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solar sister carrie
The Posies track "Solar Sister" from the album Frosting on the Beater (1993) advises someone--either the listener a person named Jean (possibly Carrie Jean) to "read the story...Sister Carrie." The song was one of three singles on the band's third and most commercially successful album. The Posies are seemingly anachronistic as a pop-rock band from Seattle, the beating heart of grunge. The album's music and production is great. The lyrics are complex and sometimes impregnated by adult allusion. Sometimes the lyrics seem more like fun rhymey things written by kids. Sister Carrie's lyrics seem pretty direct from "I'll call you sister Carrie" (x3), "Won't you read sister Carrie (Jean?!), sister Carrie" (x2)... "and you read sister Carrie, read, read, read..." In that (admittedly absurd) context, I read Theodore Dreiser's classic.
It takes some deep exposition to understand the relevance of the story to song. Perhaps the lyric "knowing I'll soon be left behind..." is about the people Sister Carrie leaves in her wake after arriving in Gilded Age Chicago on her way to the New York stage. These castaways include her sister, first suitor Drouet the traveling salesman who picked her up on the train to Chicago and second suitor Hurstwood the manager, philanderer and kidnapper who absconded her to New York. Carrie was both pragmatic and naive in these relationships. One aspect of the urban novel (of which Sister Carrie is a classic archetype) is the dissolution of rural family and community mores into a naked self interest enabled by the city's anonymous shroud. This is a body adjusting to new means of production--from the resort economy where Carrie lived with her family to the capitalism of city tenements and shop floors. Carrie only spent a few moments as an industrial worker before becoming a caged bird tended by Drouet, then she lived with Hurstood before finally succeeding as an actress in New York. This is an optimistic heroine's journey in industrial America.
The people who Carrie left behind reacted differently to being castaway. Her sister was sad to lose a boarder's money but ultimately was relieved to return to domestic status quo ante. Drouet was confused by Carrie's sudden disappearance (kidnapping by Hurstwood) but didn't linger on it. They met again years later in New York where he tried to rekindle but their social standing (and Carrie's pragmatism) made them incompatible. Drouet maturely moved on without incident. Hurstwood on the other hand, it appears, went insane thinking about Carrie. He neglected his family and stole money from his bosses. He convinced Carrie that Drouet was sick in order to haul her to New York after pretending to marry her in Montreal. When they arrived Hurstwood went broke, got depressed, became a scab and killed himself. Carrie was negatively affected--personally and socially--by his implosion but she (pragmatically) managed to extricate herself from this relationship after helping to spend all of his (stolen) money.
The Posies sing about being taught a "new story...out of the pages of your mind" and listening "to you read the story/but I'm already far behind (knowing I'll soon be left behind)." They call sister Carrie "patient" (2x). Starting new stories, leaving people behind and a patient pragmatism are traits that the song shares with Dreiser's Carrie. The ephemerality of relationships and dislocation of Dreiser's urban novel are indicative of capitalism's tendencies toward urbanization, industrialization and Taylorization. The frequency and scale of this ephemerality and dislocation only increase as the industrial economy develops and urban mass culture overtakes parochial rural America.
One theme of the book is the perplexity with which untravelled rural folk, like Sister Carrie, first encounter a city on approach. (pg 6, 223) A reciprocal novel from the rural perspective would comment on the dumbfounded city folk taking selfies in front of trees a century older than their Chicagoland subdivision and marveling at lakes carved during the ice age. This comparison ends when one realizes rural folk don't generally move into the city, level all the buildings, clean all the water and rewild the parking lots. It is more likely that a rural folk who goes to a city adapts and becomes urban. In rural Wisconsin, Chicagoland capital has pumped up from the railroads and highways and splattered out all over the forest and lakes: developing the land around every station and exit into a exurb.
Carrie had pragmatic relationships. She became friends with her neighbor, Mrs. Vance, because of proximity (and not some shared interest). Carrie and Mrs. Vance were never of the same social class. At first, Carrie was a neighbor who was apparently married to an increasingly off-putting spouse. Dreiser comments on the irregularity of this local relationship which started from a shared dumb waiter--comparing it to the more usual anonymity of urban housing. The relationship deteriorated when the Vances moved to a richer neighborhood and Carrie and Hurstwood moved to a smaller dwelling. The two ladies reconnect after Carrie has ditched Hurstwood, made it big on stage and is living in a comped penthouse. Unsaid between them is the dissolution of Carrie's sham marriage following Hurstwood's tough go as a trolley car scab. Osborne is a young sage who guides Carrie through New York showbiz. At the end of the story Lola and Carrie live and work together. The former enjoys the nightlife of the city and the later comfortably sits at her window. The male sage was also a youth, named Robert Ames, Vance's precocious and erudite cousin from Indiana (perhaps an autobiographical insertion by Dreiser). Robert awakens in Carrie a taste for the cosmopolitan culture of a city. She is enamored of and inspired by him when they first meet. She is less impressed in their second meeting after she has cultured (beautiful, singular, hard: like a pearl) in New York.
For many reasons, these urban relations are unlike those that exist in the Wisconsin resort towns that have fed their young to Chicago since the Gilded Age first connected them by rail.
Outside of childhood Posies reference, Dreiser is interesting because of his proximity to EV Debs and the Terre Haute labor movement which (like so many other things) rode a train to Chicago where it flourished. Sister Carrie starts her journey from the type of resort town that a vivid public memory today. Dreiser's knowledge of (sometimes internecine) theatre politics also informs the text.
The trolley strike chapter--the one explicitly about the labor movement--is extraordinary because of the many pages which precede it: Hurstwood's descent from Chicago manager to New York bum was funded by stolen money that eventually made him unemployable. Humanized labor (like Upton Sinclair) and dispossessed lumpenproles (like Jack London) of the Gilded Age city populate thousands of socialist memoirs, academic papers and fictional texts. Sister Carrie explores the long term development and demise of a scab to include the personal choices, psychological dissociation and economic realities. It wouldn't be a fun read if Hurstwood were the main character but it works as a subplot in alongside Carrie's journey. Ambivalent Carrie is a nominal heroine (in the socialist storytelling context) because she never crossed a picket line or joined a union and exhibits no class consciousness at all--even when she is drilling eyelets into shoe leather during her first (and only) industrial job in Chicago.
Carrie is also a nominal heroine because Dreiser's story--perhaps characteristic of urban fiction--doesn't have a happy ending. Its not a comedy or tragedy. It's a morality play with shocking subtexts that would have easily passed the Hayes Code thirty years later: no sex and the bad guy (Hurstwood, like James Cagney) gets it in the end. It might be tragic that Carrie ends her story voluntary alone but she is also self-sufficient. She is another living organism of the industrial city. Since she arrived in Chicago Carrie has grown from an discontented woman who sat on her sister's front porch and looked out at the city into a contented woman who sits in her luxury apartment staring out a window at the city. Presumably, the character is no longer the same wide-eyed untraveller that is wowed by the bright lights in the distance. To be in the metropolis she sacrifices the je ne sais quoi which made her (pragmatically) alluring to men, women and theater goers. In return she has celebrity, the social currency of mass culture (which she might have understood as "reputation" in her rural resort town).
This characteristic is replaced in her by an interesting dialectic between mass appeal (celebrity) and mass consumption (urbanization)--which doesn't exist in the Wisconsin resort town that imbued her with whatever it was that made her a success in the big city. For what it's worth, these question's of rapid urbanization, iconoclasm and class conflict were deeply embedded within the Seattle that birthed The Posies. Other than the Grunge movement--which The Posies' dismissed in songs like Flavor of the Month--there was (and is) a regional anarcho-syndicalism catalyzed into actions like the NAFTA - WTO protests (1999), the Ammon Bundy Occupation (2016) and CHAZ (2020).
"Solar Sister" is a three and a half minute pop song with infectious harmonies and a standard beat. Alexis Petridis, long time rock and pop critic for The Guardian (apparently) reviewed the album. Quoting from an AI summary (ick) which quotes from the article, Frosting on the Beater is a "near-perfect piece of mid-90s alt-rock." Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer performed the track on MTV's 120 Minutes, an alternative rock mainstay which aired on the network from 1986-2000. The TV version of "Solar Sister" was recorded after the show's first anthology album Never Mind the Mainstream (1991) and does not appear on 120 Minutes Live (1998). Seemingly every other alternative act (other than Nirvana) is on these records.
As for the "Solar Sister" performance from 1993--it's on .youtube. Lewis Largent is the VJ who introduces and interviews the duo. Largent was an incredibly influential tastemaker and proto-influencer: KROQ DJ, MTV VP of music programming and Def Jam senior VP of A&R. This wasn't the only legend who took part in the album which was released by David Geffin's DEG. Even the producer, Donald Flemming, worked for legends like Sonic Youth, Hole and Screaming Trees.
Largent's introduction to the four and a half minute clip describes "Solar Sister" as The Posies' "Alison" (referring to the 1977 Elvis Costello song from My Aim is True). He explains the punchline, "the record contains the title of the album but is not actually the title of the track..." Even though Largent is kind of a pedantic dork--he is a fine interviewer. His question about the song is: "tell us about it."
Stringfellow answers, "it's kind of an anthem of admiration for a person that maybe doesn't appreciate themselves." This is one interpretation of Dreiser--that Sister Carrie allowed herself to be swept up into an urban life of as an assembly worker, kept by a traveling salesman and kidnapped by a manager. Themes like self-sufficiency and pragmatism would be underplayed in this narrative of a rural transplant unawares to her surroundings. Here, Stringfellow could be referencing the book, a friendship or lover. He might be admitting to Hurstwood-style obsession or Drouet-style ambivalence. The entrance to that rabbit hole begins with his Me Too era experience. The man also has terminal cancer...returning to the historical dialectic between a Alt-Pop song from the Grunge Era West Coast and a story about the urbanization of a resort girl in the Gilded Age Middle West.
In 1993 Stringfellow was about twenty-five years old, his first band was at it's popular apex, about to play "Solar Sister" on the biggest Alternative music TV show in America. He described the single as "mysterious...mystical perhaps. No not really."
Auer backs up his buddy, "there's a lot of succulent dripping imagery..." These two giggle a little before playing their acoustic guitars.
Judging by the mood and substance of the MTV 120 interview, if "Solar Sister" has anything to do with Sister Carrie it is embedded with feigned ambivalence and grunge era sarcasm--the worst of Pacific Northwest's Gen X characteristics. Their rendition is great--lots of vocal harmonies and two strummed complimentary guitar parts. Auer plays a very nice acoustic version of the solo. Today this sounds like the headliner of every college town coffee shop acoustic night. Its very good singer-songwriter fare.
I watched the .youtube video online after writing the Geertz-ian thick description above. I thought there might be some truth found in the extrapolation and dialectic juxtaposition. In me, the video rekindled the period's mood of nihilism, suspicion, irony and search for authenticity. I am reminded of Grunge's bête noire known as "the poser." In this case, a poser would be someone who makes literary allusions without engaging the subject material. The Gen X triad of avoidable personality traits were (arguably) narcs, sell-outs and posers (try-hards were, in my experience, begrudgingly accepted). Anyway, these weren't viable paths to the homecoming court. Poser is absolutely an epithet that teenagers Auer and Stringfellow would have heard during their development of an Everly Brothers - Simon & Garfunkel sound within the flannel lined Pacific Northwest where Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were en vogue.
Studying popular culture like "Solar Sister" and Sister Carrie together adds historical context to both. It is easy to assume The Posies were barely alluding to some book they had barely thought about. It is unsatisfying to dismiss Auer and Stringfellow's song even if it seems like sophomoric bubble-gum pop. Dreiser's book has whole chapters--especially the Casino theater scenes--which are seemingly superfluous pulp drama. No one would dismiss the cultural contribution of the book because Dreiser's editor didn't have a heavy enough pen. Dismissing the song because the duo had the giggles on MTV is also probably imprudent.
The book continues to inspire. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra put on an opera version of Sister Carrie by Robert Livingstone Aldridge / Herschel Garlein (2016). I'll watch that one before writing it up.
sources:
Jem Aswad "Lewis Largent, Influential MTV '120 Minutes' VJ and KROQ DJ, Dies at 58" Variety 10 March 2023
Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow "Solar Sister" Frosting on the Beater (performed by The Posies, produced by Don Flemming) Santa Monica: David Geffin Company (Interscope Geffen A&M Records), 1993.
Music TeleVision (via .youtube) "Solar Sister" MTV 120 Minutes, 1993.
Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900) New York: Bantam Books, Feb. 1972.