I Came Across This Article

It has nothing to do about trans but rather it is about music and me traveling back into time.

Smells Like Teen Spirit: Why Certain Music Carries Us Back to High School
UVA Today
By Jane Kelly,
February 28, 2020

Have you ever heard an old song and been instantly transported back in time to your teen years?

Maybe it’s a song from The Police’s 1983 album, “Synchronicity,” or an entire album, like The Strokes’ 2003 release, “Room on Fire.” Looking back further to 1967 and the Summer of Love, Scott McKenzie’s “If You’re Going to San Francisco” may bring back memories of wearing flowers in your hair.

Why are these moments so arresting and so connected to certain memories?

For me it was the Animals “House of the Rising Sun” that transported me back in time.

“Teenage years are obviously pretty powerful and a formative time for a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of popular music, particularly since the 1950s and 1960s, is kind of made with a teenage audience in mind, too. That's what music is really being made for, I would say, is young people.”

Hamilton also pointed out that teens use music as a way to shape their identities. “You know, like ‘I like this type of music and there’s a part of me that identifies with being a fan of that music,’ whether its hip-hop or punk or grunge or emo or folk or whatever,” he said.

My clique used to hang out at a McDonald’s in Newington on the Berlin Turnpike in the late 60s and early 70s… Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights you could usually find us there, people came as far away as New Hampshire to come for street racing. All my friends had muscle cars and I had a little Opal Rally Sport.

The parking lot was usually full of muscle cars and across the side street from McDoanld’s was a racing parts store were we sometimes hung out. But on a Friday or Saturday night the parking lot was full with teenagers when all of sudden everyone would get in their cars and head out and down the “Pike.” Everyone was going one of two places, the Route 72 Extension or Research Parkway in Meriden to street race.

And you don’t even have to like a song to be transported back in time. Maybe you’re a 1980s kid, but heavy metal wasn’t your thing. You can still be sure that when Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” comes on, you’re suddenly back, sitting in your high school cafeteria between third and fourth periods.

“It’s just because you heard it so much in that time period,” Hamilton said. “If you don’t like a movie or a TV show, you just don’t watch it. But if there’s a piece of music that’s massively popular in a given time period, you’re just not going to be able to avoid hearing it.”

For me it was on a warm spring night about five years ago, I was driving down the “Pike” coming back from a LGBTQ event in Hartford (I think it was the “Out Film Festival” at Trinity College’s Cinsstudio.) I drove pass the old McDonald’s. Then down into my town.

The “Ave” has never changed, it is basically the same as it was back then, a couple of new stores but the same bars, the same auto repair garage, the same feed and grain store.

As I was driving down the “Ave” which is the main street in town with my window down letting the spring fresh air in around ten o’clock at night just like a thousand times before, when on the radio “There is a house in New Orleans…”

And I was back in 1970 driving home driving down the “Ave.” after a night at McDonald’s.