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Thursday, December 06, 2007
CAN U KEEP A SECRET
De La Soul
3 Feet High and Rising
Tommy Boy : 1989
[Buy It]
I HAVE A SECRET
Half Japanese
Sing No Evil
Drag City : 1984
[Buy It]
SECRET LOVE
Billy Stewart
1967
Available on : 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection
MCA : 2000
[Buy It]
YOUR SECRET'S SAFE WITH ME
Robert Cray Band
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
Mercury : 1988
[Buy It]
THE SECRET
Slapp Happy
1973
Acnalbasac Noom
Recommended : 1980
[Buy It]
MY DIRTY SECRET IS A DIVINE DILEMMA
Banner Barbados
2005
Demo
Years ago, I was dating a woman in another city west of here. One day, we woke up, got dressed, and went to get coffee. She had her head down in the coffee steam, more so than usual. Then she raised her gaze to meet mine. "I have to tell you something," she said.
I would like to freeze that moment. It was the dead of winter in the Midwest. Freezing the moment's easy. She was about to tell me a secret. I had a number of thoughts, all at once. First, I was excited. It seemed like a step forward for us. Then I was curious whether I could guess her secret in the few seconds before she revealed it to me. I think that I preferred that I be able to do so, both to soften the blow and to prevent our relationship from being exposed as the kind of relationship that needed a boost in intimacy. Then I foresuffered a feeling of anticlimax. She would tell me whatever it was and I would receive it and process it and then what? We'd finish our coffee? We'd go back home? I'd worry about what other secrets lay beneath the surface? A black curtain would fall down over the world?
She told me the secret. I won't say what it was. It belonged to the class of things that young people early in a relationship believe they should tell their partners. Maybe it was that she had slept with someone else. Maybe it was that her father was an alcoholic. Maybe it was that she had a strange habit of taking the hair that collected in the shower drain and putting it into her mouth. Maybe it was that she once masturbated on a train. Maybe it was that she stole money from a roommate at camp and blamed the theft on another girl. Like I said, I won't say. What I will say is my reaction to her secret exactly echoed the thoughts I had just before she revealed it. I was excited, then I was comforted that my internal guess had been roughly accurate, then I was disappointed. She had told me something about herself that wasn't exactly interesting, except in the sense that I hadn't known it a minute earlier. Now what?
This is not the only kind of secret, obviously. There are secrets you can tell about others without their consent. In the late eighties and early nineties, there was a boomlet of stories outing gay celebrities. I was in college then, and at least a few friends (whether straight, gay, or getting there) had strong opinions about the propriety of exposing someone else's innermost secrets. De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which was released the same year that Michelangelo Signorile founded Out magazine, stages a trivial version of that same process:Paul has dandruff
Posdnuos has a lot of dandruff
Mase has big fat dandruff
Trugoy has dandruff
Everybody in the world, you have dandruff Homosexuality has a sizeable soial charge. Dandruff, less so. The most common secret in pop music, is the one that directly precedes a relationship: secret love. There's Ron Sexsmith's "Secret Heart," The Miracles' "I Love You Secretly," and Half Japanese's "I Have a Secret," in which Jad Fair's yowls out his heart's deepest desires:Someone sent you roses, Karen.
Yeah that's twice this week, isn't it, Karen?
You're a lucky girl, Karen.
To have someone who cares about you so much, Karen.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret too.
And my secret is you. We can all agree that this is a noble and even majestic secret: just listen to Billy Stewart's "Secret Love," a remake of an earlier Doris Day hit, and just as exuberant and idiosyncratic as Stewart's cover of George and Ira Gershwin's "Summertime." The kind of secret under consideration here, the kind that can emerge with a frisson early in a relationship, is different. Think of something minor, shameful, purely personal. At the beginning of the piece, when I listed the possible secrets revealed by my girlfriend in another city, I included chewing on hair from the shower drain grate. Those are the kids of secrets I mean -- bad habits and fetishes, the revelation of which might temporarily make a new lover feel closer. Think of them as dandruff on the inside. What reason is there to share those things? None, I think. They should not be served up. No one wants to eat that dish.
Sometimes secrets are presented, and sometimes they are extracted. Here's a secret: the story I told at the beginning of the piece, about my girlfriend in a city west of here, isn't exactly true. Everything in the story--the way she lowered her face into the coffee steam, the way she raised her head to meet my gaze--happened, but something else happened before that. I pushed a half of a muffin across my plate, sighed heavily, and said, "Tell me a secret." I was pushed into this decision by sex and high spirits, and by the fear that followed immediately upon those high spirits. I thought I might lose this woman if I didn't seal the seams of our very new relationship. So I asked her for a secret.
Six months later, we weren't dating any more. The secret she told me didn't seal our fate, but the impulse that led me to ask for it may have. Asking for a secret in such a flagrant manner appears to be a gesture of intimacy, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. A secret that is requested or presented plainly is a form of currency. It appears to carry the value stamped on its face when in fact it's worth far less. It's a bond that hasn't matured.
When you have a secret, what do you do with it? You either tell it all over town or you keep it safe, like a seed inside of your heart. But dark seeds flower into dark blossoms. In Robert Cray's "Your Secret's Safe With Me," a man who has been coveting a woman across the way watches in horror as she betrays her boyfriend with a new lover. Though the production is slicker than on Cray's breakthrough, Strong Persuader, the song plants both feet firmly in the Memphis soul that has increasingly become his calling card:Baby you should keep your bedroom shades pulled down
I can see right in; I've seen you in that black nightgown
I've seen you with your lover when your man is out of town
But don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me
I'm very very jealous, weeks of wanting you
I never made a move. I never dreamed you'd be untrue.
Imagine my surprise when I see you loving someone new
Don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me. The cases where shared secrets lead to happiness are surprisingly rare and often precious. Slapp Happy's "The Secret," a Peter Blegvad/Anthony Moore composition sung prettily by Dagmar Krause, is a strange little gem of a pop song about the intimacy that's forged by holding onto something for someone else:Strike a light
He's making my days into night
Mercury man does everything he can
And my only plan is to keep his secret secret Banner Barbados, a band from Seattle that made a splash online a few years ago with a Velvet Undergroundish song called "Since You Caught My Eye," had a second standout single that speeds through a Stonesy riff into jangly, organ-driven mayhem that conflates theological and romantic revelation. It's an appropriate place to conclude, because the song gives away the real secret: that God is in the details. About a year ago, a friend of mine was dating two men. One of them screwed his courage up and, over drinks, asked her for a secret. I think she complied with the hair-chewing thing. The other one never raised the issue of secrets. He put in his time, made lots of small talk, noticed things about her, and eventually knew her well enough that the secrets were superfluous. The goal is not to deliver or receive secrets on demand, but to get them as part of a steady flow, to know another person rather than another person's secrets.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
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