Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting Napster favorites from the wild-west days of the early internet. This summer we’re covering the best of 1999: the B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Luscious Jackson, “Ladyfingers”
Underneath the armor is another good girl.
How much have we forgotten? How much do we discard in service of our own mythologies and a steady diet of nostalgia? Because even saying the past was worse–for us or for the world–is a kind of nostalgia, imagining a timeline that didn’t quite exist in order to bolster our current selves. The past was a mistake because of things they had not yet solved or bigotry that still existed or the way they dressed or the elevation of some stupid fad or another. We’ve learned from our mistakes, and look how much better we are today!
I’m not here to mythologize the past. I am well aware that some things are better and some things are much, much, deeply worse than they used to be. My adolescent screw-ups are in constant rotation in the intrusive-thought radio that plays in my head. There is something wrong with someone who wants to go back to the glory days of when they were fourteen, or at least anyone who sees it fully as the best time of their lives. You wanna go back and try to take Trigonometry again? Brave a constant barrage of high-school bullshit? It’s your funeral.
And yet. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t miss a lot of things. Little things. Anythings. As much as I am fascinated by the past and the way things were created, packaged, and sent out into the world–it’s more or less the entire reason Wooden Block Labyrinth exists in the first place–endless continued stories leave me cold. We tell each other stories in order to live, and what’s living inside a tenth Planet of the Apes film? How many times can we return to the Star War? If we’re going to continue to watch the Ghostbusters ghostbust, could they at least bring Tracy the Gorilla back into the whole ordeal? There’s nothing that the nostalgia factory of late capitalism can bring me that would make me feel the way I would if I got to ride on this bus one more time.
In this video we’re looking at Luscious Jackson as they ride the M15 up First Avenue, or maybe the M9 down Avenue B, or maybe that’s one of the Limited lines wrapping around Houston Street. They’re riding some Frankenline below 14th, but one thing I know is that before Cibo Matto gets on the bus (oh my god that is Cibo Matto!) we catch a glimpse at Gabay’s. I don’t think I’d been inside that store since grade-school excursions accompanying my mother after school; I’d wait through adult chores and boring adult clothing options until we could go to Palermo’s for pizza and pastry and then home to watch Batman on WPIX. That’s a memory of ten years before “Ladyfingers” made it to radio, thirty-five years in the past now. New York lived in layers, or at least it used to. Some parts are still like that; when I’m home I like to go to a deli that’s been in the neighborhood as long as my father has, walk in and get the same thing I’ve been grabbing for twenty years.
Wherever we’re from we have those little things and anythings. It doesn’t have to be New York or LA or Chicago or Terre Haute or Dallas or anywhere else. We build our lives on little things and anythings, detritus of a life that shouldn’t be the Big Important Stuff but which probably lives longer than the largest triumphs. If you’re anything like me, you dwell sometimes on what you’d do if you could go back to the places that are gone one last time.
Imagining what you would do in the past is nearly the same as hoping what you would do if you had it as a future. It’s the ultimate human response. I don’t pretend to know what goes on in the minds of those who say they live in the present, but yes I do. There’s a bit of let’s-pretend in all of us.
If you listen to “Ladyfingers” on the album you can hear a sharp intake of breath right before the initial sonic onslaught. It’s calculated, sure, but it’s a reminder that all of music starts with connection. No matter how much the assist comes in from digital means, the beginning is human and it always will be. It ends with the ring of an acoustic guitar and the squelch of an electric, little imperfections that add up to the perfect. “Ladyfingers” was one of the first songs to be offered up for remix on Shockmachine, and I took full advantage of that through the early months of 2000. Invariably I began my versions of this song with layered harmony, with the ineffable simultaneous expression of the members of Luscious Jackson. That seven-syllable “heart” was exciting, joyous, bittersweet. And then those drums, forever based in the absolute ratcheting precision of Kate Schellenbach.
I always liked Luscious Jackson but of course I paid more attention when I found out that their drummer used to be part of Beastie Boys. When you listen back to the snap-snap-clap-clap of “Cooky Puss” it makes perfect sense. The beat slows here and weaves within a psychedelia that was back in vogue in 1999, but the pocket is still the pocket that drove “Transit Cop”. If you were to tell your teenage self just how much of them lives in their adult self it would probably kill them dead. I know that mine would follow up with a bunch of questions that I’m not prepared to answer for either of our sakes.
“I’m so tired of my guns and my vanity. I’d like to trade them in for some sanity.”
And yet as much as we remain the same we have to be prepared for the enormous changes that life throws at us, that who we are will have no relation to who we were. Kate Schellenbach was the producer on nearly 500 episodes of The Late Late Show. Yes, the James Corden one! I’ve done the life of a New Yorker in Los Angeles, and it’s easy to metamorphose into someone else when making a drastic change. We think we’re someone new, someone different, a brand-new leaf on the tree. I can’t speak for anyone else, but given the other Manhattan kids I met out there I guess I can. You build someone else on top of and in front of you. Armor in front of another good girl. The heart you don’t show anymore. Someone else, someone else, someone else, like a bunch of punk kids who grew up to use a similar beat to spin electronic tones. Electronic tones that start with something uniquely human as if we’re trying to remember.
And yet. Gabay’s out the window. And yet. Cibo Matto on the M15.
I’ve been watching my high-school classmates turn forty all through this year. They mark the occasion in their own ways across social media and texts and in-person commemorations. Sometimes I’ll see a photo of some Brooklyn rooftop or the back of an LA beer garden with a half-dozen old friends gathered together, all of them looking barely older than when we left school. I smile and then I don’t. I wonder whether their armor stopped them in their tracks too. Is this the first time they’ve seen each other in years? Is this an every-week thing? Am I the only one who spends most of their time isolated? It makes one feel like they weren’t a good enough friend or a good enough person to keep up even appearances, let alone close bonds. Like you forgot the beat you bashed in your teens that could have made a splash in your twenties.
I am not going to be nostalgic just so it can be sold back to me. You can’t sell me Gabay’s, because it’s been gone for ten years and you can’t give me that childlike sensation back. Seems like all the world can do is add an “S” to the end of a title of a movie I didn’t really like that much in the first place. I won’t clap just because I remember it. But I will sit with people I’ve known my whole life long, and I will absolutely get up and dance if the drummer is still so in the pocket that they can play damn near anything. It doesn’t matter where that happens, but I wouldn’t mind an old dive if any of mine are left. What matters is who. What matters is how it makes me feel.
What would just-like-old-times look like after so long? Is it a new adventure or a quick-cameo paycheck? Do brand-new groups of young adventurers crowd the places we used to call home? I wonder if there are theater kids crowding DTUT’s while planning their spring musical and Dallas BBQ’s when celebrating the last of their performances. I hope there are twentysomethings choosing my old haunts as their every-Thursday hang. May the memories made there eclipse and advance anything we ever did. I hope they hear this song sometimes and fall as in love with this groove as I’ve always been.
So here I am, a thousand miles away and twenty-five years older, thinking about little bits. Realizing that I had never heard or at least never registered that breath at the start of the track. Wondering what else I’ll find when I go back to my well-worn past. What else is there underneath that armor?
NEXT TIME: Some will bend and some will fall.