second round
(2) Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”
took out
(7) Franz Ferdinand, “Take Me Out”
209-68
and will play in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
DANIELLE EVANS ON LADY GAGA’S “BAD ROMANCE”
I am more of a karaoke enthusiast than a person who is possibly tone deaf probably should be. Occasionally though I am unpleasantly surprised by a lyric on screen: startled by an adult understanding of lyrics I couldn’t parse as a child, upset by a mistaken transcription of a song I know by heart, shocked to learn I have been mishearing something every time I thought I heard the song. A few months ago, I summoned my friends to a basement karaoke bar. The bar used the pandemic shutdown to rebrand as a serious cocktail lounge but couldn’t get around having been designed and equipped for private karaoke. I believe it wants badly not to be a karaoke bar anymore but can’t afford not to use the karaoke room space or to renovate which works to my advantage, as a person who enjoys both karaoke and craft cocktails. Ensconced in the orange glow of the largest of the private rooms, I prepared to scream I’m a free bitch baby, with all of my heart, but the screen said I’m a freak bitch baby and I blinked and tried to determine which of us was making the mistake.
*
Freak/ adjective: not natural, normal, or likely
Free/adjective
2d: enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another
3a: not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself
4b: not bound, confined, or detained by force
*
The audio record seems clear that the lyric is free; at least in Gaga’s version there is no hint of a k at the end of the line. Lissie’s slower, sadder cover might possibly be the source of the mistranslation; her version is gorgeous but her voice blurs on the line and the more emotionally ambiguous tone of the song lends itself to the alternate reading. Lissie might well be singing about the kind of bad romance that makes one feel like an unnatural, unlovable freak, but Lady Gaga’s version holds open the possibility of a bad romance simultaneously being a great time.
*
It is a running joke among my friends that I can’t name a romantic comedy. I am familiar with the basic outlines of the genre, but there are classics I have never seen, classics I have seen but categorize as something more like horror than comedy because I can see the exact moment the intended turns into a monster and everyone pretends it hasn’t happened, non-classics that sort of blur together for me such that I cannot remember their titles or leads or plots. When asked I name movies that I think are both funny and romantic: Dirty Dancing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Coming to America, Fools Rush In, Romeo &Juliet but only and specifically Baz Lurhmann’s. Probably only Fools Rush In qualifies by the strictest standards of the genre, and even then, it opens with a one-night stand in Vegas and subsequently involves some ambient racism, an emotionally brutal breakup, and a faked miscarriage. It mostly holds up on rewatch and is the reason I still occasionally make a wish on a state line, but the older I get the more certain I am that the movie’s happy ending is a temporary one, that ten years out the film’s protagonists would be amicably divorced coparents whose mostly well-adjusted child can’t recognize the chaotic romantic pull they nostalgically describe. Even in 1997 I wouldn’t necessarily have called this a bad outcome; a temporary romance is not necessarily a bad one, a familial love can outlast a romantic one.
When I was a child, I thought it was the standard condition of adults to be single, and that most of the married ones had been or would be divorced at some point. Some of this came from what I remember as an urgent and concerned media insistence that this was the case, but much of it came from my own observed life: my parents, my extended family, my friends’ parents. I knew more single and divorced adults than I did married adults and it did not seem particularly tragic or abnormal, or at least, the tragedies and strange occurrences in the lives of the single adults did not seem in any way greater in quantity than the tragedies and strange occurrences in the lives of the married adults, and sometimes they were funnier or more dramatic. Sometimes I got to help my mother pick out a dress and watch her tease her hair and wait up to hear where a man had taken her dancing, and sometimes I got to hear a hilarious story about a bad date and often she did not have a date and she would bring home brie cheese and sparkling cider and we’d have what she called a lonely woman’s movie night until I asked her how she could be lonely if she was with me, and once, I swear this happened, I was her plus one to a fancy formal dinner and as we were leaving the parking lot she noticed in the mirror an attractive man in a tuxedo and she said I bet that man right now is noticing how beautiful I am and writing down my license plate to find me someday, and we laughed hysterically and I made fun of her ego and then a week later, the man, who it turned out was a cop, called her, having managed to track her down from her license plate, which is the kind of thing that as a fiction writer I could never get away with making up. The romance of an adult life for me was not so much about partnership but possibility, freedom.
The death of marriage that the 90’s promised never materialized. I have never known more married people than I do at present, and the rate only seems to be trending upward. In the late 90’s my glamorous single mother met a man who was her partner until she died two decades later; in the early 2000’s my father married my stepmother and they remain happily together. In my late 20’s I joined a Facebook group called All of My Friends Are Getting Married I’m Just Getting Drunk, but then most of my friends got married and the joke wasn’t funny anymore. In the city I live in now almost all of my friends are married or attached to their long-term partners; an astoundingly high percentage of them skipped most of what I assumed was the universal hot mess rite of passage of everyone’s early 20s by meeting their partners before them. Even most of those who didn’t have been paired with the same person long enough to have missed out on more recent dating joys like Tinder. I can count on one hand all of my single friends in this city and all of the friends I remember meeting when they were still single. I have never been so close to so much romance. More people love me than perhaps ever have. I can visit a dozen people’s warm loving houses and go home alone to my own whenever I want. I have never felt so free, or like such a freak. Did everyone else always feel like the point of love was something other than to be a little bit absurd, a little bit unsustainable?
*
Though it’s Lady Gaga’s version I remember most vividly now, it might have been the Lissie version that first made an impression on me. In 2008 and 2009 I had been busy trying to become a professional adult. I was aware of the rise of Gaga the way you can be aware of background noise without truly hearing it. A few years before The Fame I was having the kinds of 20s in which I might frequently have been in bars or clubs that played its hit singles, but by 2008 I was living in a small city in Missouri, working at my first full time job, avoiding any bar where I might run into my students and dodging an intrepid reporter who kept trying to ask me my feelings about Barack Obama, a question to which I knew there was no right answer and anything I said could and would be used against me. I remember thinking “Poker Face” was catchy and have a vague recollection at some point making a bluffin with my muffin dirty joke to someone, but I can’t think of a single person with whom I might have had the casual intimacy at the time to make it. It was a place where complete strangers regularly showed me kindness, but also a place where I lived in a strange kind of limbo, I was, I thought, embarking upon the permanent part of my life, the part where I would begin making forever choices, but for a variety of reasons, chief among them the campus doomsday preacher, the lack of vegetarian lunch options that were not French fries, and Springfield ladies KKK meeting in the public library, this did not seem the place where I’d be building that particular kind of permanence.
I lived in an apartment building with both a bridal shop and a boutique home goods store in the lobby. The bridal shop opened what seemed to me very early and occasionally I was awakened by a bride beneath my bedroom window having stepped outside to have a private and almost always dramatic conversation. I was editing my first book and because I was teaching four classes a semester then, I was mostly editing it sleep-deprived and in the wee hours of the night. Sometimes I could hear my next door neighbor also awake. He was one of the few single straight men I knew in the city and was occasionally nice enough to drive me to the store, and it was briefly enough to generate a crush, a fleeting (pre-KKK) belief that something might emerge to keep me there, but that crush lasted only a few weeks before I overheard one of my students mention to another that she was in his class and could not get over that her professor looked like “grown up McLovin” and well, after that I couldn’t get over it either.
I owned one piece of permanent furniture, a red and black velvet chair in the shape of a high-heeled shoe, the one luxury I’d allowed myself to purchase with the advance for my first book. Everything else I owned—a futon, a bookshelf I’d nearly concussed myself assembling because I not so much disregarded the instruction that said it required two people to assemble as wept and wept and couldn’t think of anyone to call. I coveted a beautifully refurbished settee in the home goods store, but it cost more than I could afford to spend on a piece of furniture and was also more furniture than I could afford to move when I left. I spent a lot of late-night time talking to a stranger I was certain wasn’t actually a stranger on AOL instant messenger. He had begun messaging me out of the blue, and I was anonymous enough then and my online presence minimal enough to assume that anyone who knew how to find me online was looking for me specifically, me the person and not me the writer, though they didn’t yet feel like separate enough people for me to make that distinction. I talked to the stranger for hours some nights because I was bored and lonely and because I imagined myself to be Nancy Drew, capable of setting some kind of trap that would force the messenger to out himself. It had to be an ex, I concluded, but which? The one I hated forever or the one I was still loved a little but not in a romantic way? On bad days I believed it was a stranger I was desperate enough to want to recognize; on great days I imagined it was both of the exes I no longer spoke to, united in their need to know what I was up to. I came to no solid conclusions.
I was lonely and out of place and eventually concluded that redemption from heartbreak would come from becoming famous enough to not need the validation of men I would forget someday. I finished the book, I got a new job, and the summer between Lady Gaga’s release of The Fame and Lady Gaga’s release of The Fame Monster, I moved back across the country to the city I was from. I donated the bookshelf and I left the futon with a friend whom I’d lose touch with eventually and some years later recognize as the anonymous villain in a viral news story. I shipped the shoe chair Fedex; there was no box big enough for it so it was wrapped in plastic; at some point in transit it was stabbed by something sharp and arrived with a rip I’ve never figured out how to or tried particular hard to repair. I still think sometimes about the settee.
A year later a man I was (badly) flirting with and I had gotten in the habit of emailing each other interesting song covers, and when I heard the Lissie cover of “Bad Romance”, I paid attentive to the growl of its lyrics for the first time. I went back to the original, and really listened to The Fame Monster, feeling seen in what I imagined then to be my willful artistic unlovability. I think I pulled my last few AIM away messages before I got rid of it altogether from “I Like it Rough”, in retrospect an odd choice for the end of decade in which I had not especially enjoyed being hurt, but perhaps the appeal of a lyric like loving me’s like straightening curls made sense given the amount of time during the 2000’s I’d spent sizzling my hair into submission with cheap flat irons.
*
…in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth—and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love. — Stephanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta/Lady Gaga (2010)
*
In September of 2010, Lady Gaga accepted the VMA award for video of the year for “Bad Romance” wearing a dress made of cuts of raw meat. The dress was later bleached and frozen to preserve it for posterity. In October of 2010, my first book debuted. I was told The Washington Post, the paper I grew up with, was reviewing it, but no one had seen the review yet. It went live while I was waiting at the bus stop and my publisher sent a link but my Blackberry wouldn’t load the page beyond the first sentence, which read “I hope Danielle Evans is a very nice person...”. I spent an anxious bus ride across the city worried that the rest of the sentence might be “… because she’s a terrible writer.” But in fact, the full sentence suggested that I would need to be likable to put off the envy that would surely accompany my career. Later that week, the post’s book critic Ron Charles donned bacon on his head in a nod to Lady Gaga’s controversial dress and repeated his praise of my book on tape as part of a video book review feature. My mother felt compelled to share this video with everyone she knew, but also to explain to them, in case they were confused, who Lady Gaga was, and what the bacon referenced, and why she, a vegetarian, was sending them a video of a man wearing bacon.
I am not suggesting that Lady Gaga and I have parallel careers. Lady Gaga in 2010 had the kind of fame that reshaped our cultural sensibilities about fandom and celebrity and its relationship to the internet. I had the kind of fame where when I met her for dinner my mother would introduce me to waiters as “My daughter, the famous writer”, and I’d have to remind her that actual famous people don’t have to be announced as famous. But it is true that in 2010 a thing was happening to my life and my art that I had wanted for as long as I could remember and was in no way emotionally prepared for. I was learning to carry on me at all times the tiny lie that could make an audience fall in love. I was learning which parts of the truth didn’t belong solely to me anymore. In the years since then I have learned a little to belong to an audience and not at all to belong to another person. It is, if I am honest, the life I imagined. Whether it was an imaginative freedom or an imaginative limitation I am yet to determine.
*
The narrative of “Bad Romance” is familiar enough to anyone who has ever wanted a bad idea badly enough to make it feel like a good one, joyful if you’re OK with being periodically liberated from joy. But the narrative of the video for “Bad Romance” is a less literal interpretation and involves no such romance. It is latex and crystal and fire and tears, emerging from a monstrous isolation, being prepared and packaged for a sinister audience, and discovering through your escape that you were perhaps the dangerous one all along, that however loudly you shout it, freedom might always entail a kind of freakishness.
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories From The South.
SUSANNAH CLARK MATT ON “TAKE ME OUT”
FRANZ FERDINAND (DISAMBIGUATION)
Franz Ferdinand (band)
The members of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand get asked about their name a lot. They’ve provided multiple explanations for it, but it’s decidedly not a tribute. "I like the idea that, if we become popular, maybe the words Franz Ferdinand will make people think of the band instead of the historical figure,” original drummer Paul Thomson said in an early interview.
It’s hard to say which Franz Ferdinand I heard of first. The band released their debut album in 2004, the same year I took AP Modern European History as a sophomore in high school. I would have read about the Archduke in our unit on World War I, toward the end of the school year. I can hear my 14-year-old voice: “Like the band?”
Franz Ferdinard (racehorse)
If you want to get technical, the band is named after a horse. Archduke Ferdinand won the Northumberland Plate in Great Britain in 2001, and the boys in Glasgow liked the sound of it, not immediately recognizing its historical namesake.
But they ended up not minding the association with the other Franz Ferdinand. Thomson said: "He was an incredible figure as well. His life, or at least the ending of it, was the catalyst for the complete transformation of the world and that is what we want our music to be.”
Franz Ferdinand (Archduke of Austria-Hungary)
I can picture a multiple choice question on the AP Modern Euro exam: “The assassination of which historical figure is considered to be the most immediate cause of the First World War?”
“Franz Ferdinand” is shorthand here. The public murder of the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne was only one domino—the Wikipedia page for “Causes of World War I” is more than 20,000 words, delving into the overall arms race and the rise of Imperial Germany. But being able to pin such a seismic shift in history down to just one guy, one moment, was especially convenient for a high schooler only in it for the grade inflation. I memorized that fact like a song lyric.
Franz Ferdinand (album)
“I don't want to over-intellectualise the name thing. Basically a name should just sound good ... like music,” lead singer Alex Kapranos has said. The allure of alliteration, nothing more.
“Seems gauche to name a rock band after a man who was assassinated,” I remember my father, a history buff, noting at the time. I believe I rolled my eyes, telling him he just didn’t get it, something along the lines of “why do I need to care about something that happened 100 years ago.”
Replaying this conversation now, I don’t think my father was discouraging me from liking the band. He just wanted me to give me context, a nudge to look outside myself (much needed for a 14 year old).
Franz Ferdinand (warship)
I failed the AP Modern Euro exam. Before writing this essay, I read up on the Archduke and the beginning of World War I, realizing how little I absorbed in that history class. But 20 years after its release I still know every word to “Take Me Out.”
TAKE ME OUT (DISAMBIGUATION)
Take Me Out (song)
See also: Take me out to the ballgame (song)
“Take Me Out” got me out of a dancing rut. Deep in pubescent self-seriousness, I had been on a strict sadsack musical diet of Death Cab for Cutie and Iron & Wine, maybe sneaking some top 40 for dessert every now and then, but not without shame. I knew I was being pandered to when I first heard the opening line: “So if you’re lonely…” but the rocklicking guitar riff threw my brooding off track. For the first time in months, I surrendered to a beat.
But I could thrash easy: “Take Me Out” was a bona fide hit on alternative radio. This kind of dancing had been cleared with the cool kids.
I only recently picked up on the dual meaning of the titular line, invoking both dating and assasssination—another nod to the Archduke. Now I can’t unhear it; the historical context appears in my mind like a pop-up ad, a hyperlink down the rabbit hole.
Take Me Out (British game show)
After being shot in the neck by a 20-year-old Serbian nationalist, Archduke Franz Ferdinand reportedly turned to his wounded wife and said: “Sophie dear! Don't die! Stay alive for our children!" When his aide asked him about the pain, Franz responded with “It is nothing,” repeated over and over to become his very last words.
I’m reading these grizzly accounts less than two months after watching my father die. He wasn’t taken out by an assassin, but I’ve villainized the rare neurological disease that shut down his brain in a matter of weeks.
My dad was a local historian: he wrote articles and books about my hometown, highlighting undersung people and events that rippled nationwide. I don’t particularly admire the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an aspiring autocrat. But my father would want me to acknowledge him as a human being instead of just a reference in a pop song. He would want me to read on.
RAGTIME (DISAMBIGUATION)
Ragtime (musical genre)
When the United States entered the first world war in 1917, ragtime music was at peak popularity. Distinguished by its syncopated rhythms, or “ragged time,” the genre was pioneered by Black Americans toward the end of the 19th century, infusing the blues with the pomp of a Sousa march. Ragtime begat jazz, which begat rock ‘n roll, which begat post-punk-revival dance rock.
Ragtime brought forth its own wacky dance fads: the Horse Trot, Kangaroo Hop, Duck Waddle, Squirrel, Chicken Scratch, Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear etc. I imagine Americans found solace in dance halls during the war, prancing around like animals, pretending to be anything but human.
Ragtime (novel)
In his 1975 novel, E.L. Doctrow uses ragtime music as an extended metaphor illustrating rapid change and boiling racial tensions in the first two decades of the 20th century. He hoped that readers would draw parallels to contemporary political unrest in the mid-70s, and again 20 years later when the novel was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1998.
Ragtime (musical)
Starting when I was a sullen teenager, every year my father would treat the whole family to a live theater production around Christmastime. This year I decided to take over the tradition, thinking we could use the cheer in the aftermath of his death.
Based solely on its name and branding, I picked Ragtime expecting something upbeat, with swinging choreography. Needless to say, we weren’t prepared for ballad after ballad bemoaning injustice and strife. A moving production, but maybe not the best choice for a family already in mourning.
The musical ends with the various characters hearing news from the other side of the world: The Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been shot. We must face this new era.
Ragtime (code name)
I set a Google alert to keep track of the many obituaries and tributes posted in honor of my father. I soon learned that he shares a name with a loquacious mayor of a small town in Saskatchewan. By now, the alerts are pretty much exclusively related to local Canadian politics, but something’s stopped me from turning them off. I don’t mind reading about the other Charlie Clark. These days, I’m only seeking more context.
Susannah Clark Matt is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Inside Higher Ed, 68to05, the Brevity blog, and elsewhere. Her essay “Signs (2002)” was listed as a notable selection in 2016’s Best American Essays.