Black Girl Indie Rocker
Childhood is full of lessons on "being"; being a good student, being an obedient child, being a good friend, and if you're like me, it also included lessons on "being Black". No one advertises the fact that being Black has a learning curve and as a kid, I felt like I was way behind.
Before I understood that Black people are not a monolith, I often felt like being Black was a giant cool kids club that I simply wasn't a part of despite my brown skin and coily hair. I'd go to school and the other kids would say that I "talked white" although my mother assured me that this was a good thing if I didn't want to end up working at McDonald's (no shade to McDonald's employees). It didn't help that I sucked at double dutch (I was double-handed and could only manage a few "pop-ups" before the ropes collapsed around me), and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was definitely the weakest link in the impromptu dance groups that my friends formed to recreate Lil Bow Wow videos. This confusion might have stemmed from being the youngest child of two immigrant parents who were skeptical of Black American culture. It seemed to me that my best chance at fitting in was through music.Growing up in South Jamaica, Queens it was impossible to escape hip-hop. Hell, 50 Cent opened a park around the corner from my childhood home, although it's always locked so I'm not sure what the point is. But anyway, I grew up watching 106 and Park, listening to Hot 97, and rolling my eyes on the bus as someone decided to blast the newest club banger from their Boost Mobile phone. Hip-hop to me was an essential part of being Black, but it didn't matter how many lyrics I could recite - and I did recite lyrics sometimes, you know, to prove my Blackness - it didn't stop others from viewing me as an outsider and so decided to embrace the outside.As a teen, I was deeply into British indie rock. I was somewhat of an indie rock connoisseur. I spent time on music blogs researching new music, downloading playlists, and learning lyrics by heart. I dressed in skinny jeans, edgy t-shirts, and black Chuck Taylor's. I developed a love for NME magazine and longed to attend festivals in the English countryside where people moshed in the mud. My first love as a twelve-year-old was Franz Ferdinand. I heard the single "Take Me Out" on the radio one night. I had developed a habit of falling asleep to the sounds of Z100 (New York's #1 Hit music station), so I was somewhere between dream and wake when I heard the song, realized that I had never really heard anything like it before and thought it was kind of catchy.It helped that the band had Scottish accents. I blame the Spice Girls, Harry Potter, and Channel Thirteen with all of those dry British comedies and bleak murder mysteries for my fascination with the UK. The lasting effect of British colonialism on my Guyanese ancestors probably contributed as well. But at that time all I knew was that the sound, feel, and grungy alternative aesthetic of British indie rock filled a void in my misunderstood pre-teen life.My family was befuddled by my new obsession. Since I didn't always have friends with the same music interest, I would share all of the new found information about band members with gel plastered hair as well as my personal interpretations of their cryptic lyrics over the dinner table. My older sister ominously warned me that "Europeans are white, just like the white people here. Don't be fooled." But since concepts like global White Supremacy flew right over my young mind, I was able to brush her comment aside and continue searching for traces of my Black girl soul in the all white, low-quality music videos that were now a staple of my nighttime routine. Nevermind that these rock stars never sang love songs to girls who looked like me.I never wanted to be a singer. I played instruments, but my passable piano and violin skills did not exactly make me rock band material. Mostly, I enjoyed being a fan. I enjoyed feeling as if I belonged to something. If I researched hard enough, if I learned the ins and outs of this new world well enough, I was sure that I could belong. I found bands with diverse members like Bloc Party, the Noisettes, and The Black Kids, but most of the music in the genre brought to mind a crowded pub in some tiny British hamlet crowded with the (white) lads watching a football match. Eventually, I would go on to study abroad in England and found that hits like "Chelsea Dagger" by The Fratellis were indeed pub favorites, but my passion for indie rock began to dwindle when I got to college and realize that many of the characteristics that I pointed out in my senior year presentation about "How to be an Indie Rocker" (I kid you not), were actually guidelines for aspiring hipsters. Other than my ever-present Chucks, I pretty much ditched the look for skirts and blouses. Slowly, I began to lose track of the music. I don't know if the genre got worse and lost its spark or if I changed. Probably a little of both.With the growth of diverse representation in popular media, I began to learn that I was not the only "alternative" Black girl out there. Somehow I had stayed away from the danger of pigeon-holing myself as the misunderstood Black girl who likes white people stuff. My high school was extremely diverse with students from just about every corner of the world (one of the perks of Queens, NY) and although I was the only Black girl who wore band T-shirts and scribbled Interpol lyrics down the margins of my notebooks, I never felt like anyone owed me an apology for my missing invite to the Black kids table. I was a hipster before I even knew I was a hipster (does that make me some kind of super hipster?!) I enjoyed the identity that I made for myself. I needed to immerse myself in something deep and substantive, in lyrics like poetry and lingering guitar riffs, to hold myself together with it until I was ready to take on the more serious questions of identity.I'm not an indie-rocker anymore. I miss the smug satisfaction of feeling that I was more than a fan and that I was ahead of the curve, knowing which songs would be hits before they were even on Pitchfork. My iTunes library still has long playlists of mostly bad music that I would skip through looking for gems, but that music no longer serves as my self-imposed identity. Now my musical taste is just as eclectic as I am and as multilayered as Black womanhood. It's a beautiful thing!
Did you go through any phases during your teen years? Tell me about it! The more embarrassing the better!