Ode to the Walkman
As children we are all hostage to our parents’ tastes in music. In my house this meant Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra. And other vocalists who tried to sound like... Frank Sinatra. Years later I was in a taxi stuck in traffic when Strangers In The Night started playing on the radio, and I realized that I knew all the lyrics to the song. The words had been uploaded to my memory through some kind of early auditory WiFi. I know the words to many Sinatra songs, including My Way, which has a high body count in Manila’s karaoke joints. Apparently the singers will only relinquish the microphone upon pain of death. Someone pointed out that there was a morbid symmetry to this, the first words of that song being, “And now, the end is near…”
Of course I also knew The Beatles. I am from the generation of Filipinos who were born with the entire discography of the Fab Four in our brains. We must’ve heard their music as embryos in the womb, making Lennon and McCartney our parents. The Beatles had long broken up by the time I was going to grade school, but continuous radio airplay ensured that the “Sergeant Pepper” album would become the default soundtrack in our heads. Perhaps the radio programmers were in denial and hoping John and Paul would make up. More likely, radio stations could play what they liked in those days, unlike contemporary stations, which are tied to whatever the giant music corporations are selling. Ah, but the giants can no longer dictate our musical tastes with their former impunity. But that’s a subject for another column.
Given my background, the personal portable stereo was my path to musical liberation. The first time I clapped on a pair of Walkman headphones was something of a religious experience. A schoolmate had just acquired a Sony Walkman, and invited me to listen. I put on the headphones, hit play, and in an instant I was transported from the school building to a concert hall. It wasn’t like playing tape recordings on my portable cassette player. This was all-encompassing, it blocked out everything else. It was like teleporting into a universe where you controlled the playlist.
True, it was also like acquired Asperger’s Syndrome — with the Walkman on, you could shut out the rest of the world. You were locked inside your own head. But one could make adjustments. Some months later, my father gave me a surprise present: my own Sony Walkman. It was cold blue metal in a faux leather case, the size of a brick and about as heavy. It was by far the coolest thing I had ever owned.
I took the Walkman everywhere I went, with five or six cassettes and two spare AA batteries. Choosing the five or six albums to carry around was agony. At the time, my source of information on new music was Casey Kasem’s “American Top Forty,” which aired every Sunday from 2 to 6 p.m. on 99.5RT-FM. This was an important weekly ritual in high school. I had classmates who would write down the entire list from 40 to 1. One classmate even threatened to kill himself if Endless Love by Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross stayed at number one for 10 weeks.
Of course, teenagers are given to making grand pronouncements. Some teens declare, “If (Blank) doesn’t go to the prom with me, I’ll kill myself” or “If I don’t pass this chemistry exam, I’ll kill myself,” but how many kids say, “If Endless Love is number one this week I’ll slash my wrists”? He even carried a razor blade in his wallet for this purpose. I mention this not as an example of the self-dramatizing nature of adolescents, but as proof of how important music was to us.
There was a kind of defiance in choosing to memorize the Top 40 rather than the periodic table of elements.
Lugging Walkman, cassettes and batteries around made my schoolbag considerably heavier, but it was worth it. I would sit in the library trying to make sense of the homework while listening to Bruce Springsteen’s The River, or Private Eyes by Hall and Oates. Yesterday I downloaded an NPR podcast titled, “Were the Eighties Really That Bad?” The panelists’ conclusion: Yes, absolutely. The duo of Hall and Oates was singled out as one of the musical crimes of the era: the synthesizers, the cheesy production, the general silliness. I see no shame in admitting that I enjoyed their songs. Top 40 was the purveyor of a lot of bad music, but occasionally you got a hit by a Springsteen or an Elvis Costello that led you into their body of work.
My Walkman is still alive, sitting in its blue faux-leather case in a drawer. There’s a rubber band-y thing in its guts that needs to be replaced, but I’m sure that if it were repaired — if anyone still repairs first-generation Walkmen — it would play perfectly. That first Walkman was replaced by smaller, lighter Walkmen made of plastic, then by a Discman. Today I have an iPod. It contains 4,251 songs (plus movies and travel photos), most of my music library and stuff filched from my friends’ iTunes libraries. (Do not sync your iPod to other people’s iTunes or its entire contents will be erased and replaced. Transfer the music files manually.) Obviously I no longer have to fuss over which five or six cassettes will be my soundtrack for the day.
Yesterday I put my iPod on shuffle and resolved to play every one of the 4,251 songs without skipping anything. It will take a couple of weeks.
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