Listening Again (Part 1) || "Make it Real" by The Jets

Last night both CBB and I had the pleasure of participating in a hi-speed pop-crit hoedown at the Redcat called "Listen Again." In the spirit of "agains" we'd both like to thank Eric Weisbard one more time for assembling all of us. Eric himself presented a haunting piece about the low-fi punk troubadour, Buddy Holocaust's untimely demise on the Southern California freeways. Its spareness felt especially poignant on the day we lost Heath. More on that tomorrow when it's CBB's turn to press the repeat button.

We'll spare you a full recap of the event, but like SoapNet and other hot resources of repurposed programming, each of us will hit you baby, one more time with our 5 minutes of infamy. Press play and sing along...



This is about the Jets.

Not the 70s rock quartet of skinny white boys from Illinois, but the fucking JETS.

An octet of stocky Tongan brothers and sisters with unruly Pacific Islander fros to match their color-coordinated pastels. You know—to give those keytars and synth drums a little extra POP!

But this isn’t one of their sizzling jams of island feelgood meets Latin freestyle with a little pinch of Minneapolis funk thrown in for good measure.

This is the slow—you can’t quite call it a jam—immigrant lovesong that most folks imagine only belongs to the likes of la Estefan.

You know the vamp...

A few sure-footed synth chords whet the appetite, as the syncopated ping of a lonely wood block surfaces alongside an ethereal slide guitar swooping in to announce heartbreak with an islander twang.

[Tonight it’s been a year…]
I remember hearing her voice in 1988. Elizabeth Wolfgramm. How a big-boned Tongan girl got a name like that I don't know. Blame it on the Empire.

But there that voice was. Sure and steady. And only one year older than my own. It was big, and young, yet (thankfully) without the diva vibrato you can drive a truck through.

There’s a modesty to her delivery that lets you know the girl has 17 brothers and sisters. Wolfgramm earnestly taps into the tropes of unrequited innocence that define crossover balladry. She made it hurt long before Selena’s posthumous radio hits added that dollop of extra booty we always knew was behind those brown voices that grew up Stateside.

[I loved you…]
“Make it Real” hailed me from “Love Songs on the KOST”* during my freshman year in high school--during that awkward time in American life when Bruce Willis’ Return of Bruno album peaked at #14 on the Billboard charts.

[You didn't feel the same..]
I didn’t even know who that "you" would be to break my heart and make me never "feel the same." But somehow, I knew I was in for a world of unrequited heartbreak in the years to come. And it was that anticipation of lust and sorrow, of the many “No’s” I’d be too afraid to solicit that made me love this song.

[In a dream you are here, you smile and hold me near...]
Maybe this was the oracular voice warning me about all the homo girl crushes I’d have to closet throughout high-school. Crushes I’d have to conceal with tawdry, disingenuous displays of hetero lust for femmie long-haired hapa boys who very well could’ve played keytar for the Jets. They for sure played the male lead in all the spring musicals.

[Hear me cryin' out to you..]
“Make it Real” cries out, in its near perfect and innocuous pop form, with all the tropes and feelings girls like to sing--ostensibly about the guys they like--but really, about each other.

[Here’s a tear from me to you…]
Trading Tears.
Was this what I wanted to call into reality?--all the tingly, girl on girl, romantic friendship stuff that already felt too threateningly real?!?

[I loved you…you didn’t feel the same]
I didn’t quite know how to say it then, but I allowed these feelings and fears to seep into my bones as I lost myself in fantasy. I was the Tongan balladeer—at once too ample to be andro, and yet still encased in a frilly blouse and boyish suit a little too-late for New Ro'.

Even when the song crescendos with a guitar solo inspired (like so many other power ballads before it) by Tony Peluso’s fuzz jam from the Carpenters’ “Goodbye to Love,” it resists really letting go and ultimately folds neatly back unto itself. It returns as the ballad form dictates to its abject chorus just begging for one more chance, but truly relieved never to get it.

[I loved you…you didn't feel the same...]
When I saw the video for “Make it Real” I knew that it would be one of the first—and perhaps even the ONLY time--I'd ever see the romantic lead played by a broadfaced Pacific Island girl in a pantsuit.

The song and the video don’t provide any pretty pictures of love, but offer comfort nonetheless with their worlds of quiet hurt and awkward poses. Worlds that echoed my own fumbling adolescence in a place that didn’t quite understand the tender feelings of stocky brown bodies that were too afraid to look for someone to love. And so it was in the wee hours of those late nite “Lovesongs on the KOST”, that I learned the greatest love of all is something a little quieter than what Whitney had in mind. - (KT)

*I wrote this before I saw CBB's KOST shout-out in her tear-jerking Death Cab post for O!I's SOTW. The simultaneity of our KOST-ing can only be chalked up to the creepy "psychic friends" quality of our ALOTR affinities.