Beat Happening - Beat Happening (1985)
Artist: Beat Happening
Author: Sarah
Date: 2/16/2025
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Have you ever been to Ocean City? It's one of those soulless towns that crop up along the seashore, Myrtle Beach for Yankees who can't handle the drive. It's one of the most baffling things ever: as far as I can tell, nobody actually lives there, they just stay for the week. It's a city without a real need to exist, without any means of continuing to exist (in my travels, half of the towns of this type don't even have grocery stores). It wasn't always that way. Looking at these kitschy buildings, you know that once upon a time, this was somewhere someone wanted to be (or somewhere someone thought someone else wanted to be). That's part of the appeal, to me: this idea that the city is dead but refuses to accept it.
It's especially fitting that my first time hearing Beat Happening was in this living corpse of a city. Beat Happening is the sound of trying to recapture something that was lost, something that might not even have ever been possessed. It's a beach party, but no one's really having that much fun; they only remember when they once found it fun. Take, for example, "Down at the Sea". At first listen, it sounds like a summer idyll, but there's a definite undercurrent of suicidal ideation in it (i.e. "I dance with the clams and you dance with the fish" or "we'll dream about the waves... coming in and washing us away"). Why such despondency? They've forgotten how to communicate.
That's what nearly all of these songs catalog. "Foggy Eyes", "I Let Him Get to Me", "Run Down the Stairs", "Fourteen", they're all explicitly about an inability to tell someone how they feel. That's why it's all so childish. They're trying to go back to when communication was easy, when somewhere like Ocean City seemed like paradise, and not a collection of half-vacant hotels. If they can go back to a time when adults knew everything (in "I Spy", it's not unimportant that Calvin's spy fantasy ends with "...and I don't know how to cry"), then all their problems are solved.