20-Something Bloggers Blog Swap

Blogger's note: This entry's been authored by Amy over at One Size Fits All. She's a talented writer and a wonderful lady, so do me the favor and check out her musings because her blog is a fresh and fascinating thing. I'd consider it a personal favor if you did. Thanks!

In my real life, I’m primarily into contemporary folk music – think a lot of women with unshaved armpits with their acoustic guitars – with some classic rock and ‘80s pop thrown in for good measure. In my car, the volume’s always up, and, so long as it’s not snowing, the window down. In my car, we have dance parties.

For the last five months, I’ve been investing more time in Top 40 music, as part of my mainstream blog project (where you’ll find Mike rocking his socks off today). So it was under that lens that, about three weeks ago, I stumbled onto Whitney Houston’s latest single, “Million Dollar Bill.”

As I said in my own blog, “Million Dollar Bill” is like being transported back to 1992. (Luckily for me, fashion already made that announcement last year, and I am well stocked in leggings and oversized shirts for this adventure.) But for the woman text messaging random things in the corner of the video, and the fact that you’ve since gone through puberty, you would have no idea that any time has passed at all since Whitney’s diva noted days of The Bodyguard.

Which leads me to what happened after I posted that blog entry.

Have you suffered through this phenomenon where you’ve carted around MP3s that you downloaded when it used to take actual time to illegally download your music, but you were so excited that you were no longer taping things off the radio on your boombox that you didn’t actually care how long it took, and then all of a sudden you don’t seem to have them anymore? After listening to “Million Dollar Bill,” it came to my attention that my only remaining Whitney MP3s were “When You Believe,” the duet she did with Mariah Carey for The Prince of Egypt and “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

So, iTunes gift card in hand, I downloaded songs that would have made my pre-puberty self proud. Oh, yes, I’m talking “I Will Always Love You,” “Greatest Love of All,” “Exhale (Shoop Shoop).” Remember those dance parties in my car? Well we had a particularly nice week weather wise last week that found me window down, driving up the crowded main street of my Pittsburgh neighborhood, absolutely belting out “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Tuesday morning, I passed two of my friends, my hand grasping the air outside to the urgency of “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”; I have not yet heard if I had my music loud enough for them to actually hear as I drove by. I hope so.

By why this flashback? Why the Whitney, the Mariah, the Boyz II Men (not kidding, not at all)? While I made it through middle school relatively unscathed, I can categorically say I’ve never once harbored the wish to repeat even one of those days. Many things in life are layered, nuanced experiences worth examining; middle school is not one of those things. And yet I can’t take my iPod in another direction. It’s been a couple weeks since Dar Williams has had any airtime in my car, and I don’t think I’ve gone that long without listening to her in the past eight years.

And soon, it will be Christmas time. (Christmas music, in my life, does not start until Black Friday.) And, at Christmas, Whitney and Mariah have always reigned supreme. Maybe by the New Year, I’ll understand this need to fall into the bottomless notes of these women, the soulful rhythms of those men, and maybe the phase will have passed altogether. But, for now, it’s nice to know “Count on Me” has not been lost to the dust of my hard drive.