The Music Man

At Ky's burial and at his memorial, on the graffiti/writers' website tributes, in letters and emails, Kyle's relationship with music was a continuing theme.

He loved music from early on: I remember him bopping (it was certainly more than swaying) to music way before he could walk. I did my best to indoctrinate my children to motown by giving them quarters in the car when they could name an artist. One time Ky hopefully guessed "Smokey Pickett?" I gave him the quarter anyway. Gearey was always introducing new music into the house. The whole family loved Oh Mercy, and I think it was Kyle who put on my leather jacket and moved around the living room singing "Man in a Long Black Coat." By age 11 he was calling up KROQ for bumper stickers and he and Miranda introduced me to "alternative" around that time. He had the 101.1 FM 60s and 70s play list down, and soon was saying, "Mom, you gotta get some better music. All they do is repeat the same songs. You've heard these millions of times."

Middle school transitioned to high school. Ky got into what I remember as Acid Rock, which I didn't much like the first time. There were the Curt Cobain years, which coincided with his feeling badly about his relationship to school, so I was a bit wary. He definitely got into old Dylan (whom I value next to Shakespeare); I know because my Dylan CD's kept disappearing from their jewel cases.

Then Ky got into rap and hip-hop and finally, reggae. Knowing I liked blues, he would play me Muddy Waters or surprise me with something like a cut of James Brown singing blues. Reggae definitely became prominent, yet he did seem open to learning more and more. His iPod, with 942 songs had 80% reggae (old roots reggae), rap, R & B, blues, classic oldies (i.e., Sly & The Family Stone's "Do You Want Me to Stay?" and Ray Charles' "Let's Go Get Stoned."), and music from the groups he'd recently seen at concerts.

Clare, our wonderful clinic coordinator at NPI, helped me with Ky's computer; she cleaned up his hard drive, saved a bunch of stuff on a CD so I would have it, and then announced that there was no way to get off the music.

She explained that he had a 50 GB hard drive and that only about 7 GB is usually taken up to install windows and a few programs, so that left him with 43GB for stuff. 40 GB of that stuff was his music. She translated what that meant:

"You could say that the average file size for one song is 4.5MB (1GB=1024MB). So if you do the math, that's over 9000 songs. To put them on CDs that would play in your car or in a regular CD player it would be over 500 CDs (15-16 songs per CD)."

"I went to college in the days of Napster--where you could download everything off the internet for free--without the worry of getting in trouble. I think that craze was coming to a close my junior or senior year--right around when Kyle was starting college. " (I remember that Ky was a napster fiend.)

"But in my opinion," Clare concluded, "It takes a real music lover to pick 9000 songs to download or to burn off CDs."

I've tried to put the word out. About those 9000 songs that are on his Dell computer? Anyone is welcome to come and burn a CD so you have some of Ky's tune to carry around with you. I'm around on Sundays.