The Music Issue
One of the worst things about getting old—and if you’re someone who right now is like, “Ugh, is he really going on about getting old again?” I strongly suggest that you unsubscribe immediately because, as it turns out, getting old is a major contributor to the despair of which this publication you for some reason elected to receive is a journal dedicated to chronicling. But not in the conventional way you hear people complain about it (aging as a contributor to despair), i.e. aches and pains or watching your friends die or whatever. I mean, that sucks too, don’t get me wrong, even though, to be very honest, I am the kind of person whose first reaction on learning that someone has died is envy, both in the sense that I am jealous that the other person no longer needs to contend with all of the assorted agonies of living but, more importantly, in the sense that I wish I were dead and I’m upset that someone else got there first while I continue to watch the days stretch out before me, apparently endlessly, with every stupid thing in this very stupid existence becoming both louder and more popular. I mean, sure, also aches and pains, I was probably too quick to diminish those earlier. There was a time in my life when if I got up from the couch and heard a pop or crack it meant something was seriously wrong and I needed to go see a doctor immediately. Now if I hear a pop or crack it is surprising because my low-frequency hearing has been damaged by years of listening to music with the speakers cranked all the way to the right (vaguely related: Have you been to a restaurant with younger people lately? It is insane. Because everything is so loud now but these motherfuckers can still hear it all you wind up spending most of your evening nodding and pretending you caught what they said or shouting because you can no longer gauge the proper volume of the room. The next day your throat hurts as if you spent the whole night singing in a death metal band and you have a lingering sense of residual shame about what you may or may not have agreed to because you were acting as if you understood it. I am starting to think that young people do this on purpose, because they are jealous of us for being closer to death than they are. I wish they knew that we are nowhere near close enough,) but also because I am so used to pops and cracks that for any of them to even be noticeable is something of a surprise. Aches and pains are the new no aches and pains, and “I guess this is just going to hurt from now on” is the new “What do you mean, does anything hurt?” It’s sad, but I suppose it’s all part of getting old. Say, would you like to know one of the worst things about getting old? Well, let’s return you to the sentence about it already in progress—is the way that your brain begins to tolerate things it once found utterly appalling. I am speaking specifically of music here.
Some people say smell is the strongest sense we have, offering the most profound experiences of memory and nostalgia. Perhaps that’s true for everyone else, but for me (and this is ironic, because I have a gigantic nose) music offers a much stronger connection to the past. (Although now that I think about it, the first time my doctor gave me a hearing test he told me that my ear passages were huge. Like, he went on about it. He even called his assistant over to take a look. This is also the same doctor who told me that I needed to lose weight and that, given where I was in life, it was a lot easier to put it on than take it off. My doctor is kind of a mean girl, on reflection. You know what, fuck that guy. If you have a GP you like please reach out with a recommendation. All I am looking for is someone who takes my insurance and won’t mock the size of various body parts. If he has a free hand with the prescription pad so much the better.) I have, as I have mentioned previously, an annoyingly prodigious memory which continually taunts me with random broadcasts of previous events from my life, but it also maintains a fairly consistent sideline in serenading me with songs it stored up over the years, regardless of whether or not they carry any significance. Here is something that has been climbing the Hot 100 of my brain’s Billboard chart lately:
Older readers will recognize this as the theme to the Nell Carter sitcom “Gimme a Break!” which debuted back in 1981. Particularly unfortunate older readers will recognize this as the original theme to the Nell Carter sitcom “Gimme a Break!” since it was eventually replaced with a more adult contemporary version. I (along with about a third of the television-viewing population, back in an era when our choices were limited to three different networks or going to bed) watched several seasons of the show, during the time when my brain was still forming, so I can understand why it is buried in the back of my cranium somewhere. Less explicable is this, which pops up much more frequently than the “Gimme a Break!” theme song:
Unless you are me or my little brother or perhaps someone who worked on the show, it seems unlikely that you remember “Jennifer Slept Here,” which lasted for half of one season back in 1983/4. I will let Wikipedia apprise you of the plot:
Ann Jillian plays Jennifer Farrell: a once-popular movie actress who in 1963 made the unfortunate mistake of chasing an ice cream truck near her Los Angeles, California home. When the ice cream truck accidentally backed up, it ran her over, killing her. About twenty years later, the Elliot family moved from New York City into Jennifer's home…. Father George was a lawyer who had handled Jennifer's posthumous affairs, including the house. George's wife, Susan, was a concerned and understanding figure. Daughter Marilyn was a typical 8-year-old. The driving story behind the series was that Jennifer haunted the Elliot house—ostensibly to mentor and befriend the family's teenage son, Joey, who was the only person to whom she made herself visible…. Naturally, Joey had a hard time convincing his family and friends of Jennifer's ghostly existence. They not only refused to believe Joey's claim, but often concluded Joey needed psychiatric or other help.
Hard to see how that didn’t make it to syndication. Even harder to see how someone is not rebooting it right now for one of the 900 content-hungry platforms throwing money at anything that might result in a subscription. (Save your money for newsletter subscriptions, people! I know one which you’re going to want to throw cash at very soon, once its writer can get it together to set up a premium tier.) In any event, even though there were only thirteen episodes, at least one of which I’m sure I missed due to punishment or family gathering (and can we talk about how awful it was to miss television in the age where you only had one shot at seeing it each year? One of the most tragic events of my childhood involves not catching “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” two Christmases in a row because of factors beyond my control; the ensuing trauma played no small part in making me who I am today), the theme to “Jennifer Slept Here” recurs so frequently in my recollection that sometimes all it takes is for someone to say, “Hello, it’s me” and I’m off to the races with the whole thing caroling through my cortex.
My point is that music takes up a very specific space in the brain, and even the songs that you don’t want to retain sit there, biding their time, waiting for you to age to the point that some showery Sunday morning while you wander through the grocery shopping for the week you find yourself smiling along to whatever they’re playing on the sound system until you suddenly recoil in horror at the realization that you’ve been, what, tolerating? Enjoying? Let’s not saying enjoying, but something more than tolerating. Something considerably less comforting than simply tolerating. Anyway, you’ve found yourself, at minimum, not hating a song you always swore you’d despise. A song that would cause you to change the station as quickly as possible once it came on the radio. A song that would force you to leave the room when they played it on MTV or VH1. (And they always played it on VH1.) Yes, you’ve been collaborating with the enemy: Steve Winwood’s execrable 1987 remix of his horrible 1982 song “Valerie.”
You have a little history with the terrible songs of Steve Winwood. Sure, you enjoy The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin.” (Or at least you used to, until every early ’90s rom-com ran it into the ground. Some people wish Hollywood made rom-coms the way it once did but, if for no reason other than how they turned some classic music into laughable cliches, rom-coms deserved to die. Also, and I know what I’m saying might be controversial here, so if it offends you I apologize in advance, rom-coms were stupid and infantilizing, and the part of you that enjoyed them is the same part of you now that pretends you are watching reality TV with ironic detachment when really you can’t get enough of seeing a bunch of trashy drunks with bad plastic surgery blare bleeped-out swear words at each other while barely bothering to pretend they weren’t just told what to say. You LOVE it. Both the rom-coms of then and the terrible rich-lady-shouting shows of now are the ultimate experiments in having it both ways: Discuss.) You guess you eventually came around on “Back in the High Life Again,” although you’re pretty sure it took Warren Zevon’s cover to make you really appreciate it. But mostly you associate Steve Winwood with gloom and sadness, because when you were a little kid you had a clock radio (and this was so long ago that the numbers actually flipped) that your parents let you listen to when you went to sleep and since it was the end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s the only four songs that ever played at night were “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” anything by Anne Murray, Randy Van Warmer’s “Just When I Needed You Most” and then, finally, Steve Winwood's "When You See A Chance," the most awful of all of them. Four songs of sheer, abject despair. No wonder you turned out so depressed! (Also, it’s remarkable how similar your early life was to mine.)
In any event, live long enough and you will a) wish you were dead so profusely that you will start a free (for the moment) newsletter dedicated to informing people about how fervently you desire to no longer be alive and b) find yourself coming around on the songs of your youth that you hated more than anything, because your brain is afraid of new things (rightly so, when you think about how horrible new things are) and it will cling to whatever it hoarded in the past because it thinks it will be of some use in fighting the frightening terror of today. And this is how you find yourself walking down the street humming Genesis songs. And not even the good, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. I mean the shit from Invisible Touch. This is why old people look so sad. You can’t do a damn thing about it. Although I swear to God, I will never enjoy Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It To My Heart.” That one is just unforgivable. She sounds like she’s going to eat you, and not in the good way. I’ll die first.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got. But I do want to mention two things I read this week that were both remarkable and which I want to make sure you come across if you have not. Nick Cave answers the question, “What made you a vegetarian?” and This Week in Scams talks about depression. Even better, these both come from newsletters to which you can subscribe. And you should, because they’re terrific. When I finally start this newsletter for real (this is not the real newsletter yet) I hope it’s even half as good. Thank you for your attention.