And the Beat Goes On

by Tahira Chloe Mahdi

When I was a kid during the eighties, there wasn’t as much sex and violence on network television as there is today.  Not many people had cable, and children and teens of the era mostly watched sitcoms and cartoons, waiting for that one time per season when a network would allow a show to address thought-provoking issues such as drugs and teenage sexual pressures.  During the promos, a serious, low-toned male voice would state, “Don’t miss this very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes [or whichever show had teenaged characters that were expected to screw up].”

My parents would watch those shows with my brother and me, but if the topic was of a sexual nature, I’d spend the whole half-hour dreading the aftermath.  My brother, who was one year older, would leave the room during the closing credits. . Then, my mother would sigh and look at her plants lining the wall of the small living room as if she were contemplating their growth.  Finally, my father, a bearded, light brown, medium-sized man, would turn to look at me from his blue leather recliner and give me his idea of wise parental advice without sparing the hard edge he used for his job as a corrections officer. “You better not even THINK about sex ‘til you in college,” he’d say in his threatening manner, glaring at me through his darkly tinted glasses and pointing his finger in my face.  “You NEED to worry ‘bout what that report card gon’ look like when it comes in here.  Matter o’ fact, bring me that homework.”  He had been training me in this way since I was three years old – around the time he started telling me often that my name in Arabic meant, “Pure!  That means you don’t have any children until you get married!”   

My father’s Stay-A-Virgin-Or-I’ll-Kill-You approach didn’t have the same impact as my mother’s way of teaching me how to face what the great R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass called the bumps and bruises of love in his song “Love T.K.O.”  Whereas my father would turn down the radio if a song came on that was too sexually suggestive, my mom used the same songs as teaching experiences – when my father wasn’t around.

While I was growing up, the only times we had away from my father were during car trips to run various errands.  On the way to the store or to my relatives’ homes, my mom and I would listen to the radio, singing along to our favorite songs and talking about them during the commercials.  To her, a song about relationships was a prime opportunity for proactive measures.  She was enduring an abusive marriage in order to give her children a two-parent home that included their biological father, but she was not going to let her little girl grow up believing that love was supposed to be painful.  Her little girl wouldn’t be like the lovesick women in the sad love songs; heartbreak was for the women who didn’t know their own value. 

On a cloudy Saturday morning in 1987, my mom and I were in the family’s old brown station wagon, on our way home from the grocery store in the quiet, just-past-rural Chase area of Baltimore County where we lived.  To maximize the short amount of time we had together after shopping, we usually took the long way back to our house via narrow back roads garnished with farms, fruit stands, and two-bedroom townhouse developments occupied by many people who had just moved out of Baltimore City in search of a safer place.  My mom had a funny way of operating that old car radio, having to grasp the volume and tuning knobs with the knuckles of her index and middle fingers because her dazzling red-painted fingernails extended about an inch from her fingertips. As she turned up the sound, we heard Regina Belle singing her jazz-infused hit “So Many Tears”.  

And I don’t even pray anymore at night / ‘cause I don’t think that anyone hears /

All that is heard when it’s late at night / are my tears / so many tears...

            My mother immediately turned down the radio and said, “That’s not a good song.  Can you imagine lettin’ some man make you cry so much that you think God doesn’t hear you?  She’s stupid.  You say your prayers every night.  And don’t pray for a man like them stupid ones do.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon in 1988, my mom, my brother and I were in the car, on our way to my aunt’s house in Baltimore City’s notorious Cherry Hill neighborhood.  I celebrated the peaceful day with the wind beating lightly against my ten-year-old cheeks as I looked out of the open passenger window.  (Did they even have air conditioning in cars back then or could we just not afford such a fine automobile?)  My brother liked having the backseat to himself so he could play with his action figures or read comic books and talk out loud to himself.  I loved riding up front with my mother, taking the opportunity to ask questions about people in our family and using their life stories of hardship to shape my idea of the kind of grown-up I wanted to be. 

            “Listen to this one!” my mother exclaimed, having found a song on the radio that she could use for a lesson.  I didn’t want to listen to a song by the Whispers, a group of old men my father liked.  But my mom was dancing in the driver’s seat and singing louder than usual along with their song “The Beat Goes On.”  As the wind blew through her short hair (neatly styled with the help of sponge rollers), her big brown eyes sparkled and her caramel-colored skin seemed to glow from the inside.

I might as well get over / the blues / Just like fishing in the ocean / there’ll always be someone new...

            “You hear that?”  She asked me as if she hadn’t just sung it at the top of her lungs.  “There will ALWAYS be someone new!  If the man starts actin’ up, the beat goes on.  You can get any man you want if you’re smart and pretty.  And that’s pretty on the inside!  If you can’t be pretty on the inside, people will think you’re ugly anyway.” 

If all little girls had mothers like mine, who orchestrated an intervention during every artistic expression of love’s calamities, would they be better off?  Would they be able to avoid the tragedies that relationships can bring, or is heartbreak a natural human foible?  Could they be set on an irreversible course at an early age just by dancing with their moms in the front seat of an old car while singing loudly to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

Who needs a heart / when a heart can be broken?

I can proudly say that I have never experienced heartbreak.  I’ve been cheated on and lied to by all but two of the six serious boyfriends I’ve had over the years, but all it ever amounted to was general disappointment and a bruised ego.  Besides, I’ve always had backup: my many male friends all over the East Coast who were all too happy to help me forget about my troubles.  Don’t settle for sex and its complications from one guy, I tell myself, when you can get genuine attention, admiration and respect from ten of them at once without leaving The Friend Zone.

When I tell someone that I hate love songs, I get incredulous looks, dropping jaws, and audible gasps.  “Why would I want to listen to a song by someone saying that they can’t live without a person?” I ask.  “Isn’t that blasphemous? And it’s just stupid!  There are always more people to date.” 

            I’m usually accused of taking things too seriously.  “It’s just a song, damn!” people say.  But I am not sure if art imitates life or if life imitates art.  I think that I’m happy because I censor what I listen to, avoiding anything sad or laden with pain and desperation.  Others, however, argue that I’m missing out on a lot of good songs as well as the euphoric feelings of being in love.  Music, they say, cannot have a negative impact on me because art cannot affect a person’s behavior.

            On a fateful night in October of 1984, a nineteen-year-old kid in Indio, California was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.  News articles and rumors reported that the coroner removed headphones from the young man and discovered that he had been listening to Ozzy Osbourne’s song “Suicide Solution”. 

Wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker / Suicide is slow with liquor /

Take a bottle, drown your sorrows /Then it floods away tomorrows...

Ozzy Osbourne faced three different lawsuits from parents claiming that he was responsible for their children’s deaths.  He has always maintained that the song was about a friend who died while drinking.

The lawsuits were dismissed, as are all cases where people claim that a song made a person behave a certain way.

            On a cold, February night in 1998, I was driving over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Maryland into Virginia to visit the guy I had been dating seriously for a whole year.  Earlier that day, I had found an old tape that contained the song “Just Can’t Stay Away” by En Vogue.  I had been playing the tape all day, since that morning’s drive to work, and the lyrics made me feel justified in my decision to continue dating a man that I had just caught cheating on me.

This is not the first time, baby / I ever wanted to get away, no / oh, but the magic of your love /

just would not let me stray / So I find that I just can’t / stay away / from you…

He was twenty-four and already married – well, separated – and had never told me he loved me.  Being a naïve twenty-year-old, I didn’t know if I was supposed to expect him to be faithful to me.  Besides, it didn’t matter because I was young and free, and En Vogue knew exactly how I felt.  They knew what it was like to defy the warnings of family and friends just to be with a philandering man whose charms were like a powerful drug.  For the next two months, I’d let En Vogue convince me that I just couldn’t stay away from him.  I have my own proof, you see, that music does damage.  Yet, I can’t sue En Vogue for the fact that their song helped me justify a stupid decision.

            I would, however, like to host a special awards show for the artists whose music helped me realize that I was being an idiot.  That April, I accepted a really cool position in radio and music became an even bigger part of my life.  Immersing myself in my new job provided me with enough distractions that prevented my disappointment over the guy from turning into heartbreak.  There were the songs "I Hate You So Much Right Now" by Kelis, "I Used to Love Him" by Lauryn Hill, and "A Rose is Still a Rose" by Aretha Franklin.  There were the famous men I encountered every day who were way cooler and more accomplished than the Kinko's employee I had just dumped.  Then, there was my own blossoming self-esteem and sense of accomplishment since getting my dream job.  The beat went on, just as the Whispers had taught me ten years earlier.

It was around this time that I began to carefully monitor everything I listened to, putting myself on a No Love Song diet.  Working in entertainment forced me to see all sides in the debate over lyrical content in music.  While I refuse to listen to songs that I think would affect my behavior, I sympathize with the teens who fight for their right to enjoy music that their parents think is too violent.  They remind me of myself when I was heavily into gangsta rap.

            On a warm June day in 1996, my friend Donna* and I were cruising the suburb of Clinton, Maryland, half-looking for summer employment and half-looking for male attention.  I was eighteen, driving my mom’s navy blue 1995 Maxima with the sun roof open, and blasting the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die CD.  To use an old hip hop slang term, we were frontin’, trying very hard to look cool, even pretending my mom’s car was mine.  We wanted to feel like the bad boys characterized in the violent songs, so when “Gimme the Loot” played, we bobbed our heads and rapped along like we knew what we were talking about.

You’re talking to the robbery expert / I’m stepping to your wake with your blood on my shirt /

Don’t be a jerk / and get shot over bein’ resistant / ‘cause when I lick shots, the shits is persistent…

We were only frontin’.  We weren’t actually going to go and rob and kill anyone.  The song didn’t make us want to fight or carry guns.  To us, it was just a song that made us feel cool.  Such is the battle for many young people whose parents, elders, religious leaders, and government officials think that violent lyrics in hip hop, metal, and other genres will ruin their lives. 

            Our country is founded on freedom of expression (so the artists say), and though songs and television shows are artistic expressions (so their writers say), CD’s come with advisory labels (thanks, Tipper Gore) and some television shows give a viewer discretion warning (thanks to parents like my father).  If the powers that be are so intent on protecting us, why don’t they censor these stupid love songs?  All this talk of crying, obsession, and sleepless nights does a lot of damage to young women! 

            Despite the fact that my mom taught me to be careful of conducting my love life like “those stupid women” in the popular romantic ballads, she has always been fond of the songs in which men crooned as love-struck puppets, captivated by women they couldn’t have.  After her divorce, she couldn’t get enough of them.  Perhaps we all have our own form of this double-standard when it comes to an audience’s reaction to art. 

            Sade's song "Love is Stronger Than Pride" once made me call my high school sweetheart and tell him I wanted him back.  The hip hop ballad "Addicted" was my favorite song back in 2002 when I decided to move in with a guy I had been dating for only two months.  At the same time, I could enjoy the brutal lyrics of songs from Dr. Dre's CD's without feeling especially homicidal.

            The kind of caveat I need for my entertainment is a voiceover or label proclaiming, “Warning: This will turn you into a spineless, empty sack of a woman who will be left alone and crying because you’ve been conditioned to believe that love hurts.” Bring on the violence, drug wars and guns!  It won’t hurt me; I’m a lover, not a fighter.  And that’s the problem.  The real threat to my existence is a man who will make a fool of me, destroying my years of schooling under my mom to earn the title of The Unbreakable One.   Who’s going to protect my heart then?  The censors won’t, that’s for sure.  And I don’t know whether this fact makes me a stronger woman or renders me incapable of sustaining a meaningful relationship, but I love that I hate love songs.