Prompt: "A song that frightens you"
Selected by Joe
"Right as Rain"
19, 2008
If I'm pulling up to my destination but there's a song playing on the radio that I like but have never heard before, I still do the thing where I wait in the car until the song is over so I can see if the radio DJ says who the artist is and what song it is. I know I can just look up the song on the radio station's website, typically, but I don't have data on my phone and there's no guarantee that I'll have WiFi in the supermarket parking lot and I'm not gonna turn on the data and waste money on something that's in the general scope of things not that important, but I also don't want to wait because, as I said, it's not that important, and I know if I wait till I get home I'm not going to remember to look it up anyway. So I waited.
(Sidenote: this usually happens on the way to Aldi, but I don't want you to get the wrong impression here. I'm not going to Aldi more than once a week, and I'm not listening to XPN all that much. It's just that the ten-minute trip is literally one of the only times during my week that I'm listening to the radio, and so all my XPN anecdotes are gonna take place in that general geographic location.)
So at some point earlier in the year, I'm sitting there, grabbing the quarter for the carts and gathering the reusable bags and grooving to this retro-sounding song whose singer has a real nice voice, a bit raspy but in a good way, not deep-pitched but definitely deep, like mature, a real natural quality, and it's got the drums going that you'd hear in a '60s pop-soul song, with those crisp round keyboard chords, it's sounding real nice. I know for sure that it's Amy Winehouse. I'm familiar with Back to Black but I know she has another earlier album too, and so I'm guessing that this is a song from that first album, and XPN has dug it out in anticipation of another shitty biopic that is probably gonna focus on the songs from Back to Black anyway. Good song. Real good song. More than good enough to stick around in the parking lot and hope Kristen Kurtis or Bob Bumbera gives me the deets.
They tell me that this is Adele.
This frightens me.
I guess it frightens me mainly because I'm afraid of being wrong, which is silly. Being wrong is fine, especially when it's about something stupid like music criticism. The thing with Adele is that I have left a trail of evidence, in print, of my hatred of Adele. Well, no, not Adele the person, her music, you know how this works, c'mon. Bad music is never a good reason to dislike an artist as a human being. Shitty people will reveal themselves through other means. Adele seems cool as shit. I believe I also have a written record of this claim, my appreciation of Adele as a cool person, though my argument has been less than ironclad. Just more of a from-the-gut approach. Cool lady, terrible music. These are my beliefs.
(Sidenote: this usually happens on the way to Aldi, but I don't want you to get the wrong impression here. I'm not going to Aldi more than once a week, and I'm not listening to XPN all that much. It's just that the ten-minute trip is literally one of the only times during my week that I'm listening to the radio, and so all my XPN anecdotes are gonna take place in that general geographic location.)
So at some point earlier in the year, I'm sitting there, grabbing the quarter for the carts and gathering the reusable bags and grooving to this retro-sounding song whose singer has a real nice voice, a bit raspy but in a good way, not deep-pitched but definitely deep, like mature, a real natural quality, and it's got the drums going that you'd hear in a '60s pop-soul song, with those crisp round keyboard chords, it's sounding real nice. I know for sure that it's Amy Winehouse. I'm familiar with Back to Black but I know she has another earlier album too, and so I'm guessing that this is a song from that first album, and XPN has dug it out in anticipation of another shitty biopic that is probably gonna focus on the songs from Back to Black anyway. Good song. Real good song. More than good enough to stick around in the parking lot and hope Kristen Kurtis or Bob Bumbera gives me the deets.
They tell me that this is Adele.
This frightens me.
I guess it frightens me mainly because I'm afraid of being wrong, which is silly. Being wrong is fine, especially when it's about something stupid like music criticism. The thing with Adele is that I have left a trail of evidence, in print, of my hatred of Adele. Well, no, not Adele the person, her music, you know how this works, c'mon. Bad music is never a good reason to dislike an artist as a human being. Shitty people will reveal themselves through other means. Adele seems cool as shit. I believe I also have a written record of this claim, my appreciation of Adele as a cool person, though my argument has been less than ironclad. Just more of a from-the-gut approach. Cool lady, terrible music. These are my beliefs.
But now I'm hearing evidence with my own goddamn ears that this is not necessarily 100% true. "Right as Rain," as I found out that day, was one irrefutable piece of truth in favor of Adele having good music. It's the sort of song that'll shake an agnostic like myself to the very core.
I'll let it scare me, but I won't let that fear convince me to deny what's right in front of me. That's what a lot of people do. Think about flat-earthers. Some of them are so convinced that the earth is flat that, when presented with evidence that it is indeed round, they will talk their way around that evidence, often to absurd lengths, rather than believe that evidence. It's okay to want to believe something. It's okay to have opinions. But that shit has to be based in fact, and sometimes, it happens that you are faced with a fact that doesn't jibe with your opinion. And so the important step here is to consider new evidence.
I'll let it scare me, but I won't let that fear convince me to deny what's right in front of me. That's what a lot of people do. Think about flat-earthers. Some of them are so convinced that the earth is flat that, when presented with evidence that it is indeed round, they will talk their way around that evidence, often to absurd lengths, rather than believe that evidence. It's okay to want to believe something. It's okay to have opinions. But that shit has to be based in fact, and sometimes, it happens that you are faced with a fact that doesn't jibe with your opinion. And so the important step here is to consider new evidence.
What this new evidence (the existence of "Right as Rain" as a good song and one that I am now familiar with and one that is unquestionably written and performed by Adele) forces me to do is to adjust my opinion. And it's not as easy as just saying "well maybe this is the only good song of hers." No. I'm familiar with the hits, which stink, and now I'm familiar with deep cut, which smells like roses, and I'm considering whether the truth, as I now am reunderstanding it, could possibly be that the problem is that the general populace of music listeners prefer the slow stinky dreck and have elevated those bad songs to the top of the charts, and that's not Adele's fault at all, and behind the hits she quite possibly has a portfolio full of Amy Winehouse-esque retro soul songs that have simply never reached my ears because the godless ignorant filthy masses have elevated the wrong goddamn songs.
I mean, it's right there in the goddamn song that I've listened to twelve times while writing this blog post: "Who wants to be right as rain? / It's better when something is wrong." I am willing to eat crow and admit that I was wrong that Adele's entire discography consisting of a bunch of overwrought basic-bitch ballads, assuming that the songs are there. What originally frightened me has now spurned me into action. It's flight or fight time, baby. I'm fighting. I'm fighting for the goddam truth. I want to be wrong if it means that I get some more good music, even from Adele. Who wants to be right as rain when bring wrong means getting to listen to songs like this?
So here's my promise, one that I will fulfill by let's say maybe sometime in the next two months or so—and not now, as I had to write some of this on my second airplane ride in many, many years with a BAC under .10, and my nerves were fucking shot to begin with—and the promise is to quickly run through Adele's relatively short discography (four albums, one of those I'm already familiar with through RC), and try to see if there are deep cuts on any of them that match the spirit and tempo and quality of "Right as Rain." If so, and if their numbers reach the double digits, then I'm going to make a playlist for y'all. I'll even put that playlist on my iPod, and consider it my own little homegrown Adele mixtape, an album in its own right, just for me and for all the reformed Adele skeptics out there. It's going to be called Wrong as Rain, and I hope that the truth is revealed.
So here's my promise, one that I will fulfill by let's say maybe sometime in the next two months or so—and not now, as I had to write some of this on my second airplane ride in many, many years with a BAC under .10, and my nerves were fucking shot to begin with—and the promise is to quickly run through Adele's relatively short discography (four albums, one of those I'm already familiar with through RC), and try to see if there are deep cuts on any of them that match the spirit and tempo and quality of "Right as Rain." If so, and if their numbers reach the double digits, then I'm going to make a playlist for y'all. I'll even put that playlist on my iPod, and consider it my own little homegrown Adele mixtape, an album in its own right, just for me and for all the reformed Adele skeptics out there. It's going to be called Wrong as Rain, and I hope that the truth is revealed.
I was frightened, but I'm not frightened anymore.
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