Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #003

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #003 – “A Kid And His Ghetto Blaster”

Long ago, I was consistently accused of being too smart for my age.

I can assure you, that doesn’t happen anymore.

Ultimately I think it’s very true that most people get their smarts from a variety of places.  It could be by reading the ol’ textbooks, or studying and education in the traditional way.  Maybe you’ve got someone that you look up to, and maybe you’re lucky enough to get the advice and wisdom they’ll impart on ya.  Maybe it’s some of that good old fashioned hands-on experience that leads you to be an expert in your field.  I was never very adept at learning things by reading when it came to the working world – I had to do things with my own two freakin’ hands, and by repetition, eventually whatever it was would sink in.  I’d listen to people blah, blah, blah their way through the explanation of how something worked, and then as soon as they were done, I’d get in there, do whatever it was in the way that I’d go about doing it, and from that point on it was almost like muscle memory taking over…I’d never forget the process.  I find comparisons to intelligence to be one of the most mundane topics any of us could ever take on.  It just seems like such a shitty argument to make.  You’re smarter than I am at something?  I’m smarter than you are at something else?  Who and what determines who’s smarter than whom?  EVERYONE – I don’t care who you are, where you come from, or what you do in life – has their own thing and can run circles around the rest of us within that realm.  For the most part, I believe intelligence is interest-based.

So no…I’m not smarter than you are overall, but I might be in a couple areas if I’m lucky.  Same goes for you.

What I did have from a very early age in life, was the gift of insight.  Did I come equipped with that straight outta the womb?  Doubtful.  I think that many of us Generation X’ers had to grow up quicker than the rest out there in many respects, largely due to going through all kinds of fucked up scenarios like childhood divorces and having to become adults quicker than we’d want to be as a result.  I was no exception in that regard, with the caveat that my parents never had to officially get divorced because they never got married in the first place.  Yup, I’m a bastard by its literal definition.  I became the defacto guardian for my mother, the constant babysitter for my brother, a cooker & cleaner, all by the time I was about eight years old.  Looking back at it now, it seems like a lot to put on a kid’s shoulders.  Did I complain?  Fuck YES I did.  I was burdened, not stupid.  Life was never easy, but I honestly figured that it was just like that for all of us and never thought of myself as the exception to any kind of rule.  Still, the heaviness of trying to find a way to keep being a kid while you’re growing up at an exponential rate is taxing in itself.  I’d progress in some ways, rebel in others, and try to figure things out on my own.

The details of the separation of my parents is muddy to say the very least, and of course there are two sides to every story…theoretically.  In my personal view, there are always three.  You get the story presented by the two parties involved, and the third side is actually on us – it’s our job to then figure out this whole other narrative, known as the truth, based on what two parties who probably weren’t telling you all the facts were saying, in order to understand what really went on.  You listen for inconsistencies, hesitations, and watch for body language.  I don’t really think it’s all that tough to know when someone is lying to you, and I learned very early on that it’s more advantageous to let people think that they’re getting away with it.  There’s more power in holding your cards close to your chest than there would ever be in letting the whole table know what you’re holding onto, right?  So let people lie to ya, I say.  There’s no harm in that, and everyone does it – and you can use that information to your advantage.  Anyhow.  In the context of this story, my mother would tell you that my dad chose to leave.  Years later in life, after I had cut off all communication with my mother (for a wealth of entirely different reasons), my dad would not so bravely attempt some revisionist history with his version of the story, probably knowing full-well that I wouldn’t go about contacting my mother to verify all the new details I had.  The truth of the whole scenario is somewhere in between the things they’ve told me, but I don’t really care.

How could I complain when going through all that I’ve been through made me into the person I’m proud of being today?  Truly, if it wasn’t for their separation long ago, I would not have become who I am now.

Maybe my old man left, maybe he was kicked out, maybe there was no possible way he could have kept living with my mother – I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that anymore.  Sure, you pore over that kinda stuff as a kid as you’re going through it, but where was I going to get the truth from?  I didn’t have the luxury of being raised by people that were always truthful with me – I had parents that were basically still kids themselves, only being twenty years older than I am.  They were still trying to figure out the what the fuck of it all for themselves, let alone have any sense of what raising a child was supposed to be like.  So essentially, with a roof over my head & rent paid for, I raised myself from there.

But I did have help.

On my eighth birthday, right after my dad had left, he got me my first ghetto blaster.  For you kids out there, that’s a giant box filled with music…like your iphone is for you today, only I couldn’t fit this thing in my pockets.  It was my ticket out of the stresses of my living situation…my refuge…my best friend.  I didn’t know that at first glance…it wasn’t love at first sight or anything like that.  Unplugged, a ghetto blaster is a remarkably boring paper weight.  Mine was all black, save for a splash of color in purple and teal that would underline certain words or features being highlighted for the different functions it offered.  Don’t get excited – we’re talkin’ about the choices between AM or FM radio, and a tape deck.  God I’m old now.  I remember my best friend well and I can still see all of its contours and functions in my mind.  It had a little switch that would toggle between the services it could provide, AM, FM, or tape – and a tiny little light that would turn red whenever it was on.  That ghetto blaster was my gateway into music, and also my ticket out of the house whenever I couldn’t really escape the reality I was stuck in.

So I listened, and as a result, I learned.  Who really raised me?  The music on my tapes, and on the radio.  I learned about empathy and sincerity from artists and bands.  I learned about passion, integrity, and what resonates inside us, all from listening to music.  More than anything else perhaps, I learned about the human connection that bonds us all…the specialness of creating something and putting it out there into the world that we can share with others, for better or worse.  My life would go on to consist of time that I could spend with my ghetto blaster, and time that I spent waiting to get back to my ghetto blaster.  Anything that got in the way of me listening to more music was a complete and total waste of my time.  There was TRUTH inside what people were singing about – raw, unfiltered truth – and I craved that kind of honesty.  As I’ve said many times in my adult life – music is the only real truth that we’ve ever known.

So no…I’m still not smarter than anyone I know in just about any subject I can possibly think of – but I do have keen insights into what makes us who we are, what motivates us, and our desire to be understood – and all of that came beaming out of my ghetto blaster long ago.  The first tapes I got were the original Batman Soundtrack from the Keaton/Burton masterpiece of 1989, and a mix tape from my dad.  I learned about expression, sex, and artistry from the mighty Purple One through the soundtrack, while the mix tape prioritized variety and could take me from DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince to Phil Collins in the span of two songs.  Mike And The Mechanics.  The Dan Reed Network.  John Farnham and Steve Winwood?  You learn from the things you like, but also from the things you don’t as much.  You start to realize that even in music, there can be a façade, but you also learn how to see through it.  The gloss of 80s music didn’t escape me, but I viewed that as fictional stuff.  Bands like Wham! for instance – that’s popcorn music…mere entertainment.  Then there was Prince by contrast – even when he was trying to be merely entertaining, he was still saying something by the level of passion he’d put into every note.  The first tapes that I ever personally bought, were Richard Marx’s Repeat Offender and MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt’em.  If that doesn’t tell you how wide my palette is for music has always been, I don’t know how else I could convince you.  Even more crucially, later on in grade four, I’d make my first significant trade for MORE music, getting my new best friend to trade me his DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince tape, and a bootleg recording of The Bangles music, for like five or six bucks.  To me, that was the best money I could have ever spent.  Who the fuck am I kidding?  It’s STILL the best money that I’ve probably ever spent.  The Bangles mix specifically, was recorded onto a 180-minute tape!  That was freakin’ UNHEARD of, because it stretches the tape so damn thin.  Usually when you’d go to a store to pick up some blanks, you’d find 60 and 90 minutes as the standard…if you lucked out, you MIGHT find a 120 – but 180 minutes, aka THREE HOURS?  Beyond incredible.  The value is incomparable.  Even IF it was The Bangles, which it was in this case, the amount of KNOWLEDGE you can pack into three hours is STAGGERING.  Between all of these tapes, and a collection that continued to grow with every paper that I delivered, I listened to the wisdom & words of those that came before me, and absorbed EVERYTHING.  I learned how to filter out the gloss and glitter in life, from what was real and sincere in communication.

Of course it would go well beyond that when you factored in the radio.  By this point, I’d already learned how to expand my little ghetto blaster’s empire by expanding it through cannibalizing other people’s old ghetto blasters.  I had a network of little speakers all connected together to form some of the WORLD’S FIRST (unverified!) surround sound.  I’d listen to these folks on the radio talk about everything under the sun, and thanks to the truth in the music they’d spin around it, I was able to figure out what they were really saying, verses what was simply said for our entertainment value.  I mean, these were all CRUCIAL lessons in learning about how the world operates…and how to see through what they’re selling you on.  I’d stay awake listening for hours and hours and hours.  I’d learned how to remove the tabs on my mixes to preserve them.  I’d also learned how to put cellophane tape over top of the holes on my cassettes so that I could tape over them again with something new if I needed to, which I often did.  My old MC Hammer tape would eventually become Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle record, so that my mom didn’t know I was listening to “Gangsta Rap” when it first started to circulate.  I mentioned I was old, right?  Taping things from the radio was a literal ART.  Sometimes you’d get the whole song, sometimes some DJ would ruin it by talking through the intro and you’d have to wait for the station to play it again.  I’m sure you can all sense by now how nuts I went when the internet allowed us access to EVERYTHING.

To make it crystal clear though…and to up my street cred that much further…when the internet first started offering UNLIMITED access, I was kicked off of every service we had around when I lived, because I was downloading what they said was FIVE TIMES the average BUSINESS.  That’s who I am.

Anyhow.  My ghetto blaster would go on to live several lives.  From its original gorgeous, untouched state of being unwrapped for the first time, to the first time I plugged it in to hear the gentle click of its power surge and seeing the little red light come on to tell me it was working, to the little army of tiny speakers I’d amassed over time and all the wires connecting them around my entire bedroom, to the eventual learning of how I could adapt a Discman (alright, just look that one up kiddos) to play through it – that ghetto blaster rocked with me for far longer than it likely should have.  My parents were never made of money, so chances are, that sucker was on sale when my old man bought it – but there’s value to be found at the lower end of retail pricing too.  Like my trusty coffee pot now…thing cost me like $15 and it’s been going for about a decade now?  I’m no mathematician, but that’s fucking VALUE y’all.

I continued to be a sponge and absorbed every ounce of knowledge that my speakers could provide me with.  I was able to push passed the bullshit insincerity of acts like Def Leppard or Metallica, and when it came time for CDs during my teenage years, I got right into the artistic truths of names like TOOL and Pavement…the screaming realness of Nirvana.  My tape rack was a pride and joy for years – it had a hundred spaces, and I worked to fill every single one of them and then some.  It saddens me now to think of the fact that when I eventually switched over to CDs permanently, they sat in storage for years until one day where I got good and stoned with a friend & we decided to go out for a drive with them.  I held each one by the middle of the actual tape film, and let them dangle beside the car as we drove until we eventually ran out of them.  That’s how my collection eventually retired, permanently damaged.  My CD collection quickly replaced them, even at the outrageous costs we were being asked to pay at the time.  Second hand stores would go on to be the places I lived in as a teenager, exchanging the stuff I’d already heard for something new, getting less than what I originally paid and dividing that again and again as I’d pawn the old tunes for something I didn’t know yet.  I’d come into those stores with a fully loaded backpack, ready to hawk my whole freakin’ collection so that I could experience a different one.  Same ghetto blaster.  Same kid.  Same ears on my face.  Same reasons for listening.  Learn, learn, learn.

As I look back on it now, I can’t even begin to understand what it was like to try and raise me from the parental side of the scenario.  Their opinions were of no consequence to me – because I’d already established that they were less truthful than they should have been with me most of the time.  They were Def Leppard and Metallica selling me an image, when I wanted something REAL like R.E.M. or the Tragically Hip that didn’t care what they looked like, because they had something of substance to say.  I craved realness.  I still crave realness.  I don’t have time for the glitz and gloss of planet earth.  When I misbehaved as a kid, there was only ONE way to punish me – and that was to take away my precious ghetto blaster.  Forced to sit in my room without being able to play my music, I’d sit there and read the liner notes over and over and over until I practically had everything from the lyrics to the songs, to the people that produced & played them completely memorized.  Of all the unforgivable things my mother had ever done to me as I grew up, weaponizing my music against me was the worst possible atrocity.  I ain’t going as far as to say that it was straight-up child abuse, but it was practically adjacent in my eyes.

Maybe it was circumstance that drove me to become such an avid listener.  Maybe it was a lack of real friends, maybe it was isolation & being withdrawn as a kid from a broken family, maybe it was nothing more than the convenience of having so much access to music early on, or being the son of a musician.  Whatever it was, I’m thankful for it all and the lessons it taught me.  Without music, I wouldn’t know a damn thing about the world and/or how it operates.  I wouldn’t have had Nirvana to give a voice to all of what I was feeling, or a Rage Against The Machine to teach me how to fucking deal with oppression.

As to where that ghetto blaster ended up…I feel like I should remember that, but don’t.  It was probably just another victim of the planned obsolescence in a consumer-driven world, despite my wonderful plastic box living for years past its intended shelf-life.  All I know is that it shaped me into who I am today – I still crave the variety it offered, and I still love listening to every type of music under the sun.  It was always my hope that I’d be able to create that same kind of environment here at sleepingbagstudios, where people would come to learn about something new they’d never heard of.  I pretty much feel like I failed at doing that every single day, because music doesn’t interest others in the same way it captivates me, and I’ve run out of ideas on how to make it important to people.  Every single day, I see a wave of political posts that far outperform anything I could do, or that I’ve ever done for that matter…at least if we’re to believe that all the numbers are true, which I don’t, because I’m in promotions and I know how the machine feeds itself.  That being said, if I could generate even a tenth of the numbers that your average political nonsense traffics in, I’d be one hell of a happier man.  It’s always going to feel like a strange planet to me, watching the majority of our people completely focused on the division and hate of politics, rather than finding the strength of community & unity that music has to offer.  I’m reminded daily that our attention has become the most valuable commodity we have to give, and I’m continually proud of where I have chosen to spend it, here with you, listening to what you create.  Symbolically, you’re all still beaming outta my proverbial ghetto blaster, and I am indeed, reading your liner notes.

To all the musicians, artists, and bands out there – thank you for everything that you’ve taught me.

My love to you all.

– Jer @ SBS