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April 27, 2020
Adam Levin's Playlist for His Novel "Bubblegum"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Adam Levin's second novel Bubblegum cements his spot as one of my favorite fiction writers. Inventive in form and breathtakingly told, this book is one of the year's best.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Monumentally imaginative. . .Levin’s vibrant voice is unlike anyone else in contemporary fiction. . .Breathtakingly bizarre, this relentlessly inventive novel teems with humanity, humor, and pathos like few other recent works and is a book many will obsess over and delight in."
In his own words, here is Adam Levin's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Bubblegum:
When Borges, in that essay on Kafka and his precursors…Actually, no. Scratch that.
Some years back, the students at the school at which I used to teach started dressing like pop musicians used to dress on MTV when I was in grade school in the 1980s. They had it all wrong, I thought, these students. They had it all wrong! Not the look. They had the look. The implicit nostalgia for the 1980’s was wrong. The 1980s was…wrong. Everyone had been afraid. Of nuclear war, nuclear fallout from nuclear war, getting kidnapped at a toy store, getting publicly accused of being homosexual, contracting AIDS from waterfountains, smoking “laced” weed which might eventually lead to smoking crack which could cause your heart to explode, the Japanese economy. The sharp, bold lines of all the best muscle cars got stolen by the haircuts and suit-jackets of all the lamest dudes; the cars softened and drooped, aspiring to resemble, it seemed, Nike Airs, which looked like the future, but instead they resembled spermatazoa, which looked like…jizz beneath a microscope. Everyone was ugly and fearful and stupid. Smelled like Aquanet and Clearasil splashed with English Leather. The drum machines sounded like distant metronomes, the synthesized horns like the Star Wars cantina. There wasn’t any bass. New Coke, Crystal Light, Sizzlelean and Tofutti, strong enough for a man but pH-balanced for a woman, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up, etcetera.
I don’t know. It gave me a not-so-fresh-feeling, seeing those students dressing like that.
Moreover, I didn’t know. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to get at here. The 1980s culture described above is a suburban grade- and middle-schoolboy’s version. It’s not irrelevant, but it’s pretty narrow. In 1985, for example, White Noise and Blood Meridian were both(!) published, and the Jesus and Mary Chain released Psychocandy. Who knew? Some people knew. A lot of people, actually. Not this person, though. And my DeLillo/McCarthy/JMC-ignorance represents about 1% of the very apex of the very tip of the iceberg that is everything about eighties culture in America that I wasn’t aware of during the eighties.
Did I make it sound like I had a point? I think that was rash of me.
But I wrote this novel, Bubblegum. It just came out. Some of it is set in the 1980s. It took some years to write, and I took a lot of walks throughout the years I was writing it. I heard a lot of songs while taking those walks, and a lot of the songs I heard were new, and a lot of them were old, and some of the old ones were songs I’d never heard, and some were songs I’d forgotten I’d heard, and one day, on one of my walks, I heard “Nuclear Seasons” by Charli XCX—one of the new ones—and it changed the way I understood some of the old ones from the 1980s. It made me understand what some of those old songs would have sounded like to me if they’d been good (or if I’d been better), and also, somewhat Borgesianly (I guess), it caused some of those old bad songs to become good (or caused me to become better). Anyway, I started thinking about this effect a lot. Not just the positive effect a great song from 2012 might have on (what formerly seemed) a bad song from, say, 1983, but the positive effect any great newer song might have on a formerly bad(-seeming) song from any previous era, or, for that matter, the positive effect any great newer song might have on an already-good (or already-great) song from any previous era.
So here are two playlists. The first is made of older songs that became better because I heard newer songs. The second is made of the newer songs I heard that made those older ones better. The tracks match up. For example, “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama was made better for me by the aforementioned “Nuclear Seasons” by Charli XCX, so each of those songs is first on its playlist. The Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail” was made better for me by Fugazi’s “Bad Mouth,” so each of those songs is eighth on its playlist.
For anyone who might protest that “Cruel Summer” and “Rudie Can’t Fail” were always great songs, never bad songs, didn’t need “Nuclear Seasons” or “Bad Mouth” to be wonderful: I don’t disagree with you. Always loved “Cruel Summer,” I. Always loved “Rudie Can’t Fail.” However, I came to love them both more after hearing “Nuclear Seasons” and “Bad Mouth.”
In fact, there isn’t a single song on the first list that I’ve ever disliked—only songs that, owing to my having heard the songs on the second list, I came to like more than I previously had.
Old
1. “Cruel Summer” Bananarama
2. “Baby Pop” France Gall
3. “Little Red Corvette” Prince
4. “Je t’aime moi non plus” Serge Gainsbourg w/Jane Birkin
5. “Cheree” Suicide
6. “Night Fever” Bee Gees
7. “Tame” Pixies
8. “Rudie Can’t Fail” The Clash
9. “When You Were Mine” Prince
10. “Mr. Brown” Bob Marley
New
1. “Nuclear Seasons” Charli XCX
2. “Milionària” Rosalía
3. “Yamaha” The-Dream
4. “Hell is Round the Corner” Tricky
5. “Distortions” Clinic
6. “Disciples” Tame Impala
7. “Mary Susan” Blood on the Wall
8. “Bad Mouth” Fugazi
9. "Ripe 4 Luv” Young Guv
10. "Bank Robber” The Clash
Adam Levin is the author of The Instructions and Hot Pink. He has been a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award winner, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. A long-time Chicagoan, Levin currently lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Playlist by the author for Hot Pink
Playlist by the author for The Instructions
also at Largehearted Boy:
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