Remembrance of Things Past: Ten Things I Listened to as a Teen

All my friends are posting lists of “ten albums that influenced me as a teen.” Sounds like a fun project. I want to play along.

The trouble is, I didn’t really have any “albums” as a teen. Most of my teen years were spent on the Planet Charismatic and its satellites in the world of homeschooling, and I didn’t like contemporary music much anyway. I listened to all kinds of other things, though.

We listened to the radio. At first we listened to a bit of contemporary music; then we were told to listen to the Oldies station with all the seemingly wholesome music from the fifties and sixties. My father always kept this music on as we traveled, so it sticks in my mind as traveling music– the Beach Boys wailing about California girls as we drove past cornfields and soy fields on our way to the “beach” on Lake Eerie; Simon and Garfunkle slowly crackling into abstract radio snow as we ascended the mountains of central West Virginia. I realized at some point that most of it was about sex, just as contemporary music is mostly about sex, and wondered why the older music was more wholesome.

My mother tried to get us to listen to a band she claimed the other homeschoolers deeply loved, “The Foxhoven Family Singers.” She assured us that they were “really cool” and the favorite of the military brat family who came to play once a week. The photo on the front of the cassette showed the Foxhovens in a family photo, with their poofy 90s hair and modest Homeschooling Gunnysacks; the music was all a chorus of eager , talented children singing in unison to synthesizer music and a drum machine.  They may well have been very good. I couldn’t tell. My brothers laughed so hysterically at it that I could barely hear the lyrics– something about generations, I think. I heard the words “generation, generation now” through the laughter. The cassette was put away. She also tried to get us to listen to “cool” music written and performed by a local doctor and member of the Regnum Christi group, who called himself “the Physician Musician,” but that was even worse. That cassette was also put away. My brother used to sing “Generation, generation now” in a mocking falsetto whenever my mother tried to claim that some other endeavor was “cool.”

We listened to “Christian rock.” There was a station that played nothing but Christian Rock, and my brothers were authorized to listen to that even though the music annoyed my parents. Those lyrics were wholesome, not at all about sex. They taught us that we would all play football in a big, big yard in Heaven; and that being Christian was something like being from outer space; and that you shouldn’t kiss a potty-mouth. We used to keep them playing in the mini van for hours and hours every Wednesday and Thursday when we drove out to Westerville to homeschool band practice– my brothers had the first hour, then an hour’s wait, then an hour while I practiced with the teens. My sister and littlest brother waited in the car that whole time, eating fast food and listening to music. I will always associate 90s Christian rock with Westerville, and both with that odd taste that an old cornet mouthpiece leaves on your tongue after a solid hour of trying in vain to make it make music.

I listened to “Les Miserables.” I read the whole book, unabridged, and then I got the CD and the libretto of the musical for a Christmas present. I memorized every word of that CD. I wanted to be a Broadway star when I grew up. My father didn’t like the music and asked that I not listen to it so often. My brothers asked what a prostitute was; my mother said “women who sell their bodies.” My brother thought that prostitutes were women who cut off and sold their body parts, the way Fantine sold her hair. This belief was further confirmed when I told him that in the novel, Fantine sold her two front teeth instead of her locket.

“No, no,” I said finally. “Do you know that thing that grown-ups are supposed to do when they’re married?”