The best thing about the iTunes Music Store is not that you can buy the one song worth having off an otherwise suckey album. It’s also not that you can buy only the fabled “one hit” from that horrific “wonder” band. Nor is its best attribute the fact that you can buy just, say, “West Virginia” and not the other 49 states from John Linnell’s
State Songs album.
These are nice benefits to be sure, but they are tertiary at best.
No dear reader, what trumps them all is the ability to buy the cheesiest, most horrendous and sappiest songs ever recorded without blemishing the artificially cool aesthetic you’ve so painstakingly crafted with the CDs you strategically display in your home.
And you know you’ve done it…just bought a CD because of what you want it to say about you: “Look how hip I am!” and “Don’t you wish you’d heard of these guys first!” and “Aren’t I artistically advanced?!” And while cheesy is sometimes cool, sometimes it’s not…so why risk it? Bury it on the computer if you’re not sure, because you know the second you go to the kitchen to get more dip, people run the culture scan on your décor, your artwork, your books and your CDs—you
will be judged!
Since I’m already embracing my charlatanism here, you should know that my
dPodLists are just front to make me look more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. In reality I’m all about Kelly Clarkson, but I digress.
My point here is that I recently went down that road and bought a few songs I wouldn’t want you to find while I was in the kitchen. A friend gave me an iTunes online gift coupon thingy (and yes, that is the technical term) for my birthday and here are the first four songs I bought with it:
- “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” – The Gap Band
- “Let it Whip” – The Dazz Band
- “Get Down on It” – Kool and the Gang
- “She’s a Brick House” – Rick James
If that were the end of the story, I’d probably delete this whole thing. But there's more to it than that, so bear with me.
One of the greatest things about music is how it can take you to forgotten places and times. These songs had been in and out of my head for years, but it wasn’t until I downloaded them that things came clear for me.
I realized these first four picks were inspired by the repair guys at my surrogate grandmother’s
1 TV shop on the South Side of Chicago in the early 1980’s. Havill’s TV & Radio was located on East 53rd Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago. It’s probably the most eclectic and racially integrated part of the city, and where I was first exposed to black people and black music.
My mom worked at the TV shop and during the summer I would go along, ostensibly to work myself, but mostly to mess things up and get in people’s way before hoofing it to the Museum of Science and Industry
2 for an afternoon of exploration.
The repair guys suffered the brunt of me. The two regulars, Aaron and Louis, along with Jessie, who came in only on Saturdays, were all African-American and would listen to the same black radio station—WGCI—while doing repairs in the shop and making deliveries in the neighborhood. I’m sure they were hoping ‘GCI would drown out the barrage of inane questions from me, but they weren’t so lucky.
It’s funny how these songs bring back sensecerebral
3 memories. Even now I can almost feel the way the back of my legs would stick to the vinyl seats of the delivery van and I swear I can smell the greasy barbecue residue wafting from Harold’s Chicken Shack across the street .
I don't think my feathered friends would appreciate Harold's neon sign.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard a rap song, though I didn’t know it was rap at the time. It was “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and it came on while Jessie and I rode in the delivery van. I was struck by the strange vocals, the candid poetry and the song’s description of life in the ghetto. Despite growing up in Chicago, there were no ghettos on the working-class Northwest Side where we lived and Hyde Park, where the TV store was, is actually a little tony in that elite upper-crusty collegiate way. “Ghetto” was just a word I had an abstract definition for. After hearing “The Message," I wanted to know more, and I baited Jessie.
“Wow that guy kinda talks instead of singing,” I keenly observed out loud for Jessie to hear. “And he’s talking about a girl who got her arm cut off by a subway train and somebody dealing drugs.” [I’m paraphrasing here, but trust me when I say that I’ve captured the essence of my very starchy white bread delivery].
The reason Jessie only worked on Saturdays is that he was a Chicago cop during the week. He told me gangs and drugs were a big problem in the South Side neighborhoods where he worked and offered to show me. First he drove me by some housing projects and then to the headquarters of the infamous El Rukn street gang, a colorfully decorated building with their leader’s name—“Fort,” for Jeff Fort
4—painted over the door. I remember feeling incrementally more scared with each bit of graft, vice and poverty he pointed out.
The El Rukns outside their headquarters on Drexel Avenue in Chicago.
This little field trip permanently cemented in my mind both that song and what Jessie had shown me. WGCI’s incessant repetition of the four songs listed at the beginning of this rant earned them an indelible spot in my memory as well, though they don’t rate for the visceral or artistic qualities I came to appreciate in “The Message.”
Ultimately though, I’ve justified my fluffy downloads by taking them in context with other music I had forgotten came from the same period. You see, WGCI also played a full compliment of so-called “dusties,” or black oldies that included the likes of James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler—all of whom I
think are considered cool, and all of whom I have full or even multiple albums from. These hundred or so songs make my four-song transgression forgivable—an ‘acceptable cheese ratio,’ if you will.
The truth is, I'm a Midwesterner, so it's OK if I like cheese. I actually have a lot more than I'm admiiting to. You just won't find any in my CD collection.
FOOTNOTES
1 – I say “surrogate” grandmother, but I doubt this is correct usage. My mother lived with Clara Havill and her family when she first moved to Chicago. My actual grandmother on my mom’s side had worked for the Havill’s prior to this and knew the family well. How this all came to be is a bit foggy to me too, but suffice it to say that Clara—Grandma Havill—is the most amazing person I’ve ever met. Though we are not related by blood, I’ve always felt she and her kin were as much my family as my actual family.
2 – The Museum of Science and Industry is the coolest museum EVER. And it was free back then.
3 – The word sensecerebral was coined by Erika Green, a girl I briefly dated eons ago. I was kind of scared of her if you must know. She suggested it when I was looking for a word that meant the way you could almost feel a feeling when you recall a place or situation with your mind's eye. You know, like when you think of a basement and you can almost smell the mustiness of it.
4 - A few years later, Fort was arrested in a terrorism-for-hire plot to carry out attacks against the U.S. on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
would cement the status. I’m speaking of the 
When Michael Jordan was a rookie on the Chicago Bulls he went to a Peabo Bryson concert at the Arie Crown Theater. I was working an entry door when he and a friend—no entourage or bodyguards—walked up. I recognized him and he knew it. Perhaps sensing that I would ask for an autograph, he, without a word, pulled out a pen and, strangely, handed it to me. A bit nervous, but not too starstruck, I said “Mr. Jordan can I see your tickets?” He smiled that cherubic smile as if to say “yeah, of course” and handed me his tickets. I tore the tickets and handed him the stubbs without asking for his autograph. As he walked away, I attempted to give him the pen back, but he said “no, you hang on to it.” It’s not exactly Mean Joe green throwing me his jersey after I gave him a Coke, but I’ll take it. I actually still have that pen…somewhere.
I once saw film critic Roger Ebert in a public restroom peeing, as one does, at a urinal (for the record, no I did not see his penis). I had not yet begun to unzip when another patron who had just relived himself recognized Mr. Ebert. The man was fairly animated and emphatically stated the obvious—“I thought I recognized you, you’re the movie guy from TV, Roger Ebert!” —as he zipped up, then tried to shake Ebert’s hand. Roger was visibly appalled as his eyebrow raised in horror and he said in a condescending voice that I did not disagree with, “I’d be happy to have a word with you OUTside the restroom AFTER you wash your hands.”
