#17 - Time After Time / Cyndi Lauper

Of all the pop songs released in the era this series has been looking at, there are few which command the depth of love and affection as Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time'. It brings with it, for many listeners, a powerful weight of nostalgic associations and memories, which is one reason it’s the perfect choice for accompanying the mesmerising dance sequence at the end of the 1997 film, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, but is there something about the song itself - something which goes beyond the particular personal feelings we might associate with it - which prompts reflection on this integral, yet elusive, aspect of being alive: the role memory plays in shaping our understanding of the passing of time?

The original recording of 'Time After Time' can be heard here. If you're enjoying the series, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. Think back to a moment in your past; a moment of joy; a moment of feeling connected to someone; a moment of simple, unself-conscious existence in which past and future seemed to fall away and all you experienced was that present moment. What is this thing that we are able to hold in our minds? This image, or sensation, or thought: what does it feel like to bring up? Are we made happy because memory brings back the happiness of that moment or do we feel rather the loss of that happiness, because what we are able to dredge up is definitively in the past, and thus irretrievable, lost? The vividness of memories seems to jar with the simultaneous recognition of how utterly different the present feels: how can the past have no existence when I’m able to hold in my mind a picture of it so easily and naturally it feels almost tangible? And why, if the past is nothing but an absence, do thoughts of it not only persist in our minds but seem to swarm there, haunting us, demanding our attention, even defining our experience of the present? It’s in these questions which Cyndi Lauper dwells in her great 1983 song, ‘Time After Time’, singing in the first verse of flashbacks and a ‘suitcase of memories’ which pain her and prompt the song’s remarkably thoroughgoing reflection on the nature of time. As we’ll see, our capacity for memory is intimately linked to our basic sense of time, and understanding what the song has to tell us about it will require an exploration of a number of different threads in our evolving picture of the nature not just of time but also, crucially, of music, which has historically been a sort of conceptual partner to time, prompting philosophers across the centuries to explain time in terms of music and music theorists, for their part, to name music, with notable consistency, the ‘art of time’. This long-standing connection between our notions of time and of music might help us see why it’s in a song where we can find the lived experience of time’s passing reflected with such moving clarity and grace.

The first line of the song awakens us abruptly to the presence of time: ‘Lyin’ in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you’. In this context, the ticking of the clock feels like the intrusion of objective reality into the singer’s internal consciousness. Clocks represent time as it passes regularly and inevitably, unaffected and unclouded by human distortion: they tell us, usually with a jolt, how late we’re running, or how much longer we have to wait, and are unmoved by any protestation we might feel that the time should be something other than what they are impassively giving us. Perhaps, in the case of ‘Time After Time’, the clock ticking is providing another form of clarity: a moment of realisation for the singer that it’s time to move on. The music video for the song, in which Lauper said she specifically ‘wanted to convey somebody who walked her own path … and did not always marry the guy’, suggests the clock may, literally, be calling time on their love, although not before the singer has worked through a fair amount of ‘confusion’ and pain.

This notion that time is something regular and objective, existing in the external universe rather than the human mind, was lastingly substantiated and codified by Isaac Newton, who, in his Principia of 1687, argued that there exists an ‘absolute, true, and mathematical’ time obscured by our everyday ‘prejudiced’ perceptions, and which exists in the same manner throughout the universe. This ‘true time’, he believed, was deducible by calculation and observation, and could, in theory, be represented by a clock, if a flawlessly accurate one could be made. Newton’s time, which has echoes of classical conceptions of God - existing constantly and unchangingly, throughout eternity and the universe, inaccessible by ordinary human perception - became the bedrock of physics in the age of the Scientific Revolution, and was swiftly so well-established throughout the western world that it became the barely conscious universal common-sense picture of the nature of time. It was not until the twentieth century that Newton’s ‘true time’ was seriously challenged within the physical sciences, and, even so, our day-to-day lives are still governed by the clock ticking; the structure of the modern world depends on the assumption of time flowing with serene regularity, precisely measurable and the same for everyone, independent of any one person’s inevitably distorting, subjective relationship with it.

But despite its persistence, physics since 1905, when Albert Einstein published his first paper on the Theory of Relativity, has not just challenged Newton’s model of time but, bit-by-bit, has completely dismantled it, leaving us with a set of mind-bending but nonetheless incontrovertible facts about the nature of time: it does not move at the same rate throughout the universe, it speeds up and slows down depending both on how close the measuring subject is to a large mass and how fast they are moving. It does not have a ‘direction’; the notion that time is moving from the past through the present into the future is a symptom of human neurology and what the physicist Carlo Rovelli calls in his 2017 book, The Order of Time, our ‘blurring’ of reality: the way our brains select only certain details out of the vast deluge of microscopic data available to us every second and decides that change is occurring from a state of greater particularity to one of greater disorder, otherwise known as the law of entropy, the only elementary equation of the world, Rovelli tells us, which distinguishes the past from the future.

Put simply, we create time; it is a construction of the human mind which seems to recede ever further from us the harder we look for it in the universe around us. Stephen Hawking, writing in 1988’s A Brief History of Time, discussed different meanings of the phrase ‘the arrow of time’, labelling one ‘the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future’.  The other ways in which the world around us prompts us to distinguish between past and future, and perceive time as an arrow, constantly pushing forward, such as the law of entropy, are, in fact, the result of our inability to perceive the multitude of changes constantly occurring at a molecular level; our perception ‘blurs’ reality to make it navigable and from that blurring emerges all our concepts of time. In other words, ‘time’ as we understand it, simply is ‘psychological time’, and so our contention with time evolves. From ‘how do our fallible perceptual capacities distort time?’ we move on to ‘how do our brains, absorbing what they can from the infinite stimuli of the world around us, invent the neat categories of time which give our lives shape and meaning?’

Amazingly, Augustine of Hippo, a monk and theologian writing at the end of the 4th Century AD in what is now northern Algeria, came up with an answer to this question which still resonates: we believe in the flow of time because we recollect past events and, noticing patterns in them, anticipate more-or-less similar events in the future, yoking past and future together via the infinitesimal moment of conscious experience, which we name the present. He writes: ‘the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers. Who … can deny that the future does not yet exist? Yet already in the mind there is an expectation of the future. Who can deny that the past does not now exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of the past … [The] present time lacks any extension because it passes in a flash. Yet attention is continuous, and it is through this that what will be present progresses towards being absent.’ Rovelli, writing sixteen centuries later, substantially agrees: ‘To a large extent’, he writes, ‘the brain is a mechanism for collecting memories of the past in order to use them continually to predict the future … This being between past and future events is central to our mental structure. This, for us, is the “flow” of time.’

This still leaves unanswered the mystery of why the passage of time appears seamless; we hold images of the past and expectations of the future in our mind but philosophers have often been puzzled as to why we should experience these apparently discrete thoughts as a unity, connecting them instinctively with the present moment, and it’s on this question that they have reached for the example of music, starting with Augustine himself, who noticed that as music occurs in time, we can only directly perceive whatever is sounding in the present moment, and yet the entire effect of music relies on us being able to perceive whole portions of musical material across time as unities: this is the only way we can perceive melodies, for instance. It’s only possible because we’re able to hold in our minds the memory of notes which have already sounded and, crucially, can intuitively connect them with the note presently sounding, and perceive them as a unified whole. Hardly less fundamental to developed musical perception is the capacity to make confident predictions about what notes may follow and to assume them to be essentially continuous with what we’re hearing: notes heard, notes being sounded, and notes about to be heard, linked together by our brains as a single, flowing, evolving entity: a melody.

This parallel between the mental faculty which enables us to follow music and that which must be involved in our conceptualization of time may have been first made by Augustine but has been reprised by thinkers ever since, including Edmond Husserl, who in 1925 made it central to his exhaustive analysis of what he called our ‘internal time-consciousness’. What’s interesting for our purposes, however, is the fact that music theorists have, independently, picked up on these themes of memory and anticipation in the fundamental workings of musical experience. The earliest extant work of western music theory, the Harmonics of Aristoxenus, notes that ‘the apprehension of music depends on … sense-perception and memory for we must perceive the sound that is present, and remember that which is past. In no other way can we follow the phenomenon of music.’ More recently, a number of theorists have discussed music explicitly as the ‘art of time’. The musicologist Paul Griffiths structured his 2006 history of western music entirely around shifting historical attitudes to time, writing as an introductory note: ‘Music, as rhythm, can keep pace with our contemplative rest and our racing activity. Music, in proceeding through time, can resemble our lives.’

The most influential modern writer on music as the ‘art of time’ was the American philosopher Susanne Langer, who wrote, in 1953, that ‘[m]usic makes time audible’. With great eloquence, Langer shows how music allows us to experience a representation of temporality immeasurably more sophisticated than clock time. ‘Musical duration’, she writes, ‘is an image of what might be termed ‘lived’ or ‘experienced’ time - the passage of life that we feel as expectations become ‘now’, and ‘now’ turns into unalterable fact.’ She terms this psychological phenomenon - the passing from anticipation into present experience into past event - a ‘tension’, and notes that the way we experience these in real life do not correspond to the regular division of seconds, minutes and hours, and neither do we encounter them one-by-one in neat succession. As she writes, ‘life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide’. Perhaps this is why the metaphor of the ‘flow of time’ feels intuitively right, because we sense we are always in the midst of time’s river, which contains a myriad of currents, different in volume, pace and duration, occurring simultaneously. The immediate moment of our experience can feel stretched or vanishingly small, and the present itself occurs against a shifting backdrop of larger durations: days, weeks, years. None of these ‘are time’ in the same way that no one current in a river is ‘the river’; the prevalence of the clock has led us to think that time is a straight line with regular, empirical divisions, but really this captures neither the human experience of time nor its true nature as revealed by modern physics, and it’s music, Langer argues, that comes closest to capturing time as it feels for us: time as we experience it - that ‘dense fabric of concurrent tensions’ - forms ‘the model for the virtual time created in music. There we have its image, completely articulated and pure; every kind of tension transformed into musical tension, every qualitative content into musical quality, every extraneous factor replaced by musical elements.’

She doesn’t mention it directly but what she might be thinking of here is what theorists in the classical tradition have referred to as ‘counterpoint’, a feature of music most often associated with the polyphonic style of the Baroque, and in particular the works of JS Bach, but in its most basic sense simply meaning the aspect of music in which two or more musical ideas are heard simultaneously, and it’s what gives music its capacity to represent ‘layers’ of time. In all but the very simplest music you will find more than one temporal process - more than one rhythm - occurring at the same time: in ‘Time After Time’ for instance, we have a regular eighth-note hi-hat pattern running throughout, a feature which a number of writers have heard as ‘clock-like’, which is set against a quite different but equally important rhythmic idea: the pairs of dotted quarter-notes which fill virtually every bar from the moment Lauper starts singing. To these two layers we could add the prominent and strangely fragmentary kick drum pattern, as well as the less regular, more complex rhythms we hear in the lead electric guitar part and Lauper’s vocal melody. Besides that syncopated dotted-quarter-note idea, which may be an explicit link to the song’s theme of the irregularities of time, what I’ve just described - the song’s layers of distinct temporal processes - are entirely typical of the style and of music in general. And none of them are identical with the song’s tempo, or pulse, which is an abstraction music-makers use to play with accuracy but which is not the only, or even the main, perceptible temporal element in music; instead, we are in the midst of a river of rhythmic currents, all implying different temporal ‘tensions’, as Langer would call them, yet all ultimately perceived by us as constituting a unified passage of time.

And yet the conceptual capacity we have to link our memories and our expectations to the present moment, feeling it all as a unified stream of time, is also, Rovelli suggests, at the heart of why we inevitably encounter suffering in the course of life. That same mental faculty which produces time condemns us to retain painful memories, to fear what pain we may encounter in the future, and, cruelly, to be aware at all times of loss, either because we remember moments of happiness which have passed or because we fear losing the happiness we presently possess. He cites the Buddha’s teaching on suffering: we suffer because we know the loss of what we have loved, we know the fear of decay and death, ‘[b]ecause’, he writes, ‘everything that begins must end’. Recognising this is presented by Buddha as one of the first essential steps towards both transcending pain in this life and escaping the constant painful cycle of death and rebirth. Our memories and fears occupy a large segment of each of our portions of earthly suffering, and it’s on this point that ‘Time After Time’ is so strong; each line and musical detail seems to complement the song’s principle theme of the impossibility of reconciling past with present.

In short, emotive phrases leading up to the song’s first chorus, for instance, a break-up is described as a series of temporal fractures, of two people no longer synchronised, their drum beating out of time: ‘Sometimes you picture me, I’m walking too far ahead. You’re calling to me, I can’t hear what you’ve said. Then you say, go slow, I fall behind.’ Exactly when these thoughts are occurring to the singer is, fittingly, unclear: are they definitively in the past, or are we actually hearing her on the cusp of the split? Memory is an unreliable guide - that ‘flashback’ to ‘warm nights’, presumably a memory of their intimacy and togetherness, is ‘almost left behind’, and implicitly seems to have become part of her ‘suitcase of memories’, something she takes with her but in a jumble, no more significant than any other image of the past she might carry around with her, and thus, painfully, an admission that that vital aspect of the lovers’ joy - its quality of specialness, the thing truly desired by both of them - is no more.

The clock ticks, she thinks of him, and, while it’s clear the love is over and receding unstoppably into the past, she can’t help but think back to their nights together. This emotional sequence might be termed nostalgia, which historically referred to painful homesickness; implicitly, the longing for a place-of-origin no longer accessible. In this case, of course, what’s inaccessible is a moment in her past, a moment which, for better or worse, memory has preserved for her. The song carries for many listeners a powerful weight of nostalgic associations and memories, which is one reason it’s the perfect choice for accompanying the mesmerising dance sequence at the end of the 1997 comedy, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, but I’m convinced there’s a nostalgic quality embedded in the song itself, which affects even those with no personal memories associated with it. I wonder if it’s something to do with the most distinctive sonic element in the song’s buildup: the lead electric guitar part. To achieve that particular, immediately recognisable tone, the guitarist has used two effects: chorus and delay. Chorus takes a sound signal and lays a reproduction of it ‘on top’ of the original but fractionally out of sync with it so that a slight distorting effect is heard which is often characterised as ‘wavy’ or ‘shimmering’. Delay repeats a signal after a specified interval; each repetition is quieter than the previous, so the effect typically approximates a diminishing succession of echoes. Both effects, in different ways, allow the guitarist to provide us with a note and, almost but not quite simultaneously, a near-replica of that note, and the result is a sound which carries intimations of memory, even on first listening.

The faint uncanniness this effect throws up - that feeling of having a memory of something we've never experienced - is only the first of a number of paradoxes the song presents to us on the nature of time. There's a moment near the beginning of the fascinating music video Lauper made for the song, where as she's singing 'the clock ticks, I think of you' she's pictured next to a man, the man who will play the lover figure through the rest of the video. Later, in the second verse, Lauper sees him 'watching through windows … wondering if I'm ok'. There's the disorienting sense that, in this song, we only 'think' of those physically present, while at the same time we're able to 'see' those who are evidently absent. At the culmination of that series of disjunctures between them in the first verse - 'you say, go slow' - Lauper sings 'the second hand unwinds', and the neat line of time invoked by the ticking clock in the song’s first line starts to unspool. The enigmas proliferate: we watch Lauper, in the video, mouthing the lines to a black-and-white movie scene starring Marlene Dietrich, where she is, with great sadness and dignity, telling a man they cannot be together. When we see the final shot of the video - a clear reference to the climactic moment of Brief Encounter - the possibility emerges that the break-up occurring in the song has happened thousands of times before; perhaps, when Lauper tells us 'confusion is nothing new', we're not just meant to hear that her character is confused but also, unsettlingly, that there's 'nothing new' in what she's experiencing. There’s a paradoxical repetition in the title of the song - what would a time after time actually be? - and the phrase itself is, after all, an idiom for indefinite repetition - time after time. It brings up the prospect of eternal recurrence: the notion that everything we are experiencing has happened an infinite number of times before and will continue to recur into the infinite future, which in western thought is often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, although some version of it is found in many pre-modern philosophies. It clashes, of course, with the vision of time associated with monotheism, especially Christianity, which necessarily holds that we are moving toward a specific point in the future: literally, the end of days, when we will be reconciled with God, and the long, painful history of humanity will come to an end. 

Music, consisting of patterns of sound occurring through time, is remarkably well-suited to represent these contrasting world-views - time moving in eternal circles, time as a linear movement towards an ending - and we can see it at work in ‘Time After Time’. There are hints of cyclicality everywhere: Lauper loves the tonal pattern of starting on a note, then sounding one above, then one below, then back to the original note: a musical representation of a circle. We hear it in the opening 4-bar chord loop: F major to G major, down to E minor, and back to F. It features in many of her vocal phrases: [singing] ‘lyin’ in my bed, I hear the clock tick … caught up in circles, confusion in nothing new … flashback, warm nights … suitcase of memories’. Yet when we reach the chorus, we’re suddenly presented with a set of firm harmonic cadences: western music’s most potent device for indicating forward movement toward an ending: that sequence of F, G to C major, the tonic chord, which accompanies the phrase ‘Time after time’, is a perfect cadence, a definite ending, and it seems strange that these two very different implications of the nature of time - it goes round in circles, it’s heading towards a specific end - sit so naturally alongside each other. 

One way of thinking about these two visions of time’s true structure might be to relate them both to an argument Rovelli makes - that our basic temporal concepts are essentially products of our evolutionary history. ‘Natural selection’, he writes, ‘has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future … The possibility of predicting something … obviously improves our chances of survival and, consequently, evolution has selected the neural structures that allow it.’ And of course, the only reason we’re able to make reliable predictions about the future is that we’re able to hold in our minds sensory data we’re not experiencing directly and, furthermore, we can spot patterns in that data - our memories - and project with confidence the belief that those patterns will recur in the future. We remember that the sun has risen and set at roughly similar intervals and conduct our lives under the assumption that it will continue to do so. It’s easy to see how this may have had evolutionary advantages: memory and anticipation, say, of when the lions visit the watering hole, must have helped us to survive. Perhaps we might see the anxious notion that the past is recurring indefinitely as that pattern-making instinct in overdrive and, similarly, the impulse to imagine great and terrible visions of the world ending as the capacity to predict the future, so necessary for our daily survival, running wild; it’s how Rovelli explains our fear of death, for instance: our ‘ability to predict the future’, he says, ‘has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight’. 

A picture emerges of the human subject, shaped by millennia of evolution, trapped in a set of deep-lying yet misleading intuitions about time’s passing, which now haunt and beset us. We’re caught up in confusion, Lauper might say, saddled with memories and fears we cannot escape. And yet we’ve seen how these same faculties of memory and anticipation are integral to our ability to perceive music as anything more than disconnected dots of sound. Musicologist Eric F Clark, building on the ‘ecological psychology’ of James and Eleanor Gibson, sees the development of our musical capacities within the history of the human species’ relationship with its environment, and although his focus is on tonal perception - how we attribute meaning to tonal intervals and melodic shapes - perhaps more fundamentally, we might be able to say that listening to music involves perceiving ‘durations’ - successive sounds and silences of differing lengths - and noticing patterns in them: rhythm, in other words - and to wonder that if, as Clark says, our perceptual capacities are the consequence of adaptation, we may hold a clue to the mystery of why music exists at all. As I explored in episode 10 of the first series of this podcast, the prevalence of metaphors of movement in the language we use to describe music suggests that musical experience - making it, listening to it, dancing to it - is fundamentally bound up in our being bodies which move in space but it’s striking that even our closest mammalian relatives seem not to do something human two-year-olds do with little prompting: register and respond to musical rhythm. Could music have played a role in ‘training’ us in this key survival ability - the conceptualization of time - or, alternatively, was it a by-product of our temporal consciousness, in which the animation of our sense of time in the act of listening to music functions as a sort of pleasuring of this basic human impulse, and perhaps also as a tonic to the distress it inevitably causes us?

Music imitates mortality; a piece of music exists then is gone. The musicologist Philip Alperson writes, ‘in the case of musical tones, it is the normal state of affairs that … we are privy to a tone’s existence from inception to cessation’. The invention of audio recording has perhaps dampened this most important aspect of music’s relationship with time for us; we can now hear a particular musical performance after it is finished; we can put it on repeat. But it remains: no matter how reproducible a performance of a piece of music has now become, we still hear it start, move through its existence, until it unmistakably and definitively ends. Rovelli writes, ‘‘The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming. … Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.’ Human lives, obviously, are included in this grammar: we are not solid, unchanging objects occupying discrete points in Euclidean space; we also are processes. And so the metaphors of movement we construct around music make a new sort of sense: like melodies, we are also processes of beginning, moving around and ending, but, crucially, we are also processes inextricably in interaction with other processes. The most far-reaching revelation of the theory of relativity is that time and space are inextricable: time proceeds differently depending on where you are in relation to other bodies. So when we share an experience with another person, we are not just sharing space but on a level both psychologically and cosmologically true, ‘sharing time’, and music, via counterpoint especially, allows us to feel the sensation of independent temporal processes coinciding. As Langer puts it, ‘the most important and novel revelation of music [is] the fact that time is not a pure succession, but has more than one dimension’.

And this song, in particular, seems alive to the seeming paradox of time moving slow or fast depending on the perspective of the observer; the break-up is never stated directly but is rather hinted at in those lyrics reflecting time’s fracturing: time is not moving in the same way for them anymore. It also channels the pain of recognition that things change, ultimately our only gauge for the passing of time. In the second verse, Lauper sings two intriguing phrases, ‘After my picture fades and darkness has turned to grey’; in the former, we’re given a reminder that images, both physical and mental, preserve a moment but fade with time; the footholds we gain in the sweep of time’s passing are only temporary. In the latter, the even richer ambiguity of darkness turning to grey suggests that while time can heal - as in, this dark moment will pass - it can also blanch feelings of their intensity.

And yet at the heart of the song is a sense that the time only mattered because it was shared with someone, despite the pain it now causes in memory of it. The most important moment in the arrangement is the transformation into the chorus when the bass guitar and second singer enter. The lyrics abruptly reverse the uncertainty of the verses and suddenly it is audibly two people singing this together, perhaps to each other, as if all the worry that has preceded is immaterial to the fundamental commitments they are making to each other - ‘if you’re lost, you can look, and you will find me’. This pledge of support in the context of a break-up song might seem a paradox but it doesn’t feel that way because the song seems to grasp that time itself is paradoxical. ‘We’ve lost each other but if you look for me I will be there’ makes a powerful emotional sense which seems, for the duration of the song at least, to override the notion of time’s linearity. 

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson used the connection of time and music to make a point about how we come to understand ourselves: ‘in recalling [its former states], [the self] does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms both the past and present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. Might it not be said that, even if these notes succeed one another, yet we perceive them in one another, and that their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another … ?’ Melodies and our lives require the stitching-together of past and present sensations in order to be understood as unities, and the memory of an important relationship with someone - Lauper’s ‘suitcase of memories’ - that sense that you were with me, we were witness to that same point in space and time together - is fundamental to both our sense of time and our sense of self, of any sort of stability of identity. That inspired addition of a male voice, implicitly the figure the song is addressed to, in its suddenly emphatic and open-hearted chorus, resonates with our intuition that on some level we rely on the knowledge that ‘you were with me’ to provide ourselves with any substantive notion of ‘me’. 

Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be thinking about freedom in the light of the life and work of Whitney Houston. So often invoked but so rarely defined, freedom has been a point of fierce disagreement in America throughout its history, and especially in the decades leading up to Houston’s emergence. It was an idea that seemed to stick to her, a quality people seemed to hear in her singing and expected her to represent. So what sort of freedom, if any, is being expressed in a song like ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.