Five o'clock this morning found me in a desperate search for motivation to get my ass out on the road running (other than the fact that bathing suit season is upon us and a gut looks only that much better as it hangs from your midsection when you spend the entire day stooped over a two year old so he doesn't fall and smash his head open on the pool deck as he careens around its wet surface). So I went to my usual font of inspiration - iTunes. There's nothing like remembering how much you loved Rob Base's "It Takes Two" to put a little pep in your step. And while I did find a new song, my new favorite that I have listened to about a hundred times since its early morning purchase, the Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling" (please listen to it, your life will be transformed!), I started thinking about how songs can act like time machines and instantly take you back to different points in your life.
For example, during this weekend's smashingly successful yard sale ($200 bucks for our old crap, thank you very much!), I was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that no one snapped up my copy of TLC's chart topping album "Ooooh...On the TLC Tip" (yet all H's Clapton CD's sold right away, proving garage sale patrons have no musical taste). Their loss was my gain, however, as I was lucky enough to maintain ownership of this R&B classic and listening to the opening strains of "Ain't to Proud to Beg" ...Nineteen-ninety-two...mic check, one, two, one two...instantly brought me back to Saturday nights on the third floor of the Alpha Chi house, getting ready to go out, drinking my formerly beloved white zinfandel (aka - wine cooler in larger portions), putting on my black bodysuit, high-waisted light wash jeans and shoe-boots, running into B's room to see if I could steal a spray of her Tresor or Obsession, before we headed out into the Antarctic, upstate New York, cold to drink apple-flavored, grain alcohol punch out of a garbage can at the DKE "Apple Pie" party.
C&C Music Factory (whose name would indicate they positively churned out the hits, but how many were there? three?) was brought back into my life a few weeks ago when The Office used it in an episode. It has become a fixture in the van now, as it was in my Cutlass Sierra almost twenty years ago, since #2 stumbled out or bed into the living room during this scene of the show and become obsessed with this song (and Andy Bernard's chair dancing, but then she is her mother's daughter). It's an interesting juxtaposition listening to this early 90's hit while driving my minivan, taking the kids to school, sweaty hair scraped into a bun, wearing my track pants, trying to remember if I packed #1's book report, when as the synthetic beat begins I can, in my mind's eye, be instantly seventeen again, wearing a color block, partially see-through blouse (just the back! and I wore a sports bra, such a prude was I) and white jeans - white jeans I tell you! - dancing in a New Rochelle night club with my friends on my birthday after having broken plans with the A-crowd wrestler (I was decidedly B-crowd) I was having a West Side Story senior year fling with that we were hiding from all our friends.
Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird" has two-stop time travel. Listening to that I am twenty-seven again, desperately trying to get pregnant, listening to this song down the shore, trying to put my reproductive failure out of my mind, wondering if I will ever have kids. Then, I am twenty-nine, a mother of one, driving in my Jetta (I had no need for a lame van for Christ's sake, those were for losers) thinking, "Huh. Haven't heard this in a while. I used to listen to this song when I was trying to get pregnant. Wonder if I'll hear it when I get pregnant again?" Too bad it wasn't playing two weeks later as I stared in shock at two pink lines.
Music is such a great way to see how far you've come in life and to remember good, and sometimes bad, times. And while some of the songs may be cringe-inducing (I want to smack the smug smirk of H's face whenever we come across Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting", which was my song with my first high school boyfriend - at least I had a boyfriend at fifteen smart guy, et tu?), I still enjoy being taken back to another place and time. I can imagine I am already shaping the musical memories of my children and can her them asking years from now, "What the hell was that song with that woman screaming about dancing or something??"
No comments:
Post a Comment