Preface

Summary

‘Mum, what’s that song that goes “Am-beh, am-beh?”’

It was Poland in the mid-1980s and I was three, maybe four. My mother didn’t know. It took, probably, a few weeks before the song was on one of the two television channels again (or was it on the radio?), and my father and I happened to listen to it together.

This is my first music-related memory. The second must have happened not long after that. I was in a music store, in a long queue, lifted up by my mother to a tall man behind the register, so I could proudly ask: ‘Can I have Michael Jackson’s album, please?’

‘Am-beh, am-beh’, as readers might have guessed by now, had been, of course, ‘I’m bad, I’m bad’, the chorus line from Jackson’s bestseller hit song ‘Bad’. It was the title song of his 1987 legendary album, and apart from the US, it charted in Canada, UK, New Zealand, and several European countries. I didn’t know anything about that at the time, naturally. I was just happy we were able to get the album (a vinyl record) and I could sing along to the tune at home. This was the first meaning-making through music that I can recall. Whereas the line ‘I’m bad’ has been interpreted by music experts as Jackson’s attempt at ‘roughing up’ his image and departing from his gentler pop style, for me, ‘am-beh, am-beh’ meant something cool, flashy and exotic. It also marked the beginning of my burgeoning music collection.

By the time I was ten, indulged by my parents I had amassed a collection of albums (now on cassette tapes). At the time, popular music (largely from the US, UK and Western Europe) was starting to become widely available in Poland, and it was cheap too, as in the absence of copyright law, the cassette tapes were usually pirated and sold unofficially at markets and fairs. There was rarely a period of silence; when a cassette ended, I would just flip it to the other side and push ‘play’ again. Unsurprisingly, the songs stuck in my head and, since I could not understand English, the foreign songs spurred a myriad of original interpretations of what I thought they meant.

As the music accompanied my everyday activities, I sang and I listened, recorded and dubbed.