clubbed to death

"It is such a quiet thing to fall…but far more terrible is to admit it." – Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

A lot of what I babble about here touches upon the associative power of music, especially the connection between music and memory. Sometimes the triggers are direct and/or nostalgia-related, like how listening to Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend,” excruciatingly trite as it may be, unleashes a torrent of non-specific memories of childhood summers in North Woburn. Other times, it’s a more subtle process, where upon hearing a song for the first time, a random half-forgotten chunk of memory gets shaken loose from my internal data store. It’s a bit like the IPCRESS process, but accidental and through pop music, rather than deliberate and through starvation and psychedelic light shows.

The specific instance which spawned this post was a case of the latter, more subtle, process. After coming across a track on Retro Music Snob (which if you aren’t a frequent visitor to, you ought to be – and I’m not saying that because RMS frequently links to me) by The Holograms, an all-female bubblegum punk pop band from Los Angeles, I headed on over to eMusic and picked up a copy of their album. Their music is an entertaining, and somewhat raunchy, crazy quilt of influences ranging from the Shangri-La’s to The Pandoras to the Lunachicks to the Go-Go’s early stuff, and I recommend it highly.

About thirty seconds into “Scene Whore,” I suffered a major flashback to an incident from about five years back. After I started driving again in the fall of 2001, Maura and I quickly settled into certain day-specific routines. Fridays became pizza and animal supplies days. We’d drive to the Pet Supplies Plus in Wellington Circle, stock up on all the necessities for the critters, then head off to pick up our food order at Antonio’s over by the Fellsway. The place was a traffic nightmare, so I used to park in the Johnny’s Foodmaster lot and just walk over to the pizza parlor. It was also handy because my bank had an ATM booth at the far end of the lot, and I could get some weekend cash there without having to make another stop.

On this particular occasion, I stepped inside the booth and the person ahead of me in line was a woman around my age (though it was a tough call) dressed to the nines in one of those over-the-top short, frilly dresses that were de rigueur for Route 1 dance clubs or the Class of 1986’s senior prom. Her bottle-copper hair was piled high and permed within an inch of its life, and her dark eye shadow ran in teary rivulets down her cheeks. In one shaky hand she held a cigarette and in the other a stack of credit cards, which she fed one at a time into the machine. Each rejected bid for a cash advance was met with a muffled sob and another deep drag.

As thick as the air was with tobacco smoke, the stink of wild desperation was thicker still. Witnessing the scene gave me repeated synaesthetic flashes of a gallows lever being pulled, the platform dropping, and the terminal snap of the vertebrae. To have dug a hole for one’s self that deep, where 9/10ths of the surface area of one’s personal Wheel of Potential Futures is filled with results like “overdose” or “murdered body found in an East Boston dumpster”…it boggles and depresses me immensely. Maybe I should stop by Keno Mart to cheer myself up.

Here’s the song that inspired today’s post, along with a similarly-themed slice of NYC “mutant disco” to round things out:

The Holograms – Scene Whore (from Night of 1000 Ex-Boyfriends, 2005)

Cristina – What’s a Girl to Do? (from Sleep It Off, 1984)