round 2

(3) RUPERT HOLMES, ESCAPE (THE PIÑA COLADA SONG)
SILENCED
(6) lionel richie, “say you, say me”
118-99
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, tweet at us, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 13.

Mandy Len Catron on “Say You, Say Me”

Let’s dispense with small talk here and get right to the point: as far as bad song tournament entries go, Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” is a bit of a softball. It’s just so bad. In so many immediately obvious ways. In fact, the song’s badness is so self-apparent that I considered just dropping a link to the video here and moving on with my day.
But maybe you, like me, began this essay with only a vague fondness for Richie’s velvet voice and a whisper of the song’s chorus echoing from deep in the recesses of memory. And it’s for you—for both of us, really—that I feel obliged to forge ahead.
Unlike many of the songs in this tournament, SYSM hasn’t aged badly. It was always bad. Let’s take Criterion 1 from the March Badness selection committee: Lyrical Weakness or Emptiness.
You would be forgiven for not remembering whether SYSM has any words other than the three in the song’s title. But it does. It has quite a few of them. Take, if you will, the first verse:

I had a dream, I had an awesome dream
People in the park playing games in the dark
And what they played was a masquerade
from behind the walls of doubt a voice was crying out

It’s as if, thirty-five years ago, Richie had the presence of mind to write a song for this very tournament. Should we unpack this verse? Honestly, it’s impossible to explicate the lyrics’ badness without simply repeating them, with emphasis. Our speaker (Richie?) had a dream—but not an everyday dream, an “awesome” dream. And this “awesome dream” was about, of all things, people playing games in the park? In the dark?
Was it nighttime Frisbee? Or soccer by headlamp? Because those at least sound fun, even if they don’t quite rise to the level of awesome. No, the nighttime game was was a masquerade, with, apparently, disembodied voices, which sounds very Eyes Wide Shut though that film was still fourteen years from being made at the time of SYSM’s release.
Do these lyrics count as weak? I think it’s safe to argue that, though they do seem to evoke a vague sense of existential terror, they certainly fail  to capture what appears to be the song’s central theme: friendship.
I know. I know. It’s no “Lean on Me” but the friendship thing is there. You have to wade through the nonsense of verse one before you actually get to it. Sure, the chorus sort of gestures toward some kind of dyadic relationship. There’s a “you.” (Is that us, the song’s listeners? I’ve certainly felt that way a time or two in the roughly hundreds of times I’ve listened to this song over past few weeks). And there’s a “me,” which I have consistently taken to mean Richie himself, the song’s sole writer and performer. Given enough listens, the song does begin to feel like more than a mere lesson in pronouns. Here’s verse two:

As we go down life’s lonesome highway
The hardest thing to do is find a friend or two
That helping hand, someone who understands
When you feel you lost your way
You’ve got someone there to say, “I’ll show you.”

It’s a little cheesy, but here, at least, the lyrics are intelligible. The official music video, which includes clips from the largely-forgotten movie White Nights—a film about an unexpected friendship between a Russian ballet dancer played by Mikhail Baryshnikov and an American tap dancer played by Gregory Hines—does a lot of the heavy lifting on the friendship-as-central-theme front. That director Taylor Hackford commissioned the song specifically for the film suggests that, on some level, Richie must have had friendship in mind when he was writing.
Is it possible that he grafted friendship onto a song he’d already written about postmodern Freudian angst? I won’t rule it out.
This lyrical inconsistency is matched by a truly inexplicable bridge where the pop piano ballad suddenly morphs into an electric-guitar driven dance brake that ends with the urgent feel-good directive to “believe in who you are/ you are a shining star.” I mean: really? If Richie set out to write the most incomprehensible-yet-blandly-uplifting pop-rock piano guitar dance ballad in history, he certainly hit it out of the park with this one. Or he hit it straight into the hearts of Academy voters because SYSM actually won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year.
Taken together, the song and the video seem to capitalize on the feel-good post-Civil-Rights-movement we’re-all-in-one-big-melting-pot-now racial sentimentality of the 1980s, which I think at least partly explains why it was so beloved by both Hollywood and the general public. The video also somehow invokes the possibility that, despite our differences, the universal language of dance might somehow soften the tensions of the Cold War. That all of this can happen in a four minute video that opens with Richie’s head rising above the horizon like the Arctic Sun (did I mention the movie is set in Siberia?) feels kind of masterful if I’m honest.
Here’s the thing: try as I might, I just can’t hate this song. Maybe it’s the magic of Richie’s voice that’s so hard to argue with. No matter how inscrutable the lyrics or how mawkish his sentiments, I like hearing him sing. Or maybe it’s that when the future arrived in my childhood home in 1991, it came in the form of a five disc DC changer. My family had Dancing on the Ceiling on heavy rotation. We didn’t even need another four discs because we had the nine incredible tracks on this one album. The crowd-pleasing title number “Dancing on the Ceiling” (oh what a feeling!), the treacly “Ballerina Girl” about Richie’s daughter Nicole, and, of course “Say You, Say Me,” which Motown kept off of the White Nights soundtrack so they could release it on Richie’s own album a year later.
It didn’t matter to us that our favorite album was already half a decade old. Every day after school, I popped open the CD case, delivered the glimmering disc into its slot, and my sister and I danced our hearts out around the living room. We’re gonna have a party and it’s starting as soon as the school bus reaches our driveway.
I’ve spent a lot of time this past month trying to understand why it is that I like something so self-evidently terrible so very much. Not just at age ten but even now, as an adult with what I hope are more developed musical sensibilities. I take some comfort in the fact that I’m not alone in my enjoyment of this song. Not by a long shot. If you watch the official live video you can see for yourself. Admittedly it is a self-selecting group, but Richie is playing to literally thousands of people who genuinely love this song. Arms are aloft and waving, lips are mouthing the words, lovers are nuzzling. There is meaningful finger pointing—to “you” and then to “me”, naturally—and there are countless soulful nods. People are feeling it. And Richie delivers a knowing performance. He’s not here to go through the motions. He’s here to move us.

I’m not about to argue that this song is so bad it is in fact good. “Say You, Say Me” is a bad song. There’s no way around it. But if, you, like me, are wondering why it is you can like a song like this despite so many reasons not to, science has actually come up with something of an answer.
Researchers stuck participants in an fMRI machine while they listened to pop/rock songs. Perhaps predictably, participants had a strong response in both the emotion and reward centers of the brain when they heard songs they were already familiar with. Crucially, whether a participant liked or disliked a song did not necessarily predict a response in these same parts of the brain. In other words, you can know a song is bad and still feel pleasure listening to it. In fact, most of us probably do exactly this all the time.
I can just picture the inside of my own brain at that crucial moment when the bridge slows down and the drums kick in and Richie points a finger to the heavens and delivers his affirmation—I am a shining star—just as the chorus rolls in again. The dopamine is flowing and I’m not even embarrassed about it.
The way things have gone these past few weeks, Lionel Richie will probably slide into the top slot of my most-listened-to artists on Spotify for 2020. But that’s okay by me. He’s a cool guy with a gorgeous voice—and some admittedly weird dreams.

Mandy Len Catron is the author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has yet to achieve her fifth-grade dream of becoming a Lionel Richie backup dancer. 

NICOLE WALKER ON “ESCAPE (THE PIÑA COLADA SONG)”

The narrative goes like this: A man is tired of his partner. They had been together too long. Like a worn out recording of a favorite song. His lady is sleeping next to him while he reads the paper. He turns to the personal ads (for ye millennials and Gen-z’s, this is Tinder of the newsprint).
He recognizes he doesn’t worry about how his lady might feel. And he knows that sounds kinda mean. But the relationship has fallen into the same old dull routine.
So he takes out his own personal as that confirms that he also likes Piña coladas and is into 70s album cover fantasies like making love on the dunes of the cape and getting caught in the rain. He has to meet her by tomorrow noon at a bar called O’Malley’s where they’ll plan their escape.
 (I’m not sure about the urgency, but it does make the incipient cheating seem imminent.)
But with an irony befitting Sophocles or O Henry, who walks into the room? His own lovely lady. He knows her smile in an instant. He knows curve of her face. She says, with such smooth insouciance, “oh, it’s you.” And then they laugh. And he says, I never knew you, that you liked piña coladas. Or getting caught in the rain. Or the feel of the ocean. Or the taste of champagne. The list of details he didn’t know about her! Well, what is love but discovering someone anew?

My husband Erik is what I think is strict and he thinks is setting standards with the kids. Max is the youngest. He plays a lot of basketball, which my husband approves of. Our neighbors rolled their old hoop down to the cul de sac so he could practice his shots. He spent six hours in 28 degree weather las Friday throwing balls into the air. He also spends sometimes six hours playing NFL games on my phone and watching Mythbusters, which Erik doesn’t approve of.
     “You’re done with screens,” Erik will tell him in the middle of a show. I feel like the kids should get some warning and some notice that they’re going to be cut-off from the life force. He says he knows when enough is enough. We sometimes go to bat for our opposing ideas. Usually, one of us ends up in another room, watching a show with Max, while the other watches a show alone. Zoe, who is obviously on her phone but claiming she’s doing homework, avoids the whole scene.

There is a reason “The Piña Colada Song (Escape)” has two titles. The dream and the specifics of the dream are at odds. Piña Coladas are frou frou drinks, easy to come by. Escape is, at least from yourself or from the planet, not easy at all. The paradox of this song is that love should be easy like a piña colada but it’s complicated, like placing a personal ad while your lover lies in bed next to you. You look around the mini-planet of your bed and you say to yourself, I think these sheets have seen enough of these two’s butts.

The problem with relationships is that you bring yourself to every single one you embark upon. You can leave the relationship but you’ll still be you, singing sad karaoke songs about how you dream there is somewhere to go, but there again, you will still be there. There’s no escape, but that’s OK. There’s no need to escape.

The American dream is really the California dream. health food and yoga spawn for the rest of the country a love/hate relationship to all things Californian. It’s hard to escape the lure of California. California will provide Pinã coladas, champagne, dunes of the cape, and all the half a brains you could want. No one leaves California, as the other, actually bad song about not leaving being able to leave hotels or California goes.

My husband Erik and I got through what I call the vicissitudes, and he calls, “what the fuck are we doing here?” When my mom comes to town, she checks in with me, “Is he still kissing you on the top of your head?” Sometimes. She checks in with Erik, “Are you still kissing her on the top of her head?” To my mom, this is the sign of rising above it all, of being able to handle the ups and downs, of believing in the little details that keep the dream alive. Are details the stuff of dreams? Or do dreams rise above the details—are dreams the way we escape the quotidian?

I am looking out the window from my house in Flagstaff, which is assuredly not coastal California. It snowed a few inches last night and, around noon, the air warms enough that the branches of the Ponderosa trees shrug off their frozen white blankets, tossing them to the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I think the trees are animals—deer or coyote, squirrel or elk. The trees move so much when letting go the heavy snow.
Flagstaff measures its fire danger based on its snow year. So far, this year, we’re looking pretty good. According to the National Weather Service, it has snowed over 44 inches thus far this year, which is a little less than normal by January 10. And last August, the monsoon storms missed us. And in June, a fire came within a mile of the city limits. The snowfall last year was as the same as this year’s—a little less than normal. Far less than record years like in 1967 when it snowed 86 inches in one night. Or even when I first moved here and it snowed 115 inches in a single weekend. Sometimes, Erik doesn’t even bother shoveling even though he prefers a dry and clean parking place. Now, the snow melts more often and more quickly. No ice to worry. Instead of soaking the ponderosas’ roots to the very bottom, the melted snow makes it only to the first layer. The trees are dry and ready to go up in flames. The trees send out a personal ad. “Hey, any other planet out there looking for a few billion trees?”

Piña Coladas are layered drinks. Alrhough they blend nicely, as they sit and you sip, the coconut milk separates from the pineapple juice. A layer of soft white fluff sits atop a watery belly. The best part of the piña colada is the coconut milk which is rare that a drink’s mixer trumps a drink’s liquor. But rum is definitely from the 70s which aligns with the song’s cover album making love in the dunes and getting caught in the rain, but had Rupert Holmes known that a coconut oil/water/milk craze would overrun the 2010s, he may have thought that too akin yoga and health food. He, with foreknowledge, may have rethought naming the song Piña Colada.  
Originally, the lyrics didn’t even mention the Piña Colada. Rolling Stone Magazine, in a reader’s poll that voted “The Piña Colada (Escape) Song” one of the top ten worst songs of all time. But the case against the song actually makes the argument to why the song is one of the best songs of all time: “The lyrics originally went "If you like Humphrey Bogart," at the last minute he changed it to "piña coladas," a drink he didn't even particularly enjoy. The couple in the song both agree to meet at O'Malleys Bar, and don't seem all that miffed to discover they were both trying to cheat on each other. Instead, they discover they both love piña coladas, being caught in the rain and making love at midnight.[i]” Rolling Stone jokes not so much an O’Henry story as an O’Malley story. Other songs on the list include “Feelings” and “You Light Up My Life.” Rolling Stone cites the song “Feelings” for lacking any sort of specificity: what feelings? Whose feelings? And blames Debbie Boone’s song for its genesis: “The song was written as a love song, but Pat Boone's daughter Debby always interpreted it as a song about her devotion to God. The song was written by Joe Brooks, who was arrested in 2009 on charges that he lured 11 women to his apartment with the promise of a movie audition, and then sexually assaulted them. He committed suicide before the case went to trial. Around the same time this was all going down, his son Nicholas was arrested for murdering his girlfriend.” Charging Holmes’ song with the couple trying (and failing) to cheat on each other doesn’t compare with sexual assault and murder. Plus, it was the 70s. Open relationships were coming into vogue—although, not perhaps with people who didn’t like yoga.
If relationships are about liking the same things, Erik and I are kinda fucked. He likes beer. I like wine although neither of us drinks Piña Coladas. I do yoga. He did yoga once, when his mom was in town. I cook, generally using a lot of butter although lately, I’ve been making ancient grain bowls, which might count as a health food. On Saturdays, I sleep in. He usually has his phone. He is not looking at personal ads, as far as I know. I turn toward him. He tells me he’s kicking ass on the Dot Dot game. iPhones will save us from our cheatin’ hearts? Erik reaches over and pats my head. His good morning song. She’s still his favorite. Just a little worn in the grooves. Still, he knows that I like to make the sheets square before I go to bed. He calls me a square for making hospital corners but in the morning, the sheets are organized over us both to which I say, win. And in the morning, I know the name of game he plays.

Holmes sings about the name of the bar where he and his fellow escapee plan to meet. He sings about getting caught in the rain. About champagne. About tomorrow noon and red tape. He brings the specifics about being in love in California in the 70s into specific relief. Admittedly, California has a lot more going on than dunes and capes. Rupert Holmes doesn’t sing about the homeless population. He doesn’t sing about the traffic or pollution. He doesn’t sing about drought or eucalyptus. He doesn’t sing about the Paradise fire which engulfed and destroyed a whole community but he does sing about the plausibility of escape. It is, even on this planet, difficult. The New York Times reported Tamra Fischer’s experience trying to escape Paradise, CA. She drove one direction into traffic with her two deaf and one blind dogs. She waited while she watched house after house go up in flames on Pentz road. She turned to get out of the jam to follow a fire truck. They sped out of town for awhile, only to be stopped by another bumper-to-bumper jam. Imagine sitting in your car as the hill burns beside you. The temperature in the car gets hotter and hotter. The cars don’t move. Your car doesn’t move. And then suddenly, it’s on fire.
“It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk—just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century.”
Tamra gathered her dog and climbed into Larry Laczko’s SUV, two dogs on her lap, one at her feet. They waited. The fire came closer. The paint on Larry’s SUV began to bubble. Larry looked down the ravine to his left. They would tumble. Crash. From above, the flames pointed downward. The winds flicked embers onto the roof of the car.
Thankfully, Joe Kennedy, firefighter and big equipment operator, roared up from the steep bank of the ravine in the bulldozer he had been driving around town to create fire lines. He pushed into the road and then pushed cars into a big graveled parking lot. In the world of climate change, parking lots are escape hatches. A paradox I’m sure Holmes would appreciate—you go to holding space in order to escape.

Since Erik and I have lived in Flagstaff, we’ve watched three major fires from our driveway. The Schultz Fire, the Little America Fire, and the Museum Fire. The road in front of our house provides a bit of a fire line. The driveway itself does as well. And there is one more road between us and the largest contiguous Ponderosa Forest in the lower 48. We scrape our needles from the ground to make a metaphorical moat around our house. A real moat might, in terms of fire, be more effective.
Max trespasses through four neighbor’s yards when he returns from his cul de sac basketball playing. He trudges across the fake moat, which is fine now, it’s winter, with mud and snow stuck to his boots.
“Max, clean it up,” Erik tells him.
He also tells him to take his plate to the sink. He also tells him not to watch a show.
     “You can’t tell him a hundred things to do at once. Pick your battles,” I tell Erik.
“You’re the one saying always saying it’s the details that matter. He just doesn’t pay attention.”
     “He pays attention to his basketball shot.”
“That is true,” Erik says, “He very determined to get his shot.”
     Erik and I met at a bar called the Zephyr in Salt Lake City. We had some things in common: Our dads had both died recently. We both grew up in Salt Lake with Mormon grandparents but non-Mormon parents. We both went to college in the Pacific Northwest.
Before you have kids, these are good, idiosyncratic reasons to get married.
     After you have kids, you don’t get to go to the bar very often. And, one of you will have a higher tolerance for letting the little things go than the other. Or you’ll take turns depending on what the tiny things are. In the Escape/Piña Colada song, the couple does not seem to have kids, which is why they can drink piña coladas, champagne, and have sex on the beach.

I conducted a survey for the Piña Colada. I set it up entirely without any oversight from the university’s Institutional Review Board. Facebook did not deem the song or the survey reproachable, so it counts as science. The song itself may count as science, since the song makes plain this basic fact: there is nowhere to go, so you might as well stay here. In the survey, many respondents, who shall remain unnamed but also might be competing in this March Badness against me so biased though their answers may be, thought this song was not romantic. But I shall show that this song is the most romantic and hopeful song that ever could be written and is thus, not only not bad, but great and insightful. This song is transformative, which makes it real art. The song shows the speaker transformed, which makes it plain real.
When I asked my respondents about the making love on the beach, I received nearly unanimous responses: almost as much as our speaker isn’t into yoga or health food, my Facebook friends are not into Sex on the Beach (the act, not the drink). Too much sand has an exfoliating effect on most sensitive skin, they claimed. My aunt responded that she likes to have sex on the beach, but with a blanket. My Aunt Sue is pretty good at TMI. Perhaps the dunes of the cape provide a little extra privacy, if not extra protection.
Erik and I spent a week on the coast of Washington when we first started dating. We also spent a week on the coast of New Zealand last month. I can’t remember the degree of exfoliation from that first coastal experience but I still have sand fly bites from the second.

It was only a week after we left New Zealand that the information began to flow in from Australia. The numbers are worse than the Camp Fire. As of today, they estimate 1.25 billion animals have died. An area the size of Maryland, for we who can only empathize with the landscape of the U.S. In the town of Mallacoota, residents escaped to the beach. But once you are on the beach, the only place to escape further is the water. The ocean is our largest moat but humans can only swim for so long. Fortunately, the Australian Navy rescued the people trapped on the beach. The evacuees will be taken 16 hours down the coast to Western Port, from where they can see which way the fire will come. They can smell the smoke, but the sight of a fire 16 hours away and 4 minutes away a least allows them to breathe. To plan their next escape even though, eventually, they’ll run out of places to go.

There’s something a little claustrophobic about fire and love and Piña Coladas. They are thick and cloying. They stick to you—your skin, the top of your head, your tongue and your waist. But move down the coast a bit and you will find that beer is a little sticky too. And so is smoke. And, love may look more like a swing dance over here or a hike over there or a tree planting date. But fire, and smoke, and love, and drinks, Piña Colada or otherwise, pervade. The details may change but the basic planet of love stays the same.
The Piña Colada song singer thinks he wants to escape. Things have become a little boring, a little general. The difference between the woman lying in bed next to him and the woman in the personal ad is the difference in the details. The woman in bed has lost her groove. It’s a favorite song but we don’t know which one. She’s just a lady. An old lady. But in the ad, she has all these specificities. She has particular drinks and particular thoughts about health food and particular places and times that she would like to make love. The things shift his vision. There’s no escape because you don’t need to escape when you look at everything with new eyes.

All Erik could see was the dirt and snow Max’s shoes had left on the floor. All I could see was how many tasks Erik had assigned Max all at once. I pointed out to Erik that although Max had left his plate on the counter and tracked snow across the floor and was looking through the house for a screen, that it had been Max, not me, who had shoveled the whole driveway.
“He did? That’s cool. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Thanks for doing that.”
Three phrases and the phase had shifted. I saw Erik in a whole new light. He saw Max differently.
The optometrist harasses me with questions. Which one is better, this one or this one. We go around and around until the focus is the same fifteen times in a row. I have no claims on reality anymore. The optometrist says, “There’s no perfect way of seeing it. Just how you see it.”
I look at Erik. He makes me mad the way he leaves his shoes all over the house. I flip the lens. He did kiss me on the top of my head on his way to work this morning. Maybe he leaves the shoes behind to remind me of his big feet and head kisses.

I admit that the tune of the song, Waaaamp Waaamp Wamp wamp, is a little cloying. Maybe a little claustrophobic making. Not everything about being trapped on the planet not being able to escape nor everything about being trapped in our own personalities in our own relationships is great. Like a song that gets stuck in our head, or like a worn out recording of a favorite song. But remember, we once loved this planet, fires and all. How do you unwear out a recording? You play the song again, maybe with some new attention to the details. We only have one planet. She has a nice curve to her face. Flip the lenses. Change your eyeballs. Look at it differently. You’re still you but you can fall in love again.

Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous nonfiction work includes Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first.