I'm so fucked up in the head that I still can't forgive my mother for cutting the cord on my stereo when I was 12...— Music_Is_life (@hip_hop_1989) August 13, 2019
Okay, just so we're clear, this really did happen to me. I was literally 12 years old, in the funky world of junior high school, puberty, and general awkwardness. But it might as well have been fucking Chernobyl, because I was fucking crushed. I was a geeky, awkward kid, so getting picked on for every little thing was a given. So, I would come home wishing for an escape from the troubles I faced all day long, yet there was none.
I don't know if it's supposed to be therapeutic for me to write about this, but I'm still, over 30 years later, scrambling to put my finger on why a person could do such a cruel thing. Because, even then, music was my everything. And yet that everything was ripped out of my life like some sort of punishment just for being alive.
Every time I slightly misbehaved, that was my punishment. To get my boombox taken away. For months at a time. It was absolute hell for me. My mother was taking me to a Pentecostal church every Sunday, so I'm sure that had a lot to do with her strict policing of my music. I went to school and would hear about some new song or album and get asked if I had heard it, and I always had the customary answer of no, that my mother was trying to shelter me from that "devil music.
Maybe that's why, even into my 40's, I'm still an obsessive collector of music in all its forms, whether it's vinyl, CD's, cassettes, mp3s, or streaming. I guess I now know that by writing this that no one will ever take the much loved treasure of music away from me again.
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