I met a man in Bermuda who sat down with me outside to tell me about music and what it had been like before it died. He sat down under an umbrella that snapped in the chilly, Atlantic breeze as we drank beer and I nibbled at some chips.
Finally, I set the portable mic down on the table between us.
He looked down at it, grimaced, and nodded. This was why I was buying the round. This was why I had come out here.
“It’s funny you’re recording this,” he said to me.
“We want all the intonations and sound of your voice for future generations. In case.”
Gregory was an old man who’d been out in the sun long enough he’d gotten a leathery look to him, and a perpetual squint. There was a layer of chapped skin on his cheeks, and a sense the Bermuda sun had somehow blasted the fat off his frame like a storm stripped leaves away, leaving behind a gnarled tree of a frame.
And once upon a time, he’d played pan down in Trinidad with some of the mightiest bands and the most royal of singers.
Now, he was just another worker enjoying a Friday night drink after a week’s hard work.
“In case,” Gregory said.
In case the music ever came back.
***
Once, Gregory told me, he ran into a man who went on a trip across the world. He was a trustafarian.
“A Rastafarian?” I interrupt.
Trustafarian.
Rich kid.
Anyway, this man, he’d seen more of the world than we could imagine. Hiked the foothills of the Andes, seen Machu Picchu. This man, he swam in one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico at midnight, and the next day parachuted into a volcano on Hawaii and hiked down to bathe under a waterfall.
He told Gregory he was in one of the most remote places on earth, on a hike up to an ancient monastary deep in Nepal. He was most of the way up when his guide told him there was a small bar for the mountaineers nearby.
So they go into this little wooden hut that’s all but bolted into the side of the rock face and snow, and inside there’s barely room for them all to sit at the counter. And there’s Bob Marley playing on the stereo.
That’s the way it was, then. That was everywhere. That was happy hour. Any bar in the world, anywhere, they knew Bob. Even if they didn’t *know* Bob.
That was music, man.
Universal.
***
Gregory had more stories, stories I was collecting from this last generation, before it passed. He told me about his youth playing pan. He drummed out the syncopated beats on the table, and people stared. It was loud in the silence of the bar on a Friday, with people chatting and eating. The so-soft hum of everyday life.
“See, but even now… I can’t hear it.” Gregory’s eyes suddenly watered. “I know these old rhythms. They’re *me*, man. They’re me. But I can’t hear them no more.”
He lapsed into silence, his hands folding awkwardly on his lap.
They once danced over shiny metal, next Monday they would dance over keyboard keys as he adjusted reinsurance documents for one of the many financial corporations in Bermuda.
We’d both been staring at those skeletal finger of his, trying to hear the music.
Gregory downed the last of his beer and stood up unsteadily. “There, you have it.”
I had a feeling I’d made his day worse.
***
They once said music soothed the savage beast, but extensive testing on animals showed that animals, just like we now did, could not get down with the beat or the funky rhythms. They didn’t have the neurological structure.
But we had, once.
For a long time humans always wondered what made us different than the animals. Was it the ability to use tools? No, crows, octopi, elephants, sea otters, other primates, they all could use tools.
A lot of careers were made trying to define the difference.
But one thing did stand out. Humans used to be able to shake that ass.
And now we couldn’t.
***
There were more people to cover. Our program had grad students all over the world collecting the stories of the last musical generation. I had only ever know the toneless world, but as the archiving continued, I found myself wondering what, exactly, we had lost.
“We lost money,” a lady at the tourist board in Jamaica told me. “I used to book the musicians to go down to the resorts back then. Oh, you wouldn’t believe what them tourist would do when you’d get them drunk and bring in the band. But when we lost the music, what happened then? It was part of the draw. The beach, the booze, the music. That’s how you knew where you wanted to end up. You hear some reggae in the middle of winter and you know, you know, where it came from.”
“So you think that sonic art helped the economy?”
“Hell yeah. From the bands making money to the people coming down here because they were pulled by the sounds.”
I tried to imagine a sound associated with a place.
The buzz of bees around a hive, maybe?
***
When the DNA rescriber started getting passed around a lot of amazing art was created. Visual artists reached deep into themselves to create new vistas. Mathematicians made breakthroughs. And composers created some of the most stunning arrangements of the century.
I couldn’t vouch as to that, but the folk who were not yet infected at the time lauded the work coming from the driven artists of the time.
It became quite clear that to excel in your field you needed to hit up your doctor for some gene editing. Eventually people were passing around inhalers with recombinant DNA infections in them.
What people slowly realized was that something had been lost. They’d gained extraordinary powers of focus and intelligence, the ability to sleep less. But there’d been a price.
We lost the ability to groove.
“You know why they did it?” my next interviewee asked.
“No?”
“It’s universal language. You think governments want that? Think about every protest back in the day. They had chants. That takes rhythm. Songs that speak truth to power, all gone. Can’t have a revolution without some idiot singing about taking to the barricades, I guess.”
Now we were all placid?
“No more angry teenage rebellion audio-scapes. Now it’s just the yelling. Alone, trying to burn furiously. But there isn’t anything to feed it. Comfort it.”
I wondered what it would like to hear a sound and feel a strong emotional response. To get pumped.
Later that night I watched several music videos from the library’s archives. People shouting at the camera. People gyrating at the camera. People dancing.
Sometimes historical reenactors held sponsored dances, trying to make sure the memory of how to twerk stayed alive. But it was hard work to go through all the motions and felt silly.
One of my old university profs studied strip clubs, where they used music to help make poles sexy somehow. I made a note to visit the museum exhibition where they’d preserved an entire club, and volunteers would tell stories of what things were like back then. I was thinking maybe it would be useful to interview some of the people who experienced the steamier side of music for the archives.
***
“Hey mom, do you remember listening to music?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Did it change your moods? Like a drug?”
“Not like that. No. It was more, an enhancer? Anyway, it was more your grandmother’s thing. I started on the rescribers when I was, ooooh, maybe in third grade.”
“So young?”
“Listen, back then, the difference between kids on it or not was starting to become so clear. Marcia Longfield was learning calculus and my parents were afraid I’d fall behind.”
“When did grandmother start?”
“Next year. She got passed over for a promotion. Her job was at risk.”
“When did she find out…”
“I came home from school and found her listening to her phone and she was crying. She kept saying: it’s all gone over and over. I gave her a big hug, but I didn’t know what else to do. It was the first time I had seen her cry.”
***
In Mexico City: a clinic.
It was antiseptic, all glass and gleaming chrome and white walls. Here there was something happening. Not archiving, but experiencing.
Dr. Inez, which was not her real name, met me in the waiting room.
“It’s a simple procedure, three injections, and then you get helmet. The helmet stimulates parts of your brain using magnets.”
“And then I can hear music?”
“To some extent,” she said. “It *simulates* the experience using scans we have of people listening to music and replicating that in your brain. It’s almost like a fake memory, if you will.”
To take old experiences and drop them in a brain, it’s not illegal, but it’s not exactly legal, either.
But in my role as an archivist, a graduate student, I felt compelled to round out my education further.
The three injections were quickly over with, and then the massive helmet with its magnets, a reverse MRI, was lowered down onto my head while I sat in a recliner. Attendants behind a booth monitored my vitals, and several large speakers nearby hummed.
“Ready?” Dr. Inez asked.
“Ready.”
I wasn’t. I gripped the arms of the chair in fear. There were horror stories of scrambled brains and people who came out with after affects. I was sure they were all urban legends, but still, I was messing with my own brain.
The old music thumped out of the speakers, some acid jazz selection synched to the helmet. And then the clack of activated magnets blew my thoughts clear of my mind like dust blown off a countertop by the errant sweep of a hand.
I felt chill music pass over me.
My head nodded. I could feel it.
There was rhythm.
***
Gregory looked startled when, on our second meeting, I pulled out a small steelpan from my duffel bag. I handed him drumming sticks.
“Could you play a small melody for me?” I asked.
I had listened to many of his albums on the flight back here. He was a genius. The greatest at making that instrument bend to his will. And even now, even though he couldn’t hear it, when he picked up those sticks and started to make metal dance and ring, a shiver passed through me.
We were sitting at a table on a beach, and when all I could hear was the rhythmic rush of waves, I opened my teary eyes.
“You’re different,” Gregory said.
“I am,” I agreed. “That was… beautiful.”
That startled the old musician. He cocked his head. “You reversed it?”
I felt as if the steel pan notes were still drifting around me. “I did.”
“You’re thirteen years old, what’ll it take for you to get your doctorate now? Fifteen years? Do you know how far ahead the rest of your world will be by then?”
Far enough.
Gregory shook his head.
“You know,” I said. “There are others like me, who’ve unwritten it. They’re out there, drumming. Dancing. Listening. You can come back.”
“Too late,” Gregory whispered. “Too late.”
He left me by the small beach we’d chosen for the interview.
“Too late for what?” I asked the empty air.
After he left, I slipped my headphones on and looked around as the music settled over me.
Everything would be alright. I had Bob with me.
And all the other musicians.