first round

(6) Blu Cantrell, “Hit Em Up Style (Oops)”
KNOCKED OUT
"(11) Depeche Mode, “Precious”
129-65
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/24.

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GOOD 4 HER: Katerina Ivanov Prado On Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!)”

So, you’ve been done dirty. Two-timed. Stepped out on. Your lover swore up and down that the bruise on his neck was just a mosquito bite. You got a DM that began, “hey girl, are you still with____?” As Shakespeare said, your treasure was poured into foreign laps. As Blu Cantrell said, your man’s gone buck-wild.
There are many healthy, therapist-approved ways to recover from infidelity laden relationships, but the song “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!)” won’t entertain them and neither will this essay. A Y2K banger from self-professed one-hit-wonder Blu Cantrell, this song is the musical equivalent of Princess Di’s revenge dress. It’s the early 2000’s answer to an eye for an eye: when you go low, best believe I’ll go lower. And like the original proverb (not the Gandhi makes the whole world blind remix), this song doesn’t deny the need for comeuppance—instead, it considers the necessity of getting even.
Concerned primarily with vengeance—the wayward step-sibling of justice— the lyrics are based on Cantrell’s personal experience with an unfaithful boyfriend, and the shopping spree that resulted via his credit cards. “Hey ladies,” the chorus instructs, “when your man wanna get buck-wild, just go back and hit ‘em up style.” In other words, take him to the cleaners. Cantrell’s lyrics are completely unconcerned with turning the proverbial cheek. She appoints herself judge, jury and executioner on behalf of the jilted, and delivers her verdict: “for all the lies you’ve told, this is what you’re owed.” As a gleeful middle finger, the song samples Frank Sinatra’s “Boys Night Out,” a celebration of the old guys-will-be-guys mentality, beginning, “hey mister, build a fence around your sister!”
Favoring the dramatic, “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!)” heartily green lights creative retaliation. Go ahead and put your ex’s motorcycle on Craigslist advertising free pick up (you know, allegedly)! Sign him up for eternal spam mail from every branch of the armed forces, plus Scientology! Catfish him until he thinks he’s falling for a fake Instagram account! Go to Neiman Marcus “on a shopping spree-ah” and put a wrecking ball through his credit limit! Oops!
Cantrell’s lyrics—and their encouragement of getting spectacularly and vindictively even—engage with the questions: who is revenge for and under what circumstances is it acceptable? What happens when justice cannot be reached through state sanctioned or otherwise systemic avenues of power?  True revenge—not that born of pettiness or delicate ego—acts as a potential avenue through which the marginalized ensure that those who wield power and agency cannot get away with harming those who do not. Even the desire for retribution acts as a reflexive analysis of the self; there is nothing more powerful than the realization: I didn’t deserve that. Like Athena springing from the head of shitty old Zeus, revenge births subjectification.
This makes revenge inherently political and thus, dangerous for those at the top of existing structures of power, who often condemn such self-sanctioned justice through universalist preaching against violent resistance. Cries for vengeance are flatly answered with “good things come to those who wait,” or the ever-limp adage, “the best revenge is living well.” It’s a very Puritan approach: yes, things are bad now, but don’t bother trying to make them better! Just suffer patiently, you’ll be rewarded in heaven! You know, probably! This criticism of vengeance and push for patience-driven alternatives falls flat when one considers: is turning the other cheek simply the act of looking away from an injustice?
There’s been a determined rise of pro-revenge discourse in recent media: Gone Girl, Promising Young Woman, Lady Vengeance are just a few films that engage with the trope of women determined to get even, even if it means ensuring their own destruction. Good for her, we think, as we delight in our anti-heroine’s ruthless drive. Cantrell’s positionality in this song is one of the scorned woman: a figure that is historically disenfranchised and derided. Revenge from this perspective isn’t pettiness, it’s insubordination. Culturally, we’re fascinated by the scorned woman, but our understanding of the trope is generally limited when, as listeners or readers or viewers, we struggle to get past our usual hang ups regarding what the subject should want. “She ruined her whole life in the process, was it worth it?” Cut to a montage of our protagonist post-revenge, staring blankly into the distance: “she got what she wanted, but is she happy now?”
This is what traditional analysis often misses: vengeance isn’t about achieving goodness or happiness. Vengeance isn’t interested in personal gain;it is one of the very few times we decenter the needs of the self. It’s interested in the action of resistance, not the categorization of its outcomes into cost vs. benefit. There is no exact formula for revenge, no x+ r= settled up. And we the vengeful are often poor allocators. Our actions are often disproportionate, overly cruel. Vengeance is inherently unbalanced, a chemical reaction that threatens backsplash onto the inflictor as much as the inflicted. Blu knows this, noting in her lyrics that through enacting her revenge, she is also destroying a life she’s labored to achieve, a home she’s built—she sings of “paying the bills a month too late, it's a shame we have to play these games,” presumably aware she’s destroying her credit along with his. It's a sacrifice she’s willing to make and a warning to the listener: do not expect to light others ablaze without burning your own fingers.
Revenge is also not equivalent to restoration or self-actualization: in fact, it often requires the sacrifice of such states. Cantrell doesn’t shy away from her own despair, crooning her way to the song’s bridge, where she longs for the good old days of relationship peace. Beseechingly, she asks her ex-lover, “what happened to the days when we used to trust each other?” Infidelity is a very specific kind of betrayal, one that can make you lose some of your grip on reality. Your pride takes a hit. Your little flame of faith is stamped out. You question your own judgment. Your world becomes a dark room and you’re just running your hands over the walls in desperate search for the switch. Revenge requires a similar suspension of reality, and in these lines, Blu subtly warns her listener: do not expect to feel whole and healed once you’ve succeeded.  In “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!)” Cantrell considers that sometimes, moving on is not about reaching peace for yourself; it’s about creating problems for others.
The song’s anguish is fleeting, and the bridge closes out with a delicious evisceration: “and all of the things I sold? Will take you until you get old, to get 'em back without me.‘Cause revenge is better than money, you’ll see!” Ending the introspection with a steep vocal run and a rousing return to the chorus, Cantrell considers the joy of vengeance. An unsavory joy, sure. But one that is completely and utterly hers.

Katerina Ivanov Prado is a writer, professor, and vengeance evangelist. 

We named [sic] the baby Born Dancin’: Beanbag Amerika on depeche mode’s “precious”

In Donald Barthelme’s story “The Baby,” [*1] the narrator states, “the baby’s name was Born Dancin’.” The phrasing is passive and implies that the baby’s attachments to the pleasures of the physical were not the fault of her hyper-intellectual parents. This is the way she came into the world, a creature of pure id. I always recall the line incorrectly, however. “We named…” It was our fault. We unleashed this force upon the world through the power of invocation. There is of course some blame in what we choose to name our children (more on this in a moment).
Born Dancin’s father, if not a direct analog for Barthelme himself, is at least of his milieu—the New York litterati of the ‘70s and ‘80s—and is horrified by his new baby’s penchant for tearing the pages out of books. My own twins began tearing books to pieces as soon as their little hands could grasp them. As a librarian, I too was horrified. (Though, foundationally, I think it was an expression of love.) In the story, the narrator eventually gives in:

The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together.

While Barthelme’s stories have often been held by the heel and dipped, Achilles-style, into a river of satire, sometimes to the point of obscuring almost any connection to the real, In the case of “The Baby” I think it’s telling that for a Serious Intellectual, embracing the impulsive pleasures of the flesh forms a clear throughline from dancing to minor property damage to major antisocial property vandalism.
But I’m sure, having both significantly younger siblings and two children of his own, Barthelme realized that pretty much all babies are born dancing. It’s among the most primal acts that we engage in. Whether moving our little limbs in an effort to move a bit of gas along our digestive track or feeling out the ebb and flow of sounds in the world and how we fit within them. The realization that our body is our instrument of awareness and expression is foundational to our coming into personhood. I dance therefore I am.

One of my kids, but not the one you think, is named after a suave sci-fi swashbuckler.

An early draft of this essay had this anecdote in a footnote, but it feels important. My two-and-a-half year old twins are named Trixie and Lando. “Like from Star Wars?” I hear you saying out loud through the miles of internet tubes. Well, no. The Empire Strikes Back (1980), which introduced the character of Landonis Balthazar "Lando" Calrissian III, is the first film that I have actual memories of watching in the theater. [*2] But, honestly? I’ve never been all that into the franchise, beyond about the minimum expected of a nerdy Gen-Xer. In truth, Lando is short for Verland, the name of my partner’s grandfather who died when we were in the midst of fertility treatments, and she said, “I guess if we have a boy we have to name him Verland.” It’s a weird name, that doesn’t seem to have any family history, just something that her great-grandparents pulled out of thin air, and I was all for it.
Trixie, on the other hand, while named in part for Beatrix Potter—I’m a children’s librarian and lover of rabbits, and in part to satisfy a running inside joke that my partner has had with her cousin since they were teenagers, she is mostly named after Vanatrix “Trixie” Delray, an NPC [*3] that I created on the spot when I needed someone to confront the party as they skulled through a seemingly empty palace complex on a small, insular planet in the sci-fi roleplaying game that I was GMing for a group of friends via Zoom at the height of the Covid lockdowns. Trixie (in the game) as I described her, was tall, athletic, and brusque, with a shock of electric green hair. She was a little tropey, fitting a spur of the moment narrative need, but as I filled out her backstory between game sessions she became more entangled in some of the ongoing storylines, and began to seem more like a real person in the way that the best fictional characters do. And, not a bad namesake for a child about to come into this world.

Things get damaged, things get broken.

I mean, “Precious” is not any weirder, content-wise, than any number of Depeche Mode’s other hits. And perhaps any narrative in the lyrics of a dance song are sort of beside the point? But also, it’s odd what we (culturally) choose to move our bodies to in ecstatic abandon. The lyrical core of Precious is a letter of apology. Martin Gore—who has written almost all of Depeche Mode’s songs [*4] but very seldomly sings lead on them—was middle-aged and getting divorced. His American wife wanted to come back to the States after a decade of living in Europe and the stress of moving fractured what must have already been a strained relationship. Gore has said in interviews that it was the resentment from having to make the move, which he felt he couldn’t deny her. But after the divorce he stayed in California—is, I think, still resident there, nearly two decades on, so I’m not sure that’s the whole of it.
The old saw about divorce is that “it’s always hardest on the children.” Gore and his wife had three, between the ages of 4 and 15, and he was worried that they would end up resenting him, or their mother, or both. So he did what a songwriter does and put those anxieties into a song. “Precious and fragile things / Need special handling / My God what have we done to you?” Yes, it’s a little trite and infantilizing. But thoughtful, at least?
When my parents split up, my two brothers and I were about the same ages as Gore’s kids. It’s unscientific and anecdotal, but in our case we had three very different experiences of it based largely on our respective ages. I, the oldest, was away at boarding school and it had very little impact on my daily life. I don’t think my youngest brother really remembers it. The middle brother was the hardest hit by it, and it seems that he and our father have never entirely reconciled.
I don’t know what became of Gore’s relationships with his kids, and am not sure if the existence/success of “Precious” as a song, penned by their dad but sung by their “Uncle” Dave, was something that helped or hindered. Or if it was just something to which they paid no mind.

Technophilic.

Fall, 1990. A high school acquaintance lends me the maxi-cassingle of “Enjoy the Silence.” I’ve tried and tried and failed to recall his name, though I do remember his Walkman, which he bought in Korea while visiting his grandmother. It was so much smaller, and sleeker, and just plain cooler than anything available in the States. And I coveted it with the early stirrings of a technophilic urge that has spurred on dozens of ill-considered purchases [*5] over the course of my life.
This tape was, I think, my first exposure to both Depeche Mode and to the concept of the dance re-mix. The tape features four extended versions of the A-side single, crammed with extra beats to get your feet moving, one of which is stretched out to over 15 minutes. I was aware that the excesses of rock and roll would occasionally bloat a song to 6 or 8 minutes or longer, and that these songs were routinely cut down to a radio-friendly 3 to 4 if released as a single. But the idea that the reverse could be true, that a 4 minute pop song might be stretched apart and layered and looped so that you could nuzzle up inside of it for a quarter hour was revelatory. And there was a period of a month or two where I listened to that series of mixes of the same song again and again and again.
As a band, Depeche Mode fit perfectly into the musical niche between the pop sensibilities of Top-40 radio that theretofore made up most of my listening habits, but—as a burgeoning adolescent music snob—at which I was beginning to turn up my nose, and the gloom and grime of the goth and grunge that I was getting into. The truth is, in addition to the cooler stuff, I kept listening to my Debbie Gibson and Paula Abdul CDs well into my 20s, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone that. Depeche Mode were dark and moody and artsy enough to be cool (the B-side to “Enjoy the Silence” is a tone-poem called “Memphisto” based on a fever dream of a fake movie that Martin Gore imagined in which Elvis plays the Devil), but could also set your toes tapping and your heart swooning.
I quickly acquired all of DM’s back catalog (the live double album 101 remains a personal favorite) and continued to keep up with what the band was doing through 2001’s Exciter. After which I sort of lost track of them, until last year’s Momento Mori, written and recorded after the death of keyboardist and founding band member Andy Fletcher, a beautiful meditation grappling with the loss of a close friend and the attendant awareness of one’s own mortality that accompanies late-middle age.

Angels with silver wings.

And so I had not listened to the entirety of Playing the Angel, Depeche Mode’s eleventh studio LP, released in 2005, until choosing to write about “Precious” for Xness. The album’s title is a line from its final track, “The Darkest Star,” a song about accepting a lover (or maybe ex-lover [*6]), darkness and all. But the whole album is rife with angels: “John the Revelator,” a rollicking track about searching for a scapegoat on whom to pin the blame for the encroaching End Times, features angels as biblical harbingers. “Suffer Well,” lead singer Dave Gahan’s first writing credit with DM, 25 years into the life of the band, has a run-in with an angel of temptation. [*7]
And there’s “Precious.” It’s not hard to see why “Precious” was Playing the Angel’s club-friendly, breakout single. It’s largely free of the industrial [*8] crunch and grime that permeates that rest of the album: air raid sirens, detuned synth arpeggios, guitar licks compressed into sludge, buttons of white noise that punctuate a 4/4 beat in the way we might expect a cymbal crash to, vocals swimming deep in the mix.
On “Precious,” Gahan coos at the top of his baritone vocal range. A synth line that runs under the chorus almost feels cribbed from Speak & Spell, the band’s poppy, 1981 debut. The beat is crisp and never lets up, though it evolves subtly frome verse to chorus to bridge. Yes, there’s a dirty guitar solo in the bridge, but even that is buried in major-key synth dust.

Voyage of the damned.

Christmas, 2007. The TARDIS crashes into a deep space ocean liner modeled after the Titanic where a plucky Kylie Minogue in a French maid’s getup helps the Doctor save the day. This is pretty much all I can think of watching the video for “Precious,” even though the similarities pretty much begin and end with “sci-fi cruise ship.”
In the video, the boys from Depeche Mode have been employed as entertainment on a cruise ship in a Tron-like cyberspace. The ocean below teems with ghostly, clockwork sea monsters. The ship is a maze of giant machinery and empty mirrored halls. As well as the entertainment, the boys are seemingly the ship’s sole passengers. By the second verse they are lounging on an empty deck watching leaping sea worms and a flock of pterodactyl/dragon/wind-up airplane creatures. As the song ends, they disembark single file, one by one by one in a sort of reverse Noah’s ark except it just three dudes, and wander into an endless field of identical fiddlehead wheat plants, punctuated only by two-dimensional joshua trees from an old wild west movie set.
It’s rare that a narrative music video is so completely divorced from the narrative in a song’s lyrics.

If God has a master plan…I hope it's your eyes He's seeing through.

I want to circle back to what I said in the opening section of this essay:

The realization that our body is our instrument of awareness and expression is foundational to our coming into personhood. I dance therefore I am.

Becoming a parent, watching firsthand as brand new people figure this out, has been magical. Though over the same period of time, I have felt a general dissociation and out of syncness with my own body and its place in the world. The neverending pandemic. The warming planet. The generalities of middle age. I don’t have Martin Gore’s penchant for couching things in religious metaphor [*9] but I do hope that my anxieties and hangups don’t poison my kids. That they can keep dancing to even the songs with sad narratives and find purpose and connection in the world.

1. Originally untitled and set in italics as an interstitial piece in his 1983 collection Overnight To Many Different Cities. When it was included in his second meta-collection, Forty Stories, it was given a title.

2. The Rise of Skywalker (2019), where Lando returns to the story, is—to date—the last film that I have seen in a movie theater.

3. Non-Player Character, a one-off or recurring character given voice and action by the game master in furtherance of the unfolding narrative in a role playing game. Also used in video games, but I don’t really play video games.

4. Founding songwriter Vince Clark, who also doesn’t sing much of what he writes, left DM after one album for the more up-beat electropop outfits Yazoo and Erasure.

5. In addition to backing many many board games on Kickstarter, I have backed a handful of electronic gadgets and doodads, all but one of which (a kitchen device called the Almond Cow for making almond milk at home) have been dreadfully disappointing. Also, remind me sometime to tell you about the time I tried to buy a fancy Discman in Hong Kong.

6. Or maybe a friend. Or maybe it’s sort of meta wish fulfillment and is from the point of view of the ex-lover about the songwriter.

7. The video for “Suffer Well” is a brilliant three-act story in under 4 minutes.

8. I’m aware that fans of industrial—as a genre—will be up in arms about using that term, even adjectivally, in reference to Depeche Mode, but they’ll just have to deal.

9. Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumors,” a song in which a depressed teenager survives a suicide attempt and then goes on to find God, only to be killed in a hit an run, was one of the foundational texts of my own awakening atheism. 

Bean (n): An edible, kidney-shaped seed, borne in the long pods of a leguminous plant. / Bean is an occasional poet, non-practicing architect, youth services & board game librarian, and dad to two small humans. He resides in NYC, and despite what you may have heard, is not actually from Antarctica. His heart is covered in paisleys. He enjoys bright colors, long novels, crossword puzzles, and the company of rabbits.