14 Forever

Joe Jackson and Escaping the Friend Zone

The underappreciated 14-year-old is a moral absolutist.  Right and wrong are so clear to him.  Why can’t everyone see it?  He has become best friends with a pretty girl, and she absolutely adores him.  He is the first guy to really make her laugh, and not just in a dumb way.  He respects her mind and heart even as he lusts for her body.  They read the same books, watch the same movies, listen to the same music, make fun of the same people.  They are in on the joke.  They get it.  She complains to him about her awful meathead boyfriends.  And he is an exceptional listener.  But wait, thinks the 14-year-old, do I want to be the nice guy, or do I want to be the boyfriend?  He is sure he wants to be both, but it doesn’t work that way, at least not in that dark chamber of ritualized sadism known as the 8th grade. We have a word for this guy now: incel.  It’s not a pretty picture, but then sometimes there’s nothing pretty about living in the real world.  Sometimes, the default setting is brutal.

Joe Jackson understands.  He is not classically handsome, but he is classically trained.  He has conservatory piano chops, an angry young man attitude, an ear for pop hooks and a love of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan and Afro-Cuban rhythms.  After a successful run of high-end commercial pop, he must have delighted the label people with an album of jumpin’ jive, then, later classical.  He had all this in him, and could bring it back to his 1979 debut, Look Sharp, a new wave classic that included the anthem for that poor 14-year-old.

Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street
From my window, I'm staring while my coffee goes cold
Look over there (Where?)
There, there's a lady that I used to know
She's married now or engaged or something, so I'm told

What a sad case.  Just staring at the woman who choose the neanderthal over the sensitive artist, who will one day grow up to write a hit song and get the girl.  But the guy singing the song doesn’t know that.  He thinks this is reality, and it goes downhill from here.  This guy saw Peggy Sue Got Married and remembered how the class brainiac grows up to be a highly successful computer genius.   He dances with Kathleen Turner—with great skill and confidence—and tells her she was always kind to him.  Sure, but not that kind.

There’s no high school reunion yet, but the people in this song are adults.  They are “pretty women,” not girls, and they are getting married.

Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me
There's something going wrong around here

There is definitely something going wrong.  Look, I know Joe Jackson is kind of funny looking, but he has so much to offer—the piano, the pop hitmaking potential, the classical and jazz ambitions.  And over that, the pretty girl, the one who really connects to all those Joe Jackson kinds of attributes, she’s walking down the street with someone who, let’s face it, is not that smart or soulful or sensitive.

But hey, when Joe Jackson rises from the torture known as the friend zone, he is not just going to crank out hits.  He’s going to educate us.  His commercial and critical peak, Night and Day (1982), named itself after a Cole Porter standard and advertised a sophisticated New York City life that always looks better from the outside.  The cover shows a line drawing of the maestro in a fancy apartment with a panoramic view with this idea that a cultured person who does not condescend can be successful in pop music.  It wasn’t going to last, but these songs are loaded with perfect chord changes and edgy observations.  “No one’s fussy, I’m a target.”  “Trying to find Chinatown.”  This guy really loves salsa, and he does something substantial with it.    “Breaking us in Two” is an absolutely perfect song.   Each chord turns to the next, to the bridge, back again.  It’s as if the guy in “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” got the girl, then got really disappointed, then made something beautiful.  Joe Jackson moved on from the girl he yearned for and had relationships with men.  This was 1982, and he didn’t care who knew it, explicitly on “Real Men,” implicitly on “A Slow Song.”

But this is a fine romance
If we have to be so demanding
We need just one more dance to
Leave here with an understanding

First he’s trying to get the girl, then break up with her.  Now he wants music and emotion to unite him with a man, a love that speaks its name, even sings it.  “Steppin’ Out,” the album’s big single, sounds like a suburbanite’s idea of getting to the city, but you’re just stuck at the Metro North station waiting for something to happen. Maybe it was an omen.  You are likely to hear it at your dentist’s office.  Still, there’s nothing really wrong with it.  There are no musical sins here, and he obviously knew what he was doing.  This album went Platinum and was nominated for Grammys.  He took the high road and still cashed in.

Joe Jackson’s next album would be named for another jazz standard, Johnny Green’s “Body and Soul,” with an album cover alluding the cover of Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2.  By then, he was boycotting MTV in 1984, kind of career suicide.  He recorded his next album, Big World, live, avoiding the artificiality of the way records were being recorded in 1986.  Then he made two more albums, Blaze of Glory (1989) and Laughter and Lust (1991) that sound like they were recorded in that very moment.     

Joe Jackson came up a couple of years after Elvis Costello, and Elvis Costello is perennial.  Even if his newest release wasn’t getting many streams, he could always appear on Stephen Colbert or The Beacon and get love.  Costello explored every genre of music imaginable and stayed cool.  You could walk into a supermarket and hear “Steppin’ Out” or “You Can’t Get What You Want ‘Til You Know What You Want,” but you might have to explain to certain youngsters why this guy, at his best, is really, really good. 

There was a moment the 14-year-old had a shot with that girl.  She nearly said she liked him, or maybe he thought she did.  This was after hours on the phone, and maybe it was a big misunderstanding.  Life would go on.  He would see Joe Jackson live a few times, including as a reviewer.  Music would unfold, and after a while the Ellington that influenced Jackson—along with much, much more—would loom way larger than Jackson possibly could.  But Jackson could still hit a nerve, because there are certain embarrassments and misunderstandings that shape who you are.  The 14-year-old who identified with the guy staring out the window on “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” has grown up.  He has new grievances and indignations.  He is grateful for what he has, but the world still ceases to make sense.  And the idea of living the life the New York advertised on Night and Day--where  Porter and Ellington and Sonny Rollins are in the air—is a fantasy.  Joe Jackson left New York years ago in protest of Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking bans.  “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” like “Fools in Love” and “It’s Different For Girls” and “I’m the Man,” still slap.  “I’m the Man,” pokes fun at the idea of music as salesmanship, but Joe Jackson was offering something real.  

Right now, I think I'm gonna plan a new trend
Because the line on the graph's getting low and we can't have that

And you think you’re immune, but I can sell you anything

Anything from a thin safety pin to a pork pie hat

'Cause I've got the trash and you got the cash
So baby, we should get along fine
Why don't you give me all your money?
'Cause I know you think I'm funny, yeah
Can't you hear me laughing? Can't you see me smile?

The 14-year-old-boy will grow up to a place where he can love and be loved in return.  He will learn so many things beyond it, and he will go back to Joe Jackson because it’s exotic, because he hasn’t gone back to this lonely corner of the past in a while. He thinks about how weird it is to feel nostalgia for the loneliest time in his life.  The opening song on Night and Day embodies the excitement of an entirely new place, where the smallness of the provinces are left behind.  Drums mix with congas mixing with a salsa riff the 14-year-old boy learns on the piano.  “Another World”—it sounded amazing on cassette.

There was no light
I was going to all the wrong places
Like day from night
Suddenly I saw a thousand faces

Step into that world and make the most of it, because it will turn into something else, maybe another world for the next unappreciated young person.  Joe Jackson felt it as a kid from Portsmouth.  Hell, he was once the musical director of the Portsmouth Playboy Club, and he could have stopped there, but he didn’t.  He made it all the way to that cassette, and to that idea that you can come a long way and keep going.  The window of excitement does not last for long. 

But this is a fine romance
If we have to be so demanding
We need just one more dance to
Leave here with an understanding

This is the encore after the encore.  There’s one more chance to go back to the past and get it right this time.  The fourteen-year-old is not a kid anymore, and he’ll never be a kid again.   Joe Jackson had an idea that he could create something that could combine The Clash with Steely Dan—not a bad idea.  By the time he created Night and Day, he thought he was on to bigger and better.  The good songs kept coming, but it really never got better than that.  But he thought it could.  The 14 year old thought he could do better, too.  He thought he had grown up.  But press play and the past is never dead. It's not even past.  It took a conservatory to train Joe Jackson and a bunch of unappreciated young people to get it.  Joe Jackson will be playing The Beacon soon, and if I go, I will be uncomfortably close to plenty of people who know the feeling,