Musical Memories
Introductory note: I’m still on a high from visiting and touring NASA Goddard last week and articulating my thoughts from that experience is a bit difficult. So, while that simmers in the back of my brain, today’s brief ramble is about music and its role as one of my memory triggers.
If you’re Terminally Online like I am, you may have seen the brief kerfuffle caused by Moby’s hot take on the song “Lola” by the Kinks. “Lola” is a gender-radical song where the singer essentially states that he doesn’t care if Lola is trans, he just wants to be with her. Pretty cool, right? Well, Moby somehow got it in his head that “Lola” is transphobic and that he can no longer listen to the song. In response, Kinks guitarist Ray Davies allegedly said, “Who the hell is Moby?”
I got a laugh out of it because as much as I enjoy Moby’s older-style techno and ambient, it sometimes seems like he’s sniffing his own farts. Everyone can have their own opinion, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s completely informed or correct. It’s kind of like one of my English 201 students several years back writing an essay about Johnny Cash and opining that the Man in Black would be ashamed of our country’s deviation from Christianity. (I dissected that essay point by point, politely but firmly, with lyrics and history to back it up.) In a similar vein, I have to wonder if Moby was just talking out of his ass or if he genuinely believed that “Lola” was a dig at trans people.
As snort-worthy as his takes can be, Moby’s music is the background to a lot of my formative late teens and early twenties, my early military career, and my brother’s passing. I can’t help but think of the sun rising over Lake Shore Drive in Chicago on September 7th, 2001, with Play on the rental car stereo as my family headed to Naval Station Great Lakes for my brother’s boot camp graduation.
“We Are All Made of Stars” plays through my mind and I’m immediately thrown back to the barracks at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, poring over the hefty training texts on basic technical fundamentals that I’m expected to master. I smell salt air coming through the window and I hear the Marines doing their daily workout in the courtyard nearby. I remember another Sailor mooning me while I was on my sentry rounds. That barracks, building 629A, no longer exists. It was torn down a few years ago to make room for something newer, fresher, free of the ghosts of asbestos and Simple Green and furtive post-boot camp hormone-fueled makeouts.
Pivoting from Moby on to other musical memory triggers. Recently I heard a servicemember singing Rush Limbaugh’s “Bomb Iran,” a “parody” set to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” I remember my brother singing that song after it came out. I thought it was catchy at that point. Now it makes me queasy. I hear that and I look at where I came from. I’m glad I’m not that person anymore. It’s been a long, slow, painful process to shed that shell – and to borrow from the saying, I read Limbaugh’s obituary with great satisfaction. It brought a small sense of closure.
But the ghosts of the past are back. I feel like we’re reliving the 2000s again, and those years weren’t particularly great for a lot of people who were living then. I was a teenage, then early-twentysomething shithead who was still trying to get my act together after my brother’s suicide. The one thing I have going for me this time around is that I’ve gone through therapy – lots of it – to untangle and sort out my personal baggage. The ghosts of the past are back and this time I have some clue of how to cope with them without getting overloaded.
