Moods Backbeat TEXT Joseph Ghosn As I lower the turntable’s arm onto the record, there’s a click, a few specks of dust boom out, tiny cracklings suddenly amplified, a note, a sound, noises, a melody, harmonies, and then everything is repeated, ad lib, endlessly. Music, or noises, swirl up into the surrounding air, filling the room, pulsing over and over. The vinyl disc spins, and the more the diamond advances along its grooves, the more it resounds, while spending itself out as if from inside. Each time—preferably after nightfall—I hear those familiar ghosts rising from its depths. Denizens of those memories welling up from a distant past, the songs on these records, acting like immanent and often highly addictive madeleines, have been accompanying me for 30 or 35 years and play with the eddies of my thought, reverberating within and around me, conjuring up the specters of those first days and first times each time I hear them. When I listen to the bars of “Please, please, please, let me get what I want” by the Smiths, I become once again that boy in 1986 who was discovering the world. When I hear the opening words of “Kotton Krown” by Sonic Youth, “Love has come to stay in all the way, it’s gonna stay forever and every day,” everything around me resonates and, feeling tuned into every vibration of the world, I believe firmly and indubitably that love truly exists, that I am once again about to experience this for myself, and that I am on the verge—because it’s never too late to remain a teenager, poised at the ready to receive the reverberations and the shadows and lights of life as it opens out before me. 22