Bring the burdens with you, if you can carry them. The magic in this type of song is that it doesn’t ask you to lay your burdens down. I’m sad because of what I can’t control, which pulls me, with arms open, toward the things I can control. I’m sad because I’m jealous, and that jealousy is unlocking a passion or a pleasure. But other times, the sadness is one smattering on a canvas that is asking for something else. There are times when I am simply sad, and there is no emotional accompaniment. But I recall a lesson I learned once from a poetry mentor: Sadness, like many of the big, surface emotions, can be a primary color - bold and obvious, still waiting to be mixed with others to create the specific hue you want to use. The pleading of Otis Redding, or the way Dusty Springfield could sound in awe of her own sadness, as if it were arriving to her for the first time, a shining jewel in the center of an open box. The sad banger has a lineage that begins sometime around the moment a person realized that a sad song didn’t have to feel sad, though it is also an art to summon that kind of feeling. All these artists dabble in bright, electronic, up-tempo odes to the specifics of heartbreak, performed with a sort of suddenness - an urgency, as if a person has just walked from the ruins of emotional wreckage and needs to deliver a report on the damage while the memory of it is still fresh. Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” may be the ultimate sad banger, and it is undoubtedly a classic within the canon, taking its emotional and sonic cues from a long line of sad disco anthems and new-wave hits (Robyn herself has cited musicians like Donna Summer and Sylvester, and songs like “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” by Ultravox). You can measure the success of a song by the limitlessness of emotions and impulses it can seduce out of a person. This captures exactly what I love most about the sad banger: that it gets beyond binary emotions and unlocks a multilayered fullness that might, depending on the song, involve dancing, and crying, and longing, and stumbling out of some dive bar midtune to text or call the person you probably shouldn’t. Getting pulled in by the song’s story line might deny you the pleasure of its call to the dance floor, and being too caught up in the demand to dance might render the narrative pointless. The trick of the sonic and lyrical imbalances here is that if you get too swept up in one, you might be able to shove the other to the back of your mind, if even for a moment. The instrumental intro is danceable and upbeat, but then the first line pulls a curtain back on another reality: Our narrator has a wife and kids he has left, hitting the road and not looking back. Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” a song I found myself returning to early and often in my pandemic playlists. Sad bangers aren’t a new phenomenon - but the old ones have a new potency. We are all suffering from a prolonged hunger, and the realities of our circumstances won’t let us be satiated. Some of these songs were decades old, some of them brand-new, but all of them speak to the frequent misalignment between what the body wants and the mind understands. My pandemic soundtracks came to revolve around what I call “sad bangers.” More plainly put, songs whose lyrics of grief, anxiety, yearning or some other mild or great darkness are washed over with an upbeat tune, or a chorus so infectious that it can weave its way into your brain without your brain taking stock of whatever emotional damage it carries with it. The minute-by-minute emotional contradictions of this era have been fascinating to watch unfold, and I’ve been searching for music capacious enough to hold them all. I enjoyed the idea of these events - but the thought of attending them filled me with a cocktail of longing and dread, despite the immense pleasure I felt in seeing the faces of people I loved. This was a result of prolonged pandemic living and all the little rituals we’ve devised to get through it: the Zoom birthday parties, wedding receptions, dance get-togethers, trivia nights. I have spent a lot of time these last two years managing small collisions of feeling: sadness laid over pleasure, heartbreak laid over some unnamed desire.
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