Recently, I was listening to one of my all-time favourite songs, Marvin Gaye’s “Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)” from What’s Going On. I always hesitate to put it on because I know it will undoubtedly take me to “the place where danger awaits me.” It’s not the same dangerous place the narrator of the song describes; he’s talking about struggling with drug addiction. What I am describing as dangerous is the emotional state this song puts me in. My day could be humming along in its ordinariness and I will decide I need to listen to this song. I tell myself I can handle it. That I won’t listen to it more than once. That I’m more than capable of listening to it without plunging myself into a sadness that is all encompassing, even as I am also experiencing a kind of pleasure and feeling of homecoming pulsing through me. “And I go to the place/where good feelin’ awaits me.” This duality of feeling and perspective is integral to the structure of Gaye’s song. For me, it’s an unbearable feeling of excess that has nowhere to go but in a loop of repeat plays. Sometimes I need to stop the loop’s work midway through the song, so I can start it again and once more hear the shatteringly perfect 10 seconds that is Gaye singing “and it’s bound to forsake me.”
Over a decade ago, a friend referred to another song by a different artist as “fine china,”1 going on to say “you don’t eat from it every day.” (Yes, this is against the grain of the “use the good dishes!” ethos of the current moment, but never mind.) It’s an idea that recognizes how some songs are simply too much to introduce into the delicate balance of the everyday atmosphere. Most of the records I love deeply have at least one such song on them. These include Robert Wyatt’s “Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road,” Joanna Newsom’s “Goose Eggs” (to be honest, it might be her entire discography post-The Milk-Eyed Mender), Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2 (XO),” among many, many, many others. Too many to name and too precious to me to list and categorize.
The trouble is, I do eat from these every day and I had never considered the meaning and consequences of that until a recent afternoon with Marvin Gaye, when I became very aware that I was trying too hard to ignore what I knew would come with the listening. Putting such songs, some songs in the wrong place is dangerous, but not because of their status as exquisite or fully realized. It’s not because you should save your finest dinnerware for a momentous occasion, rather than Saturday afternoon hot dogs. It’s dangerous because there is an art to being human and that art comes down to taking care of oneself. The wilds of feeling and association are welcome if I am lying on my living room floor simply listening to a record. They are ferociously out-of-place in the pursuit of calm and steadiness. Once I began to notice how I felt—something that took until my mid-30s to realize I wasn’t doing and had no idea how to start or why it was important—I realized something troubling about my compulsive attitude toward this type of song. I could see that these songs were very fine, indeed, but that I wanted to ignore that duality of danger and good feeling, and how out of balance they were in the looping. How out of balance this kind of listening put me. I simply believed my aesthetic judgment of the song’s virtues overrode everything else.
I’m surprised to have noticed this. I can be very stubborn and singleminded about music. I think just a couple of years ago I would have vehemently defended going to this chaotic place. I’m not even ready to say I want to stop this kind of listening all together. I don’t think I’ll ever really eradicate it. Right now, I am happy to have recognized and acknowledged this phenomenon and its role in my life. I’m grateful to simply be looking at it with some tiny measure of equanimity.
What’s Going On came out in 1971, a ridiculously amazing year in music. Here’s a playlist (ongoing, very incomplete, and a work in progress) of some excellent songs from that year. Not all of them are “dangerous.”
A final thought before leaving: I often catch myself feeling very grateful that music is not a part of my professional life. Some of you might know that before going to graduate school, I had a life in music: host of several radio shows, music journalism, booking shows and tours, starting and running a small record label, playing DJ around town, hosting shows at my apartment, working as music director (& various other jobs) at college radio stations. It was a fun, precarious, formative, naive, and sometimes painful period. When I say I’m happy I no longer do anything with music (except listen to it) I don’t mean it in relation to that period, but to what I do now. Although doing cultural and literary criticism for me generates thought and feelings, I’m glad to not be doing that with music, which has for me the status of the sacred. It lives somewhere else for me, protected from any structure where I have to consider my relation to it as part of an exchange. It reaches something that I can’t articulate and I feel okay with that, ecstatic with that, at peace with that.
xo, sara
p.s. I want to acknowledge and thank my friend Marla Zubel, with whom I’ve been talking about this topic.
I’ve been thinking about whether the use of “china” to describe porcelain is appropriate, given how emblematic porcelain is of colonial modernity. It’s not satisfactory to say it’s called “china'“ in English because porcelain was first made in China. There is a lot of scholarship on porcelain and colonialism, and I went down that rabbit hole when pondering the title of this piece, though did not come across anything that discussed in detail the ongoing use of the term. If you know of something, please send me a link. Thanks to my friend Mercedes Lee for thinking through this with me a little bit.
Loved this piece. I strongly relate, but never put my finger on it, which is so satisfying…
I'm also going to be thinking about these exquisite words of yours the next time I'm looping/mid-looping in the school pickup car line.