"But I have to have things my own way to keep me in my youth"

Supertramp and Crypto-libertarianism

An emotional centerpiece of the week was the fallout from listening to Elizabeth Zharoff, aka The Charismatic Voice, react to Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger.” A far less emotionally charged experience was a quick read of David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism - a horrifyingly prescient analysis of bitcoin and crypto-libertarianism published in 2016. Together, they make for a good example of how sex and politics refract conceptually through each other - one of my favorite demonstrations of how this works is Rachel Weil’s Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714. It was also nice that a theme in my writing also surfaced in teaching this week, as I taught an essay by Suzanne Cusick about a seventeenth-century trial in Florence, in which a man was put on trial - with the possibility of a death sentence - for sneaking into a convent to hear a woman sing. The various interpretations of the event - “he intended to have sex with her/he just wanted to hear her sing,” had enormous political implications. So, music, sex, and politics are all tangled up - all the time, but especially right now in my Saturday writing session.

Supertramp is a band I’ve liked very much, but not loved, for a long time. When I worked at Tower Records, I remember waffling between committing to buying a bunch of Supertramp albums or just going with a “best of” compilation. I ran it by a co-worker who just didn’t like Supertramp at all, so he wasn’t much help. At that time, I decided I didn’t like Supertramp enough to commit, but I did want to have ready access to some of their songs for when I was in the mood for them. So, the “best of” compilation it was. My memory can’t reconstruct how I came across Supertramp, what about them clicked, although it remains true that I am eternally cheered by the fact that their song “Breakfast in America” has A TUBA.

So, when YouTube delivered a reaction to Supertramp, I was eager, but not too eager, to dive in. But diving in was a delight. Zharoff gave me a lot more appreciation for their musicality. She made me hear the things I’d heard but hadn’t heard in their music. But, I’m going to reflect more on where I felt discomfort than where I felt my fondness for Supertramp intensify.

The first thing that I noticed as I listened along with Zharoff is that Rick Davies punches out his words in a way I hadn’t really noticed before. This punchy quality shifted my perception significantly, so that the singing was giving me a kind of toxic masculinity right off the bat. So, as I watched, I felt a very familiar pull between “oh, he’s cute” and “I don’t particularly like what he’s doing.”

In the video, there’s a particular moment around 20 minutes in where Zharoff had to process that the song wasn’t about “ending a relationship,” as her template of expectation had guided her. “Goodbye Stranger,” immediately from the title, is an anthem of a cad. If I’d been in the room with Zharoff, I’d have suggested that she put the song in the context of the catalog aria from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, to give her a framework from her operatic background.

But watching her have to process that unmet expectation brought the caddishness of the song to the surface in a way that forced me to grapple with it for real. It’s not like I didn’t know that that’s the nature of the song - but I’d been able to keep up a Teflon wall between the music and the lyrics when I’d listened to it before. As that wall came crashing down, I ended up in the feels about my sexual history. When Zharoff said, “I’m not sure I’d want to be the other person in this relationship,” a lot of memories of being the other person in experiences with cads coalesced.

If I could rewrite the story of my life, there’d be a high school sweetheart I married. When I was a kid, our neighbors Stuart and Angelo modeled a gay relationship in which two men were simply inseparable, and I think they set up a sense that that kind of bond was a real possibility. But other factors got in the way of that being the set-up of my life, and my adulthood has basically been a coming-to-terms with singleness and getting to a point where the drop in sex drive means that’s a fact of life rather than a source of distress.

I’ve also had the experience of being the one to ghost someone after a perfectly nice one-night stand. There was something about the experience that felt complete, that I didn’t want to complicate, so I slipped out before he woke up the next morning. He was someone who clearly got around, so I don’t feel like I was a heartbreaker, but I did get to feel what that break that Davies describes feels like, so I can understand where the song’s coming from. I remember talking to a lesbian friend about it, and she waxed rhapsodic about the joy of that early morning walk away from a one-night stand - and I thought her enthusiasm for that moment in contrast to my more experimental sense of it was a nice subversion of gender stereotypes.

Over the week, I had a lot of thoughts about that pull between a desire for monogamy and mixed feelings about what I’ve learned, both positive and negative, from various one-night stands or being dumped out of the blue. There’s so much to explore there. But I want to come back to how this experience of processing lessons from my sexual history intersects with our current political moment. What binds these two experiences is that both “Goodbye Stranger” and the libertarianism of tech culture value freedom as the absence of responsibility. My read of The Politics of Bitcoin was quick and superficial, but a prominent idea throughout is that the rhetoric of bitcoin defenders always ends up as an attack on the social contract that underlies any kind of decent governance. As we see Grover Norquist’s dream of drowning the government in a bathtub come true before our eyes, as we see a narcissistic techbro who sires, rather than fathers, children, as the central agent of that destruction, that common theme of freedom as the evasion of responsibility and relation is all-too apparent.

I suppose my reflections could be read as a kind of denunciation of casual sex, which is not where I want to end up. I really do not want to argue that sex has to be channeled into permanent relations. But there is a particular quality to the celebration of separation, irresponsibility, and immaturity that “Goodbye Stranger” holds up that feels a little too close to home as we watch those qualities manifest in the absolute wrecking of what little social compact our federal government could sustain.