What's the Frequency Kenneth ?
- Story
I remember beginning to write the lyrics for "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" at the BCC Activities and Recreation office after reading a Rolling Stone magazine report about a strange attack that Dan Rather had suffered.
When I was a senior in high school, I committed a crime against our community college creative writing teacher, Jan Aronson. She had us write journals, and we were supposed to report on the things we did during the day. My life was so boring that I started writing song lyrics instead, along with ideas for inventions and drawings of leaves and plants for learning landscaping and landscape architecture. Jan later became a successful and talented artist. Her stepson was a songwriter who gave away a number of his songs to popular artists, including a very famous one to Celine Dion. I was told he eventually became the creator and owner of both the Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group.
Years later, I began to hear songs on the radio that I believed I had written the lyrics to, especially after all the notebooks I had kept as journals had gone missing. One of the songs I believe I wrote the words to was R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"
I mention this because there is a line in the song I believe I know the meaning of, which I would like to explain. The meaning is tied to Julia's nickname. Just before the fall semester in 1985-86, I had fallen off a roof and gotten amnesia. When I tried to go back to Berkshire Community College, the teachers and advisors I trusted told me I should drop out before I messed up my grade point average—which is still a clean 3.0—because my voice was slurred after the fall.
I remember writing what I believed was the first draft of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" in the Berkshire Community College activity center after reading the story about Dan Rather in a library copy of Rolling Stone. What I wrote in my journal about it was what I believed was "word salad"—just nonsense phrases that sounded crazy and conveyed the feeling I got from the story, but they sounded too childish and innocent, like Alice in Wonderland. I remember writing, "butterfly teacup, two for tea."
Later, I became homeless in Florida and struggled to fix up that poem. I had recently read a science fiction story that was based upon an older story about hunters who travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs, but one of their vehicles ran over a dragonfly and changed their future. The newer time-travel novel was about what became known as the "butterfly effect"—how a butterfly can create a hurricane through time. I believe that when I wrote the words, "butterfly decal rearview mirror dogging the scene," I perceived a combination of Heart's "Dog and Butterfly" with that time-travel warning story, compounded with Mac Davis's "Happiness is Lubbock, Texas in My Rearview Mirror."
In 1997, I found a hypnotic trigger in the form of a cross on a chain with a screw and a spring connected to it. When I made the word association, I heard a 'pop!' in the back of my head, and suddenly, I heard voices and saw cartoon-like people in my imagination. I later found out I had developed two of the most disabling conditions, according to Social Security: active psychosis and dementia praecox. After a few years, I remembered that I had found the trigger years earlier while I was attending BCC, but realized it meant someone had messed with my head. I threw the cross, chain, spring, and screw away and drove the thought of them out of my mind.
In 2017, we had a hurricane in St. Pete, and I had just gone vegan for a week. My phone was off, and the cloud cover made the inside of my tent completely dark. What felt like a half-inch-diameter ball pushed down from my brain into my mouth, then out through my left cheek. It hopped onto my chest, then my shoulder, then down to the floor of the tent. While the ball was outside of my head, my vision was completely dark. The ball hopped back up into my chest and waited, so I put it back into my mouth, and it rose up into my brain. The cartoon visions I see and talk to grew up and projected themselves into my mind's eye in a few seconds. While the ball was outside my head, I did not have psychosis and I did not have "visual snow"—it was completely dark and felt very empty and lonely. Close your eyes really tight and see if you can see millions of little white points of light. If you do, you have "visual snow," which the Mayo Clinic says affects 2% of the population.
Around 2015, I went out walking at 3:00 a.m. from the Ravenel Bridge in North Charleston. I felt crazy and seemingly free, at least from my medication, and was looking for adventure and pizza. I met a very charming and lovely lady who said her name was "Queenie" and that my mom had sent her. As we walked to an old graveyard in Charleston, I sang a line of a song I liked to sing when I was out walking by myself. She said then that she loved that song and that it was one of her favorites.
If the notebooks ever come forth and my beliefs about them are validated, at least you will know what the lyrics meant, from my perspective. But the main thing I received from those journals, which has immeasurable intrinsic value now, is that after attempting suicide three times and feeling a really deep, longstanding shame hidden inside me for decades, finding out about Ms. Aronson and her family has truly healed that awkward, gaping spiritual wound inside me. Now, my life feels truthfully God-scripted and divinely inspired. I believe the same feeling awaits all of you as well.
What's the Frequency, Kenneth ?
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huh
I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed
I thought I'd pegged you an idiot's dream
Tunnel vision from the outsider's screen
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh
You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh
I'd studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines
Richard said, "Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy"
A smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
You said that irony was the shackles of youth
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huh
Butterfly decal, rear-view mirror, dogging the scene
You smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
You said that irony was the shackles of youth
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh
You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
You said that irony was the shackles of youth, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
I never understood, don't fuck with me, uh-huh
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