I like music for a lot of different reasons. Music is the bridge to my past and it’s one of the ways that I bond with loved ones. It seems that I inherited my love of music from my family; the music that they played when I was too young to have any musical tastes became the rubric by which I made my own definition of what good music is. It works that way for a lot of things, morals and personal tastes in food for example. It’s strange to me when I meet people who don’t like music or don’t have very strong associations with it, but it must be that they had no musical inheritance, no one to show them the ways that music can be the release of emotions that might be too complex for mere conversation. Personally, I can’t imagine a world without a soundtrack.
One of my earliest memories of musical inheritance happened when I was a kid and I got the chicken pox. I was laid up at home in my room for two weeks. My family lived in apartments in Norfolk and I loved school then so it was a specific kind of torture to take such a long and unexpected break. I was probably eight or nine and I was particularly popular at school around that time because I won an impromptu contest to see who could jump the furthest from the swings (I’d also thrown a flip in there that my brother taught me at the neighborhood playground). And in the midst of all the adoration, I got sidelined for a couple of weeks, locked in my room and denied visitors for fear of contamination (except for one boy whose mother wanted to expose him because all of his siblings had already had the pox and he hadn’t; I didn’t like that boy, either, he was a know it all and he asked questions right before recess to delay the commencement of the period). Over the course of that week, I spent a lot of time with my mom who has been a singer all of her life. Not a professional singer, but she sang in church and with her siblings and friends. She told me that she sang with the choir in church, the church band that traveled to other churches for revivals, the chorus in school, and a short-lived group that she and her friends formed in high school.
Time Travel Playlist
P.Y.T. by Michael Jackson
Smooth Operator by Sade
Joy and Pain by Maze and Frankie Beverly
Back to Life (However Do You Want Me) by Soul II Soul
P.Y.T. by Michael Jackson
All my life, I can remember my mom humming and singing around the house, and I remember the radio was always on an eighties R&B station because it was the music of my parents’ youth. When I had the chicken pox, the first day that I was hold up in my room, my mom took the opportunity to tell me how she met my father when they were young in Ladoga, NC. I was young, so it’s possible that I didn’t really care all that much, but my mom knew my sensibilities back then and left out the romance and kissing; the eighties R&B we listened to as she slathered me with calamine lotion took care of all that.
“I was like a model when I was in high school,” my mom said laughing. She was never the type to brag, but she really was back then. I’ve seen pictures of my mother from those days with her slender limbs and long frame, and straight black hair. She has big, brown eyes that have not changed over the years.
“Your daddy and his friends used to follow me and my friends around, asking us out on dates, to be their girlfriends, I know you’re too young to understand it, but you’ll get it pretty soon. Your father was handsome back then. All the men in his family were handsome, but your daddy was the prettiest man I ever saw. He will deny it now because he destroyed all the pictures, but he used to have hair like Michael Jackson in the eighties. By the time we were sixteen he had cut it all off, but he was still handsome.” I remember my mother looked so nostalgic for those days as she told me the story, and I understand now that time had seemed to move so fast since she was a teenager. As adults, our youth is a series of memories that flash through our consciousness like lightning bolts when something in the present reminds us of those old days. Music is an excellent catalyst for jump starting the lightning storm.
Every time I hear P.Y.T. by Michael Jackson, I will think of my mother because she told me, “Your daddy used to call me his P.Y.T. and that was our song. Wherever we are, when that song comes on, we have to dance.”
Smooth Operator by Sade
My parents were married when they were seniors in high school. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding, either. “I just really loved that man and I knew that I wanted to be with him,” my mother said while she stopped me from trying to scratch myself. “He was just so sweet and handsome.” My parents are still very much in love and now that I’m older, I understand the ways that my father worked extra hard throughout the years to keep his marriage from going the way of my grandparents, who were divorced long before I was born. To this day, my father’s parents can’t be in the same room, and it must have been a cautionary tale to my father who never stopped working to make my mother love him.
“He always knew what I liked and he never seemed interested in any other girl but me,” my mother said. “He might look like your grandpa, but he wasn’t a smooth operator like that man. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got uncles and aunts your grandpa don’t even know about.” The stories of my grandfather’s philandering are epic and even though my father loves his father unconditionally, he often used my grandfather as the negative example that my brother and I were warned to avoid growing into. By the time I was in highschool, I realized that my grandfather had a reputation as a heart-breaker as big as the eastern half of the city of Ladoga.
“Your daddy was smooth, I thought he could’ve had any girl he wanted, but he chose me. He’ll say that I chose him, and I did, but if you ask me, he didn’t have a lot of competition.” I’m sure that by this point in the story, I was barely paying attention and my mother was only talking out loud because she was deep in her memory, reliving all of my father’s romantic gestures. I learned later that my father dabbled in poetry as a teenager, but only to sing the praises of my mother. I’ve read some of the poems and they resemble the simple, fun-loving nature of early rap music with a spattering of Shakespearean flights of language and inverted syntax. He was upset with my mother for showing me, my father is quick to dismiss the character of his youth because of his current persona as a serious officer of the US Navy, but I always appreciate learning about the man my father was because it makes so many things make sense. If my father was the man he is today when he was in high school, it’s possible that I would not exist. My parents had evolved together over the years and have grown into a sort of compound person, two independent entities that form something specific together. The individual components are just as interesting as the sum of their whole, and the evolution of each component is quite fascinating.
I know that my mother was mostly nostalgic for her youth as she told me about her high school days with my father. She has always been a very beautiful woman, but of course her body as a mother of three in her twenties was very different than her body just a decade before.
Joy and Pain by Maze and Frankie Beverly
“Where does time go?” I remember my mother saying while I was relaxing in the bathtub, the water helping to sooth the itching. She sat on the toilet, only using it as a seat, staring off into the bygone days of her youth, the smooth sound of Maze and Frankie Beverly floating through the house.
I remember my parent’s bathroom then was filled with so many lotions and vials and bottles that my mother used to keep her skin youthful and firm. She exercised often and while my siblings and I were at school, she would jog to keep active and fit. She wasn’t obsessed with maintaining a youthful appearance necessarily, she only wanted to look good for her age. And I know that she wasn’t afraid of losing my father, it was a matter of her own self esteem, she wanted to be happy with her own image.
When I was done in the bath, my mother made me lunch and as I sat spooning soup into my mouth (and scratching myself under the table), my mother talked about how fast my siblings and I were growing up.
“You turn around one day, and things are different, everybody’s older. I still remember when you was in diapers. Boy, ain’t nobody can stank up a diaper like you used to.” She scrunched up her face at the memory. “But I guess time flies when you stressed out.”
When my parents first moved to Virginia after my father joined the Navy, they didn’t have a lot of money. They lived in a bad neighborhood where there were muggers and drug dealers, and my father got in more than one fight with neighbors to defend his wife and his home. He told me the story about the guy who solicited my mother while she was pregnant with my older sister, how he almost got arrested and kicked out of the service because he had broken the man’s nose and bones in his cheek.
My mother did her share of fighting as well. After my brother and I started elementary school, my mother was very involved in our school’s Parent Teacher Association, but was banned after an altercation with another mother who lived in our apartment complex. The two had been feuding for years, they both had husband’s in the Navy and it seemed that they were always pregnant at the same time. My mother never talks about the incident so I’m not sure of the exact cause of the fight that happened in our school auditorium, but maybe it was jealousy or maybe they were so similar that they just didn’t like each other.
But we had all survived those difficult periods and for my mother, it seemed that those difficult periods had been so engrossing that she lost track of time and the years just flew by.
Back to Life (However Do You Want Me) by Soul II Soul
If you can remember the soundtrack of a moment, you can recall most anything. When I think back to my time with the chicken pox, I realize that my mother was a time traveler and she used her music to relive the decades of her life up to her present. And I think that my mother gets lost in her memory because she genuinely liked the life she had lived, not because her present is unpleasant. We aren’t much more than our memories after all and my mother uses her music as a sort of album of her experiences.
By the time I went back to school, I knew all of the lyrics to Michael Jackson’s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, and I had my own associations for all of my mother’s favorite songs. I didn’t get my mother’s voice, so I don’t sound as good as she does when I sing Teena Marie or Luther Vandross, but I feel like I know her better because I know what she was listening to during all of the important periods of her development into the woman that I love and respect so much. When I hear those artists from the eighties, I always remember the itch from the chicken pox, the smell of calamine lotion, and my mother smiling at her past.
My mother passively taught me that a song could be much better for accessing memories than a picture. And when it’s time to go out and do rather than sit and reminisce, you can go into the world unencumbered, free from fussing with a camera or some other technology, to simply live and let music be the soundtrack that can be replayed in the future for recalling new memories in the future. If that makes sense.
That’s the main reason that I like music so much, why I use it in my writing, to give even more context that can help a reader truly understand a character or situation.
But there are other reasons, three more reasons.
Next week, another reason why Wes likes music. Until then, check out the rest of the Time Travel Playlist:
Through the Fire by Chaka Khan
Never Too Much by Luther Vandross
Square Biz by Teena Marie
I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) by Daryl Hall & John Oates
I Keep Forgettin (Every Time You’re Near) by Michael McDonald
Can You Stand the Rain by New Edition
Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ by Michael Jackson
PRL Serials 