music snobbery

The stereo doesn't come on until about quarter after one, just about the time I'm brushing my teeth for bed. The walls are thin enough that I can make out 90% of the songs coming from the apartment next door, but diffusive enough to muddy the melody into a thudding of notes...like how you might gather the tone of a person's conversation who has their hand over their mouth, but not the words spoken. Now, as a music lover, normally I would sigh and accept this "con" of apartment living and settle under my big green comforter for the night content that someone was rocking to some rocking tunes. But before I pulled Big Green over my ears, I caught the hook. A familiar hook. A hook I associate with Wahlert High hallways and the era when pop music still had a wholesome sheen to its face. It was "I Only Wanna Be With You" by Hootie and the Blowfish.

My fears of an Idiot Neighbor's Idiot Party Playlist playing too loudly were confirmed when Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" bled through the walls. Two songs. Two wanna's. Shit. Listen, I'm not a retro music hater--it was a brilliant pop tune, but even Sheryl got sick of playing her own song pretty early on and retired it so she could go on to make some bad-ass records (by the way, dear neighbor, you'd be happy to know she just released a new album last week...check it; add it to the rotation). Then "Closing Time" came on by the band I-Don't-Remember-Who-And-Neither-Does-Anyone-Else-But-My-Neighbors. And then another round of Hootie, this time the one with the creepily catchy lyric, "every time I look at you I go blind." What does that even mean?

All I could do was hunker down and hope for no country. If it's not 90's Garth, vomiting is always a possibility. So, kept awake by the skeletons of old songs, I re-lived some memories and re-felt some feelings, but mostly I was just wondering what kind of lame party was going on next door. Were they standing in a circle as one person showcased his or her running man in the middle? I hoped maybe it was a cover. I hoped they were in there doing lines of coke secure in knowing that no one would bust a party playing soft-rock.

Then I heard whistleing, and it sounded familiar. I saw air streaming through the same puckered mouth that covered "Live and Let Die." A velvet poster on my sister's wall. A signature sway that began in narrow, leather-clad man hips and moved through the torso. The man was Axl Rose. The band was Guns n Roses. The song was "Patience" and 5 seconds of the lead-in whistle was enough to take me back.

How you know when a song is good: when it stands up to time, just like any art--visual, theatrical, lyrical, musical. I fell asleep to that song so I don't know what other tracks had been resurrected by my neighbors that night. But that was a good fucking song.