by Laura June
People tell you that singing can calm a baby. That makes sense: music has always calmed me. And Zelda wasn’t alive very long before we attempted to use music to relax her. Unfortunately, we were, while still in the hospital just twelve or fifteen hours after she was born, limited in what we could offer her. I wish that the first piece of music Zelda ever heard was not “Work” by Iggy Azalea. But it was. It is. The first piece of music she ever heard was “Work.” I even wrote this fact down in her baby book: “First song I ever heard: ‘Work,’ by Iggy Azalea, played on a phone.”
We played it for her, not on the day she was born but the day after, because it was the only song that Josh had actually downloaded to his phone and we were still in the hospital, and the Wi-Fi was spotty. I say this as a way of excusing us, maybe, but it’s true. We played her what was on hand. It was an Iggy Azalea song.
I wish I could take it back because now it is one of those songs that, though it may never be “special” to Zelda—since really, I’d have to tell her this fact for her to even know it—it will always, somehow and so improbably, be special to me. And I hate the song “Work.” It’s not good. It’s crass, and not even crass in a good way. Not crass in the way that I’m crass. Crass like bad crass. “I’ve been up all night, tryna get that rich / I’ve been work work work work working on my shit.”
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The last time I heard “Work,” probably three months ago at random, I was sitting in a parking lot in my car, waiting to pick someone up from a train. I burst into tears. I was probably suffering from PMS, or maybe something else had gone awry that day. I can’t remember the details, only the fact that Iggy Azalea’s “Work” made me burst into tears once late last year as I sat alone in my car. I don’t randomly cry, and even though music often does overwhelm me to tears, “Work” surprised me. But I cried that day because even though I hate the song, it’s the first song that my daughter ever heard, and it triggers inside of me a deep feeling of remembrance and loss, as well as a happiness so great I sometimes feel like clawing us back into that hospital room.
When Zelda heard music for the first time, she was laying in that plastic salad bin they give you at the hospital to contain the baby. For the first hours of her life, she lay in that clear plastic container on a steel inclined gurney that had squeaky wheels. I could barely stand from the incision in my gut, but I felt like another woman, a woman not me. I felt superhuman. I could stay awake for the rest of her life, sitting beside her, simply to ensure her survival. All thoughts of my own safety and happiness had, for the moment, departed. I don’t remember what the second, third, or fourth songs that Zelda heard were. I remember only the first.
I’d love to be able to say, “the first music my daughter heard was the sweet, clear-as-a-bell sound of her mother’s voice, softly purring ‘Edelweiss.’” Tough shit.
I have always sung to Zelda. “Work” is the only musical mistake I am willing to own up to. Because I clung to habit and routine early in her life, I quickly developed a set list and simply stuck with it, adding a song every now and then. The standards of our early list included “Frère Jacques,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Alligator” by Tegan & Sara, and “Don’t Shake Your Baby” by me. I wrote it one day when I realized that, contrary to all the terrifying subway ads warning against shaking my baby, my baby wanted nothing more in this world than to be shaken, albeit lightly. She thought shaking was fucking hilarious. “Don’t shake, don’t shake your baby. Don’t shake, don’t shake your baby. Don’t shake, don’t shake your baby: Just kidding, shake your baby.” Instant classic.
But though we added to the repertoire slowly, I played for her all the music I myself wanted to hear each day. Like the books I read to her, I didn’t limit myself to kid’s music, because like her opinions on clothes, she was, at first, too young to voice them. So we listened to Pavement and Air and the Breeders and the Beach Boys. Why not?
Zelda showed interest in music very early on. So much so that the first thing she did upon learning to sit up was to start dancing, sitting in the middle of her bedroom floor, just jiggling away. Before she learned to crawl, Zelda learned to dance. I don’t know if all babies dance, but Zelda always did. It was essential to her being, and it was an overwhelming joy to see her ingest the music, to see her body relent, relax, and go with it. For her, music and dancing were intrinsically linked, especially before she had words.
When Zelda was less than a year old, I rented the 1982 movie Annie on iTunes and showed it to her. It did not go very well. She was unaccustomed at that age to television, because I took the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations to heart, and her nanny, who cared for her as I started to get back to writing, didn’t watch TV, either. Kids under two, the AAP told me, should not view “screens.” At all.
Luckily, Josh and I only ever watched TV at night, long past her 7:30 p.m. bedtime, so the most she ever saw in her first two years of life was a few minutes of an old episode of Sesame Street thrown on in a panic so I could shove some food in my face or boil water for dinner.
I realized in the maybe ten minutes that we watched that day that Annie was scarier than I remembered. I had forgotten everything but the songs, probably because I had only ever seen it a few times. VCRs weren’t that common when I was very young, so I knew the story from a book and the soundtrack. I barely remembered how menacing the actual movie was. In Annie, basically all the adults are horrifying and terrible (except for Grace Farrell, of course, who is resplendent and beautiful and perfect). Miss Hannigan, played by Carol Burnett (who is magical) is a mean drunk. Daddy Warbucks is a child-hating Republican; Rooster and Lily are actual criminals. There are dog catchers and policemen. Even the orphans, who have, admittedly, been living a hard-knock life, are rough and mean. Annie’s progress through the narrative is one of near-constant stress and danger, and Annie herself often rejects the easier path to comfort and happiness in favor of the harder but more authentic path. I saw this really clearly as an adult where before, as a kid, I simply wanted to be an orphan.
I tried Annie again when Zelda was nearing her third birthday. My timing could not have been better: within one viewing, she was hooked. The movie is still too scary for her—we have to fast-forward through Annie hanging off the bridge or there will be tears—but the emotional center of Annie’s life is not lost on Zelda. Nor are the show tunes. “It’s the Hard Knock Life” is what Zelda calls a “group song,” where all the kids in the movie sing together. Another of her favorite examples of a group song is “Do Re Mi,” from The Sound of Music. Annie perfectly combines Zelda’s first two loves in life: performative cleaning (something she started to do as soon as she could walk) and song and dance routines. When she began to choreograph “It’s the Hard Knock Life” for herself in our living room, she needed only to run a few paces away to grab her little cleaning kit, complete with rags, sponges, mops, and a bucket.
I wanted to pass on my love of music to Zelda the same way I wanted her to love books, not because I wanted her to be more like me—I don’t. I have spent much of my life anxious and tortured on behalf of other people, and I don’t want that for her. But music and reading have always been great refuges to me, mental spaces that are wide and clear and open, untroubled and never ending. When I was an upset teenager, having just argued with my mother or my boyfriend, when I wanted to smash something against a wall just to see things broken, I often crawled into the closet in my bedroom, where I would sit listening to music and drawing on the walls. It was quiet and dark in there; I kept boxes of candles and cigarettes. The thought of the dual fire hazard of smoking and candles in a thin 1960s suburban closet space, the thought of the smell alone, makes me want to wretch now, but that’s what I did. I hid there or lay under the blankets of my bed, reading books and listening to rock music.
And if I was not yet able to imagine myself in other places or in other situations, if I hadn’t yet thought ou
t what I might like to “do” next, once I graduated from high school, it was reading and music that transported me elsewhere first. And so it was that in a very important way, I was a normal American suburban teenager, dreaming away the extra hours through a boombox CD player.
I should admit that music, even sort of bad but beloved music, has always had the power to make me cry spontaneously. Usually it is not such a disastrous arrangement as “Work,” but still, I have cried listening to the strains of Neil Diamond or ABBA, to Madonna and to Mastodon. I have cried at more live shows than I can count. I remember crying at Le Tigre and Gossip. At Fleet Foxes and the Walkmen. I cried onstage when my own band played, and I cried in the audiences of tiny smoky bars when my brothers’ and boyfriends’ bands played. I have always, always been the person wiping my eyes standing in the middle of a venue.
In childhood I clung to my records and tapes, graduating to CDs around middle school. I wore them out and wore them in. I memorized breathing patterns and beat drops. Hand claps and snare hits. I was never a casual consumer of music. I listened with an ear bent on mimicry and memorization. Music was serious business to me, and I studied it, even before I could read.
It was also overwhelmingly emotional. I thought—still think—that if I listen hard enough for a certain amount of time, my ears will stop straining and I’ll be able to simply absorb it. The lyrics will wash over me and I won’t have to work at it anymore.
There are so many records that I know in this intimate, listened-to-them-literally-thousands-of-times way.
The soundtrack to the movie Annie was probably my first musical obsession. It’s also the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater, with Peg, my mother’s mother, who took me for an Orange Julius afterward and bought me a new dress. I was almost but not quite five, but I remember gripping the chair in the theater, transfixed and terrified by the movie. I wanted, like so many other girls wanted, to be an orphan.
Back then, you couldn’t just watch a movie whenever you wanted to: that technology simply didn’t exist yet. Eventually, I did get a VHS copy of Annie, but even that system was precarious. The tape had only so many views in it. VHS tapes were sort of expensive at the time, so you couldn’t waste precious viewing life on fast-forwarding to the beginning of “It’s the Hard Knock Life,” the best song and dance number of the movie, over and over. No, when I sat down to watch the movie, I usually watched it from start to finish.
I had the vinyl record of the soundtrack when I wanted to indulge my compulsive, repetitive desires. I still remember the exact sound of the crackly dead air and how long it lasted between the end of the song “Tomorrow” and the beginning of “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” I had long enough to go from a sitting (“Tomorrow”) to a standing position in my bedroom, which was small and mostly filled by my bed. For listening, I wedged myself between the bed and the wall, on the farthest side of the room, so that, if the door to my room opened and I was sitting on the other side of the bed, I couldn’t be seen. The carpeting in my room for most of my childhood was a purplish color, and it was worn thin in places, making it very uncomfortable to lay on. If I lay there silently, with my ear to the ground near the heating vent, I could hear as clear as a bell the conversations my brothers were having in the bedroom that they shared in the basement.
I spent so many hours alone in that room, studying the songs from Annie. And when, around the second grade, I made friends and simultaneously discovered MTV and Michael Jackson and Madonna, I never fully discarded my love for Annie. I still had the records as a teenager, sitting inside my closet, unlistened to but not gotten rid of, either.
My parents always listened to music, too. My father called most of the shots there, preferring oldies from the ’50s and early ’60s, doo-wop, and early rock. But he also, like so many Polish Pittsburghers, listened to a lot of polka music, and we spent a ton of time going to polka dances all over the place when I was a kid. As I aged, I grew to feel some embarrassment about these weekend activities when I realized that most of the kids I went to school with didn’t go to polka dances.
In the 1980s, I graduated from children’s music to adult, like every other kid on the planet, at around the time I started school. I eventually flirted with heavy metal, and for a long time, like many girls my age, I blew with the wind: whatever the boys were listening to, I listened to. Ozzy Osbourne? Sure, okay. King Diamond? Hell, why not?
But in the summer of 1992, I found the things that seemed to be made for me in music. They were women. I still loved Madonna, but increasingly I felt that she was more of a product than a musical outlet for me. I wanted Sonic Youth and Lush and Belly and the Breeders. I wanted to hear women actually making the music, holding the instruments, writing the songs. It helped, of course, that these women were beautiful in the new mold that I wanted to be beautiful in: they were sort of weird. They were feminists, though I didn’t use that word yet.
I wanted Liz Phair, the only artist I have ever heard my mother say unequivocally that she “hated.” She hated her voice and the words she said with that voice. I loved Liz even more for offending my mother.
My parents always had the radio on. Our house must have been so loud. My brothers had their music too, but I hid away in my room, studying my own.
My mother was cool, almost completely due to the fact that she was twenty-four years old when I was born. I was thirty-six when Zelda was born: my mother liked most of the same music I liked, and I still think of myself as cool to some degree. But I suspect by the time she is a teenager, I won’t be cool enough to like whatever music Zelda likes. I’ll be an old-ass bitch by the time Zelda is asking me to take her to shows or whatever zany shit she’ll be up to in the ninth or tenth grade, existing in that weird zone between child and adulthood, where you can still tolerate the tolerable parents and you still need rides all the time.
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I didn’t feel like we lived in the actual world. American suburbs hold a really special place in my heart. There’s something very kooky and cute about them that I love, but where we lived, where I grew up, going to the grocery store or pharmacy in the only strip mall in town was about as much excitement as one could expect from a weeknight.
There were buses that you could grab to get to the actual city of Pittsburgh; the trip took about an hour, and my mother would have killed me if I’d ever attempted such a thing. I didn’t: it seemed like far too much effort even though by then the city, any city, was a draw to me.
And we would use any excuse to get there. In tenth grade, Ellen and I signed on to a huge walk to benefit multiple sclerosis one fall and came in dead last out of hundreds of participants. We walked slowly around different distinct parts of the city, stopping in shops to buy incense or get coffee. “How do these look?” Ellen asked me, trying on a pair of Doc Martens at the Airwair store. “Do you think we’re allowed to just shop during the walk?” I asked. I was always the one to worry, just a little.
What I did not have, in any form, was a plan for what I was going to do after high school. Unlike Emily and Vanessa and Ellen, who all had parents who were pushing them to go to college, to study for the SATs, my parents were simply trying to hold things together, hold disaster back at every turn. I hadn’t failed any grades or been held back, but I was just floating by on my good nature and my aptitude. My older brother, David, was the only one of us who received any of the traditional “Well, now it’s time to apply for college” talks from my parents. He’d shipped off to the University of Pittsburgh and was doing whatever he was doing, while I was making do.
And in the space left empty by my parents’ separation and my father’s moving, there was a lot of darkness. My dad took my brothers on weekends and was incessantly checking up on us, but he’d left physically, and one of the things about an alcoholic family is, once somebody leaves, they’re out. David, and to a great extent my father, was forced outside the circle when he physical
ly departed. My dad was only twenty minutes away, but that didn’t matter. My brothers and I lied to him a great deal about what was going on at home.
I’d like to say that this was simple denial on my part, but really, it was quite selfish. Now that I was a teenager, it was fairly convenient for me to have just one parent around, especially one who was ill-equipped to wrangle me. I could, to put it bluntly, do whatever the fuck I wanted. As I said, my mother was a cool mom and was so much easier to live with simply because she was not paying as much attention.
I worried and made sure that my mother grocery shopped, and I tried to clean up around the house, but in reality, things fell apart pretty quickly, and home became a place where most of us never were. I didn’t know what my mother was doing most of the time, and often, if I needed to talk to her, I’d simply call down the street to the bar where I knew she usually was. My grandparents were closed off from this, too. My grandma Peg had never been great at dealing with reality, and around the time that my parents separated, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He wasn’t even seventy years old. It progressed quickly, and she had her hands very full with him.
So it was that I found, somehow, an upside to my mother’s alcoholism. Surely I’d have given anything for stability and a mother who was reliable and honest and nice, but in the absence of that, I made due with freedom. I had come by it honestly: I didn’t need to hide anything from my parents or sneak around. I simply had a mother who suddenly allowed me to do pretty much anything that I wanted. Luckily, my desires were mostly legal, mostly safe, and mostly harmless.
