Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)

by Saul Williams
album Saul Williams

150 Favorite Songs, #80: “Act III, Scene 2 (Shakespeare)”, Saul Williams (2004)
 A few years ago, I had gone to this coffee shop downtown in Austin where I used to perform years earlier, during their poetry night. I built a lot of confidence in that room — people responded really well to what I was doing, and for a little while, I felt like I was part of a community of peers. It didn’t last — those things rarely do — but I wanted to say goodbye to writing and reading poems, to talking to a bunch of people from behind a microphone, to that side of what I was doing with my life. So I went back to that coffee shop to read my poems one last time. A friend of mine was there, and I told him that I was done with it, that I hadn’t written a poem in two years and didn’t expect to write anymore, and he laid into me. 

“I can’t believe you’re going to stop writing,” he said. 

I told him I’d never said that. I was really interested in pursuing journalism, I told him. He insisted that one could do both — that Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism was poetry, for example — and I wasn’t interested in either point. (Poetry is poetry, anyway. It does no good to declare another form to be “poetry” just because it’s good. All it does is further marginalize actual poets.) 

For a long time, especially when I was just starting out and was writing exclusively inconsequential entertainment pieces for websites, I struggled with what I was doing. Whenever I talked to someone who wanted to know how I switched from poetry to journalism, I explained that it was about money, or about an audience, or whatever — I had a bunch of good, self-deprecating one-liners about why I didn’t want to write poetry anymore. They’re not that hard to come up with. 

But the truth is that it wasn’t just about finding a way to make money writing, or to try to establish credentials that would serve me later on if I wanted to try to get a book published, or to reach an audience that I didn’t physically have to travel to in different cities in order to be heard. The truth was, I decided that I needed to do it around the time I first heard “Act III, Scene 2” by Saul Williams.

Saul Williams is a poet — I mean really, not just a songwriter who’s good with literary elements — and so I guess there’s some irony that something he wrote helped me decide to stop writing poetry. But it’s not his words here, it’s the chorus, from Zach De La Rocha. I must have listened to this song a hundred times the first week it came out. 

Spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined
the no-ones, the nobodies, the last in line.

The truth is, poetry felt really self-indulgent. At least the way I was doing it. I wrote political poems sometimes, talked about stuff that I thought was important, but even then — I felt like I was doing something self-serving in a lot of ways. Who was it for? Who did it help? If I was good at this, and if I had something to say, then I needed to find a way to say it that helped people a little bit. 

And journalism seemed like the way to do that. I mean, not all journalism. The world is not better because I asked Big KRIT who he wants to record with. But I’m also still learning, and writing about arts and entertainment stuff is a safe place to do that. If I make a mistake like showing a story to a source who requests it because I don’t know any better (which I did, once, a few months in), or am only 95% that the quote I’m attributing to Tegan wasn’t said by Sara, or get something else wrong, the stakes are relatively low. Nobody’s harmed if I refer to “Hard To Explain” as “I Don’t See It That Way,” which makes arts journalism a good place to start out. 

But I also want to write things that help people. That tell some truths that are hard to get at sometimes. I want to spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined, the no-ones, the nobodies, the last in line. If I’m any good at this, that’s the only thing that’s really worth doing. And while other people are able to do that in a variety of different media, for me, the place that felt most right for a long time was to do it through journalism.

I don’t know if I get to do it all that often. I also am very aware of the power imbalance inherent to that goal — if people with my privileges were quieter, maybe the hated, last-in-line nobodies would be able to say what they had to say for themselves. Who am I to speak for anyone else? 

But I figured out that there’s another way to parse that sentence that makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t necessarily mean to speak for them — to say what I imagine it is they wish they could say. It also means to speak as a service to them, because I am privileged with the opportunity to be heard. The goal isn’t to dictate the viewpoint of the oppressed, but to recognize that if you’ve got the opportunity to speak, you need to use it to do something that helps people, not something that hurts them.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot lately. You can do that through writing poems, or through writing about music. You can do it in a lot of ways. Hell, Zach De La Rocha and Saul Williams probably know that better than most. But that needs to be at the forefront of your goals. If you’re going to insist on being heard, then insist on saying something that helps people whose voices are too often drowned out. 

I get the opportunity, sometimes, to do that. If I’m lucky, and I keep working hard, and I do a good job with what I’m already doing, then I hope I’ll get more of them. Either way, trying to get there has been worth trading poetry for. If it took a poet to teach me that, well, there’s something poetic about that. 

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Babe, I'm On Fire

by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
album Nocturama

150 Favorite Songs: #81, “Babe, I’m On Fire,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2003)
Here is what you fear about growing old: that you will become boring, tired, and uninspired. That your passions will become hobbies, at best, and then things that you used to do. Your body will break down and your loneliness will become ingrained, and the things you like best about yourself in your youth will fade away. You’ll be left out of touch, disconnected from who you used to be, and you’ll watch people younger than you be who you wished you’d been. And there’ll be no way to get back to it.

Or maybe that’s just me. Either way, cool. None of that is what “Babe, I’m On Fire” is about, but that’s just because “Babe, I’m On Fire” isn’t about anything. It’s an exercise, a writing prompt carried to extremes. But it doesn’t matter what it’s about, because what it says is amazing.

Nick Cave was 46 when he recorded “Babe, I’m On Fire,” which isn’t young for an angry old punk, although it’s not that bad for someone whose image involved a wise-beyond-his-years persona, too. In any case, it came at a point in his career where it was fair to question if there was inspiration left. The album that preceded Nocturama, from which “Babe, I’m On Fire” comes, was a mature, grim masterpiece about grief and divorce. By contrast, Nocturama is full of Nick Cave pastiche, with songs called things like “Dead Man In My Bed” and “Rock Of Gibraltar.” If Buzzfeed were listing fake Nick Cave-sounding song titles (and call me, you guys, if you want some), those would probably be on there. The album is the last one that the original Bad Seeds lineup would record together, and you can hear the inspiration leaking out through the airholes throughout the record. 

But then there’s “Babe, I’m On Fire,” and wow. The song is built on a simple, rolling bass riff and a simple lyrical motif: “The [uncomfortably specific character] says / the [maybe a forest creature] says / the [historical figure] says / the [stereotype] [archetype], [generalization] says it / ‘babe, I’m on fire.’” 

But the band goes through this verse structure thirty-nine (39) times. The band is more alive than it is anywhere else on Nocturama, more energized than it sounded on the restrained No More Shall We Part or Boatman’s Call that preceded it. The guitar explodes with feedback and shrill noise, things drop in and out. It’s jazz, in a lot of ways, not dissimilar to the motifs you’ll hear on “So What” or something, with the lyrical pattern or the bassline grounding it in consistency as everyone takes turns improvising. 

That improvisational spirit’s in the words, too — you don’t come up with a stanza like “the mild little Christian says it / the wild Sonny Liston says it / the pimp and the gimp and the guy with the limp says / babe, I’m on fire” while sitting at your desk. And even though it’s repetitive (39 times, y’all), there’s something sublime in realizing that there were so many ways to put it. One would suspect that he could well have tripled the length of the song (which clocks in just under fifteen minutes) and released it in place of the album, if the label didn’t have other considerations. 

And that’s the thing about “Babe, I’m On Fire” that I love so much. Because it doesn’t sound like the work of a bunch of men reaching toward fifty. It doesn’t trade passion for wisdom, or energy for restraint — it’s big and loud and messy and clearly done to scratch an itch that no one else even knew that they had. And when you fear getting old because you fear what it means, it’s very encouraging to hear something like this, all spirit and madness. “Babe, I’m On Fire” sounds nothing like a song that Nick Cave would have written at 26. From Her To Eternity is a different type of spirit, and it’s probably safe to say that the images in “Babe, I’m On Fire” come with decades of life; the urge to do something big and funny and uncomfortable is probably something that had to follow up the previous few years of work that Cave had released. 

So when I listen to “Babe, I’m On Fire,” part of what I’m hearing — besides that brutal guitar and those weird-as-shit verses — is the sound of a band that refuses to be written off. It’s the sound of someone growing older uneasily, a theme that would continue as Nick Cave started up Grinderman and generally just got louder and more beard-y as he aged. When I think about what growing older might sound like, most of the things in my head don’t sound anything like “Babe, I’m On Fire.” And that just makes me like this one more. 

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Morning Theft

by Jeff Buckley
album Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk

150 Favorite Songs: #82, “Morning Theft,” Jeff Buckley (1998)
 I’m not the only person I know who has complicated feelings about Jeff Buckley. I can’t really listen to Grace these days, unless Kat is picking out a record and puts it on as background music, but that’s mostly because I used it all up completely many years ago. The songs don’t even sound like what they are anymore; I don’t hear them as a collection of bridges and choruses and hooks. Even the obvious pop songs on the record, like “Eternal Life” and “Last Goodbye,” seem unrecognizable as anything other than these weird talismans of me-at-a-certain-point. They’ve been like that for years and years now. 

This is the sort of thing that happens, when you spend a lot of your life unsure of how to relate to the people around you, and so you choose to relate to songs, instead. Even those relationships get weird. 

That’s especially true with Jeff Buckley for me. His music always sounded the way I wanted life to sound. Charles Simic wrote that life, at its best, is a beautiful sadness, and when I was younger, I identified with that sentiment very strongly, and Jeff Buckley sang the songs that were the saddest and most beautiful. The fact that he died young and mysteriously on top of that, and that on his live recordings he’s got a silly sense of humor that reminded me of a few friends of mine that I’d always looked up to, made him loom large as a figure for me. 

(Here is a funny thing: back 150 years ago, one of the devices I used in writing on my old abandoned LiveJournal was imaginary conversations with people who would give me advice. The first time I used it, the conversation was with Jeff Buckley. It is as embarrassing as anything revealing and pretentious you wrote a decade ago might be, but I will share it nonetheless because there is not that much shame in being pretentious and over-revealing at 22.)

I’ve always had a hard time hearing Jeff Buckley as just another singer, or listening to his songs as just songs, is what I’m trying to say. I remember once being asked ”What’s your favorite Jeff Buckley song?” on a first date, because of course, and I didn’t even know how to answer it, because it wasn’t how I thought about his music. I think I probably just said, “I don’t know, what’s yours?” 

But there’s another answer, too, and that answer is “Morning Theft.” It’s not one of the more famous ones, coming from the posthumous “sketches” album. It’s also very slight, built around one chord, with his voice restrained from the soaring that marks most of the songs on Grace. There aren’t many voices who can match his version of “Hallelujah” or “Corpus Christi Carol” or “Everybody Here Wants You,” but anyone can sing “Morning Theft.” 

All of that is part of why “Morning Theft” caught my ear differently from the rest of his music, but there’s a line that hits near the end, the weirdest and most frustrated metaphor I’ve ever heard to describe a failed relationship: “You’re a woman, I’m a calf / you’re a window, I’m a knife.” 

And, geez, I’d felt that before. Who hasn’t? There are so many ways to say “we don’t relate to each other at all” and “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be to you anymore” and all of that, but so few of them are so stark, so memorable, and so effective at communicating the essential truth of those situations, which is that they’re complicated. Who do you blame? Well, hell — if you’re a window and I’m a knife, I’m not really sure that blame even factors into it. 

And that’s been reassuring to me at various times in my life, in ways that are very concrete. Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah” is a beautiful sadness, this abstract thing that hangs in the room as it happens, that can convey ineffable emotions that it’s otherwise difficult to access, whether it’s on an episode of Scrubs or airing over footage of the Twin Towers collapsing and soot-covered New Yorkers, or just in my bedroom in the middle of the night when I’m still awake ten years ago. And that’s important — but when I think about Jeff Buckley as I liked to imagine him, it wasn’t just the soaring holy man with the untouchable voice. It was the person who sang those songs, and I don’t think that person ever seemed more real than on “Morning Theft.” 

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