Soundtrack of Survival:

Released the month after I was born, Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive,” must have been quietly playing in the background of my life.

“First I was afraid, I was petrified…

But then I spent so many nights just thinking how you did me wrong

and I grew strong, I learned how to get along…

Did you think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I.

I will survive…”

My mom calls me a throwback because I have developed a nostalgia for things before my time, like Gloria's song. By the end of my teens, I would do a retro rewind in music and revive the songs and singers that came before me. But, I was a contemporary teen, so this retro rewind only takes us back to the beloved 90s (with one exception). Here is the time capsule of the music that made me, the playlist of my survival:

1. WHAT ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS- TLC 4:17

The first CD I ever bought was Ooh the TLC Tip and ooh, let me tell you, I wanted to “Lisa-left-eye-Lopez” more than a few people in my most angst-ridden time- junior high. Middle school was just a slightly more regulated version of Lord of the Flies, and I thought I might have to kill a wild boar to survive. In a less drastic measure, I requested on the radio (and put the question out to the world) “What About Your Friends?” Between the bullying at school (because I “talked like a white girl”) and the sense of exclusion and being an outsider at an all-white church, somehow, I was stuck in the middle, feeling like Punky Brewster. Neither the black kids nor white kids, who could not quite put their finger on me, realized they were helping me go Afropunk. A few years later I went natural and picked out my Afro and decided I belonged anywhere I wanted to be. I stopped being wrapped up in who liked, me who approved of me, or what anyone thought of me. I learned the treasure of true friendship and left the rest by the wayside. I took a line from Lisa: “so to speak hypothetically say/ I supply creativity to what others must take as a form of self-hate.” So, love me or leave.

2. LIFE IS A HIGHWAY- TOM COCHRANE 4:28

My mom loves to say life is a cabaret. This is the answer for good days or bad. From the weird, crazy, what-the-hell-was-that stuff to the best-thing -ever, life is a cabaret. But in high school, “Life is a Highway.” This song, I have found, is best played on headphones in the tall grass of summer, sung over the loud roar of a lawn mower. Better still, if you had plans, and you're angry that your dad is always finding yard work for you to do. This furious mowing, set to “Life is a Highway,” was my earliest near-experience of road rage. And those days probably prepared me to operate a dangerous vehicle while angry, mediated only by music I can sing out over the loud rumble of the world. Though I like the song overall, it is really the refrain that goes over and over in my mind like a mantra. No matter how bad things get, “life is a highway and I'm gonna ride it all night long.” Maybe I'll even make it to the cabaret.

3. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY- QUEEN 5:55

Enter Wayne's World. Who would have thought a silly satire and my attempts to fit in with headbanging white kids would unveil what is still one of my all-time favorite songs, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Just those words, bohemian and rhapsody- they are beautifully distinct and wrap me up in wonder. The ultimate song of angst, sung like a caged bird ready to abandon the world to a flight of fancy, the desperately divine melancholy of Freddie Mercury and the band's redefining of the word “Queen,” combined to create the symphonic rock version of Catcher in the Rye, my favorite book. Angst and despair are never more exquisite than in those two works. In a time when I sometimes sought the abandon, the escape from everything, there was always the portal of “Bohemian Rhapsody”:

“is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?... open your eyes, look up to the sky.”

4. DON’T SPEAK- NO DOUBT 5:01

Breaking up with your first love is a recipe for repeat. Song, repeat, song, repeat. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. Add all the Latin phrases and you still won’t find a song as perfect: “Don't Speak,” no doubt, the best breakup song. This song sounds like old photographs and letters and tragically losing love like it fell out of a hole in your pocket. What can you do? What can you say? You retrace your steps. You reach into the pocket 100 times thinking somehow you just missed it. You talk to yourself. You want to call love on the phone, but you hang up. There is nothing love can say. “Don't speak, I know what you're thinking, and I don't need your reasons.” I just need this song on repeat

5. UNDER THE BRIDGE- RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS 4:28

Before playlists and shuffling, there were mixed tapes, carefully crafted and curated from the records, tapes and CDs you physically owned because who knew a day would come that music was wireless and lived in clouds. These gems were a friend's way of musically declaring their devotion. I had such a friend- Angela Brown- who was one part of the Trinity, comprised of her, Angela Hamilton and me, Angelita Hampton. In 1996, the last year of high school (and I think the last best year of high schools before the world went mad), Angie Brown made the Angie's Tape, which included, among other favorites, “Under the Bridge.” Want heavy hitting emotion without the hardcore emo angst? Nothing beats 90's rock for guitar laced loneliness like a tortured lullaby rocking out.

From the soccer field to Young Life Club, from homeroom sitting behind Angela, playing with her long blonde hair, to making Angie Brown giggle in Spanish class, poking her in the belly button like the Pillsbury doughboy, the Trinity got me through high school. For me, the "city of Angels" was being with two girls named Angie, “lonely as I am, together we cry.” What about my friends? These girls had my back

6. ONE OF US- JOAN OSBORNE 5:14

As an empath, I have always found room in my angst for compassion toward others' sorrows and troubles. So, when the poignant and thoughtful Joan Osborne song, “(What if God Was) One of Us” became popular, I delighted in the idea of kindness to strangers. This was no Streetcar Named Desire, no tragic Bette Davis, but God “on a bus trying to make his way home.” Helping people is always a tonic for my tired soul and like my name, “little Angel,” I smiled the song in my life and imagined how I could bring a bit of joy to someone who might unexpectedly be my savior. God became a popular song and it sounded like an anthem for a better way to live faith in the world. “And yeah, yeah, God is great.. God is good. What if God was one of us?”

7. KEEP YA HEAD UP- TUPAC 4:29

My late teens and early 20s were marked most notably by rap and white girls with guitars. Perhaps an odd contrast but somehow between Joan Osborne and Tupac Shakur, I found my home. Heading off to college at 17, coming into my own, understanding the world and my place in it, and two weeks in, Tupac was killed. A year and half earlier, Selena had been killed, now followed by Tupac, and I recognized the unsettling reality that I was in a world where youth and brilliance could not protect you. Artists with whom I felt such a kinship, who had become part of my early music history, my original playlist, were taken in tragedy. This sad twinge of listening to “Keep Ya Head Up,” always remained, while wishing this Black prophet of lyrics, who called for a community to “heal our women, be real to our women,” could have been healed himself.

Like this playlist, my life is bookended by blackness. What has defined me over and over has been, how do I live in this body and show this face to a world that often cannot see me, like the forest for the trees. Under the bridge, on the side of the highway, told not to speak, but still, I have friends that have been around to witness my bohemian self, in rhapsody, helping me keep my head up because God is all of us. If life goes on and the music never dies, let the playlist play.