I have to preface this: I don’t believe that anything should really be a guilty pleasure; I don’t believe we should feel guilt over pleasure.
I don’t know. Maybe it would make more sense if I were Catholic?
Anyway.
Once upon a time, there was a boy. This boy had friends, and they were driving around trying to find something to do on some random night.
I first heard this song as the backing track to a fan-made commercial for the iPod touch. I was intrigued by it then, but didn’t pay it much mind.
Then, a few weeks later, I saw what appeared to be the same commercial on TV. Confused that what I’d thought was a fan project was on TV and officially advertising the product, I did a little more research.
Turns out, Apple had hired the fan, Nick Haley, to direct a professional version of the commercial he’d made, licensed “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex”, and put it on the air for real. I found that inspiring.
You know what else I found? A song that makes me shake my ass.
Have you heard me sing? Then you’ve heard me sing this one.
I woke up that day the same, sort of, as many other days, with my mom rousing me to wake up and get dressed. I’d just started college a few weeks before, still living with my parents, still getting into the rhythm, and still amazed by how early a 9:30 am class could seem even though I had been used to getting up for school that started at 7:50 for many years.
There was something different that day, though, a note of panic and surprise. “Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”
It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.
I put this song on a mixtape for someone a long time ago.
She didn’t say yes.
Later, when I was older and smarter and better off, I put it on a mixtape for someone else. She did.
But it’s just not like me to forget the slights, is it?