#like all gaga albums i hated it on the first listen and then became OBSESSED

[drdemonprince]

also, happy ten year anniversary to art pop everyone, here's a photo from the review of the album i posted back then

[stretchjournalemerson]

The Words She Knows, The Tune She Hums

By Julia Slaughter

I know no one in the world who loves Elton John more than my mother. Born in the year of JFK’s inauguration and the Freedom Riders, she went to high school with feathered bangs and bell bottom jeans, collecting the Rocketman’s records and merchandise everywhere she went. One time I was helping her clean out her closet and we found pages and pages of yellowed notebook paper with her favorite lyrics and songs from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album in her curly teenaged handwriting, the pages saturated with forty-year-old highlighter ink and eraser streaks from her annotations.

My godmother, her childhood best friend and next-door-neighbor, Sandy, was her partner in Elton fever, and she often tells me of the time when he came to TD Garden in Boston in September of 1973 and the two twelve-year-olds could not get tickets in time: so the night of the concert, Sandy came over and they listened to her Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LP and cried on the hot pink shag carpet of my mother’s bedroom all night long.

Fortunately, this tragic night was later redeemed by the fact that Mom and Sandy ended up seeing Elton in concert together something like fifteen times after that over the years. I think about this story a lot, though, because it resonates with me to my core. My best friend Miguel and I had tickets to see Harry Styles at TD Garden - the very same stadium Mom and Sandy wanted to see Elton John at all those years ago - on Halloween of 2020, but the concert was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In true fan fashion, Miguel and I FaceTimed all night long on Halloween, both laying on our bedroom floors listening to Harry’s Fine Line album and crying for what could have been.

I love my favorite artists - musical, visual, or otherwise - with every fiber of my being, and I believe wholeheartedly that this trait has to have been from the influence of my mom, who owns every single deluxe version of Elton’s discography on vinyl (which is something like thirty studio albums) and has a T-shirt from every concert she’s ever been to. I look around my bedroom at the stack of every deluxe version of Taylor Swift’s albums in CD, at the pictures of her that I’ve cut from magazines and plastered all over my walls, at the playlists upon playlists of her songs for every conceivable situation or mood, at the lyrics of hers I’ve printed out and annotated myself, the ticket stubs from past concerts pinned to my bulletin board. This obsession is a manifestation of the emotional connection my mother and I both have to music and the artists that make it, and the unashamed expression of being a fan of something.

But my experience in this expression is often met with judgement with that unmistakable, underlying current of misogyny. Why is it when I say Taylor Swift is my favorite artist, I am met with eye rolls? Or when I say that One Direction contributed as much, if not more, to the music industry than The Beatles (maybe this is a bit of an overstatement, but a hilarious one that I

believe wholeheartedly), I am met with the rage of a thousand suns from men? Do they not remember the time before The Beatles became music for pretentious white guys, and were a British boy band with a largely female audience, just like One Direction?

Truth be told, I used to hate my mom’s music. I used to whine and whine when she put her CDs into the stereo, arguing that my friends’ parents let them listen to Lady Gaga and Ke$ha in the car. She would roll her eyes and turn the volume up just to tease me - this was her music and no one, not even her five year old daughter, could convince her to change it, unless I could come up with a better alternative (it wasn’t too hard - she vibed with Hannah Montana a lot more than a grown adult probably should have). She taught me to be proud of the things I love, because despite growing up in a time when gender roles were even stricter than they are now, she never let anyone, especially any man, give her a hard time for crying tears of joy when she got tickets to see Sonny and Cher at TD Garden in 1971.

It was - and always has been - young women like my mother and myself who have shaped and influenced the music industry, and I firmly believe that this passion and emotional connection to things is passed down from mother to daughter, from sister to sister, from friend to friend. It was certainly passed down when my mom took me to see Taylor Swift at Gillette Stadium twice, once when I was thirteen, and the other when I was sixteen. She watched Miguel and I scream and sing and dance in our nosebleed seats at the top of the stadium, and laughed, posting even more photos and videos than I did because I knew she would have killed to have videos of her and Sandy at their favorite artists’ shows when they were our age. She danced along in that unabashedly awkward way that all moms do, the way that normally would have embarrassed me into the next century, however this was no normal night: the crowd was roaring, the music was blaring, and my favorite singer in the entire world was right in front of me.

Now when we go for car rides, my mom always hands me the aux cord, and in this transfer of power, I feel like the student surpassing the master. She drove me to every single college tour I went on the summer before my senior year - which was something like ten different colleges across New England, ironically not a single one of them being the school I ended up attending - and I would scour my playlists to queue up songs I thought she would like for the two hour car rides. We would chat about whatever was on our minds, or nothing at all. Sometimes I’d fall asleep in the passenger seat, other times I’d go on and on about whatever show I was watching at the time, or drama with boys and friends, all with my favorite songs as the soundtrack. We’d laugh about getting horribly lost, or stop for fast food, or just sit quietly and zone out.

“I like this one,” she’d say every so often. Or I’d later hear her humming one of my songs to herself. These moments feel like the world’s greatest honor coming from someone who helped make the music industry what it is today. Singing along to “Tiny Dancer” one moment and “Love Story” the next, we create a space that is beautifully simple, lighthearted, and joyful, a space where our voices, however off-key they may be at times, are heard.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Professor Mary Kovaleski Byrnes for introducing the concept of memoir to our class, and for her helpful feedback on the first draft of this piece. Many thanks to Sarah Sweeney for her fascinating insight on memoir writing, and to Jasmine Suk for peer reviewing this piece. I’d also like to thank my roommate Megan for enduring my writer’s block and for bouncing ideas around with me. Finally, I’d obviously like to thank Mrs. Carol Slaughter, my mom, for inspiring this memoir, and also for everything else.