Sometime around 1988 my mother had a client, in some matter of divorce or custody, who could not, as often happened, afford to pay her legal bill. This client was the proprietor of a tanning salon in a strip mall at the heart of the mostly Filipino community of Natomas, a labyrinth of strip malls and housing developments that had sprung up over the course of my childhood on a flood plain just north of downtown Sacramento.
The tanning salon was called, and I'm quite serious about this, 'Tan-Fastic'. As part of the deal for the non-payment of her bill, this client, whose name was, let us say, Corazon, agreed to offer me a part-time job welcoming clients and preparing Tan-Fastic's glowing beds, removing the sebum-traced outlines of human figures that were left on the glass after each session. I was a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout, and if I was to have any future at all, it was just as likely to be in the artificial-tan industry as anywhere else.
Now you might have guessed already that the Filipinos were not the greatest consumers of tanning-bed kilowatts, but there was no shortage of white people willing to make the drive over from the nearby gated communities in order to find that special combination of tanning, nail care, and massage --three industries that had been cornered by distinct California Asian communities-- all in the same strip mall.
As with most jobs I took in that period, I don't recall ever being remunerated by Corazon. But pay was the least of things. I took this job like I took everything else in that period, which is to say principally as an occasion to play the DJ. I am quite certain that Tan-Fastic featured the best mix tapes of any tanning salon in the entire Sacramento Valley.
Now I had never been in a tanning bed myself, but I liked to imagine that the experience would be something like that of William S. Burroughs's dream machine. Accordingly I selected mostly ambient, droning electronic music that I thought would enhance the ecstatic effect of the ultraviolet radiation. I imagined it would be particularly fitting to listen to 'Hamburger Lady' from Throbbing Gristle's Grief, at high volume, while being irradiated.
It will come as no surprise that most of my customers did not share the same sensibilities. I don't know whether you've ever seen an enraged bourgeoise trying to slither out of a tanning bed mid-session, but I've seen more than a few. One in particular has stuck in my mind, a woman who must have been in her early thirties, and was the only customer ever to avail herself of Tan-Fastic's in-store safe, where she stored her fat diamond ring and other decorations as she lay motionless and unaware in her glowing chamber.
I remember her storming out, only ten minutes or so into the session, wrapped in a towel, her face a perfect mix of leather brown and lobster red. "I told you I didn't want any of that weird stuff this time!" she shouted. "You think it's funny to put on your freaky music when I'm trapped in there. Well you know what? It isn't. Now put on something calming and nice or I'm going to have a word with Corazon."
What did she mean by 'calming and nice'? Like that song about children being the future? Or the one where it sounds like the guy is saying 'after all the hooey we've been through, I will make it up to you'? I honestly didn't know what she was after. Then I remembered I had a Cure tape in my bag. Girls like that. My girlfriend liked that. I put it on. Madame finished her session and left without a word. I was fired the next day.
This incident came back to me recently as I found myself having to endure The Cure's 'Close to Me' while sitting in a dentist's chair. The radio was tuned to Montreal's station for 'the greatest hits of the '70s, '80s, and '90s'. And who did I have to complain to about this travesty? Where was my Corazon, who would listen sympathetically as I explained that I was once fired from a job for playing exactly the same music that now soothes root-canal patients? Who would care to know that, from my perspective, the mix of music offered up by that radio station was an impossibility, a garbled code, Borges's Chinese encyclopedia. 'Close to Me' cannot, in any natural system, be preceded by 'I Will Survive' and followed by 'Dude Looks Like a Lady'.
I bring this up because the overwhelming response to my recent post against eighties music was that I should quit worrying and just 'listen to what I like'. It would take a naïveté I can barely imagine to believe that this is what one is doing when one listens to music. Music is music, but it is also (and this is especially true of pop music) a sort of totemic cosmology: an imposition of order on the world through distinctions of value. The place of a totem in the overall order can change from one generation to the next, as the incomprehensible jumble on Montreal FM radio suggests. But this is only a reordering, and not a dissolution of order that would leave only pure aesthesis in its place.