Why ‘This Is How We Do It’ Is Actually a Country Song

Last summer, I went for a run. And I do not run with any music. I run musiclessly. And so I get to the gym, and I, for once, don’t have headphones while I’m exercising. And I heard a song that I’ve heard, I don’t know, 2 million times, probably? “This Is How We Do It” —

archived recording (montell jordan)

(SINGING) This is how we do it.

— by Montell Jordan.

And somewhere at the beginning of this song, after I have gotten all of the groove establishment thoroughly in my system again, I started to hear this song in a completely new way. There’s this great line in this song where he’s saying, “It feels so good in my hood tonight, and the summertime skirts and my guys in Kani, and all the gang bangers forgot about the drive-by.” He lives in south central Los Angeles, which in 1995 when this song comes out is well established as a particular pop culture zone, from “Poetic Justice” and “Boyz N the Hood” and “Menace to Society.” It’s a violent place where people could die at any minute.

And there is just something so moving about the idea that because this party is happening, somebody is going to live tonight. And in its way, it is celebrating life in the most subtle, and, I don’t know, at the same time mundane way. And I was really picking up what Montell was putting down.

And the fact is that he put it down a long time ago. I was just finally ready to stop dancing and pick it up. And what I heard was that it wasn’t just some stellar piece of hip-hop R&B. It was a country song.

I’m Wesley Morris, and I am high on Montell Jordan because I am hearing him like I have never heard him before. I’m also a culture writer at “The New York Times,” and this is “Still Processing.”

OK. Yes, I did just say that. I do think that “This Is How We Do It” is a country song. And here’s what I mean.

There’s a kind of country song that is exclusively about where people have come from — I mean where they physically actually are from. The one that came to mind for me is kind of the opposite of “This Is How We Do It.” It’s Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” from 1969. You know, he’s upset about people’s negative reaction to the war. So he went and wrote a song about how none of those values have crept into the culture of Muskogee, Oklahoma.

archived recording (merle haggard)

(SINGING) We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.

We don’t take our trips on L.S.D.

I mean, he’s already saying, like, listen, this is what’s not happening here.

Nope, we don’t burn draft cards. We go fight in the war.

He has judged half the country in five bars. There are no lines to read between. He’s laying it all out. And “Okie from Muskogee” is the sort of songs, the sort of country song, that should be familiar to any country listener. It is about celebrating the place where you’re from and what its values are based on the constituency of the artist. You can go as far forward as Eric Church, who is basically writing songs about where he’s from that are about what you won’t be doing when you get there.

archived recording (eric church)

(SINGING) Give me back my hometown, ‘cause this is my hometown.

And so this tradition of saying, hey, this is where I’m from, is also a kind of way of saying, this is the kind of American person I am. And what Montell Jordan is doing, by comparison, is saying, you guys from Muskogee perhaps have judged us. You guys had this one idea from the Los Angeles riots, but there’s a sliver of something else to say about this place that I’m from, which is that life can be pretty good here, too.

I listen to this song now, and I just hear such a depth and complexity that [LAUGHS] I could never have heard as a 19-year-old. I just couldn’t have heard it. And I’m not the only person in this relationship that is thinking about the uses of the past. The bass line of “This Is How We Do It” is a sample from Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” which by 1995 would have been a hip-hop classic from a previous era. So in that sense, this song is the past speaking to Montell Jordan.

And it’s been with me this whole time. That song hadn’t changed at all. I had. I am a slightly more sophisticated person than I was when I was 19.

And I would say that the song that wins the “I haven’t changed, you have” championship belt is “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M.

It’s a song that I heard for the first time when I was 15 years old. It’s their biggest hit. They were my favorite band because I felt like they were always trying to tell me something that was encoded in the songwriting.

Somewhere in there was the truth about the person singing the songs. And in this case, that person’s name is Michael Stipe. He is the lead singer of that band. And I think the thing for me as a kid and a teenager that was so appealing to me about R.E.M. was the possibility that Michael Stipe might actually be singing about [SIGHS] being gay.

“Losing My Religion” was a song that seemed to be most explicitly about a kind of love or attraction that I was very familiar with at 15 years old, which was, you like somebody and they don’t like you back. They don’t even know you exist. And there’s so much shame and embarrassment, but also determination to be heard and seen and to speak.

I would listen to this song over and over. I would transcribe the lyrics in my little notebook that I kept. And even when I was an adult, I still thought my fascination for, my love of this song, was about Michael Stipe. And it wasn’t until about a year ago, when I heard the band on an episode of a show called “Song Exploder” — I was waiting for Michael Stipe to be like, yes, I wrote this song, and it’s definitely about this guy. I don’t know, his name is Nick, and Nick never returned any of my feelings.

But I actually was listening to Michael Stipe, and I realized, wait a minute, Wesley. You’ve had this wrong the whole time. This amazing song, this beautiful, lyrical song, was actually just telling you that you — Wesley — were gay. I was writing the lyrics out looking for answers to who I was, not who he was.

And you know, I’m an adult now who’s ready to do my own work. I don’t need the art to do it for me. But it’s nice to know that I always had a guardian angel in the form of this band and this song.

When I’m at the gym or watching a TV show like “Song Exploder,” and I hear an old song in a new way, whatever it is, whatever you call that experience — I think some version of that happened to us collectively last year when that “Framing Britney Spears” documentary came out.

For a lot of people, this was the first time they were hearing anything about how she didn’t have any control over her life.

And she couldn’t make her own decisions about her career, or how to spend her money, or her medical care or even how to be a mother. And I was in this documentary for a little bit, and what really struck me about it — one of the things — was just how her fans essentially became her protectors, her town criers, spreading the word about her situation.

But there is something about all of this sort of justice-oriented energy being directed at this one very famous white woman, when there’s a whole other universe of injustice happening for people — and I’m not saying that the people who were working to free Britney Spears, for instance, aren’t interested in criminal justice reform or closing the wealth gap. But even if getting Britney Spears out of that bad conservatorship is your personal cause, your fight to stop global warming, we still actually might have a problem, because Britney Spears is also an artist. And one of the side effects of shedding light on this issue of conservatorships, at least with respect to Britney Spears, is that I actually think it kind of changes our relationship to her work.

And one thing that I can imagine happening, because we now have devoted so much time and energy and concern and care and worry to the well-being of this person who makes music that used to thrill us, is that it now becomes sad music. [LAUGHS] It doesn’t make us happy anymore. When we hear — when we hear those opening bars of “Baby One More Time,” like dun, dun, dun, dun, [VOCALIZING]

And we feel so attached to the sad aspect of what we just went through with Britney Spears that when it comes on, we’re going to put our lighters up like it’s “Candle in the Wind” or “Purple Rain.” And instead of running to the dance floor or staying on the dance floor and, you know, dancing our brains out and grinding up against somebody, it’s going to be like —

She didn’t die, y’all. She’s here. Y’all freed her. She’s free.

But I also think this isn’t just about Britney Spears. We’ve spent the last five years in what we have been calling the Me Too movement. Since the revelations around Harvey Weinstein and a bunch of other hideous people, we’ve actually come to understand how deep and old this system is. And some of that reckoning has to do with how the entertainment industry has perpetuated and excused the mistreatment of so many women.

But I don’t want that to culminate in the amputation of the pleasure that these people once brought us. That’s what we’ve been talking about for the last five years, in so many ways. What do we do with all of these bad people who made this good art that we liked? Or what do we do with these wronged people who brought us all this pleasure over the years?

There was no way to live with the products that came out of this lechery, abuse, exploitation. And I don’t know if that’s really quite right, because I really don’t think that the question is, like, artist or art? I mean, it’s artist and art.

I mean, I, the other day, was in downtown Brooklyn, walking on Fulton Street, and somebody was outside playing “Jam” by Michael Jackson. And I heard it, and I had to stop. And I really had to think about what to do. Because my body went back to 1991, and “Jam” was a jam. I just — I love that song.

But I was thinking, as I’m standing there being transported — like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just three years ago, when we were in the midst of re-reckoning our relationship with Michael Jackson, I definitely would have been like, nope, can’t listen, don’t want to hear it, got to keep walking. Don’t go back to ‘91, don’t go back to ‘91.

But here in 2022, three years later, on the one hand, I am very aware of what Michael Jackson is alleged to have done to many children during his time on this Earth. And on the other hand, I can allow myself the private experience of letting this song transport me back to a place I used to be. I can think about those kids, and I can think about when I was a kid and I loved that song.

I mean, one of the beautiful things about art is that the art itself is not going to change. “This Is How We Do It” is the same song in 1995 as it is in 2022. Same song. It’s always going to feel like an invitation to me — like, come, see how we do it. And that invitation is always going to feel spiritual. And one of the great things about art is no matter what the circumstances are of the artist who made the work, the art itself is always going to be there, essentially unchanged, ready for you, waiting for you to be ready to receive it.

That’s our show. And I can’t believe this, but I have a special guest in the studio with me today. It’s Christopher Tompkins, my nephew. Say hi, Christopher.

Hi. So I’m new here. And this is a pretty big deal for me because I’ve actually never done this before. But yeah, I’m ready to do this.

You’re ready to do it? OK. So we’re going to read the credits. So why don’t you start?

All right.

“Still Processing” is produced by Elyssa Dudley and Hans Buetow.

It’s edited by Sara Sarasohn and Sasha Weiss.

The show was mixed by Marion Lozano and recorded by Maddy Masiello.

Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Des Ibekwe.

Our theme music is by Kindness. It’s called “World Restart” from the album “Otherness.”

Ah, we’ll be back next week. Christopher, that was amazing. Thanks for doing this with me. I love you.

No problem. I love you, too. So goodbye. Goodbye, guys. That was fun. Goodbye.

Did you see everything, by the way?

Yeah, I got — I used an elevator, and then I didn’t have a key card, so I got trapped in a bunch of rooms, glass rooms. And a nice lady helped me out. And I was like, I wanted to go in the elevator again. And then it happened again. So then the security guard had to let me out. And I did it a third time.

Yeah, OK. You were on floors that you shouldn’t have been on.

Yeah, and then I got stuck. And a bunch of people had to help me out. And it was pretty stressful.

Well, you’re here now. That’s all that matters.