round 1

(10) The Sundays, “Wild Horses”
silenced
(7) Art of Noise feat. Tom Jones, “Kiss”
244-240
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/22.

kathleen rooney on Art of Noise feat. Tom Jones’s “Kiss”

When my number came up in the Faxness lottery, I knew without question that I had to select the cover of Prince’s “Kiss” by Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones. If through some pitiless twist of fate that indelible combo of exquisite perfection were no longer available, I’d cede my number to someone else because if you can’t have the best, why bother with the rest?
Sweaty, present, brimming with joie de vivre, lust for life, and lust qua lust, back-to-back, these versions comprise a real two-pack of stud muffins.
I got my wish. Esteemed essayist and co-competitor Megan Galbraith proclaimed my pick “a double panty-dropper.” Correct. Panties factor into what I want to talk about, and we’ll get to them. But first, step inside my time machine, and travel back to when these heady events were unfolding: the waning days of August 2021—not the world’s most lusty moment.
A good friend of mine [1] had moved to California, part of the ongoing displacement created by the pandemic, and he and I had been corresponding by handwritten letters sent through the mail [2]. That late August, after mentioning that the vibe in Chicago continued to be off, I asked what the vibe was like on the West Coast. He replied with a remix—a cover?—of that line from Hamlet.
“The vibes are out of joint,” he wrote.
Like the Prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s tragedy—itself a cover of the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth—we were being visited by an unwelcome ghost. The gauzy spirit of the Hot Vax Summer that never was haunted us: insouciant trips we didn’t get to take, happy-go-lucky memories we didn’t get to make, and breezy fantasies we didn’t get to live. We had been promised that thanks to safe and effective vaccines, we could go hard for the future. But it turned out that Delta and the anti-vax crowd were serious boner-killers.
Abandon—as in a letting loose, a freedom from self-restraint, a surrender to natural impulses—remained in shaky supply. Promises aside, it continued to feel harder to lose yourself in a moment than ever. And yes, there have always been largely immovable objects standing between us and the carefree feeling that many of us crave, at least from time to time, to thrive. But these last couple years, those barriers have been extra.
The thing about freedom is that taking it for granted is part of the freedom. When you can’t forget the elaborate calculus of risk and reward that you’re never not engaging in in order not to get or make someone else sick, it’s harder to fantasize, harder to feel free—generally and erotically.
Fantasies do not have to be sexual, obviously, but they do have to involve an element of desire. You’ve got to really want something to pursue it wholeheartedly, be it an end to structural inequalities or simply to go home with someone cute. That August of the out-of-joint vibes, it was like: what even is horniness anymore?
Months later now, the questions linger: How, in such distrustful times when hopelessness stalks the heart and nihilism threatens the mind, can anybody attain the erotic? An erotics of hope? Of possibility? Of the future?
Seriously asking. But also answering: one way is by listening first to “Kiss” by Prince from 1986, then chasing it with Art of Noise and Tom Jones’s cover from 1988.
The erotic requires a high degree of presence, a full offering of self, and a total surrender to a joint endeavor. When many of us remain distracted by various species of dread, it’s just really hard to focus totally on anything fun or sexy.
But both Prince and Tom Jones are, in their respective performances, totally focused on both the fun and the sexy. Although quite physically and musically different, the almost manically present erotic concentration evident in Prince’s falsetto and Jones’s baritone is not the only similarity these two men share. Sir Thomas John Woodward, professionally known as Tom Jones, was born on June 7, 1940 in Treforest, Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales. Eighteen years later, Prince Rogers Nelson, professionally known as Prince and briefly by what he called the Love Symbol, was born on June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with,” they sing, yet it seems significant that both are Geminis. Big twin energy.
Both performers understand how to maximize their talents and to play into what they’ve educated their audiences to expect of them. The echoes between these two entertainers are what makes Art of Noise and Jones’s cover so inspired.
As a verb, the sense of cover meaning “to hide or screen” comes from the early 1300s, and the sense of “spread something over the entire surface” is from the late 14th century. “Cover girl” (as in you do not necessarily have to be one to turn Prince’s or Jones’s head) is US slang from 1915. The etymology of the noun meaning “recording of a song already recorded by another” is less clear, but The Chicago Tribune defines it in 1952 as “trade jargon meaning to record a tune that looks like a potential hit on someone else’s label,” the idea being that record companies wanted to “cover” the marketplace with their own lucrative versions of popular songs. “Cover band” comes from 1981.
Regardless of when the term first arose, it takes more than a great song performed by another great singer to make a great cover. A high-quality cover is one in which not only is the original song honored, but in which some new value is added, some light is shed, some secrets revealed. A static note-for-note translation of the original is inoffensive, maybe, not damaging, but boring. Bad covers, on the other hand, misread their originals, either naively or willfully, and feel awkward for their misapprehensions of or disrespect toward their source material. At worst, they’re crass cash-ins, and at best, they’re shoddy novelties where the chief element of interest appears to be, “Isn’t it weird we did this, lol.”
In its nonmusical sense, “cover” frequently connotes concealment and reticence, but it can also be a move of generosity to cover someone’s expenses. Both Prince and Tom Jones are generous entertainers, giving their all to their listeners, and Art of Noise and Jones have offered a supremely generous and appropriately irreverent cover of an already generous and irreverent song.
“Kiss” was released on February 5, 1986 as the lead single from Prince and The Revolution’s eighth studio album Parade. Despite Warner Brothers’ initial resistance to the song’s minimalism, it became a Number 1 hit worldwide, occupying the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, and getting certified Gold the same year. After Prince’s untimely death in April of 2016, it charted again at Number 28 on the Hot 100, eventually reaching 23 a week later.
Prince wrote his first song, “Funk Machine,” at the age of seven on his father’s piano. Finished, “Kiss” remains in this funky vein, but at its genesis, it was shorter and more bluesy, composed as an acoustic demo for the funk band Mazarati, founded by former Revolution bassist Brownmark. Brownmark and producer David Z had asked Prince for a song for Mazarati’s self-titled debut, which they worked on at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles in Studio 2, while Prince was next door in Studio 3.
After hearing how David Z had funked it up—as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan writes, the producer “made ‘Kiss,’ a song that Prince had written, sound like a Prince song”—Prince took it back, telling Mazarati the song was “too good for you guys.” Harsh but accurate, because the end result is Prince at his regal quintessence. Prince kept some of David Z’s flourishes, including backing vocals adapted from Brenda Lee’s 1959 rockabilly hit “Sweet Nothin’s” and added his own, including the electric guitar riff from James Brown’s 1965 funk standard “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Lyrically, it’s an exuberant and outré come on, equal parts beguiling and tense. On some level, it seeks to put its addressee at ease—not beautiful? Not experienced? Not rich? Not cool? Not a problem. Prince is gonna “show you what it’s all about.” You don’t have to talk dirty, or even take off his clothes because he knows “how to undress me.” The realms of fantasy he plumbs are deep and he’s going to take you all the way down: “You just leave it all up to me.”
These sentiments—that attraction is not some set of boxes to be checked—were ones that Prince expounded upon in song and out. In the notes for his biography-that-never-got-to-be, collected posthumously in The Beautiful Ones by collaborator Dan Piepenbring [3], Prince ponders, “If not traditionally beautiful, what characteristic can a woman possess that still makes her irresistible 2 men? The answer is this—a fully functional imagination” (85).  
“Kiss” pleads with quick-witted coquetry to think (and bone) outside the conventional beauty box. Piepenberg, observes that he’d always known that Prince had a lot of protégés, though he’d never thought about why. “He was a preternatural talent, and, more cynically, it was an easy way for him to charm women,” he muses. But “plenty of brilliant musicians never took anyone under their wings. It’d never occurred to me that grooming artists took some didactic skill, some specific subvariety of leadership. Prince understood the delicate mechanism of self-confidence. He could quell the chorus of doubts in people’s heads—could make you settle into your own potential.” That subtle manipulation propels the appeal of “Kiss”: self-confidence deployed in the service of stoking the listener’s self-confidence.
“Kiss” has also got an edge—so sexy, it’s a little ominous, making you nervous at what audacious erotic adventures might lay in store. Elsewhere in his notes, Prince meditates on “straight-up animal lust. Where rational thought is overcome by the strength of physical attraction.” This ardor he says, “will draw words from the pen that one doesn’t even know exist. This feeling will make one combine words that don’t go 2gether but just sound so good U not only read them, U can smell them.”
Hundreds of miles away in Las Vegas, virile playboy lounge lizard and all-around brilliant cabaret pervert Tom Jones caught the scent.
The biggest and juiciest slab of beefcake ever exported from Wales, Tom Jones might at first seem like an unlikely person to cover any song by the androgynous, purple, in-touch-with-his-feminine side Prince. Reflecting on his time knocking around London, trying to catch his break, Jones notes:

I’m a hard sell, is what I am. Gordon is talking to the record companies and hearing all sorts of stuff back: that I’m a bawler; that I’m too much like Elvis, and not necessarily in a good way; above all, that I don’t look right. The standard look for a pop star at this point in the mid-sixties is soft-faced, silky-haired, skinny at the waist and wrists, androgynous—less so, a working-class bricklayer who looks like he can handle himself. What did Jo Mills say about me: that she’d never seen anything so male? Well, it’s not clear what the pop industry in the mid-sixties thinks about ‘male’.

Frankly, Tom Jones might at first seem like an unlikely person to have become famous at all. With self-awareness and self-deprecating humor, Jones addresses this improbability in his 2015 autobiography Over the Top and Back, one of the best music memoirs that I’ve ever read. He and his co-author Giles Smith [5] are raconteurs, taking readers from the begrimed valleys of Wales to the thrust stages of Vegas. We hear about Jones’ gritty childhood as the son of a coal miner; the bout with tuberculosis that left him bed-ridden for a year, forever altering the course of his life; his severe dyslexia and subsequent departure from school at age 15; his becoming a father at 16 with the birth of his son Mark to him and his childhood sweetheart Linda; and his stunning rise to international fame.
And yet, like Prince rising from the neighborhoods of Minneapolis, it seems there was always something in Jones that was going to get noticed. Of his first show as a stand-in for the singer of local band the Senators in small-town Wales, he writes: “If I’m looking for anything from this experience at the YMCA, it’s for an opportunity to fucking rip it. Actually, this would pretty much define my attitude to singing, both at this point and in the coming years: ‘Wait till you fucking get hold of this.’ Won’t matter if the song is ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.’ My approach will essentially be: ‘I’ll fucking have it.’” He admits that it’s “a philosophy which will eventually lead to a succession of record producers telling me: ‘Try not to be as…large?’ Trying to get me to calm down a bit.”
But you guys, Tom Jones does not calm down. And that is why—if we love him (and I do)—we love Tom Jones. At the aforementioned show, his big-voiced booming and unbridled hip thrusts ended up “leaving the audience…well, quite frightened, actually. A bit cowed” (95).
That intoxicating cocktail of exhilarating sexiness with a quivering frisson of lowkey fear is exactly the blend needed to meet the task of covering Prince. I mean, look at this hunky gentleman, snapping and clapping [5] his way into the hearts and skirts of America on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1965:

By 1969, when Prince was 11, Jones was 1200 miles away in Manhattan having panties flung at him. A nightly gig at the Copacabana left him drenched with sweat, prompting fans seated at tables nearest the stage to proffer linen napkins with which to mop his glistening forehead. Nothing to get too riled about. Until one evening when a woman stood, flipped up her dress, stepped out of her underwear and handed them to Jones. Thinking fast while holding “this intimate, and rather thrillingly warm, item of clothing,” he decided to dab his brow, say, “You want to watch you don’t catch cold,” before handing them back, little knowing that by “playing along at the Copa that night, I was creating a monster,” specifically, “a monster made of underpants.”
During his residency at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, the tradition became to throw panties and room keys. Jones claims the hysteria remained unconsummated, the fobs collected and returned to the appropriate reception desks. But he does admit to creating a vibe. The drop—the amount people spent in casinos and restaurants—always increased after one of his shows. Moreover, the tips were higher, “the waiters and the taxi drivers went home happier. And part of that elated energy, for sure, was an active sense of sex around the scene—a pervasive sexual charge.”
How could there not be? Look at this love god:

This Jones-induced eroticism could not be confined to Sin City limits, but rather pervaded his 70s tour dates: “Best clothes. Perfume in the air. People getting revved up. A willingness to cut loose and let go. A general horniness in the crowd.”
However. As we know from countless Behind the Music-style exposés, stratospheric rises are subject to being followed by tremendous falls. Jones didn’t crash, per se, but he did plateau. After reigning as a musical and televisual king through the late 60s and early 70s, the dawn of the 1980s found him down if not out. He opens his autobiography when he’s in need of a comeback—early 1983 when he’s about to perform at the Chateau de Ville Dinner Theater, Framingham, Massachusetts’s premier function room, “home to weddings and sales conference parties and the annual Natick high school prom.” Sure, he says, the show will be a hit: “And yes, no doubt, there will be some underpants. […] Not peeled off and flung there and then, as in the beginning. But most likely brought in specially and lobbed into my hands or laid on the stage at my feet in tribute because…well, that’s what you do at a Tom Jones show, isn’t it?” 
He makes it clear he’s not complaining, because he’s “Paid to sing. Paid to make singing my life. Paid handsomely for it, too.” And yet, and yet. “Firstly, how did I get here?” he wants to know. “And secondly, now that I’m here, how do I get out?”
The way lay with his cover of “Kiss.”
Jones’s son, Mark, had become his manager and suggested, wisely, that his dad should add “Kiss” into his live shows, which he did not long after the song became a hit. Jones recalls that when he first encountered “Kiss,” “I was hearing an R&B song, but done in a Prince way—sparse instrumentation, falsetto,” and he heard a path in. Some of Prince’s songs, “like ‘Purple Rain,’ you think, forget it. There’s nothing more you can do with that. But ‘Kiss’ was so open, it left room for interpretation—taking it out of falsetto and hitting it full on, for starters.”
The cover killed in-person, but the big breakthrough came when the influential British TV show The Last Resort invited Jones on. He offered to play his recent single “A Boy from Nowhere,” or maybe a cover of “Great Balls of Fire,” but the producers asked, “What else have you got?” Jones said “‘Kiss’.”
His performance caught on and not just ironically. Anne Dudley, a musician and composer with the English avant-garde synth-pop band Art of Noise, got in touch and asked if they could record a version with him for their greatest hits compilation.
Led by Trevor “Owner of a Lonely Heart” Horn, Art of Noise is winsome and dorky, named after the 1913 manifesto by Luigi Rusolo, the Italian Futurist considered to be one of the first experimental noise musicians. He argued that people don’t have to play instruments because machines can do it, going so far as to invent Intonarumori, noise-making machines to do just that.
As befits an outfit of studio virtuosos, Art of Noise recorded their parts independently in the UK. When they sent a backing track to Jones LA, it had very little on it save a drum machine and a keyboard part. Once they received his vocal back, they spruced up the arrangement with producerly frills, incorporating the themes for the retro TV shows Dragnet and Peter Gunn (which they had already covered to popular success) at the bridge. They also allude to their 1984 breakthrough hit “Close to the Edit,” as well as “Paranoimia,” a collaboration from 1986 with Max Headroom. Unlike Prince’s stripped-down version, Art of Noise’s “Kiss” sounds maximalist to the max.
Except for the typically maximalist Jones. He had been suffering from throat issues courtesy of decades of belting it night after night and was facing polyp surgery right after recording his part. The restraint he is forced to exercise, pre-surgery, as he lays down his vocal offers a pleasing contrast to the busy lattice that Art of Noise erected around it. The vivacious video took off on MTV, leading this version of “Kiss” to become a top-10 hit in the UK, Australia, and much of Europe. It reached #31 in the States and remains Art Noise’s highest-charting single.
Lest anybody think that “Kiss” is such a banger that any old cover by any old artist would have been a comparable stroke of genius, it’s instructive to contemplate the abysmal take that came into existence between Prince’s and Jones’s. In 1986, year of the original’s release, the Leeds-based industrial band Age of Chance put out a version of which Geoff Taylor, their bass player, said, “We basically removed the sex and replaced it with lump hammers,” which: gross, why would you do that?
Greil Marcus called it a “trash masterpiece” in the Village Voice, but he should have stopped at “trash.” About this version, the less said the better, but the lesson it accidentally teaches is that if a skillful cover offers a witty and insightful interpretation of the original material, then a poor cover fails to grasp the original completely. To take the sex out of “Kiss” is to obliterate the song’s very reason for being.
Jones, though, grasps the song’s raison d’être in his manly hands, seizing every iota of super-fun sexiness. Because that’s one of the connections between these two Geminis: different as they are, when it comes right down to it, these artists are two sides of the same goofy-sexy coin.
Both perform “Kiss” as carefree yet entreating: “I just need your body, baby / from dusk ‘til dawn.” Both deliver an invitation, a gaudy seduction, but also a kind of louche youthfulness, a guileless cunning, a knowing exuberance—sophistication and vulgarity, like a loosened tie above a tuft of chest hair or satin sheets on an unmade bed.
Neither Prince nor Jones possesses the physical appearance that one might predict for a sex symbol. But regardless of whether you personally find one or both or neither sexy, it’s inarguable that each symbolizes sex to large slices of the demographic pie. In one of our many conversations about their unfathomable erotic appeal, my formidable co-competitor and spouse Martin Seay observed: “Tom Jones seems like a loaf of baloney with a Brillo pad on top. And Prince was a cat. But both are sexy.”
As Prince’s “Kiss” is aware, a huge part of being attractive is letting it be known that you yourself are attracted. Tom Jones gets it. Like in Prince’s rendition, the lady addressee does not have to do anything fancy for Jones to want her extra time. The song itself remains irresistible in its offer of irresistibility by way of unconventional means, means which are not limited to but certainly include varying magnitudes of goofiness.   
“Kiss” is a song about the mysteries of magnetism performed by two mysteriously magnetic men. Or maybe that magnetism is not so mysterious. Being funny is nine-tenths of the law when it comes to attraction, and both of these men are funny as hell. [6]
In the video directed by Rebecca Blake, Prince, sporting a 50s-style pompadour, wears a rhinestoned leather jacket and a sleeveless asymmetrical crop-top, both of which he will striptease away by the end of the song. Neither his tight flared pants nor his high-heeled boots impede his lithe frolic with sinuous dancer Monique Mannen, a-drip with black lace. A gold cross gleams from Prince’s naked chest and a gold chain glints around his twisty hips. Revolution member Wendy Ann Melvoin plays both the guitar and the straight man to Prince’s ham. His impeccably lined eyes pop with mischief and his supple lips pout with the prospect of kisses to come.
In the Art of Noise video, no other band members or people of any kind appear to tear one’s eyes from the bigness of Jones—big eyebrow waggles, big crotch caresses—all topped with big sprinkles of tasty 80s cheese. A graphic backdrop featuring bold animations of words and images—legs in high heels, lipsticks, horns—flashes behind a strutting Jones, alpha as fuck, in sunglasses and out, showing his various microphones who’s boss.
Both Prince and Jones radiate energy and vanity, creating the hallucinatory intensity and cartoonish suavity ideal in a globally recognized sex object. They both have that inexplicable It factor popularized by Elinor Glyn in her 1927 screenplay for the silent movie It, starring ur-It-haver Clara Bow: “With It, you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. It can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.”
The first literary referent to “it” with the meaning of unmistakable sex appeal comes from the 1904 short story “Mrs. Bathurst” by Rudyard Kipling in which he writes, “‘Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street.” Same for Prince. Same for Tom Jones. Though it’s their dancing as much as their walking that stays. Prince sings, “I think I wanna dance,” whereas Jones sings, “Think I better dance now.” Both twirl hilariously on “maybe we can do the twirl.”
That’s not the lyrical tweak that gets the most attention. The question everyone wants answered is: Why did Jones change the line to “women and girls rule my world” from Prince’s “women not girls”? Something competitive, harking back to the origins of the term “cover” when it referred to a rival version? Or something in homage as the word “cover” has come in some cases to connote—a reworking not intended to overshadow, but rather to add to the appreciation of the original? Me, I think it’s without a doubt the latter, one sexy beast offering tribute to another, as well as a Jones-ian wink at his own lady-killer rep, a crafty edit that carries cognizance.
Because when you’re a “Sex Bomb,” you’re gonna go off. The explosion is widespread. No one is spared the titillating shrapnel. Tom Jones knows what you know about Tom Jones and leans in. The tweak also matches the excess of the Art of Noise arrangement. While they (shrewdly in terms of making it their own) remove the funk [7] from the original “Kiss,” they add a lot, too, including the horns and the alternation between the 4/4 rock beat and the half-speed quiet-storm percussion.
That brings me to my final point about why this version of “Kiss” is a truly great cover, which is that to call it a cover doesn’t quite (ha) cover it. Jones has always been an omnivorous admirer and a bighearted interpreter of other artist’s songs, from the country tune “Green, Green Grass of Home” by Claude “Curly” Putnam Jr. (made popular by Porter Wagoner in 1965) to Sam Cooke’s 1964 “Ain’t That Good News” to sentimental ballads popular during his Welsh boyhood like 1953’s “I Believe” and one of his father’s favorites, “My Yiddishe Momme,” a vaudeville tune made famous by Sophie Tucker in the 20s.
As he says in his autobiography, “I don’t care if Andy Williams or Perry Como or some other fucker has got that song tattooed on his chest; I’m singing it as though it had never been sung before that particular moment, in that particular room, on that particular stage.” Jones inhabits every performance of other people’s songs to the fullest. He sometimes gets dismissed as a pub yeller, but the man is actually a wonderful singer, not just for the qualities of his voice, but for being a thoughtful exegetist, like a Judy Garland or a Bettye LaVette. He can belt it, yes, but he can do more—he has mindful phrasing, he really connects. Like Billie Holliday or Frank Sinatra or even his good friend Elvis, Jones has a persona, and like them, he knows that not everything fits it, but he’s smart about surprising you with what he can make work.
His variety show This is Tom Jones ran for 65 episodes from 1969 to 1971, earning him a nomination for a Golden Globe. Perusing his list of musical guests, you see his catholic taste, a taste not marred by coolness. I mean that as a compliment because cool means dispassionate, exclusive, and unwelcoming to some, whereas Jones is all over the place in his inclusivity. When the Rolling Stones declined an invitation to appear (too cool) he got Little Richard instead. He had on Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, and Janis Joplin to name a few—duets for days.  

When you watch Jones perform, you feel how much he loves music, loves it devotedly, as a lifelong fan. [8] A worshipfulness mixed with confidence infuses his renditions. Unintimidated by the greats, he recognizes their greatness and meets it with his own.
This versatility has led to his impressive longevity.  Thanks to the jumpstart provided by the cover of “Kiss,” his career revved back up. In 1999 at the age of 59, he released Reload featuring duets with an assortment of UK and European stars, the most commercially successful album of his career. He played the Glastonbury Festival as a secret special guest and contributed his deliriously sleazy version of Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” to the Full Monty soundtrack.
Taking all this into account, “Kiss” is not merely a cover; it’s an interpretation by one of the world’s sublime interpreters. Interpretation is not sheer explanation, but a way of showing your understanding—for a work of art, for a way of thinking, or even for another person. On “Kiss,” Jones works, as always, from the inside, using his mind—or, more precisely, his imagination.
While we will never know what Prince thought of Jones’s version, we do know that he held imagination sacred. In the hand-written pages he composed for the Piepenberg project, Prince wrote of growing up:

There were 2 Princes in the house where we lived. The older one with all the responsibilities of heading a household & the younger one whose only modus operandi was fun. Not just any run-of-the-mill childhood board-game fun, but fun with a wink attached. My mother liked 2 wink at me. I knew what a wink meant before I knew how 2 spell my name. A wink meant something covert was going on. Something special that only those who were in on it could attest [2]. Sometimes when my father wasn’t playing piano he’d say something 2 my mother & she would wink at me.

She never told me what it meant and sometimes it would b accompanied by a gentle caress of her hand 2 my face. But I am quite sure now this is the birth of my physical imagination.

Jones comprehends this wink. Both he and Prince show that when you bring the forces of fun and work together at their best, they do not have to be opposites, but are one and the same. In an economic system that presents outright suffering and ambient drudgery as unavoidable conditions of our livelihoods, fun and work can seem antithetical, but here are two people who built lives out of the principle that they’re inextricable.
Prince disliked the word “magical” as a descriptor for his music because it elided how each song was a constructed entity to which he had committed his labor. But I do think his music can be called enchanting, or maybe even re-enchanting. “Kiss” reminds the listener for three minutes and 55 seconds that it’s possible to laugh and dance and love being alive.
If we love the song, then we want to go where it wants to take us: away from the drab and dispiriting aspects of our existence and into the realm of reachable fantasy. Jones and Art of Noise, for all their individualizing flourishes, retain and extend that re-enchantment.
Good covers illustrate how old worthy impulses can be fused to new different structures, often with transformative and uplifting results. Capitalism wants us to believe that there is, as it insists, no alternative. But good covers show that there are loads of alternatives.
Imagination is key to not consenting to live in an intolerable, inadequate, and unjust world. If we let our collective imagination become a wasteland, a place where we concede—defeated and complicit—that we can’t expect anything more than mediocrity, selfishness, and destruction from our government, our corporations, and our communities, then we aspire to nothing. Worse than nothing, we aspire to accept misery as a natural condition, which it is not.
Last summer, I watched Adam Curtis’s phenomenal six-part emotional history of the modern world, Can’t Get You Out of My Head. It opens with an epigraph from David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently.”
Something else a good cover does is transport you through time, back to the original, forward to the cover, and even forward in your imagination to other potential future covers. A good cover ignites consideration of how things were, how they are, and how we want them to be. This transportive quality can be quite literal, like Jones freeing himself from his old routine. Or it can be metaphysical, more of a generalized feeling.
When the vibes are out of joint—as maybe they always are—“Kiss” and “Kiss” incite listeners to demand and create better vibes. Vibes more befitting such imaginative creatures as ourselves. Get horny for the future, they say; we can make it feel good.

[1] Logan Berry—check out his book Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake.

[2] Prince (who had gorgeous handwriting) wrote in the notes for his never-to-be-completed autobiography that “Handwriting is a lost art in need of resurrection. Everyone should have a pen pal 2 actually write 2 as often as possible. Having an audience who will not judge U opens the pen up 2 a more honest fluid style of songwriting.”  

[3] A former editor at the Paris Review who admits to being “known to sing ‘Kiss’ at karaoke bars.”

[4] On the subject of international sex symbols from the UK, Smith also collaborated on Rod “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Stewart’s autobiography.

[5] But not gyrating overmuch because he was warned during rehearsals “to keep my hips in check or face immediate and irrevocable censorship. It’s Sunday, is the stern message. This is a family show, and pop music is a potentially corruptive sexual force.” Thus, quoth Jones, “I obediently fight back the instincts of a performing lifetime and omit to grind.”

[6] I could go on and on with examples of this funny brashness, but to name just one: Prince traveled under the alias “Peter Bravestrong,” a super-hero-esque moniker for luggage tags and hotel registers. 

[7] Like an elegant translation of a poem, a good cover does not deaden itself with rote fidelity. Though for an admirably funky interpretation of “Kiss,’ don’t miss David Garza’s from 1992.

[8] In Over the Top and Back, Jones recounts how badly he wanted Prince to appreciate his version, but also how he could not bear to hear if he happened not to. At a party at Tramp, a club in London, he runs into Prince: “I paused to shake his hand and said, ‘Thanks for the song.’ He replied, ‘Thanks for recording it’—surprising me with his voice, which was by no means falsetto. It turns out the guy has a fathoms-deep speaking voice. And then I excused myself and walked on into the party as rapidly as I possibly could—not having anything at all against the thought of hanging out with Prince, but having in my mind a scene which has always haunted me from that Bette Midler movie The Rose.” In it, she, a rock star, flies out to see a country singer played by Harry Dean Stanton, eager to find out what he thinks of her version of one of his songs only to find he hates it. “Before you go,” he says, stopping her just as she’s leaving, “don’t you ever record one of my songs again.” And that, Jones continues, “is why I moved quickly past Prince at the bottom of the stairs in Tramp that night. It would have devastated me to hear that he didn’t like my version of ‘Kiss.’ The best approach in the circumstances seemed to be: right-turn and into the room. Don’t give him the option.”

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her most recent books include the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in Fall of 2022. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches at DePaul.

Wild Horses, Carry Me Away: Morgan Riedl on The Sundays’ Wild Horses

to the horse I rode away, and to my mother who wouldn’t leave but let me

My fate rested in the hands of two high school students on summer break. The pony-tailed girl standing before me in an overlarge T-shirt sized me up, then turned to the demure boy beside her and said, “She’d look good with Bob, whaddya think?”
I hoped he would disagree because, even though I didn’t know who Bob was, the name sounded old and dull to my ten-year-old ears. But the boy nodded, and so decided my fate.
I’d wanted to be matched with a black horse like the one in The Black Stallion, and Bob was flea-bitten grey, or what my younger sisters called “white with spots.” In most ways, he wasn’t anything like Shetan, the wild black stallion whose name means “devil” in Arabic. But in the one most important way, he was. He carried me.
At the end of the week, rather than practicing how to maneuver though obstacles like cones and bridges in the indoor arena, the instructors led us to a trail around the lake where, one at a time, we cantered the perimeter. I’d already seen how sitting on Bob’s back made the pieces of the world fit more neatly together. But as he and I flew around the lake, I discovered it was possible to escape the puzzley world altogether.
Nearing the lone tree at the end of the loop where I was supposed to slow, I wondered what would happen if I—just didn’t. If instead I leaned forward, pressed onward and let Bob take me away. I saw us leave the ground and everything behind.  

Four years later, I was still stuck on the ground—I’d even burrowed under it, holing up in my bedroom in the basement where I kept a huge dictionary to launch at the wolf spiders that trespassed. With Webster’s beside me, I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my little DVD/VHS-combo TV, sucked into a subversive world where a small girl isn’t helpless but a hero. The chosen one. Even while saving the world, Buffy still dealt with the same mundane problems I did, from divorced parents to school dances. This was before vampires shimmered rather than combusted in the sun, but Buffy loved one anyway. Until he left. Maybe even after.
In the season 3 finale, Angel breaks up with Buffy because of everything he can’t give her, and although she realizes it’s for the best, she’s still devastated. Ends aren’t easy, even the ones you want. Still, in the episode’s last scene, Angel surprises her at the prom for a final dance as The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses” plays.
In Harriet Wheeler’s voice, I heard what the characters couldn’t say. I love you and goodbye. Delicate and elegiac, the vocals floated above the ground and made me remember what it felt like to leave it for a while. And beneath was a wistfulness I understood but only later discovered a word for: hiraeth—nostalgia for a home you can’t return to or one you never had. I replayed the scene again and again to listen to the song and feel the mournful aching of a loss I was trying to move past.       

Childhood living is easy to do

We’d been in our new house on Robinwood just a couple of weeks when my dad left a note on the counter and, with it, left us behind. At first, I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, and for a while, I didn’t. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. His leaving was a mystery I couldn’t solve, even after years of pretending to be the Great Mouse Detective. Back in our old house, I’d wear my plastic mouse nose and become the great Basil of Baker Street, and Dad would leave rhyming riddles around the house to lead me to where he was hiding. This time he didn’t leave any clues behind.
He did leave Mom a weekly allowance that didn’t go far with three kids, one still in diapers. We lived on cereal, PB&J, and mac & cheese until Mom went back to working nights at the hospital. But the job didn’t last long once Dad started getting flaky with weekend visitation. I’d sit on the steps where our walkway met the sidewalk, watching for his maroon Pontiac to turn the corner. In the beginning, I waited hopefully and was disappointed if pickup time came and went without him. When that happened, Mom scrambled to find last-minute childcare for the night. If she couldn’t, she called in sick. I learned you can’t be sick forever—the only thing you can be forever is gone. After a while, she gave up and went to work for her dad. It was less money and fewer hours, but she was home when we were—and when Dad wasn’t.
Weeks came and went. Mom tore pages off her monthly calendar, and I started to dread waiting for Dad on Fridays. I moved my sitting spot from the steps at the end of the walkway to the front porch steps. I watched not the road but the sky, wishing for the kind of weather that canceled the tennis lessons I hated taking. Eventually, I just stayed inside and watched the clock. I’d peek out the window around 6 p.m., hoping I wouldn’t see his car pulling up to the curb. Since he was often late, I never knew when to stop holding my breath. Fifteen minutes? Thirty? I asked Mom how late he could be and still get us. “It’s his weekend.” From her face, I could tell she wished she had a better answer to give me. I understood then that I could never stop worrying.
We’d moved into a house my grandparents rented for us, so my sisters and I changed schools in the middle of the year for the second year in a row. At least this time we were still in the same district and would be taught the same curriculum, which sounded great in theory. In practice, I had to put on the same second-grade play at my new school that I already performed at my old one: The Lion & The Mouse. Though I knew there was no getting out of it, I was determined to memorize and deliver a different line this time around. I mustered the courage I believed a lion to have and met my new teacher at her desk. “Can I have any part other than hunter #3?” She made me the mouse.
This surprised everyone, me most of all. I was shy and spoke so quietly I’d been held back in preschool. I almost asked if I could switch to hunter #1 or hunter #2. But even though I lacked vocal projection, I had a lot of experience being a mouse. I’d been pretending I was an animal since I was 3, stuffing my blanket into my pants as a tail, wearing various plastic noses, and running around on all fours so much I developed a large cyst on the top of my wrist. If anyone could play a mouse authentically, I was sure it was me. On stage, I gnawed the netted lion free.
At home, I was having nightmares. I saw the face of Medusa. Green skin, glowing eyes. I didn’t meet her gaze. Not because I feared her piercing stare turning me to stone, but because I was transfixed by her hair of writhing snakes. They didn’t scare me. They disgusted me. The thick girth of their bodies where thin strands of hair should have been made my fingers jump. I reached out and grabbed hold of one and pulled it loose. The snake detached from her skull with the sound of smacking lips. I discarded the creature whose corpse ended abruptly in strange flatness. On Medusa’s head, hair sprouted from the spot, as though the strands were contained fully grown within the snake’s body. I pulled another. And another, until there were no snakes left. I’d pulled them all.
I awoke and rushed to the bathroom to check my own hair. Brushing it back, I could see the bald patch above my right ear hadn’t grown any bigger, but standing in front of the mirror, I felt the urge to make it. My fingers searched for the thickest, darkest, roughest hair and removed it. Over and over again. There was always another strand that irritated. At some point, the scrape of my nail or an overly aggressive yank caused my skin to bleed and I panicked. Blood was supposed to stay inside.  
     In the morning, when I showed Mom the scab so she could assure me I wouldn’t die, she was horrified. She signed me up for therapy. I begged her not to tell Dad. The next time he showed up for visitation, the first thing he said was, “How is your hair?” I shot Mom a scathing look of disbelief as I followed Dad out the door.
I began therapy with a lot of trust issues and with Leftie, my Beanie Baby donkey, complete with a hand-crafted bridle made of string. Though my therapist, with his white hair and face like Einstein’s, fit my expectations, nothing else did. His office felt more like a living room than a clinic. Rather than reclining on some futon, I sat on the floor in front of his fireplace. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. When I spoke, mine was quieter. But neither of us said much. Rather than talking, we drew.
He sketched two hills separated by a valley in the middle. A Billy goat perched on each peak. The story he told didn’t have a troll or a bridge or even a plot, so I didn’t think it really counted as a story, but in its telling I realized the point of the exercise. It was obvious the picture and story were an analogy for my family. It felt pedantic even if I didn’t have the word for it then. I decided to tell a story that had no connection to my situation. I drew mice. I had some experience since for my kindergarten self-portrait I’d included a mouse nose and whiskers. When the therapist asked for my story, I explained the mice’s parents were dead, so the oldest mouse was left to care for the younger mice siblings, venturing out from the safety of the burrow to search for food.

Wild horses couldn’t drag me away

After horseback riding camp, I became obsessed with Bob. For Christmas that year, I got a Breyer horse named Freedom that looked just like him and a model stall customized with Bob’s name on it.  As much as I wanted to, I never rode Bob again. I only pretended he was mine. Mom enrolled me in weekly horseback riding lessons at a stable closer and more affordable than his. I learned that to fall in love with one horse is to fall in love with them all. Slowly I stopped pulling out my hair.  
When I wasn’t riding horses, I was reading about them. Mom taught me to love books, often reading aloud to my sisters and me before bed. She opened the door to Narnia this way, and once through, I saw no reason to leave. I discovered something in C.S. Lewis’s novel The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I would search for in other books afterward. It was a story of unconditional love. The lion—Aslan—disappeared but always returned, died on a stone table but came back even then.
Mom frequently took us to the local library for free fun. We could spend a whole afternoon there. In the children’s section, she’d read stories aloud to my youngest sister while we two older siblings looked around. I discovered a section dedicated to horses and shelves of authors who wrote novels about them. In Walter Farley’s series, I encountered Shetan, the same black stallion whom I’d first seen on screen. I met Misty, the island pony, and Sham, the Godolphin Arabian, in Marguerite Henry’s tales. When I ran out of novels about horses and the people they carried, I turned to nonfiction where I learned about the language of horses and the language of memoir. I read everything the library had, and I came to understand something that I knew most of the adults in my life couldn’t.

Visiting Dad was something I no longer wanted to do, and I started saying so. I had homework and friends and hobbies, and I was tired of waiting. I told Mom, she told Dad, and I didn’t have to go with him that weekend. Or the next weekend I was supposed to. Or the one after that. However, as I’d already learned, nothing but “gone” is forever, and eventually, Dad wasn’t having it. He suspected Mom was behind the shenanigans, so then I had to tell him myself each time I didn’t want to go. Dad had a way of looking hurt that made me feel guilty, but that guilt just didn’t weigh as much as the pain and anxiety.
Dad let me say no a couple of times until one Friday I said “no” and he told me to get in the car anyway. On the thirty-minute drive to his apartment, I stared out the window the entire way, and I saw a black horse galloping beside us. He leapt fences and wove in and out of trees. His eye never left me. I closed my own eyes and reached through the window, grabbed ahold of his long mane, and swung onto his back. I wanted to ride away, ride home, but we couldn’t change course, so I rode him all the way to Dad’s apartment. It felt good to be out of the car.
After that, my “no” didn’t seem to ever count. I rode the black horse to Dad’s apartment on Friday and then back home on Sunday. At night I dreamed I became the dark horse. I opened the door to the apartment and my body morphed into an animal that could fly without wings.
During the day, I was there and not there. Since I realized I wouldn’t be rescued, part of me was always plotting an escape. Finally, one Friday I refused to get in the car even after Dad said he wasn’t going to let me say “no” this time. I told him I wasn’t coming and went back inside the house. He called the police.
When the cruiser pulled up, I asked Mom if I was going to be arrested. She tried to laugh through the stress and assured me I would not go to jail. “Then will the policemen make me go with him?” She didn’t think they could. But they did.
The officer told me I had to get in Dad’s car. I assumed the “or else?” was jail. I wasn’t worried about me anymore—I realized it was Mom they’d take. I rode the black horse to the apartment. After I rode him home, I steered him to court.

At 12 years old, I missed school to take the stand. Dad wanted Mom jailed. I wanted out. In the voice of a mouse, quiet but determined, I told the magistrate that I didn’t want to visit my dad anymore. The magistrate’s face was unreadable as I explained why and answered his questions. I worried he couldn’t hear me, or could but didn’t believe me, or did but didn’t care. In the end, I gnawed myself free. 

Wild horses, we’ll ride them someday

Healing is a rare and wild thing.
The trauma of it all hid inside my body, though nothing can hide forever. In high school, I tried to escape it. I stayed in my basement bedroom listening to a CD of sad songs I’d burned. Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.” Joni Mitchell’s “River.” The Sundays’ “Wild Horses.”
     In Harriet Wheeler’s vocals I heard the desire to promise something that I suspected she could not. Forever. Still, her voice was more than honest—it was earnest. She pleaded not with the listener to believe her but with the wild universe to let it be true. To make leaving something we didn’t need to do. Because to leave is to leave behind, whether you want to or not, whether you’re being dragged away or carried. Even facing the inevitable, The Sundays’ cover insisted on an unapologetic hope, which was something I needed.
A doctor I didn’t want to see prescribed pills I didn’t want to take. When I stopped swallowing them, Mom took another approach. She put me back in weekly riding lessons after a two-year break. A month later I asked if I could use the money from my part-time job to pay for a second lesson each week. Several more months later, I asked for something bigger.
I wanted a horse.
     I opened my notebook and laid out my plan. I’d researched and done the math: I had nearly $3,000 in savings, and I had just gotten another part-time job at the movie rental store, where I could make about $100 a week. In the newspaper’s classifieds, I’d found a co-op facility just fifteen minutes away where I could do barn chores in exchange for a reduced boarding fee.
Mom said no. It was too much money, too much work, too much could go wrong. Neither my calculations nor my promises nor my pleading changed her mind, so I retreated to my bedroom. A few hours later, she said she’d changed her mind.

I found him online. The drive from my home to his was nearly 300 miles. I said little the entire way, just clutched the directions printed off MapQuest, checking each step, reviewing our progress until we reached our last turn. As we arrived at Cooper Street, the houses sat too close together, sharing each other’s confidence with no room for yards, let alone pastures.
Mom slowed the car and pulled to the curb. She checked the street. It was right. We checked the GPS. It was right. I checked the directions. They were right. Then I pulled out the email I’d printed before we left to check the address. Cooper Road. I didn’t expect a town of little more than 1,000 people to have both a Cooper Road and a Cooper Street. We attempted to reprogram the GPS, but it couldn’t locate a Cooper Road. “What do we do now?” I asked. Out the window, I saw a pastor on a bicycle coasting toward us. He stopped at the passenger window and asked if we needed any help. I wondered what lost looked like.
The pastor directed us up the road and a little out of town. It wasn’t much further, he promised. He righted his bike as Mom restarted the car. I looked out the window to watch him go, but he’d already disappeared.
The woman wasted no time in leading us around to the barn. She disappeared into a stall at the very back and emerged with the black Arabian that until now I’d seen only in pictures online. Ali swiveled his head to look at me. His eye caught mine and I recognized it. I knew then—he was mine.
Ali arrived late in the night, and the blackness of his coat made him disappear into it. Not yet, not without me, I thought. I renamed him Aslan. In college, I would learn of the Christian allegory of Narnia. I’d also learn that in the Islamic faith, Ali was given the name Asadullah, which is Arabic for Lion of God. My horse, the lion and the lamb.
Finding Aslan was just the start, as it is with any horse story. I dragged him across the country with me to college, to my first job, to graduate school—Ohio to New Mexico to Colorado and finally back to Ohio. In the ways that count, though, he took me all those places.
The books I read as a kid taught me a horse could save a person, or they could save each other—or, perhaps more accurately, in saving a horse, a person could save herself. I didn’t rescue Aslan in the conventional sense. I found him and loved him. I don’t know if it was Aslan or the stories I believed about him that saved me in the end. I’d seen a love that could walk away, but Aslan has always found me. When he sees me or hears my voice, he ripples over the pasture like he is the wind itself. Bob showed me I could escape this world on the back of a horse. Aslan made it so I didn’t need to.

Morgan Riedl is a doctoral student at Ohio University in Athens, where she lives with her partner and her retired horse (not in the house). She has an MA in creative nonfiction from Colorado State University. Her essays have been featured in The Normal School, Sonora Review, and Entropy, and her poetry is forthcoming in Thin Air.