How did it feel?

As I wrote a bit about recently in my latest essay for The Normal School, I've spent a good part of the last few decades catching up with artists and bands that I was too provincial, scared, or otherwise tone-deaf to appreciate when I was in my late teens and early 20s. There were few bands back then that drove me off of the dance floor, and sometimes out of the bar, more than New Order and the Cure. Though I've never entirely warmed to either band, I've come to deeply respect the talent, nerve, and originality in each; pulling wide decades later has allowed me to appreciate their lasting and deep impression, and their sizable influence. But I won't hold back: I detested New Order's "Blue Monday" when it was released, and subsequently began popping up in every dj's arsenal at whatever bar my friends and I would drink and dance at. Its synthesized, processed, metronomic beat stood for everything I disliked about much '80s music, even that emanating from very cool scenes, and in the case of New Order, from the ashes of a highly original band. (It took me a while to come around to Joy Division, too.) I don't think that I minded the song's inherent darkness—a mood I'd often indulge in—rather I bristled at what I felt was its programmed aversion to messiness and spontaneity. I craved loud, sloppy guitars, stirring changes, indelible hooks in my rock and roll—I wasn't having Sumner, Hook and Morris's chilly approach to the stage, the antithesis to what I felt were the sonic promises made by rock and roll. Now I'm embarrassed, and I lament my stubbornness (read: immaturity), which didn't always put me in kind company with my friends and acquaintances, who likely were bored with my narrowness. Rightly so.

There was more brewing in my exaggerated distaste. On more than one occasion I recognized, with adolescent melodrama, that my dislike of New Order, the Cure, and others was often overpowered by my envy for those who loved that music, who danced to it at Poseurs, Cagney's, Back Alley Cafe, and the other D.C. joints that we haunted on the weekends, with genuine and joyful abandon, often, it seemed to me, coming alive before my eyes on the dance floor under black light and strobe while I mock-fumed in the corner, or at the bar in studied cool, all the while lamenting my inability to let go to the very music I was cold to. I didn't admit this to myself as much as I let it roil inside of me, yet another nameless, just-beyond-words discovery added to my overpowering emotional confusion at that age.

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Today in the car, I tuned in to Sirius's 1st Wave: Classic Alternative Rock channel, and "Blue Monday" came on. Nostalgia's a funny thing: though I don't think I'll ever fully warm to the song and the traditions it mined and trails it blazed—some part of taste, it seems to me, is inextricably lined in one's DNA—I melted in the memories. At once, the guys and girls dancing in my mind's eye weren't antagonists, or foils, but kids finding their true moments and joy on the floor, alone or in couples or threes, moving in whatever blend of adolescent miseries or triumphs, family dysfunction, romantic politics, and weekend drinking or drugging that drove them to the club and that tortured, or animated or inspired them, throughout the drudge of their week. The feeling was stronger than a fleeting song-as-time-machine memory: surprised, I mournfully recognized myself in those kids, the ones I rolled my eyes at way back then: we're all, then and now, dancing because we can, whatever the music is that's moving us. Nostalgia really means the deep desire to return to a home that no longer exists—that ancient, vexing paradox—and those kids' homes, both their complicated bedrooms and the dance floor with its bone-simple pleasures, became vividly clear to me as I idled in my car, in the lousy Hy-Vee parking lot, a thousand years later. So too did the opening verse of "Blue Monday" become clear, told, as I was now by those long-gone kids now firmly in middle age, how it did feel, and who they are.

Photo of Cagney's matchbox via eBay.