(14) Amerie, “1 Thing”
unplugged
(13) Electric Six, “Danger! High Voltage”
242-133
and will play in the final four
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 3/26/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
ANDREA PANZECA ON ELECTRIC SIX’S DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE
Don't you wanna know how we keep startin' fires?
The lyrics to Electric Six’s “Danger! High Voltage” are sung by two voices. That one contributor’s identity could remain a secret for years is a relic of the pre-stan (verb, not song), pre-fancam, pre-dox era. The secret contributor, Jack White, himself kept the nature of his relationship with bandmate Meg White a secret. Can you imagine, in 2023, two people claiming to be siblings when at any moment someone could post receipts of their marriage (at least one witness, right) and put them on blast? This was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone. This was the age of LiveJournal and MySpace.
The closest maybe one can come to keeping a secret today is Orville Peck, obscuring his face with a fringed eye mask. (Within seconds one can look it up, but that’s research—a word I’ve recently qualified with “not the Trump-voter, anti-vax kind”).
Each rotating member of Electric Six adopts a sort of drag name—an alter ego like in roller-derby or wrestling or American Gladiators. The gender-bending duet reminds me of Peck and Trixie Mattel’s cover of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson,” itself about a fire-seeking couple.
It’s my desire!
In the “Danger! High Voltage” video, White’s voice, like Mattel’s, is female-embodied, bra-clad and tits ablaze. Having recently rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey (though obviously the on-the-go edit: fast-forwarding the space-opera shots to get to the dialogue), I thought: Hal looks boob-like (like how Nope’s Jean Jacket’s vagina-coded).
Or Hal (singular) is more crotch. Singer Dick Valentine (Tyler Spencer)’s codpiece glows, the mound of a male ballet dancer. I did want to see the pussy! on! fire!, a phrase thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race that’s been in the lexicon for a decade. I wanted to see it lit for representation. Female gaze.
When they make out—“when we touch, when we kiss, when we touch”—it’s not exactly sexy. It is in that oh-yeah-I-have-genitals sorta way. Feeling that vasovagal nerve connection from brain to lungs to heart to gut and yes to genitals, now aflame with another’s touch. The costumes signal the campiness: the making-out overlong like maybe they are siblings. Elbow sex with sibs Magenta and Riff Raff.
It’s Janet and Frank-N-Furter in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” though musically closer to “Hot Patootie.” Surrounding the two, canoodling in the creepy parlor (easily an interior in the “Frankenstein Place”) the sad portraits portend, like the tombstones and skeletons at the queue of the “Haunted Mansion” ride: you’ll die.
Danger! Danger!
It’s a choice to remind a dancing crowd of death when certainly some had not forgotten. But that’s why it’s important to dance—to suspend thoughts of mortality for a night (or at least a few minutes a time).
Learning my great-grandfather died in a fire, when my grandmother was 16, only deepened my ancient fear. Epigenetic. I remember seeing my dad fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand, the very thing that took out the grandfather he never met. When I was 24, my dad died of a heart attack—a surprise but not really, since he always “ran hot.” His own grandson, my nephew, never got to meet him.
I moved to New Orleans, site of these traumas, in 2008, comforted by the higher likelihood of flood than inferno (though increasingly marsh fires are common, and for dozens of days this summer temps topped 100).
High Voltage!
I’m a fire sign—one friend said I even kinda look like a lion—but my rising and moons signs are water. I’m drawn to it physically—I like to swim—because I too “run hot.” I’m prone to fainting. Once in a yoga/meditation circle, an athlete noted the warmth radiating from my hands, said I “could charge for that.” I burned these same hands, at five, when I grabbed too close to a sparkler’s fire.
In 2001, my friends at the time, junior year of high school, liked to do “the hippie trick”: slice a lamp wire, maybe wet your heels (with spit?), squeeze them and the wire together. Hold hands: connect. Plug in. Voltage! Add people to the mix: 10, 12, the current maybe becoming fainter the more circuitry. You might hear, “I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
A friend asked an electrician coworker if it was safe. Probably. No one ever got singed, fried, burnt, smoked, blown like the Jurassic Park kid from the electrified fence. The hippie-trick-house family’s dad, at NASA, might have been adjacent to the O-ring disaster; the Challenger explosion (Y-shaped flame a reference for Jean Jacket’s final form).
When we touch!
Before the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, the UpStairs Lounge fire in the French Quarter, in 1973, was the deadliest attack at a gay bar in US history. 32 people died. Although my dad told me about it when I was a kid, only when I moved to New Orleans as an adult, 35 years after the tragedy, did it become widely commemorated. At the time, mere years after Stonewall in 1969, the city government offered no condolences, churches refused burials, and many of the victims’ families didn’t claim their children’s bodies.
So it’s a choice to remind people they could die at any moment, especially while squeezed into a small space, maybe with cheap tinder-like decorations, maybe with obscured doorways, maybe with only one stairway as egress. And did you know your vision fades when oxygen’s low, at least when you’re about to faint. Eyes require a large oxygen load, and when it’s in short supply they’re not strictly necessary (though certainly advantageous when trying to flee). Body pulls the system’s plug like Dave methodically (spoiler alert) disconnecting Hal’s higher capacities: “I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
In 2023, since a pandemic, panting and sweating in a ventless space with so many bodies hits different. But maybe you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb; you maybe give yourself over, to absolute pleasure.
Fire in the disco!
Those opening riffs of “Danger!”High Voltage” beep (beat) like a funky smoke detector. I think of Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks,” also lyrically anxiety-minded, maybe more with talk of running. “Danger!” claims the space. Like Beyonce’s “Freedom,” it inspires me to move manically (as I’m inclined) and yet there’s little movement in the video, a contrast both appealing and instructive. The couple in the “Danger!” barely move. They make out. One room.
The song was released in the US three days before Bush declared war on Iraq. The last generation with internetless adolescence had a taste of chaos with 9/11. But the federal assault weapons ban wouldn’t expire until 2004, so mass shootings weren’t yet on the reg. 2003 was four years post-Columbine, four years pre-Virginia Tech.
[Sax solo]
“Danger!” lore wasn’t limited to (ultimately-confirmed) Jack White vocals: it was also rumored Bill Clinton played sax. Early-internet hijinks! Maybe a music biz thing: Kate Bush was rumored to have vocals on “Hilly Fields (1892)” in 1982. Turns out, nick nicely (Nickolas Laurien) couldn’t remember the real Kate (Jackson)’s last name, only credited “Kate.”
The sax in this song isn’t tacked on like in “Baker Street,” or obligatory like in “I Will Always Love You.” It’s more integrated, closer to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours” or Tupac’s “Shorty Wanna Be a Thug,” maybe the first to sample Hank Crawford’s “Wildflower.” I honestly even like bad sax; like pizza they say.
Fire in the Taco Bell!
In New Orleans, a few years post-Katrina, there was a blighted building, once a Taco Bell. One day from the ground sprouted contractor signs. In response a warning, spray painted on the building: If this isn’t a Taco Bell, “expect arson.” It became a bakery, famous for adjacency with the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. One night, some years later, a grease flame, though extinguished at 9 pm, reignited at 3 am. The spray-painter relented: “This was better than a Taco Bell.” Today the building, again a Taco Bell, reminds us like “Danger!” and many a dance song: live más.
Andrea Panzeca is a writer and teaching artist in New Orleans.
SERIOUS JOY: SEJAL SHAH ON AMERIE’S “1 THING”
This one thing, but I’m not telling you what it is—and it’s the secret ingredient in the secret sauce—the secret ingredient is what makes the secret house. I looked it up, the lyrics, and what Wikipedia says, but with music, it’s how it makes you feel, not what others say about it. Still, here are a few things I want to say about Amerie’s “1 Thing”:
What I remember is dancing to this song in the house in the northeastern corner of Iowa, the driftless area, I rented for the academic year from a professor who was away in Copenhagen and in their little buttercream-colored house I danced at night. I was lonely. Nah nah nah nah nah oh (uh-uh). Was I going to find an academic job? It’s this 1 thing that got me trippin’. Is an academic job the way to happiness or a book? This one thing you did. For me it was neither, but I didn’t know that at the time. This one thing I want to admit it. I was dating the professor’s younger son. Ooh-wee, it felt so serious. I had also been out on some dates with a painter/chef at the local bistro. This one thing and I was so with it. It was hard to figure out. This was a town of 8,000. Blink and 20 years go by. Nah nah nah nah nah oh. Days go by. That was another song I was thinking about. What gets you tripping? The past is a head trip.
This one thing—what is it that makes a person right for another person? What’s the thing that makes a relationship last? What’s the thing that you can’t get over? And it’s exactly what I would say is not working in a student poem or story. Or one of mine. Here’s what I would write: “Thing” lacks specificity. It’s a thing. Can you be more specific? And yet, there is something about the thinginess of a thing. What’s your thing? What’s mine?
LOOKING AT SOME OF THE LYRICS:
Trying to let it go
(this is me, in everything I write, this one thing, trying to let something go)
This one thing, your soul made me feel it
(What thing is it?)
Hey, we don’t know each other well
(No, that’s what makes it interesting)
Memories just keep ringing bells
(a song unhooks those memories, unfastens them, silvers them, sounds them)
I’m hoping you can keep a secret
(What’s the secret except this 1 thing?)
This one thing you did—when it’s something that someone has done to me, it has the whiff of the unforgiveable. But what if no one did anything and dancing is only another way to write?
While working on my story collection, I found myself listening to songs on repeat and dancing alone again in my house—it was the pandemic- and who could have imagined this one thing that kept us afraid and apart was also this one thing that drew us together as we tried to figure out what the next best step was.
I danced once to “Days Go By.” This is an essay, though, about “1 Thing.” I danced to many songs including “1 Thing.” This 1 thing I want to admit it.
Amerie singing at the top of the hill and I sat and danced in the yellow house on the hill, wondering what one thing it would be—a job or a person or event waiting to happen, which would give my life direction, a ballast. Things did happen. I got a job in New York. I didn’t marry either the painter/chef or my landlord’s son (also a painter), though he said he would have. I didn’t realize for a long time that he was serious (the landlord’s son). It’s not that I wasn’t serious, it’s just that I didn’t think of myself as having that 1 thing for someone else, being that it was easier to be aware of that 1 thing in someone else.
I didn’t realize for a long time how much I admired painters. This one thing and I was so with it. They say if you admire it then you should try it. I’ve been trying (this one thing) painting some watercolors. I didn’t get tenure. The times we never even got to speak. I left New York.
It took me a long time to see this one thing is whatever you make it. I couldn’t find it outside of myself. The song always surprised me, made me wonder—what is everyone else thinking the one thing is? Or is it just the hook and the beat and the danceability of it and no one really cares what that 1 thing is or is it that there’s some mystery and anyone can fill it—magic, that you are a painter or a chef or a 6’1” teacher or that dancing alone in a house on a hill can bring you some magic and that can be the one thing that keeps you going when you don’t know what comes next in your life—and let’s be real not one of us does. Dancing can keep you going when you are writing a book, and you don’t know if someone is going to ever publish it. It’s a romance. I did marry. Not the chef-painter, not my landlord’s son, but a middle school teacher, years later. He coaches tennis and champions my writing. What is the 1 thing? It’s the turning toward each other instead of turning away when it gets harder. I think that’s the 1 thing. That’s a thing, anyway.
What are some things I will remember?
Dancing at night in the house, before there was wi-fi so I was near my laptop, which was plugged in.
Oh, been trying to let it go
Why is it so hard to let anything go?
Trying to keep my eyes close
Should it be closed?
Trying to keep it just like before
Before, before, I can see before (painter/chef)
The times we never even got to speak
The time before you know it’s going to work out with someone—
Don't wanna tell you what it is
Then when you know when it’s not going to work out, no matter how much you want it.
Do you even know what that 1 thing is?
I’m here to argue that we don’t. We just come up with reasons after—
Ooh-wee, it felt so serious
These things are serious! Even dancing alone is serious, because dancing is serious joy—
Got me thinking just too much
What is writing, but a different way of thinking?
They, we, are all of us married now. One to a psychiatrist, one I don’t know.
Na na na na oh (uh-uh).
I am writing this essay about a song, about how there was some joy in dancing even when lonely. More than writing a book, but if you are dancing while writing a book
Hear voices I don't wanna understand
Here I am talking about some thing
My car keys are jingling in my hand
Here I am telling you a story about two painters and a story collection
My high heels are clicking towards your door
And a tennis coach. It wasn’t a door, the way out is always on the dance floor, dancing, or toward a window, your eyes looking up
It's this one thing that got me trippin' (you did)
This one thing and I was so with it
Dancing with myself on a January night, not knowing what comes next, not knowing what the 1 thing was til I became the 1 thing
Trying to keep it just like before
There is no going back, but there’s always dancing, let me say that’s one thing that won’t forsake you.
Dancing is the secret house, is the way to write your secret book, is the way to make it real.
Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press on May 1st, 2024. This hybrid book came together through a lot of dancing. Her essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was a university common read, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and named in over thirty most-anticipated or best-of lists including Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, and PEN America. She lives in Rochester, New York. You can find her online @sejalshahwrites.