first round
(2) Madonna, “Hung Up”
Outran
(15) Felix da Housecat, “Sinnerman”
339-186
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 3/9/24.
Gimme (...Gimme, Gimme) Makeshift Confidence & Madonna : Ariana Eftimiu on “hung up”
During her 47th birthday celebration in August 2005, Madonna fell off a horse, breaking her collarbone, hand, and cracking three of her ribs. Two months later, she filmed the music video for “Hung Up,” the opening track to 2005’s Confessions On a Dance Floor.
She took to the stage glamorous in purple—from sequined track jackets, solid color leotards, and shiny corsets to elaborate, glittered necklines. At the 2005 MTV EMAs, at the 2006 Grammy Awards, and at Coachella in the same year, Madonna maintained a consistent color palette, exuded energy to the crowd (or, in my experience, through the boxy gray CRT TV), and ensured her permanence. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know too much about said concept of permanence; all I did know was that I was practically bound by velcro-strap to the faded green carpet in our old living room, entranced by a feverish disco tune.
It’s around 2007, and I am not a teenager in low-rise True Religions and a popcorn top, but a toddler glamorous in cheetah print Mary Janes and pink suede. I spend a lot of my time with my grandparents, who luckily do not complain about my littering their hair with butterfly clips or continuous pleas that there be some sort of performance happening on the TV. When there wasn’t one, I made sure to choreograph my own, so either way, they’d be entertained.
There was a serious formula to channeling the energy of Madonna—naturally, aforementioned butterfly hair clips, and requesting my grandma back-brush my hair enough times to make it voluminous. At times, my mother’s sleek black purse, to capture the essence of the hardworking woman, and costume white gloves that hit just past the elbow. I’d had about a year of ballet under my belt at this point, and the gloves were just perfect for twirling my wrists over and over to the Dm—F—Am—Dm chorus, mimicking movements from the Nutcracker’s “Waltz of the Flowers.” I’d secured a pink acoustic guitar, gemstones around the soundhole, and would twist and turn, instrument in hand. When my grandmother took naps, I’d have the song playing low in my room, trying not to stomp around as I practiced for The Big Show.
The shows, I mean, as The Big Show (I know, quite the nomenclature) was a recurring event. My performances had an audience generally borne out of a mixture of the same few recurring characters: one or both of my grandparents, a handful of stuffed versions of the kittens from the 1970s Disney movie The Aristocats; a blanket with faded pastel squares or two. Occasionally, my parents would come home from work greeted by a tug at the waist and a hand pulled to come see The Big Show. In these moments, under the bright light of the living room, wagging my finger at the couches packed with adoring fans (even when my audience was solely composed of toys and trinkets), I was, like Madonna, full of moxie.
Madonna, in every sense of the word, was (is) a star…and that I wanted to be. Of course, toddlers are too young to think of the flesh-eating monsters that hide in the shadows of entertainment industries, or to understand practicality, even as an abstraction. Madonna felt beyond a pop star, too—her gravity of fame and confidence was indecipherable to me. It seemed like she could be anything, and held the world in her hands. She was intangible, immaterial, yet familiar. I wanted to understand.
In so dedicatedly following Madonna, I came to recognize that music is not just listened to, but can be actively participated in; if I was moved, it was up to me to act on the impetus to also create; to respond somehow. Music can swallow you whole, I’d realized, if you allowed it to; music could be both memory and antidote. Over time, I became devoutly dedicated to the strings and synth in “Let It Will Be,” imagined a world of no cares to “La Isla Bonita,” and realized adults would give you strange looks for humming “Like a Virgin.” At the end of the day, though, it was all about “Hung Up.”
Perhaps I’ve hung up my wannabe-pop queen cheetah print skirt, and outgrown the patent ballet flats. I’m at the age where I’ve been thinking about “real jobs” for a while, and several people who meet me don’t get told the stories of spending years hoping to somehow make it in entertainment; rather, soft smiles and offhand mentions of my passions. In spite of that, if I hear the tune in any public place, it’s difficult to not break out into the music video’s choreography, or my own (which I still maintain was a stroke of brilliance). “Hung Up” is a song you give yourself fully to. Now spin!
*
I’ve had difficulties trying to describe Madonna—both in this essay, and to others. Given Madonna’s boundless personal history, concoction of controversy, and ineffable affect on the music industry, I was unsure what was within bounds or scope to cover. When you’re revolutionary, perhaps you escape comparison. It would be limiting to confine her to dance-pop or disco diva; to punk rebel.
The now-65 year old got her musical start in the rock bands Breakfast Club and Emmy, respectively, after moving to New York City seeking a career as a professional dancer. Although in a memoir for Harper’s Bazaar, Madonna wrote, “New York wasn't everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms,” eventually DJ Mark Kamins stumbled upon a demo of hers, “Everybody,” and her career began to unfold. After a bit of tweaking, the duo took the tape to Sire Records, where Seymour Stein provided her with her first contract. Her namesake 1983 studio album produced chart-topping singles, particularly “Holiday.” Over time, her success laid parallel to the growth of MTV and the music video, which she has been credited for boundless contribution to—in a Rolling Stone piece, the authors wrote, “Madonna’s music videos have spent more than 20 years sparking conversations about fashion, feminism, sex, religion and what you could and could not show on television.” Her music videos were compared to artistic short films. In New York City’s Museum of Sex, her video for “Like a Virgin” plays, with a headline explaining it “showed the sexual freedom she supported,” nevertheless controversial; nevertheless placing more eyes on Madonna’s next move.
No stranger to valuing shock value, “Hung Up” is a resurgence, a dare. Her 2003 album, “American Life,” hadn’t garnered much acclaim, with many then calling “Hung Up” her comeback. The idea to produce a dance record at a time when radio stations were practically allergic was a risky game—hence Billboard’s piece titled, “U.S. Radio Hangs Up On Madonna.” Regardless, the song soared to number one in over 41 countries.
“Hung Up” is meticulously chosen patchwork. A song’s genome is significantly contributed to by its samples—and ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” was no small feat to acquire. Ms. Madonna Louise Ciccone herself had supposedly written a letter expressing her passion for the song. She is one of two artists to receive permission to sample ABBA, with tabloids proclaiming she had begged songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.
The sample’s lyrics are fitting for the sentiment of yearning fostered by the tune. The emotion conveyed is universal—between the two songs, and across the miscellanea of music history to follow. Alas, without being creative about feeling insufficient and insignificant and helplessly enamored and a little stupid for it, where would we be? How much art, at the end of the day, is made about feeling either not enough, or too much? “Hung Up” cuts up pieces of both emotions, drops them into a gray 2006 Philips Walita blender, and presses start.
Half-past twelve
And I'm watching the late show in my flat all alone
How I hate to spend the evening on my own”
And god, have I experienced all of the above—in my apartment alone, spending the evening on my own, hung up. Dorm room basements over discount sushi. Jeeps rattling between lanes on the highway. Hometown gazebos sharing strawberry sour straws and drinking decent-enough coffee. The skyline lookout in Jersey; the park on 124th St., the garden on E 4th. There are many locations, some obscure and some not-so obscure, where I have had discussions with friends—or strangers, because those most removed from the situation just might give the best advice—unpacking what a potential love interest might mean, or complaining about something or someone we were just absolutely hung up on. Between the slightest change of tone, a canceled plan, or potential others involved (was that another girl’s hand in the corner of the table in that restaurant photo? Does the way their arm is wrapped around these people scream “platonic embrace” or “I’m secretly into you”?), we were hung up.
And of course, in these moments, the hours passed by—as Madonna had said—quite slowly. However, for nearly every moment my friends and I spent waiting for a call night and day, dare I say, was one where we were fed up, screaming lyrics and repeating that we were better off like broken records until we believed it at least a little bit.
*
“Hung Up” had been, and, considering my bias, will forever be—the enduring pop star song. For all it is dancey, it is elusive; for all it commands attention, it exists behind a veil of exclusivity and coruscate synonymous with the album cover of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor—you’re invited in, but don’t overstay your welcome. On the cover, Madonna does not lock eyes with anyone. Her arm and leg are outstretched, urging viewers to keep their distance. She looks towards the heavens, bathing in the lights of the supposed disco (the “O” in “Madonna,” of course, serves as a disco ball). 2005’s Confessions, which also birthed an entire live album in 2007, was glossier, bolder, and playful following records like Ray of Light and American Life—Like a Prayer Madonna had come back, accompanied by synth, bass, and the exuberance of the disco.
The song begins a stressed soul’s nightmare, with a ticking timepiece. It picks up smoother than one would expect—a build aided by the ABBA sample, interspersed with Madonna’s commanding vocals. The introduction is a hypnotic swirl, flowing steadily like water; compelling, but consistent. It demands attention. The song brings us to Danceteria—the New York City discotheque Madonna herself frequented.
Contrasting the difficulty that came with acquiring the sample, however, are fairly simplistic lyrics:
Every little thing that you say or do
I'm hung up
I'm hung up on you
Waiting for your call, baby
Night and day
I’m fed up
I’m tired of waiting on you.
And so, she dances. The club, of course, is supposed to be an escapist paradise; an avenue for proclaiming to friends the following morning, “I don’t even know what happened last night!” Alas, although typically the first few hours are an ignorance-is-bliss dance trance, at times there comes an inevitable creeping thought about maybe, possibly texting someone you shouldn’t; maybe you miss someone, maybe you really messed up the other day, maybe you should just get home. It is these types of lulls that “Hung Up” is perfectly attuned to, and subsequently aims to find remedy to. “Hung Up” is the friend that grabs your hand when you appear a little too in your head, or the stranger in the bar that tells you you’re quite pretty when you’ve got a glossy look on your face.
Madonna quickly finds this determination and self-respect on her own in the song, proclaiming that radio silence isn’t something she’ll be tolerating, and her (presumably ex?)-lover (or “no-strings-attached” situationship, what have you, whatever we’re calling it these days) will regret not reaching out:
I can't keep on waiting for you
I know that you're still hesitating
Don't cry for me, 'cause I'll find my way
You'll wake up one day
But it'll be too late
The 2005 music video, a tribute to John Travolta with Grease and Saturday Night Fever-esque dancing, is also fitting for Confessions’ lead single. Following the beat, Madonna spins and pops her knee in a purple-y pink leotard, clearly unscathed from her accident months before. After some time by her lonesome, she joins a larger party of dancers, jukebox in tow. Interspersed are clips of dancers in a variety of locations, including Los Angeles and London. The video boasts almost 460 million views, and stars Sofia Boutella, Mihran Kirakosian, Daniel 'Cloud' Campos, Sebastien Foucan (well-versed in parkour), and Miss Prissy, dancers that also accompanied her on tour.
Evidenced by Madonna’s re-record and new music video a year ago, “Hung Up on Tokischa,” listeners are still kept on their toes, saying that the “evolution of Madonna” is incredible; that she has remained shocking, talented, brave. The new video is raunchy, bold; a mesh of neon color and all that glitters. Madonna locks lips with Dominican rapper and Dembow artist Tokischa in the Washington Heights-filmed video, trading Jean-Paul Gaultier torpedo bras for rosy red shorts. Her royal blue zip-up is similar to the one in the original video. Tokischa appeared to be an excellent collaborator for Madonna, proudly sex-positive in her artistry and aiming to “push the envelope” as much as possible, as written in LATINA. Although uploaded 17 years after the original, the video still has millions of views.
Madonna was cool; Madonna is cool, however you define it. Defying the faulty idea that to be “cool” is to be careless, Madonna makes it evident that she does care—about doing what she wants, regardless of the buzz; about being political, about making noise. Music video after music video, regardless of contentious iconography or gossiped-about ensemble choices, Madonna has appeared to abide by the fact that all press is good press. An esteemed pop provocateur, she has always been unapologetically herself. Of course she’s fed up and tired of waiting on whoever’s got her mind occupied while she’s out—she’s too good for it. A listen (or two, or two hundred) aims to convince listeners they should feel the same way.
She’s carried this fighting spirit with her even while not bathing in the limelight. In 2017, Madonna began performing at the Women’s March on Washington, stressing power in unity and love as she sang “Like A Prayer.” The same performance landed her under investigation for “threatening” comments towards the Trump administration. On January 17, 2023, while in her 60s, Madonna announced she would tour again, with a setlist spanning a career of four decades. With every live performance of “Hung Up,” Madonna still integrates the audience and aims to replicate her early ‘00s performances —the song is a coming together, a collective dance party, an emblem.
A vote for “Hung Up,” then, is a vote for the fact that some things never change—ailments can be cured by a little bump and hustle in your slouch socks with a friend or two; it is a vote for the notion that as long as there are revolutions to be had, there is dance to supplement the ambition; the endeavor; the lover.
*
The same way I reflect on my concert binge-watching sessions, sandwiched between zig-zag pillow cushions on a turquoise couch, the tune makes me think of my parents’ first Madonna listen as well, which I’d hear more and more about as the years went by. “Material Girl,” the first video my mom saw of Madonna on a videocassette, and “Holiday,” were some of the first songs they had listened to growing up in Communist Romania around 1986.
Young people, she’d say, were attracted to Madonna’s original style; the supposed controversy she welcomed, through the music and her outfits on stage. Older generations frowned upon their listening, citing the songs as “immoral” and crazy. Regardless, they continued to listen, making cuts in their new jeans to copy Madonna’s ripped ones and bracelets out of skinny old belts. Having a leather or denim skirt, she recalled, just as stylish as Madonna—made you the coolest person on the block. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, so-called “Madonna wannabes” transcended mimicry in fashion into attitude and audacity.
My parents had sufficiently built their Madonna arsenal by the time I was born, but Confessions was one of the first albums of hers that I was around for, too. This capability of music—to provide you the context for personal history, to help you learn about others, was a new kind of understanding I have been chasing constantly since. Nowadays, we drive around and play “Lucky Star,” both reminiscing on the moment we heard it ourselves for the first time, and the first time the other had (of course, I have dreams and ideas and romanticism, and my mother was actually there to show me the tunes—but there is a bit of magic in this dissonance). We often aren’t there for people’s entire personal histories—my parents are two of few people that were around for mine, and I am lucky to be one of the few around for my younger sister’s. Music, however, can help fill in these blanks a bit. “Hung Up” is played sometimes in public spaces or bars I’m in and I like to imagine my parents, clad in jean jackets with their hair teased, smuggling cassettes in tow just to play the tracks. I wear my mother’s blue silk shirt (similar to that from Madonna’s “MUSIC” promotional shoot), tall black boots, and play her favorite songs, wondering what it might have felt like to be her in the ‘90s; if I am channeling her, it must be by proxy that I’m channeling a little bit of Madonna too. I tell my sister about my bobbing back and forth in the living room years ago, and sometimes find her composing dance routines of her own to “Hung Up” the times I return home. I wonder if she feels a bit more connected to me.
Some mornings I turn “Hung Up” on to get myself out of bed. I play it walking down the street, I play it while preparing to go out dancing myself, and pray that the DJ finds it in him to put it on, too. I find myself now both a participant in and a victim to New York City, perhaps not an uncommon sentiment upon first moving. The young adult experience in what is regarded as one of the most bustling places that can supposedly change your life appears more like gaining the realization that it can “make or break” you instead; that a little forced independence, maybe a little prematurely, is required to see it through. It is a hardening place, but also one that comes with opportunities for unparalleled warmth and love, if you allow that.
Nowadays, I find myself in the library with a friend hours past closing, talking about reasons why people may self-sabotage relationships; as Madonna says, the reasons behind “still hesitating.” I find myself in the car late at night digging my knees into my chest as I try to explain away why I’m “still hesitating.” Sometimes, this has been accompanied by a deep-seated fear that someone would one day, as Madonna portrays in the song, decidedly be tired of waiting to be on the same page. Other times, as a mechanism of self-sabotage, perhaps someone doesn’t want you to wait—they intentionally want to push you away. Clearly I’ve exhausted all the options, and both been absolutely hung up and nervous of what it would mean that someone else may be hung up on me.
With that, a song I wished I could bathe in as a child grew into an early-twenties anthem. All the independent spunk of childhood, battered by the inbetween of adolescence, was soundtracked by “Hung Up” as my friends and I aimed to collectively return to it.
The seasons turn (although with such weather, their transitions notably less apparent). I get out of the car to hug my childhood best friend goodbye after some time finally in the same state. We all tear up at the movies, where they’re falling in love in a beautiful town in an all-too-unrealistic way, or earnestly unpacking intergenerational challenges. We turn around and head to where we’re going, thinking about where we came from.
“Hung Up,” to me, is emblematic of the larger idea that music can be seen as a puzzle piece; as formative, as a mechanism for understanding ourselves. We begin to listen to the same songs with new attitudes over time. We grow to further explore their significance, both as free-standing works and to ourselves contextually. The music itself does not change—rather, the listener does; approaching it a new person every time. When I consider the songs that have helped develop my everlasting passion and love for music, “Hung Up” makes the top of the list (of course, among other Madonna classics), accompanied by Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” every Depeche Mode record ever, La Bouche’s “Sweet Dreams,” a lot of Metallica, a bit of Eurythmics, and miscellaneous other pieces. This was my being a kid in the early 2000s—my sister, born almost a decade later, had Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster play on loop in the car instead, although she has received sufficient “Hung Up” exposure to consider it a part of her forever musical arsenal too.
Some songs are meant to follow you for your entire life. There are worlds of webs to be woven out of these birth and death songs. Like passport stamps, the melodies are a way to recall and reference original lessons and points within your life; hands to hold as they are applied in new ways and brought along for new escapades. Nostalgia is a sweet, sticky liquor that subtly stings; a cough medicine that coats your throat just right. I see all versions of myself, versions of others I’ve heard about, and versions of myself I’ve been too scared to become just yet all in the belly of “Hung Up.”
I recall an essay by Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker, “Becoming You—Are you the same person you were when you were a child?” as I write this. Rothman writes about how some individuals feel very connected to their younger selves—they feel as if they haven’t changed at their core—whereas others think of their life in chapters, complete with entirely different attitudes, emotional experiences, characters, and so on. He differentiates these types of people; one lot “continuers” and the other “dividers.” Music, as it feels to me, transcends this concept of multipart lives—perhaps you’re entirely different; perhaps you don’t recognize who you were as a child, or that person is someone you can’t even remember. The music was there regardless, as powerful as the written word. Its life cycle can feel infinite.
Perhaps I am quite different than I was in 2005—although many threads have remained, including favorite flowers and tastes in chocolate and an affliction for sweet-smelling things. A love for music has never had a true moment in the shadows, even when I might have thought it was being put on the backburner.
*
While Madonna’s song is one that can be played at the club and a houseparty (makeshift club, if you will) alike, it is also one that can urge people out of a funk, get people to change the way they view a relationship; get people to feel better in unison. I believe in that power.
And I don’t mean to imply that this has stopped with Madonna; that I’ve grown disillusioned with the music industry, or don’t have faith in our ability to generate new, forever Pop Stars (although there is no arguing that monoculture has been beaten to the ground). The commentary is mixed—that there isn’t enough coverage on indie music scenes, and labels, larger publications and streaming services alike favor already-established artists, but also that there are fewer household names: more projections about who will be the next cross-generation star, and less concrete evidence for a solid guess. This is all without considering the fact that trend is valued over talent, streams rely on social media, and we live at a time where late-stage capitalism and the hyper-digital age are dismantling many “traditional” norms of the music industry. It is a lot harder to believe in the daydream of being a music starlet when even being recognized as an artist happens a lot less often, and “success” in music comes with several middlemen involved (not to mention what feels like some incredible background in self-advocacy and advertising, a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology if you can, and many voices on the inside—not to be hung up on any of that). In 2005, releasing “Hung Up,” Madonna did not feel the desire to follow mainstream trends. She gave the world some disco. The song, albeit innovative, was a success—Madonna's creative process remained uninfluenced by the imperative to create commercially successful music. Would this be the case two decades later? Would we know who Madonna was if she was just starting out today?
In her Harper’s Bazaar short memoir, Madonna wrote,
I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going.
I don’t audition for shows, and am hung up on not getting any parts. I don’t produce music or seek out opportunities to take the stage, and am hung up on no one hearing my voice. I convince myself that I will write about music and creativity and how it makes the world go ‘round into the void—that no one will care, and yet am hung up on how badly I want to write. Madonna, I think, would say that art is meant to be made. “Hung Up” would say, and with attitude, “Well, someone has to do something about this,” raising an eyebrow not-so-subtly.
As time goes by (no pun intended), I see more and more how ludicrous it is to be your own biggest setback (although is that not a bit inherently part of being a woman in your early twenties?). Regardless. We have to write as much as we are given every reason not to write. We have to sing and dance in spite of it all. We have to not spend the present thinking overwhelmingly about the future, or the past. We cannot waste time waiting…
Tick, tick tock it's a quarter to two
And I'm done, I'm hanging up on you
When I read the description for March Danceness…which sought songs that migrated to the dancefloor, or were club hits…there was no doubt in my mind that “Hung Up,” the song I’d produced living room carpet choreography to, fit the bill. My decision to write about “Hung Up,” as it appears to me, is also in some ways a saving grace, and some form of personal call-to-action. As I lay prisoner to creative burnout, I can’t help but think of the unabashed joy that came coupled with creating years ago, and how Madonna inspired those feelings.
And, admittedly, I was hung up on this essay, too—I never found myself in the right “place” for writing; I had convinced myself it was insurmountable, and I wouldn’t do it justice, and I wouldn’t be telling the right stories or asking the right questions or properly moving anybody. Perhaps this is part of an innate crisis of storytelling, with any medium. The essay was borne about after I spent a long night in Boerum Hill, driving back to the Upper West Side and looking out at the bridge and skyline, sharing bittersweet musings with my friends about the looming end of undergrad, about how we’re lucky to be in our twenties and in this sinkhole city, about how everything, at the end of the day, will be just fine. I think that music helps make this real and true. I’d gotten back home and thought to write this down, and it almost—just almost—was bound to remain a passing “almost.” Alas, it was a 2:42 A.M. rampant scribble, Madonna’s voice coyly saying, “I’m tired of waiting on you!” in my head.
Ariana Eftimiu is a student at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City. She tries not to get hung up on things, but sometimes that first requires making a several-hour-long playlist on Spotify about it, writing poetry, or a long walk accompanied by a coffee and her loved ones. She has published work in the National Poetry Quarterly, Not Very Quiet, and the Columbia Daily Spectator, among other places. Follow her co-run online music and arts magazine at pottedpurple.com or catch up with her @arianadrinkingcoffee.
felix da housecat’s “Sinnerman” and the Seven Deadly Sins by candace walsh
1. Eunice Waymon changed her name to Nina Simone when she began playing piano in an Atlantic City bar because…
a) Eunice didn’t want her mother to find out she was playing music in a piano bar.
b) Eunice was only performing in a piano bar to make more money in less time, freeing up more practice time to pursue her goal of becoming the first Black classical concert pianist.
c) Eunice once had a Hispanic boyfriend named Chico who used to call her Niña, and she picked Simone as her last name after French film actress Simone Signoret.
d) All of the above.
To talk about “Sinnerman” is to talk about sin and Nina Simone. To talk about Nina Simone is to talk about Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the name Simone was given at birth. To talk about Eunice Kathleen Waymon is to talk about Mary Kate Irvin, Simone’s Methodist minister mother, just as to talk about any of us is, in some unavoidable ways, to talk about our mothers—and to talk about our religious mothers is to talk about the ways their religion hurt and hurts us. Sometimes their religion is Christianity, body size, sometimes it’s about booze or pills or pyramid schemes or regional codes of behavior. If you’re not sure if it’s her religion, ask yourself this question: Did she/does she reliably choose it over you?
We can talk about mother/daughter conflict for hours and not run out of things to say. We can talk about daughter/mother conflict for years without talking about intersectional oppression. That’s how well it works.
Before Nina Simone was a world-renowned singer who also played the piano, she was Eunice Kathleen Waymon, raised since toddlerhood in Tryon, North Carolina to become the first Black classical concert pianist. At three years old she began playing the opening hymn for her traveling minister mother’s sermons in the Carolinas. By six she was playing piano for her hometown church. One of the songs she played was a version of “Sinnerman.”
“Sinnerman”’s premise merges the human experience and the state of sinning. Pop-culturally, “The 7 Deadly Sins” sounds badass. In a Catholic context, the term indicates that experiencing pride, covetousness, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, and sloth will lead to death of the sinner’s soul. Experiencing these states is also feeling these states, which turns feelings into sins.
Are feelings sins? A philosophical question beyond the scope of this essay, but I’ll just leave these here:
“Feelings are indicators, they’re not facts,” RuPaul, 2024 New Yorker profile.
“Feel your feelings,” therapists, kindergarten teachers, and other wise humans.
Being told our feelings are sins to avoid makes us dwell on them even more: “Subjects who were told not to think about a white bear had a heightened awareness of the object, meaning their intent to not focus on the object backfired,” Daniel Wegner’s experiments show. This is called the ironic process model. In the context of the 7 Deadly Sins, it's a tidy bit of entrapment.
The number 7 recalls the Christian 7 days of creation: the journey, the completion [1], and Eve’s consequential bite. Seven days march us through each 52 weeks of the year, over and over from birth to death—a linear unspooling. Sometimes the linear doesn’t apply, as when 8 precedes 7. In the fourth century, the 7 Deadly Sins’ earlier iteration was the 8 Evil Thoughts, composed by the Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus (who sounds like a blast). His audience: other monks. He warned that gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory, and pride could be stumbling blocks to being a good monk. Over time this list drifted over from its intended audience to parishioners. About 300 years later, the future Pope Gregory I cut sloth and made pride the ruler of the rest. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas clipped sadness and restored sloth. The Catholic Church’s Catechism replaced vainglory with pride [2].
Nuances get lost. An ancient listicle of pitfalls meant to support monks wandered over to harangue everyday people. Toxic positivity took a hit with the sadness erasure, but healthy self-esteem as pride became a deadly sin and supplanted obnoxious self-importance aka vainglory. Long story short, marginalized people, who need all the self-esteem they can get in societies that knock them down, steal their lunch money, and call them ugly, are hectored to be humble, as pride is a deadly sin, while the vainglorious peacocks and other garish birds keep on strutting, microaggressing, gaslighting, and appropriating.
I did not hear “Sinnerman” until Felix da Housecat’s remix began playing in 2003 on a short-lived Santa Fe FM station called Blue radio (not to be confused with the blues). Blue music had a timpanic blur that reminded me of club lighting on Lucite and white laminate. It slipped me from the bonds of mountain time and motherhood, back to New York City and my single life. The song hit me like a one-person Rapture. It pulled me from my life as the pregnant driver of a sporty green station wagon, toddler snack Cheerios wedged between seat cushions buttcracks, in a town-city where all the buildings legally had to be beige and couldn’t be taller than 45 feet. I was walking and running alongside New York’s East River, riding my bike to work, dancing in bars and clubs, running down three flights of tenement stairs in a new outfit my friends would greet with hollered compliments like Get the fuck out of here. Stop it! No! I love you! Shut up! When “Sinnerman” played, my former life montaged inside my body.
At the time I assumed the hypnotic, beating beginning to “Sinnerman” was Felix da Housecat’s addition, and I was wrong. I assumed “Sinnerman” was a song in which the singer was bitching out a crappy boyfriend named Rock (also wrong). I loved Nina Simone’s ominous, lilting tone. Her deep voice vibed queer to me. Had Simone unwittingly been Rock Hudson’s beard? I wondered, also wrongly.
“Sinnerman” emerged from the tradition of Black spiritual songs. In 1955, the Black gospel group The Sensational Nightingales released “On the Judgment Day” in 1955 as with Julius Cheeks and Ernest James listed as its songwriters. A year later, the white group Les Baxter Orchestra released a slightly different version of this song, named “Sinnerman,” with Baxter and lead singer Will Holt listed as songwriters. White appropriation, theft, credit-rooting. Karma: nobody has ever sounded more ridiculously, dandle-voicedly white as Will Holt singing “Sinnerman.” I couldn’t get past two bars.
Simone released her “Sinnerman” in 1965. The song begins in pianic media res, a one-handed, looping, three-notes-forward, one note back pattern. She wrapped her voice around and through the rigor, doom, and time’s-up bones of its lyrics. Owned the song with her voice. It’s often been covered since, but to listen to other iterations is to long for the grandeur of hers. That said, the dirge-adjacency and sermonish duration of Simone’s song benefits from Felix da Housecat’ sharp remix, which preserves the beginning and layers a catchy dance beat seamlessly over the tempo. His versions are four to six minutes long, and you can dance to them. It’s close to impossible not to, as I realized in that station wagon. It had me car dancing.
The lyrics tell a story: It’s Judgment Day, and the unrepentant Sinner Man is trying to hide from God. But where you gonna run to? Sinner Man tries to hide behind a rock. No dice. Silly Sinner Man. Next he runs to bodies of water, but they turn to blood and begin to boil as he approaches. Can you imagine the smell? Then he asks the Lord to hide him…from God? The Lord says, “Where were you when you were supposed to be praying? Go to the devil!” Not an insult; he means it literally. Sinner Man fucks off to the devil, who is waiting for him, but we don’t get to hear what the devil says, probably because he’s a bad influence. Nina Simone sings the word power, over and over. And over. As if Sinner Man doesn’t totally get it by now, God and the rock and the bloody bodies of water all double down on reminding him, “You oughta be praying.” Instead, he had felt at least one deadly sin enough for his soul to go septic. Prognosis: soul death. Simone’s “Sinnerman” brings home her ten-minute song with a muddy, frenzied slapping of the piano keys. Then her drummer serves up some jackboots-banging-on-the-door percussion plus a high hat’s chhhhhh.
As anyone who has lived through charismatic altar calls can tell you, the dulcet invites are extended first, second, and a tension-rising third before the preacher pries the recalcitrant loose with a stick. Nina Simone was known for ending her sets with “Sinnerman.” It gives good stick.
What was it like to be twentysomething Nina Simone performing “Sinnerman” as the sinner, layered over the inner child of five-year-old, legs-dangling Eunice Waymon playing “Sinnerman” to help her mother save souls at revivals in North and South Carolina? Little fingers drumming the keys, waves of song cresting from choir to congregation and back again, crying people coming up the aisle, knowing she was such a good girl, so special, helping her mama do the Lord’s work.
2. “Nina Simone” and her “Sinnerman,” her “Lilac Wine,” her “Mississippi Goddam” and on and on would not exist if…
a) Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute had given Eunice Waymon the scholarship in 1951.
b) piano bars hadn’t been paying twice what Eunice made as a piano teacher.
c) the bar manager told her she had to sing as well as play if she wanted to keep her job.
d) she had let her mother’s opinions dictate how she lived her life.
e) we deserved Nina Simone. We don’t. She should have gotten into the Curtis Institute. Her dream was to be the first Black classical concert pianist. And she was more than good enough. In the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? she tells an interviewer, “I’m sorry I didn’t become the world’s first Black classical pianist. I think I would have been happier. I’m not very happy now.” In 2003, the year Felix da Housecat’s remix was released, the Curtis Institute awarded Simone an honorary diploma. She missed the ceremony, as she was too ill from breast cancer to travel from her home in France. She died a few days later.
f) All of the above.
In I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, she wrote, “When I was rejected by the Curtis Institute it was as if all the promises ever made to me by God, my family and my community were broken and I had been lied to all my life.”
She wrote, “I was done with music.”
She wrote, “I was changed forever.”
She thought everyone had lied to her, her whole life: each and every member of her community who had pitched in what they could to sponsor her musical education, from childhood piano lessons to living expenses that covered her scholarship year of preparation at Juilliard for the Curtis audition. She thought the Curtis Institute “didn’t want me because I wasn’t good enough.”
Six months later, “white people who knew” told her she was turned down because she was Black. Curtis did want to enroll Black students, just not her. They wanted young men from prominent families, not “an unknown Black girl.” Race, class, gender. That was bad enough, but as she wrote: “no one is going to turn around and admit to being a racist. They just say…you weren’t good enough…you feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice and at the same time there’s the nagging worry…maybe it’s because you’re just no good.”
As Eunice approached the Midtown Bar and Grill to apply as their piano player, her mother’s voice rang in her mind. “A bar? My God, in my own family I have the devil himself!”
And He said go to the devil…
If you’re the devil, you don’t have to go to the devil. You’re already there.
By accepting this position, Eunice knew she would be transiting, in her mother’s eyes, from a blessed, talented young woman to “the devil himself.” But had her mother ever truly seen her daughter? “Momma didn’t seem too interested in what I was doing; after…showing me off in the community and making me play for her in church before her services, she didn’t seem to care how I was coming along inside, as a person.”
Eunice was able to hide what “Nina” was doing for a while. “I knew she would hate it. I hid it for a long, long time.” Later, when Nina began to perform in Philadelphia, she chose to tell her mother rather than having her find out. The response? Predictable. “I was out in ‘the world,’ as she called it, and there was no forgiving that unless I repented.” She never acknowledged or praised her daughter’s hard work and artistry: singing and playing piano up to seven hours a night. “It was strange how guilty she made me feel...there were some things her beliefs didn’t allow her to accept…but that didn’t include the money I gave her every month…earned out in ‘the world.’”
At and after the Midtown gig, Nina Simone’s renown grew. Better venues. Philadelphia instead of Atlantic City. Manhattan instead of Philadelphia. Sid Nathan at Bethlehem Records produced her first album, Little Girl Blue, then chose not to promote it. Why?
racism or am I just no good?
A white Philly DJ, Sid Marx, played the crap out of her track “I Loves You Porgy” sometimes up to four times in a row. When she suggested to Sid Nathan at Bethlehem that it should be released as a single, he hung up on her. Why?
racism or am I just no good?
When radio stations made the same request, Nathan complied and the song became a hit in “New York, Philly, down in the south, everywhere.” But not in her mother’s house.
or am I just no good?
Parents can say—and even believe—their lack of pride and affirmation is a form of faithfulness to their religious beliefs. This can coincide with parents being jealous assholes. When your three-year-old grows up and stops being the kind of extraordinary that makes you look good and helps pull in crowds for your sermons, it can be uncomfortable. See the deadly sins covetousness and envy, hiding behind the fake-glasses-and-mustache disguises of piety.
In a letter to his father in 1919, Franz Kafka wrote: “What I would have needed was a little encouragement…a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it from me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road. But I was not fit for that.” We deserve to do what we are fit for, and to be loved and supported the whole time. What artists transmute from the gulf between deserving and getting—from parents or society—has filled many a museum, concert hall, library, and record rack. That doesn’t justify the gulf’s existence.
Kafka was right, and yet he was also far more privileged than Simone. Years later, Simone met and became close friends with Black playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry. Their conversations brought her awareness to intersectional systems of oppression. “I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.” Before that context, her mother’s judgments could only land as personal slights and attacks. Patriarchal religion guided her mother’s perspective, but so did reality. Working in “the world” referred not just to being outside of a church but to a man’s world, a realm rife with sexism and misogyny. Compounding that was the racism Simone encountered along with growing adulation and a paycheck: “One night at the Midtown, I overheard someone saying that I was from Lexington, Kentucky and I was a dope addict, which was why I played for hours with my eyes closed….I went back to my room that night and cried for hours at the idea that people were going around saying that about me.” Maligned at home as the devil himself, maligned at work as a heroin user. This world was also a world of projections that engulfed not just Eunice, but Nina. Cleaning houses, as her minister mother had done in addition to preaching, and teaching children piano were generally more protected ways to make money than playing piano and singing for drunks and bon vivants at two a.m. Then why did Mary Kate Irvin take the money Nina earned, week after week? It was needed. Rejecting money to stand on principle can be ruinous for people living in externally imposed financially precarious circumstances. Simone’s memoir records through her childhood memories how hard her parents worked while being systemically deprived of living wages and job security. They were working toward the American dream they were determined to claim; at home the topic of racial discrimination was taboo. Her whole family moved up to Philadelphia to live near Nina in a deeply earned happily-ever-after in which Eunice was accepted by the Curtis Institute and went on to be the first Black classical concert pianist. Effectively, the Curtis Institute rejected them all, as well as the Tryon townspeople who contributed to and championed her music education.
The most notable was her white British piano teacher, Muriel Massinovich. Simone recalls, as a child, meeting her for the first time: “She was petite, like a little bird….when she opened her mouth and talked in her delicate English accent I wanted to pick her up and put her in my mouth, she was so sweet and pretty.”
As a piano tutor in Philadelphia, Simone’s “only real friend was a woman named Faith Jackson. Her customers knew her as Kevin Matthias, and she was a whore….she must have seen something to like in me because she gathered me under her wing and took me along to parties sometimes….I can’t remember how we met, but she lived nearby and somehow we just drifted together.”
I turned each page of I Put a Spell on You (including the ones about her friendship with Hansberry) hoping for a big queer reveal, but beyond these hinty-glinty sentences, there were none. I kept looking. The New York Times referred to her as bisexual, and her bio on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture states, “Although she was not openly bisexual, Simone was rumored to have relationships with women, and wrote of her attraction to both genders in her diary.” Being an out queer person was almost always reputationally catastrophic for public figures before the mid 1990s and was often a luxury only highly privileged or previously disavowed people could claim.
Not anymore. As my straight women friends never tire of telling me, queer women are so lucky. If only they didn’t have to deal with men. I wish all women had or claimed more options. Yet this truth pluriversally acknowledged is considered one of the deadly sins: lust (inordinate or illicit desire).
Nina Simone’s voice gives no perceptible indication of wanting to sound girly. Any womanly delicacy is shot through with the torsion of heated steel. Dazed music writer Priscilla Bajomo describes her voice as having an “untrained androgynous timbre and unusually low range.” In an interview, Simone said, “Sometimes I sound like gravel or sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.” She didn’t care about being a singer, and maybe that helped.
She didn’t care to be a jazz singer, a term Simone said was “a white term to define Black people.”
She didn’t care about clubs. “If the money wasn’t right and it wasn’t fun I wouldn’t play.”
She didn’t seek fame as a singer. “What Sid Nathan didn’t know was I wasn’t interested in being famous, and I didn’t think being a singer was any big thing.” She got to choose all the songs on Little Girl Blue, how they would be played, and with whom. Not caring enough about whether she had an album or not to compromise her vision kept her work from being junked up.
She didn’t care to play over people: “If they don’t want to listen then I don’t want to play. An audience chooses to come and see me perform; I don’t choose the audience. I don’t need them either, and if they don’t like my attitude then they don’t have to come and see me. Others will.”
She didn’t care until she got involved with the Civil Rights movement. “I was needed. I could sing to help my people. That became the mainstay of my life. Not classical music, not popular music. The Civil Rights movement.” The little girl playing piano at revivals to help her people could now harmonize with the woman she’d grown into, no longer shamed and in need of redemption. Preacher of equality through song and exhortation. Surprising, the spiraling ways ν apple can fall from the tree.
“To me,” she said, “we are the most beautiful people…Black people. My job is to make them more curious about where they came from, about their own identity, and have pride in their identity. That’s why I make my songs so powerful.” Yes, pride. Not a deadly sin; a wellspring.
Nina Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam” after the Birmingham bombing of 1963.
“First you get depressed, then you get mad. When those kids got bombed I sat down and wrote this song.” The plainspoken, fed up, and reasonably furious lyrics got the attention of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world. Many retaliated in ugly ways: radio station staff sent back boxes of “Mississippi Goddam,” each album broken in half. They did not think she, a Black woman, should be feeling and expressing anger, so often shamed as the deadly sin of wrath. But her song also made marginalized Black people feel good. Validated. “To have someone of her stature saying that! It made us so happy,” activist and comedian Dick Gregory said in What Happened, Miss Simone? As a famous singer, and a woman, she could and did express what Black men could not: wrath toward any institution or individual representing white supremacy. Righteous anger is never a sin, but it was deadly then and remains so.
Felix da Housecat’s “Sinnerman” is far more than a shorter, zippier version you can dance to. It’s a nonlinear room-realm big enough to accommodate little Eunice as she plays the piano for her mother’s and God’s glory; big enough for a just-coined Nina Simone performing it as a tribute, a penance, quest to transmute the irreconcilable; big enough for radicalized activist Nina Simone who sings it as a Movement anthem; and big enough for Felix da Housecat, the Black second-wave Chicago house DJ who shape-shifted it into a dancefloor hit the same year Simone’s soul left this earth. “Sinnerman” completes the transmutation of deadly sins into freedom and power. It’s big enough for everyone who wants to clap back to the 7 deadly clampdowns: all the feelings that, when fully felt, lead to freedom.
Note: In this essay, the sources for Nina Simone’s quotes are her memoir, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, and the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
[1] Per BibleProject podcast co-host Tim Mackie
[2] History.com, “How the Seven Deadly Sins Began as ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’”
Candace Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing (fiction) from Ohio University, where she teaches writing classes and received the 2022 Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. She will conclude her OU studies in May 2024. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Her poetry chapbook, Iridescent Pigeons, is forthcoming from Yellow Arrow Publishing. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages (creative nonfiction); The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review (fiction); and Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD (poetry). Her craft and pedagogical essays and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Craft Literary, descant, and Fiction Writers Review. She co-edits Quarter After Eight literary journal, produces the QAE Reading Series, and coordinates Ohio University’s Visiting Writers program.