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February 14, 2023
Anne K. Yoder's Playlist for Her Novel "The Enhancers"
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.
Anne K. Yoder's novel The Enhancers is a smart, surprising, and imaginative debut.
Patrick Cottrell wrote of the book:
"Animated by the absurdity of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, The Enhancers is a wildly original and contemporary tale about chemical augmentation, memory, yearning, and loss. Imagine the fearlessness and wild imagination of Jenny Erpenbeck if she had a background in the pharmaceutical industry and you might come close to approximating the tremendous brilliance of Anne Yoder."
In her own words, here is Anne K. Yoder's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Enhancers:
I wouldn’t underestimate the effect that attending university in Athens, Georgia in the mid to late nineties had on the shape of my life— I was a mess at the time. I'd nearly been set up to fumble through my college years, which I proceeded to do in my own lost and peculiar way. The one saving grace during my time in undergrad was Athens’ music and arts scene. Michael Stipe was a fixture at local haunts, and although I never saw him play in Athens proper, I could walk a few blocks downtown or get a ride into Atlanta and see Radiohead, Vic Chesnutt, Mazzy Star, Jesus and Mary Chain, Jucifer, Man or Astroman, The Make-Up, Sonic Youth, Run DMC, Pavement, Fugazi, all varieties of Elephant Six, and so many others. Music was central to my life as a teenager, especially, so that writing a playlist for The Enhancers now seems like second nature. I often listen to music while I write — it’s as if the music I'm drawn to when writing helps articulate the mood on the page. If there was any single album that set the mood for The Enhancers, it was Darkside’s 2013 album, Psychic, with its ominous immersive quality. In the first days of drafting the manuscript, I often tuned in to its alienlike ambience that isn’t “looking for a heart to heart so much as a telepathic exchange,” as Pitchfork reviewer Ian Cohen writes. Hannah, The Enhancers’ central character, and one of the novel's many narrators, isn't able to articulate or even really know what she feels, so perhaps an attempt at telepathy is her best option. Regardless, these songs form their own journey. Sit back, swallow a handful or mugful or whateverful of your chemical of choice, and listen up.
Blackalicious, Chemical Calisthenics
Blackalicious’ Gift of Gab could’ve made anything, including the periodic table of elements, into a smooth buttery rhyme. “Chemical Calisthenics” is a song about all types of energy, the basic particles that make up the world: “Dried ice, C-O squared refrigerant / N-O-2 makes you laugh, it’s laughing gas used by dentists / I nearly added acid glue, I’m like oil / of a toil, the king of chemicals / And the G hear gas waved all your mats.” This is the world of The Enhancers in a nutshell. It's our world too. Is this the art that Lumena Hills would embrace? Oh yeah. But Blackalicious has all of the cool with none of the hang-ups or oppression. He’s just nerding out on his own verbal precociousness, like: “I’m cookin a potion, cool.”
The Fall, Mr. Pharmacist
The pervasiveness of the pills! There’s much supplication to the pill-loose pharmacist when Mark E Smith sings: “Mr. Pharmacist can you help me out today in your usual lovely way?” The Fall wrote and sang this plea / encomium to Mr. Pharmacist in a world where the pharmacist is a bribable gatekeeper to the good stuff. But in Lumena Hills, “Mr. Pharmacist” could be the soundtrack for its dispensaries at every corner— a theme song that encourages the residents take pride in their chemically advanced ways. “Mr. Pharmacist” delights me again and again, and it seems I unwittingly named a supplement for this song (Liquid EnerG and, another variation, InnerG) as the song ends: “Won’t you please give me some ENERG!”
Radiohead, Fitter, Happier
A few friends have commented that The Enhancers is simultaneously future-forward and a throwback to being a teen in the nineties. That’s also an apt description of the track “Fitter, Happier” on Radiohead’s OK Computer which debuted nearly 25 years ago, though is still contemporary in this post-humanist age. Optimize self-care, optimize performance, can humans compete with AI — artistically? algorithmically? This too reflects the essence of culture in Lumena Hills, so preoccupied with controlling and optimizing emotions, safety, longevity, efficacy while completely devoid of feeling and life.
Angel Bat Dawid, We Are Starzz
This one’s for Harold, who works in an aging astrophysics lab, and because of whom Hannah thinks about stardust, with whom we share our chemical makeup, It’s not explicitly a lamentation but feels like one when Dawid sings: “We are glowing stars, shining brightly.” There are so many registers to Dawid’s voice, and when listening to her music I feel a sense of convergence with the infinite.
Sun Ra, Nuclear War
“Nuclear War” is paradoxically the most chill song about radiation, mutation, and the omnipresent anxiety about our manmade capacity for destroying the planet: “It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know.” Nuclear war isn’t the pervasive threat in The Enhancers, but Hannah has great anxiety about manmade and imminent catastrophe— climate change and species extinction, her generations’ imminent threat. As Sun Ra says, “What'cha gonna do? Without your ass?”
Elf Power, Artificial Countrysides
This one’s for the spa trip that Hannah takes with her mother to Spa L’Cran Noir, a compound that’s manufactured to appear like a desert spa, with its famous black sands, mud baths, cleanses, detoxes, and sensory deprivation tanks. But none of this is naturally occurring. In Lumena, even ‘natural’ products are patented, and often synthetic or artificial in their own way. The song sounds deceptively upbeat: “Artificial countrysides that never / rot and don’t decay / growing faster all the time / spreading further everyday.”
La Femme, (Plaisir XV)
I can’t listen to this song without wanting to conduct an orgy with the world, or at least in the back corner of a La Femme show, which is as imminently seductive if not moreso when playing this song live. “Plaisir XV”’s sonic vibrations are all pleasure, eroticism, and ear candy. The song’s delectable vocals, its incantatory beat, its background cum moans are Delixir’s—the erotic pleasure-inducing tab’s— musical equivalent.
Firewater, Psychopharmacology
If The Fall’s “Mr. Pharmacist” is essentially Lumena Hills’ theme song, Firewater’s “Psychopharmacology” is teen protagonist Hannah Marcus’ ironic retort. What she needs isn’t more pills but acknowledgment that her grief with regard to climate disaster and mass extinction is real. Firewater sings of Hannah’s baseline on mental augmentation, VALEDICTORIAN: “The endless shrink parade, the nights that never cease, and all you want is peace, but all you get is pills, and still they tell you that psychopharmacology is going to be your friend when you can’t get out of bed and you’re so tired of pretending.”
Crystal Castles, Fainting Spells
The electro fuzz of “Fainting Spells” is the white noise and buzz is exactly what I imagine the state of Hannah’s and Celia’s minds with their mental compromise and fallout from taking VALEDICTORIAN.
Of Montreal, Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
The suite of songs that kick off Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer are all about friendship, abandonment, depression, drugs, bottoming out, and pleading to the chemical gods to not make it worse. This feels like a readymade for Hannah Marcus as she finds her way through third year, certainly as soon as VALEDICTORIAN starts messing up her mind. Particularly poignant is Kevin Barnes’ shift from party mode to crisis mode in “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” pleading that the meds don’t make it worse: “ Chemicals don’t flatten my mind / Chemicals don’t mess me up this time / Know you bait me way more than you should / And it’s just like you to hurt me when I’m feeling good. Come on Chemicals!”
Bjork, Cvalda
I haven’t thought about sound and music in the same way since I first saw Bjork in the role of Selma in Dancer in the Dark, as a factory worker who among the squeals and hisses of the machines breaks into song and dance with her coworkers. The drudgery of the work turns into something closer to magic as the machines create a rhythm with their whir and grind that creates the tempo and beat over which Bjork sings, crackles, and coos. I’d like to think that the factory-centric chapters of this book would have a similar type of soundtrack comprised of the sounds of the production line.
Pink Floyd, Breathe (In the Air)
The air becomes tainted with the factory fire, though it’s not like it’s always safe to breathe in Lumena Hills anyway. This is the beginning of Hannah’s experience beyond the town, and where her life begins to open up to other possibilities. Instead of digging hole after hole, or its equivalent working in R&D, Hannah may have other possibilities. She begins to realize, as David Gilmour sings, “all you touch and all you see / is all your life will ever be.”
Arthur Russell, Being it
To continue with the idea of awareness and presence in a Be Here Now kind of way, we bring in Arthur Russell’s “Being It,” a loosely structured song about travel, leaving, bridges, crossing over, leaving: “But being isn’t certain … It is on the bridges / Get away / Soon to go away.”
Tindersticks, Show Me Everything
Tindersticks makes such dramatic soundscapes (they’re also a longtime collaborator with director Claire Denis). I read this song as a plea to learn all, the good and the treacheries, to see the world for what it is not what Hannah or Lumena Hills wants it to be. This is what Hannah is discovering toward the end of the novel. And even in this darkness there is a shard of hope: “(Show me, show me) / All the mess, all the wrong turns / We could take these stones, we could build something.”
Hole Rock Star
An apt accompaniment for the last chapter of the novel, as Hannah watches her classmates graduate while her life is set to take a different trajectory. I won’t say more to avoid spoilers, but Courtney Love’s spiteful primal screech, “Come on, make me sick / Come on make me real,” in response to the sleepwalking emptiness and conformity is on the level of Hannah’s contempt. Love’s raw anger could provide a channel for Hannah’s self-expression, an opening.
Anne K. Yoder's fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, BOMB, Tin House, NY Tyrant, and MAKE, among other publications. She writes, lives, and occasionally dispenses pharmaceuticals in Chicago.
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