust To Love”, and the defiant, hopeful “Can’t Stop The World”, this album is stuffed with shoulda-been hits. “We Got The Beat” is clearly the thesis statement, but Valentine delivers the perfect sendoff in the final track: “Can’t stop the world / Why let it stop you?”
British singer-songwriter Frank Turner has a trick. He didn’t invent it, and he doesn’t use it all the time, but he employs it to great effect on his fifth album, Tape Deck Heart. Here’s what it is: he sings a song long enough to make you think you know it, then changes it completely, putting a whole new context around it and bringing new and surprising levels of meaning to the very same words and tune.
The most pronounced version of this happens on “Four Simple Words.” The song starts out folky, and gently opens up into a swaying, strumming chorus:
I want to dance, I want to dance
I want lust and love and a smattering of romance
But I’m no good and dancing, and yet I have to do something
Tonight I’m gonna play it straight, I’m gonna take my chance
I want to dance
It’s a sweet and catchy, setting the stage for a warm and happy singalong, but as soon as it ends, furious drums upend the song and suddenly Turner charges in behind a frantic tattoo of electric guitars, spitting rapid lyrics about “heading out to the punk rock show” in a style that makes him as likely to be on the stage of that show as in the audience. When the chorus comes back it’s in that punk style, and now instead of feeling winsome and wistful, it’s a fierce declaration of independence from cultural strictures.
But the song’s not done yet. After a few pogoing verse-chorus-verse fusillades (with the occasional solo, profanity, or Rocky Horror Picture Show reference), it slows way down to deliver the chorus again, this time cabaret style, with tinkling piano and a subtle choir, and then switches to rollicking music hall on “But I’m no good at dancing”, and then ramps back into punk for a final verse and an abrupt ending.
The overall effect feels like taking the same sentiment to different phases of life, different internal and external communities, bringing them together with an insistence on joy and risk. The trick happens elsewhere too, though. “Broken Piano” finds him at first accompanied by a spooky drone, but otherwise a capella, lapsing occasionally into a grief-stricken Chris Martin falsetto. As the chorus arrives for the first time, the piano begins to assert itself, and the ominous drone increases in volume and coarseness. When the chorus comes back, it’s suddenly backed by huge, echoing drums, and a thick band of harmonizing Turners, leading up to sweeping, emotional power chords and an powerful climax.
“Plain Sailing Weather,” too, starts with its chorus in its simplest form, sung by Turner over basic acoustic guitar. Then the verse that follows it builds intensity so that when the chorus comes back, the band kicks in behind it and everything feels like it was meant to happen. “Tell Tale Signs” does a similar kind of build, albeit far more subtly.
Here’s the real trick, though. Those shifts don’t just happen within a song — they happen across the terrain of the album, too. Turner has described Tape Deck Heart as a “break-up album”, and that’s certainly apparent in songs like “Broken Piano”, “Plain Sailing Weather”, and “Tell Tale Signs”. Probably the most heartbreaking of them all is “Anymore.” No stylistic head-fakes in this one — it’s just pure acoustic guitar and mournful folk delivery of lines like “Darling, I can’t look you in the eyes now / And tell you if I’m sure that I love you anymore.” Turner frames “the romance and the running down of disconnected hearts” in stark terms that will surely resonate with anyone who’s ever been witness to the slow suffocating death of a love affair. It doesn’t get any bleaker than a repeated “I don’t love you anymore.”
But that’s not all there is to Tape Deck Heart. Amid the wreckage, there are brilliantly shining glimmers of hope. There’s “Oh Brother”, which beautifully encapsulates a close friendship on top of a deeply satisfying rock and roll riff. “The Way I Tend To Be” portrays a different kind of closeness, one that disrupts the singer’s self-destructive patterns with prompts to growth like “love is about all the changes you make and not just three small words.”
Best of all is the album’s opening track, “Recovery”. The song is unflinching in its depiction of a narrator “swallowed by the pain”, but every time the chorus comes in, the exultation of it is just undeniable, blowing through heartache even as it declares “It’s a long way up to recovery from here.” Turner’s band and his jubilant vocal recall the best moments of The Waterboys’ Big Music, with a similarly redemptive quality. At the other end of the album, the uplift that happens at the end of “Broken Piano” is similar to the breakthrough that happens in Coldplay’s “Amsterdam.” In each case, the pain gets surrounded by music so powerful that it lifts the singer into the skies, putting his earthbound heartache into a grander perspective. That’s how healing happens, and we’re lucky that Frank Turner has shared some of his with us.
Stevie Nicks made a huge splash as a solo artist at the beginning of the 1980s. For her 1981 solo debut Bella Donna she enlisted the aid of producer Jimmy Iovine, because when asked who she wanted to produce the album, she said, “I want whoever produces Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. If I can’t be in The Heartbreakers, at least I can get Tom’s producer so I can make the girl version of what I love about Tom Petty.”
Iovine brought a rock and roll sensibility quite different from that of Lindsey Buckingham, up to that point the only other producer Nicks had worked with on a full album. Not only that, he brought The Heartbreakers along with him, and even convinced Petty himself to duet with Nicks a track he had written, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” Iovine also enlisted stellar musicians like Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel, Davey Johnstone (longtime guitarist for Elton John), and the always-amazing Roy Bittan. Stevie herself brought in Don Henley for another duet triumph, “Leather And Lace.” The album went platinum in 3 months, and hit number one on the Billboard album charts.
Cut to 1983. Fleetwood Mac had released Mirage, giving Nicks another Top 20 hit with “Gypsy” but further pulling her between her solo career and her longtime band. The romantic relationship she’d had with Iovine was crumbling. And heartbreakingly, devastatingly, her childhood friend Robin Anderson had died of leukemia. Nicks always had a flair for drama, but at this time her life was providing all the triumph and tragedy of a gothic novel.
So she did what she’d become so skilled at doing. She poured all of the emotion into songs, re-enlisting Iovine and most of the Bella Donna players (plus luminaries like Sandy Stewart, Steve Lukather, and even Mick Fleetwood himself) to craft a remarkable collection of deeply expressionist music. She channeled the gothic novel explicitly, using Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as inspiration for The Wild Heart‘s title track.
And what a title track! The six minutes and ten seconds of that song are a pinnacle of Nicks’ career, especially her solo career. It features Nicks’ signature elliptical lyrics, so obscure and so relatable at the same time, at least for anybody who’s been caught in a wild emotional whirlwind, partly of their own making. Even more than that, though, it captures the most incredible vocal on the album, one of the best of her entire career.
She starts with plain declarations — “something in my heart died last night” — with notes repeated so often it’s nearly monotone. The backup singers come in to harmonize on “that’s when I needed you, when I needed you most,” adding color. The next verse ramps up to a higher set of notes, and Nicks sings a little more urgently. Then she climbs the first big ladder, on “dare my wild heart.”
Drums take us into the chorus, and the main hook for the song, musically and conceptually: “Don’t blame it on me — blame it on my wild heart.” This line crystallizes the romantic persona she’d been crafting ever since the first notes of “Rhiannon” hit AM radio. Like Brontë’s Cathy, she’s a creature of pure passion, utterly controlled by her emotions. She creates the space for all of us to inhabit who find ourselves swept up in and dwarfed by our feelings, specifically romantic feelings. “There was a danger, and the danger was to fall in love.”
As the song progresses, she adds more and more flourish to the lines, pulls more drama from them with ecstatic chants — “not even you can tear us apart, whoa-oh!” “You don’t even know how to start, how to start, HOW TO START.” She finds her falsetto among repetitions of “on my wild heart”, then flutters into a bridge that drops some of the accompaniment away amid familiar fiery and rainy imagery. The chorus returns, with some alterations bespeaking passionate devotion — “there is a reason why even the angels don’t give it up at all.”
With the backup singers chanting “blame it on me”, Nicks loses herself in the feeling as the drums press urgently on. Lines from earlier in the song return, but this time sung with abandon, as if the images themselves are leaping out before her. She swoops all around the beat like Cathy’s frantic ghost, finally losing words altogether in a series of “oooh”s.
Then come the last thirty seconds of the song. “Blame it on my wild heart,” she repeats over and over, desperately, and then everything crescendos: “Blame it on my wild, wild, wild, WIIIIIILD HEEAAAART!” That note. She pours everything into it, all the grief, all the trauma, all the heartbreak, all the out-of-control dysfunction that was her life in 1983, and in the magical alchemy of rock and roll, changes it into a rapturous, delirious, cathartic exaltation of the powers that bind us together and to this life.
Look, I won’t do this for every song. But “Wild Heart” is a perfect example of why Stevie Nicks is my favorite artist, and has been for more than 30 years now, ever since I saw her at Red Rocks when I was 16 years old. If these album assignment essays are for anything, they’re for trying to capture the thoughts and feelings that music brings to me, and in the case of Stevie, it takes some telling.
To tell it all every time, though, would maybe be to tell too much. As she sings in “Stand Back”, “no one knows how I feel / or what I mean unless you read between my lines,” but there are so many lines and so much between them, perhaps it’s better to just focus on moments.
Nothing else on the album quite reaches the peak of that last 30 seconds of “Wild Heart”, but several pieces come really close. There are the lovely lines in the album’s closing track “Beauty and the Beast”: “I never doubted your beauty / I’ve changed”, which then repeat with Nicks stretching out the last two words to near-operatic heights. There’s the dynamite keyboard riff in “Stand Back”, played by Prince as we all found out later. There’s the joyful count-off at the beginning of “Enchanted.” There’s the infuriated opening couplet of “Nothing Ever Changes”: “If it’s me that’s driving you to this madness, there’s just one thing that I’d like to say / Would you take a look at your life and your lovers? Nothing ever changes.”
And then there’s “If Anyone Falls.” This song captivated me from the opening synth swells, which were perfectly of their time but still sound so perfect now. Nicks’ vocal against this synth line shines like chrome, and her lyrics are iconically Nicksy: “Somewhere… twilight… dreamtime… somewhere in the back of your mind.” She finds so many perfect little expressions, like “I have never known the words… but I have tried to be true.” But my favorite part of this song is the bridge: “So I’m never gonna see you / Deep inside my heart / But I see your shadow against, shadow against, shadow against the wall.” Again, it’s that repetition that sounds like it arises organically from the strength of her feelings, supported by drums pounding out the words rhythm, and a key change from the synth line that sounds like it’s buoyed upward by sheer force of emotion.
I ended up at that Red Rocks concert because a friend’s mother (who was a huge Stevie fan) convinced me that there may be something there for me. The bridge of “If Anyone Falls”, which had been all over radio a few years before, made me believe it. And I’ve gotten a lifetime of joy out of this music, a bright river I can still tap into today, just as strong as ever. Much of it came from a place of pain, but it has taken that pain and turned into spellbinding and rich exultation.
Sometimes, when writing these album reviews, my first reaction has to do with the lyrics, or the performances, or the composition, or the production. And then there are those times when it’s just all about me. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy falls into the latter camp. I put this album on and I’m instantly transported to the mid-90’s, a time when one-word song titles ruled the world, and it still felt like a clever trick to leave a bunch of silence at the end of the last song on your CD, only to be followed by a “hidden track”. I’m just starting to work in CU’s Financial Aid office, after a couple of years in graduate school. It’s just a temporary thing, because I’m on my way to an academic career, just as soon as Laura finishes her Ph.D. Many of my friends are newly married, or on their way to it.
I listened to this album a lot during those years. I mean, a lot. But from 2018, time-traveling back to 1994 feels strange. So many things have changed since then. Some of those marriages have dissolved, some of those career paths have derailed, or I guess switched rails. There was so much coming that I didn’t foresee. I think that’s why Fumbling Towards Ecstasy felt really worn-out to me the first couple of times I listened to it for this assignment. Sometimes I feel a smooth, unbroken connection to the me I once was, but listening to Sarah McLachlan’s deep, cool emoting on this album, he felt quite distant indeed.
A few more listens, though, helped scrape off the overfamiliarity. I started to get past my own memories and just connect with the music on its own terms. It makes sense to me that this was McLachlan’s breakout album. It feels like the first mature expression of her artistic voice, not just her singing voice. She’d already established herself as an exceptional singer, and put that forward as her primary selling point — the debut single from her debut album was none-too-subtly called “Vox.” Her first couple of albums were very good, but still felt like an artist emerging from her influences, working to get past the Kate Bush-isms into her own unique idiom.
“Possession” is the song that stakes her claim on this new territory. A sterling member of the “Every Breath You Take” school of songs that sound sweet but are actually super-creepy, it puts McLachlan’s vocal gifts into a new context. This time, she’s not just here to earnestly express her struggles with lovers and/or parents, but rather to inhabit a pretty unsavory character, an obsessed fan projecting romantic attachment onto his favorite singer, with a sinister undertone of violence: “And I would be the one to hold you down / Kiss you so hard I’ll take your breath away.” It’d be a few more years before McLachlan would reach the US Top 40, but this song made a big impression in the “adult alternative” radio world, and consequently had a big impact on my area, as local station KBCO was a pioneer in that format, and I was still working as an intern there. Rightly so — it’s an excellent song, well-produced and performed with enough restraint that its eeriness can shine through.
Most of this album sticks pretty close to the “Possession” template musically. In fact, I’d say that the entire thing stays within a fairly limited range. If Fumbling Towards Ecstasy were a color palette, it would be whites, blue-whites, light blues, and dark blues. Even her imagery favors chilly controlling metaphors like “Ice” and “Ice Cream”. Piano, organ, subdued drums, and guitars that stay mostly in the background with the exception of occasional stabs outward, are the order of the day. The star of the show is McLachlan’s voice, but for many songs (case in point: “Wait”) she hangs out mostly in her lower register, or at least the Sarah in front does that. She tends to enrich her songs by layering herself singing a variety of parts, like a vocal harmony group made of all Sarah McLachlans. Then when the lead reaches a little higher, it feels more dramatic for how contained everything else has been.
Tempo-wise, also, most songs aren’t out to set your pulse racing, in fact so much so that some stretches of the album felt downright somnolent. I really appreciated “Circle” this time around for the way it kicks up the energy, especially on the chorus. “Ice Cream” is another welcome exception, with a little bit of swing to its drumbeat and a hi-hat that isn’t shoved to the back of the mix for once. And conversely, sleepwalkers like “Mary” and “Fear” started to feel longer and longer with every listen. McLachlan would learn this lesson well for later songs like “Building a Mystery” and “Sweet Surrender”, but on Fumbling she still stays mostly in a pretty small box.
Ultimately, it’s McLachlan’s songs that prove the most satisfying element of this album. Even though there’s a samey quality to the album as a whole, many songs have a refreshing directness that’s missing from her earlier work. “Hold On” is a plea to the fates that anybody who’s ever had a seriously ill loved one can instantly relate to. “Plenty” and “Circle” set out relationship dysfunction in a way that makes perfect sense, especially if you’ve been there. And “Good Enough” is still a very strong portrayal of somebody tired of hearing about a friend’s abusive love affair, knowing that they could fix it if only they were allowed to. At the time, it was even a little more intriguing for its hints of same-sex eroticism.
It’s those songs, and McLachlan’s endlessly compelling voice, that finally lift this album out of the mid-90’s amber in which it nearly gets preserved. Once I pry it loose from the context that sticks to it, I’m ready to love it again.
In 1982, Joe Jackson was an Englishman in New York. He’d grown musically restless, impatient with genre pigeonholing that wanted to call him New Wave, or Rock And Roll, or Angry Young Man, or what have you. His last record had tried to shrug off the whole scene by devoting itself completely to loving covers of jump blues classics by artists like Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway.
But while Jumpin’ Jive was a delightful diversion, it was after all just a covers album. It was time for Jackson to get back to writing and performing, but not to go back to the Joe Jackson Band sound of his first three albums, as great as they were. He wanted to move forward, and keep dodging labels. So he focused his creative process on the city around him. He watched it, from beauty to terror, from freedom to isolation, and he listened to it, salsa sounds pouring from Puerto Rican groceries, piano ballads in smoky clubs, the Broadway legacy stretching back to Cole Porter and George Gershwin.
He poured all of it into Night And Day, and found a sound that defined its difference from the rock + roll mainstream by what it omitted: guitar. There isn’t a note of guitar on this album, allowing the piano to occupy center stage unchallenged. Into the generous spaces left over stepped an extraordinary rhythm section: longtime Jackson bassist Graham Maby, drummer Larry Tolfree, and percussion by the astonishing Sue Hadjopoulos, who brought a whole spice cabinet of new and thrilling flavors to Jackson’s sound.
The cover art and title of Night And Day are meant to evoke Porter, but for much of this album Jackson comes a lot closer to Tito Puente. The first half of the album especially is awash in Latin syncopation and fascinating rhythms. Since albums still had sides back in 1982, Jackson took advantage of the split and literalized his title a step further, dubbing the first five songs the “Night Side” and the other four the “Day Side.” The distinction becomes a little dubious upon close inspection, but there are some important differences.
Rhythm dominates the night — right from the start we get 20 seconds of percussion before any other instrument joins in on “Another World”, and even then it’s a highly rhythmic piano part, pouncing and skittering up and down the scales. For much of the night side, the piano acts a lot like another drum, albeit one that can play different notes, taking its place among xylophones, vibraphones, and bells. Those polyrhythms make the night side addictive and exciting.
The songs on the night side all overlap, segueing smoothly into one another, and spinning through a variety of moods. “Another World” sees the city as a vibrant haven for misfits, a luminously alive place where you can find a welcome even when the rest of the world tells you “no”. (Jackson would revist this theme more comedically in “Stranger Than You”, from his sequel to the Night And Day album, the aptly titled Night And Day II.) Strangely, Jackson calls this experience “like day from night”, with day being the city and night being the rest of the world — an odd way to start the night side of this album.
But the darkness sets in soon enough. The narrator of “Chinatown” is lost and menaced, careening from one uneasy experience to another, culminating in his discovery of a murder victim being hassled by a cop. If there’s a loose narrative to the side (and I would argue that the crossfades suggest one), this harrowing journey drives him to take shelter indoors, just him and his TV, in “T.V. Age”. Here it doesn’t matter whether it’s day or night — “we send out for food, get the news on video.” He’s cocooned in safety, only to discover that, in fact, his TV is part of an alien invasion intent on taking over the earth. No kidding.
If that sounds paranoid, it fits in perfectly with “Target”, in which the narrator feels constantly under threat, no matter when or where he is. “I’m no one special,” he says, “But any part of town / Someone could smile at me then / Shake my hand then gun me down.” (And this was 1982, mind you.) Once again, the distinction between day and night gets erased: “Black, white, day, night / No one’s fussy, I’m a target.”
The relief and redemption from all this awful anxiety comes in the last song of the night side, Jackson’s biggest hit, “Steppin’ Out.” Here in fact is the first song on this side where it’s crystal clear lyrically that it’s nighttime — the narrator and his lover are steppin’ out “into the night / into the light.” Maby really shines on this track, with a scintillating bass groove punctuated by Jackson’s chiming piano. The song presents the New York City night as full of promise and wonder, the place lovers can go when they’ve no more angry words to say, when they’re tired of all the darkness in their lives — “electricity so fine” turns the night into a fairyland that restores their youth and possibilities. For so much of the night side, the city has made us wonder why anyone would stay here, but the misty secrets of its lights hold the chance for magic to happen.
“Steppin’ Out” is a marvelous song, and it deserves every bit of praise and popularity it’s gotten, but my favorite Joe Jackson song of all time is the one that opens the day side: “Breaking Us In Two.” Jackson sets aside the whirling polyrhythms and delivers a gorgeous, aching melody perfectly inlaid with piano, congas, bass, and cymbals. He also delivers some of the best lyrics he’s ever written. “Though it’s oh so nice to get advice / It’s oh so hard to do.” “You don’t do the things that I do / You want to do things I can’t do.” And best of all:
Could we be much closer if we tried?
We could stay at home and stare into each other’s eyes
Maybe we could last an hour
Maybe then we’d see right through
Always something breaking us in two
What a quietly devastating expression of struggling for connection in a relationship that’s falling apart. The album’s day begins with a hangover — from an evening bursting with promise of new beginnings, the merciless light of day reveals only endings.
From there, we get a burst of comic relief, and a return of the Latin cadences from side one, not to mention its paranoia, as Jackson sardonically relates his conclusion that “everything gives you cancer.” Yet another high point follows, the piano ballad “Real Men.” With another genius riff and more excellent lyrics, Joe Jackson deconstructs gender and sexuality norms about 30 years ahead of his time, saying “it’s got to change more” well ahead of when it would. The lyric “You don’t wanna sound dumb / Don’t want to offend / So don’t call me a faggot, not unless you are a friend” remains genuinely shocking to this day.
The day side ends with a return to the night. Jackson’s narrator is steppin’ out again, but “A Slow Song” finds him frustrated with the club atmosphere. In a pulsating disco he’s “brutalized by bass / and terrorized by treble”, wanting only “a strong and silent sound” to help him make that yearned-for connection with his lover. “A Slow Song” is, in fact, a slow song, but it’s phenomenally full of intensity when Jackson scales the chorus. The soaring wordless shouts of “Real Men” seem like they’re as impassioned as Jackson can get, until we hear his anguished vocal on this song — every time he hits the word “slow” in this chorus, it’s an incredibly cathartic musical experience.
I don’t usually write these reviews in this structure, stepping through every song of an album in sequence. But with Night And Day, there wasn’t a single song I was willing to leave out, and traveling through the album now is as rewarding as it was 36 years ago. It’s a pinnacle, an absolute masterpiece from a musical giant who cannot be contained.
This time it was Robby’s turn to help me fill in a gap. He assigned me The 2nd Law by Muse, a band about whom I knew the barest trivia-question minimum: Science-inflected prog rock. Had some modern rock hits. Memorable titles “Knights of Cydonia” and “Supermassive Black Hole”. Not from around here — like Canadian or English or something. (Turns out they’re English, from Devon.)
And that’s it. I had never listened to a Muse album, or even really paid attention to a single Muse song. So I didn’t know what to expect when I cued up the first track, “Supremacy.” But seconds in, I knew I was going to like it. A powerful stomping guitar riff, met with James Bond-y adventure strings, cool. Appropriately menacing and theatrical vocals, cool. And then, about two minutes in, Matthew Bellamy suddenly unleashes an impossible falsetto, diving straight into chills-down-the-back Robert Plant territory as the riff thunders across the frame. AWESOME. That’s when I knew I was going to love it.
There’s plenty of Zep in the Muse mix, but the band I kept thinking of as I listened to the album was Queen. There are Queen-y hallmarks all over this album, starting with Bellamy’s wonderfully dynamic voice and heading right through the layers of guitars and harmonies on songs like “Madness.” In a few places, I felt like Muse might even be quoting Queen deliberately — take for instance “Explorers”, where the melody line on “it was a mistake imprisoning my soul” sounds like it could be a harmony part for “two hundred degrees that’s why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit” from “Don’t Stop Me Now.” As I said, I don’t know the rest of the Muse canon, but based on The 2nd Law alone, I’d say that Queen’s crown has passed to the Devonian trio, and they’re wearing it proudly.
Now, that’s not to say that Muse displays the kind of White-album-esque variety on show in a record like A Night At The Opera, but they’ve got their fair share of surprises on hand. For an album that starts out sounding like it’s going to be straight-ahead hard rock (well, with orchestral flourishes I guess), The 2nd Law throws increasingly heavy doses of electronica into the mix over time. This curve culminates near the end of the album, in “The 2nd Law: Unsustainable”, which starts out string-heavy, then pulls in a spoken track (though looped to stutter occasionally) that sounds like a science textbook, then suddenly drops the title word with a HUGELY processed, inhuman-sounding vocal, accompanied by mind-melting Moog and guitar swoops. This is another one of those moments that just knocked me back on my heels. Absolutely awesome.
As well as taking varying musical approaches, the album also showcases an assortment of themes. There are relationship songs, both positive and negative (“Madness”, “Follow Me”). There are quasi-political diss tracks (“Supremacy” and “Animals”, both of which feel totally relevant to the present moment.) There are pumped-up motivators (“Panic Station”, “Survival”) and despairing cries for help (“Explorers”, “Save Me”).
But it’s the two final tracks of the album that fascinate me the most thematically. They’re joined to each other, and to the album as a whole, by their invocation of the album’s title, “The 2nd Law.” The law in question is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Order always devolves into chaos. “The 2nd Law: Unsustainable” points out, in the most thrilling way, that “an economy based on endless growth is unsustainable.” “The 2nd Law: Isolated System” shifts the focus a bit, away from entropy and towards isolation.
Listening to this album on repeat let the songs shift around in my head until it started feeling like those two tracks open the curtain on the set rather than closing it, and once I started thinking about it that way, I became increasingly convinced that The 2nd Law is a sneaky concept album. Entropy is visible everywhere, in a bunch of different contexts. “Madness” depicts a relationship falling apart. A regime is about to topple in “Supremacy”. The whole planet (or is it another relationship?) spins into chaos in “Big Freeze” and “Explorers”. “Liquid State” and “Save Me” are the anguished cries of someone losing his own center, crumbling into nothing, “drowning in denial.”
But. There are two pieces to the second law. There’s the entropy, yes, but there’s also the isolation. Looking at “Liquid State” and “Save Me” from another angle, they are desperate attempts to break out of isolation, in order to reverse personal entropy. The narrators of these songs crave connection, and feel convinced that it is what will halt the disintegration of their lives. “Don’t let me go cause I’m nothing without you.” “Warm my heart tonight / And hold my head up high/ And help me to survive.” Seen from a different vantage, “Supremacy” is about the moral collapse of an isolated political system, about to be swept away by external forces.
Yes, this album says, things will continue to get worse in an isolated system, and that can’t be stopped unless you can break the isolation. That sobering message of impending destruction, and the glimmer of hope that comes along with it, are just what I needed to hear right now.
I never took the class on Wilco. Trish has been a fan for ages, seeing them in concert bunches of times and buying every album, so I’ve gotten to hear about Wilco a lot, but never actually listened to a Wilco album all the way through. The closest I’ve come were the Mermaid Avenue records, in which Billy Bragg and Wilco set a bunch of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to music. I like those collections a lot, and on a recent re-listen to Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II I found myself really taken with the Wilco songs, so I had the idea to assign Robby a Wilco album, mainly so I could assign myself a Wilco album.
I sought Trish’s advice on which one to choose, and she picked for me: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Based on what little I knew about the band, I guess I was expecting a nice album of vaguely folky rock songs, mostly about relationships.
That is not what I got.
I was not expecting for the first sound I heard to be freaky radio sound effects, tuning in and out. I was not expecting for the first song to completely change its mind, 45 seconds in, about what song it wanted to be — new drumbeat, new instrumentation, new feel. I was not expecting straight-up Dark Side Of The Moon homages. And I was not expecting Jeff Tweedy to start singing lyrics like:
I am an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not a nice album of vaguely folky rock songs about relationships. It is so much better than that.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot careens unpredictably from the bizarre and unparseable into the achingly heartfelt and back over and over again, so much that they almost begin to switch places. Take “I am trying to break your heart”, which starts out with the lines quoted above, then finishes them with “I’m hidin’ out in the big city blinking / What was I thinking when I let go of you?” There are five more verses just like that. One moment Tweedy is all, “Take off your Band-Aid ’cause I don’t believe in touchdowns,” and then suddenly he’s grieving, “I’d always thought that if I held you tightly / You would always love me like you did back then.” At some point in the song, you start asking yourself which of these thoughts are really the ones that don’t make sense.
Meanwhile, so many crazy things are happening musically, that I don’t even know how to describe. There’s a bunch of reverb on the guitars, and an organ that sounds like it’s practically underwater. Strums jump to the front and fade back again, rained on by tuneless glockenspiel (maybe?) and arpeggios that sound like somebody dragging a pencil along a grand piano’s strings and then looping the sound back on itself. There’s a perfect piano riff, behind which it sounds like a toddler is banging on the ivories. Zithers jump around in the stereo field. The radios hum, blinking in and out, and then over the title line all the background stuff starts to battle each other, all of it sounding dissonant and yet fitting the mood perfectly.
I listened to this album for three days. It feels like I could listen to it for three years and still keep finding new things. It’s that dense, that layered. The comparison that kept leaping to my mind is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and yeah, Wilco lives up to the comparison. The songs themselves, the interstices between the songs, the references back and forth, the endless bold and surprising choices, the sheer variety — it’s a record that leaves you certain that you’ve just heard art, musical creativity at its best.
I don’t mean to give the impression, though, that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is some abstract, pretentious performance art piece. It is powerful and emotional, and the crazy lyrics and audio effects never seem tacked-on. On the contrary, they seem essential. More than anything, this album feels like a journey into an unusual mind. I’m not sure whether that mind belongs to Tweedy, or to his co-writer Jay Bennett, or to some kind of collective gestalt of the band itself — all I know is that I found it a fascinating, compelling place to visit.
Sometimes that mind is melancholy and contemplative, sometimes philosophical. (“You have to learn how to die / if you wanna wanna be alive.”) There are times when it seems scarily unsettled, near the edge or over it (as in the outro for “Ashes of American flags”), and then other times (like “Heavy metal drummer”) when it is as sweetly nostalgic as any Van Morrison song. There are moments where the trip churns into an eddy, as in the dirge-y “Radio cure”, or the occasional instrumental break that wanders off into the woods, but almost immediately something else comes along to captivate — a pang of melody, an arresting image, a sound you’ve never heard before.
It took me a long time to get to Wilco. I think it’ll take me a long time to really learn them. I can’t wait.
I love a slice of cheesecake. It could be topped with fruit, or chocolate, or caramel, or even nothing at all, and I will be absolutely delighted to have it in front of me. It feels like more than a dessert — it feels like an event. Every moment of eating that slice of cheesecake is bliss. If I’m feeling particularly ravenous or decadent, I might even have a second slice of cheesecake. But if you put an entire cheesecake in front of me, despite how much I love it, I would probably demur. A couple of slices is enough.
Yes, I actually do have a point here about Florence + The Machine’s second album — I haven’t accidentally started a food blog. My point is this: where many albums are like a great buffet, or a delicious meal, Ceremonials is an ENTIRE. DAMN. CHEESECAKE.
When any single track from this album comes up in the iPod shuffle, I am thrilled. The combination of powerful orchestration, tribal beats, building operatic drama, and Florence Welch’s astonishing voice makes for an epic experience. But listening to all twelve tracks in a row, especially on repeat, which is how I tend to listen to these assigned albums… it can be a little overwhelming.
The formula for all these songs is more or less the same. Let’s take one at random, how about “All This And Heaven Too.” After a few seconds of sound effects, there’s a steady beat and Welch singing pretty calmly, spinning an extended metaphor about the language of the heart. A shift into a minor key starts to ramp up the tension. Layers of Welch’s voice begin to swirl around the main vocal line, Kate Bush style, the range of the melody widening out until the chorus hits with a high note, and Welch shifts into belting out the lines, communicating emotional desperation as the drums pound and the synths swell. Now all those Kate Bush layers are in full effect, droning against and counterpointing the melody line.
Then it all drops out for another verse, just like the first. We build, and build, and burst once again into the same chorus, same layers, same grand parade of operatic feeling. Then there’s a wordless bridge, dominated by drums and vocal layers, stentorian chanting from Welch atop her own voice laying down base chords, and then that overflowing chorus again, resolving into anthemic vocalizations, all about how language can’t contain the level of emotion she’s feeling. And then the whole thing winds up quietly, as Welch sings about “screaming out a language that I never knew existed before.”
I mean, it’s awesome. It’s epic. It’s an incredible emotional ride, contained in the space of four minutes. And pretty much every song on this album is like that. But how many roller coasters can you ride in a row, before your head needs a rest? Is twelve too many?
It’s funny, I wrote a couple of months ago about how the Killers’ 2004 album came out just as the album sequencing era was winding down, and MP3s had turned people into singles enthusiasts once more. Ceremonials, released in 2011, goes even further, collecting 12 intense experiences into a set that wants to be spaced out, mixed in with less dramatic pieces so that it can tower over them in contrast.
When they’re sequenced back to back, over and over, it’s not that they become less good, it’s just that a kind of numbing sets in. You just can’t be transported again and again in the space of an hour. And yet, even when I listed to this on repeat, some songs retained their power to give me chills. “Shake It Off” is the first of these, quite justifiably a worldwide hit, and a memorable rallying cry to rid ourselves of the ghosts that haunt us. “No Light, No Light” is a close second, perhaps because its lyrics permit Welch to address a relationship directly rather than through a distancing metaphor. And finally, “Spectrum” pulls off the rather neat trick of a vivid visualization that ultimately maps back to an emotional reality: “Say my name, and every color illuminates.”
These songs are amazing songs. Every one of them feels like an event. Taken together, they are a little too rich for my palate. But when any single one of them is set in front of me, the bliss is that much more for not bludgeoning me with one high after another.
[As always, many spoilers for Watchmen lurk below.]
Yes, Chapter 2 is full of flashbacks stitched together by present-day scenes. But that’s far from the only reminiscing it contains. As usual, Moore and Gibbons’ themes run several layers deep, and this is most apparent in the scene between Laurie and Sally at the beginning of the chapter.
Aside from the fact that the long and painful history between the characters is self-evident in their every utterance, there are also a number of memory cues scattered throughout the scene. Obviously, there’s the framed picture of the Minutemen, which leads Sally into her flashback. There are also framed pictures on the walls, tantalizing in their sketchiness. There’s the Tijuana bible, Sally’s way of “being reminded that people used to slobber over me.” And of course, there’s the ever-present bottle of Nostalgia (by Veidt) on the vanity.
Finally, as we come out of the flashback, we get a closer look at one of those pictures:
Which brings us to our subject today. Here’s what the web annotations have to say about this panel:
The portrait on the wall is inscribed “To Sally Jupiter, Best Wishes Varga”. In the real world an artist named Alfredo Vargas drew portraits of naked and half-naked women which appeared regularly in Playboy magazine. He sometimes signed his work “Vargas” and sometimes “Varga”. The portrait of Sally is very much in his style.
As often occurs with these web annotations, this is a case of “almost but not quite.” Some corrections:
There was in fact a pin-up artist named Vargas in the real world, but he was Alberto Vargas, not Alfredo Vargas.
His work did indeed appear in Playboy, but much more relevant to the reference here is the fact that his work appeared in Esquire from 1940 to 1946, in gatefold images that became a salient aspect of American soldiers’ lives during those World War II years. His Playboy art occurred much later (1957 through 1974) and was more explicit during those years, i.e. more naked than half-naked. Incidentally, while Leslie Klinger does a considerably better job with his Vargas gloss, he also gets these dates wrong, suggesting that Vargas didn’t separate from Esquire until 1957, when in fact the artist suffered a long fallow and desperate period between leaving Esquire and starting for Playboy.
There’s a specific reason why his signature varied between “Varga” and “Vargas”, and it maps directly onto his history with those magazines. According to Vargas’s autobiography, Esquire editor David Smart decided to call the artist’s creations “Varga Girls”, on the notion that it was “more euphonious” than “Vargas Girls”. (pg. 28) But Vargas’s parting from Esquire was a bitter one, and by 1950, after four years of court battles, he had completly lost the rights to the “Varga” name. (pg. 43) Consequently, his work from there on out was signed “Vargas”.
These facts bear directly on the Watchmen panel. Because the portrait is signed “Varga” rather than “Vargas”, we can reasonably conclude that the fictional Varga in this world did his portrait of Sally Jupiter during the war years. That conclusion also resonates with the many other manifestations of 1940s nostalgia, including the flashback itself.
Painted Ladies
So what was “Varga” all about, and why does it matter that he painted a portrait of Sally Jupiter that now hangs on her wall in the “City of the Dead”?
Alberto Vargas was born in Peru in 1896. At 20 years old, after a European schooling and a brief apprenticeship with a photographer, he found himself in New York, and there became entranced with American women. He was supposed to return home to Peru, but he chose to stay instead, and from that moment onward made his living as an artist, never straying far from paintings of idealized female forms.
During the 1920s he painted portraits for the Ziegfeld Follies, which in turn led him to gigs illustrating for newspapers, magazines, advertisements, fashion designs, and personal commissions. Through the 1930s he continued this sort of work and also found himself employed by Hollywood studios, creating many movie posters, as well as portraits of the era’s major film stars. It was in 1940, though, that he would begin the most iconic work of his lifetime.
For seven years, George Petty had been the pin-up artist of choice in the pages of Esquire, but Smart found him tiresome and demanding to work with. Petty was altogether too shrewd a businessman, so Smart sought someone who was as good with the paintbrush but not nearly so good at interpreting contracts. He found his ideal match in Alberto Vargas, who had been suffering from quite a few lean years during the Depression, and who was ecstatic to receive not only work but appreciation for the kind of work he wanted to do.
The first Varga Girl appeared in the October 1940 issue of Esquire, a little over a year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The feature proved immediately and immensely popular, prompting Smart to begin a program of relentless exploitation. Esquire contracted with Vargas to produce a prodigious amount of work each year, and ran a calendar of twelve Vargas paintings only two months after his debut in the magazine.
From 1942 to 1945, Smart distributed over three million copies of Esquire to domestic military installations free of charge, selling another six million copies (without advertising) to troops overseas. The Varga Girl calendar would become an annual release throughout the war years, selling in the millions. Vargas became the premier pin-up artist of the World War Two era, a cultural phenomenon intimately connected with the times, whose work appeared in barracks worldwide, as well as on the noses of American airplanes.
It was widely suggested, perhaps even widely believed, that these images raised the morale of American soldiers overseas — reminded them of what they were fighting for back home. Vargas and Esquire reinforced this notion by presenting Varga Girls as brides, or bedecked in patriotic imagery, or posed with various military props — medals, uniforms, letters from home, army instruction books, and so forth. The images were often accompanied by some bit of verse or prose about heartfelt topics like peace, love, or Christmas.
And yet, as World War Two veteran Kurt Vonnegut points out in his brilliant foreword to a catalog of Vargas’s Esquire work, the notion of these images as morale-raisers doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. They bore little resemblance to the average American wife, mother, or sweetheart, and their net effect, if not their intention, was just “to make horny youths far from home hornier — to what end we can only speculate.”
Vonnegut suggests instead that what the Varga Girls represent is more akin to images from the Sears Roebuck catalog:
If I am right, the pinups of World War Two had the generalized appeal of merchandise, implied fixed prices and order forms. The fantasy: You really could buy one if you had the bucks, and you just might have the bucks someday. The paper woman in the girdle and bra, if you were a man, seemed as much in your power as the socket-wrench set or the level-winding fishing reel.
In other words, Vargas’s art and Esquire‘s use of it contributed to the cultural commodification of women during World War Two, and here we can return to Sally Jupiter at last.
“I’m sitting ON it!”
Sally states clearly, in the supplemental material to Chapter 9, that her career as Silk Spectre “was never a sex thing. It was a money thing.” Hollis Mason concurs, in Under The Hood, saying that Sally “was probably the first of us ever to realize that there could be commercial benefits in being a masked adventurer. The Silk Spectre used her reputation as a crimefighter primarily to make the front pages and receive exposure for her lucrative modeling career…”
Sally, with the eager assistance of her agent and later husband Laurence Shexnayder, created her image in order to sell it, during the same era in which the Varga Girls rose to prominence. It’s no wonder Vargas painted her — in a way, they were both in the same line of work. They sold fantasy images of women, turning the desires of “horny youths” into cash.
Though the Esquire Varga Girls were anonymous, Vargas painted lots of portraits of living stars, especially during his studio days in the 1930s. Even in the 40s, during the height of his Esquire work, he did portraits of Jane Russell and Ava Gardner. The notion that he’d have painted Silk Spectre during that time is totally plausible. Like those movie bombshells, Sally Jupiter was an object of desire, and she and Shexnayder did their level best to rake in earnings from the people who slobbered over her.
Sally makes no bones about any of this, recounting every “bright blue gag” about herself back to Nite Owl, and joking about the moneymaker her body has been for her, as in the intermittent voice balloons that drift over to Laurie in a flashback that takes place at Sally’s house:
And so she did, though like Alberto Vargas, she and Laurence don’t always seem to have had the greatest dealmaking acumen. Though she certainly lives in a nice enough house (at least, after divorcing Shexnayder), the film deal they make devolves from a documentary, into a children’s adventure serial, into a “B” action movie, and finally into something “too awful even to be dignified with the term ‘pornography.'”
The journey taken by the Silk Spectre biopic defines a continuum, with “classy” exploitation at one end and purely crass exploitation at the other. In Sally’s apartment, those two extremes get represented by the Varga portrait on one end, and the Tijuana bible on the other. And while Sally might prefer to be on the classy end, she makes it clear that she doesn’t mind the other end so much either, because it’s not a dignity thing, it’s a money thing. (“Listen, those things are valuable, like antiques. Eighty bucks an’ up.”)
Sally learns, in her career as a “big tough super-lady”, that her value resides in her body and her sexuality. Her function, as a woman, was more or less to be a Varga Girl: erotic and innocent at once, distant and accessible at once, glamorous and vulnerable at once, and all available for sale everywhere. Merchandise.
The Essence That Was So Divine
When she turns on Laurie at the end of the scene, Sally reveals that this view extends beyond herself. “At least I don’t sleep with an H-Bomb,” she says, and when Laurie objects that Jon is not an H-Bomb, she continues: “Honey, the only difference is that they didn’t have to get the H-Bomb laid every once in a while.” In Sally’s eyes, that’s Laurie’s job, her function as a woman: get the H-Bomb laid. She’s as much a morale-raiser as any Esquire gatefold. (And though she protests that Sally is “being totally unfair”, Laurie herself is stuck in a story where her main function is to change the state of male characters.)
Sally Jupiter’s morale-raising days are in the past, though. Her world is “the city of the dead” because the thing that gave her meaning and value has departed with age. Bitterness has replaced allure, and now her refuge is in her memories, a past that gets just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
In other words, nostalgia. Or rather, perhaps, Nostalgia, because there’s someplace else in the Watchmen world where Varga-esque images appear, and that’s in Adrian Veidt’s ad campaign for his “Nostalgia line of ladies’ and men’s cosmetics.” He describes the woman in the ad, but may as well be describing a Varga Girl: “overtly erotic, yet layered with enough romantic ambiance to avoid offense.” She’s wearing more clothing than the typical Varga Girl, but the gauzy, transparent dress that hangs down from her torso, revealing and obscuring her thigh at once is pure Vargas, as is her pose and knowing stare out of the frame, returning the viewer’s gaze with amusement.
Ozymandias, while watching his bank of randomly changing screens, muses about the “erotic undercurrent not uncommon in times of war,” and notes in his ad strategy that “when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.” Vargas’s painted ladies might belong to either, smooth fantasy women adorned in furs and flowers, who all find themselves in a half-imagined climate so warm that they’re constantly shedding clothes. It’s hard to say whether they seemed nostalgic at the time of their highest popularity, but at the very least they represented a yearning for simplicity and pleasure that must have felt distant indeed for soldiers deployed throughout the globe. Vargas’s work certainly drips with nostalgia now, especially for those, like Vonnegut, who lived through the 1940s.
The primary caption for Nostalgia advertisements reaches back even further, to the 1930s. “Oh, how the ghost of you clings” is a quote from the song “These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)”, a hit song from 1936 that was covered by multiple people that year, including Leslie Hutchinson, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. Here’s one of my favorite versions, from Bryan Ferry in 1973:
Once again, multiple layers of nostalgia are present here. The song itself is about the pain of lost love, when every element of your life can feel like a reminder of what’s gone out of it. “The ghost of you” here is made of all the simple little things that evoke the departed lover, including the lingering scent of perfume. Beyond that, the use of this caption in a 1985 ad campaign quite consciously hearkens back to a bygone era, that mythical “simpler time” that itself is the object of little-n nostalgia. That clinging ghost is the old songs, the old styles, the old times that feel so distant, especially when the present time is full of “global uncertainty.”
More than that, though, within the story, pertaining to the specific characters, when a bottle of Nostalgia appears, so do the clinging ghosts of the past. Obviously it takes a starring role in Chapter 9, appearing in close-up on the cover and shattering the Martian castle in the issue’s climactic moment. There, the ghost is the circumstances of Laurie’s birth, come back to haunt her after years of suppression.
In the opening scene of Chapter 2, that same ghost is at work, though we don’t know it yet. In addition, we get ghosts of other kinds. Sally gazes at her picture of the Minutemen, remembering how the dark and bright parts of the past brought her to where and who she is today. That picture, the Tijuana bible, and the Varga portrait on the wall surround her with ghosts of her former self — departed desire, eroticism, vitality. Most of all, she and Laurie are haunted by their shared past, the tension between them a product of thousands of interactions, behavior itself driven by experiences reaching back generations, like any complicated relationship between parent and child. Those ghosts do cling, and sometimes nostalgia is the optimal outcome, far better anyway than bitterness and toxicity.
Last, and deepest, is the kind of nostalgia that Watchmen itself set out to explode, the decades-long attachment of comics fans to the same superheroes and superhero tropes iterated over and over and over again. Those fanboy fantasies were as surprisingly fragile as Doctor Manhattan’s Martian castle, and this book was the bottle hurled at them. It marked a turning point, taking us to a new vantage from which we could see those Golden, Silver, and Bronze age comics as innocent and problematic in their own way as the Varga Girls seem now.
