I have always loved music. Since I was young, I remember listening to Celine Dion and many other artists in the car. Somehow Celine’s voice took me to another world, and I loved her vocal range. Some of my favorite songs were “Because You Loved Me,” “The Power of Love” and “Love Can Move Mountains.” I remember going on my way to school, listening in the car to her singing on the radio station. The soaring choir at the beginning of “Love Can Move Mountains” always gives me goosebumps because it is so powerful, and the song just has a beautiful and uplifting rhythm. It is hard to describe music in articulate words because there are so many feelings when I listen to music that I struggle to express. My music tastes have expanded over the years, and I remember when I was around eighth of ninth grade, I found a playlist station on Yahoo Music called “Coffeehouse Music,” and there were some notable songs I listened to on that station. One of them was Sia’s “Soon We’ll Be Found,” and it had a beautiful music video. It was my first time hearing Sia’s music, and after that I fell in love with her music and listened to her album Some People Have Real Problems. Another song on the Coffeehouse station came up, and it was Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” I really loved the music video that went with the song, too. Honestly, I miss Amy Winehouse. The day I found out that she passed away, I was heartbroken, and I can’t remember how many weeks I cried but it was painful. In middle and high school, Amy Winehouse was one of those artists whose music I really loved. In seventh grade, I struggled a lot with self-esteem and fitting in, so music was always a sort of refuge for me. I remember being young and when I was starting out with a bad Internet addiction, in particular to YouTube, I watched music videos from this artist named K.T. Tunstall. I listened to her album Eye of the Telescope, and absolutely loved it. I really loved her song “Other Side of the World” because it was so beautiful, and I love her voice. Somehow her music made me think of coffee shops and reading books. When I was in my freshman year of high school, I did a science experiment where I had people listen to music while they played cards and they had to memorize the cards, and I wanted to see if playing music helped with memorizing things. I am fuzzy about the particular details of the experiment, but I just remember it was just so much fun for me because I got to go to the library and check out all these CDs (I must have brought home at least twenty-five.) The ones I remember most was Snoop Dogg’s album Paid Tha Cost to Be Da Boss and The Very Best of Aretha Franklin- The ’60s. One of the songs I really loved on the Aretha Franklin album was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” I was listening to it today and I love it, especially the parts with the piano. Her voice is so powerful, and I love the piano parts, too. I love the rhythm and feel of the music. There is just something so powerful about Aretha Franklin’s music that I really love.
One of the songs from Snoop Dogg’s album that I held onto was “Beautiful,” by him and Pharrell. There is a very cool rhythm to it, and I didn’t listen to much hip-hop before that, other than what was played at middle school social events, but then I started listening to hip-hop more after listening to Snoop Dogg’s album. The summer before my ninth-grade year, I didn’t go to summer school and instead decided to watch MTV, eat waffles and knit scarves and hats. I loved watching MTV because they had a lot of great artists on the channel, and I loved the music videos.
I started to get more into hip-hop around college, because I took an African-American Studies class on Black culture, and one of the units in the class was on music. We listened to music from the 1960s to the present, and we listened to and analyzed songs such as Erykah Badu’s “Green Eyes” and “Orange Moon,” and “We Don’t Need It” by Lil’ Kim feat. Junior M.A.F.I.A. I remember when we listened to “We Don’t Need It,” everyone exchanged glances in the classroom and everyone’s eyes got big, like, Wait, they said what? (the song is very sexually explicit) I remember for my final project in the class I did research on the banjo in African-American music traditions, and I looked up information about Black country musicians. I told my professor that I was inspired to do this research after we had the music unit in the course, and because I saw the movie Last Holiday and there is a part where Queen Latifah’s character, Georgia, is calling her sister and her sister tells her that she is going to follow her dreams and become a country music singer. Georgia tells her “there is no such thing as a Black country music singer,” and at the time I thought it was funny, but then I remembered Black country musicians do exist, notably Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish. To be honest, I only listened to a few hits by Hootie and the Blowfish and I didn’t know that Darius Rucker is African-American. But then I started listening to more of his solo music and I really loved it. He has a song I ended up listening to a lot while studying in the library called “Alright” and it really cheered me up whenever I listened to it. It was like my music comfort food. I also discovered a band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and they perform a lot of bluegrass music. That sophomore year of college was seriously a year of musical exploration for me. I took a couple of music courses that year and both of them were on the same day in the morning, the first at 8 am and the second at 10 am. The first class was a classical music course on music history from the pre-Classical period to modern music. It mostly covered classical music and the professor had us listen to classical music from different time periods. My favorite period of classical music, to be honest, will always be the Romantic-era music. I love Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Brahms, and one of the pieces I worked on during that year was a cello sonata by Johannes Brahms. I went to a summer camp one time in high school and I heard an undergraduate student play the Cello Sonata in E Minor by Brahms for a master class, and it immediately hooked me. It was such a beautiful piece and I love E minor because it’s such a stormy and powerful key. We had to check out CDs from the performing arts library and listen to them, and then we had to write papers analyzing the style, the tone and the other different elements of the piece.
I am going to be honest, I love music, but I have only taken a couple of music theory classes, so to get into the nitty-gritty of the music would take me some practice. In my senior year of high school, I took a class called AP (Advanced Placement) music theory. And I bombed the AP exam. I remember having to ask a lot of questions in class and it was quite challenging, and then years later during 2020 when I was in quarantine, I took an online course on music fundamentals. And I bombed that one, too. I remember after failing music theory in high school, I was scared to take a course in music fundamentals. In general, I have a really irrational fear of failure. But I think a class in music theory would have done me some good. I really loved the African Popular Music class I took (it was the 10 am class) because I hadn’t listened to a lot of music by artists from Africa, other than Angelique Kidjo. But we listened to Fela Kuti, E.T. Mensah, and many other artists. For the final project, I collaborated with a classmate, and we researched the music of this artist named K’Naan, who is a Somali-Canadian artist. During the summer I was watching MTV there was a music video by K’Naan called “Strugglin'” and I loved the flow and rhythm of the song. Doing research on K’Naan and listening to his music gave me a deeper appreciation for hip-hop, because it helped me understand that hip-hop can be used to create social change and raise awareness about issues such as global warming, civil war and poverty. I decided to go back and listen to K’Naan’s album Troubadour, and he has a song called “Fire in Freetown” that I really love. A couple of students did a presentation for the class on the music of Die Antwoord, a rap rave group from South Africa. It was a pretty intense music listening experience, and it took some getting used to when I listened to the songs. There was a music video for a song called “Evil Boy,” and I ended up closing my eyes during the video because the presenters warned us it was explicit, and I am pretty sensitive about what content I take in. But I guess that is part of the music experience, in retrospect. You might like different songs and others not so much, but it all exposes you to new styles of music and new ways of listening to music. When I was in the classical music course, we listened to 20th century composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez and it was a new music experience for me because I was so used to classical music having this linear structure where I could predict the time signatures, the rhythms and the style of the music, but there were a lot of experimental elements in the 20th century music and it was very new to my ears. I really loved the final project for the course because I ended up writing about Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a composer from the Soviet Union, and how he navigated being a composer during the era of Joseph Stalin, when music faced heavy government censorship. I listened to his String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, and it was very powerful.
In college I really loved listening to the music I grew up with, so that included Phil Collins and a lot of Weird Al. I remember very vividly one evening I was studying in the music library, and I was super homesick and stressed with finals. I broke down in tears, but I was listening to Genesis’ ‘Land of Confusion” and somehow listening to the song made me feel better. I really loved Genesis as a kid; they have a song called “In Too Deep” and it is a sad song but so beautiful. In the summer of 2013, I took a class at a local college and fell in love with a young man who was tall, had beautiful brown eyes and had gone to school in Uganda for three years. There was something so attractive about him and during the time we worked together as students we developed a nice platonic emotional bond, and I filled my journal with fantasies about us getting married and having beautiful children together. Of course, fantasies are just that: fantasies. When I ran into him a few months after the course, I found out he was dating someone else. I was both happy to meet his girlfriend and also heartbroken inside because I had waited for so many months for him to reply to my email (I didn’t have Facebook at the time, but he did) and just kept entertaining these ideas of us getting together and having children together. I often listened to the song “Follow You Follow Me” by Genesis whenever I thought about him. It is such a warm and tender song, and I remember I was still thinking about my crush on the guy, and one fall day during my sophomore year the song “Follow You Follow Me” came on the speaker in the CVS pharmacy store, and I found myself falling in love all over again in the middle of CVS while grabbing batteries/ toothpaste/ whatever the hell I was buying that day. I think I had listened to that song during my time in the college class, whenever I had a private moment in my room and was listening to music. I still love this song, even if I have long gotten over my crush on this young man.
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