1990: Rubáiyát, Elektra

By Matt Vadnais 

In college, I worked as a cash-under-the-table mascot for the most popular country radio station serving the Red River Valley on the Minnesota/North Dakota border. It paid twice as much as my other college job as a security guard at the sugar beet plant. Though the work did not include the dimly perceived existential crisis that came from guarding something no one was trying to steal, the two years I spent about six hours a week being a seven-foot coyote wearing a cowboy hat and chaps did afford a lot of time to think about myself, the relationship between who one is and how one is perceived, and all of the reasons I knew I was living in the wrong part of the world for me personally. 

I was named for the station’s call letters––KYCK––which proved to be an unsafe nomenclature to use while goofy-walking amongst the people. No such crowd was free from junior high boys attempting to kick the Coyote. I worked fireworks stands, minor league baseball games because the Grand Forks Varmints didn’t have their own mascot, and even a Johnny Cash show that culminated in a photo including a dancing coyote I can’t prove is me, a photo that may or may not have survived the flood and fire that brought the city of Grand Forks to a halt in 1997 as I graduated from college six weeks early and left the region for good. 

Though the highs of the gig were genuine highs––racing a kid from the crowd and a Subway sandwich mascot during the fifth inning stretch was consistently renewing, especially when I realized that if I tackled the sandwich he couldn’t get up on account of having no arms and I could moonwalk my way to second place while the sparse crowd cheered––much of the job was about blocking feet and holding terrified toddlers while doing my best to honor the boss’s only real rule of no talking. 

The suit didn’t smell good and when it really got blooming it was hard not to feel responsible for it. And yet, sweating and stinking and dodging crotch-bound feet, I was in some ways happier in the public portions of the Red River Valley than I ever had been because, with the suit on, I passed as a country music fan and, by extension, a member of the community. 

I thought I hated country music and maybe I did, but mostly I hated how obviously I didn’t make sense in a place where a role model of aspirational masculinity for many of my classmates was a local teen legend who, after his arms had been ripped from his body by a wheat thresher, managed to make it inside and use a pencil in his mouth to dial help from a rotary phone in time to reattach the arms. Just as surely as I knew that I would simply lie down to die in the event of my arms having left my body, I knew that country music wasn’t supposed to be mine. I was used to things not being mine. I was too nerdy for my hairstylist––whose daughter was in my Crookston, Minnesota high school class––to believe me that I wanted a spike when all the boys were wearing spikes so she gave me a (more stylish) “modified spike” that made me look like a thirteen year-old composer of experimental soundtracks. 

The point of all this is that I grew up understanding music––all music, but especially country––as a shibboleth, a gendered and genre-ed litmus test for belonging, one I failed on sight. Except in the suit. Of course pop country wasn’t the only genre that existed in the Red River Valley, even if it was the only one that seemed to matter to the people most responsible for my desire to live somewhere else. There were also two pop stations that defined pop broadly enough to play hair metal, three oldies stations, and one obligatory classic rock station named something like The Hog. At least initially, hair metal had been much more welcoming for someone with my adolescent profile. Striper/White Lion, Ratt/Great White/Warrant, and Cinderella/Winger/Bullet Boys even came to our weird part of the country. I had something like a genuine epiphany at each show, but at some point in late junior high, I realized that hair metal held mostly pop country values in glam makeup and I was back to feeling without a country until grunge and alternative rock hit and I had a finally had a team willing to draft me.

If the genre prescriptivism I was internalizing wasn’t great for identity formation, it was also suboptimal for learning how to listen to music. I mostly thought music was about identifying a genre, liking everything in it, and picking an arbitrary favorite. I understood the act of listening to music mostly as about figuring out which table to sit at in the cafeteria. 

At some point during all of this, I got Rubáiyát, a double-disk album marking Elektra’s 40th anniversary by asking current Elektra artists to cover one important-to-them song from the label’s back catalog. I’m sure I got it because it had a few “alternative” bands on it (The Cure, They Might Be Giants, Pixies, the Sugarcubes) and the cover was EXOTIC, including fancy marks on letters (and cultural appropriation I was not clocking at all). Almost immediately, even if I often skipped some songs I just wasn’t ready for, the collection of thirty-nine covers with no defining theme, sonic through-line, or anything approximating a genre, became a party trick. Later it became a source for mixed tapes and a college radio show of my own. It served as a roadmap to the past and an ongoing refutation of genre as a primary organizing principle for thinking about what I liked.
All of this started with something that became obvious from the first few songs I tried: musicians listen to music. One probably shouldn’t need to hear Faster Pussycat covering Carly Simon to realize that musicians were just kids listening to music once, but I did. Liking things felt like a wristband and I genuinely believed everyone was just trying to get the access pass that maximized their popularity. As such, it made utterly no sense that a band with the kind of credibility that Faster Pussycat had in 1990 in my part of the world would cover something as off-topic as “You’re So Vain” unless they just genuinely liked Carly Simon and a song that I wasn’t supposed to like, that I hadn’t even considered liking. Kids get weird ideas about what isn’t for them.  

Of course the song is great and the cover hits. 

The album wouldn’t have worked the magic it did if most of the thirty-nine covers didn’t hit. They do. They hold up, almost all of them, and at least half function in extra-textual ways by radically changing an element of or context for the song, many more so than the Faster Pussycats cover. Nonetheless, it was one of the first songs I listened to that revealed how I had never really bothered to just listen to something and ask myself what I thought about it. Even when I loved songs, I hadn’t really considered them as texts or as having been authored. Listening to “You’re So Vain” as earnest glam, I had to think about the way the song’s accusations played differently as gender dynamics shifted.

Before this album, songs were a thing to sing, not a thing to write or make. To this day,  Rubáiyát remains an artifact I can’t listen to without hearing echoes of the ways the assembled musicians heard the originals they had chosen.

The Cure’s “Hello I Love You” examines the discombobulation of unexpected desire; I had only heard bravado in the Doors’ catalog until the cover asked me to consider what it was masking. 

Living in a farming community that at the time relied heavily on poorly treated migrant workers, the Gypsy Kings cover of “Hotel California” in Spanish was a lesson about the transgressive power of perspective and representation and a suggestion that I had a lot of work to do interrogating the cultural imaginary I had been shaped by, one seemingly surprised by the reminder that California featured speakers of Spanish. 

The Kronos Quartet introduced me to Television, the “Marquee Moon” riff that still hasn’t left my head, and the basic notion that classical musicians have probably heard of punk. Shinehead’s cover of a political song from the depression––“One Meatball”––provided a data point that would be crucial in reclaiming reggae as a political music and not the escape from it that it seemed to be when I only heard it playing from fraternity houses. Tracy Chapman drains all of the moralism from “House of the Rising Sun” and asserts that the original was maybe missing the point about the economic realities regarding the people for whom the House is simply a place of employment. They Might Be Giants turn an anti-war song into the stuff of newsreels from an alternative world where patriotism sounds like cartoons in a way that both undermines and reinforces the song’s point. The album provided tentacles into protest music, union songs, folk, reggae, rap, R&B, punk, and a roster of artists I had never been compelled to really see or hear. It both opened genres to me and allowed me to finally care less about genre as an organizing principle.  

To be sure, the public square has changed since I was Kyck Coyote. Likewise, not every public square holds the power I attributed to my conservative community when I was in high school. For the most part, my early attempts to feel belonging all led to one version of the coyote suit or another, something obnoxious and so out of place that it had to be intentional. To the extent, however, that I’ve been able to let go of the sense that anyone cares about how I’m walking or dancing––or what I’m dancing to––a big part of that has been looking for the people who love things enough to want to share those things with me. It’s hard to worry about coolness or myself at all if I’m listening to something while thinking about a person I care about and trying to figure out  how and why they love what I’m hearing.

It’s not a perfect science. People, even the best people, sometimes love harmful things or love good things in a harmful way. Nonetheless, for something like thirty years, Rubáiyát has offered thirty-nine re-listenable treatises about the many different ways one is served by asking someone to pick a song they love and sing it.

Matt Vadnais teaches English and Theatre History courses in Milwaukee. He is a scholar of Shakespeare's staging conditions and early modern authorship of collaborative art who has also written about the authorship of contemporary collaborative art including music and comics for CoverMeSongs.com, yourchickenenemy.com, SOLRAD.com and a number of other online publications. @glumchaos on Twitter.