round 1
(1) nirvana, “the man who sold the world”
foreclosed on
(16) bettye lavette, “joy”
220-179
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 3/5/22.
Emily Popek on “Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold The World”
The rules as I understood them in 1994 were this: If you liked someone, you made them a mix tape. If you were cool and you liked someone, you made them a mix tape full of meaningful songs. But only if you were extremely cool and really liked someone could you pull off a little bit of mix tape magic, like lining up two songs—one an original, the other a cover—so that if you hit the “auto reverse” button on your tape deck at exactly the right moment, you could hear David Bowie’s spacey vocals shift seamlessly into Kurt Cobain’s rasping delivery as both sing “The Man Who Sold The World”; hear the textured rhythm of Woody Woodmansey’s guiro give way to Dave Grohl’s simple percussion.
I was not cool enough to do this. I was not cool enough to even have a recording of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session, filmed in November 1993 and hitting the air a month later. But someone who was exactly this cool liked me enough to do it for me, and I have never forgotten it.
I probably saw Unplugged when it first aired on Dec. 16, 1993. Two days earlier, I had seen Nirvana play some of the same songs live at the Salem Armory—including “The Man Who Sold The World,” which was the encore of their set (unbeknownst to me, busy as I was crying in the bathroom over a lost contact lens).
But when I think about the songs from Unplugged—the rough, spare mix of covers and original tracks, old material and new, half-acoustic but still very electric, and “Man Who Sold The World” in particular—I am hearing them not from a TV set or a concert stage, but from a bad tape deck in a public park on one of those spring days in the Pacific Northwest that is so glorious and bursting with blossoms and sunshine that it almost makes you forget the four months of grey rainy days.
He and I met at a debate tournament when we were in high school. It was one of those magical teenage moments of clarity where you can feel your first kiss coming a mile away—all you have to do is hang out for long enough, and you know it will happen. But he lived 175 miles away and neither of us could drive and debate tournaments only happen every month or so. So everything happened in slow motion. Everything was strung apart by letters and interrupted by miles of distance, too many miles for phone calls, only enough for letters. How long two months is when you’re 15. How long it takes to make a good mix tape, decorate the cover with nail polish and Wite-Out and clippings from Sassy magazine, go to Kinko’s to buy a padded envelope, go to the post office to find out how much it would cost to mail it, and drop it into the mail.
Any time I could see him, I would. So when I found out that spring that he would be in town for two days—doing something at a local college, some school club activity or field trip or something—I, obviously, cut school and set off to find him.
Most of my memories of the early 90s fit into a radius about 2 miles in diameter. My high school was about eight blocks from downtown, depending on how you got there. The Salem Armory, where I had seen Nirvana just a few months earlier—just a few months before Kurt died—was a mile or so in the opposite direction. Two years later, my friends and I would stand on that stage at our high school graduation and remind each other that we were standing where Kurt Cobain had stood.
That day in 1994, I remember slipping out of the high school building and walking downtown. The Capitol Mall was blanketed with cherry blossoms and the days felt endless. For two days we got to hang out on a college campus with all of downtown at our doorstep, and hours to spend together doing positively, blissfully nothing.
He brought the recording with him to the tournament—I want to say he brought it because he wanted me to hear it. But maybe that’s not true. All I know is that we sat in the park, in the shade of some tree, as close to each other as we dared to be without touching, listening over and over again to the recording he had captured from the MTV broadcast. The Unplugged album had yet to be released, and it felt like a rare treat to be able to listen to these songs, which were like precious gems to two ardent Nirvana fans.
I remember hearing all the patter, the applause and the little things Kurt Cobain muttered between tunes (“These are the brothers Meat Puppet”). We listened to it from start to finish, flipped the tape, and listened to it again. The first two songs we all knew from Nirvana’s albums, but the surprises came quickly—first a cover of a Vaselines song, which I was thrilled to already know, having read in some interview that Kurt Cobain loved the Vaselines, and bugged my local record store to order me a copy of The Way of the Vaselines so that I could hear whatever he heard.
But after that came a song I didn’t know, a David Bowie tune, that opened with the not-electric not-acoustic droning line and loose rattle of Cobain’s breaking, clear voice. I hadn’t heard the song but I had heard of it; the title signaled, to me, something mysterious and important, something that I should know about, something that cool people would know about. Something I should understand. And before we said goodbye that day—that achingly perfect spring day, with everything around us exploding into vibrant life—he looked at me and I looked at him and we both leaned in and finally, finally, we kissed.
“The Man Who Sold The World” seems simple when Nirvana plays it. It’s a smooth tune that starts off easy, bouncing briefly with energy as the verse moves into the chorus. “Oh no / not me / we never lost control,” Kurt’s voice rasps as the bass line steps upward in a rapid scale.
Unlike Bowie’s spaced-out vocals, which drift away from your ears like ghosts, Kurt Cobain’s voice is front and center on “The Man Who Sold The World,” unable to hide, telling a story that gripped me without making any actual sense.
Him and me didn’t make any actual sense, either. It was too far, the phone calls were too expensive, the letters didn’t come often enough and two days on some college campus in between rounds of a debate tournament isn’t enough either. There wasn’t enough to hold on to. But there was something there—something I didn’t want to let go of.
A few years later, David Bowie would tell the BBC that the enigmatic song was about “how you feel when you're young, when you know there's a piece of yourself that you haven't really put together yet—you have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.”
I could not say exactly what I was searching for that day in the park as we played Nirvana’s songs over and over and over again. But the first few notes of the track—the droning guitar line that draws you into the song and repeats throughout it—grabbed my heart every time we played it. In Bowie’s version, the last several repeats are layered with an unearthly vocal wail. On Unplugged, Kurt’s guitar does the wailing instead, buoyed by the faint hum of Lori Goldston’s cello, which can barely be heard. In all versions of the song—which has been covered by Michael Stipe, Lulu, Midge Ure and hundreds more—there is a magic to it, something that makes you feel a little bit cooler for having heard it. (Except maybe the John Cougar Mellencamp version.)
It was months later that I got the cassette tape in the mail from him, the song titles and artists carefully yet cryptically spelled out in his spidery hand. The liner notes didn’t reveal his magic trick, and it was by accident that I found it when I punched the “fast forward” and the “rewind” buttons at the same time to flip the tape over—a little Easter egg, a love note, buried in sound, transmitted from his basement bedroom to the stereo of my ‘77 Subaru station wagon, transporting me back to that day in the park.
“Who knows,” I wrote in my diary that night. “Not me.” We never lost control.
It’s a cliche to try to tell you how much that band, that song, that mix tape meant to me, as a 15-year-old kid growing up in decidedly uncool Salem, Oregon, in the 1990s. But I will say that being cool wasn’t easy, and the boy who made me that mix tape, and forever imprinted that song on my heart, made it look effortless.
Emily F. Popek bio goes here
Any kind of joy in a pinch: chelsea biondolillo on bettye lavette’s “joy”
“You must study how to make yourself happy, and then put a lot of effort towards it. This isn’t something that just comes to you easily. Think hard and thoroughly about it.”
—A Piece of Your Mind (반의 반)
I am not qualified to write an essay about joy, but I’m going to try anyway. There’s a 60% or better chance that I won’t totally blow it, but in case I do, I wanted to come clean at the start. I don’t want you getting 2/3rds into this thing and then starting to doubt my credibility. You can doubt it now: I’m an unreliable narrator who doesn’t understand what joy is, let alone how one finds or loses it.
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Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, LA, in 1953. Her first album was released in 1979, but her breakthrough album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road came out in 1998. “Joy,” is the twelfth and second to last song.
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Euphoria is defined in the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, as “an exaggerated feeling of physical and mental well-being, especially when not justified by external reality. Euphoria may be induced by drugs such as opioids, amphetamine, and alcohol and is also a feature of mania.” Miller and Keane do not define joy.
Joy, when it occurs in medical literature at all, is defined as a discrete positive emotion. There’s usually no mention of whether it’s justified.
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As a child, I was often described as difficult, defiant, highly intelligent and, per one progress report from my second-grade teacher, “a loner who nevertheless gets along well with the other children.”
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Lucinda Williams performing “Joy” live, on Austin City Limits, Dec. 1998
During a live set in 1998, Williams introduces the song by saying, “This is called Joy,” and she stretches the word joy out. She doesn’t smile when she says it, but just after, when she looks down at the neck of her guitar before hitting the first notes.
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What I often felt as a child was frustrated, lonely, and always just out of step with my peers—I laughed and cried at the wrong things, which mortified me every single time it happened. I was praised at home and at school for getting answers right, and so I strove to do that. I had friends, but I was often anxious that I’d make a mistake and get kicked out of the circle. Later, at a new junior high, PE class was so terrifying (I didn’t know how to play a single sport, even passably) that some days I’d hide in the bathroom before the bell, my stomach cramped so tight I’d break out in a sweat. I felt safe inside of a book or my room or playing alone. Later, the roar of live music was a comfort. When everyone was looking at the stage, I could dance or laugh or cry and no one would notice.
I remember happiness, then, as the absence of anxiety.
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“Joy” is lyrically spare. As Williams wrote it, each line is repeated twice, and then the whole thing repeats between guitar solos.
I don’t want you anymore, ‘cause you took my joy
You took my joy: I want it back
I’m gonna go to West Memphis and look for my joy
Maybe in West Memphis I’ll find my joy
I’m gonna go to Slidell and look for my joy
Maybe in Slidell I’ll find my joy
You’ve got no right to take my joy—I want it back
You took my joy; I want it back
She’s never hemmed about the song’s meaning. An article from a 2008 Rolling Stone about her latest release, Little Honey, titled, “How Lucinda Williams Got her Joy Back,” includes the lede, “Done with ‘bad boys,’ the singer-songwriter found a good man—and crafted her most upbeat album ever.”
Her love life was in a shambles after a long-term relationship she describes as “really destructive and really difficult” came to an end. “Then I had this brief, uneventful rock & roll fling — just oil for the motor,” she says.
The entirety of the article focuses on the impact her troubled love life had on her music career, and how she met and fell in love, finally, with a good guy, leading her to write this latest and greatest record. She tells the reporter, “I’ve finally found the right relationship where I can blossom as a writer and grow with somebody and be happy… I had to wait until I was in my 50s, but, you know, I’m a late bloomer anyway.”
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I feel euphoric during the early stages of a romantic relationship. I’ve never thought of that euphoria as being joy.
When I’m at the end of romantic relationships, I often think about “Joy” (the song). I know well the sensation of tamping down my excitement for someone else’s comfort. So, whenever I’m making my latest plan to leave, I imagine having had joy and being just about to rediscover it, around the next corner, say.
Joy must be a lightness you feel with your whole body. It’s got to include laughing, and maybe goosebumps.
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I saw Lucinda Williams play in Austin, Texas, on September 30, 2006, at the Paramount Theater. I don’t remember if she played “Joy.” Instead, I remember calling a man I’d been in love with years before on my cellphone as soon as she hit the first notes of “Blue.” It was a song I’d turned him on to. I held the phone out for the whole song. When it ended, I put it up to my ear just in time to hear him say, “Dude, I heard the whole thing perfectly. You rock.”
When I lived in Austin in my 30s, I got a digital camera and started taking photos again after a long lapse. They were mostly of friends and friends’ bands performing live several nights a week, but also, for the first time ever, a lot were pictures of myself. I am smiling in so many, but looking at them now, I can’t always tell if I’m happy or just on cocaine, which I was also doing a lot of at the time. I didn’t feel euphoric on cocaine but I did feel like I had a handle on things. Getting high on other drugs felt like this at other times in my life. I always knew I was high, but I also felt clearer-headed—though I never would have said such a thing out loud.
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Bettye LaVette is often called some form of “late bloomer” by journalists. She was born in 1946, in Muskegon, Michigan. Her first single came out when she was 16, and made it to #7 on the R&B charts. She recorded several 45s after that, but didn’t get signed for a full record until 1968. The first single, recorded in Memphis, came out a year later and made it to #25 R&B, but the LP was never released.
In 1972, she was signed again. She recorded singles in Detroit and LA and a full album’s worth of material at Muscle Shoals, but this recording, too, was shelved before release. Of her time after that, she has said that much of it was spent performing in small clubs and getting by only with the help of friends. “It was more—people paying house notes and car notes and whatever for me than me being able to do anything.”
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In 1982, she recorded her third full length album, this time with Motown Records, but it wasn’t well promoted, and so failed to chart. She continued to play live, including regular shows in Europe, but was mostly known at home only to fans of obscure soul.
Her “late bloom,” then, happened in 2000, when a French record collector found her 1972 LP in the tape vaults at Atlantic. He licensed the tracks and released them in France on his own label. Around the same time, a live recording was released by a Dutch fan on a German label.
These two releases generated enough buzz to get a comeback album released in 2003. LaVette was 57 years old. Two years later, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise came out. Every track is a cover of a song by another female artist, including “Joy.” Since then, she’s been on NPR, half a dozen evening talk shows, and she’s performed at the Kennedy Center Honors, Radio City Music Hall and Austin City Limits. She’s been nominated for two Grammys, won multiple Blues Music Awards, and in 2020, she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Did she feel joy, then, I wonder? Or relief? Or vindication?
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Two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, play a part in determining how happy, content, euphoric, or joyful a person feels.
Dopamine is key to the reward system—cravings, desire, motivation. High levels of dopamine feel fantastic and can keep you alert and motivated.
Serotonin is key to mood stability and a sense of well-being. Most of the body’s serotonin is in the gut. It aids in digestion, the sleep-wake cycle and sexual function.
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I’ve been told that my major depressive disorder causes my anxiety symptoms and that my generalized anxiety disorder causes my depressive symptoms. I’ve been told that my depression and anxiety are not chronic disorders and I’ve been told they are.
I was in grad school and nearly 40 the first time a doctor referred me for ADHD testing. But I didn’t go. It would take two more referrals to get me in, and once there, the tester told me that she didn’t think I had ADHD after only a couple of questions, because, she said, I’d developed successful coping mechanisms and someone with ADHD wouldn’t be able to do that. I felt weary, then.
Two years later, and after yet another referral, the new tester said I met all the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. Now, I take one pill so I don’t get sad and one pill so I don’t get scared and one pill to I get my work done. I’m still fine tuning the mix. Which is another way of saying I’m still a long way off from feeling great most of the time.
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Bettye LaVette performing “Joy” live on Later with Jools Holland, ep 26.4, Nov. 2005
LaVette’s version:
Joy! Ohhh my joy!
I don’t like it no more, ‘cause they took my joy
They took my joy; I want it back
I said I started in Detroit and I was looking for my joy
Maybe in the Motor City, I’d find joy
Then I went to New York, looking for my joy
Maybe in the apple I could find joy
Joy! Ohhhh my joy!
They had no right to take my joy; I want it back
They took my joy; I want it back
Joy! Joy! Joy!
I tell ya I went down to Memphis, looking for my joy
Maybe in Memphis I’d find joy
And then I went to Muscle Shoals, looking for my joy
Maybe in the Shoals I could find some joy
Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy!
Everybody sing it!
(Band: Joy!)
I went everywhere
(Joy!)
Looking for my joy
(Joy!)
Joy! Joy! Joy!
(Joy!)
Joy!
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ADHD seems to be related to lower levels of dopamine availability along with higher than average uptake of serotonin. Depression, anxiety, and drug use are also related to imbalances in dopamine and serotonin, though a conclusive connection to the mechanisms and relationships involved has yet to be found.
Drugs I have self-medicated with that raise dopamine levels include cocaine, nicotine, and amphetamines.
Drugs I have self-medicated with that raise serotonin levels: marijuana and ethanol (alcohol).
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In each of the above pictures taken during the Austin years, is this joy, or am I just high? See answer key below.
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LaVette doesn’t cover songs, she reinterprets them. She only performs a song that speaks to her, that she can make her own. Here, her version of “Joy” raises the stakes of the loss at the center of the song. Her joy wasn’t taken by a shitty boyfriend. Her joy was taken by shitty music executives and marketing managers. She is a different kind of mad. She isn’t mourning the loss of a warm body in a cold bed, but entire decades of her music career. When she howls “Joy! Joy! Joy!” it is a lament and a demand.
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Hope could be a quiet kind of joy. As in, I hope I’m a late bloomer, too.
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I saw Bettye LaVette at The State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia, on December 1, 2005. I made my friend show up early with me because I wanted a “good seat.” LaVette wasn’t yet a household name, so we ended up in the center two seats in the front row. She wore a gray sparkling catsuit and clear lucite platform heels. She was nearly 60 years old, and she ran up and down the stage belting out songs with hardly a break.
After, I raced to the merch table to buy two CDs, which she autographed for me. I vaguely remember asking if I could get a picture with her “for my knitting blog” which led to her asking and then getting way more information about knitting blogs than she needed. My friend took the picture, but I thought I looked so terrible that I wouldn’t post it. It has thankfully been lost in the digital ether.
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Williams is still married to the good man she found back in 2008. Her most recent album, Good Souls Better Angels came out in 2020 and was nominated for two Grammys. Despite suffering a stroke at the end of 2020, she was back to performing by August of the next year. About the health scare and recovery, she told Rolling Stone, “Can’t keep me down for too long.” Her latest tour started in Mexico at the end of January and includes dates through to 2023.
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My current medication cocktail causes my hands to shake sometimes, which makes precision cutting and gluing of papers difficult. Collage is one of the things I’ve found to quiet the constant inner monologue of fear and frustration I live with every day. It’s a kind of happiness, but I work more slowly now.
With collage, I think through ideas in much the same way I do when I write an essay: set two disparate things side by side to see if they can speak to one another, look for patterns, motifs. During these two years of lockdown, when joy has been so hard for so many of us to imagine, I have been doing both at the same time: I flip through my mountains of paper and magazines to figure out what I’m thinking about, I write some words, and then I move the cutouts around on the page until they have something to say back to the text. When I find exactly the piece I need, there’s a satisfaction that might be a kind of joy.
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Since the 2005 album, LaVette has put out records “reinterpreting” Bob Dylan, British rock bands, Southern blues musicians, and more, along with getting all her earlier catalog released. Her latest, Blackbirds, full of songs by Black female vocalists, came out in 2020 and was nominated for a Grammy. It took 40 years, but her joy, if we can call it that on her behalf, has finally caught up with her.
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Answer key to the photo quiz:
A: Might be joy; B. Not joy; C. Probably not joy; D. Might be joy; E. Might be joy; F. Surprisingly, could be joy; G. Might be joy; H. Might be joy; I. Definitely not joy; J. Nope; K. Might be joy; L. Absolutely not joy; M. It’s possible; N. Not joy; O. Not joy; P. Not joy.
Chelsea Biondolillo is a collage artist and the author of The Skinned Bird and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. She now lives a much quieter life outside of Portland, Oregon. In this picture from 2006, she is glammed up and glassy-eyed to celebrate... [squints at temporary tattoo] Punxsutawney Phil and Groundhog Day, apparently.