first round

(8) When in Rome, “the promise”
SENT HOME
(9) Peter Schilling, “major tom (coming home”)
318-289
and will play on 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 3/3/23.

Beth Nguyen on “The Promise”

In 1988, a British group called When in Rome released “The Promise,” a dance song that would become a one-hit wonder in the United States, establishing the band’s fame and later tearing them apart; a song that would resurge in the mid-aughts due to a popular movie, and again more recently on TikTok; a song that my middle-schooler self listened to on WGRD and WKLQ in suburban west Michigan, having no idea that she would end up hearing it forever, on “yesterday’s hits” radio stations while driving, sometimes catching those opening piano notes, one day wondering what was really being promised, and what had ever been fulfilled.
I am a child of the 80s who earnestly loves that decade’s music. For me, one-hit wonders endure because they are wonders. There’s a sense of newness, or renewal, every time. To hear “The Promise” is to feel a succinct, compact joy—no obligations, no strings. That bracing temporary clarity is what I want when I try to make sense of my childhood, my adolescence, the long past that keeps getting longer.
As a kid who felt like an outsider, I deeply related to the anxiety of the line I’m sorry but I’m just thinking of the right words to say, and how the lead singer pronounced sorry in a way that sounded like sore-y to my American ears. I guess I thought the song was romantic. It even had what I later learned was a zeugma: when your day is through and so is your temper. Surely the chorus’s I’ll make you fall for me was the promise of love. I figured, it was good to have such decisive goals.
But last year, after I decided to write about this song, I looked up the music video on Youtube. I had completely forgotten it: how the three melancholy band members hang around what seems to be an English cottage while a beautiful, unhappy woman leaves. We get some gorgeous hair flipping, but there’s no interaction between the band and the woman, just the camera’s gaze in motion. It’s humorless, a contrast to the song’s new wave synth pop. No dancing, and plenty of tension.
From what I can tell from interviews, articles, and court documents online, the band broke up not long after “The Promise.” At some point the keyboardist trademarked the name “When in Rome,” the other two members of the group started touring as “When in Rome UK,” and the keyboardist sued. They’ve had chances for reconciliation, like when the song was featured in Napoleon Dynamite, but maybe there’s just too much animus, too much history. Too much thinking of the right words to say.
In 1988 I was a kid who didn’t question “The Promise.” Didn’t question a lot of things. Instead, I was sympathetic when the singer explained, Sometimes if I shout it’s not what’s intended. These words just come out. I had no concerns when he said, I’ll make you fall for me. Thirty-five years later, in 2023, I think about how quickly the speaker excuses himself for shouting. I think about the construction of the line I’ll make you fall for me. In 2023, the song sounds less like a promise and more of a threat.
Maybe most relationships, and therefore maybe most love songs, are about power. Having it, wanting it, losing it. Or maybe this is the constant consequence of getting on in years, of being Gen X, of being a child of the 1980s. The songs of our own lives turn on us, making us second guess who we were, what we believed, what it all made us become. Like any text, the words of “The Promise” stay the same but the meaning changes shape because we, the readers and listeners, change. We critique the lives we have lived in order to keep going. We are always rereading our selves, our former selves, and realizing how much was fucked up. The promise that becomes a threat—isn’t that just what it is to grow up, to enter into different phases of life that you couldn’t have understood were waiting for you? Maybe the hallmark of the one-hit wonder is its perpetual promise.
On Youtube, someone named elflingskitten saunders commented: “I remember being a teenager in 1988, we were very poor and they were about to shut off our electric. I heard this for the first time then while standing in our driveway and just being overcome by the feelings of hope and joy this song gave me. Almost 35 years later and it’s still possibly my favorite song ever.”
Last fall, driving home to Madison, Wisconsin after a brief trip to Iowa City, I was listening to “The Promise” when I saw a car parked on the side of the highway near the wooden, Wisconsin-shaped welcome sign at the border. Four young women were climbing a hill to reach it. They were laughing and calling to each other, phones ready for pictures. I wondered if they were on their way to the start of the semester. Or were they traveling farther, on a road trip documenting each arrival at each state? I’ll never know, but I will remember the glimpse of their laughter, the way they held out their arms. In my car, my own phone was playing When in Rome, its name taken from an idiom about conformity and manners, traceable to 4th century St. Ambrose by way of famous confessor St. Augustine. I promise. I promise you. I want to say to that person on Youtube who remembered standing in the driveway, overcome with feeling—oh my god, I so get what you mean. Everything moves so fast. The song, the image at the side of the road. Who we were, listening and singing and dancing along. Who we imagined we would be. And not once does “The Promise” ever use the word love.

Beth Nguyen’s next book is a memoir titled Owner of a Lonely Heart (Scribner, July 2023) and she hopes that it will indeed be much better than being an owner of a broken heart. She also teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and listens to 80s music without shame.

MAJOR TOM, or, On Coming Home, Completely Detached by Heidi Czerwiec

The song haunts me: astronaut who slips the bonds of Earth. After successful liftoff, the situation shifts, goes still. Ground Control unsuccessfully tries but cannot reestablish contact. Then, a last communication saying tell his wife he loves her.
The mythical character of Major Tom first appears in Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (1969) as an astronaut who journeys beyond the stars, floating ‘round in [his] tin can. But in 1983 I knew nothing of this. I wouldn’t hear Bowie’s version, his vision, for years. I did know Elton John’s “Rocket Man” from my parents’ record collection, but didn’t connect it to the myth before researching this piece. I definitely knew Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom (Coming Home)” from its appearance on the Top 40 Countdown for several weeks, added it to the list of songs to try and tape.
Intrigued by this weird hybrid of a song: urgent, vaguely menacing New Wave pulses of synthesizer and drum machine on the intro and verses, before the operatic New Romantics chorus breaks Earth below us / Drifting, falling / Floating weightless / Calling, calling home. Radio transmission broadcast across the sky, my fingers floating over Pause + Record + Play, to capture on cassette with the least DJ static.
Around that year, as was the habit of bored educators in the days before relentless standardized testing, my elementary school teacher dimmed the lights and closed the window blinds so we could watch a movie, My Life as a Dog. Set in 1950s Sweden, the movie is about a boy, Ingemar, sent to live with an aunt and uncle in a rural village. Bereft of his own pet dog, he’s obsessed with Laika, the dog sent into orbit by the Soviets to test their Sputnik system for life support, but with no plans to bring her home. As he lies alone in bed, looking out the window at the night sky, Ingemar stoically asserts, “I’ve been kind of lucky. I mean, compared to others. You have to compare, so you can get a little distance from things. Like Laika. She really must have seen things in perspective.”
My Life as a Dog was reportedly the favorite movie of Kurt Vonnegut, also reportedly a recluse.
But before this movie I knew nothing of Laika either, and somehow Peter Schilling’s song and the movie melded together in my mind—like Ingemar, I’d lie in bed, imagining them, each stranded, set adrift, floating alone in space, irretrievable—though haunted and horrified, without Ingemar’s detachment.
Don’t look up Laika. Just, don’t.
I forgot about the song in the intervening years, until Mike Nelson sang a bit of it as a reference on Mystery Science Theater 3000 for Incredible Melting Man, a schlocky sci-fi horror about an irradiated astronaut who turns into a melting, gooey monster upon his return to earth. The song is actually apt for the MST3K series itself: its premise of an employee blasted into space, trapped on the Satellite of Love, forced to watch bad movies by a pair of evil scientists. To preserve his sanity, adrift in space alone, he builds his robot friends out of spare parts, and together they mock the movies. In the series’ early years, before most people had Comedy Central, you’d see it on bootlegged videocassettes—you could cram four episodes if you didn’t mind the grainy resolution of super slow play recording. MST3K encouraged the practice, ending each episode with the banner message “Keep circulating the tapes.”
In college, I obsessed with circulating the tapes. Both MST3K videos and the ‘80s mixtapes I made for nostalgia. A different ache for home. The college radio station played an “Eighties Hour” late Thursdays. On standby I’d hover, fingers floating over Pause + Record + Play, to capture on cassette with the least DJ static. I tried calling in a request for “Major Tom.” The Bowie song? No. Perplexed by my insistence of its existence, even when I sang the chorus.
Though the song’s English subtitle is “Coming Home,” with no way to power reentry, any move toward Earth would result in burning up in the atmosphere. Unless Major Tom was coming home to himself in a different way: “coming home” suggesting a movement toward something, whether literal home or a merging with the beyond, the Infinite, the m’s of coming home a cozy blanket of hum.
The original German subtitle is “Völlig Losgelöst,” or “completely detached.” It suggests movement away, a choosing of isolation, the German phrase emphasizing loss, the hissing sibilance of space static suddenly cut off by a final t. Or perhaps also ecstatic, an achieving of nirvana? There’s an ambivalence, a duality in his assertion This is my home / I’m coming home.
I’m drifting a bit far. I need to bring this back home.
During the Covid lockdowns I became completely detached by being home. And yet, as an introvert, my original horror at being cut off gradually became a sort of relief. Relieved of duty to be social, my duty to society became isolation, a duty I took seriously. Home was safe; outside space dangerous. Bereft, we got our own dog. Did Covid reveal me, coming home to my true self? Or, did it allow me to become completely detached?
We were all home, all detached from each other, establishing contact only via FaceTime and Zoom. Center for Disease Control attempting communications. People isolated in ICUs hooked up to life support systems. Medical staff dressed like astronauts in makeshift isolation suits leaning plastic faceshields and iPad screens close to capture last transmissions Give my wife my love / Then nothing more.
And in this lingering ambivalence of the Not-Yet-After, the PTSD of being in society, is there a danger in becoming too detached from each other? Far beneath the ship, the world is mourning. So many of us bereft, bereaved. Do I need to come home, even if I risk burning up on reentry? What does coming home after Covid even mean?
What will it effect, when all is done, Major Tom asks—the question, the radio signal continuing to resonate across the stratosphere and out into space floating weightless

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the forthcoming Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord (Bloomsbury 2024), and the poetry collection Conjoining. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is a Senior Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com