Last week I proposed an experiment: To go a whole day without encountering music. It was destined to fail, but I knew the trying and the slipups would be interesting.
As it often does, the day began with the chirping of a chipmunk outside my open window. All one pitch and sort of a drunken swing rhythm, with occasional stutters shifting the pulse.
In the living room my daughter was watching her anime and singing along with a theme song that, unlike the dialog, was not dubbed into English. She sang the Japanese phonetically, approximately.
I went outside to read. Across the brook someone was listening to Top 40 radio. Elle King sang “they always wanna come but they never wanna leave,” and let me tell you I was scandalized!
At the transfer station, David Bowie’s “Changes” blared from a boombox. Last time I was there the attendant had been holding forth about the injustice of business closures and having to wear masks. This time he was silent. Perhaps he had decided to turn and face the strange.
The day before, I had recorded a podcast about Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas” (stay tuned) and many of its songs shuffled in my brain throughout the day. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” popped in there too for a bit.
After dinner, unprompted, my daughter explained that the best way to get rid of a song stuck in your head is to repeatedly sing its ending. But the song stuck in her head was just a chorus, and she didn’t know how it ended. Her screen time was used up, and so she couldn’t seek it out on YouTube.
Took a walk. No headphones. Instead I tried to study the polyrhythm of my footsteps against the crickets against the bullfrogs against, from one backyard, Ja Rule’s inventory of Ashanti’s lips, smile, kiss, thighs.
Ended the day with a Zoom call where a friend mentioned Living Color’s “Cult of Personality.” Now the floodgates were open. A song I hadn’t thought of since the ’90s was suddenly the most important music ever. I cheated. I looked it up. It rocked.
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