We went tubing down a river in America just before the 4th of July—a possibly questionable decision for nine queer people from the city, we saw upon arriving around noon at a parking lot percolating with pink bodies clad in various scraps of flag and novelty T-shirts redundantly proclaiming their allegiance to the team sport of drunkenness.
We boarded a decommissioned school bus to the launch point and sat down at the front, like nerds. The engine started and so did a deafening chorus of the national anthem, not led but joined by the driver over his microphone. (I like to think I’m no alarmist, but the fear of some kind of “Cloud, Castle, Lake” scenario did scuttle across my mind.) Then a 40th birthday song from a group of women with a handle of tequila they were endeavoring to kill by the end of this short ride. (No glass allowed on the river.) Someone tried to get some Garth Brooks going; a lone soul directly behind us burst out with “O Canada” a couple of times, possibly for our group’s sole benefit; he confided to those of us sitting nearest that he admired Canada for the friendliness of its people and its policies, in a tone that evoked the well-meaning straight person who spends the first moments of your acquaintance telling you about every gay person they have ever known. Given the sensory onslaught, I’m not sure if he was the same man who trailed me through the parking lot from the portable toilets with a series of polite biographical questions each beginning with “Miss.” Miss, where are you from? Oh, Minneapolis. Where in Minneapolis? South Minneapolis. Miss, what high school did you go to? Oh—well, not “from” like that. Have a nice day!
We lost our busmates by the time we were on the river, having the advantage of relative sobriety in puzzling out the logistics of the launch. But their spiritual brethren were afloat everywhere. If you love America, let me hear you say HELL YEAH! a man screamed at intervals as we maneuvered around one group. We skipped the beachside snack stand patrolled by ATVs and thin blue line flags.
All of this and the rain and the sub-70-degree weather were not nearly enough to spoil my enjoyment. America has a lot of potential, my wife said once as we drove through the Badlands, and now it’s what I think whenever I slip from the hatefulness of America the nation into the loveliness of America the place. The shallow little river shimmered in the gray, its mists cupped by green bluffs and pierced by killdeer, warblers, orioles. I paddled through it muskrat-wise, elbows up on my tube, kicking seaweed from my ankles. When the river got too shallow I strode and stumbled along the rocky bottom. Water trailed from the several extra garments I somehow found myself wearing in my rush to get afloat and reluctance to remove anything standing between the chill rain and my skin.
It turned out to be my idea of an excellent time, but it wasn’t precisely the idea behind the outing. I discovered at the launch point that we were meant to lash our tubes together with twine to form one big raft and proceed as one, at whatever pace the river decided.
For me this seemed flatly impossible. I have trouble enough in the bow of a kayak or canoe. (The bow is for power, the stern is for control, paddling tutorials will tell you.) My friends laughed—commitment issues?—and gave some well-deserved eye rolls as I bobbed around them, a lone piece of flotsam. (Though later a couple of others decided to try my method, too.)
A desire for control is not necessarily a desire to command. I wouldn’t say I’m a Type A personality. I would say I am a person of my mother’s people, a pack of furtive Midwest loners, prone to be rather careless about the shape of our lives and exact about the shape of our moments. We love rules and recoil from rulers. Feel most free when least noticed. We do not want to be our own boss. We don’t want any boss at all.
This contrariness is not all bad. When a couple of us began to shiver to a worrisome degree it became useful to have a free agent in the mix to tow the group more rapidly down the river, and I felt happy as a sled dog to have a job, a quest. But it is just as often foolish and exhausting.
So I try to tamp it down. I watch for opportunities to submit myself. Mosh pits were good for this in my punk era. On the day Roe fell I took my sorrow and disgust into the street with a couple thousand other people; I can never really sustain the chants, but it feels correct to be a body in the crowd on such occasions.
A more joyful way to give over control is the dance floor (not that I’ve been dancing more than once in these pandemic years), and music made for it. Starting in dim middle school cafeterias I was an uncomfortable dancer, not trusting the music I felt in my body to express itself in socially acceptable shapes. It’s remarkable that I ever got over this, but with the good example of freer souls and an absence of public ridicule I gradually became convinced that dancing was less about knowing the moves than making them, and that the beat really was a trustworthy partner. You’ve got moves, a casual friend called out to me in one club years ago, and I was nearly ready to sock him in embarrassment before I realized he wasn’t making fun of me. I don’t think.
I know a folk dancer who has a hard time tolerating what today is called dance music; in her genre, the dancers don’t submit to the rhythm but create it. It took me a long while to get into the kind of song that first arrives as one big uniform slab of music, a too-wide canvas for dancing or drifting. My own songs tend to have a lot of chords, a lot of notes, a lot of words, ornate with the anxiety of the self-taught and far from supernaturally gifted performer.
But I have come to appreciate music that is less propelled by narrative. Music that moves around inside one beat, one chord even, that claims a block of time in order to feel out its contours more fully, not carve a sharp path through.
Here are 13 songs that create a moment and mostly stay there. If you relax and let the rhythm pull you downstream, you might have a pretty good time.
Full YouTube playlist here, individual vids below.
Tom Tom Club, “On, On, On, On…”
Music for marching in a mood of clearheaded certainty. On and on / we will come / there are scores of us. Let the Weymouths be your guide.
Blondie, “Heart of Glass”
Every punk’s entry point to disco?
Etran De L’Aïr, “Agrim Agadez”
Wedding music from a prodigious family band in Niger. Agadez is their hometown and you can presumably hear it rejoicing in the background.
Angelique Kidjo, “Born Under Punches”
When I first bought the original “Remain in Light” it was summer in my un-air-conditioned third-floor studio in Chicago, and the record was so exactly right it was almost unlistenable. Kidjo finds space—more depth, wider dynamic range—inside the original without dispersing its trapped heat. This song grooves, but it also paces, far more restless between its bars than its companions on this list.
Y La Bamba, “Mujeres”
This, actually, is the sort of thing I’d like to hear at protests.
Hot Chip, “Over and Over”
Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal / the joy of repetition really is in you.
Le Tigre, “My My Metrocard”
Every riot grrrl’s entry point to synths and samplers?
Azealia Banks, “Miss Camaraderie”
At the end of an album of arresting provocations there is this bewitching come-on, recreating the the things she alone can do in ballroom gossamer. I think for the rest of my life I’ll pray for a reckoning and subsequent comeback from Azealia.
Os Mutantes, “Bat Macumba”
A sort of Brazilian “Louie Louie,” artsily filmed here for French TV.
ESG, “Dance”
It’s amazing to me to think of a group of self-taught teen musicians possessing the sophistication and restraint necessary to create songs this economical at the start of the ‘80s. Songwriter Renee Scroggins explained in an interview:
When James Brown took it to the bridge he cut all the horns, it was just that giant bass and the drums and letting it rip for that instant. Maybe he'd still have the keyboards, but it would just have that funk and that drive. So I said, man, if you could just take a song and make it just the bridge, wouldn't that be hot!
The Scroggins sisters weren’t afraid to stand in place for as long as the beat maintained their interest. Later in the same interview, Renee recalls finding real generative power in stasis:
I remember how I wrote the song called “Standing in Line.” I was actually standing in line in New York in a place called Motor Vehicles where you get your driver's license. And that line was so long, it just felt like the line never ended and it just kept growing and growing. And then all of a sudden as I'm looking at the people and the things that are going around me, the beat hit me and I was like, oh my god!
The New Pornographers, “Darling Shade”
The next time I’m tempted to over-engineer a bridge or something, I need to remember how much you can do entirely within the chord of C (i.e., everything here but the chorus).
LCD Soundsystem, “Home”
And here’s how much you can build on the foundation of one intricately clucking little beat, how wide James Murphy can pry open a moment to both soothe and call out your entire deal with lines like:
You're afraid of what you need
Yeah, you're afraid of what you need
If you weren't, if you weren't
I don't know what we'd talk about
This song’s 8-minute run time feels generous to me. If you enter it in a certain state and simply pay attention, you can exit transformed enough to get through the rest of the night.
New Order, “The Village”
What is the titular village, never mentioned in the song? If it’s a place at all, it’s a place under a spell, where love is simultaneously “forever” and ephemeral as flowers. The singer is trapped in it for two days, then two years, then three. And yet it’s an undeniably beautiful place to get stuck, if stuck is what you’re going to be.