Songs of '78: "Da' Ya' Think I'm Sexy?"

Nope, not done with the disco of 1978 yet. But "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?," despite--or maybe because of its cheesy title--is so much more than a fine, groovy disco tune; it is, in fact, a sly parody of the stereotypical suave disco-era lover ("He says I sorry / I'm out of milk and coffee / Never mind my sugar / we can watch the early movie")--a perhaps even honest expression by a man in his mid-30s who'd been playing rock and roll for over 15 years who is confronting the club and dance scene. Did I know any of this when I first heard the song? Not at all. But it did scandalize the youthful Mormon me? Not really--even as a kid, I think I realized that the song was, in a sense, one huge put on, revealing a Lothario who was, well, just trying a little too hard.

Anyway, I've never listened to Blondes Have More Fun, the album this single was released off of, 40 years ago today, all the way through (though its title song is also good). I'm fine with that. Rod Stewart was, and I suppose still is, more than anything else a working musician, and he worked with the tools that the moment called for. The result is a wonderfully sleazy tune (made up of not just one, but two plagiarized riffs!), a single that has stuck in my head for decades. I doubt it'll ever leave.

Ten Moderately Short, and Only Moderately Philosophical, Theses on Voting

1) I don't think there is a duty to vote, and I wouldn't support compulsory voting, even if that was a political possibility in this country. I probably was tempted by that idea back when my fundamentally communitarian intellectual orientation and sympathies were more civic republican than localist/anarchist/radical democratic, but I'm not inclined to think that way now.

2) I do think voting is responsibility though. The difference, I suppose, is that duty, to my mind, implies being part of community or organization which, because it is constitutive of who one is, compels one, by virtue of one's own identity with it, to support any or all of the operations of the community or organization, whereas a responsibility implies something more relational: that I am obligated, by affection and attachment, to take those actions which most fully reflect and incorporate my connection to all the other members (and all the other interests of all the other members) of said community or organization.

3) That doesn't mean I reject the idea that one's formal citizenship or civic identity is constitutive of who one is; I just don't believe it is comprehensively constitutive of who one is. Which is another way of saying I'm a liberal communitarian: connections to, and dependencies upon, the whole come first, both psychologically and anthropologically, but connections to the whole are always--or at least invariably, so long as we live under conditions of modernity--to be realized through the subjectivity of the individual. (For anyone who has bothered to read my ruminations over the years, this philosophical determination to see the deep communal grounding of our moral existence realized through individual expression is hardly new; I just keep evolving, I suppose, in terms of how I articulate it politically.)

4) In terms of the present articulation, it means, I think, that voting is a way of showing responsibility towards and connection to one's fellow human being--but so can not voting, under certain circumstances.

5) Those circumstances exist but are, I believe, very rarely defensible at the present moment in the United States of America.

6) Yes, I happily concur that our current winner-take-all, single-member-plurality voting structure, operating in its gerrymandered districts which both reflect and entrench sociological polarization, dominated by often internally rigged political parties, and funded in ways that almost always effectively marginalize anything except elite political preferences, presents few ways of expressing our responsibility to one another. We would be far, far, far better off--despite all of the foregoing's own particular flaws--with a) parliamentary government with general legislative supremacy (and thus providing for greater vote accountability), b) a tightly regulated and limited election season (and thus preventing the sort of electoral exhaustion which empowers those with the financial resources to outlast the attention of ordinary working people), c) a broad awareness that moneyed interests can influence the electoral process in ways which effectively deny equal representative opportunities to all (and thus obliging that we overturn the horrible Buckley v. Valeo and all the Supreme Court decisions which built upon its flawed individualistic premises), d) proportional voting (and thus allowing for a greater range of the populace to have actually electorally effective reasons to organize on behalf of their ideas), and e) significant decentralization, regionalization, and municipal empowerment (though admittedly the point of this last one has already long been greatly compromised by the leveling and centralizing consequences of global capitalism, but that would involve a whole different set of theses). Since we don't have any of the above, I can sympathize with people who think there's no point in voting.

7) But all that said, the fact remains that the two dominant parties in our kludgy, oft-dysfunctional, but still-standing-and-operating governing system nonetheless do represent actual substantive differences in political priorities and, therefore, often actual substantive differences in policy outcomes. And so if you believe either one of those sets of outcomes could even just theoretically involve even something as little as doing marginally less harm to those to whom you have a responsibility, then you really ought to express that choice through voting for the candidates of the party in question. (And moreover, if you happen to believe there actually is no substantive difference between the stated political priorities and the hoped-for policy outcomes of the different parties, then I would respectfully suggest that you are either terribly misinformed or marvelously uninformed about the parties and candidates in question.)

8) Obviously, given the realities of local, state, and national political structures and calculations, the foregoing is subject to whatever contextual considerations might come into play in any given electoral contest. Lack of local knowledge is a problem, as is lack of real choice. The first can be blamed on our unfortunately nationalized (and usually starved to the bone) local media ecosystems, but is still, I insist, something that can be rectified by being individually willing enough to follow through on our responsibility to our fellow community members by learning more about whom are presenting themselves as their representatives, and why. The second could be a function of understanding one's responsibility, quite legitimately, as overwhelmingly tied to a single policy issue or deep structural concern, and not seeing any way as a voter to express that responsibility through the available candidates. To which I can only say: perhaps consider rethinking your conception of how to express your responsibility to your fellow members--and if that doesn't change anything, then do the best you can with the choices available, using whatever creative options are available to legally expand those choices where you can, all while balancing those considerations in light of the aforementioned consequences. (As a two-time Ralph Nader voting, one-time Jill Stein-voting, one-time Bernie Sanders write-in-voting citizen, I would be a hypocrite if I claimed otherwise.) But either way, take up your responsibility, and stand, either strategically or expressively or some calculated combination of both, for whatever your responsibility to others morally obliges you to use our tottering system to, at the very least, publicly affirm, and vote.

9) The only exception I can see to the foregoing is if you understand your responsibility to others as demanding the promotion of radical, even revolutionary, alternatives, and that which any participation in the present, deeply problematic but still meaningful-in-terms-of-causing-or-mitigating-costs-and-harms system actually interferes with that promotion. I know and like people who affirm that they find themselves in such circumstances, and I don't dismiss their sincerity. However, I confess that I've personally never yet heard from any of them what I consider to be a persuasive argument that participating in a flawed process necessarily excludes or limits participation in the business of building radical, even revolutionary, alternatives to said process. If you have one, please, lay it on me. Maybe there's some new form of Marxist accelerationism or Christian end-times promotion that I haven't heard about yet.

10) In the meantime, watch this. And also, you have less than seven hours left to vote here in Kansas, so get busy, dammit.

Why the Estes-Thompson Race Matters to Me (Besides, You Know, Because it Will Decide Who My Congressman Will Be)

Let's just get this out of the way: my track record when it comes to political predictions is utterly abysmal. So I'm not going to try this time around. This time, I'm acting as much as possible as a historical-trend-watching political scientist--which I am not, to be clear, but which I can pretend to be on occasion. Like right now.

There are numerous races I'll be watching around Wichita and Kansas and the country next Tuesday--county commission races, state legislative races, the Secretary of State race, the governor's race, key U.S. Senate races, etc., etc. But the 4th congressional district race, right here in south-central Kansas, is of particular interest to me, and not just because I have my political preferences and because I consider one of the candidates to be a friend. No, that congressional race is important to me as a citizen and a student of politics, because of what its results may, perhaps, tell me about 1) the city of Wichita, and 2) the Kansas state Democratic party. Let me explain why.

So, the race for the KS-4 seat is between incumbent Republican Ron Estes and, for the second time, Democratic challenger James Thompson. The enthusiasm is all on Thompson's side, as benefits a man who has essentially been running non-stop for this seat for more than 20 months. (That includes the special election in April 2017 which put Estes in the place of the elevated-to-the-CIA-by-Trump Mike Pompeo, in which Thompson lost by 46% to 52%, and after which he promptly started his campaign again, focused on 2018.) As even his most fervent supporters will admit, Estes isn't much of a political animal, while Thompson absolutely is. Still, when you're talking about a district where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats by 2 to 1, being a political animal may not matter much. Nate Silver's 538 certainly doesn't think so; they predict that Estes has better than a 99% chance of beating Thompson by nearly 20 points--which, if you look at the history of the district, is a pretty standard spread for this congressional seat. You have to go all the way back to 2000 to find a regular match-up where the Democrat lost by a less-than 15 point difference, and all the way back to 1996 to find a Democrat losing KS-4 by only single digits. Of course, that's what happened in the special election. But special elections are just that: special, with different expectations and dynamics at work in regards to candidate selection, campaign length, voter turn-out, and all the rest. Presumably, say the serious poll-watchers, that tiny Estes victory will almost certainly be replaced with a normal-sized one.

I'm not going to make a prediction--but I thinking that there will be meaning in the results, whatever they may be. As I wrote last year, the fact that Thompson even won the Democratic nomination in the first place is impressive, given the multiple ways in which he departs from the model of Democrats-That-Can-Potentially-Win-in-Republican-Kansas which the KDP rigorously maintained from the 1960s up to the 2000s, when Kathleen Sebelius began to suggest some different electoral possibilities. Thompson may be a veteran, and he may be gun owner and firm "2nd Amendment man," but he isn't rural, he's urban; he doesn't hearken back to FDR and the New Deal, but rather looks forward to Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All; he isn't socially conservative, moderate, or even just quiet on such issues, but instead is openly liberal on matters of abortion, LGBT rights, and a host of social justice and civil rights issues. He is, in other words, a product of, and seeking to build a winning electoral coalition out of, a set of Democratic voters that are quite common in America's "blue" cities (in contrast to more "red" and rural states), but were notably absent from the Kansas political scene while the consequences of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and numerous other social transformations changed the party elsewhere.

It seems likely that Sharice Davids--a progressive Democratic candidate if there ever was one--will beat Republican Kevin Yoder to take the seat in Kansas's 3rd congressional district, which is by far its most urban, sitting as it does right in the midst of Kansas City, KS, and its Johnson and Wyandotte county suburbs. (There's also a decent possibility that Democratic candidate Paul Davis will squeak out a win in Kansas's 2nd congressional district over Republican Steve Watkins--but that race isn't especially indicative of the urbanization of the Kansas Democratic electorate one way or another, as Davis is much more your traditional creature of the northeastern Kansas Democratic establishment, relying upon voters in Lawrence and at the University of Kansas to put him over the top.) Kansas's second-most urban district, though, is the 4th, centered right here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state; hence my curiosity about these developments. Less than 5% of my district's voting population lives outside of my city's statistical metropolitan area. Yet Wichita is, as I have written at length, a slow-growth (or no-growth) mid-sized cities, with all the confusions that entails as its metropolitan area entwines with nearby exurbs, commuter towns, and unincoporated rural areas. (Check out my friend Chase Billingham's comments on part of this confusion here.) All across the United States you have seen Democrats double-down in cities as part of he "resistance" to President Trump--but this is a development which preceded his rise. As far back as President Obama's first election, there had been a suspicion that the Democratic party could--often enough anyway--orient itself entirely around the more multicultural, often secular, often unmarried, usually more educated, definitely more progressive urban dwellers of America's cities. This has taken place with some success around the country. Could it take place here? Some see it as unlikely, given Wichita's decided un-cosmopolitan local culture. And yet, one might argue that no city, not even a non-agglomerated mid-sized one in a conservative rural state, can avoid the political consequences of contemporary urbanity entirely.

One election, of course, can't and shouldn't be taken as measure of something as complicated as socio-cultural and demographic change. And yet, parties, for all their limitations, are feedback mechanisms within the political marketplace--the success or failure of candidates does tell us things: about voters, about their preferences, and about how those voter preferences can be measured against other concerns. So as someone who loves Wichita, and wants to better understand its current predicament and future possibilities, the contest between Estes and Thompson is one I'm looking at so as to learn something about the people who live here--and in particular, about the number and kind of Kansas Democrats and moderate Republicans who live here, in this urban space.

Here's what I am willing to say. If 538 is correct, and Thompson ends up losing to Estes by about the number they predict--basically a 60%-40% split in the vote--then I think there would be good evidence that Wichita isn't turning blue--certainly not to degree that other cities are and have, and maybe not at all. Rather, it would remain a city with a large, but electorally limited, progressive urban minority, one that would have to focus its energies inward (on county commission or city council races, perhaps) rather than outward. That, in turn, would communicate important information to the Kansas Democratic party--namely, that, the immediate Kansas City-area aside, there just aren't sufficient metropolitan voters in Kansas (a state where, despite its much deserved rural reputation, nearly two-thirds of its people live in cities) to support urban progressivism, and the Democrats need to re-invest in more traditionally rural socially conservative candidates. And, finally, it would broadly suggest that Wichita (and maybe other non-agglomerated urban centers like it) need to recognize that the changes of American cities really can pass them by, necessitating us to think different about the political and cultural future of cities like my home.

But if Thompson wins, or even just loses by the same amount (or less!) than he lost to Estes in the special election, despite all the particular variables of that contest in comparison to this year's much more traditional campaign...well, I think that will say something about Wichita, something relevant to the political future (and in particular the Democratic party's future) in this city and this state. Not that Wichita will have become, or would be close to becoming, a "blue" city--that would take the work of generations of voters to pull off. But it would say, I think, despite all the excuses the Kansas Republican party could legitimately put forward as an explanation (it was the fault of the depressing legacy of Brownback, it was the fault of Estes's own lack of charisma, it was the fault of Trump's and Kobach's polarizing rhetoric, etc.), that Wichita's urban population--and in particular its immigrants, its Latinos, its gays, its single progression women, its African-Americans, its artists, and its non- (or non-conservative) Christians--had grown large enough in number and influence to genuinely move the political needle of south-central Kansas in a more progressive political direction. That's hardly a recipe for major transformation; Kansas, I am certain, will remain a mostly conservative state throughout my and my children's lifetimes. Yet it would be a victory (or a revealing loss) that would tell us something--or tell me something, at least--about Wichita's relationship to the progressive forces shaping the Democratic party all across this country.

Many people, for a variety of reasons, see Wichita as a city whose motor has stalled--a city that is not moving, no matter what direction you want it to move. Results like I'm talking about here in the Estes-Thompson race would be evidence of movement, of a city that really is, however slowly, changing. And that, I don't mind saying, is something I would be fascinated to see.

Songs of '78: "Jet Airliner"

From the beginning of this series, I've been up front: these blog posts are about the pop, rock, funk, punk, and other songs of 1978 which wormed their way into my memory and have stuck with me--and that includes songs that weren't released in 1978, or that I have no specific 1978 radio-listening memories of, but which I just associate with 1978. I've already confessed that some creative cognitive reconstruction was going on with the way Cheap Trick or Sniff 'n' the Tears or Bruce Springsteen appear on this list, but "Jet Airliner," my absolute favorite Steve Miller song, probably takes the cake.

Why? Wasn't that song, and many others by the Steve Miller band, staples of the pop and rock and roll AM and (later) FM radio stations that I gained my earliest musical education from? Absolutely. But it was mostly just beloved background stuff for me until 1990 when, in a break from my tape-buying tradition, I actually started buying CDs (which didn't mean I stopped buying tapes, though). The Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978 was one of the very first CDs I purchased, because the possibility of having all that great music from my youth available in one place ("Jungle Love"! "Take the Money and Run"!) was far too much to resist. Most of all though: "Jet Airliner," a soaring, rocking, yet also dreamy composition of moving along, moving away, and then moving back home. The song itself was released in 1977 on Book of Dreams, an album which I have never listened to all the way through, but no matter: the greatest hits collection was released as an album in 1978, so that's good enough for me. This was a song that I had playing in my head as I ran around, all alone, way back at the rear of the playground of Sunrise Elementary School, so it's a song of my 10-year-old, 4th-grade year, so far as I'm concerned. 1978 it is.

Songs from '78: "My Life"

Forty years ago yesterday, Billy Joel released "My Life," the first single off 52nd Street, one of his greatest albums. I have no memory of when I first listened to the album all the way through--in fact, it might not have been until I was in college (for years, my sole Billy Joel Bible was Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II; it was a long time before I listened to anything else by him). I love the album now, particularly "Zanzibar." But it was "My Life" off of that collection which has stayed with me longest, primarily because of how it always reminded me of a short-lived television show that, for some reason, I really, really enjoyed as a 12-year-old boy:



This is the actual video, and it has all sorts of stylized tough-guy New York notes to it. But I think I still kind of like the vision of a young Tom Hanks in drag better.

Songs of '78: "Radio Radio"

"Radio Radio" is one of those songs about our material and aural history--specifically, a song about the songs we listened to, and how we listened to them, and when we listened to them, and how they made us felt. I'm not sure any other technology ever has been so thoroughly entwined with one of its primary products--specifically, in this case, the pop songs that the radio brought into our lives. I'm thinking about Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" here, Rush's "Spirit of the Radio," and many more. But, in my opinion, "Radio Radio" beats them all. It's angry, excited, defiant, confused, and just overflowing with excitement over THE NEW SONG THAT JUST CAME ON!! It's my favorite track off This Years Model, which a lot of serious Elvis Costello fans will tell you is his very best album, and I'm not one to disagree (though my favorite is the experimental The Juliet Letters, for whatever it's worth).

Costello is a brilliant songwriter and an often-brilliant musician, and this song showcases both. It was just his second album, and he was really beginning to his stride with his backing band The Attractions. The song made it to America with This Years Model, but it wasn't released as a single until it came out separate from the UK version of the album on this day, 40 years ago. The video is classic early Costello: jerky, in-your-face, kind of weird, and ostentatiously playing with the images and references from the whole history of rock and roll.



And the song itself...well, let's just say it's history in America has been...interesting. This performance got him banned from Saturday Night Live.



But of course, wait long enough, and everything will come around again.

Songs of '78: "Fire"

Last time, talking about Chic's awesome disco tune "Le Freak," I confessed that as, a not-quite-10-year-old listening to rock music on my radio in Spokane, WA, I hardly received a thorough introduction to the world of pop music. Lots of bluesy, folky, proggy, and/or just plain hard pop-rock, yes, and lots of soulful white-boy soft rock too. But the African-American side of things--the R&B and funk roots of disco? Nope, not much. Hopefully I've repaired my less than perfect launch into the world of pop in the decades sense, though I don't repent of my love for Warren Zevon, The Cars, Al Stewart, Van Halen, The Who, Jackson Browne, or the Rolling Stones for anything. Still, looking back on it all, the skewing of my 1978-radio ear is really pronounced.

Anyway, this is another song that breaks the pattern. Yes, it's a Bruce Springsteen song. And yes, by this point The Pointer Sisters had left their early years in jazz, gospel, and R&B behind, just going wherever their vocal muses carried them ("Fire" was the lead single off their album Energy, which also featured songs written by Loggins and Messina and Steely Dan). But none of that matters; the Sisters brought both torch-song heat and some wicked slow-burning fun to this tune--check out the video below, in which Ruth keeps playing the air guitar or the air keyboards while providing backing vocals--and, frankly, it's ten times more memorable of Springsteen's own rather desultory recording of the song, released nearly ten years after this gem. 40 years after the day of its release, The Pointer Sister's "Fire" still burns.

Songs of '78: "Le Freak"

Considering how dominant disco was in 1978--as I noted way back in February, it was unavoidable that year--not a lot of disco stands out in my memories, whether real or reconstructed, of what I was listening to on the radio that year. Some of that has to do with the stations I was listening to, of course, and probably some of it had to do with the thoroughly white, partly rural, partly suburban, and entirely nerdy person that my post-pubescent self was turning into. From loud pop-rock to introspective soft-rock, I drank it in--but dance music? The Bee Gees, of course, and I suppose Barry Manilow if you squint--and if you accept David Byrne's word for it, disco was always lurking around his post-punk Talking Heads stuff as well. But generally speaking, my appreciation of everything that disco was a part of then and what it has become since--soul, funk, R&B, and more--was still some years off back in 1978.

With one exception: Chic's "Le Freak." I never owned the album this came off--looking at the track listing, I've probably never listened to the whole thing through--and it wasn't until I was an adult and started paying closer attention to the producers and session musicians on the recordings I liked that I realized what a musical genius Niles Rodgers is. So how is it that this particular disco song, released forty years ago today, made it into my head? I think, in retrospect, it has to be Bernie Edwards's bass line. I mean, just listen. Isn't just the best you've ever heard? I kind of think so.

Songs of '78: "Beast of Burden"

Twice before I've showcased my love for Some Girls. There are songs that came out in 1978--whether I remember listening to them on the radio 40 years ago, or have built them retroactively into my memories of that year--while I love more than any of these Rolling Stones tunes, that's for certain. But the album as a whole holds, nonetheless, an untouchable mystique too it, I think. In fact, Some Girls embodies my Platonic vision of the Stones--Mick, Keith, Ron, Bill, and Charlie, having survived the 1970s (almost!), all of them still standing, still in possession of that bluesy energy, that sexual power, that rock and roll groove, that English naughtiness which launched them into the stratosphere with their great albums of the late 1960s. I will respectfully listen to and often really like just about any recordings by the Stones, from the mid-1960s up through the mid-1990s--but it is this album, which Jagger mainly conceived and orchestrated alone (Richards was dealing with the fall-out of his arrest for drug possession in Canada), reflecting influences of punk and funk and the times in general, that I think represents their peak. And "Beast of Burden," released as a single 40 years ago today, just might be its peak track.

It's interesting that "Beast" was mainly written by Richards, though Jagger played with the lyrics and the tempo, turning it into the slow, almost-but-never-quite punky jam which we know and love. It was certainly the first Rolling Stones song I memorized, and I make no apologies to singing it, shamelessly and at great volume along with the song as it came off my precious Some Girls tape as I drove Melissa somewhere on a date way back in 1993. She married me, so it must work at least a little bit. So Mick, Keith, and everyone else--thanks!

Songs of '78: "Time Passages"

"Time Passages," the first song released from--and the first song in the track listing of--Al Stewart's album of the same name, is probably responsible, more than any other single song, for this list's existence and my constant return to pop music and the radio for four decades of life (so far). It was the first piece of music I ever purchased (a tape cassette, the other songs on which I can barely remember, but which I destroyed from years of listening to this one song and then rewinding and listening to it again, probably hundreds of times over the years), and no other song from my early radio-listening years has stayed with me so constantly, being renewed in my memory in association with dozens of particular moments. I can remember thinking about "Time Passages" while watching clouds drop lower along the Wasatch Mountains just east of BYU's campus in Provo, UT, while I was there as an undergraduate. I can remember thinking about it while driving a moving truck along a mostly empty Ohio interstate, late in the afternoon, with my then-new wife and an old friend asleep in the front seat beside me. I can remember thinking about it while holding Melissa's and my first child--Megan, then about 10 days old and asleep in my arms--as I sat on the futon in our second apartment in Washington DC while I was in graduate school, and wondered: what the hell have we gotten ourselves into? I remember this song so damn much.

Why? What is it about this jazzy, lyrically folky, smooth piece of 70s soft rock that enabled it to send roots deeper into my musical consciousness than probably any other song I have ever heard? Hard to say. Maybe it was because, on some level, even as a 9 and 10-year-old, my consciousness was tuned to reflection and regret. Even as a little kid I was weirdly conscious of the passage of time--not in a morbid way, but one that left me thinking about how all was transitory; that there was always going to be another thing after this one. I suppose the mature Christian belief I hold to today, the faith that there is a God who is the Author of our existence--and that, as such, everything I say or do is secondary, an addendum, to the real business of my being here, which is by no means tied to any particular work I may do--was perhaps fated. Maybe I was bound to end up thinking this way, because I was the sort of person who, as a child, could hear a simple romantic lyric of longing like "The things you lean on are the things that don't last," and think to myself: oh yeah, that's the truth.

Oh well. Who knows? Forty years ago on this day, Al Stewart released a song, and it's a beautiful one, whether it makes your mind run deep or not. There was no video for it, but this live concert footage is wonderful. The fact that Stewart, at the conclusion of this passionate rendition of his humble little song, promises to be back in 20 minutes and then just causally walks off the stage fills me with a kind of bittersweet delight. Just about a perfect exit, says I. Would that we all could do the same.