My music must (almost) always be four-on-the-floor. That means a kick drum, the kind on a drum set you play with a pedal that makes a low sound that is 80% thump and 20% thwack, that hits again, and again, and again without changing, four per bar, for the entire song. Most people need rhythms to be rich and funky, syncopated, alternating, uneven. And I like that kind of beat too; it’s ponderous, or mischievous, inarguably more seductive than a four-on-the-floor beat. But my favorite rhythm is so straightforward, unedited, and unironic, so plain and basic, so stripped down to the most basic and raw element of rhythm that it makes most people uncomfortable, it hits their dance nerve too directly for comfort. Or like seeing more of someone than they wanted to see. Your beat is naked, put some clothes on it.
In my early teens, “techno,” as four-on-the-floor music is known by the skeptical, suspicious, and uninitiated, was foreign, frizzy, and “for f**s,” as I heard said more than once. No sooner had I begun turning the volume up loud on my boom box did I hear Eminem, as good a moral authority as there ever was for white boys from 1999-2002, declare that “nobody listens to techno.” Or there was that scene in Bad Boys 2, the coolest movie of 2003. Early in the film, you’re in a nightclub, blue and purple lights are flashing, the drums are hitting. It’s full of undesirably European-looking people, very doofusy white men and women that look like they might be Scandinavian underwear models waving their arms around and putting pills in each other’s mouths. In the back room, a sleazy Russian gangster taps his foot and counts bills. Four- on-the-floor-beats were to be avoided by serious young men.
Anyway, when I was young and scared, I wasn’t ready for music that made me feel open or honest. Fourteen-year-old me needed a heavy dose of anything that would make me feel strong and protected, that would put weight into my walks in and out of school through the happily chatting pockets of other boys and girls. Something so armored with bravado that if I listened to it loud enough, I could strut without thinking about who was, or probably wasn’t, looking at me. So I blasted the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album so loud that people could hear tinny gunshots from my cheap walkman headphones. I avoided social interactions at school dances by walking around rapping along to lyrics, hoping to score passive admiration for knowing the words. (I even supported the invasion of Iraq for machismo reasons).
One scene lifted and another settled when my family moved to Shanghai. The cool kids weren’t guys in long sleave Under Armor with big hair curling up from underneath their baseball hats, stealing liquor from their parents to bring to parties in Bethesda. They were Europeans who went clubbing. The buildings were tall and lit. Long ships steamed downriver carrying things from China to wherever I wanted to imagine in the world. I could take taxis everywhere. I learned a new language, poking through one of the many veils of mind that segregate humans from each other. And techno, or house, or trance, as I passively started to absorb that breeds of four-on-the-floor music were called, were in the literal air, in bars and clubs I would go to with my idiot friends, out of speakers outside designer stores on the avenue near my house, at the mini parties on beaches in the Philippines. All as I was first experiencing intoxication – chemically, and spiritually. At last, there was freedom. I resisted for a while, but at some point I let go of my attachment to my fourteen-year-old disdain for “techno” and asked my cool Belgian friend to send me the names of tracks I could check out.
Some weekday that April. In bed, on top of a thin, gray, spread-out duvet. Late afternoon light. Maybe I had been playing sports that day; I was tired, but pressed, unrelaxed, exhausted from unrelaxation. Then I noticed a new email from my Belgian friend listing tracks to download. “Like you would hear at Bonbon,” he wrote, referring to the club steps away from my house with an all-you-can-drink fee of around $15 on Friday nights. I opened up Acquisition P2P and downloaded all I could find approximately matching track titles for. The first one to complete was Dreaming, by “DJ Tiesto,” as he was known at the time.
Tiesto played a show in Shanghai a year hence, which I skipped because I was herky-jerkying around a Rolling Stones concert with my parents. I heard about it the next day from Tom in Chinese class, and felt a flash of imaginative wonder I now recognize as such, but at the time experienced as just another pressing discomfort to be ignored. But a year later, I recognize Tiesto’s name. So I put on the track.
There’s a flutter of drums, flipping and flimming, maybe a symbol or a congo, I don’t really know. After eight bars, an elevated dripping noise. And after another eight, my brain was loose, jogging in place at the starting gun.
There’s a part of you, way below consciousness, the part that knows how to dance. Right when that part expected it, came the kick drum. And with it came a sound I can only describe as a delicate shooting star, fizzing in from another system before dissipating calmly in my atmosphere, from which the flicking ornamental drums grew right before my ears. And we were off.
These plucky, repetitive chord noises I can only describe as “synths,” layered on one another, building every minute or so, until the kick drum vanished, and all the other sounds pulsed. The parade of sound was held up, the crowd of onlookers wondering what’s happening, holding its breath. The imaginary ghost of the beat, momentum continuing forward in the form of a gentle repetition of three descending notes, not unlike a gentle alarm. And the lone dancer emerges into open space from the front of the parade column, and a voice sings:
No words. No talk. We’ll go dreamin’
No pain. No hurt. We’ll go dreamin’
No words. No talk. We’ll go dreamin’
No pain. No hurt. We’ll go dreamin’
These words were the last of successive layers of sand reaching further and further down into my body, until it felt like this voice was being sung in my chest. I lay back on pillows, eyes closed, arms out, palms upward, feeling golden rainbow roads coursing through my arms and out my fingertips.
I felt a living memory’s satchel of loneliness, desperation, yearning, and striving, come out meekly and stand there, for once not hiding but watching time go by as the song’s elements jumped off from the breakdown into a soaring, magic carpet ride over blurred streaks of light and landscape. I thought of my girlfriend, and wanted to hold her hand.
When it was over, I was a little empty, but so filled. Nothing like that had ever happened before. 50 Cent made me imagine that I was known to be feared, which gave me the courage to walk through the cold courtyard and into school every day. Tiesto made me feel like I could be loved.