Workout Music
Tortured by Taylor Swift trance remixes, being forced to move to David Guetta, a childhood sweating to Mousercise, and memories of my father's workout mixtapes
It’s in the middle of “Ultimate Conditioning,” some 45 minutes of working out at my local gym “via plyometrics, core, and flexibility work,” that the thought slips in. That memory of my father and all the mixtapes he would make for his workouts back in the 1980s. One side of the Maxell tape would be 45 minutes of music suitable for a cardio workout, the flip side for 45 minutes of weights. It was that era I guess, as one of my earliest records I owned was Mousercise, that warped Disney mirror of adult reality. “Let’s do the Buggaboo.” That crazy bug-voice breakdown has lived rent-free in my head for decades now:
But the hours my father spent fine-tuning the selections, knowing just what order in which to arrange Madonna, Level 42, Erasure, Boy George and the hits of the day, the flow of the workout, and the fine art of finding a song that would work at the end of each side –even if it just had to fill that dead zone of the last 2-3 minutes of tape– he worked harder on those mixtapes than on working out itself.
In that moment, it’s a passing blip of a thought. No time for thought during “Ultimate Conditioning” class, you have to really nail the moves and –much like when dancing in the club space– you need to be in the moment, physically trying to keep in sync with that relentless beat. Have that beat you out of your own head, into your burning muscles. You’re too busy trying to find the rhythm, that it’s just the song that’s blaring, no time for memory of another song.
I go to a few of these types of classes a week. And like just about any gym, the music is dreadful. I like to think of myself as someone forever on the search for that next spiritual jazz gem, a sleek boogie b-side, or a mysterious new track, that next new audio thrill. So the music blasting at the gym is decidedly not it. In every class, I cringe at most selections.
One instructor always chucks in some modern country twang, which always trainwrecks into the ‘80s hit they also play. Another instructor invariably starts her workout with a crazy sped up version of U2 and ends her heart-exploding workout with a song I hated yet ultimately memorized. Amidst my burpee’d delirium, I somehow knew every idiotic contour of its plastic robot gloss without ever knowing what it was. After a few months, I decided to Google it and within two words in the search bar, the internet instantly knew it: “Play Hard” by David Guetta (Feat. Ne-Yo & Akon). Ughhh.
At least in “Ultimate Conditioning” class, the tracks do tend to get switched up. Would I have ever caught on that I was now sweating to a bass-boost version of “Life of a Showgirl” if it didn’t broadcast the album title in the chorus? But then there’s this stretch of the workout that brought to mind those old workout mixtapes in the first place. It was so bad that I couldn’t help but come to love these tunes, a sweaty iteration of Stockholm Syndrome.
These are exhaustively familiar songs, in that my wife and child often play Sombr and Katseye. I’m somewhat in disbelief that they have somehow escaped from their Spotify playlists and followed me to the gym. Now there’s a weird muscular heft to them in here that makes them hit different in HIIT. A ludicrous remix of Sombr’s “12 to 12” is like those old Charles Atlas ads, his waifish original instantly cockdiesel. Being subjected to my daughter’s exhaustive playing of “Gabriela” at home makes it even more torturous in class at a volume that is inescapable.
And then there’s this sweat-soaked moment when a thumping beat and warped voice going “Hey-ey-ey hey-ey-ey” emerges in the mix. It’s a voice that I’ve been trying to avoid since I graduated from high school (to say nothing of hearing it as a recent remake in that recent promo video of Nicki Minaj and Katie Miller). But now there’s no way to duck a trance remix of “What’s Up?” But Linda Perry’s pitched-up voice shouting Hey-ey-ey makes for a serotonin release or something, as I’m now doing jumping jacks and jump squats and I cringe and laugh at the absurdity of what can get turned into a sweat-inducing banger.
Wrung out at the end of class, I think more about these mixes my father made…
What do I recall of them? I don’t have any of these tapes now. I remember thinking that the version of the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” was always weird. It was so short on the radio, but in my father’s cassette deck, it felt endless. He preferred the 13-minute version, which in hindsight makes me realize my father was one to always seek out the 12” mixes of his favorite tunes. In hindsight, I think it’s one of the best minimalist pieces of the 1980s, with that deathless hi-hat stomp and whistling bomb effects, those eerie chords hovering in the background.
About the only tape that I really truly remember from my father is one he made for someone else. It was for his girlfriend at the time, the woman who was his secretary, the mother of my childhood friend. Wait, the woman who ultimately broke up his marriage. The mixtape was a means to get her back. He spent hours obsessing over the songs, the words, the order, all of that I can recall.
But the only song burned in my memory is the last song. It’s this 8-minute version of “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me,” the one that was on the 12” single version. As a kid in South Texas, this is undoubtedly my first encounter with reggae and the spatial effect of dub. The irony being that by that point in their relationship, she had already broken my father’s elbow with a telephone base, so this Boy George song is “a choice.” The dub version ends with toaster Pappa Weasel (his only credit incidentally), who coos as the song fades away: “But if you keep on hurting me/ Then I’ve got to goo-o-o.” That part: pause, rewind, un-pause. “Then I’ve got to goo-o-o.” It’s the last minute of tape, so my father loops it again and again.