Loud Music

“Loud Music,” written in the present tense, opens as the speaker and his stepdaughter dance to music: “My stepdaughter and I circle round and round” (Line 1). The repetitive loop of this image has several echoes: a ritual or folk dance with prescribed and repeated movements, a record or CD spinning, and a volume knob twisting up or down. The speaker has very specific ideas about music volume, which he explains with a direct address to the reader: “You see, I like the music loud” (Line 2). This sudden appeal to a third person who is not in the scene shifts the poem’s perspective suddenly: No longer are we invisible observers of a familial dance, but instead, we become the speaker’s confederates, adults to whom he can explain his approach to music and with whom he can later share his observations of his stepdaughter’s development. The speaker qualifies that what he means by loud is an extreme: “[T]he speakers / throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3), so loud “each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut” (Line 5). The speaker does not mind the type of music, “Bach or rock and roll” (Lines 3-4)—his only need is for the sound’s vibrations to feel so physical, it borders on violent.

In Line 6, the poem dramatically shifts, as we get a different perspective: “But my stepdaughter disagrees” (Line 6). In a direct and striking contrast to her stepfather, she prefers the music volume low. Her stepfather describes this sound as “decorous” (Line 7), which is clearly not his four-year-old stepdaughter’s word choice. The word implies polite restraint, and its use seems slightly condescending, in the benign way of an adult gently mocking a child they love. The speaker’s slightly patronizing tone comes through even more since he first chose to explain his stepdaughter’s preference through her age: “She is four” (Line 6). The poem now attempts to explain the stepdaughter’s preference through adult eyes. The speaker does not ask the girl why she would like the volume low; rather, he confides in the reader his assumptions about her psychology. To him, it seems that she needs the music “pitched below / her own voice—that tenuous projection of self” (Lines 7-8). At age four, his stepdaughter needs to hear her voice to establish her identity. The speaker has thus introduced the poem’s most important theme: the concept of the self.

From this point on, the poem contemplates the appeal and dislike of self-awareness. The speaker notices that his stepdaughter is uncomfortable with the way loud music erases her from the room: “With music blasting, she feels she disappears / is lost within the blare” (Lines 9-10). For him, this feeling is the whole point of blasting the sound: being completely lost within the music “in fact I like” (Line 10). “But at four” the speaker states, “what she wants is self-location” (Line 11). Introducing an image in Line 12, the speaker compares the stepdaughter to how a “porpoise uses / its sonar” (Line 12); by being able to hear her voice above the music, the stepdaughter can “find herself in all this space” (Line 12). The child needs to feel heard to establish her place in the world.

In Line 14, the poem shifts into a wild hypothetical, imagining how the stepdaughter’s desire to be at all time aware of herself and the speaker’s need to get out of his head would express themselves visually. He posits the existence of “a sort of box with a peephole” (Line 14) that would display whatever the observer most wanted to see. His stepdaughter’s box would show “herself standing there in her red pants, jacket, / yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject / for serious study” (Lines 16-18). The very young girl is the center of her own world; unsure of exactly who she is, she contemplates herself to discover it. The extreme specificity of what the stepfather imagines she would see—the exact colors of her belongings, the details about what she is wearing—is striking because the stepfather has so little interest in aesthetics that he doesn’t even care what music he is blasting. Still, it is important that the idea that what the stepdaughter most wants to see in the magic box is herself comes from not from her, but from her stepfather’s sense of her. This is key because the poem is primarily about the stepfather’s need to escape from self-awareness—he uses his stepdaughter as a contrast to his perspective, rather than faithfully documenting what she is experiencing.

Unlike the stepdaughter, in the box the speaker “would wish to find / the ocean on one of those days when wind / and thick cloud make the water gray and restless” (Lines 19-21). There are no beings in the scene: only a hint that “some creature brooded underneath” the waves (Line 22) and road that “someone like me” could have walked (Line 24). The speaker relishes the deletion of his personhood in the scene, not even wanting to picture specifically him walking on the road, but just any person vaguely like him. Instead, the seascape is wild, untamed, and “restless” (Line 21)—at any moment it could storm. “Loud music does this,” the speaker claims, “it wipes out the ego” (Line 25)—and the speaker loves feeling lost within something larger than himself.

The poem concludes on an image of “turbulent water and winding road, / a landscape stripped of people and language” (Lines 26-27). The speaker craves this blank space: Forgetting the self means seeing beauty in one’s surroundings, noticing “how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors” (Line 28).