Week of 10/27: Cher, Rozwell Kid, Gerard McMahon, Monsters of Folk
It's a Halloween-themed newsletter. We each wrote about a song that reminds us of Halloween. It was fun.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Cher - “Dark Lady”
Eric Bennett:
Cher is in an interesting position in today’s pop landscape. She still releases a song occasionally to minimal fanfare but has remained relevant when her lovably deranged tweets go frequently viral. Despite decades upon decades of music padding her rightfully grand legacy, ask anyone young to name a Cher song and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one whose knowledge extends beyond “Believe.” Unless you ask a precocious gay kid, which is what I was when I listened to Cher’s back catalog in middle school. I came away appreciating most of the hits, and when I found a greatest hits collection on vinyl many years later, I jumped at it. Far and away, the most impactful of Cher’s peak era output was the title track of 1974’s Dark Lady.
It’s a song that follows a mysterious narrative as Cher goes to get her fortune read, only to learn her man is “secretly true with someone else who is very close to you.” The bait and switch of that reading being, of course, that the fortune teller herself is the one seducing our heroine’s love. This gets pieced together by her “strange perfume” being in “my own rooOooOOOm,” an easy rhyme that’s still endlessly fun because of Cher’s stretched-out note. What then does Cher do? She shoots her, of course! This is a campy, high drama story as the piercing strings and brooding tone tells us, so naturally, it must end in the bloodshed made for B-movies and slasher films.
While the song is campy, it’s paramount to discuss how its dated language remains very harmful. It plays on hurtful stereotypes of Romani people and in the chorus repeatedly uses the most common slur against them. It is, ultimately, a tale of a white woman propping up stereotypes, and then murdering a Romani woman out of rage. That narrative is easy to cover in Broadway exaggeration, but remains harmful at its core. Like a lot of art from the past, it's imperfect, and enjoying it in today’s more aware culture can be complicated, but the baseline is acknowledgment.
Rozwell Kid - “Halloween 3.5”
Miranda Reinert:
When Eric suggested we do a Very Special Newsletter on Halloween music, this was my first and only choice. Too Shabby is a flawless record in my eyes and this song has a bunch of my favorite moments. I love the wobbling guitar. I love the build into a perfect power pop jam, despite the song's mid-tempo sludging through the majority of its three minutes and twelve seconds. I especially love the way Jordan Hudkins’ voice ping-pongs up and down his range. It’s endlessly charming and funny. It’s a great song on all kinds of grounds, but it’s a great Halloween Song because I feel like the equally charming and funny lyrics reflect my experience with the holiday.
I’m not that big on Halloween in terms of costumes or scary movies or candy or anything like that. I refuse to plan (I don’t have a costume for a party on Saturday). Every good costume I’ve ever had was a friend's doing. Every Halloween makeup look I’ve ever attempted has been worse than I can express to you right now and ended with me figuring out something else. And all that is kind of what this song is about!
I refuse to change! I don’t want to plan! I am embarrassed all the time! I admire everybody who has a brilliant, fun time this time of year. Many of my close friends are Halloween people and I love that for them. So many people, well, take what they have laying around and make something special. It’s just that I will not be doing that. I will be using Halloween as an excuse to to have three drinks and then go home because I’m nervous. Reason for the season, baby. Be safe. Look hot. Drink responsibly.
Gerard McMahon - “Cry Little Sister”
Eli Enis:
My girlfriend and I have made it a tradition to watch horror movies on every weekend in October (crazy, right?), and we switch off who picks each week. Upon realizing that I had never seen it, she decided a couple Saturdays ago that we were going to watch the 1987 movie, The Lost Boys. You might not be able to tell by looking at her in one of her pink Juicy Couture tracksuits, but she’s a lifelong vampire lover, admirer of hair metal aesthetics, and a total nut for movies that are morbidly surreal and gothic as hell (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboys, shit like that). She warned me that The Lost Boys was ridiculous and that it wasn’t a capital-“f” Film, so I was expecting something a lot cheesier and more poorly dated than it was. That movie is pretty fucking weird, with tons of dream-like shots and suspense, absurd, Shakespearian characters, and just the right amount of endearing Eighties humor.
I really liked it, but the whole time I kept verbally groaning about its theme song, which I knew I knew from somewhere else but couldn’t quite place it. It’s a song called “Cry Little Sister” by Gerard McMahon, and even if you haven’t seen this movie then I’m sure you’ve heard it at some point. At the end, I headed over to WhoSampled and confirmed that it was Clams Casino who sampled it in Lil B’s 2011 track “Unchain Me,” which is included on the producer’s 2020 comp, Instrumental Relics. I’m sure I had heard one of its many covers over the years as well, but I listened to that instrumental a shit-load last year when I was working and the choir background vocals during the hook of “Cry Little Sister” — “Thou shall not kill” — will always remind me of those early months of the pandemic in spring 2020 when everything felt as surreal and uncertain as Michael felt when he drank vampire blood in The Lost Boys and unknowingly became a bloodsucker. It was just like that.
Anyways, I think the original version of the song has a really creepy, cobweb-coated vibe to it that worked perfectly with the movie and sounds apt for this time of year. The drums have this slurry, muffled effect on them that makes it sound halfway underwater, while the vocals cut atop the mix in that really dramatic, oversung way that sounds specific to the Eighties. But those chorale harmonies feel pretty ahead of their time, or at least register like total sample bait to my present-day ears in a way I’m sure McMahon didn’t expect back in 1987. It’s majestic stuff.
Monsters of Folk - "Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)"
Michael Brooks:
Every Halloween I sit in my room, paralyzed in fear, waiting for the night that the Monsters of Folk will return. I think it might have appeared to me in a dream once—that haunting falsetto of Jim James which floats around like some sort of ghostly apparition—but nevertheless it’s a sound that I won’t soon forget. With a little help from Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes and M. Ward, who needs no introduction, this indie folk supergroup was a scary good time back in the late aughts, although probably not quite as terrifying as the thought of getting lost in the crowd at an Avett Brothers concert as you search for your friends through an infinite abyss of Pendleton shirts.
Not even Dracula or The Wolf Man could pen something as sinister as “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.),” the lead single from Monsters of Folk, the first and only album by the group. Throughout the track, James, Oberst, and Ward trade verses, each one of them reaching out to some higher power. Truth be told, there’s not really anything all that scary about “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)” or even the Monsters of Folk for that matter. What’s truly terrifying, at least to me, is that for some reason or another I’m pretty much always thinking about bands like Monsters of Folk a full decade after they released music. It’s like my life is a Twilight Zone episode where every time I close my eyes I see Stereogum headlines and Pitchfork scores from 2009. Maybe one of these days I will be able to return to the idyllic small-town life that I once knew, instead of messaging my friends at odd hours of the night with some hypothetical Girl Talk mashup that could happen if Gregg Gillis dropped new music in 2021. My only hope is that one day the Monsters of Folk will return with an album so underwhelming that the curse will be lifted and I will no longer care about indie rock, instead spending my free time playing fantasy baseball and getting into woodworking.
P.S. If there was a Girl Talk album in 2021 I would love to hear Flo Milli rap “Dicks up when I step in the party” over a Turnstile riff