It Just Makes You Want to Fist Pump

I love music.

No, I LOVE music. I must have it on at work and in the car, and prefer to have it on whenever I am not reading or watching something.

My immediate family are all big music lovers. From an early age I can recall my mom dancing and singing in the kitchen and in the car, pounding on the steering wheel in time with the beat. My dad had a very nice receiver with a couple of sets of large, furntiture-in-its-own-right speakers to go with it. Weekends were cleaning days and many a Saturday was spent doing chores while Madonna's Immaculate collection blared throughout the house, each of the women in my family bellering along to "Like A Prayer", "Vogue" or "Holiday". We may not have always agreed on what to listen to as time went on, but we always agreed that music was magic.

I've met some people who aren't that passionate about music (once I even met someone who professed to not like music at all, which I found incomprehensible) but could never understand it. When the melody is beautiful, the beat is moving, the lyrics are touching, the singing exquisite, how can you not be moved in turn?

I like that music is shared between people, and how much you want to share it when you find a song you really like. Learning about new music from other people is my primary way of finding new artists to add to my playlist. The biggest contributors are, strangely enough, the Big B's best man and my sister. Despite their outward differences, I've found that my sister and B's best friend share a very similar musical taste.

Each week I go grocery shopping with my sister and I can picture many a night where she plugs in her iPod to my car stereo to have me listen to a new artist.

"Just listen! You'll love this song, I know it!" Her face lights up in earnestness and she closes her eyes and wiggles around in the car seat, arms and hands gesticulating gracefully in time with the music.

Maybe it's just me, but if someone introduces me to a new song/artist, I will forever associate them with that piece of music.

The guy in IT who I became friends with during a project for my department that introduced me to Hinder and Lacuna Coil? When I try to imagine the lead singer of Hinder, I picture his face instead.

I will forevermore see my high school boyfriend's face who bade me listen to Tool's "Aenima" in his black Dodge Neon one night, his long hair swinging around his ears as he banged his head in time to the ocean wave-like rhythms of that incredible song.

I cannot listen to Pearl Jam's "This Is Not for You" without seeing my mother's hands banging the steering wheel of her green Jeep Wrangler (and this is most certainly where I learned to "car dance").

Whenever I hear Atmosphere on the Current (yay MN public radio!) I inevitably hear the clinking of poker chips and see the face of B's best man, since his poker playlist is something I steal from regularily and was where I first heard "You" by Atmosphere and decided I must have it.

Isn't that the beauty of music? Feeling something inside yourself touched by a particular lyric or rhythm and it mutiplies inside somehow until it cannot be contained anymore and you burst into movement and you want to throw your arms wide and share this wonderfulness with someone, anyone, the world at large?

This must be how dancing starts. Even my rhythmically-challenged hubby taps his feet and moves his head when "Eye of the Tiger" is played.

Once on a long car trip to the family reunion in Iowa, my sister played LCD Soundsystems's "Dance Yourself Clean" in the car and admonished me to "just listen, just listen, it gets better, I promise!"

Boy can Miss Piggy headbang!

And it did. Once the beat kicked in she squealed, "Doesn't it just make you want to fist pump?!?" which she promptly began doing.

And we fist-pumped our way down the lonely highway, enjoying every second. And now I can't imagine listening to this song without a little fist-pumping.