Ask A Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music

Dear Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,

In all the years you’ve written this column, you have never pointed out the most common error songwriters make regarding neon, which is to describe it as being some other color than orange-red. One example that comes immediately to mind is Blondie’s song “Fade Away and Radiate,” with the line, “Wrapped like candy in a blue, blue neon glow.” How have you not called this out before?

Bill S, Arvada, CO

Dear Bill,

If you really want to get pedantic about it, neon itself is colorless. But that’s beside the point. While it’s true the first neon signs were orange-red, it’s a well established practice to mix gases, such as argon, in the tubes to produce other colors. Note that this doesn’t lead to anybody calling them “argon signs”—that’s just not a thing. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect rock lyricists to hew to the physical properties of a noble gas and the history of its use in signs.

Dear Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,

I’ve always suspected there’s something wrong with the line “Neon lights, Nobel Prize/ When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies” in the Living Colour song “Cult of Personality.” Am I missing something? I just don’t get the connection here.

Sandra A, Council Bluffs, IA

Dear Sandra,

To understand this line, it’s helpful to consult genius.com, which provides this explanation:

Neon lights highlight how celebrities in entertainment are similar to leaders with cults of personality in it that the purpose of the cult of personality and an entertainer are to amuse and distract from the substance of the person.

Does that help? Of course not. It’s pure malarkey. How does a neon light highlight anything? This is a typical stretch, by the bozos at genius.com, to sound knowledgeable and profound when there’s really nothing profound about the line at all. If Living Colour sang, “Tomato ketchup, Nobel Prize,” the genius.com gloss would say, “Tomato ketchup is like the sweet blandishments spread over a message to make it palatable to the unsophisticated masses.” Such BS. You’re right, neon signs really have nothing to do with the celebrity surrounding the Nobel Prize. I think the core of the issue is that neon isn’t used for lights, per se. It’s used for signs. And the purpose of a neon sign isn’t to light anything up; it’s just to be visible and draw attention to itself and its message, which is typically something really basic like “Open” or “Budweiser,” as opposed to anything abstract like celebrity. A spotlight would have been a much more fitting trope, or stage lights.

Dear Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,

Here’s one. In his song “Neon,” John Mayer sings, “She’s always buzzing just like neon, neon, neon, neon.” Think about this for a second: have you ever actually heard neon buzz? I haven’t. It just kind of hums, and not very loudly at that. Oops!

Scott T, Naples, FL

Dear Scott,

Not so fast. While neon signs aren’t supposed to buzz (except in movies, as suggested in this article), there are various reasons that they can. Compared to other signs, neon ones are fairly high-voltage, and require a transformer which can act up. Poor grounding can also cause buzzing. It’s entirely possible that John Mayer has plenty of real life experience with buzzing neon signs, especially when you consider this article in talkbass.com where musicians compare notes on the problem. One bass player writes, “Yes, [neon signs] do cause buzz and some are worse than others!” Another replies, “Yep. Definitely a buzz there. We had to get rid of some neon we had (back in the day) for that exact reason. Of course, that was before I knew about differential preamps and active drivers and all that.” So let’s give Mayer the benefit of the doubt, especially since he employs this buzzing neon metaphor to describe a woman who misbehaves a lot. (Oh, and one more thing: Mayer is in good company; Tom Waits also sings about buzzing neon lights.)

Dear Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,

To your mind, what’s the most disappointing example of a neon-related gaff in a rock song?

Robert B, West Milford, NJ

Dear Robert,

Wow, that is really a tough one. It’s a toss-up between “Airbag” by Radiohead and “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel.

Regarding “Airbag,” I’m referring to the line, “In the neon sign/ Scrolling up and down/ I am born again.” Needless to say, neon signs—being made of carefully shaped glass tubing—cannot scroll up and down. I suspect Thom Yorke was thinking of one of those digital signs, perhaps an early LED one, that did scroll. So why did he say neon? Who knows. Maybe he fell for its perennial allure … after all, neon is a popular word in rock songs, featuring in over 300 of them, by lyrics.com’s count. It’s too bad Yorke stumbled here; I expect more from Radiohead. Why haven’t they done a song, along the lines of “Fake Plastic Trees,” mocking those “Open” signs that are supposed to look like neon but are just plastic? I’m not just talking about the so-called “LED neon” signs (that honestly look pretty good), but the cheesy ones that are just pure plastic.

Okay, on to Simon & Garfunkel. “The Sound of Silence,” the breakout hit for this duo, is centered around a neon sign, so it deserves our close attention. Early in the song, the singer’s “eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light,” and in the “naked light” he “saw ten thousand people, maybe more,” who “bowed and prayed to the neon god they’d made.” Just picture this: ten thousand people gathered around this sign. It must be huge. Moreover, “the sign said, ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, and whispered in the sounds of silence.’” That’s a pretty verbose sign. The image here is pretty absurd. Over the decades I’ve been listening to this song, I generally assumed this sign could say various things to those bowing down before it, until it hit me that this is a neon sign, so it can only say one thing. So picture the scene: there’s this absolutely ginormous neon sign with this incredibly long message, that 10,000 people worked together to fabricate, presumably in the middle of a vast open space. And then you consider that the singer also sees these 10,000 people “writing songs that voices never share.” Really? That many people? In the middle of the night, with only a neon sign for lighting, are all writing songs? Like, in little notebooks? Oh, but this was a really bright neon light—it “stabbed” the singer’s eyes and “split the night.” Who know neon could be that bright? As I’ve said before, neon isn’t used in lights, per se. It’s not “naked light” at all and is not supposed to illuminate anything. But here it’s lighting up 10,000 people, like fricking stadium lighting? Please. Now, this being a famous (and excellent) song, I went the extra mile and consulted Paul Simon’s liner notes just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Simon explains that the neon sign represents “the superficial and ‘commercial’ level” of communication.” Q: How is the sign’s message, “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/ And tenement halls/ And whispered in the sounds of silence,” commercial? A: Don’t overthink it.

Dear Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,

You accused a reader of being pedantic when he questioned the idea of blue neon, but at another time you called out the Ramones, in their song “Strength to Endure,” for asserting that neon glows hot, not knowing that neon signs actually run fairly cool. Hypocrite much?

Suzie L, Queens, NY

Dear Suzie,

Where you do think musicians get their ideas? Among other things, I imagine they notice things when they’re out in the world, such as when they’re hanging out in bars. Who hasn’t seen a neon sign that was a color other than orange-red? So I will continue to defend Debbie Harry on this one. But who ever felt heat coming off a neon light? Nobody ever. And it’s not just that the Ramones didn’t know neon runs cool, it’s that they sang “neon lights always glow hot” in the chorus. Within their song, the temperature of neon is a central metaphor, based on the mere assumption that neon lights glow hot. Always. That’s fairly emphatic for a statement the songwriter pulled pretty much out of his ass without bothering to fact-check. Plus, this is a pretty lame song to begin with so the Ramones don’t deserve any wiggle room. My column, my rules.

A Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Guy Who Catalogs Inept References to Neon in Rock Music,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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From the Archives - Starving Little Student

Introduction

I just paid for another quarter of tuition, room, and board for my older daughter, a college freshman at UC Santa Barbara. I find it impossible to lay out that kind of cash without reflecting on how different her scenario is from my college days. About 31 years ago, I was also heading into my second quarter as a UCSB student, and realized that after paying for my tuition and books, I was basically out of money. I’d been saving for college since I was a kid, working all kinds of jobs (mostly in bike shops but also at a factory and a radio station) and now those savings had run out. Distraught, I wrote this little poem, perhaps as a hint-hint to my parents.

The Poem

Starving Little Student – January 1989

 Ooh, starving little student:

 Who’s toiled hard, and cries for rent.                  2

“Not I,” said the Dad. “I won’t share my

 Fortune with no stupid kid. I was just

 Doing fine now that I’m of you rid.”                    5

 Ooh, starving little student:                               

 And who will pay his college fees?

 “Not I,” said the Mom. “The entire idea              8

 Is utterly absurd. I’d be laughed at

 And scorned if your damn father heard!”

 And who will take pity in his heart,                     11

 And who will feed a starving student?               

 “Not I,” said the government. “I would

 If I could but I cannot I know; I need                  14

 All my cash for my missile silos.”

 Ooh, former starving student:                            

 Will no one give the kid a job?                             17

“I will,” said the Shop. “For all bikes                  

 Created return unto me; a wrench

 You will hold, a mechanic you’ll be.”                  20

Footnotes & Commentary

Title & line 1 – Starving Little Student

My poem is a rip-off of, or (as I saw it at the time) a tribute to, the Simon & Garfunkel song “Sparrow.” At the time, I thought the first line of that song was “Ooh, lovely little sparrow” but I have just learned it’s “Who will love a little sparrow?” I guess my error made this line easier; the more direct ripoff/tribute— “Who will starve a little student?”—wouldn’t make much sense. Not that “little student” really fit either; I was 6 foot 3 and about 180 pounds and had a very high—and thus expensive—caloric need.

Line 2 – cries for rent

This is a little joke: the original line was “cries for rest.” Speaking of rent, it was definitely my biggest expense: to share a one-bedroom apartment with two other guys cost me $250 a month, and tuition back then was only about $500 a quarter.

Line 3 – “Not I,” said the dad

Actually, if my dad had only refused to give me money, that wouldn’t have been so bad. But as I discovered when I applied for financial aid, he was meanwhile declaring me as a dependent on his taxes (even though I hadn’t lived in his household in over four years). Thus, I couldn’t get any need-based financial aid because it was assumed I was getting support already. Nice.

Line 4 – stupid kid

I realize these are ungenerous words to put in my dad’s mouth, and to be honest I don’t think he found me stupid. (That said, there is a long-running family dispute about whether or not, after I’d done a 130-mile bike ride as a teenager and got caught in a thunderstorm, my father said to me, “You’re not very bright, are you.”) What frustrated my dad was my choice of major (English). He was kind of ahead of his time in promoting the incorrect notion that anybody who possibly can should study STEM.

Line 5 – now that I’m of you rid

This clunky word order is a classic failing of my early poetry. I grasped at some point that poets are technically allowed to put the verb at the end of the sentence, after the object. In fact, I probably thought this made me sound all fancy and literary. Don’t worry, I do realize now how terrible it sounds. It was just a convenient way to get the rhyme and meter right. I should have tried harder … for example, I could have written “I won’t let you have a free ride—God forbid!” It’s tempting to just go back and fix it now, but that would be cheating. Plus, I want you to give me credit for progressing as a poet. (I know—like you care!)

Line 8 – “Not I,” said the mom

In my mom’s defense, she had remarried, and my stepfather—whom we called “the landlord” because that’s how she met him—was kind of a dick. She was loathe to ask him to help me out financially and no longer had her own income. (He was pretty loaded so she no longer needed to work.) To his credit, he did end up supporting me to the tune of $120/month for nine months out of the year. Not a huge amount of money, of course, but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, and it obviously wasn’t his duty to give me anything.

Line 9 – scorned if your damn father heard

It was a very bitter divorce and in fact the idea of being my sole financial supporter did inflame my mom. It wasn’t uncommon for my brothers and me to fall into this parent-vs.-parent chasm. My brother Geoff never did get money from our parents, and was almost literally a starving student. He got by on meals that a friend of his would filch, daily, from her sorority house.

Line 11 – who will take pity in his heart

I lifted this line verbatim from the Simon & Garfunkel song, which is laziness at best and borderline plagiarism at worst. And as you’ll see, it makes no sense in context.

Line 13 – the government

This is easily the weakest stanza in an already unimpressive poem. It’s not like I was trying to get food stamps or something; government student loans would have been more appropriate to mention in the second stanza. And since when does the government—any government—have a heart? They operate based on policy, not feelings like pity. This is all great evidence of why I didn’t deserve a merit-based scholarship.

Line 14 – missile silos

And here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the very worst line of the poem. It’s a disgrace. First of all, common sense tells us it’s the missiles themselves, and the airplanes and aircraft that launch them, that make military spending so high. Silos can’t be a big part of that expense. Meanwhile, the meter is all screwed up here, obviously, because “silo” is trochaic (i.e., the stress falls on the first syllable) rather than iambic (i.e., stress falling on the second syllable) which is what’s needed here. Instead of lazily settling for such weak phrasing, I should have written, “Big funding for schools? A bad stratagem. We need all our budget for ICBMs.”

Line 16 – former starving student

I guess the idea here was that I would have to drop out of college. That’s a bit of exaggeration, of course. I just needed a part time job. God, what a drama queen.

Line 17 – will no one give the kid a job?

Factually, it really was hard for me to find a suitable job. I managed to get a bike shop job in Montecito, but my commute was 17 miles each way by bike, just to work a four-hour shift. For the first week I had the job, it poured rain every day so I’d show up drenched. My boss seemed to take pity on me and simply took me off the schedule without formally firing me. I passively declined to complain and the job just kind of ended. I really needed a job on campus, but those were mostly reserved for kids on the Work Study program. I was not eligible for this program because of my dad’s income level. Thanks again, Dad! I wonder how much he saved on his taxes with that little make-believe dependent trick. Probably like $100. (Note: I am not bitter.)

Line 18 – Shop

Why is “Shop” capitalized here and not “Government” in line 13? I guess it’s because I was trying to make “shop” a proper noun since I couldn’t make “bike shop” fit in that line. So, so sloppy. Please—don’t judge. I was under a lot of stress. I was broke.

Line 19 – return unto me

Another ripped-off line from the Simon & Garfunkel song, which of course doesn’t really fit because the job I ended up getting was at the Associated Students Bike Shop, which didn’t sell bikes. That is to say, the bikes were created elsewhere, so being taken to this shop for repair wasn’t a return in any sense. I should have worked with the idea that I myself was returning … as in, returning to my roots since this was the sixth bike shop I’d worked at.

It was a pretty cool job, though. Because this was through the Work Study program, the shop was required to be really flexible about my class schedule. Like, if I had a midterm or something I was automatically given time off. And I could be in the middle of a repair and when it was time to head to class, I could just walk away. I was also permitted, and to some degree encouraged, to show customers how to fix their own bikes. Why “to some degree”? Well, my supervisor hated it when I spent more time with the good-looking coeds than with our male customers. (This wasn’t just personal preference; for reasons of ego many of the dudes didn’t like being shown anything.) My supervisor bawled me out a lot for this attention imbalance but he wasn’t my manager so I just smirked.

“But wait,” you’re thinking (if indeed you’re still reading), “I thought you couldn’t get Work Study?” Well, my manager cut me a deal. He said the shop is supposed to pay half my hourly rate, and the University the other half. Since I didn’t qualify for the program, I couldn’t get any money from the University, but if I was willing to work for half the normal pay, he’d take me on. Score!

Line 20 – a mechanic you’ll be

What did I mean “‘a mechanic you’ll be’”? I already was a mechanic! That’s why they were willing to hire me! It’s a good thing I didn’t try to recycle this poem as some kind of class assignment…

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From the Archives - Latin [Class] Is for Lovers

Introduction

Here’s a sad one, from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.

Latin [Class] is for Lovers – October 19, 1990

I just can’t concentrate on my Latin homework anymore. It’s tempting to blame this on girl trouble, but that would be overstating the case, like saying you have car trouble when in fact your car was repossessed. I just have this empty space, this lack, where I thought I had a girl.

She’s in my Latin 1 class, a freshman. I’m a junior, but on the stunted, naïve side so it feels perfectly natural to be chasing after freshman girls. Besides, just like them, I only recently arrived here in Berkeley, having transferred from UCSB.

Latin class had been going fine before R— caught my eye and became a constant distraction. My god she is fly. Of course, there’s not a lot of mingling among classmates, not with a discussion-style language class of only fifteen students. I passively admired her for over a month before making any moves. (Well, I did rework an old sonnet in her honor, but never gave it to her or anything. I did get course credit for it in my Shakespeare class.)

From Psych 1 I learned that mere proximity can increase attraction, so I took to sitting next to R— whenever I could, which was most of the time. She always takes a chair right up in the front row, where you’re a sitting duck in terms of getting called on. So I’d take the invariably empty chair next to her. It’s a tough price to pay, getting called on twenty-four seven, but well worth it. This one red-haired guy seems to have had his eye on this same girl, but he has never gone so far as to sit in the lethal chair. I’ve had to really focus so as not to play myself. (This is a constant risk for me because I study far less than my peers. I loafed through my first two years of college, and old habits die hard.)

The instructor, Jonathon, is cool enough, I guess. He has this really soft, airy East Coast voice that sort of floats out over the classroom. He likes to remind us how easy everything is while he tackles some obscure grammatical structure most of us don’t even know in English. I think he’d single me out even if I weren’t sitting in the front-and-center death seat, simply because he likes my name. To be more precise, he likes what he thinks my name is: Dale. I don’t know how he managed to misread this on the roll sheet the first day, but he’s sticking with his mistake. And due to his mellifluous style of speech, he pronounces Dale “DAY-oh.” (Is it a coincidence that this is how we pronounce the Latin word “Deo,” which means “God”? I don’t know. It could be that he is making a little joke.)

Jonathan seems particularly prone to call on me when we’re learning some totally new grammar rule. Here is an actual quote from class: “Okay, as you can see, the past-contrary-to-fact construction uses the pluperfect tense of the subjunctive mood in both the protasis and apodosis clauses. This is really quite straightforward. Would somebody like to take a crack at the first example, please, DAY-oh?”

The only thing I have on my fellow students is that I’ve actually used my newly acquired Latin skills outside of class. This won’t help my grade in Latin, of course, but I might as well get some mileage out of it here: I read this rad Sir Thomas Wyatt sonnet for an English class. A guy sees this deer and is so blown away by how beautiful she is that he finds himself uncontrollably and shamelessly chasing after her, and after finally catching her, discovers something that makes all his efforts futile: 

And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”

The footnote in my Norton Anthology of English Literature has this to say: “Noli me tangere quia Caesaris sum (‘Touch me not, for I am Caeser’s’) was inscribed on the collars of Caesar’s hinds which were then set free and were presumably safe from hunters.” After studying Latin I can read the whole thing and could even tell you about how the negative imperative, or prohibition, uses a complementary infinitive, which is then followed by a conjunction and the name Caesar in the dative case to indicate possession when used with the subsequent present indicative first person singular form of the verb “to be.” But I won’t go into that because it’s boring.

Less boring, of course, is my own pursuit of R—. How has that been going, you might ask? Well, a few times we hung out after class, sitting on the lawn chatting. I’m trying out this new form of humor where I basically bag on myself. I’m told this is endearing somehow, and in any event it ties in nicely with the embarrassing behaviors that I stumble into anyway. For example, Jonathan was calling on me in class and—due to a combination of sleep deprivation and this strange college-induced narcolepsy I seem to suffer from—I actually started falling asleep right in the middle of being drilled. “DAY-oh, are you falling asleep?!” Jonathan asked, incredulous. “No, of course not,” I muttered, as the class erupted in laughter around me.

So after class, I admitted to R— that I truly had been falling asleep, which was inexplicable because being quizzed in Latin, far from being boring, is actually kind of terrifying to me. This seemed to really charm her, so I bit the bullet and asked if she wanted to have lunch sometime. She not only accepted, but enthusiastically. In fact, I think she may have even blushed. (Actually, that was me.)

We set our date for Friday after class. The next time class met (Wednesday) I was trying really hard not to play myself by being all perma-smile, and though I probably did a poor job (i.e., was too visibly stoked), she was very tolerant. She mentioned our upcoming lunch, which seemed almost too good to be true. I’d half-expected her to totally forget, or pretend to forget, which would have been awkward. (Yeah, I’m not a natural-born optimist. So sue me.)

On Friday I busted my ass to get to class early, but R— was a bit late. No biggie, of course. But all through class she seemed not only to have her gaze averted, but her entire body angled slightly away. It was weird. I was getting this massive bad vibe off her. I felt like the proverbial elephant in the room.

After class she couldn’t very well avoid me any longer; after all, it was time for our lunch. We walked over to Mario’s La Fiesta on Telegraph, because it’s close to campus, has great food, and is dirt cheap (so I could afford to pick up the tab, and if R— ended up being all modern and saying it’s lame for the guy to pay, I could say, “Come on, the whole bill is under ten bucks, it’s nothing!”). I’d never had a bad meal at La Fiesta, but this was pretty close. R— was just a total cold fish. Where was the laid back, enthusiastic chick I’d been so merrily chatting with earlier in the week? I couldn’t figure it out.

Finally (actually, after not so very long a time, between the chips-and-salsa and the main course) I couldn’t take the stony near-silence anymore and said, “What is up with you, anyway?” I know, I know, this is dating suicide, but what did I have to lose? I was already done for and I knew it. The truth came out: she’d had this high school boyfriend, and they were still really close and talked on the phone a lot. They’d decided when they parted ways for college that it was silly to try to stay together, so they were free to date, which was all well and good until she told this guy about our upcoming lunch. He got all sore, and petulant, and whiny (okay, I’m possibly extrapolating a bit here), and they decided to “get back together.” Never mind that he’s at BYU, which is hundreds of miles from Berkeley.

I was very suave about the whole thing. “So what you’re saying is that he loved the idea of dating hot chicks at BYU but it never occurred to him that you might be more successful at playing the field, and he hadn’t counted on his own jealousy and feelings of inadequacy,” I did not say. “Surely you’re aware that in Utah they practice polygamy,” I did not go on to point out. I did, however, say, “He should make you a collar graven with diamonds in letters plain, so there is written, your fair neck round about, ‘Noli me tangere quia Dickheadis sum.’” No, of course I didn’t say this either. In fact, this third thing I didn’t think up until later. At the time, I just sat there, biting my tongue. I was so, so disappointed because, even when stricken with the awkwardness of the situation, R— was so, so fly.

I went home and played some Simon & Garfunkel. Yes, I’m that nerdy … but it’s not like I had some girl over whom I needed to impress. Besides, I’d thought of just the song for my mood: “April, Come She Will.” It concerns a love affair that begins in April (when “the streams are ripe and filled with rain”), proceeds all summer until June when “she’ll change her tune,” and on into July when “she will fly,” and so on until September when “I remember,/ A love once new has now grown old.” Poor guy—but hey, at least he lasted six months. I only made it six days! And with this realization, I was moved to write my own song: 

Monday, come she may.
The day is bright and filled with sun.
Tuesday, she will stay.
We spend some time just having fun.
Wednesday begins cruel play.
She now seems cold and so withdrawn;
Thursday, my nerves she will fray,
For now I know that something’s wrong.
Friday, I’m pushed away.
At all my pain she is just annoyed;
Saturday, she has gone away.
A love once made has now been destroyed.

I guess the song doesn’t totally fit because my little campaign didn’t erode gradually—it careened off the road in the span of little more than an hour—but whatever. I guess it’s also true that it wasn’t entirely my fault I crashed and burned, though I can’t help but think a savvier guy like Sir Thomas Wyatt would have known just what to do in this situation and surely would have gotten the girl in the end. Oh well … at least now I can sit in the back of the Latin classroom and maybe not get called on so much.

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The albertnet Christmas Guide - Part II

Introduction

This is Part II of my albertnet Christmas Guide. For Part I, click here. In this post I cover the best Christmas song, the best Christmas poem, and—on the recommendation of my kids—the worst of each as well.

If my use of the word “Christmas” (as opposed to “the holidays”) causes you to raise an eyebrow, please read the “semantic housekeeping” section of my last post.

The best Christmas song

Let’s face it, there’s gobs of Christmas music out there but it’s slim pickings finding anything even listenable, much less good. As described here, I cannot stand how malls immerse us in this godawful noise. But if you look hard enough, there are a couple of really good holiday songs. (Perhaps exactly two.)

I’ll start with the runner-up, that being “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” by Simon & Garfunkel. For one thing, those guys can actually sing. Where other name-brand musicians try to breathe new life into stupid old songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” by randomly warping their voices, to give the song an unstructured “live” sound, S&G sing this classic song beautifully and in harmony. Meanwhile, they fold in a grim radio announcer reading the evening news, which grows steadily in volume and bleakness. This combination has a bite that no other holiday music would dare attempt. Perhaps the only fault is that the irony is just a bit too thick … it’s fine line between timeless music and a parlor trick.

The winner in this category is “Realness of Space” by Bob Schneider. You may cry foul because this is not obviously a Christmas song. In fact, you might argue that this is obviously not a Christmas song. Well, subtlety is sometimes what makes great art. If you listen to this song a number of times you’ll realize that its underlying structure resembles, more than anything, a Christmas gift list. In the span of just over two minutes, Schneider utters the phrase “I want” no fewer than 21 times. And the real giveaway is when he sings, “I want a gold watch/ I want some Hickory Farms.” Let’s face it, nobody ever even thinks about Hickory Farms except around Christmastime.

To put this theory to the test, I asked my wife if her family ever got a Hickory Farms gift basket. She said, “Yeah, for Christmas some relative would always give us this giant cheese ball. It was kind of weird, just this big old ball of cheese encrusted with nuts. As a little kid I was kind of fascinated.”

My family wasn’t actually lucky enough to get anything from Hickory Farms, other than their Christmas gift catalog. I would leaf through that with a combination of desire and mild disgust. Of course I loved cheeses and peanut brittle, but the giant sausages—which appeared to be at least four inches in diameter—struck me as grotesque, almost obscene. (My mom was known, on burger night, to stretch a pound of ground turkey with oatmeal so it would feed our family of six, including four ravenous boys.)

What makes “Realness of Space” profound is the chorus: “I want the Jacksons from 1973/ I want the Osmonds, and I/ Want you to love me.” When looking to summon something that is gone forever, the very quintessence of the unobtainable, you couldn’t do much better than this (the Jackson 5 having split up that year, and The Osmonds not long after). It’s as though by gathering together these things he cannot have and juxtaposing them with what he really wants—love—he’s tormenting himself as masochistically as Edgar Allen Poe does in “The Raven.” And what could capture the dark, lonely side of Christmas better than that?

(Sure, you may continue to claim that “Realness of Space” has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, and you know what? That’s totally fine. Go write your own blog.)

The best Christmas poem

Look, I get that nobody reads poetry, and that almost any reader would have no use for this category in a Christmas guide. It’s not like we’re all going to go write poems for our loved ones, or read published poems to them, or anything like that. If you think maybe I’ve gone off the rails, well, you’re probably right. Christmas does that to me, okay? But actually, one of the greatest tributes to Christmas ever created happens to be a poem.

I’m talking about “King John’s Christmas” by A.A. Milne. It concerns a king (or perhaps a man who deludes himself into thinking he is) who gets no respect—men passing him on the street would give him “a supercilious stare,/ Or passed with noses in the air.” King John has no friends, and “The cards upon his shelf/ Which wished him lots of Christmas cheer/ And fortune in the coming year/ Were never from his near or dear/ But only from himself.”

But John won’t give in to despondency, and gamely writes out a letter to Father Christmas: 

I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don't mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball!

Lying awake during the wee hours of Christmas morning, John thinks he hears Father Christmas up on the roof, and gets so excited about getting anything at all (“He’ll bring one present, anyhow— / The first I’ve had for years”) that he rescinds all his requests, except for the last one. I won’t tell you what happens next … just go read the poem.

The worst Christmas song

It would be almost impossible to discover the very worst of the modern, name-brand covers of insipid traditional Christmas songs, because that would mean deliberately wading into the cesspool that is this genre. I wouldn’t wish that on any critic or blogger. Perhaps somebody working in a mall might inadvertently become an authority on the matter, but I’d hate to draw him or her out on the topic outside of working hours. Haven’t these people suffered enough?

Perhaps the best I can do is present the most disappointing, wince-inducing exhibit in the canon: “2000 Miles” by The Pretenders. I suppose it’s possible the band thought they were making real music, but my suspicion is that this is one of the bigger sellouts of all time—a cynical, shameless ploy to get their music into the malls. I mean, why else would a rock band make a Christmas song?

The song is monotonous, and Chrissie Hynde’s voice sounds a bit whiny, and the lyrics are abysmal. The observation is made that 2,000 miles is “very far.” Yeah, no shit! Then we’re regaled with a Thomas-Kindade-esque sentiment: “Our hearts were singing/ It felt like Christmas time.” Awwwww. It wraps up, “I hear people singing./ It must be Christmas time.” Who doesn’t know already when it’s Christmas time? Are we supposed to be moved by this deduction?

Even Hynde, who wrote the song, admits her lyrics suck. According to Wikipedia, she once declared, “Robbie McIntosh plays beautifully on ‘2000 Miles.’ Anything to avoid listening to my voice and my stupid words.”

But the worst part about this song is how damn catchy it is. If I hear it on the radio, or some chance phrase brings it to mind (which isn’t at all unlikely at this time of year), it gets stuck in my head and just won’t leave. When I think about The Pretenders—a band I normally like—stooping this low, it just depresses me.

And that’s not even the end of it: predictably enough, a number of bands have done covers of this imbecilic song. Wikipedia lists 11 of these, many for (gasp!) Christmas-themed albums.

I can understand why a mall might play inoffensive holiday-themed music in order to instill the kind of retail trance that separates people from their money, but why would rock music fans have an appetite for this kind of pablum?  Ugh.

The worst Christmas poem

Nobody should be bagging on poetry, right? Shouldn’t I be supporting it in all its forms? Of course as a wannabe writer I should be forgiving of anything committed to the printed page in pursuit of art. And so I’m myself surprised at having anything to describe in this unlikely category. And yet I do.

Somehow, in “researching” this post I stumbled upon a poetry website, PoemHunter.com, that does something—in the name of poetry—so utterly tasteless I cannot begin to fathom its origin. It presents poems (a strange mix of classics and amateur efforts) alongside not just a whole bunch of ads, but below what I guess it calls a video. It’s a little window with the words of the poem printed (like a Karaoke screen) and a computer voice doing an exceptionally poor job of reading the poem. The video, of course, is prefaced with a video ad. (The first poem video I viewed had an ad for fake wood siding for your home. I grabbed a snapshot and thought of pasting it below, but then that would technically be an ad on my blog which of course I would never do.)

Here is an example of this audiovisual monstrosity. Who the hell would want to hear that? It’s tempting to think this website is catering to the blind, but then why would there be all the visual ads? I guess the Poem Hunter creators figure there are people who are so lazy they’d rather hear a robot voice absolutely butcher a poem than do the reading for themselves. I truly hope nobody is so lonely during the holidays that he or she would listen to a Christmas poem on this site, just to get the simulacrum of another human voice.

I read the “About Us” section of the website, and found it decidedly non-erudite: “PoemHunter.Com aims to spread the effects of poems in the social and individual life of people, where a continuous change is undergoing with the Internet. PoemHunter.Com without a pause, continues its activities with the active participation of thousands of members.” My favorite part is the grammatically incorrect pause-inducing comma right after the phrase “without a pause.”

Yeah, I know that lousy website isn’t really Christmas-themed, per se. What can I say? I’m just not that devoted to this topic ... even with the big day only a week away.

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From the Archives - Unemployment Poetry

NOTE:  This post is rated R for pervasive mild strong language and disturbing themes.

Introduction

Since I started this blog seven years ago, I’ve posted 346 times (generally four posts per month).  It’s not easy to write that often, so I sometimes don’t.  That’s what these “from the archives” posts are for.

Lately I’ve been doing a hybrid version of this:  I post an old poem, then provide all-new footnotes and commentary on it.  (Pretend you found this in your Norton Anthology of American Teen Poetry.)  Today I go back to a poem written under extreme duress:  I’d just turned 18, moved away from home, and then hit the doldrums after entering my third month of unemployment.

Unemployment poetry – August, 1987

           I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU

I sit here letting time roll slowly by

My [word redacted] has become a bore.                        2

I cannot find a job, although I try;

And while I sit here, I’m becoming poor.

I buy the paper each and every day

And scan the ads for work I’d like to do.                       6

But each employer seems to always say

My years of working are, fuck you, too few.

Unless somebody takes a chance on me,

And signs me up with hope that I will learn,              10

A dumbshit’s all I’ll ever get to be;

Experience I’ll never get to earn.

     This vicious circle simply has to end

     fuck hopes and dreams                                                14

Footnotes & commentary

Title:  I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU

The title should not be construed as anything aimed at the reader.  I assumed when writing this poem that nobody would ever read it.  I knew back then (though I’ve evidently since forgotten) that nobody wants to read amateur poetry.  I’d read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and surely took note of the Vogon captain’s threat that he’ll not only fling the heroes into space to die, but that “if you’re very lucky, I might read you some of my poetry first.”

Frankly, I’m posting this poem here largely for archival purposes:  until now, it has existed only in the original hardcopy, on paper that’s gradually disintegrating.  If you’re reading this on April 15, 2006, or in the days (or perhaps even weeks) following that date, you’re in a race against my mom and might very well be the first living human to lay eyes on this poem.  (Dead humans, down in hell, may see it constantly; it may be posted in every corridor down there.)  If you think you may be the lucky first reader, feel free to e-mail me and see!

So why “I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU”?  Well, it was a dark time, and I was an angry youth, and had soured on soft rock around then.  I distinctly remember turning against Simon and Garfunkel (more on this later), and railing at the Peter Gabriel song “Don’t Give Up,” mainly due to guest singer Kate Bush’s contribution to the song, which (in my angry youth mode) I might have described as “menstrual.”  So I turned to punk rock, notably Fear, which I had on cassette.  This album had a very memorable song titled “I don’t care about you.”  (Sample lines:  “I seen an old man have a heart attack in Manhattan/ Well he died while we sat there lookin’ at him/ Ain’t he cute?”)  When I finished this poem (as you can see it was only very lightly edited) I realized it needed a title, and “I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU” seemed as good as any.

(A final note:  my favorite song on the Fear album in those days, due to my depression and frustration, was called “Getting the Brush,” which I’ve explored at length in an exegesis in these pages … click here.)

Line 1:  letting time roll slowly by

This may well be an unconscious tribute to the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer,” which was probably on my mind, as it includes the lyrics “When I left my home and my family….”  My line “letting time roll slowly by” possibly alludes to “Now the years are rolling by me/ They are rockin’ evenly” (which you’ll find in the concert version of this song).

Line 2:  [word redacted]

The first version of this line read, “Relaxing has become a total bore.”  This line wasn’t exactly honest.  I mean, relaxing was a bore, but I later revised this bit to be more specific, and edgier, and more to the point.  That was all well and good for a poem that just moldered away in a 3-ring binder, but not for the Internet.  It’s a happy coincidence that “word redacted” fits nicely into a line of iambic pentameter.

Line 4:  I’m becoming poor

This is probably my least favorite phrase of the whole poem (and/or any poem ever written by anybody).  It seems somehow incorrect to say a person “becomes” poor.  I’m not at all sure poverty works like that.  Many people are born into poverty; some transcend it; some lose everything; but “becoming poor” … it just sounds wrong.  Besides, a middle class kid who knows he’ll one day go to college may be penniless, but doesn’t actually have to face the prospect of real poverty.  This is a sad example of the amateur poet picking words because they meet the rhythm and rhyme requirements of the sonnet.  Pretty lazy on my part.

Line 6:  scan the ads

Over time, fewer and fewer people will remember that, before the Internet, when you were looking for work you actually had to buy a newspaper and look through the classified ads.  These printed ads were billed per word per day, so they tended to be very brief and thus often cryptic; e.g., “Admin asst type 70 wpm WordStar filing phones $1200/mo neg/ xlnt benefits 3 yrs exp req’d.”  The name of the prospective employer was often not given.  You’d just dial a phone number, tell whoever answered “I’m, um, calling about the help wanted ad?” and hope for the best.  I wonder how many times I was rebuffed by some receptionist who didn’t even know her company was hiring.  (Probably never:  I’m just rewriting history to let myself off the hook for interviewing poorly.)

Line 8:  years of working are, fuck you, too few

I was living in San Luis Obispo, a college town, and there were probably plenty of people trying to get the lucrative office jobs I sought.  Likely there were even college graduates going after those jobs.  I just didn’t know how the world worked.  I also kept holding out hope that Spirit Cycle Works, the bike shop where my brother worked, at would eventually hire me, but I was deluding myself.  It was plain to see that Spirit was slowly dying.

In revising this poem, I was totally right to replace the word “alas.”  That might have conveyed how a prospective employer might have tried to let me down easy, except that almost nobody uses the word “alas.” I sure didn’t hear it from the manager at Sizzler Steakhouse where, in desperation, I applied as a dishwasher—and was denied!  The guy said, “You didn’t get the job.  But check back with me on Thursday because, this guy I hired?  I don’t think he’s going to work out.”  I think “fuck you” is a very accurate, concise summary of that message.  And the internal rhyme of “fuck you, too few” is probably the strongest thing about this poem.

Line 10:  signs me up

This revision makes no sense.  The phrase “hires me” is better all around.  Why did I change it?  Who knows.  I think I just wasn’t trying very hard—at this poem, or at getting a job.  At the time I was scared shitless about my future and a kind of paralysis had set in.  To be honest, I wasn’t rejected that many times … I just wasn’t applying to enough places.

Line 11:  dumbshit

Changing “bum” to “dumbshit” was a fine edit.  After all, nobody uses “bum” to mean “chronically unemployed person” anymore (nor back in 1987).  A bum was somebody who spent too much time on the couch or borrowed money without paying it back.  And of course “dumbshit” perfectly matched the overall mood of the poem.

That said, the idea presented here—that getting a job will keep you from becoming a dumbshit—is problematic.  As it turned out, the first job I ended up getting—working in a factory canning underwear—would not have prevented me from declining into dumbshit-hood.

Canning underwear?  It’s true.  I worked at a factory that made Hot Chillys thermal underwear, which was packaged in cans.  I still have one of them:

Full disclosure:  I only worked the canning machine for about a day.  The company made better use of me in the shipping department, which took more brains because the underwear wasn’t being made nearly fast enough to keep up with orders, so we had to ship partially-filled orders to every customer and keep track of how much product each customer was owed.  That was a pretty good job.  In fact, when Spirit Cycleworks let my brother go, I got him a job at the factory working right alongside me.

Line 13:  vicious circle simply has to end

This line makes no sense.  My situation was a bit like a Catch-22, in that I had to have work experience to get a job but couldn’t get that experience without a job—but that’s in no way a vicious circle.  There was absolutely nothing cyclical going on, nor anything vicious.  I certainly wasn’t going to get a job as a poet with clunky lines like that.

Line 14:  fuck hopes and dreams

This was a bold, decisive way to get out of the corner that line 13 had painted me into.  You can tell “fuck hopes and dreams” was added later, as it’s in the same blue ink as the revisions.  I must have gotten to the end of line 13 and just given up on the poem, and then came back to it later and hastily finished it off without worrying about meter, rhyme, or even conveying anything meaningful. 

This line, “fuck hopes and dreams,” is actually a cinematic reference, but to a movie whose title I cannot remember.  It was a really awful movie.  My brother and I rented a lot of movies in those days, most of them awful.  This line came toward the end of the movie when the main character, totally stymied by everything in his life, melodramatically picked up a gun, put it to his head, and uttered this line.  I can’t even remember if he pulled the trigger because at this point in the movie my brother and I started laughing so hard we couldn’t see straight.  My god that was a stupid movie.

When researching this commentary I looked up “fuck hopes and dreams” on the Internet Movie Database but couldn’t find anything.  Probably it was such a forgettable movie that nobody bothered to mine it for memorable quotes.  My search did turn up a movie called “Young People F---ing,” which earned a Critics’ Metascore of 39 out of 100, which is remarkably low (but not the worst I’ve seen).

So, it’s been a long time since I wrote my unemployment poem, but I’m pretty sure the last line was a way to tell myself, “You’re being silly and melodramatic, lugubrious even, like that awful movie, and it’s time to stop writing indulgent, woe-is-me poetry and go get a damn job.”  Which I did.  After the underwear cannery gig ended, I held down two jobs concurrently—one at a bike shop and one at a radio station, as an evening receptionist—which not only paid the bills, but helped me save up some money for college.  Looking back, I’m glad I had that unemployment experience, and the depression that went with it, just to get it out of my system—hopefully once and for all.

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