the sweet 16
(8) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll”
laid low
(4) Flo Rida, “Low” (feat. T-Pain)
252-243
and will play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/19/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
The Truth About "Low": caroline macon fleischer on Flo Rida and T-Pain
You should only continue reading if you are willing to accept the truth. Because once you become aware of the truth, you will be different. You will withdraw like a shadow into a weaker, surrendered corner of yourself.
If you dare to know at this cost, here goes:
“Low” is a song about doomed love. Everything is a song about doomed love. Once it happens to you.
After it happens, for the rest of your whole life, you’ll hear songs differently from most people. When the DJ puts “Low” on and everyone on the dance floor pushes chest-to-chest, lap-to-lap, you’ll shy away in your feelings. You’ll cross your arms and reconsider the lyrics, fixating on the thousands of freckly disco lights chasing each other across the wall. Some chase one another playfully like Duck, Duck, Goose. Others stay back, more reserved.
You’ll know which of the dots you are, which ones share your personality. You’ll remember you used to like dancing, before love was revealed and you watched it get fractured.
You’ll press your fingers into the space above your abs and between your ribs. You’ll be thankful for your diaphragm, a muscle which seems to give you the release you need dependably, helping you let go.
Because before you knew the truth, you had a good, long standing relationship with “Low.” You got low for the first time in eighth grade, you purchased baggy sweatpants in its honor, you smoked countless joints listening to it, your Reeboks on the gas of that beat up Saab, that beat up Honda, that beat up Beemer, the Jetta. Swiping lip gloss in the makeup mirror. Before you knew.
Each time the song found you, you recited the lyrics by heart. You knew them at 21, pressed up against the wall by a stranger at the club and at 17, saving room for Jesus between your body and that of a guy you liked from church, despite his being so obviously gay. You knew them when you wandered the halls in the morning of this apartment and that, unsure of what to wear, and when you dressed to the nines, ready to tear it up.
But what you understand now is that “Low” is a crooning ballad, not the catchy, campy dance hit you were sold.
You’ll understand, humbly and with grand aching, it’s not about apple bottom jeans but about agonizing over someone, something, that doesn’t want to be, can’t be, in no way would possibly ever be, yours.
Now, when you get home from the club, you’ll read the lyrics like a storybook, searching for comfort—that others, too, have fallen lovesick, crazed. You’ll feel for him.
The dude’s cleaning his pockets, all in hopes that she’ll simply notice him. He digs cash and she dances. But he loves her—that’s the twist. It’s what hasn’t been shown how it is in the music video, a dusty stream of light projecting Step Up 2 on the wall.
By the end of the song, he’s out three grand. But you’ll know three grand will be the least of it, that his suffering is just at the start. The real cost is his identity, his perception of the world. The secret is that doomed love causes, without fail, a worsening poison—a psychological transposition.
Because before you fell into love like this, trees seemed to grow upward, reaching toward the sky. After you fell, you saw the truth—sure, branches and leaves appeared to grow up. But the reality was that trees grew down—a steadfast dissension of roots, hellbent on cracking the Earth’s core.
You won’t be able to shake this feeling that growth is inherently detrimental. You’ll worry that all growth is like this, breaking something along the way.
Even as you find courage to turn away from your doomed person and walk toward the sun, you’ll incur a blistering sunburn. You’ll have no choice but to turn back and look once more at this person, noticing their face has blended into the horizon.
Their disappearance into the crevice between hill and sky will remind you that one day they will die. And this will cause you great distress, because you know that if they die sooner rather than later—and probably even if they die later—you won’t be invited to the church service. Because you are doomed, too, as far as they’re all concerned.
But you can’t escape it. Because they are right. That first there was love and then there was doom and then there was nothing after. Everything else was just pretend and the truth was hiding in plain sight.
The truth is we are all down bad. We share this. We know this. We will never admit that we know this but we know. Flo Rida knows. T-Pain knows. When this sort of love is mentioned, everyone at the table will giggle in discomfort. You’ll giggle with them, but you’ll know.
Caroline Macon Fleischer is a writer, teacher, and mom living in Chicago. Her first book The Roommate is a psychological thriller that was published in 2022 and her second book, A Play About a Curse is a horror forthcoming in 2025. Beyond creepy novels, Caroline loves writing plays, films, strange honest essays, and poetry.
YEAH YEAH YEAHS’ “HEADS WILL ROLL” AND THE MONSTERS OF INFLUENCE BY ERIN KEANE
First, the invocation: Nick Zinner’s synth-ceremonial curtain-raising, an indicator that something electric and epic is about to begin. Karen O, conjured, draped in fabric, raises high her mic like the Statue of Liberty in neon kicks, and layers on her incantation: lose yourself, stop thinking so damn hard, follow your instincts, and sure, swallow some of these, maybe. You summon me like that, I tuck my flip phone I’m too broke to upgrade into the tragic pockets of my skinny jeans, point a drink to the sky, and heed the call. It’s the end of a decade that began with terror, hung together with paranoia, and was only just beginning to reveal how much we were being watched. Facebook had overtaken MySpace and Twitter was still a bunch of nerds shooting the shit, but we were excited about the president still, and it felt good to be in Chicago’s Grant Park, where he had given his election night victory speech last November, and where Yeah Yeah Yeahs were filling in as Lollapalooza headliners after the Beastie Boys bowed out because of Adam Yauch’s diagnosis. We’re two songs in when the dance anthem begins. When Brian Chase’s beat comes in, on the floor is where we already are.
A Yeah Yeah Yeahs jam, especially one like “Heads Will Roll,” is no passive experience but tell that to the bemused audience in Richard Ayoade’s floor show-turned-massacre video. (Indie rock videos were important again for a while there, thanks to music blogs.) The video opens on Zinner’s hands on a light-up synthesizer playing the overture—what Andy Thompson of the delightfully lo-fi site Planet Mellotron dismisses as “really obviously sampled strings,” sourced from the Mellotron M4000D (“described by the manufacturer as 'a Mellotron'. No. No, it isn't.”—Ibid.), and specifically, from the Sound Card 02’s Roxy SFX 2 series, which you can hear in its unadulterated state on YouTube, where in comments, Zinner’s exact sequence can be found. Then the camera pans up and across to Karen, a Queen of Hearts fancy-dress fetish dream, all cellophane and red satin and chrome studs and scarlet lips and those iconic bangs framing her kohl-rimmed eyes. Chase in shades, impenetrable, and the camera spins and we see the audience from the band’s point of view. Couples at little cloth-covered, civilized tables. Watching. Not waiting, exactly. They don’t know something’s coming.
Fifteen years should be far enough in the rearview to say something definitive about the sound of a dance hit, and yet. Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out their third full-length album, It’s Blitz!, in 2009, locking down Karen O’s pedestal in the rock-god pantheon with the one-two punch of its opening tracks. From the first lines of “Zero,” it’s clear It’s Blitz! is an elevation from their previous records, though the precise effect is hard to put into words, a common limitation of writing truthfully about music that we can swaddle in instrumentation details and production reports and clumsy metaphors but never quite overcome. You can call it a ripening of the sound, I guess, but also, it’s not simply that artists—the trio, producer Dave Sitek—plus time equals change, though there had been plenty of that on display: Karen’s fall off the stage and recovery, her move to Los Angeles, that SPIN cover story for Show Your Bones, etc. Take a fist, explode your fingers into a sunburst, trace an arc in the air, like you’ve just pulled off a magic trick. It’s like that. They kind of had to. If a blistering debut like Fever to Tell is a birth announcement via dynamite and the introspection of Show Your Bones a declaration of survival, with a third album a band enters kill or be killed territory. They’re either on their way out or they’re here to fucking stay. (Back then, anyway. Now who knows what you get before the algorithms bury you alive.) It’s Blitz!, and “Heads Will Roll” specifically, displays earned confidence: What doesn’t kill you gets cut up into confetti and blown back at the world.
“Every now and then I’ll hear, ‘Thank you so much, you really got me through high school.’ Or ‘Thank you, you really got me through freshman year of college.’ Or ‘Thank you so much, you really …’ I have heard that from fans who don’t really know what to say to me and I don’t know what to say back, except for, ‘Oh really? Thank you! I’m happy I got you through that,’” Karen says in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, the indispensable account of the New York City Aughts rock revival. “But really in my head I’m like, ‘I manifested that shit for you! I wanted to get in there like a motherfucker and that’s what I did.’
“Heads Will Roll” certainly manifested some shit for me. Alice taking over Wonderland and turning it into a revenge blood bath was something I didn’t even know I needed until I heard it. One Christmas, some twenty-five years before this song came out, my uncle gave me the Junior Illustrated Library hardcover copy of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, with John Tenniel’s almost-grotesque illustrations in full color on the cover. There’s Alice, looking hassled and indignant, as the Queen of Hearts points at her, commanding. There’s no dialogue bubble emerging from the sovereign’s mouth, but there’s also no mistaking the sentence: Off with her head! The mock turtle and the dodo and the griffon lurk in the background making comments, while the Mad Hatter gawks, useless. I’ve met those dudes a million times over since I first read the book. (Speaking of dudes, another standout moment on Planet Mellotron: Thompson deeming the cello on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” “[f]ar more memorable than it deserves to be” and I’m sorry for the intrusion but I’ve become obsessed with this website, I love contrarian purists, and would absolutely binge a one-and-done season of a TV show about this guy but only if Richard Ayoade directed it. Anyway!) Pretty much everything I needed to know about being born into a finite human-girl life and growing up in a hostile world I absorbed from this book, buried deep in anarchic nonsense so I’d have a shot at paying attention.
The story begins with a jump down a rabbit hole and ends with a death sentence and in between, Alice encounters tests everywhere she goes. She stumbles through a series of nightmare scenarios, quizzed by disturbed creatures who don’t care if she fails, set up for breaches of etiquette she’s never taught, scorned for being a stupid girl, her disgusting, out-of-control body berated at every turn. Eating mystery cakes. Drinking off-label potions. Swimming in a pool of her own tears. Even though she’s never alone, throughout her adventures Alice is still lonely. But when she’s put on trial, she outsmarts the system, escapes her own elimination, and lives to wake another day.
“Was I the same when I got up this morning?” Alice wonders to herself at one point. “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?”
2009 wasn’t the exact year I started taking that question seriously—that was more of a drawn-out process, a test of how long one could be considered “emerging”—but we can ballpark it. I had had my extensive warm-up, my twenties, all those nights in dive bars and at the shows, every band a bar band back then, some you’d recognize by name now and others you wouldn’t unless you had been there. And my god, the iPod changed everything—a whole CD collection the size of a pack of the cigarettes you could no longer smoke inside, a choose-your-own-adventure with every spin of the clickwheel: the White Stripes, the Walkmen, Interpol, all the bands who sounded old and new at once. If I am telling time by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and why wouldn’t I, when Fever to Tell came out I was in the throes of a prolonged and poorly-hidden adolescence that had bled into my mid-twenties, getting an MFA in poetry, living in a starter home and marriage, both of which I would leave by the time their EP Is Is hit iTunes.
These days the last thing anyone wants to hear are the leftover neuroses of those tagged “academically gifted” as a child, and believe me, I get it. But I regret to admit there was a time—around my second semester of graduate school—when I said out loud that if I hadn’t published my first full-length book by the time I turned thirty I would consider myself a failure. (By failure I meant regular.) This notion—that I had until thirty to break through—would have been laughable in more youth-oriented disciplines like garage rock, but it’s what the literary world told us in the pre-Instagram era: That a writer of thirty-nine, even, could still receive a meaningful title of “Younger Poet,” which was clearly the next best thing to simply being young. What better way to stay younger forever than on a campus? According to our professors, all we would need was that first book, a handful of letters, and a little teaching experience to land a tenure-track teaching job and be set, more or less, for life. Being a (lower-case for us losers) younger poet was fun, and I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to outgrow it. Sure, there was the enduring of things like the calculation of how badly it would, hypothetically, screw my chances to get published in a print journal I wanted on my CV (online journals were considered borderline then, imagine!) if I called out the editor staring down my shirt in the conference hotel lobby bar. But there was also driving my VW with the top down singing “Y Control” and “Maps” through the suicide curves and cackling hills of the rural corners of the region, on my way to present at a conference, visit a friend’s classroom, give a reading in a little series at a cool coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, hoping the machines wouldn’t drown me out. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always in rotation for my in-car vocal warmup.
How did all that work out for me? I didn’t have a book out by the time I was thirty, but a week after my birthday, I did land a contract, hallelujah, with an indie label, I mean press. I celebrated by barhopping with dudes who were not my husband, who stayed home because midterm election results or something. He was already an adult; I was getting kicked out of a seedy karaoke bar after one of the guys kicked over a chair singing “Night Moves” and we were deemed too rowdy for a Tuesday night. Je ne regrette rien! By the following spring I was living alone in my own apartment, revising my acknowledgments page, building out my record collection, iPod tucked away in favor of vinyl, and a promise to myself that I would never again be with another guy who wouldn’t dance with me.
Then came the book. I applied to every full-time, permanent or visiting, creative writing job, my new and promising boyfriend—who, yes, would and did dance—said he was open to moving with me wherever the AWP Job List would take us. I remember marveling at how far north the rest of the state of New York actually goes. I was a finalist for one job but didn’t land it. By spring most of those searches had been canceled, victims of the Great Recession, sections re-assigned to adjuncts, where they’ve probably stayed. That boyfriend and I adopted a magnificent shelter cat, and then all three of us signed a lease together timed to the academic calendar and I vowed not to acquire any furniture that wouldn’t be easy to move or leave behind.
Do we ever know when we’re out of the exposition and into the real action until it’s over? If I think about it too much it starts to feel like the whole first decade of this century was an exercise in learning how to survive in the beginning of an end. The next year, there were way fewer jobs and they needed more CV burnishing. I kept at it, got a contract for my second book, the deeper one that would mean my work had legs, not just dirty jokes and a couple of good moves. The summer before it came out, we bounced through that Yeah Yeah Yeahs Lolla set at Grant Park’s bucolic North stage, with its trees and skyline lights as a backdrop. It’s hard to really dance during a festival headliner set—you end up kind of jumping up and down in place for an hour, crushed in with the crowd that’s been drinking giant beers or those weird boxes of wine all day. But we did our best. Everything about the last show of the day feels epic after all the side stage antics and heat-addled mishaps, and this set was no exception. Karen was a controlled explosion; the crowd sang our hearts out on “Maps” as she blipped on the words. I spent the weekend feeling by turns younger and old as hell next to the girls in sundresses young enough to be my students. I was tired of living temporarily. I put away the dream of tenure, and the following month took my first full-time job in journalism, scoring a newspaper staff writer job in the last days of the actual paper claiming to be as important as the website. The buyouts, of course, had already started.
Are any of us aware of the weight of our decisions when we make them, or only in hindsight, when the critics start dissecting our moves? Maybe this was my real talent after all, coming in at the beginning of the end of something, and figuring out how to hide out there in plain sight.
*
Ayaode’s “Heads Will Roll” video really picks up when the main character arrives, a ponytailed werewolf in a skinny tie—tailor, introductions—eyeing the crowd, his prey, with contempt. The audience won’t dance, but he will, and they will watch with fascination.
But first, a word about dancing werewolves: Yes, there’s Michael Jackson’s varsity-jacketed “Thriller” routine and Michael J. Fox boogeying in a white suit and full “Teen Wolf” fur. But also, if you haven’t seen this clip, you really should: there’s Tom Cruise as upstart pool shark Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 adaptation of The Color of Money, his sequel to The Hustler. Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) is on his way to collect his protégé, a baby-monster he can’t control, who’s showboating as he runs a table. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is playing over the bar’s sound system, and Vince—wearing a VINCE T-shirt, for chrissakes—is feeling himself and the song. He's sending the balls in one by one, and between, he’s dancing. And there’s this shot, set to Zevon warning us to stay away, where Vince does this little spin then leans down to sink a ball one-handed, and he pauses to grin—presumably he’s aiming this contemptuous pity at his mark, but cut to him looking right at the camera as he bares his teeth and it lands like it’s meant for the viewer. (Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, is a genius too.) The next time the camera is back on Vince we stay with him for a continuous dizzying shot, and with every ball he drops, his arrogance swells, his improvised choreography grows more intricate. He’s wielding his cue like a combat staff, like a sword. He bites off the irresistible line, “his hair was perfect,” as he rakes his fingers through his mane with a leer. I mean, is there anything more terrifying than Tom Cruise’s own teeth?
Back to our wolf: While the band plays cool on stage, our guy’s solo floor show is all balletic menace. The floor lights up in homage but he’s all loose flips and careless elbows, more “Napoleon Dynamite does New Order” than “Billie Jean” en pointe, than “Thriller” precision. A pause, a howl on his lips. Then comes the carnage.
Michael Jackson himself died on June 25, 2009, just about a month after the video for this song, which would hit Number 1 on the Billboard Dance charts on August 1, premiered. How do you outlive a pastiche like that? The night of Jackson’s death, word spread by mouth and text and, probably, Facebook: We’d meet at this intersection and see how big of a party we could throw before we got shut down. This intersection was exactly the kind of spot you’d expect to encounter a flash mob (I’m sorry! It was 2009!) shutting down traffic to “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.” And all the terrible things we had heard about Michael Jackson were put inside a box and placed on a high shelf for a half-hour of sweaty chaos in the street. We danced, soaked with sweat in the humid river town summer night, like we did when we were kids and “Thriller” first entranced us, like we did in the ‘90s when his elaborate, technically dazzling videos ruled MTV. Almost a decade later, years after I married the boyfriend who went out dancing with me that night, and after I managed to make a career in journalism that feels to this day like it’s borrowed and I’ll have to return it on short notice, we stood outside the Adlon in Berlin where Jackson once dangled his infant son off a balcony with a blanket over his head, and said, Well, that happened here. I have a similar thought when I’m sitting at a red light at that intersection: Once upon a time, when we didn’t pour all our anger or mourning out on the internet, we danced in this spot—not for him, but for our younger selves.
And speaking of monstrous influences, when you’re a girl falling in love with Alice in Wonderland, nobody tells you about the metanarrative surrounding those books. You find that out decades later, and you wonder why so many things you thought were beautiful when you were younger had to have something rotten at their core. What was Charles Dodgson’s damage, exactly? Scholars and historians differ on the specifics, but here’s Virginia Woolf’s observation:
For some reason, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. … And therefore as he grew older, this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins.
Woolf did have a flair for the devastating detail. The image of “little girls whose frocks he pinned up” lingers terribly, to say nothing of the myriad psychosexual interpretations of his life and rumored predatory designs on a real girl, Alice Lidell; the contemporaneous gossip, the postmortem literary analysis, and the growing acceptance that there was something deeply fucked up and malevolent about this guy whose aesthetics also, oh yeah, course through my veins. Knowing this, what am I supposed to do with Alice’s persistent body horrors? With the sinister depictions of eating and appetite, of the fantasy that should a girl move enough among monsters she could become one herself?
“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” as Alice told the dudes. “I was a different person then.”
These texts shape us before we can know the people who made them or hope to understand their actions. What “Heads Will Roll” does for me—song and video together—is subvert those formational texts, bending their influences into something new and yes, useful. The video’s wolfman is a monster, but he’s defanged on the dancefloor at least, revealed to be just a chaotic terror. And that’s Alice’s voice that Karen is channeling, not any made-up queen’s—she’s giving the orders now, and she’s not going to settle for being made to feel abandoned in Wonderland for one second longer.
Third books function like third albums in a career; mine was a leveling-up, too. It came out almost a decade ago and went out of print nearly as fast, a casualty of the precarious economies of indie houses. (I have never been the major label type.) In that book I wrote a series of “exam” poems, and at readings I would set them up by saying that while I was writing that book, it felt like life was a series of tests I was failing, one by one. Another way of saying I couldn’t answer the riddles because they didn’t make any sense then.
But what if dance til you’re dead isn’t a curse but a blessing, an invitation, one rule worth following. I wrote a better book, and I found a way to teach on my own terms. I’m not younger anymore, and I’m a more resilient writer for it. What I really am is a slow learner. You could call that being a late bloomer, but blooming is just a response to conditions. When you apply the metaphor to a person, it becomes Wonderland-level nonsense.
Back in the wolfman’s dance, by the time the dance floor turns orange, the audience sees all too late what it sees. They can’t outrun him. But when he slashes them with his claws, confetti spills out instead of blood. His monster eyes match Karen’s dress. He takes her down, too: decapitated and bisected across the torso, Black Dahlia-style, she’s still singing. Inside, she’s all red glitter. I think of this image when I contemplate the “dissection” model of writing about art, of slicing something open to see what it’s made of: Was I expecting a raven or a writing desk? And what, together, do I think they would they tell me?
Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems, and two are even still in print. She’s the editor of The Louisville Anthology and author of Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (both from Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022. She teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon. She can’t believe she found that photo of herself at the Michael Jackson dance party.