‘Social control of his beginnings’
Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir
by Michael V. Smith
Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2025
$24.95 / 9781771669498
Reviewed by Catherine McNeil
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Soundtrack by Michael V. Smith takes us through history, through the prism of the songs of the time in which he grew up. We witness a small town, working class, queer boy navigate a life of childhood trauma from learning to disappear and dissociate, to becoming a drag queen who twirls like wonder woman and breaks from the social control of his beginnings.
We walk into his past of Rubik’s cubes, Pope John Paul, mullets, rotary phones, and record players and see a young man watching others emanating something he identifies with, but cannot put his finger on it, nor act on his desires at first.
There are friends who accompany Michael on this journey of being a queer entertainer and he tracks their paths, sometimes tragic, as he does the songs in the book.
His language can be cheeky, poignant and whimsical: “her best bitch face, fists on hips” and “popularity is a light switch” and “little round pumpkin nose” or cocky as in “approaching poems like they’re dicks.”
He writes about early sexual experiences that most of us have growing up and for us queer folk, like me, it’s different. He speaks of that which can not be spoken of – the swallowing of the queer self : “after time, we eat ourselves / to prevent being / eaten.”
Michael pays homage to queer heroes or allies like Cindy Lauper, Michael Jackson, Boy George, Lady Di, and Liberace. I still hear the earworm “karma karma karma chameleon” roll around my brain as I read the book.
He defends the AIDS era by attending AIDS-related demonstrations and speaks of friends turning positive, the chorus of silence, how every gay man was nervous about sleeping around because of the “invisible virus we all think will kill us “ and “Everywhere I look / someone in the news / is planning / my death.”
But Michael remakes the story of his faggot body. In a “room bumping with possibility.” I love this: so much permission to move / and occupy space, to be a body / without need / to reduce myself.”
So many gay folks can relate to what Michael writes in Soundtrack, the years when we are drowning in alcohol because the bar is where we meet each other and we can’t come out because at the same time, there is “too much tiptoeing around men’s egos and dodging the heavy bricks of homophobia.”
He writes of how creative writing professors did not feel equipped to comment on his writing, which I have just experienced and how “history has not been kind to history that is queer.”
My favorite line of all is: “I had to forget you if I wanted to be happy.”
This is an astounding record of a man who is able to survive the throes of growing up in a homophobic world, finding his place in it and, revelling in life as a queer artist.
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Catherine Elizabeth McNeil, the author / singer-songwriter from Gibsons, BC, the recipient of the National Milieu’s Emerging Writer’s Contest for her first poetry book under the influence (Bedazzled Ink) in 2016, has poems from her second book emily and elspeth (Caitlin Press) in Queer Chroma, Rampike, Sinister Wisdom and Room of One’s Own. emily and elspeth won first prize in the Sunshine Coast Book Awards in the category of Diversity as well as first prize in the Not An Island Seniors Literary Contest. Other publications written for include Event, Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Exact Fare 2, and The Fed Anthology (Anvil).
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
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.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster