5 Songs That Unlock My Memories

In sequential order

They say that smell triggers memory. It’s the reason my wife gets nostalgic whenever she smells manure. While I’m busy rolling up the windows, she smiles wistfully, lost in bright adventures on her grandparent’s farm.

Smells have never really done that for me. Music is the key that unlocks my memory vault. Even just a few bars of a certain song acts as a form of muscle memory, effortlessly reminding me of things I might otherwise forget.

Here are five songs that are especially meaningful to me. Not for the song, but for the piece of myself the music reclaims, even if only for an instant.

You Dropped A Bomb On Me — Gap Band

Some of my memories are mere fragments. So it is with this one.

It’s sometime in the early-to-mid 80s. My mom is driving my brother and me around in her red Z28 Camaro. The windows are down and the T-Top is open. The wind whips around the interior like a trapped spirit, ruffling my hair.

And then Dropped A Bomb On Me – as we called it – comes on the radio.

But you turned me out baby (you dropped a bomb on me)

Baby, you dropped a bomb on me

We sing together. I don’t know many of the words, just the hook.

My favorite part is the whistle as the imaginary bomb plummets and it still is.

Kiss From a Rose — Seal

Batman Forever came out on June 9, 1995. If you were alive at that time, you might remember the music video for the movie, which featured this song by Seal. If you lived in a tiny Northern Michigan town at the time, you might remember the one good radio station playing this song endlessly. And continue playing it. All. Year. Long.

So it’s ironic and a little funny that my first dance with my then-girlfriend and now-wife would be to a song we both absolutely despised.

I worked at a grocery store during high school. The store decided to throw a Christmas party my senior year; I’m not sure why — maybe we’d sold a lot of flour and were flush with dough. They rented out a hall and hired a DJ and brought in a caterer. Everyone was going. We could even bring dates!

The store went out of business a few years later. I’m sure it’s unrelated.

I’d gone to Homecoming with a different girl; Prom was still five months away. We were both excited to get out on the dance floor for the first time.

And then Seal started in.

There used to be a graying tower alone on the sea

You became the light on the dark side of me

These are clearly killer lyrics, poetic and beautiful. I’d just heard them way too many times that year. As we swayed to the beat, we discussed how much we hated the song, and whether or not we should’ve waited for a better one for our first dance.

Real Muthaphuckkin Gs — Eazy-E

I have a soft spot for cursing in songs, all the more if it’s rap. You can take a boy out of the city but he’s not gonna forget all the colorful stuff he’s learned. Sorry, Mom!

Shortly after high school, my brother and I worked in the packaging department of a semiconductor plant. I was saving up for college and an engagement ring. My brother had something a little different in mind.

One day he met me outside as I was getting off work and had me sit in the passenger seat of his car. I already knew the big surprise — he’d been planning on getting a booming system for his car practically since he got the car.

He had the perfect song to test the bass on his new speakers; if you know this song, you know how hard it thumps, especially at the beginning.

Found a pup and now yer dapper, but tell me where the

Fuck ya find an anorexic rapper

(The context here is Eazy-E is dissing his old friend Dr. Dre; these references are to Snoop Dogg and they are gold.)

Looking back, there’s something hilarious about a couple of white kids head bopping to gangsta rap behind a warehouse in a one-light hick town. We were just kids, clinging to what we’d known, even as the future was starting to pull us in different directions.

My brother’s cherished system was stolen a couple of years later. He’d come to visit my wife and me in our new hometown and arrived in window-rattling fashion. We didn’t know at the time that the area was somewhat sketchy. By morning, his speakers, radio, and hundreds of CDs were gone.

I can’t remember the joy of hearing his new system without the bitter memory of how it ended.

In da Club — 50 Cent

Look — another rap song with foul lyrics!

My brother got married in 2006. I was the best man and had given an epic best man speech — according to the hordes of drunk dudes that came stumbling up to me later. Standing up and talking in front of 300 people is never an introvert’s idea of a Good Time. And, shame of all shames, I’d gotten visibly choked up talking about how as kids we’d pinned towels around our necks and ran around playing Batman and Robin; it was calling him my chum that did me in.

I was 28 at the time — don’t do the math — with one kid and another on the way. A few months earlier, I’d noticed I was starting to develop a bald spot. It was undetectable to anyone else, but I knew, and that’s all that mattered. It seemed as though I stood on a precipice, at the height of my youth, after which only a long fall awaited.

Between such morose thoughts and the stress of the speech, I decided I was going to drink a lot of alcohol and dance as my life depended on it.

Enter 50 Cent.

When I pull out up front, you see the Benz on dubs

When I roll 20 deep, it’s 20 knives in the club

This song had been on heavy replay since it came out and I knew all the words, even the bad ones; sorry, Mom! My wife sat out the fast songs because she was pregnant, so naturally I ended up in a faux grudge match with another groomsman, wherein we took turns spitting lyrics and gesturing at each other. As you do.

Did I mention I had been drinking a lot?

My brother has footage of all of this. They rewatch their wedding video sometimes — who does that? — and he’ll make a comment about me tearing it up on the dance floor. I’m sure I look like an idiot, but I felt like a rap god.

All Summer Long — Kid Rock

As far as I’m concerned, Kid Rock has had only one really great song — Bawitdaba, which instantly makes me wanna jump in mosh pit and try to love someone — and everything else is meh.

Way back in the early 90s, I once rode around metro Detroit in my older cousin’s car listening to a Kid Rock mixtape he’d gotten from an underground music scene. My cousin was going on about how Kid Rock was gonna be huge. I don’t remember any of the songs but there was a ton of cussing, which was part of the appeal. Again, sorry Mom.

All Summer Long came out in 2007, probably 15 years after I first heard of Kid Rock. At some point, the guy who’d gotten my attention with quick, profane lyrics and the thunder of heavy metal had decided he could sing. And then started making bluesy, country-rock dreck. Kid Rock nowadays is like a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band that only plays original songs; gimme some Free Bird already.

So it’s fitting that this particular song holds a special place in my heart because someone else hated it even more than I do.

I’d driven up to Northern Michigan to golf with my stepdad and Uncle Rich, who worked as a mechanic and general handyman at the course. Uncle Rich could get us out for free, so long as we golfed in the late afternoon during the week — the so-called twilight hours. That was fine by me – it just meant fewer people to yell ‘four!’ at.

I don’t quite remember how it happened now, but I ended up alone with Uncle Rich in his truck before the round. We sat with the windows down and the radio up.

All Summer Long came on.

She was seventeen and she was far from in-between

It was summertime in Northern Michigan

Uncle Rich quickly flipped to another station. “I’m so tired of this fucking song.”

“Not a fan of Kid Rock?”

“The stations up here play it constantly. All because he mentions Northern Michigan. He’s probably never even been north of Flint.” He lit up a smoke. “They even use that part of the song for the jingles they play every hour. I can’t get away from it.”

Uncle Rich died a few years later after complications from a stroke. I think of him whenever the Detroit Lions do something stupid, or at Thanksgiving, while loading up my plate — somehow we’d made it a competition to see who could eat the most; I always lost.

I don’t remember anything else about that day on the golf course. But whenever All Summer Long comes on, I give the radio the bird and think, ‘this one’s for you, Uncle Rich’.

And then I turn the fucking channel.

Eric writes about pop culture here at Medium and is probably the second coming of Kevin Bacon on the dance floor. If you’d like to see what else he’s working on, check out his newsletter.