BAUHAUS: “All We Ever Wanted”

(The Sky’s Gone Out LP, Beggars Banquet, 1982)

Bauhaus: a terrible band, but when I was fifteen they sounded dark, dangerous, deep. Daniel Ash’s razoring guitars on The Sky’s Gone Out dismantled me when a friend dubbed suicide anthem “In the Night” on a mixtape. I’ve long since sold most of my Bauhaus records—hopefully to misunderstood teens—but still own this LP. The only song I can now bear is the record’s quietest: its lyrics, and its unassuming, inoffensive acoustic guitar and plucked bass—unlike the rest of the record, this song almost wants to be overlooked—typify the postindustrial “factorytown” where I was raised. “All we ever wanted was everything”: sure, but we knew that asking rarely led to getting. We didn’t ask because we were unwilling, or because we believed our requests excessive, or because we understood already that the favor wouldn’t be granted, but because the only way to success, we’d been told, was work. Our working-class aspirations conflicted with vague, mostly unspoken desires to “shoot out of darkness”: we were socialized to define ourselves according to occupation rather than what legitimately occupied us. I escaped in the pages of an outdated yard-sale Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas, the leatherette spine of which finally disintegrated, and sustained myself with a secondhand stereo those years I hoped to elude the notice of others, while also secretly craving their acclaim more than I dared—and dare—admit: “Oh, to be the cream…,” Peter Murphy croons, and the song winds down to a sigh.