Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Let me take a deep breath.  I like this song a lot.  At a time when I'd all but written off Oasis, largely because of the lack of empathy they seemed to generate, here came Noel with this pleading, melancholy melody and lyric.  Though the production was contemporary at the time, to me the tone and melody felt like something I might hear in the mid 80s, by Phil Collins or Mike and the Mechanics (think Home by the Sea or Silent Running).  Those where formative years for me in a major way.  It was when my parents divorced, so I was an emotional wreck, an 8 year old misanthrope dealing with my world shattering less than a year removed from the first death I can remember, that of my paternal Grandfather.  The fallout of these events radically altered the trajectory of my life.

I've written about how my body betrayed me, and I'm pretty sure I've written about the impact of my parents personalities on the formation of my own, but I skimp on details.  I neglect the things that make "belonging" and "conforming" so bothersome for me.  I am not normal, I just am not.  I am physically uncommon.   I'm Black, a minority group member, so there was already isolation as a result of being singled out among the majority.  I was the youngest of three children, the only boy, four years younger than my closest sibling, so I was the odd man out at home.  I had an antagonistic relationship with my sisters and mother, and my father was an Enigmatic Icon.  I ended up feeling more emotional attachment to my dog than my family, and then my friends outside of home.   I lost all hope of getting lost in a crowd of  people my own color by the time I was 13 years old and 6'2".  It was a wrap.  After that point I went from being tall for my age, to uncommonly tall, to abnormally tall.  So, my skin color and my height rendered me a physical minority within a minority.  Then there are the cultural issues.

Growing up in the early 80s pop culture was still the primary influence on kids.  It wasn't colorblind, but it was wide open.  Michael Jackson & Prince were Mega Stars, and shared the limelight with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.  Eccentricity was the norm.  Boy George didn't seem like a weirdo to most of the 8 year olds I knew.  Then again, I thought Boy George was a nickname, and didn't realize George was a Boy for a good long while.  In my eyes Elton John and Billy Joel where the same guy musically, and I had no interest in either or their sexual orientations.  I'm Still Still Standing and For the Longest Time were just catchy songs.  I didn't care that Annie Lennox was ambiguous, the Eurythmics just had great songs.

There were a few things I knew for certain.  Cruel Summer by Bananarama was on the soundtrack of Karate Kid, and was one of the songs that came out when my parents separated and it seemed so fitting. Shout by Tears For Fears came out that summer too, as if sent from on high, to give me something to focus on other than the Sky Falling.  I remember seeing promos for Miami Vice's debut set to In the Air Tonight and playing a toy electric guitar I was given with its push-buttons, even though the track is mostly keys and drum loops until the the breakdown, save for those sweeping lead lines that I couldn't have picked out back in the day with my limited understanding of music.  There was so much melancholy in the music undercutting the glamour and flash of that day and age.  Leave it to Prince and The Police to put it completely over the top...  They made depression dance-able. They made it popular.  I would have to say, seeing the video, as well as repeatedly playing the 12" single of Owner of A Lonely Heart I found in my parents' record collection hammered in my understanding of what it meant to be solitary.  It was only through Hip Hop that I got a sense of vigilance and defiance about my own identity as a person. Maybe I could have found that in Punk Rock, but at that time I hadn't heard anything like that that would have appealed to my taste in music.  I was raised on pop, rock, and r & b through the mainstream media.

My fondness for the music of my childhood and refusal to let go of those tastes created a problem once the music world started to slide back into the old-timey tradition of "Race Music".  It can be argued that the return to music segregation was inspired largely by the popularity of Hip Hop & New Jack Swing.  Along with my move to a more segregated community, the expansion of the urban music market made it possible to completely avoid listening to pop music, which to many people my age & race, became "White" music.  As I learned more about embracing the cultural legacy of being African American musical prejudice became a habit, and it was only via tracing back samples used for backing tracks in a lot of songs that I got reacquainted/ reintroduced to the value of popular music past and present.  The catch is, in doing this, I alienated myself from my friends who weren't ready or willing to embrace something outside of what was culturally acceptable for young black kids at that time.  I ended up gravitating towards rappers who seemed to care less about fitting in, and more about finding things they liked.  This put me on the fringe of the subculture within a subculture.  By that time I'd found a few Black rock groups to dig and it became possible for me to breach the cultural-musical divide without breaching the racial one.  Living Colour, Fishbone, Seal  (my first taste of 90s electronica honestly), and Lenny Kravitz (which they actually played on Video Vibrations, which is where I first saw it one day, waiting for Rap City to come on after school!), were inspirations, albeit with limited exposure, if any on BET or Mtv in the long haul.

Those folks pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable made it possible for me to be a musical explorer.  I have to give some credit to the Video Jukebox for turning things on their head too.  They played Smells Like Teen Spirit so much I had to cave in and listen to "that one song" with the amber hued video at least once, and that was all it took.  I bought Nevermind on cassette but nothing else from the grunge era back in 91', my last year as a normally sized human.  After that I joined Columbia House and BMG, I ordered nearly all the Hip Hop cds they had in their catalog and then started working in on classic R&B and soul, and once I exhausted that, and had reached the zenith of my alienation, I went ahead and got two rock cds:  Jimi Hendrix - The Ultimate Experience & Black Sabbath - Paranoid.  I kept this music to myself, with no expectation that any of my friends would give it a chance.

Rock & Roll was a solitary thing for me.  My interest in it was a means by which to alienate myself from my peers, save for a few, although I did have a friend or two concede to liking Teen Spirit or Jeremy, the latter being an anthem of sorts given my feelings of alienation.  My rejection of norms in my artistic interests (I was still an avid comic book fan at that time and video gamer) coincided with my rejection of other stereotypical or characteristic facets of my identity.  I lost interest in competitive athletics, the local franchises, and anything exclusively marketed for a particular demographic I identified with that seemed cliche or corny.  I became aggressively contrary as a means to self-actualize in the face of disappointing points of identification from my childhood.  After spending two months bed-ridden and wheelchair bound after elective surgery was performed on both my feet by my podiatrist I got serious about believing in God and being a Christian.  Though it may be hard for some people to believe in this age of polarized political and cultural rhetoric, there was possibly no smaller minority among the social circles I was exposed to during high school than vocal Christians.  You did your thing if you believed in God or Jesus, but you did it quietly.

All of those choices pretty much pigeon-holed my prospects in my social life, and ultimately my future by merit of limiting my options in who or what I was willing to relate to, and vice versa.  It was a trap, one I couldn't/ can't escape without getting over myself.  But then came the "have it your way" age of instant gratification by way of the internet, complicating matters.  It allowed me to isolate myself further with more contrary choices in interests and activities.  It also made it more likely for others to have the freedom to make those same contrary choices with there being less stigma against them.  Coupling is hard enough, but it's infinitely more difficult if you limit your options by what you're willing to accept, and what you force someone else to entertain.  By committing so much of my sense of self to disparate cultural interests, I've made it so compromise isn't a choice, it's destiny, and "settling" is the outcome of courtship.  The more even-keeled, humble and thoughtful people of the world will have more forgiving views, but when things get rough, and something about the person you're with rubs you the wrong way, it's going to be really easy to think to yourself, "Maybe if I'd have kept looking I wouldn't have chosen to be with someone who has an issue with ________?"  In some cases that's fair, sometimes we do choose poorly for ourselves because we are haunted by our emotional baggage, or material/physical consequences of our choices.  It's a rough trade, this companionship thing.  With every choice we make, we add a panel to the maze that leads to our hearts and peace of mind.  When the things we choose isolate us from others, those panels are mirrors.