Jonathan Lethem

Jim Carroll's "People Who Died"

The summer of 1980 I was sixteen, and unpersuasively cool. I listened to the Ramones, and clung to a thin claim of 'having been there' - meaning CBGB's, which let you in without an I.D. But I meant to be a writer, and had begun favoring Talking Heads and Elvis Costello, music which buffered emotionality in layers of cleverness and metaphor, in postures of alienation. I spent a lot of afternoons at my desk, writing stuff that wasn't any good. One such day that summer the DJ on WNEW came on and announced a new single, a debut - 'by a New York poet turned rock 'n' roller' was the way the he set it up. While the DJ rambled I had time to sneer in advance - this would probably be some flowery singer-songwriter, about as tough as Billy Joel, at best. Then the DJ dropped the needle on "People Who Died", by Jim Carroll, which, by the end of one snarling, anguished chorus, had wrecked the walls of my pretensions. The song was a ticking bomb of rage at loss - "they were all my friends, and they died!" Carroll moans, as astonished that he's found a voice to report it as he is at the gruesome fact of death itself. Though I'd have to learn the lesson a thousand times again, Carroll's channelled beatnik vulnerability, shrouded in a punk rage which was still, that summer, an undeniable thing, was the first rebuke to my foolish hope that being a 'writer' or an 'artist' could mean skirting my emotions. No, it would always mean ramming straight into them - Carroll had put me on notice.

The DJ let it finish, then played it immediately again: He, and I, were that impressed. I still am. Nothing else of Carroll's has had that impact on me, but it hardly matters, because "People Who Died" is breaking me open still, and there's only room for so many songs like that in your life, even if Carroll had somehow managed a career that kept that song's impossible promise. Punk - or pop, or life - isn't always about keeping the promises you make, but daring to make them in the first place. Despite knowing what's at stake. Maybe even making them because you know what's at stake. That's what "People Who Died" knew that I didn't, that summer afternoon, and why it broke my heart twice quickly in succession, before I'd completely understood it could be broken - and why the song goes on breaking it now that I've learned.

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GQ, 2001