Thomas Dolby - Hyperactive!

Hmmm...Tell me about your childhood

Thomas Dolby with high hair, now as bald as the author

HYPERACTIVITY

I was not one of those kids who couldn’t pay attention in school. Who would tap their pencil against the desk with metronomic agitation, who struggled to read a book let alone complete any homework, whose favorite class was gym because they could finally MOVE THEIR BODIES.

When I was growing up, kids like this would have been called hyperactive or in psychiatric terms, hyperkinetically reactive. In today’s world they would be diagnosed as having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and put on meds.

I’m grateful that I didn’t struggle with this particular….what’s the right word….imbalance? I hesitate to say “mental illness” or “disorder,” because I think for a lot of kids, the traditional sit-at-a-desk-and-be-fed-information-by-a-teacher method of instruction does not match their natural ways of learning. The one-size-fits-all school of schooling.

I wonder if the rest of us, the people who were able to navigate the public (and private) school systems in the United States didn’t necessarily learn better sitting at a desk as much as we were more capable of adapting to the setting. We could memorize our times tables and write 5-paragraph essays and speak simple sentences in Spanish/French/Italian/whatever language was not our native tongue. We could do that and know which kids to avoid that might bully us, what table was okay to sit at during lunch, which bushes behind the gym were best to hide behind to smoke pot with the kids from drama class (or maybe this was just me).

If ADHD had been an established diagnosis in the early 80s when I was a pre-teen and teen, I would not have fit the profile.

But I did struggle with depression. It was never diagnosed; I never saw a therapist or a doctor. I had plenty of friends. I got good grades. I played little league baseball and even one year of high school baseball (this tidbit will be explored in a future newsletter). On the outside I was a typical suburban kid, seemingly well-adjusted if not a little shy.

If my depression did expose itself (that sounds too much like being a flasher, but I’m leaving it in), it was expressed by going off by myself at a party without telling anyone. Or not contributing to conversation at the dinner table.

I would often be described as “sensitive” and “quiet” and the aforementioned “shy” — words that felt like coded replacements for “different” or “strange.” Words I already used to describe myself in my head.

Anxiety would come to replace depression as I became an adult — with a considerable overlap period during my 20s. Anxiety has now overtaken depression as the most common mental health struggle for young people worldwide.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I can speak from experience about what has been the most effective means of treatment for me: music.

Image from The Groove Vintage

MUSIC AND AIR DRUMMING AS THERAPY

From the day I received my own 8-track cassette player on my 10th birthday, music became my go-to form of therapy. Music was where I finally fit in. Where I belonged. Where instead of feeling exhausted trying to interpret social cues, trying to quiet the inner voice that never ran out of critical things to say about me, I could blast it all away with a power chord and an insistent beat. Where I could slip on a pair of Sennheiser headphones and lose myself in the progressive virtuosity of Rush, air drumming with abandon along to my favorite album, Moving Pictures.

I lived in a condo complex so owning my own drum set was not an option. Instead, I closed my eyes, envisioned Rush’s drummer Neil Peart’s 35 piece kit spread out in front of me and swung my arms around with abandon. I memorized every 32nd-note snare roll, every syncopated tom-tom break, every slap of the crash and ride cymbals. I used my imaginary mallets to match the tuned, resonant clucks of the wood blocks on their 1978 song “The Trees.”

Rush was my number one band, but I played along to all my favorite drummers. I pounded the air heavy and hard with John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. I focused on finesse along with Stewart Copeland of The Police. I kept a steady beat to Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones.

My air-instrument repertoire would expand by my junior year of high school when new wave and punk rock entered my world. Air guitar was already all the rage; I’d mastered the drums. But what about bass? And saxophone? Trombone? Xylophone?

I needed a song that spoke to my inner extrovert, the guy who loved to dance around and show off his new moves, his mad skills at miming an entire orchestra of instruments in a single tune.

In 1984 I found that song.

Thomas Dolby’s “Hyperactive.”

HYPERACTIVE!

These are the lyrics from “Hyperactive!” that I’ve been unable to get out of my head (and I’m not sure I want to).

With the vision in my brain
And the music in my veins
And the dirty rhythm in my blood

This pretty much describes the feeling of listening to “Hyperactive.” The feeling of any song that gets you out of your head and into your body, that injects the dirty rhythm in your blood. Like Dolby sings later in the song: It won’t stop messing with my heart.

It’s an odd song, really. I am wracking my brain to think of anything to compare it to and am stumpified. That’s a combination of stumped and stupefied for the people in the back.

It’s frenetic. It’s funky. It’s got a ton of sudden stops and starts. The main melody is played by the trombone. There’s wonderful backing vocals. There’s what sounds like a child singing the chorus with Dolby. It’s perhaps the most perfectly titled song in musical history.

To be honest, the entire song is an earworm for me. The above lyrics do stand out but so does the bridge, which also perfectly captures the joy of music and the crazy excitement it can inspire:

Semaphore out on the floor
Messages from outer space
Deep heat for the feet
The rhythm of your heartbeat

I may not have suffered from hyperactivity, but when I hear this specific Thomas Dolby song, it gets all of me into a frenzy. It’s impossible to sit still and listen to it. I have to jump around and dance and air trombone and air bass and air guitar and air keyboard. And air any other instruments played in the song.

And of course, when I’m not actually singing along at the top of my lungs, I have to air sing.

LIP-SYNCHING: A CONDENSED HISTORY

(INSPIRED BY COMEDY CENTRAL’S “DRUNK HISTORY”)

The first recorded proof of lip-synching dates back to the stone age. Cave drawings featuring what look like stick figures screaming or perhaps orating or giving a lecture, are, after careful study, now thought to be lip-synching. At this early stage, the cave people (who apparently prefer the term club-wielders) are said to be trying to sync their mouth movements to their leaders in an attempt to gain power.

Other scholars suggest that lip-synching began as a form of mocking. A way to make fun of someone by copying their delivery and mannerisms in exaggerated tones and gestures. This teasing style would eventually evolve into the popular spoken word game, “I Know You Are, But What Am I?” played by spoiled children across the globe.

Eventually, homo sapiens realized that they could elicit sexual responses from one another when elongating and altering the smoothness of their grunted primitive language. Vocabulary quickly expanded to include innuendo and romantic flirting, resulting in the very first “Roses Are Red” poem, which would soon become de rigueur in Valentines and Anniversary themed Hallmark™ Cards.

(It’s a little-known fact that Sting, vocalist and bassist for The Police, wrote the band’s 1980 hit, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” in honor of this moment in history when “the song” first appeared.)

Lip-synching would become a world-wide phenomenon during the 1950s when The Dick Clark show invited musical guests to appear and pretend to play along to their own songs. This form of lip-synching would be called “biting your tongue and collecting a paycheck” by capitalist businessmen.

A couple decades later, envisioning lip-synching’s potential, the drag community would adopt the art form, bringing artists such as Barbra Streisand, Cher and Madonna out from the caves of obscurity and into the hearts and ears of heart and ear owners the world over.

Then in 2017, actor John Krasinski realized he could up the ante and came up with the idea for a brand new reality TV show: Lip-Sync Battle. It’s rumored that an appearance by yours truly lip-synching to “Hyperactive” is set for the summer of 2023.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And when they say it, they are speaking in a sweet and mocking tone.