21. “Ecstasy”

PJ Harvey, Rid of Me (Island, 1993); composed by Polly Jean Harvey

I have not heard anything Polly Jean Harvey has recorded since Stories From The City ten years ago which (unlike many other sympathetic listeners) bored me silly. But I have never once thought I was “all done” with her, nor do I think I ever will be. It was once said about Richard Rodgers that he “just pissed music,” and Harvey is one of the only people in contemporary art of any kind to give me a similar impression. Nothing epitomizes that sense like the closer to her second album from 1993, the entirety of which is terrific, but “Ecstasy” - probably the simplest song on the album - is an uncanny masterstroke. Based on a riff she probably came up with the very first time she ever tried to play slide (the recorded take might well be the second time), she just lights into a humongous groaning maelstrom, and then traces her own melodic path over the top of it, and in and around it, with a voice that never overloads, never goes past its limits, but pulses and penetrates, leaving no doubt of the intuitive rightness of Harvey’s vocal contour at each turn. You and she will meet again.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

20. “Kind im Einschlummern”

Composed by Robert Schumann, from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 (1838); as recorded by Mieszyslaw Horszowski (Nonesuch, 1988)

Schumann’s Kinderszenen is a well-known cycle of piano pieces written when the composer was 18 years old. Its best known segment is probably “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”), which Alban Berg once praised for its deceptively complex harmony, but the most disquieting (for not dissimilar reasons) is this next-to-last segment, “Child Falling Asleep,” in E minor, culminating an increasingly somber sequence with a precipitous drop into an intense Romantic microcosm lasting less than two minutes: the deepest fear and sadness of a child fading from consciousness and watching himself fade at the same time, diagrammed to the millimeter harmonically, and thus graspable by the listener, and that much more harrowing. Schumann apparently meant Kinderszenen to evoke childhood as experienced by children in childhood, without any intermediate adult sentimentality, which means the apparent playfulness ultimately gives way to its generating principles: we are happy here, but we fade. My favorite performance is the one recorded in 1988 by Mieczyslaw Horszowski, when he was 95 years old, who had begun his career as a child wunderkind a full century ago. I find it impossible to listen to this man play Schumann (or especially Chopin) without imagining the lightness of my own corpse.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

19. “She Moves Through The Fair”

Fairport Convention, What We Did On Our Holiday (Island, 1969); composer unknown

A group as mercurial as Fairport Convention was could never really hit a “peak,” but the coincidence (not confluence) of temperamental opposites, Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, is the consensus favorite. Still, the numerous high points are shadowed by a handful of utter duds: not just dull listening but utterly misconceived. Which are what is purely subjective, however, and the serious intent of the duds speaks to how serendipitous the high points probably were. This particular high point, a traditional Irish folk song, was on their first album with Denny in 1969, when they still might have been aspiring to be Jefferson Airplane. Apart from Thompson’s electric guitar counterpoint, it is not rock, but their communalist approach illuminates and defines the song in a way no folklorist ever had, and inspired countless subsequent versions. It is both more playable and mysterious. In the first verse, a girl assures her lover that her parents have waived all objections to their marriage. The entirety of the second verse has him watching her walk away. In the last, she tells him: “It will not be long, love, ‘til our wedding day.” The original third verse explaining that she is now dead was omitted.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).

18. “Dali’s Car”

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969); composed by Don Van Vliet

Even if eighty percent (by my rough estimate) of what has been said about how Trout Mask Replica was made is not true (including most of what its auteur ever said about it), that detracts absolutely nothing from its achievement. Which raises the question of what all the mythopoeia was actually for. Did it answer any genuine need for empirical evidence that these 28 tracks comprising such ruthlessly engineered collisions of allusive wordplay and musical strokes (like the painting kind) were intentional, as we understand the word? No, because we do not understand the word. “Dali’s Car” is a polytonal instrumental guitar duet lasting barely a minute and a half, smack in the middle of this two-LP behemoth. The music is beautiful, grim, and in tone utterly unlike any of the other tracks, except for the only other instrumental, “Hair Pie” which is presented in two different renditions (or “Bakes”) just to show that it was “intentional.” Two “Dali’s Car”s would be redundant, because it is a challenge like Gertrude Stein's riposte to a journalist with the temerity to ask her why she didn’t write the way she talked (i.e. “normally”): “Why don’t you read the way I write?”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

17. “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”

Parliament, Mothership Connection (Casablanca, 1975); composed by George Clinton, William Collins & Bernie Worrell

The great U.S. Funk Mob had hotter jams than this, but their oeuvre never readily boiled down to high points. This aggregation (“band” is inadequate to a project this conceptual) got far more mileage than anyone else out of what would be filler from anyone else: midtempo grooves on which the harmony group at its core could expound vocally and, above all, rhetorically. This track was edited and shortened by half for single release in 1975, but it makes no sense reduced to its hooky bits. It requires its full six minute length for the groove to unwind properly, underlined by Bernie Worrell’s sublime bridge sections, interlaced with Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker’s horn lines, interrupting the overall flow periodically while underlining George Clinton’s explication of his extended metaphor. The Mothership on the album cover (and in the shows) was not just slick science fiction marketing; it was a chariot to the next life. Certainly, Electric Light Orchestra could hardly land their own copycat spaceship and start quoting the Book of Revelations -- saying “it’s nothing but a party” and “it’s just me and the boys,” and then caution listeners thus: “When Gabriel's horn blows, you better be ready to go.”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

16. “The Moon In June”

Soft Machine, Third (Columbia, 1970); composed by Robert Wyatt

“The Moon In June” is a nineteen minute last gasp of unassuming greatness from an English band that was pioneering (or succumbing to) a kind of electrified doodling that could be marketed as “jazz-rock,” but on this double-LP comprising one title per side, it was their jazziest player – drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt – who crafted the only non-instrumental track, and the songiest song. And in a period when tedious nineteen minute (or longer) epics were becoming a common ploy among the ambitious, this track is unlike any other. Wyatt warbles a bunch of words about sex and homesickness that he sounds like he is drumming to, and has claimed in interviews that he has absolutely no memory of. But all are buoyed by an oddly discursive melody that steadily varies but never quite repeats; it just snakes across the record sounding like nothing but itself, until the music gives way to the best jazzy-rock playing on the record and a moaning coda with demented violin soloing over manipulated tapes. Wyatt’s departure from this group soon after was so acrimonious that he claims his confidence never really recovered from it, but his group never recovered from this.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

15. “I Want Your Love”

Chic, C’est Chic (Atlantic, 1978); composed by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers

At its edited-for-radio length, the more modest of the two hits off Chic’s second album was even more obnoxious than the immodest hit ("Le Freak" – Atlantic's best-selling 45 ever, once). There is barely a song there: just the same four descending notes in a single chord over and over. However, at its full seven-minute length, it becomes completely different music, and the most weirdly pure example of what distinguished disco once its aesthetic definition began to take hold. The vocalists sing the humdrum words in unison, abjuring any soloist’s “expressivity,” but the guitar and bass vamping weightlessly over drummer Tony Thompson’s rippling straight four with no clear downbeats allows the music to distend itself, making the ostensibly inexpressive vocals strangely hyper-emotional, and extending into the instrumental breaks which do not, by strict definition, contain solos. A string section plays a cleanly articulated counter-melody; brass repeats the same phrase and same rhythm; and by the time Nile Rodgers takes the track out with nothing but a rhythm figure on guitar, the tune is in midair. It was difficult to discern this breakthrough amidst the treacle marketed as disco on late ‘70s radio, but it still is.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

14. "Eisiger Wind"

LiLiPut (Rough Trade 45, 1981); composed by Chrigle Freund, Marlene Marder & Klaudia Schiff

One of the most remarkable things about the late Tony Judt’s genuinely remarkable history of modern Europe, Postwar, is how pig ignorant he was about punk rock. That Judt would posit European critical theory and the Sex Pistols on the same page as if they were opposites (see page 480) against the readily documentable contrary certainly caught my attention. Does it matter? No, but sometimes yes. Why? Because of certain isolated but definitive acts of aesthetic generosity that epitomized punk without typifying it. Maybe foremost among these is “Eisiger Wind” (German for “Icy Wind”), a single by an all female group of mostly-painters from Zürich who released a string of sublime records on which varying personnel sang or howled in alternating and equally incomprehensible English and German, hilarious and scary in equal measure, against primitive (or primitivist) guitar-bass-drums. Sometimes whistling. I have not a clue as to what this song is about. All I know is that the three musicians on this record play and sing what sound like three completely different yet still intimately related songs at the same time, at full force, resolving as one into a chorus that goes: “LA-LA-la-la, LA-la, La-LA-la-LA-la-LA-la, LA-la-la-la-LA-LA-la, La-la-la-LA!”

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

13. “When The Levee Breaks”

Kansas Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie (Columbia, 1929); composed by Joe McCoy & Lizzie Douglas;
Led Zeppelin, Ƶ ɸ ʘ @ (Atlantic, 1971); composed by John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant & Memphis Minnie

Memphis Minnie began her lengthy career with this song in 1929, two years after the cataclysmic flood it describes, when she was still performing with her first husband who co-composed and plays guitar with her on it. Even with the memory of the flood as fresh as it was, Minnie’s dispassionate alto suggests that the upheaval she is describing is as much sexual as it is about merely surviving. There is nothing quaintly stoic about it, but its droll matter-of-factness surprises anyone who hears Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track of the same title first. Although Minnie received co-composer credit and the lyrics are largely the same, the two songs have far less in common than do “Killing Floor,” and “The Lemon Song” (which conspicuously failed to credit Willie Dixon). It is meaningless to say that Led Zeppelin’s re-creation is overstated, when overstatement is its subject and its medium. The drums were recorded in a stone hallway with mikes catching three floors of echo and overtones. Nothing on the master tape is played back at the same speed at which it was recorded. A record that sounds like there is more music on it than there possibly could be, because there is.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

12. “Yesterdays”

Billie Holiday (Commodore, 1939); Miles Davis (Blue Note, 1952); Marianne Faithfull, Strange Weather (Island, 1987); composed by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for the 1933 musical, Roberta

I own at least five versions of this song from a now- obscure musical where it was introduced by Irene Dunne. Although its “subject” is obvious from the title, the song is hard to parse, both emotionally and musically. The words wistfully recalling “days of wild romance and love” and oddly rhyming “youth” with “truth,” exude a steely reluctance to mourn anything, and the music follows suit. Major chords glimmer through the minor, and the harmony never quite resolves in any predictable way. The song never lands. Miles Davis’s 1952 version (recorded after he almost fired Jackie McLean for refusing to learn it) underscores this. Billie Holiday’s definitive version was recorded at the same session as “Strange Fruit” and even more jarring than the similarity of the two performances is how appropriate that similarity is. Sorrowful, sardonic, but no regrets at all. Marianne Faithfull’s version with the weltschmertz underlined by Bill Frisell’s guitar and Michael Gibbs’s string arrangement would seem to overstate the case for melancholia were it not for the physical fact that Faithfull’s voice seems to drip with an almost idealized notion of pain so visceral that it is as much a dark joke as nostalgia itself is.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

11. “Soon”

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless (Sire/Creation, 1991); composed by Kevin Shields

As anyone even remotely familiar with this band knows, the album that this song closes is all of a piece, conceptually differs wildly from the (sole) album that preceded it by three years (pretty great, but it took me a while), and was never followed up, numerous press releases and reunion tours notwithstanding. But nothing encapsulates the full-bore weirdness of Loveless like its coda. The one tune with a dance rhythm, but it is the obverse of what contemporaneous dance music was turning into as it perfected itself by dispensing with live drummers. “Soon” has a “live” drummer, but Colm Ó Cíosóig is rarely more than just audible under a hyper-sampled onslaught that is deafening no matter how low the volume goes. It is deafening because the guitar is so overdriven that it engulfs the available sonic space and pushes every other detail to the periphery, denuding the music of any physical reference point – like Jupiter: massive but nothing to stand on even if you could get there – and makes even Bilinda Butcher’s cooed vocals sound menacing. Which they are. Either a lover or an opiate tells you: “Someone like you can find the reason / Of what I did to you."


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

10. “Nacht und Träume”

Composed by Franz Schubert, to text by Matthäus Kasimir von Collin, D. 827 (Op. 43, No. 2) (1822)

The composite words of this three minute lied form a praise song (auf Deutsch) to night time, as if the dream life fell into our heads with the darkness, as though this was an unexceptionably pleasant thing, and as though dreamers necessarily cry for its return when the morning takes it all away. It is the music that makes this argument, however. The entire score is incredibly quiet (pp) and lulling throughout, but the rhythmic structure is deliberately disjoint; the accompanying piano is much faster than the vocal line, which accordingly floats over the top like a single steadily expanding cloud that does not appear to move as it falls. This song is also one of only two pieces of pre-existing music that Samuel Beckett included in dramatic works (Beethoven’s “Ghost Trio” is the other), this for German television and very late in his life, which this piece appears to capture. A sleeping man twice dreams of himself being comforted (or nursed?) by the hands of an unseen other (possibly himself again), differentiated by the second dream image's greater size as if it is slowly crowding out the dreamer, who may or may not still exist in the waking world.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

9. "Follow The Leader"

Eric B. & Rakim (Uni 12-inch, 1988); composed by Eric Barrier and William Griffin

Even before I had actually heard any of it, rap interested me. Just from seeing it described in print (even by the numerous hostile) its long game was obvious to me, and also that it ultimately could not be just “spoken word” with music. It was some time before I began to hear records that sounded like what I expected rap to sound like, which is not to say that I could have imagined how the first hip-hop record I loved would actually sound. "Follow the Leader” broke through to me like nothing before it because (in Jay-Z’s precision terminology) the “rhythm argument” in Rakim’s flow, keyed to Eric B.’s constantly self-destabilizing beats, presented an immediate right brain problem: It was music I heard as music rather than a rhythmic verbal flow that I heard as words first and then had to go that extra inch to process (and thus ultimately hear) as music. I might have hit that sweet spot with The Treacherous Three and, in their initially austere way, Run-DMC when they first emerged, but both (and Public Enemy) always impressed me more than they confused me; and the latter is what I need great music to do.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

8. “Because”

The Beatles, Abbey Road (Apple/EMI, 1969); composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

This is the last song The Beatles recorded. John Lennon wrote it around the chord sequence from the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata played backwards, originally by Yoko at John’s inspiration. This song belies practically everything Lennon said publicly about his partnership with Paul McCartney, up until just before he died, by which time Lennon finally had the rudiments of a working method that did not highlight McCartney’s absence from the room. That is not to say that “Because” is not Lennon’s sole composition, but it is also neither the “rock & roll” that supposedly distinguished him, nor would it have been one of the late Beatles singles that were usually McCartney songs (irrelevant now; but not then, even to the Beatles). “Because” is, however, perfect: 2:45 of reverse Beethoven sung in triple-tracked three part harmony by John and George with Paul’s upper partials. This is what we have. As Linda McCartney said in 1984 (when Paul was out of the room): “I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again. … People thought, Well, [John's] … a househusband and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write and it drove him crazy.” We will never know.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

7. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”

Sly & the Family Stone, There’s a Riot Goin’ On (Epic, 1971); composed by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone

This is the title track of the first album by Sly & the Family Stone in two years back in 1971 when such a gap was unusual for an act so popular. Nevertheless, the album went straight to No. 1. And its title song does not actually exist. On the LP label, the track’s time is clocked at “0:00.” It would seem more likely that Sly Stone’s massive cocaine intake was simply messing with his sense of humor, were it not, firstly, for the strange gripping quality of the music you could actually listen to. The group that played Woodstock was largely absent from these sessions. Sly sang and played most of it himself, with a few session musicians and spot vocals from Rose. Even on the hit singles (of which there were three), the songs are like being woken up by a threatening phone call. The title comes from “Riot in Cell Block #9,” a 1954 song by the Robins. Its joke is that the partying rioters depicted are as doomed as the ones at Attica were just a few months before Riot came out. Rather than tell you this directly, Sly rings you at midnight and hangs up.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

6. “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”

Pet Shop Boys (featuring Dusty Springfield), Actually (EMI, 1987); composed by Chris Lowe, Neil Tennant & Allee Willis

Before this duo formally came out (wryly observing that they surprised no one), their hits shared a decided delicacy toward gendered pronouns and a comparable indelicacy toward the moral collisions the songs were about. Although this song is as quintessentially chromed as a Fairlight-driven ‘80s pop tune could be (and it went to No. 2), it is as much punk rock as the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays In The Sun,” which, as Dick Hebdige once observed, is both about and an example of semantic disorder. Dusty Springfield’s guest performance is key, because she imposes her sound on any aesthetic without sounding like she is part of it. Effectively, she is no less detached than Neil Tennant purports to be. The song is not a duet. They are not singing about “their” relationship; they are singing about “relationships” breaking apart semantically as well as emotionally, notwithstanding even the most cynical motives. One line goes, “Now you’ve left me with nothing – can’t take it.” Its counterpart one verse later goes, “Now I can do what I want to – FOREVER!” As willed optimism it rivals the Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light,” and puts a lump in my throat every time I hear it.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

5. “Open Pit Mine”

George Jones, The New Favorites of George Jones (United Artists, 1962); composed by D.T. Gentry

This song came out as a single the same year as "She Thinks I Still Care," which alone would make Jones a genius singer in the way he makes the line about dialing his ex-lover's number "by mis-taaaaake today..." sound both hilarious and like you and he each lost a kidney. "Open Pit Mine," in contrast, is a murder ballad like no other, although in its outline it is like almost all others: the singer’s wife cheats, so he kills her and her lover together. And the Arizona copper mine of the title is a metaphor like a sack of doorknobs is: he makes the money he gives her for pleasure by working "like a slave" there; he runs to it after his crime; he has been digging his grave in it all along. But the shocking dispassion of Jones' performance makes the comparatively studied solemnity of Johnny Cash's own genuinely great moments sound utterly cornball. Neither sad resignation nor grief: just barely articulable horrified surprise. In contrast, for Bruce Springsteen to have Charlie Starkweather say that "there's just a meanness in this world" in “Nebraska” is just Bruce’s admission that his performance alone cannot do the math for us.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

4. “Give It Up Or Turn It A-Loose”

James Brown, Sex Machine (King, 1970); composed by Charles Bobbit

This edition of the JBs, with Clyde Stobblefield on drums and Bootsy Collins on bass is as different from the band that played on Live at the Apollo, Vol. II, released only two years earlier, as the storied 100 mile per gallon carburetor would be from a Hummer. The earlier music is classic, but the music made on this album constitutes one of the half dozen most pivotal shifts in 20th Century music. The only other musician to grasp the uniqueness of its implications compositionally was Miles Davis, but not as dance music, as which it is unequaled. It is as if James Brown invented something as pivotal as lightbulbs or automobiles but no one else could ever manufacture them. “Give It Up” is almost entirely variations on one highly complex counterpointed rhythmic figure. The verse is one chord. The bridge is another chord, up a major fourth. There are no other chords. Despite the obvious downbeats, the transitions between sections are impossible to predict by counting bars or beats; you simply have to remember where James cues the band. On this track, he cues the band with a shriek that sounds like he is falling out of an airplane.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

3. “Birdland”

Patti Smith, Horses (Arista, 1975); composed by Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral & Richard Sohl

The first Patti Smith "group" comprised Patti reciting, with Lenny Kaye on guitar and Richard Sohl on piano. “Birdland” is the one track on their first album using this drumless configuration, plus Ivan Kral’s bass. It is a slow two-chord vamp setting Patti’s semi-improvised, half-sung recitation describing Wilhelm Reich’s son after his father’s funeral, imagining his father turned into an alien (“very different tonight”) coming to take his son away in a spaceship. The implicit promise of the apparition is that Dr. Reich would take Peter away and sidestep the problem of death forever for both of them. As the vision solidifies in Peter Reich’s mind, he is overcome with joy, but then the ship vanishes. He is as alone as he had always been but with a new burning question before him: Can a mind even contemplate a level of grief so intense that one would gladly change species altogether on the outside chance that the metamorphosis might allow you the repose necessary to think it without feeling it? Or could accepting the entire package turn you into a prophet? This song is why I trust everything Patti says about Rimbaud, even when I disagree with it.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.

2. “Midnight Rambler”

The Rolling Stones recorded live at a 1973 show in Munich, found on various bootlegs, most notably Bedspring Symphony; composed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

The most problematic aspect of the Rolling Stones’ discography is that an early business decision resulted in Allen Klein’s obtaining control of their ‘60s publishing. Accordingly, the Stones made a point of keeping those songs off concert recordings which is why the only official live album with Mick Taylor on it (Ya-Ya’s) was under their Decca contract when Taylor had only just joined. The full capabilities of that group as a live unit are not documented on any recording you can legally buy. This version of “Midnight Rambler” was recorded during a tour of Europe promoting Goats Head Soup, which is generally considered the beginning of a steep artistic decline and the point at which Keith Richards’ heroin use was making audible inroads on his ability to function. Nevertheless, this rendition of “Rambler” is over 13 minutes long, although its tempo is double that of any officially released version. Keith cues every part of it, including what Jagger does. You can tell that Keith’s guitar is all Charlie Watts hears in his monitor. Mick Taylor plays banshee slide over the top. It bears reminding that the Stones were a specifically musical phenomenon and their mystique was the tail of that comet.

Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.