“You hurtle toward the future where you might look back upon the intricate secret handshake and laugh at how silly it once was, if you can remember it at all.”
Back then, there was no time where we wouldn’t be listening to music. We would pass an earbud back and forth like a game of tennis, returning serves of melodies and noise. In the years prior to streaming, we would scour the internet for new sounds, finding deadly Limewire downloads, converting Youtube videos to MP3, buying songs on iTunes using our parent’s credit cards. The potential of music as a means to connect two people felt endless. But then again, time passes and life throws us in some strange directions.
The first time we met was in our music classroom. He was tall and striking - the same height as me but much more interesting to look at. He had wiry black hair and thick glasses that accentuated his long facial features. His was thin, even lankier than myself, and he seemed to stroll around as if moving was a challenge. Every time he would stride into class late, he would careen through tables and chairs like a golem. In the middle of a lesson he would pipe up, speaking loudly to question whatever the teacher was explaining. He always knew the correct answer to whatever question was being posed, but he was more interested in interrogating the question itself: ‘But why sir?’, ‘That doesn’t make sense sir’, ‘But that’s stupid… sir’. It was as if the world was something to be cracked open, not to see what was inside, but to interrogate why you would crack it open in the first place. He excited me. I wanted to be like him.
We had been sitting next to each other for a few weeks now. For some reason, we would always just end up sitting beside each other. He would make some quip and I’d laugh, but that was the extent of our conversations. One day after class, he came up to me to have a proper chat. We got talking about the kind of music we enjoyed. I suspect this was in my Nirvana period (a period that had lasted most of my life up until that point). The conversation took us all the way to our next class, but I didn’t want to peel away. He described music in a way that made you know exactly how that music sounded. If it was loud and chaotic, he would be flinging his arms and speaking loudly. If it was laidback and melodic, he would let his words float by, closing his eyes as if he was listening to the music right then and there. When we parted for our separate classes, he told me he would show me some of this music at our next lesson.
I’m reminded of this time after having read Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True. Of all the books I’ve read, I would say that I have had the most trouble getting my hands on this one. A couple of years ago, I read an article of Hsu’s in The New Yorker. It described how he would keep in touch with his dad through fax while Hsu grew up in America and his father made money for the family back home in Taiwan. I was deeply affected by this piece; how Hsu and his dad connected through the music and culture that was evolving around them. They would discuss the deep impact of Nirvana, and connect over the untimely death of Kurt Cobain. In one fax, Hsu’s dad consoles his son:
‘I agree it’s a social tragedy, too much pressure. If he felt that it’s beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. He felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs to compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us.’ (This fax is written in Hsu’s dad’s original English.)
This article would go on to become a chapter in Hsu’s memoir. As I read the piece, memories I had long since buried flooded back, rekindling that feeling of being more alive when music can say the words we are unable to express.
But getting my hands on a copy of the book was somehow impossible. As soon as the book was released, I scoured every book shop I knew to try and find it. With its bright orange and yellow cover plastered with a photo of Hsu behind a lens, it was hard to miss. Most bookshops said they could only order it from the States, setting me back in excess of $100. I thought that was a little steep for a book that was less than 200 pages, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider it. I’d never been as excited to pick up a new book, it felt like I was a child again, waiting for the release of a brand new album.
A year passed, and there was still no sign of the book being released in the UK or Australia. I would read the news and see that the book had won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which only made me more frustrated that I couldn’t read it. Then it won the Pulitzer for non-fiction. It was like being tortured in real time: the meal only getting larger and looking more delicious, but I was being told that I wasn’t allowed to devour it.
Almost two years after the book had been released, I saw a sign in the window of Waterstones saying that the paperback edition will be released in a month. I go in, tell them to take my money, and put my name down for the pre-order. The day it finally came in, I got up far earlier than I usually do, ran to the shop - yes, I ran - just as it opens, grabbed my copy and started reading it as I walked home. I finished it within a matter of hours.
The story itself is simple. It is about the unlikely friendship of two very different people: one is an introvert who prefers to sit inside, listening to alternative music and reading books alone (Hua Hsu), while the other is more preppy and popular. The friend listens to popular music that Hsu detests, while being far more successful with girls and people - an all-round better person. I won’t say what happens - that’s for you to read - but the way Hsu recollects this period as if each memory is being picked from a box of lost memorabilia is beautifully precise, wonderfully self- deprecating, and simply heart-wrenching. His prose is clean, exacting, and quiet. Hsu turns the coming-of-age memoir on its head. It left my heart full and my mind racing. I could feel memories come billowing back. My past rising to meet me. People I had forgotten becoming crystalline.
Now I’m back in the music department. My new friend was already sitting on the church pew that sat alone and out of place in the department hall. He looked up to see me, smiling and waving. I took a seat beside him. He reached into his bag and pulled out what appeared to be a piece of sheet music that was shaped into a pentagon. There were paper clips that kept the paper sheet folded in shape. ‘I thought you might enjoy this’, he said. I opened it up, and inside was a blank CD. I still have this CD in the top drawer of my old room, still wrapped in the same sheet music. ‘I burnt an album onto it last night. You said you liked Nirvana, well, this is even better.’ I thanked him and we went into class.
Later that night when I got home, I opened my CD player, put in the disc, and pressed play. A pair of maracas came shaking through the speakers, quickly followed by a growl of rolling drums and bass guitar. Guitars splintered in from every-which direction, hurtling through notes that had no right being placed next to each other. They bounced and flew into a whirl of chaos and noise, before crashing in like lightning in a cataclysm of cymbals and distortion. A voice screamed:
I must have read a thousand faces
I must have robbed them of their cause
Sickened thirst, sickened thirst
Keeps it together
Soft white glow in the cranium
A bullseye made sedated
Then the voice and the music somehow rose to another plateau, the singer screaming for dear life:
Beware
Beware
Beware
The album finished. Each song shaking me with something I had never heard before. I pressed play again. It was like discovering another planet. Nirvana sounded tame in comparison to this. The album didn’t even have a name on it. I just had the music, and I couldn’t stop listening to it.
The next day in class, I asked my friend what the name of the band was. ‘Did you like it?’ he said. I said I didn’t have the words to describe how I felt. ‘It’s good isn’t it? The band broke up after releasing that album.’ He told me about the band - At the Drive-In - and showed me some videos of their live performances. They were chaotic, like children throwing a tantrum. Guitars would fly over heads, strings would become horribly out of tune, the whole thing sounded terrible and looked fantastic. It was the embodiment of ‘punk’. I still feel the hairs on the back of my arm stand on end when I watch one of their live videos. He said he would bring me another CD in our next lesson.
But then I didn’t see him for several weeks. I asked some people around school who I knew were friends with him and they said they hadn’t a clue where he was. They explained that sometimes he won’t come to school for a few weeks then reappear again later without an explanation. I let it go, listening to my new favourite band every day. The music calmed something inside of me. Through the chaos, my body became light and I could feel my angsty worries and fears subsiding.
Hua Hsu’s writing on music is better than any writing I have read on the topic. ‘I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together.’ He makes the experience of listening to music come to life off the page. I remember that feeling, the discovery of music like a religious experience, your body rising as the song lifts you off your feet. It’s a greater feeling than (almost) anything else.
A few weeks passed and life went on.
I walked into our music classroom and suddenly there he was. I took a seat next to him and he reached into his bag and pulled out another pentagon. ‘This ones a bit different’, he said, delving straight back into the music, ‘but it’s equally as good.’
I went home, put on the record, felt profoundly changed, and listened to it a on repeat for what must have been a month. It was folk, country, and avant-garde experimentalism all wrapped up into a fascinating bag of prettiness and strangeness. ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,’ he told me a few days later. ‘It’s by far Wilco’s best album.’ I still return regularly to this strange and wonderful album, just to sit in its glow for an hour.
This system would continue over the course of the next year. We would listen to new things in class that we had discovered, blasting the song as loudly as we could on our headphones. Sometimes we would go to the music practice rooms, put on our most recent favourite song and play it so loudly that we must have done some permanent damage to our ears. We’d pretend we were playing the music together, jumping on tables, standing on chairs, crashing to the ground with all our weight, feeling music cascade through every inch of our bodies, our skin coming alive through our shared love of noise and chaos. We became closer as friends. We would stay at each other’s houses, sleeping on the floor of his granny flat. Whenever we were together, there was that energy, that volatility of discovery, something only captured in your mid-teens.
Then one day, my friend stopped coming to school altogether. I didn’t hear anything from him. It’s not for me to say what was happening in his life. We were reaching the tail end of school, in the humdrum of exams, failed first relationships, and knowing that things will only get better now that we were becoming more mature. I would be the first to admit that my mind was preoccupied. My fears and worries were elsewhere, and my selfish personality at the time (I can only hope I’ve moved away from that version of myself) made me incapable of thinking about anyone else. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to reach out, to have simply checked in and said ‘Hey, how you going mate?’ Years later, I can see the simple things I could have done to return even the slightest ounce of what he had- has - given me.
Every time I play those albums - Relationship of Command, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, TNGHT EP, the list goes on - I remember the feeling of hearing them for the first time and knowing that music could bring two people together through something more than just words. Hua Hsu says towards the end of his book, ‘Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us further away.’ The words that went unspoken are all I think of now, and the fact there was so much I didn’t say only makes me feel further detached. I should’ve said, ‘You blew open my world to so much wonder by not having to say a thing. Thank you.’ But then life meanders on, you forget about those things that seemed inconsequential at the time and you continue on with life. Until, one day, you remember it all again, and you find it hard to forget.
What I do know is that my friend is doing well. I hear about him every now and then through people who know people who know people (so on so forth) who know him. I’ve thought about reaching out, but every time I tell myself I should, I find a reason (an excuse) not to.
Hsu says, ‘Words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.’ I have these memories enclosed in amber, and they still make me nostalgic for the times where music was the be all and end all and nothing else mattered. Where music could pull two people together simply through a shared love of sound. ‘There is still time to repay those gifts,’ Hsu says. I think it’s time to reach out. Now is a better time than any to repay those gifts, to repay just a little of what still feels so tangible, so electric, so real.
‘“Stay true to the game,” later abbreviated to “stay true.” True to yourself. True to who you might have become.” - ‘Stay True’, Hua Hsu
Was not expecting that..
beautiful