first round

(4) Flo Rida, “Low” (feat. T-Pain)
brought down
(13) Chemical Brothers, “Star Guitar”
216-82
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. 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 3/6/24.

The Truth About "Low": caroline macon fleischer on Flo Rida and T-Pain

You should only continue reading if you are willing to accept the truth. Because once you become aware of the truth, you will be different. You will withdraw like a shadow into a weaker, surrendered corner of yourself.
If you dare to know at this cost, here goes:
“Low” is a song about doomed love. Everything is a song about doomed love. Once it happens to you.
After it happens, for the rest of your whole life, you’ll hear songs differently from most people. When the DJ puts “Low” on and everyone on the dance floor pushes chest-to-chest, lap-to-lap, you’ll shy away in your feelings. You’ll cross your arms and reconsider the lyrics, fixating on the thousands of freckly disco lights chasing each other across the wall. Some chase one another playfully like Duck, Duck, Goose. Others stay back, more reserved.
You’ll know which of the dots you are, which ones share your personality. You’ll remember you used to like dancing, before love was revealed and you watched it get fractured.
You’ll press your fingers into the space above your abs and between your ribs. You’ll be thankful for your diaphragm, a muscle which seems to give you the release you need dependably, helping you let go.
Because before you knew the truth, you had a good, long standing relationship with “Low.” You got low for the first time in eighth grade, you purchased baggy sweatpants in its honor, you smoked countless joints listening to it, your Reeboks on the gas of that beat up Saab, that beat up Honda, that beat up Beemer, the Jetta. Swiping lip gloss in the makeup mirror. Before you knew.
Each time the song found you, you recited the lyrics by heart. You knew them at 21, pressed up against the wall by a stranger at the club and at 17, saving room for Jesus between your body and that of a guy you liked from church, despite his being so obviously gay. You knew them when you wandered the halls in the morning of this apartment and that, unsure of what to wear, and when you dressed to the nines, ready to tear it up.
But what you understand now is that “Low” is a crooning ballad, not the catchy, campy dance hit you were sold.
You’ll understand, humbly and with grand aching, it’s not about apple bottom jeans but about agonizing over someone, something, that doesn’t want to be, can’t be, in no way would possibly ever be, yours.
Now, when you get home from the club, you’ll read the lyrics like a storybook, searching for comfort—that others, too, have fallen lovesick, crazed. You’ll feel for him.
The dude’s cleaning his pockets, all in hopes that she’ll simply notice him. He digs cash and she dances. But he loves her—that’s the twist. It’s what hasn’t been shown how it is in the music video, a dusty stream of light projecting Step Up 2 on the wall.
By the end of the song, he’s out three grand. But you’ll know three grand will be the least of it, that his suffering is just at the start. The real cost is his identity, his perception of the world. The secret is that doomed love causes, without fail, a worsening poison—a psychological transposition.
Because before you fell into love like this, trees seemed to grow upward, reaching toward the sky. After you fell, you saw the truth—sure, branches and leaves appeared to grow up. But the reality was that trees grew down—a steadfast dissension of roots, hellbent on cracking the Earth’s core.
You won’t be able to shake this feeling that growth is inherently detrimental. You’ll worry that all growth is like this, breaking something along the way.
Even as you find courage to turn away from your doomed person and walk toward the sun, you’ll incur a blistering sunburn. You’ll have no choice but to turn back and look once more at this person, noticing their face has blended into the horizon.
Their disappearance into the crevice between hill and sky will remind you that one day they will die. And this will cause you great distress, because you know that if they die sooner rather than later—and probably even if they die later—you won’t be invited to the church service. Because you are doomed, too, as far as they’re all concerned.
But you can’t escape it. Because they are right. That first there was love and then there was doom and then there was nothing after. Everything else was just pretend and the truth was hiding in plain sight.
The truth is we are all down bad. We share this. We know this. We will never admit that we know this but we know. Flo Rida knows. T-Pain knows. When this sort of love is mentioned, everyone at the table will giggle in discomfort. You’ll giggle with them, but you’ll know.

Caroline Macon Fleischer is a writer, teacher, and mom living in Chicago. Her first book The Roommate is a psychological thriller that was published in 2022 and her second book, A Play About a Curse is a horror forthcoming in 2025. Beyond creepy novels, Caroline loves writing plays, films, strange honest essays, and poetry.

Toeing the Threshold: Kyle Simonsen on the chemical brothers’ “Star Guitar”

For me, “Star Guitar” the song is inextricable from “Star Guitar” the music video. The first time I heard the song was while watching the video. There was no radio station in my little midwestern life that would have played this song, or if there was, I certainly wouldn’t have known about it. I came to the audio via the visual. This was opposite the typical order, in my experience: usually, you loved an artist and waited with bated breath for their new single, and then their new video.
I saw the video for the first time at a house party at a friend’s place, a common landing spot for many of us after we were released from our jobs stocking shelves and manning registers and waiting tables in those tenuous first couple of years after graduating high school when those of us who hadn’t gone off to university were trying to figure out what came next. His place had a big empty basement where a band could jam while we stood around drinking beer, and a den on the main floor where someone was always ripping a truly ludicrous bong, and that, of course, is where someone had popped the DVD for The Work of Director Michel Gondry into what was almost assuredly a PlayStation 2, just before I walked in to, you know, see what was going on.
The DVD features one well-known, mind-bending music video after another: fellow Danceness competitor Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World,” The White Stripes’ “Hardest Button to Button,” The Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” a slew of Bjork tracks. Like movie directors like Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua and David Fincher, Gondry got his start with music videos. But Gondry, best known as the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, did all his finest work in the medium, never fully translating to the longer form. 
Yet even amidst a whole passel of other certified bangers, the video that grabbed my attention and never let go was “Star Guitar.”
A sober, cynical mind could perhaps write the video off as just more Y2K-caliber CGI, a particularly clever Windows XP screensaver. But for me, the rhythms of the video capture an experience so ineffable and fundamental to my life’s experience that it’s inescapable.
The premise of the video is simple: it’s just the view out of a train window as it rolls by various landscapes: an industrial area peppered with various outbuildings, a river spanned by a sequence of bridges, a quaint cityscape with a few faceless pedestrians. That’s it. That’s the whole video. But everything in view enters the frame to the beat of the song: the song becomes the active soundtrack to the world rushing by.
And what a beat! The song is so named because it’s built atop an only vaguely recognizable sample from early on in David Bowie’s “Starman,” and that Ziggy energy ripples through “Star Guitar,” with other soundscapes weaving in and out of the track smoothly throughout, including an immediately more recognizable bit from Electronic System’s “Fly to Venus.”
 The video evokes the liminal state of travel, that sense of being in between things, both closely rooted in and completely detached from your surroundings. And that’s my space. That’s where I operate. When people ask me where I’m from, where “home” is, I never quite know how to answer, because I moved back and forth between Nebraska and Colorado frequently and never really felt rooted in either one. Over the years, I’ve realized that the interstate between them was the place that most felt familiar, that most felt reliable. So I guess that’s home.
Several years ago, I saw this comic by Adam Ellis, and immediately thought of two things: my own frequent trips back and forth on highway 81 from Omaha to Denver, the one true certainty of my childhood, the constant by which I could measure all other time and space, and though I didn’t have a Gameboy, I often tried to read some thick book of epic fantasy in the backseat of whichever car was hauling my brother and I back and forth between our parents. And, of course, I thought of “Star Guitar” and the way that Gondry’s video, like Ellis’s comic, captures a universal experience of fantasizing about what lies outside the window, of turning it into a game, of the way that changing light patterns and shifting shapes and shadows slipping by creates a meaning both deeply idiosyncratic and yet obviously communal. I thought not of the ubiquitous fields of soybean and corn that we cruised by, but of the way that, when the interstate was perfectly perpendicular to the crop rows, you could look right down the gap for a brief sliver of a second and seemingly see all the way to the next state.
“Star Guitar” came out the year I graduated high school, perhaps the ideal time in a young person’s life to encounter a bit of music, a transitory period that imbues any particular bit of music with an inscrutable bit of meaning. So many people I know still listen mostly to music they listened to in high school and college. But I wasn’t listening to The Chemical Brothers in high school, aside from maybe catching it in a friend's car or at a party; I was an avowed metalhead then, and scorned nearly any other form of musical expression. In fact, I somehow frequently confused The Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method, two different acts that people who sold me weed seemed to like well enough, but that I was never really interested in. I associated the music with the film Hackers, and especially with Matthew Lillard’s cyberpunk weirdo in the film, even though The Chemical Brothers don’t even feature on the soundtrack (nor do The Crystal Method).
Yet both bands are part of the big-beat acid-house techno of the late nineties and early 2000s. “Star Guitar” appears on The Chemical Brothers’s 2002 album Come With Us, at the end of the genre’s height, so this song is like the crest of the wave, the beginning of the end of their big beat mode and a shift into their trance-influenced era. A liminal space.
I’d never really thought of this as a dance song until now, though obviously most other people probably do. The song is still a staple of Chemical Brothers live sets (this recent version with butterflies in place of the familiar train tracks and more of the titular guitar being a good example) during which people are most assuredly dancing. But it had the opposite effect on me, the video rooting me in place and compelling me to watch each beat-driven water tower or streetlight flow by with its perfect, eerie regularity. I sat in that smoky room rapt, the scenery flickering by, my own mind reeling into the past and those highway drives.
The song has only two lines of repeated lyrics, sung by the UK vocalist Beverley Skeete:

You should feel what I feel
You should take what I take

The chemical paean is obvious, but that shouldn’t erase the quiet yearning of that moment of the song, a resonant one for me as I wish other people could feel as joyous about the video as I do. I mean, clearly I’m not alone: the video was given a number of minor awards, despite not being nominated for an actual MTV Music Video Award. But I know it doesn’t have the same significance for most who see it.
In showing it to other people—something I’ve probably done an annoying amount—I’ve discovered that some can’t even see it at first. They don’t get it. They watch for a while, sometimes all the way up until Skeete’s ghostly voice finally appears in the song, before it clicks for them. That wasn’t the case for my kids, though, when we watched it after a conversation about music videos came up and I decided to show them the finest in the genre. They understood it immediately, intuitively. Though “childish” might often be used as an insult, it’s perhaps the highest compliment I can give Gondry, who simply sees the world in a way that is ground out of most of us. But I’ve often caught my own children running along the edge of their backseat windows in the car with their fingertips, jumping over landmarks that appear out the window, turning their commute into something compelling.
The landmarks in the video, through the filter of the CGI and careful splicing needed to stitch the thing together, initially seem overly faceless and beige, their repetition appearing to be a critique of our modern industrial geography, but in truth the structures are based on the actual landscape on a very real train trip that Gondry took. In fact, he took it ten times, recording each time to capture the imagery that he would copy, over and over, to create the video’s effect. And there are some moments that feel almost shocking: a train passing the other way, during which we can briefly, faintly see the reflection of the empty car we are riding in as viewers. The tracks cutting through earthbanks as the music swells and wanes. And that moment when people finally appear and we first hear a voice calling out to us.
He details his creative process somewhat in a making-of video that’s also on the DVD. In it, we see the plan of the video, the initial schematic, which he builds by hand, just drawing with pen on a piece of paper, reverse-engineering a sort of sheet music for his video. This video is the rough draft, and as with an essay, the draft is fascinating, perhaps even superior to the original in some ways. Rewatching it now, the song finally landed to me as a dance song, thinking of the video mapping he does as a kind of choreography; it’s not us that’s dancing, but us tuning into an existing dance that’s bigger than us, in which all things around us are in harmony with our interior experience, a joyous fantasy.
Hilariously, he also plots out the video on a smaller scale, using seemingly random objects: oranges, nails, cans, forks, brooms, books, shoes. The number of objects reveals the complexity of a song that often feels simple and direct, highlighting each individual pattern and effect in the soundscape, bringing the background to the forefront and visually depicting how Gondry himself experiences the song.
Gondry uses a similar technique in other videos. In fact, “Star Guitar” seems to split the difference between his approach in two other solid dance tracks, Daft Punk’s “Around The World,” which has more literal dancing but a less expansive and ambitious vision, and Lacquer’s “Behind,” which captures the energy of cross-country travel but loses the synchronicity.
Lo these many years later, the video still has the power to pull me back to that smoky house party, to the thin, flat stretches of tumbleweed in eastern Colorado, and now that capability has been passed on to the song itself, those opening click-clacks of the train transporting me, carrying me home.

Kyle Simonsen is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, teaching technical editing, creative nonfiction writing, and rhetoric and composition. He is the managing editor of The Linden Review, a journal of the medical humanities. He lives in Wahoo, Nebraska, with his wife and two kids.