How Music Changed My Life: Allison's Story

January 27, 2014

I stood there, hunched over a turntable and a Moog synthesizer soaking in the skeptical and intrigued stares in my eleventh grade English class. As a group research assignment, our task was to choose an art form, and then teach a lesson for an entire class period. Liz, Dalila and I decided the best topic was to demystify the art of electronic music, for our classmates and ourselves.

It was the early spring of 2006 in Metro Detroit, a time when the windows of high school hoopties finally roll down, billowing smoke and unleashing blasts of Kid Rock and Eminem in the parking lot. The radio in my hoopty was stuck on AM. We sang Journey and Styx in choir. We played John Williams in band. In drama club we rehearsed to perform the sexless, edgeless, kiddie version of Grease. The only relief I got from this noise nonsense was crate digging through my parent’s collection of vinyl, since I was too cheap to buy music downloads, and too prewd to pirate it.

That was where electronic music started for me, between the stiff and flaky sleeves of DEVO and Depeche Mode, between the Theremin frequencies of the Beatles and Beach Boys, between the hair line of Brian Eno and the bass line of the Talking Heads. What I didn’t know was that these relics were part of the foundation of electronic music. What I did know is that I liked it a lot more than Foreplay Longtime and Lose Yourself.

When Mr C, our English teacher who was the emotional doppelganger of Bob Dylan, made the announcement about the project, Liz and Dalila and I immediately agreed to be a team, silently, shooting acknowledging glances across the classroom. We had the rest of the class to hold a charette and pick a topic. Whatever ideas we first flirted with for project ideas couldn’t stand up to the quixotic, alluring suggestion I put forward: electronic music. Not just techno, that was too narrow, we decided. We would, in the course of 45 minutes, uncover the history of electronic sound in popular culture. It was so full of new territory, yet somehow already farmiliar. It was 2006, and it was two weeks from the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.

Convincing our suburban, protective parents that attending DEMF was legitimate “field research” was no small feat, and we had to compromise to make it happen, we could only stay for as long as the sun shone. Dalila, on the other hand, was forbidden from attending. My mom’s silver Volvo unloaded Liz and I, with a friend Gina in tow, on Jefferson Avenue, beneath the LED sign that sometimes switched graphics to the undulating beat that filled the air. Before she could tell us to maintain the safety precautions outlined throughout the ride down Woodward, we were past the temporary fences and in our new world.

After the blur of sweaty hip swinging, laughing, ogling, and smiling was over and my ringing ears climbed back into Mom’s safety-mobile, I realized I was brining something home with me that I had not arrived with. Besides mild hearing impairment, I returned to the suburbs with a new sense of identity, of belonging, of familiarity and comfort and coziness.

The ringing in my ears lasted for days, like a honeymoon. My appetite for electronic music multiplied like the bacteria on a port-a-potty door handle. Liz, Dalila and I made our electronic music research into a massive undertaking, for the weeks after DEMF, we lived and breathed electronic music. Our class was going to be the best.

I asked Mr. Hartsoe, our paisley-wearing, arena rock-loving choir teacher if I could bring in the Moog synthesizer that I had been practicing Foreplay Longtime on in preparation for the “Pop Concert” in the coming weeks. I wanted to demonstrate to the class what the pioneering electronic instrument looked and sounded like. I brought in my parent’s clementine orange portable record player and cache of DEVO. Kid Rock and Eminem were about to meet their makers. I stood in front of the class, hunched over my turntable and synthesizer, and taught my 16-year-old peers about the history and evolution of electronic music.

After the class was over, I got the same feeling I had watching Hart Plaza in the rearview mirror of the Volvo, disappearing behind me. In the moment, the serenity of electronic music is totalizing. Afterwards, it becomes the vessel that you can pour yourself into and shape who it is you are.

This year is my eighth straight year attending DEMF, finding myself again. In all these years, Dalila and I have remained close friends. Every year, she can’t make it to DEMF. She doesn’t have tickets this year, but I hope that this year is different. I hope to put a ringing in her ears. I hope I can find a way to help her connect with the music festival that put my own puzzle pieces together.