the first round
(7) the eagles, “hotel california”
outpartied
(10) eddie murphy, “party all the time”
230-212
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 5.
That Creep Can Roll, Man: thomas mira y lopez on “hotel california”
For me, it’s as iconic a scene as any. The Dude sits in the back of a taxi. He’s had a long day—a porn producer roofied him, the Malibu chief of police has chucked a coffee mug at his forehead—and the taxi driver is playing one of his least favorite bands. The Dude asks the driver to change the channel. “Fuck you,” the driver yells. “If you don’t like my music, get your own fuckin’ cab. I’ll kick your ass out.” This doesn’t stand with the Dude. “I had a rough night,” he says, “and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.” The driver pulls over, and kicks his ass out.
I spent most weeknights in high school in the early 2000s listening to Q104.3, New York’s classic rock station. I would lock the door to my room, tune the stereo, and, after about thirty minutes of math, position myself in the center of my room, between bed and bookcase, pump up the volume, and rock out. I could do this for hours, jumping around my room and whisper-screaming lyrics, the radio loud enough to drown out my noise, the rug thick enough or the downstairs neighbors patient enough that they didn’t complain. The whole thing had a very George Michael and his lightsaber vibe. I tried to keep my fantasies modest. In my imagination, I played my school talent show in front of my classmates so they could see how cool I’d become. I was my own little dictator: I just wanted to be loved, and maybe adored.
I idolized pretty much anything Q104.3 played. If you got lucky, on Two for Tuesdays, when the station played ten songs by five bands without commercial breaks, you’d catch something like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” or Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you were unlucky, you got “Layla” or “Light My Fire.” If it was a really rough night, you got the Police or the Eagles, and then you turned the radio off, sat down, and finished your homework.
The irony of the Dude’s cab scene, as the clip’s surprisingly insightful YouTube comments point out, is that we the audience expect the Dude, a white, middle-aged stoner who smokes roaches in his car and listens to CCR tapes, to like The Eagles, and the cab driver, a Black man wearing a taqiyah, to dislike them. The pair’s fiercely opposite reactions—the Dude just cannot keep his mouth shut; the driver almost causes an accident pulling over—are both a subversion of racial stereotypes and a joke about the Eagles. They are the most indifferent, blandest of bands, and yet both these characters are ready to die on this hill.
I disliked the Eagles in high school for a mostly aesthetic reason: their songs were oversaturated with the 70s. They sounded like they wanted to be liked, and that made me dislike them. As a grad school professor would write shorthand in my margins, they were TTH: Trying Too Hard.
I also mistrusted them because “Hotel California,” with its upbeat and wooden timbales and Don Henley’s elongated vowels, sounded like a bunch of white guys on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to sound Spanish. Indeed, the song’s working title was “Mexican Reggae.” And here I was, a white guy with a Spanish last name, who did not speak his father’s native language, and who decided to take Chinese in high school so he wouldn’t have to learn the Spanish the rest of his family spoke. I did not identify with what the Eagles were trying to do in that song, and yet I did identify, and this bothered me most.
At least, I think this is why I disliked the song. Because at some point in high school, along came the Dude and The Big Lebowski and here was another white guy, who smoked pot and wore pajamas outdoors and hated the Eagles.
By now, I’ve watched the movie more times than any other except for Casablanca. (Once I was alone for a long time in a house without cable.) The anxiety of influence kicks in. Did I hate the Eagles because my favorite character in my favorite movie hated them? Or is he my favorite character because he was able to articulate my dislike in the way we say good literature articulates our long held yet unexpressed truths? Did I root for the villains in Bond films because I too am slippery and untrustworthy, and because I appreciated how these figures complicated and undermined a sense of unflappable masculinity? Or did I feel this way because these villains wormed their way into my head before I could come to my own questions about myself?
You might say any assignation of good or bad, like or dislike, is never a judgment about the text itself, but a shaping of ourselves in reaction to a text. We want what reflects us back to ourselves. Or, as the Dude would say, “Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion man.”
The other day, my friend Alyssa brought up a personality metric her younger sister invented to measure the world. There are four categories to express a person’s outward and (inward) dichotomies: You can be 1) chill (un-chill), 2) unchill (chill), 3) chill (chill), or 4) unchill (unchill). Chill (unchill) presents a chill exterior while maintaining an un-chill interior. Unchill (chill) does the inverse. The rest explain themselves.
As is the case with any personality metric, the test becomes more complicated the more you think about it, although you could say that that is pretty unchill of me to point out.
But still it’s a fun exercise. For example, Walter, the Dude’s best friend, with all his screaming about Vietnam, is decidedly unchill (unchill), as are the movie’s Nazis, despite their nihilism. Jesus, the Dude’s bowling antagonist, is actually chill (chill). A Bond villain is unchill (chill): at their core, they know what has to be done and how to do it. Their firmness of purpose bespeaks a certain calm.
On first blush, the Dude appears to be chill (chill) since, after all, he’s the Dude and the Dude abides. But you could also argue the Dude is chill (unchill). Beneath his façade lies an interior full of agitation and anger at the injustices in the world, as well as the failing of the Dude’s life work to correct those injustices, that anger often funneled into wherever he happens to be at the moment, such as in the back of a cab with a bruise on his forehead from a fascist police chief’s coffee mug, listening to Don Henley want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a million stars all around.
Like the Dude, the Eagles are chill (unchill). While their songs present a surface of easy listening and relaxed SoCal vibes, underneath that surface lies a corporate mentality, a lack of conviction, and a cynical, exploitative view of the world. Unlike, say, CCR, the Dude’s favorite band, the chillness of their music does not ground itself in the knowledge that the world is decidedly an unchill place. Their music instead argues that the world is an easy place, or at least a place where shallow, derivative, uncomplicated songs can succeed in the way that my imaginary concerts strove to: by presenting a fantasy and wanting adoration.
If the length of its guitar solo is any indication, there is no song more a fantasy, more wanting of adoration than “Hotel California.” Its six minutes and thirty-one seconds are full of vague metaphors and knock-off Springsteen lines that portend to mean anything and everything. The narrative possesses a muddiness that makes “Stairway to Heaven” sing like a clear mountain stream. Musically, its guitars cascade through the song, awash and bright not like sunlight, but like Dawn, like your computer monitor turned all the way up. I suspect it’s a song simply about getting your nut, but at least when Led Zeppelin sang those, they didn’t have to do it with so much pomp and mystery.
That said, this is less an essay about whether Hotel California is a bad song as it is an essay about why I feel the need to say Hotel California is a bad song. About how aesthetics often equal an idea of how the way we are good is determined by what we say is good, or at least how we might appear good in public by what we say we like.
Whatever its limitations, could a metric like chill (unchill) be applied to the notion of good and bad? What are the qualities of a song that is 1) good (bad) versus one that is 2) bad (good)? What makes something 3) good (good) or 4) bad (bad)?
I would like to think that this is a world where the core of a text makes itself known eventually. Take Guy Fieri, for example, who people such as myself only admit to liking ironically at first. Guy Fieri appeals because of his ridiculous exterior; liking someone so unsophisticated is one way of gaining social capital in a generation suspicious of sincerity. Irony is a mask, says Anne Carson (good (good)). That is, we say Guy Fieri is good but we wink when we do so because we are witty and patrician enough to know he is good (bad). But spend any amount of time with him, and those designations tend to flip or disappear. What actually appeals about him is not the way in which he might make a viewer feel intellectually superior, but the way in which his relentless positivity, good cheer, and support of others make me, at least, wish for more of those qualities in myself. I start to admire what big bites he takes and the convenience of his backwards sunglasses. Irony is a mask, but then, Carson adds, the mask becomes the face.
To put it more succinctly: Once I grew a mustache as a joke. Now I have a mustache.
So while I’d like to live in a world where the core parenthetical reveals itself, the core also shifts, moves, heats up and cools down. And I myself am moving in relation to it. I might hardly even know where I am in the first place.
Is “Hotel California” a bad song or am I saying it’s a bad song so I can sound like a certain (good) person? Is it possible to call it a bad song and still say I like it? Or to say that I like it but that I don’t believe in it?
Anyone that’s watched The Big Lebowski knows about Jesus. As played by John Turturro, the character wears a lavender jumpsuit, a hairnet, and a perfectly manicured violet pinky fingernail. He dries his fingers over the air vent and tongues the bowling ball. In a fitting touch for the Dude’s nemesis, “Hotel California” plays in the background when we meet Jesus. Not the Eagles’ version, but a cover by the Gipsy Kings. Jesus prepares to bowl during the song’s instrumental opening; if you’ve never heard this version, you’d have no idea what song it was. Once Jesus bowls a strike, he turns around, hops from foot to foot, and points at the camera as the first verse begins. At this point we the audience recognize what we have, and how it differs. Here is a Bond villain cooked up by the Coen Brothers.
I find the Gipsy Kings’ version formidable in its arpeggiated fury, and I also do not know how seriously to take it. Is it over the top, or does it just accompany one of the movie’s most over the top scenes? Either way, it does something I hardly did in high school, something the Eagles are all too eager to convince you they do: as the kids say, it fucks, and does so in the Spanish I refused to learn as a child. Given all the vague references to mission bells and colonialism and the exoticism of California in the Eagles’ original, here is a twist. The song feels like it’s taking something back and pushing something else forward.
Some time ago, my partner described an article that considers how song covers “queer” their original versions, such as when a woman covers a song in which a man pined for a woman. That is, a cover does not just imitate, but destabilizes its original. I think, most famously, of Jose Feliciano playing a folk version of the Star Spangled Banner during the 1968 World Series. To many viewers, Feliciano presents an image of defenselessness: a person who is blind, sitting and playing an acoustic guitar on his own, with no martial band to back him. This, in turn, gives the cover its power; Feliciano manages to demilitarize the anthem brilliantly. And like all good (good) covers, he renders it so that you both can and can’t sing along to it. When the melody rises, Feliciano descends. When a note should be held, he shortens it. Certainty becomes, instead, conditional.
I hesitate to use the word queering myself. I’m not sure it is my word to use, and I do not want to dampen or quell the word’s effect, much as I was hesitant to use the word partner. I wonder as well if my using that term is similar in some respect to the pop corporate mentality with which Don Henley and the Eagles appropriate the sounds of a just-passed era where others laid more on the line than they did, or the way in which a multinational corporation will drop a Kardashian into the vaguest of Black Lives Matter protests to sell soda.
But I admire the subversion a gesture can create. What a cover does to the original song resembles what the Dude is to Jeffrey Lebowski, or how Jesus, whose last name is Quintana, does not pronounce his name “hey-zeus” but as the Anglicized “gee-zus” himself. A cover questions the original’s values and repurposes content for new aims. It does something more complicated than call the original good or bad. It alters a text from whatever is considered acceptable, keeping in mind that when we call something such, we want that to say more about ourselves and our good standing than about whatever that thing is.
The house where I watched Casablanca over and over again belonged to my grandmother, a house she and my grandfather, whom I never met, had built outside Rio de Janeiro. Casablanca is, of course, a movie about people of mostly comfortable means attempting to escape the threat of fascism by traveling to the Americas. (Good luck, many would say.) It resembles, to that skeletal degree, my grandfather who fled the Spanish Civil War for South America just a few years before, the way the families of the future Gipsy Kings also fled Catalonia during that same civil war for the south of France. It’s a cheap move, an easy move, to tell you the insignia of both Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Third Reich was an eagle.
Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review Online among other places and he has received fellowships from Colgate University and the MacDowell Colony. He's an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, and a lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
dan kois on “party all the time”
No one thinks they’re recording a bad song. Looking over the March Badness bracket, I don’t see a single title about which I can comfortably say, “Ah, these guys knew this was a piece of shit the day they made it.” Even while cutting the most craven, label-mandated “sounds like a single” track, the band making the song and the singer singing the song tend to believe, in the heat of the moment, that it reflects something great about their skills and talent, and that the bad song is actually good.
Like so many other artists in this tournament, Eddie Murphy thought his song, “Party All the Time,” was good. So why do I think this particular song, this display of towering ego disguised as a thin post-disco ‘80s dance track, deserves to go all the way in March Badness? Because no one in the history of recorded music has ever thought their bad song was good as emphatically as Eddie Murphy thought “Party All the Time” was good.
In the spring of 1985, Murphy was basically the most famous and popular dude in America. By late May, I—a 10-year-old—had seen Beverly Hills Cop three times in the theater. The film was in its twenty-fourth week of release and was still the No. 4 movie in the country. (It had just broken the $200 million box-office mark, the first R-rated movie ever to do so.) I have vivid memories of my fellow fifth-graders reciting Murphy’s comedy routines verbatim—yes, even the awful homophobic ones, but also the one about putting Old Spice on your dick.
And at that exact moment, at the absolute peak of his fame, what did Eddie Murphy want to do? He wanted to make music. Though Murphy’s comedy albums had included the occasional novelty tune, like the immortally stupid and fatally catchy “Boogie in Your Butt,” his album How Could It Be was a statement. The cover featured an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Murphy, in a dark suit, leaning thoughtfully on a white piano. Murphy recruited Stevie Wonder to write and produce two tracks, and Rick James to write and produce two more—including “Party All the Time,” the lead single. It also featured three songs written by Murphy himself, including an anti-racism track called “My God Is Color Blind.”
So let’s be clear: “Party All the Time” is not good, though it is one of the better songs on the record. The chorus is an earworm but the verses are forgettable; its sound is thin as tissue paper, even by the standards of mid-‘80s pop production; Murphy’s voice lacks any of the character or bravado he brought to movies or his stand-up. He sounds like an anonymous session singer on a day when he didn’t really have it. Rick James, in a brief cameo on the breakdown, blows him out of the water.
But the whole conceit of the video is not just that the song is good. It’s that the song is insanely good. Eddie Murphy skips down the stairs into the studio, greets a control room full of pals, dashes into the booth, throws on some headphones just in time for the first verse. And as soon as he starts lip-syncing, the room is out of its head at how terrific this shit is. The producers twiddle knobs to attain the perfect mix; Eddie’s friends cannot control their own dancing and smiling and singing along; Rick James is beside himself with delight. By the time Murphy reaches the end of the song’s second chorus and nearly hits a sustained high note, James attains a kind of ecstasy, as if this moment—stuck in a studio pretending to record a Hollywood star whose brother would later brag about beating him up—is the pinnacle of his storied career.
The real story this video tells is dire. For the first single off his first album, Eddie Murphy chose this narrative: Everybody is waiting for Eddie. When Eddie shows up, the fun finally starts. Everyone is delighted by Eddie. Everyone applauds Eddie. An honest-to-God legend cannot stop himself from running into the booth with Eddie and sharing a microphone. At the end, Eddie does the OK sign from Beverly Hills Cop.
I think what haunts me the most about this video is that the studio is filled with all those friends, dancing. That Murphy surrounded himself at this video shoot with sycophants, tasked with pantomiming delight while the guy with more money than God played pop star. Were they Eddie’s inner circle? Did they depend on him the way so many hangers-on desperately cling to the stars whose support seems always conditional? Video shoots take forever. Imagine how much their cheeks hurt from smiling. Imagine how every day was like this. They had to party all the time.
Dan Kois is a writer at Slate. He's the author of the memoir How to Be a Family and Facing Future, part of the 33 1/3 series of music criticism. He also co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of "Angels in America" with Isaac Butler. He lives in Virginia.