Dance Music

Chris Neilan

You find your heart is a balloon, blown up and let down and blown up again, so you make tapes. Mix tapes, cobbled together from mix albums—Dave Pearce and Euphoria and Ministry of Sound: The Annual. The plastic hinges chip as you carry them in your rucksack to the parties, with the cans and syphoned liquors you’ve managed to finagle. Ultra Nate, Armand Van Heldon, ATB. In commuter town living rooms crowds of children listen to those tapes, when you’re able to commandeer the tape deck, paying no hint of the attention you wish them to pay, to these tapes, these pieces of your inexplicable balloon heart. A boy from your year is asleep on the sofa, the room pungent with eau de toilette and lager, young bodies. Cliques both strengthened and dissolved, boundaries shifted by the new presence of Booze. Some have been kissing. As you try to rouse the sleeping boy he vomits into your lap. Your tape is not playing. A girl you know says you’re nice, and her friend agrees, and the first of these girls drifts into your personal orbit. She lies on the floor of the sitting room alternately allowing you and a bowl-cutted boy called Matt to kiss her, and spectacularly she allows your hand up her top, into her bra. The room is dark by this point, and it’s very late—people bedded haphazardly on the floor and sofas, chatting, laughing, laughing at you. Your tape has been played, a bit: Jungle Brothers, Paul Johnson. You remember deciphering the rhythms in your bedroom, walking around town—the thump thump thump thump drop.

The house is quiet now, and a-fog with scent—the acid stench of puke, fag stink, spilled lager, stickysweet Hooch, some peaty whiff you don’t yet know to identify as hash, and something else—something in the air, of hard kids, violence, the violence of contact, desire, bodies, kissing, grinding, groping, laughing, humiliating, and with it all the home smells everyone knows, of carpet cleaner and pot pourri. You turned fifteen this month—most are still fourteen. Do you wake up next to the girl? No, but under your own coat, freezing cold. It is October, and morning now, and you’re sicker than you’ve ever been. The hostess’s mother has appeared and is making, inappropriately, black coffees.

Your tape plays. You stumble the half-mile home. Maybe you listen to your tape when you get home too, in the light of your bedroom, the ceiling spinning and spinning. You make more tapes, more and more, often try to put them on, and they’re seldom listened to. Sometimes, sometimes, they stay on for four or five songs, and one person might nod their head, white-boy overbite. Maybe it stays on long enough for you to forget it’s on, to stop watching out for people who might turn it off and put their music on, long enough to just enjoy, for a while, the ambience that your tape has helped create, the interactions that are happening, the jokes, the joshes, flirts, moments, scored by you. Don’t comment on it, don’t seek approval—that will conjure belittling. Keep it quiet. Let the tape be changed when it’s changed. Don’t rush to reclaim it as if it’s a precious jewel. You’ve stopped thinking about it. You forgot it was even playing. Let the time pass. It’s no big thing. Life is no big thing. Music is no big thing. Hearts are no big thing. That first kiss? Drunk, on a living room floor? No big thing.