Music Was My Gateway Drug

I haven’t watched the Grammy Awards in years, I don’t think. I wasn’t watching them live this year, either, but my group chat blew up when Tracy Chapman performed and thanks to social media, I got some glimpses as to why. Since then, I’ve watched the performance probably twenty-five times, much like most of the country. Threads was united like early Twitter days, just experiencing the love and awe and admiration all together.

Lauren Hough wrote this stupendous piece about it. I think it’s mostly about it, but there’s a lot more and you should read it because Lauren is an incredible writer who will make you laugh and cry and yes, it’s better than Cats.

I bought Tracy Chapman’s cassette tape in February, 1995, in Krakow. Cassette tapes cost 100,000 Zloty which I think was about five dollars whereas compact discs ran more like 2000,000 Zloty and besides the doubled price, I did not own a discman. Out of the 105 kids in our semester abroad program, only Alex — the gorgeous son of the visiting philosophy professor — had a discman, that sometimes he would let me borrow. Or if I was lucky, he would pop his headphones over my ears so I could hear just how incredible D’yer Mak’er was and ask how on earth I had never heard Led Zeppelin before, and I would genuinely react to that song and that song alone, but pretend the rest of the album was brilliant when I honestly didn’t know the difference between Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard.

And I never could bring myself to tell Alex or anyone else that I wasn’t allowed to listen to Led Zeppelin because I didn’t want to get possessed, and did they know that if you listen to Stairway to Heaven backwards, you can hear the devil himself? It was all true, according to a double VHS tape documentary featuring a mustachioed man who backed up all of his claims with primary sources like how the band hung out with Alastair Crowley and even tied into the Loch Ness monster somehow. Later on in the same documentary, there was even a segment on why Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All was evil, too. I hadn’t been allowed to listen to secular music since I was about nine years old, so the only thing that documentary did for me was give me more catchy songs to yearn to listen to and also feel guilty about enjoying.

Even among this group of Catholic students I was going to college with, who all went to church nearly every single day, I knew that I was a weirdo among weirdos for that one. So I would just shrug my shoulders and be secretly grateful at that moment that I hadn’t let the devil possess me previously because now this really hot guy had made it his mission to spread the good news of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and the risk of possession was absolutely worth it.

It wasn’t my first attempt at a jailbreak. The semester prior, I had gone into the city with some friends and bought two cassettes at a used record store near University of Pittsburgh after having lunch at The O where we stuffed ourselves full of fries and gravy. Digging through the bins, I had snagged a copy of Depeche Mode’s Violator and The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come. The former, I just really liked the cover, all black and mysterious with a blood-red flower cutting up the front of the small plastic box, and the latter because I had soundly humiliated myself pretending that I knew the words to Girlfriend in a Coma to impress a guy at a party. I resolved to never let that happen again. I hid the tapes in my room, but my previously rebellious brother was living with me that semester and had found Jesus which meant he subsequently found the cassettes in my room and had thrown them away. I never bothered asking him about it, because I knew they were long gone.

But I was studying in Austria for the semester, thousands of miles from home, and for five dollars each, I could have some music for the next few months. I knew it would probably be discovered and tossed when I landed back on US soil, but that was three months away. For ninety glorious days, I had the handheld Panasonic cassette recorder my mom had given me for Christmas so we could send audiotapes back and forth, and I was going to listen to secular music, demons be damned.

Like I said, I had heard secular music before, but I just didn’t know who any of the artists were or when their music was from. A song from 1988 was as new to me as a newly-released single. I heard the radio on the brief bus ride to school, and sometimes my older sister would get brave and put Q107 on while we were running errands, but inevitably she would forget to turn the dial back to the Christian station and we’d get in a lot of trouble that really wasn’t worth it for half of a Belinda Carlisle single and a lecture on letting devils into the Corolla.

My sister had long given up her previous strategy, which was convincing my mom that her favorite bands were actually Christian. Mr. Mister made that one easy when they recorded Kyrie, and for a while we were even permitted to watch their MTV Spring Break in Daytona concert that a friend had recorded for us. Then my mom caught a glimpse of the crowd at the show and decided Christian or no, this wasn’t going to work. U2 was a fairly easy sell, although I think that decision was reversed when word got around that they gave out condoms at their Achtung Baby tour. We’d usually buy a little time with the “they’re secretly Christians” line, but eventually, mom wasn’t willing to risk our souls for it.

Sometimes she would bend the rules a bit under duress, like letting me take part in a skit for Girl Scouts set to Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” because mom would feel badly that I was missing out, after all it wasn’t my personal fault that the world was so terrible, but then she’d be wracked with guilt over her own sinful nature for days. There was even a heated debate about whether or not I should in good conscience attend my best friend Amber’s Bat Mitzvah because there was going to be a DJ at the reception, but thankfully, my parents caved.

But there I was in Austria, and Poland, and a half-dozen other countries, and so far, I hadn’t seen any demons or noticed any evil befalling me, so I took a chance on a couple of cassettes: the first was Peter Gabriel’s So because when my one and only boyfriend at that point had tried getting literally anywhere with me, he played In Your Eyes. Then months later when he broke up with me, I sat in the common room of my friend’s dorm and played that song on repeat for hours on end until the study group that had it reserved awkwardly requested I go home and get some sleep.

And the second was Tracy Chapman’s self-titled album. I want to tell you that I saw the cover and the image of this gorgeous Black woman shouted out to me to take a chance with my Zloty. I just knew that it was something special, something undiscovered by anyone I knew even though it came out seven years prior, but in truth, the guy I was with just wouldn’t shut up about her musical genius, so I caved.

(The guy I was with was a thousand percent right, at least about this. He was wrong a lot as well. For instance, he would not shut up about Phish, and to this day, I can tell you way too much about bootlegs of concerts from 1993 and why Trey Anastasio was such a big fan of barbershop quartets and who Elehu dancing on Leemor’s bed was, but for the gift of Tracy, I will always be grateful.)

I was a sheltered 19-year-old by most standards. Maybe most of us were, who knows. But while I appreciated the artistry and the musicality of Chapman’s record, the lyrics may as well have been written in a foreign language. I did not know of riots and welfare lines nor lovers and violence. But I could tell SHE did. She was singing about her life. Her loves, her family, her loss, her suffering, and I refused to believe that anything that honest could be evil.

If Satan was the father of lies, Tracy Chapman wrote sacred hymns.

There were other cassette tapes, and yes, eventually CDs, like the collection I amassed through countless subscriptions to Columbia House and BMG that I kept carefully hidden on campus in my friend Ann’s dorm room. Ann grew up in a covenant community where families pooled their money and arranged marriages existed and even she thought my family was bonkers for not letting me listen to music. I think my copy paper box full of contraband amused her, considering. I mean if she was staring down the barrel of an arranged marriage, at least she could listen to 10,000 Maniacs while doing so.

these are all cassingles - don’t judge my taste level, I was a newb, okay?

Music made me see the cracks, though, and that was terrifying. Maybe that’s the whole point of music. Any good or decent art makes you question everything you thought before, I think. If I could listen to “secular” music and not get possessed, or start doing drugs and getting wasted, what else was on shaky ground? I put a lot of those questions off for a bunch of years because I wasn’t ready for them.

I’m still putting them off.

I have no idea how, maybe I got better at hiding my secrets, but I still have those cassettes from Poland. When I got back, my brother had moved out and I didn’t have to hide my stash all the time, just during Christmas and summer breaks. The price sticker is still on Peter Gabriel, go figure.

I think I’m gonna throw on a Tori Amos album and contemplate the sacred as profane some more. Hear her wail about how God sometimes doesn’t come through and wait for the walls to shake.

Then I’ll stop short of burning it all down, at least for today.