first round

(5) Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
dulled
(12) Rosanne Cash, “Seven Year Ache”
289-126
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 3/9/23.

BUHM BUHM: irene cooper on “tainted love”

The primary image is disembodied: me seeing me in the backseat of a rust-ruffled Ford Country Squire station wagon, aurally bathed in the subject of this essay. And isn’t that always at issue, this idea of being in or out of the body, or of realizing the Schrodinger state of being both in and out of the body until some practical, clinical asshole says different.

I am sixteen, July 17, 1982, and soon to be headed to Rio de Janeiro as a Rotary exchange student, when the synthpop single peaks at #8. It is entirely lost on me, though not for long, that I am to be released from the paranoid Catholic lockbox of my childhood into the technicolor (albeit still Catholic) extravaganza that (to my virgin eyes) is coastal Brasil.
I am not, at this point, a virgin by choice. In 1982, presumably straight Catholic boys in Queens are less tempted to sin than one might presume.
Gloria Jones records the original version of “Tainted Love” and releases it as a B side in 1965, the year of my birth. Jones re-records it in 1976, and includes it on the album Vixen, produced by her lover, glam rock icon Marc Bolan, of T. Rex. In choosing to cover the single, Soft Cell duo Marc Almond and David Ball cite Bolan, as well as the rough and ready UK Northern soul club scene—manifested in clubs such as Va in Bolton and Wigan Casino, which spin Black American soul music out of Chicago and Detroit almost exclusively—as major musical and aesthetic influences.
Soul. Glam. Industrial. Conceptual. Wowza.
And then there’s the video. WTF.

July 17, 1982, is seven months and six days away from Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, the final day of Carnival, the celebration that precedes Lent, the Catholic period of deprivation before Easter. Growing up in a predominantly Irish enclave in Queens, I understand the sere implications of Ash Wednesday. The absence of meat on Fridays, the giving up of one’s pleasures—be that chocolate or bread or alcohol or, secretly, masturbation—is an imitative martyrdom endemic to what I understand as faith, and subsequent redemption. Sacrifice is holy; just say no. Nothing comes before Lent, and Lent is always coming.
Plucked from the muffled greyscale grit of a Jacob Riis photograph, I would drop, that next February, into the psychedelia of a Pablo Amaringo painting, 3D and fully animated, sound up. During Carnaval do Brasil, parades of samba school dancers, strategically feathered and blindingly bedazzled, lead a six-day party in an ecstatic orgy of indulgence that almost requires the restorative promise of forty days of sobriety. It’s a suspension of reality, a free pass on no-holds-barred dancing, drinking, and sex that ceases, cleanly, according to doctrine, on the threshold of the most somber liturgical observance in Catholicism.
A week or so before Carnaval, I am travelling in the north, in the Amazonian city of Manaus, staying with friends of my Carioca (Rio de Janeiro-based) host family. I am seventeen and still, reluctantly, a virgin. The couple who has welcomed me into their home are in their twenties (perhaps the man is thirty), and new parents. The woman is preternaturally gorgeous, if visibly tired. The man smiles at me a lot, says, repeatedly, I should stay in the north for Carnaval.
The woman takes me aside at some point to warn me about lança-perfume. My Portuguese is not yet fluent, but I manage to get the gist of it: lança-perfume (akin to poppers) is a mix of ethyl chloride and scent, emitted from a pressurized canister and inhaled for a quick and short-lived rush. During Carnaval, it is not uncommon, the lovely woman tells me, for someone to sneak up on an unsuspecting (non-consensual) other party with a blast of lança-perfume. Along with the high, I learn many years later, ethyl chloride ingestion can result in arrythmia, diminished motor coordination, dizziness, drowsiness, slurring of speech, loss of feeling in the legs, and hallucination. I have yet, at seventeen, to hear the phrase, rape drug. It’s all in good fun, the madonna says. There’s a song about it. But I am made aware: giving oneself up to the moment is not necessarily an act of generosity; it can, instead, look and feel a lot like sacrifice. The lamb does not consent.

In the video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Marc Almond’s disembodied head leers over the cosmic boredom of a young man tormented with sleeplessness, subjected to the intrusion of fiery blue balls of light and the cage-dancing antics of two mudflap girl starlight demons more interested in each other than in him (though he is clearly, also, disinterested). Almond is Puck, is Mephistopheles, is a Pee Wee Herman’s evil cousin of a second-tier god, toying with the virgin, whose dream and subsequent awakening lie somewhere outside his closet of an apartment.
My own sexual awakening, unbeknownst to me, is concurrent with the emergence of what would be an epidemic of HIV and AIDS. I live in Houston after returning stateside from Rio. House of Pies in Montrose is more tenderly known as House of Guys. I work at a Stack ‘n Stash with Milton Doolittle. We sell fashionable doodads to organize one’s various closets. Still relatively recently deflowered, my worst case scenario involves herpes, maybe chlamydia, the odd crab. Milton, barely forty, eschews the clubs that yet pulse and throb with young men, is perpetually trying to quit smoking, and has a penchant for eating cold casseroles over the sink, despite intestinal troubles. He asks me to go with him to visit a friend in the hospital. Milton is afraid of hospitals. We bring a king-sized bag of M&Ms. A man who might have been young lies in a bed behind a curtain at the end of the ward. He is skeletal, and lesioned, and somehow funny, in his whisperings.
AIDS is wildfire and information is repressed, as it will be for years to come. There is medical infighting and a proprietary tussle between western nations over research of a disease that is not being mitigated, let alone championed.
In July 1982, Terry Higgins dies, the first acknowledged British casualty of AIDS. In 1982, AIDS is still widely held to be a Gay disease, a reckoning for a tainted love contained to a so-called deviant population.
In September 1982, the Tylenol Murders terrorize Chicago. In December 1982, surgeons perform the first heart transplant into a human, who lives 112 days. Also in December, Time’s “Man of the Year” is not a man, but a computer. By 1982, everything is or will be tainted: the water, the air, and of course, love. We know a kid one block over who jumps to his death, full of yearning and poisoned hope. Occasionally, a leaking body is found in the trunk of an abandoned car in the Kmart parking lot, across from the tennis courts. A ninth grade girl goes into labor in the stairwell of the E wing of the junior high school. Purity, in respect to that which is untainted and untouched, is not a thing, and certainly not a thing to be confused with innocence, a state of being wholly separate from inexperience. Innocence, in our case, does not preclude knowledge, but absorbs it, transcends it. Aspirationally, to be innocent is not to be unbroken, but to live joyously in defiance of the caustic drippings of those legacies that would make broken our only signifier.

New Zealander singer-songwriter Lorde’s 2021 cover image for her album Solar Power celebrates this kind of freedom with the depiction, photographed from below, of her very own taint, a slang term for the part of the body defined as the area of sensitive skin between the genitals (scrotum or vagina) and the anus; the perineum. Taint this, taint that. Tis, though.
For release in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the image of Lorde’s taint is obscured by a sunburst. Sunlight is, for all purposes, shining right out her ass. “[H]oly light,” one Weibo user in China suggested. And indeed, the image recalls the prominent print of a crucifix emitting heavenly light that hung in my grandmother’s boarding house.
Taint obscured or in full view, Lorde’s cover reads unavoidably wholesome. Is this a generational shift, this sun-kissed embrace of oneself? But then I remember all the beautiful men and women on Ipanema beach, back in 1982, a slip of lycra to keep the sand out of the bits, bodies burnished and glowing and turning to and loved by the sun; me in my second-hand maillot, prim as a pre-Vatican II habit, shame-splotched patches of exposed Irish-Scottish flesh blistering at the suggestion of freedom and vitamin D. Love and light (as in sunlight—not neon, not dashboard, not the cloaked glow of a streetlamp) was not how I experienced, or how I believed I could experience, love. I thought (I may yet think): One must be seeded and grow in the sun to be of the sun.  

Voiced by Almond, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” is an exaggerated wink at the indulgences and excesses of the moment, a pleather-chapped nose-thumbing to the would-be utopians of the previous decade. You can smell the cocaine, it’s been said. Jones’ earlier, arguably more soulful rendition is plaintive. She’s got to—buhm-buhm—get away. In Soft Cell’s video, while the young man does indeed flee the teasing of the two curvaceous star-figures, it feels less like an escape and more like a rejection of a heteronormative fantasy.
In the 1980s, Pee Wee Herman, aka, Paul Reubens, animates Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A childlike jester, Pee Wee embodies both innocence and bedevilment. Never sinister, Pee Wee yet emits a whiff of grown-up naughtiness, an awareness that is both costumed in and elucidated through heavily made-up character. Truth and complexity otherwise inexpressible can sometimes breathe through the veil of entertainment, the arena within which such dichotomies of innocence and knowing are allowed. But only within. Without the suit and the bowtie and the makeup, there’s just Paul Reubens, getting arrested in Florida for lewd conduct—reportedly masturbating in a pornographic theater, which was presumably pretty dark and likely hosting other people engaged in similar behavior. Gay, as Black, is an acceptable anomaly in entertainment: a costume, a stage persona, acceptable—celebrated—as long as it remains contained to the arena. Self-love: Tainted love.
Unless the situation calls for a pariah. Should anyone be tempted to confuse the popularity of the resurrected Queer Eye as evidence of widespread social progressiveness, the father of the man who shoots up the LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs in 2022 provides a reality check when he tells the press that he thanks his god his son wasn’t in the club to dance, that he wasn’t infected with the gay. Whew.

Other covers of “Tainted Love” include recordings by Marilyn Manson (2001) and by Spanish cover band Broken Peach (2021). The latter, especially recorded for Halloween, features three zombie insane asylum patients playing guitar, bass, and drums, along with three zombie nurses performing vocals. The undead: Tainted love.
Broken Peach’s version mixes in riffs from Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and what one YouTube commenter identified as the intro from German hard rock’s Rammstein’s Deutschland. Controversy exists over whether Rammstein’s philosophy is, as the band maintains, left wing; or if it promotes, as some critics insist, a right wing national agenda, the very agenda that manifested the Holocaust. Nationalism, as Fundamentalism: Tainted love.
In an interview with fellow Soft Cell member Dave Ball, Marc Almond talks about their efforts at the onset of the endeavor to turn their art school, multi-media aspirations into something commercially attractive. Almond uses the term, Industrial Cabaret. Ball suggests they were after an amalgam of Northern soul + Kraftwerk; Almond chimes in that maybe they were more like Kraftwerk meets Judy Garland—Kraftwerk being the iconic pioneers of electronic pop.
The original members of Kraftwerk (trans., power plant), Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, cite influences from German Expressionism including film directors Fritz Lang (Metropolis), and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), as well as architects of future-focused and unsentimental movements such as New Objectivism and Bauhaus. The period after World War I and before World War II was, for Germany, a highly creative and artistically dynamic moment, and not a naïve one. No one didn’t know trouble lay ahead. But some artists and thinkers tried to stem it.
Of Kraftwerk’s ambitions later in the century, Simon Reynolds of NPR Music writes, “Kraftwerk were inventing the '80s…Crucially, it was music stripped of individualized inflection and personality, no hint of a solo or even a flourish. ‘We go beyond all this individual feel…We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine.’”
Reynolds talks about riding in a car on the actual Autobahn between the Black Forest and Cologne,  listening to Kraftwerk’s music: “It might have been…‘Autobahn’ itself—I had to [BUHM-BUHM] turn my face away and look fixedly out of the window to hide my tears. I’m not sure why the music, so free of anguish and turmoil, has this paradoxical effect. But…[it has] to do with what Lester Bangs called the ‘intricate balm’ supplied by the music itself: calming, cleansing, gliding along placidly yet propulsively, it's a twinkling and kindly picture of heaven.”
Gloria Jones is at the wheel when Marc Bolan dies in a car accident at 29. Clean, self-propelling machines that they are, Schneider and Hütter travel from venue to venue by touring bike. By July 17, 1982, I have no taste for sloppy tragedy or fresh air utopia, but I crave, oh, how I crave, the inflection. How I ache for flourish.

Despite Soft Cell’s spoken aspirations to the likes of Kraftwerk, something is most definitely lost (or scuttled) in translation. There is no heaven in Soft Cell’s driving “Tainted Love.” I do not cry in the backseat of the station wagon (going nowhere), nor do I feel cleansed. Technically pure, I am scoured, too, by the scraping losses of the seventies, and broken enough to let in a kind of joy, even innocence, forged in ruin, sharp as Eliot’s shards, crusted in last night’s cocaine shared among last night’s friends and lovers at the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that is 1982, if I can make my way to the right dimly lit place, away from the basements and fluorescent sprawl and mall-infested interstates of suburban paranoia. Love is all there is, teases the emcee through the greasepaint, and isn’t it resplendent, tainted through and through.
Touch me, Baby, please.

Irene Cooper is the author of Found, crime thriller noir set in Colorado, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family, & spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, & elsewhere. Irene is co-founder of The Forge writing program & Blank Pages Workshops. She teaches in community & supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, & lives with her people & Maggie in Oregon. irenecooperwrites.com

never to know happiness: J. W. Bonner on “seven year ache”

“Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.”
—Rosanne Cash, Composed

“[T]he hormonal flashes of love affairs are not the only things going on in a life.”
—Rosanne Cash, Composed

“They say all’s well that ends well / But I’m in a new hell every time.”
—Taylor Swift, “All Too Well” (10 minute version)

“I should not be left to my own / devices, they come with / prices and vices, / I end up in crisis / Tale as old as time”
—Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero”

“’Nome, I ain’t a good man,’ The Misfit said…, ’but I ain’t the worst in the world neither.’”
—O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

My youngest child is an unadulterated Swiftie. She braved the recent Ticketmaster meltdown to procure tickets for her six-person posse to attend the May 2023 Taylor concert in Nashville: an all-nighter,  her computer periodically updating her place in the queue as if feeding her algorithmic matches in a love search. It was: love—
Love kept her riveted to that laptop tedium. Love for an artist, love for those songs.
This daughter has recently been keeping my playlist stocked with Taylor’s gifts: the updated Taylor versions of Red and Fearless, Lover, Folklore and Evermore, and the loan of Midnights, because, although she has no cd player, my youngest loves to have the cd jewel case on her desk as a relic, a benediction, a talisman that sends her positive energy, that soothes and inspires and blesses.
I’ve been curious about the Taylor phenomenon since her teenage debut, and I was—am—an absolute fan of the pure pop of “Shake It Off,” song and video (video made even more meaningful because one of my former students dances in that energetic finale exuberance). “Shake It Off” convinced me of Swift’s chops. I’ve welcomed these musical additions gifted me by my baby, and I’ve been impressed by Swift’s recent work with the National’s Aaron Dessner—equivalent to Dylan’s musical development when he began to play and tour with the Band. The Band, Dessner and the National, opened up new avenues of expression while enriching the roots already embedded in Dylan’s vocabulary, and in Swift’s. Taylor Swift may well be, then, the 21st Century pop music equivalent of Dylan.
Taylor, of course, wouldn’t exist so deeply in the pop consciousness without the lyrical roads and rhythmic phrasings of Dylan. But that’s another essay.
There’s another elder whose influence threads through Taylor’s material: the daughter of the Man in Black. Rosanne Cash herself proudly lists and acknowledges those who came before her, and she, too, has become a musical progenitor to many, of whom Taylor Swift may be one of the most gifted today.
Both women started their careers closely identified with the Nashville country scene, though each brought an outsider’s perspective to it. Both women quickly broadened their palate to procure a place not only on country radio but also the pop charts.
Cash was on the road with her father right after high school graduation in the mid-‘70s. She tried a year of college at Vanderbilt, and she had writing and literature professors who proved helpful with her sense of vocation. (Cash attended Vanderbilt the same year I was visiting my high school ache, our respective college freshman year separation, she at Vandy and I along I-40 at Duke. I visited my then love interest early in our freshman year: she lived in an all-girls dorm with a desk monitor guarding the premises, a strict curfew for my departure. Nonetheless, irony of ironies, my paramour had a basement apartment with a window at ground level that would open sufficiently to allow my entry and exit during non-sanctioned hours. And when I returned a second visit, after Xmas break for a weekend, we had an evening at a bar close to campus, and now, decades later, I imagine that Rosanne Cash was there in that too bright space, enjoying a drink in the crush of college students and young adults, rejoicing when the bell clanged after a particularly generous tip, listening to too loud music and trying to shout over the bedlam of noise, of revery, of youth drinking and thinking of what the night might yet offer in terms of a warm body, warm bed, even as outside the snow continued to drift and pile. More likely Cash was at home trying to write a story or a song, likely at a family friend’s listening to the outline of a nascent song, picking a tune and trying a lyric in search of magical alignment. In reality, when we had returned to my almost-love’s room, we listened to Rod Stewart’s “The First Cut Is the Deepest.” It’s a fine enough radio song, written by Cat Stevens, of betrayal, of a heart “torn. . .apart,” but nothing like Rod’s earlier work with the Faces, or his debut magical solo records with Ron Wood’s guitar heat. Rod’s voice, even in the smarminess of the Stevens tune, conveyed an acute ache that keeps on aching, genuine feelforyou hurt, let me soothe you in this night, while-I-still-can emotion—the way my heart seemed to be feeling then, that  Nashville January night, walking home in the dark and snow, all the way to the room and some tears and fumblings, coming to grips with the understanding that this long distance striving was not ever going to be consistent enough to repair whatever misgivings or misreadings might occur in these brief rejoinings, as Cash herself, second semester underway, decided that college didn’t provide her with the education she needed to achieve whatever visions of herself had to be realized. She left. I left, too, in the cold of the following morning, a cardboard sign with black magic marker reading North Carolina on one side and Durham/Duke on the other, in perhaps a misguided or arrogant attempt to assure all drivers that, notwithstanding the long hair well past my shoulders, this young man aspired to greater things than robbery or throat slitting if some traveler proved kind enough to stop and offer a ride east on the great interstate transportation system, that means to escape ache and to return home to some kind of precarious and nascent comfort—if one, indeed, might ever come home again.)
A too maligned Gerald Ford was stepping down, defeated by Jimmy Carter, whose election seemed to promise a shift in American politics, a gentler administration, Southern charms: music, food. There was Bruce who was born to run, there were the Eagles checking into their Hotel California, Rod Stewart’s gleeful nights on the town. (Dylan would soon be saved.) America was not quite at the level of economic malaise and incapacity afflicting England, and the music of the time, notwithstanding the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, the Talking Heads, and the like, hadn’t quite equaled the intensity and stir, the gleeful, anarchic, in-your-face obscenity, of the Sex Pistols.
Cash grew up a Beatles fan, as she states in her compelling memoir, Composed. Germany, where Cash recorded her first record in the late ‘70s, provided her a back door into her own music—music that played with the traditions of her family heritage and her Beatles pop aesthetic rather than any British anarchy and mayhem. Germany was also where the early Beatles played, night after night after sweaty night, honing, in those dark clubs, the sound that would soon sweep the world in a kind of hysteria that Elvis and Sinatra and only a few others had achieved.
Cash, even coming from her lineage, her blood line and stepfamily, never enjoyed the equivalent. It’s partly the country phenomena: Hank Williams, mega country star, didn’t have that visceral, physical acclaim. And it’s also the lineage her father cultivated: outsider, fan of folk and pop musicians as far ranging as Dylan and Andy Williams.
Cash, of course, was not really country: that is, she grew up a California cool kid. (North Carolina is where I first listened to her breakthrough album Seven Year Ache and the titular single that had me swooning in love with her sound and voice. I was much more itinerant—Texas to Arkansas to North Carolina—than Cash, in some ways more country in my roots, notwithstanding the Bakersfield country sound haunting California. I began and ended my adolescence in Asheville, when its downtown was a shell, store fronts shuttered, the department stores drifted to the 1970s era mall, city sidewalks a temporary stop for those laborers using the bus line as transportation, for the itinerant hustlers, for the few patrons of the breakfast and lunch joints still slinging slop to warm a belly, if not a heart, if not hope—and life—itself, food enough as salve to whatever aches, physical or emotional, seeped into the flesh and soul, decades before the beer (and food) scene made this Western North Carolina mountain town one of the hottest destinations for (ex) Presidents and Hollywood types and the like. I lived in Asheville in those early to mid-‘70s, when living in Asheville didn’t make you a cool kid, when you told people Asheville and they always asked for clarification: Nashville?)
Rosanne Cash loved the Beatles. (I loved the Beatles.) She’d lived in London. All this before her early twenties and the recording of her first record. She’d lived a hip life. I wore uniform denim and boots—two decades before grunge gave it currency. It was the backwash of the Sixties look—not punk spunk, not disco flash. My friends and I in high school could have auditioned for the Allman Brothers, not as extras in Saturday Night Fever.
Or, given our stylings, we could have been session musicians for Rosanne Cash.
I became a fan of Cash’s music in the early 80s, about as old then as my youngest child now, who is immersed in the world of everything Taylor. I was in my early twenties, like Cash was herself, who was feeling her way to a sound that might be hers and hers alone, even as, good daughter that she is, she acknowledged lineage and influence and tradition. (As a kid, I was a lover of the radio and pop songs, but by high school I was a rocker, and when I got to college, I loved punk. Still, shortly after college, I found a way back to my earlier radio roots and to pop music and lovedlovedloved the single “Seven Year Ache.” It, too, caused an ache I could feel in my being and appreciate in my head.)
For this self-proclaimed Beatles fan, my kindred youthful spirit, what is the Beatles equivalent to “Seven Year Ache”? Is it “No Reply”?—its seemingly sweet tune undermined a few lines in by the anguish of Lennon’s heated voice when he accuses her of being home—“I saw the light!”—and pretending otherwise? Or is it the ache of ”I’m a Loser”?—the anguished title as the song’s opening lament? The very uncertainty of the line “is it for her or myself that I cry” hints at “Seven Year Ache’s” own ambiguity. It’s the question at the heart of Cash’s song. Maybe it’s ”This Boy”?—the opening guitars with their simple poppy sound that could be heard on many Brill Building singles as the synth lead to “Seven Year Ache”? There’s the simplicity of the first two verses, but in the third, Lennon unleashes an aching cry, especially on the “my”/”cry” rhyme. He’s feeling pain—and the shiver in the voice sends an empathetic response through the spine of any feeling listener.
We hear some of these Beatles moves in the arrangements and some in the lyrics of the song Cash composed not quite two decades after the Fab Four’s ascendance (Cash, too, in her early twenties, as were the band members from Liverpool as their first albums appeared). “Seven Year Ache” is the second cut and title track on Cash’s second Columbia album (third, counting the German album debut, and a lucky number three Seven Year Ache proves for her), her first #1 country record and first record to chart the pop charts. It was recorded in 1980, album “mastered,” as Cash informs us in Composed, “a few days after John Lennon was murdered,” her Beatles hero—and that loss may linger in the musical air as the album is completed. The title tune, nonetheless, aspires to transcendence: a pop sound undergirding a voice with an ache so genuine I had shivers. The song stakes a claim for this record: all is not well, love drives us but nevertheless confounds, loss after loss is a given in life, impermanence is the only certainty.
The strings swelling (or is it Hank DeVito’s steel guitar mastery?) at the song’s opening, which haunt the tune throughout, sound almost as synthetic as a synthesizer, and start as a swoon. The sound might be lifted from Roxy Music, if Brian Eno were thinking of approximating a steel guitar, or from Heroes-era Bowie. (It’s an opening we hear Taylor Swift approximating in Midnights’ “Anti-Hero,” though Swift brings more baroque or romantic lyrics to her song, and the lines in Swift’s verses pile atop each other like train cars in a derailment (lyric lessons learned from Dylan) until the chorus provides a pause, a chance for Swift to catch her breath and for the listener to catch up to what’s been sung to prep for the next round. The song’s words, however, contrast with the almost Teutonic mechanical austerity—Berlin-era Bowie stylings?—of the musical accompaniment, and there’s that synthetic drone, a hum in the ear, from the initial measures of “Anti-Hero” that hints at that peppier synthetic swoop to start “Seven Year Ache.” Even the dropping of Swift’s voice, as if shaking her head at all the mess of the song, singer and listener aligned—“everybody agrees”—before rising back into pop-range territory for the final chorus, hints at Cash’s own lower vocal register in “Seven Year Ache.” Swift, like Dylan, is one of the great pop borrowers, and the musical opening (and vocal swing) plays like an homage to Cash’s country hit. Swift does the same nodding to predecessors in the music video of the song, which plays humorously off elements of Alice in Wonderland and closes hilariously with Swift as a suburban Godzilla.) Then Cash begins singing and the band pulls back for that voice to take center stage, and it’s a voice that’s wistful, longing, looking to a past (there’s history already in this song, from its opening lines: her father’s own aching troubles and wanderlust shading into the song’s character?), even as that voice takes stock of the current downtown situation, as if we’re suddenly in familiar narrative territory with the same old same old story of unrequited bliss in play. It’s a voice (which Cash describes in Composed as “darker and roomier, damp and yearning…untamed and imperfect”) grounded in country, and the lyrics themselves address relationship matters that have been the heart of country songs since the expulsion from Eden.
The first two lines of the lyrics take the listener some place fresh, notwithstanding the pop structures and synthetic string palaver leading into them: “You act like you were just born tonight / Face down in a memory but feeling all right.” Here’s love as phoenix-risen, ever new, ever possible, but, still, it’s an “act.” Then the braggadocio inverts: “Face down” drunk is the trope, but Cash has this player staring at a “memory,” as if Narcissus looking at his reflection, rapt—or at least “feeling all right” as this song begins. (Swift’s “Anti-Hero” plays more overtly with the myth as current psychological currency: “Did you hear my / covert narcissism / I disguise as altruism like / some kind of congressman / Tale as old as time.”) Repetition seems to haunt Cash’s character; the third line poses a querulous question: “Who does your past belong to today?”—his story for new ears and his body for new arms to gather. And underneath the words, a few notes of piano, the shortest run of notes, so that it’s almost a chord, a little bit of pop propulsion that could come from “ABC,” marking time for the tune, for the story—the persistence of ache (real or memory). It’s a haunting—or it’s a damnation, a boulder he has to shoulder every evening of his existence (going on seven years—and counting).
He's not talking much in this song; the singer talks for him: “Baby, you don't say nothing when you're feeling this way.” And he’s not listening to what’s being said to him: “everybody's talking but you don't hear a thing.” His very presence stirs the bar: guys hoping he’ll leave this dive “’to give [them] some room,’” to score what they can in this dark room tonight, while the gals lament his departure, “’God, I hope he comes back soon’”—offering a prayer for divine intervention, for the promise of his presence, his resurrection. He’s a cipher on which they all project their frustrations and their longings. Only the singer, following his progress through this hell of longing, a tale of hurt, seems to know him. She’s his Beatrice, watching from above as he hits the crossroads of despair yet another night.
It’s a night spent in some bleak hell—one without meaningful connection: “the boulevard’s empty.” There’s a void here, mysteriously “empty” as in apocalypse. He’s heading down, as Cash cleverly suggests in her word play: “You're still uptown on your downhill swing.” Perhaps he’s uptown in his mind, thinking of this muse whose very voice follows him, even as he descends, driven, condemned, eternal, into the despair of a sexual hunt that can’t fulfill.
It’s a siren call pulling him in: when, in the fourth and final verse, Cash sings, “There's plenty of dives to be someone you're not / Just say you're looking for something you might have forgot,” the backup singer trills higher than Cash, a luring call, nonverbal. There’s a sense of serial entrapment, of behaviors he can’t curtail: “Don't bother calling to say you're leaving alone / 'Cause there's a fool on every corner when you're trying to get home.” She knows his habits, the promises he proves unwilling or unable to keep, ensnared on some corner by someone willing to offer what he lacks in the moment.
There’s magic in threes, and Cash seems, based on her memoir, prone to see meaning in numbers. Three times we hear the chorus (the steel guitar emerging in the forefront, the notes playing a quivering, sonic ache), three times the title: that he’s “trying to cure a seven year ache.” The first and third times, Cash sings, “Tell me.” The middle time she sings, “Tell ‘em.” Who’s he telling?: those in the dives and/or his woman back home? He’s not talking much in the bars, and he’s out prowling the streets, so to whom is he justifying his behavior? And is she still tracking him in her mind—and heart—after seven years? Still seeking some explanation to soothe what’s an ache for each? It’s a forgetting that can’t—as with Swift’s “All Too Well.”
Seven, too, is a lucky number—except it’s lost that magic in this song. There may well be a reference to Seven Year Itch, the iconic Marilyn Monroe vehicle, directed by Billy Wilder, in which a hitherto contented husband’s family has headed to Maine for summer vacation, leaving the husband at work in the City, and all temptation breaks out when the husband, played by Tom Ewall to great comic effect, meets the Marilyn character, who plays it straight against his Fool. (And all people in lust are fools.) The husband’s imagination of what might be overpowers him, sends him down a rabbit hole every bit as magical as Alice’s. His adventures, too, prove just as farcical, amusing—he’s a Walter Mitty of sorts, with less of the darkness that Thurber provides the character. And just as Alice finds her way home, so, too, does the Ewall character make his way to a chaste Maine family vacation—at least, that’s the film’s narrative ending, though hard to know what longings have been unleashed that another seven years might find propagated. (The Ewall character, named Richard Sherman, prefigures Jimmy Carter’s famous Playboy interview admission in 1976 that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”—an admission that ironically may have helped humanize the seemingly pious Carter in the ’76 election against Ford. A victory, then, for lust, for foolishness, amongst American Puritans.)
Anaïs Nin, in her Diaries, writes, “If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness.” It’s the truth of countless pop songs. Happiness only exists without fever. In fever lies the effects of sickness, of tragedy. Comedy, on the other hand, lacks fever. (Give me tragedy and give me death.) Comedy brings contentment. Tragedy bleeds loss.
Tragic loss may well be what the best art conveys: everyday ache, our need to find somebody thwarted too frequently by too human fickleness. Good contentment is hard to find.
That’s why so many down by the river blues songs speak to us, echoing the dark ending of Flannery O’Connor’s iconic story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “’She would have been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’” Most of us remember that line as the nail in the story’s coffin. But O’Connor has two more lines of direct speech for the reader as the story’s proper conclusion:

“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

Having shot the grandmother, The Misfit humbly proclaims that what he did is hard hard work—no “pleasure” in it. (Or even “pleasure[s] in life” itself—no contentment, nothing found and achieved and preserved, because all a heated feverish pitch.) No “’fun’”—as Iggy Pop would sing, fronting the Stooges in their debut album as the Sixties concluded, negating Bobby Lee, throwing his lot in with O’Connor’s Misfit. (And Johnny Rotten, another misfit, would sing the song not even a decade later, “no real pleasure” in his snarl of a voice—and perhaps a clue to how we read The Misfit’s benediction at the story’s end.) Pop, in “No Fun,” sings a grunge guitar-fueled anthem:

No fun to be alone
Walking by myself
No fun to be alone
In love
With nobody else

But it’s his lot, so might as well accept what is. O’Connor, notwithstanding her Catholicism (or, because of it), has The Misfit embracing his outcast status from fellow humans, the Sisyphean burden that’s living.
That dear boulder is the ache of our lived experience, notwithstanding the pop songs that want to sell another future. Cash has shouldered the burden in a truthful tune, her songwriting talent working against the grain, as with the best of country—and pop—songs. Her hair, yes, was thick and cut in a shag for the video. Her belt buckle aspired to boxing grandeur, wrestling world champion gaudiness. Her ambition in this song is equally large: to continue the tradition yet speak truth to a contemporary audience. Our ache in hearing her pop charted song confirms she’s spoken to us— unavoidably, because Cash aims higher rather than lower—with honesty rather than dross. Her truth is plainer than the plain Puritans of our founding: love is its own hell, and there’s no single way to prescribe it. All efforts to proscribe ways of loving evade containment. The “hormonal flashes of love affairs are not the only things going on in life,” Cash writes in her memoir. True, but love’s fever is our universal ache.

J. W. Bonner teaches for Asheville School (N.C.) and has written for March Faxness before. Essays and reviews are forthcoming in ARGO: A Hellenic Review and Asheville Poetry Review. Rosanne Cash continues to wind her voice into his heart, even on the coast of Maine.