Thomas Dolby - Hyperactive!

Hyperactivity, a fake history of air-drumming, and celebrating (one of) my favorite dance-around-the-room-like-a-banshee tunes.

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

HYPERACTIVITY

I was not one of those kids who struggled to pay attention in school. When I tapped my pencil against the desk with metronomic agitation, it was because I wanted to be a drummer, not because I was jumping out of my skin. I had friends who struggled to read a book or focus on completing their homework. Who thought they were stupid and bad students because their attention was so scattered. Who couldn’t focus or sit still. They couldn’t wait for gym class because it was a chance to 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 more than likely 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” and I don’t like the word “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 doesn’t match their natural ways of learning. This one-size-fits-all school of schooling alienates tons of eager young people. Especially if the child has attention deficit struggles.

I wonder if many of us — the people who were able to navigate the public (and private) school systems in the United States (I don’t know about other countries) — were able to learn in a traditional classroom setting because we were lucky enough to be equipped to adapt to this modality. We could memorize our times tables, write 5-paragraph essays, and speak simple sentences in Spanish/French/Italian/whatever language was not our native tongue. We could play along with the “rules” and get A’s and B’s on our report cards. We could do this while having the wherewithal to avoid the bullies, to be aware of which table was okay to sit at during lunch and to know which bushes behind the gym were best to hide behind to smoke pot with the kids from drama class (or maybe that 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.

I did struggle with depression, though. 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-half year of high school baseball. (I’ll share this story soon, perhaps to coincide with the start of the new baseball season.)

On the outside, I was a typical suburban kid, seemingly well-adjusted if not a little shy.

It was hard to know where the lines between shy, awkward, introverted, and depressed were. They all seemed jumbled together.

My extended family, the majority of them filterless extroverts, didn’t know what to make of me. They would label me with words like “sensitive,” “quiet,” “odd,” “different,” and the aforementioned “shy.” Words I would adopt to describe myself as well, never thinking these could be anything but negative traits.

Anxiety would come to replace depression as I became an adult — with a considerable overlap period during my 20s.

I didn’t know how to handle anxiety. Depression I was more or less used to. I know it’s not the same as ADHD or hyperactivity, but my anxiety often came with speediness, a struggle to pay attention, and mild OCD symptoms, like constant counting. That still is how my anxiety manifests most of the time.

I tried the pharmacological route at first, but everything I took made me feel worse. And I didn’t want to be dependent on meds. I know they work amazingly for some people, but I wasn’t one of them.

I’ve since put together an extensive toolkit to help me with my anxiety. Exercise, meditation, writing, gardening, hiking with my dog. And the occasional lorazepam. But there’s one thing that’s by far 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. I could slip on a pair of Sennheiser headphones and lose myself in the progressive virtuosity of Rush, air drumming alongside Neil Peart on 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 Neil’s 35-piece kit spread out in front of me, and swung my arms around with wild 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 with all my favorite drummers. I pounded the air heavy and hard with John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. I focused on finesse alongside Stewart Copeland of The Police. I kept a steady beat with 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 ability to mime 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.” As Dolby sings in the next verse: It won’t stop messing with my heart.

It’s the last track on Dolby’s second full-length album, The Flat Earth. It’s a party tune on an otherwise more subdued, subtle, sublime album. A friend told me that Dolby wrote the song with the idea of having Michael Jackson singing it. Michael said ‘thanks but no thanks’ and so Dolby sang it himself. I can’t imagine The King of Pop singing this, though I am tempted to see if I can get AI to create it for me!

“Hyperactive” is an odd song, really. I'm wracking my brain trying 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 are wonderful backing vocals. There’s what sounds like a child singing the chorus with Dolby. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink. And it all works.

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 when it’s playing. I have to jump around and dance and air trombone and air bass and air guitar and air keyboard. And air any other instrument 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” 2013-2019)

The first recorded proof of lip-synching dates back to the Stone Age.

Cave drawings featuring what appear to be stick figures screaming, orating, or giving a lecture are, after careful study, now thought to be expressing lip-synching. Back in the day, the cave people (who apparently prefer the term Club-Wielders™) would attempt to sync their mouth movements with their leaders in an attempt to gain power. Practicing for when the boss gets eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or a dragon, and they might need to step in for the role of head honcho.

Other scholars suggest that lip-synching was, in fact, an early form of mocking. It was 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 Valentine’s and Anniversary 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 it was believed the ‘lyrical song’ was invented.)

Lip-synching would become a worldwide phenomenon during the 1950s when The Dick Clark Show invited musical guests to appear on stage and pretend to play along to their own songs. This form of lip-synching would be called “biting your tongue to collect a paycheck.”

A couple of 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.

Around the same time, dynamic duo Milli Vanilli would take lip-synching to a new level by actually lip-synching on their debut album (Girl You Know It’s True in the U.S., All or Nothing in Europe), which was apparently taking things too far. The Vanilli's were essentially excommunicated from the music industry.

In 2017, actor John Krasinski (of The Office) realized he could up the ante, coming up with the idea for a brand new reality TV show: Lip-Sync Battle. The idea is two TV and movie stars compete to see who can Lip-Sync better. It’s oddly addicting. It’s rumored that an appearance by yours truly, lip-synching to Thomas Dolby’s “Hyperactive,” is set for the summer of 2024.

The rest, as they say, is history.

• What is your go-to lip-sync and/or air-guitar song? Is there more than one?

• Did/do you have ADHD (or hyperactivity or ADD, or whatever it may have been called when you were younger)? How did/do you navigate the world with it?

• Drunk History, did you watch it back in the day?