Bee Gees
Stayin' Alive

I was born in 1991.
My parents were not very passionate about music, and there was very little music playing in my house. Moreover, I lived in the countryside, I had no neighbors, and there wasn't music in the air or in the streets. It was already a lot that there were streets at all.
As a child, I remember I had a VHS tape with a dozen intros of I don't know which cartoons. Man, how I wore out that tape. But even before I learned how to use the VCR, since I probably wasn't even tall enough to reach it, there were other tapes, which the educated today would call audiocassettes, but what can you expect from a 3-year-old; to me, they were all tapes. Even saying my cousin's name was a challenge. Tazio, which became Caco, for example.

I had quite a few of those little tapes. My mom used to buy me those little storybooks with a tape that had a narrator's voice, and she tells me that I would follow the words on the pages with my finger. It seems I started learning to read that way.
Not that my parents didn't read to me at all, quite the opposite, but perhaps they weren't always available to read me something, or maybe it was me who was insatiable. The fact is, I had learned to use the red-handled tape recorder, the various buttons: PLAY, STOP, FF, REW, and that mysterious REC that was different from the others... who knows what the heck that button did. From the yellow speakers came the voice of I don't know who, telling me stories that I soon learned more or less by heart. Exactly by heart.
Among the tapes, however, there was a transparent one with nothing written on it, just A on one side and B on the other, which only years later did I understand what they meant.
And then, while the others were colorful (green, red, blue... really inviting), that one was very anonymous, almost saying 'Don't play me, really kid, it's not worth it'.

But on that tape, there was music.

And I don't remember how many or which pieces were inside it (perhaps Phil Collins, or the Dire Straits, but I think that now that I know my parents' tastes). But before the others, there was this piece here, which I played often. I didn't know who those guys were, what they looked like, what language they spoke. No cover. There wasn't even a book with the words to follow with my finger.
Yet I remember it well. Played in the evening with the light of the hood on and me - a 3-year-old boy just barely - standing on a chair with the tape recorder on the kitchen table, while I waited for my mom or dad to come back from the workshop.
Well, I think that song was my first musical memory, or maybe my first memory ever. With all due respect to John Travolta and disco music.
It didn't really stir me much at the time, although with hindsight, it's a song that makes a lot of butts move. But it's understandable; a 3-year-old's butt often remains stuck to the floor.

Then came the The Lion King alarm clock, The Aristocats, some radio jingle, the Spice Girls... but they're no longer memories, just things that happened while I was living; still far from music's tracks.
It will take 10 years before another song of a completely different genre strikes me so much that it makes me move my butt, this time for real, so much so that I take up drumsticks, guitar, and whatnot. But that would be another age. Another mindset.
A whole different story.

And now who knows where those tapes ended up.

Miles Davis talks at the beginning of his autobiography about how his first memory is of a flame being lit. A light taking shape.
My first memories, instead, are of that open hi-hat on the upbeat, and the guitar riff of Stayin' Alive.