My children are fans of a goofy Disney channel program called "So Random", which is a SNL-style sketch comedy show for kids. Some of it is eye-rollingly annoying (a music video for a horrible song called "Ketchup With Everything" and anything that involves Zombie Man) but other sketches are really very clever. There is one in particular that makes me laugh (because I relate to it - not because it is wildly funny) about a sort of nerdy girl whose mother hires a group of female 60's-style backup singers to follow her around school. Every time something of consequence happens (little or big) the girls, resplendent in their beehive hairdos, lean in and sing a few bars.
Although I don't have my own backup singers (and if I did, they would not be a dainty girl group. They would be Daniel Craig, Clive Owen, and Jason Statham. And no, I don't actually care if they can sing or not!) I do have a Soundtrack To My Life that always seems to be running, as if I am starring in my own movie. My own, usually somewhat dull movie, yes. But my own movie nonetheless!
I don't think that this stems from any personal psychosis. I will leave that to the professionals to decide! I just know that music has been a huge part of my life, right from the get-go. My parents tell the story of how, as a tiny baby, I could only sleep if a little transistor radio was in my crib. (That was usually turned to the news, actually, but stick with me.) I asked for my own subscription to Rolling Stone Magazine when I was twelve. I tried to understand The Velvet Underground, and failed miserably. Everything has a soundtrack to me: breakups and makeups (involving myself and not), movies I love (and not necessarily the soundtrack the director chose), books that have seduced me, deaths and births and weddings and dinner parties. How many mixtapes have I made for people, just to show how I felt? And how many have I gotten in return? (Not as many as I've given, that's for sure.) My first concert (that I didn't choose) was Kenny Rogers. When I had a choice? Sting.
As a child growing up with immigrant parents, I wasn't exposed to any of the music most of my friends were. It wasn't until high school that I really discovered (and promptly began to dislike) Bob Dylan. A lot of the music my parents listened to meant nothing to me at the time: just a whiny assortment of vocalists going on and on about things I could care less about. Part of the difficulty was that many of the singers sung in the Egyptian dialect, which I could not (and still can't!) understand. I thought the music was awful. Boring. One of their favorite singers, a woman named Oum Kulthum, particularly tested the limits of my patience. She would sing one song FOR THREE HOURS! This what not something I was used to. My father is from a town in Lebanon called
Baalbeck, which is the home to a world-famous music festival that is now coming back to its full pre-civil war glory. He tells stories about how she would hold the audience in thrall the entire time, with the crowd whooping and hollering at critical points in the show. My mother had a chance to attend one event as a young girl, and remembers that she was the only child there, remembers the crowd in tears, overcome with emotion and memory. I didn't care. I wasn't moved yet by life's pains, as Um Kulthum eloquently sang of in her classic piece
El Atlal (The Ruins):
My heart, don't ask where the love has gone
It was a citadel of my imagination that has collapsed
Pour me a drink and let us drink of its ruins
And tell the story on my behalf as long as the tears flow
Tell how that love became past news
And became another story of passion
I haven't forgotten you
And you seduced me with a sweetly-calling and tender tongue
And a hand extending towards me like a hand stretched out through the waves to a drowning person
As I grew older, I began to better understand how these songs tied them to a place they had not forgotten, and still loved dearly. They came to America for a better life for themselves and their future children, but this did not mean they had blacked out everything that had ever held meaning in their not too distant pasts. My mother has a beautiful singing voice, although she will not admit to it, and is too modest and conservative to show off her talents in a public setting. (This apple did not fall off that tree, I assure you!) I will never forget the time we were cleaning the kitchen together, and, as was her habit, she began singing. That day it was a song that has now become one of my favorites: Ya Tayr (O, Bird) by the Lebanese legend Fairouz:
O, bird, flying at the edges of the world,
If you could speak to my loved ones of the pain I feel...
O bird, who takes with him the color of the trees...
The hand of separation guides me
I beg your feathers which equal my days...
If you're going to them and the paradise of love,
Take me just for a minute and then bring me back.
Her voice broke as she sang, and she said, holding back tears, "I really miss my family." My mother was not, and is not, much of a crier, and this display of emotion unsettled me. I was a teenager, but it was the first time I felt the full force of her longing, the throbbing scar of a wound that had never healed, the sense of having a foot in two worlds and never belonging completely to either one. It wasn't the first time I realized how music can affect our emotions (that had happened a few years earlier when I wore out The Cure's "Pictures of You" over some forgettable boy), but it was the first time I understood the breadth of feeling a particular piece could dredge up.
My parents eventually branched out musically, and so did I - but all of us (and, subsequently, my brothers) never strayed too far from melodic melancholy. My father, thanks to a work colleague, became enamored quite thoroughly with country music. Even now, the sob-in-the-throat voice of Marty Robbins brings a tear to my eye. Maybe that music reminded him in a way of the old folk songs he grew up with: lots of human drama, basic simple storytelling. Those are still the types of songs I gravitate toward: singer/songwriters like David Gray and Ryan Adams, music that is lyrically quite heavy and poetic.
Of course, for a music lover like me, there is room for more than just stories. Sometimes I don't care about words, and just want a beat that makes me forget everything except the way my body is moving. Sometimes, I want to have my cake, and to eat it, too. The result is reflected in my song choices at the end of posts: an odd mishmash off throwaway pop, classics, strange forays into realms I first visited in my younger days, on the path to reconciling the little girl who didn't know what she wanted with the woman who now wants nothing less than everything.
