How 2000s Music Transformed my Dad

My mum and dad met in university when they were both eighteen. One night they fooled around with each other, and consequently I was born when they were nineteen. But my dad was the only one who raised me. I didn’t think too much of it until I got older - when I was fourteen, I asked him why mum wasn’t there to raise me besides him. It was over a tense dinner one rainy Friday night where we stayed at home and ordered some Hungry Jack’s. That was the only time we ever talked about it, when he told me things I never knew.

When his parents found out about the pregnancy, they kicked him out for sleeping with an “Abo”, he said, and didn’t have anywhere else to stay. He had been offered to stay with my mum’s parents, who didn’t have much, and he did for a while until he was able to rent an apartment in the city and provide me with a home. So he juggled a baby, a part-time job, and vocational training to be a beach lifeguard - all by himself, in his early 20s. He told me he bought toys and books from op shops and read to me all the time, but also gave money from his paycheck to support my mum and her family. Why would I know this? I never asked, but his determination stunned me.

When I was three, Dad was able to buy a neat little bungalow in the Perth suburbs, and I lived there ever since. One day, when I was a little older, he showed me a cardboard box that he always kept in the cupboard in his bedroom. It contained a CD player with albums, and had “David’s” written on the front in black marker. They were all artists from his youth, when he and his mates visited nightclubs where he danced and sang along to their songs - even seeing them live in concert if he was lucky. Artists such as Choirboys, Rick Springfield, Icehouse and Divinyls, just to name a few. Dad once told me that before he met Mum, he and his mates had massive crushes on Chrissy Amphlett, and they’d sometimes compete on who could write the sappiest love letters to the famous frontwoman.

But then, amidst a pile of CDs and a mess of black and white wires, I discovered an MP3 player and a portable music speaker that looked like mine, except that it was white while mine was dark blue. To my surprise, not only did the music on the MP3 player consist of my dad’s favourite rock acts, but also included pop tracks that were popular from when I was a toddler to when I attended primary school. These tracks included Madison Avenue’s Don’t Call Me Baby, Vanessa Amorosi’s Absolutely Everybody, Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, and a dance pop cover of Belinda Carlisle’s Summer Rain by some Melbourne girl group, which Dad said would make him cry for some reason. He even admitted that when I was at school and had days off from work, he would draw the curtains in his bedroom, turn on the speaker, and sing along to each song out loud, much to the annoyance of some of the neighbours who demanded that he turn that shit down. His microphone was a body brush from the bathroom, and he would dance around the house with it like Tom Cruise from Risky Business.

It’s funny because my dad came from a demographic of people whose childhoods were defined by vintage rock music. However, it was the dance pop and house music from my childhood in the 2000s that transformed my dad into a carefree youth, despite barely having time to be one.