by Kevin Nguyen
“This is the first album that Margo ever recommended to me on PORK.”
I hit PLAY. It was immediately clear that the sound quality of Jill’s laptop speakers was horribly inadequate—tinny and weak at the high frequencies, garbled and muddy at the low ones. I pulled out a pair of headphones from my backpack and handed them to Jill.
“What is this?”
I just wanted her to listen. The name of the artist wouldn’t mean anything to her anyway. But if she just experienced it, I thought maybe she could feel what I’d felt the first time I heard it. I remembered the moment distinctly. The ’80s Japanese music Margo loved was bathed in synthesizers. It was a strange inflection point in music, where aesthetics became increasingly electronic, but the recordings were still recorded in analog studios. It represented a time of transition, and would inform the American sound for decades to come. Hearing it brought the warmth of familiarity, and the sudden realization that it was foundational to so much of the music I’d heard all my life.
All Jill could muster was: “This is pretty catchy.”
I played her another song.
Headphones off. “What is this band?”
I explained that it was a group that was huge in Japan in the ’80s, pioneers of synth pop. They’d earned the nickname “the Beatles of Japan” for a few years.
“Huh, I’ve never heard of them.”
Pushing the headphones back over her ears, I thought about how a band could be one of the biggest bands in the world, even make it to the States, and inspire a generation of pop music, and in a matter of decades, it could disappear almost entirely from American consciousness. The group’s music wasn’t available anywhere in the United States, unless you scoured the rare remaining record shop that happened to sell import vinyl—and even then, you’d have to already know what you were looking for. Discovering this music was nearly impossible.
This was one of the draws of PORK. Music pirates are stereotyped as cheap—too cheap to pay for music. Sure, many are, but there were communities like PORK that served a greater purpose. The internet at the time was disparate and disorganized. There was order to PORK, ambition. It sought to be a definitive archive of music. PORK gave me a sense of purpose in the shapeless days of my adolescence: I was researching and ripping and downloading audio as a means of preservation. I maxed out the allowable number of CDs I could check out each time I visited the library. At home, I’d meticulously tag and ID each track I copied as an MP3. It was hours upon hours of busy, satisfying work.
“So why was Margo into this music, in particular?”
I tried to give a little context. “In the late ’70s and ’80s, funk and disco had swept up clubs in Tokyo, just as it had most of the world. The influence of American culture reflected the country’s postwar hegemony; but inadvertently, it had spread the influence of black music around the world. Margo had always been drawn to Japan’s fascination with American music. She joked that it was like seeing her reflection, as an American obsessed with Japanese culture.”
“Did it bother her at all that Japan had appropriated black music?” Jill asked.
“You know, I asked her this too. It’s true: Japanese musicians were imitating the soundscapes that defined decades of black culture,” I said. “But to Margo, it was cool that the influence of black music could reach as far as Japan. Geographically, that’s about as far as it could go.”
“Plus,” Jill added, “the music is really damn good.”
At first I’d been ranting breathlessly at her. But as I played her more, her enthusiasm spilled over into something genuine. She began asking more questions about the music itself, telling me which songs she liked, the ones she liked less.
“I’m glad you’re into it. I wasted so much time researching and ripping things on PORK.”
“It doesn’t sound like you were wasting time,” Jill said. “It sounds noble, almost.”
“Well, it was all for naught.”
“What do you mean?”
“PORK was shut down a decade ago.”
PORK had been and still was illegal, even if it had higher, almost academic aspirations. I woke up one morning and went to log in, as I did every morning, and the site was gone.
“So all the friends you’d had on there—”
“Effectively gone. The site disappeared overnight. Years of work by dozens of people gone. The only thing left was a government takedown notice. It was like waking up and all your friends have been raptured.”
“God, that’s so sad. I can’t even imagine losing all of your work and all of your friends with no warning.”
“You know what’s funny? Technically, that was the first time I lost Margo.”
Jill embraced me. We were seated on the floor of her bedroom, holding each other, our bodies positioned to avoid the clunky laptop and hard drive between us. It felt good. The only person who had known about this part of my life, the hundreds of hours of music, the amount of time I’d spent amassing it, had been Margo. There was a comfort in sharing that with someone new.
“So Margo’s expertise was in ’80s pop music—”
“—from Japan.”
“And what was yours?”
I leaned over to the computer and navigated the cursor through several hierarchies of folders on my hard drive. There was a lot of music here that I hadn’t listened to in years. I recalled some of it; other names seemed vaguely familiar. I picked the most obvious one. I could hear the faint, warm sound of intricately strummed nylon guitar strings from Jill’s headphones. Then a low, soothing baritone.
“Is this Portuguese?”
I nodded. “How did you know?”
“I had an ex that spoke Portuguese.”
It was the first time Jill had mentioned an ex.
“My specialty was bossa nova. It’s Portuguese for ‘new wave,’ a kind of fusion of jazz and classical guitar from Brazil. It was big in the ’50s and ’60s.”
“It’s very…tropical,” Jill said. “I like it. It reminds me of ‘The Girl from Ipanema.’ ”
“So there’s a story behind that song! One of Brazil’s most beloved guitarists wrote ‘Ipanema’ with a saxophonist. When they needed a singer, the guitarist suggested his wife, even though she had no formal vocal training. Skeptically, the saxophonist is like, ‘Sure.’ That song became bossa nova’s only international hit—and, most likely, the lasting legacy of the entire genre.”
“It’s the only one I’ve heard.”
“Later, the guitarist’s wife would split with him after having an affair with the saxophonist.”
“Dramatic. And yet, the music is so calm.”
I played more. We spent the afternoon flipping through my music collection. I went to the kitchen to make a couple of egg sandwiches, and Jill brought her laptop along, the external hard drive still plugged in, cradled in her arms. I turned on the stove, and Jill hunted for another power outlet. Butter sizzled in the pan as she picked songs at random, delighted by every new sound coming from the computer.
* * *
—
THE CONVERSATION ABOUT JAPANESE music eventually led to a discussion of Margo’s obsession with going to Tokyo. She’d mentioned it to me only a few times in passing. She talked about it like Tokyo wasn’t a city on the other side of the Earth. It was a different planet altogether, light-years away. But to Jill, Margo talked about it like it was a real possibility.
“We joked that we were going to take a girlfriends’ vacation to Tokyo,” Jill said. “Maybe she was serious about it. I’m sad I’ll never get to do that with her.”
“Margo never left New York, though,” I said, puzzled by the idea she would propose such far-flung travel. “Never really, anyway. She rarely got any meaningful distance from home.”
Jill pulled out her phone and opened the browser. She tapped around for a while, trying to summon the right c
ombination of search keywords from her memory to direct her to the page she was looking for. Finally, she found it. A video. She hit PLAY.
The clip opened on a small temple, tucked in a quiet cranny of Tokyo’s sprawl. From the outside, the building was both traditional (wooden hip-and-gable roof; large sliding doors) and somewhat modern (brutalist sheets of concrete). But as the doors slid open, the temple revealed a brilliant, otherworldly splash of colors. At first, it appeared to be some kind of light fixture attached to the wall, changing calmly from shades of purple to blue to green in naturalistic waves. But as the camera moved in closer, we could see the temple’s beauty for its component parts: 2,045 little Buddha statues, each illuminated by an LED light, which changed hues in patterns that resembled a tranquil sea of color.
“Is this some kind of art installation?”
“No, it’s a burial ground.”
I took the phone from Jill’s hand. There was an accompanying article with all the details. This was a high-tech cemetery, where people’s physical remains were stored in small boxes and represented by tiny light-up Buddhas, each connected to a computer system storing their digital remains—a marriage of analog and digital in death. Graveyard technology. A necropolitical computer system.
“Margo joked that she wanted to have a tombstone here,” Jill said.
But Margo already had a place in the ground.
* * *
—
LATER, POST–EGG SANDWICHES, WE returned to the bedroom with the laptop/hard-drive setup. I put on more music and we started making out. Mid-kiss, Jill laughed and told me that it was very funny that I had a hard drive named Ozymandias.
“Kind of ironic for your music library.”
“Wait, why?”
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
I didn’t understand.
“Shelley?”
“Who is Shelley?”
“Percy Shelley, the great English Romantic poet?”
I didn’t know who that was, or how to respond. Could I hide it? Should I?
“I was in middle school when I picked the name Ozymandias,” I said, trying to explain it away, “but it was a character in a comic book that I liked.”
Jill laughed. “What college did you go to that didn’t make you read a Shelley poem?”
“I didn’t go to ‘college’ college. I went to community college.”
“Oh, I thought that was…”
Jill laughed again. I wasn’t sure why she was laughing. I guess she didn’t know why either, so she stopped.
We were quiet for a moment, though music continued to play from Jill’s computer.
“I recognize this song,” Jill said. “Or at least the melody.”
I was surprised. This was a pretty obscure song—one I could barely identify—by a Japanese musician who toyed with electric organs, a rare series of instruments called Electones. The piece had a solo keyboard part, noodling and meandering, melancholic. If you listened closely, you could hear a quiet, nearly invisible drumbeat, keeping time like a metronome.
“You definitely don’t know this song,” I said. “In our PORK days, it took Margo and me a colossal effort to dig up anything about this artist. Through sheer perseverance, we learned this guy’s music was largely improvised explorations of mood and tone. He was a recluse who lived in Nara, a Japanese city famous for its wild deer. That was about as far as we got. Information on the internet was nonexistent; trips to the library were fruitless. This dude had put out four albums of extraordinary synth work that were hugely admired among Electone collectors, but no one knew a damn thing about him.”
Jill couldn’t figure out how she knew the song. We listened to it again. Then again, and Jill finally had her eureka moment. She took the laptop, closed my music library, and opened her own. She scrolled for a bit until she found the right track. She hit PLAY.
I should’ve seen it coming. The song Jill had been thinking about was a recent one, which sampled the melody that had been familiar to both of us. That electric organ—once so sparse and sad and winding—was now featured beneath the vocal track of a white guy singing about loneliness. This is how music persisted, sequestered and repurposed, a ghost of its original composition. I looked up the artist, and it confirmed everything I had suspected. His look could be described as “immaculate dirtbag,” a perfect five o’clock shadow and a flannel befitting a hangover.
“You hate this song, huh?” Jill asked.
“It’s fine.”
“ ‘Fine’ means you hate it.”
“No, I just—”
“You can hate it.”
Jill was smiling again. “I want to hear more of Margo’s music.”
“I think I’ve played all of it. At least, the files that I have.”
“On Ozymandias,” she teased.
“Yes, on my stupidly named hard drive.”
“But you have Margo’s computer, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“If you said you have Margo’s laptop, does that mean you have all of her music?”
Did I? “I never thought to look. I mean, it’s probably on there?”
“Instead of listening to the music Margo gave you, couldn’t we listen to her actual library?”
“That’s…a good point, actually.”
“Let’s go.”
“Right now?”
She was already on her feet, reaching into the closet to find her coat.
* * *
—
WHEN WE ARRIVED TWENTY minutes later by car, I could tell Jill was taking stock of my apartment. We’d been hanging out for a few weeks, but she had never come to my place. Compared to her apartment, which had the decor and cleanliness of an adult woman who lived by herself, mine must’ve come across like a college dorm. There was a sink full of dishes and a too-full garbage can—the attrition of two roommates who never quite divvied up responsibilities for the home—and a lack of furniture or wall art that, for the first time, made me self-conscious. Jill withheld judgment, or at least withheld vocalizing it. I quickly pulled her into my bedroom, which wasn’t any less of a disaster than the shared spaces of the apartment, but at least this mess was mine. Dirty clothes were scattered across the floor, and, more embarrassing, empty beer cans lined my bed.
Margo’s laptop was at my desk. Jill sat on my bed as I booted up the computer. I logged in with the password, still represented in my handwriting as a sticky note applied to the screen: M4v15B34c0n.
“Is that Margo’s password?”
Jill grabbed a pen from the desk and searched around until she could find loose paper. She settled on an unopened envelope for an unpaid bill. She scrawled out:
M4V15B34C0N
MAVISBEACON
“It’s Mavis Beacon!”
“What’s Mavis Bacon?”
“No, Beacon.”
“Okay what’s Mavis Beacon?”
“You know, she does…the thing.” Fumbling with her words, Jill stuck her hands out and began making a motion like she was playing piano.
“She’s a pianist.”
“No, what’s the word?” Jill’s hand motions became more exaggerated as she tried to summon the right word. Maybe she was casting a spell?
“She’s…a witch. Mavis Beacon is a witch.”
“No, on the computer. The typing game. With the car.”
“I’m going with ‘witch.’ ”
“Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!” Jill lifted her arms in the air to celebrate her victory, a moment of victory only she understood.
“What is that?”
“It’s Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.”
“Repeating the name of the thing back to me doesn’t explain what it is.”
She laughed and hit me gently on t
he shoulder.
“Mavis Beacon was this software that taught people how to touch-type,” Jill said. “We had to use it in computer class when I was in fifth grade. It had this game where you were racing another car, and you’d be able to speed by it if you typed enough words in a row quickly and accurately.”
Jill pulled up the Wikipedia entry for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
“Oh my god, Mavis Beacon is not a real person?” she said.
There was no Mavis Beacon. She was a fictional character designed for the software. But she had a real face.
Jill kept reading out loud from Wikipedia. The name Mavis was chosen after a favorite soul singer of one of the developers, while Beacon was picked because it sounded like a good name for a teacher—Ms. Beacon, someone who would, literally, guide you.
“Well, that’s a bit on the nose,” Jill said.
I wanted to know more. Why was this Margo’s password? “Keep reading,” I said.
The owner of the typing software had discovered the woman who would become the model for Mavis Beacon working behind the perfume counter at a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. She was born in Haiti and named Renée L’Espérance.
“That might be an even better name than Mavis Beacon.”
I pulled the computer away from Jill. “You know, she looks a little bit like Margo,” I said.
“She does?”
Aside from the Wikipedia entry, there was almost nothing out there on Renée L’Espérance. The only thing I learned is that while she had been the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, she hadn’t received any residuals on sales of the software. There was a rumor that she had returned to the Caribbean.
“Do you think there’s some significance? Her password being Mavis Beacon?”
“For a lot of people, learning to type was the first introduction they had to computers,” Jill said. “And Mavis Beacon was the face of that. Which means a black woman was a lot of kids’ first association with technology.”
“Imagine growing up, being introduced to computers, and expecting that world to be populated with other black women,” I said. “Margo was the only black woman at either tech company I’ve worked at. She used to tell me, often, how disappointing that was.”