Deafness and music [2024]
I don’t know if I’ve ever written in depth about my deafness and love for music before. When we were kids, my best friend told me I walked like I had a disco in my head. She wasn’t wrong.
A quick recap, in case you don’t know: I can’t hear through my right ear. It doesn’t work. Some genetic wiring problem from birth. So I’ve always experienced sound through my left ear only. I’m a human mono switch.
Scandalous, 2001-2005
Growing up, music became important in that tribal, all-encompassing way from about the age of 13. I rapidly fell in love with stuff older than me, new stuff, and bought the music press every week, racing my friends to get one of the only 3 copies of Melody Maker the little shop on the way to school had in stock. I switched to the NME when Melody Maker vanished, and must have bought every issue between 2001 and 2005. It was the perfect timing — post Britpop, right in the middle of the NYC takeover that would pave the way for the Brit indie revival. Dead set on a career as a music journalist, I studied and absorbed as much information as possible, as well as cutting out my favourite photos and sticking them on my school binder. For as much as I would have loved to be some cool, aloof muso, I was still a teenage girl — something I will never apologise for. Teenage girls are pivotal to the growth of bands and are responsible for untold numbers of record sales. Caitlin Moran wrote about this far more eloquently than me.
I found my new favourites through my friends, through seemingly impossible-to-solve earworms in 2001 (this was years before anything like Shazam would emerge to help you name that tune) and from recommendations from the record store in my shabby hometown. The kind of shop that smelled of fag smoke, paper-thin carpet held together with gaffer tape and faintly of sweat. It was called Scandalous, formerly What Records? and it was my Mecca. The guy behind the counter, a veritable Rob Gordon in his own right, dished out recommendations, helped me solve earworm mysteries and was largely responsible for absorbing the bulk of my meagre income from weekend jobs from the age of 14 onwards. My first ever pay packet from my shitty waitressing job went on a soft case for my guitar (a hand-me-down faux Stratocaster) and The Strokes’ debut Is This It. A record that stayed in my room for less than one night before my older brother borrowed it out of the hi-fi while I was asleep. I’d only gone in for what turned out to be Unknown Pleasures and he recommended and sold me Ocean Rain and Turn on the Bright Lights at the same time. Bonus points if you can tell me the link.
Back to the point…
Forgive the tangent. Got excited. Music and deafness is all inescapably intertwined. And deafness — my deafness — is so tricky. It’s only now in my 30s that I’ve started to advocate for myself and to feel some kind of pride for it. Because I am, for the most part, a hearing person. You probably wouldn’t ‘know’ to talk to me, unless you notice me lipreading you. To borrow a phrase from the amazing brand DEAF IDENTITY: “Well, you don’t look deaf”. I don’t wear hearing aids, haven’t got a cochlear implant, can’t sign, and I grew up with hearing parents and went to a hearing school. I don’t have an irregular tonal pattern like some d/Deaf people do. The only ‘tell’ that I’m hilariously self-conscious about is the way my mouth moves when I talk. It’s a bit wonky, like some unpleasant girl pointed out at school. That aside, you could say that I’m kind of shit at being deaf.
Gigs and tours
And when I was younger, the only times I ever thought about being deaf was when I started going to gigs. Which I did, copiously, and blagged my way through my exams exhausted as a result. And I only thought about my hearing from a selfish point of view. Not from a place of fear and thinking I must protect it, but from the perspective of getting as close to the front as possible to flood my hearing completely and get vertigo from the bass amp. If I didn’t have intense tinnitus for the 3 days following a gig, then I’d got off lightly. Headphones in the late 90s and early 00s were shit and rarely had a mono setting, so I had to be content with losing half the track. It made some albums unlistenable. Back at home, my CD collection grew, and my love for a classic mixtape was a regular weekend activity. I did tape swaps on rudimentary forums — the ones that would fall into obscurity and obsolescence after social media and Reddit took over the messaging board format.
Music as lifeblood
I am rarely without my headphones in public. These days it’s just as likely to be a podcast, but I still listen to music daily. I have playlists for working, playlists for running, playlists for walking, playlists full of 80s hip hop, 90s indie, just women, nostalgia, the odd spot of emo, dance, EDM and more. It’s necessary. It’s a constant companion. And it’s only in my left ear, and only ever will be.
There might not be an overarching point to this ramble. But know this: music is the lifeblood of so many d/Deaf people. We might not experience it in the same way, and I can’t begin to understand what stereo sounds like or how hearing people know where a certain sound is coming from. But what I do know is without music I would be so insufferably bored and understimulated. My headphones might be massive, the volume might be offensive, and my choices might be repetitive, but without it, life would sound very different.