round 1

(2) k. d. lang, “crying”
slipped by
(15) the staple singers, “slippery people”
172-152
and will play on in the second round

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

sheila squillante on k. d. lang’s “crying”

For most of my life, I was terrified to sing out loud. I thought—no, I knew—I had a terrible voice. My mother couldn’t carry a tune, and I was sure I was just like her. She sang to me often as a child, but instead of soothing me, as was certainly her intention, it made me uncomfortable. Her lullabies were Irish rebel songs, dirges about men in damp prisons, awaiting their deaths by hanging in the morning, but that wasn’t the most uncomfortable part. It was her delivery. She a low, raspy smoker’s voice and would sort of speak-sing them. I can remember cringing to hear the unnatural drop off at the end of a phrase, the way students sometimes read poems, followed by a quick, short intake of breath before starting the next. Like a hiccup or a gasp for more air. A clipping of wings for birds that should soar. Later, she’d let her erratic lead foot push the car to accelerate, then take it off and let it glide until she needed more speed. Down, up and then back to the floor. These were the days of too much to drink. Of choosing between two bottles of red wine before bed or else crying herself to sleep after her marriage to my father disintegrated and then he died. The years of her driving her car onto neighbor’s lawns, somehow not killing herself or someone else. For a long time, we swam away from each other on opposite currents. But when my kids were born, she got sober and we floated back to one another. It was more complicated than that, but it was enough. She died of lung cancer nine months ago.

*

In the 80s and early 90s when she was a rising and then established star, I wasn’t really aware of the music of Canadian country singer k.d. lang. I was busy being a fawning girlfriend and then a voiceless wife to a swaggering, smart guy who turned off whatever I happened to be listening to, and blasted Metallica and Ministry from the flimsy speakers in the drab brown living room of our sad, drab duplex in Naugatuck, Connecticut. After he left me—an utter obliteration—I worked as a nanny for a lesbian couple whose kids loved me, who became my family, who, in my mother’s absence, helped me put myself back together. I would do their laundry sometimes, folding soft linen shirts and skirts into piles on the dining room table, and wonder who I was. I had just started feeling drawn to women’s bodies. Their hips, ample like my own, I found especially distracting. Later, a lesbian grad school professor of mine would say “like attracts like,” as an explanation for why she always fell for swaggering, smart Butches. In the 80s and 90s, was there a more famous Butch lesbian than k.d. lang?

*

Before my thirties, there is only one time I sang intentionally, by myself, in front of other people. It was 1988 and I was auditioning for the part of Glinda the Good Witch in my high school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. I sang two or three verses of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into the awful spotlight of the mostly empty auditorium, knowing my teachers and classmates were looking at me, and worse, listening to me. I felt like I would faint or throw up. After, an ex-boyfriend who was a musician, approached me and said, “I didn’t know you could sing.” I didn’t believe him. I was sure he had misheard me.

*

In 1988, k.d. lang appeared onstage on the program Top of the Pops with Rock legend, Roy Orbison, to perform his 1961 hit, “Crying.” Having heard her early work and been impressed, Orbison invited the twenty-seven-year-old lang to record a duet of the song the previous year, thus securing her status as both icon and iconoclast in the Country and Pop music landscape for at least the next decade.
For me, the decade that followed my terrifying live audition (I didn’t land the part of Glinda but was instead cast as Munchkin Number 2. I declined.), included a marriage and a divorce and a graduate degree and a reinvention of myself. I wouldn’t go so far to say iconoclast here, but I did what I could to undo many of the things I had once believed in for and about myself. I pawned my diamond engagement ring for almost no money and loved the dark symbolism of that. I dropped my wedding dress off at a Goodwill in New Haven. I fought a judge for over a year to get my last name back. I became a feminist. I got a tattoo. I kissed the lips of a girl with hips like mine.

*

Roy Orbison had an angel’s voice. Routinely, when we listen to his music at home, my husband and I marvel at the clarity of the tone, the smooth, delicious, pitch-perfect richness of that great man’s talent. If you’ve ever watched videos of Orbison singing, you know that even when he hits those highest, most out-of-the-reach-of-mortals notes, his face shows no strain. He simply opens his mouth and the notes soar out and up, up as if on the wing. He was an astonishing, singular talent, that is not to be denied. And “Crying” is as classic a song as we have in our American songbook. It’s a ballad of love and lament for what’s been lost. Imagine you are a person who runs into an old love, someone who has left and gone on to make a new life, maybe with someone new. You exchange pleasantries—hello, how are you, it’s been so long—and you think, with relief, Okay, I got this. I am over this person. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Or, at least, it doesn’t hurt the same. And then, in parting, you find your hand held tightly in friendship and well wishes and nostalgia and goodbye, and suddenly it all falls apart and you find yourself crying. Alone and crying.
Science calls this phenomenon frisson. It’s basically a physical reaction to intense stimuli— emotional feeling or experience. It’s the same autonomic nervous response as what happens when we get goose bumps or chills from the touch of a someone we love or find sexually attractive. A spark in the skin that ignites a dopamine fire. Frisson is also sometimes referred to as a “skin orgasm” because of the waves of pleasure that wash over the person experiencing it.
If you’ve ever felt chills while looking at visual art or listening to music, then you’ve experienced frisson. Not everyone does. Some studies suggest as few as 50% of us have nervous systems wired for it. I’m one of the lucky people who do, given the right music, the right voice. Here are some songs that elicit frisson in me: “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” by Blue Oyster Cult, “Oh Holy Night,” the traditional Christmas hymn, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin but only as performed by Ann Wilson of Heart at the Kennedy Center, “When Doves Cry,” by Prince, and Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” as performed by k.d. lang.
After listening to lang sing “Crying” a bunch of times for this essay, and experiencing those waves of pleasure, I wondered if I would have the same reaction to hearing Orbison’s version. I feel certain that his voice has elicited this response in me in the past, but I wasn’t sure. I had to test it. So, I conducted a Very Scientific Experiment. The table below presents data that tracks my heart rate (I wore my Apple watch) and tallies the number of chills I got while listening to the same song sung by the two vocalists. My method: listen to three different recordings by Orbison, followed by the famous Orbison/lang duet, and then three different recordings by lang, all of which I found on YouTube. I kept my eyes closed during the listening so that my data wouldn’t be skewed by visual stimuli.

The results surprised me. I would have expected Orbison to rate higher, and even though I wasn’t shocked to see lang pull it out as clear winner in terms of quantity of chills given, I really thought MTV’s stripped down version would come out ahead of the Kennedy center’s more orchestral performance, because I really don’t love all that over production. But then again, it might be the very presence of that sweeping instrumentation that gave it the edge. According to the article “Have You Ever Had a Skin Orgasm? By Ainsley Hawthorne, PhD in Psychology Today, “the features that most commonly induce frisson are ones that violate our expectations, like crescendos, the onset of unexpected harmonies, the entrance of a human voice, or affecting lyrics.” So, maybe flutes, too? I don’t know what’s going on with my heart rate here, because many times I could feel my face blush while listening, but the numbers didn’t show an appreciable increase. Though interestingly it looks like where lang’s Kennedy Center “Crying” puts me into a state of clear ecstasy, Orbison’s studio version calms me down. I should also note that I listened to these in the sequence they appear here, and with no down time in between, so that by the time I got to the final version, I was having the odd sensation of feeling like the chills were there, but I couldn’t quite feel them. Like they were dulled by…overuse? How many times can one experience this sort of euphoria before becoming a little spent?
Well, this has gotten steamier than I expected it to at the start of my little experiment. Let’s leave it at this: 1990s lang, with her sharp suits and sharper jaw, close-cropped hair, skin like moonlight, and, oh yes, swagger, looks nothing like me, but frisson doesn’t lie. The hypothalamus wants what it wants.

*

Alcohol abuse damages several parts of the brain including the cerebellum, which is responsible for the motor coordination and reflex action that would have helped my mother not drive her car onto neighbor’s lawn, and the limbic system, which controls our emotions. At my mother’s (fully-vaxxed) memorial at the Jersey Shore this past summer, we, her daughters, sat under a canopy among her many brothers, cousins, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren. That is to say, my children. The past year of anticipating a death that was hard on all of us, was hardest of all on my daughter who had an especially close relationship with my mother. When my daughter was born my mother got sober, finally, and for good. That was fourteen years ago. Fourteen years of healing and largely normal, healthy (if not always positive) emotional response. My daughter studies voice at a performing arts high school here in Pittsburgh. She is a Singer. She loves to be in the spotlight, on the stage. This is her identity in the same way that I am a Writer. When she saw my mother’s casket at the church, she let out an involuntary wail that shook every heart in that building. I wailed too, but quietly, into my husband’s shoulder, into myself. She opened her throat and screamed her pain out. After the service, under the canopy, my mother’s cousins gently cared for my daughter. They held and rocked her and told her how much she is loved. They asked her to sing, so she stood in the center and sang “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. We all cried. How could you not? I had gone to get a piece of cake and talk to a cousin, when behind me, under the same canopy, another powerful voice erupted in a different song,

In a dreary Brixton prison/where an Irish rebel lay…

and I stood, mute with shock, and listened. These were the words to the dirge, the lullaby my mother would sing to me as a small child, the one that filled me with discomfort and embarrassment for her and caused me to silence my own song for much of my life. I had never head them sung by anyone else.

By his side a priest was standing/’ere his soul should pass away…

My mother’s older brother, Tommy, sang “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland,” with sad, clear tones that lifted and soared up, up through the top of the canopy and out over the Atlantic Ocean, and I cried and felt love and shame and regret and relief for the fourteen years we had.

*

In grad school, in Kim’s kitchen, we cooked tuna burgers out of a Martha Stuart cookbook and laughed at how outrageously expensive they were. Chaka Khan spun in the CD player and we sang along. In her car, on the way to somewhere, we had the windows down and the Indigo Girls on. I must have forgotten myself, the way you can with great music, because I still, at this point in early 2000s, only let myself hum along to songs when I was with other people. I still felt embarrassed about my voice. I skipped out on karaoke night every time. I only know I was actually singing in the car because I got all tied into knots trying to navigate the sonic complexity of those songs, trying, as one does, to sing both melody and harmony at the same time, and ended up laughing and saying something like, “Oh god that was awful. I can’t sing!” And then Kim, who has a beautiful singing voice, said the thing that changed my self-perception for the rest of my life: “Of course you can. You have a voice like k.d. lang’s.”
I knew my friend did not mean that I could sing like k.d. lang. She meant that, like, lang, my voice sounds comfortable in the lower range. Lang is actually a mezzo-soprano—as is my daughter—but I cannot hit those high notes.
Five years after this moment in the car with my friend who had no idea the gift she had just given me, the damage she’d just undone, I would find myself in a darkened nursery, rocking my infant son to sleep, singing “Here Comes the Sun,” singing,” Rudi Can’t Fail,” singing, as I would also to my daughter two years later, every verse of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” brightly and with something close to confidence, but also dolce, dolce, so as not to wake them, as mothers do.

*

The month before she died, I sat next to my mother on the white leather couch in her southern Florida living room. Cancer had made her so small she had almost disappeared, and she knew she was going to die very soon. She told me she was ready for it. We had spent severa weeks over Zoom together earlier in the year, before she lost so much of her cognition. “I want you to interview me about my life,” she said. “I have some things I want to say.” So, we moved through her seventy years, one decade at a time. I felt anxious as we approached the 1990s—those were some of my darkest years. My father died. My marriage died. My relationship with my mother ached from the strain of her alcoholism, my resentment and our total misunderstanding of each other as people. What would she say about all of that? What would I?
It turned out, we said nothing about those most defining moments of my life. Her memories of the 90s looked different. They were filled with the stuff of her life and that’s what she wanted to talk about. It made sense, finally. We were, and always had been, separate people whose lives intersected irregularly. This sounds lonely, but I don’t mean it to. Maybe it’s how mothers and daughters should be after a time. Both of us moving forward on our own journey, both stranger and familiar to one another, waving and smiling as we pass on the way.
She was done talking now. Tired, often confused and already beginning to transition to the next realm. I pulled out my phone and opened YouTube. I wanted to make things easier for her. Softer. I thought we’d listen to some music to pass the time, so I cued up Simon and Garfunkel, a favorite of hers for my whole life. “Mrs. Robinson” played from my tinny phone speaker and I started to sing to my mother and my mother sang every word with me. An unexpected harmony. I cried, knowing that soon I would lose her, that I’d be standing alone, as we all do, in my grief. I cried. I’m still crying.
But I’m so glad we sang.

Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist living in Pittsburgh, and the director of the MFA program at Chatham University. She serves as executive editor of The Fourth River literary journal and editor at large for Barrelhouse. She is the author of the poetry collections MOSTLY HUMAN, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, BEAUTIFUL NERVE (Tiny Hardcore, 2016), and three chapbooks. DEAR SUNDER, her fourth chap, will be released by dancing girl press in late 2022, and her debut (as yet untitled) essay collection about motherhood, daughterhood, love, grief, food and music, will be published by CLASH Books in 2023. She doesn't understand how 1990 could be 32 years ago. Visit her at www.sheilasquillante.com and on Twitter/Insta as @sheilasquill.

What’s the Matter with Him? He’s Alright!: matthew vadnais on the staple singers’ “slippery people

The Staple Singers’ rendition of “Slippery People” is one of the rare covers to appear in the Billboard Top 100 at the same time as its original cousin. In fact, this version, featuring the legendary Mavis Staples doing call and response with her equally legendary father Pops, actually charted before the Talking Heads original and stayed there a week longer.
Two years after recording this cover (with Taking Head David Byrne on guitar), Pops Staples, then aged 72, appeared in Byrne’s film True Stories. In a 2018 Rolling Stone interview, Byrne described the film—structured loosely around the town of Virgil Texas as it prepares for its 150-year anniversary and a “Celebration of Specialness”—as an ode to creativity in places not typically heralded for their creativity, small towns not unlike the one I grew up in Minnesota but one, I’d argue, very different from small town of Winona Mississippi where Roebuck “Pops” Staples was born in 1914, precisely at the midpoint of the century separating Emancipation from the passing of the Civil Rights Act.
Reading any plot summary some 36 years after the film was made likely sets off some alarms: Pops plays Mr. Tucker, a kindly practitioner of Voodoo who works for a white woman and is hired explicitly by a white man to use Voodoo to help him find love. When I ran into the movie, I wondered aloud why more folks haven’t asked Byrne to account for a character description that soundly meets the criteria for what Spike Lee and a number of other critics have called the “Magical Negro.’
     The answer likely resides in two factors.
First, Byrne had already established a willingness to write about everything and everyone as subjects of his hyper-specific examination of humanity while also establishing a record of sharing his platform to the best of his ability with the artists, many of them African, to whom the Talking Heads owed a profound debt of inspiration. Even as the film clearly runs into problems not unique to it concerning characters of color whose wisdom, power, and artistry are in service of white characters, there is a pervasive oddness that shades every character in the movie in such a way that Mr. Tucker’s idiosyncrasies (though they retain racial valances) are presented as character traits no more bizarre than the rest of the (white) townsfolk.The pure weirdness of the film likely insulates it from criticism justifiably leveled against many other movies made in the same decade.
Additionally, though, Byrne *is* relentlessly specific. Even as the character is an embodiment of a very problematic trope, Byrne has done his research. The result is a song called “Papa Legba” that Pops sings in the film and as an alternate extended version on the film’s soundtrack. In the lyrics, written of course by Byrne, Staples sings two languages and calls on Papa Legba, a Voodoo Loa he asks to “open the door” for “we are your children.” Though I need to immediately acknowledge my limitations as a glossary for figures and concepts of Voodoo and other religions of the African Diaspora, my understanding is that a Loa is similar to a spirit and that Papa Legba is typically the first Loa summoned in a ceremony, a gatekeeper who determines whether or not a practitioner gets their desired audience.
There are a number of questions to be asked about the character of Mr. Tucker’s role in the larger movie, but, here, I’d like to think about the actual performance of “Papa Legba” as its own artifact. During the four-minute clip, where he appears to do the love magic he was hired to do, Pops sings and dances and pours red dirt upon the ground in front of a “Voodoo altar,” though it looks, at least to my untrained eye, to have been prepared with more attention to detail than most Hollywood depictions of similar that I have seen. In any case, with only minimal nods to his 40-year history making music in and around the gospel, blues, jazz, and popular music scenes, Pops calls on Papa Legba to open the gate and ride his horse into Virgil, Texas.
However—and this is where Byrne’s attention to detail matters—Papa Legba is most definitely not disconnected from the traditions that shaped Pops Staples as a musician. Called by a number of names, including the Devil, Papa Legba appears in many blues songs and is often associated with the crossroads. Regardless of whether or not it was a great idea to cast Pop Staples as a Voodoo practitioner whose creativity is excluded from the town’s “Celebration of Creativity,” Byrne is as curious about Mr. Tucker as he is anyone else he writes for or about. The result is a clip that, at least when taken by itself, implies some fairly subversive things about race and entertainment.
As Pops sings that he will “say these words,” he is clearly calling on something beyond or outside of contemporary American culture. He finishes his vow and begins what sounds like an incantation in what is clearly not English but is hard enough to understand because of distortion that it took me cheating with Apple Music’s lyrics to realize it was Spanish. Precisely as he sings this othered incantation, the film inserts footage from the preparations being made for the Festival of Specialness, moments that are clearly marked as exclusively white spaces of making art where whiteness is announced in American-flag blouses and line dancing. The intrusion of whiteness marked as whiteness manages, at least for me, to reverse the polarity of otherness. It is the weird cowboy hats and ballet swans made with shadows that somehow get marked as “exotic.” This exoticism is both reinforced (and shown to be ironic) by the incantation that must be identified as Spanish and translated in order to reveal that Pops is asking Legba to “break the monotony.” Orphaned from the rest of the film and the details of the love spell, Pops and the filmmakers seem to be inviting me to consider myself part of his “we” and not the “we” of the intervening footage.              
This kind of trick is something Byrne has done throughout a career in many ways defined by an enduring interest in the relationship between a song and its singer. However, to the extent that it works, the real magic of the clip comes from Pops and his performance of the song, a magic that works even better on the album than it does in the film. Without the visuals, the song slips free of vestigial associations with exploitation in order to exist only in the slinky space the band holds for Pops, space that he fills with a playful slither. In his hands, even an mmmm-hhhmmm-hhhmmmm-hhhhmmm is an incantation, one shaped by multiple Black traditions to call on Legba in a variety of musical dialects. The longer Pops sings, the more the song becomes truly liminal, an invocation of a Loa that is answered by the arrival of Actual American Music Royalty as the song reaches its crescendo and he sounds less like the character of Mr. Tucker and more like Pops Staples.
His performance is a musicology lecture in song form.
     If it were an hour long, I don’t think I could manage to stop it until he was finished.

When I was twenty-two, I ran into my own crossroads, one that in retrospect has revealed that the paths of racism and anti-racism are not diverging paths at all so much as they are a matter of how one walks, how one remembers the walking, and how one talks about it moving forward and looking back. More on this later.
At the time, I thought my crossroads were literal. I had graduated from college a month ahead of schedule because of a flood (and a fire) that mostly incapacitated Grand Forks, North Dakota. I had no reason to procrastinate leaving the place where I felt like a medium fish and going to grad school where I would be a fish with a Minnesotan accent I barely knew I had. I cannot say for sure whether or not I would have eventually gone to graduate school had my college town not been nearly destroyed upon my graduation. I can be sure, though, that I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school two full months before it started had I not lost all connection to the first place I had lived as an adult which happened to be mostly the same place that I had lived as a teenager and child.
Had there been no natural disaster to force me out of the Red River Valley before other students who were coming to Ames, Iowa, were in Ames, Iowa, I would not have walked naively into the theatre building I had just found on the map to ask if there were any paid opportunities for someone who had done touring theatre in college at precisely the same time that the Iowa State University Minority Theatre was looking for someone to replace an actor who had last-minute conflicts, someone with a male-presenting voice and a willingness to wear a very large mask to play the part of Teddy in a touring children’s production of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. It was probably the least direct way to earn 400 dollars in 1997, but I jumped at the chance for a dozen reasons and spent the remainder of summer touring Iowa with nine women of color. Any story I tell about my long and non-linear path toward justice work has to start in that van; even the parts of my journey that took place prior to that summer owe part of their significance to the way that summer changed how I thought about power, identity, race, and making theater.
We talked about race the whole time. We talked about it when we compared our favorite books. We talked about it when I didn’t know the songs they were playing on the van’s tape deck. We talked about it when I knew a song well enough to sing along in a way that got teased. We talked about it if I stopped singing so that I would start singing again. It’s probably both good and bad for my sense of myself that I do not have a perfect memory of the van: I can remember the importance of the conversations even if my brain protectively edits out some of my questions and responses. I don’t remember being defensive very often, but I’m also pretty sure my brain’s editing software has something to do with that.
What I remember thoroughly is the way that once our masks came off after every show when we were taking questions from the audience, the white children of Iowa only had questions for me. Why was I in a minority theatre company? How did I remember the dance? What was it like being the “only dude” on tour? What was it like being white?
I’m being misleading. The first three questions, every stop, were versions of that last one: white kids wanting to know about my experience being white in a company that otherwise wasn’t. There are a bunch of possible explanations for these questions, all of them troubling, but as I continued through graduate school I recognized the historical tendency to exclusively bestow white cis-male artists (usually but not always straight) with artistic agency. In the same way that sportscasters have shaped narratives of Black excellence as the inevitable result of athleticism and not the product of volition and work, my cast members were largely dismissed as people whose presence there was merely an artifact of their identities. I was asked questions because I *chose* to do this and didn’t *have to be* in a minority theatre. The lack of questions for my peers—all of whom were better in the show than I was—came with an implicit reminder that the word actor was originally designed to accommodate me and not necessarily anyone else on stage. I could be Teddy because I could be Hamlet because I could be anyone.
Though I didn’t realize it as I was being asked about what it was like to learn the dance (and, reader, it was just the Macarena) when no one else in the cast was asked anything about how they became a snake or a mongoose, the racist tendency to dismiss the efforts of my cast members as something other than what it was I was doing when I put on the Teddy mask has been fundamental to the role of arts criticism as long as audience members have been elevating themselves to the role of critic, evaluating and minimizing the work of folks who do not share the identity that critic associates with artistry.
This tendency to dismiss excellence and craft as “inborn talent” (or worse, “nature”) has special legacies for Black artists and is the first thing we need to jettison if we’re going to accept my premise here: this modest hit by a crossover gospel act formed by a man born to indentured sharecroppers in the full heat of Jim Crow is the best cover in the tournament.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about Staple Singers’ cover of “Slippery People” is how “good of a fit” the song is for the kinds of things the band does really well. Even the dated synthesizer that opens the cover, one that has been removed from arrangements Mavis does these days, comes off as less dated than it might because it also feels “organic.” Like it’s the first thing the band reached for “on instinct.”
The tricky thing about a lot of racist tropes is that they sound like compliments: it’s hard for a lot of white folks to understand how stereotypes of being good at X, for example, can be hurtful and dehumanizing. Like a lot of Black artists versed in multiple traditions, the Staple Singers make what they do seem “natural” and easier than it is in part because the shibboleth of authenticity, even as it can border on racial essentialism, is often the only available path towards record deals and mass promotion. The apparent ease with which they are able to graft religiosity onto a pop song certainly invites outsiders to dismiss the fact that the song sounds good as being an accident of identity stemming from the obvious-in-hindsight decision to have a Talking Heads’ song with gospel elements covered by group with gospel bonafides.
It should also be acknowledged that there was, in fact, nothing actually organic about the decision to cover the song: Staple Singers and Talking Heads shared representation and it was the agent who realized the original’s gospel-inflected call and response would lend itself to things the Staple Singers had been perfecting for twenty years. Personally, this was not the story I wanted explaining the origins of this cover: it’s unromantic and not about an artist admiring an artist, at least not initially, though the continued collaboration after the cover suggests that what started with an agent’s business decision became something else.
    In any case, given the pragmatic aspects of the choice to cover the song in the first place, it is tempting to think this cover is just what you get when the Staple Singers take on any song: something soulful you can dance to. Even if this largely true, the idea of “soulful” music has become a way of thinking about something other than craft or artistry or whatever kinds of framing critics use to talk about David Byrne’s genius as a songwriter and performer. Even in the 21st century, one wouldn’t be alone in implying that Byrne made artistic choices and Mavis and Pops just sang how they always sing (“on instinct”), the way my students think they “just talk how they talk” (the thing that had me not realizing I sounded like a character in Fargo until I finally lived south of Fargo).
What happens in this cover is far more significant than a manager hearing overlap between the interests of two of his clients. Though the Talking Heads original is written about people in religious traditions that invite the inhabitation of the Spirit, it’s clearly written from outside of that tradition. The polyphonic aspects of the song all get located into a jagged neuroticism that is clearly Byrne’s, a fractured-but as-self-aware-as-possible western self at the heart of every Talking Heads song, one that, if I’m being honest, is probably at the heart of every personal essay I’ve written, maybe including this one. In other words, he is doing something I was taught to do as an artist: seeing people who code as strange and then using art to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange (to and for a very specific audience with shared references, etc.).
     The biggest change the Staple Singers make is splitting Byrne’s part amongst Mavis and Pops with her taking the verses but leading the response chorus as Pops takes on the questions about Slippery People in a voice that sounds more like a deacon of the church than an outsider observing the service. Removing the dialogue from David Byrne’s mind (a talking head if ever there was one, where polyphony is often understood as an individual response to cultural schizophrenia) and relocating it into a Black space where polyphony is code switching necessitated by over four-hundred years of oppression, the song stops being about the intersection of otherness that is an outsider viewing slippery people. It is Mavis herself who tells us commandingly that “the Lord won’t mind” and that the slippery people are “all right…. from the bottom to the top.”
One reason I chose this song, though, is that the Staple Singers’ trick here is *not* any less about musical proficiency than Byrne’s composition of the song. Pops Staples was—and Mavis Staples remains—no less a musical polyglot than David Byrne is. Speaking multiple languages or being conversant in multiple traditions has always been understood differently for non-white peoples: bilingualism is often presented as a failure to assimilate and not as evidence of verbal acuity or intellectual flexibility the way it is advertised for white suburban parents considering emersion schools.
This double-standard is one that Pops was certainly aware of and is one that informs the tremendous footage of the group performing at “Black Woodstock,” The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, in the recently released (and must-watch) Questlove documentary Summer of Soul. The full twenty minutes that are Staple-centric (from 35:00 to 54:00) are of interest to my thinking here, particularly the things Mavis has to say about being invited to non-gospel festivals because, as her father told her when she questioned it, many, many musical traditions were part of the music they made.
All of this is just to say that musical hybridity at work in this cover is a deliberate repositioning of the original song’s ability to be multiple things at the same time. Where the Talking Heads thrive by hybridizing external influences in the noisy brain of their lead singer to demonstrate an intellect pulled in a dozen directions, the multivalence of the Staple Singers, here and elsewhere, comes from hybridizing identities and traditions to which the group not only belongs but helped popularize. R&B instrumentation frames the original’s polyrhythmic structure in such a way that a coherent and consistent rhythm more at home in funk drives a bluesy initial round of call and response that eventually gives way to nonverbal vocalization that borrows both from charismatic Christianity and West African traditions before Mavis ends her own incantation with howl that ushers in what is I think the most joyful 70 seconds in this tournament, a euphoric collision of hyper-precise harmonies that reveal how timid, actually, the first bit of call and response was, at least in comparison to the 3:42-mark of the studio version where Mavis howls again and the Spirit—however you practice or do not—arrives.
Where the Talking Heads’s version presents slippery people as a potential antidote to Byrne’s displacement and ill-fittingness (think of the iconic suit coat from Stop Making Sense), the Staple Singers are slippery people, sliding gracefully between traditions like “a wheel within a wheel” inhabiting all of them “from the bottom to the top.” Where the Talking Heads original shows an individual dislocated by the multiplicity of the song’s sounds and influences, Staple Singers create and hold space for a heterogenous community of people who slip between codes and traditions like Legba’s horse through the open gates.
One reason for this relocation of who the slippery people are has to do with where the power of the traditions coalescing in this cover originate: people. People who, in America, have only selectively been understood as people by the laws, institutions and many of the people in this country. In Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom, August Wilson chronicles the historical Ma Rainy, a figure who drew immense power from an audience that filled her tents and performance spaces in a deep south where lynching was common and protected voting rights were not. A central tension in the play resides in the distinction between the source of the music’s power—Black people who see her live—and the source of the music’s profit once it became a recorded artifact, a very different group of people than those she understood as her real audience, the one depicted in the recent film version running through dangerous nights to come hear her sing. It is for this reason I have chosen the Staple Singers’ clip from Soul Train; it is this cover at its most potent, Mavis claiming the mantle of a slippery person and extending it to everyone in the audience so long as they move.
     Clearly, the choice to cover this song created an immediate relationship between two sets of essential artists that led to Byrne playing with the group and casting Pops in his movie. Perhaps the real magic is that exchange, one in which Byrne’s archetypal “Western Individual” willingly stops singing so a family and community can take center stage. This probably should be the end of my essay. This version of the song demonstrates a necessary move from the social technology of the individual to that of the community, one that in no way diminishes the value and importance of individual voices: Mavis and Pops remain two of the most recognizable voices in American music.
The end.

Except it’s not the end of these questions about who the arbiters of music, culture, and memory understand as agents of artistry and who gets dismissed as a gifted savant singing a “naive melody” (to borrow a parenthetical title from Talking Heads, additional evidence of a shared interest in these questions).
The first March Xness tournament took place the same year as #oscarssowhite and included a very good meta-discussion about whiteness and the music of sadness as the tournament’s only entry recorded by a person of color nearly won the whole thing. We talked about a number of things that potentially explained the lack of diversity and inclusion in our 64 songs. This has been a sub-topic of essays nearly every year that followed as generic constraints have reinforced the general notion that it is white artists who are the ones playing with the intersections of music, culture, and memory. We—participants in the tournament—have been put in the position of a hiring committee working with a pool of applicants created by institutions who have failed to diversify applicants: it was hardly “our fault” that a grunge tournament was almost monolithically white because grunge was.
And that is the problem this year. This year was our first chance to write about anything, freed from any genre restrictions and even a long list. This was our pluralistic community’s chance to, regardless of our native musical inclinations, ensure that we resisted a hegemonic depiction of what it means to cover a song or to, in our cases, write about music, culture, and memory.
Looking at our 64 entries—and this isn’t me talking shit about any of the choices themselves—it’s clear we, collectively at least, were not demonstrably driven by a goal of making the playlist reflect the diversity of covers that meet the selection criteria. This year’s field is nearly as white as every year’s field.
     On the one hand, it’s easy to dismiss my objections here as coming from a ‘woke scold’ or whatever. It’s certainly true that I haven’t always lived by the values that are at the heart of these concerns. I wasn’t listening to Staple Singers in 1985, at least not intentionally, and though seeing Mavis at Eaux Claires (the painfully self-aware music festival started by Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner) in 2016 remains among my very favorite concert experiences, my musical touchstones still very much resemble the canonical scriptures of the white, male, cis indie kid more than any of the traditions the Staple Singers draw upon here. It wouldn’t be remotely credible for me to claim that this cover has always been among my favorites since I’m not actually sure I had heard it before Mavis sang it to all of us who were standing in the Sunday sun as she played outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Worse, I have often listed covers that relocate songs written inside Black traditions into the mostly white genres of grunge, alternative, and an especially white kind of folk as being among my favorites as though I didn’t realize the song was good until it was repackaged for *me* (often in a way that erases the original artist completely). All of this is to say that, if I’m throwing stones, I’m throwing several of them straight up into the air so they land on my own head.

            While I am doing so, there’s something I haven’t mentioned about my work in the Iowa State University Minority Theatre’s touring production of Rikki-Tikki Tavi. I’ve certainly made it sound like I was cast to play Teddy, the colonizer in the original story, because of reasons that make sense. However, both because someone else was supposed to play the role and because it was 1997 and the emphasis was on multiculturalism more than it was actually on auditing legacies of colonialism, Teddy was Japanese. The mask was made before I agreed to do the part; the mask was meant to appear Asian. I was given foam hands that made my hands giant karate hands. I was instructed to do an accent that I objected to at the time but did, especially when audiences started laughing.
I put off writing about this part because I didn’t know how to talk about it without looking like I am trying to justify myself. It’s hard for me to know where exactly to locate the blame for creating a yellowface portrayal (full stop) in the context of a production ostensibly in service of social justice. Likewise, it has proven difficult to figure out how to write about how my role in the play—and by extension the play itself—was racist without downplaying how important that summer was to my desire to extend humanity beyond people I already related to without trying. The hundreds of miles we spent driving backroads in Iowa weren’t me getting on the anti-racist path or leaving the racist path: it was the same path because none of us get to live outside of systems of power and, however I tell the story of that summer, I was most definitely not the story’s protagonist.    
I believe that part of what prevented us collaborative field-makers from consciously creating a field that would more accurately represent the diversity of people covering songs has to do with ways systemic racism’s removal of craft from discussion of the accomplishments of Black people is reinforced by the idea of covering a song as changing its ownership from the original artist to a covering artist. Not only are Black artists—and these problems are hardly limited to Black artists—descendants of people whose “otherness” was codified into law, they are, historically at least, musicians who learned craft in traditions that tended to be far more interested in community and collectivity than in the individual ownership of songs. Thinking about covering a song as an act that in many ways originated in the blues and jazz traditions, most covers were of traditional songs to which ownership wasn’t really the point: the point was connecting an audience moving now to an audience that used to move to the same song.
     What I’m getting at here is that covers not only merge the acts of making and listening to music by recasting an implied member of an initial audience in the role of creator in the cover—something that clearly reinforces the idea of musical ownership in both cases—they also merge the acts of listening to the two versions. As such, covers are a means by which we are invited into traditions and audiences to which we aren’t born, a means by which the Staple Singers can invite me to identify as a slippery person or Pops can ask Papa Legba to come ride his horse for children that may eventually include my own.
And so, I write this essay in part to acknowledge that the Xness community (one I love enough to come back to the hell-site of Twitter) didn’t take full advantage of the second power of the cover, the one that involves the transformation of the audience into another audience. I imagine that we didn’t for mostly the same reasons that I didn’t really listen to the Staple Singers until Justin Vernon (white, cis, straight, indie kid) brought Mavis to Eaux Claires, which are mostly the same reasons I am tempted to exclude the problematic aspects of my work during the summer of 1997 from the account of how much these amazing Black women taught me. The second power of the cover requires us to re-see the path to where we find ourselves as a path that has been created by far more than our individual choices so that we can think about how we got there in order to actually change the way we walk the same path as it leads forward.
In many ways, this second power of the cover is to create a crossroads out of a thing we thought was singular. Like Papa Legba, the Staple Singers’ cover of “Slippery People” throws open a gate. We, all of us interested in justice and equity, need to go through it, do better, listen harder, listen more.

Matt Vadnais teaches at The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. His work on music and pop culture has appeared in Cover Me, Your Chicken Enemy, Solrad, and Comics MNT. He is the author of All I Can Truly Deliver. He is currently second-guessing his bracket.