first round

(10) godley & creme, “cry”
LOCKED UP
(7) larry carlton, “theme from hill street blues”
257-192
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/23.

chris keller: The timeless struggle between patience and control that Mike Post's and Larry Carlton's "Theme From Hill Street Blues" evokes

Our four-and-a-half-year-old son left the dinner table and carried his banana peel to the garbage can. Then he caught a glimpse of the recycling bin. The peel made it into the trash, but a cardboard egg carton, an aluminum can and a cereal box caught his eye.
"Dad, we can make something with these," he said to me. His eyes beamed at the sight of the materials for his next project spread out before him.
Lately, our son has spent his days singing, having concerts and making things. He gathers scissors and markers and paper and leans into his muse. He cuts paper into tiny pieces and tries to tape them back together in different, imaginative ways. Occasionally, these creations become something more involved. A balloon and a Kleenex box become a drum. A toilet paper roll and some string turn into a rocket ship or a castle.
I've seen this behavior before. In my father. In myself. In our daughter. I know it all too well, and I am conflicted.
On the one hand, my son is the first of his kind in the world, unlike anyone who has lived before. He can do anything—in theory—that he wants to. And yet, he comes from generations of stubborn, sure and resourceful men on my father's side of the family. Men with a certain "Je ne sais quoi." Tough as it is to describe, it's already clear. He's got "it," this ability to take what others do not want and make something useful. And he's starting to realize it.
But it's also clear that he has this other, not-so-alluring side. It's a little aspect we never outgrew. It's a struggle to maintain patience. It's an urge to control outcomes. And when added together, those character traits create an outsized feeling of being "right." And he's starting to realize it.
So, like my father before, it falls to me to ask myself some questions. Can I be confident enough to let him develop organically and not guide him toward "the right way" to do something? Can I help him learn how to improve from his mistakes? Can I be patient and appreciate the gifts he's received from the generations that came before?
Because even though he has yet to turn five, I'm anxious. I'm anxious to see what he dreams up. I'm eager to know that he'll recognize all the chances he'll have to demonstrate his abilities. And I'm anxious because I know he needs to be careful out there. So do I, for that matter.
Anymore, we all do.

*

Leave it to me as I find a way to be / Consider me a satellite forever orbiting / I knew all the rules, but the rules do not know me / Guaranteed

By the time he found himself in front of two television executives who needed something from him, Mike Post had already demonstrated what he could do several times over.
Post made a hit with "Believe It Or Not," the theme from The Greatest American Hero, which he wrote with Joey Scarbury. That came on the heels of the TV theme for The Rockford Files,which landed in the Billboard Top 10.
Those successes came after a 24-year-old Post became the musical director for The Andy Williams Show and produced a Billboard Top 5 hit for a yet-to-be-famous Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, according to Post's biography. (You probably know it as the song during The Dude's dream about … bowling?)
So when executive producer Steven Bochco was looking for a theme song for an hour-long show that depicted a police department in a gritty town—somewhere in the Midwest or Northeast—he thought Post could contribute. 
Bochco and Gregory Hoblit had the task of bringing Hill Street Blues to the television screen as a mid-season replacement in January 1981. Bochco had already worked on "Columbo," "Silent Running," and "Double Indemnity" by the time he went to work for MTM Enterprises.
Post, who through The Gorfaine/Schwartz Agency declined an interview for this piece, said he'd never read the script for Hill Street Blues, according to a 2009 interview clip posted by the Television Academy Foundation. But upon seeing a cut of the pilot episode for the police drama, he was blown away by the story and the way it was told.

Post described the moment the group began to hash out what might be possible. 

"So Bochco finally goes, 'Hey, what do you think?' I said, 'Well, it's such a different show.' I said, 'What you'd normally do is something kind of funky and street-y … something really down and dirty.' 
And (Gregory) Hoblit said, 'You know what I'm thinking about is a door on a garage and then it comes up and a car comes out, just bombed out mean streets snowing and just really, you know desolate, you know, in the inner city.'
Bochco said, 'What else could you do?'"
I said, 'Well, you could go against it. You could write something really kind of poignant but not sloppy sentimental. Just kind of like you nod your head and go, man, there's gonna be somebody born, there's gonna be somebody died, there's gonna be a whole lot of stuff going to go down in this 42 minutes, but the clock's gonna keep ticking.'
'You know,' he goes, 'why don't you try that?'"

Post said he drove home, messed around on the piano in E flat for about 30 minutes and called the TV execs back. He said he found what they were looking for.
Thirty minutes to find what would turn out to be a Grammy Award-winning collaboration with famed session guitarist Larry Carlton that spent more than five months on the Billboard charts.
Half an hour to find inspiration and create a song that turned into a main character and a touchpoint for what would become one of the most decorated television dramas ever during its seven-year run on NBC.

*

In the pilot episode of Hill Street Blues, you hear the theme—or portions of it—five times.
You hear it over the closing credits, and you catch a riff in the first half of the episode as a transition from the A plot to the B plot. And after a critical moment that points toward tragedy, you hear the plaintive first four measures of the theme. And then during the big reveal at the end.
But the first time we hear the theme, that's the one that leaves its mark. It starts just before the opening credits when a garage door swings up and three police cruisers roll out to respond to a call. There's a three-part riff repeated over the first four measures. The syncopated rhythm sets a plaintive and reflective mood, and as the song almost stops altogether to heighten the tension just before the fourth measure, there's a release.
The song that played over the Hill Street Blues opening credits sequence differs from the "Theme from Hill Street Blues," which reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Adult Contemporary charts. Chief among the differences is that Larry Carlton's soaring guitar solo doesn't appear.
But on the single released in August of 1981, Carlton's guitar hits just over a minute into the track. It appears—to this untrained ear—to start somewhere in the major blues scale and ascend higher and higher until it comes back down to offer what I can only describe as wiggly little triplets that convey the limits of what an individual can control.
It offers a counterpoint, contemplation and perhaps a little bit of chaos to the main riff that Post called ​​poignant. That main riff no doubt influenced Carlton's playing. I wanted to ask him myself, but his representation did not respond to inquiries about an interview via email.
Born in Torrance, Calif., Carlton picked up his first guitar when he was only six years old, according to his biography. He dove into jazz, immersed himself in the blues and found John Coltrane. Then Doo Wop and Chuck Berry played a significant influence, according to an Aug. 2021 interview.
Those varied styles helped Carlton to become a prolific session musician, who—no doubt—got used to rehearsals, taking what had in front of him and making it better. 
The soon-to-be 75-year-old Carlton—his birthday is March 2—has contributed music to film soundtracks, television themes and more than 100 gold albums. He has appeared on recordings by everyone from Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt to Michael Jackson and Christopher Cross.
A contributor to Steely Dan recordings, his solo on Steely Dan’s "Kid Charlemagne" helped the 1976 release off The Royal Scam become No. 80 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time. During a live performance on Oct. 18, 2019, at The Iridium in New York City, Carlton called the "Kid Charlemagne" solo the only one he had improvised that he had to go back and learn.
I couldn't find the story of how Post and Carlton came to work together, but regardless of the creation myth, the magnitude of what they created remains apparent. And the theme's three distinct parts—the intro, the solo and the outro —and the feelings they invoked surely helped it climb the Billboard charts. 
All told, the "Theme From Hill Street Blues featuring Larry Carlton" spent more than five months on the Billboard charts. It helped Carlton win his first of multiple Grammys.
There's a video of Carlton playing the song in 2019 at the Blue Note in Napa, Calif., with his son Travis on bass. The joy on his face is evident and apparently hard-earned. There was a time when Carlton wasn't sure if he'd be able to strum a guitar again. Some 21 years earlier, Carlton came face-to-face with the uncertainty of life.
In April of 1988, according to a Chicago Tribune report published more than a year later, Carlton saw a dog and two teens run past his home in the Hollywood Hills.
Carlton went to close an open door and one of the teens fired a gun and hit the renowned guitarist in the neck.
He survived. Carlton suffered nerve damage, lost a vocal cord and had to relearn how to use his left arm, according to the Tribune article.
"I didn't lose consciousness. I walked about 10 steps and I laid down on the floor and I said, 'Jesus forgive me my sins and let's go home. I honestly thought I was going to die."

*

And as I still walk on, I think of / The things we've done together / While our hearts were young

I've spent too much time wondering if Larry Keller had the patience required to be a dad to a son. Because if my dad didn't, what does that say about me?
Little boys are relentless and unyielding and lack an attention span and demand more and more constantly. But that's part of the equation. The input that goes in and somehow allows knitting needles to become swords and hammers to become firearms. It's how we create fortresses out of sofas and use cushions as landing pads for daring stunts.

I don't remember dad putting up too much resistance as I scattered pieces of my imaginary world around our small Wisconsin living room that served as a playground and a laboratory. Hell, his act of turning on the television to police procedurals and guys on primetime provided a jolt for my still-evolving imagination. Magnum, P.I. and Knight Rider and The A-Team and Miami Vice provided a script of sorts to my childhood, which means to a large degree, Mike Post provided the soundtrack.
Sure, I loved some cartoons, but nighttime TV provided real ideas. It gave permission to turn household props into the tools required to build whatever contraption, vehicle or device would help Hunter or Stringfellow Hawk accomplish that day's mission. It's where I could consider when I'd need to use the helicopter from Airwolf and when I'd be better off flying the Screaming Mimi with the guys from Riptide.
It's where my ultimate dream of having a robot drive a go-kart while I sat in the back working on a portable computer took root.
My parents thought I was much too young to watch Hill Street Blues. But that doesn't mean I didn't catch glimpses at times on the hand-me-down black-and-white RCA television in my bedroom. And it doesn't mean I didn't absorb aspects of the drama. Especially the need to be careful, as least as conveyed to me through dad.
As a self-employed handyman, a "Mr. Fix It" type with only a high school education, dad could figure out how to fix or improve just about anything. He once built a tilt mechanism for a pickup truck topper, so you could lift one side or the other. And when it came to projects, my role as a kid was to fetch tools. Screwdrivers, Vise-Grips, clamps—whatever he needed when he decided he needed it, I'd go try to find it. And when he was done, when the project was complete, I'd put it away—while I was resting.
But the actual work—the hands-on activity that made someone handy—was left to him. It was safer that way. It kept me from getting hurt. Safety always seemed to be dad's thing, and his concern for what could happen was apparent. Over the years, it transformed from a caution to an obsession to paranoia. 
I learned early on to keep my bedroom clean and maintain a clear path to the door or else it would be deemed a fire hazard and I'd hear how I'd never make it out alive. Yet our smoke alarm went off anytime mom used the broiler.
When I learned to drive, dad developed what might as well be his signature invocation. A three-parter he'd recite with unmistakable feeling, never in rote obligation, and always to remind me of the hazards in the world and what I could control.
Fasten your seatbelt
Slow down.
Turn your radio down.
In other words, be careful out there.
And he said it a lot, 'cause in a small town you learned early on that putting on miles and burning gas for hours on end—if not fun—signified freedom. Even if I still leaned on my parents for nearly everything, cruising through town in that 1983 Olds Cutlass Supreme meant everything. It gave me a chance to learn on my own. It offered time to figure out answers to the looming questions clouding a teenage mind. It signified a path to becoming my own person.
And yet here I am, the same age my father was when I was a freshman in high school and I have so many questions I never got to ask.
Now that I have a front-row seat to witness the robots and castles and ninja weapons and swan dives off the coffee table, do I finally get it?
Because—without an explicit education—how am I going through life as a tinkerer and a jack-of-all-trades inclined to figure things out and ask "What if we tried?"

*

Every generation / Blames the one before / And all of their frustrations / Come beating on your door

If the "Theme From Hill Street Blues" provided the show's beating heart, then Sgt. Phil Esterhaus served as the show's soul. You could argue Esterhaus—portrayed by the late Michael Conrad—served as the voice of authority.
Conrad's Esterhaus kicked off each episode with a briefing for the officers of Hill Street precinct, a daily rundown of what had happened and what to keep an eye out for on the streets of this fictional city. And at the end of each briefing, Esterhaus had a message for the officers, his officers.
The tone and pace change. So too does the shape of the 6-foot-6-inch man responsible for preparing the officers from the Hill Street precinct for another day. Heck, the sergeant isn't beyond adding an adverb here or there or drawing out the syllables to hammer home his point.
"Let's be careful out there."
Very. Extra. Really, really. Particularly. Always.
Those are just an embellishment of the most important word: Careful.
And always out there, where no one was in control of what could happen, let alone what would happen.
In his position of authority, it's all Esterhaus can do for the rank and file in the precinct, many of whom are younger and thus—it stands to reason—more inexperienced. Or worse: they are too eager to show off what they can do for the veteran who is left to relay patterns and facts during the morning briefing.
There's a reason Esterhaus is in that room. Sure, his voice carries the weight of experience. But it's more deliberate than that. It's all that is left for him to do. Too old to work the beat, Esterhaus can only communicate what he thinks could happen out there. But he can't help the rank and file beyond that. He can't stop anything from happening. He's a blueprint for Cormac McCarthy's Ed Tom Bell, the Texas sheriff in No Country For Old Men who recalls:

I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but wonder how they'd have operated in these times. ... The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. but I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: Okay, I'll be part of this world.

At some point, we all reach a point where we realize the world we'd been preparing for is not the world that exists. It's moved on. Still, there is a fork, a choice to be made. You can throw up your hands, withdraw and take everything you've learned with you.
Or you figure out what you can do that no one else can and teach someone else.
In that room, Esterhaus is trying to do that. He's showing the officers of the Hill Street precinct that there is another way. And as a proxy for that path, the sergeant reminds us that in a world where no call for service can be regarded as routine, care and patience can keep his officers safe. Patience—in lieu of control—can keep his officers alive. 
It can keep us alive.
We'd all do well to practice patience. We'd all do well to be careful out there. There is no dress rehearsal.

*

I know I'll make it back / One of these days and turn on your TV / To watch a man with a face like mine / Being chased down a busy street / When he gets caught I won't get up / And I won't go to sleep

Looking back at it now, in those final days that mom and dad spent together, I became a briefing sergeant of sorts. I took in reports from doctors and nurses. I absorbed what I could. I disseminated what I could to my dad and sister and to others. I shouldered the rest.
I also had lost any sense of patience, so I tried to control everything.
Every briefing sergeant worth their stripes knows the limits of control. There in that room, you control the flow of information. You control what others know. You prioritize information for them. But it's an illusion. Once you leave the room, once others are left to their experience and instincts, their fears and strengths, no one can stop what awaits.
And neither could I, no matter how much I tried to prepare for something that had dominated my entire life to that point. Blame movies if you must. Criticize television, which had been my window into how to feel in the real world. But for as long as I could remember, I had an obsession with being there when my parents passed away.
I wanted to bear witness, though I doubted whether I had the courage.
I wondered whether I could feel that level of loss. Genuinely. Honestly.
I wanted control.
But I wasn't all there because in the back of my mind stood a more ominous threat. See, as it became clear mom wouldn't last another week, we faced the prospect of dad living on his own. In the wake of at least one stroke and another mini stroke—a transient ischemic attack, also known as a TIA—his peripheral vision was gone. His memory became worse. His system of remembering was reduced to a pen and notepad. It made everything in that home a hazard at best, the cause of a fatal accident at worst.
The thought of dad driving a car prompted me to imagine any number of potential tragedies that seemed unavoidable, which shook my confidence and faith. My sister and I had any number of conversations about how we might be liable should dad kill a family of four on his way to the grocery store for cookies and "Broasted" chicken.
Ultimately, the three of us made an imperfect agreement. Dad would wear an alert pendant that could be used to summon emergency assistance. It also had GPS capabilities, so we'd be notified if dad was on the move. It didn't take long before I got some alerts that appeared on my phone. One alert showed him at the grocery store. Another showed him at the cemetery. At first, I would call him out of the blue to see how he was doing. Then I began to ask him about his travels.
After that, the pendant didn't move. And largely nothing happened.
Until something did.
It's hard to know if I remember it as the best conversation I ever had with my dad because of how we spoke to each other or if it was because it was our last.
As the uncertainty about an emerging virus swirled around us all, dad and I talked at length on March 17 about whether we each had enough food on hand. We brainstormed a list of supplies we'd want to have on hand should things get dire. We talked about washing our hands and how people don't think twice about spreading germs.
At this point, we didn't know what this thing was.
We also talked about happier things. We talked about the results of the inspection on the first home my wife and I would purchase. We talked about how the kids were adjusting to our recent move to New Mexico. And we talked about how thankful we were that mom—and her compromised immune system—wouldn't have to experience whatever was on the horizon.
I asked him to stay away from people and I asked him if he had enough to eat. And I asked him to be careful.
But no one can prepare for a microwave that—at an otherwise insignificant moment—would burst into flames that could spread so fast that my napping dad had zero chance to escape from the home he built for us with his own two hands.
And about an hour after a text message from my best friend suggested that I check on my dad, after so many failed attempts to reach my father, the phone call came just after noon Mountain Time. My sister was on the other line and I merged the calls.
"Is this Chris Keller?" the woman's voice asked.
"This is."
"This is officer Jennifer Schaaf with the Mount Horeb Police Department. I regret to inform you that your father Larry Keller died earlier today as a result of...
I don't remember the rest, at least the details. My mind turned off its ability to make memories long enough that I now need to use the police shows I watched on television as a kid to fill in the blanks.

*

We watch those films / That make men cry/ Young lovers kiss / Then fight, and die / We start to yearn, we climb the vine / We have to face the truth sometime

That's from a song on The Who's 2006 album Endless Wire titled "Mike Post Theme." Written by Pete Townshend, the tune not only tries to convey not only the impact Post had on television but the effect the stories on those shows had on us.
In the case of Hill Street Blues, by the time its series finale aired in May of 1987, the show had won the second most Emmy Awards of any television program to that point. And judging from a Google search, it provided a template for any number of dramas and other genre shows yet to come.
It also provided a jumping-off point for cast members and those tasked with creating the world they inhabited. Writers and producers that worked on Hill Street Blues became creators of shows such as Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, and Law & Order, according to the New York Times.
One of those was Dick Wolf, and when he created Law & Order and needed a theme song, Wolf did exactly what Bochco did when he needed a theme for L.A. Law or N.Y.P.D. Blue later on.
He reached out to Mike Post.
For all he created after the "Theme from Hill Street Blues," Post said he knew he'd connected on something in those first 30 minutes at the piano, tinkering around in E flat. 
But how it came to him—and the legacy of that time—well that's not so straightforward. 

So, you know, it becomes a character, it becomes an integral part of the fabric of the drama or the comedy or the emotion. … I'd like to give you something highly technical and I can. I can certainly walk you through, you know, everything technical about it. I know everything, not everything, but I know most everything technical about it. And I don't know anything about it emotionally except that it's magic. And I don't even know how it happens. … Other guys will say this and I've heard it said it's the truth. About half the time or three-quarters of the time, I'm a witness. You know, I'm just kind of standing there and the train comes by and, OK, we're gonna do that. … It's just this lucky little gift, you know, and I can see it in my kid. My youngest kid's got it, you know, and I see it. He's seven years old and I can see it, you know, I know what that is…

*

And he was talking 'fore I knew it, and as he grew / He'd say "I'm gonna be like you, dad" / "You know I'm gonna be like you"

For weeks, screens provided one of the only methods I had to absorb the loss. I acquired photos of what remained of my childhood home and scrolled through them endlessly on my phone. I called a local television station and obtained footage it recorded but did not broadcast. It contained images of firefighters and police officers scrambling with hoses and spraying so much water to combat the fire that changed lives.
The last time I saw my father was over FaceTime as he was lying in a casket.
Because of what was then still the coronavirus outbreak, weeks passed before I could travel back to my hometown and see first-hand what was left behind. Before I could salvage anything from my time in that home or save anything related to who I was.
So I could learn who I had become.

I bought a costume, one befitting of an investigator. The Tyvek suit, work gloves and respirator mask not only shielded me from the smells and soot and any toxic remains of insulation or other 1970s construction materials. 
As I made my way through the house the first time, I lingered in two spots. 
And I lingered in the living room—my living room—which because of the fire had been divided. On one side, closest to the fire, lay destruction and rubble.
On the other, shelves of knick-knacks and collectibles remained. A glass display case stood in the corner, intact, and held the handbells I bought for mom as gifts and model cars I bought for dad as gifts, a patina of soot and ash over everything.
I lingered there in the hallway where, according to police officers, they found dad facedown, underneath where the smoke detector had hung. There I wondered if the smoke detector worked. I wondered about dad‘s last thoughts. His last memories.
I lingered there because, in some ways, my costume kept reality at bay. It limited what I could truly feel. It gave me permission to play a role that—naturally—created some level of disassociation. Of otherness.
But before I left town, I went back in. We had plans to raze the house, remove the foundation, and prepare the lot for sale, so I knew it would be the last chance. I took my mask off for a while and just let the smell of soot and smoke settle over me. I removed my gloves and rubbed my fingers over the oily lacquer that covered everything with a sticky film.
I felt the remains of the first home that I knew. I felt the remains of myself and the person I'd been forced to become wake up.
During my trip, I gathered up all kinds of things during my trip to bring back.
I filled a notebook with memories of how mom's baked chicken smelled and the made-up games I created to keep myself busy as a kid, and the anxieties I carried as a teenager, trying to figure out who I was.
I found mom's diary from when she was pregnant with me, the boy who would become her son, which somehow survived the blaze. 
And I basically filled a U-Haul trailer with small motors, collectibles from dad's Western-themed room, scrap materials—wires, locks, nails and screws—and tools. I have a lock-picking kit. I have an assortment of slim-jims for getting in car doors. I have more Vise Grips and sockets and screwdrivers and clamps than anyone has a right to own.
You might say I'm finally ready to tell dad that I am ready to use these to make something.
The home we moved into had a shed out back and I turned it into a workshop of sorts. I talk to dad often back there. I ask him which of these tools would help me make things like bird feeders and poster frames and bean bag boards and fence posts.
Before firing up his decades-old miter saw, I ask him if I am doing it right, and if I am not, please cause a power outage because I'm being careful out here.
Our son likes being in the workshop and looking over all the tools and things. The other day I cleaned up the workshop a bit and went through some of the scrap materials I salvaged from dad. My son helped. We looked through buzzers and motors and switches. We also looked at leftovers from some of the home repairs we've done over the last three years. Light fixtures and brackets and whatnot.
"Dad, what are we going to make with these," he asked.
And so we started with a wooden truck. And then we'll try something else. And we will keep on trying to take what we find and improve it because that's who we are. It's what we do. 
Today at least, I think I am content to wait—patiently, carefully—until my son reaches an age where I can share more materials to help him realize who he is. And I will do my best to try not to control his journey. 

Chris Keller dropped out of college in 1999 to enter the professional journalist draft. His career started in a small town of 1,200 people in his home state of Wisconsin and has stretched to markets across the country. His pursuit of stories that help people understand the world around them has been honored by the Online News Association, Public Radio News Directors Inc., the Los Angeles Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and state press associations in Wisconsin and Indiana. Currently the managing editor of Albuquerque Business First and a member of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government Board of Directors, Chris lives in New Mexico with his wife, children and cat. He misses his parents dearly and wants everyone to be truly careful out there.

In It for the Vibes: kathleen rooney On the Ecstatic Trembling of “Cry” by Godley and Creme and Miami Vice

Some people are night owls. Not me; I’m a lark. This fact has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with biology—I am incapable of sleeping much past 5:30 am. My brain stirs around dawn and makes me wake up, fully and irrevocably, no matter what I’ve done the night before. Consequently, I’ve never been a nocturnal partier. On the few occasions that I have stayed up from dusk to daybreak without at minimum a couple hours’ slumber, I have wanted to die.
Or at least to cry, which is the subject of this essay: the English soft rock duo Godley and Creme’s bravura 1985 song “Cry,” about which more soon. But for now, suffice to say that my identity as a morning person means that—despite my abiding affinity for music and all its power—I’ve never been one to hang out on the dancefloor until sunrise.  
This lack of lived experience of nightlife has left me ignorant in certain areas, including the function and expertise of DJs, those crepuscular people who—with their crates of records or bins of CDs or laptops of digital audio files or whatever—play recorded music before a live audience.
I didn’t realize it last January, but 2022 was destined to be the year that I finally understood and subsequently appreciated what it is that DJs do exactly. After decades of thinking that they just sort of threw together a playlist and played it, I apprehended that their role is more metaphysical. I mean, I now know that they use mixers and crossfaders and cues to align beats and craft transitions and manipulate rhythms and tempos and so forth, but my epiphany relates more to their manipulation of vibes—the responsibility they take for a non-stop flow not merely of music but of transportive feeling.
In true lark style, I came to this knowledge not by encountering it in person under cover of darkness, but by reading. Late in June, I served as the interlocutor for my friend Andy Farkas at Madison Street Books here in Chicago in support of his fantastic essay collection The Great Indoorsman. A deliberate self-conscious artificiality characterizes his work, and when I asked for some of his recent reads with similar traits, he recommended Sphinx, the 1986 debut novel by the French author Anne F. Garréta.
Andy has taste worth being influenced by. I devoured the love story’s 152 pages, pages in which Garréta reveals the gender of neither her unnamed first-person narrator, nor the narrator’s lover A***, a feat which helped Garréta become only the third female member of Oulipo—the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, meaning the “workshop of potential literature”—a loose collection of primarily French-speaking authors who use linguistic and mathematical constraints to create their work. [1]

Through a macabre plot twist best left unrevealed, the protagonist blunders into the position of DJ at a prestigious and decadent 1980s Parisian night club. There, they are shocked into the insight that “To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult.” As they practice this mystical craft, they discover that:

Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try—utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure—to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy, nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song), subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill.

In other words, DJs rely on shared instinctive feeling. And what is a shared instinctive feeling if not a vibe?
The noun “vibe” originates in 1940, short for “vibraphone,” which itself is a 1926 hybrid of “vibrato” and “phone,” with vibrato arising in 1867 and meaning “a tremulous effect in music” from the Latin vibratus: “to turn, to vacillate, or to tremble ecstatically.” 
All these variations relate to the word “vibration,” cropping up in English in the 1650s from the Latin vibrationem: “a shaking, a brandishing, a setting in tremulous motion.” The word vibe’s denotation of an intuitive signal about a person, place, or thing became popular in the late 1960s (think of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” [2]) but has roots as far back as 1893, when Frank Earl Ornsby's astrology text The Law and the Prophets used the expression “good vibrations” to mean “positive energy.” [3]
In August, not long after I became a Sphinx enthusiast, I participated in a one-off show put on by my friend Andrew Tham (these Andrews—they know what’s hip) and his ever-evolving project/band big TEEN, a Chicago-based DIY arts scene concerned with live music and performance. At the end of the evening, a DJ—Andrew’s buddy Chris, then performing as Donna Somersault, but whose actual DJ name is Disco Crystal—did a 15-minute set during which he challenged himself to play as many vinyl records as possible during the allotted time. He did 13, and probably could have done more, but when he put on Gloria Gaynor’s Spanish-language version of “I Will Survive,” everybody danced in such goofy ecstasy that he let it play in its entirety as the set’s conclusion.[4]
Experiencing Chris’s work reinforced—physically, empirically—what Sphinx had taught me about the athleticism and mysticism that combine in the labor that a DJ executes. Dork that I am, I recommended Garréta’s book to Chris afterwards as I delivered my compliments.
To round out 2022’s unexpected DJ-appreciation trifecta, in October, I read Ed Caesar’s New Yorker profile of the DJ Mladen Solomun, the so-called King of Ibiza who plays the island’s oldest night club Pacha at least 20 Sundays a year, cultivating a cult-like following.
In a passage in which he quotes Ed Frenkel, a Berkeley math professor and Solumun devotee, Caesar writes:

“He never played the same way,” Frenkel recalled. “It took me some time to realize that he actually had a much stronger bond with his audience than most d.j.s did.” It wasn’t that Solomun gave listeners exactly what they wanted, Frenkel said—he simply knew “what channel of communication was open with this particular audience and would operate along that channel.” A Solomun set, he told me, returns us “to that space we had as children, mesmerized by music, mesmerized by looking at the starry night sky.” He went on, “The function of the d.j. is to preside over the ceremony. He is the priest, or the shaman.”

Solomun himself says, “I want to have fun. If I’m not having fun, I can’t transmit the happiness.” And what are vibes but the transmission of emotion from a source, as well as an emotional reaction to the transmission of that aura? [5]
The aura transmitted by Godley and Creme’s “Cry” with its minimalist melody and massive bassline is unsettling and tense, pentatonic and propulsive, simultaneously melancholic and soaring, a sobbing rhythm appropriate to its title and owing much to the production of Trevor Horn from The Art of Noise [6]. “Cry” captures more than its simple lyrics suggest—that people in love often cheat and lie—and it does so on the level of emotion more than intellect. As John L. Walters writes in the Independent, “If you were looking for a sound, a single note, to sum up postwar Western pop music, the long, high, crying G-sharp at the end of the line would have to be a contender.” Apparently, Godley and Creme are admirers of Debussy, which makes sense because Debussy too dwells in the realm of transcendent ineffability, given his status as arguably the first Impressionist composer.
Outside of their previous band 10cc’s oeuvre (the standout of which is perhaps 1978’s yacht rock classic “I’m Not in Love,” with its ethereal multitracked backing vocals), “Cry” became Godley and Creme’s only Top 40 hit in the United States, making it to Number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. They also directed the innovative video for the song, a black-and-white masterpiece featuring a series of diverse faces lip syncing, mixing and fading into one another by way of dissolves and wipes.

This virtuosity in what was still, in the 1980s, a relatively novel genre proved significant to both Godley and Creme, who directed over 50 of that decade’s most important music videos, including “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock, “Don’t Give Up” by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung, and “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran to name a few. As Glen Levy writes in Time, “The entire medium of music video owes Kevin Godley and Lol Creme an enormous debt.”
Even if they depict distinct characters and narratives, what the best music videos are “about” more than anything else is vibes: a moodboard to support the sentiment of the song. Vibes in videos—and everywhere else, really—are atmospheric, miasmic. A smell almost. A room spray for the mind. Operating in a lyrical mode as opposed to a sequential or argumentative one, vibes express and evoke idiosyncratic emotions. They make an audience get the vapors. They—like the lover who doesn’t “even know how to say goodbye” in Godley and Creme’s hit—can make you wanna cry.
Given the song’s chart success and the ubiquity of the video on the not-yet-five-years-old MTV, I must have heard “Cry” unwittingly somewhere in the background over the course of my lifetime. Yet neither commercial radio nor cable television are how I recall first encountering “Cry.” No, that encounter came as a result of “Definitely Miami,” the twelfth episode of the second season of Miami Vice, an episode which premiered on January 10, 1986 in which Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs must take down underworld figure Charlie Basset, played to icky straggly-haired perfection by the also icky-in-real life Ted Nugent.

Being only five years old myself at the time, I also did not encounter this episode when it initially aired, but rather as a result of my being married to esteemed March Xness co-competitor Martin Seay. A Michael Mann afficionado, Martin had recounted many a thrilling detail of the show to me over the years. I was intrigued. Miami Vice sounded less like a plot-driven cop show and more like a tone poem—an ode to the sun-drenched, cocaine-dusted decaying Art Deco milieu of a subtropical city when greed was good and Don Johnson thought he had a shot at a music career. In short, it sounded like a show that was mostly about vibes.
The origins of Miami Vice are the stuff of elevator pitch legend. NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff (apocryphally anyway) wrote a two-word napkin memo, “MTV Cops,” signaling his desire to cash in on the triumph of the channel. Memo recipient Anthony Yerkovich, a writer and producer whose work included the award-winning police procedural Hill Street Blues, drew inspiration from a recently passed asset forfeiture law that allowed law enforcement agencies to seize property from the criminals they prosecuted and use it in departmental operations. Yerkovich drafted a script about a team of Miami-based vice cops trying to stop the influx of narcotics into their metropolis.
In a crucial development for vibes everywhere, and possibly the very invention of the 80s themselves, the pilot episode, “Brother’s Keeper,” features Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” playing over an indelible scene of Crockett and Tubbs driving around the neon-lit city at night, one of the first instances of a pop song being woven into a show in this manner. For all its implication of a narrative, “In the Air Tonight” is really a song about vibes, because implication is all there is—we get a huge mood but we don’t get the whole story.
Shot on location and adhering to executive producer Michael Mann’s dictum “No Earth tones,” the show was broadcast in stereophonic sound, a newish development which allowed Miami Vice to incorporate a move that—along with the palette—made the show stand out from its competitors: the assertive inclusion of pop music to enhance and advance the action to the point where each installment is basically a 46- to 49-minute music video. These high production values meant that each episode cost about $1.3 million to make, 30% more than the average cop show, a sum which appears to have been spent almost entirely on vibes.
Obviously, when Miami Vice became available on Netflix in 2014, Martin and I watched the hell out of it, savoring the pastel t-shirts worn under white linen suits and the sharp-dressed cartel bosses and the speedboats darting across aqua waters and the suitcases full of money and the Ferraris driving intensely around at night, all set to the most iconic popular songs of the era, not to mention the numerous cameos by musicians including Willie Nelson and Sheena Easton and Little Richard and Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen and Barbra Streisand and too many more to list exhaustively here.
In a show that saturates itself with vibes, “Definitely Miami” is super-saturated thanks to its last six minutes being set to Godley and Creme’s “Cry,” a pairing that the Miami Vice Fandom Wiki tells me “is considered by many fans to be one of the defining scenes of Vice as a show and among the best endings of the second season.” It totally is.
When the theme of this year’s March Xness tournament—one-hit wonders of the 1980s—was announced, I vowed to write about “Cry.” Tragically, my number did not come up in the lottery; however, I care enough about this song that I wrote a whole essay about it for an out-of-competition spot. Talking about “Cry” and its immaculate vibes and the use of those vibes in “Definitely Miami” means that much to me. But then. In an expedient plot development befitting one of the later and admittedly less impressive seasons of Miami Vice, someone dropped out, a spot opened up, and here I am, applying my powers of persuasion to gain your votes—to “play the game” as the lyrics have it.
Over the course of their investigation into Basset/Nugent’s malfeasance, Sonny becomes romantically involved with Callie, a beautiful French-accented bikini-clad blonde who claims to be trapped in a bad marriage but is really Baset’s moll.
Many an intricacy pops up in solving this crime, but these intricacies are not the point. They are merely the set-up to the culmination in which “Cry” plays during the satisfying scene in which we watch real-life NRA shill and racist sleazebag Nugent get his violent comeuppance, and Sonny sees to it that his seductress—whimsically wearing an outfit with mermaid vibes and serving faux-innocent vibes by building sandcastles on the beach—gets arrested by helicopter for reasons unknown, reasons which seem mostly designed to let Sonny stop and gaze soulfully at the vehicle as his faithless lover is led away. This exquisitely soundtracked sequence is, as the kids say, a whole mood.
Watch it again; I’ll wait.
The way that Callie mistakes Sonny for Nugent before—in a wipe effect reminiscent of the original “Cry” video—she recognizes who he really is? The grace with which Sonny slides his sunglasses over his eyes, closing his face to Callie the same way he’s closing his wounded heart? His windswept pout? All those little points of light dancing on the crests of the ocean waves? The show may as well have been called Miami VIBES.
Gestures and movements, outfits and accessories. Suggestions, not statements. Insinuations not ideology. A misty glow more than a resolved shape. Vibes!
Yet some people don’t like them, or don’t find them enough at any rate. French New Wave film, for instance, like music videos and Miami Vice, is also largely “about” vibes. A cinephile friend of Martin’s and mine who showed us many filmic treasures over the years could not stand Jean-Luc Godard. This friend is a smart person, but thought Breathless was dumb. Boring. At the time, I couldn’t explain to him why it was neither dumb nor boring to me, but now I see, wit of the staircase-style: vibes.
This friend also hated the oeuvre of David Lynch, which again now makes sense, because every Lynch movie is vibes up to here.[7] Relatedly, this friend claimed that he could never “get” poetry, and—knowing I’m a professor of it—frequently wanted me to explain it to him, which past a certain point I could not do, because ultimately, poetry is often also very much about vibes. A vibe-oriented approach encourages and enables the audience to do what it wants in terms of its experience of the work, whatever its genre or medium, instead of insisting on particular rigid interpretations. Alas, some people just can’t let themselves vibe to that.
Another cinephile friend, fellow March Xness essayist Robert Puccinelli recently wrote a perceptive review of George Franju’s elegant and upsetting 1960 horror movie Eyes Without a Face. His final paragraph about the film’s conclusion captures the essence of the lyrical apprehension produced when an artist turns from the hardness of narrative to the softness of vibes: 

The poetry of the ending doesn't make any concrete sense, but it does make poetic sense. The feeling of loss and desperation is simultaneously suffused with a feeling of acceptance (you don’t have to understand; just follow your intuitions and be) which feels like a form of freedom, of release for the viewer. You leave the movie feeling strangely exhilarated, almost uplifted: artists have worked on you and filled you with an unnamable longing. This longing can never be satisfied, but its beautiful desperation doesn't feel like a lack because the film that gives it to you is whole and complete and perfect and perfectly beautiful.

Intuitiveness and being—yes. Vibes! They are less about sense than about sensation. They afford a poetics of feeling, if you will. Vibes tend to be more closely related to poetry and music than to story or philosophy for how they use rhythms and images as ends unto themselves, not necessarily to advance a narrative or point.

You can catch a vibe like you can catch a ball, a thief, or a cold—actively and enthusiastically, aggressively and with great intention, or passively and unwillingly. Sometimes with a bad vibe, you’re curious—you peek at it suspiciously through a door held shut only by a short brass chain, but it seeps in anyway. Other times, a vibe hits you like a convulsion and you want to be rocked. Music is a way to choose what vibe you want to invite in, or to let somebody else offer that vibe up for you.
In Veronica, her novel about the hedonistic milieu of fashion models in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill captures music’s superb function as a conduit for vibes. At 17, Alison, the protagonist, says:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next—songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

Significantly, before she stumbles into modeling, Alison aspires to be a poet [8]. As a character, she’s drawn magnetically to vibe-centric pursuits.
As I bid farewell to 2022, year of my discovery of the magic of DJs, I doubt that I’ll be catching vibes on late-night dance floors. Luckily, I can catch them in a lot of other places. I can keep vibing over and over to the last six minutes of “Definitely Miami,” for example. I can cue up “Cry” again and again like a spell that Godley and Creme have put out there for me and for everyone when we need to cast a peculiar enchantment over ourselves, permeating everything with emotional intensity, becoming the vibesmiths of our souls.
In 2015, I noticed that my DePaul student Jireh, an awesome poet and artist, always signed their emails “vibes.” I liked that a lot, and so with that I will leave you.

Vibes,
Kathleen

[1] High-fives to the translator Emma Ramadan for getting the book’s genderlessness and atmosphere of sex-and-death—its vibe!—to shine in English, too.

[2] Brian Wilson wanted to call the song “Good Vibes,” but lyricist Tony Asher argued that doing so would be a “lightweight use of the language” and that the full word would sound less “trendy.”

[3] One hundred years later in 1993, producers Quincy Jones and David Salzman launched the hip hop and R&B-focused magazine Vibe.

[4] Gratitude to this show for starting at 5:30 pm and therefore ending comfortably before my preferred bedtime.

[5] Steve Hulme, Pacha’s booker, pursued Solomun for the club’s Sunday slot because, as he put it, “It was the kind of music girls liked. There was just a vibe about him—there was a vibe about the label, the name Solomun was really cool.”

[6] As followers of Xness may remember, The Art of Noise is a band I like whose collaboration with Welsh nonpareil Tom Jones I wrote about last year for March Faxness.

[7] For instance, this music video interlude in Mulholland Drive where Rebekah del Rio performs a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” is one of the most mesmerizing covers of all time.

[8] While we’re in the neighborhood, Frank Báez has a fantastic poem called “Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ” that examines the similarities and differences between the two vocations.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in September by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.