I’ll find your lips in the streetlight: The Retro Report, vol. 40

Sometimes I talk myself out of including things in this newsletter because I think everybody already knows about that. But then I must remind myself that monoculture is dead and there is almost no such thing as a thing that everyone knows, and that is why, this week, I am telling you all about Carly Rae Jepson’s 2015 masterpiece, Emotion (or, to be technical about it, E•MO•TION).

Part of me thinks, don’t the people already know about this? But what if you DON’T? Or what if you knew but you’d forgotten, or you only think of Carly Rae as the “Call Me Maybe” girl?? DID YOU KNOW: 2015 was literally eleven years ago? Obviously that is illegal and I’m looking into it, but in the meantime, what of my beautiful Gen Z readers who were mere children when Emotion and the just-as-worthy Emotion: B-Sides came into the world? People everywhere are still living in the dark by not listening to enough Carly Rae, and I must bring them into the light.

I also have a Big Pop Theory about WHY this album rules so much and not just because of its no-skips quality!

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Delaware: I’ll see you VERY soon! You can buy your Retro and get it signed at:

• Bethany Beach Books on Sunday, August 23 from 6-7:30 p.m.

• Browseabout Books in Rehoboth on Monday, August 24 from 1:30-3:30 p.m.

Also I’m going to bring a bunch of candy cigarettes to give away to readers who want to accessorize with the coolest vintage prop of 2026. They were a big hit at my book party.

Are you going to a different beach but still craving a great read for the beach? Is something rude (such as: your employer, your children’s back-to-school schedule) keeping you from getting out of town but you yearn to escape to some glorious elsewhere if only in your imagination? You can order Retro today from wherever you get your books and escape from wherever you are! Then you can show everybody how it’s done by leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, and/or Barnes and Noble.

RETRO AWAITS!

Sometimes when I tell people about my Caro year1, they want to know if they “have” to read all the LBJ books, or could they perhaps skip ahead to a later installment, when the history with which they are more familiar (and therefore the stuff they assume will be more compelling) is covered.

To me this question calls to mind the Axios publisher telling all the world that he relies on AI to essentially do all of the reading parts of reading on his behalf — this was properly and thoroughly ripped to bits by Defector, a very enjoyable takedown that reminded me of the old internet from Before; I recommend it! — and, as Defector points out re: this man’s literature of choice (The Last of the Mohicans) doesn’t really make sense because technically none of us “have” to read any of these books. (The Last of the Mohicans is especially skippable, in my opinion.)

But the instinct to find a way “out” of reading, and in so doing robbing yourself of the great joys of reading, is both disturbing and embarrassing to me and, I trust, to all TRR readers. You’ll never get the real feeling you’re supposed to get in the middle and at the end of the book if you skimmed/skipped the beginning! You can’t know what’s going to matter to you before it matters, what will move you before you’re moved! Allow me to report on a specific and thrilling instance of experiencing this very feeling from my CARO YEAR!

The Path to Power (LBJ book one) starts out not with Lyndon really but with his whole line, and also with the history and — crucially! — the topography of the Hill Country in Texas, where Johnson would one day grow up. It’s a tale as old as colonization: An Edenesque landscape of lush, unlikely beauty that had stood for generations wiped out as soon as settlers brought cattle to graze on the grass, “which had been holding that thin Hill Country soil in place and shielding it from the beating rain,” and the hills which had been a verdant green turned a desolate brown and then much of what was left was just rock.

That rock was the reality of the Hill Country. It had taken centuries to disguise it with grass, but it took only a very few years for that disguise to be ripped away.

This is ~20 pages into the first book, okay? It’s early days. I read this back in March.

As you might expect it is very difficult to grow anything in this rocky soil, and so we are already getting a sense of how Lyndon’s whole deal — whatever ideals he has, he will not hold them above practicality — is rooted here, in a place where, per Caro:

…principles, noble purposes, high aims—these were luxuries that could not be tolerated in a land of rock. Success in such a land required not a partial but a total sacrifice of idealism; it required not merely pragmatism but a pragmatism almost terrifying in its absolutely uncompromising starkness.

A person might be thinking “…okay?? That’s all well and good but is this entire book going to be about dirt and the vibes that dirt produces in its people? I thought we were going to learn about how LBJ stole every election he ever won.” And we WILL. But this is the rocky soil from which, in a way, the Voting Rights Act and the treachery of the Vietnam War will one day spring. This dirt is mission critical. We must, as the kids say, trust the process.

So now I’m ~700 pages into Master of the Senate, which is book three. LBJ is Senate Majority Leader. And he has, in his entire time in the Senate, stood obstinately against any civil rights legislation, including federal anti-lynching legislation. But he is also, as Caro tells it, not a to-the-marrow racist in the mold of many of his Southern compatriots, unrepentant white supremacists and never-get-over-it Lost Cause maniacs like Richard Russell (for whose approval and support Johnson so passionately argued against anti-lynching bills and the like). As Caro writes, LBJ’s big financial backers were “men so bigoted that to talk to them when their guard was down was to encounter a racism whose viciousness had no limit.” And Johnson did not share their passion.

On its face this is kind of a puzzling thing because LBJ would, just by demographics alone, be likely to hold this same prejudice. So why doesn’t he? It’s not because he’s a nice person :( Sorry to report this in case you were wondering but by most reliable accounts he is very mean and scary :( :( to basically everyone.2 So what is the origin of this unlikely personality trait?

Well: Because of that rocky soil, along with insufficient rainfall, barely any cotton was grown in the Hill Country, which means there weren’t any plantations, and so (as Johnson was to say himself), “I never sat on my parents’ or grandparents’ knees listening to nostalgic tales of the antebellum South.” In fact there were hardly any Black people in the Hill Country at all, so, as Caro writes, “the atmosphere in which Lyndon Johnson was raised was not steeped in racism, and neither was he.”

Because. Of. The. SOIL!!!!!! THE SOIL FROM 1,896 PAGES AGO!!!

Imagine you are me, reading Caro, when all of this comes together. Here is an updated illustration for those of you who need assistance in the visualization department:

And don’t even get me STARTED on the callback to the “soft Bunton skin” from literal page one of this series that we are hearing about again because when Lyndon had to work at what little cotton picking there was to do, as a child of nine or ten, his hands never calloused — they only blistered — and his actual memories of this excruciating labor inoculated him against the lie that enslaved people didn’t mind working in the fields. THE BUNTON SKIN.

Real readers know: This is one of the GREAT FEELINGS you can have when you are really IN it!! It’s three cherries in a row!!! Like when SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE YET TO PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO ELENA FERRANTE; I BEG YOU TO LOOK AT YOUR LIFE AND YOUR CHOICES, REMEMBER: THERE IS STILL A FULL MONTH OF SUMMER AHEAD, IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO JOIN US IN THE IDEAL TIME OF YEAR TO GO TO ISCHIA IN THE MIND, on the very last page of My Brilliant Friend, Marcello Solara appears at Lila’s wedding wearing the shoes she had made with Rino, “making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.” I know some of you reading this letter right now were UNDONE by the reveal of those shoes.

It’s been literally FIVE MONTHS since I first learned about the Hill Country soil. To tell you the truth I knew absolutely nothing of the Hill Country before I started my Caro year. I most certainly did not have any strong feelings about the soil situation there. Now I am an amateur edaphology freak for this specific region of our fair nation and I cannot stop telling people about how if LBJ had just grown up in a more cotton-conducive climate we could all be living in a very different America. Now everything is connected and I am seeing the Matrix re: rocky dirt, civil rights!!

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Back in 2015, I wrote a piece for Cosmopolitan about how this was the greatest pop album of that year, but for reasons unclear that bit of journalism is gone from the internet unless you go to the Wayback Machine.3 Still: I stand by that assessment! It’s synth-y, it’s moody, it’s dance-y, it’s glittery, it’s catchy but not cloying. That sax intro on “Run Away With Me”—the opening song of the album—makes me want to be driving a car just so I can speed up on an open road.

Honestly the weak point is the lead single, “I Really Like You,” which feels like it is still clinging to the whimsy-childlike energy of “Call Me Maybe” instead of sprinting at the bigger, bolder sound the rest of the album doubles down on. It almost works in context, though. Just listen to the whole thing straight through and listen to the B-Sides too!

To get into why this album felt so special at the time of its release I want to talk about the STATE OF POP in the mid-2010s.

We were in the thick of very gossip-heavy pop music moment. Under Taylor Swift’s influence, pop was undergoing this full Easter Eggification, wherein it felt like many of the big releases of the day, by the biggest stars, were less standalone songs than sonic cyphers whose core function was to present listeners with a little puzzle to solve.

Sometimes those puzzles were hardly puzzles at all. You’ll recall: Swift’s “Style” and One Direction’s “Perfect”; or the call-and-response of Justin Bieber’s “is it too late now to say sorry?” and Selena Gomez’s reply that she was “so sick of that same old love.” Taken together, all of this music felt like the soundtrack to a reality show we couldn’t turn off, in which these celebrities were constantly starring, on a channel none of us could change.

Interesting to think about this in 2026, because if anything this sense that the stars offstage lives are intruding on their ability to make great music has only grown more intense. Some of this song-suffocation is brought on by fandoms whose parasocial devotion to pop stars has rendered them constitutionally incapable of engaging with art without making it (sorry!!!) as boring as possible, that is, by strip-mining every song for its “secret” literal meaning. I’m thinking of the speed with which Phoebe Bridgers’ new album was reduced among them to “I can’t believe this song is about Bo Burnham and/or Paul Mescal and/or Gracie Abrams” though of course your timelines and FYPs are littered with a litany of other examples.

One could argue that some contemporary pop artists require this extra text to prop up art that is otherwise insufficiently interesting.4 But actually good music would be better with a little breathing room, and personally I don’t like to approach an album by treating the artist as a musical Zodiac Killer whose primary purpose in this life is to clutter their output with clues. If I was intermittently amused by some of their winking references to one another ~11 years ago, I find myself exhausted by it now.5

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So what does this mean for their MUSIC? While some songs can soar despite carrying all this baggage (“Style” is an all-timer), many of them feel so… heavy. They are crowded with characters, narratives already fleshed out, loves already lived. Whatever happened to the song that exists in that pop sweet-spot: so specific it has to be about you, so vague it could really be about anyone?

This is essentially what I said back in 2015: The beauty of pop—pure, unadulterated pop—is the way it takes you to that bubbly, blissed-out state. It is escapist by design, transcendent at its best. It’s not about his desperate plea to win back his ex-girlfriend or her triumphant return from rehab. It’s about you and whoever you are secretly singing about every time you sing along.

This, right there, is the real magic of Emotion. Think: Who is Carly Rae Jepson dating? Who broke her heart? Who is her best friend? Who does she hate? Do you know? Do you care? Carly Rae Jepson has done the impossible: She is practically an enigma in a field of oversharers. Most people don’t even know how old she is. (She’s 40! Really!)

Carly Rae gets out of the way. She leaves room for the most important person in a pop song: You.