The Ring of Pop

Among the many simple pleasures in life, few are sweeter than a captivating pop song. There’s the immediate gratification such a song provides, be it on the car radio, inside our homes, in a restaurant, or at the ballpark in between innings. (My current pop-song thrill arrives when I hear the Ting Tings’ contagious “That’s Not My Name.”) Beyond the momentary pleasure, though, these perfect pop songs also carry an important element of time and place, as they serve as signposts to our lives. They help us to connect the often frenetic dots of our life, and to place an important, yet fleeting, memory in the context of a three-minute hook or riff.

The songs we choose to remember may differ with each of us, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with our overall music taste. But they have stamped themselves into the fabric of our lives, and our nervous systems get a jolt of sorts when we hear these songs. I don’t need to listen to the music of the Bangles all that often, to say the least. But one note of their song “Eternal Flame” has me tossed into the sweetness of the first time I kissed my wife, 20 years ago. I’m not a huge follower of Outkast, but two seconds of their song “Hey Ya!” place me in a Boston subway, watching a young man walk onto the Orange Line with the song blasting from an old-school boom box, daring us all to not tap our feet to the rhythm. By the time I hear the chorus, I’m remembering the moment my oldest daughter started singing this at home, at less than two years old – her first favorite pop song. I don’t know if I can name more than two Ace of Base songs, but give me the chorus to “The Sign,” and I see myself singing this at the top of my voice in a North Carolina apartment, a young 20-something finding a theme song as I looked for divine guidance on decisions related to career and relocation.

The world may get more complex every year, but a perfect pop song is delicious in its simplicity. The Beach Boys, Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Madonna and Prince are just a few of the artists who found a way to create three to four minutes of musical heaven. But no one has ever done it better than Michael Jackson. And I don’t know if anyone ever will.

I listen to some of his songs today, the day after his premature death at age 50, and they give me the immediate urge to tap the feet, sing along, bob the head – as they always have. Better yet, these songs unfold the calendar in my mind, as I make that connection between the music and what I was doing at the time I first heard the song. I see the autumn of my seventh-grade year, when my brother, friends and I sit in front of the TV and watch the “Thriller” video with eyes wide open; I see the summer before my senior year in high school, when I buy my first-ever CD player, plug it into my stereo system in the basement and christen the thing by blasting “Man in the Mirror”; and I see my junior year in college, when I clean my first-ever apartment while singing along with “Black or White.”

The man lived a difficult life, and he made some decisions that puzzled a lot of people. I don’t have any answers for that, nor is it my business. But I do know his songs, and I know that they have brought me the dual pleasure that pop songs can bring – pleasure of the moment, and pleasure of the memories. That is the gift of the perfect pop song, one that Michael Jackson could deliver as though every day were Christmas.