Consider the references to popular teenage music in the story and the number of instances where music is mentioned.

Oates begins the story with the epigraph "for Bob Dylan," and she has said that her 1966 story was inspired by Dylan's 1965 song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."
Music is first mentioned in the story in relation to how Connie moves; she is described by the narrator as sometimes moving as if "she was hearing music in her head." The restaurant where Connie and her friends hang out always has

music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

When Connie leaves her girlfriends to go off with a boy, the joy she felt had nothing to do with the place nor the boy; she decides, "it might have been the music." On the way home that evening, Connie looks back at town and observes that "she couldn't hear the music at this distance."
After Connie's family has left for the barbecue, she immerses herself in music:

She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here, you girls at Napoleon's—Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!"

Connie feels that the warmth and joy that she experiences always come to her when she is listening to music.
When Arnold Friend begins his attempted seduction of Connie, the narrator describes his speaking voice, while he is reciting facts about Connie's life, as "exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song." His companion Ellie has a transistor radio pressed to his ear the whole time Arnold is bothering Connie.
As he becomes more insistent and threatening, Connie hears "the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again."