music

Playlists for Wankers


Nowadays I am a playlist girl with my beloved iPod and my click and drag iTunes catalog, but back in the day when Walkman still ruled I was all about mix tapes. I didn’t even know that there was a word for what I was doing then. I would sit with my tape recorder positioned next to the radio to catch my favorite songs as they came up on American Top Forty countdown every Sunday afternoon. I am not even sure where the idea to first do this came from either. I don’t think anyone showed me or told me what to do. It was an instinctive pre-teen thing. Popular music and adolescence have a long history. As the technology, such as it was in the 1980’s improved, I eventually had a boom box with a double cassette deck, which allowed me to tape tapes and capture singles as best I could from FM radio. I was good at that too. A quick finger, I seldom missed much past the opening bar or two of any song I wanted to record. But, I wasn’t much of a mixer. My tapes were eclectic to say the very least. Even when my next upgrade to a boom box with a CD player and a double cassette allowed me to organize, I didn’t often take the time. I wasn’t someone who made tapes for her friends or crushes. Until I met my husband Rob, I’d never been the recipient of someone’s musical taste either. Sharing music is an intimate thing you know. It is revealing of those things about you that no one suspects. Your passions. Your odd sense of humor. Where you find meaning and where you were at different stages of your life.

 

During my new hobby of periodic trolling for interesting blogs to read and share, I sometimes employ the tag surfer. It will bring up the latest blog entries that correspond to the many tags I have checked off on my search page. One of these searches revealed a piece on play lists about songs that refer to masturbating. That is something I have frankly never thought needed a soundtrack, but I recognized many of the songs the blogger had listed. 80’s songs, a lot of them that took me back to college days: She-Bop by Cyndi Lauper I remember was such a big deal because it was about a girl and even in our twenties, none of my friends at the time would admit to doing such a thing. We were all such prudes really and this in spite of the predatory sexual attitudes that were just becoming the vogue for young women. We would talk all racy and raunchy about sex and guys, but couldn’t talk about ourselves anymore than we could ask for what we wanted from the guys we dated. As I remember it, unless we were drinking (heavily) we couldn’t even sing songs like She-Bop and I Touch Myself in the company of anyone. Songs about guys doing themselves were different. Dancing with Myself and Turning Japanese were double entendre enough we could ignore what they meant because, well, they didn’t mean us anyway and everyone knew that guys did nothing but jack off, right?

 

I have to admit that the idea of a self-wanking playlist isn’t on the top of my list of things to listen to as I mainly use the iPod for working out.  But the idea of a sex mix isn’t a bad one. Rob used to send me love songs during our long distance days. He would attach them to his emails. Desperately Wanting and Got You Where I Want You. Mark Knopfler’s Prairie Wedding is still one of my favorites. Our first weekend together at the Holiday Inn Express in Idaho Falls was soundtracked by A Perfect Circle primarily but also an interesting variety of heavy metal and rock. Nights on the sofa, before its lice infestation and subsequent banishment to the Clover Bar Landfill, were accompanied by the satellite music provider Max Trax, The Edge – mostly because the windows were always open and we are loud. I can’t say if any of the songs were romantic or even remotely related to sex or making love, because there is a difference. It was loud and pulsating. Like those long ago days of dancing until sweat drenched in the clubs of Iowa City. Primal and urgent and out of breath, knowing that the next day you were going to feel it in muscles you didn’t know you had.

 

Funny the images that music will bring to the forefront even when it’s just a list of long forgotten tunes.

 

 

1976 is Song Lyric Thursday Inspiration


1976 was a good year to be twelve and a fan of pop rock. One of my favorite songs was a one hit type of thing title “Did You Boogie?” by Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. Wolfman Jack was still riding on his popularity revival courtesy of George Lucas’s American Graffiti and he does his characteristic DJ patter which I don’t remember so the radio stations in my hometown must have been playing the Wolfman-less B side.

A and B sides. Remember those? Gems or dogs. Makes me miss vinyl.

 

 

Got any bi-centennial music memories to share?

Soundtracking My Life


There was this very nineties television show that Will absolutely  hated and made fun of all the time. I guess that nearly every woman he had ever dated loved that show, and he was quite surprised when I confessed near total ignorance of it’s content beyond what I would read about it on occasion or overhear from the show’s faithful with whom I worked. I do recall though that the main character visited a psychiatrist who believed that a woman should have a theme song and urged this character to adopt a song and play it in her head for inspiration. I was surprised by the reaction this elicited from most of the people I knew who watched the show. They thought it was a funny and bit beyond quirky thing to do. Indeed I believe the doctor was written as a bit of an oddball. I didn’t think her suggestion was weird at all. I have a virtual soundtrack for my life. Songs that can pull me out of time and right back to the circumstances that provoked my adding them to the playlist that is as much a part of me as the books I have read or the movies I have seen or the television shows I can recall in minute detail.

Music is one of the reasons I survived the past several years. My iPod literally saved my sanity during the months that Will was in hospice and the year following his death. One song is particular comes to mind too. The Middle by Jimmy Eats World. The chorus is even now a very powerful influence and it never fails to pick me up or push me onward.

It just takes some time, little girl you’re in the middle of the ride.Everything (everything) will be just fine, 

everything (everything) will be alright (alright).

It was a shared love of Grunge that bridged some of the ten years between Will and I. He introduced me to Metallica and I convinced him that rap and hip-hop were real forms of musical expression although he never learned to like it much. There was one song around the time we were first together that we heard nearly every time we were listening to the radio as we drove from here to there. So incessantly did it dog us that Will was prompted to dub it “our song” though a less likely suspect for a romantic song you couldn’t possibly find it is eerily prophetic in retrospect. The song was What It’s Like by Everlast.

God forbid you ever had to wake up to hear the news

Cause then you really might know what its like to have to lose

Before Rob and I fell in love and were still just internet friends who wrote prolific quantities of email and conducted rather lengthy IM chats, he would send me mP3’s he had essentially liberated from his public library or was introduced to by his girls. Some of the first songs were by tOOL. Jambi and Right in Two were songs he had listened to over and over in the first months after Shelley died. We’ve discovered only recently that we both have the annoying (to other people) habit of playing a track, or tracks, over and over until we have somehow satisfied our souls need of it. I don’t know what Shelley thought of that but it drove Will crazy. I was inspired by these two songs to actually track down the CD and buy it ( I wasn’t corrupted yet) partly as a way to get to know Rob better but also because I knew that Will would have loved this music. I wasn’t as fixated on the lyrics as Rob was. In fact I hardly heard them at first. It was the sound. It brought Will back and at a time when I needed that. Eventually though I came to hear the twisted humor in some of the writer’s songs, particularly those he did with Perfect Circle and I saw the music as Rob.

The first romantic song Rob sent me was Desperately Wanting by Better Than Ezra or was it Got You Where I Want You by the Flies? The first CD he sent was Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. The first time we made love was to the oddest collection of songs that just happened to be on his laptop at the time. The first time we danced though was to a carefully crafted playlist. 

I couldn’t imagine a life without a musical background. How would you keep your memories in order? Pull them up with perfect recall? Feel the same emotions. I can’t listen to Desperately Wanting and not remember the week before Idaho Falls. Just as I can’t hear Mazzy Starr’s Fade Into You and not remember that Will chose that as our first dance song after hearing it in a movie we watched one night on television. And although it is now rare that I hear the Everlast song, whenever I do it is at a moment when I am wondering about directions or decisions and I always take it as a sign that I am on the right track.