The Penguins’ “Earth Angel;” Sylvia Plath’s violent poetry; Roland Garros
I’m All Lost in…
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#33
1) Practicing “Earth Angel” on piano.
The Penguins’ single Earth Angel defines 1950s doo-wop, a genre that itself defines early rock and roll. With its melancholy time signatures, heavenly vocals, sparse arrangements, and lovesick angst front and center, doo-wop’s teen-aged arias are pitch perfect artifacts of mid-20th century America.
Earth Angel was recorded and released in 1954 during doo-wop’s showstopping initial wave when its aching pop cadences suddenly turned young vocalists into street corner composers across American cities nationwide. The result: a rush of low-budget, unbridled lo-fi singles from local DIY ecosystems made up of aspiring high school acts, rhythm-and-blues record shops, radio stations, and hustling post-War indie labels.
In the case of Earth Angel, L.A.-based gospel label Dootone (an African American-owned label) hastily put out the acetate demo featuring just vocals, piano, and bass that a crew of Fremont High students calling themselves the Penguins (after the Kool cigarettes logo) recorded in a garage.
In addition to L.A.’s Penguins, the 1953/54 class of doo-wop pioneers included (my favorite doo-wop act) NYC’s the Crows, whose 1954 smash Gee (the first doo-wop song to break the million-seller milestone) is often cited as the first rock & roll hit. What’s indisputable is that it was the first R&B chart topping record to “crossover” to the upper echelons of the Pop (read, “white”) chart.
(I wrote about doo-wop and Earth Angel at length in my 2021 essay, “Absolute Beginner Blues.”)
The Penguins’ reel-to-reel garage demo of Earth Angel (pressed straight to single and eventually climbing six notches higher than the Crows’ crossover hit) is forever marked by its DIY trappings: the opening bars were inadvertently lopped off. As a result, the song begins mid-piano intro. This historic accident may explain Earth Angel’s mysterious rhythm, which I can only describe as having an undertow. Rather than prompting a sense of resolve and ascension that pop chord patterns create by landing on the root 1 note of the key (as Earth Angel does with its standard I vi ii V/ I vi ii V/ I … “50s progression”), it nonetheless feels as if its always faltering toward resolve, rather than ascending toward resolve. Earth Angel is constantly making an attempt to begin; appropriate, perhaps, given how the recording SNAFU creates the sensation that Earth Angel never actually starts in the first place.
The only other bit of music I can think of that naturally flows-in-reverse like this, as if it’s actually moving backwards, is the beautiful spooky climax of Claude Debussy’s 1893 String Quartet in G Minor.
My attempt to replicate Earth Angel’s counterclock throughline has been the task of the week, a frustrating and euphoric one.
Fittingly, I tired reverse logic by playing the progression with a propulsive one-TWO rock back-beat. That approach, among other tricks (such as locking in doo-wop’s standard left-hand arpeggios in the style of another doo-wop masterpiece, In the Still of the Nite) did not work. The backbeat ploy, for example, simply turned the Penguins’ dreamy prayer into a polka.
Guess I’ll just have to go back to the drawing board on this song and start over.
2) Close reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
Trying to sharpen the life or death skill of interpreting poetry, I took my copy of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous (and Pulitzer Prize winning) collection, 1965’s Ariel, off the shelf and started reading it this week as if it was a homework exercise: I studied her verse line by line, consulted secondary sources, and then re-read the poems as if I was memorizing them.
My Friday-Saturday-Sunday night Memorial Day weekend plans? Hanging out at the bar with a whiskey and a pen marking up Sylvia Plath.
What did I find in Plath’s poems? Violence.
It’s an odd match, poetry and violence. But that’s what’s happening on the pages of Ariel.
Kamikazes, knives, vengeance, homicide, armies, poison, the Holocaust, animal traps, drowning cats (and I’m only 20 poems into this 40-poem collection.) There’s even a poem titled “Thalidomide” about the infamous drug that doctors widely prescribed to pregnant women during the late 1950s and early 1960s that caused birth deformities. Another poem here, “Cut,” turns a mundane kitchen scene into a bloody, chopping board incident. This is violence against women in particular—in natal care, in the kitchen—as Plath crafts allegories publicizing the urgent themes of the oppressive domestic scene. Plath’s Ariel reads like verse to the prose of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.
The excellent title poem—named, in part, after Shakespeare’s Ariel, the Tempest’s magical sky spirit trapped in servitude under magician Prospero—contemplates the ultimate act of violence, suicide. Specifically, “Ariel” is about the self-destruction inherent in the pursuit of liberation. It ends:
“And I/Am the arrow,/The dew that flies/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red/Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
But apparently there is a joy in being “Suicidal, at one with the drive,”—a least when the destination is a “cauldron,” witchcraft’s means of rebirth. Along this “drive” (a horse ride through the English countryside), the narrator unites with her passions. Casting off “dead stringencies,” she is the women’s rights Paul Revere, Lady “White Godiva” on her rebel ride. Eating “sweet” berries, she savors the natural world around her. And then, Becoming one with nature itself, she transforms herself into basic physiological and geo functions: “And now I/Foam to wheat/ a glitter of seas.”
At one point she even becomes the horse. Using the Hebrew definition of Ariel, God’s Lion—though, with Plath at the reins, it’s “Lioness”—she writes:
God’s Lioness,/How one we grow./ Pivot of heels and knees!”
All this joy galloping on the way to corporeal evaporation, like the “dew that flies,” evaporating as the morning sun rises in the sky.
Plath strikes a similar ecstatic pose in “Cut.” It begins: “What a thrill—/My thumb instead of an onion/The top quite gone…” Three stanzas later, Plath is openly giddy about her own dismemberment: “Straight from the heart./I step on it,/ Clutching my bottle of pink fizz/ A celebration, this is.”
Plath’s poetry, inventive, erudite, and elegantly unruly as it is, has always struck me as a finite heirloom of the early 1960s Feminine Mystique-era. But as Donald Trump runs for president on a platform of mob violence, and as Israeli and Russian bombs devastate Gaza and Ukraine, respectively (with bloodshed looming in Haiti), reading Plath’s grisly poetry at a bar on Saturday night in 2024 felt—as great poetry always should—like a zeitgeist move.
3) The French Open at Roland Garros
I’d never heard the tennis metonym Roland Garros before until earlier this year when I watched Jay Caspian Kang’s documentary about Michael Chang’s historic win at the 1989 French Open, aka, “Roland Garros.”
This week, as the 2024 French Open got underway with headlines about former star, Japan’s Naomi Osaka’s surprise three-set near-win against current Women’s No. 1, Poland’s Iga Swiatek, and veteran Rafael Nadal’s poignant first round farewell(?) loss, “Roland Garros!” has been my favorite phrase. I exclaim it whenever the mood strikes.
Once again, for me, it’s all about following the chaotic travails of my favorite tennis player, the WTA’s No. 2, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, as she angles for a re-match of her Italian Open finals loss in mid May to Swiatek (and her Madrid Open finals loss to Swiatek two weeks before that.)
While it may sound like Sabalenka is in some sort of Federer–Nadal-level rivalry with Swiatek, that’s not the case. Swiatek, who easily beat Sabalenka 6-2, 6-3 in the Italian Open, holds an 8-3 advantage over Sabalenka overall (Sabalenka’s three wins over Swiatek have all taken three sets, while only two of Swiatek’s eight wins over Sabalenka have taken a three-set effort.)
While Swiatek hovers above the women’s circuit, Sabalenka is battling it out at the top of the rankings a notch below the Polish star, against peers like No. 3, American Coco Gauff (who has a more comprehensive game than slugger Sabalenka and is quietly making quick work of the competition this week) and No. 4, Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina, who has cruised through this week so far onto the current 4th round where she’s on a collision course with Sabalenka before either can make it to the Roland Garros finals. Rybakina won her 3rd round match against the No. 25 in two quick sets, 6-4, 6-3.
Sabalenka, who, I’ll admit, is doing better than usual (and who has, surprising us all, added a new drop shot to her game) had a more nerve racking third round showdown. Her tour circuit best friend, the former No. 3, Paula Badosa, now un-ranked, pushed Sabalenka to 7-5, 6-1.