Big Love by Fleetwood Mac

I love cheese. Once, I ordered a burger and was asked if I wanted cheese on it and for reasons unknown I said, “Oh, no thanks.” My friend gave me a look like I had just killed a man. I still think about that burger and the missing melted milk-product draped as lovingly over the seared meat as a security blanket over a sleeping babe. Why oh why did I deny the tiny wants of my feeble heart?

I love cheesy songs. We all do. Often ironically, but only because the irony allows us to impersonate someone cooler while our insides scream “I’M NOT O-FUCKING-KAY”. We love songs with big feelings because our feelings are big and grotesque and often inexplicable to ourselves and almost always inexplicable to others. I love cheesy songs in the way I love how contestants on The Bachelor franchise talk about “love”. It is completely performative, and it is exactly how human beings express the things they care about the most: like frightened animals. My reaction to most dialogue on The Bachelor is, “I didn’t know you could make a sentence with those words in that order.”

Have you ever seen someone cry in public? I don’t mean silent tears as they stare out the window telegraphing main character syndrome to everyone around. I mean wretched, heaving, snotty sobs. Maybe it’s because I lived in Boston for a long time, but we avoided those people like they had a disease. We fear the infection of sadness and pain, cannot imagine ourselves in the same vulnerable place. Yet we are jealous of them. Whenever I hear a small child crying in the wild, I think “Damn, me too, kid.” The problem is that if we felt the way Kate Bush does when she sings “Get Out of My House” and makes donkey noises into a microphone that costs more than my rent, we would simply cease to be. It’s catharsis. Cheesy music gives us permission to be our most wasted selves without moving a muscle. Put on that one song and let the professionals do the talking.

We—yes, you and me, dear reader—love cheesy music because it expresses the inexpressible. The dumbest thoughts and basest feelings we’ve ever had are best channeled through songs so loud and absurd they transcend time and space and genre. Never deny yourself the cheese. You will regret it.

On that note:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every Fleetwood Mac song is about fucking. Yes, even “Landslide”. When the songs aren’t explicitly about how much you love/hate fucking Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham/John McVie/Christine McVie/Mick Fleetwood, they are about the absence of fucking. No Fuckwood Mac song is more about carnal desire than the opening track to the total tonal trainwreck, Tango In The Night.

How much is this song about the hanky-panky, the horizontal mambo, the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am? If you brought a platoon of pleather pants to life, gave them poppers and a huge recording budget, they would eventually make this song. The drums and guitar loop endlessly like a Kate Bush b-side. Buckingham pouts and whispers his way through the verses, rising to a wail every refrain. As if all that synth and reverb wasn’t enough, during the bridge two voices grunt and moan back and forth in the most blatant imitation of intimacy in pop music since Prince made love to his guitar on the outro to “Let’s Go Crazy”. The music video looks like a haunted VHS tape; seven days after watching you would have the sweatiest, filthiest poontang of your life in the back of a car neither you nor your partner own.

In my mom’s cherry red minivan, where the Mac marked me for death, the CD most heavily in rotation was The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac. This compilation features the more canonical version of “Big Love”: a live cut wherein a solo Buckingham makes one guitar sound like three. It rips. It rules. It is some of his best work. It is almost inconceivable that the same song appears on the 1987 record.

The album version is not bad, per se. It’s just weird. In the late 80s it was already behind the times, retreading tropes of the era’s production-heavy pop. Upon release, much was made of its suggestive grunting, and commenters of course ascribed the “female” voice to Stevie Nicks. The Fleetwood Mac Soap Opera was in its umpteenth iteration, it was only natural the on-again off-again couple subject listeners to some Moog synthesizer pornography sounds. Except it wasn’t Nicks’ voice at all. Buckingham was quick to point out she wasn’t even in the room. Who then was this other woman? Lindsey Fuckingham himself. He artificially pitched his voice up to imitate the sound of his partner. This man spent so much time and effort simulating a duet, and he got mad when we believed it. No one realized he was just fucking himself.

And yet, rising above the weirdness of this whole performance of gender and desire that really makes no sense, is this simple fact: the song Bangs. In its crescendo, the drums break out of their loop and into a frantic roll, a screaming guitar backs the exasperated sexual yelps, the song feels like it might just fall apart. It’s on this edge of total oblivion that “Big Love” rides out from the doldrums of sticky pop-rock and sears itself into my psyche forever.

This is what interests me: the songs with flaws and warts that rise above. Songs so bold in their unconscious badness, you can’t look away. Songs that for better or worse, are unforgettable.