Memories by Music...

So, last night, I was watching the new episode of Glee that aired on Fox. I don't watch it live anymore because it's on at the same time as Lost and given that Lost is in its last season and on the last few episodes, there's no way I can not watch it live.

Anyway, for those that don't watch it, Glee is a somewhat dark comedy mixed with an alarming degree of perkiness. It features people breaking out into song but usually it's songs that are contemporary, that you hear on the radio. Well, in my case, I haven't heard most of the songs because, well, I'm a rock music/punk music fan and they tend to skew a little pop/hip-hoppy for my tastes. However, I still enjoy the show because it caters to my dark sense of humour and my odd love of musical theatre.

Last night, the entire episode was devoted to the music of Madonna. I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not because it seemed a bit gimmicky. However, it actually did work quite well. One of the songs they did was a combination of Madonna's "Borderline" and "Open Your Heart." If you're familiar at all with Madonna, you'll know those were from the 1980's. They were some of her earlier hits before her constant reinventions.

For me, it was almost like a time-travel experience. The minute I heard "Open Your Heart" being sung, I was immediately thrust back into my childhood. That song was popular when I was around 11 years old and still lived in England. My good friend and neighbour- Sarah- had purchased Madonna's "True Blue" and Wham's! "Make it Big," albums. We spend countless hours rotating the vinyl 33" lp's on her turntable. We used to pay board games as we listened to the music or we'd try to find ways to stop Sarah's little sister from trying to interrupt us. We tried to play Barbie's but, well, neither of us were really Barbie girls and we always ended up giving up on that in favour of board games. She had this peculiar game called Yeti that I'd never seen before or have seen since. We never did know the rules because they were extraordinarily hard to decipher so we made up our own rules. It had a plastic yeti that you would load up with plastic disks that had footprints printed on them. Every now and again there'd be a different disk with some other symbol on it.

We'd listen to Madonna a lot. Sarah also had the "Like a Virgin" album so we'd sing along to that too.

For a moment, last night, while watching Glee it occured to me how music really is like a time-machine. It thrusts you back into your past as if you're really living it. For me, for a few moments, I was back in Sarah's bedroom, playing Yeti and singing along to Madonna.

It's not just Madonna who has that power. Every stage of my life can be documented with the music I listened to at the time. Wham! was a huge part of my childhood. Convinced that I was going to marry George Michael (go ahead, mock all you want), my friend Sonya and I would obsessively watch the "Careless Whisper" and "Wake Me Up Before You G0-Go" videos every lunchtime before we'd go back to school for the afternoon session. Madonna followed soon after. Then, when I moved to the U.S., a friend introduced me to Richard Marx and I still can't hear "Right Here Waiting," or "Endless Summer Nights," without remembering the months of culture shock I experienced after we moved to Indiana.

The same friend discovered heavy metal or, as we now call them, hair bands. She was obsessively into Poison. I still can't hear "Talk Dirty to Me" without thinking of her. She soon became obsessed with Guns and Roses and fell in love with Axl Rose. I still can't hear "Welcome to the Jungle," without thinking of her caterwauling along in her absolutely awful singing voice. We parted friends soon after as she went a little crazy and, as far as I know, still is but the memories invoked by the music we listened to remain.

Then came my own foray into 'hair bands' or 'heavy metal.' My new group of friends were into bands like Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Skid Row...all of the bands which are now featured on compilation albums from the 'hair band era'. To this day, I can't hear "Love Bites" by Def Leppard without thinking of that group of friends and how we'd hang out playing Uno, trying to stay up all night to watch terrible horror movies that used to scare me and eating junk food.

I know I've said some of this before so I apologize for re-blogging.

I changed direction after my heavy metal days. I switched to Broadway and had a new set of friends, very theatrically inclined. My best friend and I eschewed the rock concerts I'd previously attended- my first one, for the record, was Motley Crue during the Dr. Feelgood tour- and started to seek out performances of Cats. We were fans of the tours of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber and I remember one concert in which we were running late after being at a band function (I wasn't in the band but, if I recall correctly, was there to cover the performance for the school newspaper). We drove to Indianapolis at the speed of light, well, over the speed limit by a long-shot, anyway, to try to make the show that featured Sarah Brightman. I think we made it, only a little late. I can't hear Sarah Brightman without thinking of our harried drive to try to make that show.

After that, I have memories of college. My roommate was rotatingly obsessed with Bob Marley and Tori Amos. I used to blast my Andrew Lloyd Webber. I'm now embarrassed but at the time, I didn't realize how much she hated it. Of course, after so many listens to "Buffalo Soldiers" by Mr. Marley and "Crucify" by Tori Amos, I, too, hated her music.

Since then, I've had other music obsessions, thankfully, not so much with Andrew Lloyd Webber of late though I had a heavy period where all I could listen to was the "Rent" soundtrack. Green Day, still a current obsession of mine, ranks high on the list.

Although, on a side note, I can't bring myself to listen to or buy the new Broadway version of American Idiot. I watched a YouTube video of the workshop version and, well, lets just say that it sort of made me cringe. I love Broadway and I love Green Day but the two together...feels unnatural. I don't like the idea of Green Day, former punks, going corporate and producing theatre. It just doesn't feel right.

Regardless, I wager that every single stage of my life can be brought back into the forefront of memories if I hear the right song. It's not even just my music tastes. If I hear Genesis singing, "Invisible Touch," I think of my dad's fondness for the album and how he'd play it every time the whole family would go out on a Sunday, often to a DIY warehouse. Simon and Garfunkel reminds me of my parents when it was just them and my older brother and I, before my younger brother and sister were born. The Rolling Stones will always remind me of my mother, Marilyn Manson...my sister.

The list goes on. I think for me, as it is with so many people, music reaches deep. Some people document their lives with photos. I've never been a very photo-oriented Monkeypants. I'm not a visual person. I've tried but I tend to always forget my camera or do something stupid to ruin the pictures I do take. I do tend to observe, finding a way to capture memories in my head so I can turn them into words in a story or a narrative piece.

Yet there's also music. I don't know if that makes me an audio-person but it's one of the strongest ways , for me, of evoking memories, of revisiting moments in my life that I associate with the music. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. Yet until I hear a certain song or piece of music, they often remain locked down inside me until the music coaxes them out. I love the surprise memory, the thrusting back in time that occurs, just as it did last night with Glee that happens when a song takes me by surprise.

The power of music amazes me. In a way, for me, its the strongest evidence that time travel is possible. It might not occur physically but, emotionally, it feels as though you're right there, in the moment that passed even years ago. The power of music over memories is strong.

I'd love to know if I'm alone in this or if you all have similar experiences. Feel free to comment. I promise not to mock. After all, I've openly admitted a couple of times now that I once believed George Michael and I were destined to be together and that I thought Andrew Lloyd Webber was the coolest person on the planet. It can't be worse than that...right?

Happy Thursday!

Why I Once Would have Loved Twilight: The Obsessive Nature of Captain Monkeypants

I've always been a creature of phases. And I don't mean that like I'm a werewolf or anything but, rather, that I've always had a bit of an obsessive personality. Ever since I was a child, I've had a tendency to get stuck on something and it becomes my most favourite thing in life.

For example, one of my earliest obsessions was with a British children's author named Enid Blyton. As an avid reader anyway, I discovered that she had hundreds of books. They were books about boarding schools, fantasy lands that could be found at the top of trees, child detectives, mysteries and even had my most favourite character: Noddy. Noddy was a little elf-like thing whose best friend was the grumpy Big Ears. I used to call him "Biggy Ears" before I knew better. I absorbed Enid Blyton's books like a sponge: I used to go to the library and come home with a stack of five books, all by her. I wanted to go to boarding school, to have midnight feasts, to do all the things her characters did. Actually, I've always had a sneaking suspicion that J.K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter, also read her share of Enid Blyton when she was younger. There are definitely some good Blyton-esque scenes in her books, especially the earlier ones before the world of Hogwarts got too dark.

Anyway, my obsession got to the point where, I believe, a teacher even told my mother that I should probably read something else to give me some variety. You see, I didn't know it then but Enid wasn't, um....a good writer. She tended to use the same words over and over and being as young as I was, I didn't realize how dated her books were, even when I was a child.

Sadly, I got my hands on some Enid Blyton books fairly recently, books that I'd loved as a child about St. Clare's school. I was horrified. They were terrible. They were full of terms like "fiddlesticks" and "golly gosh" and they were absolutely horrendously written. Needless to say, I was mildly crushed that such a staple of my youth wasn't the paragon I believed her to be. Yet she'd given me an impetus to read voraciously as a young 'un and there was value in that.

My obsessions continued. They veered in music in which I am now sort of embarrassed to admit I was a huge Wham! fan and was in love with George Michael. Ok, I'm more than sort of embarrassed. Hey, I was ten. We didn't know he was gay then. My best friend and I would had recorded two Wham! videos- "Careless Whisper" and "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (and yes, ok, I know technically "Careless Whisper" was a solo effort by George but that's irrelevant to my story). We would run home at lunch EVERY DAY and watch them. My poor mother- she had to suffer through that. Sorry, mum. Really.

From Wham! I moved on bouncing from films to television to books and back to music. I went through a heavy metal period in my teens, wearing the black band shirts and thinking I was cool because I liked hair bands. Again, hindsight is 20-20 but at the time, they were a metaphor for my painful awkward teen years. My friends and I would have lotteries to divide up who had 'custody' of a band for the week. Yes, again....I was an unhappy teen for a while but, then again, show me a happy one. As teens, we all think that we're misunderstood and unliked by our peers. It's only fifteen years later and you realize that all those people you thought hated you really were just as messed up and befuddled by life as you and suddenly they all want to be your Facebook friend.

Uh, sorry...I digress. After that phase, I changed friends. I think it's because I suddenly realized that life really didn't suck and I was just a dork in a black shirt listening to music from men more effeminate then me. I made new friends and started to listen to happier things like Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.

It was a new phase. That one lasted me a while. During that phase, I also went through an Anne Rice phase in which I loved vampires again. I've always liked vampires but Anne Rice made them more romantic and less, you know, fangy and bloody. Phases can overlap, you know.

Since then, I've probably had a dozen more phases. I went through a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer phases but, then again, that one is still ongoing merely because Joss Whedon, the writer and creator of the show is a genius and I will follow his creativity wherever he goes because he always keeps me amused, spellbound and fascinated by his ability to write and create such original stuff.

You may wonder why I'm telling you all this. My snarky answer is that it's my blog, I can tell you what I like. Surprisingly, however, I do have a point. This whole reverie was sparked by a visit to a bookstore this weekend in which I saw two teenage girls grabbing several copies of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight books and literally being so excited you could see them jumping up and down.

Surprisingly enough, given my past rants and blogs about Ms. Meyer, this isn't actually a tirade against her and her mediocre books. It's mostly because when I saw those teens being that excited over a book, I could relate to it. Maybe the reason I hate those books so much is because I know, as a teen, I, too, would have wanted to be Bella Swan with her sparkled-skin, bronze-haired hero to save her from her mundane life. I would have felt catharsis in Bella's unhappiness too. So I can't even mock them as I normally would. Mostly, I'm excited that they are that excited over a book. Ok, so I wish it was someone more deserving like Neil Gaiman, Celia Rees, J.K. Rowling or even Stephen King but, well, at least they're excited over a book of some kind.

The only thing that I wonder, especially as I surf the pages of the internet, is how those Twi-hards are going to feel in a few years. At the moment, every entertainment site I read likes to talk about the sequel to the blah Twilight movie and who will play who and if the new director will be good. With each online news story, there is room for comments and that space is filled with devoted love from Twi-hards about how amazing the movie will be, how much Robert Pattinson resembles the Edward in their head and all of that. Yes, I read them. I used to be a quasi-journalist- I'm a firm believer in reading the good as well as the bad.

The comments are often written in that annoying shorthand used for text messaging, so fluidly done that it's obviously a teen. They love their Twilight. They love Stephanie Meyer. They love the books so much that they've read them multiple times.

There's nothing wrong with that. Whatever gets 'em through the day.

Yet, as I mentioned, in a few years, when those devoted fans are a little better adjusted to life, when the awkward teen years are behind them and they find themselves becoming adults, will they really be able to go back to Twilight and see the same beauty and brilliance they see now? Or will it become one of those slightly embarrassing obsessions that got them through middle school or high school but now needs to be forgotten?

I can't answer that because I don't know. What I do know is that when I was fourteen, I read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I fell in love with the book. I read it and reread it. I memorized the opening. I wondered what would happen if I met Ponyboy. I watched the movie. It wasn't great but I was willing to overlook that because there were Sodapop, Ponyboy and Johnny on the screen.

I reread that book a few years ago. I get why I loved it. It's the tale of a teen who doesn't fit in but eventually, after some crappy experiences, realizes that he has to stay true to himself. Something like that, anyway. I don't know why I could relate to it. I was from an unbroken, nicely stable, loving middle-class family- completely the opposite of any of The Outsider's characters. Yet I also cringed a little that I'd loved it as much as I had. I recognized that value it gave me in my teens but, as an adult, like any youthful obsession, I couldn't remember why I'd loved it to the point of obsession.

I suppose, maybe, The Outsiders was my Twilight. Minus the sappy romance and drippy descriptions, of course. I know now, having the hindsight and something resembling wisdom, that had I loved Twilight in my teens, it would now be one of those shelved memories along with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and crushes on skateboarders who should have bathed more often. I'd be slightly embarrassed that I loved it but in a way, it made me who I am, for better or for worse. I like who I am now and that means everything. I hope those Twilight fans have a similar experience.

Sorry for the long blog but thanks, as always, for reading. Happy Wednesday.