SHUGGIE OTIS: “Aht Uh Mi Hed”

(Inspiration Information LP, Epic, 1974)

“Nothing special—‘You could dance to it,’ as we said,” my mother told me when I asked her to recall Little Anthony and the Imperials’ version¹ of the Teddy Randazzo-and Bobby Weinstein-penned “Goin’ Out of My Head.”²

“For a slow dance?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “A slow dance.”³

“I want you / I need you / I want you to want me / I can’t think of anything but you.”⁴,⁵ Little Anthony, in a girlish, prepubescent voice⁶, intones these lyrics as part of a teenage passion play; from Ella Fitzgerald’s lips, these words hum with the worldly electricities of physical desire.⁷ Never mind her characteristic improvisations and asides, her utterly distinctive phrasing, the force of her breath; consider instead how she caresses the words “into your heart” before, a moment later, summoning that breath’s full measure for the refrain “outta my head”—localizing these parts of the body as she turns the song from the melodramatic tale of a weepy and passive crush to one of adult longing and obsession.⁸ The production of her version—a fairly sloppy live recording—in no way rivals the sophisticated production of the versions by Little Anthony and the Imperials or the Lettermen, and yet she imparts the lyrics with a depth of expression no amount of studio wizardry can recreate.

The Oxford English Dictionary posits the head “as the seat of mind, thought, intellect, memory, or imagination; cf. BRAIN” and “often contrasted with heart, as the seat of the emotions: see HEART.“TO be off one’s head—“out of one’s mind or wits, crazy. colloq.”—did not, apparently, enter the lexicon until the nineteenth century; to be out of one’s head is the same phrase contemporaneously Americanized. But if mind is in some ways synonymous with head—the former perhaps the inhabitant of the latter’s vessel,⁹ though the two are inseparable—such definitions bring us no closer to understanding this odd turn of phrase.¹⁰ In what ways does grief over love—or the desire for love—affect the seat of intellect? In what ways does the head here trespass on the realm of the heart? ¹¹ How does grief, at least metaphorically, resemble decapitation, or perhaps more accurately trepanation, some severance of one’s faculties from the skull that contains them? ¹²

“I think I’m going out of my head” ¹³ is, at any rate, a difficult line for me to believe. If one were going out of one’s head, wouldn’t one know it was happening? And if one is out of one’s head, or about to approach such a state, how can one retain the self-consciousness to narrate such an advent? ¹⁴ Perhaps Randazzo and Weinstein hoped to convey such confusion as an elemental part of the young lover’s grief, just as a teenager smoking pot for the first time believes she is stoned long before she is—the force of the desire to experience the altered state increases, at least in her head, the amount of alteration. “Goin’ Out of My Head” seems not so much to recount the actual grief of a lost love, the grief over a relationship ended, as to approach the idea of such grief in a sanitized and self-consciously pubescent way—i.e., in a way appropriate for the sort of slow dance my mother recalled, held Friday night in a sweaty gymnasium, wherein shadows and makeup have transformed the pull-up-induced facial contortions of one’s daytime classmates into the sleek, romantic visages of one’s new, mysteriously familiar evening companions. ¹⁵, ¹⁶

“Goin’ Out of My Head” should, ideally, be performed not by a group but by a lonesome teen, constructed not in the impersonal space of a rented studio but on the edge of the same bed in which the lonesome teen cries him-or herself to sleep over the crush the song addresses. Accompaniment should consist of soft hums and finger-tapped thighs or windowpanes at least, out-of-tune guitar at most. The volume of this solo performance should not exceed a dB level capable of escaping the bedroom walls. All of this begins to approach Shuggie’s “Aht Uh Mi Hed.” ¹⁷,¹⁸

“Who’s Shaggy ¹⁹ Otis?” my stepfather asked me on a recent visit. I’d laid the LP atop one speaker after listening to it sometime prior to his arrival, and now he squinted through his spectacles—if not closely enough—at the photo on its odd, nearly monotone cover: Shuggie sits, skinny legs elegantly crossed, in an Adirondack chair amid a strangely shaggy garden; the cover’s only color is a sort of rainbowing to the album title.²⁰ My copy of the LP, a promo originally loaned to a radio station—has a scuffed and ringworn sleeve, a clipped corner, taped edges, and a radio station sticker with tracklist on the front. Despite such evidence of wear, I doubt this copy was much played at whatever radio station it was sent to; none of the “recommended cuts” have been checked off, and the vinyl is pristine. ²¹,²²

Luaka Bop, the record label that reissued Inspiration Information more than ten years back, offers on its website a sampling of the reviews that greeted the reissue: “An expansive creativity that appeared unlimited,” says Rolling Stone; “more than justifies the cult following garnered in the years since its (largely ignored) 1974 release…[u]nbelievably wonderful,” promises Billboard; “nothing short of a ‘70s psychedelic pop Rosetta Stone,” claims Barnes & Noble’s online review.²³ I bought my copy of Inspiration Information at a used record store before the reissue, at a time before I really knew who Shuggie Otis was—and since this was the sort of record store where almost all the used LPs cost $3.99, regardless of rarity, the shopkeeper—a long-haired Merseybeat fan rather than a condescending young hipster—seemed not to know who Shuggie Otis was either. Shuggie, of course, was always busy defining and reinventing himself anyway, or being defined by others, ²⁴ beginning as a teenaged blues guitar prodigy who wore fake moustaches to play nightclubs, moved from blues to the “psychedelic soul” of “Aht Uh Mi Hed” and other tracks, turned down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones after MickTaylor quit the band, and ended, sometime after Inspiration Information’ s commercial failure—when Shuggie was twenty-one years old—as a musical recluse: someone, we might say, lost in his head. ²⁵,²⁶

“Aht Uh Mi Hed” burrows its way into the listener’s head ²⁷—a miniature headphone symphony, ²⁸ an ornate lite-funk pop pastiche of echoing drum machine, swirls of organ, skeletal ska-style rhythm guitar, some subtle strings, and Shuggie’s sweet vocals. Call it delicately persistent.

While simple headphones—such as those worn by telephone operators—existed for most of the twentieth century, John Koss is generally credited with inventing the first modern stereo headphones for consumers in 1958, the Koss SP/3. By the 1970s, headphones weren’t much less bulky or comfortable than the SP/3, but studio production values had improved enough that a pair of padded headphones often accompanied many home stereo systems. The six-foot tether of copper wire kept the listener near the stereo, but the headphones effaced much of the rest of the world by thwarting its sounds. Stereo pans, crossfades, multitrack recording, and other studio effects made music appear to originate from some point at the center of one’s brain.²⁹ This location became critical once the SonyWalkman helped shrink the headphone: now a cranial music was portable.

Inspiration Information—both the original release and the reissue—coincides with two important moments in the history of the headphone: first, the moment in the early ‘70s when it became a fairly common household consumer product—a way of shutting out the sounds of the family home and concentrating on a private experience of music rather than a communal one; next, the more recent moment when its ubiquity, indicated in part by its free inclusion with many portable electronic devices, signifies both our near-inability to exist in silence (both because we bring music with us everywhere, and because music, as unwanted noise, is imposed upon us ³⁰—the former condition perhaps a response to the latter), as well as the way our listening now often takes place somewhere other than the home. Headphones permit us to transform any public space with the addition of our own soundtrack, or indicate the noise with which the world surrounds us and the desperation of our need to reclaim what we hear, or suggest the circumscriptions of our private lives and our private spaces, which now often extend no further than the limits of our own bodies: so we colonize our headspace before some other does. If the head is a space that can be trespassed against our will, it seems unsurprising that Shuggie’s record invites the intimacy of headphone listening.

“Nothing special—he has two or three good songs: ‘Inspiration Information,’ ‘Aht Uh Mi Hed,’ and that ten-minute-long one on Freedom Flight,” my friend Hua told me when I asked him what he thought about Shuggie Otis.

“‘Strawberry Letter 23’?” I prodded.

“Yeah, that one too,” he agreed. ³¹

“At that time,” Shuggie Otis told Philadelphia Inquirer music critic Tom Moon in a 2001 interview, referring to 1974, “there was the understanding that you could write lyrics and they didn’t have to have any meaning.³² Well, I wanted the songs to mean something, at least along the lines of a fantasy or something outside of your normal experience….³³ That’s what I was striving for, to free the mind of the listener and free my own mind.”

A freed mind, at least since the 1960s, has variously connoted a mind altered by drugs, uncolonized by political or social propaganda, unburdened by systems of labor, untroubled by preconception or prejudice, or enlightened through Zen Buddhism (as interpreted by US counterculture); it signifies a utopia in which the physical world can be transformed as one’s consciousness is transformed. We can also read the idea back further, to André Breton’s 1924 Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, in which Breton described the socially constructed mind that surrealism would liberate: “Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.” Surrealism, as Breton defined it, involved “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

Shuggie’s apparently associative, possibly automatic lyrics don’t relate a narrative so much as they conjure a mood. Part of that invocation may be due simply to Shuggie’s reliance, like most pop songwriters, on cliché: we all speak in clichés so readily that pop music is popular in part because it borrows our most familiar language to give voice to feelings we think we already feel, feelings we cannot articulate except through debased expression. These inarticulate articulations generally reflect some relatively temperate emotion: the sunny-and-harmless, the socially-acceptable-passionate, the bittersweet-and-safely-depressive, the mildly-political; when we hear a pop song that speaks to a starker desperation through cliché—such as Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” or Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”—the effect is, as in “Aht Uh Mi Hed,” memorable. Whether or not the mood Shuggie’s lyrics summon represents the experience of being out of one’s head, whether or not it frees the listener’s mind, ³⁴ it does, unlike Randazzo’s and Weinstein’s version of a similar sentiment, feel ecstatic in all senses of the word.

A common trope for pop music criticism invokes Emily Dickinson’s famous comment ³⁵“to propose the site at which music affects one both physically and as close to cerebrally as a pop song might achieve: the head (a song “took my head off” or “knocked my head off,” etc.). Perhaps in an even more familiar idiom—often, but not always, a complaint—the song has become “stuck in one’s head.” ³⁶,³⁷ But the brain can, apparently, ³⁸ inscribe music into itself as a way of remembering it—our heads offering us storage space for our music that’s not too different from the external hard drives onto which we cram excessive iTunes libraries, so that our preferred music is always in our heads, even when it may be driving us out of our heads. “Aht Uh Mi Hed” is too subtle a listening experience, too mellow in its particulars to knock anyone’s head off, but it’s long been stuck in my head.

____________________

1 “‘Goin’ Out of My Head’ was never a No. 1 song for Little Anthony, but when the Lettermen combined it… in a recorded medley, the tunes became pop classics, recorded by a gamut of industry giants, from Frank Sinatra to Dionne Warwick. ‘I’ve lost count on how many versions there are,’ [Randazzo] said.” (Wayne Harada, “Teddy Randazzo, ’50s Rock Legend, Dead at 68,” Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 24, 2003.)

2 See also the aforementioned medley version by the Lettermen, or the bossa-nova-lite version by Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, or perhaps the slightly funked-up version by the Delfonics, or the wah-wah-’n’-horns disco version by Gloria Gaynor, or any number of countless others. But, e.g., the Lettermen’s version is too unsoiled by any emotion—how can any listener believe that these four clean-cut young men, all with perfect enunciation and matching sweaters, are even close to out of their heads? They’ve calculated every move of this medley; even the sound engineer cranks up the artificial enthusiastic applause from the imaginary audience (themselves all well within their crania) at each segue between “Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” And though disco was, at root, all about reaching a state of being out of one’s head—from cocaine and alcohol, marathon dancing, post-pill and pre-AIDS sex; about a state purely physical, not at all cerebral—and though a disco version of “Goin’ Out of My Head” seems appropriate, still Gloria Gaynor’s version is again too crisp, too studied. The uptempo rhythm suggests that this pain is not real, no deeper than a snub from someone at a singles bar. Is this song the place for a bouncy bassline, for disco’s swollen string arrangements, for an extended instrumental break with laser noises and tabla?

3 “The word ‘desperate’ is apt for his early work, because no one spoke more for the agonies of very young love than did Little Anthony—and his high-pitched falsetto was a most appropriate instrument.” (Unattributed liner notes, The Very Best of Little Anthony &the Imperials, United Artists, 1974.)

4 “Yearning hurts, / and what release / may come of it / feels much like death.” (Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. by Brooks Haxton, Viking, 2001.)

5 “Melody / especially when it grieves / (arioso dolente) / takes your hand. / Leads you / willing or unwilling / to the pine-lit / wedding chamber, / you are married / to the fact of it, / the light goes out / on all you’ve felt / or failed to feel. / Grief / is the distance / between loves…” (Robert Kelly, “Section 9, Sonata in A-flat: The Essay on Form,” The Loom, Black Sparrow Press, 1975.)

6 “Effeminacy of character arises from a prevalence of the sensibility over the will; or it consists in a want of fortitude to bear pain or to undergo fatigue, however urgent the occasion…. [These persons] have been so used to a studied succession of agreeable sensations that the shortest pause is a privation which they can by no means endure—it is like tearing them from their very existence… They are completely wrapped up in themselves; but then all their self-love is concentrated in the present minute.” (William Hazlitt, “On Effeminacy of Character,” Table-Talk, Oxford UP, 1933 [reprint].)

7 “Her presentation is casual and matter-of-fact. In one hand she holds a small hand mike. In the other she clutches a colored kerchief with which she dabs at perspiration on her brow or dries the corners of her eyes, which water very easily in the presence of smoke. So she keeps her eyes closed when she sings and, keeping time with her shoulders, her arms and her body, floats airily through familiar ballads, gently expanding or rephrasing the melodic line, or she rolls out chorus after chorus of darting, silver-quick scat singing…. ‘Music today has a different beat,’ she was saying one afternoon in her suite at the Americana as she reflected on the songs she has sung and still continues to sing. ‘The style of music has changed… If you don’t learn new songs, you’re lost… Everybody says there are no good songs now. But there are two from this generation that I like—“Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Sunny.”” (John S. Wilson, “Ella Changes Her Tunes for a Swinging Generation,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 1967.)

8 “When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. ‘A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals’ says Sappho…. ‘You have snatched the lungs out of my chest’…and ‘pierced me right through the bones’… says Archilochos.” (Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998 [reprint].)

9 “The perceptions we refer only to the soul are those whose effects we feel as being in the soul itself, and for which we do not normally know any proximate cause to which we can refer them. Such are the feelings of joy, anger and the like…. We need to recognize also that although the soul is joined to the whole body, nevertheless there is a certain part of the body where it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others. It is commonly held that this part is the brain, or perhaps the heart—the brain because the sense organs are related to it, and the heart because we feel the passions as if they were in it. But on carefully examining the matter I think I have clearly established that the part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance….” (Rene Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, 1988.)

10 Off the top of my head: the Rolling Stones: Out of Our Heads. Lupe Fiasco: “Out of My Head.” John Newman: “Out of My Head.” Ashlee Simpson: “Outta My Head.” Madchild: “Out of My Head.” Deetron feat. Ovasoul7: “Out of My Head.” Swearing at Motorists: “Going Out of My Head.” Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Electric Light Orchestra: “Can’t Get It Out of My Head.” The Blake Babies: “Outta My Head.” M. Ward: “Outta My Head.” The Go-Betweens: “I Need Two Heads.” The Go Team: “My Head Hurts.” Etc., etc. Yes, I know I missed most of them.

11 “The mind does not understand the heart? Neither does the heart.” (James Richardson, Vectors, Ausable Press, 2001.)

12 “For a hundred years, (literary) madness has been thought to consist in Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’; madness is an experience of depersonalization. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror.” (Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1978.)

13 Italics mine, though who can narrow the emphases the multitude of singers who’ve covered this song have suggested?

14 The original connotations of the word “ecstasy”—“to drive a person out of his wits,” per the Oxford English Dictionary—suggest the uncontrolled experience, a “withdrawal of the soul from the body.” As Milan Kundera has noted, “Ecstasy means being ‘outside oneself,’ as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one’s position (stasis). To be ‘outside oneself’ does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is the absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time).” (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, HarperCollins: 1995.)

15 “Even though the staple of rock and roll in the fifties was teen schmaltz of wondrous innocence and vapidity, and even though the popularization of black music meant romanticizing the hard-assed realism of rhythm-and-blues, the sheer physicality of rock and roll, its sexual underpinnings, always implied a negation of such escapist rhapsodies.” (Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973, Cooper Square Press, 2000 [reprint; expanded edition].)

16 “…soon life began to unfold, beautiful and passionate and sad, while still the young men and girls entered, scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young…” (William Faulkner, “Dry September,” Collected Stories, Vintage, 1977 [reprint].)

17 “Though blessed with a sweet, buoyant voice and a knack for subtle inflections, Otis was too shy to record with anyone in the studio.” (Tom Moon, “Shuggie Otis’ Classic Returns,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2001.)

18 “Three years in the making, Inspiration Information is flamboyantly arty, the work of a young musician determined to get it all in. It is also remarkably accomplished. In the tradition of R&B auteurship that stretches from Stevie Wonder to Prince to D’Angelo, Mr. Otis wrote every note and played nearly every instrument on the album.” (Jody Rosen, “Luxuriating in the Sprawl of That Early ’70s Sound,” New York Times, July 29, 2001.)

19 “Shuggie—it’s impossible to call him by any other name…” (Jeffrey Lee Puckett, “Soul Inspiring,” Louisville Courier-Journal, March 31, 2001.)

20 The reissue features entirely different jacket art: the portrait of Shuggie from his second LP has been warmed with a self-consciously retro palette of red and orange; his Afro has become mere abstraction. The new cover seems designed around a current college student’s idea of what an LP from the ’70s should look like: garish, bold, iconic. The image is as easy and unearned as the plastic repro tiki drink glasses one can now buy for ten dollars a dozen at certain shops, along with butterfly chairs, paper lamps, and T-shirts with artfully—artlessly?—faded logos of imaginary high school sports teams; it loses completely the sense of the original artwork’s weirdness.

21 “The album proved too futuristic, too stubbornly unique for the rock marketplace of 1974.” (James Sullivan, liner notes to Inspiration Information, Luaka Bop, 2001 [reissue].)

22 In his review for Pitchfork, Jonny Pietin argues that Inspiration Information was ignored upon release not because “the world wasn’t ready” or because “some evil executive quashed it,” but because it was “designed to be” overlooked: “Inspiration Information is a stubbornly small album, free of the grandiosity and posturing of similar records of the time, like What’s Going On and Superfly. There are no social issues at stake here, and no 60-piece orchestras swelling our hearts. There’s just the sound of one extremely talented young musician exploring his craft’s limitations, and his own.” (Jonny Pietin, undated review on Pitchfork.com.)

23 “But, no matter how much the partisans claim[,]… this isn’t revolutionary, even if it’s delightfully idiosyncratic. So, don’t fall for the hyperbole. This isn’t an album that knocks your head off—it’s subtle, intricate music that’s equal parts head music and elegant funk, a record that slowly works its way under your skin…. But it isn’t a record without precedent, nor is it startling. It’s a record for people that have heard a lot of music, maybe too much, and are looking for a new musical romance.” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Allmusic.com.)

24 “Most present, however, is the sense and beginning of a totally new struggle for Shuggie. The thirteen-year-old who made his recording debut with the Johnny Otis Show, and later came to national attention through the Al Kooper sessions, is a man and an artist now. He is creating in the Seventies, a time whose conflicts are being shaped by information—and the lack of it. One gets the feeling that even as the information changes, so will the inspiration.” (Winston Cenac [Scoops], liner notes, Inspiration Information, Epic / CBS LP, KE 33059, 1974.)

25 “It is possible that this solitude is dangerous only for those idle and vagrant souls who people it with their own passions and chimeras.” (Charles Baudelaire, “Solitude,” Paris Spleen, trans. by Louise Varése, New Directions, 1947 [reprint].)

26 “Otis was not exactly sunny—he had a fragility that bordered on melancholy—but he was insular and hermetic and emphatically apolitical; his music has timeless appeal because it never belonged to its time to begin with.” (Ben Greenman, “Lost Soul,” The New Yorker, June 11, 2001.)

27 “One is hardly ever completely listening (which requires a devotion to time of the wild leap), therefore what follows such reduced attention generates little but quick opinion, and you can feel the mass of all you missed draining away. Music must be the room you are in, for the duration.” (Clark Coolidge, “Rova Notes,” Sulfur 17 [1986].)

28 “The headphone music experience is qualitatively different from a typical concert situation. Undesirable sounds, such as the coughing, rustling of programs and emergency-vehicle sirens that are often heard at concerts, are almost completely masked. And while at a concert one shares in the community space of an audience, one enjoys a direct personal relationship with sound when listening with headphones; the sociological and cultural accessories of music are eliminated.” (Durand R. Begault, “The Composition of Auditory Space: Recent Developments in Headphone Music,” Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 1 [1990].)

29 These same studio technologies are what allowed Otis to write and record the entire record himself: the one-man band, like the writer, arranges, assembles, overlays, produces; the performance is not live but constructed, a series of revisions that occur over time. Stephen Thomas Erlewine: “Otis crafted all of this essentially alone…and it’s quite clearly a reflection of his inner psyche…” (Allmusic.com).

30 “Mass music is…a powerful factor in consumer integration, interclass leveling, cultural homogenization…. Beyond that, it is a means of silencing, a concrete example of commodities speaking in place of people, of the monologue of institutions…. But silencing requires the general infiltration of this music, in addition to its purchase. Therefore, it has replaced natural background noise, invaded and even annulled the noise of machinery. It slips into the growing spaces of activity void of meaning and relations, into the organization of our everyday life: in all of the world’s hotels, all of the elevators, all of the factories and offices, all of the airplanes, all of the cars, everywhere, it signifies the presence of a power that needs no flag or symbol: musical repetition confirms the presence of repetitive consumption, of the flow of noises as ersatz sociality. (Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.)

31 When I e-mailed him this brief paragraph to confirm its accuracy, Hua responded: “I do think Shuggie Otis was someone special. I guess what I meant to say was this: he’s the type of artist that invites hyperbole. There’s a ‘Shuggie discourse’ that’s formed around all the strange aspects of his life—prodigy turned recluse, famous pops, almost a Rolling Stone, black and psychedelic. And, in his more sublime moments, he is unrivaled: ‘Strawberry Letter,’ ‘Aht Uh Mi Hed,’ ‘Freedom Flight,’ and the all-time facemelter ‘Inspiration Information.’ But generally I think his albums rarely rise to those heights—I haven’t really sat with the third one (my favorite) in a while but the first two have a lot of run-of-the-mill stuff on them. I’ve always associated him with Fugi, Rotary Connection, Black Merda and all those other post-Sly psych dudes, and in retrospect, they were all probably as ‘big’ as they should have been.”

32 “Outta my head / it’s growing / outta my head / it’s glowing / outta my head / ’cause I heard / something said / in a word / from your voice / did I hear / only choice / dear / outta my head / she tells / from shots that shot above / outta my head / things are different / outta my head / of a time / in the bed / for a rhyme / flashin’ back / to your air / and the good / there,” etc. The first and second person here are the usual subject and object of most pop music, but apart from the refrain, the heavy parataxis and obscure referents of the lyrics give them enough ambiguity that we might read them as the random words singers sometimes sing when writing lyrics to first get the melody right. But the depth of Shuggie’s passion is so evident as he sings—his voice ranges from whispers to cries, breathy ooohs to strained cracks—that we have to assume they do “mean something” liberating to him: “it’s about time / something new,” he croons near the end of the song.

33 “We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday…. the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.” (Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” Reflections, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Schocken, 1986.)

34 Like all distinctive, memorable songs, “Aht Uh Mi Hed” does, at least, free the listener’s mind in that, after hearing it, our notion of the possible in the four-minute pop song has been expanded.

35 “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 68, No. 4 [1891].)

36 “German music fans have adopted the term ‘ohrwurm’ (earworm) to describe” those “annoying snippets of pop songs that get lodged in your head and won’t go away.” (Barry Willis, Stereophile “News Desk,” February 2, 2003.)

37 “This was the first study to examine the earworm phenomenon. It documented the pervasiveness of the phenomenon and sought to lay the groundwork for a theory of ‘cognitive itch.’ The primary focus was on identifying ‘sticky’ properties of music that make becoming an earworm more likely. It appears that music characterized by simplicity, repetitiveness, and incongruity with listeners’ expectations is most likely to become ‘stuck.’” (James J. Kellaris, “Identifying Properties of Tunes That Get ‘Stuck inYour Head’: Toward a Theory of Cognitive Itch.” In Susan E. Heckler and Stewart Shapiro, eds., Proceedings of the Society for Consumer Psychology Winter 2001 Conference, American Psychological Society.)

38 “All of us (with very few exceptions), can perceive music, can perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm. We integrate all of these and ‘construct’ music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music. ‘The inexpressible depth of music,’ Schopenhauer wrote, ‘so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.’ …Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is ‘played in the mind.’ The imagining of music, even in relatively nonmusical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and tempo. Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one’s early years may be ‘engraved’ on the brain for the rest of one’s life. Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music.” (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia, Knopf, 2007.)