(12) Aimee Mann, “One”
denied
(7) Devo, “Satisfaction”
388-288
and will play in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/26/22.

ERIN BELIEU ON DEVO’S “SATISFACTION”

It’s October 14th, 1978, Omaha, Nebraska, and I’ve been a teenager just shy of three weeks.
It’s the year I begin creeping down to the TV room once my parents are in bed, sitting in my dad’s surpassingly ugly recliner, smoking the leftover ends of the four cigarettes that framed his after-supper ritual: four Larks, four Triscuits, each topped with a sweaty square of Colby cheese, and four Manhattans.
By 10pm, I knew he and my mom (with her own best time in this nightly liquid marathon) couldn’t clock an oom-pah band marching through the house. I’ve come down this evening to watch Saturday Night Live. For a girl living in the Brigadoon-like mists of Nebraska, my weekly illicit viewings of SNL are proof of life.
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that being thirteen sucks. Or it should be. I still recall the intensity of how terrible it feels to be that age. The enraging in-betweenness of it—too young for the older kids to bother with, but a galaxy beyond the babies you’re stuck “watching” at the card table end of Thanksgiving.
I’ll make the further case that being thirteen in 1978 was above average terrible: economy tanked, oil prices stratospheric, the Cold War still slouching on, a machine whose reason or purpose no one seemed to remember; Son of Sam’s trial on the nightly news, and that terrible picture on the cover of Time magazine, countless bodies splayed where they’d dropped after drinking the purple Kool Aid.
1978 also wins for peak divorce rate in America. Whatever spackle held the grown-ups together had rotted away over the course of the decade, as more and more of my friends were contractually obligated to spend weekends sleeping at their fathers’ divorce-sad one-bedroom apartments. Moms now had boyfriends, sketchy guys with receding hairlines named Denny and Cliff. Two of the kids in my neighborhood had uncles living in their basements, soldiers come home but not quite returned from Vietnam.
And the music. Uff. It was bleak from my position—that is, as a white girl from a suburban family barely clinging to the middle class, raised in an aggressively segregated midwestern city. I caught flashes on the periphery (from American Bandstand and Soul Train on Saturday mornings) that something musically vital was happening somewhere, but it wasn’t music to which I had real access back in the informational Before Times.
I had the soporifically wholesome stylings of “the Ol’ Redhead” Don Cole on KFAB AM radio announcing the treacly ballads that defined that year in pop music, a slough of already overplayed rock “classics,” the Gibb brothers’ Hydra-headed disco juggernaut, and the “Desperado” singer-songwriters whose stale “You know I gotta ramble, girl” machismo hit me as up its own ass even at that tender age. A perfume capturing the mainstream musical essence of 1978 in America would contain notes of ditch weed, Velveeta casserole, and polyester slacks (worn commando).
So I’m sitting in my dad’s chair smoking butts and regretting my nascent life when SNL’s host Fred Willard announces that week’s musical guest, some unknown band called Devo that in the next couple minutes will permanently alter how I perceive…well, everything.
As is true of any wildly original art that kicks the door open for much of what follows, the event of Devo’s appearance that night (back when we had three channels to choose from, and maybe PBS if you got the TV antenna pointed just right), this happening live on nationwide TV—it’s hard to capture the super-size audacity of their performance in our present time when you can experience everything anywhere always.
The danger-yellow biohazard suits, the evil-toy choreography—they looked like animatronic aliens who’d landed their spaceship in the uncanny valley. With unfashionably lean and punchy drums (especially compared to the era’s prog rock behemoths) and rhythm guitars laying out a tweaky, industrial through line, the song’s opening bars have more in common with Antheil’s score for Ballet Mécanique than anything the American public identified as a pop music at that point in history.
It’s not until Mark Mothersbaugh rips into his sugar-cereal amped version of the iconic hook of “Satisfaction” that you recognize this controlled demolition as a cover of one of the world’s most famous songs. The glitching robot vocals (Mothersbaugh spitting his famous “babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby” line like a possessed gumball machine), Gerald Casale’s boingy, Looney Tunes bass putting the party in the proceedings—they were the exact musical definition of “WTF??”; a weirdo bolt of lightning that shook the audience to their boogie (oogie oogie) shoes. It took Devo a little over two ferociously tight and catchy minutes that night to plant their harpoon in the bloated, boring, and twee nonsense clogging the airwaves at the time.

While our subject is cover songs, I’ll admit I have a hard time calling Devo’s version of “Satisfaction” a cover. That’s a toothless word for the Derridean surgery they perform on The Stones’ charismatic, seductive but ultimately backward-facing original. As T.S. Eliot said—who knew from demolishing traditions—“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
By this standard, Devo’s futuristic deconstruction of “Satisfaction” works as a crime-of-the-decade heist, hijacking the Stones’ song into something indelibly and completely their own. Respect to Mick Jagger for approving their use of the song, but what Devo does to “Satisfaction” has no basis in homage. The bluesy, roadhouse sex appeal that defines the Stones’ music is ruptured unto death by Devo’s mordantly playful amalgamation of Dadaism, Nihilistic philosophy, postmodern satire, and sci-fi kitsch, pressurized into the ear wiggy-ness of the corporate jingle structures they origamied into scathingly political pop music. And beneath the performance art drag, Devo had the added virtue of looking completely ordinary to their audience, genetic “spuds” as they called themselves—nothing like the sex panthers, renaissance fair troubadours and Valhalla cosplayers folks were used to. For all their obvious smarts and art house surreality, Devo was appealingly DIY for the kids who discovered them that night, both musically and visually; non-descript dudes indistinguishable from the college guys sacking groceries at my local Hinky Dinky. 
Of course, I didn’t have any of this language or context at 13, only a freshly minted teenager’s heat seeking radar for music so fresh and exciting—SO FUCKING NEW—that it left me slightly alarmed, disturbingly aroused and usefully confused. And I wasn’t alone.
Soon after their appearance on SNL, some of the certifiably coolest boys at the neighborhood high school covered Devo’s “Satisfaction” at the annual talent show causing a joyous riot that became immediate legend every kid in town heard about. A friend of mine, a well-known novelist (name redacted for the sake of personal dignity), told me after seeing their SNL performance he immediately dismantled his shower curtain and wore it around his tiny, conservative hometown to feel “Devo-esque,” despite the serious abuse he took from the normie kids (and proving once again being in the vanguard isn’t for the weak). My response was to start regularly pedaling my bike the 4 miles (uphill! Without permission!) to the closest record store, using my chore money to raid the bins for music I learned was called “New Wave”: Elvis Costello, B-52s, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, Blondie (and bless you, Chrissie & Debbie, for showing me women were damn well included too).
Seemingly overnight, it was a glorious time to be thirteen.
It’s a mystery to me and no small shame that on a recent stroll through the Internet I found surprisingly few “10 Greatest Covers of All-Time” lists that include Devo’s “Satisfaction.” I don’t even understand how that’s possible.
For many music nerds and budding musicians, Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” was a seminal moment in their early lives, a Schedule 1 introduction leading directly to the dive clubs and rumpus rooms of punk and new wave that would quickly infiltrate and reshape music worldwide.
Maybe Devo is considered more “performance art” than music to your more parochial sorts? Too equally committed to the satiric videos (MTV soon made ubiquitous) for the crankier purists to approve? Perhaps some simply take a pass on their music’s avant-garde complexities and experimentation?
Or maybe Devo is ultimately too Cassandra-like for some list makers with their upsettingly unsentimental “Jocko Homo” critique of post human devolution, zombie consumerism, and cannibalistic capitalism? I mean, nobody’s gonna vote Devo’s music most likely to get you laid.
I suppose this last reason makes the most sense to me. Little more than a year after Devo’s performance of “Satisfaction” on SNL, Ronald Reagan (*shudder*) won the presidency, ejaculating a backlash of fifties nostalgia porn as cultural “corrective” to the “dangerous” ideas unleashed by the Civil Rights, LGBTQIA+ and Women’s Liberation movements. During Reagan’s first administration, it remains in memory the only time I ever openly swore at my father—a public school administrator—paradoxically dedicated to working in lower income schools for 40 years—who ended up voting for Reagan not once, but twice. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD, DAD? IT’D BE A LOT QUICKER.”
So the great and greedy sleep of white America recommenced in the 80s with a revenant’s vengeance. In his second term, Ol’ Purplehead openly trolled the nation, using Bruce Springsteen’s obviously and indisputably brutal “Born In The USA” as his feel good campaign song while Alex P. Keaton clones were more than satisfied to dance along mindlessly in their whale print turtlenecks and Topsiders.
It’s hard not to think the human devolution Devo informed us of starting in the late 70s is all but complete in the apocalypse-adjacent aftermath of another racist, bigoted, and corrupt D-List actor’s presidency. That night on SNL, Devo delivered a message to the nation—a musical harbinger of the future soon to come--but hasn’t this always been America’s most singularly defining feature—not hearing what we don’t want to hear?
(“Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.”)

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021's Come-Hither Honeycomb. Recent work has appeared in the New York Times, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, and Kenyon Review. Belieu lives in Houston where she teaches for the University of Houston's MFA/Ph.D. program in Creative Writing.

NOT THE LONELIEST COVER YOU COULD EVER DO: BROOKE CHAMPAGNE ON AIMEE MANN’S “ONE” 

Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.

She first made herself known not through sight, but sound. What did she sound like? Like a cartoon bubble bursting over my head. Like the bright pop sound Andy Williams makes in the chorus of The Chordettes’ 1958 song “Lollipop,” sticking his forefinger into his cheek and uncorking the champagne bottle of his mouth. Half-believing I dreamed the pop, I stood up from bed at 2 a.m. and felt a slow leaking, as if my body had forgotten how to hold itself together. At first I thought I was pissing myself. Suddenly, about a gallon of bloody water emptied from my vagina. 
My daughter was due in almost a month, but she’d be arriving today. Still, I had reasons to remain calm. The hospital was only one backroad mile from our house. My husband slept soundly next to my wet spot, but there was no need to wake him yet to pack a bag. I’d read that we wouldn’t need to leave till contractions were four minutes apart, and that was likely hours away. All I needed was my phone timer and something to do. And I knew just what that was. “Okay, this is good,” I thought. “I have papers to grade.”
It was the middle of the fall semester and I had subs to cover my classes, but I didn’t want to leave them with a full set of ungraded memoirs. Besides, I like reading student memoirs. What’s a “bad” one look like? Too self-centered? Too incomplete a narrative arc? Screw all that. My students share their lives with me. They may not completely plumb the depths of why things happen the way they do or what it all means, but they’re getting there. They open up to me in ways they may not with their parents, in ways that—holy shit—my daughter might also close off to me someday. Yes, I was already this far afield while timing contractions and commenting on my students’ uses of reflection and scene, entering grades ranging from A-minus to A-plus. Then, I was somewhere twenty years in the future: who would this early girl be, and what would she mean to me. I couldn’t imagine the answer; the question itself was terrifying.
In fact, the question required further distraction, so I scrolled through my DirecTV guide to where I usually find it: HBO. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia had just started—a perfect movie for the desperation I was masking. Then, I was nearly twenty years in the past, first watching the movie and hearing the dial tone as the song “One” begins, beep beep beep beep. The singer leaned on the word “one” so deeply, so coolly, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…” The opening film credits revealed a magnolia blossoming at hyper-speed, followed by the slow unraveling of sad, lonely characters I would spend the next three hours only half paying attention to. Like I said, I’d seen them all before.

Now I spend my time just making thoughts of yesterday.

She first made herself known not through sound, but sight. In my second year of college, my mom’s best friend Gloria burned me a CD with a homemade cover design. She often made me gifts like this, introduced me to R.E.M. and Radiohead and all the Gen X coolness I’d always been slightly too young for. On this CD, a long, lanky woman, blonde and cool-looking, like Gloria herself, wore a tankini and her name written in script across her body: Aimee Mann. Oh boy, I thought, another beautiful, blonde singer. But I trusted Gloria. She’d never married or had kids, and so from my purview her life comprised of great-art consumption, astute political commentary, and believing in me. She cheered my amorphous writing ambitions, even masochistically asked to read early drafts.
Gloria wasn’t an artist, but loved art in all its forms. She could name all the architects who designed her favorite buildings in our hometown of New Orleans, and she was fun; she knew every rooftop bar in town. Because my mother spent much of her adult life raising three daughters, three stepdaughters, and cycling through three husbands, she didn’t have as much time to slow down, pay attention. Whether or not a piece of art or music or film was beautiful didn’t much matter. My mother rarely analyzed, or let a thought or feeling linger. She accepted a breadth or dearth of beauty, and moved on. At that time, in college, I saw in these two women two discrete paths for womanhood. The Gloria path was glorious. Freedom, one-ness, living life mostly for yourself. Though my mother is no martyr, I feared choosing her path would mean my own martyrdom. To be encumbered, constantly needed and tired, having little time to contemplate art and the self in the one life I was living. I needed time. I wanted to write, to make art, like this childless, beautiful Aimee Mann.
Because I wanted to impress Gloria, I didn’t just listen to Aimee Mann, I studied her. I read somewhere that Anderson wrote the screenplay with Mann in mind, that he wanted his movie to be the equivalent of an Aimee Mann album. In that sense, the film was a cover of Mann’s musical oeuvre established in the early-mid 90s. The soundtrack’s first song, “One,” opens the film, and it wasn’t immediately my favorite. The song contains no images. It’s pure argumentative lament. When I first heard the album from start to finish, I was most gripped by the track “Save Me.” It begins with the lines, “You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet.” If you’ve ever really loved someone who’s damaged, or been that damaged person, it’s a perfect simile.
Anyway, “One” is an ostensibly simple song with simple lyrics. The relationship referenced is one where a presumed lover, or loved one, is gone. That’s all we know. When I first heard it, the English major in me found it fascinating to hear that one was a number you could “do.” As in: enact, or perform. The rest of the song felt pointless to deconstruct. “One” is lonely, “no is the saddest experience…”, yes, I get it. I remember sometime after Gloria burned the CD for me, I asked her what she thought of the song, to confirm if I was correct about it. She laughed and said, “Well, yeah, it’s sad, but ‘one’ isn’t always the loneliest number.” Given that I planned to take her solitary path, I was glad to hear it.
Over the years, as I dug further into Mann’s oeuvre, I learned “One” was a cover with interesting tweaks to the 1968 Harry Nilsson original. Mann’s version includes an electric guitar, and her tone makes the song’s argument more starkly than Nilsson. He sings “one is the loneliest number” like it’s a suggestion; when Mann sings it, “one’s” loneliness is fact. But what I love most about the cover is how much Mann relies on Nilsson’s voice, both at the opening and closing of the song. In the opening, just after the beep beep of the dial tone, we hear a male voice shout, “Okay, Mr. Mix!” Which feels totally weird and nonsensical. Turns out it’s Nilsson, from another of his tracks called “Cuddly Toy.” And as “One’s” final cryptic line concludes—one is a number divided by two—Mann’s voice recedes, and Nilsson’s enters again. He sings the following lines, which are not lyrics from “One,” but from another of his songs called “Together”:

And one has decided to bring down the curtain
And one thing’s for certain
There’s nothing to keep them together.

I knew none of this when I obsessively listened to the soundtrack, but hearing a song titled “Together” superimposed over “One” is a bit ironic, and something that two decades ago, I could’ve written an A-plus paper about. Now, thinking about my relationship with Gloria, the song, and my daughter, who six years ago was in the process of being born as I listened to “One” while timing contractions, I’m considering the nature of covers. What makes a good cover? What should a cover song do? As in: enact, or perform. According to Ray Padgett’s book on cover songs called Cover Me, musicians worried for years that if their song was covered successfully, that meant an erasure of their original. Padgett vehemently disagrees with that conclusion. For him, a cover expands the original, adds new textures and contexts, invites a new audience to enjoy the update and revisit the old. In other words, a successful cover only makes the original stronger.

It's just no good anymore since you went away.

She made herself known that balmy January day of 2022 not through sight, or sound, but smell. Warm jambalaya and cold, olive-stuffed muffulettas waited upstairs at Schoen & Son Funeral Home on Canal Street in New Orleans, where my mother and I would eat after we’d said goodbye to Gloria.
Though I didn’t speak at the memorial, I thought a lot about what I’d say. One of the things that made Gloria the best was that she was legitimately interested in what I thought, which stroked my ego in a way my busy mother couldn’t always do. But she was also interested in everyone else, too. There was some artistry, I suppose, in how she plumbed the depths of why people were the way they were. This is why she had so many conservative friends despite being one of the most politically liberal people I knew. Proof was all around me in the hundreds at the memorial, a great gathering of both the masked and unmasked.
The first to eulogize her was a young attorney, one of many for whom Gloria worked at the downtown law firm where she and my mother were legal secretaries for almost four decades. The attorney made a joke about the great unmasked, saying it was a testament to Gloria’s patience and grace that there were so many Trump supporters in the room. It reminded me that when Trump first came down that godforsaken escalator, right around the time Gloria was diagnosed with breast cancer (proof that if there’s a god, he’s a bastard), I raged and scoffed at the stupidity of anyone who could consider this monstrous moron as anything but a joke. Gloria reminded me that listening to others’ wrong-headed ideas only strengthens our positions, because we’re empathizing where they won’t.
Over a dozen people spoke beautifully at the memorial, including members of the great unmasked, but it was her college-aged niece whose impromptu speech most touched me. “I didn’t plan to say anything, but, my Aunt Gloria, there’s probably no other person as responsible for making me who I am as she was. She shared with me what was good, what was cool. Every piece of music I listen to or television I watch and love is because of her. I can’t imagine not being able to talk to her about any of it anymore.”
But silence touched me as well. During the parade of memorial speakers, I asked my mother if she wanted to say something, said I’d hold her hand and walk up there with her, if she liked. She just gently shook her head, and later, in the privacy of plating our jambalaya and muffulettas, said it’d been enough for her to tell Gloria’s family everything she felt, what losing her meant—losing the best friend she’d ever had, losing a piece of herself. In Gloria’s final days under home hospice care, Mom had been with her. She held her hand, watched her slowly go. She didn’t need to enact or perform her love.

One is a number divided by two

It’s sad, embarrassing really, how much I learned about Gloria from her obituary and memorial, simple facts I’d never bothered asking her about. Like me, she attended Nicholls State in Thibodaux, LA (a.k.a. Harvard on the Bayou), and graduated from LSU. How had we never discussed that? She was born earlier than I’d thought, in 1958, the same year, in fact, that Andy Williams swiped inside his cheek in the chorus of The Chordettes’ “Lollipop,” the very first sound I conjured when my water broke. The song “Lollipop” itself is a cover, first recorded by a long-forgotten duo named Ronald & Ruby. The oddly, wonderfully comparable sound would’ve never entered my mind upon my daughter’s arrival had it not been for The Chordettes and Andy Williams’ famous pop.
Covers are so ubiquitous now that we take for granted the term itself—why they’re called covers at all—and as stated in Padgett’s Cover Me, there are three theories for its derivation. The first is that a music label would “cover its bets” by releasing a recording of a popular song; in the second, the idea was that the new version would literally “cover up” the old on record store shelves; and the third, most capitalistic theory was how music label execs would answer, when asked if they had any copycat versions of a popular song to release: “we’ve got it covered!”
I can’t help but find a metaphor in these theories, and how they apply to the relationships I’ve held most dearly. Having a child is a way to cover your bets: if you can’t get everything you want out of this life, maybe your child can. Maybe they can cover up your shittiness, your aging, your (hopefully) slow bodily unraveling. If you choose to have children, a secret, sacred hope is that when you get old, they’ll care for you; they’ll have you covered.
Before deciding to have children, and still, I’ve been both afraid to be covered, and afraid not to be. I’ve feared motherhood would mean half-measures in artistry, and vice versa. And I’ve feared the obverse: that without motherhood, I’d have no excuse, no cover, for my mediocre art. But in listening to “One” again to write this essay, perhaps more obsessively than I did twenty years ago, after re-hearing the lament and singularity of being one, I see that although I planned to take Gloria’s path, and instead took my mother’s, the two paths weren’t discrete at all. The overlap lives in their love for each other. “One” can be sad, but “two” can be, too, and children won’t always cover our loneliness, or any other parts of us that need covering. This essay is an inadequate cover for the originality, the oneness, of Gloria. And of Aimee Mann. And of being a mother to my daughter and a daughter to my mother. But I’m making this cover, anyway. I’m still singing the song I’ve heard before, only singing it differently.
I’ve learned, too, that just the concept of covers is relatively modern. Before the advent of rock n’ roll, it was the song that was paramount, not the singer. The quality of the song mattered more than the person performing it. So to extend that cover-as-relationship metaphor, if my daughter is my cover, the question isn’t what she makes of me, or I of her; the singular song she makes of her life is what counts. My daughter, my cover, who first made herself known, truly, not through sight or sound or smell, but touch. After twelve hours of labor, when she crowned, then blinked, then screamed, I brought her to my breast, and tasted what it was for me to be born into someone irrevocably different, both alone and not alone, not joined together anymore, but not two, either, and never quite one again.

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises,“ which was published in The Normal School and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess.” Her writing has appeared widely in print and online journals, most recently in Under the Sun, Barrelhouse, and Hunger Mountain. She is seeking publication for her first collection of personal essays entitled Nola Face.