the first round
(3) starship, “nothing’s gonna stop us now”
muzzled
(14) kenny g, “songbird”
317-293
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 8.

This Dream, Together: melissa faliveno On Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”

Heart to Heart

The lights of the RCA Dome in Indianapolis are low, bodies packed in tight and pressed together in the dark. There’s an energy in the air: thick and giddy and humming. It’s a day that’s been circled on calendars in Midwestern kitchens for months, days leading up to it crossed out in black Xs. Like a holiday or vacation, but more: a destination, maybe a destiny, this thing we’ve driven hundreds of miles to see. We the weekend warriors, we of the wanting, we of the dreams.
And then: the first five beats of a snare drum, a rapid-fire explosion of sound. It’s a LinnDrum, actually, a drum machine that’s not a drum at all, but I don’t know this yet. Today I believe everything I hear.
And then come the synths: cool and dreamlike and compulsive, twinkling like stars and soaring above the four-four bass (not a real bass) and kick (also not a real drum).
     The lights go up, and the stage is alive, and we are too. And the male vocals sing:

Lookin’ in your eyes I see a paradise / This world that I’ve found is too good to be true.

But it is true: This is paradise. We’ve found it.
A lone man paces the stage. He holds a wireless mic, or maybe he wears a headset. Either way he’s got his arms raised high and he’s clapping. And we follow his lead, because he is our leader. We do whatever he tells us to do. Because this man has promised us something, and we believe he will give it to us. We believe that he can. We believe in him, and yes, we even believe in ourselves.
We clap in bad time, thousands of doughy Midwesterners with no discernible rhythm. We are compelled, as if by some intangible force, to pump our fists in the air. And when the female vocals come—and they come high and loud—we screech them together:

Let ‘em say we’re crazy / I don’t care about that / Put your hand in my hand, baby, don’t ever look back.

We are ecstatic. We are fired up: with anticipation, with love, most of all with hope.

Let the world around us / Just fall apart / Baby we can make it if we’re heart to heart.

What does it even mean? We have no idea. But we feel it anyway. We are heart to heart. And in one massive, stadium-sized chorus we sing it, we scream it, we are filled up with the universe-sized joy of it:

And we can build this dream together / Standing strong forever / Nothing’s gonna stop us now.

I am singing at the top of my lungs. I might be crying. I am pumping my small fist in the air. It is 1993, or 1994. I am ten or eleven years old. And I am not here in the RCA Dome to see Starship, no: I am here for an Amway convention.

The Dream

Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a bad song. It is objectively bad. But oh, how I loved it. And oh, how I can’t help but love it still. Maybe it’s so bad it’s good. Maybe, more likely, I love it for its unabashed badness, like I’ve loved so many bad songs before (not least Starship’s other badsterpiece, “We Built This City,” to which I choreographed several interpretive dances as a child). But when I play “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” at home on my guitar, which I’ve been doing with embarrassing frequency these days, I play quietly. I certainly never plug in. I don’t belt the lyrics; I whisper them low. I don’t want my neighbors to hear.
It’s not the music that makes this song so bad. It’s actually a solid chord progression (though a repetitive one—verse, chorus, and bridge), and Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas can sing. It’s a song built entirely of hooks, so catchy one can’t help but sing along. (In the 2014 movie The Skeleton Twins, a lip-syncing duet by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader is predicated on the song’s irresistibility). We might even forgive the LinnDrum, the Charvel MIDI guitar, and all those synths—the purely synthetic pop products of the eighties.

It’s the lyrics that make this song so bad. To wit: “Standing here beside you / want so much to give you / this love in my heart that I’m feeling for you.” And: “Take it to the good times / see it through the bad times / whatever it takes is what I’m gonna do.” Such lyrics aren’t just embarrassing; they also possess that most insidious kind of badness: the bogus message they’re trying to sell. Those syrupy-sweet clichés about love as battle, love as a dream for which two people against all odds will fight, and win. That they are invincible. It’s saccharine, insipid, and stupid, an eyeroll in F#. From instrumentation to implication, the song a sham. It’s bunk, baloney, codswallop, claptrap—so completely built of crap that Grace Slick herself has suggested the song, and the whole Starship enterprise (see what I did there?) was bullshit.
What better song, then, to serve as an anthem for Amway, that titan of American fraud, purveyor of impossible dreams? At conventions, on motivational tapes, its lyrics repeated by wealthy white men who paced stages across America: “We can build this dream together,” they said. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.” We listened, and we believed it. We sang our anthem and we turned it up loud.

From Badass-ness to Badness (Or, From Airplane to Starship) 

When the realization came, it hit like a rocket crashing to earth. That the woman who sang such psychedelic rock anthems as “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” could possibly be the same woman who sang “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” seemed at best a bad dream, at worst some kind of nightmare trip. But it’s true: Grace Slick was both Acid Queen of the sixties and shoulder-padded, hair-sprayed synth-pop-star of the eighties.
How does a musician of such talent and imagination, whose low commanding vibrato gave us the words “Feed your head,” find herself singing “If this world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other”? To understand the fall, we must start with the ascension.
     In the ill-fated voyage from Airplane to Starship, there’s a lot of convoluted history: firings and departures and lawsuits, side gigs that became bands like Hot Tuna, the shedding and reclaiming of names, various aircrafts relaunched long after they should have been grounded. But where the story begins for Grace Slick is in 1965, at a San Francisco club called the Matrix. She found herself in the crowd, watching the first show of Paul Kantner and Marty Balin’s new band, the Jefferson Airplane. The experience inspired Slick’s own first band, the Great Society, for which she wrote “White Rabbit”—the product, she says, of twenty-four hours of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and a lot of LSD. They eventually opened for Airplane at the Fillmore, the famous haven for tripping flower children, and a year later Slick was recruited as Airplane’s new frontwoman. “White Rabbit” and another Great Society song, “Somebody to Love,” made it onto their 1967 record Surrealistic Pillow; the Airplane took off, and Slick was crowned a Queen of Rock.
“The first time I saw Grace play I was entranced by the strength of her delivery,” Kantner says in the 2004 documentary Fly Jefferson Airplane. “The power and the strength of her onstage was amazing.”
On “American Bandstand,” in 1967, Slick—who David Crosby called “the Chrome Nun”—wears something between a habit and a druid’s cape and stares directly into the camera as she lip-syncs. In one performance of “White Rabbit,” she floats atop Marty Balin’s organ; it’s an acid-drenched video, and we trip along with her. Playing Woodstock at sunrise, a dreamy-eyed, slow-voiced Slick, hair wild and dressed in white, promises the crowd “a new dawn.” And in 1968, a year before the Beatles did it, Airplane plays a rooftop in New York City, yelling “Wake up, you fuckers!” as crowds of dark-suited businessmen gather below. In the footage, Slick wails into the sky, her voice carrying up above the high-rises.

The word “badass” gets tossed around a lot, but if ever there was a badass Grace Slick was it. She recorded a solo album called Manhole, and once hatched plans to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD (she and her conspirator, the anarchist Abbie Hoffman, were thwarted by White House security). In her book, Somebody to Love? A Rock and Roll Memoir, Slick writes of a show in Chicago, when a man in the audience yelled at her to take off her chastity belt.
“I look directly at him and say, ‘Hey, I don’t even wear underpants,’” she writes. “I pull my skirt up over my head for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering, ‘Oh, Jesus.’”  
Slick was a drinker. She was arrested several times, once for waving a gun at a cop, once for drinking wine and reading poetry in public, and usually for talking shit. In 1978, four years after Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship, she donned a Heidi outfit and goose-stepped across a stage in Hamburg, drunkenly berating the audience.
     “Who won the fucking war?” she yelled. Kantner, who was by then the father of Slick’s daughter, asked her to leave the band; she did, and went to AA.
In interviews, Slick is smart, funny, and self-deprecating, and talks openly about her problem with “drunk mouth” and “talking under the influence.” In 1981, she climbed back aboard Jefferson Starship, sober and ready to play it straight. But Kantner left in 1984, later explaining: “The band became more mundane and not quite as challenging and not quite as much of a thing to be proud of.” Slick stayed and kept the rights to the songs, Kantner sued for the name “Jefferson,” and the band became Starship. Mickey Thomas, recruited after Balin’s departure in 1978, took the reins and sang sweet-voiced duets with Slick.
“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” written by hitmaking duo Albert Hammond (father of Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.) and Diane Warren, was commissioned by director Michael Gottlieb for his exquisitely bad 1987 movie, Mannequin. Hammond credits a drawn-out divorce, and finally getting to marry his long-term girlfriend, as the inspiration for the song. “It’s almost like they’ve stopped me from marrying this woman for seven years,” he said to Warren. “They’re not gonna stop me doing it.”
Included on both the Mannequin soundtrack and Starship’s album No Protection, the adult-contemporary power ballad hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 4, 1987, and stayed there for two weeks; it was No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for four weeks, and hit the top-ten in six European countries.
Slick hated it.
“In the 80s we weren’t writing our own songs,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “It was like being in L.A. rather than San Francisco. I was in my 40s and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is just awful.’ But I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober…by being a good girl.”
She left Starship in 1988, and with the exception of a rare reunion show retired from music. I’m not saying “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” made her do it, but maybe I am.

Going Diamond

My father always wanted to be his own boss. The son of a barber from Orange, New Jersey, he started a small business of his own, counting the inventory of convenience stores, bodegas, and gas stations in Florida, and then Wisconsin. It was work my mother and I did with him, on our hands and knees in dusty stores across the state on weekends, large manual calculators in hand. The business was a side gig, part of a larger dream: that my father would one day work only for himself—never again to walk a department-store floor, spend days on the road selling forms, heft boxes or sort mail in a hospital basement. But it never worked out that way.
Imagine, then, what the promise of Amway must have sounded like. The promise of financial independence, of providing, of freedom. This was the dream Amway peddled. It promised that if you worked hard enough, you too would be wealthy—like billionaire cofounder Rich DeVos, father-in-law of Betsy—that you would go Diamond (the Amway ladder is made of jewels, with Diamond at the top). This was the message we were given, and it’s the message we bought.
We also bought products. Amway-branded everything filled up our cupboards and closets: SA8 detergent, LOC floor cleaner, Artistry makeup and Satinique shampoo, Glister toothpaste, Nutrilite vitamins, the Big Cookie—a giant oatmeal-raisin rock that could have been branded Colon Blow. We were no longer allowed to shop at the grocery store. The Amway catalogue, we were told, had everything we’d ever need.
     It was my job to fill out the order forms.
“Soon you’ll get a starter kit of your own,” my father told me as I hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling product numbers. The Amway equivalent to a confirmation or bat mitzvah, when I would become not a woman but a tiny entrepreneur. In the background, a tape played on the stereo, the promise of riches proselytized by a conservative Christian man who was indeed extraordinarily wealthy, but not from selling soap. Between his words were the ones I loved: We can build this dream together.

Fake Plastic Girl

It’s time to talk about Mannequin. The whole reason “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” exists, it is a movie so bad it’s a wonder. So miserable it might be a miracle. Mannequin is not just a bad movie; it’s quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen.
I watched it for the first time only recently, having somehow escaped its clutches all these years. And not only will I never get that $3.99 Fandango rental or those ninety precious minutes back, I will never be able to unsee it. It’s etched indelibly into my brain, a plague upon my consciousness that will no doubt send me to an early grave.
For those lucky enough to have missed Mannequin, a quick plot summary: In ancient Egypt, a young (white) woman is doomed to marry a man she doesn’t love. The gods spare her, naturally, by transforming her into a mannequin in 1980s Philadelphia. Jonathan, a young failure of an artist played by a motorcycle-driving, pervy Andrew McCarthy, assembles her in a mannequin factory. She is beautiful. She is perfect. She is his. Then she comes alive—but only in front of him. He falls in love with her, of course, because he made her; because she helps him become a hugely successful window-display artist but takes none of the credit; because she lives only for him. A fake plastic female, the movie declares, is the perfect woman.

Atrociously unfunny slapstick and witless hijinks abound, and McCarthy’s Jonathan is so much of what’s wrong with America: a mediocre white dude failing fantastically upward. Kim Cattrall as plastic muse manages to be somewhat charming, as does Meshach Taylor, the actually-talented window-display artist and flamboyantly gay caricature named Hollywood (the movie deals in casual homophobia and racism almost as effortlessly as it does misogyny, but not quite). Rotten Tomatoes gives it an aggregate 22 percent, which is stunningly high; The Washington Post called it “made by, for, and about dummies;” and Roger Ebert gave it a generous half-star, deeming it not only “full of clichés” but, simply, “dead.”
The song doesn’t come in until the last scene. (A reminder that the whole reason I sat through this shitheap was the song. I almost watched Mannequin 2: On the Move, because the song also appears in the sequel, but I actually feared death.) Once it did, what struck me was this: The movie is so bad it makes the song seem good. In the universe of badness, if Mannequin is the ninth circle of hell, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a polystyrene paradise.
In the music video, Grace Slick plays the role of mischievous mannequin come to life, and Mickey Thomas is a convincing McCarthy—he mostly just looks around dumbly and dances with his hands. Slick, like Cattrall, is pretty delightful, despite the overwhelming emptiness one feels while watching; she rocks those eighties shoulder pads, that eyeliner and huge-sprayed hair, with her signature spooky grin. At the end of Mannequin, the plastic girl becomes a real live lady and—let ‘em say we’re crazy!—the lovers get married. In the music video, Slick and Thomas both end up as mannequins, which seems a much more fitting end.

The Tapes

Each month, we got a new tape in the mail. They were audio cassettes, ninety minutes of motivation by way of yee-hawing about dreams and boot-straps cut with songs. Bad songs. The kind of songs meant to get one “fired up.” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was on several tapes from the 80s and early 90s, along with another terrible Starship song, “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” We listened to the tapes whenever we got in the car; they blared from the living-room stereo. Gone was the classic rock, here were men like Rich DeVos and their promises of pools and Cadillacs and kitchens, wives who spoke of serving Husband and God. We listened on repeat, memorizing the words.
The Amway mantra was “Show the Plan (STP).” They chanted this on the tapes, too. To Show the Plan meant inviting friends, coworkers, and neighbors to your home—or inviting yourself to theirs—to try to get them to buy, and then sell, the products. While the Wife served coffee and cocktail wieners, the Husband drew on an easel the basic model of any multilevel-marketing scheme, which of course took the shape of a pyramid.
     In “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Mickey Thomas sings: “You can’t build a dream without a plan.” On the drive home from Indianapolis, I scrawled STP in the fogged-up windows of our Chevy. In freshman-year math class, I spotted a sticker with the same three letters plastered to the binder of the coolest girl in my grade.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Do you Show the Plan too?” I whispered, frizzy-haired and giddy.
     “What are you talking about?” She said with a scowl, then turned her back.
I had no idea who the Stone Temple Pilots were.

The Gear Shift

A note about the key change. It comes at the end of the song, like any respectable key change. It’s the classic truck driver’s gear shift, the proverbial long-hauler saying, We’re on the open highway now, baby; let’s kick this big rig into fifth. We jump from F# to G, just a half-step up but it might as well be another universe, higher than most contraltos can sing. But Grace Slick nails it, and Mickey Thomas does too.
The gear shift doesn’t come with any new lyrics; you just hear the same words you’ve been hearing in a shiny new key—in this case with some added Hey Babys and Woos and impressively high wails. The gear shift is great. It incites—maybe requires—a fist pumped high in the air, which Mickey Thomas delivers in the video along with a perfectly-timed HEY! With those two triplets—one fast, one slow—we know what’s coming; in six synthetic snare hits we transcend the stratosphere. And as that guitar solo carries us to the stars, we can’t help ourselves; we pump our fists in the air too.
But the gear shift is also a gimmick, a superfluous trick of shlock-pop producers who say, “Let’s just go ahead and get these suckers to pump those fists for no reason.” It’s a lie, promising us something with no substance. It’s a manipulation, and it works.

The Dream, Deferred

In December 2008, Indianapolis’s RCA Dome imploded. In video footage, after a series of small controlled explosions at its foundation, the stadium collapses in on itself in slow-motion—a fitting end to the site of an Amway convention, just as the economy was doing the same. But as it falls, the dome’s replacement, the Lucas Oil Stadium, stands behind it—a reminder of the tenets upon which cities, and this country, are built.
I’m not sure when or how my family got out of Amway. Like so many things, we don’t really talk about it. What I know is that my mother—once a bra-burning hippie, who had loved Grace Slick but hated Starship—hated the conservative messages Amway sold, and the good ol’ boys who told her that her real job was not to manage a Marshall’s but to serve her husband.
     I also know that we never got rich. And one day the SA8 and Satinique and Artistry and Big Cookie were gone, and we were allowed to shop at the grocery store again.  
For a time, maybe Grace Slick imploded too. But she rose from the wreckage—and by that I mean not addiction but Starship—and built a different kind of dream. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as a member of Jefferson Airplane, which received a lifetime achievement award in 2016. At age eighty, Slick now spends most of her time painting: portraits of musicians, mostly, her dead friends from the sixties—Jerry Garcia, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison—along with some trippy white bunnies wearing marijuana-leaf capes. In 2017, she licensed “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” to Chick-fil-A for a TV commercial, then gave all the proceeds to the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal.
“We can use our gifts to help stop the forces of bigotry,” she wrote in a Forbes op-ed. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.”
Paul Kantner died in 2016, and Marty Balin followed in 2018. Jefferson Starship continues to tour, with original member David Freiberg and frontwoman Cathy Richardson—who’s been singing “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” and “Find Your Way Back” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” pretty well for decades—at the helm; while a separate offshoot, Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas, is still touring too, ostensibly playing the same songs. It’s confusing, and none of it is very good.
Today, when Grace Slick talks about Starship, she’s the first to call it what it was.
     “That was a sell-out band,” she says in an interview. “The Airplane was a smorgasbord, but the Starship I hated.” She sang the songs, she says, but it took some big-time faking. 
“I felt like I’d throw up on the front row but I smiled and did it anyway.”
     In one video interview, she is asked about “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” She laughs, and it’s a big, contagious cackle. She falls backward comedically, as if in pain, and moans.
“A dumptruck will stop you right in your tracks if you don’t look,” she says. “Oh, man…it’s such horseshit.”

Melissa Faliveno (pictured above, early nineties, around the time of the Amway convention) has never had her ears pierced. Hair by Satinique™. Rather than an entrepreneur she became essayist, and her first collection, Tomboyland, is forthcoming in August 2020. 

brad efford on “songbird”

1986.

Kenny G is on The Oprah Winfrey Show at thirty years old telling stories about laying down sax for Whitney and Aretha. Those kinds of things are fun, he says. A producer calls you up, asks for a day of your time. Those are really fun. New white tee under a deep navy blazer with the sleeves rolled up, mullet bewitched, already iconic. This is mid-eighties Oprah, too, small scale, year one of syndication. Kenny’s come by to play with a couple bandmates under bad stage lighting. She asks if playing sax feels like making love, or she implies it. He doesn’t know how to answer, lets her answer for him, and she is gracious enough to do it.
Kenny G just dropped Duotones five weeks ago. It’s perfect for 1986; between the late-September release and this early-November daytime TV appearance, President Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland to discuss nuclear de-escalation, the Iran-Contra Affair began, Murdoch launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, and Bill Buckner watched his entire life roll through his legs. No one knows what’s going on and everyone’s into lasers and cocaine. Duotones rolls in with nothing to say, no reason to exist, and what absolutely feels like a complete lack of self awareness. Within a year it will reach number six on the Billboard 200 having spawned two fangless, airless singles that both cracked the top 15 on the Hot 100. “Songbird” is the one with legs; it reaches number four. Makes Kenny G a fucking star.

Interlude.

I thought I could craft an argument for Kenny G, for “Songbird” in particular but for Kenny as an artist really, G-Team all the way. I told the committee: give me “Songbird,” I want the bullet, knowing well my own proclivity for dusting off garbage to reveal the shining crusts of hidden gems beneath. I think now this was foolishness. What good is irony masked as genuine emotion? Who stands to benefit from false adoration at the mercy of the cool? I thought because I love Sade and Enya that I was wrong about Kenny, could fake it at least. But I am not cool, and these artists are not the same. I should have thought more about this. “Songbird” means nothing. It is an aural metaphor for the confidence of straight white men, rewarded thusly. Was Kenny G hot? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Trying to understand 1986 somehow.

2002.

Ted Panken speaks with Kenny G for bn.com:

Do you think of yourself as a jazz musician? Do you think of yourself as something other than a jazz musician?

KENNY G: Well, personally, I do think of myself as a jazz musician. But I grew up with the word “jazz”…to me, it meant instrumental and it meant improvisation. It really doesn’t matter the style. I don’t play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word “jazz” only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that’s fine. They should be, if that’s what they feel. But that’s just my opinion. I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word “jazz” means to them, and that’s fine. Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it’s jazz, and if it doesn’t, it isn’t. It’s no big deal.

What sort of things are in your personal listening rotation at this point? Do you listen to a lot of music?

KENNY G: No, I don’t listen to a lot of music at all. I’m actually more into…I don’t know. I’m just more into playing golf. It’s a great thing. I work on my music and I play my albums, and when I’m done, I’m done.

1966.

When he was ten years old, Kenny G began golfing and playing the saxophone. Monumental year for Kenny G. He loves to tell the story of the latter: watching “someone” rip a sax solo on The Ed Sullivan Show and immediately thinking, “Wow, if I could do that, it would be so cool.” In 2018, he tells the story in just this way. Before he graduates high school, 1973, he’s got his first gig playing in Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. He starts playing in funk bands in college while majoring in accounting, graduates magna cum laude. He’ll spend a lot of the rest of his life connecting dots between his love for numbers and his love for jazz. The details of his story begin to explain the music from every angle—there is no counter-narrative to work against. Kenny G is a nerd who thought the saxophone looked cool on TV.
In 1966 his older brother teaches him how to golf, and Kenny takes to it immediately. He plays on the Franklin High School golf team, splitting his time between sax lessons and the green. Eventually he chose one over the other, but the clubs never really leave his side. In 2001, he wins the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am with Phil Mickelson after working with Tiger Woods’s coach. “Fortunately, when you have a name that people know, you can make a phone call to people that wouldn’t normally take your call.” In 2010, he tells the story in just this way. If this paragraph is boring, understand that it’s serving its purpose. This is Kenny G, rounded out.

Interlude.

The “Songbird” music video is incredible. We’ve got Kenny G on a portico at night, in a public park picnic area with the band, on a bench, on the beach, in the exit stairwell of an abandoned apartment building. His outfit keeps changing but his kicks are consistent: un-tied white Adidas high tops, clean and slick. A sneakerhead would have some insights about whether or not they underscore or score against Kenny G’s dweebness. I know nothing, but I do support a man playing saxophone on the beach in white Adidas high tops, light jeans, and a tucked white tank top. This is all there is to say about the “Songbird” music video, and really I said nothing at all. When you write about Kenny G, everything that is nothing is truly a metaphor for everything. The music speaks for itself by having nothing to say. You could say this is Kenny G’s intention, this devotion to nothingness, this romantic ideal of the void. You could say this, but I’m not sure why you would.

2014.

I’m kind of proud of the fact that it’s just kind of self taught and comes from my heart, and so you know that when I’m writing my music I’m not following a guideline, it’s just...whatever feels right to me, then that’s how I do it.

Kenny G is speaking with the Oprah Winfrey Network to promote his new Christmas record. He says he’s had the same saxophone his entire life, says that every album he’s ever recorded he recorded with this saxophone, locks eyes with the camera in a thrilling show of braggadocio. It reads more like a dad who refuses to throw anything away or buy a new shirt because this one’s still perfectly good, what’s wrong with this one?
It’s been almost 30 years since he first went on Oprah and proclaimed to have never had a single music lesson, to rapturous in-studio audience applause. It takes about twenty seconds of googling to discover that this is bullshit, but Kenny G was just clear of his twenties, suddenly famous for seemingly nothing at all. It’s hard to fault an eager smile.
For the record, Kenny G is a practicing Jew. He is making a Christmas record in 2014 because he regularly plays “White Christmas” on stage (regardless of the season? A great question with no answer) and the fan response is overwhelming. He tells the Oprah Winfrey Network that he’s careful not to call his Christmas records “Christmas records,” opting instead for “Holiday” to preserve his complete lack of vested interest in the subject. The Oprah Winfrey Network titles this interview “Where Are They Now: Kenny G on His Best-Selling Christmas Album.” It’s almost cute the way “Holiday” was a four-letter word in 2014. Kenny G lays down backing sax in studio, on camera; it’s difficult to tell if he’s even trying. It’s undeniable, the muscles he’s built from nearly forty years of daily practice—even he admits this, is humbled by it.
Do you think Kenny G listens to smooth jazz? Do you think he listens to anything at all? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Trying to understand Kenny G somehow.

Epilogue: 2002.

Kenny G tells Ted Panken that Coltrane, Bird, and Grover Washington Jr. are three of his biggest influences, and Panken asks him to talk about some of his favorite songs of theirs. I haven’t stopped thinking about Kenny G’s answer to this question for weeks now; I feel eternally haunted by it. There is a good possibility that it does more work explaining Kenny G than my 1,600 words were ever truly able to:

The Grover Washington one that I listened to a lot when I was a kid was called ‘Inner City Blues.’ As for Coltrane, of course, ‘Giant Steps’ is the main one that he did, and he also did a rendition of ‘My Favorite Things.’ To me, those are the famous John Coltrane songs.

With Charlie Parker, there are just so many different records. I don’t say this to be disrespectful, but when you listen to Charlie Parker, on pretty much any record he’s going to sound the same.

Brad Efford is the founding editor of Wig-Wag and The RS 500. He lives in Berkeley, CA.