the first round

(7) martika, “toy soldiers”
drilled
(10) gerry rafferty, “baker street”
134-87
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 7.

mall at night: gabriel palacios on “toy soldiers”

Your ears are not tricking you, there really was one single synthesizer used by virtually every pop artist in the 80s, it was called the Yamaha DX-7, and I bought one, around the millennium, for $350 cash at Chicago Store with my minimum wage earnings from KB Toys. I’ll never forget how the guy in the keyboard department snatched the bills right out of my hand as I was counting them, because he’d grown impatient with my slowness. It felt emasculating, but apparently not as emasculating as the prospect of leaving without the keyboard A-ha used to craft “Take On Me.” The DX-7 is all over Martika’s “Toy Soldiers.” Musically, it’s a genuine 80s artifact: frigid instrumental backdrop, however complicated by its uncommonly committed vocal, which is not without a certain wondrous and unanticipated measure of bluesiness and soul, even. To hear it now, those synth flourishes and Martika’s vocal, casting cold, digitally reverberating trails, it all adds up to a stirring hollowness. It feels like music fit for gazing at abandoned malls.
As it turns out, dead mall gazing, judging by the scores of YouTube channels dedicated to the past time, has already claimed a soundtrack of its own: Vaporwave. Vaporwave music consists mostly of preexisting 80s tunes not so much chopped/remixed/sampled as lifted wholesale, then slowed down, and made distant by a veil of digital decay. I’m not sure I buy it as a musical form—more like a setting, a parameter, a preset on some machine. Nevertheless, whenever I hear it, and especially if I happen to be staring at the label scar of a shuttered Pretzel Time, I’m convinced. It really does capture the cavernous indeterminate roar of our abandoned glass and brass temples. And maybe what I find moving in “Toy Soldiers” is half Martika’s vocal talents, half the essence of the shopping mall in its late 20th century prime. The mall when it was still alive, but after hours, air still thick with ghosts of slamming registers and Reebok footsteps squeaking on the waxy checkered tiles of day.
Before she sang “Toy Soldiers,” I had come to know Martika as Martika Marrero, a member of the teen cast of Kids Incorporated, an early Disney Channel network success. It was a musical variety show. Other cast members included Fergie, Rahsaan Patterson, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mario Lopez, and Shanice—Shanice went on to sing “I Love Your Smile,” and where I’m from that’s a classic love song, like “Angel Baby.” Martika left the show in 1986, and meanwhile the world of child stardom, the shitty teen day job Martika left behind, raged on, and gathered casualties: the Coreys for sure, along with all the other the less remembered denizens of Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, the first teen night club for young stars which lasted 86-89, which roughly corresponds with the period in which Martika was out of the spotlight. You can read about Alphy’s Soda Pop club if you want to, but I wish I didn’t. What it represents for me is a crass fetishization of youth in popular culture that didn’t begin in the 80s and didn’t end there, but might have reached a fever pitch of predatory there, right in that spot in Hollywood. You can see footage of the kid disco on YouTube.
Elsewhere on YouTube, there exists a genre of videos called shred videos, in which flubbed notes, out of tune singing, and grunts are overdubbed onto live footage of well known musicians. Visually we take in all of the emoting and heroic poses that we expect from rock stars but what we hear is a lot of plink and squawk. It’s funny. To some extent, if you’re not a sucker for its pathos the way I am, “Toy Soldiers” might feel like that—a failure of “Toy Soldiers” could be its overreaching, the divide between its bubblegum ingredients (Martika’s voice in moments recalls “Cool it Now”-era Ralph Tresvant) and the rangy depths of its despair. I guess what I’m describing is melodrama, which I happen to value in popular music. “Can You Stand the Rain.” “Town Without Pity.” “Blue on Blue,” heartache on heartache, blue on blue, now that we are through. When you’re all done sulking underneath a streetlamp in the rain you’re cleaner than you were before. You breathe easier. It might heal you to howl into a food court solitude and maybe I never would have known it had Martika never taught me.
Is the lyrical mention of addiction a red herring? Think about the title, the children’s chorus… Is this a Christmas song? Toy Soldiers was originally released November 15, 1988, in what may have been a cynical Black Friday plot to hook the children of my generation on murky, untraceable, or repressed sorrow.
Because the pain in “Toy Soldiers,” the suffering feels real, but is vague, unnameable—I don’t know, unearned? The lyrics give up no specifics. Addiction gets at something, it’s a flavor, but La Croix flavor, essence only. And the video’s not much help, though I enjoy it. It has that videogranular washed-outness you’d recognize from the opening credits of the original Melrose Place.  
After “Toy Soldiers,” Martika went on to release Martika’s Kitchen, a more eclectic, and quite fine sophomore collection of songs that includes “Love, Thy Will Be Done”—lyrics composed by Martika, music produced by Prince. Maybe you know that one. The original Prince demo appears on the 2019 vault release “Originals,” and legend has it none other than Jay-Z lobbied for its inclusion.
Which maybe means I can consider forgiving Hov for this.
Following the release and promotion of this album, Martika once again went underground.
Almost ten years later it was Christmas, pre-Y2K, the last day of summer for the shopping malls. 8:45 for me meant time to power down and gather the mechanical playthings of the display table at KB Toys. Cut the stiff little puppy mid-yip, mid-convulsion, turn the penguin escalator off, flick the switch on the ball that yanks a furry weasel tail like a wild comet. Pull everything inside of the gate so we can lock up. As I tidied things Paul, the manager of this store, would perform his arithmetic, prepare the night’s bank deposit. Across from us at Spencer Gifts worked two unflattering doppelgängers. The manager of Spencer’s was a hairy, Bluto-looking guy, his neck burned with a small tangle of glistening medallions. He’d stand one hand on his hip the way a pirate would, leering. His other hand rested on the shoulder of the mousey, little teenage guy who worked under him, and it was to be assumed these gestures, the familiarity of them, meant something paternal, unofficially father-son. There was never any good reason or emergency to compel me to learn either of their names, still, we’d wave to each other across the sea in these quiet moments. There was no one else to wave to.
We’d work late. Around Black Friday, we might be there until midnight, and my dad would have to pick me up since I didn’t yet have a car of my own. I was 19. But you can understand how putting on your shoes to leave the house at 1 AM to retrieve your grown kid, the one who skipped college in order to work late at a ridiculous toy store mall job and buy synthesizers, and self-assured in this choice the way a first round draft pick would be, how the overall experience must fall short of some expectations.
What do they have you doing?
We have to unpack boxes and stock. And take inventory.
What’s this manager’s name?
Paul.
Is he married?
The landscape of this remembering vignetted, ringed by burning, drinking, demolition, construction of a Walmart.
Years and years later, during the era when Martika was no longer Martika, I was visiting my friend Andrew at the Emeryville, California office where he worked as a booking agent. He had recently received the press materials of a new band called Oppera, which he shared with me. Oppera, from the looks of it, was a full-on gothy-pop duo, and it was made up of Martika and Michael Mozart, her husband. The transformation was startling. They looked to me like dark faeries. You know, faerie sightings at one time were exactly as widespread as UFO sightings. I think you might detect hints of those gothic sympathies if you go back and watch the “Toy Soldiers” video, and this progression, though dramatic, checks out to me as authentic. Who knows how we end up where we do. But lately I hear she’s Martika once again, touring now and then in the 80s nostalgia revues with the likes of Tiffany, all over the world. 

Gabriel Palacios lives in Tucson, Arizona and his poems live there but also in the hotel lounge, the world's fair pavilion, places never meant to be settled in. 

you’re going home: erin fitzgerald on “baker street”

Let’s get SAXOPHONE out of the way, right now.

The SAXOPHONE in Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 song “Baker Street” was written by Rafferty himself, and was originally intended for guitar. SAXOPHONE was performed by a session musician with the best name ever, Raphael Ravenscroft. He received￡27.50 for his work on the song, and the check bounced. But, as you might guess from his subsequent work with Pink Floyd and Marvin Gaye and Daft Punk, among others, Raphael Ravenscroft went on to do just fine. When asked later how he felt when he heard SAXOPHONE in “Baker Street,” Ravenscroft said that his instrument had been out of tune, by enough of a degree that it now irritated him at best. 

What about the rest of the song? Why is it so easy to hold love and hate for “Baker Street” in one’s heart at the same time?
I’d always thought “Baker Street” was about its most famous resident, Sherlock Holmes. It isn’t. “Baker Street” was inspired by a book published about twenty years before its release—Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, an exploration of outsiders and their place (or lack thereof) in society. 
“Baker Street” was also heavily influenced by a one-hit wonder. 
In 1973, Gerry Rafferty and his high school friend Joe Egan started a band called Stealers Wheel—comprised of the two of them, and session musicians. They wrote a parody in the style of Bob Dylan about a tedious record industry cocktail party called “Stuck in the Middle With You.” That joke became an international top 10 hit, and was later associated with an infamous scene in Quentin Tarantino’s movie Reservoir Dogs. Its misattribution to Dylan endures to this day.

The “two core members plus session musicians” structure of Stealers Wheel may have allowed Rafferty and Egan to maintain control of their content, but it caused other problems. The two rarely agreed on the rest of the band’s lineup, and Stealers Wheel had eleven different members over the next two years. (Rafferty himself quit, twice.) This, in addition to record label and album producer issues, led to the band officially breaking up in 1975. 
As a consequence of Stealers Wheel contract entanglements, neither Rafferty nor Egan could release new music for the next three years. During that time, Rafferty frequently had to travel from his home in Scotland to meetings with lawyers in London. “Baker Street,” released in 1978, is about one of those trips:
SAXOPHONE. You are tired and buzzed, and it’s time to get full on drunk. You’re walking down the street in a city you used to love, but now you know it’s full of assholes. Life will get better, sure, but you are weepy AF right now. SAXOPHONE. You arrive at your friend’s house. Your friend has seen and heard it all from you before, but he listens anyway. When it’s his turn to talk, he says he’s thinking about moving out of the City of Assholes. You both know he’ll never do it. You wake up the next day, and you go home. SAXOPHONE. Guitar. SAXOPHONE.
By the time Gerry Rafferty got to his friend’s door on Baker Street, sometime in 1976 or 1977, he already knew that he loved making music but felt quite differently about the industry, some of his bandmates, touring, and fame. He’d already said what he needed to say, and he would soon be able to say more. Just one more year and then you’ll be happy. But there was still a song, in between.
“Baker Street” has an unostentatious vocalist, and lyrics in which nothing really happens. But the song also has SAXOPHONE and elaborate production that can make even late 70’s colleagues like Electric Light Orchestra and ABBA seem restrained in comparison. 
This combination is a reminder: Most of the time, we’re living plaintive, even flat lyrics. Sometimes we fight to keep them separate from our minds’ highly overproduced arrangements. Often, we fail. 

In 1978, on the first day of school, you turn to your friend Jennifer P., who is sitting next to you, and you whisper: “I can’t believe we’re in second grade!” Jennifer P. whispers back: “I know!” SAXOPHONE.

/r/relationships, 4 hours ago:
Your (M25) friend (F28) ghosted you, but you would really like some closure. SAXOPHONE.

You are a key figure in the galaxy’s liberation from oligarchy, and you decide the next phase in your life will be to teach. You fight with one of your students, your beloved nephew, and other students die in the fallout. So you close your school, and you move to an island where no one will find you unless they’re willing to make some serious effort. SAXOPHONE.

You are trying to take a walk with your baby and the dogs in the Pacific Northwest while your husband is thousands of miles and an ocean away, but the photographers are right here, right now. Just one more year and then you’ll be happy. SAXOPHONE.

You get a job as a census enumerator just as your mother is diagnosed with several kinds of cancer. She insists that you not give up the job because you haven’t had one in a while, and her greatest wish is for things to carry on as usual. So you spend two months walking around well-groomed suburban neighborhoods you hadn’t known were hiding behind nearby hills and tall trees. You knock on doors of households that didn’t turn their census forms in on time, and also jump a little every time your phone rings. SAXOPHONE. Most people aren’t home, or pretend they aren’t. One woman tells you she has just come back from a long trip to discover she’d left her bedroom window open and a raccoon gave birth on her bed. SAXOPHONE. Another woman, a few blocks away, invites you to come in and join her and her friends for coffee and cookies they’d been about to have. SAXOPHONE. You were trained by the United States government to decline such offers, so you do. But for years after that census is over and your mom died, you think about going back to that house and knocking on the door. SAXOPHONE.

Erin Fitzgerald is the author of the novella VALLETTA78, and online editor at Barrelhouse. She lives in northwestern Connecticut, talks on Twitter at @gnomeloaf, and received her first radio on Christmas in 1978.