A Screaming Song is Good to Know…

One of the most memorable panels from Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s 1960 book Open House for Butterflies features the line: “A screaming song is good to know in case you need to scream.” I’ve thought about that line a lot in the 4,932 days since 2020 began, and I am ready to sing like a fucking canary. Every sentence I type here that isn’t in all caps is a testament to my self-control, which is hanging on by a thread. I have zero interest in finding a solution to any of the world’s problems right now. There is no amount of text-banking, sound baths, or sourdough starters that will fill the great empty space that has been hollowed out inside of me in this absolute dumpster fire of a year. Instead, I’ve decided to give into the void and place my vocal cords on the sacrificial pyre, like Lulu, Kundry, and Laura Dern before me. This is not without precedent: Freud saw screaming as a useful means of identifying an object as painful. “The information of one’s own scream serves to characterize that object,” he wrote in Project for a Scientific Psychology. 20 years later, Arthur Janov expanded on the therapeutic use of screaming with his conception of Primal Therapy. For Janov, a primal scream was “at once a scream from the pain and a liberating event where the person’s defense system is dramatically opened up. It results from the pressure of holding the real self back, possibly for decades.” If you want to spend Election Day with me in the void, here are 15 screaming songs that are good to know in case you need to scream.