Unforgettable

"This is a book written in the presence of music." So begins Geoffrey O'Brien's sprawling memoir-cum-critical essay, and the reader is tempted to ask: What book isn't? As O'Brien goes on to extravagantly describe, we live in a world of wraparound sound, in which popular music can scarcely be escaped. Pop records play on our home stereos, are piped into restaurants and supermarkets, blare from the open windows of passing cars, tinkle behind the images on television and movie screens. Teenagers in the United States, Europe and Japan will spend tens of millions of dollars this year downloading ringtone versions of Top 40 hits to their cell phones. Even when momentarily out of music's reach, we are hard-pressed to switch off the jukeboxes in our heads. In 2003 James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, published a groundbreaking study, "Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on The Song-stuck-in-your-head Phenomenon," detailing the way that tunes lodge in our brains, for maddening hours and days on end. Fully 99 percent of those Kellaris surveyed had endured the malady at one point or another, and more than half were chronic sufferers. If Kellaris is to be believed, that haggard-looking soul across the subway aisle may well be trudging through life with "Macarena" stuck on repeat in his cranial hi-fi.

Indeed, pop music is arguably the art that we experience most intimately. Even songs we can't stand ricochet in our minds; those that we love become enmeshed with our innermost feelings and memories. Proust's madeleines have nothing on pop records, the most powerful nostalgia machines ever devised: Who doesn't know the sensation of being transported back in time by an old, half-remembered song, by the sound of a single piano chord or vocal quaver? "Don't play that song for me/Oh, it brings back memories," Aretha Franklin sang in 1970. "Singles remind me of kisses," went a hit by the English band Squeeze. "Albums remind me of plans."

O'Brien has spent years pondering the intersection of popular music and private experience, and the result is Sonata for Jukebox, a rambling, idiosyncratic, occasionally brilliant autobiography-in-singles- and-albums. O'Brien is the editor in chief of the Library of America, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and, it turns out, the product of a colorful, intensely musical New York household--part Glass family, part Dorsey family. His grandfather was the leader of the Rainbow Club Orchestra, a Depression-era jazz band; his father, a suave morning-drive-time disc jockey on New York's WOR; his mother, a musical theater comedian. From them O'Brien inherited an abiding love of music and an insatiable pair of ears; O'Brien's has been a life of voracious, deeply sympathetic listening--a life, even more than most, lived in pop music surround-sound.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.