Each year Rebekah Goode-Peoples writes an end-of-the-year wrap up of her experience of the year’s music. Check out her 2012 and 2013 editions as well. “Marriage,” the second album from her band Oryx and Crake, comes out June 2015.
Pop heaven: Iz gets Taylor Swift tickets for Christmas
by Rebekah Goode-Peoples
I bought my first cassette tape at Turtle’s Record Store in Roswell, Georgia. Belinda Carlisle. She was in the Go-Go’s, but I bought her solo album, “Heaven On Earth.” It was 1987, and I’m not sure why I bought it. I was nine.
I shook my hair in the shower while listening to that tape on my turquoise boom box, as I washed the dishes, in my head as my dad drove around listening to Schubert.
“Heaven is a place on Earth” played in my head as I sat in my pew at church. And not just normal Sunday morning church. Five times a week, floral dresses to the floor, don’t-talk-to-anyone-at-school-because-they’ll-make-you-sin-so-hard church. White-haired men intoned about heaven as a goal I was supposed to aspire to. As a maybe. As a reward in the future if I didn’t screw up. If I was perfect.
Heaven is a place on Earth. A thing you could have now. Here. A thing I’d never considered.
Sweet Belinda sang about finding heaven in the now, through love, and allowed me to question what I’d been taught—that life was all about plain work, sacrifice and subservience that might pay off in an eventual heavenly existence, after Armageddon. At the bare age of nine, I found out there was another way. A better one for me.
It wasn’t until I left my family home for college that I was able to officially leave the religion, but part of me left in 1987, humming Belinda Carlisle under my breath as I knocked on doors to tell strangers the good news I didn’t believe anymore.
I think I love pop music because of Belinda. I’m not saying pop music is equivalent to Proust or that one silly pop song saved me—certainly I would’ve found my way eventually—but I am saying that the saccharine flowing from Top 40 radio isn’t necessarily completely worthless. It is silly, but it can be powerful.
So it is with no shame that I admit that Taylor Swift’s “1989” was my top album of the year.
Because I am lucky to have a spunky five-year-old music loving lady named Iz who is susceptible to the charms of “Shake It Off,” I downloaded the album the day it came out. After a solid month of my daughter’s pseudo-rapping and shake-shaking, she finally let me play the rest of the songs. After 1.5 listens, we both knew all the lyrics and knew it was just the album to crank up while tooling around town with the windows down or booty-shaking doing the dishes.
But our love of T-Swift was not an accepted one. My partner rolled his eyes and sighed. “Why do you let her listen to that crap?” he said. Iz and I had to wait to until we were alone to listen to our girl.
The resulting clandestine Gilmore Girls-esque listening sessions were epic and no doubt adorable, but I worried that giving in to the Swift might cause irreparable harm, might make my girl a boy-crazy ditz. I worried, but we kept listening together and cutting all the rugs. The album is straight-up addictive.
Turns out, Iz has a mad “crush-love” on a 2nd grader, but I don’t think it’s Taylor’s fault. And when her heart breaks one day, maybe she’ll be able to shake it off. Shake, shake it off.
Who knows what good she’ll get from it?
Recently I took a writing workshop at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the instructor read a bit of Anne Sexton’s “Admonitions To A Special Person.” Sexton’s words grabbed and nudged me, and, for some reason, good ‘ole Belinda popped into my head. I keep learning the same truths. Over and over again.
There is value to pop music. It’s fun, and you can dance to it. It’s fun to know all the words and sing them loudly. And sometimes you might find a message in that glitter pink bottle that you needed.
So I let Iz listen to Taylor Swift as much as she wants. And when the “1989” tour comes to Atlanta, Iz will go to her first concert. I’ll give her what I didn’t have. Whatever her heart wants.
Other 2014 lovelies:
San Fermin- San Fermin
Chad VanGaalen- Shrink Dust
Jhene Aiko- Souled Out
Jessie Ware- Tough Love
No Devotion- 10,000 Summers
The War On Drugs- Lost in the Dream
Grouper- Ruins
The Afghan Whigs- Do to the Beast
TOPS- Picture You Staring
Admonitions To A Special Person
by Anne Sexton
Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.
Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you’ll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.
Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.
Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
Watch out for games, the actor’s part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.
Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won’t be heard
and none of your running will end.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Special person,
if I were you I’d pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come.
Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.
Photo by Jenn Brandt
Rebekah Goode-Peoples is a teacher and writer who lives in Atlanta, GA. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @goodepeoples and her band, Oryx and Crake, at @oryxncrake.
Creative Thresholds 
Leave a Reply