We wrap our arms around one another and sing sad songs at the top of our lungs

A few thoughts on one of my favorite parts of being alive

There is a lovely documentary out now about a high school mariachi team in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. It’s called Going Varsity in Mariachi. A bit on the nose, as far as titles go, but forgivable. The film is soft-hearted and well-paced and the kids that it profiles are thoroughly, wonderfully all right. I cried at least once and smiled a bunch and I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s on Netflix, and perhaps other places. 

My favorite scene in Going Varsity comes near the end, after the team’s final meet. Their season is over. If you’ve ever been a senior on a high school team of any sort, you can imagine what the kids might be feeling. They aren’t technically saying goodbye, but because the activity through which they bonded is over, a chapter has ended. They love each other and are proud of what they’ve accomplished, but are completely overwhelmed knowing that their worlds are about to change. The scene plays out exactly how you’d hope. There are mascara-stained tears and long hugs. And then, one of the girls pulls out her phone and blasts Selena’s 1992 Tejano anthem, “Como La Flor.”

That’s the part that made me cry, by the way. Watching best friends embrace each other and sway and sing along to a song that has likely already soundtracked a lifetime of weddings, quinceañeras and backyard barbecues.

In the pantheon of “things that human beings do,” this very well might be my favorite. I love when a group spontaneously sings together, when we tumble into each other’s arms and half-remember the lyrics and shout and laugh and bawl at the same damn time. I love it at bars. I love it at cookouts. I love it at churches. According to my sixth grader, ever since Thanksgiving, kids at school have been globbing onto each other during passing periods, belting out Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Perfect. absolutely perfect.

Would you like to know about one of my favorite late night rabbit holes? I watch stadium singalongs, videos of college football fans belting out their campus-specific anthem in unison. This is odd behavior on my part. I didn’t go to a big football school. I’ve never stood shoulder to shoulder with a beer-soaked stranger and shouted loudly enough to cut through the cold of a November Saturday night. But consider this. I did attend a liberal arts college that offered an actual degree in Peace And Global Studies and one year in the early 2000s, the Indigo Girls came for homecoming and I remember what that gym sounded like when they played “Closer To Fine.” So in a deeper sense, I completely get it.

There are a few variations on the “for the next three minutes, everybody in this stadium loves each other unconditionally” theme. The least compelling are the generic hype-up anthems, the ones that are mostly just generalized movement and noise. Think “Jump Around” at the University of Wisconsin. The point isn’t about expressing earnest feelings, it’s the chance to take the song’s title literally. Jumping is fun, you see, especially when you do it around.

For the record, I still love this variety of group singing. I said least compelling, not uncompelling. So too do I love the second best category, “songs that namecheck the geographic location of the campus in question.” Think “Rocky Top” at Tennessee or “Country Roads” at West Virginia or the best possible example, “Callin’ Baton Rouge” at LSU. What's the proudest you’ve ever been? Surely not as proud as the crowd at Tiger Stadium every time they remember that Garth Brooks once hooked up with a young lady from their town and then wanted to call her again.

For my money, though, the best anthems are the ones that shouldn’t be anthems at all. I’m talking about “Sweet Caroline” of course (for the purpose of narrative consistency, imagine the Penn State version, but yes, Boston I am aware that you too have sports traditions and I’m very happy for you). I’m talking about Washington State’s use of Andy Grammar’s “Back Home.” But mostly, because I am a White millennial with two ears and a heart, I’m talking about 100,000 Michigan fans singing their Wolverine hearts out to “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers.

I am not in that video, but in a different sense, if you have ever been in a bar or a wedding or jeez even a CVS with me when that song has come on, you know that I am very much in that video. How am I doing, as I come out of my cage? I’m so glad that you asked. I AM DOING JUST FINE!

These are not intuitive anthems. “We Will Rock You,” is an intuitive anthem, or at least we’d assume as much. That’s a song about how there’s a clear, powerful “we” and less powerful “you” and how you’re about to get rocked. Songs like “Mr. Brightside” make so much less sense than that. They are confoundingly rousing. They initially present as uplifting and life-affirming until you pay attention to the lyrics. Mr. Brightside, notably, is not about how the Michigan Wolverines will prevail over Ohio State, nor about how your best friends will love you forever. It’s about a guy whose girlfriend slept with another guy. Everybody knows that. And yet what the stadium full of 100,000 shout-singers presupposes, though, is… maybe it isn’t?

It was only a kiss. IT WAS ONLY A KISS!

We love these confoundingly rousing songs, us human beings. We especially love shout-singing them to our friends, ideally while hugging. College football hype teams know what they’re doing when they play these songs over the PA system. Do you know what the crew at Washington State was going for when they first put together their Andy Grammar-scored montage video?

In their own words, “we wanted this video to either make you run through a wall or start crying.”

I mean, why not both? But also, that’s the confoundingly rousing song experience in a nutshell.

I may be over-essentializing when I say “us human beings” because I don’t have international evidence here, but in the U.S. at least, the phenomenon of “depressing songs that become life-affirming when we sing them together” is cross cultural. To be clear, there are no shortage of primarily-but-not-solely White people anthems in this space (“Don’t Stop Believin’” walked, of course, so that “Mr. Brightside” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” could run), but it isn’t just a White American thing. Remember those mariachi teens from South Texas? Here are the first lines of Como La Flor:

Yo sé que tienes un nuevo amor

Sin embargo, te deseo lo mejor

Si en mí encontraste felicidad

Tal vez, alguien más te la dará

If you missed the absolute heartbreak there, here’s the English translation:

I know you have a new lover

Even so, I wish you the best

If you didn't find happiness in me

Maybe you will with someone else

Oh man, that cuts deep. Speaking of which, have you paid attention to the lyrics of the all-time Black family cookout classic, “Before I Let Go” by Frankie Beverly and Maze?

One minute, Beverly croons what sounds like a beautiful love song…

You know I think the sun rises and shines on you

You know there's nothin', nothin', nothin' I would not do

Because of the song’s groovy tempo and Beverly’s golden pipes, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that all the previous verses were in past tense (“you made me happy” not “you make me happy”). But yes, the track that brings a nation of uncles onto the nearest grill-adjacent dance floor is, in fact, a break-up song. A few lines later, Beverly delivers the gut punch.

I can't understand it, no

Where did we go wrong

Again, that cuts deep. Frankie Beverly is going through it. So too are Selena Quintanilla and Brandon Flowers of the Killers. And so too, it seems, are all of us, if these are the songs we choose to showcase how happy we are to be sharing a special moment with our favorite auntie or our closest teenage friend or the drunk dude next to us in Section 206. 

I am far from the first person to be fascinated by the confoundingly uplifting anthem. In 2021, J. Wortham and Wesley Morris devoted an entire episode of their “Still Processing” podcast to the question of why a song as sad as “Before I Let Go” has become such a joyful, life-affirming touchstone in Black communities. This year, Rob Harvilla asked a similar question about the relationship between Mr. Brighside and millennials generally (and White millennials specifically) on his “60 Songs…” podcast. I am not wading in uncharted waters here.

It’s not really a mystery, though. I’m no expert on music theory, but there are obvious musicological tricks that make a sad song present as an anthem. These songs build. They’re propulsive. The drums hit, dude. But in my lay estimation at least, that’s only part of it.

It seems notable that the vast majority of our favorite communal sing-shouty songs are written from the perspective of losers. Cuckolded lovers. Heartbroken also-rans. Strangers waitin’ up and down the boulevard. People who need to be actively reminded to not stop believin’ because, you know, they’ve really considered it. 

What does that say about us? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Across lines of privilege, power and identity, most of us spend a higher percentage of our lives feeling like losers than winners. And while there’s surely some false consciousness and myopia to that, at least for some of us, the feeling is real. We like to think of ourselves as misunderstood, non-self-actualized underdogs. Or, at the very least, when it comes time to publicly admit— to a stranger or a lifelong friend— that there are some real big time feelings inside us, it’s the low moments that are most likely to come to the surface.

We rarely connect with each other from a place of triumphalism. We don’t need to. It isn’t actually all that fun to sing “We Will Rock You” with buddies. We can metabolize those feelings without external assistance. But the part of us that feels like a loser, the part of us that has, quite frequently, been a loser? That’s the part that seeks out a community to wraps its arms around us, not to say that it’ll be alright, but just to say, in essence, we get it. We may be losers, but we are losers together. That’s why it feels so good to sing a sad song together, even if the catharsis only lasts for three minutes. Whatever we’re feeling can’t be that wrong if that many other people feel it too.

This is a political essay, by the way, but I’ll try not to shove the message down your throat. At a very instinctual level, this is just what I was led to write after an election season where everybody has felt aggrieved— some on their way to the polling place, others after the votes were tallied. I may identify with some of those grievances and strongly reject others, but I live in a world shaped, for better or worse, by all of them.

It’s what I was led to write after a week when an assassin became a folk hero for killing a healthcare executive. I stayed out of that conversation, by the way, because as a pacifist Quaker who decries violence both structural and discrete, my opinions on the matter are both obvious, hyper-specific and annoyingly self-righteous. Nobody needs to hear me weigh in on the tactical and moral value of non-violent vs. violent action right now. People are hurting, and for many right now the only person who seems to understand them is a man who ordered a ghost gun online and hatched an elaborate plan. I get it, is the thing. I really do, even if I can’t bring myself to feel anything but overwhelming sadness about every aspect of the situation.

Even more than that, though, it’s the essay I was led to write while driving back from delivering the Sunday message at a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in a part of Wisconsin known throughout the world as a tourist destination but which is also a real place where people work and live and build community together, especially in the cold months when the crowds are gone. 

My message went over well, I think, but I bet if you ask the congregants their favorite moment of the service, they’d likely talk about the time, during joys and concerns, when one of their friends stood up and recapped an article she had just read. It was in The Washington Post, I think. It was written for people— like myself and the other the bleeding heart Wisconsinites gathered in that Fellowship room— who weren’t pleased with the recent election results. If I’m remembering correctly, the article was a list of “five things you can do if you’re upset about the election.” She related, with immense pride in her voice, that one of the items on the list was “join a Unitarian Fellowship.”

I was sitting in the front of the room, so I got to see the reaction to that news. Oh man it was so great. Instant smiles. Spontaneous whoops. Claps and cheers. In that moment too, I got it. I was new to this community, but I had all the context. It had been a tough month. They likely felt more like losers than winners. But they were here, together, and somebody told them to keep at it. 

Como la flor

Just like a flower.

They wouldn’t stop believin’

They weren’t about to let go.

They too were comin’ out of their cage 

They were doin’ just fine. 

But only because they were doing it together. 

End notes:

1. Speaking of the American healthcare insurance system and how it’s a viper pit that has left so many of us sicker and poorer and more likely to die untimely deaths, if you’re wondering “what can I do?” I highly recommend the work of Whole Washington (that’s Washington the state, not the district), a group I’ve been lucky enough to work with a bit. If you live out there, plug in to what they’re doing— they’re fighting for a true universal healthcare referendum. For those of you who aren’t in Washington but do live in a referendum state, look to them as a model. The answer is always collective action, my friends.

2. Were you a parent in March of 2020? One of the best podcasts in the land (The Mother Of It All with

   Sarah Wheeler
   and Miranda Rake) would like you to fill out a brief survey! Thanks!).

3. So, you may have noticed that I’ve become more direct in my asks to support The White Pages as a paying subscriber. The back story there is that, after a few years of building (and parsing together income from a few different sources), I’m at one of those inflection points where the dream of this newsletter itself being a sustainable, non-precarious job (which I define, for my circumstance, as “what I’d be able to make if I returned to a K-12 public school classroom”) is close enough to feel graspable but still just a bit distant. Seems like a good reason to both (a). more actively remind you that subscriptions allow me not just to write these newsletters but also do all my training and coaching at the Barnraises and (b). get creative with perks and incentives. That’s to say, in the new year I’ll be launching a public radio style pledge drive with some fun premiums (some old ones like Barnraisers merch and some new ones like copies of The Right Kind of White, “soup and pie and nobody left behind” hats and, for real weirdos, an actual physical mixtape) but existing subscribers (including ones still joining now) will get to choose a premiums first. A pretty good deal, as some might run out. So there you go, that’s this week’s pitch. If you can swing it, jeez that’s great. And if you can’t, I still love and appreciate you.

3. A few more communal singalongs, because we deserve nice things. First up, “Como La Flor” at the 2005 Selena tribute concert

I absolutely love a good “the music drops out and the crowd keeps singing a cappella moment. Here’s Southern University and Jackson State fans doing Frankie Beverly proud with a stadium rendition of “Before I Let Go.”

While we’re at it, here’s an escalator-length “Before I Let You Go” singalong.

Finally, one last Mr. Brightside. You know a song has hit a new level of cathartic anthemdom when it soundtracks an actual Irish wake. If you have not watched this video and are somehow under the impression that the gentleman standing on the bar plans to keep his shirt on, you are in for a treat.