Workaround

Did anyone else remember feeling betrayed in the early 2000s when everyone who had previously listened to post punk or screamo or “indie” whatever started getting into dance music?* As someone who sat on the side at bar mitzvahs and school dances feeling, as I always have, like a brain unmoored inside a body that I didn’t ask for or want or feel able to use to do the things I wished it could do or move in ways that mimicked how other people moved, last picked in gym class never been kissed in high school, I did. Indie and punk had seemed like safe head bobbing and foot tapping and fist pumping spaces but all of a sudden I stood on the edge of the party again, because I can’t walk down the street without tripping over my own feet, much less dance. 

I thought about this at the gym the other day, where every few years I return to try to confront my weird physical self and attempt to understand the connection between words—“tuck your pelvis”—and corresponding physical actions. Maybe this gap explains the weird role electronic & dance music plays in my life: the most public-facing music, meant to be played and enjoyed communally, & yet I have only ever experienced it privately in headphones. It soundtracks the movement of data in Excel sheets and my labored motions at the gym where I cannot escape that primordial feeling of doing-it-wrong-and-everyone’s-watching. My taste in this music also has no grounding or history or context. I find out what some friends listen to and I like it or I don’t. As someone who came to a sense of self, for better or worse, through music-knowing, this too seems like doing-it-wrong. 

These days, though, I like listening to dj mixes on the [internet] radio, which is weirdly an exercise in trust. I just let someone else who knows about the stuff pick the stuff for you and enjoy both the chunes and the expertise: a liberation, a deeply human one, from the stress of selecting from innumerable choices in just one area of one’s life. The format makes sense in my headphones because a mix has such personal qualities, a tour through someone’s records or hard drive or whatever, complete with shouts out to friends or cursing about Brexit. I even wrote an email to a group I heard on an NTS mix and they sent me the unreleased track that I loved! What a throwback—straightforward fandom! 

Maybe someday I will find an ability to extend this trust to other parts of my existence, ie. to my own legs and arms and hips, forgiving them for their clumsiness and weakness, their aches and blobs. For now I feel moved by this Beatrice Dillon record “Workaround.” It reminds me of tapestry weaving: a rigid frame of 150 bpm filled in, albeit sparsely, with bursts of analog instruments or vocals or melody. The craft here, these trained instrumentalists meshing with the mathematics of Dillon’s compositions, might represent a bridge crossing these mind-body head-heart public-private gaps.

*I read about 50 pages of “Meet Me in the Bathroom” the other night (maybe more on that a different time) which probably got me thinking about this but the reason I read it was because I want to figure out where the bar in the Strokes’ “Someday” video is, which might be in MMITB but the index doesn’t work on the ebook. Do you know?