Okay.I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I keep putting it off because I think it might piss a few of my friends off, then I remember that if you're my friend, then you're an intelligent, enlightened individual, and besides, sometimes it's healthy to be mad.
Perhaps it's an american thing. Maybe it's universal now, but I think it's pretty secular at the moment. Music is no longer a form of art, a medium of expression meant for revelation and experience and beauty and celebration...or...at least it sure as hell doesn't seem to be anymore.Lately the good folks with whom I share the bench at the bakery have been compiling cds of the music they survived on during their teenage years. Everybody's all into it, touting the benefits of sharing secret little soul crevices through the music they leaned so heavily upon and tore their hair to, lacquered posters on their walls for, and felt completely alone and misunderstood with."You should make one!" an enthusiastic fan of the idea effused a few days ago, and I wondered why my gut reaction was to balk and shy thoroughly away from any such project.Then I realized, I didn't really listen to much music in high school.Not until my freshman year of college, did I really begin to open up my tastes and explore all the different genres available for my consumption, and being the partner of a very world weary music traveler with quite discerning tastes, it has frequently been my duty to digest enormous slices of humble pie as my ignorance of the many "standards" and "classics" was revealed.
I had never consciously listened to a led zepplin song until I was twenty six.There. I said it.
It's not that I lived in some terrifying religious household where anything other than hymns was burned and my terrified sisters and I rolled on the lawn in our nightgowns at midnight singing songs along with a radio we tuned to the devil's music. Well...we might have done some of that, but it was all in good fun.My parents played a few specific albums that I recall. 1. The soundtrack to the film the big chill (which my sisters and i can still sing both sides of in order)2. tchaikovsky (most memorably the 1812 overture) 3. the greatest hits of buddy holly 4. Queen's the works
As far as I was concerned up until middle school, Queen was hardcore and buddy holly was pop and cannons were classical and motown was pretty much everything else.My sisters and I sang along with the radio, and used our father's voice recorder from his interview journalist days to record songs off of Alex's boombox. Yes. We held it up to the speaker thus a lot of our early mixed tapes held vague interruptions as we were called to dinner or sarah decided to join the party and didn't grasp the grave silence required for such a task. Alex was way more into being a dj than i was, and I would rather read, so I sort of let the mixed tape thing fall by the wayside until high school.I was fifteen when we could finally afford cable, and we lived in america and that meant exciting, luxurious choices like HBO, Nickelodeon and MTV. After we got home from school, there was a top ten countdown on mtv, and it lasted about an hour, and that was exactly how long i was allowed to watch television until dad kicked us off to respective homework duties. I watched this countdown religiously, partly because those marketing guys knew who their audience was, and they geared it toward the pocket change of the blossoming tween empire, partly as a weird way to get to know american tastes (what the fuck was cool here? why did nobody want to eat lunch with me? etc). It was on said countdown that I first saw a little band called savage garden, and for some reason, my brain clicked on. I can try to make this sound cooler than it was, but that would be a farce. In short. They were cute, their songs were catchy, and the stars aligned with my hormones to create the cataclysmic inaugural rock crush.I bought the cd with my saved up pocket money. I locked myself in my room and listened to it and wrote poems and wore a lot of black and generally behaved like a massive jackass for the better part of my fifteenth year. Afterward, I didn't move on to another band. I remember I bought a real fancy like stereo with a three disc changer and a subwoofer with money I saved from my summer job at an ice cream parlor, and I used to listen to the radio constantly. I purchased music very rarely. I had a cd tower with barely twelve slots filled, while across the hall, Alex had hers already overflowing onto the floor, and her door constantly open blasting whatever music she was moved by at that moment. I wasn't very social in high school, and I studied hard and read a lot. My friends weren't really music people, and I never lay on a floor sharing headphones with someone just basking in communal rock love.Like I said, it wasn't until college I realized there was more to the whole music thing. People were serious about their music. They were more than serious, they were rabid, livid, passionate. Some of them were even musicians, which was an entirely alien concept to me, asking me to play an instrument has always produced the same reaction as would asking my cat to don leiderhosen and make bratwurst. I was taken under many wings. People were all too willing to impart their musical wisdom upon me, except, there's a lot of schools of rock out there, and trying to be a student of all of them is really fucking exhausting. Then of course there's the holier than thou attitude of any music type attempting to enlighten a pupil. I had my indy rocker, with his junked out frankenstein guitar with an old nintendo controller imbedded in the base of the neck, who would play easy rock from twenty year old college students crooning about problems not unlike our own, voices and strings breaking with emotion and desperation and a need for beer money. There were my folkie girlfriends who dreaded each others hair and mended their quilted skirts on bunk beds while a super hot lesbian strummed an acoustic guitar and we all listened to soft spoken girl poets lullabyes about abortions and thwarted revolutions and poisoned rivers.There was the dark boy with the collection of creepy angry music that we would sit in his basement room and listen to with only one dim lamp blurring the shapes of the bookshelves and couches. These were songs about pain and anger and alienation, and after a while they filled the room with so much angst I wanted to laugh out loud at the thick bog i had to wade through just to find the door. As I went from room to room, and later from town to town, people passed in and out of my life and experiences came along and some of them brought their music like troubadours in a blaze of identity and tangibility so solid they would become inextricable from one another. Others brought music like gifts, quiet and sweet like little wrapped boxes that I could open then, and pack away and open again and again and be precious for different reasons every time. In time I would find bands that just made sense to me, depeche mode for one, the cure, the dresden dolls, bands that just seemed to be waiting in the velvet curtains for me to stop staring into the lights and catch me off guard and whisper things that made me trip or curtsy. But more than anything, music has become this beautiful woven tapestry, forever being woven and unwoven from the middle outward, and I reach the point of this whole diatribe now.What the hell is with the music nichery?!Why is it so important to be the first to "discover" a band and introduce others to it? Music is always best uncovered by the individual on his own time and terms. This is how the ties are formed between listener and listened.
This new practice of forcing the newest craziest weirdest band and thrusting it on people just because it's new and neat and weird is absolutely against the whole notion of music being art. Art is something you aren't looking for, but finds you, standing alone in an atrium under a skylight next to a palm tree, like my favorite sculpture in the whole wide world did. Music is the same.
I don't care if it's three year old inuit children who play world war two tank relics inside of a walk in freezer and manage to replicate the tokyo ska/klesmer scene, so it's unique, that doesn't mean it's forged any kind of musical/sexual/artistic/life altering with anyone!
Unless you can prove to me that a toddler screeching hebrew in an icy steel tomb while his bandmate rocks a helmet solo truly moves something inside of you, stop trying to tell me that it's worth listening to just because it's the nichest niche in nicheville.
I didn't even know I was in nicheville. I was just enjoying the bloody view.
With that tirade out of the way, I would like to take this time to encourage anyone who is, like me, music challenged, and maybe didn't get the magical musical education that seventh graders seem to be mastering these days via wonders like the internet and rockband and guitar hero, to keep falling in love with music the way you should fall in love ever, by happenstance, by accident, by keeping and open mind and saying, "
gee, what is that playing just now, in this perfect moment in your car, while we feel the sand crumble off our feet from watching a moonrise on the beach on a sickly sweet humid august night?"
and then having the grace to reply,
"oh...in a walk in freezer, really?" and taking the moment, the music and life distilled into that single perfect drop, and playing it all the drive home.
