(11) Big Country, “In a Big Country”
HEARTBROKE
(10) Godley & Creme, “Cry”
337-207
AND WILL PLAY IN THE ELITE 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/22/23.

ADAM O. DAVIS ON “IN A BIG COUNTRY”

I’M NOT EXPECTING TO GROW FLOWERS IN THE DESERT

This may be true. A long time ago, a group of intrepid Scots, fed up with Viking pillaging and English incursion, built a boat and sailed west into parts unknown. After months of seafaring, the unknown part they encountered was what would come to be called Florida. Paradisical as it may be to the contemporary European tourist, it was not then to those wanderlusting Scots. This was before Miami, before DEET, before Epcot. The weather was too hot and the alligators too dragon-like. So said Scots got back into their boat and headed north where they found a craggy outpost of frigid rock and, finding it so much like home, named it Nova Scotia. New Scotland. And there they remained for centuries in a familiar cold far, far away from the prospect of vacation rentals and fan boats.

I CAN LIVE AND BREATHE AND SEE THE SUN IN WINTERTIME

The title of Big Country’s biggest hit, “In a Big Country,” achieves the rare feat of namechecking the band that performs it without sounding trite (consider how poorly U2 might have fared with “With or Without U2” or Queen with “Queen Will Rock You” or Def Leppard with “Pour Some Sugar on Joe Elliot”). It creates a kind of aural Droste effect: Big Country plays a song about being in a big country which may be Big Country. Or, the land is the band is the land. And the band is of the land. Formed in 1981 between the Firth of Tay and Firth of Fourth—right where the upper teeth would be in the anthropomorphic mouth of the old Walker’s crisps adverts—Big Country sounds Scottish. Deeply Scottish. But it ain’t because of the bagpipes. Namely because there are none.

IN A BIG COUNTRY DREAMS STAY WITH YOU

Scotland is an iconoclastic country. Idiosyncratic and proud. Where Cola-Cola comes in second to the national soda of choice, Irn-Bru, whose famously rusty hue (“Made in Scotland from girders”)—the result of two colorants that require a warning label about the potential for causing ADHD in children—is so potent at staining carpets (and everything else) that it has, according to The Scotsman, “become the liquid of choice among unscrupulous individuals looking to fool their insurance firms.” This mixture of national pride and stubborn defiance is something of a Scottish hallmark. The kind of polarity that makes for potent mixture of myth and commerce, particularly when applied to the more unique aspects of Scottish culture. Say Scotch. Or bagpipes. Or tartans. Or Nessie, haggis, Robert Burns, shortbread, Irvine Welsh novels, the proper maintenance of dilithium crystals, and the best James Bond ever. In this, there’s something indisputably tangible about the idea of Scotland in the things of Scotland—or, at least, the ideas foreigners have about Scotland (particularly those foreigners who, like me, claim Scottish ancestry). An idea that has something to do with longing. Longing for old places. And for new ones.

THAT’S A DESPERATE WAY TO LOOK FOR SOMEONE WHO IS STILL A CHILD

My middle initial stands for Ogilvie. The name of the Scottish clan my ancestors belonged to. They had a castle (in ruins), a tartan (quite tasteful), and a motto (“a fin,” Latin for “to the end”). They were, I’ve been told, horse thieves and priests. The horse thieves were hanged. It’s upon this past that I hang my hedging ways—he who’d love to be a bankrobber if only he could handle the guilt. But there’s another version of this story. One without piety and executions and in their place a bit of social climbing, a man looking to move up in the world by adopting his wife’s name as his own. A tale of aspiration rather than expiration. Less fun that the first but more honest. How a person finds their way out of one life and into another. What they give up to get somewhere better.

YOU CAN’T STAY HERE WITH EVERY SINGLE HOPE YOU HAD SHATTERED

Big Country is a tale of two bands. The first—the Skids—begat the second—the aforementioned B.C. Despite commercial success and opening for The Clash, Stuart Adamson was frustrated by the lack of creative control he had in the Skids, so he gave it up and found new bandmates—guitarist Bruce Watson, bassist Tony Butler, and drummer Mark Brzezicki—and named his new band Big Country. In doing so, he named the sound and the weight of his ambition. Something epic, something Scottish, something that would redeem the dreams he held for the sonic landscape in his head. Knowing this, in “In a Big Country,” I believe Adamson’s singing to Adamson, exhorting himself Mickey Goldmill-style to rise up from off the floor screaming and fulfill his musical promise. To keep striving against the odds. To succeed. The plea is equal parts desperation, defiance, and hope. And it worked. And then it didn’t.

SO TAKE THAT LOOK OUT OF HERE IT DOESN’T FIT YOU

If there was a shadow over Big Country, it was U2 though, ironically, U2 had initially been in their shadow—or at least debt. If Adamson’s first band was an inspiration to U2 (who covered their song, “The Saints Are Coming,” with Green Day in 2006), his second band was their doppelgänger. Outside of the Edge’s jangling atmospherics there’s no more iconic guitar sound from the 1980s than that of Stuart Adamson’s Fender Stratocaster filtered through many a foot pedal. And in the beginning it seemed that the scales of success were tipped in Big Country’s favor. John Peel, the legendary British musical kingmaker, rejected U2’s advances but praised Adamson as “a new Jimi Hendrix.” Even the Edge went on to claim at Adamson’s funeral that Big Country wrote the songs U2 wished they had written. Both bands even the same producer—Steve Lillywhite—who in 1983 produced U2’s War, Simple Mind’s Sparkle in the Rain, and Big Country’s The Crossing. There was no doubt this band could deliver. And they did. And then, somehow, it wasn’t enough. Part of it was timing. Burnt out by the band’s success and drinking too much, Adamson threatened to quit Big Country in 1985. Though he may not have been serious, gossip turned it definitive and Bob Geldof, believing they’d broken up, didn’t invite them to perform at Live Aid where U2 played to tremendous results. Their star ascendant while Big Country’s faltered, perhaps also thanks to the flexibility they had that Big Country didn’t. Though deeply Irish, U2 never sounded Irish in the way Big Country sounded Scottish. They slipped musical skins while Big Country proudly grew further into theirs. They were the country and the country was them.

CRY OUT FOR EVERYTHING YOU EVER MIGHT HAVE WANTED

How to create a hit Scottish single:

Exhibit A: The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”

Exhibit B: Travis’ “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?”

Exhibit C: Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out”

Exhibit D: Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night”

Each song is a stone-cold Caledonian classic whose beat is that of a military tattoo (sometimes lilting, sometimes lashing) and whose chorus is that of a Hibs match. But none of them surpass the anthemic beauty of “In a Big Country.” None can touch its ecstatic folk harmonies whose ear-blistering guitarwork threatens—but never falls into—anarchy. Though the aforementioned songs pack plenty of punch—The Proclaimers’ charmingly irreverent ambulatory romance, Travis’ rousing faux-miserable ode to precipitation, Franz Ferdinand’s stomping kata-like plea for love or assassination, and the Bay City Rollers’ orthographic celebration of S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night and all the things that might happen (dancing, rock and roll, solemn declarations of love) on said night—none can hold a candle to Big Country’s barbaric yawp delivered by way of an MXR Pitch Transposer (I repeat: There are no bagpipes in this song) that’s the musical equivalent of, God help me, William Wallace yelling alba gu bràth for four straight minutes. The song is pure rabblerousing joy. A cathartic scream against insignificance, against despair. A demented highland jig (see: the jaunty fling two be-denimed lads conduct onstage during a live performance by the band on The Tube) blasted out of a cannon as soon as the drums—rat-tat-tata-tat! rat-tat-tata-tat!—kick in. And that twin guitar attack. It’s like eagles. Like how eagles would shriek. If they were electronic and joyfully aflame. 

ANOTHER PROMISE FALLEN THROUGH ANOTHER SEASON PASSES BY YOU

On December 29th, 1993, Big Country played a show at Glasgow’s Barrowlands. After thanking the audience and before launching into “In a Big Country,” Stuart Adamson says “I’ve got just one more thing to say. Stay alive.”

LIKE A LOVER’S VOICE FIRES THE MOUNTAINSIDE

Not shot in the Big Country itself but Dorset, the music video plays like a low-budget The Goonies. The band is on a treasure hunt. The treasure: a box marked BIG COUNTRY. But keeping Big Country from finding Big Country is a suitably emo PVC-clad woman who spends three-minutes-and-forty-five seconds committing robbery, setting houses on fire, punching the lead singer in the face for no reason, and totally smoking the band on their Zodiac raft as she blasts by on a Sea-Doo (have I mentioned how vehicle-heavy this video is?). But then she finds herself stranded in a cove where Adamson rescues her by abseiling (that’s rappelling to you Yanks) down a cliff for which he receives a chaste hug and some handholding. But! The drummer discovers the stolen box in a kelp bed. The band has found the treasure. The treasure of themselves. In the background of all this, the band performs in the kind of smoky, laser-lit netherworld all Thatcher-era bands were contractually obliged to film videos in. They play on as the song fades in that classic 1980’s way that suggests the song never ends. Which, in the case of this song, it never does. No matter where you might find yourself in the world, it’s on the radio somewhere. 

I THOUGHT PAIN AND TRUTH WERE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTERED

When considering the suicide of an artist the question inevitably arises: Did their work point to their end? Such thinking often provides for a kind of grieving hagiography whose emphasis on a throughline from art to death isn’t for the artist’s benefit but the audience’s. Ah, we say, now it all makes sense. Now we can move on. But “In a Big Country” isn’t a song you can move on from. There’s something tidal about it, the way it ebbs and flows between joy and despair—a tension that, when balanced right, makes for timeless tunes. How the propulsive, arpeggiated drive of the melody nearly overwhelms the lyrical darkness whose growing pleas to cry out for everything you might have ever wanted become more triumphant the more desperate they grow. A song that’s as much war cry as cry for help. But maybe I’m reading too much into it. As the band’s drummer, Mark Brzezicki told Classic Rock, “Only in hindsight I’ve started looking at the lyrics and I’m starting to go, ‘Hang on a minute—the writing’s there. This guy was saying it all along.’ Or was he? I don’t know.”

I NEVER TOOK THE SMILE AWAY FROM ANYBODY’S FACE

Roughly 300 million years ago, Scotland was a volcanic vacation spot slowly making way for the incoming Atlantic Ocean. Where once it had been fused to America and Europe, it would eventually head north where its tropical temperament would be cooled by ice sheets. Both Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat sit on extinct volcanoes so Oahu must have looked strangely familiar to the boy who had grown up in Dunfermline near the Lomond Hills. So far from home and yet home, this Scotsman seeking paradise. This Scotsman who, suffering increasingly from alcoholism, found the sun in wintertime. On December 16th, 2001, nearly a month after being reported missing, Adamson would be found dead in his Honolulu hotel room.

BECAUSE IT’S HAPPENED DOESN’T MEAN YOU’VE BEEN DISCARDED

Countries are ideas we give bodies to. Those bodies ideas we call home. Songs, too, are like countries. They speak to who we were before we became who we are and who we hope we might still become. Ambition and reality filtered through the alchemy of a name. “In a Big Country” is a country unto itself. A great country, this song-shaped country. That it was Big Country’s only top 20 American hit doesn’t diminish it—it makes it all the more precious. We have to hold tight to such miracles, such songs that demand, like Rilke demanded, that we change our lives. That we get up screaming. That we stay alive.

Adam O. Davis learned to read and write in Scotland. He’d also drink an Irn-Bru over a Coke any day of the week. He’s the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), the recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Award and the 2016 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his work has appeared in The Believer, The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. More at www.adamodavis.com.

In It for the Vibes: kathleen rooney On the Ecstatic Trembling of “Cry” by Godley and Creme and Miami Vice

Some people are night owls. Not me; I’m a lark. This fact has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with biology—I am incapable of sleeping much past 5:30 am. My brain stirs around dawn and makes me wake up, fully and irrevocably, no matter what I’ve done the night before. Consequently, I’ve never been a nocturnal partier. On the few occasions that I have stayed up from dusk to daybreak without at minimum a couple hours’ slumber, I have wanted to die.
Or at least to cry, which is the subject of this essay: the English soft rock duo Godley and Creme’s bravura 1985 song “Cry,” about which more soon. But for now, suffice to say that my identity as a morning person means that—despite my abiding affinity for music and all its power—I’ve never been one to hang out on the dancefloor until sunrise.  
This lack of lived experience of nightlife has left me ignorant in certain areas, including the function and expertise of DJs, those crepuscular people who—with their crates of records or bins of CDs or laptops of digital audio files or whatever—play recorded music before a live audience.
I didn’t realize it last January, but 2022 was destined to be the year that I finally understood and subsequently appreciated what it is that DJs do exactly. After decades of thinking that they just sort of threw together a playlist and played it, I apprehended that their role is more metaphysical. I mean, I now know that they use mixers and crossfaders and cues to align beats and craft transitions and manipulate rhythms and tempos and so forth, but my epiphany relates more to their manipulation of vibes—the responsibility they take for a non-stop flow not merely of music but of transportive feeling.
In true lark style, I came to this knowledge not by encountering it in person under cover of darkness, but by reading. Late in June, I served as the interlocutor for my friend Andy Farkas at Madison Street Books here in Chicago in support of his fantastic essay collection The Great Indoorsman. A deliberate self-conscious artificiality characterizes his work, and when I asked for some of his recent reads with similar traits, he recommended Sphinx, the 1986 debut novel by the French author Anne F. Garréta.
Andy has taste worth being influenced by. I devoured the love story’s 152 pages, pages in which Garréta reveals the gender of neither her unnamed first-person narrator, nor the narrator’s lover A***, a feat which helped Garréta become only the third female member of Oulipo—the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, meaning the “workshop of potential literature”—a loose collection of primarily French-speaking authors who use linguistic and mathematical constraints to create their work. [1]

Through a macabre plot twist best left unrevealed, the protagonist blunders into the position of DJ at a prestigious and decadent 1980s Parisian night club. There, they are shocked into the insight that “To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult.” As they practice this mystical craft, they discover that:

Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try—utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure—to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy, nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song), subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill.

In other words, DJs rely on shared instinctive feeling. And what is a shared instinctive feeling if not a vibe?
The noun “vibe” originates in 1940, short for “vibraphone,” which itself is a 1926 hybrid of “vibrato” and “phone,” with vibrato arising in 1867 and meaning “a tremulous effect in music” from the Latin vibratus: “to turn, to vacillate, or to tremble ecstatically.” 
All these variations relate to the word “vibration,” cropping up in English in the 1650s from the Latin vibrationem: “a shaking, a brandishing, a setting in tremulous motion.” The word vibe’s denotation of an intuitive signal about a person, place, or thing became popular in the late 1960s (think of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” [2]) but has roots as far back as 1893, when Frank Earl Ornsby's astrology text The Law and the Prophets used the expression “good vibrations” to mean “positive energy.” [3]
In August, not long after I became a Sphinx enthusiast, I participated in a one-off show put on by my friend Andrew Tham (these Andrews—they know what’s hip) and his ever-evolving project/band big TEEN, a Chicago-based DIY arts scene concerned with live music and performance. At the end of the evening, a DJ—Andrew’s buddy Chris, then performing as Donna Somersault, but whose actual DJ name is Disco Crystal—did a 15-minute set during which he challenged himself to play as many vinyl records as possible during the allotted time. He did 13, and probably could have done more, but when he put on Gloria Gaynor’s Spanish-language version of “I Will Survive,” everybody danced in such goofy ecstasy that he let it play in its entirety as the set’s conclusion.[4]
Experiencing Chris’s work reinforced—physically, empirically—what Sphinx had taught me about the athleticism and mysticism that combine in the labor that a DJ executes. Dork that I am, I recommended Garréta’s book to Chris afterwards as I delivered my compliments.
To round out 2022’s unexpected DJ-appreciation trifecta, in October, I read Ed Caesar’s New Yorker profile of the DJ Mladen Solomun, the so-called King of Ibiza who plays the island’s oldest night club Pacha at least 20 Sundays a year, cultivating a cult-like following.
In a passage in which he quotes Ed Frenkel, a Berkeley math professor and Solumun devotee, Caesar writes:

“He never played the same way,” Frenkel recalled. “It took me some time to realize that he actually had a much stronger bond with his audience than most d.j.s did.” It wasn’t that Solomun gave listeners exactly what they wanted, Frenkel said—he simply knew “what channel of communication was open with this particular audience and would operate along that channel.” A Solomun set, he told me, returns us “to that space we had as children, mesmerized by music, mesmerized by looking at the starry night sky.” He went on, “The function of the d.j. is to preside over the ceremony. He is the priest, or the shaman.”

Solomun himself says, “I want to have fun. If I’m not having fun, I can’t transmit the happiness.” And what are vibes but the transmission of emotion from a source, as well as an emotional reaction to the transmission of that aura? [5]
The aura transmitted by Godley and Creme’s “Cry” with its minimalist melody and massive bassline is unsettling and tense, pentatonic and propulsive, simultaneously melancholic and soaring, a sobbing rhythm appropriate to its title and owing much to the production of Trevor Horn from The Art of Noise [6]. “Cry” captures more than its simple lyrics suggest—that people in love often cheat and lie—and it does so on the level of emotion more than intellect. As John L. Walters writes in the Independent, “If you were looking for a sound, a single note, to sum up postwar Western pop music, the long, high, crying G-sharp at the end of the line would have to be a contender.” Apparently, Godley and Creme are admirers of Debussy, which makes sense because Debussy too dwells in the realm of transcendent ineffability, given his status as arguably the first Impressionist composer.
Outside of their previous band 10cc’s oeuvre (the standout of which is perhaps 1978’s yacht rock classic “I’m Not in Love,” with its ethereal multitracked backing vocals), “Cry” became Godley and Creme’s only Top 40 hit in the United States, making it to Number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. They also directed the innovative video for the song, a black-and-white masterpiece featuring a series of diverse faces lip syncing, mixing and fading into one another by way of dissolves and wipes.

This virtuosity in what was still, in the 1980s, a relatively novel genre proved significant to both Godley and Creme, who directed over 50 of that decade’s most important music videos, including “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock, “Don’t Give Up” by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung, and “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran to name a few. As Glen Levy writes in Time, “The entire medium of music video owes Kevin Godley and Lol Creme an enormous debt.”
Even if they depict distinct characters and narratives, what the best music videos are “about” more than anything else is vibes: a moodboard to support the sentiment of the song. Vibes in videos—and everywhere else, really—are atmospheric, miasmic. A smell almost. A room spray for the mind. Operating in a lyrical mode as opposed to a sequential or argumentative one, vibes express and evoke idiosyncratic emotions. They make an audience get the vapors. They—like the lover who doesn’t “even know how to say goodbye” in Godley and Creme’s hit—can make you wanna cry.
Given the song’s chart success and the ubiquity of the video on the not-yet-five-years-old MTV, I must have heard “Cry” unwittingly somewhere in the background over the course of my lifetime. Yet neither commercial radio nor cable television are how I recall first encountering “Cry.” No, that encounter came as a result of “Definitely Miami,” the twelfth episode of the second season of Miami Vice, an episode which premiered on January 10, 1986 in which Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs must take down underworld figure Charlie Basset, played to icky straggly-haired perfection by the also icky-in-real life Ted Nugent.

Being only five years old myself at the time, I also did not encounter this episode when it initially aired, but rather as a result of my being married to esteemed March Xness co-competitor Martin Seay. A Michael Mann afficionado, Martin had recounted many a thrilling detail of the show to me over the years. I was intrigued. Miami Vice sounded less like a plot-driven cop show and more like a tone poem—an ode to the sun-drenched, cocaine-dusted decaying Art Deco milieu of a subtropical city when greed was good and Don Johnson thought he had a shot at a music career. In short, it sounded like a show that was mostly about vibes.
The origins of Miami Vice are the stuff of elevator pitch legend. NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff (apocryphally anyway) wrote a two-word napkin memo, “MTV Cops,” signaling his desire to cash in on the triumph of the channel. Memo recipient Anthony Yerkovich, a writer and producer whose work included the award-winning police procedural Hill Street Blues, drew inspiration from a recently passed asset forfeiture law that allowed law enforcement agencies to seize property from the criminals they prosecuted and use it in departmental operations. Yerkovich drafted a script about a team of Miami-based vice cops trying to stop the influx of narcotics into their metropolis.
In a crucial development for vibes everywhere, and possibly the very invention of the 80s themselves, the pilot episode, “Brother’s Keeper,” features Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” playing over an indelible scene of Crockett and Tubbs driving around the neon-lit city at night, one of the first instances of a pop song being woven into a show in this manner. For all its implication of a narrative, “In the Air Tonight” is really a song about vibes, because implication is all there is—we get a huge mood but we don’t get the whole story.
Shot on location and adhering to executive producer Michael Mann’s dictum “No Earth tones,” the show was broadcast in stereophonic sound, a newish development which allowed Miami Vice to incorporate a move that—along with the palette—made the show stand out from its competitors: the assertive inclusion of pop music to enhance and advance the action to the point where each installment is basically a 46- to 49-minute music video. These high production values meant that each episode cost about $1.3 million to make, 30% more than the average cop show, a sum which appears to have been spent almost entirely on vibes.
Obviously, when Miami Vice became available on Netflix in 2014, Martin and I watched the hell out of it, savoring the pastel t-shirts worn under white linen suits and the sharp-dressed cartel bosses and the speedboats darting across aqua waters and the suitcases full of money and the Ferraris driving intensely around at night, all set to the most iconic popular songs of the era, not to mention the numerous cameos by musicians including Willie Nelson and Sheena Easton and Little Richard and Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen and Barbra Streisand and too many more to list exhaustively here.
In a show that saturates itself with vibes, “Definitely Miami” is super-saturated thanks to its last six minutes being set to Godley and Creme’s “Cry,” a pairing that the Miami Vice Fandom Wiki tells me “is considered by many fans to be one of the defining scenes of Vice as a show and among the best endings of the second season.” It totally is.
When the theme of this year’s March Xness tournament—one-hit wonders of the 1980s—was announced, I vowed to write about “Cry.” Tragically, my number did not come up in the lottery; however, I care enough about this song that I wrote a whole essay about it for an out-of-competition spot. Talking about “Cry” and its immaculate vibes and the use of those vibes in “Definitely Miami” means that much to me. But then. In an expedient plot development befitting one of the later and admittedly less impressive seasons of Miami Vice, someone dropped out, a spot opened up, and here I am, applying my powers of persuasion to gain your votes—to “play the game” as the lyrics have it.
Over the course of their investigation into Basset/Nugent’s malfeasance, Sonny becomes romantically involved with Callie, a beautiful French-accented bikini-clad blonde who claims to be trapped in a bad marriage but is really Baset’s moll.
Many an intricacy pops up in solving this crime, but these intricacies are not the point. They are merely the set-up to the culmination in which “Cry” plays during the satisfying scene in which we watch real-life NRA shill and racist sleazebag Nugent get his violent comeuppance, and Sonny sees to it that his seductress—whimsically wearing an outfit with mermaid vibes and serving faux-innocent vibes by building sandcastles on the beach—gets arrested by helicopter for reasons unknown, reasons which seem mostly designed to let Sonny stop and gaze soulfully at the vehicle as his faithless lover is led away. This exquisitely soundtracked sequence is, as the kids say, a whole mood.
Watch it again; I’ll wait.
The way that Callie mistakes Sonny for Nugent before—in a wipe effect reminiscent of the original “Cry” video—she recognizes who he really is? The grace with which Sonny slides his sunglasses over his eyes, closing his face to Callie the same way he’s closing his wounded heart? His windswept pout? All those little points of light dancing on the crests of the ocean waves? The show may as well have been called Miami VIBES.
Gestures and movements, outfits and accessories. Suggestions, not statements. Insinuations not ideology. A misty glow more than a resolved shape. Vibes!
Yet some people don’t like them, or don’t find them enough at any rate. French New Wave film, for instance, like music videos and Miami Vice, is also largely “about” vibes. A cinephile friend of Martin’s and mine who showed us many filmic treasures over the years could not stand Jean-Luc Godard. This friend is a smart person, but thought Breathless was dumb. Boring. At the time, I couldn’t explain to him why it was neither dumb nor boring to me, but now I see, wit of the staircase-style: vibes.
This friend also hated the oeuvre of David Lynch, which again now makes sense, because every Lynch movie is vibes up to here.[7] Relatedly, this friend claimed that he could never “get” poetry, and—knowing I’m a professor of it—frequently wanted me to explain it to him, which past a certain point I could not do, because ultimately, poetry is often also very much about vibes. A vibe-oriented approach encourages and enables the audience to do what it wants in terms of its experience of the work, whatever its genre or medium, instead of insisting on particular rigid interpretations. Alas, some people just can’t let themselves vibe to that.
Another cinephile friend, fellow March Xness essayist Robert Puccinelli recently wrote a perceptive review of George Franju’s elegant and upsetting 1960 horror movie Eyes Without a Face. His final paragraph about the film’s conclusion captures the essence of the lyrical apprehension produced when an artist turns from the hardness of narrative to the softness of vibes: 

The poetry of the ending doesn't make any concrete sense, but it does make poetic sense. The feeling of loss and desperation is simultaneously suffused with a feeling of acceptance (you don’t have to understand; just follow your intuitions and be) which feels like a form of freedom, of release for the viewer. You leave the movie feeling strangely exhilarated, almost uplifted: artists have worked on you and filled you with an unnamable longing. This longing can never be satisfied, but its beautiful desperation doesn't feel like a lack because the film that gives it to you is whole and complete and perfect and perfectly beautiful.

Intuitiveness and being—yes. Vibes! They are less about sense than about sensation. They afford a poetics of feeling, if you will. Vibes tend to be more closely related to poetry and music than to story or philosophy for how they use rhythms and images as ends unto themselves, not necessarily to advance a narrative or point.

You can catch a vibe like you can catch a ball, a thief, or a cold—actively and enthusiastically, aggressively and with great intention, or passively and unwillingly. Sometimes with a bad vibe, you’re curious—you peek at it suspiciously through a door held shut only by a short brass chain, but it seeps in anyway. Other times, a vibe hits you like a convulsion and you want to be rocked. Music is a way to choose what vibe you want to invite in, or to let somebody else offer that vibe up for you.
In Veronica, her novel about the hedonistic milieu of fashion models in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill captures music’s superb function as a conduit for vibes. At 17, Alison, the protagonist, says:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next—songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

Significantly, before she stumbles into modeling, Alison aspires to be a poet [8]. As a character, she’s drawn magnetically to vibe-centric pursuits.
As I bid farewell to 2022, year of my discovery of the magic of DJs, I doubt that I’ll be catching vibes on late-night dance floors. Luckily, I can catch them in a lot of other places. I can keep vibing over and over to the last six minutes of “Definitely Miami,” for example. I can cue up “Cry” again and again like a spell that Godley and Creme have put out there for me and for everyone when we need to cast a peculiar enchantment over ourselves, permeating everything with emotional intensity, becoming the vibesmiths of our souls.
In 2015, I noticed that my DePaul student Jireh, an awesome poet and artist, always signed their emails “vibes.” I liked that a lot, and so with that I will leave you.

Vibes,
Kathleen

[1] High-fives to the translator Emma Ramadan for getting the book’s genderlessness and atmosphere of sex-and-death—its vibe!—to shine in English, too.

[2] Brian Wilson wanted to call the song “Good Vibes,” but lyricist Tony Asher argued that doing so would be a “lightweight use of the language” and that the full word would sound less “trendy.”

[3] One hundred years later in 1993, producers Quincy Jones and David Salzman launched the hip hop and R&B-focused magazine Vibe.

[4] Gratitude to this show for starting at 5:30 pm and therefore ending comfortably before my preferred bedtime.

[5] Steve Hulme, Pacha’s booker, pursued Solomun for the club’s Sunday slot because, as he put it, “It was the kind of music girls liked. There was just a vibe about him—there was a vibe about the label, the name Solomun was really cool.”

[6] As followers of Xness may remember, The Art of Noise is a band I like whose collaboration with Welsh nonpareil Tom Jones I wrote about last year for March Faxness.

[7] For instance, this music video interlude in Mulholland Drive where Rebekah del Rio performs a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” is one of the most mesmerizing covers of all time.

[8] While we’re in the neighborhood, Frank Báez has a fantastic poem called “Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ” that examines the similarities and differences between the two vocations.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in September by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.