Music, Lenny Kravitz and a 90s Boombox

With a master’s degree in my pocket and the sky as my limit, I moved to Jakarta in early 2007. I had just signed a one-year contract at the German cultural centre Goethe-Institut and was deliriously happy to relocate to the one city I had always wanted to live in. The daughter of an Indonesian mother and a German father, I fell irrevocably in love with Jakarta when we travelled there for our summer holidays in 1992, and I had dreamed about working there someday ever since.

Of course, a one-year contract implied that I’d be coming back to Berlin rather sooner than later, so I decided to put most of my stuff and furniture into storage – including my extensive collection of CDs and tapes as well as my Sony stereo, which I had bought in Japan and included a Mini Disc player and a – gasp! – CD changer. I stuffed everything into several boxes and was heavy-hearted when the movers picked up my things on a cold January morning. I was excited about my new beginnings, but felt strangely melancholy about seeing my whole life packed away in a truckload of cardboard boxes, leaving me with only two suitcases of my belongings.

I left with the assumption that I’d come back after one year. But I should have known better. Once I had set foot in Jakarta and started to build a life and carve out a career for myself, there was no turning back. It was, frankly speaking, the most rewarding time of my life. My furniture and winter clothes, my CDs and tapes gathered dust in the storage room outside of Berlin – but I didn’t really miss them all that much.

If I wanted to listen to music, there were other ways. My sister gave me my very first iPod nano as a birthday present in 2007. It could hold more than 200 songs and was more than enough for me to keep myself entertained with music while being stuck in Jakarta’s infamous traffic, to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling of my room or to sing along in the shower.

Digitalization changed everything and also brought radical changes to the music industry. I had long stopped buying CDs and downloaded MP3s instead. But the older I became, the less interested I was in new music. Up and coming talents and breakthrough artists suddenly were nothing than a name without a face or voice to me, and I found myself increasingly listening to music that had accompanied me during my youth and university years.

Once in a while, I’d still discover new bands or musicians – how did I go through life without knowing the songs of Nando Reis or Brendan Benson!? – but most of the time, I was happy reliving the different musical phases of my life: a colourful mixture of pop, rock, hip hop, reggae and even opera, musicals and classic music; not to forget Lenny Kravitz, my first love in music and an artist I still adore to this day. But the most important one always was and always will be my beloved alternative and grunge music, the angsty, powerful and introspective sound of my teenage years, second to none and forever evoking a myriad of emotions and memories. Oh, those memories!

Any given song can instantly transport me back to a different time. When I hear Nirvana’s “Lithium”, I see my younger self at a bar called GasPanic in Roppongi, Tokyo, enjoying my adolescence perhaps more than I should; I suffered through a break up to Pearl Jam’s “Black”, finding comfort in Eddie Vedder’s baritone voice; and headbang-ed through the living room to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.”

In 2018, after having lived in Jakarta for more than 11 years, I eventually moved back to Germany. I did so mainly for personal reasons and felt and still feel incredibly homesick for the city I was allowed to call my home for over a decade. But coming back to Berlin also meant that I was finally reunited with all the things I had left in storage so many years ago.

When I found an apartment, and the movers came, schlepping one box after another to the third floor of my building, it felt a little bit like Christmas in springtime as I was searching for long lost treasures. I tenderly caressed my favorite books, but immediately threw out old chairs, lamps and tables that I simply didn’t want to use anymore. When I saw a couple of boxes labelled “CDs”, I could hardly contain my excitement.

My parents suggested I throw away the CDs and tapes, as my Sony stereo, once the apple of my eye, hadn’t survived the storage years. Of course, they were right. Why keep hundreds of CDs when I don’t even have a CD player anymore and can listen to almost everything I want on Spotify these days?

In the end, I didn’t. I got rid of some albums I didn’t even remember buying, but I kept most of them. I emptied one of my shelves and lovingly placed all my CDs there. When I recently celebrated my birthday, one of the presents I received from my sister was a boombox. A red 90s boombox with a CD player and tape deck.

After I found a spot for this shiny new toy on my nightstand, I walked over to the shelf and grabbed a couple of CDs to see if they were still working: Pearl Jam’s outstanding debut album Ten, the formidable Disintegration by The Cure, Oasis’ unforgettable (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory, and the soundtrack of cult movie Empire Records.

I then picked up Lenny Kravitz’s album Circus, and as soon as I heard him proclaim that rock and roll is dead, I nestled into my orange-colored armchair, leafing through the booklet like I did so many years ago when I first bought the album in a music store in Toyko.

It was released in September 1995, and I had set aside some pocket money to be able to buy it right away. In the morning, I took the train to Shibuya station and walked over to Tower Records, a giant music store sprawled over nine floors – a haven for music lovers that left no request or desire unfulfilled. In my excitement, I hadn’t realized that I was too early, and I had to wait ten more minutes before the store opened its doors.

As soon as I was allowed in, greeted by the Japanese staff calling out “Irasshaimase”, I rushed to the New Releases section, and I could already see it from afar, the black-and-white cover of Lenny Kravitz’s brand new album. I quickly took one of the CDs from the stack, paid at the cashier and went home immediately.

I locked myself into my bedroom, carefully removing the plastic wrap, putting the CD into my stereo and pressed “play.” Lying on the floor, I listened to the familiar sound of Lenny Kravitz’s voice, breathed in every single song, immediately determining my favorites, only to change my mind again after going through the whole album a second time. I leafed through the CD booklet, internalizing the lyrics, staring at the photographs and looking for Thank You notes (which, in this case, were reduced to two tiny sentences).

And here I was, 25 years after spending a whole day devouring one single album and fully taking in the entire listening experience, sitting in my bedroom in a different city, much older but equally excited to be able to relive these memories, getting lost in an ocean of nostalgia, accompanied by the words of Lenny Kravitz: “Life is just a lonely highway, I’m out here on the open road, I’m old enough to see behind me, but young enough to feel my soul.”

It was a good day.