We're entertaining you
About a week ago my sister called me into the TV room to show me something "cool". The last time she tried that I ended up watching an extended, overwritten punchline on Scrubs so unfunny that it caused my brain to flatten into a crepe, but this time what she had to show me was pretty neat, and totally unexpected. There they were on my TV screen, estranged friends from a different era: Angelique Bates, Lori-Beth Denberg, Keenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell, Josh Server and Alyssa Reyes, otherwise known as the cast of Nickelodeon's All That. By some method I don't understand, she had managed to excavate and record long-gone All That episodes and was watching them again like an eight-year-old who had just finished her homework.
Attempting to play it cool, I spat, "Wow, that show is so la--" before a wave of nostalgia hit me with the force of an oncoming train. I used to spend hours each week watching All That in my elementary school years, and I know I'm not alone. For eight-to-12-year-old American children not accustomed to growing up on the streets, this show was ace: hip, teenage urbanites from around the block who wanted nothing more than to entertain us (it's in the theme song). And it worked incredibly well, even if Lori-Beth Denberg's "Vital Information" got a bit wearying. Call me crazy, but I even think that the messages latent in the proceedings resonated on a level far above kid-friendly sketch comedy: What was point of watching Earboy and Pizzaface being picked on in the high school cafeteria if we weren't prepared to confront our own superficiality in the process?
The largest impact All That had on me, though, was that it taught me about R&B. Boyz II Men, All 4 One, TLC, Monica, Adina Howard, 702, Salt 'n Pepa--they were all there, performing to a group of beyond-ecstatic kids in the front row. For me, it represented a new universe that was easier to reach than the gangsta rap concurrently occurring (though I would subsequently go through that phase as well), full of ear-pleasing harmonies and funky, syrupy grooves. And the lyrics were at least more PG than rap tended to get, where even references to sex masqueraded as love. (I swear, the phrase "making love" was birthed for R&B.) My hands-down favorite act on the show was Soul for Real, a slightly lesser Boyz II Men composed of four brothers, with a killer single--"Candy Rain''--that they performed to a very receptive audience and my own widened ears. I was on a big vocal harmony kick back then, the way I'm on a guitar distortion kick now, and I think it was the way that the brothers' voices--from Chris's rumbling croon to 14-year-old Jason's upper-register belt--melded with each other and the music around them so perfectly that made me buy their CD on sight. I've long since moved on from most R&B, but every now and again I'll flip "Candy Rain" on my iPod; even to my too-discerning ears, it's still a great song. If candy rain existed, it would sound exactly like this.
But the Soul for Real song that killed me wasn't the one that made them famous; it's "Spend the Night", a song buried in the middle of the tracklist that no one but Soul for Real themselves remembers. It's one of the slower numbers, with typically-R&B MIDI instruments and some misty Spanish guitar that practically ensures its eternal marginality. The chorus, which I must have listened to hundreds of times, goes:
Come on and spend the night
With me tonight
And we're making sweet love
By the fireplace.
It doesn't get any more vapid than that, folks. So why did this song disarm me the same way that "Just the Way You Are" makes middle-aged people weepy? Here I have to give you a little background. When I was nine years old I decided to take up Tae Kwon Do. A lot of my friends were doing it and it seemed like a nicer alternative to basketball, a sport I deemed awesome but couldn't really play. My parents gave me the choice between David Park's and Billy Blanks' studios, and here your eyebrows should perk up because Billy Blanks singlehandedly invented the stupid-sounding but incredibly popular phenomenon known as Tae Bo. But I also had a hulking steamship of a crush on a girl named Jenna who was in the class above me at school and took Tae Kwon Do at David Park's, and I don't have to tell you that having a crush can make you do practically anything, including turn down Billy Blanks.
Unbelievably, by the time I was 11 my crush only grew bigger. This was when I was beginning to abuse my copy of Candy Rain and listened to every song on the CD, including the ones not intended to be knockouts, like "Spend the Night". Even when I listened to that song over and over, I didn't pay attention to all of the words or even knew what they meant; that "making love" equated to having sex was completely beyond me. Instead, I picked up bits and snatches of the lyrics ("Spend the night," "love," "fireplace") in a way that made sense to me. (This is why, I believe, adults don't complain about occasionally unintelligible lyrics in pop songs: The specifics of the lyricist's story aren't as important as the general idea that the listener gathers from it, and the emotion that the singer conveys in his or her words.) Sleepovers with girls were out of the question when I was 11, so the idea of Jenna spending the night with me (by the fireplace--if we'd had a fireplace) made my stomach do a dance. Maybe we'd explore the backyard, watch some All That and laugh, make hot chocolate, kiss in the dark. The connection between music and memory is robust; ain't one time I play "Spend the Night" and don't think about Jenna.
But it also makes me think about what it was like to be 11 and in love, rather than 23 and jaded. Having a crush of that magnitude and sincerity is sometimes even better than actually being in a relationship; it gives you something to hope for, fills your days with wonderment and the aura of your fantasy. I don't care what anyone says--life was simpler as a child. Instead of having 17,000 songs in my iTunes library, I had a small clutch of CDs that I lived and breathed and turned into beautiful memories that will remain with me until the day I die. And as thankful as I am for discovering a goldmine of diverse music that solders new memories into my brain, I almost wish I'd kept those few important recordings much closer to me when I continued to grow up. My various experiences throughout the subsequent years have made me exponentially wiser than I was at 11, but wisdom is overrated. Which is another way of saying that ignorance is bliss.
I felt an ever-so-brief pang of that sentiment when I watched All That with my sister over a decade after seeing it last. The opening credits contain scenes of black people playing handball on a commercial garage door in what looks like Queens or Brooklyn, dirty metropolitan cityscapes, the cast members making rap maneuvers with their arms and hands at the camera. After spending time in lower-class New York, listening to violent rap music and reading news articles about crimes committed in poorly maintained urban cities, I just couldn't watch this in the same completely carefree way that I did without all that knowledge. I know, I know, it's a stretch: All That certainly wasn't glorifying or even documenting a deviant lifestyle. But in those moments I desperately wanted to be 11 again, when the weight of the world hadn't yet found me and learning was so obviously secondary to being entertained.