Tag: Janet Jackson

Yesterme. Yesteryou. Yesterday.

It was somewhere between coffee and cleaning up from a dinner party on Saturday night that I learned the verdict in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial. I stood gawping and silent, coffee and kahlua still dancing on the palate, staring at the multiple Twitter streams telling me: Not Guilty.

There followed a restless, late night, one spent exchanging ideas across social media networks, listening to old soul songs, reading various articles, thinking about America and its founding ideals, about youth,  about justice, about relationships near and far, about differing perceptions across different lives, in different places and in different circumstances. About the notion of “different-ness” itself.

The incident sent me back in a time machine somehow, to recall a childhood friend I hadn’t thought about in many, many years. Tanya and her family moved to my old neighborhood in suburban Toronto when I was in seventh grade. It was a strange time, of shifting hormones, changing tastes, swirling, sometimes intensely passionate feelings; my once-strong friendships were disintegrating, changing faster than my hairstyles.

My twelve-year-old self was experimenting with new tastes in music, in clothing, in food, in books, in ways of seeing and experiencing the world; Tanya seemed to show up at the exactly right time, helping me navigate through the terrible trauma of first periods, the weirdness of my single mother dating, the importance of forging notes for gym class (we were possibly the only non-sporty types in the whole school and hated the athletic mean girls), and the joys of hitting up the local record shop to scope out the latest dance records. I was introduced to Janet Jackson’s music through Tanya, and we’d spend hours dancing in my basement to “Nasty” and “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” as well as hits by both Michael Jackson and Duran Duran. It was refreshing to find a (female) friend who never put the two in competing camps, as so many around me already had. (Either you liked MJ or you liked DD; there was no in-between, which, to me, seemed absurd.) I introduced Tanya to the wonders of the Eurythmics. We’d go to the cinema Friday nights and laugh loud and hard, at whatever absurdity we’d paid our $7 for; sometimes people would try to shush us and throw dirty looks. Our response was to throw popcorn and quickly duck down, giggling.

We didn’t know about history, or what we did know, we barely cared about or paid much attention to. We were young girls being… well, young girls, whispering, giggling, sharing, crying, being loud and obnoxious one minute, weepy and dramatic the next. When I visited Tanya’s house, I just saw people getting along with life, their jobs, their kids, their responsibilities. Tanya’s parents seemed tired, and her father was older than I expected, but they were friendly and very welcoming, delighted their rambunctious daughter had found an ally in a quiet, bookish, then-shy piano-playing local girl, and perhaps pleased at my mother’s church-going habits. Her mother’s smile as my eyes bugged out trying jerk chicken for the first time, her younger brother excitedly dancing with us in the basement and acting out the scenes from the “Thriller” music video … it was the mid-80s, and suburban Canada felt about as far away from the racial boiling-pot of America as you could possibly get.

Very often Tanya and I would relate the way many young women do, talking about the strange weirdness of our changing bodies and the absolute, utter mystery of male bodies. Tanya used to do a hilariously vulgar sort of pelvic thrust walk, making a funny wakka-wakka-sound in her throat – I can’t remember why, or the circumstances for such a creation -but I do remember howling with laughter. Tanya was, to me, a very cool girl, with her perfectly filed, long fingernails, Chuck Taylor sneakers, light-heartedness with the whole mysterious s-e-x thing, and, of course, a very chic-casual purple cheerleader-style jacket. For all that, I never thought she was any different than me; it never occurred that she was a black girl from California with a very different set of life experiences to my own -hailing from a large family with many siblings, her parents having recently moved to Canada and settled in what was then a very Wonder Bread neighborhood. She was sometimes laughed at in the schoolyard, with more than a few sporty, slim girls rolled their eyes at her in gym class (when we went), what with her hole-speckled socks, baggy shirts, and dimpled knees. Again, I never noticed those things, and she was just my cool, funny friend. I remember how I felt when we were together, whether in-person or on the phone.

It was with more than a bit of surprise that I thought of Tanya when Rachel Jeantel was interviewed recently. Her awkwardness, her self-consciousness, her mannerliness, her sparkling, shy youth… Tanya’s face came flashing into my mind, particularly the moments when my friend used to interact with my mother or my mum’s church-going friends. There was, in retrospect, a weird over-compensating going on that I, in my fuzzy-cotton-shielded-from-everything upbringing, hadn’t noticed as a youngster. As Laura Beck wrote on Jezebel, “I don’t know how you watch this and see anything but an unfiltered, genuine teenager. One who suffered  the tragic loss of a friend she spent hours and hours on the phone with each day.” Maybe that’s what set me off to write this blog post, madly typing out rough thoughts in the middle of another restless night recently. There is a truly real, touching core of deeply-felt friendship so extant in Jeantel’s reminiscences, it’s almost painful to watch. You feel like you’re intruding on the lives of two teenagers who are super-tight with each other -literally to the point of death.

I’m not sure why, or how, but Tanya and I stopped talking -a petulant tween fight, as I recall -and soon after she moved away. I ran into her a little while after that at the local mall, when she was visiting; Tanya had moved back to California, her parents had separated, she was living with her mother and siblings. She was, somehow, such a grown-up at sixteen. I often wonder where she is now. Tanya would be about the same age as me, and looking at the date of Trayvon Martin’s birth – 1995 -I wonder if she chose to have children. What would she tell them? What might be be telling them now? Can she – can we -possibly return to that beautiful place in childhood, of laughter and love and shared secrets and innocence? Perhaps Christy Moore says it best:

I want to meet you where you are
I don’t need you to surrender
There is no feeling so alone
As when the one you’re hurting is your own.


(Bottom photo: detail of Kenny Scharf mural, 2011; both top & bottom photos from my Flickr photostream)

Move Me

Listening to the first release from The Chemical Brothers, two thoughts strike me: first, this is very ambient-meets-techno, second, what took them so long?

I always loved dancing, and dance music. I didn’t recognize the labels -house, electronica, etc (not that they existed much) -so much as enjoy the output. I danced with equal vigor to the latest pop hits of the day (something about the hummable jumpiness of MJ & the bass-heavy, thumpalicious grooves of “Nasty” sister Janet still moves – literally) as the wordless, hazy instrumental stuff you heard everywhere but could never quite name; it had a groove, it had a heart, it had a beat, and it breathed, in a wordless, low whisper, “move…

So I did -to everything from 70s era instrumental funk and disco to 80s glam pop to the awe-inspiring, genre-defying sounds of the 90s, when technology took a decided leap forwards and married metal, rock, beats and block-rockin’ rhythms to create a holy land where definitions vanished and were replaced by a nirvana outlined in the fuzzy shapes of outstretched limbs and undulating hips.

Dance has always felt like a kind of holy sacrament for me. After moving home from Dublin and London, I bemoaned a North American club culture that seemed to cater exclusively to the under-21, micro-skirted, posing-with-cocktails set; I was more accustomed to the cargo-panted/t-shirt, big-boots-and-all-ages crowds actually dancing at clubs in Ireland and England. The phrase “dance music” has very different connotations between continents; even now, with the success of bands like Air, Daft Punk, and MGMT, it’s still, I think, somewhat ghettoized as being the exclusive enclave of the young. Nonsense.

howie_b_-_take_your_partner_by_the_hand.mp3
Found at: FilesTube – Megaupload search

As Robbie Robertson breathily intones in the gorgeously dense Howie B. track, “Take Your Partner By The Hand“:

this is a place she goes to fulfill a very basic need
… to communicate without talking…
she wants to make a connection
…this is about smoke and sweat and beats
this is about no questions

I relate even now, my club days like foggy, happy, multi-color memories smiling at me from afar.

So with The Chemical Brothers’ new release, I’m taken back to that place. I love hearing the notable embrace of past (with samples of work from The Who, The Beatles, and Pink Floyd certainly audible) and fearless celebration of present. The Chemicals were one of the first big acts to hit the mainstream back in the 90s, and they paved the way for others –The Prodigy, Orbital, Underworld -to come forwards in North America, and dip into a bigger ocean in Europe. I’ll never forget walking through a dull, flourescent-lit department store in Dublin (a more depressing, middle-of-the-road retail spot you couldn’t find) and hearing “Firestarter” piped through the store’s enormous, bland expanse. Young mums walked by pushing strollers and grannnies glanced at sale-tagged sweaters as the screaming insistence, with echoing beats and shouts, bounced off the scratched, matte lino: “I’m the firestarter…

These days, the songs being piped through that dreary store might be made by someone on a laptop, living in an equally dreary suburb; it doesn’t matter about the source now, so much as the spread. Everything yawns open, embraces, pushes, pulsates, sways and shimmies; the Chemicals recognize this bold, scary, exhilerating sense of the unlimited essence of sound, music and experience -that basic need to communicate – and with a wink to the past, they’re kissing the future, and moving feet, hearts, minds, past categories and into the horizon where sea, sky, and dancefloor bleed.

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