How Doo-Wop Saved My Soul

What's gotten me through the last very difficult 24 hours is music. More than music, though, is being able to put names to the kind of music I have always loved but for which I had no language.

Once, two years ago, a song came onto my father's stereo and I fell in love. I remember nothing about it except that it was maybe Led Zeppelin and was low-key, discordant, quiet, unsettling. Then, last year, I saw Ghost World and fell in love with "Devil Got My Woman," listened to it on repeat for weeks in the strange emptiness of my Philadelphia apartment. Longed for a record player but was trying mightily not to become a hipster, so never got one. Then, I dated a stoner who ended up sending me a super-early Wailers CD after we broke up and were pretending we could be friends. I can't stand Bob Marley, so imagine my surprise when I found out who the Wailers were.

These three musical hauntings were given flesh last night, when Bryce came over. I discovered then that Bryce knows about music made before the 70s in a way that I know about music made after the 1990s. I also discovered that music made before the 70s is pretty much all that's been missing from my life.

Here I was, all this time, thinking I only liked hip hop, lesbians with guitars, men with falsetto voices, and the Beatles. My dad listened to a lot of pre-1970s music, but it wasn't the right stuff. Turns out I love Delta Blues, Doo Wop and old school Ska (I can't stand contemporary Ska). Turns out I love Led Zeppelin. And not just in a passing, niche-interest kind of way, like the time I thought it was so cool to buy the Pulp Fiction and Eve's Bayou soundtracks to round out my music collection.

I pretty much want to spend the rest of my life listening to this stuff:







And this is the Zeppelin song I've waited two years to hear again:



We also determined that we miss the presence of the muted trumpet and the organ in contemporary music (thanks to Arcade Fire for bringing the latter back, at least). And I was finally able to articulate that I dislike the electric guitar when it becomes a solo instrument. I feel about it the same way that I feel about the epilogue in otherwise excellent literature.

Wow. It sure is great to know thyself.