round 2
(7) THE EAGLES, “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
STOPPED
(15) kylie minogue, “the loco-motion”
283-202
AND WILL PLAY 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 12.
THAT CREEP CAN ROLL, MAN: THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ ON “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
For me, it’s as iconic a scene as any. The Dude sits in the back of a taxi. He’s had a long day—a porn producer roofied him, the Malibu chief of police has chucked a coffee mug at his forehead—and the taxi driver is playing one of his least favorite bands. The Dude asks the driver to change the channel. “Fuck you,” the driver yells. “If you don’t like my music, get your own fuckin’ cab. I’ll kick your ass out.” This doesn’t stand with the Dude. “I had a rough night,” he says, “and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.” The driver pulls over, and kicks his ass out.
I spent most weeknights in high school in the early 2000s listening to Q104.3, New York’s classic rock station. I would lock the door to my room, tune the stereo, and, after about thirty minutes of math, position myself in the center of my room, between bed and bookcase, pump up the volume, and rock out. I could do this for hours, jumping around my room and whisper-screaming lyrics, the radio loud enough to drown out my noise, the rug thick enough or the downstairs neighbors patient enough that they didn’t complain. The whole thing had a very George Michael and his lightsaber vibe. I tried to keep my fantasies modest. In my imagination, I played my school talent show in front of my classmates so they could see how cool I’d become. I was my own little dictator: I just wanted to be loved, and maybe adored.
I idolized pretty much anything Q104.3 played. If you got lucky, on Two for Tuesdays, when the station played ten songs by five bands without commercial breaks, you’d catch something like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” or Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you were unlucky, you got “Layla” or “Light My Fire.” If it was a really rough night, you got the Police or the Eagles, and then you turned the radio off, sat down, and finished your homework.
The irony of the Dude’s cab scene, as the clip’s surprisingly insightful YouTube comments point out, is that we the audience expect the Dude, a white, middle-aged stoner who smokes roaches in his car and listens to CCR tapes, to like The Eagles, and the cab driver, a Black man wearing a taqiyah, to dislike them. The pair’s fiercely opposite reactions—the Dude just cannot keep his mouth shut; the driver almost causes an accident pulling over—are both a subversion of racial stereotypes and a joke about the Eagles. They are the most indifferent, blandest of bands, and yet both these characters are ready to die on this hill.
I disliked the Eagles in high school for a mostly aesthetic reason: their songs were oversaturated with the 70s. They sounded like they wanted to be liked, and that made me dislike them. As a grad school professor would write shorthand in my margins, they were TTH: Trying Too Hard.
I also mistrusted them because “Hotel California,” with its upbeat and wooden timbales and Don Henley’s elongated vowels, sounded like a bunch of white guys on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to sound Spanish. Indeed, the song’s working title was “Mexican Reggae.” And here I was, a white guy with a Spanish last name, who did not speak his father’s native language, and who decided to take Chinese in high school so he wouldn’t have to learn the Spanish the rest of his family spoke. I did not identify with what the Eagles were trying to do in that song, and yet I did identify, and this bothered me most.
At least, I think this is why I disliked the song. Because at some point in high school, along came the Dude and The Big Lebowski and here was another white guy, who smoked pot and wore pajamas outdoors and hated the Eagles.
By now, I’ve watched the movie more times than any other except for Casablanca. (Once I was alone for a long time in a house without cable.) The anxiety of influence kicks in. Did I hate the Eagles because my favorite character in my favorite movie hated them? Or is he my favorite character because he was able to articulate my dislike in the way we say good literature articulates our long held yet unexpressed truths? Did I root for the villains in Bond films because I too am slippery and untrustworthy, and because I appreciated how these figures complicated and undermined a sense of unflappable masculinity? Or did I feel this way because these villains wormed their way into my head before I could come to my own questions about myself?
You might say any assignation of good or bad, like or dislike, is never a judgment about the text itself, but a shaping of ourselves in reaction to a text. We want what reflects us back to ourselves. Or, as the Dude would say, “Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion man.”
The other day, my friend Alyssa brought up a personality metric her younger sister invented to measure the world. There are four categories to express a person’s outward and (inward) dichotomies: You can be 1) chill (un-chill), 2) unchill (chill), 3) chill (chill), or 4) unchill (unchill). Chill (unchill) presents a chill exterior while maintaining an un-chill interior. Unchill (chill) does the inverse. The rest explain themselves.
As is the case with any personality metric, the test becomes more complicated the more you think about it, although you could say that that is pretty unchill of me to point out.
But still it’s a fun exercise. For example, Walter, the Dude’s best friend, with all his screaming about Vietnam, is decidedly unchill (unchill), as are the movie’s Nazis, despite their nihilism. Jesus, the Dude’s bowling antagonist, is actually chill (chill). A Bond villain is unchill (chill): at their core, they know what has to be done and how to do it. Their firmness of purpose bespeaks a certain calm.
On first blush, the Dude appears to be chill (chill) since, after all, he’s the Dude and the Dude abides. But you could also argue the Dude is chill (unchill). Beneath his façade lies an interior full of agitation and anger at the injustices in the world, as well as the failing of the Dude’s life work to correct those injustices, that anger often funneled into wherever he happens to be at the moment, such as in the back of a cab with a bruise on his forehead from a fascist police chief’s coffee mug, listening to Don Henley want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a million stars all around.
Like the Dude, the Eagles are chill (unchill). While their songs present a surface of easy listening and relaxed SoCal vibes, underneath that surface lies a corporate mentality, a lack of conviction, and a cynical, exploitative view of the world. Unlike, say, CCR, the Dude’s favorite band, the chillness of their music does not ground itself in the knowledge that the world is decidedly an unchill place. Their music instead argues that the world is an easy place, or at least a place where shallow, derivative, uncomplicated songs can succeed in the way that my imaginary concerts strove to: by presenting a fantasy and wanting adoration.
If the length of its guitar solo is any indication, there is no song more a fantasy, more wanting of adoration than “Hotel California.” Its six minutes and thirty-one seconds are full of vague metaphors and knock-off Springsteen lines that portend to mean anything and everything. The narrative possesses a muddiness that makes “Stairway to Heaven” sing like a clear mountain stream. Musically, its guitars cascade through the song, awash and bright not like sunlight, but like Dawn, like your computer monitor turned all the way up. I suspect it’s a song simply about getting your nut, but at least when Led Zeppelin sang those, they didn’t have to do it with so much pomp and mystery.
That said, this is less an essay about whether Hotel California is a bad song as it is an essay about why I feel the need to say Hotel California is a bad song. About how aesthetics often equal an idea of how the way we are good is determined by what we say is good, or at least how we might appear good in public by what we say we like.
Whatever its limitations, could a metric like chill (unchill) be applied to the notion of good and bad? What are the qualities of a song that is 1) good (bad) versus one that is 2) bad (good)? What makes something 3) good (good) or 4) bad (bad)?
I would like to think that this is a world where the core of a text makes itself known eventually. Take Guy Fieri, for example, who people such as myself only admit to liking ironically at first. Guy Fieri appeals because of his ridiculous exterior; liking someone so unsophisticated is one way of gaining social capital in a generation suspicious of sincerity. Irony is a mask, says Anne Carson (good (good)). That is, we say Guy Fieri is good but we wink when we do so because we are witty and patrician enough to know he is good (bad). But spend any amount of time with him, and those designations tend to flip or disappear. What actually appeals about him is not the way in which he might make a viewer feel intellectually superior, but the way in which his relentless positivity, good cheer, and support of others make me, at least, wish for more of those qualities in myself. I start to admire what big bites he takes and the convenience of his backwards sunglasses. Irony is a mask, but then, Carson adds, the mask becomes the face.
To put it more succinctly: Once I grew a mustache as a joke. Now I have a mustache.
So while I’d like to live in a world where the core parenthetical reveals itself, the core also shifts, moves, heats up and cools down. And I myself am moving in relation to it. I might hardly even know where I am in the first place.
Is “Hotel California” a bad song or am I saying it’s a bad song so I can sound like a certain (good) person? Is it possible to call it a bad song and still say I like it? Or to say that I like it but that I don’t believe in it?
Anyone that’s watched The Big Lebowski knows about Jesus. As played by John Turturro, the character wears a lavender jumpsuit, a hairnet, and a perfectly manicured violet pinky fingernail. He dries his fingers over the air vent and tongues the bowling ball. In a fitting touch for the Dude’s nemesis, “Hotel California” plays in the background when we meet Jesus. Not the Eagles’ version, but a cover by the Gipsy Kings. Jesus prepares to bowl during the song’s instrumental opening; if you’ve never heard this version, you’d have no idea what song it was. Once Jesus bowls a strike, he turns around, hops from foot to foot, and points at the camera as the first verse begins. At this point we the audience recognize what we have, and how it differs. Here is a Bond villain cooked up by the Coen Brothers.
I find the Gipsy Kings’ version formidable in its arpeggiated fury, and I also do not know how seriously to take it. Is it over the top, or does it just accompany one of the movie’s most over the top scenes? Either way, it does something I hardly did in high school, something the Eagles are all too eager to convince you they do: as the kids say, it fucks, and does so in the Spanish I refused to learn as a child. Given all the vague references to mission bells and colonialism and the exoticism of California in the Eagles’ original, here is a twist. The song feels like it’s taking something back and pushing something else forward.
Some time ago, my partner described an article that considers how song covers “queer” their original versions, such as when a woman covers a song in which a man pined for a woman. That is, a cover does not just imitate, but destabilizes its original. I think, most famously, of Jose Feliciano playing a folk version of the Star Spangled Banner during the 1968 World Series. To many viewers, Feliciano presents an image of defenselessness: a person who is blind, sitting and playing an acoustic guitar on his own, with no martial band to back him. This, in turn, gives the cover its power; Feliciano manages to demilitarize the anthem brilliantly. And like all good (good) covers, he renders it so that you both can and can’t sing along to it. When the melody rises, Feliciano descends. When a note should be held, he shortens it. Certainty becomes, instead, conditional.
I hesitate to use the word queering myself. I’m not sure it is my word to use, and I do not want to dampen or quell the word’s effect, much as I was hesitant to use the word partner. I wonder as well if my using that term is similar in some respect to the pop corporate mentality with which Don Henley and the Eagles appropriate the sounds of a just-passed era where others laid more on the line than they did, or the way in which a multinational corporation will drop a Kardashian into the vaguest of Black Lives Matter protests to sell soda.
But I admire the subversion a gesture can create. What a cover does to the original song resembles what the Dude is to Jeffrey Lebowski, or how Jesus, whose last name is Quintana, does not pronounce his name “hey-zeus” but as the Anglicized “gee-zus” himself. A cover questions the original’s values and repurposes content for new aims. It does something more complicated than call the original good or bad. It alters a text from whatever is considered acceptable, keeping in mind that when we call something such, we want that to say more about ourselves and our good standing than about whatever that thing is.
The house where I watched Casablanca over and over again belonged to my grandmother, a house she and my grandfather, whom I never met, had built outside Rio de Janeiro. Casablanca is, of course, a movie about people of mostly comfortable means attempting to escape the threat of fascism by traveling to the Americas. (Good luck, many would say.) It resembles, to that skeletal degree, my grandfather who fled the Spanish Civil War for South America just a few years before, the way the families of the future Gipsy Kings also fled Catalonia during that same civil war for the south of France. It’s a cheap move, an easy move, to tell you the insignia of both Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Third Reich was an eagle.
Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review Online among other places and he has received fellowships from Colgate University and the MacDowell Colony. He's an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, and a lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
brian oliu on “the loco-motion”
Track 1
When one thinks of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, they think of trains—of how the low guttural whistle cuts through the humidity and the burnt rubber scent from the Goodyear Tire Plant a few miles past the West End. There is an Amtrak Station in town that services only the Crescent Line—while it snakes all the way up through North Carolina to New York Penn Station, the majority of passengers take the rail down to New Orleans where it is affectionately called “The Drunk Train,” though the mood is less joyous upon its return trip to West Alabama, as New Orleans has a tendency to suck the moisture from your bones. However, the most traveled route is on the Norfolk Southern Railway lines, which are hauling coal, steel, and automobile parts to and through West Alabama. The tracks cross Hackberry Lane, just after the brewery and the Chinese restaurant, and just before the massive track and field facility, where on a meet day, you can see the pole vaulters twist up and over the bar before crashing into the pads below. There is inertia here: the abandoned bowling alley stripped of its wood, the brake lights illuminating the wet pavement in the cheap curly fry drive-thru. I notice these things because I myself am stopped—the railroad tracks are 0.7 miles from my front door, and I need to get home to make dinner. I need to get to work. I need to finish this run so I can shower and meet a friend for lunch. There are a lot of things that I need, but there is always something in the way.
Track 2
Kylie Minogue’s first performance of “The Loco-Motion” was impromptu—during a charity event for the Fitzroy Aussie Rules Football Club, Minogue and her Neighbours castmates (which included Guy Pearce and Alan Dale) sang a cover of the 1972 Little Eva hit; a song that Minogue was familiar with because she owned a Carole King songbook. At the time, Minogue’s Charlene character was a fan favorite; her on-again/off-again romance with Scott Robinson launched the two actors into Australian superstardom. The characters were set to be married—the wedding was regarded to be controversial because of the ages of the two characters; the classic social taboo of young love had the majority of the country fearing that they would cause a pandemic of teen weddings. Greg Petherick, Minogue’s manager realized that this would be the perfect time to release the single: with interest in the Charlene-Scott marriage reaching a fever pitch, Minogue would drop “Locomotion” on July 27, 1987, two weeks before the Australian and British television wedding of the century. After the episode aired, Minogue and Jason Donovan (who played Scott), embarked on their “honeymoon,” which was a PR stunt—a massive tour of both Australia and the UK where Minogue would perform “Locomotion” at every stop. The tour skyrocketed Minogue to superstardom and was the death knell of her acting career. Her story had reached a definitive end with her wedding; soap opera producers always lament the finalization of a couple because the joy is in the chase—the will they or won’t they moments that make for intriguing television. Upon Charlene and Steve’s return to the show, writers kept trying to find ways to throw wrenches in their marriage: money problems, an affair with a school tutor, an affair with a driving instructor. Of course, the writers could see that Kylie was not long for the soap opera world: Locomotion was the first artist to reach #1 on both the British and Australian charts, and she would leave Neighbours almost exactly a year to the day “Locomotion” was released. Good, inherently, is boring.
Track 3
The song, inherently, isn’t bad. While most people recognize the track as a cover of an older song, the version that we are familiar with is actually a cover of Minogue’s original 1987 mix that was rushed out and released in Australia in time for the Neighbours wedding. The original is more of a clomping stomp, with a multiple orchestra hits and more of a focus on Minogue’s vocals, in which she is attempting to do her best Little Eva karaoke. The recording sounds like someone who was asked to do their best Bananarama impersonation, but the only Bananarama song they’ve ever heard was a three-second snippet during a shampoo commercial. There is an odd instrumental breakdown about halfway through the track with an intense drum breakdown, a guitar solo, and a section where Minogue’s vocals are run through a synthesizer as she repeats “chug chuga chug” over and over. As a result, the song sounds super aggressive: do the Locomotion or I’ll kill you.
It sounds much more like a demo, especially compared to the overproduced polish of the 1988 version, where Stock Aitken Waterman, a sound engineer who was responsible for Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Right Round,” and an actual Bananarama song, made the song into what it is today: a completely innocuous and outdated mall bop that is insanely repetitive and goes on for too long. Despite the song having a much faster BPM than Little Eva’s original, it adds a full minute to its run-time; presumably to get more shots of Kylie in a multitude of outfits in the music video. The video, hilariously, was filmed at an airport. By the end of the song it is less of a demand by Minogue and more of a plea: do the Loco-Motion with me. I know you’ll get to like it if you give it a chance now.
It is a song that leaves us begging for reprieve; whether that would be in the return of the bizarre vocoder section, or a guitar single, or, with how Kylie Minogue was marketed as an Australian Princess, a didgeridoo would suffice. Instead, it drones forward with no end in sight—a line of railcars crawling like a snake, with occasional blips of graffiti from a Memphis railyard breaking up the slow blur.
Track 4
I started writing this essay in early December of 2019. I had the framework of the train interrupting my morning commute to class or early afternoon run—how I would drive the extra few miles down towards Queen City Avenue to avoid the tracks altogether, or how I would start my runs from the other side of the tracks, driving to the park next to the river so that my day would not be halted. I would talk about the trains in my life: the fact that we are always being propelled forward despite paths laid out in front of you hundreds of years ago, of how trains never deviate and when they do they bring nothing but torn up sod and disaster. I was going to honor my mentor, Michael Martone, and his retirement from teaching—how he finds joy in every station stop. I was going to talk about how I learned to love Kylie Minogue—the white jumpsuit with the impossible cleavage in the “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” video, of how I downloaded an illegal .avi and attempted to learn the dance moves of Minogue and her scarlet-adorned backup dancers to wow the women at Rootie Kazooties, or 723, or Have A Nice Day Café, or whatever shitty Fell’s Point bar that would accept my friend Adam’s brother’s old ID, but I could never get the moves right—of how I stay rigid and without motion; a slight shimmy and wobble to my steps like I am a car full of coal buzzing up and over a hill—a forward motion with a lack of deviation. There are facts to be utilized: of how the preferred mode of transport by Australians is by air, or how The Ghan is a 1,851 mile stretch of rail that goes from Adelaide to Darwin through the most barren parts of the continent—documented by many Australian redditors as the worst 54-hour trip they’ve ever been on.
Track 5
On December 13, my grandmother died. Oma, as she was known, had always wanted to travel to Australia—a fact that we found fascinating because of her hatred of snakes, spiders, bugs of any kind. She loved trains: traveling across the United States for vacation—looking out the window, knitting baby blankets, reading ¡Hola! Magazines, and singing to herself. I wrote a small eulogy—about her love of music and how she constantly sang along to every song, despite not knowing the words in English, or Catalan, or Spanish, or German. I have been unable to write anything worthwhile since: every sentence coming out wrong.
Track 6
Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 at the height of her worldwide star power. She has been open about her health, famously saying that she had been given the all-clear by doctors before getting a second opinion when she felt as if something was truly wrong with her—that there was something in her heart that told her that things just weren’t right. I have this fear as well—that there is something dormant inside of me that will malfunction at the worst possible time; that the right combination of internal and external forces will converge to stop me dead in my tracks. I will never truly trust my body in the same way I am constantly wary of being interrupted—the days that I am late for a meeting are the days where the train breaks down on the tracks. I feel as if I have a bad motor; that at some point I will lose the ability to propel myself any further, that the system could shutdown at any moment. The easiest dances still need to be done.
Track 7
The cause of death was a bacteria that attached itself to foreign objects—it was first discovered when it surrounded her knee replacements; the doctors removed both knees and replaced them with temporary spacers; a long thin piece of rectangle plastic. She was going through physical therapy to try to find a way to get home when we found out the bacteria had attacked her heart valve. I think of the abandoned railways leading into Tuscaloosa; of failed projects or tracks that have been forgotten and fallen into disrepair, of how they scar the earth—of lines that tear through swaths of farmland, the backyards of rowhouses, of how regardless of where we are we can still hear the ghost of a whistle cutting above the trees.
Track 8
After the cancer diagnosis, Kylie Minogue was forced to cancel her Showgirl tour. In 2006, however, she recommenced the tour with the moniker Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. What a beautiful concept: we can choose to live in a world where we can subtract by addition—remix it in a way that makes it seem new yet familiar. That somehow we have the power to cut out everything that is rotten and start anew.
Track 9
What if I choose to think of a train as less of an interruption—we regard the slow-moving cars as a hindrance because we are outside of it. The trains are bad today. Oma loved the train because it reminded her of her times on the train—that a change in viewpoint can somehow turn a bad thing good—that instead of staring at the coal car, it is us on top of it, admiring the view of the countryside as it slips through and through—that there I am, dragging my body that at this instance is running as it should toward the flashing lights before stopping my watch and waiting for the cars to rumble past. What a sight that would be. What a good thing.
Track 10
Kylie Minogue still performs the track. It has been a mainstay on every one of her setlists, along with the song, “Especially For You,” a duet she performed on Neighbours with Jason Donovan. In August of 2019, Minogue famously performed the song from an actual train, surprising riders on the Scarborough North Bay Railway, complete with backing dancers. The dance has always been the least important part: swing your hips, jump up, jump back, make a chain. In most performances of the song it breaks down into a conga line that bounces up and down. Carole King admitted that the dance never existed—Little Eva was forced to come up with a few moves as she performed. In the video, Kylie does this too: there is a lot of running in place with the occasional hip swivel. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at it—the most important thing is that you’re doing together.
Track 11
There’s one other difference between the original Australian mix and the refitted version for world audiences that I have not told you about—the name. The original rushed out version was titled “Locomotion,” whereas the official and new version uses the proper nomenclature of the original: “The Loco-Motion”. I have been thinking too often lately of the hyphen as interruptor when it is the opposite: a linking of two things, a way of bridging the gap between one thing and another. Something that delivers us instead of halts us—a way to bring us to where we need to be.
Brian Oliu currently teaches, writes, and fights out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of non-fiction, including the lyric-memoir i/o, and So You Know It's Me, a collection of Craigslist Missed Connections. Essays on topics ranging from 8-bit video games, to long distance running, to professional wrestling, appear in Catapult, The Rumpus, Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney's, DIAGRAM, TriQuarterly, Runner's World, Waxwing, Gay Magazine, and elsewhere.