Carole is Beautiful

Carole King is beautiful. She is majestic and brilliant and talented and legendary and she has great hair.

I was still young and living in the city the first time I listened to “Tapestry” all the way through. I had already heard every song a thousand times, except “Beautiful”; this was the first. It is positive, upbeat, motivational; it’s fake it ‘til you make it; it’s see it and be it. It was the worst song I could have listened to back then.

New York City will always be glamorous and exciting to anyone who has never lived there. Everyone needs to see it, at least once. Every Long Island kid needs to live there, for a least a year. In short, New York City is necessary. It also sucks; it is depressing and it sucks.

Consider the city from the perspective of someone who can just barely afford to live there. Your small studio apartment is nothing more than a box; it is a small box within a large box. (I never actually did the shoebox studio, but work with me on this one.) You wake up every morning in your small box, get yourself ready for the day, leave your small box for an even smaller box, within the large box, the small box takes you to the ground level of the big box, then you step out into the world and walk one, or two, or three, or four or more blocks to a staircase that leads you down into a long, low box (or the tenth level of Hell, whatever you want to call it), with tunnels that connect it to other long, low boxes, and you get into a tube that takes you to box and box and box, until you reach the box of your destination, and you emerge from the tube, emerge from the depths of Hell, and you walk one, or two, or three, or four or more blocks to a large box, that is likely even larger than the large box that houses your small box, and in that large box, you get into a small box, that takes you up, up, up, to a higher level of box, and you snake your way through half-boxes, that are no larger than the small box that you just traveled in, and you sit in that little half-box and watch television commercials for eight hours. Okay, fine; maybe I was one of the few idiots who had that job. You do the whole thing in reverse at the end of the day. You go from half-box, snake your way through other half-boxes, get into a small box, that takes you down, down, down to the ground level of the big box, walk one, or two, or three, or four or more blocks that take you to a staircase, that takes you down into a long, low box, with tunnels that connect it to other long, low boxes, and you get into a tube that takes you to box and box and box, until you reach the box of your destination, and you emerge from the tube, emerge from the depths of Hell, and you walk one, or two, or three, or four or more blocks, to a large box, then you get into a small box that takes you up to your slightly larger small box, then you eat your dinner out of boxes, left over from the night before. You do this every day, through rain and snow and wind and sleet and heat and, in spite of the daily effort that sucks the life out of you, you can’t afford to do most of the things that you would like to do, or the things you don’t want to do, and you don’t have the energy or the will to enjoy most of the things that you can afford to do. It’s enough to make a person a little cranky.

And so I would listen to “Tapestry”, in full, over and over again in my little box, in my jammies with a joint. Every morning, for about six months, “Beautiful” – this positive, upbeat, motivational, fake it ‘til you make it, see it and be it song – would start playing in my head while I was in the shower, and last the whole of my commute, and I thought… ‘fuck you, Carole.’