“Yoooooo! Play the song!”
“Oh, hell yeah!”
“Play the song! Play the song! Play the song!”
My high school varsity locker room: the baseball team captain and co-captain. Both of whom I recall intensely disliking. I can also recall my own unsettled sense of self in this era, and have no doubt that this was the engine of my dislike. I couldn’t stand peers who seemed certain of themselves, who seemed to hold some truth about who they were. I was jealous of those I perceived to be further along the path of personhood.
(Then again, they may just have been better than me at masking all the same uncertainties and anxieties.)
So, I remember this back-and-forth unfolding in that locker room—feeling that familiar, almost instinctive dislike, as I watched them fumble out an iPod from a locker, plug it into a speaker, and press play.
I remember the shock.
I don’t know what I expected to come out of the speakers—what I thought “the song” might be.
I was shocked, yes, but I was also irritated.
This was “the song”?
“Demons,” by Guster.
I loved this song.
Guster had, for me, connected to my anxious interior life I lived in high school, and I loathed that these two guys had appropriated it as a locker room singalong.
I’ve wondered about this in the years since: Did I really think I had any more “right” to the song than they did?
High school me would have admitted, if pressed, the absurdity of claiming “ownership” of the song (or any song!)—but I don’t think I would have been able to shake that irritation.
At that age, when our musical taste is taking shape, that sense of ownership can feel very real, even knowing that it’s not. As I got older, I saw past it more and more.
But I’ll always carry the sting and shock of that moment in the locker room, when “Demons” wasn’t just for me—it was for the jocks I didn’t like, too.
Taylor Coe 