CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)
By:
February 4, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
MAD JENNY & THE SOCIETY BAND | “HEART OF GLASS” | 2015
The past is a basement cabaret on the Lower East Side of New York. It’s already part mirage, with a singer performing a tune that was popular more than 30 years before, in a style from four decades and a world war before that. At least the mirage is recurring.
But in that, the song is an epitaph, and if we don’t know it then, we’ll remember it that way. Performance artist Jenny Lee Mitchell had a well-pitched ear for how history rhymes, and in the year before Trump first got elected her Mad Jenny persona had been playing a set of songs from 1970s, 1980s and 2010s radio alongside, and with arrangements matching, non-standards of the Weimar stage from Hitler’s rise to power.
Wistful and elegiac, Mad Jenny’s “Heart of Glass” is insulated against tears since it’s so damn comic. Blondie’s 1979 hit, keyed to the fad of disco in the first place and thus fading as it ascended, was here re-paced to fit Jenny’s mid-song tapdance, an antique hipness that both burlesqued the song’s original context and strangely knitted it into history. This was Jenny’s joyful footwork against the final pull of the Obama era’s 8-year sleepwalk into totalitarianism. A time when dissent flared, not inspired by but in spite of the president who deported the most people in history, embraced drone warfare and mass surveillance, presided over violent suppression of economic and ecological protest. But also when difference and creativity flourished, in the relative relief from a hammer that was being raised again just out of sight, or where many didn’t care to look.
I think of this tune as the end-title theme for that whole span of history. Accompanist Maria Dessena’s lilting arpeggio is like rain falling up, a delicate fond figure that turns out to be a perpetual farewell. It plays in my head like a haunted-house piano, but one I welcome back; there is a lot to miss about those days, and the lesson of Mitchell and Dessena’s nesting-doll retro is that ever-worsening times produce an evolving nostalgia. (Consciously evanescent, the song has also evaporated from the web, though some echoes of the musicians’ aesthetic linger here.)
Mad Jenny didn’t survive the first Trump era; Mitchell retired her for the boozy midcentury kitsch chanteuse Muffy Styler in the manner of U2’s shift from earnest in the Reagan years to absurdist in the Clinton ’90s, and this made sense: dark WWII undertones were necessary when nobody was taking Trump seriously enough; ridicule of his fantasy peak-America is the obligation now that he gets as much credence as he does. Mad Jenny’s song played out, and I know why it had to. But it said everything it needed to, and I hear it still.
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (MAD JENNY) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on THE LIVES OF OTHERS | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Michael Grasso on PYNCHONIA | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!