What is the first thing you remember? I often play this game with myself every night before I go to bed and each night I remember something different. Different answers to the same question and the answer depends on the day. Sometimes I choose a category. Today is music, what is my first musical memory?
Looking back on memories so distant creates a shuffling conjoined confusion in the mind. Images and sounds are stretched like the view of the world shooting by as you move through it in very fast car. It scares me sometimes, to look back so far, to see what was done by you, reliable or otherwise there is always something in the past that achieved a hurt for yourself or others. I think, for I am not one hundred percent on this, that my earliest memories of music, was discovering something about it that created permanent impression on me.
Back beat. The two and the four. Most songs have it in one way or another. Rock and pop most of all. Jazz switches it up and hands the torch of the back beat from snare to hi-hat. Reggae gains it’s off-kilter romance with the ear by choosing the bass drum and not the snare. We have all heard a song lacking a certain something, then BAM! We get it in the form of the drive, the pulse, the engine of the song, the part any person can play by bringing their hands quickly together, the clap, the two-and-four, the back beat. At a sold out concert to you favorite pop star or in an expat bar to your friend playing a fifteen minute open mic set for a free beer the clap brings you closer, into, the music.
Prince. Now that he is gone, everyone has spoken of Prince and his many deeds and contributions to music. Strangers, friends, and the world have all shared how he touched them with his being. With social media the world can now give a eulogy, and such a eulogy it was. Everyone called him Prince but we all knew he was a king.
My first memory was driving in the car with my mother. We were listening to the radio. That was when Prince’s “When Doves Cry” came on and my ear tingled with it’s open guitar lick. I had heard this song before, I knew that for sure because I remembered I liked it. What did you like most about it? The rhythm.
I remembered hearing these slaps, over and over, thick and sharp at the same time, so predominate and they covered everything else in the song when they struck. I started to tap my fingers to the song. We were nearing home I rush of anxiety flooded over me, what if we pull up to the house before the song ends? This was a reoccurring nightmare for me when I was a child unable to drink myself. That day I was lucky. I spent the whole song tapping my fingers to that pulse. Some boy band’s cola flavored attempt at budding sexual traction came after. I knew even then that the song was shit, but there was something more. The same strikes, the same slaps, the same pulse. Only the sound and speed was different. Prince, you led me to back beat, so I thank you Prince for first putting me in the pocket, and for my first memory of music.