“Hey Pretty (Drive-By 2001 Mix)” – Poe
(Words/music: Kenneth Burgonmaster, Mark Z. Danielewski, Poe, and Matthew Wilder, available on Haunted, Atlantic 2000 (Reissued 2004))

I had only the vaguest recollection of “Hey Pretty” when House of Leaves took hold of me in college.  What started as an assignment for a modern fiction class grew into a semester long independent study on Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel, and somewhere in the process I realized that Poe is Danielewski’s sister.  Moreover, her Haunted album makes numerous detailed (page numbers!) references to her brother’s book.  When I sought out her album during the week that my paper sent me nocturnal, I never really got much further than the remix of “Hey Pretty” featuring Danielewski reading part of the book over her song.  Even if Poe told an interviewer that the collaboration grew out of a desperate desire for airplay on the testosterone heavy modern rock radio, Danielewski’s reading builds on Poe’s original.

Of course, Danielewski picked a relevant section of the book for “Hey Pretty.”  Rather than use one of his labyrinthine footnotes or detailed explorations of the novel’s mysterious house, he reads from a section detailing a romantic tryst in a fast car.  These sections lean heavily on visual descriptions and sexual tension, pushing the driving-as-sex metaphor awful close to obviousness.  Still, Danielewski’s pacing and eye for detail fit the song well as he balances rhythmic passages (the “fast, slow, fast-fast, slow” sounds better than it reads).  Particularly, the focus on communication in the jazzy breakdown puts the two lovers (for lack of a better word) as physically close yet emotionally detached – a recognition that the narrator acknowledges when he laments that “dark languages rarely survive.”  Even if it’s a little odd to have such an explicit affair in a song performed by siblings, Danielewski’s storytelling and Poe’s chorus suit each other well.  Even if the remix isn’t as darkly complex as either of their other works, it’s a rare bright spot in an otherwise labyrinthine intertextual multimedia web of storytelling. 

(And yes, Poe, we get the gist of the song now. Thanks for asking.)

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