Sony Walkmans Keep Us Walking

From Xanadu to De La Soul

I had a day off from work this week and I went to meet my friend Luke for a vegetarian buffet lunch. We are in a such a habit of doing this exact lunch, we don’t actually have to plan out the details anymore. “Do you want to have lunch on Friday?” now translates to “Do you want to have lunch on Friday at the Green Door around 1 PM? Definitely have something intense or weird about music or movies that you’d like to discuss.”

Since I had no other plans, I had the time to walk to the restaurant instead of driving, which was a bonus. Scrolling around on Spotify as I started the walk, I realized that I hadn’t yet listened to De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising album (RIP Trugoy), that had been re-released and added to streaming services the previous week. It was the perfect option for a late winter walk. The way it took my mind fully away from my immediate surroundings reminded me distinctly of my experience listening to the album on cassette when it was first released.

I got my first Walkman when I was six years old. My family was moving overseas and I was not jazzed about the major disruption to my small, familiar world. In an effort to appease me and possibly also get me to be quiet on long plane rides, my parents presented me with the very welcome gift of my own Sony Walkman. It was large. It had a carrying case with a shoulder strap and a pair of headphones with a long cord, prone to tangling in the bottom of my backpack. I loved it.

I was never without a Walkman again until I went away to university in the mid-nineties and cassettes relinquished their market share to CDs. Over those childhood Walkman years I had several different models. I have vivid memories of the mild chaos that would overtake my life when one Walkman stopped working (most common crime? Eating tapes.) and I hadn’t yet purchased a new one. I remember, after we’d moved back to Canada, a deeply exciting trip to the new Future Shop megastore with my dad, where we looked at all the available models and carefully debated which one I should get. It was a Panasonic that time, the smallest and highest quality model I’d ever owned. It carried me through long walks to and from high school, blasting The Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom albums as I trudged to and from Markville Secondary School.

(At one point my mom asked me to not listen to my music too loud while walking because girls my age were getting abducted and raped with alarming frequency. She was worried I’d be oblivious to my surroundings and get nabbed. Thank you, Paul Bernardo, for ruining my formative years in so many colourful ways.)

The De La Soul record came out a few years before those walks to high school. I was thirteen years old and I don’t know exactly why I bought it, except maybe that I liked the cover and had read a review in one of the Rolling Stone magazines I bought at Sam the Record Man in the mall. I had definitely never heard anything like it before. I listened to it on my headphones constantly, aware that some of the subject matter and language might have my parents on alert if they heard it. But, although the album had some adult-y stuff on it, it had many moments that were distinctly childlike, with whimsical stories and kind, playful lyrics.

De La Soul were definitely not thinking of a thirteen year old white girl in the suburbs when they made this album, but it reached me nonetheless. It’s the album I most remember listening to on my Walkman when my family went for an extended visit with my grandparents during my first year of high school. I loved my grandparents, but I was at the stage of early teenage-hood when I felt uncomfortable in my own skin all the time and I definitely did not want to be on a long family vacation in an unfamiliar city. My headphones and that De La Soul cassette were my coping mechanisms. I listened to it over and over again, while sitting on my single bed in the guest room. A lot of the samples were from songs I’d grown up hearing from my parents’ music collection. That, coupled with the whimsical, childlike parts of the album were a comforting reminder of the childhood I was rapidly leaving, while the lyrics that used wildly creative vocabulary to talk about race, sex, and the perils of stinky friends pulled my mind in a more adult direction.

As my own children enter their tween years, I recognize their need for space that exists away from their immediate family. My ten-year-old spends a lot of time in our basement, watching TV and gossiping with friends. He has discovered the pleasure of walking to the corner store with neighbourhood buddies, enjoying the freedom of venturing a few blocks away from home without adult intervention. For me, my Walkman was always a mental space for me to escape to, especially when we were travelling away from home, which we did frequently.

During our lunch I asked Luke if he had clear memories of the Walkmans (Walkmen?) of his youth. He sure did. He remembered walking to school listening to rap and hiphop cassettes, and the excitement of making mixtapes from an older sibling’s music collection. Our conversation evolved into a back and forth about how hard it was to carry a reasonable amount of cassettes with you at any given time and how the Discman was never really a good companion for a long walk. These are concerns that my own children, with their unlimited access to my Spotify account, will never understand.

But some things still span generations. Later at home, while we did after-dinner chores, I put on “The Magic Number” and watched them dance. We got through the whole song before they requested Megan Trainor instead. Everyone has their own music to escape into, I guess.

Songs - March 2023

Here are some hits I remember listening to on my Walkman, in a very rough chronological order:

It’s a Miracle - Culture Club - one of the first cassettes I remember picking out on my own after we’d moved away from Canada.

Xanadu - Olivia Newton John - I had such a deep obsession with this super weird movie and it’s equally strange soundtrack. Roller skating was a large part of my life as an elementary school kid.

Love Bites - Def Leppard - This was the song I always wanted to dance with a crush to at the grade seven dances.

Me Myself and I - De La Soul - see above.

Me and the Farmer - Housemartins - I moved high schools in grade ten and made my first friend (Hi Rakhi!) by complimenting a stranger in the hallway on her Housemartins t-shirt.

Little Pieces - Juliana Hatfield - I think I listened to this album literally hundreds of times while I walked to and from school in the early nineties.

Feelings - March 2023

Superfan by Canadian superstar Jen Sookfung Lee is a non-fiction collection of essays that tie the author’s personal experiences to various pop culture phenomenon. The essays are moving and sharp and it becomes a very satisfying game to figure out how Sookfung Lee will link, say, The Kardashians, to her experience growing up in Vancouver, BC. The essays touch on racism, mental health, and divorce and the pop culture connections are broad, ranging from Bob Ross to The Joy Luck Club. The writing here is top notch and this is the kind of book I would recommend to almost anyone that I know. It deserves to be widely read.

Anne of West Philly is a departure as far as my recommendations go, since it is a middle grade graphic novel that I borrowed from my ten-year-old’s bookshelf. There seem to be a large number of Anne of Green Gables (another pop culture reference from Superfan, coincidentally) re-tellings coming out which I am all for. I love the story, but when I tried to read the actual book to my kids, the language was a bit too much for them to follow at their current ages. So these age-appropriate re-tellings and modernizations are a great solution for now. I was sure after reading it, though, that some AoGG purists would have been displeased about some of the liberties the author takes with the original story and guess what, I was right! Shocking, I know, that people are mad about something on the internet. Anyway, just ignore the Goodreads reviews and approach this with an open mind and you’ll probably get a kick out of it if you’re a non-intense fan of the original.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next month!

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My debut romance novel, MAKE ME A MIXTAPE is coming from Doubleday in 2024.