Fundamentally Broken?

So says my wife

Photo by Xavier von Erlach on Unsplash

My wife asked me, recently, what kind of music I listened to as a child. I told her the truth — Debussy, Mongolian throat singing, women chanting work songs in Gaelic — and she delivered her verdict without missing a beat: I am fundamentally broken. I laughed, because she’s probably right, and because the diagnosis arrived so early in our marriage that by now it just sounds like an anniversary toast.

It starts, like most things, with my mother. She played a black baby grand in our living room — Debussy in the afternoons, Beethoven when she was annoyed at something specific, though I never learned what. We didn’t have a stereo system. We had one record player, the kind that looked like a tiny piece of beige furniture pretending to be an appliance, and through that single speaker came everything. Not a genre. Everything. I don’t think anyone in my house ever decided I should hear a particular kind of music; the machine simply played whatever arrived, whether it was German beer hall songs or Broadway musicals, and I absorbed all of it the way a kid absorbs a language he hasn’t been told he’s learning.

This should have made me a generalist. Instead it made me musically insufferable. By the time other children were discovering music — actually discovering it, the way you discover a flavor of ice cream and decide it’s the only flavor — I had already heard so much of it that the discovering felt like old news. I wasn’t bored by music. I was bored by the idea that there was a normal amount of it to know. I needed something the record player hadn’t already used up on me in infancy.

So I went looking for the edges. John Cage, Charles Ives — composers who treated a piano like a question rather than an answer. Miriam Makeba’s click songs, which sounded like a language deciding to also be percussion. Women chanting work songs in Gaelic, in dialects from the Balkans, with that specific authority that comes from singing while your hands are doing something else — laundry, bread, burying somebody. Mongolian throat singing, which does something to the back of a single throat that by all rights should require two people. A fujara, which I will not pretend I can describe except to say it sounds like wind that has been given an opinion. Cellos played by people who clearly resented the cello — smacking the wood, hitting the strings off the beat on purpose, treating the instrument less like a voice and more like a body that needed shaking. And Ise Mitsue — a Japanese singer-guitarist whose hushed, nostalgic covers of Studio Ghibli songs, and of stranger things besides, I did not understand a single word of and, for months, never bothered to look up, because something in me suspected the not-knowing was doing half the work.

My wife thinks the throughline here is dysfunction. I think the throughline is actually pretty simple, once you say it out loud: none of this requires me to understand it to feel it. Debussy doesn’t have lyrics either. The baby grand in the living room was already teaching me, before I could read a word, that music could mean something oceanic without explaining itself. I don’t even like trying to read musical notation. Everything I sought out afterward — the click songs, the throat singing, the cello abuse, the guitarist I’d spent months not translating — was just me chasing that same arrangement: meaning that arrives in the body before it arrives in language. I was, by some accident of timing, taught to love a kind of communication, like photography, that skips the part where you have to know what’s being said. You simply know things differently.

That’s not nothing. I’d argue it’s almost the opposite of broken — it’s a fairly specific, fairly defensible taste, formed early and never really revised.

But here’s what changed: I gave in. One of the songs in Ise Mitsue’s catalog is a cover of “Sayonara Jinrui” — “Farewell Humanity” — originally by the band Tama, and I finally looked up what it actually says. The translation didn’t disappoint so much as escalate. It describes humanity arriving on Jupiter and gradually evolving backward into monkeys, deploying the word Pithecanthropus — an old, nearly extinct anthropological term for ape-man — seemingly for no better reason than how satisfying it is to say, right alongside the word Bougainvillea, a flowering vine with no connection whatsoever to apes, evolution, or Jupiter, chosen, as far as I can tell, for the exact same reason. I had spent months assuming that understanding the words would tame the song into something ordinary. Instead, understanding the words revealed that they were never trying to be ordinary in the first place. The translation didn’t explain the mystery away. It just gave the surreal mystery a vocabulary.

I told my wife all of this, fully expecting it to either cure me or convict me. It did neither. She still thinks I’m fundamentally broken. But now, at least, she knows precisely what she’s dealing with: a grown man who can listen to a song about evolving backward on Jupiter, built half out of obsolete biology and half out of a flower chosen purely for its consonants, and call it musical heaven. I laugh, because she’s not wrong. I just don’t think it’s the kind of broken anyone needs fixed.

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