I'll Win that Motley Crue Mirror if it fucking kills me

My Spotify Wrapped this week was entirely expected—the number one song I listened to, without question, was Carnival by Bikini Kill.

It’s probably foolish or shortsighted to say it’s my favorite song, period, because frankly having a favorite song is a fun thought experiment but ultimately an empty statement. I have plenty of favorite songs, tied to specific memories, individuals, psychic moments, deep emotions, even tiny flashes of clarity and inspiration. Seeing This Must Be The Place in Stop Making Sense for the first time. The first time All My Life kicked up on one of my Dad’s homemade mix CD’s. Getting wistful and sentimental for my grad school life when I stumble into Windowlicker deep in a playlist.

So, there’s no such thing as a singular favorite song, at least in my accounting. I do think that Carnival a perfect song, which is distinctly different.

This year I’ve been more or less detached from music at large, and spinning in algorithmic circles dictated by whatever Spotify is pushing on me that week. Honestly, I very rarely listen to any music unless I’m on a run, and even on the track I’ve been tending toward podcasts in 2024.

This is frustrating. I’m thinking about abandoning Spotify for a while, but I’m apprehensive about losing the music (and especially) playlists I’ve curated over the years — these playlists are maybe the most concrete markers of time and place over a five or six year period of my life. They’ve been getting thinner and less frequent for a while now. I picked up an iPod Classic to circumvent both the obnoxious dependence on streaming as a platform, but also to foster and rekindle the sense of discovering music, downloading albums, and listening to them straight through as complete expressions. I want to own and listen to my own music, in the way that I did when it was a much more central part of my life. There’s a lot of friction in this pipeline, which has prevented me from committing to the iPod on a daily basis. It’s essentially functioned as a hard drive so far, because it’s unbearably slow to get any new music loaded.

Moments of feeling truly inspired by what I listen to are becoming fewer and far between. Carnival was a major exception.

It’s a minute and a half long, mostly two chords, and atomically perfect; urgent and joyful and sweet and snotty and playful and deadly earnest. It starts by letting you know exactly what it’s about:

This is a song about the seedy underbelly of the carnival
The part that only the kids know about
This is a song about sixteen year old girls giving carnies head For free rides and hits of pot

I want to go
I want to go
I want to go

What do I mean by perfect? Sonically perfect? Perfectly performed? Perfectly expressed? I tend to think it’s all of the above, which ultimately means I think it’s perfect because every single component — from Kathleen Hanna’s devout bawling, to the fact that it’s over almost as soon as it’s kicked up — is entirely and perfectly appropriate.

Carnival is short, but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be to get its point across. It’s a song without flourish, it’s brass fucking tacks. Direct, cutting straight from a to the bone. It’s communication in a laser-straight line. I need to develop this thinking further, but there’s something conceptually interesting about linking punk rock (and maybe “punk” ethos more generally) with something like the Shakers. Purposeful and intentional, making something only if it’s useful and necessary, and then making it without ornament or embellishment.

At the same time, Carnival is powerful because it might be cutting, but it’s also absolutely joyful and earnest.

I think the reason Carnival has dug its hook in so deeply into my heart is that it’s a very clear expression in the way that I struggle to articulate. I want my work (writing, art, design, anything) to be as perfect (not thoughtful, but perfect) as Carnival, or Louie Louie — messy, shaggy, but specific and purposeful in every facet. I want to say what I mean, and say it directly, and say it with passion and purpose and delight and wonder. I want to go!