My interpretation of “Summer Playlist Screamer Songs” follows, radically in heart and soul, translated: a list of songs, all brought together into a collaborative, collective, tiny, modern thing, most playfully known as a “playlist.” The singer is screaming into a crescendo about something, anything, affectively deep. It could be in your mother tongue, or a foreign tongue, too- indeed, what is in yours? “¿En inglés o en español? ”In English or in Spanish?” What language do you love in?” a poet drilled Yolanda, the main character of Julia Alvarez’s, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
First and foremost, they must exhilarate emoting. The ethology of catharsis is also gleaned from said effect. The most surefire way to experimentally create heartbreak is when psychologists play weepy, sadness-inducing music. I am arguing for another subcategory of emotive music called “Screamer Songs,” whereby rage, loss, or joy are released in a cathartic crescendo. Why summer? Because the upbeat season for the majority is profoundly heart-wrenching for those who feel lonely in my city of New York, for instance, or are mourning the losses of summers past. In short, it is the season when we tend to travel at higher levels, which can also be a season of deepest delight. Summer Screaming may also be in a passionate, exuberant tone.
My musings supersede how diverse and mesmerizing song lists are, and how they feel like they may just pinch your soul ever so slightly. Further, they bring humans together in concerts and “collective effervescence,” à la Émile Durkheim, that can bring us into close proximity at a heart-throbbing concert in the shared sacred musical field where we all co-exist in pulsating harmony, which is considered one of Dacher Keltner’s “eight wonders of life.” Keltner defines another of the eight wonders that leads to transformative, wow-like wonder through “musical awe.” He uses the stunning term “cashmere blanket of sound” to narrate these phenomena.
Attachment theory follows that feeling felt, seen, and soothed are all signals of secure attachment. How does a song play that particular role in your life? Do the embers of the song tear you up inside like a love poem? Attachment was discovered by John Bowlby, a construct he delineated as an evolutionary mechanism for seeking close proximity to caretakers, known as “proximity maintenance,” which protects us from predators and other threats. Bowlby posited that infants cry and cling to maintain survival. Indeed, does a Screamer Song make you cry and cling? Is the Screamer crying and clinging in said Screamer song? Bowlby invented something known as “Safe Haven,” à la David Bowie playing Rock and Roll Suicide: “You’re not alone!” playing with a courageous crescendo where, when a child is threatened, or in pain, caretakers soothe and co-regulate their utter distress of loneliness. Does the Screamer Song soothe the soul?
He furthermore invented the brilliant construct called “Secure Base,” whereby a responsive early attachment figure gives a child permission to explore, that is, adventure playfully into transcendent experiences. Is the Screamer Song playful, and does it incite you to wish to transcend into joy? A la “I was Dancing at a Lesbian Bar” by Jonathan Richman, where he dictates dancing by himself at a bar that is presumably more heteronormative, only to be welcomed by a group of people who bring him to a transcendently delightful “Lesbian Bar” where human hips seem to be liberated, one of the utmost symbols of security:
In the first bar, folks were drinking sips,
But in this bar, they could shake their hips
In the first bar, they were drinking sips
In this bar, they could shake their hips
Finally, Bowlby moreover contributed the concept of “Internal Working Model,” in which a child internalizes caregivers, and their early attachment shapes their sense of self-worth in future relationships. Does the Screamer Song tear you up inside because it reminds you of a parent, impacting your self-worth? Consider the definitive Screamer, “Stand by Your Man” by Tammy Wynette, which I initially despised for all of its patriarchy, and had to include to elucidate the genre. Like what I define as the “Elephant Pants Effect” in traveling to Thailand, where most, if not all, U.S. American foreigners are wearing them while traveling, they kind of secretly grew on me the more I saw them and listened to this misogynist heartbreaking example of passively standing by as your man presumably drifts nefariously. This song embodies anxious ambivalent attachment, which I will describe in short order.
Margaret Ainsworth invented the magical experiment called the “Strange Situation”, a 20-minute standardized, observational study designed to measure an infant’s attachment in 8 stages: while playing (see Summer Screamer Playlist), while encountering a stranger, and with brief separations and reunions with a parent. Does it tear a hole in your heart with “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” by Bessie Smith? (See Screamer Playlist.) Moreover, Ainsworth discovered three miraculous attachment styles: Secure, Anxious-Avoidant, and Anxious-Resistant/Ambivalent, and later researchers discovered Disorganized/Disoriented. Secure attachment is when the caregiver is used as a “Secure Base” to play and explore. Infants cry or show distress when the parent leaves. “La Llorona” by Lila Downs translates to “The Crier!” Crying is normative for both secure babies and insecure, anxious-resistant babies. Secure infants are easily soothed upon reunion with comforting parents. Do you see a caretaker or beloved other through “La Vie en Rose” by Édith Piaf (rough translation: “Life Through Rose-Colored Lenses”) and Patti Smith’s “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo?”
“I walk in a room, you know I look so proud, I move in this here atmosphere where anything’s allowed.”
This Screamer amplifies into security personified. Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” follows as a day spent with your beloved exonerates you from your problems, with a crushing crescendo:
Just a perfect day, problems all left alone
Weekenders on our own, it’s such fun
Just a perfect day, you made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else, someone good
Imagine a true other making you feel your goodness inherently. That rips the soul out with its security.
In Mahalia Jackson’s “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” she exuberantly screams. “I am weak, but Thou art strong” identifies her relationship with a True Other who is older, wiser, and indeed stronger than her. While it was a stunning religious hymn that played at my grandmother’s funeral, the relationship with the Other is indeed secure, with proximity-seeking to secure attachment figures who might soothe us, whether religious or parental:
I am weak, but Thou art strong;
… keep me from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
In a miraculous discovery, Ainsworth also found three distinct styles of insecure attachment. Anxious-Avoidant infants show outwardly lower levels of distress when the caregiver leaves. “Chan Chan” by Buena Vista Social Club is set in a majestic pre-Columbian Peruvian city, and the following lyrics epitomize anxious-avoidant attachment: despite betraying few outward symptoms of distress, internally they are feeling insurmountable sadness, albeit mixed with a profound longing for autonomy and discovery:
“When Juanica and Chan Chan
were sifting sand at the sea
The way she took the sifter
made Chan Chan sad”
Anxious-Resistant (Ambivalent) Attachment is how children and later adults internalize others and whether or not they are soothed by their parents. Does the song furiously pierce your soul and refuse to comfort you? Like the vibrations of Hole’s “Violet:” (ambivalent) attachment. “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash is further ambivalently attached, as the protagonist, “A boy named Sue,” literally threatens to kill his father: “My name is Sue, how do you do? Now you’re gonna die!” That’s what I told him!” A minute before a destructive fight where he took swings at his own father, and his father, in turn, cut off a piece of Sue’s hair.
Disorganized-Disoriented was later invented by researchers to suggest that the child has a complex craving for intimacy, all while fearing vulnerability, and the push-pull behaviors ensue. À la Magnetic Fields, utterly holding onto an ex even though everyone in their life wants them to move on. “I don’t want to get over you. Cause I don’t wanna get over love. I could listen to my therapist. Pretend you don’t exist.” Not wanting to release an ex or get over them indeed personifies disorganized attachment. “Paloma Negra” (Black Dove) by Chavela Vargas roughly translates to the following Screamer lyrics about an ex. She indeed precipitously crescendos with ”There are moments when I’d like to give it up, and tear out the nails of my suffering, but my eyes, they die without looking at your eyes. And my affection, with the dawn, waits for you again.” Again, there is an intoxicating culmination of intensity of the words and climax of the Screamer.
Please handle the below Screamer Playlist with tremendous care. Do not listen without being able to “Screamer Sing” along.
1. “Paloma Negra” by Chavela Vargas translates to “Black Dove”
2. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” by Mahalia Jackson
3. “La Llorona” by Lila Downs. Translates to “The Cryer”
4. “Un anno d’amore” by Mina. Translates to “A year of Love”.
5. “Rock and Roll Suicide” by David Bowie
6. “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf. Translated roughly to the following idiom: “Life in Rose Colored lenses”
7. “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo.” By Patty Smith.
8. ”I Don’t Want to get Over you” by Magnetic Fields.
9. “I was Dancing at the Lesbian Bar” by Jonathan Richman.
10. “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash
11. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” by Bessie Smith.
12. “Stand by your man” by Tammy Wynette, even with initially insisting on my own despising of this song based on the lyrics, and its genre that I do not follow, I kept relistening to it, it is indeed a Summer Screamer.
13. “Chan Chan” by Buena Vista Social Club
14. “Ruby, Baby” by Björk
15 “Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin
16. “A tu vera”- (translates to “by the water”, a colloquialism that signifies ” By your side” by Lola Florez
17. “A Fool in Love” by Tina Turner
18. “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding
19. “I’ve Got a Woman” by Ray Charles
20. “Hey Ya” by Outkast.
21. “Criminal“ by Fiona Apple.
22. “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse.
23. “ Violet” by Hole
24. “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed
25. “Beginning to See the Light” by Velvet Underground.