the first round
(1) Beach Boys, Kokomo
stopped
(16) Don Johnson, Heartbeat
157-150
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 March 9

SOMEONE TOOK THE WORDS TO MY SONG: lawrence lenhart on the doudismé of ‘Kokomo’

If I ask politely, stuff some American dollars in the glass vase, the house band in the resort’s cocktail lounge will play an impeccable cover of “Kokomo.” And that’s the problem.
The Bahamian singer, Jermaine, looks at me like, Are you sure? Do you really want to go there? As if to say, isn’t there enough guilt in your tourist pleasure? I stand back to see what will happen. 

During the verses, the loungers chomp ice from their cocktails, cut cigars with guillotines, and suck the blood out of their pretty mamas’ clavicles. They sway their sunburnt bodies with arrhythmic confidence, like this yacht rock earworm has stolen their breath, amputated their sea legs. Scanning the faces of those who sit in this lap of luxury, it’s easy to tell how supposedly fun this is all meant to be. They have all taken up residence in the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, which is more clef than it is caye. Watch as they all surrender to the tropical contact high. No surprise here: “Kokomo” is not an attempt to engage with the Caribbean states so much as it wants to co-opt the Caribbean state of mind.
But it’s Jermaine’s take on the song’s signature amphibrachs that’s most infectious. Without much effort, he gets the whole lounge to take up the cause. Dozens of couples erupt in spontaneous incantation: “Aruba, Jamaica... Bermuda, Bahama... Key Largo, Montego…” Some lay it on thick, dropping their voices into bassy spellcasting, raising their arms like drunken witch doctors. Just when I was getting the hang of not policing the super-elite, I glare at the most ill-behaved woman in the room. There’s a world of difference between having fun and making fun. From the adjacent casino, it probably sounds like the lounge is the site of an incoherent geography quiz.
It’s a song written by a generation of lyricists whose doorsteps were clearly skipped over by door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. What else could explain the presence of Aruba and Bermuda whose irreconcilable distance does no favors to a song whose hook is meant to geolocate the fictional Kokomo? Oughtn’t rhyme connote geographical proximity? The island nations are 1,500 miles apart—in the South Caribbean and Atlantic respectively. I can’t help but jot down a shortlist of more appropriate locales that still adhere to the ˘ˊ˘ amphibrach: Barbados, Antigua… Grenada, Tortola... Tobago, Havana. 
I make the same request four nights consecutively, doubling, tripling, and eventually quadrupling my initial inducement. I look at the cash in the vase, wondering if I could even be obnoxious enough to request a receipt for the song. I know I can make the case in my grant paperwork that it’s all part of the small island/climate narrative research, but decide I just don’t have that kind of gall.
“Kokomo?” Jermaine asks. “Again?”
“Please,” I nod. And: “Sorry. Last one.” I don’t look him in the eyes this time. It’s as if he is dealing me something illicit. 
Just as I’m preparing for the Caribbean litany, ready to white-knuckle again through the redundancy of “Montego” (it’s a bay, not an island; and wasn’t Jamaica invoked just a few measures back?), Jermaine decides to cleverly swap the locales in the song for U.S. states whose names have the selfsame syllabics. He winks at me, his jerk requestor. It’s a thrilling projection onto an audience that whoops when the lyrical guesswork is correct: “Ohio, Wisconsin… Wyoming, Virginia… Montana, Alaska… Kentucky, Rhode Island… New Hampshire, Missouri… Nebraska, Nevada… ” For a moment, everyone seems to forget the purpose of the song—“to get away from it all”—and the pride each takes in being flung back to the prairie, desert, or pine barren from whence they came makes it all the more ironic when Jermaine’s bandmate plays the steel pans on his digital keyboard. In this rendition, Kokomo is less of a Caribbean escape than it is the real town of, say, Kokomo, Indiana—allegedly named after an “ornery” Miami Indian chief. Jermaine respectfully leaves Hawai’i out of the modified cover, and I lead the lounge in ovation.

*

Overturn the jukebox in the nearest-by tiki lounge, and out will spill the proto-surf sound: twist beat with loose-tuned tom rack, minor pentatonics and rick-a-tick triplets, tremolo picking drenched in “wet spring” reverb, amateur field recordings of waves breaking. Watch the acetone vinyls slip from the needle, The: Belairs, Challengers, Champs, Chantays, Del-Tones, Lively Ones, Rumblers, Sandals, Showmen, Surfaris, Trashmen.
I try to imagine the surf rock supergroup, along with their would-be single that follows the surf formula to a t. Let’s call them The Grommets. The track would begin with five seconds of breakers doing what breakers do best: lapping, splashing, crashing. Sound recordist Irv Teibel, founder of the “nature sounds” genre (and responsible for the un-ironic Psychologically Ultimate Seashore), would make the listener feel as if this song is being recorded not from a studio, but from a SoCal sandbar. Cue Dick Dale’s frenetic fretting along a single heavy-gauged string, a Turkish scale that crests and troughs like a wave. The story goes “Misirlou” (made famous again by Pulp Fiction) was written on a dare: “Can you write a song using just one string, Dale?” Now for Sandy Nelson’s swell—tom-a-tom-a-tom rumble and a backbeat whose rimshot sounds like the crack of a surfboard. Fuck it. How about a second match-grip drummer? Let there be drums and let there be more drums. Rhythm guitarist Duane Eddy strikes at chords, but chokes them off in reverberating caesura. And just like that, The Groms have laid down another surf classic. The crowd goes gnarly, surfer-stomping their way through the whole composition.
A summary: Waves breaking. A pick scrape into exotic tremolo. Every note goes WOM or WEE. Chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom / chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom. Tremolo again, presto this time, WOM-WOM-WOM-WEE-WOM-WEE with whammy and more pick scrape. Chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom-a tom-a-tom-a-tom-a / chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom tom-a-tom-a-tom-a. Key change lets loose a catchphrase—better yet, a single word. Uttered once, something good enough to be the title.
Because “surf” is instrumental, a song in this genre can only spare a single word. Think tequila, think wipeout, think 6-pak. The Trashmen should have known better. If everybody already knows that “bird [was] the word,” then every lyric not “bird” was needless.
Let it be a word from the surfer’s dictionary. Something like ripping or carving or bailing or pearling or bogging. But no gerunds please. Something about the motion of the ocean. Barrel or wave train, whitewater or backwash. It should be a word whose vibe overpowers its meaning. Or maybe an image of what comes after the surf. And what does come after the wetsuits have been stripped off, the boards slid through the barn door of the microbus? “Bonfire!” they’ll scream when the sun has slipped the horizon. “Bonfire” it is. And let’s be sure to let the waves come back at the end, Irv, because “surf” is art imitating life and lifestyle. 
Sure, some tiki-lounge jukeboxes will acknowledge the seeds of surf in punk, art rock, and new wave. But the closest you’ll get to The Beach Boys in my all-time favorite jukebox in Sacramento’s Hideaway is the opening riff from Duane Eddy’s “Moovin’ and Groovin’,” which Carl Wilson poached for “Surfin’ USA.” (The plagiarism doesn’t end there: the rest of the song is a total rip of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.”)
Surfers saw through The Beach Boys from the start. Except for the one true beach boy, Dennis Wilson, they were too clean-cut, too virginal. Their manager-father bought them striped shirts from Macy’s, a starter pack for a barbershop quarter. When Capitol Records execs hatched a plan to distribute their early records for free to local surf shops, storeowners faked enthusiasm before chucking the vinyl into the trash bin. At early shows, surfers pelted The Beach Boys with rotten vegetables and threatened to kill them. Dennis kicked one of them and “split his scrotum,” whatever that means. There’s no avoiding it: The Beach Boys were the O.G. boy band, bona fide posers who faked membership in a surf scene from which they cowered.
In fact, Brian Wilson couldn’t even swim. Having only ever experienced radio waves, he relied on the DJ to tell him “the surfin’ is fine.” His aversion to the beach was so strong that he famously had a sandbox constructed around the piano in his living room as he composed Pet Sounds. This way he wouldn’t have to go outside to have his toes in the sand.
After decades of trying to convince Midwesterners they were the beating heart of the SoCal surf scene—see the way they literally pose with surfing props in their earliest music videos, tandem-surfing like it’s a freestyle photoshoot by Jostens photography—The Beach Boys finally traded in their bogus calling card for a boarding pass to the sexed-up retirement home that is Kokomo. The transformation didn’t happen overnight. From the start, their message was one of energetic peer pressure: “Let’s Go Surfing.” A decade later, they’re phoning in their one contribution to the counterculture movement. “Don’t Go Near the Water” is a sad-sack song more notable for its irony than its vague political message. Another decade on and desperate for another hit, they release “Keeping the Summer Alive,” an echo of disco’s twee existentialism. A year later, Dennis Wilson drowned. As the one surfer in the Beach Boys, Dennis shouldered the band’s ethos. Without him, 1988 seemed as good a time as ever to finally come clean.
This is the one strength of “Kokomo.” It is the most honest song The Beach Boys ever released. It is the sound of late-career musicians confessing, We’ve always been more poolside hacks than beach bums.

*

This is probably why I balked at the idea of The Beach Boys mini-concert experience at my Las Vegas hotel. For an extra $50 per person at check-in, available to the first 250 customers only, you could watch some of the original Beach Boys play staples from their early catalogue.
“You’re going to want to go directly to the pool,” the concierge said, tracing the maze with a fountain pen. 
     Having just arrived in the desert, we rolled our suitcases toward a newly renovated deck with four large pools, “three of them infinity.” As a thirteen-year-old on vacation with his parents, I was more interested in the promise of tomorrow’s Warped Tour than I was in seeing these living legends of beach pop.
The pool deck was a bourgeois oasis crowded with boomers on pool chairs, recumbent like the plaster Roman sculptures in the periphery. I reluctantly lifted away my headphones, which had been playing Combat Rock nonstop since takeoff from Pittsburgh.
It was unclear to me how people on a luxe vacation in Las Vegas could identify so insistently with the “let’s get away from it all” sentiment. How much farther could one get from “it all” than Las Vegas? It wasn’t until I heard “Kokomo” live that I realized that in performing a song about a fictional place off the Florida Keys, they were culturally identical to Jimmy Buffet with his lame utopia of Margaritaville.

*

As far as bad songs go, Kokomo is a gift that keeps on giving. If I were merely trying to make the case that the song is bad, I would probably focus on its place in the pop cultural landscape of 1988. It first appears on the soundtrack for Cocktail, a movie about a seasonal barman, Flanagan (Tom Cruise), whose hustle includes show-offy mixology during late-night shifts in elite Manhattan bars; an entrepreneurial spirit that fails to impress his grouchy business professor; and who’s consumed by the chronic notion to “date up.” He winters in Jamaica, where he’s certain the tips from upper-class expats will pad his checking account. All of his ambition forms under the bad influence of a father figure who attributes his work ethic to Irish ancestry and whose pseudo-philosophy stales midway through the first scene. I know what you’re wondering, and the answer is: yes, Cruise does deliver at least one of his lines in Jamaican patois.
In fact, that line is basically the cue for “Kokomo,” which plays as nocturnal visions of Manhattan’s skyline dissolve, replaced by the mineral blue waters of the Caribbean. The movie begs the question: Can one really get away from it all? (Spoiler: Not even close.) In one terrible scene, Flanagan is on a date with his romantic interest, Jordan (Elisabeth Shue), when he indicates the cocktail umbrella poking out of their drinks.

Flanagan: You know there’s a guy who makes these?

Jordan: One guy? He must be exhausted.

Flanagan: Yes, he is. But still, he gets up in the morning and he kisses his wife and he goes to his drink umbrella factory where he rips off ten billion of these a year. This guy’s a millionaire.

Jordan: [Picking up an ashtray] How about the guy who makes these?

Flanagan: How about that guy? Not to mention the guy who makes these.

They take turns fondling unlikely items, in awe of their potential value.

Jordan: And those little wrappers are made by another guy.

Flanagan: What about these plastic things at the end of these laces.

Jordan: Hmmm. It’s probably got one of those weird names too like – ummm, ‘flugelbinder’.

Flanagan: Flugelbinder, right. We’re sittin’ here, and we’re surrounded by millionaires. You rack your brains day and night to try to come up with a money-making scheme, and some guy corners the flugelbinder market

Jordan: Poor baby. He’s frustrated.

Flanagan: You get a bar job to keep your days free for your real gig. After work you’re so charged up, you have a few drinks. You know, hey, it’s party time. Days get shorter and shorter. Nights, longer and longer. Before you know it, your life is just one long night with a few comatose daylight hours.

Jordan: Oh God. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself, Flanagan. Hey, your flugelbinder is out there waiting to be discovered.

Flanagan: Waiting. Do you think so?

Jordan: I do.

Until then, they’ll polish off this cocktail and another, stare into each other’s eyes like they’re the only couple at this resort. Like they’re the only couple in the world.

*

It’s always a forbidding sight: clusters of honeymooners, clutching at Bahama Mama cocktails, their teeth stained from too much grenadine, coming and going from the all-inclusive beach bar—their knock-off flip-flops stretching, straining, eventually unplugging as they are dragged through the white-soft sands, pulled along by the swollen, lymphedemic machinery of the American ankle. 
Happy and Tre, shirtless and smiling, hoist the limbo stick shoulder-length, waiting for the honeymooners to queue before them. Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” plays on the bluetooth speaker as Happy repeats the banal rules to the guests again and again, encouraging them to form a line. Just form a line. They are illuminated by the curve of tiki torches thrust into the sand, which is still wet from high tide. 
One guest—Brian, if his penchant for self-reference in the third-person is a valid indication—approaches his new wife from behind, patting the backside of her smocked tankini. “Come on, pretty mama,” he actually says. “Just foam a lion.” He is obviously mocking Dion’s Bahamian Creole, though it sounds more like Jamaican patois.
Brian reaches into his trunk pockets to find a handful of fritters. He palms them like the fried testicles they are before popping them into his gob. “Mmm. Come on now. How low can you go, mama?” Brian has called his wife ‘mama’—in the fashion of The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo”—so many times in the past hour that the other honeymooners have started snickering at the Freudian term of endearment. Like walking into a room that play previews for next week’s episode of [any TLC show], it is impossible to look away from the spectacle of Brian and Jessica.
Jessica—not nimble, nor quick—shimmies toward Happy and Tre. “I guess we’re the only ones who want to play, boys,” she says to the party corps, wrapping her fingers around the limbo stick. She overdoes it, the flirtation, and looks to Brian to see if she’s provoked his world-famous  jealousy. When Happy ripples his pectoral muscles, Jessica stares down the center of him, fixating on the pendulant keloid scar puffing like bubble gum on his chest.
Most couples, worn out from the day’s pampering—the resort’s unholy regimen of breakfast buffeting, Swedish massaging, bikini waxing, mani/pedicuring, oatmeal exfoliating, triple-digit Jacuzzi-ing, elkhorn-coral snorkeling, lunch buffeting, sunglass shopping, lotion lathering, recumbent sunbathing (clothing mercilessly optional), water scootering, 36-hole golfing, beer koozying, dinner buffeting, blackjack strategizing, ATM thumping, and rum-flight sampling with the occasional sojourn back to the bungalow for clumsy honeymoon fucking—are keen to just stand on the sidelines, bellicose and varicose, obnoxiously comparing photos from the day, and waxing braggadocious about their humdrum lives on pause back home. 
But not Brian and Jessica. They are getting their ever-loving-cent’s worth. And aren’t we all Brian and Jessica—summoned to the reef, strangers to paradise, whispering to ourselves “we deserve this” “we earned this” “we deserve this” “we earned this” at each and every dose of leisure.
Watch as they “limbo lowa now, limbo lowa now, limbo lowa now.” Long after they collapse onto their asses, their cocktail wrists unhinging drinks into the sand—“Ew, it looks like your period,” Brian actually  says—the corps keeps the party going: bugling the horn, striking the cowbell, chirping the whistle, buzzing the conch. There are stick holders and stilt dancers and acrobatic limbo ringers vying for Guinness World Book’s attention. Scanning the resort, it’s plain to see that all this excitement is just so unexciting. Dozens of people squat on their balconies, diving into their phones’ blue light, nose first. Some stare absently at the ultra-bright LED fountain. One man gives himself a foot massage and says “now, that’s the stuff” to no one in particular.  If you’ve ever heard the lyrics to the original “Limbo Rock,” you can never unhear it: “What a monotonous melody!” they sing. “What a monotonous melody!”

* 

The Beach Boys could have gotten away with it, lending their bad song to the soundtrack of a bad movie with just a few fans holding their noses. Instead, sensing this would be their last go at a No. 1 hit (and their first in decades), they let it all ride on “Kokomo.” For that year, they became “Kokomo.” In the music video, which features silent clips from Cocktail, one can see just how bad of an actor Cruise really is. It’s like the director gave him a note to “just relax, act casual, be cool,” and Cruise, in turn, played it like he had a balance disorder, like gravity just has a stronger pull on him than everyone else on set. During the montage in which Flanagan and Jordan are day-drinking, horseback riding, and beach bumming, Jordan seems more like a caretaker to someone with palsy than she does the film’s romantic interest.
But enough about Cocktail. The music video is otherwise the scene of a fake beach concert filmed at Disney’s Grand Floridian. Filmed weeks before the resort and spa opened, The Beach Boys were the hotel’s first guests—them, and the UNLV cheerleaders who were shipped in to twinkle and titillate in the front row of the video. The cheerleaders wear bangs and semi-perms, thin bandeau tops and high-leg string bikinis. In addition to swaying, they also run through post-production mist, a few long strides in the wake, enough to get the breasts to jounce in sync with Mike Love’s voice: “Port-au-Prince, I want to catch a glimpse.” At the three-minute mark, they maneuver their hands in generic hula kahiko; one imagines the director offered a thirty-second demonstration sprung solely from his own imagination. 
If anyone is “perfecting their chemistry” in this music video, it’s not Flanagan and Jordan, but rather, Mike Love and John Stamos. Oh, you didn’t know? Uncle Jesse has been touring on-and-off as a Beach Boys drummer for decades. And not just drums: in the case of this video, it’s drums, conga, and steelpan. Every time he pantomimes a goofy-looking drum fill, the camera cuts to Love eye-fucking Stamos. The flirtatiousness is a feature of their live shows too.
If the link between Stamos and The Beach Boys sounds familiar, it’s probably because his relationship with the band was the basis for their repeat cameos on the popular sitcom, Full House. If Al Jardine had shown up on the doorstep just a few times more, he might have replaced Kimmy Gibbler as the Tanners’ new persona non grata. A Rolling Stone article puts it like this:

the most vexing questions [about Full House] revolve around The Beach Boys. They often materialize almost out of thin air to help the Tanner family get out of a jam, whether Jesse needs permission to record their material, their telethon needs an act or D.J. wins a radio contest to see them live and the entire band comes to pick them up and personally escort them to the show. That was the plot of “Beach Boy Bingo,” a second season episode that aired on November 11th, 1988.

1988 was a yearlong last gasp for The Beach Boys.  
Is “Kokomo” bad? I’ll do you one better. Not only is the song bad—even The Beach Boys seem on the verge of admitting to that—it’s vile.

*

The Kokomo of “Kokomo” is pure synecdoche. It’s kind of like when my mother tells me her friend has recently been to the Caribbean, by which she means her friend was shuttled from Lynden Pindling International Airport directly to the resort where she baked herself in the sun for a week as she took and posted photographs suggestive of the Bahamas. I scroll through her vacation on Instagram, recognizing the ways in which she tries to pass landscaping off as ecology, the aquatic petting zoo as wildlife encounter. Her hotel offers cultural experiences that are carefully apolitical (e.g., fire breathing). And the “locals” (her word) she poses with all wear resort nametags. It’s the most profound form of xenophobia—getting so close to the real thing, but not having the fortitude to dip toes in waters beyond the resort’s private beach. Where does one get the permission to disengage upon arrival? For starters, it’s all there in the brochures. Your private island getaway/adventure/escape awaits. They might as well drape a jumbo Privacy Please sign around the neck like a lei. There’s a marked difference between the tourist who would “forfeit” their vacation to become a cultural ambassador and the one who fully embodies the solipsism of “Kokomo.”
What’s less clear: where else should I go at the end of the day, if not to the cocktail lounge for a negroni and glimpse of the live band?
Rather than describe an island, Kokomo’s lyrics seem to describe the all-inclusive hotel concept in the Caribbean. In fact, after learning the hit song inspired thousands to call the Key West Chamber of Commerce (“Where is Kokomo please?”), Sandals Resorts International opened up their own Kokomo, a private island in Montego Bay. (This real-life emplacing of Kokomo would bring the total number of Jamaican references to three in the song.)
Cultural critic Susan Harewood has pointed out that all-inclusive hotels first emerged in Jamaica “as a way to shield tourists—and for tourists to shield themselves—from any sensory awareness of the sounds, tastes, smells, or feel of political and economic upheaval in a post-independence Caribbean state.” It is an effort to delink “as much as possible from the island nation in which it [is] located.” She argues that this is how silence became a trope of Caribbean tourism. By designing all-inclusive hotel spaces with this critical silence in mind—from sound-proofing rooms to ambient soundtracks in the spas to the far-flung cabanas on private beaches where tourists recline on divans surrounded by tiki torches, within earshot of waves and gulls and whatever wind catches the curve of the ear—resort managers are complicit in the erasure of local voice.
The book Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism reveals the audible history of labor. In his prologue, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld writes, “it is impossible to separate the history of tourism from the history of slavery and colonization, the history of the gaze, the history of reproduction of power relations of tourists and touristed.” For example, the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation, site of an historic slave auction, gets 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor. We all circle poster boards with grim facts about the Middle Passage, about human cargo “packed below [on slave ships] … with scarcely space to die in.” We take it all in, clockwise or counterclockwise, standing briefly or prolonged before the iron tandem collars. We walk freely in a space others could not. Moments later, a British man logs into WiFi at a pub down the street and gripes on TripAdvisor that the museum “left no endearing emotion what so ever.” He craved “powerful imagery and perhaps more paraphernalia.” He gives it two stars. I feel surrounded by him in the cocktail lounge on that last night as he and dozens of ruthless customers like him sing: “Aruba, Jamaica: Ooh, I wanna take ya.”
Because of the strict adherence to the amphibrachs, the subsequent ‘to’ gets elided. When it comes to tense singalongs, there’s a world of difference between “I want to take you to…” and “I want to take you.” Just imagine colonizing hordes—Spanish, Dutch, and British descent—singing these lyrics: ˘Aˊru˘ba ˘Jaˊmai˘ca ˘OohˊI˘wan ˘naˊtake˘ya. It’s a catchier version of Columbus’s journal entry when he first arrived in the Bahamas (and not India) in October 1492, writing of the indigenous Lucayan: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
There must be fifty of us in the lounge tonight. In a region whose GDP is sustained by tourism, full-time musicians must be deployed in all-inclusive hotels, forced into the contradictory space where their voices are unwelcome, but also “for hire.”
At the same time, Feld notes that one of the essays in Sounds of Vacation deconstructs “dismissive commonplaces about tourism and tourists as an inauthentic or spurious subject, including assumptions about tourist music as ‘bad’ music, bad in both musical form and content, and bad for local integrity.” In essence, the fact that “cosmopolitan set lists” came to replace 1970s calypso is not ipso facto insult or injury, but more than likely, a symptom of globalization. Perhaps the contemporary Afro-Bahamian lounge singer grew up listening to The Beach Boys, not Lord Kitchener; Abba, not Calypso Rose; and god forbid, Jason Mraz, not Harry Belafonte. There was a wishful period when calypsonians were confident American musicians would gravitate toward their style, and not the other way around. In Wilmoth Houdini’s “Bobby Sox Idol,” for example, he sings an open invitation to Ol’ Blue Eyes: “Ah Frankie Sinatra / Ah Frank Sinatra / Frankie me boy you don’t know / You have a perfect voice to sing Calypso.” Houdini could have never predicted that this writer would first encounter his voice as a sample on a track by Australian electronic group, The Avalanches.
While “Kokomo” may be bad in form and content, it is definitely bad for local integrity in Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo, Montego Bay, the Caribbean at large. Its badness is due to its central premise: a distortion through doudouisme. Créolité writer Ernest Pépin’s analysis of doudouist literature could apply equally to the lyrics of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo”:

doudouisme inscribes the Caribbean in a sort of ideological vacuum, deporting it to an Eden located ‘elsewhere’ and defaced by all the clichés that the colonial gaze has come to expect… Blue seas, golden sands, humming birds, luxuriant vegetation, and the physical grace of the Creole doudou are the stock elements of this anesthetic divergence, guaranteed to inspire a cheap wonder based on the illusion of an innocent paradise. Far from being in any way natural, this is a crudely staged sham, its very excess annihilating nature and preventing all possibility of meaning, so that there remains only a hollow, exotic stage-set of fantasy islands caressed by a vanilla-scented breeze. Human beings are airbrushed from this landscape which is thus utterly untouched by social or historical reality.

Before the lounge band is finished for the night, Jermaine dedicates the last song to me. “For our friend, on the house,” he says, glancing at his vase, which at this hour, is stuffed full of crumpled bucks.
“How about another Beach Boys song?” he asks.
I shrug. Still preferential to punk, I’d rather hear something like “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.”
     “Here’s a song not many people know is from Bahamas.”
A few synthesized notes in, and I recognize it as “Sloop John B.”
     Before The Beach Boys ever laid hands on those notes, before The Kingston Trio plucked it on the banjo, before Carl Sandburg claimed it for his American Songbag, “Sloop John B” was a Bahamian folk song whose haunting lyrics are being sung at me now, and directed at me forever after: “Let me go home / I want to go home / why don’t you let me go home?” Soon enough, Jermaine unstraps the guitar from his shoulder, and does just that: leaves by the resort’s service entrance, taking the local bus to his home over the hill where all-inclusive might even apply to him.

Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19), Of No Ground: Small Island/Big Ocean Contingencies (West Virginia University Press), and a book-length essay about the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret to the Colorado Plateau. His prose appears in Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Prairie Schooner. He is the Associate Chair of the English Department at Northern Arizona University where he teaches fiction, nonfiction, and climate science narratives. Lenhart is reviews editor for DIAGRAM and founding editor of Carbon Copy.

megan baxter on “heartbeat”

Open to a church in rural Missouri. The glory of the place left years ago, packed up and headed west after some sunshine daydream. Now, all that’s left is peeling paint and a view out into spring fields where mud and sprout mix in a messy green. A skinny blonde boy, too tall for his pleated polyester trousers, has taken a step out from the ranks of the choir towards the seated congregation. While the boy sings, in a falsetto clear and cool as water from a seep, there isn’t a soul who isn’t drawn to him. In the front row, a farmer rings his rough hands together. A reek of alcohol sweats dark moons under his Sunday suit. A beautician, who, this very morning, has used her trade to conceal bruises on her cheek and wrist, smiles and her mascara begins to run as tears fill her eyes. These are the boy’s parents. This is not a movie. This is this boy’s life.
Let’s get to the heart of the story. In 1986 Don Johnson an actor famous for playing, the pastel clad, swaggering cop from Miami Vice who made Armani shirts and Ray-Bans a veritable uniform for a certain type of 80’s masculinity decides to put out a rock album. Johnson has taught himself to play guitar and he first learned to sing and perform in church. That life is a million acres of swamp, suburbia, and soy behind him now. He’s put the work in, taken the acting classes, suffered nearly a decade of missed chances, and shacked up with a 15-year-old Melanie Griffith in a bungalow deep in the throat of Laurel Canyon who he’ll later marry and divorce twice. He’s cultivated a history of significant drug and alcohol abuse. He’s made friends, broken hearts, and no longer looks like the angelic blond kid who hacked his way out of the heartland to the California coast. Tanning, drugs, and sleepless nights have left him with the charmingly cut face of a playboy. Drug dealers gift him dope in night clubs. He orders women up like Uber-Eats deliveries, calling the top five Miami modeling agency before heading out onto a town that his show has rebuilt.
But Johnson is tired of all this. He’s recently gotten sober, it’s his 9-month-old son’s eyes, he’s said, not pleading but actually looking at him and seeing him for what he is. A guy stumbling sick into a dining room at dawn where a mother and child wait, like the Madonna and Christ, sunlit and milky before plates of shimmering grapefruit sections. As the clouds lift, he knows two things; he needs to stay sober and he wants to try something new, he wants to return what first called him before a crowd. Don Johnson wants to make a hit Rock and Roll album.

He’s written songs with the Allman Brothers and is a friends with men who can make guitars scream like his female fans on Wall Street, who, while filming an episode of Miami Vice, showered their panties down from office building windows onto the heads of Johnson and his costar Philip Michael Thomas (shooting had to be delayed while some poor tech, hopefully, dressed in surgical grade latex, picked up all those high cut thongs). Tom Petty, Dickey Betts, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Ronnie Wood, Willie Nelson, and Dweezil Zappa all sign on to Johnson’s album: a posse of talent.
"I wanted the record to be modern, tough rock,” Johnson told the LA Times when the album first dropped, “I didn't want it to sound like something that other people designed and I just stopped by for a few minutes to do the vocals. And I made it clear that I would walk away from it if I didn't think it was credible.” But what Johnson delivers is the uncanny valley of Rock and Roll. “Heartbeat” is the cancerous aspartame to the straight-up sugar that Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Petty, The Rolling Stones, and Zappa shot straight up the nostrils of listeners like toddler beauty pageant queens blowing pixie sticks.
For unknowable reasons the title track given to Johnson by his producer is a song written for Helen Reddy, famous for her 70’s feminist anthem “I am Woman”. It sank to the bottom of one of her albums and was never released as a single. Perhaps it was with humor that someone pitched the song for Johnson, the Poseidon of Panties, but either way, in 1986 Johnson says the lyrics reflected his relationship with his ex-wife and beloved son—the owl-eyed kid who had sobered him up. How the confusion of words meant anything to him—for instance, how could anyone look for something that was a sound—or what could a person without a heartbeat feel other than dead—is a mystery? Maybe Johnson knows that little mystery, like a 5 o’clock shadow, isn’t always a bad thing. He won’t reveal the names of his first two wives but you can easily find his naked butt cheeks in a 1979 Playboy spread. It’s a matter of image, after all. The marriages were embarrassments, one day flings in college in Kansas and on the set of his first movie. He reinvents. He’s a club kid. He’s at The Factory with Warhol, he’s posing nude with his famous girlfriend. Now, deep into the excess of Miami Vice success, Rolling Stone writes ‘Don Johnson Wants to Be a Rock and Roll Star’. It’s bad when what you want, rather than what you are, makes the headline.
“Heartbeat,” the title song on the album climbed to number 5 on the Billboard charts and even higher on German and Austrian lists, a calculation which music theorists might one day discover to be essential to the determination of bad songs. It was the age of MTV and thus it was proclaimed that every song must have its music video and so an entire concept video album was assembled in which Johnson staggered, with uncomfortable sincerity, through dramatized romances and stages that look like tic-tack-toe boards. He’s too handsome to be a rockstar and too vulnerably average as a singer to bear the emotional weight required to raise up nonsense lyrics. The result is something like an album made by a fictional character in the style of the era, A Monkees of the mid-1980s, where, instead of innovating or collaborating, Johnson settles instead for tragic bid at credibility. Looking like you’re trying hard to fit in is the anthesis of rock and roll.

What we all love is the original story, a simple pattern of rise and fall and flatline. It’s 2004 and I’m on the roof of a hotel, 25 stories above the shimmering obsidian tarmac of the Miami airport. I’ve been drinking out of the adult’s discarded glasses at a gala to celebrate young artists, to celebrate me. I have danced with Robert Redford’s business partner and he’s told me how panthers scream in the jungle. Now on the roof of the hotel, there’s a box of Domino’s pizza and my friend Max, leaning against the cement wall of the stairwell and above us, the bellies of jets dip so low they take all the sound with them. They scream over the needle tip of a flag pole flying a sheet of American stars and stripes.
I shout Hunter S. Thompson quotes at the planes like a kid throwing rocks at the water, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional!” I shout “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used”. But the words only ripple in my head. I want to take the flag down and wear it as a cape, wrapped around my pulsing sunburnt skin.

It’s a late afternoon in Woody Creek Colorado. Don Johnson and Hunter S. Thompson are sitting in Johnson’s garage, among all the muscle of his private collection, the hoods sleek as jungle cats. Through the eye of the door, they can see Owl Range where Thompson blows up Jeeps and rides his lawn tractor in a bathrobe and later, just a few years from this afternoon, ends his life with a bullet to the brain. Thompson has a sloshing highball of whiskey and is smoking through a gold-tipped cigarette holder. Johnson is smoking too but drinking nothing. He hasn’t had a drink in a decade but he still loves the heat of the Gonzo journalist. They talk racing, boats, and cars. They talk a new show into life, they write together in dogged afternoon sessions before Thompson spills over the brink of toxicity. They call it Nash Bridges after the title character and it’s an inside joke that grows into another hit for Johnson.
Thompson is getting sloppy and Johnson starts to tease him. The writer has recently completed an online course in Zen and Johnson asks him a riddle.
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A traditional koan which is supposed to be mulled over but the Gonzo man doesn’t need time, he’s electric with ideas. Switching both the cigarette holder and the high ball glass into the left hand he swings his open palm and slaps Johnson full across his handsome face. Johnson’s ears begin to ring as if someone has discharged a handgun near his head.
“That’s the sound of one hand clapping,” Thompson says.
Johnson’s ears ring for days and days.

In the music video for “Heartbeat” Johnson is trapped in a dark box of a room, bumping into listless dancers. He wails to the floor; he screams to the echoing blackness of the soundstage. A 16-year-old Dweezil Zappa plays the guitar uncomfortably close to Johnson, like a kid trying to piss off their parent. Johnson stares straight ahead and getting no reaction, Zappa drifts into the middle of tic-tac-toe board of the stage. No one, not the dancers, not the flat-lined band, pays Johnson any attention. His intensity played against the delirious coolness of the musicians makes his performance as an actor even more apparent.
Outside, in the dramatic narrative of the movie Johnson has cut the sleeves off nearly every item of his clothing save for his signature Armani tank tops, which are already sleeveless. The Chrysler Building looms like some monolith of meaning but it’s the only indicator we’ll get for the rest of the movie that it’s taking place in the real world. While filming a swarming protest on the streets a passing super model catches Johnson’s eye and then she’s gone. He looks for her in some unspecified tropical village where she appears first posing for a photoshoot on the hood of a burning car and again while slipping a black mask over her face: is she part of the resistance? Ninja? Wild west bank robber? Taking health precautions?
Back in his studio, assisted by Paul Shaffer in a jolting celebrity cameo, Johnson sorts through all of his footage for the image of this perfect woman, flipping through his war photos for a shot of a hot babe. The badness of this narrative, ignoring the world and focusing solely on a singular object of desire, is matched only by the badness of the lyrics, which seem to break Johnson’s voice to pieces at the end, grinding his vocal cords by weight of sheer repetition. The celebrity appearances, the pyrotechnics budget, the post-production filters all stand-in for a kind of legitimacy that the song fails to deliver. The only moment in which Johnson realizes the quest in the song is when he looks up at the words ‘Heartbeat’ pulsing across a building in branded neon.  
This frantic search for life, looking for a heartbeat in the streets, is the ridiculous task of a limited gaze. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting something badly, hunger mixed with talent, under the crucible of training and work ethic should forge something resembling art but what makes Heartbeat so heartbreakingly bad is the terrible self-awareness of Johnson, whose constant performance squeezes out all authenticity. No one is helping him solve this riddle. Clearly, the world is full of heartbeats, the rhythms of blood through the body and the earth are our earliest and most universal drumlines.
Scientists have determined that everything with a heart is given about 1 million beats. Humans, due to their exceptionally long periods of childhood and adolescence which slow the cell’s aging process, are the outliers in the mammal kingdom. We’ve got 2.5 million beats to work with. This is an average of course, true to the species but not the individual which means that some will beat much more and some much less than others. Small animals, like the Etruscan shrew, have hearts that skitter out 835 beats per minute. A blue whale, whose heart is the size of a Prius and whose arteries are large enough for a human to walk through upright, can slow its heart rate to 3 beats per minute while diving hungry, into the depths. Hearts beat slower as they age too, an infant faster than a grandma, a woman’s always slightly faster than a man’s. Nearly every living creature, save for the oddity of jellyfish, sea cucumbers and corals, have hearts and those hearts beat in a rhythm prescribed to them through the ages. Even the earth beats, two-fold. Beneath our feet magma pulses in the deep time of geology and above us, electromagnetic fields, generated and excited by lightning discharges resonate at exactly 7.83 Hz.
A heartbeat is not hard to find. The first sound all womb-born mammals hear is the pulse of blood through their mother’s body, amplified by the ocean of fluids we float in. Who hasn’t marveled at the sound in a lover’s chest, when, ear to breastplate you listened as the miniature rivers of the body moved perfectly, this great beautiful mechanism, this animated mystery? Love, of course, and art, are collective experiences of awakening, their discovery being the awareness of the complexity and glory of the universe.

I am back in Miami, not a native or even a tourist. My work with the same art program I attended as a teenager puts me up on the 21st floor of a corporate hotel and sends me off to campus daily on a 10-minute walk inland as part of the creative writing team. At dawn or dusk, I run small explorations, 2 miles, 3 miles out and back from the hotel through streets and over the Venetian Causeway, past Star Island, where Don Johnson used to live, commuting by speed boat to the set of Miami Vice. The buildings are the color of French candy and the cars roar in Italian. The wind slaps the bay against the seawall and palms shuffle like tarot cards on their strange bird legs. Here, the police look like dancers. Some tailor has been working hard to cut those uniforms tight around each set of toned glutes and wide-winged lats. At dusk thunderheads ride the uplift at the coast, turning their beautiful, bruised profiles inland.
Most reviews of Johnson in Miami Vice said that his years of drugs and partying produced an authentic performance. It’s common to find praise for all sorts of addictive behavior in relation to works of art. This assumption of experience as authenticity has become the root of an ongoing dialogue this week. I want it to be spoken about carefully, because what I heard, at that the age of the young writers in my group, was a recipe for substance abuse. Addiction seemed like a readymade code, a stand-in for the artistic life. Of course, genetic markers beating through my heart helped too. My father’s warned us of this growing up. I was so sheltered by his moderation that it was easy to reject like I rejected everything else, friendship, advice, commitment, responsibility. I spent decades looking for the obvious things that my addiction concealed. The story of addiction is true to the group, not always to the individual. To write one does not have to escape the body, to slip skins, to transfuse blood—this appropriation of form, this character acting is the root of much of the group’s discussion. The creative team, myself included, are reminded that two years ago we worked through the aftermath of the Parkland shootings and the ripple of the Pulse nightclub attack up-coast. We begin to make a list as a group, hurricanes, shootings, floods. The students are steeped in these traumas. Still, they are careful about who gets to tell what story. We look at each other, back and forth, across conference tables, lunch tables, bus seats, paving stones, the question beating like a heart between us, story and speaker.

The curse of the addict is the constant mirror gaze of self-reflection, the ringing in the ears that last for days. Myself, in this chair writing. Johnson outside his home on Star Island having his picture taken for an article about Heartbeat which will run in the LA Times. The photographer suggests something musical, to add to the authenticity of the scene. Johnson replies that he owns a prized guitar, a gift from the Allman Brothers but no, he doesn’t want to hold it. That’s not right. Johnson posing, aware of how he looks and how the picture will make him look, shrugging off the guitar, talking to his son on the phone, eating pasta salad by the gleam of Biscayne Bay, watching himself from outside himself. When Rolling Stone Magazine comes to interview him, Johnson changes his mind about the guitar. The picture runs inside the cover article ‘Don Johnson Wants to Be a Rock and Roll Star’ and it looks exactly like he worried it would. A movie star posed with a prop.

For a day in Miami, the young writers and their creative team are locked in rehearsal in a small theater. The performance is in the evening and the small space will be packed with wealthy patrons, teachers, parents, and the other art area winners. The stage is a 24 x 24 box set in front of black curtains and surrounded on three sides by rows of chairs. It looks like the set of “Heartbeat,” black disappearing into universal emptiness, under the blind of the stage lights.
The writers are reluctant as a group to dance as they deliver the final, joint lines of a collaborative piece they’ve written. The director wants them to sway over to the piano where they classical musicians will riff off a solemn piece the tuba player composed as a tribute to the Parkland victims, transitioning, chord by chord into a Mardi Gras style funeral march, a dirge that is also a dance to celebrate the dead. The writers, who are prouder of their words than their physicality don’t want to be viewed by their peers as awkward. They are worried about the graceful ballerinas will see when they look at the writers, with scripts in their hands, trying to find a beat. Hell, even the theater kids can dance!
With only a few hours to curtain, the creative team tells the writers that they need to collaborate and find a solution. Their plan is twofold: one, they’ll do their best but they won’t fake it, and two, they’ll text their friends who will be in the audience and ask them if the spirit moves them, to rise from their seats at the end of the show and dance out on stage. The proximity of the audience allows for this breaking of the wall.

You know how this song works. You can see it coming from a mile away, a lumbering, simplified creature, as exposed as the heart is hidden. It took centuries of violating the dead and torturing the living for scientists to understand that most central of organs. Typically, healthy hearts have only two audible heart sounds. The first heart sound is described as a "lub" and the second is called “dub". A physician listening with a stethoscope can hear the two distinct sounds of the heartbeat but can only see them, as Johnson sings if an EKG machine is set up to monitor the heart. And then it’s not hard to look for at all, it’s a blinking screen, just off to the side. Asystole is the complete absence of any detectable electrical activity of the heart muscle. It appears as a flat line on the monitors of an EKG machine and what it feels like without a heartbeat is most certainly the end of life as you know it.
The switch from looking for a heartbeat to asking what it feels like without one is not the turn you hoped for. There’s no coming back now. You don’t expect the song to go there, but it does, so repetitive as to become mystical. Suddenly we are talking about the dead, or we are in love with the dead, or we are all just in this bad song together, trying to break out of the final lines repeated, by a wailing Johnson, over a dozen times. His voice falters at the height of his imploring lyrics. In the original version, Helen Reddy can hold and carry that high note further giving her track the air of a fun night swiping through Tinder, while Johnson stumbles alone through the ruins of Rock and Roll, abandoned by his collaborators.

In the last scene, the night is coming to an end. At the finale of the show, the writers fold their scripts and shimmy over to the gleaming hood of the concert piano. They eye each other nervously, hoping to be collective in their awkwardness. They begin to sway and the music rises, the tuba pulsing and the drums beating. The polite violinist yields to the melody, her hair falling over her instrument, and the whole audience stands, cheering, unbelieving, as every young artist rises from their seats and joins their peers onstage, forming a dance line that absorbs the writers and encircles the musicians. Clapping becomes a drumline, a sound playing into and beneath the music. The circle forms fully, linked, with nearly a hundred bodies on stage, pulsing around the musicians. The dancers jump into the center, break dancing, leaping, hip-hop, and ballet and tap. The beat is easy to find, in the blood and in the palms, and we’re all holding the same simple rhythm, two sounds, silence and noise, and no is trying to be anything at the moment other than part of that collective, authentic heartbeat.

Megan Baxter's essays have won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize.  She has been published in such journals as The Threepenny Review, The Florida Review, Hotel Amerika, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine's True Story Editions. Her essay collection 'The Coolest Monsters' is available from Texas Review Press. Look for her debut novel Farm Girl this October from Green Writers Press. She has 6 tattoos, but only one of them is a Bruce Springsteen reference. Megan currently lives in Syracuse, NY, with her fiancé and their three beloved dogs.