Tomorrow and Tomorrow

annieYou are indeed always a day away. Is this cause for hope or despair? For Annie the eyeless orphan, hope, naturally. Corollary: the present sucks. But you’re supposed to forget this when you’re immersed in the song, tumbling down the diatonic staircase to future happiness, become as much a child as the performer. It must be sung by a child, the less proficiently the better (as I heard it, endlessly, helplessly, one morning on an Amtrak train), to express the perfect naivete, the utter conviction of the position you, the listener, are expected to adopt. To create a surrogate present. To wallow in hope. No wonder she doesn’t have eyes, this Tiresias reborn as Pangloss: all she can see is the future, and it’s roses, roses all the way down. Or maybe she dashed them out, not, like Oedipus, to punish herself for her arrogant blindness to prophecy, but to better signify her willful neglect of the present. The dream may be deferred, but for little white Annie, it never dries up, rots, or explodes. Hell, it doesn’t have time to, the play is so quick in rewarding her (and the audience) for her stubborn will-to-hope by making tomorrow today. The orphans are not the sans culottes, storming the barricades of their conniving wards, cutting off their heads, burning the orphanage to the ground. A bizarre mixture of charity and Keynesianism ensures that the wicked are punished and Annie lives happily ever after. No surprise, either, that this Depression-set tale of hope would resonate with a bankrupt city in the year of the blackout. Only in hindsight does the Depression reveal its function in our grand historical narrative, redeemed by the New Deal and the economic expansion beginning with the Second World War. We can follow this tendency as far back as the American jeremiad, as Sacvan Bercovitch (re)interpreted it: straying from the righteous path is only ever a detour to fulfilling the glorious mission that God intended for this nation. America is Annieland; even Disney’s Tomorrowland simply technologized the seeds brought by the first English settlers; and it was Disney that would be coming to save New York, too (morrow), though audiences in 1977 wouldn’t have guessed it.

It might be fruitful to compare Annie to Jane’s Addiction’s own paean to tomorrow, “Jane Says” (the definitive version is on their live first record, Jane’s Addiction, 1987). Here, in dreamy, sustained-fourth choruses, the eponymous Jane says she’s “gonna kick tomorrow.” The verses describe her hard-knock today, and the way she’s planning a new future: leaving the abusive Sergio, quitting junk, saving to “go away to Spain,” etc. But if Sergio comes back, well, “Tell him to wait right here for me/ Or try again tomorrow ….” It’s that “tomorrow” that carries us into the chorus, the change in tone suggesting the fantasy that allows Jane to escape the vicious cycle of her life, musically encoded in the tick-tock two-chord progression of the verses. It matters much here that Annie sings in the first person, while Jane’s words are reported, except in those choruses, where Perry Farrell assumes her voice. She hasn’t started saving, of course. She’s the one who needs saving. But this is no “22 Acacia Avenue” (Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast, 1982), the idealistic young working stiff saving Charlotte the prostitute from her own perdition, metal’s version of Daddy Warbucks, told in his voice. No one’s going to step in and rescue Jane, not even against her will. But then she has no will. “She’s never been in love”—so the last verse reports—and the chorus that follows, eschewing the “tomorrow” of the first two: “I want them if they want me.” Jane is the anti-Annie; no fighter, “she can’t hit”; she is devoid of the ability to start anything, least of all her own life over.

Tomorrow proves to be more than Annie’s john—she doesn’t care whether tomorrow wants her; she’s in love; and even more than Annie’s pimp, it’s her long-lost daddy. But tomorrow is most certainly Jane’s pimp. Hope is stripped of its romantic aura. She says a whole lot, but is unable to do; tomorrow remains a word, a word expressing a dream, a dream curtailed the moment the word is spoken, deferring it, ever deferring it. The explosion happens—“she takes a swing”—but is impotent. The dream, hope, is the addiction. Unlike Annie, which entices us to see the Depression folded into the narrative of America’s bumpy road to the future, and envision the same glorious destiny for a beleaguered present, Jane is trapped in the moment: skid-row L.A. in the 1980s, in the ashes of Reagan’s California, shrilly calling out the fantasy of Morning in America. If Jane could only wake up! A few years later, the messiah would arrive, not as a New Deal, but a Neoliberal Bubble. But then Jane never made it that far.

And yet, satirized as it’s been, Annie’s “tomorrow” is not devoid of irony, just as Jane’s is not devoid of that willful hope. With Annie, the adult listener is at once moved by hopefulness and aware of the wider context, the hard-knock life, the potentially delusive nature of that hope, at least as it appears outside the theater. Conversely, we can’t help but be moved by Jane’s desire to change, even as the song’s fatalism makes Perry Farrell’s crooning of that word so grotesquely ironic: a bell tone that opens no doors, a bird call without answer, hovering and falling from the same hopeful fifths, chorus and verse … the same fifths Annie hits, even as she suggestively surpasses them (to-mor-row, 5-6-5). Make no mistake, Jane goes out saying, saying, saying. They’re sisters, Jane and Annie, they share an ambiguous genealogy, Jane the grown-up Annie who might have been, in another possible tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Janis once said, is the same fucking day, man … except that, as Pink Floyd is always singing in the continuous present of some classic rock radio station somewhere in America, you’re “Shorter of breath/ And one day closer to death.”

Here’s to a great 2016!

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