Girl With Music
I want a girl with music. Not a someone with a soundtrack, but a woman who takes her music personally, just as it was always meant to be. I can see the songs in her life, the different girls she is.
Sometimes she lies on the bed and listens to Belle and Sebastian. She stares out the window at the mist over the sun; she wears tights with polka-dots on them and thick-rimmed black glasses. She probably has the album on vinyl. She’s not exactly shy but her way is slightly sideways, something reserved and hesitant about the girl who’s always sees everything a little bit different. Belle and Sebastian makes her feel sad and happy at the same time when she’s alone with them. They tell her secrets.
But sometimes she’s on stage with torn fishnets. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing and she’s dancing in the living room at 9:00PM on a Saturday night, waiting for her posse to arrive. They’re drunk already and loud, probably British, stepping into her apartment supporting one another and screaming over the tops of their cleavage. That’s the night out to come, a rage, a raw euphoria blind and sloppy. It’s screaming sex when you just don’t care anymore what the neighbors hear. If there’s a cost for this much life, so be it, but dear god she’ll think about it tomorrow; and the fishnets will never be mended because that’s the girl she is.
Other nights she listens to Massive Attack. This one’s too tall and precise to be ignored. This one has taste. She understands perfume. She’s not hot, she’s sexy. The colors of her apartment all match – she designed it herself – and every accessory is just right. She probably has perfect breasts and she definitely has perfect speech, except when she snorts and spills wine onto her cream silk blouse. That’s why you love her, for the sparks of joy that flaw her elegance; and as she tears up the driveway in her one vice – christ, that’s a slick car – you suddenly see the claws implied by that chewed-up bassline.
Then there was the day you found her 17 years old in the sunshine and listening to Led Zeppelin. Zep is immortal. Page and Plant will be with us forever, they will exist in every generation as long as some beautiful child has hips that want to move. She’s got long red hair and you yourself are too young to appreciate the youth of her innocent face, but you see her there, eyes closed, just moving to that beat. It’s old. Page wails and Plant whines and the emotion gets her, but it’s the throb that makes her dance, makes her move, just move, for no one but herself; and you smile to know that it’s really in her, that rock and roll could never be just a show.
And she’s the soprano who makes grown men weep for her on that big Italian stage. And she’s freaking out to some other Miles Davis, yelling go! go! go! with no less passion than Kerouac. And she’s lounging on that grand piano with dark eyes and promises. It’s in her, it’s through her and—
hold on—
She’s looking at me. She just put something on that I’ve never heard before.
