email #64 -- on langley and bordeaux, part 2
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
There wasn’t anything I felt especially compelled to write you this week; but mere days after I sent my last email, several conservative talk show hosts decided to make Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” a cudgel in their stupid, definitely-not-racially-overtoned culture war against hip-hop. I want to make it clear that this timing was purely coincidental; I did not take an interest in “Choosin’ Texas” for ideological reasons. I just like the song.
To prove it, let me make a few more-sophisticated, musically-oriented notes about others songs in Langley’s catalog, which I’ve been making my way through over the last two weeks:
Be Her
I’m pretty sure “Be Her” is what Taylor Swift sounds like to people who like Taylor Swift.
(I once asked my friend Tzvi, a singer-songwriter, what I was missing about Taylor Swift. He responded, immediately: “The experience of having been a teenage girl.” This was extremely helpful.)
Last week, I noted how uninspiring Jane Bordeaux’s rendition of “Choosin’ Texas” was, and I theorized that she can’t croon country, because – being Israeli – she cannot fathom, in her soul, the geographical expanses across which southern singers swoon.
“Be Her,” by contrast, has something of an equivalent in the Bordeaux catalog: “Einav,” a song about an oh-so-perfect girl who’s smart and pretty and tanned even in the wintertime. “They ought to dump all the ‘Einavs’ in the world into the ocean, and that’ll raise everyone’s spirits,” she sings.
A fun thing about “Einav,” in this context, is that it includes that classic old-Western refrain: “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us.” Except – demonstrating what I said above – in Bordeaux’s song, it might actually be true! This whole country is hardly big enough for two people. Let alone this little moshav that Einav ought to return to.
Back to “Be Her,” though – the difference between this one and “Einav” is indicated by the fact that Langley a) never names “her,” and b) never evinces any sarcasm in her (Langley’s) descriptions of “her” perfection.
A natural interpretation (which is obvious in retrospect, but which I only discovered from a YouTube comment) is that “she” isn’t another person at all, but rather the person whom Langley wants to become. (n.b.: “Whom,” because her higher self is a direct object here, and "become" a transitive verb, as in the blessing: shehakol nihye bidvaro, 'at Whose word everything is is’d.')
If this were a Taylor Swift song, it would not be this introspective.
Bottom of Your Boots
This is a very gendered-female song, but I have no trouble inhabiting it, and I like when that happens. Granted, it’s even better when it comes from the singer him-or-herself (e.g. John Prine singing, “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy…”), but I’ll take it on the listener’s end too.
(One way these sex-incongruous songs come about is covers – when, e.g. a woman sings a song whose speaker is unambiguously male, but somehow pulls it off with a special sort of grace. A notable exception to this preference, as it happens, is Jane Bordeaux’s greatest work – her ‘Kolnoa Lev,’ which takes one of Leonard Cohen’s crudest, malest songs, and reincarnates it as the memory of a young woman in Tel Aviv.)
On first listen, rhyming “the moon and back” with “the top of your hat” sounded like a stretch to me, like a placeholder for some better lyric that in the end was never written. Parallels might be Sierra Ferrell’s “steal your cake” line in “I Can Drive You Crazy,” or that part of “Lose Yourself” where Eminem says “His soul's escaping, through this hole that is gaping” – which is clever rhythmically, but come on.
But there are a few reasons to scold myself for that first impression. For one, “back” and “hat” don’t actually rhyme. So it’s clearly a conscious choice, to which she’s attached, and she’s a good songwriter. But for another: It’s possible that “from the bottom of your boots to the top of your hat” only sounds silly to me because I don’t know anyone who wears boots and hats on a daily basis.
I like the idea that there is still an America where men wear boots and hats. You know, it’s so sunny outside in Jerusalem these days, and what is a guy like me to do? A baseball cap hardly helps, and if you go even one level up from that, you risk Making It Your Thing. No one wants to be the adult equivalent of the neckbearded high-schooler in the fedora.
Now, I could solve the hat problem by becoming Haredi, but the rest of the uniform would work against the goal of staying cool, so I think that’s out, too.
Country Boy’s Dream Girl
This song is bad.
So, if I didn’t get to “Choosin’ Texas” through the Ben Shapiro Show, how did I suddenly find myself listening to it all the time? Good question. I got to it through “Choosing Wessex,” a bardcore rendition of Langley's hit by the inimitable Hildegard von Blingin', who this week released “Greenhorn Wagtail” – a medieval adaptation of “Teenage Dirtbag,” with lines like, “I’m but a greenhorn wagtail, lady. Naught but a hedgeborn blaggard, lady. I'd stand in an iron maiden, lady for thee.”
Hildegard is named, of course, for the 11th c. mystic, whose compositions Blingin' also records from time to time, no shtick attached. Every time I listen to one of those videos, it's a miracle I don't immediately run off to the Old City to devote my life to Christ. She's not the only one still doing bardcore covers, but hers are high art, while everyone else's these days is what the kids call 'AI slop.'
And that does matter. Hank Green (who just got in trouble himself for AI use, interestingly enough) had a good video recently on this concept of “slop." His insight, as I understood it, was that when it comes to a lot of art, the value is not merely in the form of the finished product, but also in the process of creating it, to which the product bears a sort of tangible witness. (An extreme example of this might be an Orthodox icon, or – on the other end of the theological spectrum – a Tibetan sand mandala.)
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I think that applies to the last video I will invoke, of a singer named Olive Klug, performing an original song called “What to Make of Me," on a channel called "Western AF." I haven't listened to anything else by Klug, and I don't have any complicated thoughts on the lyrics, but: What a voice! What a banjo! It’s crazy to me that one person, with one instrument, is bringing what I'm hearing into the world.
Plus, in this particular video, Klug is wearing a t-shirt from the Common Ground Country Fair. I went to that fair in 2014, during my brief sojourn in Maine, and there, I drank a chai tea that made my soul dance with my body dance with the universe, in a way no other food, beverage, or other mind-altering substance ever has, before or since.
Sometimes, I fantasize about going back to Common Ground, finding that chai guy; but I know that even if I did, it wouldn’t be the same – havel havalim, hakol havel.
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Alright, it’s time I go to sleep. This was fun. Sorry for not staying up the extra ten minutes to link absolutely everything – but I think I gave appropriate coordinates for Googling.
(Plus, and I think you know this, I take a guilty pleasure in making references that few to no one will understand. It’s like in old books, when they quote something in French, and then just carry on, because obviously the reader understood it. As my friend Nicholas, who is technically from Texas but spiritually from several centuries ago, stressed in his recent memoir about serving in the French Foreign Legion: “it is not so much praiseworthy to know the French language as it is shameful not to know it.” Well behold, as they say on the Holidays, I am before You as a vessel filled with shame and humiliation.)
Shabbat shalom, in this waning month of Av,
You know I have a playlist for this time of year, right?
It's theologically resonant but also just good.
As always: I am alive, and I am well – thanks to others, not all of whom are.
'Til the next one,
Yehuda ben Reuven v'Leah