Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Driving one of my children to a soccer game on a Saturday morning, I was visibly grooving to a song from my youth, maybe Prince’s “Sign of the Times,” and in a brilliant display of disregard or teenage bravado, he absently changed the station while scrolling his phone, a “No No” to when I was his age and in the car with my parent.

But, because I am an enlightened parent, I didn’t smack his hand from the knob or jokingly say something on par of “Do that again, and you’re gonna draw back a nub.” No. Instead, I pushed the dial back to my station and sang slightly louder until he noticed my noisy joy.

Yet, there were those moments, too, when I did allow my children to hijack the stereo and play their music, because they needed to get amped for the game, or simply they were feeling some kind of way, and my music didn’t cut it, didn’t console or capture their melancholy or rage like the musicians from their generation.

And frankly, you love that they have found a sound that speaks to their inner life and that they are sharing it with you and not lost between their headphones. Their enthusiasm for SZA, Rex Orange County, Beach House, or Bikini Kill becomes infectious, and you even hear how your tastes have mildly influenced their tastes: heavy bass, eclectic sampling, crisp percussion, expansive lyrics that get beneath the surface of things.

It's as if you’re listening to their values, their moods, and to words that imprint and help them navigate their adolescent years and all of its challenges. You begin to swap playlists and apocryphal stories about the lives of musicians and recording sessions. You love how you speak to each other across the music you listen to together and take comfort that they have found a possible way of surviving this particular world, learned to create a fortress of melodies for their souls.

Today’s poem celebrates the bonding that occurs when music and art are at the center of our treasured relationships. There is gratitude for the ways we learn to talk to each other as family and friends, that make music a spiritual bridge across time.

from Let It Be Broke
by Ed Pavlić

xvi

2015. My daughter, fourteen, sings Rihanna’s “Stay”
at a local café. She and Milan argue
about music. I’m what tells him that Suci doesn’t listen
to what songs sound like, she hears what
they’ll sound like when she sings them. Milan nods.
Sunčana sings, “All along it was a fever.” 

These days if I’m speaking to you chances
are—consciously or not—you’re tracking a play of shadows
across my voice. If you asked me
about those shadows and if I thought we were what
friends feel like I’d say that those shadows
are prayers of thanks for the music my children love.

Music tracking quite precisely and fully what
comes and goes from our bodies. Family songs in every room of the house.
And if I ever say “Turn it down” please understand
that means never stop.

from “Let It Be Broke" by Ed Pavlić from LET IT BE BROKE © 2020 Ed Pavlić. Used by permission of Four Way Books.