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May 3, 2021
David Stuart MacLean's Playlist for His Novel "How I Learned to Hate in Ohio"
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.
David Stuart MacLean's novel How I Learned to Hate in Ohio is an important and timely snapshot of mid-'80s suburbia.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"... although Ohio is set 35 years ago, MacLean intends to speak to the present. The novel is girded with themes of racism, economic inequality and political division, suggesting that our current fractured moment is exemplified by mid-'80s Midwest suburbia, practically built on an assembly line there."
In his words, here is David Stuart MacLean's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel How I Learned to Hate in Ohio:
La Di Da Di - Dougie Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew (feat. MC Ricky D aka Slick Rick)
This song came out around the time my book is set. It was released in August of 1985 and my book starts in September '85. I love this song so much.
Rockabiller - Eerie Wanda
I think there should be a national holiday where we all spend the day in our pajamas listening to this song and only eating food that comes out of to go boxes and not responding to a thing on email.
Sam Stone - John Prine
This is one of the classic first album John Prine songs. I love how unrelenting the darkness is in this song. If I could write a novel that behaved like this song I’d have achieved Boss Level status.
Take on Me - A-ha
This song! Oh this song. My childhood spread out in front of me like rose petals. Have you ever lost something you couldn’t describe?
Lady Cab Driver/All the Critics Love U in New York - Prince
I was thinking casually of writing an essay about the best two song punches on albums inspired by this couple of songs on 1999, but then I realized that this wasn’t even the best two song punch on this very album (which would be 1999/Little Red Corvette). But I still love these two songs as just pure dance break grind em out genius. I’ve spent a lot of time dancing just outside my office to these songs.
It’s Not Funny - Run DMC
Another song from the time period of the novel. Early hip-hop is so full of delicious boom bap. The bass shaking your teeth as you blare it out on your used Nissan Sentra’s base model speakers.
Bitties in The BK Lounge - De La Soul
This song changes perspective three times. How could you not love a song that changes perspective three times?
I wrote a paragraph or two about this album for my book but it got edited out. I’ve got it on an old draft though. Here it is:
There was a party out on Houk Road for the graduating class of 1991. I hadn’t been to a party since my freshman year but even though I had no real friends and I hated every thing about high school I was feeling nostalgic. So I got out my bike, put the new De La Soul in my walkman, and rode there. De La’s new album is weird. It’s called De La Soul is Dead and it basically is an impossible record. They hit so big with their first album and became such big stars, what they do on this new record is deconstruct their fame and the hip hop world. It’s funny but they show how easy it is to write catchy dance songs which they do over and over except they interrupt them, break them, mock the song and the idiots who’d dance to it. It’s an album about integrity and how most people operate perfectly fine in society without having souls. Also a character calls another character “hamsterpenis” which is the funniest thing in the world. Ever.
Let’s Dance/Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space - Spiritualized
I will never get enough of Spiritualized. Easily the band I turn to the most often when I want to peel barnacles from my soul. Just so thick with sound that it’s like entering a cloud when you’re 40,000 feet up and all you can do is rely on your instruments and feel to get you through.
To Be of Use - Smog
I love Bill Callahan in all of his guises. I love this song because it’s an ode to the feeling of satisfaction after you successfully pleasure someone else.
Weight of the Planets - Aldous Harding
I love the eerie mood of her songs. Her voice is like a freezing mist on a hot ass day.
Trouble in Here - The Frightnrs
I stumbled onto this band because of a recommendation from The Turntable Lab record store in NYC. I love how they recorded it in a retro fashion. The beats dig that much deeper as a result. I listened to this album a lot while I was revising the book.
Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye - Roberta Flack
Her piano and voice on this cover are just so perfect. It’s a palate cleanser for the soul. I just feel my feet on the floor and the solidity of the floor under my feet and the firmness of the earth under the floor. It’s a good song for coming out of a writing session to.
Jug Day - Ugly Stick
This band is from my hometown. The song is about how the whole town shuts down one day every September for a horse race. It’s maddening because everything is closed and the traffic in this little town overflows everywhere. This song captures the frenetic energy of that one day.
When You Put Me Down - Bobby Blue Bland
Bobby Bland is one of my favorite singers ever and this song comes off of one of my top five albums ever, Ain’t Nothing You Can Do. This song I can imagine my narrator crysinging into his pillow at 2 am.
Didn’t Know What I Was in For - Better Oblivion Community Center
This is one of those epic life-scarred songs whose wisdom is a howling shrug at this impossibly complicated world. I love a song this complicated and world weary.
I Ran Away - Dinosaur Jr.
There’s a lot of running in my book. Not all of it morally defensible.
Trem Fantasma - Os Mutantes
Whenever I play this band, it makes me think of the coolest parties I’ve ever been to. Disorienting and lovely and mysterious. In my case that party would have been in Chapel Hill, NC circa 1998. There are so many parties in my novel as warranted by the many structural nods to Gatsby throughout the book.
2-35 - Spaceman 3
This album gets namechecked in my book. It just seems like the kind of song you’d hear when you walked into the “creative” dorm at a mid-tier liberal arts college in the mid-80’s. It’d be turned up to migraine levels, where you could hear the music behind your eyes like god intended.
I Know You Got Soul - Eric B and Rakim
Back when I used to do readings at bookstores and colleges, this was my pregame psych up song. I still listen to it nowadays just to get through the long days of doing nothing.
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns n’ Roses
This is from my novel about GnR:
Dear god, when Appetite for Destruction was released in 1987, it didn’t seem as much new as something pure vomited up from the subconscious of the Midwest wrapped up in the tinfoil of hair metal and jammed into the microwave of Los Angeles. See, when Axl Rose first started his jitter-stop high-stomping around the stage any midwesterner worth his corn recognized him as one of our own. Axl was from Indiana. He got out. He left and he found the streets lined with cocaine in LA. This was our collective fantasy. To leave.
If I left, and I made a whole new life for myself somewhere like Texas or Maryland and I ran into someone from my high school would they be my kryptonite or would they be more like a phantom limb that finally got itched? Axl was weaselly white trash and here he was being treated as a sex symbol. There was a revolution at work as the half that has always felt like shit because the rest of the world seemed to run on greased rails realized that life was always going to be a slog patching together jobs in order to stay ahead of the creditors and out of the range of what passed as justice in a neighborhood let gone feral by the city for lack of property tax revenue. And that half of the population decided to just get high and watch it all burn down. Like a lower class nihilism. Everybody gets all bent out of shape about NWA and how they glorify gang life but it’s Guns N’ Roses we should all be watching out for. The sludgy pumps of their malformed hearts will drown us all with their talk of blood purity and heroin. This is what we’ve empowered not Rodney King but the cops’ fear and glee as they wailed on him.
Semantics - NNMADÏ
I love how much stuff is going on in this song. It’s like being in the heart of a giant heaving machine while having a panic attack. I feel this song in my ribs. There’s a panic attack that the main character has that starts off his “infamousness”. I love songs that build into more and more and more wildness.
David Stuart MacLean is a winner of the PEN Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and author of the award-winning memoir The Answer to the Riddle Is Me. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Guernica, and on This American Life. He has taught creative writing at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and the School of the Art Institute; is co-founder of the Poison Pen Reading Series in Houston; and was a Fulbright Scholar to India. Raised in central Ohio, he now lives in Chicago. How I Learned to Hate in Ohio is his debut novel.
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