I started this article about an ear worm in July 2018 and it struck me that it was probably time to release it out into the world.
Listening to my OG Terry Gross’s interview with the badass director Desiree Akhavan and writer Emily Danforth about their work on The Miseducation of Cameron Post this afternoon, minding my own business when finally at the end of the show, Terry cues for some music to go out on, saying, Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” features in the prom scene of the forthcoming movie.
And, look, we understand. It’s a slammin’ song. But when a song becomes the central plot point of a much beloved, cult tv show on the BBC, and then that cult show makes it to the big times after a Brooke Gladstone shout-out in 2015, and your mom’s friends start talking about binge-watching the whole series during your Christmas vacation, it’s time for you to step back and re-evaluate. Because song overuse is a real thing. We need to be aware of our baser instincts and curb our craven tendencies toward the easy, because what are we if not basic bitches all of us, reaching for the familiar Buffalo Springfield hit on the lowest shelf, even though we know it’s bad for us. But how did we get here? How is it that a snowflake like me can find himself triggered by the outro to Fresh Air? How did we hit this saturation point and how could we possibly leave unscathed?
As far as I can tell, it started in the 1964 when, at the ripe old age of 23, Irma Thomas, a former waitress from New Orleans, coming off a hit, “Don’t Mess with My Man,” five years earlier, was having a pretty good year. In that year alone, she recorded four singles, all of which hit the Top 100 charts, the most successful year of her career. It’s at this time she recorded a single co-written by Randy Newman and a country music starlet, Jeannie Seely. “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” and the B Side’s “Time Is On My Side,” which the Rolling Stones would memorably cover) made a splash in the charts, taking the respectable 52nd slot in pop songs. For reference, Nicki Minaj’s “Bed” ft. Ariana Grande and Nicki as a mermaid is currently #52 on the Billboard 100. May the immortal lines “got a bed with your name on it” and “strawberry lingerie” ring forever in the halls of kings and queens.
Irma Thomas’s music found a place in the early days of TV’s Golden Age, where it seems like it was selected for its splashy nostalgia in season openers. “Time Is On My Side” was featured memorably in the supernatural cop thriller The Fallen (1998), and then in the opening episode of the second season of The Sopranos in 2000, as well as in the opening episode of the third season of Six Feet Under in 2003. Three months later, the producers of The Wire used “Ruler of My Heart” in the “Hard Cases” episode.
The next instance I can find of Irma Thomas’s music cropping up in pop culture is in The Secret Life of Bees (2008), starring a painfully young Dakota Fanning (who is not Elle Fanning), Paul Bettany (???), Alicia Keys, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson the same year that she won her first Grammy, and, as if that were not enough, a presumably pre-rape allegations Nate Parker. The song appears again like a sonic cicada hatching from its years long slumber in the third season New Girl of places (2014), and then seems to find traction in successive years of television shows. We see it again in Hulu’s well-received dramedy Casual (2015), and then more appropriately in Queen Sugar, a show set in Louisiana, Thomas’s birthplace, Ava Duvernay cut her teeth on directing with Oprah producing (2016; it’s also worth mentioning that during this time another Louisiana-based show of note, Treme, also used Thomas’s songs to add local flavor). Nick Nolte in Epix’s Graves (Epix’s is televisions best kept secret apparently) features the song the following year in 2017. Through the second decade of the 2000s, we have a modest but sustained use of Thomas’s “If Anyone Knows What Love Is” in dramedies and shows set in Louisiana. Now it’s worth considering the conscious, repeated use of the song in Black Mirror and the point at which it seems to have reached a saturation point.
The creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, talks a bit about the way in which the song organically became an iconic theme for their show: “It was originally selected… because it was, it has the sound of a timeless haunting classic, yet wouldn’t be familiar to most viewers.” Possibly Brooker is talking about the shows primarily British viewership, all those poor souls who had missed The Secret Life of Bees, but he’s right that it hadn’t hit television in almost a decade at that point. After it’s initial use in Fifteen Million Merits (2011) user NogShine notes, and the Wrap confirms, that the song was used as a callback in a karaoke scene in the “White Christmas” special nearly a year after the Second Season’s release (Dec 2014). Season 3 of Black Mirror was released on October 21st, 2016 right in time for everyone to binge instead of giving candy to the neighborhood adults who can’t be bothered to put on a costume while pimping their kids out for free candy. The Third Season made the song into an anthem for the series in the “Men Against Fire” episode. It feels like this is the moment for me when the show made a conscious decision to build a soundscape around the song, hide it on car radios and in the background of hotel rooms.
A strange thing happened the following year when two highly anticipated events in pop culture featured the song separated by only weeks of one another. The much buzzed about release of Black Mirror’s Season 4 dropped on December 29th, 2017 on Netflix. At the same time, the first trailer for Jurassic Park: Lost Kingdom, set to come out in May, included as its soundtrack the Irma Thomas song in question. The trailer, as far as I can tell, hit theaters and the Internet in the first week of December, 2017, about three weeks before Black Mirror Season 4 and directly after a successful (and artful) guerilla marketing campaign by Netflix during Thanksgiving called the “13 Days of Black Mirror”. The effect of this saturation was that the trailer came off as a combination of stale and thirsty, like the film was unaware of the tremendous air time the song was already getting or didn’t care, two girls arriving to prom in the same dress.
Since that instance of crossed lines a year and a half ago, I cannot help but associate its use in other Hollywood projects, like Cameron Post, as a little craven, by which I mean in no way to condemn Thomas’s song. Clearly the song is a wonderful, heartbreaking anthem for a certain kind of star-crossed dependence, but its repeated use for any and every strained relationship has diluted its potency. We need to explore new artists and old songs that can add to our palette of sonic expressiveness. We owe it to ourselves to retire the song, if only for a little bit.
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