round 2

(1) Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You”
woke
(8) Glee, “Teenage Dream”
477-432
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 3/15/22.

emilie begin on whitney houston’s “i will always love you”

When I lived in DC in my twenties, I participated in an adult competitive karaoke league. During that time period, I found myself at least twice a month at a karaoke night with janky microphones, a messy sign up sheet, and beer-stained binders filled with titles of former chart-toppers and inexplicable deep cuts. My favorite for a while was a live karaoke band night at a local bar/restaurant on Wednesdays where you could pick a song from the band’s roster and play lead singer for four minutes. I went to this live band karaoke night so often that I came to recognize the regulars. 
From the months of May to August, you had at least one gaggle of Capitol Hill interns that would sing Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA'' every week or Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way,” featuring at least one intern attempting Nick Carter’s “don’t want to hear you saaaaaaay!” key change with varying results. Another regular was a teenage girl whose relative was one of the band members. Every week, her parents would drive her to the bar just to sing Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” and then she’d leave almost immediately afterwards. I’ll never forget the juxtaposition of a 15 year-old in a baggy sweatshirt singing a beautiful rendition with all her heart while drunk, sweaty twenty and thirty-somethings clad in Banana Republic or Ann Taylor Loft workwear yelled along and cheered her on.
The last time I heard this girl sing I was 27. I moved to California that year after spending months trying to find an opportunity that would force me to leave behind a life where I had always lived within the same 60-mile radius. Despite knowing three people who lived there at the time, I accepted a job offer in San Francisco in June of that year and one month later my sister Camille and I drove my Volkswagen Rabbit across the country.
There’s a term in astrology called the Saturn Return, which refers to the point at which the planet Saturn returns to the placement it was in the day you were born. It takes Saturn 27-29 years to return to that point and signifies a set of major changes in someone’s life. The first Saturn Return we experience in our late twenties is usually tied to feelings about adulthood and settling down, and often stirs up decisions around marriage, career paths and overall life direction. As a late bloomer to the astrology world, I learned this term not through a horoscope book but rather through No Doubt’s underrated album Return of Saturn, which features several songs Gwen Stefani wrote about her late twenties. 

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Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” on the same day she wrote “Jolene” in 1973, the ultimate Capricorn move. At 27, she wrote that song to signify her Saturn Return, which meant branching out as a true solo artist and ending her musical partnership with Porter Wagoner, the man who had made her famous but controlled her career and wanted to call the shots. The song, though sad, is a feminist anthem in its own way, a one-sided farewell where the singer expresses all the best to the person on the receiving end but makes it very clear that she’s leaving. She leaves no room for the other person to protest her decision, maybe because she knows nothing will convince her otherwise or maybe because she’s afraid she’ll change her mind if she hears what they have to say.
Dolly was 28 when the song topped the country charts in 1974, and she was later approached by Elvis about letting him record the song that same year. At the time, it was customary to sign away half of the publishing rights to Elvis whenever he recorded a song written by someone else. Dolly, newly in charge of her career, tearfully apologized and said no to Elvis and his manager Col. Tom Parker. She couldn’t give it up.

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In the days after I signed my job offer letter I began the process of telling my friends and family I was moving and quitting my job at a company where I had worked for five years, the only job I had known outside of college. I accepted the offer verbally on the spot and signed the letter within minutes of receiving it, offering my resignation at work an hour later. I didn’t want to second guess my decision and feared that someone would try and talk me out of it if I asked what others thought.

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Whitney Houston’s own Saturn Return appropriately coincided with the filming and release of The Bodyguard and its soundtrack. In 1991, at 27, she was cast as the female lead Rachel Marron. Stakes were high, with the studio hesitating to cast someone with no acting experience but her co-star Kevin Costner insisted on her, going as far as to delay making the movie a year to accommodate her schedule. Always a Leo, Whitney fought to prove herself good enough for the role. 

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After accepting the job offer, selling off my furniture, and donating about half of my wardrobe, I took a quick trip to San Francisco a few weeks before moving to find an apartment. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of a skyscraper by myself, and for the first time the weight of this decision hit me. I had lived in or near the same city my whole life, a city where no building was taller than the Capitol and almost every street downtown was named after a letter, number, or state so it was always easy to know where you were. I hated not knowing the succession of streets, I worried about having no friends, and I wondered if I would get fired within the first few months of my job once they figured out I was unqualified. 

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At the same age when the song became a hit for Dolly, Whitney recorded her rendition of “I Will Always Love You” in April of 1992 at 28. Maureen Crowe, the film’s music supervisor, suggested an arrangement based on Linda Ronstadt’s cover of the song in response to scrapping the originally-planned cover of Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” which had been featured in Fried Green Tomatoes. When David Foster, the soundtrack’s producer, called Dolly to tell her, she pointed out that Ronstadt’s version didn’t have the third verse and then proceeded to sing it for him on the phone so he could write it down.
Though she brought back the third verse to stay truer to the source material, Whitney made the song her own, beginning with an a cappella rendition of the first verse, a stylistic choice David Foster didn’t agree with but she and Kevin Costner insisted on keeping. Whitney’s version also gains momentum over time, softly singing Dolly’s words at the beginning with unbelievable control and slowly getting louder over the chorus and following verses. Then, at 3:08, after she sings the third verse, almost tricking us into believing she’s going to end on “I wish you love,” her belt punches through, accompanying arguably the most famous key change of all time.

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Much like the scene in The Bodyguard where the song plays, I had my own tearful goodbye at the airport as I dropped my sister off to fly back to DC after driving out to California with me. A true Pisces through and through, my emotions were only compounded by a residual hangover stemming from a drunken night of karaoke. Driving away from SFO, I decided I would just give it a year, and if I hated it, I could always move back. No one would think any less of me.

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Released November 3, 1992 when she was 29, Whitney’s cover spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, won two Grammys, and helped The Bodyguard soundtrack become the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Dolly was always supportive of Whitney’s cover, and when she died, she wrote that she would, “always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, 'Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.'"
Today the song gets lost in Soft Rock station shuffles while you’re waiting to get your teeth cleaned and the cheesy saxophone interlude is dated, but it represents many important choices made by two women at pivotal points in their lives. Dolly’s choice to professionally split from Porter Wagoner, write a song about it, and then deny Elvis the chance to record that song resulted in reportedly $10 million in royalties in the ‘90s alone (or as Dolly has said, “enough money to buy Graceland”). Whitney’s choice to record “I Will Always Love You” made her an even bigger star and gave her a signature song so ubiquitous that most people don’t know it’s actually a cover. 

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Almost seven years later, I’m still in California. I can easily rattle off the succession of streets in downtown San Francisco and I can tell you the best place to sing karaoke in the city. It’s The Mint for entertainment value, Martuni’s for live piano and showtunes, and Silver Cloud if you want to hear a gaggle of Marina Girls sing “Party in the USA.”

Emilie Begin graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in Creative Writing in 2010 and currently lives in Oakland. She co-hosts the Old Millennials Podcast and occasionally writes an essay here and there (most recently for the RS 500). You can find her on Twitter talking about how underrated some forgotten '90s power pop band was @emilieabegin.

LET’S GO ALL THE WAY TONIGHT: MOIRA MCAVOY ON GLEE’S “TEENAGE DREAM”

I had two reactions to the realization that the covid-19 pandemic was going to ravage the world—spend $300 on non-perishable food at Target, on Leap Day, just in case, and begin rewatching Glee from the beginning. I’ve long joked that watching more than an isolated episode or two of the show operated as one of my surest cries for help, but it was a reasonable reaction—it was familiar and nostalgic, which is comforting, and is the only show I’ve watched that was unhinged enough to make the pandemic’s reality tolerable to my illness anxiety-addled brain.
For the uninitiated, Glee is the improbable breakout hit musical dramedy series which dominated both Nielsen ratings and the iTunes charts from 2009 to 2015. The show centers around the New Directions, a downtrodden glee club at a WMHS in Lima, Ohio; predictably, each episode featured an abundance of singing, with the club tackling both classics and contemporary hits both in competition & rehearsals as well as a plot devices to move along the stories, further develop the ensemble casts’ personalities, or both. At its best, the show was a deft mix of humor and heart highlighted by showstopping earworms and surprisingly successful mashups. The writing and cast carried their characters with care and self-awareness, letting out little hints that everyone is in on the joke, such as the moment in the first few moments of the pilot when Artie, a student who uses a wheelchair, points out that it’s ironic that he has been given the solo in a rendition of “Rockin’ the Boat”. It is likely responsible for both the revival of interest in a cappella groups–arguably setting the stage for the popularity of the Pitch Perfect film series–and for the mash-up fad that overtook YouTube and SoundCloud in the following years. The cast mounted sold out arena tours in its heyday, and the show’s meteoric popularity helped catapult Ryan Murphy to his status as a perennial showrunner under Fox’s auspices. Nearly seven years after the show’s finale, Glee is still tied for the most Billboard Hot 100 entries of all time, thanks to a whopping 207 formally released cast recordings charting.
This is not to say Glee is necessarily good. More often than not, the writing moved past dark humor to objective cruelty, many plotlines were gallingly implausible, the characterization became wildly inconsistent as additional seasons were added to the show’s contract, and the musical numbers that were not Billboard hits? The range runs from “forgettable” to “an absolute aberration of music and human decency” either in concept, execution, or both. This can be attributed, in part, to the fact that Glee was not supposed to exist, at least not in the six-season television show structure it ultimately assumed. Ryan Murphy, then mostly known for his work on Nip/Tuck, had originally pitched Glee as a standalone film, a dark comedy centered around jackass-written-as-hero Will Scheuster, the floundering director of the New Directions and his attempts at corralling a band of misfits and queen bee’s into something cohesive and victorious. That sort of format would have been a better showcase of Murphy’s vision for the project, I think—eviscerating one-liners, characters that were caricatures of the most stereotypical players in any American high school singing songs just earnest and well-performed enough to have you rooting for Will and his crew of underdogs. The pilot—which I personally believe is one of the best pilot episodes of the twenty-first century—was even shot as such, its lighting, writing, and production mirroring the energy of the great coming of age comedies of the 2000s in whose tradition it was trying to follow. No, we were never meant to hang around McKinley long. So what gave the show its staying power?
The most enduring fascinating aspect of Glee, beyond its absolutely ridiculous plotlines and delightfully hateable characters, is that the music is nearly entirely covers. A handful of original songs surfaced throughout the show’s tenure–though more often these compositions were to serve as comedic relief, such as diva Rachel lamenting only childhood as a life-defining plight, or Mean Lesbian cheerleader Santana mocking human sunshine Sam Evans’ giant lips under the guise of a sultry ballad–but the heart of Glee’s power laid in the writers’ ability to weave songs into the plots, or sometimes to build plots around them. Glee’s incorporation of songs frequently felt similar to making music videos out of songs on your walkman in your head in the backseat of the car, a reclamation of something universal into something personal. The covers did something deeply appealing to the show’s teenage audience; it gifted the characters agency over their stories and the characterization and often allowed them to be empowered in the face of adolescent tumult, such as a breakup or homophobic bullying.
The latter serves as one of the backdrops for the sixth episode of season two, “Never Been Kissed.” Kurt Hummel, the only out gay student at McKinley, has become the primary target of closeted jock-bully Dave Karofsky’s ire, and despite his efforts, the combined abuse from Karofsky and general homophobic jabs from the other guys in the glee club is getting to him. In a moment of desperation, Kurt seeks to transfer to a safer space, an unrealistically egalitarian all-boys school, Dalton Academy. Enter the Warblers, the school’s so-called rockstar a cappella group, helmed by the disarmingly charming Blaine Anderson, Kurt’s immediate crush and eventual husband. Blaine welcomes Kurt to Dalton with casual ease, smirking while referring to him over and over as “new kid” and briefly answering Kurt’s questions about a current ruckus in the halls—the Warblers are about to perform.
The Warblers play an interesting role in the Glee Cinematic Universe. In their introductory episode, Kurt quips that everyone on the team is gay—an observation which is quickly and comically refuted by the extremely queer-coded men on the team saying they have girlfriends. Blaine is one of the few out gay members of the team, and yet, thanks to Darren Criss’ undeniable charisma, Blaine is also a further point of heterosexual desire for viewers and characters alike. The show riffs on this numerous times, with gaggles of girls from sister schools and leads such as Rachel and Tina alike falling for him over the span of criss’ tenure on the show. He is the ultimate conduit for desire and accessibility, the perfect vessel for any sort of queer longing.
The vast majority of things that happened on Glee were entirely removed from any iteration of reality; the production quality of the New Directions multitudinous musical numbers (both in rehearsal for competition and in their everyday lives) is the most consistently jarring. The contrasting implausible grandiosity and polish of the McKinley high numbers is part of what gives the Warblers and their off the cuff a capeplla so much charm. Sure—the simple-but-cohesive choreography raises some eyebrows, the tendency to burst into song would likely be frowned upon in a school with such an upstanding reputation as Dalton Academy’s, and it defies statistics that there is a THIRD high school with this much musical talent in the same general area of Ohio. But the notion that a handful of guys have a similar enough taste in music to be familiar with the same sort of songs and know how to spontaneously harmonize beautifully after frequently rehearsing together? A pass for grounded plausibility in and out of the Glee cinematic universe. More than just being semi-realistic, the Warblers make their music seem effortless.
But we—Kurt and the audience—don’t know any of this, not yet. Now, the two walk down the hall, hand-in-hand in slow motion, until they reach a crowded library-lounge filled with smiling, excitable students, where Blaine then leads the Warblers in an impromptu rendition of noted pop masterpiece and anthem of gay longing, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”.
Fewer things are queerer than unabashed longing and a sense of temporality, the two main ingredients of many of pop music’s all time greatest hits, including “Teenage Dream”. The song opens with a single guitar chord, the instrumentals multiplying in measure as the first verse builds and Perry’s desire grows, bursting at the chorus into full pop bliss as the singer fully surrenders to her longing and is moved to confession. The composition, to me, perfectly mirrors the rhythms of falling in love. A breath hitched and held when luck allows you to see your crush’s smile; a fluttering heartbeat whenever you get to have a conversation and your connection deepens; the clarity and simultaneous trepidation that sits in the core of your stomach upon realizing how much this person means to you; the ecstasy igniting every nerve ending when you give into the possibility that maybe, just maybe, all of this could be reciprocated, too, that you’ve both simultaneously been struck by lightning.
Part of “Teenage Dream’”s queer charm lies with the track featuring ungendered pronouns, instead addressing the beloved simply as an admired “you” and an aspirational “we”, allowing the listener to imagine whoever and whatever they desire while they listen.
No regrets, just love. You could be young forever. These simple sort of sentiments, desire laid bare in obvious jubilance, entice you to fall in love deeper than you ever thought possible because it helps you believe it’s the most natural thing in the world.
I didn’t know what I wanted from love as a teenager. I didn’t even know what love was supposed to look like. And who could blame me? I was coming of age during my parents’ drawn-out divorce in the era of Team Edward v Team Jacob. It’s hard to discern what’s healthy, what’s aspirational, when the examples available to you include things like the unsalvageable love of two people who care deeply for each other yet are incompatible and impossibly handsome, nearly-abusively possessive young men too absorbed in their own senses of duty and honor to see what their beloved deserves or needs. 
More than this, I also had yet to realize that I was queer. Of course, on some level, I knew—I’d taken and re-taken innumerable poorly-coded personality quizzes named things like “r u gay?” and “if you score more then 60 on this quiz ur a lezzy” and consistently gotten results saying I was bisexual—but I didn’t KNOW. It was the mid aughts; I lived in southern Virginia and went to a tiny Catholic school. I was afraid of what these results could mean, all at once exhilarated at the possibility of something resonating on that level and so deeply terrified at what would come as a result of that resonance. I spent nearly every night huddled under the green and pink paisley covers in my bedroom wishing, willing, begging for this thing about me to change, literally trying to pray the gay away. 
So much of being a teenager is not knowing who you want to be; it’s much more daunting when you’re constantly bucking at any discoveries of who you might be. I was obsessed with love and yet I didn’t know what I wanted from it. I wanted distance and I wanted intimacy. I wanted to be desired but to be alone. I wanted a boyfriend, a girlfriend. I wanted to BE a boyfriend, a girlfriend. It was too much for me to square in my mind. I fell in love with so many people who could never love me back, building walls without even realizing, protecting myself from the realization of dreams I wouldn’t dare admit to myself I was having. I was overwhelmed, but I knew, deep down, I wanted to feel like I’d been struck by lightning.
“Be my teenage dream tonight” Blaine sings directly at Kurt (and to the audience, too) with so much charisma that you can’t help but acquiesce and want to run away with him tonight, too. The Warblers’ entirely a cappella rendition of the song elevated its intensity, the emotional pulses shining through thanks to staccato backing vocals and Criss’ dynamic solo performance. Stripped of the instrumentals and the production, we have unadulterated longing and exhilaration.
As the camera pans wide and out of Blaine’s gaze, we see a room full of boys pumping their fists, clumsily dancing without any hint of embarrassment, the Warblers harmonizing effortlessly (thanks to backing vocals provided by actual a cappella group the Tufts Beelzebubs) over Blaine’s passionate solo. It’s a space of performance and queer love and the performance of queer love and it’s most normal, flawless thing in the world, a point driven home by shots of Kurt being nearly stunned to tears amidst a tableau of is teenage dream coming true.
This illusion is, of course, short lived. Kurt does not last long at Dalton (he doesn’t even make it the full episode). Before he and Blaine eventually marry several years later, they will break up, cheat, fight. Blaine briefly dates the very tormentor whose taunting drove Kurt to Dalton in the first place. The show has the wherewithal to play into this temporality; two seasons later, Blaine reprises “Teenage Dream” as a somber solo after he cheats. Of course the dream is short-lived; it was always going to be, as is the nature of dreams. The temporality doesn’t negate the beauty of the moment, however: rather, it heightens it, the serenity and exhilaration all the more delicious in its rarity.
Be my teenage dream. Fall in love with me with the ease and fervor of someone who doesn’t know what kind of work goes into love, what kind of heartbreak lies on the other side, just for tonight. The most natural thing in the world.
Rewatching Glee multiple times throughout the last two years has enabled me to do an embarrassing amount of inner child work. I’ve done a great deal of growing since I was the teenager obsessed with Glee and afraid of myself, but that sort of growth is not complete without allowing yourself to access the things you were denied.
Though I have not always known what I wanted love to look like, I had an inkling of what I wanted it to feel like—I love music, so I wanted it to feel like a love song, all of the glitz and glamour and grandiosity and intimacy and also the ever-present impermanence mingled into the abundant possibility. I could imagine someone impossible—Blaine Anderson, my best friend, a faceless Anybody—serenading to and being serenaded by me and briefly access the sensation of a dreamy love to which I so nebulously aspired.
I’ve passed a large part of the last year falling in love so naturally and imperceptibly I didn’t realize it was happening. A smirk here, butterflies there, a feeling of serenity sitting in the deepest pits of my stomach every so often that are just a smidge too big to comfortable interrogate for more than a moment. The only clue? An hours-long playlist called “smitten” I’d been building here and there month over month while talking with the twitter mutual who would later become my girlfriend, the layer between myself and the performers providing an adequate barrier between myself and my confusing swirl of emotions. I did not process what was driving this at first—I just happen to love a lot of love songs, and they happen to get stuck in my head after I spent time with her—until a week before our first date (which, in a pseudo-adolescent way, we both refused to believe was a date), the Warblers’ rendition of “Teenage Dream” came on shuffle, and it felt like I’d been absolutely stunned in place, electrified. I listened to it seven more times, pacing around my empty apartment.
My beloved knows I’m afraid of the mysteries of love and the complexity it entails, knows this is my first relationship—long past my teenage years—and it doesn’t scare her off. She takes it as a challenge to love me better than I’ve ever dreamed possible. She consistently succeeds.
During our first extended date months later (a weekend hanging out in my apartment), she gathers me into her arms on the couch, looks into my eyes for an eternal moment, and begins to quietly, sillily sing “Teenage Dream” to me. I join in, my terrible voice doing the opposite of harmonizing with her much better vocals, until our spontaneous song ends and we dissolve into a puddle of giggles and tender hugs. It’s a small moment, one in a sequence of many off-the-cuff serenades she’s gifted to me, but to me it’s the mundanity of what would have been a show stopping moment in my adolescent musings that is transcendent—the way it happens and then it ends and we’re still here. Love with the ease of a teenage dream. The most natural thing in the world.

Moira McAvoy lives, writes, and tweets in Washington DC. McAvoy has served on the editorial staff of NANO Fiction, The Rappahannock Review, and Bad For You; work can be found in The Rumpus, Storyscape, The Financial Diet, wig-wag, and others. Glee should never be rebooted.