Winamp Wednesday: What You Became
A trip on a Black Balloon to end the year.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Goo Goo Dolls, “Black Balloon”
Who’s your favorite person you’ve ever been?
Before we get to that existential question, we’ll start with the acknowledgement that Goo Goo Dolls are two different bands encased in a single package. I have been to recent concerts hoping in vain that they’ll play “Only One”, even though I know full well that their speed-freak masterpiece hasn’t been on a setlist since before “Iris” became a giant radio hit. The fate of the Goos is like if The Replacements became known for “Answering Machine” and the world demanded a dozen more records exactly like it. A band that could craft blazing angry tunes had a few fluke hits with something more pondering and sentimental and then they were locked into that mode for the rest of their career. Johnny Rzeznik was astonishingly good at writing songs that were essentially “Name” over and over again, which is something considering his admission that First Release was written under the influence of “truck-stop speed” and the band’s original name was The Sex Maggots.
It’s weird to consider who we become, or maybe to consider who we don’t.
Maybe you don’t have a favorite version of yourself. Maybe like me you are utterly mortified by the general conception of self as both present tense and past actions. You can see the mistakes you’re making in real time and you can see more when you look back. The past is a bully and the future’s even worse. Maybe this feeling only lasts as long as it takes to consider the question; the bright light of interrogation makes every line in your life’s illustration look harsh and unfamiliar. When you’re not thinking about it maybe you’ll have a moment pop into your head that makes you realize when you were at your best, or at least close to it.
So what’s your best? When you’re at your most capable, most free, and most hopeful? When the malleability of youth follows you into your future? We all think too much, and I’ve found it’s best when we don’t. We meet the moment. We find the perfect joy within it. That’s difficult to do when you’re burdened by the everyday thoughts of a modern adulthood. Maybe that’s what gives credence to the myth that so many of us peak in high school. (As opposed to the truth of the matter, as stated by Crow T. Robot of Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Does just walking through it make you want to kill yourself? Then it’s a high school!” I was glad to see that one grace the pages of my senior yearbook.) Too young to take over but too old to ignore, full of energy and seeming purpose but still functionally a kid. I thought I was so smart and so ready at fifteen and looking back I knew less than nothing. There was a feeling in my heart but it wasn’t something I could name. And when you go out into the world like that you are nothing but invincible.
That’s where I found myself on New Year’s Eve 1999, witness to history, one of the biggest events of my lifetime and definitely the only one that had come with fanfare and a countdown clock. Commercials, songs, movies, news reports, conspiracy theories, harbingers, everything and everything counting down to the Millennium as if the calendar wasn’t mankind’s construct alone. I’m not going to pretend that I was blase about it. Of course I was scared something was going to happen, because I was fifteen and I believed in narratives. 1999 had been a wonderful confusing beautiful whirlwind of a year that I exited a better person than I entered. It had to end with a bang of some sort. It had to mean something. So I did what millions of other people did that night: I got on a tuxedo and went to a party with a bunch of old friends. But until it was time to go I paced the floor of my room and played video games and flipped the dial on my radio from The Cat to PYX 106 and back again.
I don’t know why I did this, but I took it upon myself to write down every song I heard in the wild that night. Taking stock of this soundtrack must have meant I knew the world was going to be just fine, but that didn’t stop me from drinking my volume in champagne and watching the TV for clues that the lights were going out across the world.
I could have picked any other song on this list—check back when we’re hundreds of entries deep, I probably will have—but “Black Balloon” had this primal reaction for me. In many ways it’s the direct opposite of last week’s choice. Instead of upfront and giddy proclamations of the loveliness of the world we have the hidden plaintive reflections on an addict’s death. Pop music has always been good at shuttling meanings in behind irresistible medleys, which is why to this day concussive shows of machismo at football games all over America are interrupted by songs like “Y.M.C.A.” Looking at the lyrics now I realize that I have wildly misheard several lines over the past twenty-four years. “And you’re not thinking about tomorrow” became “I’m thinking about tomorrow” to my hopeful ears. There’s no bigger misinterpretation than the full opposite.
Even in fully unifying events you can’t speak for anyone else, so all I can say is that I was looking for hope in that moment. I fully believed in it. Here I was in my grandfather’s tuxedo in a town time tended to forget waiting out armageddon or Sean Connery robbing the Petronas Towers or Phil Fry getting frozen or anything else that was supposed to happen at the stroke of midnight. (I had even named the mixtape I had made for the occasion “Armageddon Mix”, what a dork.) When I listen to the ringing guitars that begin “Black Balloon” I can taste exactly what it was like to be that person on that night. Young and loving and in love and knowing full well that whatever happened we were all standing on the precipice of history. Surrounded by people I adored being absolutely rambunctious.
I’ve been many people I like, but that night I was one of my best selves. Happiest New Year.
At 11:59 I heard one of my neighbors calling for his younger brother in a crowded room, sure of who he wanted to stand with in a new century. I don’t remember the relief at midnight, but I know it was there as we hit the Millennium. (Excuse me, Willennium.) At 12:01 I found myself running outside into the freezing cold, dress shoes over ice, sprinting into a world that was still there. I looked up to the sky and exclaimed to my friends that it was still there. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in your whole life?” I could see every star, or at least I could in my optimistic view. Everything was going to be okay. Millennium approached and brought with it a life that would be perfect from here on in.
I was dead wrong. Life kicked my ass like it does most everyone else, and it didn’t even have the good graces to wait a little bit. A lot of it was my fault, just like it is for everyone else. I stopped being that kid who looked up at the sky and was stunned it was still there. We’ve had twenty-four more years with those stars above us, and we’ve all been all sorts of people since then. How often have any of us been that joyful, that optimistic? There’s nostalgia looking back at that moment, but what stopping anyone from embracing that feeling?
“I’ll become what you became to me.” That line always made me think of the older kids I looked up to growing up, the people just far enough ahead that you want to emulate their best qualities. But there’s someone back there who I could learn me a thing or two. The world is entering 2024 with anger and terror on everyone’s mind. But the sky is still full of stars and the new year still holds promise. We are all of us older and we know the way the world works. Next year might be awful, and there’s no hope of sudden total salvation for us all. But the sky is full of stars and somewhere in the past is the favorite person we’ve ever been. May we get to carry their best traits into the new year.