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January 17, 2023
Dan Kois's Playlist for His Novel "Vintage Contemporaries"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Dan Kois's novel Vintage Contemporaries is a smart and funny debut, charming in the best and most profound of ways.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A bittersweet love letter to 1990s New York….what’s best about Kois’ work here is…his eye for detail and penchant for humorously trenchant descriptions….This keenly observed…atmospheric first novel is an ode to friendship, creativity, and an era now gone."
In his own words, here is Dan Kois's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Vintage Contemporaries:
In the first meeting between Em and Emily, the two friends at the center of my novel Vintage Contemporaries, the young women sit in Emily’s Lower East Side apartment late at night and listen to music. It’s 1991, and Em is astonished at Emily’s 25-disc CD changer, which allows her to play random songs for hours. “Let me introduce you,” Emily says with great pride, “to the shuffle.”
Many of the characters in Vintage Contemporaries really care about music, in the way that they also really care about books, theater, and movies. They bond over songs, argue about songs, theorize about songs—most of all, they just listen to songs, almost all the time. Here’s a playlist of the songs that the characters in this novel, which is set partly in the early 1990s and partly in the mid-2000s, listen to.
New Order: True Faith
The novel opens in a dance club in 1991. Em is not a true club kid, so when this song—familiar from the radio—comes on, she feels a sense of relief and finally allows herself to cut loose on the dance floor.
Breeders: Glorious
Emily plays this for Em on the CD changer during that momentous first meeting. It’s slow and roiling, and when it’s over, Emily says, “That song just fucks me real good.” Em spends a lot of their friendship wondering how on earth Emily can say the things she does.
Neneh Cherry: I’ve Got You Under My Skin
That same night, this song comes on the shuffle. It’s from Red Hot + Blue, an AIDS benefit album of Cole Porter covers that came out in 1990. Organizing against the government’s repugnant AIDS policies becomes the first real activist impulse of Emily’s life.
R.E.M.: Life and How to Live It
Emily is from Athens, Georgia, an origin story that drives Em very slightly insane. She can’t believe she’s meeting someone who’s actually from that place, a place that had always seemed to Em the epitome of an artistic wonderland, where everyone makes something beautiful and you might run into Michael Stipe in a coffee shop. Emily eventually asks Em where she’s from: “Wisconsin,” she says, meaning nowhere.
NWA: Straight Out of Compton
Like some white rap fans, especially in the 1990s, Emily has an overly sympathetic sense of her own relationship to the Black struggle. In the midst of an argument about the politics of the movie Boyz ‘N the Hood, Emily busts this song out and raps along with it as a way of proving what she sees as her bona fides. Em asks her to please stop using the N-word quite so much.
The Clash: Know Your Rights
On a drive to an ACT UP rally in Maine, Emily starts Side 2 of a protest-themed mix tape with this song, the first single off 1982’s Combat Rock. It’s the one that begins with Joe Strummer yelling, “This is a public service announcement … with guitar!”
Madonna: Like a Prayer
Louis, Em’s roommate, who is gay and more involved with ACT UP than either of the young women, accompanies them on the trip to Maine. Eventually, he gets sick of Emily’s protest mix tape and puts in his own cassette, which begins with this gift to people singing along on road trips.
Morphine: Cure for Pain
Em accompanies Emily to Georgia for her grandmother’s birthday party, and Emily listens to a Morphine CD on her Discman all the way down. This is mood music, and Emily’s in a mood; I confess that in my twenties I spent a lot of time on buses and trains listening to this exact album, staring out the window, whole towns passing by, insignificant in the face of my enormous feelings.
Ministry: N.W.O.
Em’s older sister and her husband come to New York to visit. Emily puts on this CD—described as “the most misbegotten choice of Em’s twelve-for-a-dollar BMG CD club deal last fall”—to fuck with them. Em’s poor, square brother-in-law asks politely, “Now, is this grunge?”
For those of you who do not know about the remarkable schemes that were these music clubs: For decades, two companies, BMG and Columbia House, ran mail-order CD businesses (previously, they had been mail-order cassette and record businesses). When you first signed up, you got some incredible number of albums for basically nothing. For a young person crazy about music in the pre-streaming era, this was astonishing and irresistible.
The problem was, you’d get your 12 free discs, mostly stuff you loved but a few things that were completely not to your taste—and you were then obligated to buy like five more CDs at exorbitant prices in the next few years. They would mail you a catalog, and if you didn’t reply in time, they would just ship you that month’s special selection and bill you $14.95 plus shipping and handling. And they would hassle you endlessly. Remember that scene in A Serious Man where Michael Stuhlbarg repeats, “I didn’t ask for Santana Abraxas”? It was like that.
When I departed for college I left behind four such memberships, two with each company, under the names Dan Kois and Daniel J. Kios, which somehow worked. My mom had to field angry letters and calls from Columbia House and BMG until she sold our childhood home, possibly for this very reason.
They Might Be Giants: Don’t Let’s Start
Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful.
Heartless Bastards: New Resolution
Now we’re in the part of the book set in the 21st century. Emily and Em’s friendship broke up a long time ago, but they’re taking tentative steps toward getting back together. They bond over this song during their first lunch in years. Attentive observers might notice that I am not a woman, though I am writing about women. I had a lot of help from a number of women readers for this novel, who gave me a lot of advice about maintaining a believable voice. No advice was more important than the instruction I got from my friend, the essayist and novelist Belle Boggs, who read the first draft of this scene, in which Em and Emily bonded over the Hold Steady, and said, “That is not believable. Do the Heartless Bastards instead."
Traditional: Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart
I love this hymn, which Em hears, and thinks a lot about, during church.
Grateful Dead: Ripple
Em’s husband, in the year 2005, is a Deadhead of long standing. Em is somewhat bewildered to find that after years of marriage she just somehow knows a bunch of Grateful Dead songs, including this one, which makes a beautiful lullaby. I was never a Deadhead—like an idiot, I even skipped the chance to see them when they were playing in 1992, 200 yards from my dorm room at the Dean Dome—but I’ve come to love them late in life, fulfilling my destiny as a bearded man.
Spoon: The Underdog
In the novel, Em’s toddler dances an adorable naked dance to this song, waggling her little butt like a bee, and Em takes video of her with her new phone, and puts the video on YouTube, where it remains for years until it is deleted as algorithm-identified child pornography, a crushing development. This exact thing happened to us.
The Backyardigans: The Customer Is Always Right
At some point in parenting, you discover that you’re just listening to stuff like this all the time. The Backyardigans was a TV show about four anthropomorphic animals who lived in suburban houses with adjoining backyards, where they had musical adventures. Thirteen years after the last time I watched this show, I can still sing this song, because it is a bop.
Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and a Writers Guild Award. He’s the author of How to Be a Family, a memoir of parenting around the world; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), an oral history of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which was a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book; and Facing Future, a book of music criticism and biography. He is a frequent guest and host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, was a founding host of Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, and hosts The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis. He lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.
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