Freaks and Geeks, 1999
I am the last person who should be writing about music.
When my friend Kate (whom some of you know as Katie) visited me a couple of years ago, she brought me a 45 of Madonna’s “True Blue,” and it was blue. This was really nice for three reasons: she remembered that I had liked Madonna in high school, it was a song about friendship, and you don’t get a blue vinyl record every day. Kate, Scott (my husband), and I were talking about music. “It was great that you didn’t care what other people thought—you liked what you liked,” Kate said. For a moment I sat back and enjoyed being that person who just doesn’t care what others think. But then I realized it wasn’t true. I wanted to shout I did care! I cared a lot! If you don’t even know that the music you like is bad, you can’t take credit for flaunting it.
Yet I have always been surrounded by people who not only know how to play music, read music, perform music—but who know music. Gilford itself was the Von Trapp family of high schools: the Stephensons, the Buswells, my friend Derek who played the oboe—beautifully—and went to Julliard. And there are the peole I met after—my friend Alex, who is in the band Constant Velocity—and is a classically trained guitarist. My friend Elizabeth, who knows obscure film soundtracks, once kissed Gato Barbieri. And there is even my own husband, a vinyl record dealer who subscribes to Stereophile magazine, for whom we have a room in our house designated “The Record Room” and an overflow “Ex-Record Room.” Yet despite, or maybe because I am surrounded by people who know music, my biggest fear is someone taking a peek my itunes “purchased” list. If these ever become public I am shutting down my account.
I first realized the power of liking good music in middle school, when it was crucial to write the logos for bands you liked on your Three-Ring binders. I remember writing RUSH in fancy bubble letters, even though I loathed them, and the symbol for Van Halen and Def Leppard, even though in the privacy of my own room I listened to The Muppet Movie soundtrack, Olivia Newton John, or Rick Springfield. One day in eighth grade, a mean girl named Monica asked me, in a threatening way, whether I liked Bruce Springsteen. It was not immediately apparent to me what the right answer should be. My guess was “yes,” and then she proceeded to ask me to name one of his songs I liked (this was before “Dancing in the Dark”, so I was stumped.) I don’t know how I avoided getting punched in the face that day, which surely would have happened if I had told her that I regularly listened to Duran Duran.
Nick Hornby once said that people stop listening to a lot of new music when they hit their thirties, and he indicated that this might have to do with our brains—it’s biological. If this is true, then it gives me some time to catch up.
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