MY NIGHT WITH CARLY

One time, during a roughly sixteen-hour  bender, I listened to “WHY?” by Carly Simon probably a hundred times in a row.

Not the radio version, either.

The extended version.

Eight-plus minutes of the same song, over and over and over, while I was higher than giraffe nuts and apparently conducting a private graduate seminar on Carly Simon and the emotional architecture of post-disco.

There are two things you need to understand about this perhaps lost song from 1982.

FIRST OFF, it is fucking brilliant.

On the surface, it’s almost light. Bouncy. Warm. That little reggae-inflected groove just rolls underneath her. The backing vocals are beautiful. The whole thing feels strangely effortless.

And then Carly sounds absolutely wounded.

That contrast is what kills me.

She isn’t screaming. She isn’t giving you some massive torch-song performance where the orchestra swells and everyone understands that we are now EXPERIENCING PAIN.

She sounds almost confused by it.

“Why does something that is supposed to feel this good hurt this fucking much?”

That idea hit me unbelievably hard at the time.

And yes, drugs probably had something to do with the intensity of my literary analysis.

Powder has a wonderful ability to convince you that whatever thought you are having at 4:37 in the morning is not only profound, but may require immediate documentation.

Still, there was something about that song that genuinely connected with me.

Because addiction works almost exactly the same way.

The thing you believe is giving you pleasure is also hurting you.

You know it is hurting you.

You can physically feel it hurting you.

And somehow your response is:

Again.

Play it again.

Do another one.

Why does your love hurt so much?

Well, Carly, funny you should ask.

At that particular moment I had been awake for what felt like several fiscal quarters, my jaw was trying to escape my face, my heart was performing experimental jazz

and I really don’t like jazz unless it’s smooth. The kind you hear on the weather channel’s local forecast circa 1997.

 and I was listening to you ask the same emotional question of WHY for the sixty-third consecutive time.

So apparently I had some thoughts.

The SECOND thing about “WHY?” is that it came from Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, which explains why the record feels so unbelievably good even while Carly sounds emotionally drained. They wrote it, and Chic produced it for the 1982 Soup for One soundtrack. The extended mix eventually became a cult club record in its own right.

Nile Rodgers is one of those people whose fingerprints are all over modern popular/dance music whether people realize it or not.

Chic (Obviousy)

David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.

Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

Diana Ross.

Duran Duran.

And of course Daft Punk in 2013 which our Gen Z readers will resonate with.

He understood something almost supernatural about rhythm: how to make music sophisticated without making it feel smarmy and intellectual, and how to make something danceable without stripping the humanity out of it.

That is what makes “WHY?” so strange.

The groove is telling your body everything is fine.

Carly Simon is telling your brain something is terribly wrong.

And cocaine absolutely fucking loves contradictions like that.

When you are that high, repetition stops feeling repetitive. It becomes microscopic.

You stop hearing a song and start hearing individual molecules inside the song.

The guitar.

A background vocal you somehow missed the previous forty-seven times.

The delay placed on the Linn drum toms (A drum machine made infamous by Prince Rogers)

The way Carly serenades this listener with the La-Di-Da-Di-Da pre chorus…So sexy. Like the emotional brain took control as the pain was unable to be articulated so it became a melodramatic hum.

Some tiny production decision suddenly feels like Nile Rodgers has reached forty years into the future specifically to communicate with you.

There is also something about stimulants and emotional fixation that can turn a song into a closed neurological loop.

You aren’t simply enjoying it anymore.

You are investigating it.

Solving it.

Trying to get back to whatever feeling you experienced the first time it hit correctly.

Which is also, inconveniently, a pretty accurate description of cocaine.

You keep repeating the experience because you are trying to reproduce the original moment.

Another line.

Another play.

Another line.

Another play.

Eventually you are no longer chasing pleasure.

You are chasing the memory of pleasure.

And there I was, somewhere around hour sixteen, listening to Carly Simon sing about a love that hurts while voluntarily participating in the most abusive relationship of my own life.

The cocaine.

Not Carly.

Carly was wonderful.