Me Unchained: Beat Happening, The US Navy, And Me

By Emily Carney

Some personal history: at the age of 19, I joined the United States Navy. The reason why I joined the military was ostensibly to get money for college. After many struggles (too many to mention, or else this article would be at least 100 pages long), I went to my first (and only) ship, the USS George Washington, CVN 73, in January 1999. I was one of the only women in my department at the time, and certain higher-ups (chiefs and officers) made it abundantly clear that my 100-pound frame would not make it in the US Navy. I was terrified.

In mid-2000 I departed on my first Mediterranean cruise. Music had made an abrupt exit out of my life during this time, mainly because I had no time to listen to music; the US Navy, it seemed, owned every facet of my life. During this cruise, I was slowly but surely starting to lose my mind, as histrionic as that may sound. I was pretty depressed and felt very strongly that my higher-ups did not want me there. I was also drinking an awful lot (which probably explains my irrational paranoia that certain people “were out to get me”). By the middle part of the Mediterranean cruise I discovered one of the only cassettes in my storage locker, Dreamy by Beat Happening. I had bought it ages ago when I was a teenager, and hadn’t listened to it in about as many years. I had a crappy old Walkman, and decided to give the cassette another go.

Beginning with the opening song, “Me Unchained,” Dreamy contained all of the seething-lava-under-childlike-innocence that I was dealing with during that time. I was still hopelessly young (22), and certainly not much of an adult. I felt in a way that I myself had been “unchained” for the first time in my life, and the results weren’t turning out too spectacularly. The next song which held a lot of significance for me was “I’ve Lost You,” which described the end of a relationship, and has the best Beat Happening lyric ever: “Who’s gonna love me, who’s gonna love me, who’s gonna love me the way that I am?” I didn’t feel as if anyone accepted me for what I could (or couldn’t) do, so the theme of being loved as is really appealed to me.

I must’ve listened to this tape hundreds of times for the rest of the cruise. The mixture of pure rage, naïveté, and lo-fidelity instrumentation seemed to epitomize the feelings of ultimate sadness and inevitable letdown I was experiencing at the time.

I returned to the United States in December 2000. I was permanently changed, and permanently embittered. Certain higher-ups had made it clear that my 100-pound frame wouldn’t make it in the US Navy—and they were right. I left the USS George Washington in May 2001. If it hadn’t been for Dreamy, I probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did.