(12) CHARLENE, “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”
undressed
(7) THE EAGLES, “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
1021-652
and will play in the march badness championship

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 March 26.

THAT CREEP CAN ROLL, MAN: THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ ON “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”

For me, it’s as iconic a scene as any. The Dude sits in the back of a taxi. He’s had a long day—a porn producer roofied him, the Malibu chief of police has chucked a coffee mug at his forehead—and the taxi driver is playing one of his least favorite bands. The Dude asks the driver to change the channel. “Fuck you,” the driver yells. “If you don’t like my music, get your own fuckin’ cab. I’ll kick your ass out.” This doesn’t stand with the Dude. “I had a rough night,” he says, “and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.” The driver pulls over, and kicks his ass out.

I spent most weeknights in high school in the early 2000s listening to Q104.3, New York’s classic rock station. I would lock the door to my room, tune the stereo, and, after about thirty minutes of math, position myself in the center of my room, between bed and bookcase, pump up the volume, and rock out. I could do this for hours, jumping around my room and whisper-screaming lyrics, the radio loud enough to drown out my noise, the rug thick enough or the downstairs neighbors patient enough that they didn’t complain. The whole thing had a very George Michael and his lightsaber vibe. I tried to keep my fantasies modest. In my imagination, I played my school talent show in front of my classmates so they could see how cool I’d become. I was my own little dictator: I just wanted to be loved, and maybe adored.
I idolized pretty much anything Q104.3 played. If you got lucky, on Two for Tuesdays, when the station played ten songs by five bands without commercial breaks, you’d catch something like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” or Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you were unlucky, you got “Layla” or “Light My Fire.” If it was a really rough night, you got the Police or the Eagles, and then you turned the radio off, sat down, and finished your homework.

The irony of the Dude’s cab scene, as the clip’s surprisingly insightful YouTube comments point out, is that we the audience expect the Dude, a white, middle-aged stoner who smokes roaches in his car and listens to CCR tapes, to like The Eagles, and the cab driver, a Black man wearing a taqiyah, to dislike them. The pair’s fiercely opposite reactions—the Dude just cannot keep his mouth shut; the driver almost causes an accident pulling over—are both a subversion of racial stereotypes and a joke about the Eagles. They are the most indifferent, blandest of bands, and yet both these characters are ready to die on this hill.

I disliked the Eagles in high school for a mostly aesthetic reason: their songs were oversaturated with the 70s. They sounded like they wanted to be liked, and that made me dislike them. As a grad school professor would write shorthand in my margins, they were TTH: Trying Too Hard.
I also mistrusted them because “Hotel California,” with its upbeat and wooden timbales and Don Henley’s elongated vowels, sounded like a bunch of white guys on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to sound Spanish. Indeed, the song’s working title was “Mexican Reggae.” And here I was, a white guy with a Spanish last name, who did not speak his father’s native language, and who decided to take Chinese in high school so he wouldn’t have to learn the Spanish the rest of his family spoke. I did not identify with what the Eagles were trying to do in that song, and yet I did identify, and this bothered me most.

At least, I think this is why I disliked the song. Because at some point in high school, along came the Dude and The Big Lebowski and here was another white guy, who smoked pot and wore pajamas outdoors and hated the Eagles.
By now, I’ve watched the movie more times than any other except for Casablanca. (Once I was alone for a long time in a house without cable.) The anxiety of influence kicks in. Did I hate the Eagles because my favorite character in my favorite movie hated them? Or is he my favorite character because he was able to articulate my dislike in the way we say good literature articulates our long held yet unexpressed truths? Did I root for the villains in Bond films because I too am slippery and untrustworthy, and because I appreciated how these figures complicated and undermined a sense of unflappable masculinity? Or did I feel this way because these villains wormed their way into my head before I could come to my own questions about myself?
You might say any assignation of good or bad, like or dislike, is never a judgment about the text itself, but a shaping of ourselves in reaction to a text. We want what reflects us back to ourselves. Or, as the Dude would say, “Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion man.”

The other day, my friend Alyssa brought up a personality metric her younger sister invented to measure the world. There are four categories to express a person’s outward and (inward) dichotomies: You can be 1) chill (un-chill), 2) unchill (chill), 3) chill (chill), or 4) unchill (unchill). Chill (unchill) presents a chill exterior while maintaining an un-chill interior. Unchill (chill) does the inverse. The rest explain themselves.
As is the case with any personality metric, the test becomes more complicated the more you think about it, although you could say that that is pretty unchill of me to point out.
But still it’s a fun exercise. For example, Walter, the Dude’s best friend, with all his screaming about Vietnam, is decidedly unchill (unchill), as are the movie’s Nazis, despite their nihilism. Jesus, the Dude’s bowling antagonist, is actually chill (chill). A Bond villain is unchill (chill): at their core, they know what has to be done and how to do it. Their firmness of purpose bespeaks a certain calm.
On first blush, the Dude appears to be chill (chill) since, after all, he’s the Dude and the Dude abides. But you could also argue the Dude is chill (unchill). Beneath his façade lies an interior full of agitation and anger at the injustices in the world, as well as the failing of the Dude’s life work to correct those injustices, that anger often funneled into wherever he happens to be at the moment, such as in the back of a cab with a bruise on his forehead from a fascist police chief’s coffee mug, listening to Don Henley want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a million stars all around.

Like the Dude, the Eagles are chill (unchill). While their songs present a surface of easy listening and relaxed SoCal vibes, underneath that surface lies a corporate mentality, a lack of conviction, and a cynical, exploitative view of the world. Unlike, say, CCR, the Dude’s favorite band, the chillness of their music does not ground itself in the knowledge that the world is decidedly an unchill place. Their music instead argues that the world is an easy place, or at least a place where shallow, derivative, uncomplicated songs can succeed in the way that my imaginary concerts strove to: by presenting a fantasy and wanting adoration.
If the length of its guitar solo is any indication, there is no song more a fantasy, more wanting of adoration than “Hotel California.” Its six minutes and thirty-one seconds are full of vague metaphors and knock-off Springsteen lines that portend to mean anything and everything. The narrative possesses a muddiness that makes “Stairway to Heaven” sing like a clear mountain stream. Musically, its guitars cascade through the song, awash and bright not like sunlight, but like Dawn, like your computer monitor turned all the way up. I suspect it’s a song simply about getting your nut, but at least when Led Zeppelin sang those, they didn’t have to do it with so much pomp and mystery.

That said, this is less an essay about whether Hotel California is a bad song as it is an essay about why I feel the need to say Hotel California is a bad song. About how aesthetics often equal an idea of how the way we are good is determined by what we say is good, or at least how we might appear good in public by what we say we like.
Whatever its limitations, could a metric like chill (unchill) be applied to the notion of good and bad? What are the qualities of a song that is 1) good (bad) versus one that is 2) bad (good)? What makes something 3) good (good) or 4) bad (bad)?
I would like to think that this is a world where the core of a text makes itself known eventually. Take Guy Fieri, for example, who people such as myself only admit to liking ironically at first. Guy Fieri appeals because of his ridiculous exterior; liking someone so unsophisticated is one way of gaining social capital in a generation suspicious of sincerity. Irony is a mask, says Anne Carson (good (good)). That is, we say Guy Fieri is good but we wink when we do so because we are witty and patrician enough to know he is good (bad). But spend any amount of time with him, and those designations tend to flip or disappear. What actually appeals about him is not the way in which he might make a viewer feel intellectually superior, but the way in which his relentless positivity, good cheer, and support of others make me, at least, wish for more of those qualities in myself. I start to admire what big bites he takes and the convenience of his backwards sunglasses. Irony is a mask, but then, Carson adds, the mask becomes the face.
To put it more succinctly: Once I grew a mustache as a joke. Now I have a mustache.

So while I’d like to live in a world where the core parenthetical reveals itself, the core also shifts, moves, heats up and cools down. And I myself am moving in relation to it. I might hardly even know where I am in the first place.
Is “Hotel California” a bad song or am I saying it’s a bad song so I can sound like a certain (good) person? Is it possible to call it a bad song and still say I like it? Or to say that I like it but that I don’t believe in it?

Anyone that’s watched The Big Lebowski knows about Jesus. As played by John Turturro, the character wears a lavender jumpsuit, a hairnet, and a perfectly manicured violet pinky fingernail. He dries his fingers over the air vent and tongues the bowling ball. In a fitting touch for the Dude’s nemesis, “Hotel California” plays in the background when we meet Jesus. Not the Eagles’ version, but a cover by the Gipsy Kings. Jesus prepares to bowl during the song’s instrumental opening; if you’ve never heard this version, you’d have no idea what song it was. Once Jesus bowls a strike, he turns around, hops from foot to foot, and points at the camera as the first verse begins. At this point we the audience recognize what we have, and how it differs. Here is a Bond villain cooked up by the Coen Brothers.
I find the Gipsy Kings’ version formidable in its arpeggiated fury, and I also do not know how seriously to take it. Is it over the top, or does it just accompany one of the movie’s most over the top scenes? Either way, it does something I hardly did in high school, something the Eagles are all too eager to convince you they do: as the kids say, it fucks, and does so in the Spanish I refused to learn as a child. Given all the vague references to mission bells and colonialism and the exoticism of California in the Eagles’ original, here is a twist. The song feels like it’s taking something back and pushing something else forward.

Some time ago, my partner described an article that considers how song covers “queer” their original versions, such as when a woman covers a song in which a man pined for a woman. That is, a cover does not just imitate, but destabilizes its original. I think, most famously, of Jose Feliciano playing a folk version of the Star Spangled Banner during the 1968 World Series. To many viewers, Feliciano presents an image of defenselessness: a person who is blind, sitting and playing an acoustic guitar on his own, with no martial band to back him. This, in turn, gives the cover its power; Feliciano manages to demilitarize the anthem brilliantly. And like all good (good) covers, he renders it so that you both can and can’t sing along to it. When the melody rises, Feliciano descends. When a note should be held, he shortens it. Certainty becomes, instead, conditional.
I hesitate to use the word queering myself. I’m not sure it is my word to use, and I do not want to dampen or quell the word’s effect, much as I was hesitant to use the word partner. I wonder as well if my using that term is similar in some respect to the pop corporate mentality with which Don Henley and the Eagles appropriate the sounds of a just-passed era where others laid more on the line than they did, or the way in which a multinational corporation will drop a Kardashian into the vaguest of Black Lives Matter protests to sell soda.
But I admire the subversion a gesture can create. What a cover does to the original song resembles what the Dude is to Jeffrey Lebowski, or how Jesus, whose last name is Quintana, does not pronounce his name “hey-zeus” but as the Anglicized “gee-zus” himself. A cover questions the original’s values and repurposes content for new aims. It does something more complicated than call the original good or bad. It alters a text from whatever is considered acceptable, keeping in mind that when we call something such, we want that to say more about ourselves and our good standing than about whatever that thing is.

The house where I watched Casablanca over and over again belonged to my grandmother, a house she and my grandfather, whom I never met, had built outside Rio de Janeiro. Casablanca is, of course, a movie about people of mostly comfortable means attempting to escape the threat of fascism by traveling to the Americas. (Good luck, many would say.) It resembles, to that skeletal degree, my grandfather who fled the Spanish Civil War for South America just a few years before, the way the families of the future Gipsy Kings also fled Catalonia during that same civil war for the south of France. It’s a cheap move, an easy move, to tell you the insignia of both Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Third Reich was an eagle.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review Online among other places and he has received fellowships from Colgate University and the MacDowell Colony. He's an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, and a lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: ZOË BOSSIERE ON “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”

I had hoped to internalize the music. To listen to Charlene’s one-hit wonder on repeat until the lyrics settled deep down into the recesses of my brain, where bad songs and useless information go to be preserved for all eternity. To listen until, maybe, I even liked it a little bit in spite of myself.
In the months between selecting “I’ve Never Been to Me” for this tournament last July and when these words were written, I’ve cued the song up on Spotify and YouTube more times than I can count. I listened to multiple different versions by several artists to break up the monotony of Charlene’s breathy refrain; I played it in situations where I would not be able to leave, such as while taking a shower or behind the wheel of a car; I forced myself to muscle through the song for the sake of art, a la Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage. But invariably, by the third or fourth repeat, I’d rip off my headphones in a sweaty desperation, reaching a point where I couldn’t get through the song one more time. Not even for another second. By November, this ritual of failing to listen to, let alone write about, “I’ve Never Been to Me” was beginning to get under my skin. I worried ceaselessly about the uncertain future of this essay. So eventually I put my headphones away and did what many of us resort to when we’re stuck and need advice: I called my mom.
It turns out this was not the worst place to start; my mom is roughly the same age as Charlene and was alive to witness the rise of “I’ve Never Been to Me” on the charts from a paltry #97 in 1977 all the way to a respectable #3 in 1982. 1977 also happens to be the year my much-older sister was born. Mom was nineteen, living in the deep Georgia south with the disaffected high school boyfriend her parents had all but forced her to marry, shotgun style, after her pregnancy. Savannah was a long way from Charlene’s star-studded existence in Los Angeles, but according to the latter’s memoir (also called “I’ve Never Been to Me”), Charlene and Mom had a lot in common, both as “discontented mothers” and “regimented wives.” I don’t know about making love to preacher men or sipping champagne on a yacht, but Mom did lead quite the storied life throughout her twenties, first running away with my then two-year-old sister to Seattle, Washington where she made and sold dresses at the Pike Place Market, and, later, joining an Eastern European traveling circus with my dad where the two of them performed onstage with sea lions. My birth is not even the tenth most interesting item on her long list of adventurous experiences.
The first time I call her, Mom is in the middle of packing an order for her online paper crafting store, a business venture she’s taken on in her sixties. This enterprising is typical of her. While most of her friends are thinking about how they’d like to spend their retirement, Mom is out hustling for her future, one stamp set at a time. She seems distracted when I ask her whether she remembers Charlene and what she thought about “I’ve Never Been to Me” back when she was a young mother, herself. Just as Mom is about to answer, she’s overtaken by a dry coughing spell.
“People—people thought—it was stupid,” she gasps into the receiver.
“Like stupid how?” I ask. I wait while she takes a sip of water.
“The song was just so corny,” she says. “The music, the words, everything about it.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but Mom says, “Can I call you back in thirty minutes?”
She does not call me back. 

As might be clear by now, I can’t stand “I’ve Never Been to Me,” and if you’re reading this, chances are good that you probably don’t like it either. The March Badness tourney is far from the first arena the song has been publicly called out in, nor is it the first “worst song” contest it’s unwittingly entered. Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” earned the #3 spot in a 2006 CNN “Worst Song of All Time” poll, and #4 in Jimmy Guterman’s The Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of All Time. Humor columnist Dave Barry gave the song an honorable mention in his own bad song survey (later chronicled in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs) back in the 90s due to the sheer number of readers who took the time to write in and complain about it. Barry actually noted that while “I’ve Never Been to Me” might not have received the most votes, it was one of the few songs that inspired the most “intense hatred” among responders. Further evidencing this are the sheer number of personal blogs in which people have taken it upon themselves to convince the rest of the internet that Charlene’s song is one of the worst of all time.
But while many listeners can agree that “I’ve Never Been to Me” is, in fact, very bad, I was unable to find anyone who could articulate exactly how or why the song’s legacy has endured for so many decades. Why do we still remember—for better or for worse—what is, on its face, a crappy song by a woman with a short, arguably unremarkable musical career?
To answer this question, it might be important to consider the circumstances of what made Charlene famous in the first place. According to her memoir, Charlene grew up dreaming of becoming an actress or a singer. Her big chance came in 1976, when Motown signed Charlene as their first ever white artist. But the world wasn’t yet ready for “I’ve Never Been to Me.” The lyrics were too risqué, the idea of such a liberated woman (even one who ultimately learns her place) too counter to the more conservative “traditional” sensibilities of the time. Despite its great promise as a single, the song was an utter Billboard flop, barely scratching the top 100. Everyone seemed to agree Charlene had the voice, talent, and drive to sing, but it was apparent she lacked some ineffable quality one needs to successfully break away from the dreamers and become a star. Motown—and the American public—quickly lost interest in what Charlene had to offer.
Discouraged, she left Los Angeles in the early 1980s to follow her new husband, an ordinary man named Jeff, to his home country of England and found work in a local candy shop. Charlene’s dream of fame and stardom must have seemed then hopelessly beyond her reach. In another version of her life, the story might have ended here.

“I think it also helps to understand that everyone was trying to find themselves back then,” Mom says when I call her a second time. “There were all these movements, and the 70s were a time when women were becoming more independent and doing things our parents’ generation would find shocking. So women like Charlene were really bucking the system.”
I had asked Mom why she thought Charlene only became so popular five years after its initial failure. Though she admits to disliking the song and remembers laughing about it with her progressive Seattle friends when it was on the radio back in 1982, Mom is able to see “I’ve Never Been to Me” from a generous point of view I hadn’t considered, which frustrates me a little. I had wanted her perspective about what qualities she thought contributed to why the song was so bad, not its potential merits as a misguided baby step towards the third wave feminism we know today.
“But do you think Charlene was bucking the system, after all?” I ask. “Because even though she does go and lead this independent life, she ends up regretting it in the end, right? So it seems like the song is actually advocating for pretty traditional values.”
There is no question that the speaker of Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” has led a privileged and enviable life. She’s well-traveled, ostensibly wealthy, and has a lifetime of hedonistic experiences to fondly recall. But alas: she also has a problem. Between all that travel and lovemaking and champagne sipping she forgot to settle down and start a family. Now, at an advanced age (Charlene was 26 when the song was recorded), she has zero hope of finding a man who would be tolerant of her salacious past, leaving her unable to achieve something even adjacent to happiness. Like the ghosts of so many Christmas pasts, Charlene resigns herself to wandering uninvited into other women’s lives, warning them against pursuing the same freedoms, independence, and pleasures she once enjoyed. Instead, she implores women dreaming of a little excitement to appreciate the gift of their pedestrian, unfulfilling lives as housewives under the watchful eye of the patriarchy. You’ve got it made, honey, “I’ve Never Been To Me” seems to say, so plaster a smile on those cheeks! Your husband will be home soon and he’s expecting his dinner to be hot and on the table; kick off those shoes, sling that baby on your hip, and get cooking!
Mom pauses. “Yeah,” she says, “But I think the song might be more about living with regret. Like, she’s led this untraditional life and didn’t end up where she thought she would. It has that introspective quality to it. But I agree her perspective does feel dated, now.”
The song is dated, yes. But so is a lot of other music from the same era—plenty of stuff that doesn’t regularly crack the top five in “worst song” competitions, let alone merit consideration as a contender in these arenas. Why “I’ve Never Been to Me?” Why Charlene?
“Would it surprise you to hear that Charlene didn’t write the song?” I ask. “It was actually written by two men—Ron Miller and Kenny Hirsch.”
Mom laughs. “Well isn’t that typical,” she says.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge Charlene her successes, nor do I blame her for failing to recognize the more problematic aspects of “I’ve Never Been to Me.” I know she comes from a time (the 1970s) and a place (Hollywood) where a producer screaming at a woman if she doesn’t sing a better take is a motivational “kick up the butt” (Charlene’s actual words) rather than a terrifying, traumatic, or abusive experience. She may not have written the words, but Charlene does personally identify with the song’s message so strongly that she titled both her memoir and the domain for her official website after it. Though one can find many versions of the song by a variety of other singers, the legacy of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and Charlene are inextricably linked such that it is impossible to examine one without also interrogating the other.
By a divine (or perhaps cruel) stroke of luck, the push for feminism and gender equality had died down just enough in the early 80s for the public to give “I’ve Never Been to Me” another shot. A Florida radio DJ is credited with popularizing the song at the behest of his girlfriend, who was one of Charlene’s few fans the first time around. Almost overnight, Charlene had become famous. She took the first plane back to the states to promote the song and for several months her life resembled the stardom she had fantasized about as a child, replete with frenzied fans begging for autographs, fancy dinners paid for by the record label, and meet-and-greets with all the most idolized musicians of the day. But her fame was ultimately short lived; Motown had ensnared Charlene in an exploitative contract, and she would go on to take home less than $13,000 from the rerelease of her song. As that money began to run out, Charlene knew she would need another hit if she was going to establish herself in the industry as more than just a one-hit wonder.
Charlene hinged her second-chance career on a new song, also written by Ron Miller, entitled “Used to Be.” She was thrilled to have the opportunity to record the piece as a duet with none other than Stevie Wonder. True to his name, Wonder was a national sensation and every song he touched seemed to turn to gold. If anything could solidify her status as a serious musical artist, Charlene thought, it would be the success of this next song. But fate clearly had other plans. “Used to Be” peaked at a tepid #46 position on US charts and was banned outright on UK airwaves (yes, really) because of such unfortunate lyrics as:

Have another Chivas Regal
You’re twelve years old and sex is legal
Your parents don’t know where or who you are

This mistake would mark the beginning of the end for Charlene’s zombie-like career. In her memoir, she recounts this disappointment with particular bitterness. In the music business, you rarely get a second chance, and here she had squandered hers with a song that, on paper at least, should have been an easy hit. But even Stevie Wonder wasn’t enough to save “Used to Be” from itself. Charlene reports feeling shocked anyone would think the lyrics sexualized children, writing, “people misinterpreted it and thought we were condoning sex for 12-year-olds for God’s sake,” though, it should be noted, she does not offer a convincing alternate interpretation.
Charlene would never again record a song that broke the top 100. But despite the ever-mounting odds against her, Charlene has never once stopped chasing her next comeback. The final chapters of her memoir detail a series of increasingly desperate schemes to become relevant once again, including releasing a 2008 dance mix of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and touring the gay nightclub circuit for extra cash, at times sleeping in her car because she couldn’t afford the price of a hotel for the night. She admits this relentless pursuit of fame has caused strain on her relationship with her husband and daughters, but she still hasn’t given up on her dream of reclaiming her career with another hit. Her memoir concludes with this heartbreaking self-assessment:
“I look back on everything I’ve been through in my life with a sweet sadness…You sit there and childishly think that things are going to last and last, but they’re not. People are going to die, things are going to disappear, and songs will be forgotten. But there has to come a time when I will wake up, look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Hey lady, you lady, I’ve been to paradise and now I’ve finally been to me.’ So I’d better start living my life before it’s too late.”
The irony in this, of course, is that it’s already too late. The book is over. Charlene, the heroine of this story, hasn’t found what she’s spent the better part of her life searching for. She’s lived the glamorous lifestyle of a star as well as the realities of a motherhood her song’s narrator so wishes could be hers, yet still, despite all of this, Charlene is left feeling unfulfilled. Who is to blame for this tragic outcome? Was it “I’ve Never Been to Me” that doomed Charlene to this Groundhog Day-esque cycle, forever trying and failing to find herself amid lofty goals of celebrity and fame? Or is it that Charlene’s short-lived fame could only ever have hinged on the improbable success of such an insufferable song? While we may never know the answer, one thing is clear. Though her 2017 memoir does not acknowledge this, Charlene’s song continues to thrive well beyond its expected lifespan in the spirit of competitions like this one. Unwittingly, Charlene has established a legacy for herself after all, but the cruel paradox of this recognition is a kind of attention she didn’t ask for and likely doesn’t appreciate.

“One more question, Mom,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“Have you ever been to Me?”
“Oh god,” she laughs. “Who has time for that? I can find myself when I’m dead.”

The endurance of “I’ve Never Been to Me”—and, by extension, of Charlene—represents a kind of celebration of failure that should be familiar to all of us. In this way, Charlene’s “Me” becomes a metaphor for the impossible standard each of us privately holds for ourselves. A standard so high we have little chance of ever meeting, let alone exceeding, our own expectations—whether as writers, as parents, or as good people. As Confucius once said: no matter where you go, there you are. This is perhaps the most relatable thing about Charlene as an artist, and also what makes the song a cultural icon that habitually creeps into so many “worst song” tournaments. This is what makes “I’ve Never Been to Me” the bad song we love to hate. Because underlying its dated “feminist” sentiments, its not-so-subtle anti-abortion rhetoric, and more problematic stereotypes about motherhood than I can reasonably deconstruct in just one essay, is a song that doesn’t just look back and reflect on what it means to live with regrets. Rather, the song, much like Charlene herself, commands our attention with a sincerity so insistent, so grotesque, and so uncanny that we are all but forced to reckon with it. This is how “I’ve Never Been to Me” has stood the test of time. After more than forty years and against all odds it’s still here, damnit, and here it will stay, immortalized in our hearts and minds until each one of us—Charlene included—succumbs to the overwhelming relief of a death sweeter than any paradise.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of its forthcoming anthology, entitled The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Find her online at zoebossiere.com or on Twitter @zoebossiere