#149, "Four American Dollars," U.S. Girls (2020)

#149, “Four American Dollars,” U.S. Girls (2020)

I remember everything about the day I first heard “Four American Dollars” by U.S. Girls. It was a Friday morning. I had some work to do that day, but I’d just gotten ahead of some deadlines and I had some errands to run that morning. I put on the “new music” playlist that the Apple Music algorithm makes for you ever Friday, based on what it knows about your taste (a lot), and this was the first song. I was in a good mood, the weather was nice, and it’s got that disco beat that makes it feel like a lost song from the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack or something. One of the things I like best about music is how just having it on can color your experience of whatever is going on—I liked the way it felt when this song was soundtracking my morning.

I went to a store down south to try to find a new backpack. SXSW was a week away, and after years of carrying messenger bags that made my shoulder numb after lugging it around for twelve hours, I decided I’d prefer to distribute the weight in a backpack. I couldn’t find anything I liked, but on my way out of the store, this song came on KUTX, the local college radio station that was playing in the shop. When I got back to the car, I started that playlist over again and decided I’d pop into Waterloo Records to buy a copy of the album, which—it turned out—had just come out that morning. It’s always been thrilling to me how hearing a new song can be a rush of infatuation. I didn’t even want to listen to the rest of the album before I bought it. I was excited to imagine what the other dozen-or-so songs would sound like, and to look forward to hearing them for the first time at home, the windows down and a breeze blowing through the windows. That was a nice thought, made me feel optimistic.

It was the last time I felt optimistic for a year, maybe. It was March 6, 2020. While I was at the record store, I learned that SXSW had been canceled because of COVID, which was unthinkable. We knew the pandemic was happening, but the scope of it was still impossible to make sense of. There had been a petition circulating that week urging the city to cancel SXSW, and I’d written about how that would be devastating to the entire city economically—restaurants counted on the festival to bring them into the black after the winter, workers from pedicab drivers to servers to musicians to security staff to tech crews relied on it to pay their rent, etc, etc. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do or not, but I knew it wasn’t a decision that could be made lightly, or simply out of an abundance of caution. It didn’t make sense to cancel SXSW but keep playing NBA games, keep going to movie theaters, keep otherwise living our lives like normal.

And, well, you know how all that turned out. (The fact that the pandemic disrupted everything, incidentally, is why a lot of people endured the cancelation of SXSW—enhanced unemployment, PPP loans, eviction suspensions, and the rest mitigated the damage.) Once I heard that it had been canceled, I was no longer ahead on my deadlines, so I bought the record and went across the street, to the picnic table in front of the bookstore, and wrote my story about the cancelation of the festival.

The rest of the country would understand that the pandemic meant that the whole world had changed while they hadn’t quite noticed soon. The following Thursday night, the NBA season suspended; Tom Hanks announced he had COVID; Trump gave a speech about closing the border (also, for some reason, Sarah Palin was on The Masked Singer—it’s funny what you remember). But in Austin, we had a preview of the way things had changed, had a few extra days to let the seriousness of the pandemic sink in. It was a wild, disorienting time—a local promoter responded to the news by announcing they’d be holding an unofficial festival at a bunch of downtown clubs featuring a lot of the musicians who’d already booked their travel, then canceled those plans shortly thereafter, upon processing that an airborne wasn’t the sort of thing you can overcome with a punk rock attitude and everyone singing along together in the spirit of community. But it was early days still.

That time—the spring of 2020, when we were washing our groceries and crossing the street while walking our dogs to avoid breathing in the same cone of air that whoever was going past was exhaling, when we strapped bandanas over our faces because masks were sold out everywhere and we were supposed to save them for emergency workers anyway, when everything was terrifyingly new and novel and unfamiliar—it’s not one I am very nostalgic for, and I’m a sentimental kind’a guy.

But I did go home that afternoon, and open the windows, and put on the album that “Four American Dollars” comes from, and that was nice. I did that again, and again, and again, for a year or so, and then there was a vaccine and the new version of normal that we live in now—which for some people looks exactly like it did on the morning of March 6, 2020, for others looks much more like the rest of that month did, or maybe like some sort of mix of the two—started to unfurl. I’m not nostalgic for the early, terrifying days of the pandemic, but I had a new record to keep me company, and every time I listen to “Four American Dollars,” I at least get the chance to remember that even during frightening and uncertain times, there’s still joyful, exhilarating newness to be found.