first round

(7) Fatboy Slim, “Weapon of Choice”
DULLED
(10) Jewel, “Intuition”
150-59
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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Weapon of Mass Dancestruction: Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” by anne weisgerber

It’s hard to say something original about a work so famous. A funky dance song interpreted by an Academy Award-winning actor; a low-battery color palette duking it out with a thunderstorm of motion; a celebrated don of bass players penning and singing lyrics that popped the Dune fanbase like a Lacoste collar.
The video for Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” (2000) won six 2001 MTV Video Music awards: Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, Best Choreography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography. It won the Best Short Form Music Video at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards show (2002). VH1 ranks it best music video of all time. The song, which reached #1 in the UK, was released in November 2000.
The star of the “Weapon of Choice” video, Christopher Walken, remembers how, in the aftermath of the video’s release ca. 2001, “I happened to be traveling all over the world, and it was amazing to me how many people saw it…. not only different countries but the different ages of people, young people, old people. (It) really brought home the power of television to me.”
Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, also recognized the power of this collaboration with Walken, music legend Bootsy Collins, and Director Spike Jonze, calling it “as much of a turning-point in my career as anything. It launched me worldwide.”
 “Weapon of Choice,” filmed over two December-2000 days in a Los Angeles Marriott, has been awarded, lauded, studied, celebrated, deconstructed, essayed, and memed six ways to Sunday, with hundreds of millions of plays and views since it debuted at the start of the new millennium. It flies through every new sound delivery innovation: vinyl, mp3, MTV, social media, P2P, Vevo, YouTube, streaming. A sleek 4K remaster of the original 35mm film in 2021 kicked out the jams once more, giving this cultural touchpoint a fresh boost.  
In the lead-up to 2000, Disco was dead (as were Kurt Cobain and Bradley Nowell), AIDs and HIV had treatments, and the coming stock market and housing crash dimly tweaked in distant financial reports. The World Trade Center, an international symbol of global commerce and peaceful trade, yet glistened at sunrise.
Public fears about computer shut-downs at the turn of the century (something programmers never accounted for) were palpable. All the same, Y2K came and went without chaos: the grid kept griddling, networks kept chattering, water flowed from kitchen spouts.
By 2000, I was 35 and married for seven years, had three children, and was four years into being a stay-at-home mom. I had been a radio DJ in the 80s, and an award-winning national salesgal in the 90s—the trophy says I made eagles fly—but my eyes were always toward family. To keep my brain solvent, I picked up freelance writing jobs for The Echoes-Sentinel, my local weekly, and was spending days with playgroups—ball-pit birthday parties at Chuck-E Cheese and Romparound—my evenings interviewing Kissinger, Cronkite, and Russert. I was on my own with the babies a lot, my partner is an artist who travels to the jobs, plus living through a home renovation and kitchen demolition…. I have vague memories of washing dishes in the bathtub, the winter-of-the-microwave-pancake, but I have a blind spot with music for about eighteen months. I, so sleep-deprived, missed how clubs were scrambling to install projectors and screens so that Walken could soar over dance floors. I wasn’t there. Even so, that video found me a short year later.

“Weapon of Choice” Appears

It wasn’t until my littlest enrolled in full-day kindergarten that I considered working again. I knew, good as the pay was, I didn’t want to go back to the corporate soul-suck. I enjoyed freelance writing, but invoicing a few hundred dollars here and there isn’t part of my Jersey playbook. I had won the 1999 first-prize for features writing from the SPJ, and parlayed that into being a guest speaker in local schools. I really enjoyed it, so thought I’d try substitute teaching, which was a lot of fun. Fast forward, I sail through hoops, sign checks, and get certificated, landing a job as an English teacher at a public Magnet High School in 2002.
Let me tell you this: If you want to feel better about the world, surround yourself with teenagers who like to read and write. Because of my Marketing background, I taught a Communications Media class. I asked them to apply a media literacy paradigm to a school-appropriate music video, and the day came and students presented videos from Franz Ferdinand, Shania Twain (mimicking Robert Palmer), and Fatboy Who??’s “Weapon of Choice.” We were projecting it on a big screen in the computer lab in the dark, and up comes this tight little movie, a perfect film. It was a revelation to me. I remember the dive over the balcony taking away my breath and all of us whooping and clapping!
That was 2002. I’ve used it in lessons ever since. Any time I want my students to write about a film, I give them a list of critique points and we practice with “Weapon of Choice.” It touches upon every aspect of great cinema. Over the years, I’ve accumulated some things my students have said about the video, and I always feel a fondness for this film in their musings.

Emphasize the Lead

For instance, what is this film about? Its plot, its verbs, its narrative? Do you care about it?  My student consensus on the subject: A businessman sits in a hotel lobby, appearing slumped, burned out, and defeated. He hears some music, and begins to nod in time with it, then stands. Suddenly, he launches into a dance, energetically racing and leaping and smiling. He eventually dives over a mezzanine railing and flies around the main lobby area, and hangs for a moment in front of a large painting of a boat at sea. Then he comes back down to earth, and after some thought and a sigh he returns to his chair and his old sad self.
As for the song itself, Cook said his arrangements were less intentional. In an April 2023 interview with Karl Boltzmann, he said, “I just wanted to make a record with Bootsy and see how much fun we could have.”
So, there may not be an underlying message for the musical composition, but there really is a main idea at work in the film. My students often sum it up like this: you can fantasize about a different life, but if you don’t actually get up and move, you’re doomed. Dance makes life better. Music makes life better. The video businessman reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s take on Cinderella in his great “Shapes of Stories” lecture; although Cinderella lost everything at midnight, she doesn’t return to her lowest starting point; she will always remember that dance. Walken’s character channels that enchantment.
The video’s singular focus evinces a philosophy its lyricist and singer, Bootsy Collins, learned at age 18 when he was bassist for James Brown’s band. In a 2018 interview with Mitch Gallagher, Collins shares Brown’s phenomenal advice, instructing Collins to reign in his guitar-style bass-playing and emphasize the lead beat in an 8-bar measure, what Brown called The One. This unlocked the teen’s first lesson on being a bassist. Collins said, “I was a busy player, I was playing all over the place, but (The One) made me come back, and it helped me stabilize.” Later in the interview, Collins says that “knowing where The One is at allows you to either play with it or off it.” The kick drum, he says, will always be there. The One, said Collins, has always helped him know where his “groove is at.”
It is from Brown that Collins mastered his signature style that inspires countless bassists (including Norman Cook who had a hit with the Housemartins). Collins says the concept of The One also applies to life. “You got to figure out what that one is for you, and keep coming back to it. And for me, that meant being in a great band. Playing it is one thing, living it is a whole 'nother one.” 
For Collins, Cook, and Walken, the creative focus is performance: bands, DJing, and dance.

Screen shots from Mike Judge Presents: Bootsy Collins (Season 2, Episode 4) original air date 22 November 2018 on Cinemax. By the way, a whole episode of Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (Season Two) has an animated explanation of The One, succinctly narrated by Hank Hill. Mike Judge not only produced and narrated the series, but his characters Beavis and Butthead often reviewed Spike Jonze videos when the cartoon was on MTV. Here’s a link to them watching the Beastie Boys “Sabotage.”

Content Mirrors Life

As for themes within the Jonze canon, Paula Murphy, in her July 2018 thesis on Jonze’s work, says “One can trace common themes and techniques across Jonze’s short films from the 1990s to the present, illustrating the coherence of this body of work, despite its obvious range.” She lists themes of marginalization and isolation; destructive, self-sacrificing love and desire; and the relationship between love and violence. She also notes there are repeated dramatic techniques across Jonze’s short films, “including the use of incongruity, mirroring, as well as the collision of real and fictional worlds and characters.”
This video pegs many hallmarks of Jonze’s style. The businessman schtick was in Jonze’s original treatment for the film. When he was brainstorming components, he wanted Walken to star. 
In a 2018 interview with The Nine Club, Jonze recalls pitching the Walken concept to Fatboy Slim. Cook said, “If he’ll do it!” So Jonze wrote up a treatment. “It was really kind of simple, kind of like when my dad would come to town and he’d stay at one of those hotels by the airport, one of those Marriotts, and I’d imagine my dad traveling around all those hotels around the country at the Marriott kind of hotel, and just… the mundane, repetitive, numbing quality of that. And sort of the idea of that was like the fantasy that comes out of that.”

Triple Threat

Walken goes far with little. In terms of acting, he’s believable, he seems real, his timing is natural, and he owns the space. My students, whose ability to identify Walken erodes year-to-year, still call him as they see him: an energetic dancer, able to evoke the character’s attitude of both defeat (at the open and close), and freedom through all the dancing and flying. “He transmits a feeling of anarchy and energy;” “his moves are an appropriate commitment to the theme of the film;” “It’s funny to see this guy in a role where he does not play a psycho;” “Love the doggy move.”

Ronald “Christopher” Walken (who began using Christopher the year Cook and I were born) was 57 at filming. This 1978 Best Actor Oscar-winner for Deer Hunter (Russian roulette guy!) had, in 1993, acted in a Madonna video as the Angel of Death. Walken had never heard of Spike Jonze before his agent mentioned it, but loved the idea of a dance feature.

Weapon of Choice was not the first Jonze/Cook collaboration. In 1999 they had worked together on “Praise You,” the Torrance Community Dance Group one starring Jonze himself. “I wanted to do dance again,” Jonze said, “but I didn’t want to do lo-fi, amateur dancing. I wanted to do a real dance production thing. Amazing dancing… and then I was like ‘who do I want to film dancing? And from, like, years earlier, I remembered Christopher Walken on Saturday Night Live, and, that would be amazing. So, I talked to Norman Cook from Fatboy Slim and told him my idea is, basically, filming Christopher Walken dancing.’
Jonze remembered “watching Deer Hunter with my dad, and so there (was) that connection with Christopher Walken and my dad, when we would drive on road trips my dad would sing show tunes, so somehow this all made sense.
“And then I somehow got Christopher Walken’s number. We talked to his agent, and I pitched it to his agent, then I pitched to his manager, and then they pitched it to him, and then Chris got on the phone.
“He basically was like, asking a lot of questions, and kind of not sure about it, and then at a certain point he just got quiet and he was like, ‘You know, I’m 57-years old and don’t know when I’m going to get to do this again.’”
The video was a phenomenon.

Walken’s dance training is extensive, and if socks need knocking off, here is the man doing a tap-dance striptease in 1981’s Pennies from Heaven.
Jonze has said of his casting decision, “I did know (Walken) could dance…. And so, while I was thinking about it, I also love making dance videos. I love filming dance. And I did this Bjork video, called “It’s Oh So Quiet,” and that was the first one I did where I got to do choreography and dance, and then I just kept doing more.” 
The Bjork project foreshadows many themes and motifs in “Weapon of Choice:” somersaulting businessmen in suits and mundane interiors (a tire shop) come to life in a big dance number. Bjork elevates above street level, right into the camera eye.
Meanwhile back at the music studio, Cook revealed how excited he was to have Walken on board. In his Higher Frequency interview with Nick Lawrence, when asked how he managed to get Walken for the project, Cook replied, “He volunteered.”
Jonze got the go-ahead from Walken’s agent, then, Cook said, “Spike went outside and phoned me and said: ‘Mr. Walken. Tap-dancing in the video,’ and I was like ‘Yes!’” Cook added, “I think it's full of irony, and to see an actor that I really admire but who's famous for playing psychopaths, to see him do that silly un-psychopathic dancing made me smile and made everyone else smile.”
Walken does an audio commentary of the video, and reveals some gems. “The dance sequence was shot on two floors, the ground floor and the mezzanine level in this hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and (Jonze and the crew) kind of knew the layout of the space.
“When we got there, there was stuff in the hotel that was good, and that went into the number.”
Jones has been asked about directing Walken, specifically, about the use of the call bell and the baggage trolley, if that was the actor’s doing, and said, “that’s him.”
And Walken didn’t walk in unrehearsed for the gig. Zach Schonfeld asks about it in his 2016 Newsweek Magazine interview with Walken, who said, “the choreographer was Michael Rooney, who's Mickey Rooney's son. I worked on it for weeks. I rehearsed with him. Then we went in and we shot it in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We shot it in one night when there weren't a lot of people around. It was a lot of fun to do.”

Mind Yer Tone

There’s no dialogue, per se: there is an expressive actor commanding a space, there are actions, camera angles, lighting, and point of view. Therefore, it’s the lyrics that inform Walken’s movements and transmit clues about what is happening.
Collins recorded the vocals live in studio. He also penned the lyrics, which directly reference the 1990s Dune film, most notably in “the tone of my voice,” and “walk without rhythm.”
The lyrics emphasize tone in a way that’s figurative and literal. Inferring that a voice is a weapon of choice is not only straight up Frank Herbert/Paul Atreides dogma, but also indicative of the sound engineering on the track.
Cook recalls, in his interview with Karl Boltzmann in April 2023, that “Bootsy wrote the lyrics,” and as it turns out he was a fan of Dune. Cook said the first Dune had just come out, and as far as the references to the film, for Collins, “I think it was just something that turned him on.”

Karl Boltzmann does an excellent deconstruction on the song, and Cook joined him and provided generous commentary. Boltzmann and Cook spend a bit of the interview discussing Collins’s vocals, and how the audio was processed. The lyric “don’t be shocked by the tone of my voice” is broadcast in two channels, one eight octaves lower than the other.
YouTube yields a short clip from @secretsofdune, connecting the Dune fan world to Walken, and, fun bonus: the narration is in Collins’s unaltered voice from the “Weapon of Choice” studio session.

     If, like me, you get a bang out of Walken, there’s a montage tribute to his dancing, set to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” worth having a look. It’s an edit compiled by KM Music, a discontinued Greek YouTube Channel operating from 2014–2022. The video is now listed on the <3 MUSIC NON-STOP YouTube channel, and highlights Walken dance moves in all his feature films. What impresses are the joyful expressions his dancing partners make plain.

333 South Figueroa Street

And then there’s the holy humdrum of corporate hotels. As luxe and spacious as that Marriot in Los Angeles might have been, the low light suggests something sinister camps in the shadows. The hotel evokes contemporary corporate interiors, contrasting the dancing. Walken’s appropriation of onsite props (luggage trolleys, escalators, elevators, tables) reveals character—this is a man constrained by his environment, who parlays what little it provides into great profit.
     There’s a cool blog, I Am Not a Stalker, edited by Lindsay Black, which has a long post on the hotel. It shows the interior, with images of its many appearances on TV and film. She said, “Though the property looks vastly different today, fans… can take comfort in the fact that its set-up is still the same and that the escalators Walken danced on remain intact.”

One “Weapon of Choice” scene, the hallway of mirrors, was custom-fabricated. In his interview with Chris Roberts, Jonze said, “We built that. We got hardware store mirrors for the closet doors. We built that in a conference room upstairs, like a 100-foot section of mirrors.”

Clean, Well-Lit Spaces

A lot of the tone and atmosphere of this dance film is established through lighting. Shadows and intense contrasts of light and dark help develop the businessman. Nothing is overused. I’ve had students comment that the vaguely dim lighting gives things a sinister edge. They pick up on how, when he is suspended before high-placed wall lights, or a painting of fresh, open air, the man seems extraordinarily happy.
Ambient sounds are discernible in the soundtrack: a call bell (nobody answers), the elevator ding, and tap shoes all nick at the bass and drum loops. And, ahem, yes:
Weapon of Choice has got cowbell. Let us never forget that Christopher Walken has gotta have more cowbell.

Maestro, Please

For this production, the music came first, so the video is a sartorial artifact. Cook was 36, same as me, when this song was produced in November 2000. While I had remade myself from Corporate MBA to mom of three, from freelance journalist to high school teacher, he’d evolved from The Housemartins bassist to popular DJ, from Acid House to Big Beat. He was in full swing under the stage name Fatboy Slim; my students affectionately nicknamed me Miss Dubya-geezy.
Theeez keeeedz.
Back in 2002, students called this sort of music hip hop, funk, dance crossover. Pretty much anything that uses body movements to emphasize rhythm. I remember them doing The Superman dance.
What Cook was doing in the “Weapon of Choice” era was new, an exploitation of new technology to make music in new ways. In a CNN Interactive SHOWBIZ article on 8 July 1999, Donna Freydkin distinguishes the difference between the terms electronic music and electronica. She defined the type of work Fatboy Slim, Lo Fidelity Allstars, and Chemical Brothers were pioneering as electronica, or “DJs' electronic samplings and manipulations of previously recorded work by others.” She contrasted that with musical composers of electronic music, e.g., Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, John Adams—and said that term “usually means original, not remixes. (Electronic music is) work created synthetically without traditional acoustic instrumentation.”
Karl Boltzmann’s soundboard deconstruction of the video is marvelous. The 1970s cushion the track, which samples The Electric Indian, The Chambers Brothers, and Sly & the Family Stone.
There exists a short documentary by Dutch Public TV’s Top 2000 a-Gogo, where Cook is interviewed by Magnus Broni in front of his original Atari sampler setup, what he calls the “octopus.” Cook says, of the joy of creating the music from audio extracts, “you could get the funk by using drum loops and samples rather than having to sit there, you know, pretending to be Bootsy Collins on the bass.”

He could also pixilate the vocals to be replayed at the syllable level (Funk. Soul. Bro-ther.) Cook says, from “’70 to ’75 are the best years for finding samples.”
Of record hunting—crate digging—Cook shops the cover art: “if you look at it and if it’s a multiracial band with long hair and it looks like they take a lot of drugs, then there’s probably going to be something interesting on it.” Cook has an affinity for bands from the 1970s.
Coincidentally, that’s a blithe connection between him and Walken. In Walken’s 7 August 2001 appearance on the Conan O’Brien Show, he admitted his “music knowledge stops somewhere in the 1970s.” The 1970s… the apple of Cook’s thrifting eye.
As far as working with Collins, and being a successful bass player himself, Cook said, “For us bass players, Bootsy is The Don…. He’s lovely. He’s beautiful.”
In terms of the Collins and Cook collaboration working as a film score, the anachronism of a boomer businessman grooving to a funk dance track reveals a Jonze aesthetic. His first skateboarding film, Video Days, soundtracks the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” for pro-boarder Guy Mariano’s segment; John Coltrane’s “Traneing In,” which the end credits describe only as “some damn good jazz,” underscores Mark Gonzales’s six minutes (and it pairs so well with the 3:45AM parking garage footage).

It's also interesting to consider the legality of clearing use for high-profile samples that are the building blocks of electronica. In Cook’s High Frequency interview with Nick Lawrence, Cook said licensing requires, “Lawyers. Two lots of lawyers, our lawyers and the person's you sampled’s lawyers, and nowadays there're lawyers who simply deal with samples. So, you just have to come with an arrangement with the person you're going to sample—sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's not. It's a necessary thing for what I do.”
The most royalties Fatboy Slim ever doled out? One hundred percent, for “The Rockafeller Skank.” Cook said, “If there was more than a 100 percent, I probably would have paid that…. There were four different samples on it we had to clear, and they all wanted 40 percent, or 50 percent, and we were like ‘Hold On, there's only like 100 percent that's available.’ So, we were like, ‘you can all have 25 percent,’ and there was none left for me.”
For a side-by-side play of the samples used in “Weapon of Choice,” check out the Who Sampled site.

Psychic Friends

In terms of cinematography, Jonze showcases the individual. The gaze of his lens doesn’t judge. The distance is respectful, and the camera is encouraging, moving slowly toward the solitary figure. Whenever I alerted students to visual composition basics (rules of thirds, or painterly notions of background, middle ground, foreground), they found much to admire. Things they’ve jotted down include how “the guy comes very close to the camera, then moves away, and does a lot of spinning;” “it begins with long shot and high angle, as we ‘move in’ to study the businessman;” “even when the actor is passive, the camera is energetic;” “there is a lot of perspective change.”
Walken, in his audio commentary of the video, said, “Yeah, it has a very nice look to it, doesn’t it.”

Hotdoggin’

Short as the film is, it does include special effects. The flight moves get the most attention. The student who presented me the video at the start of my teaching gig did some research, and discovered Walken's flight moves necessitated the use of numerous wires, and support harness. The CAD designers, Sea Level, re-created the lobby in 3D in inferno. Walken was then extracted from the original footage in combustion, and composited into the 3D lobby in inferno. The result? Seamless flight. You can tell by his hair a stunt double does the cartwheel flip, and also the dive over the balcony. Other than that, it’s well done, and the 2021 remaster did a nice job of cleaning up any residual signs of the wires.

Walken says some funny things, and in his audio commentary of the video, he describes the feeling of flight in this way: “Yeah, you know you hang up there in the air like a frankfurter.”
That hanging in the air pays dividends in service to the theme. The young ones pick up on the pacing. I had one student comment on the visual rhythm, with long shots and longer cuts echoing the character being “stuck” in his thoughts, and faster-paced edits and close-ups used to convey the character’s feeling of happiness. The long pause before the return to ground makes that moment important, as if Joseph Campbell phoned in the shot.
Editing is also the foundation of electronica. The Boltzmann deconstruction gets into the tin tacks of how Cook was able to arrange music with early hardware samplers (circa 2000, Cook was arranging on an Atari with the C-Lab suite). Cook said the time intensity wasn’t a consideration, “We were thankful that we could do it, not so much worried about the long process.” Fatboy Slim songs are the product of Cook’s catalog of samples: “a cappella vocals, drum beats of a certain tempo, bass lines, piano lines, and I used to sit there for hours…. looking for a collage that works.”
What ties this whole short film together is Jonze’s overall direction. It’s a multilevel blend of visual and acoustic elements, the light dropping like pixie dust. Even without dialogue, the actor and creative camera work and lighting and setting and FX all serve the theme of journeyman Zen. Nothing is wasted, and everything brings out the nature of the modern anti-hero. When the camera extreme-closeups at the literal height of the journey, it reveals bliss. Walken delivers an iconic performance.

His Name Means Mirror

Director Spike Jonze, born Adam Spiegel, is the youngest of the main talent, having turned 30 at the millennium. His Epicly Latered biopic at Vice tells a thoroughgoing story of how Jonze skated into lifelong, professional friendships by hanging around Rockville BMX. He'd chauffeur visiting BMXers, then photograph and film their events. It was after Sonic Youth saw his Video Days short film that Jonze careered into filming bands.  His humble beginnings as cameraman for Freestylin and Dirt magazines put him in the saddle toward winning an Oscar. The very year "Weapon of Choice" debuted was the year Jackass, another Jonze creation, was first broadcast on MTV.
To choose Walken as the main character, who epitomizes the look (that pasty face!!) of a washed-out businessman while having the dance talent to pull off a virtuoso performance, was brilliant. The use of archetypical imagery, especially the character "dipping" into water at the peak of his journey, is a skilled visual metaphor that plumbs the unconscious. The juxtaposition of the dim, corporate lobby with the empathetic storytelling (accomplished in camera angles and editing!) earns the high praise.
Jonze had already garnered critical success with Being John Malkovich (1999), a story he described as one where he was "trying to make it a fluid emotional path through all these different ideas." The timing was perfect for him to unify the gigantic acting, musical, and artistic genius of Walken, Collins, and Cook into one funked-up juggernaut. The readiness was all. 
Jonze and Cook have a lot in common when it comes to artistic temperament. In the Boltzmann interview, Cook says he'd "just had four top ten records in a row, and I was kinda hot." When asked how he knew "Weapon of Choice" was coming together at his workstation, he said, "you know when something's working." Along the same lines, Jonze said of his creative process in a 2010 Vice interview, “I judge the success of what I do by the feeling." 
Further, in an October 2009 interview by Peter Sciretta for Slash Film, Jonze articulated what differentiates making music videos from making films: "With a video, you're still representing the artist. You're trying to make something that's both, you and the artist."
The aesthetic for "Weapon of Choice" has its motifs and style rooted in Jonze's earlier work. His music for video for the Chemical Brothers' 1997 "Elektrobank" features an individual, a gymnast named Janet, who enters the video solo before a curtained backdrop, dimly-lit and seated, underscored by an ambient tune—until she pivots unexpectedly to a tour-de-force tumbling routine of agility and athleticism—tumbles, twists, ribbon-dances—blissfully syncopated to the beat. She's the harbinger of a very Walkenesque persona.
More recently, there's the "Welcome Home" video he directed, of FKA Twigs, where again a solitary figure emerges, comes home, and starts dancing—summoning superpowers to transform the muted colors of her home into a candy confection. The use of the mirror image and looking glass fantasy also hearkens to "Weapon of Choice” and other Jonze-directed scenes (as in Her), whereas protagonist spins in front of a glass.
Jonze's eye for dance reports lovingly. Even in Her (2013), the Large Language Model, Samantha, has fantasies of inhabiting a body. Lines of dialogue reveal this, when she says to her human partner how she fantasized... "that I had a body;" "that I could feel the weight of my body," and when the LLM arranges for a human surrogate to be a go-between for body contact with Theodore? The first thing her human stand-in asks him is if he'd like for her to dance.
Shower thought: I don’t care what Boston Dynamics can do with its Ping-Pong-looking soldier dogs: to create, to dance, to be human, is divine.
I know I've talked a bit about using "Weapon of Choice" in class as a great short film that does big cinematic things, but there’s another short by Jonze I also love using for an alternate assessment: “I’m Here.” You know, sometimes a kid gets a concussion, and they missed turning in a high-value assignment or something like that. When they are back on their pins (and often overwhelmed with making up work for all their classes), I’ll ask them to select any three of the twelve critical lenses this essay mentions (subject, theme, dialogue, acting, yadda yadda, directing), and I’ll ask them to set aside three separate times in the upcoming week to watch “I’m Here,” and study the film’s use of those three things and jot down their ideas about them. It’s amazing how much one can learn with deep observation, attentive consideration. Jonze is a short-form master.

Best Foot Forward

Cook, now 59, commented in a Billboard Music interview on the future of dance music. He predicted "the dance music scene will gradually rid itself of DJ acts in it for the money, and return to its state of artists genuinely in it for the music." He tips his hat to Hot Since 82, Carl Cox, and Skream, whom he says are in it for the same reason as him. "They love the music, they love the craft of DJing, but they also love to party and they get involved with the crowd."
Collins, 72, is active in music and philanthropy. He was awarded the December 2023 Best Philanthropist of Cincinnati by CityBeat. That same year, he was inducted into the Cincinnati Black Music Walk of Fame. The Bootsy Collins Philanthropic Fund has given a new endowment to the Greater Cincinnati Hospital to help patients afford care and medicine.
Jonze, 54, is currently executive director of Vice Media. He’s, Malickly, directed no features since Her, but the rumor mill squeaks that he’s got two big projects in the works: A) an animated series based on an Arcade Fire album, and B) that he’s in pre-production for a big-budget sci-fi series for Netflix, and Joaquin Phoenix might be on board.
Walken, now 80, has a showboat role in Dune Two this year. He has said, of doing more dance on screen, "Well, if someone wants me to, they had better ask soon." He quoted James Cagney, saying there will come a time when he’d "hang up his tap shoes." Also, I couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the essay, but I have another nonchalant Jonze/Walken connection: Walken wrote and starred in a Broadway show called Him, about Elvis being alive and well and living his best life as a waitress
(It was reviewed by Vincent Canby in the New York Times on 6 January 1995.)
As for me, 59 and maintaining, the day I filed this essay, a student said she couldn't wait for her sister to have me as a teacher. I asked what grade her sister was in. Sixth. I did the math and got a chill. I won't be teaching in six years! If life is kind and I've time enough, I'll be retired before little sis gets to me. This was a late-life career change; been up and at it since “Weapon of Choice” picked up that Grammy.
There’s an old saying, “Anne plans and God laughs,” but I feel Bootsy Collins’s blessing is out there for all of us. Find your team, your talent, be ready for your luck; figure out what your One is, and keep coming back to it. I won’t teach forever, but I will keep writing, friends.

Anne Weisgerber (1964 - ) was born in Orange, New Jersey to middle-class parents. The author, center, was not immune to the 2000 trend of family portraits in coordinating jeans and white shirts. Photographer is Oscar Stokes, a local acting legend who played Mr. Smee in Peter Pan on Broadway, and had that sweet voice and way about him. Anne is an award-winning journalist, teacher, and storyteller. Her short fiction has won multiple nominations for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best Micro-fiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Anne lives in semi-rural Somerset County, New Jersey with her husband, and occasional cameos from her now grown sons: a Marine Corps officer, an artist, and a land surveyor. When she isn’t writing or teaching, Anne enjoys walking to the local to catch up with neighbors and get the news. She is passionate about supporting charities working to preserve open space, clean water, and the wood turtle. Anne’s last xness essay was a write-in on Motley Crue’s “Too Young to Fall in Love” in the March Shredness tournament. Follow @aeweisgerber or visit anneweisgerber.com

Never Broken: The Po(p)-et(h)ics of Genre Flailing: irene cooper on jewel’s “intuition”

March 2003: I am not in da club, stepping onto the dancefloor, I am in the kitchen, stepping on Legos, laying a banquet of mac-n-cheez, bouncing that which I got to Raffi.
The U.S. invades Iraq.
Jewel releases ‘Intuition,’ the third track from her upcoming album, 0304. The up-till-then folk star will include a message in the liner notes: ‘This album may seem different to you.’

Happiness isn’t in France, you can’t just go there and stay [i]

Jewel has described her soaring popularity in the mid-nineties as serendipitous timing—her songs offered an alternative to grunge, which spoke so keenly to pain, and articulated no way out. Jewel’s music, and persona, soft-cheeked, angel-voiced, suggested hope.[ii] In 2003, however, Jewel was ready to leave the dark hard-tiled narratives and shed the hoodies of her folk origins and get on up and dance.
In a July 2003 piece in the business section of Slate magazine, the author, now an esteemed and prolific social critic who has gone on to pen a respected book, etc. etc., about how we are all sheep on the green, green pastures of Big Advertising, flayed and skewered Jewel and her ‘sell-out’ song for ‘Shilling for Schick.’ Although he deigned to enjoy the occasional ‘unabashed pop tune,’ his argument (with no opportunity for rebuttal) was that in selling ‘Intuition’ to a razor company, Jewel lost her integrity by undercutting her message of authenticity. He continues, ‘Presumably [dear reader, beware the introduction of ‘presumably’!] [Jewel’s] status had something to do with the idea that she’s more ‘authentic’ than some flash-in-the-pan pop tart…’
Pop tart—sweet burn!—signifying mass-produced, indistinguishable, and cheap (dude, not flash-in-the-toaster?). As an epithet, it delivers: catchy, cute, and corrosive. At least Dewey, the white-tailed deer cloned that year from a dead buck at Texas A&M, got a name.
In contrast, on the cognitive dissonance scale, the Gap ad that featured ‘Dress You Up’ way back in 1999 registers low-to-zero in the pairing of product and pop song, but it remains that Madonna did not suffer the yolk of sell-out, nor have many other musical artists who have brokered with corporate culture.

I really try to understand
All the powers that rule this land

In her leap from folk to dancepop, Jewel committed genre flail. Americans, particularly, hate that shit.
In an article in Capacious, Lauren Berlant of the University of Chicago writes, ‘Genre flailing is a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one’s confidence about how to move in it. We genre flail so that we don’t fall through the cracks of heightened affective noise into despair, suicide, or psychosis.’
She goes on to say, while it may be highly imaginative and creative, genre flailing can also take the form of humorless criticism, using passive aggression, science, ‘common sense,’ seriousness, and ‘bitter mirth’ to throw a bucket of ice water on whatever it is that makes the genre flailer feel threatened. Like, maybe, a sexually actualized, financially independent woman.
Might I want to revisit and revise (or forget/erase entirely) my comments from twenty years ago? Sure. So is it fair I bring up some shitty criticism from over twenty years ago?

I promise
It won't be in vain

Jewel has said, in multiple recent interviews [iii], that she believes forgiveness is a man-made construct—a clunky, heavy, unwieldy thing that doesn’t occur in nature.
Here’s the thing—I was not encouraged to commit my ignorance and arrogance to the internet, which is, among its other inhuman traits, unforgiving. In 2003, it wasn’t just free speech anymore, it was data. No more ephemeral language, it’s all in the archives, accumulating, taking on weight. ‘Jewel, alone, is to blame’: ‘Tis posted.
Slate writer may have been so steeped in the casual and fully condoned linguistic misogyny of the moment that he failed to realize how a statement like ‘I don’t think Schick can be faulted for latching itself onto the latest hit from a fairly popular artist’ contributed, as I think it must have, to a catastrophic build such as the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, you know the one—the corporations are people, too judgment.
Forgiveness may not be real, Jewel says, but letting go and moving on are toolkit essentials—don’t leave home without them, your survival depends on them.

In a world of post modern fad
What was good now is bad

Side rhyme to the rhetorical tactic appeal to nature (and maybe, too, the naturalistic fallacy), the lyric I’m just a simple girl should be a waving red flag, the neon arrow that announces: What proceeds from here is parody. As a fallacy (and not as a wink), ‘I’m just a simple girl’ positions simplicity as a natural trait, and therefore good. It implies its opposite, complexity, is bad.
To be anything but simple is to be duplicitous, is to have an agenda (doesn’t even need to be a hidden one, just any old agenda—aka, goal, aka ambition—suffices), to lack integrity. To want anything more than to provide ornament or arousal is to ask too much, to over(dub)step.
Jewel—whose mother left the family when she was five, who performed in bars with her father from the age of eight, who left her Alaskan home to live by herself at fifteen, who attended (by the merit of her application and the grace of the collective fundraising efforts of the residents of Homer, AK) Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, who was houseless when she was ‘discovered’ at 18, who in 2003 had four best-selling albums behind her—wasn’t just anything, let alone simple.

Let go of your mind

But oh, to believe it.
The official video for ‘Intuition’ flips from famcam (or CC surveillance screen—I watch a lot of British crime shows) complete with date and time, to high-gloss commercial fantasy—saturated color, slo-mo action, lots of young, bouncy, dewy flesh. What is real is a little washed out, disconnected, random as a city street can be random. Sporadic warmth surfaces in a chance encounter, takes the shape of a friendly dog. Fantasy enters in flaming hot complementary packs—all is familiar and everyone knows the choreography. It doesn’t take much for fantasy to flip the script, to add narrative: With the addition of a tropical backdrop, an old guy sleeping on a public bench transforms to a dude chilling beachside with a crisp pale Mexican lager. Protesters pumping handmade signs drop into the beat, a beautiful, bootylicious troupe, anger dispersed.

Your Intuition
Is easy to find

And why not? There’s sparkling Jewel herself, former houseless teen, dancing under the cool jet of a fire hose wielded by a willing and rippling civil servant. She looks happy. They both do. 

Let go of your mind

The eldest was two when she experienced her first seizure. When she was five we took her off her medication, only to double down after she dropped from consciousness onto the living room floor and flopped like a trout one early evening as I slid the lasagna into the oven. At seven, with no reliable western medical way to measure the drug’s efficacy, we visited a kinesiologist, a Sikh woman dressed in a white robe and turban who had me hold my daughter’s arm as she tested for food allergies, environmental toxins, and—what we came for—the relevance of the carbamazepine I dosed my kid with twice daily.
The Sikh kinesiologist determined the drug to be in use and useful. She then asked if we wanted to go deeper into our inquiry, so we continued, I supporting my daughter’s limb, the kinesiologist tap tapping on my daughter’s body.
‘Are you familiar with the Demonic Shadow?’ the woman asked.
I was not. Turns out the Demonic Shadow is a darkness that is passed down matrilineally. Unresolved trauma continues a lineage until it is resolved, or in some way addressed and disrupted. My grandmother was the source, apparently, but it could have been her mother, or Eve. I could disrupt it, was the good news. I could prevent the Demonic Shadow from occluding the light in my two daughters if I eradicated it from my own body. I had to grow roots, the Sikh said. I had to ground myself somewhere, in something.
Another goddamn thing.
On the way to the natural grocery store where I would spend money I didn’t have on the organic produce that would help us live right and true and clean, seizure and shadow-free, the eldest chirped from the backseat:
‘You know, mama, this isn’t about you taking care of me, this is about me taking care of myself.’
Reader, I nearly crashed the car.
The double-edged sword of recognizing my child as separate from myself, shadow aside: I am responsible for this human; there are limits to what I can do for—hard limits—as to the protection I can extend to this human. It was March 2003: my child’s self-possession was a cold spring wind blowing through the window of the Ford Escort LX, and a revelation: she would face her life alone. Somehow I was not devastated.

Let go of your mind
Your Intuition
Is easy to find

Epilepsy can be genre flailing. Not an aberration, but a survival technique.  

Way down yonder where the dolphins play
Where you dive and splash all day [iv]

The second movie in the Charlie’s Angels franchise, Full Throttle, came out in 2003. Of the first one, released in 2000, Roger Ebert said, ‘A movie without a brain in its three pretty little heads.’ He was kinder, more generous, with the second, allowing it was [h]armless, brainless, good-natured fun. Leaving Full Throttle, I realized I did not hate or despise the movie…I decided that I sort of liked it because of the high spirits of the women involved.’

You'll love me
Wait and see

Lucy Liu, one of the high spirited women involved, went on to make the critically acclaimed Elementary, laying a smart, fashion-forward recovery counselor-turned sleuth. Through it all, she painted under the name Yu Ling. Liu’s since stopped using her Chinese name, but it’s not hard to imagine why she’d chosen to use it.
Liu’s paintings take inspiration from shunga, a style of Japanese erotic art developed in the 17th century. An art dealer once suggested she tone down the effect of the oversized genitals by recutting the canvases. She refused. Liu recalled the dealer asking, ‘Well, do you want to sell? Do you want to create this career?’ [v]
Fans and foes alike hate a genre flail, let alone one that manifests large arty canvasses depicting super-sized female genitalia. In showing under another name, criticism of the art would not be affected by the reputation of the actress, would not be subject to the scrutiny of those who would resist the genre flail.

I paint landscapes, and I paint nudes
I contain multitudes [vi]

Jewel, arguably, contained multitudes by the time 0304 was in production, skills that predated her music industry success. In her childhood in Alaska she learned to be ‘adroit with a chainsaw,’[vii] ride horses, and fix stuff. She was a musician from a young age, was abandoned by her mother at a young age, navigated (and performed with) an alcoholic and abusive father from a young age. She lived through a period of houselessness. When she was offered a million dollar signing contract, she went to the library and read The Music Industry for Dummies. On an interview that aired July 14, 2023, on PBS’s Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Jewel says it’s hard to leverage someone who knows how to do stuff.
But folks have opinions, and express them, sometimes violently, when the stuff that gets done is not the stuff they’re accustomed to, or upsets expectations. In a 2022 show in London at the Royal Albert Hall, Jewel shares an anecdote in which she is ‘summoned,’ shortly after the release of ‘Intuition,’ to meet David Geffen, with whom she has no professional relationship. She assumes he wants to ask her to write a song for someone on his label, or some such. Instead, he sits knee-to-knee to her, leans in without introduction, and tells her, ‘No one wants this generation’s Joni Mitchell to wear a miniskirt, you knock it the fuck off.’ (Never mind Joni Mitchell was known to sport a miniskirt. Also, to paint.) On that London stage, Jewel jokes, well, fuck you, David Geffen, turns out you can be smart and wear a miniskirt, and the audience laughs. But what did it mean for a sixty year old man of power to feel he could tell a twenty-seven year old successful-by-any-measure artist her business? To just say, ‘No.’

Baby beluga, oh, baby beluga
Sing your little song
Sing for all your friends, we like to hear you

Switching or floating through genre can feel like a betrayal for fans. Fan of Jewel’s Pieces of You lamented what they saw as the vulgarity of ‘Intuition’ and 0304. Jewel knew they would, hence, the liner note, which has been interpreted to be the artist’s lean toward, not electronica or dance pop, but Big Band, swing, and Cole Porter. Jewel will repeat this attachment to the twentieth century songbook, but credulity thins, and the parody argument gains strength as Jewel appears to sing directly (wink) to the incels and an industry that cultivates them:  

You look at me
but you're not quite sure
Am I it or could you get more
You learn cool from magazines
You learn love from Charlie Sheen

If you want me let me know
I promise I won't say no 

…which muddles the ‘follow your heart’ lyric, unless it’s all tongue-in-cheek. It’s genuinely hard to tell. Jewel joined forces on 0304 with powerhouse producer and songwriter Lester Mendez, go-to collaborator for icons including Shakira and Santana. Production value-wise, the album is no joke. Could be Jewel’s brand of folk protest doesn’t translate well to 100 bpms.
‘Who Will Save Your Soul,’ the folk ballad Jewel wrote at sixteen, addresses some of the same subject matter as ‘Intuition’:

So you bargain with the Devil, but you're okay for today, say
That you love them, take their money and run 

In the folk song, though, there is moral consequence. ‘Intuition’s Sell your sin / Just cash in plays as it lays.
So, maybe there’s not much statement in the statement. Could be she just really wanted to make a dance album. And/or she wanted to say something about sex. And/or she was a young woman who wanted to lay down the heavy vestments of folk, slip into something sparkly and go to the club, have a little fun.
Jewel has a bit of fun, or seems to, in a 2010 episode of Funny or Die’s Undercover Karaoke, when she dons a prosthetic nose and drab business casual to sing her own songs—undercover!—at karaoke night at a little bar. The crowd goes wild. Before the joke is revealed, a woman tells Jewel, costumed as Karen-in-accounting, that it doesn’t matter how ugly she is, with a voice like that she’ll have no trouble getting laid.
Humor is a genre flail, a disruption, a cognitive dissonance that feels good instead of disturbing—a convulsion of the body, an affect, that manifests a physical and psychic struggle between trauma and joy.
I feel a little undone by the reveal. My heart goes out to Karen in her business casual, whom the bar owner said, truth be told, actually sounded better than Jewel herself.

Baby beluga in the deep blue sea / Swim so wild and you swim so free

The daughters are two and six in March 2003. I am reading Siblings without Rivalry, needlessly, perhaps, as, while they have their squabbles, these girls already behave in a way that says, I’m for you. The younger, now a musician, recently said in an interview that if she played her music for only her sister and her dog, that would be enough.

Is the water warm
Is your mama home with you, so happy [viii]

In her Firing Line interview, Jewel says steadfastness and curiosity, while not sexy, are the qualities she would promote to her younger self.

Your intuition
It will lead you in the right direction

The youngest is not yet three when, during a bath, she points to her clitoris and asks, What is this for? I am caught off-guard. It’s one of those moments when there’s no time for anything but the truth, so I answer, ‘To feel good.’

Waves roll in and the waves roll out
See the water squirtin' out of your spout

I was 20 when I moved to Sacramento and subsequently split from the boyfriend with whom I’d moved from Texas. In my first solo apartment, on my first answering machine, I left a breathy Marilyn-sings-happy-birthday kind of outgoing message. My ex’s mother, whom I’d met and known only briefly, took offense, said it didn’t sound like me, the me she’d taken for me, decided was me.
What did I want for my daughters? Pleasure, fun, the courage of their desires, a world in which they can want and not be shamed for it, a world which can hear ‘No’ and at least entertain ‘Yes.’ Tenderness. Self-regard, and autonomy. Community. In more vulnerable moments, the list loses its loft, is more basely civic: health, safety, stability.

Moon is shining and the stars are out
Good night, little whale, good night

In March 2003, a little over a week before the US invasion of Iraq, Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) band member Natalie Maines made a statement of thirty-two words on a London stage:

‘Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States [George W. Bush] is from Texas.’

Shut Up and Sing [ix]

In a genre known, in the main, for its flag-waving devotion to horsepower, so-called traditional values, and national pride (it’s called country, after all), this wasn’t just genre flailing, this was genre-nuclear meltdown. Top of their game and top of the charts, the band was instantly blacklisted on radio stations across the nation. Alienated fans and avid foes threw record and CD-burning events.  Maines told the New York Times in 2016: ‘I look at how much more polarized and intolerant people have become now. With social media, opinions all start becoming noise, but at that point, people weren't really supposed to have an opinion.’
By people she means, I think, the talent. Because, clearly, the people felt eminently entitled to their opinions, which skewed more in favor of loyalty than justice. Not all the people, though. The Dixie Chicks still packed the arenas. More than a few people believed the vitriol around Maines’ comment to have been fueled by right-wing conservatives looking to deflect public attention.
Simon Renshaw, the Dixie Chicks' manager, commented on the fact that the music of Tracy Lawrence continued to get plenty of airplay, despite the country music star’s 1998 conviction for spousal abuse.[x] Domestic violence, often a topic of country music songs, could be forgiven, but speaking out against a sitting president on foreign soil? Treason.
‘What they did to these ladies was just devastating,’ said Don Ienner, who became president of Sony Music US in April 2023. ‘They weren’t part of a mass shooting! They said [32] f–king words—and they were right.’ [xi]

who will save your soul after all those lies that you told, boy?

This year’s Super Bowl marks the twentieth anniversary of what in 2004 was dubbed Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, an incident in which, during the halftime show, Justin Timberlake tore a piece of Janet’s Alexander McQueen couture, revealing a sun-guarded nipple.
The Village Voice’s Michael Musto said, ‘Janet became a symbolic Joan of Arc to burn at the stake. I actually do think her breast was used as a diversionary tactic—I'm not sure to distract from Iraq specifically—but it did distract from important issues, from things we actually should be appalled by…the fact is nobody has proved how her breast harmed anyone.’ [xii]
Jackson shared, ‘People think I'm immune to being hurt by what's said. They ask me questions that shock me. Not everybody is as strong as the next person and words can kill. People push you and you start to think can I handle this?’ [xiii]

You'll love me
Wait and see

In 2023, Pamela Anderson starts attending fashion shows ‘barefaced;’ Britney Spears humbling memoir The Woman in Me airs the devastations she’s suffered as a pop star and meal ticket; Jewel spearheads a digital mental wellness app. 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)[xiv]

In the meantime, Beyonce, Taylor, and Miley continue to push into and blur genre lines like they just don’t care, with a whole empowered generation of smart, sardonic artists entering the field. And yet, while Lizzo can model her lingerie line, shaming the fat shamers, she cannot avoid the onslaught of outrage that comes her way when she picks up and plays President James Madison’s antique crystal flute on a visit to the Library of Congress—more straight-up racism, perhaps, than genre flailing, but there seems to be something in there about jumping lanes, about disruption, about survival.
The ‘bitter mirth’ inherent in the humorless 2003 critique of Jewel’s dancepop experiment can be seen, if one chooses, for what it is: the dark shadow of genre flailing, an attempt to stop the music by bullying its readership into thinking there’s only one way to dance, and to be multi-faceted, or even to try, is to dilute one’s authenticity, read: Brand.

Baby beluga in the deep blue sea
Swim so wild and you swim so free

The eldest, 27, the age Jewel was when she made ‘Intuition,’ will have brain surgery later this month, to remove the mass that was presumed to be the impetus for her seizures when she was two, the mass which sat dormant for a quarter century, but which has now changed, and must be excised. The disruptor must be disrupted. The seizures may or may not continue, but this particular genre flail no longer functions, to the extent that it did, as crisis management. Some other facet of my daughter’s microverse will have to rise up, flailing, to surprise and protect her.

Heaven above and the sea below
And a little white whale on the go

‘Intuition’ is not a dazzling moment in dance pop history, and may be, at best, a cloudy attempt at critique, but Jewel’s electronica moment shines as a Hope diamond of genre flail, and, legitimately, remains a bop. Respect.

[i] Firing Line. Jewel Kilcher. PBS, 12/22/2023. Web.

[ii] Mayim Bialik. The Breakdown. “Jewel: Just Turn Your Life Around One Thought at a Time”

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Raffi Cavoukian, Debi Pike. “Baby Beluga”. Concord Music Publishing. LyricFind.

[v] shesnake.tumblr.com

[vi] Bob Dylan. “I Contain Multitudes”. Special Rider Music, Universal Tynes. Musixmatch.

[vii] Firing Line. Jewel Kilcher. PBS, 12/22/2023. Web.

[viii] Raffi Cavoukian, Debi Pike. “Baby Beluga”. Concord Music Publishing. LyricFind.

[ix] Shut Up and Sing. Directors, Barbara Kopple, Cecilia Peck. Lionsgate, 2006. Documentary.

[x] Edward Morris. “Dixie Chicks’ Film Draws Full House of Bush Detractors”. CMT, 11/03/2006

[xi] Steve Knopper. “An Oral History of the Chicks’ Seismic 2003 Controversy From the Indistry Execs Who Lived   It”. billboard. 6/14/2022. Web.

[xii] Matt Kalkhoff  (October 2004). "Jackson Distraction”. Genre. 

[xiii] Jordan Paramor (2004). "The Truth About Me, Michael, & Nipplegate". Glamour: 90.

[xiv] Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself, 51”

Irene Cooper is the author of Found, feminist noir, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy, and spare change: poems. Stories, essays, and critical reviews appear here and there. Irene supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, teaches in community, and currently serves as an editor for Airlie Press. She lives in the middle of Oregon.