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In the passenger seat, T. thumbs her Spotify. “Which album?”
“Whichever,” I say, eyes on the road, distracted by one of Ireland’s many tricky roundabouts, “Play that one— that album, the one that came out when we were young.”
“—when we were young,” T. mutters to herself, appalled. “Don’t say that, it makes us sound old.” But she reads my preoccupied mind and puts David Guetta’s risible “Sexy Bitch” on anyway.
Popular music documents where we were in our lives, and when. Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” has me doing wobbly planks on the hardwood floor of the dance studio, and Edward Maya and Vika Jigulina’s “Stereo Love” flies me to a beach party in Thailand where Beng and I first fell into each other’s arms. So no matter how grey our hair becomes, I have a hunch that part of the musical palettes T. and I have will always be frozen in the heady university days of 2008-2012. Those were days of tantalizing potential, BlackBerry phones, and the slow spread and slam of the Internet. Social media was in its infancy: still heedless of the need for online curation, we had too many unwise flash-exposed Facebook photos taken in the intimate, womb-like darkness of clubs, posing with lukewarm Budweiser or Red Bull shots.
This was a time where EDM came onto the scene like a wrecking ball— Black Eyed Peas’s “The Time (Dirty Bit)” and Far East Movement’s heavy-bassed “Like a G6” were our backdrops to being eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Pitbull simped himself Mr. Worldwide. Akon was lonely, so lonely. LMFAO declared that every day they were shuffling. These inane pop-culture flotsam were the hairy poltergeists of the zeitgeist: we could coyly publish a lower-case tweet referencing dance hits (“grab somebody sexy tell them hey”) to seem both nonchalantly cool yet vaguely suggestive. The lyrics were vapid, but who cared? The beats were sick. Club cache. An excuse to move our bodies and express our fledgling sexualities. In reality, we were probably as alluring as partially sentient root vegetables, shrieking “Oppa Gangnam Style!” and cheerfully imitating Psy’s dorky horse dance. We schlepped our silly bodies and got “slizzard” to electropop’s auto-tuned athleticism. Dub sirens and air horns. Dirty bit. Re-re-re-remix.
Despite the vacuity of the lyrics, our permeable minds unquestioningly swallowed the generational gravity of their messages: Sia proclaimed she was titanium, and so, by extension, were we. Rihanna rapturously consoled that yes, we could find love in a hopeless place. The throbbing bass and filtered electronics both rooted us and lifted us out of our bodies. In the freewheeling throng of people losing themselves to turntablist breakbeats, we were always new, always modern. Still, there were doubts. Fergie taunted, “I’m so 3008/ You’re so 2000 and late!” Despite coming of age in the new millennium, already we were in danger of being left behind. But no matter. These were the least serious of our cultural scripts, and nobody went to Zouk to think.
When a club remix of Avicii’s “Levels” played, the atmosphere shifted. We grinned, expectant, when the unnervingly simple synth hook started crackling through the air. The original three-minute version of this progressive house dance song is peculiar: an EDM song with no drop. Like its title, the threadbare composition of the song adds layers as it progresses: the haunting whistle in the second hook, the drum loop, the kick and snare… The slow and never-ending build-up created an illusion of transcendence, one that cooled the blood and excited it. The club remixes added drops, just so the tension created by this haunting escalation had somewhere to go. But the persistent and unthinking potency of the original remained, like some kind of joyful purgatory, which takes on troubling resonances once we realize Avicii named himself after Avīci, the lowest level of Buddhist hell, often translated into English as “suffering without periods of respite.”
Mid-song, the synth hook stuttered to a stop and the drums cut. The lights turned down, and the club descended into a half-second of total silence that one moment more would have started to hurt. But no matter whether in Zouk or The Butter Factory or The Arena, at that very moment, everyone tilted their heads skywards, opened our mouths, and chorused with face-splitting reverence, “Ohh, sometimes I get a good feeling. Get a feeling that I never, never, never had before/ Oh, I get a good feeling.”
Like a gospel choir, we drew the sound of it out for as long as we could, buoyed by the authority imbued in Avicii’s echoey lift of Etta James’ warm, soulful voice from her 1962 “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” And that’s it, that’s the only line. But Etta’s sureness— her enchanted premonition— had such potency it colored the rest of the song. The manic synth hook picked up, and the cycle began again. We threw away our amorphous fears, seduced by her hunch that something was about to happen to us, something wonderful. The anticipation during the MIDI piano trance build-up—the tightening coil, the swelling reverb— felt like our future waiting to happen. It was coming, the moment the heavens would open up and pour. We held our breaths and as one, collectively roared our catharsis— our creation myths— when with a whoosh, the EDM finally, blissfully, dropped. Boom boom pow.
But for now, T. and I are in Ireland, driving along the coast. We are two thirty-somethings energized by instant coffee and tepid green tea, concocted hastily before we bundled sleepily out of our B&Bs. It is summer and instead of the miserable perpetual rain we were warned about, the skies are wonderfully clear. The coastal contours of County Kerry weave in and out of sight as we suck sugared sour plum bits and Haribo gummies for fuel. A vacation! A temporary retreat from life’s obligations and routines. For a miraculous ten days, we are beholden to neither students nor offspring, and our biggest concern is maintaining the stamina needed to drive from destination to destination. It makes a touching sort of sense that during this costly escapism, we fill our gas tanks of energy by retreating even further back, deeper into the music of our past.
Music transports us back to the tone of a time, it takes us traveling: a journey towards the past while our eyes are on the road ahead. If I’m on a road trip with a friend, we listen to Third Eye Blind, not Post Malone. Hoobastank, not Lizzo. Jay Chou. Wang Lee Hom. More Jay Chou. Songs we can belt along to. Songs we know in our bones. The melodies and lyrics are buried somewhere in our bodies, we only need to pull them up. The weather is gorgeous and the wind would feel great against our faces but we keep the windows firmly shut. To open them would let the sounds of the outside world dilute the composition of the brilliant, contained world we are creating, with songs so relentlessly past tense that our car is turned into an airtight cocoon of young millennial yearning.
The roads of Ireland are often unpaved, unmarked, and narrow. Many are hardscrabble two-way dirt paths with space for only one car. Some inclines are so steep our little Suzuki Swift rental whirs and strains. But the tricky journey doesn’t mean a thing when the company is this good. Outkast. Train. Avril Lavigne. Nickelback. Creed. Bowling for Soup. The Cranberries. And of course, T., who mock-screams the vocal fury of Dashboard Confessionals’ “Vindicated” into the mouth of a water bottle, as I laugh and laugh. We hurtle backward in time to our awkward teenage years, when we chose songs on iTunes and synced it onto our iPods, its magical touch-wheel spinning the years into a playlist of Y2K irony and post-breakup angst.
I’m aware that everything I think and feel about popular music is a coalescence of certain clichés: that I am at once a mainstream loser with zero street cred who screeches along to Fall Out Boy, as well as a basic girl whose hoe anthem in her early twenties was DJ Felli Fel and Akon’s “Boomerang”. And yet these songs are repositories of collective history, Proustian madeleines that blur the line between the epochal and the mundane. Even if music is enjoyed in private, it is a sublimation of a social ethos. T. and I didn’t meet till university, and we certainly don’t make it a habit to regularly trade musical interests, but we thrill in the serendipity of sharing a canon we didn’t know we shared.
I often reach for these songs just for the comfort of something familiar. But sometimes this tendency troubles me. Isn’t it a little bit embarrassing to search for musical mementos of the bright, flashing episodes of youth, especially now when the BPM of life has slowed down? It’s not like we discover anything new. We aren’t being witty or original, belting out these well-licked lyrics at the top of our voices. No, we are endlessly quoting, plagiarizing recorded music’s infinite repeatability, hopelessly off-key. Why do we do this? What joy do we glean? Do we then go out hungrier for the future? Are we whetting our appetite for something else? Surely there’s something more to familiar music evoking a prelapsarian world tinted in sepia.
Or maybe there isn’t. And maybe there’s nothing else behind hitting ‘play’ than stoking the feelings we had that first time around; because we miss everything. Youth. Friends we don’t talk to anymore. Play. A time when things didn’t matter as much as they do now. Play. That sweaty, sweaty dancefloor. Perhaps music has such tantalizing emotional weight not simply because we want to indulge in the emotional amplitude of the past, but because it carries the shape of loss so well. Most of the time this form of nourishment is thin milk: we cannot, will not ever be able to find the fat of it all again, that first arrow to the heart. The late scholar Svetlana Boym notes, “Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial.” Still, we tilt the windmills of time and reach out for something as sturdy as a sound to gift us once again the taste of a particular period— delaying for three or so minutes the coming sundowns of our lives.
And maybe this insistent hope of resurfacing the most fluorescent parts of our lives misses something crucial, which is that our most visceral associations to music often descend, unbidden, when we least expect it— when our guards are down. Like when T. and I are cycling through Irish musicians to accompany the heartbreaking landscapes that whip past the car window, and we inevitably come across The Corrs, and I roll my eyes a little and shoot out a scornful, “My mum used to listen to this,” because the music our parents listened to was always just that little bit uncool, before focusing again on the road ahead. But as the familiar Irish flute intro from “Runaway” comes on like a dream from long ago, and Andrea Corr’s crystalline voice starts singing the words to this clear-hearted love song, and as the familiar words find their surprising way to my mouth (“I want to run away, run away with you”), the unfamiliar landscape before me dissolves and I am back in the living room of the house I just left behind halfway across the world.
And there she is. Standing right there in the heart of Limau Purut, with a full head of healthy hair, wearing a yellow ribbed tank and khaki shorts. And packed somewhere into the way Andrea Corr bends her voice around the words “I” and “love” in the stunningly simple line, “Cause I’m falling in love with you,” there my mum’s voice is too, in my ears after nine years of silence, loud and brash, singing along, as she heads toward the stairs, pretending to dramatically exit the stage she set.
And because not all things have a replay button, her voice strikes me with the impact of a truck. She had always been the loudest in a room; the one whose nickname in her first year of university in Singapore was “freshette triple-lungs” because she was just that loud. It bounced off the walls in the same boisterous way her family from Penang announce their presence. For someone so petite, her presence was outsized. No one could match her volume, her rage. We tiptoed around her, afraid of the tripwire that might set off an explosion. Even near the end, at her weakest, her shrieks of fury could still be heard two houses down— But I don’t like this song so I’m going to skip. Rewind. Go back. Here, she is in a good mood, she is playful, she is happy. She is on the stairs singing, rescripting this song from The Corrs with stagy-indignation, insisting that she will run away, run away from all of you, you horrible ingrates! as we laugh and laugh.
How? How can a forgotten song resurrect her voice so vividly? How can it stop me in my tracks like that, even as I continue journeying forth, hands gripping the steering wheel, passing abandoned towers and ruined stone walls? My voice trembles as I quaver along to The Corrs singing this stupidly innocent love song, and I must be doing something right because, by some magical alchemy, the fickle disc jockey of memory has my mother right here singing along too, her guard down, before love and life let her down. T. has fallen silent beside me, but I must finish singing, must see this stupefying incantation through, even though my voice shakes and my eyes water, even as we hurtle ever on forward, because stopping would mean the end of this vision, this 4:24 mirage. Please, I beg through the lyrics of this timeworn song, please let me be shipwrecked on the seas of this memory just one moment more. Please let me listen to a big-voiced woman I have lost sing her triple-lungs out before disease gets to two and silences her last.
“Runaway” will become yet another port of call I arrive at, luggage ready, ready to disembark, waiting for the hull to hit the shore. But I know that no matter how many times in the future I replay this song, I will never hear her voice as clearly as I do now. I’ll continue to do it anyway, because behind the flawed magic of hitting replay is the valiant hope that we can find again that ghost in the machine, that full-volume illusion. A song on loop is fuelled by a weak hope that the next time will be different, that there will be a chink in the rules of time, that the portal in the wardrobe will once again open into a world now barred to me. Even in writing these words, I am trying to recreate an already fading reverie, in hopes that I am transported back to that perfectly tuned vision of her singing on the stairs, when in reality all I have is a mirror house song where my empty needs echo.
Still, sometimes I get a good feeling. Play. Let me try again. Play. And again. Play. I’m so close.
We remember, we forget. We come back from Ireland and I say goodbye to T. and our hug feels like a new beginning. I fall back into the rhythms of writing and domesticity— there’s marketing to do and laundry to keep. The clang and drill from the construction next door wake the family in the morning. Upstairs, a door shuts. The My Little Pony theme song squeals from the TV. The neighbor’s lawn mower rumbles and grass flies into the air. From the radio playing from the front of a ride-share, Dua Lipa and Silk Sonic excavate the sounds of the past and make something new. As Beng whisks Quinn up the stairs after dinner, and I roll up my sleeves to clear the dishes and continue this quiet business of living, the house falls into a welcome, yawning silence amidst the clink of tableware. I hesitate for a second and pull out my phone to type in ‘The Corrs’ on Spotify. Look, I feel like saying to myself, even as I untangle the wires of my earphones yet again. Look— stop, that’s enough. But of course it never is.