30 Minutes for the Rest of Your Life

What will you do with yours?

Sorry to disappoint, Tebow fans, I’m not talking about the Gators quarterback’s famous half-time speech at the 2008 BCS game. I’m talking about 30 minutes of song for the rest of your life.

Girls are teased for listening to their favorite songs on hyper-repeat until they run those songs into the ground. I am guilty of engaging in this behavior from time to time, but it’s not always a case of the “junk cravings.” We all have those songs that we could listen to anytime, anywhere. Music has the power to penetrate our psyche and engage our memories, emotions, moods all at once. What we listen to says a lot about who we are.

I am absolutely listening to this playlist as you are reading this.

Now that you’ve seen my top-10 lineup, what have you learned about me?

Did you perhaps think that…

1. I’m a movie buff. I, like many others, thought that Watchmen was a terrible movie, but it produced an A-list soundtrack. “The Beginning is the End” is completely different from anything else Smashing Pumpkins puts out, but it was the soundtrack for the trailer, and it was good enough to get me to watch the movie. I can’t remember a single scene, line, or actor from Watchmen, but I know this song inside-out.
2. I’m a dancer. The best days in ballet class were the days on which my teachers brought “different” playlists. That included anything from top-40 radio hits to circus music. Cirque du Soleil goes so far beyond “circus music,” though. I remember the first time I improvised to Mystere, I understood what it felt like to have my body entirely taken over by a rhythm.
3. I’m an only child. The first time I heard this song, I was visiting my aunt in Indiana. She is my aunt, but she’s only 11 years older than I am. Unlike a parental figure, she took me out to do “what the cool kids did.” “Cool” for my 11-year-old self consisted of getting Wendy’s frosties and going to see movies in IMAX. It was like having a big sister for a week.
4. I’m a big Edgar Allan Poe fan. Pure genius. That’s what Eminem and Edgar Allan Poe have in common. They share the mechanics of a clever use of vocabulary, assonant rhymes within lines, and flawless rhythm, but Poe and Eminem manage to convey a life’s worth of emotion in the span of 2 minutes.
5. I’m a millennial. Yes, yes, bring on the stereotypes. I was an angsty tween when this song came out, and it was our generation’s middle-school anthem.
6. I’m my mother’s daughter. My mom and I watched Mighty Joe Young together, and she bought the soundtrack the next day. She is known to have very strange taste in music, and I am known to take after her.
7. Try listening to this song on your iPhone while you stroll down Broadway past at least ten homeless people who are digging through the trash for cans and bottles. The complexities of guilt, social responsibility, New York City, and activism require a whole other post.
8. I’m a writer of children’s stories. I took a class called “Race and Religion in African American Culture” and had a very open-minded professor who allowed us to submit essays in all different forms (visual art, performance, memoir, story, you get the picture). I used this song in an annotated, sound incorporated essay, but that class was the first one in which I submitted children’s stories as essays.
9. I’m a Spanish minor. Leon Gieco is nicknamed “the Argentine Bob Dylan…see #7.
10. I’m a shy person. When iPods and the iTunes store became “a thing,” we all scrambled to consume as much music as we could in search of “our favorite band.” I remember being in sixth-grade, and the second question after you asked someone their name was “what’s your favorite band?” Mine was Aerosmith. It never made sense to anyone…it still doesn’t.
11. My 10 songs went over 30 minutes. What can I say? I’m a rule-bender!

Did you guess any of those things from my playlist? Probably not, but what did I say before: “music has the power to engage our memories.” So, you may have come to other conclusions about me from my playlist, and for all we know, you may have been correct! What’s important about the 10-song lineup isn’t only what you can guess about people, it’s about the limitless potential of what you can learn about them. Great ice-breaker don’t you think?

You are only allowed to listen to one playlist on a constant loop for a whole day (“the rest of your life” seemed a bit extreme- I’ll leave the dramatics to Tim Tebow). What’s your 10-song lineup?

Choose wisely. :)