The Day The Music Died

These days, everyone's got an Ipod and everyone's listening to them practically 24 hours a day. Many of my students arrive to my class "plugged in," and the first thing they have to do is yank the buds out of their ears and wind up the wires and stash all the equipment. (I have a "no electronic or digital equipment of any kind" rule in room 245, period. Even their calculators can record, store text, and serve as Cheating Devices. It's incredible. But I digress.)

I have an Ipod. I got it by default. My husband had it sent to him free as a promotional gift because he is a Cleveland Cavaliers season ticket holder. It's one of those Ipod Shuffles. I was the only one at the Dept. who didn't have an MP3 player, so I ended up with it. Rick loaded it up with a bunch of MP3's that were on our computers, leftovers from the Napster Frenzy of CD Burning, and I was presented with my Very Own Customized Collection of Music.

Which I almost never listen to.

I also rarely listen to the radio or CD player in my car, put on the stereo or radio in my house when alone, or listen to any music when I'm taking one of my 45-minute baths. Right now, I'm typing this post alone in my home office, and the only sound is the forced-air furnace and the tapping of my keyboard. I could put on a CD, bring up Pandora in a separate browser window, or turn on a radio. I could even stick the earbuds of my Ipod into my ear and listen to my favorite songs. But I won't.

It's odd, isn't it, this lack of music in my life? Sometimes I think about it and try to trace back to where it began. It's relatively recent, I think. I don't know when music stopped being pleasant and soothing and started to simply add to the cacophany of my life--serving as yet one more thing I had to think about.

Radio is the worst. Too many commercials and interruptions. And, no, I'm not going to start paying for radio. It's bad enough I have to pay for television. I'm not in my car long enough to really listen to radio much anyway. But if I actually would hear a song, it would be at the end or in the middle. Or, if I heard a song that I didn't feel like hearing, then I had to flip stations endlessly. It's too annoying. So, I gave up on radio, except for NPR, but when I found myself listening to someone droning on and on about--and I'm not kidding here--Norwegian Folk Metal Music--I realized that I was turning into something that wasn't fit for society. I leave the radio off.

And I don't even keep CDs in my car. Again, it's just become noise to me. A CD by one artist invariably contains one or two that I don't like. And then, I have to skip. Or, I get bored. Or I find myself trying to figure out irksome lyrics. Pretty soon, I'm driving and trying to get a handle on the music stuff.

I'd rather have the quiet. I'm a public school teacher in a building of over 2000 teenagers. My whole day is full of talk and chatter and humanity. But no music. I still wonder at my new aversion to music.

When I was younger, my taste in music was largely informed by my older sister, Patti. She was a child of the sixties and a Beatlemaniac. In addition to the Fab Five, she turned me on to artists like Three Dog Night, Carly Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Yes, Electric Light Orchestra, and The Moody Blues. I'm forever grateful for that.

Later, I listened to Seals and Crofts, Cat Stevens, and anything Elton John put out. I went through a brief KISS period (didn't everyone, now really!) and bought KISS Alive! on vinyl and wanted "to rock and roll all night and party every day." But I got over that and moved on to disco like everyone else and stopped following actual artists and sold out and just went to clubs and danced to horrid music that had an incredible backbeat.

But then came the Eighties, and that's the music that I really still love. Or loved? Or choose to listen to when I think of music. My Ipod has Duran Duran on it. And "Voices Carry" by Aimee Mann, then with Til Tuesday, and Flock of Seagulls and Thompson Twins and Bowie and Dire Straits and Fleetwood Mac (so 80s--they ruled the 80s) and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and George Michael (before all of that) and Rod Stewart and Talking Heads (come on, "Once in a Lifetime!?" listen to it!) and Wang Chung and The Cars.

Now? Hell, there's like, no one now. Music, quite frankly, stinks now. I hate most of it. Rap? Please. That's not music. It's nagging. If I want to hear someone yammer at me, I'll call my mother up and finally tell her some of the stuff I used to do in college. Awhile back, I liked Train. But their latest song is crappy. I liked Anna Nalick. But she only put out one album; I played it to death and her career is, apparently, dead. Not too long ago, Gina put up a video of a good song by a band, Aqualung. I liked it, so I had Rick download, er, get me some more songs by them. But I've only listened to them a couple of times and I don't like all of them. That's how it is with me and music. I get disappointed and I give up.

But, my point--and I believe I did have one and I am getting back to it--is this: at some point, the music left my life. I find it disconcerting and aggravating to listen to any kind of music. I am bewildered by the number of my peers for whom music is still a large part of their lives. I wonder if silence is anathema to them, or if they do balance the music with quiet. I realize I am in the minority; it is I who is the oddity.

And it wasn't always this way.