round 2

(14) captain & tennille, ”muskrat love”
toppled
(6) THE CARPENTERS, “TOP OF THE WORLD”
202-38
and will play on in the sweet 16

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 11.

JENNIFER EPSTEIN ON “TOP OF THE WORLD”

I’m 11 years old, standing on a set of risers and trying hard not to sing. The opening notes of “Top of the World” play from the music teacher’s tape deck. I’ve signed up for sixth grade chorus to avoid daily P.E., and the mortification of singing (very very quietly, because by sixth grade, one knows one’s strengths, and singing was not mine) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays is preferable to the mortification of dressing in a green and white P.E. uniform and attempting various sports on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We are rehearsing a medley of songs by The Carpenters, not because it’s current music—Karen Carpenter had died five years earlier and the band ended with her—but because this is South Middle School, in Downey. Karen attended this school, and Richard and his parents still live across town. Less than two miles up the road are the Close to You and Only Just Begun apartment buildings. This is Carpenters country.

Some of the more established Downey families had members who went to school with Karen and Richard. One friend’s mother, whose name also was Karen, grew up with Karen Carpenter. She told me about what a beautiful voice she had, even in high school. 
The middle school medley features the group’s more upbeat hits—“Top of the World” and “Close to You” and, in a nice bit of meta-programming aimed at the folks—“Yesterday Once More.” At the performance, we rock gently from side to side, an off-key group of sports-averse pre-teens made slightly less off-key by my silent rendition of the songs. We embody the wholesome image of Downey that The Carpenters created, a nonthreatening, swaying mass of blank happiness, a pleasure to behold.

In “Up From Downey,” a 1974 cover story for Rolling Stone, author Tim Nolan refers to Downey as a “low-lying, bland suburb near L.A. International Airport.” Never mind that Downey is considerably nearer to Hollywood than the airport, that Beverly Hills is much closer to LAX than Downey is. Or that Beverly Hills is bland, too. Nolan isn’t writing about Downey’s literal geography, but the jab is a reminder that the city is invisible, even in Southern California. Downey is a working class city. The wonder isn’t that the Carpenters came from here; it’s that they stayed. 
Throughout their career, Karen and Richard were The Carpenters, from Downey. And I am from Downey, home of The Carpenters. I have said that phrase hundreds of times throughout my life. I said it again, when explaining where I was from to a co-worker, just the other day. 
Downey isn’t known for much else. My hometown is home to the oldest McDonald’s, which has been disowned by the Krocs (but that’s another essay). In the heyday of the aerospace industry, Downey-based Rockwell built the Challenger (same). And given our proximity to Hollywood, we’ve been on film a time or two: we’ve had bit parts in Mad Men, The X-Files, Falcon Crest, Big Love, a Madonna video, more things. We play indistinct towns that could be anywhere in the U.S. Before the 105 freeway opened, we played ourselves in Speed. 
But back to the music of my sixth grade chorus class. Was it good? This is a question I never considered before Badness approached. I invite you to think back to the home a beloved relative, a grandparent maybe, lived in when you were a child. How was their wallpaper; was it ugly? Were your grandmother’s shoes in good taste? In Downey, The Carpenters were just a fact of life, the musical wallpaper of our city, and we didn’t spare a moment to think critically about them. 
Until 1994, that is. That’s when, through some combination of nostalgia and irony, 14 alternative rockers recorded a Carpenters tribute album, If I Were a Carpenter. I had just entered my senior year at Downey High School (Richard, ‘64, Karen, ‘67). We were deep into the alternative music scene by then, making pilgrimages to Sunset Boulevard all-ages clubs as much as parents would allow, loitering at Middle Earth Records (an impossibly cool shop for Downey, filled with obscure punk 7-inches and a wall of bootlegged tapes), our school uniforms black dresses and thrifted old-man cardigans. 

When the record came out, we were all-consumed by it. We already knew most of the songs, or thought we had. But here they were, completely reimagined—it was your grandmother’s wallpaper in a design magazine. And it was good.
I especially love Shonen Knife’s cover of “Top of the World.” Where The Carpenters’ version is sedate, Shonen Knife infused the song with vigor, joy, and jangly guitars. I asked Naoko Yamano, singer/guitarist/founding member of Shonen Knife, what she thought of the original version of “Top of the World.” 
“When I was an elementary school student, my friends and I visited our teacher’s house for a party. It was in 1972 and a girl said “The Carpenters are in Japan and their concert is playing on TV now. Let’s watch it!,” Naoko wrote in an email. “Everybody except me loved to watch… The Carpenters were textbook-like for me. Actually their song “Sing” was in our music textbook at school.”
It wasn’t until being approached for the project that she reconsidered the band. “After I covered their song,” she wrote, “I [started] to notice how they are great. The original recording of “Top of the World” is perfect! Karen’s vocal is Godlike.”
I listened to “Top of the World” more times over the past month than I had since sixth grade. And Naoko was right; her voice is otherworldly. The lyrics are not great, but how many early 70s soft-rock songs have great lyrics? (The answer: one.) 
Shonen Knife’s arrangement of “Top of the World” roughs up the soft edges, exaggerating elements of the song (like that quarter rest in the chorus), effectively magnifying what is good about the original. And there’s that fantastically catchy opening riff, which I recently learned is the Osaka train melody. 
“I quote it in our song because I wanted many people in the world to know about my hometown Osaka through my music,” Naoko said. 
They are Shonen Knife, from Osaka.

I told Naoko that Downey is my hometown and she graciously replied that she’d like to see it someday. I grew up in this area and now live just a few miles away, in Long Beach (home of the Carpenters Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach, which Richard and Karen attended), and I would recommend a hundred other tourist spots before ever directing her to visit Downey. 
But you know who did visit Downey, if only for long enough to record the video for “Superstar?” Sonic Youth. And what a thrill it was, to wait stay up late, TV volume turned low, waiting for 120 Minutes to air that video. What a thrill it is to watch it, even today. 
It’s a cliche, but back in 1994, when we were on the cusp of adulthood but our own world still felt so small, by listening to the album, we felt seen. Our idols, they were Carpenters fans, too. 

Jennifer Rice Epstein was born and raised in Downey, Calif. She’s published nonfiction and essays in dozens of magazines, including LA Weekly, Los Angeles magazine, Flaunt and Paste. She now lives in Long Beach with her husband, kids, and assorted pets.

elena passarello on “muskrat love”

Muskrat mating season begins in March. I doubt Texas songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey knew this when he composed his now-infamous ballad of Susie and Sam—those two muskrats with bewilderingly WASP-y names. According to Ramsey’s misguided and possibly ‘lude-induced lyrics, the coital behaviors of muskrats include: eating bacon and cheese, the jitterbug, and a sort of ambiguous and whirling frottage, all of which takes place by candlelight. In fact, the song we all know as “Muskrat Love” was originally called “Muskrat Candlelight,”—a problematic detail, since muskrats do most of their mating in the water.
If it’s March when you’re reading this, you can bet your ass that right now, in some nearby wetland, a real-life muskrat Sam is hunting for his Susie. Finding her isn’t as mellow-gold as Ramsey imagines it, however, because there are often myriad Sams vying for the fittest Susie of any given pond, fighting viciously throughout the month for the right to mount her. Males choose their queen based on the pungent scent she squirts from the oily glands encircling her anus. Maybe this biological fact appeared in Ramsey’s earlier drafts of “Muskrat Candlelight,” but then had to be cut for time.
The final lyrics aren’t wrong about all the muzzle-nuzzling, though, as many zoological texts list “kissing” and grooming as part of muskrat courtship. But things go off-script with the line about Sam sidling up to Susie and “rubbin’ her toes.” In reality, muskrats possess neither fingers nor toes—they’re more like half-webbed murder-mitts covered in needle-sharp hairs and topped with claws. And since it’s not uncommon for aggressive muskrats to use those claws against rivals, when a real-life muskrat offers his paramour a foot rub, the claws he uses to massage her might still be sticky with the viscera of his enemies.
“How old are you?” skinny Sam might ask Susie while tickling her with his bloody digits.
“I just turned one, so I’m ready to breed!” she’d answer.
“You smell like a hot dumpster. Let’s get it on.”
The muskrat penis is wide and knob-tipped. It probably evolved these features to better maintain its purchase inside the slippery muskrat vaginal canal while the breeding pair “whirl and twirl and tangle” in the water. My favorite thing about muskrat sex (a phrase I never thought I’d type; thanks, Ander and Megan!) is the fact that two muskrats in flagrante delicto will occasionally take the humping to the next level by throwing their bodies onto a passing plank of driftwood, so they can float while they do it. I’m no biologist, but this is obviously some sort of twisted Titanic role-play, the finale of which involves Muskrat Susie pushing Muskrat Sam off the wooden plank, like Rose did to Jack in the movie. As she watches Sam sink to the muddy river bottom, Muskrat Susie climaxes.
Anyway. Sam and Susie’s floating kink—their musk-raft love, if you will—is a risky addition to their mating dance, since bonking on a log exposes the pair to predators. Raccoons pose the biggest threat to muskrats, though humans have also been known to hunt the rodents for their fur or, occasionally, their flesh. Eighteenth-century missionaries along the Detroit River were permitted muskrat during the Lenten meat fasts, and certain sects of the Michigan diocese still honor this with “Muskrat Friday” dinners from Mardi Gras to Easter (I’ve read that the meat tastes better if you drown it in sherry). Michigan’s raccoons are probably pissed that these Catholics keep poaching their food source every March. Unless, of course, said raccoons are Catholic, too.
The male half of the 1970’s duo Captain and Tennille, who isn’t a Captain and whose real name is Daryl, grew up Catholic but did so far away from any muskrat stew, in southern California. Both he and his wife/musical abettor Toni Tennille were vegetarians when they released their hit cover of “Muskrat Love” in 1976. And speaking of 1976—and of raccoons!—that same summer, Tennille went to a coke party at Gordon Lightfoot’s house where everyone was blasted out of their gourds and oblivious to the fact that a large family of raccoons had taken over Lightfoot’s kitchen.
I read this terrifying anecdote in Toni Tennille’s recent memoir, which is stuffed with alarming 70s details like Lightfoot’s trash panda kitchen crew, the risks of early hair transplant surgery, and the time Queen Elizabeth dozed off during a command performance of “Muskrat Love” at the White House (Henry Kissinger stayed awake, but was visibly disturbed). Tennille also devotes considerable page space to the merits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory, but only briefly mentions that she’s never seen an actual muskrat in her life—even though the animal screws its way through her third most popular song.
She says she first heard “Muskrat Love” in the car on the way to a nightclub gig, about a year before she and Captain Daryl got discovered. Given the timeline, they probably heard this 1973 version by the band America, which was both the first recording re-named “Muskrat Love” and the first to receive any real radio airplay. Weirdly enough, the year before, Lani Hall had recorded a soporific take on the song called “Sun Down” for the label that would eventually sign Captain and Tennille. “Sun Down” uses the exact same tune as “Muskrat Love,” but with new lyrics that omit the Susie and Sam storyline, and I fully reject this heinous act of muskrat erasure.
Unlike Lani Hall, the band America weren’t about to remove those titular muskrats; their version keeps all Ramsey’s rodent lyrics intact. This isn’t surprising, since America’s first two albums made notable contributions to the canon of animalian soft rock, what with that one song about the “alligator lizards in the air”—how did they get up there? Did somebody toss them?—and their other song about the horse with no name, which features crackerjack naturalist observations like “there were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America’s take on “Muskrat Love” is peak Yacht Rock: so smoothed-out, it’s borderline menacing. Their rendition sports both an acoustic bass guitar and bongos, plus a double-tracked, whispery voice that sounds like a date offering you a post-coital doobie on his bearskin rug right after he gave you crabs. The band ignored their label’s pleas not to include the song on their third album and, perhaps as a middle finger, they made it the record’s opening track. They also cockily titled the album Hat Trick—an act of hubris made even funnier when it flopped. Guess they shoulda stuck with alligator lizards.
And hey! Since we’re on the subject of lizards, here’s something else I learned from Tennille’s book. Guess what Captain Daryl’s last name is? Dragon! As in somebody looked at a tiny little baby and decided to name it Daryl Dragon. Which leads me (and, I’m sure, all of us) to wonder why in the world these two didn’t call their act the freaking Dragon and Tennille? That’s infinitely cooler! And you know what would be even cooler than that? KOMODO DRAGON AND TENNILLE!!!!
Imagine an America (the country, not the shitty band) where the Billboard Hot 100 juggernaut of 1976 wasn’t “Muskrat Love,” but instead “Dragon Love,” about the erotic thrill-seekers Komodo Dragon Sam and Komodo Dragon Susie. They tie the knot in a badass desert ceremony with live snakes flying about and a basilisk egg dowry, and that night, Komodo Dragon Sam takes K.D. Susie to his lair so they can get busy atop a bunch of direwolf skins, and then she has to eat a raw horse heart in front of him while he makes hungry Aquaman eyes at her and pools of horseblood seep into her white-blond Khaleesi braids and yes, I did rip all those details from the Jason Momoa love scenes on Game of Thrones rather than look up the mating practices of real Komodo dragons because I’ve already Google-image-searched “muskrat penis” like fifteen times to write this essay, so I’m probably pushing it with the NSA as it is. OK fine, I just Googled “Komodo Dragons doing it” and to my surprise, their lovemaking actually seems quite gentle.
But my point here is why in the actual muskrat fuck would Daryl Dragon rebrand himself with some bogus naval rank when his given surname evokes the image of a storied, fire-breathing hell lizard…not to mention Jason Momoa? The answer to this question, my friends, is the 1970s.
I was born toward the end of the 70s, within months of Jason Momoa, which means we both could’ve been conceived while “Muskrat Love” played on the radio. Perhaps many of you reading this were born around then, too, and we The Lost Children of “Muskrat Love” should start a support group. While the particular tune to which our parents got busy is difficult (and awkward) to confirm, we do have plenty of documentation proving that the 70s—the petri dish that grew Momoa, myself and countless other late GenXers—were absolutely insane. All those thick chintzy fabrics and disco boots with goldfish in the heels and Queen Elizabeth falling asleep while a president nobody elected grooved in the chair next to her. People smoked about thirty cigarettes a day—forty if they were on an airplane—and brassieres were illegal. There was too much garbage and not enough gas and folks had basically stopped voting because it no longer seemed to work. Everyone was both alarmingly hairy and disturbingly horny and somebody gave a weekly TV show to a pair of mimes.
Captain and Tennille also had a TV program in the 70s, despite the fact that Captain Dragon often went days without speaking (maybe he was a mime, too?) and reportedly hated: jokes, the camera, dancing, people, and anything else that wasn’t a macrobiotic food product or a bulldog. Their show ran on ABC in the year of the Muskrat, aka 1976, and featured a skit about a bionic watermelon in which Toni portrayed her own arch nemesis, Queen Elizabeth II. They also staged a lip-synched performance of “Muskrat Love” for the show, and it serves as the closest thing to its music video (unless you count this alarming karaoke vid that I found, which looks like it inspired the movie Midsommar).
The TV show clip of “Muskrat Love” features two actors in full-body chipmunk suits who have been shrunk by some analog camera trick. They bounce on Tennille’s shoulders and on Cap’n Drag’n’s famous hat. At one point, they jump off the hat and look like they’re travelling downtown to fellate him, but it turns out they’re just headed to the edge of his keyboard, where they groove with the terpsichorean skills of that guy who spins the Qwik Payday Loans sign in front of my Walgreens.
This video is bad, y’all. It makes “The Bionic Watermelon” look like Citizen Kane. It’s cutesy and cheesy and miles away from the carnal habits of any rodent, reptile, or Momoa. But underneath the terrible visuals, you hear the special brand of Badness “Muskrat Love” offers. And I’ve been thinking about that Badness—delighting in it, honestly—all week. I needed something to distract me from, I dunno, every single piece of news I encountered. You don’t Google rodent wangs for a straight hour unless you’re seriously trying to forget the state of the world for a while.
The only indefensibly bad components of this “Muskrat Love”—what I would erase if I could teleport back 44 years—are the Captain’s post-prod electro-flourishes. With a few rare exceptions, any time a white dude discovers a cool new electronic musical toy, the results don’t age well. Remember when the Monkees learned about synthesizers? Or when John Tesh bought a keytar? Dare I even mention Peter Frampton here?
Most of the Captain’s sonic aggressions are MOOG-related: the rococo flips and gibbers and binary burps that, according to Tennille’s book, were meant to approximate both the dance of the randy muskrats and their eventual petites morts. While it’s true that courting muskrats do chirp and babble while they posture for one another, no muskrat ever sounded like a broken Nintendo farting along to the Deep Throat soundtrack. But to his credit, these noises do add the Captain to a long tradition of pop musicians misrepresenting sounds of the animal kingdom. A robin, be he rockin’ or not, won’t sing tweedlydeedlydeet; the flight of the bumblebee isn’t nearly as modulated as Rimsky-Korsakov imagines it; and even though Prince sounds amazing while screaming it, no dove has ever cried “Skype! Skype! Skype! Skype! Skyyyyyyyyyyyype!” on the A below High C.
But pop music has never really been about accuracy, of course. What’s more, I think pop forms are designed to harbor Badness, and often when a song does, it still has space to do some kind of work. Many of the entries in this tournament could support this. Sure, they’re awful songs, but rarely because they’re tedious (save maybe “Disco Duck” or “Toy Soldiers”). Our bracket is one of Badness that somehow manages to cultivate energy, and I hope we all celebrate the Energetically Bad in our voting this muskrat month. A few hundred listens in, I think “Muskrat Love” retains its energy via the very components that make it so pungently odious: Ramsey’s bestial lyrics, the Captain’s electric wanking, and all the tawdry 70s vibes Tennille’s vocals can muster.
Context plays a part here, too: this song represents an era of Badness we will never experience again: an age of only three channels and snail mail, when coke-addled cultural gatekeepers made unchecked decisions about what got injected into the living rooms and car speakers of almost everyone. “Muskrat Love” is a capsule from a colorful time that managed to be simultaneously puritanical and overheated, family-friendly and gross. The song epitomizes not simply what was wrong about the 70s, but what was spectacularly wrong about them, and thanks to thirty years of Boomer nostalgia, it’s this wrongness that I have been programmed to miss.
Such nostalgia is aided by the general production of this track, which is honestly pretty damn solid. Rather than the acoustic 60’s holdover approach that America took, this “Muskrat Love” sports the mellowest Hammond B3 you’ve ever heard. The lilting chords noodle Ramsey’s melody about in soft pastel drips. It’s a pleasing accompaniment to Tennille’s vocals, which are also on point. Lemme tell you, Toni Tennille isn’t much of a memoirist, but mama knows her way around a ballad. She’s got this wonderful, almost golden, mid-throat delivery that’s raspy and chewy and not only intoxicating; it sounds intoxicated.
Though she claims to have just said no throughout the decade, Tennille sings “Muskrat Love” like she’s orbiting the moons of Jupiter, as do most of my fave voices of the time. Take the river of barbiturates in Andrea True’s delivery of “More More More!” or Neil Young’s coke-boogered crooning of “Helpless” in The Last Waltz, or whatever the hell Minnie Riperton snorted to hit those top notes in “Loving You.” If you asked me to guess what drug yielded Tenille’s “Muskrat” tone, I’d probably guess an eight-ball of physical love. Toni sounds absolutely fucked in this song. You can almost hear the glow in her cheeks as she pulls a satin sheet around her, sits up, and lights a Newport menthol.
Tennille’s signature sound is also ironic, given the offstage coldness of her marriage to the Captain. She writes that though she tried to change him and despite how well they jibed professionally, he avoided showing her affection for over forty years. Can we just stop for a second and take that in? This song that we’ve loved to hate my entire life is the sound of a thirty-six-year-old woman with a Prince Valliant haircut singing like she’s been shagged within an inch of her sanity right next to her husband, who “couldn’t even give [her] a hug,” using whatever that does to a person’s psyche to croon about two horny muskrats. That, my friends, is an aesthetic Rubik’s cube I’ll never be able to click into place.
Tennille’s vocals are a teaser for what’s to come in “Do That To Me One More Time,” her 1979 hit that is so stanky with white-lady coital fervor, it makes “Muskrat Love” sound like “Old Shep.” But here’s the thing: I never want to hear “Do That To Me One More Time” again. I think that song is a different brand of bad—the kind that rarely interests me because its bad aspects are enough to flatten it: the self-indulgent tempo; the monosyllabic, single-entendre verses; and the Lyricon solo that’s nothing short of a federal crime.
For another example of the irredeemably bad, we need look no further than America’s flop album Hat Trick. A few tracks down from their lesser “Muskrat Love” is a song written by the band with a suspiciously similar title: “Molten Love” (not to be confused with “Molting Love,” which I wrote yesterday about Muskrat Suzie getting aroused whenever Sam sheds his winter fur). I just listened to “Molten Love” six times and I’ve already forgotten everything about the experience other than 1) I hated it and 2) someone blows bong bubbles in the fadeout. Also 3) this chestnut lyric from the chorus: “I want to carry you across a threshold of fireflies and violet smoke all alone.” Da fuck?
All this is to say that yes, “Muskrat Love” is rotten, and I hope you’ve all got it topping your brackets, but even if it wins this pantheon of Badness, I’d still take spectacularly bad—loaded vocal delivery bad, 70s doomsday bad—over forgettably bad any day. “Muskrat Love” beats “Molten Love” in my heart forever. Note, too, that I would specifically take Captain and Tennille’s version over the renditions by the actual author, or that lady who omitted the original song’s oddest lyrics, or those hit-maker dummies with their bongs and bongos. Sure, this version has topped Worst Song Ever listicles my entire life, but it’s managed to stay alive. It has rented space in the consciousness of three generations, like the family of raccoons overtaking Gordon Lightfoot’s kitchen.
And lord knows being a modern human can make you crave a ludicrous outlet—like, say, an ode to a pair of insatiable semi-aquatic mammals, or a memoir about the troubled mammalian lounge act who sang said ode. Maybe “Muskrat Love” also sticks because it proves to us how truly bad life in America (the country, not the shitty band) can get. It reminds us that, at certain points, the citizenry has craved the vibrantly ridiculous as some sort of national coping strategy. On both personal and public levels, we occasionally ache to stop and smell the muskrats, which makes this song a Badness life raft. Nimble, loaded, catchy, and gross, it’s a last-ditch transportation device for when we need something stupid to hold close—stink and all—as we float away from the larger things in our lives that make even less sense.

Elena Passarello is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat.