The silence

Somebody on my local network has a strong taster for 80's music. Bored with the daily pounding of public radio, I snoop through their iTunes library. I give a brief ear to the Bangles, Bananarama, the Cars, Alan Parsons project, even Toto. Thin melodies and saccharine electronics almost make my teeth hurt. I wonder if these bands were really that bad or if production back then simply hadn't yet figured out how to use synthesizers to fill out a sound? No.. NO... these melodies are truly bad. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to have blanked out the 80's?

At the beginning of the 80's I was a tall kid jealously eyeballing my older sisters as they got their own clothes, got to wear makeup and came home from high school with lots of smart looking books. I counted the years off until I would be studying from real books that offered some real insight into the world as fifth grade was pretty mind numbing. Nothing about what I was learning seemed to matter. But my sisters? They could argue back with my parents from things they had learned in their classes. I wanted THAT education.

They also began to amass a collection of records. At every birthday or Christmas there would be a large, flat, square package or two for them which revealed albums by Styx, Abba, Peter Frampton, Michael Jackson, Lief Garrett, Foreigner, etc. I tried to play along. One Christmas two vinyls showed up under the tree: "Let's Disco" which featured music on one side and instructions on how to disco dance on the other, and "Pieces of Eight" by Styx. First we put on the disco album and stumbled about the living room trying to learn the steps. Then, as there was only one musical device in the house and record players didn't come with headphones, we all listened to Styx. I liked both records. I thought Styx had some pretty cool tunes to them, so I got up and tried to perform my new disco moves to it. I was so not cool, so not one of the big girls.

But these songs in my anonymous co-worker's playlist don't bring back memories of my earlier years. I've never heard this music before. They remind me of the years I spent in silence. I was on my way to doing what my big sisters had done. I had a 14th birthday in the fall of my freshman year of high school. As a gift I received a Culture Club record (possibly an early sign of my becoming a fag hag?). That Christmas I was given "Purple Rain" by Prince. At the unsubtle urging of my sister I tuned into Buffalo's one black radio station and got hooked on Run-DMC, Curtis Blow, the Furious Five, Sugar Hill Gang and other rappers.

And then the music stopped.

My brother, at some point in that stretch of time, became born again and fell in with a particularly virulent crowd of pop-culture-haters. He began to lecture me constantly about the evils of "rock" music. How the beat was devilish. How I was being hypnotized to doing bad things. He started pulling me into his room every evening to listen to radio preachers. They were vehement and convinced of their rightness by an ability to string together sentences from diverse scriptures. They convinced me, who did not know otherwise, yet, that I was on the path to hell if I chose to ignore them. So I turned off my radio. I turned off the 80's. I listened to radio preachers. I did whatever I could to not conform to the popular culture affectionately called "the world" by my new Christian radio mentors.

Quickly I grew very lonely. I couldn't get too close to my friends at school unless I could justify their church-going qualities with my ever watchful brother. I lied to him because some of my friends were atheists (or worse.. Methodists!). I know I should have been stronger. But this is the person who used to beat me up as I was small and he already had a pretty effective cause-and-negative-effect mechanism set up in my mind. I was scared to death. Every little thing I did had implications that I was doing something wrong and therefore damming myself. The two vinyls I had been gifted from the previous year were marched out of the house and burned while I looked on.

Everyone could tell I was some weirdo, the freak. I wore strange clothes and could supply no answer to that all important inquisition of high school social categorization "So, what music do you listen to?" It was like freezing to death from the inside out. I wanted so badly to conform. I wanted to get a loud, lopsided hair cut, put on garish makeup and enjoy the sounds I heard coming to me from the radios in cars, on the bus, in the art room. But I was just too afraid of the consequences.

I had, and have always had, one small advantage over my brother. I have a more critical mind and more (although not GREAT) social intelligence. Where he took the fundamentalist message, printed it on his mind as "true" and has never once to this day strayed from his original thesis, I began to question. The initial rush of good feelings conversion affords faded pretty quickly. I started having more and more moments where the judging, angry, vengeful God described by the preachers just didn't make sense and certainly did not seem like something I wanted to serve. I started realizing that having good, Christian thoughts all day was just too much damned work.

By the time I was a senior I figured out how to outsmart my brother, the judge of all things musical. I was playing horn more and more seriously and this meant listening to more orchestral music. F~ didn't know anything about orchestras or composers and deemed what I was listening to as "ok" because it didn't have "that rock music beat". Little did he know of how many classical composers died of venereal disease. I didn't keep it tame for long. I brought in Peter Menin, Dmitri Shostakovich, and the loudest, drum poundiest, most dissonant, most modern orchestral music I could get my hands on. The third movement of Shostakovich's fifth was my angry anthem.

Six months after leaving home I bought "Abbey Road" in a tape store in New York City. I started down the long and winding road back toward sanity. I don't regret the silent years anymore. They've let me find a great empathy for others who find themselves swept away in a tsunami of idealism or subsequently washed up on the beach of disillusion. Heck, this way, I don't have a pile of vinyl records that can't be played anymore. This way I was a teenager who sat and did her homework and who didn't get messed up with boys. "Jesus" kept me from drinking for 3 years and may have afforded me just enough time to get a real education and some good work habits under my belt.

The silent years have shown me what a thorny stem the eternal bloom of unconditional love bears. I don't think my brother is right. He was never right to beat me, he was never right to bully or terrify me in the name of any god or being. But I no longer see him as wrong. Whatever his persistently dysfunctional methods of dealing with his little sister have been, he was just a human doing the best he could with the tools he had.