1998: Massive Attack, Mezzanine
By Dare Williams
All These Half-floors Will Lead To Mine
La Verne, California, is a small town in a group of cities known as the Inland Empire. The 210-freeway used to end there, causing people to take route 66 through beige and bland strip mall suburbia. A few movies were filmed there. In 1998, I was a junior in high school living in the third location we—meaning my mom and me—had moved. We moved every time things got bad, a relationship ended, or the constant debt piling up had built up more debt and we had to bounce. Each place leveled down with the disintegration of my mother's mental health. Growing up under systems of debt is expensive financially, spiritually, and emotionally. I was not a good student because I never wanted to be home. I never did my work. The only education I cared about was English, although I hated that we always got to poetry in May, which meant we spent two weeks with it. Choir and drama and whatever Rolling Stone said were my other interests. I was smart in that way adult children have to be, trained to be hyper-vigilant and a planner amongst the chaos. Part of my escapism practice which allowed me to be small was journaling, followed by music. Journaling was how I hid to avoid the widening circles of my mother’s -isms. Thankfully I didn't play the violin or the trumpet. You always heard those kids; therefore, you always knew where they were. I made a whole goal of trying not to be found which was how I could get free.
A pen and a journal are quiet. A Walkman with headphones is soft; and both allow for fantasy. Music was a balm, salvation, and a spaceship. Living below Foothill Boulevard amongst the streets labeled by only a number and a letter meant you were on a grid of scarcity and a class type. I lived in Old Town, which meant if you had a house your front or backyard had junk in it, maybe those faded plastic Playskool toys. Your parents smoked inside. I lived on Evergreen Street, which held rows of fourplexes all down the street. It had its own economy and music punctuated by strife and violence. The local pizza parlor had a no-delivery policy for us. I had no means or access to a car, fueled by restlessness and a change of scenery, I started my ritual of wandering.
In the spring of 1998, Massive Attack released their third album, Mezzanine. The cover features a slick wet black dung beetle against a white background. It was weirder and darker than their other albums, which ushered in downtempo trip-hop electronica. I believe there are daytime and nighttime albums, and this one fits into the mythos of the velvety night. A place for the beautiful and shadow side to co-exist. Messages from the moon. I bought the cassette because that's the medium I had at the time, and it also meant I had to listen to the album from start to finish. It's always better this way; the artist wants you to do that. Many albums became my soundtrack for wandering my neighborhood at night. Better always if I had cigarettes or a joint. The songs were my lantern taken with me into the slick inky evening.
In the blue indigo twilight, I would walk the neighborhood making friends with my interiority. My obsession with twilight hours started to shape and inform my practice of witnessing and gazing. Twilight is a liminal space between public and private. It's the changing over of personas, the above-ground world starts its journey into the underground, the secretive. Based on my citizenship from suburbia, I am always of the opinion that suburbia is much more insidious than the urban sprawl of the city.
The first track, titled “Angel,” starts ominous and spacious. The vocals come from behind as if someone is guiding me fueling this wandering. You are my angel, come from way above. To bring me to love the message of the song is a welcome beacon. It’s sexy and seductive and an auspicious opener. Secrets are everywhere, and suburbia's stillness and darkness are much more covert. My drug use and drinking career were starting to gain inertia. I was an appetite on legs, a "big scream looking for a mouth;" I thought too much and felt too much and didn't know how to be with myself and my emotions just the motion of leaving and never looking back and putting that all down in notebooks. I was the kid you see with his head down with a backpack, Walkman clipped onto wide-leg jeans, eyes always looking towards a horizon but never at you.
I would walk to a friend's house to visit, looking for a surrogate family, even if only for an hour.
The complete fantasy of an authentic dinner at a dining room table, watching how they communed, was a wild and thrilling experience that I longed for. Ben's mom would have the two of us help her with her scratchers, and we'd sit under the dining room's low lights, scratching and hoping and praying. Ben's house had auto parts and lawn equipment in the front yard.
The lead single heard everywhere, “Teardrop,” features vocals by Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Frasier. Elizabeth is the angel of the record, and I have carried her ethereal message with me since encountering the first lines of the song: Love love is a verb; love is a doing word. In my house, love was not a verb but a currency and a conduit for trade. One gave or rescinded love based on willingness to shrink or forego agency. To serve another and then withhold it for ransom.
The houses on my journey through the lettered and numbered streets were lower-middle-class-anywhere-USA-style. My longing for another kind of household or upbringing led me to yearn for what I saw. Families coming together. The lyrics to the song “Man Next Door” describe the lonely just like me coming home exhausted eating a solitary meal in the low lamp light.
Here's a man that lived next door In my neighborhood / He gets me down / He gets in so late at night / Always a fuss and fight
My mother medicated herself by taking a lot of depression naps coupled with an unwillingness to seek help. Sadness was an unseen but deeply felt family member in our apartment. As an only child, I was spousified when there was a crisis. I was my mother’s emotional support animal. When the heat was turned down a bit, I was no longer needed which also meant my wants and needs didn’t exist. This emotional incest taught me that my value came in the form of how much I could help or solve for X. X being a situation my mother’s distorted thinking and choices had caused. Until I learned to address and heal from this type of upbringing, I would carry this with me into future intimate relationships with distorted renderings of love. But I return to the lyrics of “Teardrop:” love is an action.
The most black road
Son kid childLove you for GodLove you for the mother
Now my way of being in the world as a poet, I lose time living in memory, mining in the landscape of this imagined space. I allow myself to linger hypnotized by nostalgia, which is a fantasy about the past because my present was stolen from me. The angels and devils of this album appear like a specter when the veil between that space is thin. This album shows up as a salve ready to smooth over my wounds. This attendance spent in the mezzanine, half-floors and dark slick black alleyways act as my hallway, my portal. It’s how I walk through the door seeking connection first with my subconscious and then to the world and then to you. See through me little glazed lane. A world in myself. Ready to sing. My sixth sense peacefully placed on my breath. (Flickering I roam). And listening…I’m free to go.
Dare Williams (he/they) is a Queer HIV-positive poet and artist rooted in Southern California. A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, he has received support/fellowships for his work from John Ashbury Home School, The Frost Place, Brooklyn Poets, Breadloaf, and Tin House. He was the co-curator of the West Hollywood Literature Festival 2021. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Poets. His work has been featured in Foglifter, HAD, The Shore, Exposition Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere.