Three Dog Nights' "One,"
performed by Aimee Mann
Music can be subdivided any number of ways: racially, culturally, geographically, chronologically, generically. In practically every case, however, the edges often blur if not dissolve altogether like a Venn diagram made up of amoebae — so much overlap, so much osmosis.
The only distinction standing, particularly in the arena of pop music, is gender. Music appeals to the universal to foster identification with its listeners, and while as many men identify with songs featuring female vocalists as women do with songs featuring male vocalists, there’s nevertheless a je ne sais quoi — sociological, biological, who knows — that puts a song sung by a man inextricably in that side of the camp, and vice versa. Yes, it’s universal, but it’s more universal for half of us than it is for others. That why there’s a much greater dichotomy in hearing Otis Redding’s version of “Respect” back-to-back with Aretha Franklin’s than there is in hearing James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is” after Marvin Gaye’s.
There are all sorts of funky, telling examples of this throughout the decade — Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Dancing in the Dark” is as unlike Bruce Springsteen’s own as it is like it; Cake’s “I Will Survive” either deconstructs Gloria Gaynor’s original to the point of mockery or marks that point in American cultural history when guys could get away with calling that women’s-lib classic their own.
“One,” as sung by Aimee Mann, is a fine example of this. It’s a contrast-laden powerhouse never performed much above a whisper, a song whose lyrical playfulness is counterpointed by the fact that it sounds like a dirge:
“No” is the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Yes, it’s the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Because one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know
or, as the (male) background vocalist intones in the closing measures:
One has decided to bring down the curtain
And one thing’s for certain
There’s nothing to keep them together
To see it on paper, the song is not clearly “his” or “hers.” But Mann infuses it with her trademark, liquid oxygen voice and makes it sound like she’s trying not to sound heartbroken. And it’s more of a sister to Liz Phair’s catalog than it is to the Harry Nilsson original (who wrote it, although Three Dog Night — with its three male vocalists — recorded the definitive version).
A significant second side to this cover of “One” is its inclusion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. A cultural appropriator in the best sense, one of Anderson’s brightest gifts is his ability to weave pop elements together in a way that magnifies their affective energy. Anderson credits Mann’s songwriting as being the creative genesis of Magnolia, and the songwriter’s fingerprints are all over the movie, in many obvious ways — the sing-along to “Wise Up,” the quoting of the opening line from “Deathly.”
Not every Mann song featured in the movie was written for it (“Wise Up” is from, of all things, Jerry Maguire), but “One” is the only original Mann recording of someone else’s song that Anderson commissioned. It’s also perhaps the purest barometer of the film, the stage-setter: Magnolia is an ensemble movie in which everyone is very much alone. The aphorisms in the lyrics to “One” — “Two can be as bad as one/ It’s the loneliest number since the number one,” “One is a number divided by two” — may be vague, but Anderson illustrates them in the film with the same razor clarity of Mann’s recordings.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
