‘Looking over my shoulder’
Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir
by Michael V. Smith
Toronto: Book*hug, 2025
$24.95 / 9781771669498
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic
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Born in March of 1971, Michael V. Smith was seventeen when “Heart of Glass,” the iconic single from Blondie’s Parallel Lines, began to blast from speakers everywhere.
Readers familiar with Smith’s no-holds-barred memoir My Body is Yours (2015) know of an anguished—“desperate, confused, enraged, and terrified”—childhood and adolescence described as a “caged life,” and early adult years conveyed with a wit (“Everyone had funny drunk stories. I was competitive so mine just happened to be better”) that amused even it is revealed considerable pain.
A decade after that memoir, Smith (Queers Like Me) returns to his formative years in a “lyric memoir” composed as a two-sided mixtape of free verse and prose poems. Soundtrack opens with “Parallel Lines” on Side A and with a litany of seemingly nostalgic references: PoP Shoppe cola, Grease, Studio 54, Dallas, Rubik’s Cube, and, of course, Debbie Harry—“in a white cocktail dress / on the black-and-white striped album, standing akimbo // between smiling, shaggy-haired men oblivious to her / best bitch face, fists on her hips.”
Smith juxtaposes that familiar pop culture imagery with disconcerting mementos, sobering remembrance rather than dreamy, soft-filter nostalgia: nuclear war drills in classrooms, the Jim Jones suicide cult, Harvey Milk’s assassination, John Wayne Gacy’s murders, and HIV. Closer to home: discord managed with homespun creativity—
Before my parents break up
the first time and we sell this house where I learn
a trick to keep myself alive, to not move, to lie perfectly
still, to dissociate, to disappear into every Nancy Drew and
Hardy Boys mystery I can find. When I discover music
drowns the noise too. Music, music in my headphones.
The tension of the ensuing poems relates to wonderment and, for better or worse, knowledge acquisition. In “Thriller,” for example: “Nobody has seen anything / like Thriller’s music / video, its large ensemble / dance numbers, zombies / of small-town men / and women.” In the same poem: “conformity violence / a strategy / small-town men use / as social control” and “I’ll be too afraid / to get my own / George Michael hoops / until thirty-one.”
In Smith’s telling, that Ontarian past—“This is before / cameras / lined the streets”—evokes a classic coming-of-age trope: the conflict between individual and society (in the form of laws and norms, institutions and conventions); but whereas society manoeuvres to preserve an oppressive status quo, the individual fights for his very life.
In Soundtrack, there’s music, music everywhere at the point where these two unequal forces interact. With poems named after music by Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Jane Siberry, The Cure, and Sinead O’Connor, Smith summons experiential highs and lows——“this joy / or that devastation,” as he writes in “No Borders Here.” And whether it’s the outside world or within rooms at his home address, social forces imperil the narrator.
Though readers understand that Smith, a Creative Studies professor at UBC-Okanagan, survives and thrives, there’s no denying the fear and apprehension he induces with lines like “I’m a seventeen-year-old / suicidal fag in a mill-working family, / the sissy who can never do anything / right” (in “No Borders Here”).
And yet, and yet. “I feel my life expanding,” Smith writes. At a Cyndi Lauper concert recounted in “She’s So Unusual,” as the singer “she-bops / on speakers right / above me and my friends / too terrified to dance,” the young Smith imagines her transmutational sweat: he wants it to “turn me / into someone more / than this self-conscious / shuffler I’m dying / to undo.” As family appears to offer him little comfort or protection and the flung word “faggot” dogs him, there are minor-chord, soft-spoken exultations that could also be viewed as sighs of relief: “We’re laughing till we cry / with that joy / death reminds us to gather everywhere possible,” Smith recalls “We Are the Champions”; and, in “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” “I’m so happy / I can imagine / a future.”
Side B, still set in “the before times” and touching on music from Depeche Mode, Deee-Lite, Destiny’s Child, and PJ Harvey, portrays Smith’s personal “expanding,” but—always—with caveats. For the young man, “AIDS / can’t help / but feel inevitable,” for instance. And: “You can’t walk down the street / homosexual / without slyly checking out / who in the crowd / would choke you to death.” Even in Vancouver and revelling in “the joy of being a downtown sissy” (in “It’s-It,” named after a 1992 remix album by The Sugarcubes), there’s a counterforce, an undercurrent, a shadow. In “Rid of Me”: “I’m facing years of fumbling / condoms / compulsion, drowning / in alcohol.”
Settled in an eclectic urban peer group, including queer punk musician Kim Kinakin (1971-2024)—to whom Soundtrack is dedicated—Smith remarks on gay culture (“We live in sufficient danger to make your blood run”) and questions a common assumption that gay liberation by then was a fait accompli and that queer people could walk the streets as virtually normal and virtually equal. “[R]ighteous anger” appears in these later poems too, and Smith frames it as a facet of his growing political consciousness. With it too, more learning, expressed wittily: “But interpersonally, anecdotally, I can assure you / nobody / likes an angry faggot.” The mixtape ends with a celebratory account of a concert by Kinakin’s band The Skinjobs. Spare and lovely, an epilogue-like poem, “(Hidden track: 29/09/24),” eulogizes Smith’s close friend.
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And after that?, I wondered. Smith’s backward glances effectively end a quarter of a century ago. In Soundtrack, the absence of two-plus decades is curious, puzzling. Based on the textual evidence alone, it’s as though music acted as an urgent young man’s personal soundtrack, best sidekick, and reliable buttress and that with the onset of stolid middle age—hypothetically: mortgage payments and property tax, committee meetings, date nights, grey hairs—music lost its cachet. Seemingly, it—and the pivotal struggles twinned to it—belonged in and to the past; ostensibly, the writer outgrew music and it (as well as its associations: “righteous anger,” messy nighttime fun, colourfully radical misbehaviour, serious political activism) disappeared. In real life, I doubt that’s true. The poet might play Bach now as he reads or blast Chappell Roan on the way to campus. I really have no idea, but when reading Soundtrack I felt that I wanted to. If music is it just background noise for a comfortable and secure middle-class existence, it is unworthy of comment and ineligible for treatment in a memoir? Perhaps Soundtrack II will tell the tale.
[Editor’s note: Michael V. Smith has October appearances planned for Vancouver (25th) and Victoria (26th); for November: readings in Penticton (1st), Kelowna (4th), and Vernon (5th).]
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Whenever he finishes it, Cull will be Brett Josef Grubisic‘s sixth novel. He assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s recently written about books by David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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