For someone who has severe hearing loss, I am a bit particular about the type of music I typically listen to. Music is truly the soundtrack of life. It heals, it soothes, it gives motivation at the gym, pushes you to go that extra kilometre on your run, a huge confidence booster and so on and so forth. In summary, music bops.
However, an interesting fact about the love affair between music and I. I never actually hear the lyrics to majority of the songs that I listen to (until i actually read them on google or wherever). Very weird I know.
Thing is, with my hearing loss, I can hear that something is being said (voices and co), but the actual words, I can't actually make them out. It basically feels like the song is not being sung or rapped in English and I have to get it translated. What I usually enjoy about my music are the usually the instrumentals. I can typically listen to songs that are totally rubbish lyric-wise but instrumentally are amazing. Trust me there have been SO MANY songs i have listened to and I really bopped to it. Then i read the lyrics and my expression exactly like below GIF below for various reasons (either cringe-worthy, or is this what I've been listening to???)
I think this is probably why i'm a huge fan of opera, classical music and songs in other languages (especially South African music - I'm currently obsessed with the South African gospel group - Spirit of Praise)
When i was much younger, I was obsessed with buying lyric books (when we still had tapes and CDs). It was really important that I was a cool secondary school kid at the parties. It would just not do for me to be looking totally blank or humming when the popular songs came on.
I wanted to look like this:
NOT this:
I mean you cannot NOT know what to sing (or rap as the case may be) especially if everyone was screaming the lyrics to songs at parties and social nights. (I mean trust me, I was cool. I won ALL the birthday party dance competitions. I could even break-dance... but that's a story for another day)
Thanks to those lyric books, I can still sing (off the top of my head) word for word, the lyrics to Nelly and Kelly Rowland's Dilemma, 50 Cent's In da Club and 21 questions, Lloyd Bank's On Fire (I LOVED this) and Destiny Child's Survivor. There are also a couple of other favourites.
Musics and lyrics also holds one of my favourite memories. You see, there were sometimes the odd songs, that I would absolutely love the instrumentals, the voices and the emotions evoked, but I could never find the lyrics anywhere or the tape did not include the lyrics of the songs in the insert. But I, however, just absolutely had to know what they were saying. One of such songs was the Nigerian boy band - Plantashun Boiz song - You and I (i used to be a die-hard romantic). This was in the time where we were still using music tapes to listen to songs. This must have been when I was in Junior secondary school (year / grade 7-9). My immediate younger sister who was in primary school at the time saw how much I was looking for the lyrics at the time, then decided to hand-write the lyrics for me.
So what she did was get the tape on our music player at home, got a notebook and pen, laid down on the living room floor, after our lesson tutors had left for the day. She then painstakingly in one evening, over the course of a few hours, starting and stopping the tape several times, wrote out the lyrics of this song. I was ecstatic when I could finally figure out what was being said. (The song lyric is actually quite long) and guess who was singing You and I, extremely loudly for the next few weeks, if not months!
So forever and ever, that song is dedicated to my sister - Link to the You and I lyrics (which are now THANKFULLY online) are here
(not actual footage of Oreos and I)***
She did this for a number of songs I loved at the time, it wasn't a one time thing. However, that particular song remains in my heart because of how much I loved it and she did it without being asked. You see why I say I have amazing family? Shoutout to Oreos!!
I love that in this day and age it's just a quick Google search to get just about ANY lyrics I would love to read and sing along to. Technology is amazing!
Until next time folks!