Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I cannot fully explain my renewed love for vinyl. All I know is that for eight weekends straight, I have found myself randomly walking into a record store. Although you might know me to be nostalgic, I do not uphold the golden days of analog and denigrate all things digital.

Reprising classic albums and finding new-to-me gems is keeping me excited to listen loud. So, I find myself scrolling secondhand postings online and digging in the crates. My last treasure hunt yielded Donald Byrd’s funky Street Lady, Mahalia Jackson’s holy shouts, and the inimitable Dinah Washington singing “Cry Me A River.” Move over, Justin Timberlake.

There is nothing like the liner notes. It is its own genre of writing, the author being like a Virgil guiding me through the album’s journey. I scour to see if I recognize favorite musicians mentioned in the session’s lineups. They don’t make names anymore like Wah Wah Watson. The album’s old moldy smells make me a little dizzy, but the anticipation of hearing the music buoys me until I get home. When I drop the needle on the record, that first crackle sends a sweet shock to my ears, inviting me to prepare for an audio experience where anything is possible.

Today’s poem insists our lives, like so many analog recordings, are raw, unadorned, layered, full of disruptions and distortions.

Fade Away
by Amorak Huey

How a song ends 
has changed over the years,
they used to fade out
as if the music hadn’t ended at all,
was still playing somewhere 
and it was us who’d moved on, 
already singing the next song
even as the first one continued
in some other room, a lover
moving on with their life as we
moved on with ours. When 
Def Leppard’s drummer lost his arm
in a car accident, it took a while
for us to hear what happened,
news spread differently in those days,
so by the time we knew the story for sure, 
the band had resumed performing
and Rick Allen had an electronic kit 
he could play with his feet. None of this 
is metaphor, it’s just what happened
in the world. Not everything
stands for something else. Some 
things just are. Like us. We are.
We exist in this world as a lesson
to no one, about nothing,
not cautionary tale or exemplar,
not fable or psalm, sermon 
or poem. One body and another body,
side by side in bed at the end of a day,
at the end of the next day, and the next,
until the bodies expect each other’s 
presence. The absence of absence.
This is what we wanted. What 
we’ve always wanted,
though we probably would not have said so,
not back then, not before.
I saw KISS in concert long after their prime,
after the makeup had come off,
leaving only the band, 
unadorned and trying too hard,
and music that never quite sounded 
the way it once had. It sounds
like a metaphor but it’s just life, 
which I guess makes it a metaphor.

"Fade Away" by Amorak Huey. Used by permission of the poet.