by Sheila Heti
Written for The Oxford American Music Issue. It will be be out in 2010.
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Claudia Whitten never recorded any song other than this one, a deep-soul melody which she sings in a voice that is at once womanly and girlish about wanting a real good man. Later it turns out what she means by a real good man is a man who will—well, discipline her. She wants a man to not “spare the rod.”
Because she recorded only one song, everything we imagine about her has to be drawn from this one song, which is like trying to understand a person’s life by looking at just one day. I wouldn’t want someone to look at the day I just lived and think, That day reveals everything we need to know about her whole life. Yet if I look back to the morning, when I rose at six a.m. (it’s one in the morning now), I have to admit this day contained a lot of what’s repeated throughout my life. You could get a pretty good read on me by looking at just my today.
So we have just one song, but the DNA of the artist is in this song, let’s say. Something I always wonder about an artist is, What makes her make art? Because if you know the engine of her art, then you know the engine of her life, and if you know what makes her live, you know what makes her art live.
And this song does live—it haunts and follows you. It takes up a place just as substantial in the world as any person or stalker you might know. The song lives—not because there are any details about the life of Claudia Whitten to attach to it—because there aren’t; at least not in the public realm. I have no idea whether she made tea in the morning or didn’t get up because she was too drunk or what.
Of course, in this song she’s talking about making it work with a man, but I like to think she’s also talking about making music—and making it work with a man and making it work in art are aligned, really. At least for me, these two realms have always traveled similar tracks. I want to get away from writing the same way I want to get away from my boyfriend—whoever my boyfriend is and whatever it is I’m writing. It always feels like too much.
So perhaps this song by Claudia Whitten can be used to discern why it’s her only one: either because she found a real good man, or because she didn’t find a real good man. (There’s that refrain: “I want a real good man”—then the line at the end where she sings what she means by a real good man: “If you don’t want to spoil the child/You better not spare the rod.”)
Either way, the presence of a good man or the absence of a good man is critical. And, sure, the man she’s singing about is a literal man like a boyfriend, but since art is always also about the art, the man she’s singing about can be seen as the man inside her—the tyrant inside the artist who either turns out to be a tyrant who helps the artist make music, or a tyrant who prevents it; who’s so tyrannical that the whole country ceases to function, and you look at the country in that woman and think: So much soul! If only the tyrant was a little less tyrannical, that country would be top of the nations, putting out every toy the whole world consumes!
I have a friend whose boyfriend is pretty abusive, and she tells me that she loves him more than any man she has ever loved. She always wants to leave him, she doesn’t want to leave him, and she gushes—happy, dismayed, confused, resigned to it—This man has gotten under my skin! He’s become the tyrant inside her, I suppose.
Anyway, that’s a man who knows the right amount of rod to give her, if giving it to her makes her love him so much that she’s thrown away her whole life and the last of her childbearing years to a heroin addict. I’m just saying.
Either Claudia Whitten’s tyrant spared the rod and she got so spoiled that she sat around eating cake the rest of her life and didn’t make another song, or, more likely, that tyrant could have spared the rod a little more. Because the rod can scare a child, too, so the child can barely lift her hand to make another song, fearing its tyranny—oppressed under it, I mean. There’s got to be the right measure of sparing and not sparing. No rod at all and nothing gets done. Too much rod—nothing gets done. That’s why the man’s got to be a real good man.
That’s what she was looking for, but I figure that’s not what she got. Only one song came out—but what a song! Those bars repeat and repeat, like the heartbeat of a body; like it’s the rhythm of her deepest life we’re listening to; leaning in, getting at something, like waves dancing and advancing and retreating. The waves come up to the shore and beat down, pulling back and coming up again to beat so gently on the lip of the shore.
She beats down on the shore for two minutes and fifty-two seconds, then the music of Claudia Whitten goes dark with permanent night. The moon disappears and the tides don’t beat.
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