Before Music Shuffled It Walked

Not me or anyone I know, but might as well have been -- this was the vibe.

I turned 7 years old in September of 1982, and I clearly remember what my favorite birthday gift was that year.

After spending countless hours playing records on my Holly Hobby record player, and using the tape recorder my uncle got me for Christmas to record songs from MTV, my mother sprang for the gift that made me the most popular kid in the neighborhood. She got me my very own boombox, complete with a tape player that could also record songs from its built-in radio.

John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" hit number 1 on the Billboard top 100 just five days after my birthday; it was absolutely one of the first songs I recorded from the radio. I loved the way the drums came in on the bridge. I rewound the tape and replayed it over and over. As I did, I internalized Mr. Mellencamp's plea that I "hold on to 16 as long as you can," vowing to myself to make that year count when it arrived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h04CH9YZcpI

For the next 10 years, I put my boombox through its paces with constant, daily use. To say my mother got her money's worth out of whatever it cost her would be an understatement. The only other gift that had any chance to top it arrived on my 15th birthday. It was the Red Ryder BB Gun of early 90s music tech: the clunky, heavy Sony Sports Walkman, built to withstand not only being dropped, but also, getting wet.

The boombox was about sharing music with whoever was in the room. The Walkman was different—it was private, intimate, just me and the music creating a bubble no one else could enter. Better yet, my soundtrack didn't have to stay wherever my cumbersome boombox was (usually in my bedroom); now it could come with me everywhere.

The Sports Walkmans were state of the art when I was a teenager, but I had that ancient fucker on the right too.

I can still feel the weight of it clipped to the waistband of my jeans. That bright yellow plastic box of electronics was my constant companion, whether I was riding the T into Boston or walking home from school.

Time spent with its gears gently whirring on my hip as the music pumped through those flimsy in-ear headphones was often the highlight of my day. That’s how I checked out a new-to-me band’s tape from start to finish, which I did as often as I could afford to buy a new one. Having that uninterrupted time to do nothing but listen to music has resulted in several instances of memories burned into my brain that have very specific songs associated with them.

"Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time"

-- Jean-Michel Basquiat 

• I know that Smashing Pumpkins’ “gish” was released just before the summer of 1991 because it never left my Walkman as I walked back and forth to summer school between tenth and eleventh grades. I preferred the harder edge, driving songs on the way to class, and the more ethereal, melancholy cuts on the way home.
  

• I know that Pearl Jam’s “Ten” came out at the end of that same summer, and that MTV was running promo clips for “Alive” in the week leading up to that release. I heard a three-second snippet of it and was sold. I headed down to the record store to pick up the album, but the guy behind the register couldn’t find anything under that band’s name. He looked it up in the binder of new releases and found it there. He told me it was due out next week; I’d need to come back on Tuesday…and I did, as soon as the store opened.
  

• I know that Blind Melon’s self-titled debut album came out just a few days before my 17^th birthday in September of 1992. I have a crystal clear memory of riding the T, staring at the familiar scenery that whizzed by on my way to the Harvard T stop in Boston as Shannon Hoon crooned, “…and I only wanted to be 16 and free, yeah…” I felt a deep and resonating melancholy in the realization that 16—the age John Cougar Mellencamp had begged 7-year old me to hold on to “as long as you can”—was now gone.

Little did I realize how much else would be gone along with those analog years.

These days my phone holds thousands of songs, but I can't tell you the last time I sat down and listened to a new-to-me album, start to finish. New music just gets added to the shuffle, and I run across the songs...eventually. The algorithm decides when and where.

I miss the weight of intentional listening—the commitment of pressing play and staying with an album from start to finish, decorating time deliberately instead of letting it shuffle randomly, popping up with seemingly no rhyme, reason, or connection to the present.

I could, of course, make the effort to listen to one album all the way through, but who has that kind of time with no distraction? Not me. Not anymore. I guess John Cougar Mellencamp was right.