| It's
happened. I've started listening to the light rock station.
Everyone told me it would; but now I'm admitting it. Before
you start throwing things at me and calling me a Lionel Richie
or Neil Diamond lover, let me explain -- it's not your ordinary
light rock station. Yes, they call themselves light rock and
yes they do occasionally play Lionel Richie or Neil Diamond
or the Carpenters (and then I change the station), but this
is not your parents' light rock. The songs they were playing
are the kind of stuff I remember listening to as a kid. In
the same set of songs they played the Beatles' "Twist
and Shout," "The Glory of Love," "Respect,"
"Bridge over Troubled Water" and a Pete Seger song.
I'm not sure how those fit together, but I like the station
because they play random songs that no other station plays,
songs that make me remember things.
Like today, they played Mariah Carey's "Hero." Yes,
the song sucks, but back in middle school I went through a
major Mariah Carey phase and so the song brought back a flood
of memories, not all of them good. Mostly it reminded me of
how I hung on those words because my life sucked so badly.
But in the middle I realized that music could bring the memories
flooding back to me like nothing else can. If I'm listening
to a song I haven't heard in a while it can put me back in
that place and time so that I feel like I'm there. I don't
try to explain it, I don't try to fight it, I just go with
it.
In the trip down memory lane I discovered that I have two
sets of "memory songs," those that bring back very
specific place and time memories and those that I listened
to over a period of my life so they bring back feelings of
that time and place. For example, my first slow dance with
a boy was to "I’ll Be There" as sung by Mariah
Carey (I told you I had a phase) and every time I hear that
song I'm back in 1992 and the Valentine's Day dance wearing
my pink suede skirt and gold vest and dancing with Josh Ellis
and feeling oh so terribly awkward. Or when the group of boys
in my 6th grade class did lip synched to "Bohemian Rhapsody."
I can still picture Mark Swallen headbanging and smashing
his fake guitar. Nothing else makes that memory so vivid as
hearing those songs.
But, the vast majority of the songs that bring back memories
are the ones that bring back feelings like Hall and Oates'
"Maneater." When I hear that song I'm instantly
on a road trip with my family laying in the back of our white
Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon (no fake wood side panels
though) watching the lights go by on the highway in a state
of half consciousness as I doze. Or "Footlose":
I'm somewhere between five and seven and I've thrown our color-blocked
afghan on the floor (it looked like a disco dance floor) and
I'm dancing my heart out in the middle of the living room
while mom takes a shower. Or Simon and Garfunkel's "I
am a Rock" that will forever remind me of the summer
that my friend bought their greatest hits and she and my boyfriend
proceeded to play it over and over while banging on my car
seat because they found out that I hated it.
Those are the good memories, most of the childhood or teenage
songs bring back warm, fuzzy, safe memories -- but what about
the songs that bring back the horrid memories? More than one
of my favorite songs has been ruined by being too closely
associated with a relationship that went sour. It's not fair.
I love those songs and I don't want them to be tainted by
having been on a mix that my ex-boyfriend made me (Tori Amos'
"Love Song" or a couple of Sarah MacLaughlin songs
for example).
I'm still trying to figure out how to get some of those songs
back. I've experimented with different methods. I tried playing
them over and over in a positive context (or semi-positive
in the case of the ones that make it to the workout mix).
But I'm still not able to shut off that little part in the
back of my brain that says "you're fooling yourself,
give it up." I also tried putting them on new mixes that
I gave friends but the voice was still there. I was trying
too hard. There are whole groups that ex-boyfriends introduced
me to and those are the worst; how do you rewrite memories
for an entire catalog of songs?
In the meantime, pop music has moved on and so have I. With
every new album release comes a new set of memories, like
discovering that Rob Thomas had cut his hair and is now super
hot. I guess like most things in pop music, in the end you
have to take the good with the bad and hope they just stop
playing the bad on the radio. Instead, I choose to continuing
to listen to my light rock station (most of the time) in hopes
that I'll hear another gem from my childhood. |
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