courtesy photo of Patti Smith
[Editor’s note: Liner Notes chronicles how Chelsea Schlievert Yates discovered music through the ’80s and ’90s while growing up in Norfolk, Neb. This is her final piece of the series. Read the full mix here.]
by Chelsea Schlievert Yates
“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
— Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)
Exploring music is a continual process; it involves discoveries and rediscoveries, interpretations, dead ends and opportunities. For me, working on this column for Hear Nebraska has pushed me — as a writer, a consumer, a show-goer, a record-collector, a former Nebraskan, a listener and a fan — to seriously engage with how my experiences growing up through music and in Nebraska aligned to position me exactly where I am today. I cannot look back through my past without the lens of music. It is what weaves together my memories, and it’s also what shapes my present-day experiences.
One of my favorite music writers is a woman named Ellen Willis. In 1968, at a time when writing seriously about rock and pop music was rare, and for a woman to be doing so rarer yet, she was hired as the New Yorker’s first music critic. (If you’re not familiar with her work, check out her 1967 essay on Bob Dylan that appeared in the short-lived magazine Cheetah. No matter how you feel about Dylan, the essay is phenomenal.) Ellen used to test out albums by dancing to them in front of the mirror in her New York apartment. The combination of play, performance, consumption, personalization and reflection represented in such an act speaks volumes to me.
I imagine that many of us can relate to Ellen’s approach. I mean, who of us hasn’t danced our hearts out behind a closed bedroom door or cranked up the volume of our car stereo to sing along with that one song? How many of us have adopted a tune — one that becomes exclusively ours when we step up to a mic to sing it in a karaoke bar or when we plunk around on our guitars, pianos and ukuleles? Who hasn’t scribbled favorite song lyrics on a piece of paper and tacked it to a bulletin board or tucked it away in a book to be revisited on days when we need those words the most? How many playlists have we created over the years — workout playlists, road trip playlists, party-with-friends playlists, walk-the-dog playlists, clean-the-house playlists? Whatever the activity, no matter how mundane or exciting, we’ve likely assembled a soundtrack for it.
In 1969, Ellen wrote, “It’s my theory that rock and roll happens between fans and stars, rather than between listeners and musicians — that you have to be a screaming teenager, at least in your heart, to know what’s going on.” In our own ways, we’re all reviewers and critics, dreamers and fans, screaming teenagers in our hearts, constantly discovering the ways in which the music we listen to moves us.
I’m grateful to Hear Nebraska for giving me a space to share my reflections, but I’m even more grateful for the ways in which it’s compelled me to read, write, imagine, discover, question and think more about music than I ever have before. The funny thing is, as personal as my experience writing “Liner Notes” has been, I have a hunch that I’m just one of the many who has been impacted by Hear Nebraska in this way, and who will be in the years ahead.
Rock on, Nebraska. And thanks to you all for reading.
Chelsea Schlievert Yates grew up in northeast Nebraska and now lives in Seattle, Washington. Though this is the final entry for her “Liner Notes” column, she looks forward to contributing more essays to Hear Nebraska in the future. Reach her at chelseadyates@gmail.com.