Freestyle Wednesday #3: Noel

A few years ago, while waiting for my new apartment to finally become available (the previous tenants had been taking their time), I went out into the country, two hours into the west, to move in with my grandparents while I waited. Once, during that slow succession of lazy days, I woke up to a morning that felt like most mornings in my early childhood--with all the windows open, with the smell of my grandmother's cooking, light on the back of a morning breeze, carried throughout the entire house. I went out to my car for something, I forget what, and was greeted by my grandfather, up since daybreak, watering the roses. Just then, somewhere around the corner, perfectly and as if on cue, I heard an approaching car being trailed by the familiar strains of a certain freestyle classic, and somehow, with my bare feet caught mid-tiptoe on the cold driveway I used to tiptoe barefoot through as a kid, avoiding the bees on the lawn, my brain did a sort of memory double-take; it processed the sound of that car booming down the street, and the presence of my grandfather behind me with the garden hose in hand, and the bare feet and my grandmother calling us in to eat, and it settled into some long-forgotten and comfortable nook, but the paradox created by the car keys in my hand and the conscious understanding that I'm no longer seven-years-old and this is no longer my summer home and is, in fact, 20 years older than when I remember it, and smaller at that--that paradox created some new form of memory that surfaces every time I hear an 808 beat.

MP3: Noel - "Silent Morning"

That song, "Silent Morning," was a top 10 hit in 1987, and everyone in town knew it. Including, most importantly, my older cousins and youngest uncles, who spent every single summer day installing huge carpeted boxes of speakers (were those woofers or tweeters?) in the trunks of their cars. Ride-alongs consisted of my younger cousin and I buckling ourselves into the backseat and having our ribs quite literally rattled by the bass as we sped down the main road.

Noel (born Noel Pagan) caused a considerable ripple with that first single, and although it was his second hit, "Like a Child," that made the biggest wave (it peaked at #1 on the dance charts), it's "Silent Morning" that does it for me. (That embedded video up there, by the way? With the new wave girls in the audience hamming it up for the camera while Noel tries his best tortured artist stance? That totally does it for me, too.)