Death Is A Song I Can't Stop Singing

I’ve been writing this newsletter for two years. It’s good to look back and see all that work in one place. Here’s a playlist of the songs covered in year 2.

Thanks to Jennifer Huang and Kayla Carcone who both contributed wonderful essays this time around. I’m looking forward to lining up a few more guests for the coming year.

The most popular piece this year was also my favorite to write: on Orville Peck, Lady Gaga, and old men who can’t help telling me about their dead loved ones.

I’ve moved over to beehiiv instead of Substack because the latter likes Nazi and transphobe money too much. Shouldn’t change anything for readers.

Here’s another essay about music and dying.

Love,

Carl

My great uncle J lived alone in Arizona. He moved out there in the 80s. My mom said he’d sought out the desert climate on a doctor’s suggestion that it might aid in alleviating his allergies. It had always been inexplicable to me, this westward move, away from the big Catholic Czech-immigrant family. Though maybe that was the reason. Uncle J was the seventh of eight children, and outlived all his siblings.

It’ll be his 99^th birthday this weekend. Would’ve been, I guess. You probably guessed he’s been dead for a while.

It was July of 2020. I’d driven 800 miles home to Vermont, quarantined in my grandparents’ long-empty house before rejoining my parents and sister. My dad was getting surgery and I needed to be there for his recovery. The pandemic’s onset had delayed the procedure, and it seemed a miracle it was really happening. We huddled inside a hotel by the hospital. Next door, another hotel was housing a children’s sleepaway camp who’d been stranded across state lines and quarantine restrictions. The kids ran around the parking lot, making do. We watched them instead of the news.

Meanwhile, Uncle J was dying in Arizona. It had been a long time coming. Two years earlier he’d fallen on the sidewalk and hit his head. Ended up in a hospital unable to remember his name. As if dementia hadn’t done enough. He would argue with my mother, his caretaker before the assisted living home, insisting that he wanted to talk to his brother—her father, my grandfather—who had been dead twenty years.

A nurse called us from their own phone. Held it up to his deathbed. My mom read the lord’s prayer in Czech. She’d learned it just for this occasion. We had to believe he heard us.

My mom said she woke up in the middle of that night and knew he was gone. I think I remember something similar. He died. My dad lived. I made my way back to Michigan, though many of my friends had moved away to be closer to their own families. Those who stayed I rarely saw. You remember how it was. I don’t want to go over it all again.

I spent a lot of time alone in the print shop warehouse, sobbing where I wouldn’t bother anyone. It took me a while to get there.

Some people had told me I needed to listen to the new Machine Gun Kelly album. I knew very little about this character, who earned accolades and aspersions from anyone who ever heard music before. I put it off, because I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for anything new. I’d been playing the same albums I always did, over and over. Nostalgia for when he wasn’t dead, maybe.

It took one roll across the kit for me to recognize Travis Barker’s touch. Oh, okay. I could listen to this. I actually kind of loved it. The best part was and is Halsey fulfilling the prophecy from her candid cam foodcourt rendition of “I Miss You” and making an emo-tinged banger with that stuffed animal soprano of hers. The album writ large was self-obsessed, silly, and self-serious. Everything the scene had always been.

There was a lot of talk about Machine Gun Kelly pimping out a pastiche of a pop punk aesthetic that was antithetical to some imagined pillars of good taste and authenticity. The conversation was so consistent the guy made a second pop punk album with a terrible cover and worse title: “MAINSTREAM SELLOUT” that almost could’ve been a canny sendup of the long-outdated and dead mores of a quickly co-opted music movement. MGK, like every other white guy rapper, bought too hard into his own mythos. After this second stab, few were sad to see him say he was done with rock records.

In recent years I’ve tried to divest from the idea of authenticity as far as it pertains to something as readily monetized and sanitized as the music I grew up listening to. I am not, as it turns out, immune to nostalgia. Nor, clearly, is Machine “Mister Gun Kelly Was My Father.” He was formed by the same mallrat trash I was. And no he is not just like me fr fr, though we are both gangly dweebs very obviously uncomfortable in our own skin. And still, I believe some of the backlash stemmed from a realization that MGK was plenty representative of a time and sound that maybe owed more to a Bush-era trauma bond than its devotees wanted to admit. The gates had to be kept because a millionaire wannabe Marshall Mathers stepping sideways into three-power-chord pop-punk didn’t gel with the now two-decades-stale illusory underdog story of a scene that still held a spark for those who remembered Pete Wentz’ LiveJournal dickpics. I am speaking for myself.

At the heart of the record sits the requisite sad song: “Lonely.” It sounds, like so many emo songs, a drunk voicemail.

If you told me he plagiarized this from the Goo Goo Dolls, Hoobastank, or some other turn of the century dross, I wouldn’t be surprised. And yet they’re just clichés until they come for you. Part of grief is the indignity of inevitability. Everyone warned you. Like the hormonal teen realizing the long mocked love songs suddenly all make sense. Not so special now, are you?

In July 2020, the singer’s father passed away.

Most everyone is going to have to live through that. Me too. Someday. I was so happy I didn’t have to that year.

Come the bridge, he describes the scene over the panicked drumroll of time running out:

He’s agonizingly autotuned, and Travis Barker is incapable of minimalism or understatement even in moments of devastating mundanity. And yet, alone in a warehouse, bent over a printing press nearly as old as the man I missed in that moment, I wept.

My mom wondered if Uncle J had been closeted. She’d had access to his medical records during his last years; there were never any allergies listed. Maybe he had moved west to be alone on purpose—penance or protection. He and I were never very close. Now there was no way we would ever be, would ever know.

That song still makes me cry.