More of a love letter

Loose Joints – "Tell You Today"

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds writes that what gives rock critics such fits writing about dance music is that they've learned the paint-by-psychological-numbers method of writing about rock music too well: "the song is a mini-novel, a story (either personal confession or character study). As instrumental music, techno is closer to the plastic arts or architecture than literature, in that it involves the creation of an imaginary environment or kinesthetic terrain."

To a certain extent, this is a helpful distinction, except that it still needs to pad a claim like "music is not like literature" with another claim like "music is like architecture." On the one hand, you have album reviews as stories, which seem to insist that you should read them as you're listening to the record, so that you'll understand the story that you're listening to. On the other hand, you have record reviews that don't add up to anything more than a detailed "all senses on deck" description of pure sound. What peers out from behind both of these kinds of writing is the ever-unhelpful distinction between form and content.

But one of the things that I love so much about "Tell You Today" (1983), an exquisitely clumsy, rapturously joyous weirdo-disco cut by Arthur Russell (here appearing as Loose Joints), is that it absolutely will not be written about in either of those ways. The challenge is right there in the title. Yes, it is a dance track, which means that it's subject to the usual "does it work on the floor" kinds of evaluations (it does), but for crissake it's called Tell. You. Today. It's not a character, but it's not only there to take hold of your limbs and wiggle either.

That sly neither here nor there is all over the track from the very beginning, where a looped female vocalist (apparently a woman named Joyce Bowden) sings "Tell you, tell you, tell you, tell you," over and over again, except that it's not fully mechanized because Russell has a few different loops of the lady's two-note phrase that begin an end with slightly different timbres and pitches, as though his sampler had a few different digitized performances of the same two notes. That goes on for a while. (At this point, "Tell me what?" will be the perceptible but not quite articulable sensation kicking around the middle-depths of your head.)

Then a little group of horns, which also play a completely repetitive four-note series and nothing else, except that these guys are really terrible at their instruments, blaring all over the place and each a microbeat off from the others. It's a little annoying the first time around, but not in the same way that the endlessly repeated laser beam from an electronic track can be annoying. One wants to be annoyed at someone, maybe the same someone who can't get that two-note "tell you" quite right, but there's no one exactly there.

Then, very gradually, the song decides to get its shit together. An ascending, briefly harmonized whistle figure is a really witty thing to include, both for its signaling of a person-there-who-won't-talk as well as its shrugging disavowal of those gawdawful horns. A piano follows, suddenly puncturing its descending staccato figure with a bluesy trill that personally served as the moment when I started walking warily back into the thing. At that point, very quietly, it's all over. The piano revvs up for about a minute more, charismatically rumbling some gospel bass when it feels like it, and for the first time in three minutes I'm dancing, which I've been doing anyway but damn, suddenly it feels good to be stepping around.

Then a glissando crash into a hiccup–where'd the piano go?–and that lady going "tell you" a few more times but I'm not mad anymore because I'm getting the inkling that she had a plan the whole time anyway, so step step step. Then another hiccup.

Here, I'm almost positive that the beat slows, for about a beat and a half, by maybe two metronome clicks. Then, two glissando piano crashes, which is just so perfect because what I'm waiting for is one, leading into the downbeat and sending me off, but when it's the second one that actually does it I come out disoriented and ignorant of when or how exactly I was born into what is now obviously a full-fledged disco beat, with funking guitars and piano chords and the whole deal. Hey! The whistling is back! Oh man this song just really came together nice job Arth-

Oh. That's why. That's what the rest of it is for. I did not see those voices coming.

Walking down your street
I knew it was my chance
Chance to lay
New shoes on my feet
I thought that they could dance
Dance away
Makes me come alive, I remember
A look of sadness on your face
That was before
I want to tell you today.

Russell's voice, harmonized in layers on itself, has a watery quality that somehow manages to indicate both the sickness crying at the center of his World of Echo LP as well as the watery-eyed health of Tolstoy's spiritual pilgrims. In both of these respects, the voices that rush into "Tell You Today" in such an ecstatic way effect an irresistible affirmation of something like physical existence. The first time I heard it, I was sitting at my desk, and what rushed through my body when the voices kicked in was the ability to turn my head, or to lift a book, or to shift my weight, transformed into a real physical sensation, as real as shivering or bumping my foot. His voice turns the ability to move into a sensory experience. The cool thing is that his voice turns the ability to move into a sensory experience even if you're already moving, which you probably should be by that point. Of course, this is all accompanied by unambiguous feelings of joy, which as I'm listening to the song are most easily directed towards the people around me.

Don't worry, the vocals drop out–it's for the best, I promise–and Russell lets you down as easily as possible. There's a warm glow that hangs around though, like the knowledge that one has heard without having been informed. "Beyond words" is a cheap way of putting it, but that's a problem that's built into the phrase anyway.