Writing About Music: Carly Simon's Coming Around Again
This was the first song I ever really really loved. Consequently, Carly Simon's Greatest Hits was the first CD I ever owned. When I was about five I was totally obsessed with the song -- a lot like how I become obsessed with songs now and they just make me unexplainably happy. A huge welling up feeling in my chest. Its different than poetry: more like being in love and having first date jitters and sweaty palms and feeling so overwhelmed with something that you can't deal. It’s perhaps a sign of an anxiety disorder.
So I was five and in Caldor (which was like Wal-Mart) the first time I heard it, and its probably one of my most vivid memories of being a kid. I wanted to listen to it on single song repeat and memorize it and spin around with my hands out. If I knew how to read yet I would have poured over the liner notes.
My mom bought it for me at the record store next to the shoe store a few weeks later when I wouldn't stop talking about it. My grandmother was an AVON lady and bought me the Carly Simon "Live at Martha's Vineyard" video when it was sold through the catalogue. (Carly Simon is claustrophobic and can’t perform indoors with other people around. Almost all of her music videos after 1980 are performed outside, and she had stopped touring all together prior to the “Live at Martha’s Vineyard” performance, which is filled outside).
When I was a teenager and listening to the Pumpkins all the time my mom would say "you used to be such a nice girl, listening to Carly Simon and things like that..." Later when I started listening to Belle & Sebastian my mom was really excited. "Now, this is nice music, not angry,” she would say, and I would retort - bitterly, I may as well add - "mo-om, if you listened to the lyrics you would know that this is about lesbians, s/m, and suicide. God." This was roughly the same time that I came out, and got in trouble regularly for listening to Tori Amos and other female singer-songwriters, since they were considered to be angry-dyke music. When I was listening to Boys for Pele one evening when no one was home and - suddenly - everyone was home, my aunt complained that I was becoming a “man-hater” and she and my mother grilled me on whether or not I had acquired a “dyke tattoo.” Around the same time as this I borrowed all of my mom’s Beatles CDS for an extended period of time (read: I still have them) and this equally invoked her ire, despite the fact that the Beatles are perhaps the furthest thing from “angry-dyke” music I can think of. Sometimes you just can’t win.
Next Installation: How Elvis Costello and Melissa Ethridge Formed my Queer Identity (and, likely, part of my comfort with sex work).