In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jack Balderrama Morley’s book Dream Facades smartly explores the intersection between reality television, the houses featured, and modern culture.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Little may be more American than the intersection of housing and television, and Morley offers an entertaining, informative deep dive into the reasons why.”
In his own words, here is Jack Balderrama Morley’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Dream Facades:
I can’t listen to music while writing because my little lemming brain gets too distracted, and there’s not much music referenced in my book, so I made this playlist didactically, imagining a set of songs that could be a sort of crib sheet for my book. Dream Facades is about the architecture of reality TV. It explores the feeling of unreality that comes from living in emotionally hollowed-out homes and the resulting yearning to feel real that drives us to look for reality on our TV screens by studying a handful of seminal shows. I imagine this playlist as a micro companion book that does something similar with these songs. Dream Echoes, maybe. Sounds that reflect the modern longing to more fully exist.
“Got to Be Real” — Cheryl Lynn
“To be real!” A cri de cœur, and what a dream it is, ironically, to be real. In this day and age, life feels so unreal, and we seek out the feeling of reality from many things: true love, homeownership, or media that promises to provide reality, whether that be reality TV or the news or anything else that claims to reflect the world as it truly is. Truly feeling real is a fantasy, and nothing that we see on a screen or experience virtually can ever really provide it. We are left with this yearning to be real even though we’re just as real as we have ever been. But this feeling of lacking something and yearning for it keeps us coming back to our screens, our dream facades, searching for a reality that they’ll never fully give us.
“Video Phone (feat. Lady Gaga)” — Beyoncé
A strange mix of sensuality and techno optimism was pervasive in the 2000s, when reality TV and its screens full of sexy bodies came into its own. When this song came out in 2008, the world was a mess: a global recession, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Technology seemed to point toward a better, more connected future. Facebook and social media were becoming huge, and cell phones, which were still pretty new, offered connection wherever you were. “Video Phone” made this new world sexy, not sad, a place where women could amass a gallery of men to keep in their pockets. Financial security may be out of reach, but a little hit of pleasure never is.
“Imma Be” — Black Eyed Peas
The recession was huge for reality TV and housing. The mortgage crisis sent millions out of their homes and tore up the American dream of homeownership, and the writer’s strike in Hollywood incentivized executives to rely more on unscripted programming. The homes on shows like The Real Housewives and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which took off in this era, offered surrogate dreams that had their corollaries in recession pop, of which “Imma Be” is a standout example. “Honeys in debt, baby bouncin’ them checks / But I don’t really mind when they bouncin’ them cheeks”—what lyrics! Who cares if they don’t really rhyme? In this economy, we can’t be picky. We’ll lose ourselves in whatever schlock the entertainment industry throws at us and end up with whatever world we find ourselves in today.
“WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)” — Cardi B
Any reality TV music playlist has to include the biggest reality star turned musician: Cardi B, who got her breakthrough role on VH1’s Love and Hip Hop. But even aside from that, “WAP” expresses how people look for the feeling of reality in physical sensations. “I wanna gag, I wanna choke / I want you to touch that lil’ dangly thing that swing in the back of my throat.” The song came out during the pandemic lockdown era, when so many people’s lives were feeling denuded, and it gave us a multisensory orgiastic experience. I only realized this recently, but even the title of the song is onomatopoeic: “Wap, wap, wap, that’s some wet ass pussy.” Cardi’s mind! And go figure, the video’s fantasy sex house features a cameo from reality megastar Kylie Jenner. We’re craving reality, and that’s what “WAP” gives us.
“Money Can’t Buy You Class” — Luann de Lesseps
Countess Luann de Lesseps of the Real Housewives of New York has not yet broken through musically like Cardi B. She’s not even the most successful Real Housewife musician; that would be Kandi Burruss, who was a Grammy winner before going on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Nor was the Countess the first to release a novelty song—Kim Zolciak Biermann released Tardy for the Party with Burruss’s help before de Lesseps’s single dropped. But de Lesseps pioneered a strange lane of reality TV musicality with her semi-ironic traveling cabaret act that offers the thrill of seeing a reality star in the flesh. Many other reality stars have followed her by becoming “DJs” and hosting club nights. They’re not mainstream music stars in any conventional sense, but they are making money with music and show how the absurd world on screen is sliding over the one all around us, making reality feel even less real.
“Immaterial” — SOPHIE
Now we pivot from the delirious pop portion of this playlist into the dark night of the soul that I fell into while writing and immersing myself in the sordid sides of American culture. Released in 2018, this song is not bombastically optimistic about technology, and SOPHIE, the song’s late creator, self consciously played with the themes of pop from decades prior. “Immaterial” is, I assume, a wink at Madonna’s seminal “Material Girl,” and SOPHIE’s song turns the late 20th-century capitalist anthem into a 21st-century techno delirium that could be either heaven or hell. The track’s voice sings feverishly about technology’s power to make peoples’ identities immaterial, cut off from whatever grounded them before so they can become anything they want. Is she excited? Panicked? Something strange or the star shooting through the night where we’re all headed?
“Homogenized Milk” — Special Interest
Writing Dream Facades sent me into a gentle psychosis. The deadlines, the constant streams of reality TV, and the dive into the depths of the fucked-up American housing system, all against the backdrop of whatever crap was happening in the world. This song, which starts with the lines “What happens when there’s nothing left to gentrify / And genocide is on your side?” and devolves into the repeated shouted question “What happens when there’s nothing?” really spoke to my spirit.
“ALie Nation” —The Halluci Nation, John Trudell, Lido Pimienta, Tanya Tagaq, Northern Voice
Surprisingly for me, my book about reality TV and architecture became a book about colonialization in the United States and even how religions like Christianity have detached people from their natural surroundings in their focus on an internal soul and a metaphysical sacred plane. That’s not at all what I had in mind when I started writing, but it’s where I went while I was trying to figure out why we’re so eager to look for a feeling of reality from little screens in our homes instead of finding it in the physical worlds where we live. I started listening to this song after I finished writing, and it seemed to summarize what I was thinking way more concisely that what I had written. “All the things of the earth and in the sky have energy to be exploited / Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls, sold / Until nothing is sacred not even their self / The ALie Nation, the alienation.”
“Unwritten” — Natasha Bedingfield
This is the only song on this playlist that I reference in Dream Facades. Though the story of the world is pretty depressing these days, the rest, I write at the end of the introduction, quoting Natasha Bedingfield’s millennial optimism, is still unwritten. “Unwritten” is the theme song of The Hills, which is my favorite reality TV show. I use it to tie the book together. The show signaled an evolution of the genre away from its raunchy days of the early 2000s, into a more glamorous era. Adam DiVello, its creator, pioneered a slick, cinematic look that seduced me; the show inspired me to move across the country to LA when I was 21. I wanted to be a part of the sunny world I saw on screen, and that seductive power of reality TV is what my book is all about. And despite how fake so much reality TV is, it’s that sunny optimism, no matter how dark things are now, that I still try to carry with me as we write our next chapters.
Jack Balderrama Morley is a queer, Xicanx-Anglo writer and managing editor of Dwell, a preeminent digital and physical magazine dedicated to home design. Jack’s nonfiction writing has appeared in Dwell, and their fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, No Contact, Gertrude, and Soft Punk.