We Were Never Supposed to Have This Much Access to Our Childhoods

My brain has an infinity jukebox. It plays music constantly, refuses requests, and apparently employs a programming director whose only qualification is an enthusiasm for chaos. I can be making coffee, answering an email, or minding my own business when a song I haven’t heard in thirty years suddenly takes over. Sometimes the selection makes perfect sense. Other times, I wonder what sort of meeting took place in my subconscious that resulted in this particular musical decision.

Recently, the jukebox decided we were going with “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham!

Excellent choice, mysterious jukebox operator. Excellent choice.

Within seconds, George Michael was singing in my head, and my internal energy level had increased considerably. I wasn’t thinking about the 1980s or deliberately searching for a little nostalgia. My brain simply dropped a Wham! song into the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, and I was more than happy to go along with it. Some songs are practically engineered to make remaining in a bad mood difficult, and this one has been successfully conducting that experiment on me for more than forty years.

Naturally, hearing the song in my head wasn’t enough. I opened my music streaming app and played the original recording, which led me to wonder whether anyone had done an interesting cover. A few searches later, I was listening to other interpretations, some surprisingly good and others that made me appreciate the original even more. That’s one of the things I love about music. You can take the same melody, the same lyrics, and the same basic structure, and somebody will find a completely different way to make it their own.

And then I remembered the video.

Oh, the video.

The enormous white T-shirts with their oversized lettering. The neon colors. The dancing. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley looking like they were having the absolute time of their lives. Everything about that video belongs so completely to its era that you could probably show it to someone who had never heard of Wham! and ask them to guess the decade. I suspect they would get it right before the first chorus.

Of course I had to watch it, and by this point my serotonin levels were heading enthusiastically in the right direction. I was smiling, moving along with the music, and enjoying a completely unplanned visit to one of the brightest corners of 1980s pop culture. There’s something wonderfully effective about a song that doesn’t ask you to contemplate the meaning of existence before deciding whether you’re allowed to have fun.

By the time curiosity finally loosened its grip, I’d listened to the original, investigated covers, watched the music video, found the lyrics, and wandered through enough Wham! history to qualify for some sort of extremely specialized trivia competition.

All of that happened in roughly three minutes.

Three minutes!

My teenage self would have absolutely lost her mind.

Back in 1984, I could have spent three hours waiting for MTV to play that video, with absolutely no guarantee it would ever appear. If I wanted to hear the song, I needed the record or cassette, or I had to wait for it to come on the radio. Finding the lyrics meant checking an album sleeve, buying a magazine, or attempting to decipher them myself. And if I got them wrong, there was a reasonable chance I’d continue singing the incorrect words for years.

Not that I would know anything about that.

I remember the particular frustration of trying to record a favorite song off the radio. You’d have your cassette ready, finger hovering over the record button, waiting for those first familiar notes. Everything depended on your timing and the DJ’s willingness to stop talking. If you managed to capture the entire song without a weather update or station identification interrupting the ending, that was practically a personal achievement. We were out there conducting amateur audio engineering operations with equipment purchased at the mall.

Now I can watch George Michael dance across my screen seventeen times while waiting for the washing machine to finish.

I’m not complaining. This is magnificent.

For years, most of the music videos I loved existed as a handful of images in my memory. I could remember the colors, the clothes, and the feeling of watching them, but I couldn’t necessarily replay them whenever I wanted. Some of those memories were remarkably accurate. Others had apparently been through several rounds of unauthorized editing, because our brains don’t always preserve things exactly as they happened.

Memory can be generous that way. It holds on to the details that made an impression, loses a few along the way, and occasionally fills in the gaps with something that seems plausible enough. Which might explain why some childhood television shows had considerably better special effects in my memory than they did when I eventually watched them again. Apparently, my brain has been quietly increasing production budgets for decades.

Now I can pull up the original video and compare it with the version I’ve been carrying around for forty years. And that makes me wonder whether revisiting something changes the memory itself. For years, those images belonged to my experience of them, connected to where I was, who I was with, and what mattered to me at the time. Watching them again adds another experience to the collection, one shaped by everything that’s happened since.

I don’t know whether the new memory replaces the old one or simply takes up residence beside it. I suspect it depends on what we’re remembering. But I like that there’s room for both, even when the version in my head turns out to have been a little more impressive than the original.

With “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” there was no such disappointment. The video was as colorful, exuberant, and gloriously 1980s as I remembered. Those oversized T-shirts were still making a statement, although I’m not entirely sure what the statement was beyond the fact that subtlety had apparently taken the decade off. And the song still made me ridiculously happy.

As a musician, I could spend time examining the arrangement, the vocal harmonies, and all the little musical decisions that make the song work. After years of making music, that kind of curiosity comes naturally. But I wasn’t particularly interested in conducting a musical investigation that afternoon. I was far too busy enjoying George Michael and wondering whether dancing around the house counted as cardio.

Sometimes knowing more about music makes me appreciate a song differently. Other times, it’s nice to remember that I fell in love with music long before I understood much about how it worked. I didn’t need to know why a song made me happy to enjoy the fact that it did, and apparently I still don’t.

What surprised me about this particular trip through my musical history was how naturally something from forty years ago fit into an ordinary day in my life right now. My teenage self heard that song while living in a world that was still largely unknown to her. She didn’t know which friendships would last, where life would take her, or which unexpected turns would become part of her story. She was simply listening to music, enjoying the moment, and building memories without realizing that’s what she was doing.

I know things she didn’t. I’ve lived through experiences she couldn’t have imagined, and my understanding of the world has changed considerably. I’ve also collected decades of additional music, which explains why the infinity jukebox now has such a ridiculously large inventory to choose from. And yet, somewhere in all of that change, there’s still room for the song she loved.

I think we sometimes talk about nostalgia as though enjoying something from the past automatically means wishing we could return to it. Certainly, there are moments when we miss particular people, places, or experiences. But I wasn’t trying to recreate my teenage years when I went looking for Wham! I wasn’t wishing I could go back to 1984, and I definitely wasn’t longing for the days when hearing my favorite song required coordinating my schedule with a radio DJ.

I was enjoying the fact that something my teenage self loved could still make the person I am today ridiculously happy. I can love what those years gave me without wishing I could trade the life I have now for the one I had then.

I have no idea what the infinity jukebox will play next. It could be Madonna, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, or something I haven’t thought about since eighth grade. Whatever it chooses, I now have the rather extraordinary ability to follow that song almost anywhere, discovering what I remember, what I’ve forgotten, and perhaps something I never knew in the first place.

Which is wonderful, really, considering the person in charge of programming my brain’s soundtrack has never once consulted me about the playlist.

I suppose I should just be grateful the DJ has excellent taste.

✨Remember, Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and ideas that move you.