the first round

(14) captain & tennille, ”muskrat love”
stomped
(3) culture club, “karma chameleon”
300-103
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on March 2.

kori hensell on “karma chameleon”

March Badness: I’ve been VERY bad. And not the sexy, cool kind of bad—just good old-fashioned badness.
In a word, I’m a liar. 
And I do it very well. I’ve got a cherubic sort of face I’m told you’d find trustworthy. I know how to wrinkle my brows in such a way as to put even the most anxious among you at ease. I do a sort of side nod while speaking and gesture softly with my hands; I welcome you into this intimate space, promising integrity, and effortlessly, I betray you. Every word I utter is a unique string of confidences, curated just for you and voiced with the confident timbre I cultivated early on to hide an inherited southern twang. I thought you’d believe me better this way. I aim to make you believe me. I want you to love me for telling you anything at all. And I think you do. I tell myself as much, anyway. 

 I'm a man without conviction.

I fear the imminent pathology.

*

Research on false allegations tell us that lies are told for one of two reasons: either the deceiver believes they have more to gain from lying than from telling the truth, or the deceiver is incapable of discerning what the truth is (either temporarily or owing to some permanent mental defect). Moreover, lies may be divided into two distinct motivational categories: prosocial lies constructed to benefit others and antisocial lies constructed to benefit the liars themselves. My lies fall in the former category: I never want to hurt you; I just manage to keep doing it, and half the time, you never even know you’re being lied to. Lies hurt, of course, no matter the benefits; they are always damaging to one or both parties, somehow or other, no matter the ethical nuances. I simply weigh the outcomes (with record speed) and choose accordingly. What's funny is that, despite being a liar myself, I resent and judge anyone who would (dare) lie to me.Hannah Arendt writes, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Does the ease with which I lie hint at a growing inability to tell the difference between truth and falsehood? How would I even be able to tell?
For years now, I’ve lived in service to myself. I’ve given myself everything I’ve wanted, and sure, I’ve tried to be generous with my money and time, but I’ve never really made a true sacrifice for anyone. I have a closet full of clothing and a vanity full of products purchased to serve an illusion I couldn’t even come close to affording. To become the person I always wanted to be, I needed to look the part—successful, beloved—and tell the necessary lies to sustain the picture. I know you’re wondering how that worked out. Well, kids, I never became her, and now I live at the very expensive mercy of my desires.
Friends often tell me, “Don’t ever change.” Y’all, I need to change.

*

RED

“I…
The word of worship in the Veds, the thrill
That passeth in the ether, and the strength
Of man’s shed seed. I am the good sweet smell
Of the moistened earth, I am the fire’s red light,
The vital air moving in all which moves,
The holiness of hallowed souls, the root
Undying, whence hath sprung whatever is.”

(The Bhagavad-gita, Book 7) 

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

*

About eight months ago, I began visiting different churches in the area. As a skeptical heathen preacher’s kid, the prospect made me groan. But I wanted to do something that was difficult; this was difficult. I wanted to see what truth looks like for other people, though I’m still not sure I accomplished that. The decision was prompted by a new friendship I’d made at work in UNC’s Department of Philosophy.
The irony is not lost on me: a liar girdled by bookish philosophers, their heads plunged into the nebulous clouds, living lives in daily pursuit of capital-T Truth. Providing administrative support to truth-seekers can be a bit demoralizing, especially when their findings are untranslatable (I blame so much on academia). What would truth even look like if I found it? God and Beauty: are they interchangeable? My philosopher friend from work is also a preacher’s kid, and after several conversations about my skepticism and his fought-for Christian faith, he wrote me a long letter addressing many of my struggles with faith and truth:

A good prophet speaks the Truth, not haltered half-truths for itching ears. The mark of a good prophet is not that his message is accepted; “Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted?” Stephen demanded before the Sanhedrin, and the only honest answer was the false ones. No, the mark of a good prophet is a true word, and not just a true word but an interesting one—not just a message, but news which pricks the heart or boils the blood (or both).

I did not like receiving this letter; it challenged my personhood and my broken moral compass, and I resented my friend for the harsh truth. (I still do, sometimes.) But I knew that he was basically right—especially about my selfishness. I had to do the hard things; I had to drink the cup of shame. So I did. I went to church—to humble myself, to see what truth looks like for other people. Church has always been the total opposite of what I wanted to do, but I’m familiar enough with it, having spent the first half of my life in the Salvation Army (yes, it’s a church!). Baby steps. I went.

*

In an interview with David Letterman in 1983, the year Culture Club released its successful single “Karma Chameleon,” a young Boy George is interrogated about his looks and his reception among his American audiences: “I kill them with kindness,” he says. With a mocking crowd laughing in the background, Letterman begins, “You’re obviously...” and Boy George cuts him off with an obvious, but sweet “...beautiful.” The audience jeers. Boy George continues, “I’m probably a little bit more honest than most performers.” The interview ends soon after with a befuddled Letterman cutting off his own line of questions about Boy George’s gender—the taunting gallery still in the dark.
In a separate 2016 interview, Boy George speaks more directly to the challenges of visibility: “Yeah, kind of look at me, but don’t look at me—that’s the dichotomy of exhibitionism in a way. You want people to look at you, but you don’t want them to comment. You want to be a spectacle, but you don’t want them to home in on you, you don’t want to be analysed.”
It is a frightening thing to reveal myself, to be so vulnerable with you, especially when you could react poorly. I am afraid of your reaction; you are often unpredictable. So I lie.

*

New Elam Christian Church Mission Statement: “To proclaim the Gospel of Christ and the beliefs of the evangelical Christian faith to maintain the worship of God, and to inspire in all persons a love for Christ, a passion for righteousness, and a consciousness of their duties to God and their fellow human beings. We pledge our lives to Christ and covenant with each other to demonstrate His Spirit through Worship, witnessing, and ministry to the needs of the people of this church, the community, and the world.”
This place was cooooountry—about thirty minutes out of town, a beautiful little white church in New Hill, North Carolina situated at the end of the Tobacco Trail. The most notable thing about New Elam is that each service begins with the Pledge of Allegiance. Imagine, me, the commieheathenliar, white-knuckling and mustering every last inch of cultural relativism to stand, hand over heart.
I had arrived early that day, and so before service I was subjected to Sunday School. I was placed in the “Young Adult” class along with a handful of other folks mostly in their forties and fifties. Young people just don’t seem to go to church much anymore, especially to small country churches, for any number of possible reasons: digitization, consumer culture, liberal education, general godlessness, etc. During the main service, you couldn’t point to anyone in the congregation between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine; they were all just...missing. I think tradition doesn’t stick for most people my age.
One Nashville study of the church’s demographic shift found that 66% of its young adult participants had stopped going to church. When asked why, life changes, including moving to college and work responsibilities that prevented them from attending, were cited by 96%; church or pastor-related reasons were identified by 73%, of whom 32% said church members seemed judgmental or hypocritical and 29% said they did not feel connected to others who attended; religious, ethical, or political beliefs for dropping out were cited by 70%, of whom 25% said they disagreed with the church’s stance on political or social issues and 22% said they were only attending to please someone else. Young adults think differently about the world now, and spiritual warfare is a less pressing concern than paying monstrous student loans. The day Millennials finally crawl out from under their debt, that is the day they achieve nirvana. The church can’t help with that (or at least isn’t trying to), not in this century anyway. So young people put their energies into work, into some commodified version of self-betterment, their grand motivator total self-preservation.

            Everyday is like survival
You’re my lover, not my rival

*

In 2006, Britain’s Labour Party used “Karma Chameleon” as the theme song for a series of political advertisements against Conservative Party leader David Cameron in the 2006 UK local elections.

*

Barbee’s Chapel Harvest Word Church & Ministries Mission Statement: “To present the Gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that turns non-Christians into converts, converts into disciples, and disciples into mature, fruitful leaders, who will, in turn, go into the world and reach others for Christ. It is our desire to turn the hearts of youth and families to GOD and each other, developing our GOD-given potential in order to win in every area of our lives. We are here to advance the Kingdom of GOD, first throughout our circles of influence, then the nations abroad. Most of all, as a church of Jesus Christ, it is our desire to give no man an excuse to miss Heaven or fail in the Kingdom of GOD.”
I got called the fuck out at Barbee’s Chapel Harvest Word Church by a tiny powerful woman decked out in an INCREDIBLE purple robe named Apostle Hattie B. Stancil. As the only white woman visiting the smallish congregation that day, I already failed to blend in—certainly no chameleon. The call-out didn’t help matters, and neither did my crossed arms and stern face, but at least I wore a modest cardigan to cover my tattoos. I recall lively music with streamers; I recall red, gold, and green flags waving in the air and a color guard dressed in jumpsuits adorned with gold glitter. I got misty-eyed at the sheer joy of the worshiping congregation singing and dancing together through the aisles—hugging, smiling, and warmly greeting one another. I would go back just to get a kind word.
At the tail end of a Prosperity gospel sermon exhorting the flock to plant seeds of faith ($$$), Apostle Stancil hopped down the aisle toward me, locked eyes with me, pointed at me, and proclaimed, “That girl’s got a WEIGHT on her. Lord help it! Lord bless it! I can see it plain as day, but good things are coming...just right around the corner, I can see that too!” I shrank and began uncontrollably weeping as everyone turned in unison to watch me. After the service, nearly every single member of the congregation came up to me and gave me a tight hug. I’ve never been hugged like that in my life. To be touched by belief, that’s literally what happened.
Do you see it too? Can you see the weight? 

*

Boy George, in a 2018 interview with The Guardian: “People talk to me about my past like it didn’t happen to me, ha ha, like it wasn’t the most harrowing thing that could have happened to a human being! I went through it! Why would I want to talk about it? It is a mad one because people always think like, ‘Oh, you’re hiding something.’ The only thing I’m hiding is the truth.”

*

GOLD

“The clod, the marble, and the gold are one;
Whose equal heart holds the same gentleness
For lovely and unlovely things, firm-set,
Well-pleased in praise and dispraise; satisfied
With honor or dishonor; unto friends
And unto foes alike in tolerance,
Detached from undertakings—”

(Bhagavad-Gita, Book 14)

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

*

The Chapel Hill Friends Meeting Statement: “The Chapel Hill Friends Meeting joyfully embraces the full spectrum of the Light Within, made visible through the participation of people of all beliefs, cultures, backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, races, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Quakers, also known as members of the Religious Society of Friends, are a community of people who gather on Sunday mornings to worship in silent expectation to wait upon the spirit. We have no formal creed, no ritual, or liturgy.
“We believe that God is present in every person and the Light Within can lead us toward God’s will. The Religious Society of Friends has a long history of spiritually-based activism. We are guided by communal testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and service. We believe that Truth is continuously revealed and that everyone may have a direct experience with God. Our lives speak our faith in action.”
If I’m being honest (heh), this is where I felt most comfortable. Quaker meetings are totally silent unless you are inwardly prompted to break the silence. When you enter the meeting room, you quietly take your seat on the bench. During the hour or so of worship, anyone moved by the spirit can rise and speak; after an hour, a designated member of the Meeting closes worship with a handshake shared by all who are gathered. My first time with the Quakers, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I left crying after a woman stood up to speak about her experience as a hospice worker. She had recently been working with an elderly couple who were so in love they died hours apart. I lost it at such a loudly (quietly) proclaimed truth—the truth of love always gets me. I didn’t stay for the concluding handshakes; I was not yet ready to be known, having just found some measure of safety in the anonymity of the space.
I went to several Quaker meetings. There is something very sensually affecting about sitting silently in a square in a room facing eighty other people. There are no pews facing the pastor; you must face each other and look into everyone else’s eyes. (I considered wearing sunglasses.) When you speak, it is only because you are moved to do so. And if you aren’t moved by speech, you are certainly moved by the quietude.
Shall I then remain your silent friend, at least until this passes?

*

In an interview about “Karma Chameleon,” Boy George once explained, “The song is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing. It’s about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren’t true, if you don’t act like you feel, then you get Karma-justice, that’s nature’s way of paying you back.”

*

As a kid, I was told by my Pawpaw that painful bumps on my tongue were punishment for telling lies. When I got older, I chalked such occurrences up to acidic foods or sweets, not morally unsound utterances.
Recently I took a peek under my tongue, because I’ve been feeling a hard knot on my lower palate behind my teeth: a mandibular torus, a harmless bony growth, an indelible reminder of what I’ve become.

*

GREEN

Men call the Aśwattha,—the Banyan-tree,—
Which hat its boughs beneath, its roots on high,—
The ever-holy tree. Yea! for its leaves
Are green and waving hymns which whisper Truth!
Who knoweth well the Aśwattha, knows all.

(Bhagavad-Gita, Book 15)

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

* 

Boy George, in a 2018 interview with the Tampa Bay Times: “Being a Buddhist, I feel any kind of pain in the world, whatever it may be.”

*

I often get a terrifying feeling that the truth is lost on me, that I live invertedly. The words, if not untrue, simply do not come. I have a master’s degree in poetry and another in literature, but the words, they no longer come. I’ve had some sort of blockage. I think it’s in my heart. I told so many lies in 2019, of various shapes and sizes, most of them seemingly inconsequential. I hurt people, though, with a couple big ones. I told at least one lie a day. I recall one day when I counted all the lies I told: seventeen in total. It’s like breathing to me now, saying something untrue. Even attempting this piece, I struggled to get at the truth of it. What is the truth of it, my lying?

Didn’t you hear your wicked words every day
And you used to be so sweet, I heard you say

I know that church will not be the answer to this; it never could have been. But I don’t know what the answer is. I have nothing to offer you in the way of a solution—only inchoate impressions thus far. I am at the beginning of what I expect to be a very bumpy and unpleasant transformation, and if this all seems disjointed, it’s because speaking truthfully and with consistency is so new. There will be a learning curve. Please bear with me.
I think of this experience as a trial study with my heart, a chance to take an uncomfortably honest look at myself and the way I live in the world. To be at church is to be vulnerable, and I fear vulnerability. Perhaps fear is clotting up the valves my heart; perhaps vulnerability is the solvent. While Christian theology isn’t totally unpalatable (Jesus did turn over tables in the temple and curse out the capitalists of his day), there’s so much I can’t jibe with. You know the parts; people between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine know them too. But I want so much of faith and hope. I want so much to be known and to be vulnerable with you. I want so much.

*

Seneca writes, “If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.” 

*

I feel a strong calling to incorporate the tenets of Buddhism and of the Stoics, the way of necessary detachment, acceptance, and honor. What is truer than suffering? I know how my friend would answer this rhetorical question: “Joy. Joy is truer than suffering.” Perhaps that is right, and perhaps joy, in turn, is itself a radical act. Joy, ever impossible to find, may be one of those things you have to create. I am actively seeking the face of God, and from that pursuit I believe I am coming to know joy. I hope.
To know the face of God is to know Beauty. The two—God and Beauty, Beauty and God—are interchangeable. Knowing myself and my penchant for skirting around the truth, I’ve settled on cultivating a practice of honesty that will bring me closer to Beauty, because seeing Beauty and the face of God means seeing things as they are—seeing the truth. Marilynne Robinson writes, “[T]here is more beauty than our eyes can bear...precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.” I want to be beautiful and to live beautifully, because beauty is a way of seeing and honoring what you’ve been given, and I can only do that by practicing that which feels unnatural (for now) to me—honesty. “The human quest for beauty,” writes Alister McGrath, “is thus really a quest for the source of that beauty, which is mediated through the things of this world, not contained within them.” To be a Stoic is not to be a passive participant in your life, but to actively honor what you’ve been given without desiring more (always more more more). It is to take an honest assessment of everything and be perpetually ready to give it all away. I take responsibility for you, because to do so is to honor you.
My life is not my own, and I aim to be grateful. I’ve been addressing you throughout these paragraphs, but I think I am ready to be we. Our lives are not our own. We belong to each other. I am responsible for you, and you are responsible for me and we are responsible for each other.

When we cling, our love is strong
When you go, you're gone forever

I have so much. I’ve been given so much. I’m ready to give it all away. Over and over, like a mantra—a lilting, lovely, joyful mantra that lifts me... 

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Now to deal with the other badness: petty theft.

Kori Hensell received her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Stirring: A Literary Journal, Big Lucks, TheRS500, and elsewhere. She will always be game for a car singalong to any and all Hall and Oates tracks. She lives and avoids the sun in Chapel Hill, NC and is one half of Foxxxy Mulder. 

elena passarello on “muskrat love”

Muskrat mating season begins in March. I doubt Texas songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey knew this when he composed his now-infamous ballad of Susie and Sam—those two muskrats with bewilderingly WASP-y names. According to Ramsey’s misguided and possibly ‘lude-induced lyrics, the coital behaviors of muskrats include: eating bacon and cheese, the jitterbug, and a sort of ambiguous and whirling frottage, all of which takes place by candlelight. In fact, the song we all know as “Muskrat Love” was originally called “Muskrat Candlelight,”—a problematic detail, since muskrats do most of their mating in the water.
If it’s March when you’re reading this, you can bet your ass that right now, in some nearby wetland, a real-life muskrat Sam is hunting for his Susie. Finding her isn’t as mellow-gold as Ramsey imagines it, however, because there are often myriad Sams vying for the fittest Susie of any given pond, fighting viciously throughout the month for the right to mount her. Males choose their queen based on the pungent scent she squirts from the oily glands encircling her anus. Maybe this biological fact appeared in Ramsey’s earlier drafts of “Muskrat Candlelight,” but then had to be cut for time.
The final lyrics aren’t wrong about all the muzzle-nuzzling, though, as many zoological texts list “kissing” and grooming as part of muskrat courtship. But things go off-script with the line about Sam sidling up to Susie and “rubbin’ her toes.” In reality, muskrats possess neither fingers nor toes—they’re more like half-webbed murder-mitts covered in needle-sharp hairs and topped with claws. And since it’s not uncommon for aggressive muskrats to use those claws against rivals, when a real-life muskrat offers his paramour a foot rub, the claws he uses to massage her might still be sticky with the viscera of his enemies.
“How old are you?” skinny Sam might ask Susie while tickling her with his bloody digits.
“I just turned one, so I’m ready to breed!” she’d answer.
“You smell like a hot dumpster. Let’s get it on.”
The muskrat penis is wide and knob-tipped. It probably evolved these features to better maintain its purchase inside the slippery muskrat vaginal canal while the breeding pair “whirl and twirl and tangle” in the water. My favorite thing about muskrat sex (a phrase I never thought I’d type; thanks, Ander and Megan!) is the fact that two muskrats in flagrante delicto will occasionally take the humping to the next level by throwing their bodies onto a passing plank of driftwood, so they can float while they do it. I’m no biologist, but this is obviously some sort of twisted Titanic role-play, the finale of which involves Muskrat Susie pushing Muskrat Sam off the wooden plank, like Rose did to Jack in the movie. As she watches Sam sink to the muddy river bottom, Muskrat Susie climaxes.
Anyway. Sam and Susie’s floating kink—their musk-raft love, if you will—is a risky addition to their mating dance, since bonking on a log exposes the pair to predators. Raccoons pose the biggest threat to muskrats, though humans have also been known to hunt the rodents for their fur or, occasionally, their flesh. Eighteenth-century missionaries along the Detroit River were permitted muskrat during the Lenten meat fasts, and certain sects of the Michigan diocese still honor this with “Muskrat Friday” dinners from Mardi Gras to Easter (I’ve read that the meat tastes better if you drown it in sherry). Michigan’s raccoons are probably pissed that these Catholics keep poaching their food source every March. Unless, of course, said raccoons are Catholic, too.
The male half of the 1970’s duo Captain and Tennille, who isn’t a Captain and whose real name is Daryl, grew up Catholic but did so far away from any muskrat stew, in southern California. Both he and his wife/musical abettor Toni Tennille were vegetarians when they released their hit cover of “Muskrat Love” in 1976. And speaking of 1976—and of raccoons!—that same summer, Tennille went to a coke party at Gordon Lightfoot’s house where everyone was blasted out of their gourds and oblivious to the fact that a large family of raccoons had taken over Lightfoot’s kitchen.
I read this terrifying anecdote in Toni Tennille’s recent memoir, which is stuffed with alarming 70s details like Lightfoot’s trash panda kitchen crew, the risks of early hair transplant surgery, and the time Queen Elizabeth dozed off during a command performance of “Muskrat Love” at the White House (Henry Kissinger stayed awake, but was visibly disturbed). Tennille also devotes considerable page space to the merits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory, but only briefly mentions that she’s never seen an actual muskrat in her life—even though the animal screws its way through her third most popular song.
She says she first heard “Muskrat Love” in the car on the way to a nightclub gig, about a year before she and Captain Daryl got discovered. Given the timeline, they probably heard this 1973 version by the band America, which was both the first recording re-named “Muskrat Love” and the first to receive any real radio airplay. Weirdly enough, the year before, Lani Hall had recorded a soporific take on the song called “Sun Down” for the label that would eventually sign Captain and Tennille. “Sun Down” uses the exact same tune as “Muskrat Love,” but with new lyrics that omit the Susie and Sam storyline, and I fully reject this heinous act of muskrat erasure.
Unlike Lani Hall, the band America weren’t about to remove those titular muskrats; their version keeps all Ramsey’s rodent lyrics intact. This isn’t surprising, since America’s first two albums made notable contributions to the canon of animalian soft rock, what with that one song about the “alligator lizards in the air”—how did they get up there? Did somebody toss them?—and their other song about the horse with no name, which features crackerjack naturalist observations like “there were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America’s take on “Muskrat Love” is peak Yacht Rock: so smoothed-out, it’s borderline menacing. Their rendition sports both an acoustic bass guitar and bongos, plus a double-tracked, whispery voice that sounds like a date offering you a post-coital doobie on his bearskin rug right after he gave you crabs. The band ignored their label’s pleas not to include the song on their third album and, perhaps as a middle finger, they made it the record’s opening track. They also cockily titled the album Hat Trick—an act of hubris made even funnier when it flopped. Guess they shoulda stuck with alligator lizards.
And hey! Since we’re on the subject of lizards, here’s something else I learned from Tennille’s book. Guess what Captain Daryl’s last name is? Dragon! As in somebody looked at a tiny little baby and decided to name it Daryl Dragon. Which leads me (and, I’m sure, all of us) to wonder why in the world these two didn’t call their act the freaking Dragon and Tennille? That’s infinitely cooler! And you know what would be even cooler than that? KOMODO DRAGON AND TENNILLE!!!!
Imagine an America (the country, not the shitty band) where the Billboard Hot 100 juggernaut of 1976 wasn’t “Muskrat Love,” but instead “Dragon Love,” about the erotic thrill-seekers Komodo Dragon Sam and Komodo Dragon Susie. They tie the knot in a badass desert ceremony with live snakes flying about and a basilisk egg dowry, and that night, Komodo Dragon Sam takes K.D. Susie to his lair so they can get busy atop a bunch of direwolf skins, and then she has to eat a raw horse heart in front of him while he makes hungry Aquaman eyes at her and pools of horseblood seep into her white-blond Khaleesi braids and yes, I did rip all those details from the Jason Momoa love scenes on Game of Thrones rather than look up the mating practices of real Komodo dragons because I’ve already Google-image-searched “muskrat penis” like fifteen times to write this essay, so I’m probably pushing it with the NSA as it is. OK fine, I just Googled “Komodo Dragons doing it” and to my surprise, their lovemaking actually seems quite gentle.
But my point here is why in the actual muskrat fuck would Daryl Dragon rebrand himself with some bogus naval rank when his given surname evokes the image of a storied, fire-breathing hell lizard…not to mention Jason Momoa? The answer to this question, my friends, is the 1970s.
I was born toward the end of the 70s, within months of Jason Momoa, which means we both could’ve been conceived while “Muskrat Love” played on the radio. Perhaps many of you reading this were born around then, too, and we The Lost Children of “Muskrat Love” should start a support group. While the particular tune to which our parents got busy is difficult (and awkward) to confirm, we do have plenty of documentation proving that the 70s—the petri dish that grew Momoa, myself and countless other late GenXers—were absolutely insane. All those thick chintzy fabrics and disco boots with goldfish in the heels and Queen Elizabeth falling asleep while a president nobody elected grooved in the chair next to her. People smoked about thirty cigarettes a day—forty if they were on an airplane—and brassieres were illegal. There was too much garbage and not enough gas and folks had basically stopped voting because it no longer seemed to work. Everyone was both alarmingly hairy and disturbingly horny and somebody gave a weekly TV show to a pair of mimes.
Captain and Tennille also had a TV program in the 70s, despite the fact that Captain Dragon often went days without speaking (maybe he was a mime, too?) and reportedly hated: jokes, the camera, dancing, people, and anything else that wasn’t a macrobiotic food product or a bulldog. Their show ran on ABC in the year of the Muskrat, aka 1976, and featured a skit about a bionic watermelon in which Toni portrayed her own arch nemesis, Queen Elizabeth II. They also staged a lip-synched performance of “Muskrat Love” for the show, and it serves as the closest thing to its music video (unless you count this alarming karaoke vid that I found, which looks like it inspired the movie Midsommar).
The TV show clip of “Muskrat Love” features two actors in full-body chipmunk suits who have been shrunk by some analog camera trick. They bounce on Tennille’s shoulders and on Cap’n Drag’n’s famous hat. At one point, they jump off the hat and look like they’re travelling downtown to fellate him, but it turns out they’re just headed to the edge of his keyboard, where they groove with the terpsichorean skills of that guy who spins the Qwik Payday Loans sign in front of my Walgreens.
This video is bad, y’all. It makes “The Bionic Watermelon” look like Citizen Kane. It’s cutesy and cheesy and miles away from the carnal habits of any rodent, reptile, or Momoa. But underneath the terrible visuals, you hear the special brand of Badness “Muskrat Love” offers. And I’ve been thinking about that Badness—delighting in it, honestly—all week. I needed something to distract me from, I dunno, every single piece of news I encountered. You don’t Google rodent wangs for a straight hour unless you’re seriously trying to forget the state of the world for a while.
The only indefensibly bad components of this “Muskrat Love”—what I would erase if I could teleport back 44 years—are the Captain’s post-prod electro-flourishes. With a few rare exceptions, any time a white dude discovers a cool new electronic musical toy, the results don’t age well. Remember when the Monkees learned about synthesizers? Or when John Tesh bought a keytar? Dare I even mention Peter Frampton here?
Most of the Captain’s sonic aggressions are MOOG-related: the rococo flips and gibbers and binary burps that, according to Tennille’s book, were meant to approximate both the dance of the randy muskrats and their eventual petites morts. While it’s true that courting muskrats do chirp and babble while they posture for one another, no muskrat ever sounded like a broken Nintendo farting along to the Deep Throat soundtrack. But to his credit, these noises do add the Captain to a long tradition of pop musicians misrepresenting sounds of the animal kingdom. A robin, be he rockin’ or not, won’t sing tweedlydeedlydeet; the flight of the bumblebee isn’t nearly as modulated as Rimsky-Korsakov imagines it; and even though Prince sounds amazing while screaming it, no dove has ever cried “Skype! Skype! Skype! Skype! Skyyyyyyyyyyyype!” on the A below High C.
But pop music has never really been about accuracy, of course. What’s more, I think pop forms are designed to harbor Badness, and often when a song does, it still has space to do some kind of work. Many of the entries in this tournament could support this. Sure, they’re awful songs, but rarely because they’re tedious (save maybe “Disco Duck” or “Toy Soldiers”). Our bracket is one of Badness that somehow manages to cultivate energy, and I hope we all celebrate the Energetically Bad in our voting this muskrat month. A few hundred listens in, I think “Muskrat Love” retains its energy via the very components that make it so pungently odious: Ramsey’s bestial lyrics, the Captain’s electric wanking, and all the tawdry 70s vibes Tennille’s vocals can muster.
Context plays a part here, too: this song represents an era of Badness we will never experience again: an age of only three channels and snail mail, when coke-addled cultural gatekeepers made unchecked decisions about what got injected into the living rooms and car speakers of almost everyone. “Muskrat Love” is a capsule from a colorful time that managed to be simultaneously puritanical and overheated, family-friendly and gross. The song epitomizes not simply what was wrong about the 70s, but what was spectacularly wrong about them, and thanks to thirty years of Boomer nostalgia, it’s this wrongness that I have been programmed to miss.
Such nostalgia is aided by the general production of this track, which is honestly pretty damn solid. Rather than the acoustic 60’s holdover approach that America took, this “Muskrat Love” sports the mellowest Hammond B3 you’ve ever heard. The lilting chords noodle Ramsey’s melody about in soft pastel drips. It’s a pleasing accompaniment to Tennille’s vocals, which are also on point. Lemme tell you, Toni Tennille isn’t much of a memoirist, but mama knows her way around a ballad. She’s got this wonderful, almost golden, mid-throat delivery that’s raspy and chewy and not only intoxicating; it sounds intoxicated.
Though she claims to have just said no throughout the decade, Tennille sings “Muskrat Love” like she’s orbiting the moons of Jupiter, as do most of my fave voices of the time. Take the river of barbiturates in Andrea True’s delivery of “More More More!” or Neil Young’s coke-boogered crooning of “Helpless” in The Last Waltz, or whatever the hell Minnie Riperton snorted to hit those top notes in “Loving You.” If you asked me to guess what drug yielded Tenille’s “Muskrat” tone, I’d probably guess an eight-ball of physical love. Toni sounds absolutely fucked in this song. You can almost hear the glow in her cheeks as she pulls a satin sheet around her, sits up, and lights a Newport menthol.
Tennille’s signature sound is also ironic, given the offstage coldness of her marriage to the Captain. She writes that though she tried to change him and despite how well they jibed professionally, he avoided showing her affection for over forty years. Can we just stop for a second and take that in? This song that we’ve loved to hate my entire life is the sound of a thirty-six-year-old woman with a Prince Valliant haircut singing like she’s been shagged within an inch of her sanity right next to her husband, who “couldn’t even give [her] a hug,” using whatever that does to a person’s psyche to croon about two horny muskrats. That, my friends, is an aesthetic Rubik’s cube I’ll never be able to click into place.
Tennille’s vocals are a teaser for what’s to come in “Do That To Me One More Time,” her 1979 hit that is so stanky with white-lady coital fervor, it makes “Muskrat Love” sound like “Old Shep.” But here’s the thing: I never want to hear “Do That To Me One More Time” again. I think that song is a different brand of bad—the kind that rarely interests me because its bad aspects are enough to flatten it: the self-indulgent tempo; the monosyllabic, single-entendre verses; and the Lyricon solo that’s nothing short of a federal crime.
For another example of the irredeemably bad, we need look no further than America’s flop album Hat Trick. A few tracks down from their lesser “Muskrat Love” is a song written by the band with a suspiciously similar title: “Molten Love” (not to be confused with “Molting Love,” which I wrote yesterday about Muskrat Suzie getting aroused whenever Sam sheds his winter fur). I just listened to “Molten Love” six times and I’ve already forgotten everything about the experience other than 1) I hated it and 2) someone blows bong bubbles in the fadeout. Also 3) this chestnut lyric from the chorus: “I want to carry you across a threshold of fireflies and violet smoke all alone.” Da fuck?
All this is to say that yes, “Muskrat Love” is rotten, and I hope you’ve all got it topping your brackets, but even if it wins this pantheon of Badness, I’d still take spectacularly bad—loaded vocal delivery bad, 70s doomsday bad—over forgettably bad any day. “Muskrat Love” beats “Molten Love” in my heart forever. Note, too, that I would specifically take Captain and Tennille’s version over the renditions by the actual author, or that lady who omitted the original song’s oddest lyrics, or those hit-maker dummies with their bongs and bongos. Sure, this version has topped Worst Song Ever listicles my entire life, but it’s managed to stay alive. It has rented space in the consciousness of three generations, like the family of raccoons overtaking Gordon Lightfoot’s kitchen.
And lord knows being a modern human can make you crave a ludicrous outlet—like, say, an ode to a pair of insatiable semi-aquatic mammals, or a memoir about the troubled mammalian lounge act who sang said ode. Maybe “Muskrat Love” also sticks because it proves to us how truly bad life in America (the country, not the shitty band) can get. It reminds us that, at certain points, the citizenry has craved the vibrantly ridiculous as some sort of national coping strategy. On both personal and public levels, we occasionally ache to stop and smell the muskrats, which makes this song a Badness life raft. Nimble, loaded, catchy, and gross, it’s a last-ditch transportation device for when we need something stupid to hold close—stink and all—as we float away from the larger things in our lives that make even less sense.

Elena Passarello is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat.