My Little Underground Essays is a place for contributors to write about basically whatever they want. Here, the rules of avoiding lyrics and focusing on sound, process, and gear are lifted. Writers might indulge in analysis of lyrics, band history, and even introduce stories from their own lives. We hope you enjoy this entry from Ari Wolf.
--Ari Wolf
I know everyone is busy kicking into Spring. I also know that if you’re anything like me, you feel heartbroken, and devastated, and you’re only now beginning to realize the toll the last four years has taken. If you’re anything like me, you’re watching the Corona Virus statistics rise. I’m personally scared for my own health since I have a chronic respiratory disease. I know a lot of folks out there are probably in that same boat. I also know that for some of us, those of us who are working-class and suffering mightily right now, being scared for the future is nothing new. For some of us, even achieving ‘normal’ things, like job security, a 401K, a relationship, or physical health, can start to feel totally out of reach. So here are the songs that remind me that we are all in this together, yes even those of us who are in pain and lonely and worry that maybe we really are invisible, and no one even cares what happens to us.
I guess you could call these songs my spiritualism, my medicine. Because I care. We are all interconnected. Your life impacts everyone and everything. Thank you for being here.
1. Better Days—Goo Goo Dolls
This song always makes me feel exhausted, but also hopeful. I listen to this song to remind me that we really can begin again. Every moment, every new day, is an opportunity to transform the way we look at our own lives and the way we look at the world around us. People really do transform their outlooks and their behavior, every day. People really do change. Change is always available to us. The question is, are we brave enough to try?
2. If We Hold on Together—Diana Ross
Some of you out there might be ‘90s kids like me, in which case you will probably remember this song from the end of The Land Before Time. That film about a plucky band of little-kid dinosaurs who find their way to the ‘Great Valley’ where their beloved relatives are waiting for them was my very favorite childhood movie. That film always made me cry. And this song is the perfect way to end the film. This song is about hope in the face of despair, about continuing on in the face of extreme suffering.
The film itself was my favorite precisely because it offered no easy answers and no pat Disney-ified conclusions. The lead character, Littlefoot, loses his mother in a violent way that is partially his fault, and she dies right next to him. While her bleeding form scared many a young child, others, like myself, grew up witnessing extreme acts of violence. Some of us grew up in homes where a bleeding mother was the norm. Others of us grew up in a house where we were the ones doing the bleeding. Either way, too many of us were kids who learned very early exactly how dangerous hope can be. Others of us learned that what is broken might not ever be fixed, and sometimes when you lose someone you love, nothing can ever repair that wound. Still, as the film teaches, there is so much to live for. Your friends are waiting for you, and they need you to lead them to the Great Valley. Your pain can transform into intuition and a leader’s sensitivity, and you can lead everyone home again.
The song is beautiful and fluid and difficult to listen to. Diana Ross seems to stumble as she’s singing, almost as though she’s holding back tears. For a little girl like me who didn’t really have much in the way of real family, this song meant so, so much. People forget sometimes that some people have families, but other people have music. Some people have actual love in their lives as kids, but some people just have songs about love. Songs like this reminded me of how not so great my life was at the time, but this song also made me feel like if I kept going, kept moving forward, somewhere I’d get somewhere better, somewhere worth going to.
I also love this film because this song reminds me of one of the most beautiful and tender moments of my own life. I went on a trip to Viet Nam in high school. A group from my high school went as ‘peace ambassadors,’ traveling around South Viet Nam with members of the Vietnamese State Department. Our trip was sponsored by Peacetrees Viet Nam, a Seattle-based organization which removes land mines that the United States army left behind during the war. While I was there, I met children who had lost limbs to these mines, and I heard stories about people who had lost their lives. This was the first time in my life when someone asked me to really encounter and come to terms with the harm colonialism has done and continues to do. While I was there, during one of our last days, we went to this big-deal dinner with high-up Vietnamese officials. We sang karaoke, for some reason. One of the members of the State Department and I had built a bond over the past few weeks. She asked me to sing, and even though I was completely terrified to sing in front of other people at that point in my life, I agreed. She asked me if I knew this song, and I said I did. So 16-year-old me got up onstage and sang ‘If We Hold On Together’ to foreign dignitaries and members of my high school, alongside this brave, passionate young woman who belonged to a country halfway around the world from my own. I don’t know where I got the courage to do that, but I think she gave it to me. And when we sang ‘If We Hold On Together,’ she and I, we really meant it.
3. And the Youth Shall See Visions-Debbie Friedman
This song comes from my own Jewish tradition. It is rooted in part in a Torah verse, but Debbie Friedman brings this song so far beyond simply proselytizing. This song is about finding hope in confronting your own past, about honoring generations who’ve gone before and leaving a better world for generations that will come. Her songs are themselves an act of worship. This song is magical and mysterious and so much bigger than the short, ordinary-looking woman who sings it. Watch Debbie Friedman’s face while she sings. She is transformed. This song can transform us too.
4. Not Only Human—Heather Nova
Heather Nova took a moment out from writing about sex and desire and passion to write this spiritual ballad. The song is haunting and difficult and something to stumble on, to stumble away from then stumble back again. It takes some time, this song. It eats you down and washes away the muddiness inside. It’s hard to swallow. The song simultaneously reminds us that our lives are steeped in pain and gives the suggestion that there is something vast beyond all that pain, another place worth getting to. It’s lovely. It’s hopeful. It’s unexpected. It’s worth a listen.
5. Will You Be There—Michael Jackson
You’ll remember from my last list that I believe that even horrible people can make beautiful art. Michael Jackson almost certainly abused children, and I think that is the worst and most immoral thing any person can ever do to another. Yet this song, with its message of hope and brotherhood and its search for connection in the face of devastation, this song means something to me. I was once stuck at a truly horrible young adult treatment facility and this one girl played this song every single night for two weeks. I wanted to throttle her, but this song got to me. I am very grateful to her for introducing me to this song, which is calming and tender and so, so sad somehow. Aren’t we all just begging someone to hold us, and mean it, and not leave? And isn’t the person we’re begging really beyond just any one individual, into the whole of the collective of humanity?
6. Natural Bridge—Adrienne Young
This song is about the human individual decision to change. Adrienne Young remains one of my favorite singers. She lives on a farm somewhere in the Midwest, sings in jeans and a t-shirt with her hair down like an old-fashioned hippie, and wouldn’t be caught dead naked on a cd cover. Most of her Youtube videos take place at organic farm festivals. She is an advocate of organic farming and a green lifestyle. She is an artist/activist in a soft, gentle way that seems entirely her own. The song is about the freedom of change, a freedom that is, for Young, always grounded in the natural world. We all have the capacity to make a different decision, to find another way forward for ourselves, every day. That’s worth remembering.
7. Blizzard—Judy Collins
This song is about a woman who gets stranded on a mountain in a blizzard. Yet, the song is about so much more than that. The song is every one of us who has ever found ourselves heartbroken and alone on the top of a metaphorical (or literal!) mountain. The song is the moment when you are so full of grief that you can’t breathe, and maybe you don’t even know why. The song is for those of us who are in love with someone who can’t or won’t love us back, who just is not worth it, but we can’t bring ourselves to move on. The song is what happens when we look around and dare find beauty in the world even when that is the last thing we feel prepared to do.
8. Our Children—Ragtime
Ragtime, for folks who have not read the book or seen the musical, is about the future. It is a musical about feminism, about fighting back against police brutality with everything you’ve got no matter the cost, about Jewish immigration and poverty. Ragtime is about the turn of the 20th century in America, about how absolutely morally bankrupt and classist and cruel it is, and how some people tried to make the best of it and others tried to do the best they could for one another. It is a story about how sometimes, the good guy is going to lose, or even die, and the bad die will survive him to tell the tale. It’s also a story about how our ancestors’ hopes for us live on in our bodies and our spirits, even when our parents die too young or even when our parents as individuals badly mess up. It’s a story about redemption, and the power of music to change a person’s mind or heal a person’s heart. It’s about how some things won’t ever heal, but some things do, and the future is always a place where we can start again. This song is the base of that musical. The song is sung by two people, a Jewish immigrant man and a wealthy white woman, watching their children play together on a beach. It’s about the impossibility of that moment, about crossing class lines and ethnic lines in order to find connection and even romance. And it’s about wanting to protect our children, and ourselves too, from realities we’ll never be able to protect anyone from. But we can find reasons to move on from these realities, to leave them behind, in loving each other deeply.
9. Seasons of Love—Rent
Okay first of all, if you haven’t seen the movie Rent or at least listened to the OBC recording, what’s wrong with you? Get to it!
Good. Now that you’re back, we can talk about this song.
Measure your life not by stuff you accumulate, or money you earn, or people you f***, or degrees or cars or any other status symbol. Measure your life by who you love, and who loves you.
Also? People die. When you’re young, it’s easy to forget that. I forgot that, for a long time. I thought I was immortal. I thought I could drink as much as I liked, spend money without a second thought, take whatever jobs I wanted when I wanted, and keep running away from my problems forever. I thought none of it would ever come back to haunt me. But then, two things happened. The first is, I met a guy. And suddenly I started wanting, y’know, a family and a home and kids and all that stuff I really just thought I would never want. The second thing that happened is, I realized I’m sick. I mean, I’d been getting worse for years, I just tried not to notice. But suddenly I woke up one day and now I get breathless and dizzy whenever I walk upstairs, and my heart hurts pretty bad. So you can see why this song seems particularly poignant for me. Turns out I’d been living for all the wrong reasons, totally blind to what I truly wanted and why. Meanwhile, my body had been shouting at me to pay attention, because we all only have so much time.
People die. I’ve lost friends over the years—to alcoholism, to eating disorders, to drug addiction, to PTSD from rape trauma and the additional trauma of not being believed. Many of the people I have loved in my life are dead. Maybe most of them. And I’m not going to live that much longer either. That man isn’t in my life anymore, but I don’t think I’m going to live long enough to live that vision of happiness I saw with him anyway. I don’t think my body will survive that long, to be honest.
But there’s love. This song outlived its maker, Jonathan Larsen. Jonathan wrote this song and the rest of Rent, and the musical went to off broadway. The day before opening night, famously, Jonathan Larsen died of an aneurysm. He died before his musical could reach Broadway, before it could define a generation, before it could change the world. He died the night before his dreams came true.
He died, but this song lives on.
May we all be so blessed as to create something beautiful that outlives us.
10. One Voice—Wailin Jennys
If you haven’t ever heard of the Wailin Jennys, that’s okay! Clearly, you’re not a folk music fan, but no worries. You still have time to correct that flaw. Anyhow, this song gives me shivers. This song makes me feel enlivened and in harmony with the universe. This song makes me feel like being a human being is a good thing to be. I suggest you listen. Then, after you’ve had a good weeping, I suggest you listen all over again. And repeat as many times as needed to feel better.