White-people music

Over the weekend we seemed to be in the car an awful lot. While we were traveling from place to place, we listened to the radio. If I get control of the radio, it’s pretty much a given that we’ll be listening either to old-school R&B, or else to BBC-One. (If the satellite radio had an All Swedish Pop station, I’d be listening to that stuff twenty-four/seven.) If the Mont is in control, one can be pretty certain that it’s going to be tuned into the stations playing the songs of his long-distant youth.

The Mont was in control over the weekend. It was only a moment or two out of the house that he began singing along with some goopy song I’d never heard of before, allegedly a chart-topper in 1982. “If you must take your love away,” he sang, “take it gradj-oo-leeeeeee.”

“You know this song?” I asked with an eyebrow raised.

“Everyone knows this song!” he protested, and kept on singing.

I let him warble through the multiple melodies of “Hooked on Classics” without comment, before he started bobbing his head along to some Styx number. “What song is this?” I mumbled.

He stared at me. “Oh my god,” he finally said, and let it pass. I sighed, and thought to myself that if we’d been having a pop quiz on the lesser-known singles of Shalamar that the situation might be reversed.

It was after a number of similar exchanges that we had a showdown outside of a supermarket. “You know this song,” the Mont was goading me, jabbing his finger savagely at the radio.

“I do not,” I said stiffly.

“Come on!” he said, as if yelling at me more loudly would jog my memory. “You know it!”

“No I don’t.”

“You do!”

“Who is it, then?” I asked. The radio’s screen had abbreviated the singers’ names so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell.

“It’s England Dan and John Ford Coley singing ‘I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.’ So there,” he said. “Now tell me you don’t know it.”

“I don’t know it!” I freely admitted, taking a sample of the song on my phone and checking to see if he was correct. He was. “What the hell kind of name is England Dan, anyway?

“I can’t believe you don’t know that song,” he said. “What rock were you under?”

“I didn’t listen to white-people music in the seventies!” I protested, as he pulled the car to a stop. We unbuckled our seat restraints and got out of the car.

“White-people music?” he asked with incredulity. “You are white people.”

“I went to a city public school. I was the only white person in my high school graduating class!” I reminded him. “My senior class theme song was ‘One Nation Under a Groove,’ for crying out loud. I don’t know that white-people music from the seventies!”

And it’s true. There’s a huge cultural lacuna in my musical background, a vast gap in which the collected songs of Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John and Kiss have no resonance. To the Commodores and George Clinton or just about any funk ensemble of the era, I can respond with instant recognition, if not an eerie ability to recall all the lyrics. If it’s not from one of the very few groups that did gain a foothold of popularity in my high school—and that would be limited to Blondie, Queen, and my own secret indulgence of ABBA—or if the hook wasn’t played constantly on the K-Tel eight-track television ads back then, the chances that I’ve heard it are pretty doubtful. Yes, I’m talking about you, AC/DC.

“White-people music,” the Mont said again as we walked into the store. He shook his head, as if I were the whitest person he knows.