THE NAKED ANIMAL

Last night I had a Japanese guest student in my evening class of Korean ESL beginners, and we were talking about music preferences. The Koreans all betrayed the mushiness behind their crisp, salty exteriors with a love of sappy pop songs. The Japanese woman, on the other hand, perkily reported that she didn't like any kind of music. I looked at her with unmasked astonishment. "What do you mean you don't like any kind of music?" I questioned her, and she said: "I just don't like it. I don't listen to it." She had no qualms about it, and none of the other students seemed in the least disturbed by her declaration, but it chilled me to my core. Perhaps it's corny, but music in all of its manifestations adds a textural layer to my life that weaves its way in and out of the other layers as an integral part of the whole fabric, and it has always acted as an emotional touchstone, diary and compass for me. In fact, music has often informed me of my emotions before I grasped them intellectually, and I have always counted on it to mediate my moods. Not to like music! It was akin to saying that she didn't like eating; which I also suspect might be the case: she was wafer thin.

Lately I've been experiencing a phenomenon that comes about in every music lover's life around the age of 40, and that is the usurpation of one's history as nostalgia both shaped and propagated by the media. I knew my time was coming when Led Zeppelin started hawking Cadillacs a few years back, going for the crowd that had doped its way through high school just before I arrived there. Now, it's 80s, 80s, 80s, shoved down my throat 24 hours a day, and it's mostly not my 80s, but the same mainstream (or poseur avant garde) 80s bullshit that I did my best to stay away from even when it was new. I have to say that I'm SICK of nostalgia altogether. It feels so two steps forward, one step back; or one step forward, one step back; or is it simply one step back, one more step back these days?

The poor generation behind mine is not even being allowed the decency of the standard 15- to 20-year waiting period: The 90s are already being packaged as nostalgia (Hey, We Love the 80s, so why not Love the 90s, too, while we're at it?). And it's not even real nostalgia, but ironic nostalgia, or is it quasi-ironic or post-ironic? Anyway, it's highly adulterated. We're not allowed to actually feel something real about anything unless we also sneer at it. But this is not about cynicism. That's a much squirmier can of worms than I'm willing to open today, one that takes thought and analyses.

Instead, I want to start on a new technique of self exploration, following phenomenological streams in my life to chart the interlocking tributaries between them, and to measure how they've flowed into the sea that is now me. I think this kind of subject-based life study coupled with the sort-of-chronological narrative I've already begun will provide me with the warp and weft I need for the kind of weaving I'd like to do. Okay, enough with the metaphors.

So I'll start with music, mostly because that music-despising Japanese student ("Oh wait," she added later. "I like the song 'Happy Birthday to You,' because I know I will soon get gifts when I hear it. Tee hee hee hee [giggle, giggle].") made me start thinking seriously about how integral it has always been to my worldview, my soul, and my very sanity. She also reminded me in an unexpectedly visceral way how much music has always moved me, whether down the road in my car or through the stratosphere via spirit, and I immediately wanted to put my relationship with it together and look at it, like a scientist with a new spirochete to examine under the microscope.

My first deep contact with music happened the day I got kicked out of nursery school in 1969. Stevie Wonder was singing "Ma Cherie Amour" on the radio in my mom's Chevy station wagon, and it was the first time I had ever differentiated one song from the miasma of environmental noise that squeezed its way through my toddler’s nervous system. I completely disappeared into that song, and wandered out when the commercials started up again, dazed and wanting more. More, more, more! I sucked up music from my environment like an anteater does its scurrying prey. I remember, sometime very soon after being initiated by Stevie in the station wagon, standing outside someone else's screened off patio in our Downey, CA apartment complex and listening to "Summerbreeze," the entire song, on their radio, certain that I was hearing "blowing through the jaspin of my mind," and almost as certain that "the jaspin" was a special part of the brain that processed memory.

In fact, most of the pleasure I derived from listening to music as a very small child--mostly on AM radio stations--came from extremely idiosyncratic misunderstandings of pop song lyrics, my all-time favorite being "Rickey Don't Loose that Gumba," (by Steely Dan) in which "loose" is supposed to mean "free," and a "Gumba" is a ferocious animal similar to a mongoose, in a cage, and the singer doesn't want this "Rickey" person (also the name of my only male friend in second grade, when the song came out) to let it out for some reason. Now, the really BIG thrill I got from this song was my imagined understanding that "Steely Dan" (of course, I thought it was the singer's name, didn't you when you were a kid?) was actually not talking about a REAL Gumba, but a metaphorical one, which was a ferocious, mongoose-like part of this Rickey's personality. I thought I was very sophisticated at the time for figuring that out. Never mind that the lyrics following this line made absolutely no sense if my theory were true. The point was that my imagination was getting a work out, and that is something I've always treasured more than just about anything else. Of course, when my friend Rickey's mom told me that Rikki (a woman, not a boy) was being advised not to lose a phone number the singer had given her, the banality of it compared to my own fantasy shocked me. I went straight out and bought the 45, my first music purchase.

Shortly after that, I got my first real album (not a Disney record with a picture book and songs from the movie)--in fact, it was a double album: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my mother had forbade me, but which my grandmother happily bought me for my birthday. After that it was all over. I left childhood behind very early, and secretly dreamed of being a sexy rock 'n' roll star with a deep voice. From that point on, I was far more aware of what I was listening to, and I started to consciously shape and texture my world with the music I took in, as if through my pores. At times, music felt like a second skin I could don at will to protect the first one. I hung out all the time with older kids, and made a point of reacting to music the same way they did. And the music had to be good. And new. And preferably obscure to semi-obscure. In Bakersfield, that was a challenge not to be taken lightly.

To be continued...

Categories: backstory, music