"I'm getting older too"
Music: Def Leppard: Pyromania (1983)
File this post under nostalgia, as in "thirty-something-tries-to-make-golden-the-yesteryear-because-fears-of-mortality-sink-more-deeply-in-the-mid-thirties." I'm feeling very Tom Brokaw this week, except that I'm not attempting to commodify a generation to make some money, nor do some hegemonic work for my parent company. Well, I reckon I'm doing my own hegemony dance here, it's just not routed through coffee table books and prime-time specials. I just want to think-through, for a moment, the feelings of my youth, which I'm revisiting in headphones. I received in the mail today Def Leppard's Pyromania "Deluxe Edition" remaster, which was first released in 1983. It sounds delicious. I'm singing along as I type here. I was ten when I first heard this album. I'm now 36. I was gifted the cassette for a birthday or something, I don't remember. I do remember that at that age MTV was a regular viewing habit (it was all music videos then, with "VJs" chatting between them), and Def Leppard was a staple on MTV. The video of "Rock of Ages" is deeply burned into the memory banks, as is "Photograph." I know every word---and I'm fairly certain this is where my fascination with the Union Jack began. I couldn't afford them, but I longed for years to have a pair of those Doc Martin's with the Union jack on the foot.
The feeling-memories of my youth are often tied to music---to the soundtrack that was playing in the background. My love of radio is rooted in the significance of that medium to my youth, and to the ways in which radio was used as a technology of mood. Radio was omnipresent when I was growing up. I remember Blue Oyster Cult playing softly in the background as I went to sleep. And Steely Dan (later, in my teens, I would discover Steely Dan sounded even more divine as a soundtrack to the ubiquitous "joint"). In the 80s, radio was today's television---or better said, radio was today's cable television. Radio was what pre-teens recorded on their "tape decks"---we "stole" music as a pastime (the equivalent, I think, of "downloading" music today). I remember waiting for a song I wanted to "dub" off the radio, sometimes so long my hand got tired waiting on the "record" button, a memory that only resurfaced listening to Pyromania tonight. Good lord, the hours I wasted waiting for a certain song on the radio to broadcast that I wanted to tape for myself. (I recall the Bow-Wow-Wow had a single about this, "C30-C90-C120 Go!" or something like that, which referred to "piracy" and the time limits of cassette tapes).
As a pre-teen I remember listening a lot to Z-93, a radio station in the Atlanta area that played "classic rock." Back then radio stations had "formats," a convention that's still around but losing its hold, and they also had real flesh-and-blood DJs that lived in your city. I remember Z93 was the station that my "teachers" in preschool (La Petit Ecole, now out of business) played on the VW busses as they ferried us on "field trips" to Stone Mountain. (I remember I was like six or seven and the whole VW bus full of after school kids singing REO Speedwagon's "Don't Let Her Go" at the top of our lungs). It's also the station my mother liked to listen to when Q93 shifted to their "harder rock" slate. My mother was a sucker for the Allman Brothers and Fleetwood Mac. The title of this post is homage to the song "Landslide," sung by Stevie Nicks and played incessantly on Z-93 (Stevie was among my first pop crushes, next to Juice Newton, someone who has faded into pop history while Stevie has remained on the radar).
The more I listen, the brilliant obviousness of fact: feelings are encoded in sound, much more readily than they are in words or, yes, photographs. I don't know if this is unique to my person or not; my father, for example, has no interest in music whatsoever, and I've met many people---often students---who declare a disinterest in music. For me, however, so much of my affective life, my affective history, is encoded in music; my music collection functions as a kind of feeling storehouse. If I put on the first Nine Inch Nails song (TMI alert), it cues the feelings and memories of making love for the first time with someone, excitement and fear all at once. Today, that album sounds so teenage in its sentiments, but it does unleash feelings listening to it.
To be sure, other forms of media "inscribe" memories for me, but music holds a special spot. I sometimes wonder if this has to do with how I encode memories for myself; I'm much more likely to remember the sound of someone's voice, or a "sound bite" of what he or she said in my head, if I'm asked "how do you feel about such-and-so."
The book I'm writing right now is about the processes of cultural mourning and human speech, so I've been in this place of thinking about feelings and sound for some years. My next book, which I've already outlined (and which is based on a class I've been teaching now for eight years), is titled A Rhetoric of Music. I'm thinking I'll need to read-up on brain research, sound, and music. I'd like to know what "empirical" evidence exists for the kinds of claims I'm making. Right now, these claims are purely about my own experiences---but I want to know if my affections for early Def Leppard (not late---ugh) are shared by others in reference to the music of their youth.
Funny thing is, I remember actively saying to others during that time in the early eighties that I "hated" Def Leppard. I actively thought to myself that I didn't like them. I said this to myself and others about Duran Duran too. Who was I fa-fa-fa foolin'?