The Breakup Song. The Greg Kihn Band. 1981. Beserkley.

 In 1981, when I turned fifteen years old, I was impatient and anxious about the music I wanted to listen to. Falling apart in high school, I was not unlike teenagers everywhere, responding to the chaotic demands of their changing body. It was pre-Obergefell America, and the nineteen eighties was taking its time reaching the Fort Worth barrio where I still lived with my parents. Homosexuality had opened in my mind like a book whose pages I gazed at intensely before I was even enrolled in school but now that adolescence was on me with its inextinguishable fever I had to figure out—all queers do who aren’t spontaneously gifted with revelatory style—how to shift it from my imagination into the light of reality, and if I wanted to. Only two years before, a minority of Americans had felt the chill of Diskonacht, a thinly veiled auto da effigy of blacks and gays held at an inner city baseball stadium. Ostensibly a mass celebration of disco sucks hysteria, the organized immolation of disco records was also a public spectacle of straight white rage that had more to do with a cretinous response to emerging social and civic recognition of two specific minority communities than it did with The Bee Gees or extended club mixes of cherished pop songs. It was around the time of the disco conflagration at Comiskey Park that I was attacked and beaten by two male peers on the football pitch at school during a phys ed period. The attack began so awkwardly that I mistakenly assumed the pair was roughhousing, and I began to jostle laughingly in return. This angered the pair, causing the pummeling with fists to begin in earnest; they even fell into a kind of coordination and I began to understand that the beating was not being distributed evenly among three but was concentrated on a sole target. Through the blur of the altercation I could see that all other students had returned to the school building and that we three were now alone. As my aggressors started listing their homophobic grievances regarding my personal style, I vowed not to become their victim, imagining only the glamorous, grisly end of St Sebastian Venable, Elizabeth Taylor’s doomed cousin at Suddenly, Last Summer’s climax. Two years later, before starting my high school sophomore term I responded to Diskonacht by divesting myself of all hard rock associations, and began to cautiously imagine the possibility of an escape exit from the provincial Catholic barrio of my parents’ neighborhood.  Compelled by FM radio to behave calmly, repressively, and according to the dictates of my underdeveloped instincts, I began absorbing music with a neurotic discernment that interrogated artistic motive. In liner notes for the 1992 outtakes compilation LP Incesticide, Kurt Cobain put it this way, “At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” I policed my tastes then by the rule of a similar bias, attempting to guess at the cultural prejudices held by the audiences that attached themselves to a particular record. Perhaps unfairly, Huey Lewis and the News terrified me. The lack of tension in its songbook made it all too easy for me to fantasize the band Pied Pipering an army of goose stepping Republican Pentecostal Youth. Same with Starship, Grace Slick’s impeccable bona fides notwithstanding. Even San Francisco super idols Journey. Conversely, Greg Kihn Band’s exuberantly crafted power pop felt liberatingly democratic in its willingness to examine lives gone awry in the tailspin of romantic confusion. The unmistakably American tone and energy of The Breakup Song, along with the music of new bands like The Cars and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, helped me see the America beyond the fascist horizon inaugurated by the Reagan administration. Having to endure the time it would take to reach the promise of that country, then, as it is now, could be described with the lyric from a song by another new band whose music I’d fallen into with a cultist’s abandon: “Said the wait child bruised ball child pride slapped child hurts. The wait child crest felled child tear eyed child hurts. The wait child bus stop child late come child hurts. The wait child platform walk idle talk hurts. Oh gonna hurt some child child Gonna hurt some whoa my baby.”