music – Alice Thomsen

When someone asks, “What sort of music do you like?” I tend to fumble and search for a way to say, “A bit of everything,” without sounding completely vapid. The cliche is a bit of everything except rap and country (which has implications that are a whole different discussion); I never ruled out rap or country, but for a while, I could at least append, “except opera.” It struck me a bit the way ballet does—it’s hard for me to ignore, while listening to it, the fact that there’s supposed to be a larger performance at play. By fluke, I ended up with a dancer friend, and so I ended up at the ballet, and so I cultivated the ability to hold the performance in my head while listening to the music (or else to watch every “Trepak” video on YouTube) but I never had that exposure to opera. Then COVID happened, and a singer friend shared broadcasts from opera folks trying to adapt to the distance, and, well, now I need to come up with something else to exclude.

I want to have an exclusion because I don’t want to give the impression that I like everything. It’s not that I’m not picky, just that my criteria are eclectic, often arbitrary, and rarely connected to any of the labels we use to group things. I think I’ve finally come up with a name for it, though. Let me give it a try and see how it feels.

Hey, Alice, what’s your favorite type of music?

It’s called the all-nighter.

Imagine this: You’re on a creative development team. You were given a week to come up with the Next Big Thing, and now here you are, the day before your big meeting to give the pitch, and you have wastebaskets full of idea maps, brainstorming charts, half-drafted concepts … but no finished product. Most people have headed home for the day, but your team has come to the unspoken agreement that you’ll be staying late. Someone makes a coffee run. You order pizza and continue talking through ideas. Your whiteboard markers are drying out; you’re making a list of themes in yellow when someone else makes a Red Bull run.

Around midnight, you hit a slump. Your meeting is in nine hours. What’s the point? You have nothing; you may as well just go in there and own up to it.

How nihilistic, someone remarks, snapping the pop tab off their long-empty Red Bull. The Next Big Thing is … wait for it … nothing.

There is dejected laughter that dies out into dejected silence, but then something in the mood shifts. Because what if …

The all-nighter is whatever follows that what-if. What if it’s Metallica … but with cellos? What if it’s country, but we replace the F150 and moonshine … with a 747 and mini bottles? What if it’s … whatever this is?

Here’s the other thing about your hypothetical creative development team. The company you work for? They’re understaffed. (Maybe part of the reason it’s 4am on the day of the meeting before you have your pitch ready is that you’ve all been busy doing three jobs?) The all-nighter isn’t just about having a twist; it’s about having a reckless twist, the sort of absurdity that can only flourish under a false sense of invincibility fueled by caffeine, sleep deprivation, and the realization that, well, what are they going to do—fire you?

The all-nighter isn’t a genre just of music. There are all-nighter books, movies, podcasts; there are arguably all-nighter dishes, tea blends, single-batch sour ales that deserve a rerun, if only so I have a chance to stockpile. And, like most things that happen after hours, it’s not always good—part of recklessness, after all, is the higher-than-average chance of a fiery crash-and-burn disaster. I don’t know what makes a given all-nighter successful; all I know is that my new favorite cover is by Like A Storm, which is describes itself as “an Alternative Metal/Rock band from New Zealand, best known for blending heavy riffs with the DIDGERIDOO”:

… and if that doesn’t exemplify 4am pseudo-hypomania, I don’t know what does.

You guys, I have a confession to make:

Sometimes I listen to Ke$ha. For instance, “Blow”:

Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I even go to dance clubs. Willingly, I should add—not just because my friends have coerced me. Near where I grew up is a club named Necto, which has a different theme for each day of the week. A few times when I got the under-age bracelet, and a few times when I got the buying-drinks hand stamp, I’ve been in there. Yes, it’s usually prompted by a social outing, but I join in of my own volition. The best part? Hovering around the dance floor on a sort of catwalk, with a full view of the DJ, flashing lights, and, of course, (seemingly) spasming bodies. Get a black russian, find a place with a protruding drink rest, and just take it in. The people-watching in clubs is like nothing else in the way that the mythical mass suicide of lemmings, with the exception that the people-watching is real.

Here’s the thing:

Now what? What? We’re taking control
We get what we want
We do what you don’t
Dirt and glitter cover the floor
We’re pretty and sick
We’re young and we’re bored
It’s time to lose your mind and let the crazy out
(This place about to—)
Tonight we’re taking names ’cause we don’t mess around

I have found, in highly non-scientific study, that introverts show as much “guilty pleasure” for songs like this as extroverts do, even though the speaker (because we’re writers and know better than to assume that the singer, Ke$ha, is part of the actual “we” of the song) is ostentatiously extroverted in her behaviors, essentially invading a club and overthrowing the existing leadership. Drink that Kool-Aid, she insists; Shut the DJ down.

“Blow,” I would posit, is an introvert’s wish fulfillment the same way some songs allow us to live out our dreams of all-night partying or unconditional praise of our beauty. All media, after all, has an element of wish fulfillment, doesn’t it?

Or maybe not. After all, countless songs bemoan being on the sea of heartbreak or an ex-lover’s suicide. There’s a painful resonance in some music—hence the cliché of the angst-ridden teenager flopped back on the bed, listening to equally angst-ridden tunes, or the grieving figure leaning a forehead on a rain-streaked window while a melancholy sonata murmurs in the background. I’ll grant this, and I’ll openly admit to having indulged myself in this. Who hasn’t?

But then the Ke$has come along, and we can visualize ourselves as feeling like P Diddy. We can pretend, for three and a half minutes, that we’re not loitering on that catwalk, that instead we’re in the thick of those hot, writhing bodies on the dance floor, feeding on the energy of a crowd, like some sort of foreign creature we observe but can imitate only poorly.

Books are the same, though. We have to empathize, in some way. We have to see our dead ex, or our recent breakup, or our dark, tortured, misunderstood soul somewhere in the lines. Still, it’s too boring to read a story just about ourselves. We can do that any day just by getting out of bed. The writer has to hint at a wish, something we want but can’t have. Love. Survival. Understanding. Justice.

It’s never that easy, of course. Protagonists can’t just show at a club, fight till they see the sunlight, and set everything in the world right. Still, is it so wrong, every now and then, to put a character in a deliciously improbable situation, just to see what happens?

Tag: music

The All-Nighter

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