My Life, Minus Music

For 3 years of being a uni student, I lived without music because my life was all about books, academic journals and 20-page papers I wrote but could barely save on my failing laptop. I taught English and math to kids in the afternoons I wasn’t in class myself. So much time went by, I forgot what music sounded like when it wasn’t Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged album or a YouthSpeaks poetry medley by the legendary San Francisco performance art collective, both burned and bootlegged for me as gifts, the titles scrawled carefully on the top side of each disk. As a student in my early 20s living in barely-furnished dorm rooms at Mills College in East Oakland, California, then a nearby apartment, then a house, with 2 CDs and no stereo, I always wished I could make a short film that could show the silence of those years. I would call this sad film “Mi Vida sin Música”-- “my life minus music” in Spanish, a language I learned from being mistaken for Mexican all those years before I finally pierced my nose and they stopped.

It sounds funny now, but smartphones didn’t exist in 2004--at least not for the poor. Broke young adults didn’t have $12/mo. for Spotify Premium. I was fresh out of my first live-in relationship and had just lost my mother, with my immediate family living in different states and countries within the Western Hemisphere.

How did I live without music? There were distractions and I kept busy exploring my sexuality and eventually coming out as bisexual. I changed my appearance to pass for male because some older white chick in my dorm told me I never could. Genderqueerness--or what I now think of as disguising femininity to be gender “neutral”--was replacing the masculine names lesbians used to describe themselves. “Butch” an “baby butch” were going out of style. Everyone knew that if you wanted to be a visibly queer woman 24/7 (read: get laid more often and way faster), short hair and smaller boobs were the way to go. (It worked.)

This would be a good time to mention that Mills College is an institution of single-sex education, a four-year university for women and people who were born female. Students protested because they wouldn’t let trans women in. With men only occasionally present as either professors or graduate students, women were emboldened to confront our differences of colour, age, class, size and every other intersection out there. Tough conversations became the norm as hundreds of closeted women of colour either came out or carried out secret affairs with “best friends.”

I came out. My father and siblings had all met my Afro-Caribbean girlfriend on a trip from Oakland to Las Vegas, Nevada, in the next state, right after the death of my mother. Despite my siblings’ silent objection, we were given my parents’ bedroom, where my father could no longer sleep in my mother’s absence. When they all arrived for my graduation dinner in 2006, they found themselves surrounded with Indian, Pakistani and Afghani lesbians. What’s all this got to do with music?

Whether we were demanding tenure for queer professors of colour, creating installations to bring attention to the femicides and female sex trafficking happening at our local seaport, or getting a certain queer male professor of colour fired for offering drugs and sex to his students, there was no time for music. In the absence of speaking, there was only the silence of reading, writing and community organising.

I forgot about music completely until a world-renowned professor carted a bunch of Ethnic Studies scholars into her hatchback to conduct research next door, at UC Berkeley. Outkast’s “I Like the Way You Move” was playing and to this day, that song makes me want to write a second thesis on existential performativity and how individuals make decisions to align themselves with opposing groups and institutions.

I must have rediscovered music during the year I took between my two degrees--2007. I was a published poet by then and started studying dance. As if to compensate for all the silence I’d grown to accept as the soundtrack to my life, the Arabic music used in my teacher Shabnam’s technique classes suddenly filled every waking hour I wasn’t teaching (I was a classroom teacher by now--surprise). Then I met a colleague who asked if I could salsa and I said I didn’t know. He dragged me home to his father, a salsa instructor. He said I could salsa, “mas o menos” (more or less) but my hips, cemented into the posture of an academic drowning in theory and literature at her desk, couldn’t keep time. The joints had calcified for life.

I threw myself into both dance forms, did hot yoga to improve my flexibility and range of motion, but still had no idea how music fit among my interests. I put myself through graduate school doing astrology and gem therapy for private clients and along with predatory federal loans and classroom teaching, I didn’t have to bother my father, a million miles away in Bangladesh, for help. After graduate school, I even trained as a psychic hoping to grow my energy business--a useless skill in tight-ass Sydney but a great side hustle in Oakland. But music was still just a luxury, an art form I couldn’t appreciate unless justified by needing to nail a dance choreography or set the mood for a poetry event.

When I began organising comedy events in Sydney in my late 30s, another organiser advised me to always use music to introduce a comedian to the stage. As in, any music. There was no curating happening, just skipping to the middle of a random song for 3-10 seconds and hoping for the best. I became obsessed with finding the right song, the right part of the song, to provoke intense emotion from each performer just before they attempt to disarm a room full of strangers with nothing but their own thoughts and memories.

Using a mix of what I grew up on in Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s, plus all the weird shit that made it to Vegas and Oakland in the 2000s and whatever I could YouTube from Busan, South Korea, I used these comedy shows to fill in some of the gaps--years of missed music I may never get back. Moving to Sydney’s added select new artists to my attention. Integrating musicians into my comedy shows has also put me in a unique new position to understand what it is these magicians do with sound and language--skills that as a child, I badly wanted. A repressed musician myself, having no artists in the family meant no one understood I needed to express something that sounded incomplete as just poetic verse. Still does.

Now that Sydney’s in our second lockdown and it seems we’ll never get back there, music is everything to me. I notice it in films, which I also didn’t have time for all those years of academic study. It’s how I set the tone for my day, how I ensure my writing gets started, how I change my mood when another imaginary crisis threatens to jump out from behind my bedroom door, where I’m always sure an intruder’s hiding. My upper middle class Viet neighbours tell me to let my guard down here, but I know I never, ever will. Living in places where getting home by sunset can mean the end of your life, where wearing a smile instead of a grimace immediately makes you a target for being mugged at gunpoint and not even make the evening news, changes a person. Forever. It’s good to know I can protect myself anywhere.

Just after Sydney’s first lockdown, a local rapper and radio broadcaster convinced me to do a course that would enable me to do my own radio show one day. I don’t know exactly why I agreed--I was frequently getting interviewed about what it’s like to introduce antiracist values into stand-up comedy--and I wanted to be better prepared. I’d teamed up with a colleague to make a doco film about other antiracist comedians and had interviewed them all myself with no training or experience, yet there was no one who could interview me. Only my voice “appears” in the film.

For years after arriving in Australia, I was told my accent was intolerable. Undesirable. Until another female professor, also an operatic singer and music teacher, told me she loved my voice and that it was beautiful. My international students in English class and audiences at comedy shows responded positively to it, despite the predictable resentment and eye-rolling it got every time an Australian colleague heard my voice for the first time. It wasn’t until I completed editing each interview into podcast episodes that I heard what that professor was describing--I sounded good. Broadcast-ready, even.

With live shows cancelled indefinitely, I have agreed to start a weekly radio program in late 2021. To produce, present and invite guests to join me via Zoom and to spotlight Sydney music around the world like no one has ever done before. To unapologetically choose songs and speak on them with other antiracist comedians who, like me, want to see artists of colour and unknown artists get airplay in just one context that privileges their voices above all others. Will there be Tupac, Outkast and Lauryn Hill on my playlists? Hell yeah. But I can’t wait for all the unfamiliar names and melodies to show me something new about this sparkly city I accidentally changed using all I learned as an antiracist academic--a city whose artists will continue to change me.

BEYOND THE LAWN