My Sonic Life

By Davin Maske

A mixtape memoir of sonic moments during the formative years of a mixed-up kid who grew up during the eighties and nineties. For some, just hearing a single note of a song can take you back to a specific moment in time whether you like it or not. My Sonic Life is Davin Maske's collection of popular music selections that takes him back to the good, bad and the ugly of his youth. In this blunt, no nonsense musical memoir he dives headfirst into the harsh truths of growing up as an only child with a family that is far from perfect. Music can be the glue to keep you sane during life's knockout punches.
Songs are scars. Scars that never go away and force you to re-live every embarrassing and horrifying moment in your life. My Sonic Life is a twelve-song mixtape that does not hold back and should have a parental advisory warning explicit content warning sticker. Take a listen if you dare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098398309

Book preview

PLAY

Music is my life, and life is my music. For some earthlings, hearing a single note from a specific piece of music can transport them back in time. I am one of those lucky earthlings. This sonic experiment in writing a mixtape memoir was born on a chilly drive home with my wife and kids on Christmas Day, 2019, in Southern California. Out of nowhere, I rambled on to my wife, Mallory, about a song that came on the radio. This has been a huge annoyance for her throughout our marriage. Honestly, I have no idea how she stands me. I have a tendency to go on random tangents with little to no context while forming pointless diatribes that amuse only me. For some reason, this particular time, she actually listened to my mindless anecdote and seemed slightly interested. A big fucking light bulb appeared above my huge dome minutes later: I was going to write a memoir for dumb people like myself to enjoy! This memoir would center around songs that bring me back to an exact moment in time. A chord, a lyric, a snare hit, a record cover image or a guitar solo . . . anything musical that serves as a glue to my memories. For all my life, music has been the time machine for my fucked-up mind. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone with this mind-blowing revelation, but I’ll continue to exploit this idea like I’m the first to realize it. You can say music is my history, and my history is my music.

In this ridiculously self-righteous pseudo-memoir, I’m going to cuss excessively and tell my tales of woe like some sad guy you just met at a bar after he got laid off. The dates, years, dialogue, and stories may not be exactly correct, but they are close. I might jump around in time like a college student’s poorly written creative writing assignment. However, I promise you I am not making this shit up. Everything you are about to read really happened. These characters you will learn to love, or hate, are all real people. However, in these sonic tales, I am making a half-assed effort to change the real names of those not related to me. If any of you get pissed at me thinking one of these characters might be you, please know that they were all completely made up and any likeness to your existence on earth is merely a remarkable coincidence. For those of you related to me, dead or alive, you probably think I’m a jackass anyway, so fuck it, I’m using your real names.

I ran into a little hiccup when writing this thing. Contrary to popular belief, most writers do not have money to burn. Securing the legal rights to include published song lyrics for twelve major-label hit songs in a published novel could bankrupt the likes of Stephen King. I’m telling you this because I’m the guy that pays attention to the lyrics in a song, for the most part. Heaven to me would be simply reading a lyrical compilation of my top one hundred all-time favorite songs. Some song lyrics are so good, the music doesn’t even matter. So I implore you to purchase, legally stream, and look up the lyrics to each of the tracks that inspired each chapter in this book. Support the music industry, folks. They need it! Listening to each of these tracks more than once and Googling the lyrics are a must for this adventure. Music dorks out there will have no need to do extra homework.

There are literally thousands of these sonic moments that have made some sort of unconscious imprint on my psyche, but these selected tracks left the deepest scars—I dig scars. Scars that force you to imagine every embarrassing shit-your-pants kind of moment you have ever had. A song brings you right back to a moment in time, whether you want it to or not. Sometimes it just feels good to listen, feel, remember, cry, and bleed it out.

This is my sonic life.

Track 1

Bruce Springsteen

Born in the U.S.A.

Release date: June 1984

Columbia

The anthem of the 80s. If you were expecting deep cuts and B-sides from a music elitist, this isn’t the mixtape memoir for you. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), the dystopian novel by English novelist George Orwell helped fuel the fear of a fucked future. Both Orwell’s novel, Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and the actual year 1984 defined the term fucked. Ronald Reagan was reelected for his second term in office that year. During the conservative demigod’s bid at two terms, a Reagan advisor asked if they could use the song in the president’s reelection campaign. Springsteen said fuck no. Reagan was not alone in forgetting to do their lyrical homework with the Boss’s American heartland megahit. The song is not a celebration of American awesomeness, but rather an indictment of the American government, politics as a whole, and the way in which we treat those who have risked their lives in war. This is in fact a quintessential fuck the Vietnam War anthem. Conservatives in the 1980s did not read the fine print. As a result of this ignorance and lack of intelligence among a great number of Republican and Democratic candidates, the song has become the de facto feel-good election season anthem for politicians nationwide—at least in the 80s, that is. Well, you can say five-year-old little Davin was just as ignorant. However, he had an excuse. He couldn’t read good—I mean well.

My discovery of this triumphant anthem was rooted in cavities and fear. During a horrifying trip to the dentist’s office, I heard a few seconds of this track’s chorus while sitting in the waiting room of the torture chamber. Just like most politicians of the day, all I made out in the song was the born in the USA part. Within days of hearing this magical phrase, I saw posters with the same phrase around town and at local department stores. Even at five, I put two and two together.—maybe with the assistance of my parents, I’m guessing. I was fucking five, after all. When I came to the realization that these red, white, and blue images were related to this song, I was hooked. The majestic image of a scruffy superhero in tight blue jeans became my crucifix of worship. My very first memories of my American flag include Bruce Springsteen’s tight buns with a red ball cap tucked in his jean pocket and bedazzled silver belt. Oh yeah, and the red, white, and blue too. Keep your crosses and statues of Mother Mary. I had Bruce Springsteen merchandise to worship. In addition to finding immense gratification while gawking at the commercialized imagery of Born in the U.S.A., I became obsessed with screaming out the Springsteenian phrase born in the USA out loud, whenever and wherever. At the grocery store, in class, the playground, the dinner table, the toilet—you get it.

Born in the U.S.A. became my only certainty in a world of ethnic confusion. I was born in the United States of America. I am a first-generation GermPak. My America-loving immigrant parents became US citizens at the first chance they got. America was truly the promised land for two educators driven to teach English as a second language, American citizenship, and US history at whichever community or state college would have them. My parents never completely denounced their heritage or the countries they were born in; they just firmly believed the plasticratic idea of America could come very close to erasing who they really were. Both my parents, Harald and Zara, bought into the American dream like a drug and literally did everything they could to spread its western ideologies as if they were crack dealers.

Plasticratic: Democracy forged by plastic manufacturing methods. Yep, I just made that up.

Let’s start with Harald, my dad. The big Kraut was born in Oranienburg, Germany, in 1950. Yes, this was post-war East Fucking Germany. My chubby, blonde-haired, pasty-white dad had a younger sister who was of course named Ingrid. His mother was also perfectly Euro-named, Helga, and eventually married her polar opposite in all of humanity. Helga may or may not have been involved in the Hitler Youth campaign as a child, depending on which German you speak to. However, during the actual war, as a literal child, she was forcibly drafted to operate the manual telephone and cable communication lines used during the war. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a real Nazi . . . I think. Harald’s father was a concentrated German man who went by the name Alfred Maske. The vision you have in your mind while reading his name is an uncannily accurate depiction of the real-life Alfred, I assure you.

Baby Alfred was adopted by the Maske family. When the shit hit the proverbial fan during the rise of Hitler, believe it or not, being Jewish was frowned upon. Flat-earthers, Trumpers, Proud Boys, Q followers, millennials, the Holocaust was real. Fake news or not, in the fucked year of 2020, some NPR poll alluded to the horrifying stat that nearly 50 percent of millennials in America believe the Holocaust either did not happen or was grossly exaggerated. Back to my adopted grandfather, Alfred. The Maskes were not Nazis; they were Germans. Being German during the 30s and 40s did not automatically make you a Nazi. I know, your minds are blown. I’m not saying the majority of the country did not wholeheartedly buy into that psychopath’s ideology and mission. I’m saying within the German population, there were good people that did not want what Hitler wanted. I like to think that both my grandmother and grandfather were a few of these good people. However, good people are forced to go to war by such means as a military draft. Alfred Maske was just so unlucky. He was also forcibly drafted to fight as a Nazi during World War II, taking part in pivotal wartime brawls such as the Battle of the Bulge. To my knowledge, my grandfather did not take part in any concentration-camp-related posts during that fuckhead Hitler’s attempt to exterminate an entire race of humans. In fact, there was a slight chance Alfred would have been in one of those death camps as a Jew himself if he didn’t play his cards right.

When the war began, all German citizens had to prove their Aryan bloodline through documentation. This meant finding concrete proof in writing that they were not, in fact, a Jew. The story goes that my grandfather was adopted through nontraditional methods and that accurate records of his true heritage did not exist. So, they faked them as a means of sheer survival. The reality was that Alfred was most likely, at the very least, part Jewish, we think. Regardless, this forgery meant he would not be forced into death camps, but he was a prime candidate for the draft because of his young age. Somehow both my grandparents survived the war of all wars while serving in the armed forces, and they seldom spoke of its horrors. We’ll get back to my grandparents later. Let’s fast-forward the tape and press play on Born in the U.S.A. again . . . .

Nowadays, when I hear the introductory synthesizer chords and Max Weinberg’s driving drumbeat, I am instantly transported back to my childhood bedroom in 1984. The post-toddler bedroom where I demanded my parents purchase me a massive Born in the U.S.A. poster to hang on my baby blue walls. I was a fucking American kid through and through. Actually, I was a demanding kid, but my parents didn’t hesitate to fulfill my snotnose demands because the subject matter was red, white, and blue. They were uber proud, to say the least. Harald and Zara also didn’t read the lyrics. At this age, I had little or no interest in actual music. Born in the U.S.A., as a song, meant nothing to me. It was just the catchy phrase and the amazing imagery that I fell in love with. This was, in fact, my first true love.

When hearing the audible, memory-jogging handshake of this track today, the sonic cheese also trans- ports me back to one very distinct moment when this little GermPak was in kindergarten. This remarkable and somewhat unbelievable early memory painted the pissmy-pants stage of my childhood’s ethnic confusion to a T. My immigrant parents could not have been more thrilled to have their American-born only son screaming misinterpreted American propaganda lines in public. You see, I was my parents’ literal Captain America project. I gave you some of Deutschland Dad’s backstory, but what you don’t know yet is that my mother, Zara David (her maiden name), was born in Pakistan in 1948. Hence the Pak part of GermPak. I’m guessing you pieced together the Germ part already.

In case you were wondering, little Davin popped out of the womb a brown-skinned infant. Yes, this is important to this story, the current state of America, and planet fucking earth. Truth be told, my parents adored everything about the good old US of A, and what they wanted more than anything was to manufacture their own real American child. However, the single lifeform they created came out dark brown and somewhat ethnically ambiguous. For most of my adolescence, I was raised with limited exposure to the truths of my cultural heritage. My parents, to a significant degree, shunned the majority of their culture and replaced it with the American dream. I was to fulfill that American dream that they held in such high regard. However, little brown Davin quickly discovered some massive ethnic confusion early in life. The GermPak didn’t know what side of the fence to stand on.

Believe it or not, Harald and Zara initially raised the little GermPak with the Christian faith. During this time in my life, I had sporadically attended a Presbyterian church near my hometown. My mom was all in with white Jesus, while my dad took great delight in debating the conflicting meanings of bible verses among true believers. I’d call my father an atheistic agnostic and a history buff, to say the least. The Kraut just wanted to rile people up most of the time. My mom just wanted to find some sort of tiny hope inside her own personal dark world. I’ll get to that dark world my mom lived in later, I promise. I’m hitting you early with a sonic memory that is on the lighter side before I hit you with the knockout punch of fucked-upness. Zara needed the simple and happy idea of a god, while my dad needed to challenge its existence. Five-year-old Davin simply enjoyed church because there I felt safe, American, and white. In the real world, I was a dark-skinned kid, but at church we all seemed to be the same color in Jesus’s eyes. Five-year-old me bought this complete bullshit—hook, line, and sinker.

During these seemingly farfetched church-going years of my early life, my parents decided to give Christian private school a go for their little Christian-American boy. Brethren Christian Kindergarten was my place of study in year five of my life. From what I remember, this Jesus-peddling school was run like a cult compound. For some reason we had two kindergarten teachers teaching us literally nothing but bible verses. This pissed off my dad, while my mom thought Brethren Christian was literally sent to us by Jesus himself. My kindergarten days were spent learning about some white guy named Jesus, and my nights were spent worshiping my Born in the U.S.A. paraphernalia on my bedroom walls. This created even more confusion inside my puny child brain. However, Jesus had nothing on the Boss. Occasionally, my weird teachers would have us practice non-bible-related arithmetic, art, and writing among our class of shitheads. During one specific class, near the end of the school year, we were tasked to make a flip-book centered around things we liked and things we were scared of. Pretty heavy stuff for a five-year-old. So, I dug deep into my soul and put crayon to paper. Things I was scared of included lions, vegetables, and knives, while things I liked included the USA, blue jeans, Luke Skywalker, and hamishire and rice. Hamishire and rice was my favorite food at the time, and the mere mention of this in class caused a near riot. I was no genius five-year-old; don’t let my ego and superior writing talents fool you. Both then and now, my spelling was for shit. Near the end of my project, I flagged over one of my cult leaders—I mean, teachers.

"How do I spell hamishire?" I asked the teacher with the stringy brown hair.

"Hamishire? Mrs. Swan, will you come over here?" said the stringy-haired teacher, looking for help from her partner in Christ. The other teacher was a tall, thin, but very pregnant white lady with a pink face. She was the nice one, I think. (Remember, I was five. Right about now, most of you are calling bullshit with this tale. Maybe I was touched by Jesus, resulting in a superhuman memory. Regardless, if I was making this shit up, I would have made it a lot more interesting.) Mrs. Swan came right on over to assist with the dilemma. What transpired was an onslaught of confusion, hilarity, and