The Earwyrms Canon, Pt. III: Cringe
ISSUE #180
I’m ending the year by tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next six weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.
Cringing is an automated defense, our sympathetic reflex to seeing pain. Simply anticipating it, the body still cringes, even when no harm comes. We cringe at earnestness, rejection, desperation, and need—testament to the reality of psychological pain.
We don’t ask for our feelings. We can manage or hide them, but we can’t easily call them forth. Yet music plays with emotion like a marionette. It is the most manipulative art form; it is also one of the few that can sidestep this cringing, a path to vulnerability without derision.
Past selves are distant enough that we often cringe at memory. But music will keep the body present. Like Quentin’s watch in The Sound and the Fury, music stops time by marking it, “that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”
Life’s purest delights—singing, dancing, telling someone you love them—all come from indulgence in unsolicited feelings. The path to euphoria is narrow—it demands we ignore our exposure to pain. This section of the Canon is filled with those songs that speak directly to our emotional fears, the music that conquers pain with melody.
“Everything is Embarrassing” | Sky Ferreira
2012
Truly, everything is. Rarely do I get a day that doesn’t end with myself behind a mental fence, shooting spitballs at my daytime self for something I said. Living is a powerful impulse; mistakes are inevitable. This song, written by Dev Hynes, soothes the embarrassments of love by confessing, like the balm of his Blood Orange catalog with the addition of an icy backbeat. It remains essential VDM.
“Gypsy” | Fleetwood Mac
1982
Memory chimes like a church bell in winter’s black afternoon—sharp at first, quickly gone. Like Kane’s Rosebud, “Gypsy” is about the impossibility of return. Note the narratorial change—first-person before, third-person after—that straddles the middle eight. That section cements this song’s place in the Canon by doing what all my favorite bridges do: escorting the listener from epiphany to release.
“Hungry Heart” | Bruce Springsteen
1980
Satisfaction doesn’t come easy—running fast to what you want only dispels it as mirage. Renounce the destination for the journey and you’re in Springsteen’s domain, thundering from one illusion to the shimmering next with the top down on the open road. Never weigh one’s liberation against your loss. We all have a heart to feed.
“Me at the Museum, You in the Wintergardens” | Tiny Ruins
2014
Great chord progressions unfold like conversations, which are themselves love affairs in microcosm. This one, with its first descending half-step, mirrors the rush of being in love and the waning warmth when it’s away. It seems to disintegrate even as I listen—my favorite, crumbling love song.
“Love” | Mica Levi
2013
Under the Skin is the story of an alien who comes to Earth to harvest skin before getting infected with painful emotions—love, affection, and concern. For its score, Mica Levi used resonant violas, synthesized strings, and microphones that interfere with one other to create a sound that churns and distends. “Love” is the abject trying to be beautiful, until the listener realizes that the abject has always been beautiful.
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” | Cyndi Lauper
1983
This is glossy perfection that snaps like bubble gum, bounces like a trampoline. The entire 80s came together in time for Cyndi’s version to loot it all. Like all my favorite dance music, it’s the happiest sad song, a liberating cry for the unfortunate ones, a clarion call to rip off the shoulder pads, to break up and break out and walk in the sun.
“Linger” | The Cranberries
1993
“Linger” is a lesson in balance: the drums roll on with a soldier’s fury, the strings take half the crying melody, but both are kept so far down in the mix that Dolores O’Riordan has room to make history. The lyrics are so heavy they could fall through the floor, but her voice lifts them up as if they were silk. Even the turn to the chorus—typically punctuated in 1993 by a Dave Grohl-style snare-and-stomp—sounds as gentle as the opening of the morning’s curtains. Songs this devastating don’t sound like the sunrise, but that lightness is the eternal magic of “Linger.”
“Crown of Love” | Arcade Fire
2004
The bravery it must have taken for these adults to plumb the depths of teen-diary sadness and pull out a marching dirge in 6/8 time. “Crown of Love” is a constant crescendo, from the funeral-parlor piano to those shivering violins. At ninety seconds in, Régine Chassagne enters like a specter behind Win Butler’s tragic hero. It’s melodrama of the highest order—my modus operandi—until finally the song catches the wind and lifts off, flies away, a heart unburdened at last.
“Marion’s Theme” | John Williams
1981
Everybody recognizes the John Williams triplet. Like his longtime partner Spielberg, he changed movies forever, which means he forever changed popular orchestral music as well. Williams’ suites are still played frequently from parks and bandshells in every state—but far from being played out like his other masterpieces, I always come back to “Marion’s Theme.” It has all of what followed with “Luke and Leia” or “Across the Stars,” only Marion was there before all the rest—and because I so rarely get to hear it, my heart always gets more than it bargained for.
“True Love Will Find You in the End” | Daniel Johnston
1990
There’s that quote from scientist Stephen Jay Gould that I’ve recently seen going around: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Stripped of pretense and the pressures of capital, outsider art is described as “pure,” but rarely is it as pure as Daniel Johnston. The immense simplicity of this perfect poem is present in our unsolicited feelings of love—Johnston, for all his struggles, saw this light and chiseled down to it. Amateur, sure, but wonderful proof that all of us are artists, all expression is worthy, and the shame surrounding what we really feel is the only thing holding us back from beauty.
Next week—more to come.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.