Cher not only listens to music at home now, but she now records music there too.

I just did a blog post about how my Cher and poetry blogs tie together. This is another blog topic I didn’t quite know which blog to post on. It’s related to Cher but also about the creative process and mental synthesis.

Last night I finally got to the point in Cher’s new memoir where she mentions that Sonny didn’t allow her to listen to music in the house. She says “He wouldn’t even let me listen to music” (196). It’s at the half way point. I knew it was coming. I’ve seen all the interviews. But I wanted to read it for myself before I made it my first post about this book.

First, let me say it’s hard for me not to think about the book as a writer as much as a Cher fan, having thought a lot about the best way to tell the Cher story to a wide audience.

Fans might want a lot of things, but non-fans have a lower tolerance for too much detail or Wikipedia facts as Cher calls them.

And it’s important to remember what the book is trying to do and who the intended audience is. I believe the intention is to reveal insights about the main character to the population at large.

And to that rubric I think, like Mary Poppins, the book is pretty much perfect. I’ll go into it all more later, but it’s hitting all the notes. Some of the factual errors are maybe driving some scholars a bit crazy, but I think the reviews have been pretty unanimously the best of her career. Which isn’t surprising really, that her life story would be giving her the best reviews. Cher is really bigger as a character than any media she travels on.

And I really wanted to blog about recent events in date order: the Spotify playlist, the Victoria’s Secret show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Memoir but I think now we’ll have to do it backwards. The memoir is just so big and seemingly impactful. Every media publication known to man is looking for an angle story on Cher right now. House & Garden is even weighing in.

At 78, Cher is as hot as she ever was. Which is just incredible when you remember all those lean years of fandom.

So why is it taking me so long to finish this damn book? For one, I’m reading pretty slow and taking notes. Scholars are nerds, after all. I’m also reading other books although I’ve done some drastic paring down to accommodate the Cher book. But I also have book club books on deadlines and the new Murakami book I’ve been dying to read. I’m exactly halfway through that one as well.

So Mr. Cher Scholar says I read more than anyone he’s ever met. Which I don’t think is true, really. Book reviewers, for example, spend a lot more of their day reading than I do. I read maybe an hour in the morning and 1-3 hours at night. I mean I also watch some TV every day or so too.

But I think what he might have been driving at was that I read a lot of books at the same time. Sometimes like ten books at a time, I’m embarrassed to say. I picked up this habit in college when I was taking multiple classes and sometimes a miracle would happen when something I was reading in one class sparked off something I was reading in another class and that’s how I came to write a whole essay on one paragraph of William Faulkner’s Light in August as seen through the lens of a Plato theory about pre-knowledge. Maybe my scheme wasn’t entirely accurate in hindsight but it was a good mental exercise and I felt pretty brilliant about it at the time.

Yesterday I had cause to look up what this type of thinking might be called as it relates to music. I’m not good at thinking about music and I think this is why musical mashups appeal to me. How does someone hear one song and then another song and then think they could find an avenue to meld the two together into a collage. It’s a way of thinking I have no access to. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it’s that spark of the idea and then the sewing together that intrigues me, these conceptual combinations we use for everything from inventing new food recipes to creating basic metaphors. How to show like to like and different to like, how to bring disparate things together somehow into a new thing.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in joke format.

This comic I saw today is a mashup of Door Dash culture and the myth of babies being delivered by stork. Unless you have a lot of unrelated material floating around in your head, you probably can’t make these connections.

I would even guess the bulk of jokes are created by bringing two unrelated ideas together.

Which brings us back to music and Cher.

I read a lot more than some people maybe, but it is nothing, nothing, nothing compared to the amount of music I listen to every day. Like 6-8 hours of music (a day). I listen to music at work, while I’m cooking, while I’m cleaning, while I’m driving, while I’m decorating for the holidays (which I am not doing this Cher-treeless year).

It seems to me a kind of torture to insist that someone you live with not to listen to music in their own house. Cher is talking about the days before earphones were common. Maybe superstars like Sonny and Cher already had headphones. I keep trying to figure out what Sonny was worried about: was it undue influence working on Cher, his musical prodigy? Was he worried about subconscious plagiarism seeping into his own songwriting? Or was he just annoyed by her musical choices?

None of that matters though because listening to music is a human need in my opinion. I can’t imaging living without it. I wouldn’t do it.

Atul Gawande talks about decline of living standards in his book Being Mortal and what animal sense you could possibly lose that would make your life not as worth living. I definitely think not being able to eat solid food would be on my list. But what about loss of hearing? Loss of sight? I don’t do well with audio books and podcasts because I keep drifting off in my imagination and can’t find my way back to the spot I fell out.

Would I rather give up books or music? Ugh. Unpleasant decisions. I just can’t get there.

But back to my earlier point about mashups: Music is a way of thinking. Very different from reading. But those two things talk to each other, just like anything else: knitting, plotting against ground squirrels, surrendering to ground squirrels and building them a hutch.

I don’t really want to give up anything because they all feed together like hungry squirrels.

Not being allowed to listen to music. Inconceivable! In some ways, Sonny was a genius at being outrageous.