#63 - Keep It Like a Secret
Jessica Hopper's memoir talk of becoming a high school grunge chick in order to woo a boy reminded me of the torturous musical journeys I took in adolescence. Hopper found her way, eventually, to a music and self that felt right -- for her it was riot grrrl and strong sense of feminism. Mine led all over the map, so far as I can tell.
These memories that her talk sparked for me are suffused not so much with nostalgia, not even melancholy nostalgia. More with humiliation, even shame. Vulnerability of the self being made, fashioned from observations and desires, quick glances and projections across the school bus aisle, down the hallway, among the lunch tables, in study hall, within the auditorium, at band practice.
The way I had to imitate others to find myself, the weird desires and dreams, the overheated uncoolness of desperately wanting to find a music that was right and a self that was right. How this had an oddly religious quality, a search for salvation in sound and in the secrets that sound could, weirdly, circulate out in the open, yet which still were somehow surreptitious. The half-concealed, half-accessible erotics of it all. The farce and the way it felt profound at the same time.
I found myself retracing my own maps of generation X marks the spot musical secrets. They've been long hidden away, tattered and old, stuffed in the back of the closet, behind the thrift-store shirts.
Earliest moment: My cousin convinces me that Men At Work come from "the land of Gumby" instead of "the land down under". Learning the truth results in deep disappointment and intense humiliation.
Next, middle school: Mike Lieberman, the first kid to grow his hair long, had a treasured shoebox of Grateful Dead bootlegs, secret mystery cabinet beckoning with strange mixture of Memorex technology and homemade labels. I start to like the Grateful Dead in high school, in a Lee Ranaldo kind of way (scroll down to his 10 August 1995 journal entry). I kind of found the music intriguing, but remained suspicious of the people -- and often, in time, of the music too. But there was some kind of secret being shared there, beyond all the pot fumes.
Grateful Dead get old and tiring but seem like the only thing there is in high school besides the Muddy Waters record my parents had stashed among the Beethoven and Mozart (and Phil Ochs). Find lots of Chess Records blues albums remaindered in Tower Records as CDs come into vogue. A kind of secret salvation, but noone to share it with much.
Discover NYC college radio coming in and out on static at night. A girl two years younger than me, Korine Simchai, has cool New Wave college rock taste in music, and one day shared various cassettes by Sonic Youth, the Cure, and especially the Pixies. Letting me in on punk-descended secret at dawn of alterna-rock nation.
I remember being aware of this process of self-making of mine, which was also self-faking. Unable to escape it, but only had to dive in, listen and change, draw out the maps, try to find my way. The total inauthentic authenticity (or is it authentic inauthenticity) of it all. Those musical secret messages -- you could be this, this could be you -- so vividly personal and intimate, so plain and common and cliched.
Taking part in the covert operations of popular culture: the recorded music placed on mix tapes (now ripped on CDs, podcast as MP3s), passed along like portable libraries of the soul; the static radio or distant streaming audio coming into the headphones; the awkward standing around at concerts, everyone sharing the desire to dance; the Doppler beats out car windows slipping down the avenue. How do all those secrets get created, worshipped, hoarded, shared? Are secrets democratic? Secret oaths? Smoke signals? Figments of the imagination? Just hierarchies of taste and cool? Clicks and cliques? Access to marketing niches? Who gets the secret and who doesn't? Who manufactures it, who keeps it, who spills the beans? Maybe the answers to those questions are the politics of pop.
17 May 05