Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  You say nothing of any of this to your parents, though your mom senses it. After one particularly hard week in which you are not invited to a crucial birthday party, she takes you out of seventh grade for a day so that the two of you can make the four-hour round trip journey to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Once there, you gaze upon the gruesome Watson and the Shark, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1778. The shark’s open jaws are frozen in time, inches away from Watson’s blond head, his face contorted in agony, his severed limb a dark absence in the water. When you return to look at the painting as an adult, you notice the terror and helplessness of the two people on the boat, whose faces are obscured, their arms outstretched. They are so close to Watson but can’t reach him; their hands clutch the air around his torso. Watson is so busy looking at the oncoming shark that he can’t see their efforts, doesn’t realize how far they are reaching out to save him.

  Best-selling how-to-save-Ophelia books aside, was it even possible for any parent of a daughter in the early 1990s to do much but watch from the boat as an entire generation of girls sank beneath the surface? After your trip to the gallery, you and your mom stop at a café for French onion soup. She tries to give you words of encouragement, words to help you navigate what she imagines to be the typically treacherous waters of middle school drama. You can’t bring yourself to tell her the real problem: You aren’t pretty enough. You will never be pretty enough. You can’t tell her because you are ashamed that you have a problem so clearly unfixable, a problem that can’t be solved by working harder. Everywhere you look—magazines, TV, movies, high school pep rallies—you see that not being pretty enough will mean your life will be much different—more difficult, more restricted—than you would have ever imagined a few years before. And even if you somehow did become beautiful, you know it would not be enough to put you on equal footing with the boys.

  One bleak night, a few months before your thirteenth birthday, you sneak out your bedroom window and walk a mile through a snowstorm to the interstate overpass near your house. You intend to jump off of it, and you spend minutes willing yourself to lean farther and farther over the railing. But after a while you back off and lie down in the snow, listening to the scream of the eighteen-wheelers as they fly beneath your body. The interstate is the biggest difference between your old town in West Virginia and your new one in Virginia. The noise of the traffic on it reverberates off the mountainsides, a hymn of American commerce that brings goods you had never encountered in West Virginia: granola bars, flavored tea, live lobsters.

  “I know what you must be thinking,” says Kate Winslet’s Rose after her suicide attempt in Titanic. “‘Poor little rich girl. What does she know about misery?’”

  “No,” Jack responds compassionately. “What I was thinking was, what could have happened to this girl to think she had no way out?”

  Life in the body.

  By high school, the anorexia epidemic spreads its tentacles into the bodies and/or minds of almost every girl you know. It creeps into town and stalks its victims; girls collapse on the gymnasium floor, on the running track, in the shower. They are scraped off floors and lawns and bathtubs, shipped off to the hospital, then to rehab. There are whispers of “heart attack,” “force-feeding,” “nose tube.” There are louder conversations about what techniques those girls used and how to best emulate them for one’s own purposes. In the cafeteria, tables of girls dump canisters of black pepper onto their lunches in collective rituals of self-imposed refusal.

  The adults are incredulous. They don’t seem to recognize the epidemic, or at least, they don’t see how large the presence is, how menacing. How it doesn’t just manifest physically, but psychologically. Famine, to them, is something last brought about by Sherman’s March of ransacking Yankees. Famine is not something willed into existence by a bunch of silly teenage girls who are so ungrateful for the opportunities girls have now. It’s the nineties! Don’t we know that girls can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough?

  What we want to be is skeletal. By fifteen your body is begging you for calories, to let yourself grow. You are losing weight instead, your work ethic turned inward, toward your own flesh, which you are convinced you can eviscerate. All you need to do is work hard! You don’t succeed. But girls who lack the genes or the willpower to fully commit to starvation, yourself included, don’t give up trying. There are many differences between girls with full-blown anorexia and those who can’t quite squeeze themselves into the disease, but self-hatred is not one of them. An inability to reconcile life in the body is not one of them. You survive for a week on water and a single sour, green Jolly Rancher. You try ipecac syrup and diet pills. You join sports teams not because they bring you pleasure (you hate sports) but because you hope they will shrink your muscular body to a stick. You wake up at dawn for weight-lifting class, drink a single cup of coffee, skip lunch, go to track or cross-country or soccer practice, and arrive home at night light-headed and morose. Your mom makes spaghetti and meatballs. You gobble down two plates. And the failure of this—two plates of spaghetti, you disgusting pig!—weighs on you more than any other failure.

  But unlike so many of the other drowning girls, you have something tethering you to the shore. When you play the violin, you are told you have a reeyell gift. That’s bullshit, you have no gift, but there’s something about the way that people look at you when you’re playing. (As a teenage girl, you are a world-class expert—a veritable PhD in visual semantics—on the subject of the facial expressions of people who are looking at you.) When you put your violin under your chin, there is a brief moment in which your worth as a human being is not being gauged on a scale of relative beauty (her face is a six, but her ass is a ten). When you play the violin you are able, for a moment, to leave the female body in which you are contained, the body that signals sex, whether you want it to or not, yet is somehow never sexy enough. By putting a violin under your chin—or even carrying a violin case through the puke-green corridors of your high school—it is as if you’re telling the world that you have authority on something, and in having this authority, you are more complex, more consequential than your young female body suggests.

  For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not. Playing classical music on the violin provides a corrective: The violin is serious. Classical music is serious. An understanding of classical music—something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t—gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.

  And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.

  But Why Is Playing the Violin the Cultural Equivalent of Growing a Penis?

  In late 1993, when you are twelve years old and just building the stamina to play full-length violin concertos, researchers at the University of California at Irvine have thirty-six college students do a series of geometric puzzles after ten minutes of listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. The students’ spatial reasoning IQ scores are eight points higher after listening to Mozart. In the report on this research—a mere three paragraphs published in Nature—the researchers warn that the IQ boost only lasts ten to fifteen minutes and that there is no reason to assume that Mozart’s music, in particular, has special qualities: “Because we used only one musical sample of one composer, various other compositions and musical styles should also be examined.” This caveat will be ignored. “The Mozart Effect” has been born.

  The UC Irvine study goes viral in pre-Internet America. The New York Times exclaims: “Mozart Makes the Brain Hum.” Time magazine reports: “Listening to Mozart makes students smarter.” Music teachers across the country brandish the UC Irvine study like a shield, fending of
f budget slashes. The Mozart study is “scientific evidence” that music class improves standardized test scores. “Beethoven is no longer the world’s greatest composer,” declares Alex Ross in a 1994 New York Times article. “Mozart is the composer who gives you an edge on the SATs.” By 1997, when Don Campbell publishes his popular book The Mozart Effect, the actual results of the UC Irvine study have been left far behind. Campbell compares Mozart to Jesus and claims that listening to Mozart’s music not only increases intelligence but also cures everything from brain hemorrhages to autism to paralysis to cancer. Mozart can make cows produce more milk, reduce traffic accidents, and prevent premature birth. Mozart’s music can even make yeast rise faster, producing better sake at a brewery in Japan.

  The Mozart Effect gains traction during the same era in which Tipper Gore wages war on rap music, the same era in which school dances in the whitest enclaves of Appalachia begin to blend Garth Brooks with Snoop Dogg, whose Doggystyle album debuts at number one on the Billboard charts just a few weeks after the Mozart study is published. At your middle school, the boys who hate you grind up against your body to the beat of “Snoop Doggy Doo-oww-ohhhoggg!” The sexual ministrations of inner-city lyricists become the lingua franca of your generation, fluently spoken by every thirteen-year-old kid regardless of race, class, or geographical location. Decades later, these songs will seem so tame that people will play them at wedding receptions, white grandmas shaking it to Biggie Smalls. But in the early 1990s, the Tipper Gore generation maligns rap and hip-hop as cultural poison. The Mozart Effect offers an antidote; it is “proof,” after all, that “good,” IQ-enhancing music is composed by old white men, not by young black ones.

  But dozens of subsequent studies fail to replicate even the minor increases in IQ achieved in the original study. Most of these follow-up studies conclude that any music that puts the test taker in a better mood increases his test score. So if it is 1993 and you are a thirteen-year-old looking to increase your IQ, you should probably listen to ten minutes of Doggystyle.

  While the actual effect of listening to Mozart while taking a test is minimal at best, the effect of the UC Irvine study on American culture—The Effect of the Mozart Effect, one could call it, or the Mozart Effect Effect—is tremendous and undeniable. The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is far more organically American: marketing. Megacorporations like “Baby Einstein” are born and flourish by promoting the disproven belief that blasting Mozart toward a baby—or even a fetus—can fast-track the kid to Harvard. In 1998, Georgia governor Zell Miller allocates over $100,000 in state funds to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music, arguing that it will help Georgia’s kids outperform their peers in math and science. When a Georgia state legislator asks about the possibility of including Charlie Daniels on the tape, he is told that “classical music has a greater positive impact.” The subsequent studies suggest the opposite; Charlie Daniels (likely to put more Georgians in a good mood) would have been the more productive choice.

  At about the same time that every baby in Georgia is receiving a free Mozart tape in the mail, you are engaging in your own misguided attempts to harness the Mozart Effect, having been indoctrinated by school music teachers that the Effect is real and significant. You listen to the depressing chords of Mozart’s Requiem during the forty-five-minute drive to the closest SAT test site.

  But, of course, the real effect from Mozart in your life comes not from any enhancement to your IQ but from the fact that Americans increasingly believe in the tangible benefits of classical music, while simultaneously knowing less and less about the art form. In the 1990s, classical music becomes both more desirable and more mysterious, a potent combination. Hollywood movies of the 1990s are full of messages about the inherent redemptive and beneficial qualities of classical music: A gal might be a high school dropout and a prostitute, but if she cries for joy during an opera performance, she is inherently upper class and deserves to marry a millionaire (Pretty Woman). White women moving to Harlem might mean gentrification, but white women teaching black children classical music equals redemption (Music of the Heart). An emotionally distant father having a quasi-affair with a high school student redeems himself by bringing classical music to his deaf son (Mr. Holland’s Opus). A debilitating mental illness is surmountable, even charming, if one can play Rachmaninoff with enough sweaty passion (Shine). Taking away a woman’s piano is tantamount to taking away her ability to speak (The Piano). A violin is not a mere musical instrument but the body and the blood, the dead Madonna and her dead baby, the corpse of the beloved, the orphan, the gypsy soul, the fuck object, the ultimate weapon against communism, the “perfect marriage of science and beauty” (The Red Violin).

  In the last paragraph of the original UC Irvine study, the authors speculate that the change in IQ they observed might not be due to an increase from listening to Mozart, the experiment’s variable, but instead a decrease in IQ from listening to the experiment’s control: overly simplified and repetitive relaxation music.

  Music like The Composer’s.

  They write, “We predict that music lacking complexity or which is repetitive may interfere with, rather than enhance, abstract reasoning.”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Durham, New Hampshire

  The Composer mugs in front of Harriet’s video camera.

  “Are you trying to capture the sounds, the sights, the smells of a hard-working rock and roll band?” he asks in a fake British accent.

  “Hard-working rock and roll what?” Harriet repeats, confused.

  He ignores her and continues with his act. “I jaust wont teh say one li’el thing,” he says, his British accent slipping into Australian. His eyes widen the same way they do during his real speeches at the concerts. “That the music we try to play for people really resonates with the outer . . .”

  “Limits?” Harriet prompts.

  “No,” The Composer says in the voice of a BBC commentator. “I say it’s more like the paint on the walls, it resonates, it resonates . . . It’s the pigment in the paint that I try to capture, the salt pieces, the crystal. But if you can get past that, suddenly you open everyone’s hearts. It’s the pigment.”

  “Someone’s been sniffing paint pigment,” Harriet says.

  But later, we’ll realize what The Composer is talking about: He’s imitating the British accents of the band members in This Is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest’s brilliant fake documentary about a fake rock band. Which, it turns out, happens to be The Composer’s favorite movie.

  After our concert, The Composer has a surprise for all of us. We’re going to love it, he says. He tells us to wait in the RV while he sprints off somewhere. We’re parked near the college where The Composer studied music and, as Yevgeny once told me, played in a hair metal band.

  “What was the name of the band?” I had asked Yevgeny.

  “I don’t know, but they tried to do the same thing we do—play at malls and craft fairs and sell CDs. It doesn’t work for heavy metal.”

  “Yeah, I can see how there might be a few problems with that,” I said.

  “And then he tried doing children’s music,” Yevgeny said.

  “The Pirate video?”

  “Yeah, and that didn’t work; I think he just freaked kids out. And then he did Irish music for a while, but that’s an oversaturated market. And then nature sounds.”

  “And then Titanic.”

  “Yeah,” Yevgeny said. “And that’s what sells.”

  Patrick, Harriet, Kim, and I wait for The Composer outside the RV in the chilly afternoon air. Harriet has announced that tonight she’s going to try to make us all okra soup using the RV’s stove, though anytime someone cooks, we all worry about being poisoned with oven gas, or, even worse, the RV exploding into a fireball on the freeway. But it is soup weather, and comforting homemade soup seems worth the risk. The sunlight is slanted; the air has a singed-leaf smell.
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  The Composer sprints back, carrying a box. He is wearing his concert clothes with his running sneakers.

  “You guys!” he yells as he approaches. “I have something for you! They shipped it here from the office. You’re gonna love it!”

  He sets the box on the ground and starts pulling out the contents: large piles of black felt. The cloth unfolds to reveal large black varsity jackets with leather sleeves, the kind athletes pin their medals on in high school. The first jacket goes to Patrick, who puts it on and models it for us. As he turns around, we see that the back is embroidered in white cursive letters: God Bless America Tour 2004. (Long after the rest of us have stealthily shoved our jackets into the RV’s cargo hold, Patrick will proudly wear his, even in the hottest weather. Patrick loves his jacket so much that The Composer orders him several official God Bless America Tour 2004 polo shirts to wear with it.)

  Once all of us are in our jackets, The Composer takes a photograph.

  “We look like a real tour now,” he says. “We look like real musicians.”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Norfolk, Virginia

  The Composer runs along the beach, the tide of the Atlantic lapping at his sneakers. I sit on a hotel towel in the sand, watching him and writing in my journal. Looking through the pages that I’ve written so far, I see that they are full of anecdotes of The Composer’s bizarre behavior. He broils a cake that ends up in a trash can. He only eats apples and mashed-up Cap’n Crunch cereal. He doesn’t recognize Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He waltzes. He runs laps in his concert clothes. He orders us ridiculous jackets. He smiles like a velociraptor and becomes aggravated when he feels we are not smiling enough. His favorite line from the movie Spinal Tap is “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”