Everybody Knows

When I was ten or so, I memorized a passage from Julius Caesar. Don’t look at me like that—I wasn’t reading Shakespeare at ten, I found it in a Batman comic book. Robin had memorized it, and I liked Robin very much, and thought “it would be cool to have a passage from Shakespeare memorized” so I did. It’s the only one I have, even all these years later.

It goes: Cowards die many deaths before their time; the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders I yet have heard, it seems most strange to me that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, shall come as it comes.

I never really gave much thought to what it meant at the time. I just liked the idea of having it memorized.

I’ve been afraid in my life, as we all have. I’ve wondered whether I would have courage in a moment where the stakes were as high as they get. And we are entering a frightening time, where many of the basic assumptions most of us have had about how the world worked are being specifically and deliberately challenged; where challenging those assumptions seems, if not entirely popular, to at least be something people were willing to vote for if it might lower the price of eggs. (Which one it is is a question it’s too early to answer. I hope it’s mostly about the eggs.)

So I think about that quote from Julius Caesar in frightening times, because I’ve come to understand that those are really what it’s a response to. Caesar is saying that you could get killed by someone who hates you, or you could get hit by a bus, or you could get cancer and be gone in three months, but either way, dead is dead. So compromising your principles to avoid danger is pointless, because in the end, you’re going to end up in the same place no matter what you do. There’s no amount of risk avoidance that’ll make you live forever, so what matters is choosing to live as yourself, valuing what you value. When things get frightening, that’s the time to be brave, because the cost of cowardice is high, and the final fate of the valiant and the coward is the same.

That’s all probably Shakespeare 101, or maybe Intro to Existentialism, but what do I know? I didn’t go to college.

I’ve spent the day vacillating between hope and despair, which I think is common enough in times like this. I’m frightened, and extremely sad, but I also know that frightening times do reveal things about ourselves and the people around us that it is valuable to have revealed. And, as is the custom of my people (music nerds), I’ve been doing that today to a soundtrack. I didn’t intend to send another one of these so soon, but here we are. You can listen to it here or here.

1. “Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen (1988)

   This song came into my head very late last night and it stayed there all day today. Not hard to figure out why. everybody knows that the dice are loaded. everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. everybody knows the war is over. everybody knows that the good guys lost. Leonard Cohen is one of those people who I will sometimes have a really specific feeling and then realize he wrote a perfect song about it thirty-some years ago. I’ve known “Everybody Knows” since I was a teenager but I don’t know if it hit me like it did last night before.

2. “Waiting For a Superman,” The Flaming Lips (1999)

   The way this starts, with the drums and the piano just crashing down, and then Wayne Coyne singing so sadly, it just breaks my heart even a quarter of a century later.

3. “I Know the End,” Phoebe Bridgers (2020)

   This was on the last playlist too. Maybe you listened to it. Either way, it feels appropriate. Was thinking about making a playlist with this, “Bull Believer” by Wednesday, a few other songs that have long periods of women just screaming into the void, but couldn’t commit to it. Still, let’s move on from sad songs after this.

4. “The Guns of Brixton,” The Clash (1979)

   “When they kick in your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?” is basically Paul Simonon’s take on “cowards die many deaths before their time; the valiant never taste of death but once,” I suppose. Both of them feel right.

5. “Touch Me Again,” Petrol Girls (2022)

   touch me again and i’ll fucking kill you. touch me again and i’ll fucking kill you. touch me again and i’ll fucking kill you. touch me again and i will fucking kill you.

6. “Rise Above,” Black Flag (1981)

   Man, I dunno. It’s old as shit and a little bit of a cliche now, but “Rise Above” still gets me going on a day like this. Only punk rock can save us now.

7. “I Wanna Kill Sam,” Ice Cube (1991)

   Only the first four Ice Cube solo albums can save us now. Actually, Ice Cube almost certainly voted for Trump in this election. Funny how money changes a situation. But hungry twenty-two year old Ice Cube would have fucking hated the guy, and regardless of what’s become of him now, that young Cube is is still there on wax, angry as hell at the right people, and not shy about it.

8. “Alright,” Kendrick Lamar (2015)

   Please nobody tell me who Kendrick voted for.

9. “Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox,” Rage Against the Machine (1998)

   More Allen Ginsberg, this time reinterpreted by Rage Against the Machine. This is another of Ginsberg’s late 1970’s political poems, full of disappointment and rage and heartbreak and frustration over everything he saw happen over the course of his life to that point. Zach De La Rocha, rock and roll’s most righteous voice, builds something really powerful out of it, with the rhythm section playing with atypical restraint and Tom Morello exploring the sounds of outer space with the whammy bar on his guitar. Ginsberg did an interesting thing with this poem, laying out facts that eventually spiral into conspiracy theories, with a resigned defeatism underpinning the whole thing that Zach recognizes and picks up, and then reworks to the point that it doesn’t matter which parts are true and which parts are paranoia, because in the end the result is the same: one mind, brute force, and full of money.

10. “If There Was Ever a Time,” The Armstrongs (2017)

    This song dropped early into Trump 45, a sweet little poppy punk rock number from Tim Armstrong of Rancid and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day (no relation, but hence “The Armstrongs”) that gives us one of those classic pop-punk hooks that’s worth more than the sum of its parts (“if there was ever a time to stand together, if there was ever a time it’s tonight. if there ever was a time to hold your brothers and your sisters, then the time is right”). Well. The Armstrong boys were right then, and they’re right now.

11. “The World’s On Fire (And We Still Fall In Love),” Parker Woodland (2021)

    This is an Austin band whose singer is a friendly acquaintance of mine. They recorded this song in 2021 and its chorus has brought me a lot of comfort over the past four years, and will continue to do so until I die, I expect.

    By coincidence—I didn’t plan it this way—I had my first appointment with my therapist since before I went to Australia this morning. We talked about the election, obviously, and one thing she said that stuck with me is that human history is really a story of people resisting tyranny; that’s not an American story, but one that stretches back thousands of years, although it can be hard for people who grew up in America during the relative stability of the eighties and nineties to really grasp that our early years were the aberration, not what we’re experiencing as authoritarianism rises around the globe. And yet: People throughout that time lived, and loved, and made art, and found beauty, and experienced peace and joy, even as that all happened, too.

    Battles will be fought. Violent bigots and bullies will be empowered. The seas will rise. Fires will engulf the forests and the prairies alike. Crops will die. People who deserve the opportunity to live their lives with dignity and in peace will be victimized for no reason other than because someone hateful is able to do it to them, and not all of them—of us—will survive it. And yet: People will still fall in love, and make things, and challenge one another to be better through it all, too. It’s not enough, but it’s what we have.

12. “If You Build It, We Will Break It,” The Chamanas (feat. Jim Ward and Kiko Rodriguez) (2018)

    This is a collection of El Paso heavyweight musicians—The Chamanas, a Grammy-winning, border-straddling indie pop group teamed with accordion superstar Kiko Rodriguez of Frontera Bugalú and At the Drive-In/Sparta guitarist and singer Jim Ward for a song about Trump’s border wall. The wall never materialized, because of course he was full of shit, but if it had, I do believe they would have taken hammers to it. You can’t separate a single culture whose ties are far deeper than the arbitrary boundary created by a lone river, no matter how many walls you promise. They just put that into words.

13. “Everybody Knows,” Concrete Blonde (1990)

    And we’re back where we started. I learned “Everybody Knows” from this version, recorded by Concrete Blonde for the soundtrack to the early 1990’s teensploitation masterpiece Pump Up the Volume. The movie is perfect; I rewatched it not long ago to confirm that it wasn’t just childhood nostalgia telling me that, even if it is probably quite a bit dated if watched by today’s teens.

    (The plot centers around a neurotic boy outsider, played by Christian Slater, who can only express himself from behind the microphone of his small-wattage pirate radio station, where he transforms from a shy kid named Mark into Happy Harry Hardon, whose taste in music is incredible and willingness to say complicated and controversial truths makes him a legend; his fellow teens trade tapes of his broadcasts at school as he becomes a symbol of defiance against the conformity demanded by the adults, until the FCC gets involved and we get an epic climax that, I think, would not make a lick of sense to any teen who watched it today.)

    The radio show opens each episode with Leonard Cohen’s recording of “Everybody Knows,” which was really only a couple years old at the time the movie was made; when the film reaches its climax, he replaces it with this cover by Concrete Blonde, which sheds some of Cohen’s synth-driven paranoia for the weary cynicism that Johnette Napolitano carries so effortlessly in a voice that is one of the greatest in rock history. everybody knows the boat is sinking. everybody knows the captain lied. everybody’s got that sinking feeling like their father or their dog just died—all of that feels just as true and powerful in her voice as it does in his, and given the way the song inhabited a corner of my brain over the past twenty-four hours, it seemed appropriate to bookend this playlist with it.