Deep Cuts

Fight the Power

Joe burned me a disc of his other songs, mostly fragments, and we arranged to meet at his house on a Tuesday night to discuss them. From his front porch I heard loud hip-hop; I had to bang on the door with my full forearm.

“Did not take you for a hip-hop guy,” I said as I entered.

I sat down and he went to get us beers. Then he perched on the futon’s arm, turned the volume down enough for us to talk, and before I knew it my hip-hop confession had come tumbling out of me: I didn’t get it, I needed melody, I was too distracted by liberal guilt to enjoy the parts of it I did like. This was a more acceptable thing to say back then, but it was still extremely uncool. And I went all the way: all those white boys in my high school dressing in FUBU, I said, calling their cheerleader girlfriends “bitches,” then going home to McMansions bought with inherited wealth from social programs that excluded Black people—it made me cringe, I said.

Joe’s eyes shifted upward; if not quite an eye roll, it was eye roll adjacent. “Don’t you think hip-hop artists would rather have your twelve bucks for the CD than your guilt?”

I didn’t know what to say. Yes, obviously.

The truth was, I just didn’t like hip-hop. But I didn’t like a lot of music. I’d take hip-hop any day over techno, or ambient, or death metal, or prog rock, or most jazz, or most country. I didn’t even like a lot of the greats—Elvis sang songs that bored me; Sinatra sounded like the smug jerk he surely was, showing off over a bunch of blaring, flatulent horns.

Joe was smiling now, letting me off the hook. “I was one of those hip-hop boys, freshman year. Could barely keep my jeans up.”

“No way.”

He picked up an acoustic and rested it on his knee as if for comfort. “I wouldn’t have cared what you thought about it. My mom was dead, I hated school. Hip-hop felt right to me.”

I tried to square this image with the even-tempered, fingerpicking guitarist in front of me. “How’d you get into Berkeley, if you hated high school?”

“Zoe,” he said simply. “She wanted to go here, and I wanted to be with her. We took all the same classes at junior college and she helped me. Like, a lot. She still does. She’s the only reason I’m here, and definitely the only reason I’m a poli-sci major.”

He turned the volume back up as the next song started. “”: I recognized it from the famous Spike Lee movie. “At least you didn’t go the Rage Against the Machine route,” I said loudly.

“Oh, I had that phase too,” he said.

“No!”

“It didn’t last long—I segued into goth once I met Zoe. But Percy, this is Public Enemy.” He turned to the stereo and irritation flashed on his face. Finally: I’d been wondering when my shovel would hit that metal. I shut up and listened.

The production was thick with layers, samples, and shuffling funk rhythms, more of an explosion than a song. At this volume, I could feel shrapnel on my skin. It bounced off the high ceilings of the old house, the dark and dusty crown molding, filling every ounce of empty space. The final, famous verse slayed me: Elvis and John Wayne name-checked as racists, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” reframed as an Uncle Tom jam. When it finished, Joe hit the power button with his toe and it was dead quiet in the house. I heard a keyboard clacking in a roommate’s room.

“Amazing,” I said. “I hear echoes of—”

He stood up abruptly and faced me, holding the guitar. “I don’t want you to analyze ‘.’ I just want to tell you something, which is that when you’re fourteen and the worst thing happens, there’s a lot of rage. When your dad starts drinking and you’re an only child, there’s fear too. There’s fear, and rage, and very little giving a shit. I was erupting, like this gigantic, ridiculous volcano of emotion. I needed music that matched it.”

I couldn’t think of the right thing to say. “I get it,” I said finally. “That was a volcano of a song.”

I tried to say the rest with my face: I’m so sorry that happened to you, you sweet, beautiful boy. But he just stood there holding his guitar by its neck, suspended parallel to his body. He was wearing an oversized button-down made of some stiff synthetic material and he looked like David Byrne in his big jacket, in that moment, towering in his vulnerability.

“You’re weird,” I said carefully, “but I don’t get rage from you.”

“It’s still there,” he said, and his expression finally lightened. “Mostly in the sense that I don’t care. Zoe gets all worked up about grades, about Bush, about her zine. And some part of me always thinks: Your mom could die at any minute. Fucking chill .”

Yes, this was Joe’s brand of chill. I hadn’t been able to definethat wiry, intense easiness. It was not na?ve chill, not people-pleasing chill—it was Your Mom Could Die Chill.

“If the rage is manageable now, it’s because of music,” he said. “Because of good music that made me feel okay, even when there was a monster inside of me. And sorry to be talking about myself for an hour, but I want you to know this—it’s maybe even why I had my high school music blasting when you showed up, come to think of it—God, am I being insane? Does it sound like I’m about to say something really massive?”

“Kind of?”

“Sorry. I’m not.” A hand went up in the hair. “I want my music to be good.” His face flooded with color; he looked down at the floor as if that would make it less noticeable. “I don’t have any other options. I suck at everything else.”

I felt an impulse to argue with this—he was smart, he was young, etc.—but I held it back. It occurred to me he might not be getting the best grades.

“The problem is, it’s not always easy for me to know what’s good, when it’s my own stuff. All I know is ‘Somebody Said’ is the best thing I’ve written—I’m sure of that, I’ve never been so sure of anything. And it makes me think I…I need your help.”

“I’m not a songwriter,” I said.

“You don’t need to write. Just react. Do what you did with ‘Somebody Said.’?”

I felt myself smiling. “Okay.”

We worked all night. We drank coffee with heaping spoonfuls of sugar. I started by telling him which fragments I liked best and why—I had retained enough from my mom’s piano lessons to speak the language of music, albeit with a child’s proficiency—and then opened the spigot on my opinions as he worked. He had absorbed some confusing music theory from a handful of three-inch tomes on his bookshelf with names like How Music Really Works, all of them swollen and shaggy with Post-its, and he would use this knowledge to explain some beautiful choices and also to defend some extremely questionable ones.

“But I wanted to do the sixth with the diminished chord!” he’dsay.

“But it clashes with what the song is saying here.”

“But what you’re proposing is less interesting!”

“But it works.”

He’d play it my way on the keyboard and the guitar and then the keyboard again. Finally he’d plug it into Cakewalk on his desktop, just to prove me wrong, while I did some of Megan’s yoga stretches on the floor or read his CD booklets.

“Damn,” he’d say, playing it back, realizing I was right. (Not always. Sometimes I made a fool of myself with musically illiterate suggestions; some things he refused to change, trusting his gut more than me. These moments felt initially devastating, but he was so casual about them, moving on before I had a chance to dwell—plus I felt buoyed by our victories, by each time the song would suddenly, in a single tectonic shift, become better.)

At one a.m. a roommate came into the living room and announced in a huff that he was going to his girlfriend’s. Joe promised to make it up to him, something about donuts from Oakland.

We had turned his fragments into two almost-songs when I noticed the window had lightened. I became, at the sight of the dawn, crushingly tired. I had Shakespeare at ten-thirty.

“Come with me to get donuts,” Joe said, putting the computer to sleep. “Then I’ll drive you home.”

Outside the air was bluish and unreal. The streetlights were still on, accomplishing nothing. As soon as we found his roommate’s car parked four blocks away, I curled up in the passenger seat and rested my head on the seat belt strap.

“Oh, hell no,” Joe said as he turned onto Telegraph. “Talk to me. Keep me awake.”

“But I’m cozy,” I murmured.

“Remember twelve hours ago or whatever at the beginning of this night, when I gave you that speech about Public Enemy—God, was I standing?”

“Yes. The whole time. And holding your guitar like this.” I held my arm out.

He laughed. “Well, give me your speech. What’s your high school story?”

“I just existed,” I said, yawning. “Nobody died. I had one friend, but her parents were strict so I was alone a lot. There was a tendency for people to be”—I used my hands to show opposing magnetic force—“repelled. By me.”

He leaned over the steering wheel and looked intently out the window as if he were having a conversation with the road. “And this was in Indiana?”

“Yeah. Madison. Small town on the river.”

“One of those places with racists and big-box stores?”

“No. I mean, yes, racists, but historical charm. My mom would never live somewhere ugly. She’s a snob.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, she—oh, you’re kidding. Hah.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t see myself as a snob, but I get what you mean.”

He glanced at me, seemed reassured by whatever he saw. “What do people do there?”

“My dad makes car parts at a factory. He works hard.” I tried to think of what else people did in my hometown, but instead my brain served up an image of my mom scrubbing a spot on our Formica counter with a sponge, then switching to her fingernail. “So does my mom.”

“Were you poor?”

“Only moderately, in the context of our town. In fifth grade my dad got promoted to manager—that was the year I got real Keds.”

“Hah. My dream was Reebok Pumps.”

I smiled, remembering the way a certain type of pubescent boy would crouch down to his shoes, pump up the tongues with a toss of his hair. “Did you ever get them?”

“No. I always managed to get tapes and CDs, though.”

“Me too. I got a job at the Dairy Queen to support that habit. The high point of my year would be my brother’s games in Louisville or Indianapolis—I’d have my parents drop me off at the HMV and blow my whole check.”

“Okay, so, here’s my question,” he said. “Why? Why’d you get so into music?”

“I didn’t get into music,” I said. “People who work at Amoeba, they got into music. My mom got into music. I got into songs.”

“Mmm. I like that.” He drove quietly for a minute and then he tapped my thigh lightly with the back of his hand. “You haven’t answered me. Why? Was it your snobby mom? Dad a jerk?”

I laughed. “You think bad parenting is the only reason people love songs?”

“Well—” He laughed too. “Maybe? I mean really love songs. There’s got to be a driving force.”

My eyelids were a heavy curtain above the sky, which was white now with morning fog. I could still sense the presence of his hand; he must have rested it on the edge of the passenger seat. “I think songs gave me a window into a magical life,” I said. “Something bigger, or whatever, waiting out there. And I felt like the only way to get there was through the songs. Like the songs, if I listened hard enough, would show me how to get it right.”

“Get what right?”

I let my eyes close, feeling the rumble of the car, the heat of his upturned palm near my leg.

“This.”