My Spotify is my most honest form of social media. Instagram is a polished, posed image of my hilarious, cool, city girl life. Twitter is a library of my never ending witty refrains, dry remarks and pop culture commentary. LinkedIn is for the employers that don’t want to hire freshmen, and for the scammers who bug me to fill out a survey for a gift card. My Spotify is just for me. “What are you listening to?” dives into each of my playlists and explores how my taste in music has grown with me over time.
Music has been a part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to The Beatles and other old school legends on our CD player, dancing along to “Eleanor Rigby” and falling asleep to Karen Carpenter’s drum solos. Our family music taste was impressively American – we loved The Beatles (and didn’t realize they were British until a few years ago), knew old school hip hop songs by heart (like true New Yorkers) and watched our father dance embarrassingly to every song he claimed was our mom’s “favorite.” On the rare occasions we drove, I filled the car with my enthusiastic, slightly off-key voice.
Growing up in a staunchly anti-screens household, I rarely knew what the voices of Generation X’s America actually looked like. America. It wasn’t until middle school that I watched a music video for “Hello, Goodbye” by The Beatles and its brightly colored three piece suits, women in grass skirts — and overwhelming whiteness. As I made my way through the discography of my childhood, the closest I got to representation was John Lennon with long hair. The music of my life was fun and catchy and danceable — but it was not made for me.
Unlike most Taiwanese-American families, I did not grow up listening to Teresa Teng. I learned about the iconic singer not from my mother, whose immigrant parents sacrificed their native language for her assimilation, but in my high school Chinese class. As I got older and more aware of my confusingly mixed identity, I began to resent my family for our ignorance of my culture. We celebrated Christmas with turkey rice gruel but forgot about the Mid-Autumn Festival. We exchanged hongbao, red envelopes for Lunar New Year, but never called our elder family members. We, like our music taste, were fundamentally American.
Although I pass for white, the small cultural differences between my family and the all-American ones who share our music taste feel like an uncrossable chasm. Friends walk through my apartment with their shoes on. Classmates laud “Gangnam Style” as the greatest song of all time — Psy is the first Asian artist they know. I sit somewhere in that dark space below – the sound eventually travels down, but none of it is made for me. Music and media do not reward the complexities of identity, rather they find a binary and drag it to the extreme, maintaining white as the norm and tokenizing anything outside of it. I am, in a sense, alienated from the music I love.
A few years ago, I discovered one of my best friends was just as big a fan of The Carpenters as I was. As we sang “Close to You,” she stared at me with confusion as I sang “so they sprinkled moon dust in your hair, and laughter in your great big eyes of brown, brown, brown.”
“Jenny, that’s not the lyrics. It’s ‘starlight in your eyes of blue.’ Are you sure we like the same song?” I was baffled, to say the least. I didn’t sing along for the next few minutes. Was I a fake fan? Later, I realized that my parents had changed the lyrics to make the song about me. I do not have golden hair, nor are my eyes blue. Girls’ beauty as described in my childhood songs did not match mine. So, they rewrote the song to include me.
I still sing “Close to You” with the wrong lyrics for two reasons: first, I honestly don’t think I can remember the original without significant mental effort. Second, that song is the first time I’ve felt connected to music in my life. Music and art in general are not heard in a vacuum; it exists for what we need at the time. When I needed to feel like I belonged, my family changed music for me. I have learned to shape songs around who I am.
Now, I use music as a tool to understand my current state of life. Last October, during college application season, the vibe was frantic and depressing. This past August — right before I left for college — was pure nostalgia. Every December, at least three Christmas songs make the cut. When I put on my headphones and turn the volume up on a playlist made two years ago, I’m immediately transported back to a younger me whose heartbeat echoes in the percussion and whose emotions ring through the lyrics. I’m borrowing the feelings I used to have, but they feel like mine.
Listening to The Carpenters or The Beatles or The Talking Heads, I remember the seemingly monumental problems of childhood (my brother took my toy! I can’t find my stuffed bear. Why can’t I stay up late tonight?) and let my old anger and joy and excitement wash over me like they’re new again. It’s a grounding in my past that helps me move forward. With my old music, I feel I can face the future with the same vivacity, passion and raw emotion I felt in childhood.
What are you listening to?
Listen to the playlist here.