This Must Be The Space
By Mark Rosenberg
My car is many things. When I put on “Lounge,” it’s a café with comfy lounge chairs and tattooed baristas. When I put on “Amp,” it’s a sweaty club filled with writhing bodies. When I put on “Up,” it’s a hot-air balloon drifting over golden fields. When I put on “Drive,” it’s back to the old green Subaru my parents got in 2000: mud flap torn to shreds and reattached with zip ties, aluminum foil shoring up the holes over the tires, speakers on their last legs.
I have seventy-seven Spotify playlists, at last count, many of which I update, edit, and cull on a regular basis. Each is intended to make me the sculptor of my domain. I’m neurotic in many things, but none more so than deejaying. When I plan the playlist for a party, I fret endlessly. Should I play this BROCKHAMPTON song a third of the way through the festivities, or two-fifths? Is Blood Orange sufficiently groovy, or excessively mellow? And how many Talking Heads songs is too many? I’ve always viewed being on the aux as a vast responsibility. “Grabbing” the aux, like taking the wheel of a car, is only just the start. After that, you’ve got to ease it into gear, commandeer it over twists and turns, and parallel park it. You’re the architect of the space. The steward of the vibes.
Or so I’d long thought. But in a TED Talk recorded eight years ago (and watched by me only recently), David Byrne, the Talking Heads’ former frontman, argues just the opposite. At the start of his music career, Byrne explains, he played at small clubs like CBGB in the East Village. These shows teetered on the verge of bedlam: fans shouting, drinking, falling all over each other. The music, in response, became more raucous. Later, when Talking Heads’ nihilistic, avant-garde music became world-famous, Byrne moved to bigger stages: Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, Disney Hall in LA. But his songs didn’t sound the same in these big, resonant spaces. “I asked myself, do I write stuff for specific rooms?” Bryne says. “Do I have a place, a venue in mind when I write? Is that kind of a model for creativity?”
Byrne goes on to argue that music has long been shaped by the popular venues of the era, from rapid rhythmic drumming outdoors to long choral harmonies in gothic cathedrals to frenetic jazz improvisation in clubs to slow rock ballads in baseball stadiums. When radio and recorded music were introduced, everything changed: singers could whisper directly into listener’s ears, while DJs could topple dancers like dominoes, pumping manufactured beats through speaker towers.
My parents’ Subaru, I realized, dictated the music I played (it’s past tense now; they traded it in last month) every bit as much as my playlists transformed it. The speakers were always kind of grainy, so I stuck to sparse songs with easily recognizable melodies; my memory could fill in the rest. The bass blew out a few years ago after I played a Tame Impala song a few ticks too loud, shifting my selection towards crisp vocals and high-pitched snares. (And eventually, the tape-deck aux converter I used stopped working, so I was pretty much stuck to a rotation of 88.9 WCRB, HOT 96.9, and grumpy Boston-accented sports talk show hosts.)
My common room is much the same. It’s malleable—but not so much because of the music I play. It’s more about the people in it. If the space is packed with sound-absorbing bodies, it’s more or less a CBGB situation: 808s and big bass drops are the only way to cut through. But when the room empties out, the same sounds clang metallically off the plaster walls. Then, I turn the volume down and stick to something more ambient. I could play anything, of course, but I don’t. I listen to choral singing at a church every Sunday night; it wafts to the ceiling and washes over me. On a Beats boombox, it wouldn’t sound quite the same. My car or common room could become a club or café. But neither will ever be a cathedral.