Be My Baby is not a pop record. Not a thunderclap like a call to dance in the masque of the red death, a century bleary eyed waking out of a war with hands darting across the bed for its revolver. Not Cuba the previous October—won’t you please be my baby!—calling out in love an endless stream of serial numbers as the cloud rises, the strings coming in at 2:00 like afterwaves of a nuclear blast stripping a hemisphere apologetically of its flesh, the minutes stretching inchoate into a nebula of undecided time. Not the Spector of death. Not the sweat and grief of a hundred proms, a hundred populations of dancers now on medications in homes and graves. Not the tempo of this mantled earth, its diurnal rolling over into night, into morning. Not the artifact of rhythm and blues construed by some variety of madness into a mercurial force, momentary loss of blood pressure, totem, talisman of some sexual apocalypse hidden in Richard Nixon’s briefcase. Not the song Lee Harvey Oswald may have listened to as he masturbated in the bathtub with a mirror in the other hand and a dove with a snapped neck hanging like the victim of an avian lynch mob from the steel handle of the medicine cabinet above the bath. Not the mushroom cloud pushing phallically into a soft bank of cumulus, cactuses mourning the blasted corpses of New Mexican coyotes, the glow of the cloud like a milkshake, or a puff of magicians smoke, or a god of popcorn that learnt the origin of evil and gave its soul unflinchingly to space, the bloodied head of the desert rearing and falling gaspingly with the sound of horns into a busom of cloud all hung with stars. Not the skull of a buffalo slick with oil like vinyl blood, like the trophy of an alien war fought some distance from the American Empire and brought back home to be made into movies and serialised. Not the insurance policy Job took out, God speaking out of the tornado like some mannequin of a forgotten arcadian shopping mall. Not the Four Horsemen riding out on the campaign trail with Smith and Wessons and microphones taped to their necks like bulging black arteries, screaming slogans out of pandemonic stacks of speakers borne up by slave armies of cherubs, burnt red by the desert and screaming out the taglines of movies and detergents and the names of all the sporting heroes of the past, codewords to the dark door. Not the nuclear fire blossoming like a rose in winter and the rolling drums fading out into a soft night of thunder and eclipse. Not the horse rearing with the bullet between its teeth, appearing in its own hourlong network special, facelifted and laughing like a harbinger of holocaust and ruin. Not the specter of death, grasping blindly into a vinyl night, the lights of every soul long extinguished, dancing off into the next configuration of matter to wait there as the event horizon conceptualises a sun, ready to bloom for a billion billion years when time is come again, our planet but a child of children of matter a thousand years perjured and inane. Birth, and a little span of light, and we collapse with a moan into the fire: woah oh oh oh ohh.
