Unveiling the Hidden Harmonies: How John Garrison’s Memoir Transforms Music into Life’s Untold Stories
Our Lives as Playlists
The music we invoke in our writing can reflect who we are, and multiple songs can offer a setlist that functions as a narrative thread for explaining our lives. And, music can do more than let us talk about who we are. It can allow us to comment on the culture that shaped us.
Kiese Laymon does this powerfully in his memoir Heavy, which features hip-hop not just as a soundtrack in the book, but as a lens through which to examine how his own identity has been shaped by the genre’s messages about Blackness, masculinity and political resistance. For Laymon, the inclusion of music allows him to go beyond talking about how music as a passive reflection of society to show readers how music actively shapes predominant cultural beliefs.
