This was orginally written for Jamie Anderson's Blog in 2015! Check it out!


Music is powerful. That’s why I like to write musicals. I think of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, and how, in 1949, its themes of interracial marriage were considered too risky for Broadway — until after the show had proven itself in London! I think of how nearly every song in that show made it to the Hit Parade on the radio: “Bali Ha’i”, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”, “Some Enchanted Evening”, “There Is Nothing Like a Dame”, “Happy Talk”, “Younger Than Springtime” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy.” The entire nation, racists and all, hummed happily along to the score of this musical.

What about the time? By 1948 soldiers returning home from the war were increasingly unwilling to accept the lack of freedom and equality in their homeland— a country that held itself up to the world as a bastion of democratic process.

The year before South Pacific premiered, segregation in the military and discrimination in civil service jobs were declared illegal, and the stage was set for one of the most powerful and violent civil rights movements in history. Did South Pacific reflect a collective readiness to confront racism, or did it actually serve as a cultural wedge to pry open the doors of consciousness?  Audiences could not take those lush melodies and haunting lyrics to heart without also letting in the message of the play: Life is too short and too precious to waste it on artificial boundaries that prevent us from loving.

A lyricist has responsibilities. Music, if it’s good, will lodge itself in the brain of the listener. It will seduce us with rhythms and syncopations. It will manipulate us emotionally with a melody that can soar and plunge, hold us in suspense, and release us with closure. The brain will forever associate the lyric with the music — hence the phrase “earworm.” Wikipedia defines “earworm” as “a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person’s mind after it is no longer playing.” Synonyms include “musical imagery repetition,” “involuntary musical imagery,” and “stuck song syndrome.”

Let’s look at Springsteen’s “Blinded By the Light.” Manfred Mann altered one simple lyric, changing “cut loose like a deuce” to “revved up like a deuce,” and forever after millions have wondered what it means to be “wrapped up like a douche.” Springsteen jokes that the song did not achieve popularity until Mann rewrote it to be about a feminine hygiene product.

Responsibility, people.

But deuces/douches aside, what’s up with 99% of popular music being about sex or compulsion? Popular music appears to be one endless booty call. What effect does this have on us, that every earworm would direct our attention toward lust or codependency? And … as a true child of the sixties, I have to ask the question “Who benefits from that?”

Well, heterosexuals would appear to, because I rarely hear a song on the radio about lesbian or gay couples. Yes, there are gender ambiguous songs, like Melissa Etheridge’s “Come To My Window,” but the more explicit ones never seem to get on the national radar. In fact, the only one I can think of in the moment is “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” by Paul Simon. 1972, nearly a half-century ago. It was a song about boys caught fooling around, doing something that mama saw that was against the law. Asked by Rolling Stone, “What is it that the mama saw? The whole world wants to know,” Simon replied “I have no idea what it is… Something sexual is what I imagine, but when I say ‘something,’ I never bothered to figure out what it was. Didn’t make any difference to me.” His indifference was radical at the time.

Okay, but sexual orientation aside, these ubiquitous sex-and-compulsion songs appear to me to be written to reflect male fantasies. Female sexual empowerment is equated with a woman’s ability to play into these fantasies.

But, seriously, orientation and gender aside, who benefits from a nation whose earworms are obsessed with sex?  Aren’t there other things we could be singing about?

Well, yes. In country music, we have mama, trucks, and prison. In folk music, we have a wide array of social justice issues.

But… musicals… ah, musicals. This is a lyricist’s playground. Songs that reflect character, that move the plot forward, that are true to the dramatic moment. Songs that capture the feel of an era, or the flavor of a culture. And all of this filtered through the experience and personality of the lyricist.

Take The Sound of Music. Oscar Hammerstein was dying when he wrote the lyrics for the show. In fact, he wrote some of it from his bed. The last song he ever wrote was “Edelweiss,” which was inserted late into the second act. “Small and white, clean and bright…”  A simple, simple lyric, but one that focuses attention on a wildflower when an evil world of fascism is rapidly bearing down on a small country, when the “Anschluss” of chronic physical pain is launching an assault on all the senses.

The Sound of Music is a musical about appreciation of life, with lyrics by a man who was about to leave it. Here is Hammerstein right from the heart: “My days in the hills have come to an end, I know / A star has come out to tell me it’s time to go / But deep in the dark green shadows are voices that urge me to stay / So I pause and I wait and I listen for one more sound, for one more lovely thing that the hills might say.”
 
And he goes on to write about favorite things, about climbing every mountain, about having confidence, about having done something good in one’s life, about how love can survive…. And then he sums it all up with that single, simple white flower… “Small and white, clean and bright/You look happy to me…”
 
Hammerstein writes the songs that he is needing to hear. Romance, as opposed to lust. Romance — that feeling of excitement and mystery toward what one loves, in this case the natural world and its simple wonders.

Two things are going on for me this week: PTSD and Martha Graham. The PTSD is from the constant headlines about the sexual predation of one of the leading candidates for the office of President. Martha Graham is from my work on a play about Jean Rosenthal, the lesbian who lit her performances for thirty-five years.
 
In the course of researching Martha, I ran across a Youtube video of one of her most famous dances, “Errand into the Maze.” It’s a recreation of the dance that premiered in 1947. You can see it here.

Twelve years ago, I had watched the video of this dance, but I didn’t’ really see it. At that time, I was mostly interested in it from a biographical perspective. Was this about Graham’s ambivalence about marrying Erick Hawkins, one of her dancers? I had accepted the analysis of the dance pundits that “Errand” is about a woman’s fear of sexual intimacy.

Watching it this time, with active PTSD, I arrived at a very different understanding of the dance. I felt I was watching a woman wrestle with retrieval and integration of a traumatic rape memory. “Errand” was suddenly personal and relevant to me.
 
The dance is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the story, the warrior Theseus must slay the Minotaur that lives in a labyrinth. Adriadne, the king’s daughter, helps Theseus by giving him a ball of thread that he uses to find his way out. In Graham’s version, there is no male warrior. It is Ariadne herself who enters the maze and slays the monster.
 
What Martha Graham has done is take us into the internal landscape of the survivor and her memories. Every single beat of this dance was suddenly intelligible and relatable to me. As an archetype, it reinforces the map of a survivor’s terrain: You are here. You may find yourself here later on. And if you can manage to get here, you’re out of the woods.

The dance begins before the dance. Martha would lay out the labyrinth before she danced it. It was made from lightweight, flexible boning that dressmakers used. One could buy it by the yard. Boning, unlike rope or ribbon, has something of a mind of its own. It resists, and the dancer must dialogue with that. I believe this is important. I believe it is why Martha chose it, instead of rope. It has a will… as do traumatic memories. And I like that she would lay out the labyrinth as a personal ritual, before each performance. Dancers still do that today. The path back into our memories is profoundly personal, if subconscious.

So… the stage is set with a stylized moon, a path of boning, and a V-shaped sculpture at the center of the maze that resembles an inverted pelvis with both legs up in the air.  The dance begins with pelvic contractions… labor pains? (Martha suffered from agonizing menstrual cramps.) The dancer begins to move as if she is being compelled against her will… Some have said that the world is forcing her, but her spirit resists. I see the opposite. I see her spirit calling her, her memories coming to get her:  It’s time.  The resistance is her habitual self, the armor of denial or routine that has been her protection.

Traumatic memories arrive. Their arrival feels unbidden, intrusive, pathological. In fact, often they arrive to be healed. The psyche that has been hiding them may be suddenly ready. Sometimes there is a trigger, an event that replicates the trauma, and we are set on that path again, greatly against our conscious will. But in Martha’s dance, this struggle is set in motion by an action that archetypically marks the beginning of labor, of birth. Unbidden, intrusive, seemingly pathological… but necessary for creation.

So, bent double with the violence of the contractions, the woman begins her journey dancing down the path of the boning, dancing into the maze toward the memory. She arrives at the crotch of the torso, or the trees, where she appears to ground herself temporarily, and then pull away, and then return. “I can’t but I must; I can’t but I must.” And then suddenly the Minotaur appears, a male dancer, mostly nude, with horns on his head and his arms yoked over a bone/staff.

Here it is: The Memory. She shields her eyes from the sight. She turns her back. It menaces her. She finally, turns toward him, throwing up one arm in a futile gesture of resistance. He literally bends her to his will and the horror is accomplished. She pushes the memory away, refusing to look. In denial mode, she retraces her steps back into the maze, this time, pulling up the boning behind her and weaving it between the legs of the torso as a kind of shield, just as the Minotaur returns, looking for her.

She does not want to come out from her defenses. The memory is exerting a pull over her. This time, she collapses on the floor, not even attempting a defense. She rolls as he steps over her, appearing to kick her along. He pulls her onto his back and carries her curled up in a fetal roll. He drags her back when she attempts to crawl away. He swings her around by the wrists. The Minotaur/memory literally kicks her ass.
 
But all this time, she has been growing stronger. This time, when he leaves, she discovers a joy, a lyricism in her body. She discovers pleasure. The contractions return, but she is integrating them, owning them as part of her body—part of her process. They are no longer an alien force violating her. She participates. She experiences them as part of her strength. And when the Minotaur returns, she still doesn’t want to look, she still experiences the dread.  He gloats, he menaces, he taunts. She is avoidant, she tries to move away… He still frightens her, but there is a new determination. Her hands are over her uterus.

Suddenly, she spins around to face her tormentor. She grabs his hands and leaps onto his thighs, towering over him, wrestling him, staring him down. She holds her ground. He collapses on the ground, the stiff bone that held up his arms rolls away, and he dies.

She returns to the torso/altar and unwinds the boning, stroking the legs/bones/trunks. She is free. Her body is her own. The "errand" is accomplished.