Loud Music

“Loud Music,” written in the present tense, opens as the speaker and his stepdaughter dance to music: “My stepdaughter and I circle round and round” (Line 1). The repetitive loop of this image has several echoes: a ritual or folk dance with prescribed and repeated movements, a record or CD spinning, and a volume knob twisting up or down. The speaker has very specific ideas about music volume, which he explains with a direct address to the reader: “You see, I like the music loud” (Line 2). This sudden appeal to a third person who is not in the scene shifts the poem’s perspective suddenly: No longer are we invisible observers of a familial dance, but instead, we become the speaker’s confederates, adults to whom he can explain his approach to music and with whom he can later share his observations of his stepdaughter’s development. The speaker qualifies that what he means by loud is an extreme: “[T]he speakers / throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3), so loud “each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut” (Line 5). The speaker does not mind the type of music, “Bach or rock and roll” (Lines 3-4)—his only need is for the sound’s vibrations to feel so physical, it borders on violent.