About ten years ago, I was in the produce section of a supermarket inspecting bundles of kale. Supermarkets always play music, and probably like everyone else, as a human Shazam, I like to pick up on whatever pops up. On this particular morning, ‘Africa‘ by Toto came on. It’s a very easy record to identify due to its brassy, vintage 1980s intro. It’s also an old pick and that in itself is evident due to the fact that it is now music suitable for weekend grocery shopping by worn down adults. Still, I picked up my greens and moved along with my shopping list, inwardly jamming to the synthesizer’s groove. Then suddenly without warning, I heard a new backing vocal. But it wasn’t a backing vocal because the person was near me. Indeed, it was a fellow shopper standing beside me. He was singing exactly one level from under his breath:
“I bless the rains down in Africaaaaa”
I smiled to myself and nodded to the beat. This song is a bit of a comfort jam for many of us in my generation. Back in the 1990s, I actually picked up a real telephone one night and called a 1-800 number so I could order the two CD set advertised on a commercial. The CD set called “Cool Rock” had Africa on there as well as some other hits that had grown elusive to me in the 1990s. Remember, that was still the age before everything could be pulled up on your phone. Back before you were able to pull up the old TV commercial off of Youtube. I felt silly ordering something advertised on the TV, but that purchase turned into a foundational element of my CD collection through college. But I digress.
I kept moving through the store. There was a perceptible hum as I realized that other shoppers were also singing the Toto song out loud. It was unconscious singing– no interest at all as to whether anyone else was listening– but ultimately, a funnily unifying moment. Whether they knew it or not, the song now had its own backup choir practice underway.
Fast-forward to this past weekend, and I was in an Italian supermarket, this time walking past packages of underwhelming fette biscottate. It happened again. This time, for me it was not a song I was familiar with– but right away I could tell that it was a selection that captured a large swath of the adult Italian shoppers. As I passed shoppers, a number of them had spontaneously joined in to the sing-talk rasps of the singer, Vasco Rossi:
“Voglio una vita spericolata
Voglio una vita come quelle dei film”
I smiled to myself, returning to join my partner in the hardware section (Lidl is a weird supermarket) . “Everyone is singing along to this song,” I told him. He raised his eyes up, as if to catch the lyrics, then he joined in with the rest of his cohorts:
“ognuno col suo viaggio, ognuno diverso
e ognuno in fondo perso, dentro i fatti suoi”
Perhaps it’s a symbol that adult life has too much drudgery built into it, but some of my favorite moments are ones of accidental synergy. And maybe it’s not completely about synergy– but rather it’s the weird collisions of existence where you suddenly realize that we’re all pretty much living the same existence.
And this week, there was the Grammy Awards in the United States– an annual event that recognizes the heavy hitters of music from the previous year. I checked out the performances online on the morning after the show, and immediately came upon the performance of ‘Fast Car’ performed by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. Like “Africa”, this is a song that I grew up with. I know it so well that I can sing the entire song in my head. And still, on that morning I must have watched the 5-minute clip at least five times. It made me emotional; it took me somewhere– someplace that moments before, I hadn’t expected to go. But there I was. And as if to capture how we, the audience, were receiving the moment, towards the end of the song, a camera cut to the artist Michael Trotter Jr. in his lime green suit. He was fully involved in the moment, pointing to Tracy Chapman as she sang “I-I”, then pointing to himself for the rest of the lyric:
“And I-I, had a feeling that I belonged I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone”
As I continued to listen, I scanned the internet for others who also saw the performance either in real time or afterwards. Some kid posted the scene in her living room during the show, and she suddenly realizes that her mom is crying. The kids asked why she was crying while watching ‘Fast Car’ and the mom just says, “I don’t know why.” The more I scrolled, the more I saw variations on that theme. In this online space that has evolved beyond CDs bought off television, we weren’t all singing along together, but we were all definitely caught doing the same thing.
In the hours later on while I was at work, I walked through a hallway that has an elevator with a TV showing the news mounted just above it. There were three Italians workers waiting for the doors to open, but they had their heads raised watching the reporting of the Grammys from the night before. I could hear one of them say, “Tracy Chapman” in his Italian accent. Then the song’s familiar guitar strumming started playing in the news clip. As I walked by, I looked up at the TV, bobbing my head as the guys looked at me. No singing, but it was a split-second shared moment of goodness.
Music can be many things: restorative, prescriptive, educational, and indeed a whole lot of fun when you strike upon something delightfully unexpected. I kind of wish that I would stumble across these shared moments more often than I do, but perhaps that is what makes them all the more special. These three songs that I’ve talked about don’t have anything to tie them together, apart from the fact that they all happened to pass through my particular existence. I know many more like them exist, because of course, whether folks realize it or not, we all have certain songs that move us. This week, it was nice to be reminded that many of us can all be moved at the same, sharing a moment of unity.