pigeon

I’m about to lose control and I think I like it!

I listened almost exclusively to classical music in 7th grade, 8th grade....

My best friend listened to classical music too, for a while, though never with the singleminded ferocity with which I pursued the hobby. Occasionally we would compare notes on the cassette tapes we’d acquired. We generally preferred the allegro, the molto vivace; we were kids after all.

One time when our junior high class was walking along the breezeway over to the high school for whatever class we had to walk over there for, some random kids, random in the sense that they were other people besides me or my best friend and therefore they existed for him more corporeally than they did for me, asked him, hey, what kind of music do you listen to? and he barely hesitated and barely glanced at me before replying, too brightly, too obviously having summoned courage (bless him) to do so, “Beethoven! Bach!” and of course they laughed and gave him shit and he laughed it off, and I knew he had said that for my benefit, but somehow nevertheless I was picayune enough to say out loud, “I didn’t think you had any Beethoven,” and so he was forced to laugh that off too. Why couldn’t I just let well enough alone, why couldn’t I accept his gesture of not wanting to make our best-friend reality fake in the searing light of these public, normal people, but no, the gesture wasn’t good enough for me, I had to push him on the particulars; I might as well have been saying PROVE YOUR LOYALTY like some insecure tyrant.

I really did like the music I listened to. I still get wistful when I hear the strains of, for example, Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony — “...as if the clearest ear in history were saying its musical goodbye” is what the tiny, blurry liner notes in the cassette case said.

But there was of course an element of pretense as well. I knew it but didn’t know it. I had to have known it when I heard myself defending my few departures from classical listening, as when my brother challenged me: “You always say current music and rock and stuff is so insipid and repetitive, but you listen to Simon & Garfunkel, and the Beatles...” (There was a Beatles song playing at the moment on the car stereo, to which he gestured by way of example) “But how is this different? There’s the same four-four beat, over and over...?” I don’t remember what my rationalization was, but it amounted to “That’s different.” Basically, non-classical was OK as long as it was old, I guess.

Nevertheless, my little monaural AM/FM/cassette jambox played my growing collection of tapes over and over again, and I really listened, in earnest — always Mozart foremost, but also Haydn (the trumpet concerto contains perfection in a single, high bright tone), Holst (speaking of Jupiter!), Bach, Vivaldi, Strauss, even Elgar — oh! let’s not forget Tchaikovsky and all the other Russian guys! The cannons of 1812 were amplified by my imagination well beyond the paltry capacity of my jambox’s little speaker — and yes, even Beethoven, even though that cliché of a name sounded like one you would drop if you wanted for some reason to sound as if you listened to and cared about classical music when you really didn’t, not really. The slower movements were perfect to get hypnotized and go to sleep to.

One time after I’d spent a week in Kansas City at my younger but somehow more worldly cousin’s house and we’d had the opportunity to visit a big, famous record store that didn’t exist back in my relatively podunk town, I came home with my haul of new cassettes and my stepfather asked, casually but hopefully, “Did you get any pop... or rock...? Or just classical.” I felt kind of bad, dashing his hopes, but oh well, I wasn’t gonna lie.

It must have been sometime in 9th grade — or maybe the summer before? — when something cracked. I was home alone at mom’s house, in my room (the smaller one, before I graduated to the one across the hall, with its own sliding door and deck, that my daughter now is jealous of me then for having). Did I flip the wrong switch and go to “FM” on the jambox instead of “TAPE”? Why did I tune to a popular station, one of those “top 40” type stations, one of three stations that came in loud and strong and clear, even without extending the antenna? Random impulse? Secret signal calling to me somehow? Who knows. But the song that came on, loud and strong and clear, was “I’m so Excited” by the Pointer Sisters, and before I could switch it off, correct my mistake, it... hooked me, somehow.

Shit, I’m gonna play it right now — damn! That intro, that clear bright snare! That relentless thump! The pure, forward driving energy! Apparently, Billboard named the song number 23 on their list of “100 Greatest Girl Group Songs Of All Time” — but of course I didn’t know anything about all that at the time.

Instead of turning it off, I turned it up. And then there I was, alone and free, dancing around my room like a joyful idiot, literally being so excited, something in me knowing I was about to lose control and I thought I liked it! It was a swift, surprising, and ultimately sexual release. I could see how absurd it was even as it was happening, but — it liberated me. From that day onward, I could listen to pretty much anything I wanted to, without giving a fuck what anybody thought.

My mom — bless her — who’d always defended me any time anyone intimated that it was a little weird that a teenager only wanted to listen to classical music — who’d always said, “I love it! I love classical too! It’s great that I don’t have to hear loud, raucous rock music all the time!” — pulled up in the driveway as my explosive little surrender was coming to a close. She asked me later, “What was that music coming from your room? Was that you playing that? That didn’t sound like something you would play!” I shrugged it off. No way was I going to try to explain to my mom the visceral, guttural thing that had just happened to me.

I still loved Mozart and all the other old boys (still do), but, as another irresistably undulating song would proclaim some 20-plus years later, hips don’t lie. It’s still a barometer — I still know I’m on my way back out of a held-down, darkened, depressive, self-censored season, any time I find myself able and (un)willing (not) to dance, by myself, goofy as fuck, in my room to whatever song has made its way into my heart (and other parts) on any given day.