Song of the Week: "Testing 1, 2, 3"

In keeping loosely with my previous blog, my song of the week is "Testing 1, 2, 3" from the BNL album Everything to Everyone.

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To be fair, though, I've really had the whole album in mind. Thelma and I have seven BNL albums in our collection. This is our sixth. It's a soft-sell criticism of celebrity culture, corporate excess and government policy, but somehow it still manages to play like a pop album instead of a lecture.

"Testing 1, 2, 3" captures the internal thoughts of someone who wants to move beyond the identity everyone else seems content to affix to them. It rings true to me when I think about people who have an overly simple and static idea of who I am or what I stand for.

Testing 1,2,3
Can anybody hear me?
If I shed the irony
Would anybody cheer me?
If I acted less like me
Would I be in the clear?

I remember when Thelma and I were wrapping up our time in Provo. It was the summer of 1997. Braeden was just a few months old. I had been accepted to Yale but I wasn't eager to let anyone know about it. I wasn't comfortable with how people reacted. For some people Yale connotes elitism or aloofness. I didn't like having that image projected on me. Even now, if someone asks me about graduate school, I just say I went to school in Connecticut. Most people drop it there. If they ask where, I say New Haven. That's usually enough to smoke out the people who were just asking to be polite. If they press it further, I'll tell them Yale.

Maybe my image could stand for something of a makeover, though. That same summer Thelma told one of our neighbors that we were moving because I had been accepted at Yale. The neighbor looked shocked and volunteered that they "didn't even know [I] was smart."

I suppose we are all richer and more real than we appear. For every moment I've mourned not being understood in my complexity, I'm sure there are countless occasions where I've lazily passed over someone else.

Well, I said it was the album on my mind as much as the song. So, I've included a few other songs in the play list. The best of them, "For You", is a bittersweet love song illustrating the other side of being misunderstood—the inability or unwillingness to share our true feelings.

I will give you all I could ever give
Though it's less than you will need
Could you just forget, if you can't forgive
All the things I cannot concede

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