I am a person who actively appreciates music of many kinds. Music has always been a large part of my life, and therefore has a role both within my memoir and as part of my ongoing writing practice.
Classical Music
My mother was trained as a concert pianist, and she passed on to me her love of classical music. I grew up listening to her play Chopin every day on our baby grand piano, and hearing the classical music station on weekend mornings in our house. Fast forward to the past seven years, when I first started writing creatively, and I always put on classical music as a backdrop to writing. I prefer pieces that are beautiful but soothing rather than dramatic and moving or else I will be pulled out of the writing. Having said that, occasionally I gladly stop typing to close my eyes and let a particularly gorgeous passage flow over me because in this way, rather than a constant disruption, the music still becomes part of the art of creation.
“Love the Way You Lie”
This song, a duet sung with Rihanna, is Eminem’s bestselling single ever. My sons were young teenagers when it was released in 2010, and they both “followed” this rapper with the tough working-class persona. I was an early fan of black rap, including Whodini, Grandmaster Flash, Newcleus, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, and Tupac Shakur, so I didn’t really appreciate Eminem except for this one song, “Love the Way You Lie.” I liked this song because of the beat, the melody, and the harmonies. What I did NOT appreciate were the lyrics that speak of a woman loving the lies and the abuse from her boyfriend (husband?) because, the words imply, this is what true love is all about. It’s ok that you tie me up to a bed and threaten to set it on fire, sings Rihanna to Eminem, because I love the pain, I love the way you lie.
My memoir, about the evolution of my feminism as a life philosophy, begins with a prologue that describes a Junior National League meeting with twelve girls during which I teach “media literacy.” My goal is to teach these young women how to “read” the “texts” surrounding them all day, every day, including song lyrics. I therefore task them with reading the lyrics to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” to themselves then writing down their reactions. Many of the girls are shocked at the words, even though they have heard the song many times and most of them like it. Our discussion focuses on the insidious and normalized sexism in our culture, and how we all need to practice critically analyzing cultural influences in order to understand how and why they manipulate us, in this way counteracting any negative impact.
Latin Pop
Although I don’t explicitly include in my memoir any of the songs from the “latin pop” genre that I grew up with because of my Peruvian mother, they do serve as a backdrop to my cultural experiences not only when we visited Lima as a family, but also growing up in the US with a Peruvian mother whose first language was Spanish and who never stopped loving her home culture.
One song is a dramatic ballad sung by Nino Bravo called “América, América.” It’s about love but also about America as a character. When we were in Peru, we would blast it when it came on the radio as everyone loved it. I remember looking out the back window of the car crowded with family and seeing the rocky sand dunes pass by as we approached the gates to my aunt and uncle’s lush irrigated residential neighborhood while everyone sang along lustily.
A song that helped serve as a soundtrack to my adolescent life when we lived in Quito, Ecuador is Menudo’s “Claridad.” Menudo was a young boy band, and when I say young I mean before voices changed during puberty. This group had a music-producer mastermind behind it who was in charge of replacing the boys who aged out. At one point Ricky Martin was a member of this band. “Claridad” is an incredibly catchy song that my siblings and I used to happily sing along with when it came on the radio or after we bought the record. It encapsulates the optimistic partying ethos that I found to be integral to South American culture.
Pachelbel’s Canon
My all-girl Catholic high school had a vibrant and inspiring music department. As a result, a quartet of music students would play during every school Mass. One of my best friends formed part of this quartet, playing the violin. I loved the music so much as a student sitting in a Mass that would have been painfully boring except for this music. One of my favorite pieces was “Pachelbel’s Canon.” The lilting melody and the string instruments as they cohered and soared inspired a wordless sense of joy in me every time I heard it—and made the experience of sitting through Mass much more tolerable!
When Doves Cry
One of the chapters in my memoir, “Regrets,” features Prince’s haunting song, “When Doves Cry.” It was and remains one of my favorite songs. The notes, the lyrics, the instrumentation, the guitar, they all come together to make what to me is a moving piece of art. Moving as in transportive. Listening to this song moves me from one more ordinary, mundane, even boring space to another alive with feeling and drama. Here is an excerpt from the chapter that I hope describes how such a song can effect its power and become an integral part of an experience:
I drove, Enika and Daniel sat next to me on the front seat, not one of us thought to wear a seatbelt. On the radio, Prince’s “When Doves Cry” announced itself with the soft wail of the guitar and the sad lyrics about fathers who are too demanding, mothers who are never satisfied, the young couple who, perhaps inheriting these traits, can’t seem to get along. Enika started to sing with the radio, Daniel harmonized, and I joined in for the chorus. The three of us were high on singing together, on the angst and disaffection the lyrics evoked, on leaving the suburbs for the city in search of adventure in San Francisco’s small underground club scene.
Then the night took a turn. Daniel had brought alcohol for himself. The underground clubs, pop-ups often in warehouses down dark alleys in industrial neighborhoods, didn’t offer drinks of any kind. His drink of choice, the one he had that evening in the car, was rum and Coke. Had he premixed it? In a thermos of some kind? I don’t recall. I was driving. He was drinking. We were singing. The Plymouth Valiant, the rum and Coke, the radio and the song. Daniel talked of his father—too cold? Contemptuous? Angry? Violent? I don’t remember the particulars. Just his drinking, my driving, his voice more and more quiet, more and more sad. Is this what it sounds like when doves cry?
Pachelbel’s Canon (again)
The last chapter of my memoir is titled “F is for …”. The point of this title is that all my life “F” has stood for “Feminism” as a driving force, a life philosophy, an organizing faith. Although “Pachelbel’s Canon” does not feature directly in this chapter, it does serve as an implicit counterpoint to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” in the prologue. This chapter, along with the prologue which is called “Feminist or Not?”, frames the memoir and serves to highlight the narrative arc. In the prologue, I ask the twelve young women to whom I am teaching “media literacy” if they consider themselves feminists. Only three raise their hands, and two of them are hesitant. I am discouraged, to say the least, by this response. But I forge forward, nonetheless, with the lesson, which includes an unpacking of the lyrics of “Love the Way You Lie.”
In the last chapter of the memoir, I tell a table of guests at a memorial that I am a “raging feminist.” In response, a quiet young woman, skinny and shy, is inspired to lift her arms in triumph and exclaim “I am too!” I could tell she was delighted to find a kindred feminist spirit. Her surprise made me feel sad that it wasn’t a given, even in 2018, that most people would identify as feminists, as people who believe in the full and equal humanity of women. But it also made me happy that this young woman would be so delighted and so triumphant in her finding a sister feminist. And I chose to juxtapose in my mind the moment teaching media literacy when only one young woman raised her hand with confidence with the moment at the memorial, in the end of the memoir, when a young woman unabashedly claims feminism as her own.
How does Pachelbel’s Canon fit into this concluding chapter and its function as a frame with the introductory prologue? I think of Hemingway’s metaphor of the iceberg: what is written is only the tip and rest of the iceberg, the foundational knowledge behind the written, is invisible, submerged underwater. For me, Pachelbel’s Canon is foundational to the memory of the young woman claiming feminism with exuberance. The memorial where this conversation with the young woman took place was for my friend’s father (the same friend who played in the high school quartet during Mass) and we were at her home in LA. After most of the guests had gone, she and I sat down at her piano and played, over and over, a duet of Pachelbel’s Canon. It is one of our traditions, this playing together (even though I have a very limited part), and one that brings us joy.