A Quasi-Feminist Reading of the First Two Songs of Side Two of “Night Moves”

I don’t feel qualified to say much about Bob Seger. I know lots of people loathe the guy, at least mildly, for cramming “Like a Rock” down everyone’s throats in those Chevy commercials. Thus my mental image of Mr. Seger is of a stereotypical iconic American pickup truck enthusiast – bearded, big forearms, probably wearing a Stetson. An American man singing American songs. Google tells me that he currently looks like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Willie Nelson; on the LP cover to Night Moves, decades ago, he looked more like Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar. I know he’s from Detroit, which perhaps motivated the Chevy thing.

Shortly before my senior year of college, I got heavily into vinyl. From Tears for Fears to Creedence, oldies and pop radio had soundtracked my life; now, hearing a needle drop onto uninterrupted analog signal made the drums snap and the guitars shimmer in unheard dimensions. Night Moves was one of the albums I picked up my senior year, namely because I recognized “Sunspot Baby” – a strange tale of a woman stealing the narrator’s credit cards and treating herself to a tropical getaway. Women and money: key themes in pop music.*

I once decided that all songs were either about having something or wanting something. I’m not alone in these sweeping statements; one of my favorites comes from Roger Bobo, LA Philharmonic tuba player, who insists there are only two kinds of songs: love songs and pirate songs. Between these two oversimplifications we can cover pretty much every possible combination, based on which type of “booty” the singer has or misses.

Although the old trilogy goes “wine, women, and song”, the new trilogy is “bitches, money, and trees” – music and money being interchangeable, except in the case of trying to make money as a musician. For female artists like Destiny’s Child, the relationship to money is complicated: “Bills, Bills,Bills” rebukes a man who is unwilling to spend on his woman, while “IndependentWomen” is an ode to “all the mamas who profit dollars.” (Bobo would call these both pirate songs, and would probably put Beyonce’s “Formation” and “Diva” in the same category.) Fergie’s humps got her man spending all his money and time; but more relevant to Mr. Seger is Blu Cantrell’s call for ladies to punish cheating men by taking a man’s credit card and going on a shopping spree.

In “Sunspot Baby”, we don’t get an explanation for why she’s robbed the narrator. He can’t understand why she did him so wrong. But where an angrier narrator in this kind of pirate song might talk about how he’s going to hunt her down and kill her (especially if it’s an old dark country song), Mr. Seger says he wants to “catch up with her sometime, show her a real good time.” This woman has wrecked his credit and his heart, and he still wants her! What power she has over him! In the Bible story of Samson, a mighty warrior is ultimately seduced into revealing his secret to a woman who betrays him and takes his strength. The tale includes a riddle of “What is stronger than a lion? What is sweeter than honey?” and ought to be answered with “A woman.”

In the battle of the sexes, a man’s protests about the pressure on them and how women have it easy are met with hard facts from women about sexual violence and 75% pay and being assumed to be stupid and expected to be pretty. (If only there was some thought process to challenge all these gender roles at once.) I dive into grad school level conversations about this, but also enjoy ridiculous movies like White Chicks or songs like “Sunspot Baby” because they show how the average human really feels about these things. In the world of “Sunspot Baby”, she tried to seize power by taking his money, but he doesn't miss the money: he misses her. Is he a player who admires someone who can play him?

The next album track “Main Street” is probably my favorite Seger song, and not just because my four-stoplight campus town was centered around Main Street and I got the vinyl when senior year was wrapping up and the lead guitar makes me sad, but because of the narrator trying to step out of his shyness and only coming off as creepy.

The narrator of “Main Street” reminisces about standing on the corner, trying to get his courage up. He’s watching a dancing girl through a window (a stripper? Or just a regular bar fly?) but doesn’t muster the courage to talk to her. He even watches her making her way alone down that empty street, which seems like a huge feminist red flag – she could be walking to her car with her key in a raptor claw and a can of mace (or her concealed carry sidearm), fearing for her safety, and the last thing she wants is to be approached by the narrator, no matter how romantic he may be. What's sad is that the narrator has no idea. He’s simply trying to get his courage up and step out of his shell.

I like this song not just because the narrator doesn’t know he’s clueless – a kind of dramatic irony – but because I too have been clueless. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been shy or hesitant or wanting to play it safe and have actually come off worse for it. It’s easy to be creepy because of bad attitudes about people – but it’s also easy to be creepy on accident. The struggle is real and the story is real. In scholarship, there’s a “criterion of embarrassment”, which basically says that information unflattering to the author is likely to be true, because it would have been left out for being embarrassing, if not for it having to be included for being true. Seger’s story is true.

The song ends with the narrator looking back on these days and thinking that, now, when he feels lonely and beat, he drifts back in time and finds his feet. I’m not sure how the memory of the dancer is supposed to inspire him. Maybe he thinks, “I’ve come a long way since yesterday.” Maybe he feels the need to offer repentance at the shrine of Dworkin and Steinem. Maybe he thinks, “Wow, I was a clueless chump, and the shyness that stopped me is never stopping me again.”

Or maybe the narrator simply freezes in his mind the image of him frozen, and the dancer – a beautiful, wordless tableau, like the haunting guitar solo or the yell at the end of the song, like the way the lights mixed with the train tracks on my own Main Street – because something abstract and beautiful is the best way to capture, and ultimately work to make sense of, far more complicated facts.

I'm tired of arguing with Republicans, I already know what they're gonna say

It's like all Republicans got together and decided to believe, at the same time, that guns do more good than harm, that capitalism doesn't need regulation, that the environment is "fine" and climate change is "cyclical", social programs are "wasteful", and conveniently, government should be small and let people be (except, of course, for closing Planned Parenthood). Seriously, every Republican I talk to believes ALL of these things like gospel. ALL of these things simultaneously. At least the smart ones have given up on opposing gay marriage, but that's kind of like complimenting someone for owning a cell phone when they've been around for two decades.

Not a Conspiracy, Just Code

That the phrase "latest shooting" exists should HORRIFY us. But we've become used to it. Which is...horrifying. #UCSB

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 25, 2014

In the wake of yet another mass shooting, it becomes clear how routine this has become. I'm numb and incapable of being shocked. The pro-gun and anti-gun folks have their talking points, they'll spew them, and nothing will change. Nothing new will be said, much less anything new be done.

The Onion recognizes this. Every time there's a shooting, they post the same article with the location and death count changed to reflect the "latest shooting".

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://t.co/UmEukJuv0E pic.twitter.com/zN0vDZdFf7

— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 3, 2015

I took to Googling this to see just how many times they've had to post it before. It was there that I noticed something weird...



Do you see what I see?

San Bernardino, the latest shooting, is listed is the location. The date is May 27, 2014, the date of the then "latest shooting" at UCSB Isla Vista.

Wait...multiple shootings already listed together? IS THIS PROOF OF A CONSPIRACY?

No, it's not. It's code. It's how Google indexes their pages.

A similar issue came up with the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories... "The date of pages is in the past for the news stories that just happened!" It's debunked here. Google's code can index filler pages where news stories will eventually go, and/or mix up dates. (Editor's note: Author is not a programmer)

The Onion also might be updating the same linked story with the new details - and Google generates the page preview (containing "San Bernardino") without updating the date. (Editor's note: Author is not a programmer. But I did learn to embed tweets just now.)

The old Onion article is also covered in the "news" (I call HuffPo "news" loosely) back when the UCSB shooting was the "latest shooting".

Just wanted to get this in here, if anyone is going to suggest a conspiracy to "take our guns away" ... make sure you do your research.

Like when I was Googling Sandy Hook, looking into the whole conspiracy piece, and I found the school's website archived. It had years of e-newsletters archived from the preschool for at least three years before the shooting. If Sandy Hook was a conspiracy, they had to be paying someone to make those newsletters look convincing for three years. Sure, it's possible, but Occam's Razor?

I'd also encourage people to do their research and see that Ronald Reagan, conservatives' God, supported the assault weapons ban, and see that half of gun owners support an assault weapons ban ... but that's for another day.

Halsey's Invisible Cello and My Invisible Debate Team

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more into the music of Halsey.

  

It’s the kind of pop music that people are “supposed to” like these days – electronic beats, palatable lyrics, verse-chorus-bridge song structure, pleasant melodies – and I like the music not in spite of this, but because of it. 

It would fit right in on the TouchTunes playlist at the Oak Tavern, it would fit on the stereo of the hair salon under my apartment that’s always playing Sam Smith and Hozier, it would fit as the muzak at Kenwood Towne Center, it would fit on the “sexy” playlist you’d put on Spotify if you want to make out and have it awkwardly interrupted by Spotify commericals. 

All this, and Halsey's album is something I actually enjoy listening to. That deserves a prize.

But I was kind of bummed when I read Halsey's blurb in Rolling Stone. In the midst of plenty of other interesting tidbits (she writes songs "about sex and about being sad" - what more do you need?) there was an anecdote about playing the cello as a teenager (It's in RS 1243 - Sept 10 2015 but not online, so I had to transcribe it...)

Growing up, Halsey played violin, viola and cello until she was 14 and decided "that wasn't cool anymore."

 I instantly found myself annoyed when I read that - not just as a music teacher, not just as a person who plays a stringed instrument, but as someone who, as a core principle, thinks it's categorically ridiculous to deny yourself life experiences based on whether or not they're "cool".

Has she sufficiently distanced herself from that teenange mentality? I thought about how Halsey is part of a generation that barely remembers 9/11, how she probably had an IPad in high school, how she probably never remembers a time without computers, and how nineties kids are better, and to hell with everything.

And then I remembered myself at the age of fourteen.

My freshman year of high school, I was encouraged to join the debate team. A few teachers saw that I was good at writing and arguing and told me to check it out. My parents strongly encouraged me to do so.

And I didn't do it.

I thought that the debate club carried a negative stigma as being for "nerds". (This was right before I got braces next year, which - privilege check - was probably the most devastating thing to happen to me in high school.) I thought that the deck was already stacked against me because I wore glasses and wasn't good at sports. I needed all the help I could get to avoid being labeled a "geek", because once that happened, I would be singled out for it, and there was no hope for my high school experience!

My parents badgered me several times to consider the debate team, but I refused.

To this day, I love writing and arguing, and I surround myself with people who love the same. But what if, in my formative years, I had spent even more time doing the thing that I loved, surrounded by people who loved the same? I missed out, because I was worried it wasn't cool.

It's pointless to reflect on "what might have been" and assume it would have been better. I'm writing and arguing plenty, despite my silly teenage refusal to get an early start. Halsey is making awesome music even without her cello. Would things magically be any better? Maybe the debate club would have gotten hit by a bus, and then that same bus would have taken a stop at Halsey's school so she would have gotten hit by a bus while carrying her cello.

Halsey is making fine music, I'm doing a fine job of writing and arguing. None of us are hit by a bus.

Things are what they are right now. We can't change the past, but we can learn from it. I solemnly vow not to make decisions based on how "cool" they'll seem.

Or, perhaps, I should solemnly vow not to judge an artist as "cool" or "not cool" because of their popularity, because of their presence on jukeboxes, because of what they say in interviews - but simply on the merits of the music.

On that note:

Why I Should Go Vegan But Haven't

Yet again, my mind and heart don't match- I intellectually "get" veganism but don't need to become vegan to sleep at night.

Now she can help me sleep at night...by bringing a vegetable midnight snack!

I haven't written anything on here in a while. The usual self-criticism and analysis-paralysis can always get in the way of just writing, but with my blog, simply logging in forces me to confront the hard reality - instead of just worrying that I'm shallow and pedantic, there's actual written evidence that I'm shallow and pedantic.

As usual, I'm getting my butt in gear because of a girl. A colleague, compatriot, and companion requested that I lay out my conflicted attitudes towards veganism, and speciesism - so I know at least one person will read this, so here goes.

Vegan is a relatively recently coined term for those who, in addition to being vegetarian, forgo the use of all animal products. So, in contrast to pescetarians who still eat fish, or vegetarians who still eat milk and eggs, vegans forgo all of that. No products resulting from animal suffering. Their reasons are many, and really hard to argue against - both pragmatically and ethically.

This adorable moment is just before the calf was pulled away from its mother to be used for veal.

The pragmatic objection: we get animal products through means ranging from the unsustainable to the downright nefarious. The methane from cow farts, burps, and manure is contributing to global warming more than vehicle emissions. Most of food mega-industry puts profits before provision and is unconcerned with how food processing depletes food's nutritional value.

The ethical objection: it should be a dealbreaker that we get animal products through animal suffering. Chickens are crammed into cages where they cannot move. Cows are abused and mothers and offspring are separated so the industry machine can roll on. (Google it if you want to feel terrible.) Even a humanely killed cow or chicken is still being killed so that we can eat it- when it doesn't need to die at all.

I put this cuddly calf here to emotionally manipulate you into not enjoying your next hamburger.

That is the crux of a more involved problem with "speciesism". Speciesism is a label for the belief that the rights, well-being, and non-suffering of human beings is more important than that of non-human beings. Animal liberationists call into question whether "speciesism" is really a fair justification for what we do to animals. We seek to prevent suffering for humans, but why not non-humans? Who decided that animals matter less?

If animals are capable of feeling pain in the same way that we are - does this suffering mean less just because they're a different species?

To get theological, does Baby Jesus cry more tears over a suffering human than a suffering cow, or doesn't every part of God's creation matter to God? (Well, plenty of believers talk about humans having "dominion" over the earth and God giving us animals to eat - but I'd fire back that in the Garden of Eden, people were vegetarians, and the Old Testament God only permitted people to eat meat later as a concession. Christian vegetarians would agree.) Or, taking God out of it, if all consciousness is way for the cosmos to know itself, why are humans better than chickens?

Crucial to the argument is the fact that people don't "need" to kill animals for food anymore. Early in human evolution, around the time we were bashing each other's skulls in to survive, we also had to bash in other animals' skulls to survive. But, just as we developed society to avoid bashing each other's skulls in, so have we developed agriculture and food infrastructure that means we no longer have to do things that way. We've also developed ways to make food that is delicious without using animal products.

Or we have food that's "accidentally" vegan because the artificial flavors include no dairy or eggs.

So there, intellectually, is an argument for veganism and no longer using animal products. I watched the documentary Speciesism and had lengthy conversations with my vegan companion, and I see the point to all of it.

So why am I not vegan?

Reason 1: Burger Madness at Arthur's.

It's more than just not wanting to give up hamburgers. It's more than just the force of habit, and being so accustomed to being a carnivore in a society where the majority of food is meat-based.

Deep down in my gut, giving up animal products is not the change I need to make to sleep at night. (How do I sleep at night, anyway? I'd like to think giving it my all with the stuff I'm passionate about, treating people how I'd want to be treating, seeking a meaningful life...but it ain't working.)

I think part of my reticence to embrace speciesism was driven home by some Facebook conversations today. Sometimes vegans draw comparisons between the suffering of animals being ignored under our noses, and the suffering of people in concentration camps being ignored under German society's noses. (Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies aside...)

Hitler Cat. Puns about the "Fuhrer" as Purr-rer or Fur-rer are a given.

I observed two polar opposite reactions to that statement, basically:

a) How can you compare what happens to chickens and cows to the awful hell that millions of humans went through in the concentration camps?

b) Well, why not compare them? Who decided that human beings were more important than animals? If suffering is bad, why wouldn't we want to prevent suffering on the scale of hundreds of millions of animals?

If I had to "pick" a) or b), I'd have to admit I still have a hard time equating the suffering of non-human beings to the suffering of human beings. "Guilty of speciesism!" I can't really argue with that accusation.

But I can't really "argue" emotionally with either perspective - I can just unpack the premises as if I'm describing an electrical wiring schematic. Am I going to argue with the person who is offended that the suffering of cows is compared to the murder of six million Jews? No, because I understand their premises. Am I going to argue with the person who says, well, why don't we look at all suffering equally, and why is our species so special? No, because I understand their premises.

Long ago, trying to "pick a side" would have thrown me into some kind of obsessive compulsive tailspin, but I've become a lot less emotionally attached to most arguments. Even topics where I have an unshakeable opinion: i.e. the judicial system being unfair to black Americans or the need for marriage equality and LGBTQ rights - I can usually listen to any perspective without getting too hot-headed. Especially because my opinion - apart from the ballot box or maybe, slim chance, a conversation or debate - isn't really going to change much.

John Lennon was a wife-beater, but that doesn't stop me from posting his song "How Do You Sleep".

Part of me sleeping at night is finding some kind of recognition that there's a limit to what I can do. There's a lot of awfulness in the world, but there is comparatively little we can do about it. All we can do is try to find what we need to do to sleep at night. Call that growing up?

Nick

Tragedy makes no sense

One way we make sense of senseless tragedies is to frame them into political debates.

My Facebook feed seems to be split between two perspectives on the Santa Barbara shooter's misogyny. One is that his violence was fed into by sexist online cultures and attitudes that turn women into commodities. Another perspective is that the guy was, plain and simple, severely mentally ill, and misogyny has nothing to do with it.

It's easy for me to turn the conversation about the Santa Barbara shooter into a conversation about masculinity and misogyny, because those are topics that I want to talk about, anyway. I'll check my privilege and admit that I have no idea what it's like to be a woman who has to deal with our society's conflicting expectations. But when I studied feminism, I was captivated because we went even further beyond gender into unpacking all of the inequalities and false assumptions that underly society – including capitalism and militarism. My role models for “manly men who recognize how screwed up gender roles are” include people like George Carlin and Louis CK, who also take that leap into recognizing how screwed up everything is.

Do we need to talk about misogyny and online cultures that turn women into objects? Absolutely. Would this guy have found something else to drive his rampage even if he hadn't bought into those sexist attitudes? Probably.

When something terrible happens, we struggle to make sense of it. Can we really make sense? I was just reading Roger Ebert's review of Elephant, a movie about a school shooting, and he praises the movie because it doesn't give us any easy answers. It just presents, without comment, the lives of the people affected by the tragedy.

One way we make sense of the ambiguity is to make political points about it, putting the unexplainable and horrible into a less unsettling box, with ideas we already know how to talk about.

Look no further than the gun control debate. I don't even need to ask to know that there are two different perspectives emerging from this tragedy. On the gun control side, people are lamenting that he had access to guns, and calling for stricter regulation – then this wouldn't have happened. On the pro-gun side, people are imagining what would've happened if one of the victims had a concealed carry and was a good shot – then this wouldn't have happened.

We want to make sense, and we have things we already want to talk about. But when faced with something so horrible, no matter how we slice it, we are trying to make sense of something terrible that defies sense.

Technology outpaces values, but so does everything else

    Mary Shelley literally created a monster; Ray Bradbury warned of automation eroding our humanity. Today, instead of Frankenstein's monster or sentient robots, technology meets values in taxicabs and episodes of Girls.
    Ride-hiring smartphone apps like Lyft and Uber are taking off because riding through them is cheaper and often more convenient than taking a cab. But, of course, this new menace of sharing your car with strangers is something cities are rushing to regulate – cheered on by cab companies who don't want to lose business.
    The rationale may seem principled, but is really pure self-interest, with an icing of whatever principles happen to back it up. When a corporation doesn't want environmental regulations or taxes to cut their profits, they don't want big government meddling in the free market. But when a rival business model comes in, thanks to that sacred free market, they want the government to step in and protect their profits.
    As for cities regulating ride-sharing, trumped by ostensible “safety” is the concern over whether everyone is paying their taxes – whether the regulators are getting their piece of the pie. Values follow convenience.
    Technology has been outrunning both our values and regulations for some time. For instance, stalking and privacy laws don't account for victims of “revenge porn” – intimate photos uploaded by angry exes – because those laws were written back when those intimate photos would have been developed on 35mm film at Walgreens. In the case of Lyft and Uber, insurance regulations and chauffer laws were not written to account for someone's liability giving a ride to a stranger via smartphone. By the time the slow legislative process could pass a law, smartphones would be obsolete.
    Apart from phones enabling a drug-like hit of Facebook anywhere, the average person most notices technologial acceleration in how we consume music and TV. It may not be fair to download an mp3 without the artist being compensated – but this small bit of stealing has become acceptable. Record companies warned that “home taping is killing music” back when people would copy Devo cassettes for their friends – now, technology is such that people just refer their friends to a link on The Pirate Bay to illegally download it. Not just free, but way more convenient than copying a tape.
    Or, say you don't have cable, but you want to watch HBO. You can Google an illegal stream of Game of Thrones in less than a minute. You could watch it legally through HBOGo, but to get an HBOGo subscription, you need cable. Or you could get someone else's password. If people don't want to pay, would they be willing to watch advertisements before a program – the way Hulu and Crackle make money and pay the rightsholders – in exchange for a higher quality picture and not having to feel the lingering sense of criminality? This can't happen yet. The powers that be who make sure HBO gets their piece of the pie haven't yet figured out how to make money off the non-cable demographic, so there's no convenient way to be legal, therefore yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
    People will be legal when it's convenient. Services like Spotify have become ubiquitious – still with lingering doubts that artists are being paid fairly – and many people stream music off of Youtube, which has “content matching” and runs ads to ostensibly pay the artist by paying the rightsholders. The success of these organizations proves that people want to be legal, so the nice argument goes. But these things have not taken off because they're legal; they've taken off because they're convenient and luckily they happen to be legal.
    In everything from where we shop to who we vote for, principles should be our foundation for how we act. We should make our decisions on which companies we buy from or how we get music based on underlying values – the kind of person we want to be or the standard of fairness we want to uphold. But, just as our values run to catch up to technology, we buy or steal based on what is convenient, with the “principles” behind it catching up later.