The Book of (More) Delights: Essays by Gay Ross

Author:Gay, Ross [Gay, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Poetry, Essays
ISBN: 9781643755472
Google: XL-mEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0BS15QC8N
Goodreads: 149437019
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2023-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

42. DeBarge on Tiny Desk

My friend Aimee sent me a link to one of those NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, featuring El DeBarge, which, though I am hyperbolic by nature and design, is unhyperbolically one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And not only because El looks good, like really good, but that, too. For those of you black don’t crack-ers out there, El, like your gentle guide, has a lot of cracker in him, first that. But as you black don’t crack-ers out there will also probably know, El, as far as I understand it, had a string of very difficult years, intense addiction stuff, which can put a beating on your collagen, teeth, brain, and, oh yeah, voice.

My god his voice. El had a silky falsetto as a young man, which makes sense, for the falsetto—at least a certain kind of airless, dense, smooth falsetto—is a young man’s game. Listen to Gallant or Moses Sumney. Or better yet, and more to the point, listen to Maxwell’s MTV Unplugged version of Kate Bush’s song “This Woman’s Work,” which, if you’re like me, you’ll need to watch—I guess today I listened to it on Youtube, which means I also listened with my eyes—three or four times so you can deal with yourself, put your heart back in your chest and such. Let me not try to describe it. But when he sings it these days, fifteen or twenty years later, though it’s still Maxwell, it’s a different Maxwell, more nodules, more grit, more air, the latter of which we’re all turning into anyway. It’s for this reason, among others I’m sure (including how men sometimes are like birds; including how men, sometimes, are girls), that the silky falsetto is so moving to us—it’s the glimmering sonic anticipatory evidence that all is change. Which is also to say that Maxwell’s voice twenty years later, further along on its voyage to air, is also beautiful, and wordlessly so. (I sometimes think that one of the purposes of the beautiful, by the way, is to leave us, or rather bring us, to wordlessness. To grant us some silence.)

All to say though, and here’s the thing, and delight underdoes it: El, in these fifteen minutes, singing “I Know This Love Is Real,” a little mash-up of “This Dream” as tribute to Martin Luther King, which rolls into “Love Me In a Special Way,” by which time he’s donning a Kangol, sounds almost precisely like his seventeen-year-old self, as is confirmed by the comments, the blackest comments I promise you ever left behind one of these little desk concerts, the blackest comments to ever be planted in the gardenia field of NPR. Lots of give him his flowers and where’s his lifetime achievement award. And part of his lifetime achievement might be not only his angelic voice, but his being here with us at all. I mean his being alive.

Some years back I found myself in a DeBarge rabbit hole—if you have to go

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