Driving to the music of chance
NEW YORK – I bought my car, a Jetta wagon, back in 2006. It was 4 years old and came with a five- CD cartridge lodged, impractically, over a rear wheel well. Not surprisingly, the CD player refuses to function on any less-than-perfect road – and in Brooklyn, where I live, there are few perfect roads. Even stop- and- start traffic makes the discs, well, stop and start. So when we want to hear music in the car, which is always, my family relies on the ad- riddled idiosyncrasies of commercial radio. I know there are other options. I’ve tried all of them. I’ve plugged adapters into the cassette player – yes, I have a cassette player, if you’re dying to hear that mixtape your boyfriend made you in 1987 – to connect my iPod. I’ve tried to support indies like WFMU, but my scanner sails right past them. I sampled satellite radio in my brother’s space- age minivan that parallel parks itself and changes stations at the sound of his voice. ( He asked me to drive it for him once; I told him I wasn’t a licensed astronaut.) All that’s left are the signals strong enough for my bottom- of- the- line radio to receive. Usually, we flip back and forth between classic rock on Q104.3 and “the best of the ‘ 60s, ‘ 70s and ‘ 80s” on 101.1, CBS FM, unless a double dose of “Hotel California” forces us to seek refuge in the mainstream pop on WPLJ. It’s not so bad, really: My daughters explain who Pink and Fun are ( but not why they’re called Pink and Fun); I explain to them, as my parents explained to me, that Creedence Clearwater Revival is singing about a “bad moon on the rise,” not a bathroom on the right. On a good day, we all learn something. I grew up on these stations, these voices. One of my earliest New York City memories is of being bundled with my brothers in the back of my father’s car, sometime in the late ‘ 70s, barreling up the West Side Highway, watching the lights of the George Washington Bridge swoop through the sky as CBS FM counted down “The Top 100 Songs of All Time.” (“In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins always seemed to be No. 1.) At 16, after failing my first road test, I was still in the back seat, but the car was my friend’s Cabriolet, and the radio was tuned to Z100 to catch George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” or “Nasty” by Janet Jackson. Then, as now, Top 40 songs were so ubiquitous that, when they ended, we simply spun the dial and found them again. Like the songs we sweat to at the gym, the songs we want to hear in the car are not necessarily the ones we love at home. For me, home is Big Star, classic Stax, the Avett Brothers; the car is Beyoncé, Bad Company, Tommy James and the Shondells. Twenty years ago, two college friends of mine with intimidatingly hip taste in music used to drive around Portland, Maine, waiting for the classic rock station to play Pearl Jam’s “Better Man”; they would never buy the album, but on the road they loved to sing the song. The car is a musical separate sphere, where some days Kansas’ dirgelike “Dust in the Wind” will be on three out of four stations, while on others I’ll be blessed with “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “Cruel to Be Kind,” all in a row. It’s true that on stations with “classic” playlists like CBS and Q104, the songs have been selected through complex corporate algorithms to appeal to listeners just like me. But I’m glad my daughters are being exposed to music they would otherwise never hear. I know that commercial radio conforms to strict playlists, but when I’m driving, it still feels like the music of chance. I surrender control and let the music play. If every moment of my kids’ musical experience originated from iTunes, I would have missed many perfect moments – like 10- year- old Lucy’s horrified response to “Another Brick in the Wall” (“This school district sounds terrible”) or her older sister Maggie’s conviction that Frankie Valli is actually Elmo. There are downsides to this lack of control, of course, like realizing that your fifth- grader is singing “my angel is the centerfold” to herself while doing her homework. ( Better than “Thrift Shop,” I guess.) But I think it’s worth the risk. Sometimes the green lights line up just right and we fly down Ocean Parkway, singing along to the glorious chorus of Boz Scaggs’ “Lido Shuffle”: “Leeeedo – Oh- ohOH- ohohoh!” Carrie Fisher’s heroine in “Postcards From the Edge” felt that “God was in her car radio, and He would play her songs she liked when He was happiest with her.” I’m not sure about God, but I know that when serendipity provides a perfect soundtrack to my life, I get a rare sense of both contingency and convergence. Downloading “Superstition” or pulling it up on Spotify is simply not the same as catching it on the radio just as the DJ’s voice fades into Stevie Wonder’s unforgettably ominous intro. I can’t predict or depend on the random perfection of these moments, nor can I design every aspect of my daughters’ lives. Some things just happen, but they can happen only if we unplug our devices and hit the road. So let’s say goodbye, however briefly, to the satellites. ( They will still be up there when we’re done. They will be up there forever.) Let’s try the scan feature on our radios, and search for songs we haven’t heard in years, or decades. Listen to ads for local restaurants we’ll probably never visit. Give in to the static and stretch of a messy world that doesn’t fit on a screen.
Listening to the car radio, I surrender control and let the DJ take over
Commercial radio is hardly the voice of the people, but I’m willing to bet that it’s more various than the one on your phone. There are limits, of course: no need to subject ourselves to “Blurred Lines” or “Brown Sugar.” ( I love the Rolling Stones, but why is this racist song still on the air?) Like Cheap Trick says, “Surrender, but don’t give yourself away.” At 14, Maggie guards her iPod like a Gorgon. I’m no longer allowed to load songs on it without her approval. I can’t complain about her taste; she loves Radiohead, Phoenix, the White Stripes and the Breeders. But she also likes to ride in the car just to listen to the radio. Her hand bumps mine as she reaches to change the station, and I downshift into second for the inevitable backup on the Prospect Expressway. To Maggie, traffic just means more music. She lands on Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which takes me back to the beach in 1985, tan boys in U2 shirts and, yes, Wayfarers. I’m afraid she’s going to breeze by it, but she settles back, smiling. “Really?” I ask, amused. Maggie’s hair is blue. She’s wearing ripped jeans and Doc Martens and a Neko Case T- shirt, and she is fresh from a bass lesson at the cheerfully hip Brooklyn Music Factory. “Yeah,” she replies, eyes closed. “This is my jam.”