8 / lilac, ginestra, tulip
Woman who has only ever heard Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" is getting a lot of "Dancing on My Own" vibes from [everything]
I intended for this newsletter to reach you, perhaps finally, in the last vestiges of March. Instead, hello from April. Since last I wrote,
Gabrielle McCulloch published a great article on Newsroom about New Zealand’s online literary magazine landscape (a landscape I am, admittedly, biased toward, in a fanatic-Instagram-town-crieresque way—but an article I would recommend regardless)
I finished the television show I talked about in the previous newsletter: a process full of voice memos; anguish and delight; liberal use of [M]emojis; and an immediate pivot into a spinoff—for which the theme tune, alas, is not nearly as good (though the Irish accent[s] are far better)
Paula Green was kind enough to publish my poem ‘Sunday, 7 November’ over on NZ Poetry Shelf—another bouquet of sorts, for you, if you like
[Also, strap in, sweets: this one’s a long one.]
The passing of March crept up on me, really, though I don’t say that with too much regret. I have been working and writing and much of what seems like silence will eventually become sound.
Mid-month, I read Hanif Abdurraqib’s The Delicious Misery of the “Sad Banger”, published in The New York Times. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a ‘sad banger’—and I’m resisting an obligatory bit about a depressed sausage here—think ‘ecstatic melody, devastating lyrics’. Think, arguably, ‘the greatest songs of all time’.
I’ve mentioned before how much I love Abdurraqib’s writing, particularly on music,1 and I think this comes down to his brilliant understanding of the emotional exchange inherent in the art form: something entwined with words, and their minute, refracting connotations, but also possessing key access to a core beyond them, to a kind of pure, tonal expression. In less convoluted terms: Abdurraqib gets it, y’know? He gets the marriage between lyrics and melody, as catapults or counterweights, and how, together, they can hold nuance otherwise unavailable to the listener. A sad banger is the epitome of that.
I’ve something of a penchant for the melancholy, and the bittersweet, which I think deep down stems from an obsession with analysis: watching feelings and circumstances encase one-another like tree rings, culminating in the kind of response too big to hold within oneself, pointing to whys and hows over easy whats. Sad bangers and compelling characters, be they fictional or not, explore how—to quote Sarah Marshall on Kato Kaelin, of all things—‘we also experience multiple things at once.’ Abdurraqib writes:
There are times when I am simply sad, and there is no emotional accompaniment. But other times, the sadness is one smattering on a canvas that is asking for something else. I’m sad, but I still want. I’m sad because I’m jealous, and that jealousy is unlocking a passion or a pleasure. I’m sad because of what I can’t control, which pulls me, with arms open, toward the things I can control.
In particular, Abdurraqib alludes to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” as ‘[maybe] the ultimate sad banger’. An early-on mention in the article, and absolute icing for me.
Alongside a large portion of the planet, I love the song “Dancing on My Own”. I love its twinkling, intangible, pure pop eclecticism; I love its expansiveness; I love its deceptive simplicity. I love its above-average chord-melody tension. It’s got an intensity akin to sprinting through a field toward a place you’ll never reach. It’s Rose Matafeo in Horndog describing horniness (or, later, passion) as ‘girls putting one hundred into something that is just not worth it’; it’s Rose Matafeo in the closing monologue of Horndog deciding through tears that putting one hundred percent into something is always worth it; it’s Rose Matafeo in the post-monologue finale to Horndog continuing to weep through a fully choreographed callback group number; it’s perhaps literally not quite any of this but it is also spiritually aligned to all of it—
The kind of feelings “Dancing on My Own” engenders in me, or those which it encourages me to explore, come to me melodically and settle into a gentle, crisp purple: pale and (despite their source) calm, closer to blue but not mistakable for it. The colour pairs well with a red. I feel oftentimes—oh, god, if you’ll indulge me—like I live in this colour, this kind of stone grey with some fledgling love in it. Perhaps I reach for Robyn because like recognises like, in the tension between euphoria and discontent. The cool lilac I’m talking about also resembles, I realised when I went to verify the quote, the shade of nail polish Rose Matafeo wears in the recorded version of Horndog.
Except, as Abdurraqib points out, ‘sad’—and, indeed, this purple, though I don’t mean to create a false equivalency—is only ‘one smattering on a canvas’. Really, I think this lilac, as I’ve glanced toward with the mention of red, is a single piece of a larger palette. The whole point of the sad banger, with all that it contains, is to exist as multitudinous. And to that end what springs to mind instead, with “Dancing on My Own”—and, you know what, to hell with it, with my feelings, and with everything—is the complementary cohabitation of shades descending from that lilac with a delicious, summery gold. In particular, I’m thinking of Joan Mitchell’s diptychs, ‘Two Pianos’ (1980) and ‘Wood, Wind, No Tuba’ (1989). It feels too cute that they’re musically named, but here we are. Sometimes the world is cute and we call things fated.
Following Abdurraqib’s article, “Dancing on My Own” continued to weave itself through my March. I stumbled back across the video of a NYC subway platform teeming with post-concert bodies, united and belting:
I love this video. I genuinely, wholeheartedly love it. You could write a whole trite essay about the fact it’s being filmed by someone outside of the moment, but I think that reach is beside the point. This throng of concertgoers blooms outward to catch you. It’s the kind of collective joy I’ve missed.
The clip now also functions as an archive of the World Before—one which, despite changing restrictions, still feels so far away to me. I know, of course, there will be no return to the World Before, and in many ways there shouldn’t be, but I look at these united strangers and I think back to when I saw Matilda: The Musical in 2017, and stood in floods of tears down the front post-curtain call, and was swept into a hug by the woman beside me, who was also crying, and whom I had never met before, and I think about how we have lost out on casual common-ground and new acquaintances, and how necessary caution and isolation have shifted the motivation for dancing on one’s own significantly, and how that’s a heavy-handed nod to our topic but also how cavernous the difference is in the minor semantic tweak between “Dancing on My Own” and “Dancing With Myself”, a sad banger to a spangly one, and forced distance at the heart of it—and—and—and—
To nod to Abdurraqib again here:
We are all suffering from a prolonged hunger, and the realities of our circumstances won’t let us be satiated.
The past couple of years have brought into stark—sometimes coexisting—contrast the difference between being a creative person without the resources to, say, get into that audition, or get that screenplay produced, or to publish wherever, or have a play programmed, and being unable to engage in face-to-face contact without endangering oneself and others. I’m very used to facing barriers against which I can, in some form, eventually triumph, barriers which can be combatted through my own agency—or at least barriers in which I might make a dent—but this has been, and continues to be, different. This is not a willpower fight.
(And there will be better times. There will be. Even if—and not to break out another sad banger here—‘you know it’s not the same as it was’.)2
Two more little bits on “Dancing on My Own” before I leave you. The first, simply, is hell yeah to the legend who made this call. And the second:
In early 2020, I was preparing to direct a production of Estelle Anna Lewis’s Sappho of Lesbos (1868). I’ll speak at length about the play as soon as you let me out the gate, but, for now, here’s a parallel in the script that always tickled me. From Cleone, a character renowned for her dancing:
Or, as we’ve all been screaming since 2010:
So timeless is the reach of the sad banger.
Thank you, as ever, for reading. I’ll be back soon with more—specifically, with a kind of sequel to this bouquet. (I never know whether to sincerely refer to these as bouquets, but here we are, and I am shoving flowers into your hands—)
In the meantime, stay safe, and well, and enjoy the below image for a moment before you move on. It may not do much for you but it was taken in a place I was very glad to be walking through. So there’s that.
On Summer Crushing is superlative work, and changed my life, or else at least crystallised something within it. (Please, please read it.)
Gorgeous music video for this song, by the way. There’s a rich kind of creamy light to it, especially noticeable after you reach the auditorium for the first time, that reminds me of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). The textures are exquisite, as is the sense of movement. Every single bouquet to the colourist.