Written by Audrey Orenstein
Art by Lillian Anderson
Sometimes, I think that the ancient Greeks had the right idea when it came to belief. While I myself don’t believe in God, I find myself questioning the potential existence of some higher power—or powers—when faced with setback after setback, falling on me one after another like a line of dominoes. It’s at times like those when polytheism starts to really make sense. Think about it: there are different gods for basically every aspect of your life. If something bad happens that’s related to one of those aspects, you just didn’t pray hard enough! That desire for a “why” is something that I feel frequently, but at no point in recent memory was it felt as strongly as when my beloved headphones broke a few weeks ago.
They were a pair of over-the-ear headphones, modeled to look like the pair that came packaged with the original Walkman from 1979. A thin aluminum band connected two circular black speakers, each covered by complimentarily circular orange foam. While they were only $20, they held a charge pretty well and didn’t sound all that bad for the price. As such, I used them on a daily basis since I bought them a year prior. Additionally, unlike the vintage headphones they were intentionally evoking, these used Bluetooth! Not only did this allow me to groove to my music without a cord as my unwelcome dance partner, it made connecting them to both my phone and my laptop a snap. Across both devices, I’d estimate that they were used solely to listen to music 90% of the time, with the remaining 10% consisting of video gaming, Discord calling, or both simultaneously.
If I were walking alone, I would all but certainly have a playlist of mine on shuffle, usually one of the “Big Three”: a rock playlist I made, every Electric Light Orchestra song on shuffle, or my liked songs on Spotify. On the other hand, the LoFi Girl and her Beats to Relax/Study to were consistent co-workers and companions in more academic contexts. Whenever I’d be doing my schoolwork, they’d be streaming through my cheap, yet classy cans, along with the typewriter noises I’d modded my internet browser to make with every press of a key. On the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh day of every week, Audrey heard that it was good… until September of 2024.
That fateful day, my dear sweet headphones developed an unfixable fault, one related to the micro USB port that allowed me to recharge them. As a result of the functional death sentence they had just received, I found myself wondering how I should use up their ever-dwindling lifespan. If memory serves, it wasn’t very memorable. Later that day, they played their last encore and ended their career on a note I wish I could remember. Fortunately, I had remembered seeing something that might serve as a suitable replacement for them in a vintage clothes store a few days beforehand. But as luck would have it, I found out the hard way that it just so happened to be the one day of the week that they’re closed (“the hard way” referring to the fact that I walked there after assuming they’d be open and not confirming it online). As I mentioned earlier, it was one of those domino days where I started to question if something past the pearly gates had biblical beef with me.
The next day, I was musicless until my classes were out for the day and I was free to go back downtown and try the vintage clothes store again. As it turned out, I had really taken my music for granted. Walking with only the sounds of nature and Burlington to accompany me felt more bizarre than I’d care to admit. It was as though I hadn’t fully appreciated the goods and services that Apollo, the ancient Greek god of music and dance—or Apollo, if you’d prefer to use his Roman name—had been providing. Resulting in them being taken away from me until I gave their importance in my life the acknowledgement they deserved. Luckily, that day of suffering seemed to be enough, as I made my way to the store and bought that suitable replacement I had seen the week before.
The purchase was a pair of 1985 Tandy-brand radio headphones—shoutout to my father for helping me figure the exact year out. They’re a wonderful model, only capable of listening to the AMs and the FMs. Off-white, chunky, rectangular plastic house speakers. They reach my ears via foam within black polyester that was probably a lot softer nearly forty years ago. While the headband is supposed to be adjustable, it just plain isn’t. There’s a knob for volume, a knob for frequency, a switch that toggles between AM and FM, and a hole wherein lies a 9-volt battery. They’re dated, but charming. Plus, owing to the nature of radio and the inability to connect to a Walkman or what have you, they are also conveniently wireless! But that’s only what they look like. What do these radio headphones that are nearing half a century in age sound like?
Good enough! That is, if their connection to whatever station you’re trying to listen to is a solid one…
Between their age, the fiddliness of the knobs, and the fact that the spring in my step I walk with keeps them moving a lot, keeping these things tuned in was practically a game unto itself. Evidently, Apollo still wasn’t convinced that I had shown my appreciation for his gifts, so time and focus-wasting adjustments ended up being my sacrifices for his appeasement. But once they were stable, they often stayed that way for a while. As you might expect from someone who happily purchased a pair of radio headphones that were literally sold at RadioShack back in the day, I primarily listened to MeTV FM—96.7—an oldies station focusing on music from the 1950s to the 1980s. As the name might suggest, it’s a part of the MeTV brand, which broadcasts reruns of shows like Gilligan’s Island… which I may or may not have watched as a child.
Despite being initially quite annoyed at the loss of control over which songs I listened to, I soon found that the stormcloud of randomness had a silver lining. In Abandon, one of the essays contained with her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit mentions that “Music and dance have always enchanted [her] as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience” (Solnit 97). With my old headphones, I had more or less complete control over what feelings that communion expressed as the ever-hypothetical Apollo was only able to control the order of the shuffled songs. However, it turned out that such control came with plenty of subtle, but significant downsides. For one, it meant that I was rarely put into a position where I would be listening to new music, meaning that no matter what emotions were coming across through the songs, the repetition of those songs meant that I would never really feel anything different from what I had heard for so many months. But perhaps more importantly, who would’ve guessed that a lot of the songs liked by someone with clinical depression would be huge bummers? When I said earlier that I spent 90% of my time with my headphones, I was counting the 25% of the time that I had to spend skipping songs that would make me feel sad in order to find the diamonds in the rough that were songs not about general misery.
All of that changed when MeTV was on my air. With a radio station at his fingertips, Apollo became an Olympian disc jockey, with a level of control over what I listened to that I had never before heard. While they would occasionally play a song that I already knew and loved, most of the tunes were brand new to me, adding a level of freshness to my life that I didn’t fully realize decades-old technology could provide. For the most part, the music on the air was upbeat and happy, which kept me in similar moods throughout the day. Additionally, even though there were still aspects of repetition in their broadcast, I found them more charming than I had when I had control over what got repeated. It was nice to hear the same hokey ads, the same fun facts about 50s television, the same weather announcers. There was a familiarity to it that felt warmer than my frankly overly-cynical music taste could provide.
I wish I could say that the story ends here, with the lesson that a loss of control helped me find happiness in going with the flow all wrapped up in a nice little bow. Unfortunately, that’s not how the story goes. As I write this essay, I’m listening to songs I’ve listened to for years on a new pair of headphones identical to the previous ones. It would seem that despite how much better I felt when Apollo had the aux cord, I’m still not quite ready to give up the tiniest bits of control that I feel like I do have over my life. In a world with so many powerful forces I have no influence over despite the vast amounts of influence they have over me, those tiny bits feel all the more vital. Even then, I don’t think that this is a bad ending, one where everything else I’ve said has been invalidated by my cowardice.
Two years ago, in August of 2022, my benevolent parents treated me to a Broadway performance of Hadestown as a reward for making the dean’s list the semester prior. My mother and I settled into our—frankly amazing—seats, excited for the show I had dreamed of seeing for a long time beforehand. Sure enough, it was absolutely fantastic. But in addition to being a show deserving of its numerous Tonys, it was also the previous prominent example in my life of letting Greek gods control my emotions. Granted, this was far more literal, with the plot revolving around Hades and Persephone, not to mention the narration done by Hermes, “a man with feathers on his feet / Who could help [me] to [my] final destination” (Mitchell). But even though these were performers and Hermes isn’t Apollo, I still think his words are relevant here.
To me, my final destination is wherever my walk is ending, all while I listen to music that helps me get there in a good mood. When I started using the radio headphones, it took a lot of trust to put my mood in someone else’s hands, especially an ancient Greek god that doesn’t literally exist. Still, it elicited a wonderful feeling when it paid off like no other. I never would’ve guessed that the odds of music making me happy would increase when I wasn’t the one choosing the songs, but the gamble worked out! At the beginning of Hadestown, Hermes says that “maybe it will turn out this time” in regards to the upcoming myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (Mitchell). Likewise, I said that to myself whenever a new song came on, both on my phone and on the radio. But with the latter, I felt more optimistic about the chances of it working out than I ever had before.
So much of life consists of determining which of its various aspects belong in the hands of fate, deciding whether or not your own hands would be better suited to having their knuckles downed or their fingers crossed. For one wonderful week, I took my fingers off of Spotify’s skip button and let them tap along to whatever Apollo deemed a worthwhile bop. Since I bought new headphones the obvious—and correct—assumption would be that I’m not quite ready to give up all of that control to these hypothetical deities. However, I know that to some poetic extent, they’re kindly and patiently waiting for the days when I can take a deep breath and take another step down the path of least resistance in a musical sense.