Nowadays

You can like the life you're living... kinda!

It may come as a shock that this Gen Z elder can remember days before iPods.

In his excellent essay collection Pure Innocent Fun, Ira Madison III recounts many pop culture touch stones from the 90s and early 2000s which were just before my time. For example, when I watched Buffy in high school it was on Netflix, not the WB. The Britney music video that I sparked my fervent obsession with her discography was “Criminal” rather than “…Oops I Did It Again.” Still, there are pieces of millennial culture I was born early enough to be intimately familiar with. One is the CD walkman.

My mom had a CD walkman that I would listen to as often as she would allow me to borrow it. The internet tells me iPods were first released in 2001, but this does not FEEL true, and I have trouble believing it. In my heart, iPods did not exist until the release of the 2nd generation iPod nano in 2007, and even then, it didn’t exist to me until sometime around 2008 or 2009 when I got one for my birthday.

My iPod was blue, sleek and seemed like the pinnacle of modern technology. She was everything to me. Before I had my own computer, DVD player, or phone, my iPod was my connection to the pop culture that ruled my life. I was the kind of kid who planned my week around network TV show schedules¹ and as soon as streaming made its debut, my thirteen year old self was sneaking time with the family computer to watch House of Cards.²

But before any of that, I had CDs. I had a blue CD player/radio in my room from PC Richards & Sons and the borrowed CD walkman that I would listen to on a bench in the lobby of the yoga studio where my mom worked. I wore out my favorite albums there while impatiently waiting for her shift to end so we could go to Benny’s Burritos.³

The crown jewels of my CD collection were:

• Ultimate Broadway (A Collection from 1998)

• Sweet Charity (The Original Cast Recording (1966))

• Rock of Ages (Original Broadway Cast Recording (2009))

• Priscilla: Queen of the Dessert (Original Broadway Cast Recording (2011))

Because I didn’t have my own money to spend on Apple Music and these selections were somewhat niche, I continued to listen to these CDs long after I got my iPod and CDs had begun to fall out of fashion. My music taste was built by these CDs. Ultimate Broadway gave me the sampling of Broadway soundtracks that would become a part of my DNA. My love of good and cheesy 80s rock is a direct result of Rock of Ages. Priscilla first introduced me to disco and 70s pop outside my parents’ taste.

In addition to sharing the walkman, my mom and I also shared CDs. My favorite of her collection was the 1996 Chicago revival album. She went through a big Chicago phase where she’d listen to “Cell Block Tango” on repeat at the gym, but I was still all about Sweet Charity.⁴ When I did listen to Chicago, “All that Jazz” and “Roxie” got plenty of plays, but “Nowadays” was always my absolute favorite number. “Nowadays” is the show’s final song leading into the epic finale, which is made up of the instrumental dance number “Hot Honey Rag” and a one minute “All That Jazz” reprise.

“It's good, isn't it?
Grand, isn't it?
Great, isn't it?
Swell, isn't it?
Fun, isn't it?
Nowadays”

“Nowadays” felt quite profound to my young mind. It opens with Ann Reinking’s unmistakable rasp saying, “It’s all gone.” Her character Roxie has reached the end of her fifteen minutes of fame as a murderess in 1920s Chicago. Her dreams of being a famous showgirl on the Vaudeville circuit have been dashed. Gone are the press, her lawyer, and the husband she never cared for. But hustler that she is, Roxie isn’t done. The music slowly builds as Roxie tells us how “good,” no “grand,” no “great” things are. Then, an announcer presents Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly (Roxie’s rival in jail) as a killer double header, putting the pair back on top.

This song appealed to the kind of main-character-syndrome child I was. The type that sang to the flowers at recess, wrote novels in my journals, and was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. I wanted the freedom to build “the life I liked” without any social or parental restrictions. I wanted to emulate the sexually liberated, tenacious feminine heroines singing that “you can even marry Harry and mess around with Ike,” before I fully understood what they were talking about.

Sweet Charity has similar sensuality and style, only the finale leans tragic rather than triumphant. The title character Charity is a painfully sweet and naive dance hall girl, who despite her best efforts, just can’t catch a break. She puts all her faith in a Cinderella story that doesn’t pan out and ends the show with nothing but a broken heart.⁵ As a kid, I loved a beautiful, doomed heroine. I didn’t think of myself as naive like Charity, but I was definitely emotional and a hopeless romantic. A few years ago, at dinner, my dad said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “Well, if there’s one thing we know about you, it’s that you’re sensitive.” I still haven’t forgiven him for it.

I am sensitive. I cry whenever I think about my parents dying and find it hard to look at dead mice on the street. I have my share of breakdowns and moody journaling sessions, but I am NOT as sensitive as I used to be.

I see the change in my reactions to Fosse’s heroines. When I listen to Sweet Charity now, I feel bad for Charity, but I don’t fear becoming her. I no longer see myself as love’s fool, desperate for a person to plan a future around. Instead, I see parts of myself in the merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail. Roxie and Velma are selfish, callous, and often cruel, but they’re also ambitious, independent, and fun. Velma Kelly sings at the end of “All that Jazz,” “No, I'm no one's wife / But oh, I love my life.” That can be a truly fabulous feeling!⁶

When I first got a Spotify account around 2016, I created a Broadway playlist, but it never quite held up to the CD collection that had begun to collect dust in my bedroom. Broadway songs don’t work as well on shuffle. You need the progression and the storytelling with certain expected skips.⁷ These days, I mostly listen to showtunes on vinyl, which means the albums I don’t own become blind spots. I do have a vinyl copy of Sweet Charity⁸ but not of the 90s Chicago revival.⁹

This month, when I attended Chicago on Broadway for the first time, it was a moment of rediscovery. Everything was as good, if not better than I remembered. When Dylis Croman’s Roxie announced, “It’s all gone,” I felt just as entranced and amazed as I always was hearing “Nowadays” as a kid.

I left the theater on a high. My visiting college besties, and I took photos in front of the theater marquis, and I drafted an Instagram story set to my favorite song. Only then it occurred to me, I can’t exactly post something with the line, “isn’t it good… nowadays,” because is it?

Is it really?

“Nowadays” was never intended to be taken literally. Chicago is a musical that mocks the pageantry of the justice system and the thirst for blood in the press. When Roxie tells her lawyer that people love her, he replies, “They'd love you a lot more if you were hanged. You know why? Because it would sell more papers!”

Still, it’s hard to look around, see the world burning, and accept that this is the nowadays we’re stuck with. Lately I’ve felt horrified and frustrated and hopeless about the millionaire man-children running our country with no regard for human rights. I’ve felt disappointed and stuck and sort of powerless in my present moment. I’ve even been tempted to retreat into nostalgia for days of CDs and iPods, but that kind of escape is a hollow one.

Chicago warns us, “nothing stays,” and thank God it doesn’t.

I believe it’s ultimately up to us to change things. To work towards the world, the relationships, the career, and the life we like. In between that work, in moments I feel hopelessly stuck, I find a good song helps pass the time. Not the kind of song that makes you wallow, but the kind of song that gets you fired up, gets you going, and makes you dance on your way out of the office. The kind of song that can shift your perspective and remind you, not all is lost and nothing is over. The kind of song that leads into an epic dance finale with an outro like:

“Okay, you babes of jazz. Let's pick up the pace.
Let's shake the blues away. Let's make the parties
longer. Let's make the skirts shorter and shorter.
Let's make the music hotter. Let's all go to hell
in a fast car and KEEP IT HOT!”

Recommendations for This Era:

• If you’ve never felt the euphoria of belting “All That Jazz” at Marie’s crisis cafe, I can recommend nothing more.

• Mayhem by Lady Gaga (still on repeat)

• Mid Century Modern on Hulu

• XOXO Gossip Giancaspro’s “The Worst Song to Fuck To” list Parts 1 & 2 - truly a delightful hilarious read with so many fabulous author/musician guest stars:

  150. The Worst Song to Fuck To, Part 1

• “twilight zone” by Ariana Grande

• Trench coats

• A fantastic advice column from ¡Hola Papi! about feeling powerless in present times (that has better answers than my newsletter):

  What Am I Supposed to Do?

• Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III

• Rewatching Moonstruck (1987)

• Listening to Broadway albums in full

1. Tuesday nights were for Glee!!!

2. I only watched through season two and don’t feel any inclination to revisit this series. Still, I’ve never forgotten the Season 1 Episode 7 scene when Kate Mara is sitting on a fire escape on the phone wishing her dad a happy Father’s Day and it seems as though she’s going to trace a heart in the fogged up window, but but instead she makes it a dick. In the same scene, she then has sex with Kevin Spacey while still on the phone with her dad and he has some truly gross dialogue, but it was that heart bait and switch that made a permanent imprint on my young mind.

3. It devastates me that this restaurant doesn’t exist in the West Village anymore. In its prime, the burritos were enormous and the vibes were unmatched.

4. I’d play “Rhythm of Life” and “I Love to Cry at Weddings” over and over. “I Love to Cry at Weddings” remains one of my all time favorite Broadway bangers, but in adulthood “Rhythm of Life” has been replaced in my good graces by “Baby, Dream Your Dream,” which offers a perfect combination of upbeat and heartbreaking storytelling.

5. She’s kind of the OG Anora!

6. And it can be achieved without murder!

7. As any Wicked fan can tell you when it comes to “A Simple Man” and “Dear Old Shiz.”

8. I felt like I won the lottery when I found it at a Housing Works.

9. A 25th anniversary vinyl printing does exist, but you’re never going to find that album laying around used book stores the way you do with popular musicals from the 50s, 60s, and occasionally 70s.