Dear listeners,
I read a lot of books about music. When I’m really enjoying one, sometimes I’ll make a playlist of songs mentioned in its pages to stave off that bittersweet feeling that always comes upon finishing a satisfying read. That way, I can always crawl back into a book’s atmosphere just by pressing play.
The book that inspired today’s playlist, the cultural critic Lucy Sante’s “I Heard Her Call My Name,” isn’t about music per se. As its subtitle attests, it is mostly “a memoir of transition,” centered around Sante’s decades of gender dysphoria and her eventual coming out as a trans woman in 2021, in her late 60s. The experience “cracks open the world” for her, as she eloquently puts it.
I found it a gorgeously written, admirably honest book, and I’m not alone in that opinion: The New York Times Book Review named “I Heard Her Call My Name” one of the 10 best books of 2024, and in a laudatory review, Dwight Garner wrote of Sante, “Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal.”
But another potent part of the book’s appeal is the way Sante depicts culture — and music in particular — playing a vital role in her lifelong journey to becoming more herself. (That she is such a sharp cultural observer will come as no surprise to anyone who has read any of her other books, like the New York chronicle “Low Life” or the collection “Kill All Your Darlings.”)
Eye-opening avant-garde art beckons her to New York as a teenager, and the pulsating sounds of the city — from groundbreaking artists like ESG and Grandmaster Flash — provide a soundtrack to her 20s and 30s. Sante uses music to bring long-gone New York haunts back to life (like a certain bar where the Fall is always on the jukebox) and, eventually, thanks to her childhood idol Françoise Hardy, to arrive at the version of femininity that resonates most deeply with her.
If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it. And if you have, may this playlist bring you back to the distinct atmosphere between its pages.
I drank a jar of coffee then I took some of these,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. The Angels: “My Boyfriend’s Back”
One of the earliest musical memories Sante writes about in “I Heard Her Call My Name” happened when she was in fourth grade and her teacher, in lieu of a planned square-dancing lesson, “threw caution to the wind, plugged in the jukebox, and taught us to frug” to this 1963 girl-group classic. “Dancing to pop music gave me proof that there was a better world somewhere,” Sante writes. “I picked up this world in bits and pieces because I was a child, but it wasn’t hard to find in the mid-1960s.”
2. The Fall: “Totally Wired”
Smash cut to two decades later, when Sante is living in New York, taking in the downtown scene and often swinging by the storied Times Square bar Tin Pan Alley, where her friend, the then-aspiring photographer Nan Goldin, was a bartender. One of Sante’s favorite things about Tin Pan Alley is that this jittery 1980 single by the English post-punk group the Fall was on the jukebox.
3. ESG: “U.F.O.”
Another defunct nightlife spot that comes back to life in Sante’s book is the Roxy, “a roller disco in the West Twenties that one night a week covered the rink and welcomed the Manhattan hip-hop-post-punk interface.” She recalls a memorable night there when the rap legend Afrika Bambaataa served as D.J. and played this spacey tune from the great Bronx dance-punk group ESG “at least a dozen times in succession.”
4. Public Image Ltd.: “Public Image”
In the late 1970s, writes Sante, the stereo at a friend’s First Avenue apartment “was our communal radio station,” where different friends would take turns introducing new sounds: “The first spin of the eponymous first single by Public Image Ltd. got us up and leaping — not pogo-ing, more like stags in the forest.”
5. The Floaters: “Float On”
Another First Avenue favorite that “would get us all up and swooshily pantomiming,” Sante writes, was this singular 1977 hit by the Floaters, which is part otherworldly R&B slow jam, part personal ad — complete with each member’s astrological sign.
6. The Pop Group: “She Is Beyond Good and Evil”
One of my favorite anecdotes in the book concerns the Pop Group, the English post-punk band that released this jaunty single in 1979. While hanging out in the First Avenue apartment around that time, one of Sante’s friends happened to spot the Pop Group from her window. “Hey, Pop Group! Come up!” she yelled to them. “So,” writes Sante, “the Pop Group, from Bristol, U.K., duly climbed the stairs and joined us for an hour or two of smoking herb” and listening to Jamaican 12-inch singles. “We never saw them again.” Only in New York!
7. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five: “The Message”
“It was the summer of ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash,” Sante writes, setting the scene for a personally tumultuous time in 1982. “The Message” and its menacing refrain — “don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge” — hover over that section of the book like an aptly chosen song soundtracking a cinematic montage.
8. Françoise Hardy: “Enregistrement”
Finally, Sante writes of feeling drawn to Françoise Hardy — the eternally cool French singer-songwriter who died last year — from an early age, though she also felt that something about her close identification with Hardy was a gender taboo, as though liking her was girl stuff. It is only after Sante’s “egg cracked,” as she puts it (in a metaphor commonly used as trans slang), that she was able to see that Hardy was in fact one of her earliest “‘role models,’ by which I meant women who in one way or another inspired or formed me.” Toward the end of her memoir, Sante writes that she now understands her obsession with Hardy in a new light: She was drawn to her all those years ago because she saw “a beautiful, sexy woman with a touch of the masculine — her strong jaw, her lanky body — and a reserve, bred in the bone, that I recognized as kin to mine.”
The Amplifier Playlist
“A Soundtrack to a Fabulous Memoir Crackling With Music” track list
Track 1: The Angels, “My Boyfriend’s Back”
Track 2: The Fall, “Totally Wired”
Track 3: ESG, “U.F.O.”
Track 4: Public Image Ltd., “Public Image”
Track 5: The Floaters, “Float On”
Track 6: The Pop Group, “She Is Beyond Good and Evil”
Track 7: Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message”
Track 8: Françoise Hardy, “Enregistrement”
The post A Soundtrack to a Fabulous Memoir Crackling With Music appeared first on New York Times.
