Wakey-Wakey: Musical Imagery and The Soundtrack of My Life

I am haunted by a party I attended three years ago. For his birthday, my friend Jeremy hosted a Lip-Sync Battle that, for two years straight, made me laugh liquor through my nose hairs. Laughing booze through the nose hurts, but I did not regret it. What I do regret, and what haunts me to this day, is not jumping into one particular performance when the audio-track pooped out. During a captivating sign-language interpretation of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” by my lovely friend, Jen, the song simply stopped in the third verse, right about the time that “she had opened up the buttons on her shirt so far, I guess that’s why I didn’t notice that police car”. Everyone in the room moaned in disappointment while Jen shrugged her shoulders and sat down. As equally sad, I could have jumped alongside Jen and rapped -- pitifully so -- the entirety of that third verse so she could complete her sign-language Lip-Sync. Why I did not come to my friend’s aid still boggles me. 

But what boggles me more is that each time this story pops in my mind (as it has daily these past two weeks) I instantly hear the whole of Fresh Prince’s third verse. Typing now, I “hear” it again, even though a different record spins on my turntable. And this boggles me because I have not listened to that song in well over a decade, perhaps two. Not even after Jeremy’s party or since. Somehow I experienced enough exposure to the Fresh Prince in junior high for the saga of his parents’ “brand new Porsche” to outlive more pertinent information, such as birthdays, contact information, people’s names, due dates, and, worst of all, pithy movie quotes at the primo moment. So why the dadgum Fresh Prince? And why does he hang around all day at the haunt of Jeremy’s Lip-Sync Battle and Jen’s flawed audio track? If only I had jumped in to assist Jen, I would not be so haunted by my failure as a friend or by such ha-ha-larious lines as “they took turns: one would beat me while the other was driving!” The joke grows old.

Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain, refers to this phenomenon of cognitively looped tunes as “musical imagery”, which is about as quaint and elegant a phrase as one might expect from Dr. Sacks. He begins his essay “Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination” by stating, “Music forms a significant and, on the whole, pleasant part of life for most of us -- not only external music, music we hear with our ears, but internal music, music that plays in our heads.” He continues by exploring the various ways listeners engage music in their minds both in pleasant and unpleasant ways, even examining the peculiar nature non-auditory stimuli may have on our internal jukeboxes. That “ear-worm” that loops inside us and reflects our real-time listening habits, he says, is “the least personal, the least significant form” of musical imagery. He then claims, “We are on much richer, much more mysterious terrain when we consider tunes or musical fragments we have perhaps not heard or thought of in decades, that suddenly play in the mind for no apparent reason. No recent exposure, no repetition can explain such tunes.” He adds, “There must be more emotion, more meaning here than I allow, even if it is of a mostly sentimental and nostalgic kind.” The suggestion here is that such musically imagined songs may say more about us than the most recent plays on our iPods. And what that brain-worm says about us, he says, may be more embarrassing than our guiltiest pop pleasures.

Fascinated by the directions of my own mental jukebox, I started a new Spotify playlist this past month titled “Wakey Wakey”. The goal is to record the songs playing naturally in my mind each morning. I began the playlist on May 10 when, after several days of waking with either Sade singing “No Ordinary Love” or Bad Brains crooning “I And I Survive”, I suddenly woke to the Misfits belting “Angelfuck”, which I had not heard in months. Sure, Sade owned my home stereo the previous week while Bad Brains had looped in my car a bit longer, but where did the Misfits come from? And why “Angelfuck”? It’s not even one of my favorite Misfits tracks. Could that song’s humid-leather meets velvet-swagger have morphed from a late April preview of Glen Danzig’s unfortunate Danzig Sings Elvis? Provoked by such questions, “Wakey Wakey” was born. 

Most “Wakey” songs, so far, remain with me throughout the day, an often welcomed situation (as with Brazilian songstress Roberta Sa) but not always (see the melodramatic deep-cut from Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet). For instance, my wife’s daily singing-of-the-hymns could not silence the only three bars of an Eddie Rabbit ballad that seized itself upon my impressionable mind nearly four decades ago as I was carted about -- sans seatbelt -- in my mother’s ‘77 Ford Thunderbird. How such a tune remained even partially intact when so many other facts of life fell away begs a great mystery. In this, the morning’s “musical imagery” jukebox proves as much a time-machine as a marvel.

Obviously, most top-of-the-morning “Wakey” tracks reflect my current listening habits, but, as with the Misfits, some took me off-guard. Like when I woke at 3 AM to a Cannibal Corpse murder anthem only to arise again later to the more hopeful omen of Tom Petty’s sweet Florida drawl. Admittedly, several nights I have tried to plant a song in my mind to greet my morning. I succeeded two nights ago with the Ramones, but not so much with a Bill Evans number I imagined to be pleasant in the pre-coffee dawn. Now I lay me down to sleep too titillated for slumber, wondering, “What will it be? Whose voice will meet me first?” I have my rathers. But, as I’ve learned, rathers be damned.

Without further adieu, here’s my “Wakey-Wakey” playlist from May 10 - May 31.

1. “No Ordinary Love” -- Sade

2. “I And I Survive” -- Bad Brains

3. “Angelfuck” -- Misfits

4. “Every Which Way But Loose” -- Eddie Rabbit

5. “Abyssal Plain” -- Pelican

6. “Sailin’ On” -- Bad Brains

7. “Going Underground” -- The Jam

8. “I Got You” -- Split Enz

9. “Red Before Black” -- Cannibal Corpse

10. “Here Comes My Girl” -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

11. “Our Lips Are Sealed” -- The Go-Gos

12. “Never Say Goodbye” -- Bon Jovi

13. “Casa Pre Fabricada” -- Roberta Sa

14. “Maria Tambien” -- Khruangbin

15. “Cicatrizes” -- Roberta Sa

16. “White Gloves” -- Khruangbin

17. “Soledad y el Mar” -- Natalia Lafourcade

18. “Pet Sematary” -- Ramones

As Sacks states, “Sometimes normal music imagery crosses a line and becomes, so to speak, pathological, as when a certain fragment of music repeats itself incessantly, sometimes maddeningly so, for days on end.” The sad fact, it appears, is that such pathology is beyond our control. As with the randomness of some “Wakey” songs conjured alongside more predictable numbers. Somewhere beneath the ramble of today’s top hits, another story is being revealed in me, a narrative that juxtaposes Eddie Rabbit alongside the Misfits. Where this is going -- or where it should end -- only wisdom can reveal.

Also, returning to Jeremy’s party and Jen’s flawed tape, given the choice I would have not chosen DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince to own such real estate in my dadgum amygdala. And maybe that’s why I didn’t grab the mic next to Jen. To do so would have dared exposure, especially to the people whose names I had forgotten, that “Parents Just Don’t Understand” proved more nourishing than making their acquaintance. Perhaps Dr. Sacks is right again. Perhaps emotion and sentimentality -- the heart -- is more central to memory than even our rational minds. In the voluptuous words of comedian Sarah Silverman, “The heart wants what the heart wants”. To that, I will say, Amen and Selah. I just never fathomed the heart could want The Go-Gos before caffeine. Does anybody’s heart really want The Go-Gos before caffeine? Dear Lord and Rivers Cuomo, say it ain’t so.

POSTSCRIPT: While writing this, I listened to Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for William Friedkin’s film Sorcerer, which is guaranteed not to create ear-worms.

- June 1, 2020