But “Espresso,” frankly, belongs to the summer of 1982. Pretty much every musical idea in America’s Pop Song of the Moment can be traced back to an entire genre of music that, in its own time, was resoundingly rejected as “not pop enough” by radio and MTV. Ironic indeed that so much pop in the past couple of years, whether it’s Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk!,” Dua Lipa’s Barbie soundtrack entry “Dance the Night,” or Doja Cat’s SZA team-up “Kiss Me More,” derives from this musical movement that never even had a name of its own.
This is not a case of an underground style finally edging into the mainstream, like punk did in various forms in the 1990s. This particular case is a cold case. A RICO case, even. It’s about the people who decide what pop does and doesn’t sound like—or, more to the point, what pop looks and doesn’t look like. And after all these years, it still makes me mad.
“Noise” is a technical term. It isn’t defined by volume or source, but rather as unwanted sound that interferes with an important acoustic signal. Sound travels four and a half times faster underwater than in air, and the right sound under the right conditions can cross seas. For many aquatic animals, while other senses—sight, taste, smell, touch—are often diminished in water, sound becomes enhanced. Just as animals evolved to live in certain temperatures, or to eat certain foods, they also evolved in what may be called certain soundscapes. In recent decades, however, these soundscapes have begun to change.
Globally, shipping noise in the ocean has doubled every decade from 1960 to 2010. Piercing sonar, thudding seismic air guns for geological imaging, bangs from pile drivers, buzzing motorboats, and shipping’s broadband growl can also disrupt natural soundscapes. Such human sounds are not universally problematic, but they become noise when they’re unwanted. And while noise can cause acute injury and even death in marine mammals—for example, by sending animals fleeing to the surface from great depths too quickly—it also impacts communication, mating, fighting, migrating, and bonding in subtle and wide-ranging ways. Underwater, acoustic space is valuable, and noise is a trespass.
The mourners went through the back of the old building and made their way kind of rowdily upstairs to the second floor, where Matt’s office used to be. It was now a utility closet. The layers of dust and old cardboard boxes stood in opposition to how lively a room it had been, Matt sitting beneath a bulletin board with the stories he’d printed out haphazardly and ideas for the newspaper written here and there and magazines flayed over the desk, before he became more organized later on. They lingered a few minutes in the office where Matt once defended his wardrobe choice of black button-down short-sleeved shirt with sparkly silver pinstripes, where Matt encouraged students individually or in groups to visit and chat, to shoot around ideas. Matt with his laptop open; Matt arguing about the ’80s hair band Savatage so much it was hard to figure out if he was joking when he said, This is real music; Matt buzzing on coffee and the adrenaline of having written his first big piece for SB Nation Longform about horseshoes (but “not really about horseshoes,” if anyone asked), never believing that he could do this kind of journalism until he hosted a panel of longform writers in 2012 and they encouraged him to try. It turned out to be an example of one of the lessons he tried to impart to his students, that stories never go the way you think they’re going to: The piece was supposed to be about the man everyone expected to compete for the world horseshoe title, but then the man essentially choked. “Feet of Clay, Heart of Iron” turned out to be a story about a guy who was losing his grip.
There is an enormous amount of invisible work that is done in publishing. Adding a standard credit page would not be an answer to the various and copious labor problems in the industry, but it could be a nice (and cost effective) start in making publishing staff feel more valued.
In Landau’s novel, many things can be true at the same time. A summer trip can be a lavish vacation and a frightening trial. The fulfillment of a man’s artistic fantasy can be traumatic for his family, and the time a woman needs to complete her book project may require “hooking up” her children to their iPads until they are “transformed into glassy-eyed drones.” A child can be alive and dead at the same time, in the same mind. The world can be unjust, and one’s position in it unjustly elevated, and yet that same person can be a valorous survivor, continuing on despite a deep, soul-rending wound that deserves sunlight and air.