I don't desperately love this song, but I am starswept by the lyrics.
I found gold in the wreckage Put it on a necklace Keepin’ it cause I-I-I, I know that it’s mine I wear it like a message So I don’t forget it Keepin’ it cause I-I-I, I know that it’s mine
I know that it’s mine no matter what I do I know that it’s mine whether I win or lose And even though my heart needs to take its time I know that it’s mi-i-ine, I know that it’s mine.
As the year closes, I think everyone tries to find things to sum it up. What did you accomplish? Where did you go from where you were before? Did you shift out, pull up, fall in, explode forward? Backward? At all?
Every necklace I wear means something.
And this song encapsulates my year more profoundly than anything I could say.
U2, so says every hipster music blog ever, has fallen wayyyyy out of vogue. I've mentioned that longlasting rock bands have a few paths they can take to their second or third decade -- and as far as I'm concerned, U2 picked a really annoying, bland one. And don't get anyone who gives a shit about music started on their ridiculous Apple-marketing partnership. What the fuck, honestly? Start with those dumb iPod ads (I'M AT A PLACE CALLED VEEERRTIGOOO -- remember?? remember?? the black cutout shadow of Bono dancing?? GORGEOUS), then force-download an entire garbage album onto everyone's iPhones; GREAT JOB, GUYS. Dad-style marketing if there ever was. These guys have aged ridiculously.
BUT.
Did you know they did some really cool shit in the early 90s?
BECAUSE I DIDN'T. Not till this weekend.
I mean okay: 1991's Achtung Baby is absolutely solid (and have you heard that cover album released for the 20th anniversary? Garbage's take on Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses will BLOW YOUR DAMN MIND). But I'm a casual fan -- years ago, when I was downloading the discographies of every band I mildly enjoyed, I snagged theirs. Did I listen to it? No. I have a fuckton of Rolling Stones to get through, too. But Saturday, it was me and Zooropa, baby.
I used to write fiction a fair bit when I was younger -- I don't share my work, really, but I love writing. In the haze of personal goals I made last year, writing more kept coming to mind. So, 2015 has been the year I got back into writing. Of course, I like to make life exponentially more difficult than it has to be -- so heaven forbid I just, you know, write a story like a sane human being. Instead, I've started a series of vignettes -- one per month of the year 1993 -- with each based on a song released that year.
Consequently, I have all these albums from '93 floating around on my iPod. When the urge to write strikes, I'll give another one a go. Saturday, I was feeling it -- and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy wasn't cutting it (great album, don't get me wrong, but I wanted something weirder). So: Zooropa. With a bit of a resigned eye roll.
And wouldn't you know it -- the album is fucking good. Despite claims to the contrary from the band (but you know, I'm clearly not putting too much stock in U2's opinions, here. DAD MARKETERS.).
The title track sets up this fantastic soundscape, to the point where it's almost a landscape -- visual, lush, neon and dark. I love when albums start off like this -- setting a defined mood for what's to come, even if it shifts in tone. The first track is like the emotional key of the album: you may slide away from it, but you're aching to get back, and you'll pull the content with you.
...so much is lost from the listening experience when we only listen to singles.
Anyway, I didn't like the title of the second track ('Babyface', really? ugh) and I was feeling 'Zooropa' for my January vignette, so despite it being catchy, I didn't listen closely -- moved to the excellent, droning 'Numb'; the fantastically '90s 'Lemon'; the heartrendingly melodic 'Stay'; and so on. I was excited, man; who knew U2 could pull something like this off?! Zooropa is weird, disjointed, and kind of brilliant.
But at 1am, writing away to 'Lemon' (come on: that image of a girl in a yellow dress on a grey day begs to be vignettified), I restarted the album and forgot to be irritated at 'Babyface's title and...fuck.
'Babyface' is a lot more than mildly catchy.
Just take a second, here, to appreciate this lyric:
Slow down, child / Let me untie your lace
Get out. Get out. Not okay. God.
It's also about the lullaby sounds & melody, and the plays at created narrative in the lyrics ("checking out every frame / I've got slow motion on my side") -- there's something deeply special happening in this song.
'Zooropa' is more my ultimate style. 'Stay' is more beautiful. 'Lemon' is probably smarter.
But 'Babyface' is a flash of magic.
I was too young in the early 90s to really experience it. The music that sprang up is something I'm honestly just now starting to appreciate in its full glory. Misplaced nostalgia: like, I wasn't listening to alt-rock or grunge when I was 7, but I get all ~music used to be~~~ about it. Particularly when it comes to all the creepy concept shit groups that had been around awhile were doing -- Zooropa, yes, and Bowie's 1. Outside (one of my all-time favourite albums), etc. There was a certain vibe to the early 90s that -- even though I don't actually remember it -- I find quite profoundly captured when you listen to those experimental cult classics.
U2 has undoubtedly lost some of their cachet (sometimes bands need to gracefully bow out). But there are treasures in their back catalogue, and Zooropa is one of them.
In elementary school, best friends are convenient. You sit beside someone who likes the same cartoon as you -- instant camaraderie. You're friends for life, man, this is it. You have sleepovers and talk till eleven, trade Pogs and fuzzy stickers, sometimes even let each other play as Barbie instead of Ken. Everything is perfect.
And then everything is drama.
You sat with someone else at lunch and didn't even look at me. I brought you back something from a family trip so you let me sit beside you during computer time. I didn't feel comfortable wearing a tank top and you rolled your eyes and found the cooler girls who wear makeup. You liked the Spice Girls and I thought you were too mainstream. The friendship falls apart -- it was nothing to begin with.
High school ain't much better. If you're not a cool kid or a nerd or an athlete, you get grouped with the outcasts, the people who don't fit in a social circle. Now: I made two of my very best friends in high school -- but that was not the norm. I drifted away from most of these people; we didn't have much in common, in the end.
You're supposed to make your best friends in college, in university.
But I don't think I knew what friendship was in university.
You could be anything out there Butterflies flying in the air Oh no / it came Higher than an airplane
I used to be lonely.
It wasn't that I had no social contact ---- I don't know that I can describe it, though I know most of us have felt it: that crushing certainty that no one really gives a shit. Yeah, our family's on our side, but no one's choosing to stand beside us. Not invited to parties or deciding not to go to parties -- either way, I felt separate, and sad. None of my friends ever really asked me how I was -- or if they did, I assumed they didn't really care. I was a receptacle: what's wrong? do you need to vent? tell me everything. And, for the most part, they did.
I have always kept significant aspects of myself private -- it's a personality quirk, so I shouldn't fault my old friends for indulging it. But I thought, vainly, that they might want to know; that they might...but they never did. They never asked.
Friendship, though, has so little to do with what you say.
It took me, as I'm sure it takes most people, until my mid-twenties to understand what friendship could be -- that it isn't about mutual complaining or gossip; bribery; pictures plastered all over social media; constant contact. It's not even endless conversations or similar goals or shared interests. Friendship is fucking sacred, and it is rare, and when it's real, it is worth clinging to with every shred of you.
Friendship is nebulous as fuck, and much of it is inarticulable -- like the feelings you get being with the people who truly fucking get you, who've stood beside you through the wars and who are not afraid, will not stand down. But it's also being inspired, daily. It's feeling safe in conversation, in silence, in shared space. It's waking up with a roaring hangover and knowing no one will judge you for the bullshit you pulled the night before. It's genuine laughter seguing to genuine anger and back again. It makes you fucking fearless.
And it doesn't dissipate with distance.
I started this post a few weeks ago, upon returning from a weekend in Toronto. Cause the problem, you see, with building an adult life in your home city is that most of your friends...don't. So: flung across the continent are people who have big chunks of my soul. They keep 'em safe, but I know I'm not complete unless all those parts are back together. Ah, friendship.
Two of my soulmates are in Toronto (which is not great, but better than, say, Vancouver. Or Whitehorse. Or Edinburgh. Or Nashua or San Diego or....). I visit when I can, which is less often than I'd like. When I got home from this particular trip, I instantly opened Blogger to start writing about how deeply and intensely I felt while I was there, while I was with them -- how profoundly they sparkle, how they fill gaps in my heart, how I would not be complete without either of them, without any of the absolute goddamn diamonds I am lucky enough to call friends.
And then this post sat for about three weeks because it is completely fucking inarticulable.
So I give up.
Are you looking for harmony? There is harmony in everything.
I have more incredible, more brilliant, more vibrant, more intense and kinetic and inspirational and powerful friends than I could have hoped for when I sat at home biting my lip, wondering if I should go to that party (though admittedly -- some of them were at those parties. It takes time.).
And I blared this song as the plane took off Sunday night, staring down at Toronto blinking yellow and white, and it encapsulated everything I could say -- about my Toronto princesses; about any of my diamonds.
It starts as a bright song, a little cheesy, a little ridiculous. The verses are singsong joy, pulsing cheerfully. La la la.
But the choruses are riven. Hands in the air -- from bliss, from fear, from surrender, from sheer fortitude of emotion.
The first goes outside at 1am on a clear November night, crackling forest on all sides, headphones blaring Past Lives firmly clamped over her ears, breathes in the sky and the potential. Everything is starlit, literally and figuratively: the world is in place, is kinetic, is everything she was worried it couldn't be again. And as she throws her arms up and raises her eyes, a single shooting star flashes across the sky.
The SECOND person is well fucking aware that literally no one is going to believe this shooting star story, but the arm-throwing wasn't about that anyway ----- it was part of a chaotic, frenetic dance that no one can see because no one is supposed to see it; a dance inspired by a fuckton of history and even more possibility ------ but, excited by this cliche of a fucking moment, the dance gets wilder and she rolls her friggin ankle over and trips and slices open her toe on a stick.
Guys there are two kinds of people in the world and I am both of them. Sometimes in the space of one song.
yeah yeah my toe's fine DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT sigh. Poise and grace just ain't my thing.
Here's something they don't tell you when you're studying to be an English teacher: Teaching media you personally love is fucking terrifying.
Okay picture it: you're standing in front of a bunch of generally apathetic teenagers, most of whom would rather be sleeping or on Snapchat. You hold, in your hands and your heart, something that definitively shaped you. They stare back at you blankly. Taking a deep breath, you press play or send or hand it out. The words are theirs, now. They're confused, they're bored, they're waiting for recess.
And now, vibrating with context and history and hope, you have to direct the discussion.
As a person, I am deeply defined by the media I love -- to the point where if you want to get to know me, I'd rather give you a song or a book than explain who I am. So as a teacher, I raaaarely bring stuff that has profoundly affected me into the classroom (unless I have a class that I know won't completely rip it apart and leave me raw and crying). There are, however, exceptions --- and Leonard Cohen is one of them.
Leonard Cohen has defined my literary and musical souls for as long as I can remember. Before Bowie, there was a low grumbling voice that barely hit any notes, expelling (because he never speaks) poetry. My father, a few years younger than Cohen, idolized him and grew up in his footsteps -- just a few neighbourhoods away from Westmount, where Cohen embodied (and, I'd argue, in many ways still embodies) the spirit of artistic Montreal. I was raised on Cohen. I knew the lyrics to Everybody Knows before I understand what any of it meant, would write down lines about taking Manhattan and then taking Berlin in my elementary school notebooks.
This is a fairly dangerous way to raise a little girl.
As she gets older, the lyrics will start to pierce and twist inside her. She'll realize that words hold volatile power; that they are, somehow, enough. She will become strange, and separate. And when she is old enough to start sincerely understanding what's behind formative explosions like Take This Waltz --- it will devastate her.
Take This Waltz shifts paradigms.
A translation of a Federico Garcia Lorca surrealist poem, and a professed thank you note to Lorca from Cohen -- this song is too much to process, the first few (many) times you hear it. Musically, I am sure it's the reason I now love 3/4 (waltz) time; lyrically, I'm sure it's from where much of my literary aesthetic derives. I can't even decide on one lyric to post; all of them shatter me ---- but I guess for the interest of enticement:
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook With the photographs there and the moss And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty My cheap violin and my cross
I don't know that my father ever particularly loved this song -- but I vividly remember when I started loving it. It was one of the first instances I was aware that the music was mine, as opposed to chosen by my parents ------ I wasn't allowed to use the CD player until I got to high school (my dad was Very Into Sound Equipment) -- and I would always ask him to play me this song. It was my Leonard Cohen, it was viciously gorgeous, and it has never disappointed me.
My English classes are admittedly chaotic, but there are a few things I know with certainty -- and one is that, before you graduate high school in Montreal, you must have experienced Leonard Cohen. There are no two ways about this. His words are essential.
So every year I teach grade 11, I put on emotional armour, hope the kids won't laugh -- and press play. Sometimes they can't handle it, sometimes they just don't care -- but there's always at least one student I'm teaching for, one adolescent who reminds me of my little goth girl self, years ago; another person willing to open up their figurative veins and let in Cohen's quietly violent brilliance.
Almost exactly ten years ago, Norton anthologies in hand, I started my first degree ----- and I moved out.*
We take it for granted nowadays, but remember? Holding the key in your hand, eyes lighting up as you walked the perimeter, sitting in the middle of an empty room and really realizing: this is your space. You go, princess: you watch TV till 4am. You negotiate the noise level with your neighbours. You organize those cereal boxes. You answer to no one.
19 and blazing: it was 2005 and I was ready to fucking dance.
So of course I went home every weekend.
AHEM AHEM a few items of backstory:
1. My family (nuclear, extended, all of it) is unequivocally perfect.
2. My childhood home, in Rigaud, is literal forested paradise. If you have visited you know what I mean.
3. In August '05, my parents had just rescued a dog we eventually named Freyja, and I really liked her. I also practiced/taught karate on Saturday mornings in the next town over from Rigaud -- so it made sense to be there on weekends,
but 4. When I moved out, I took the family PC with me.
WAIT GUYS, CAN WE DO AN EARLY-2000s PAUSE AND REMEMBER WHEN THERE WERE FAMILY COMPUTERS?! oh my god
anyway I took it with me ~~for school.
so 5. My dad got a MiniMac.
6. External hard drives weren't compatible with both PCs and Macs (are they now? who knows). There was no highspeed, either: we're talking dial. up.
7. When I went home on Friday nights, I stayed up way later than I am decade-later capable ---- but
8. there was literally. one. song. to listen to on the shiny new family MiniMac.
And it was Hollins Steele's Tongue Tied.
And I listened to that song over. and over. and over.
I get bored quickly.
You wouldn't necessarily know it to look at me: I've been at the same job for six years (but the classes change every fall); I've lived in the same city for ten (but the city changes every day). But when things stay the same too long, I get restless; frustrated. I'll change the seating arrangement in my classroom; cancel all my plans and go wandering around the city; book a flight and spend ten days alone. I'm an introvert -- my shifts often happen internally, but they're always happening.
And lemme tell you: listening to the same song for more than a week is rarely something of which I'm capable.
So what was it about this song? I mean realistically speaking I could have transferred files or downloaded something else. But I didn't. I listened to this endlessly. And I can say oh it was the lyrics or oh it was the electropop (formative, to be sure), but none of that really captures it, does it? We listen to the songs we respond to in a moment. And oh my god: my fall of 2005 is absolutely, beyond doubt, contained in Tongue Tied.
Sometimes songs inextricably wind themselves around a particular feeling I had in the moment I loved them. Not happy, or sad; not memories, or at least not exclusively -- something more experiential, less articulable, something of its own particular quality. When I listen to the old songs, I am back there. It's as if I shift into the experiential state of the person I used to be -- like my cells refigure themselves to her, and I am living through her eyes.
For a moment.
While I listen.
I found an old mix from fall 2005 the other day; put it on in my car; blared Tongue Tied when it came on. Still a Montreal resident -- but driving, out of school, a young 'professional,' older than I ever pictured myself at that age. I am nothing like what I imagined I'd be. But when this song plays, I am every version of the self I used to be.
I've been out of Rigaud for ten years now. I'm on my 6th roommate; a gem, incidentally (there were roomie-overlaps...I'm really not that horrible to live with, I promise). There have been some vibrant, explosive nights -- some of which I'm sure will be described in later entries -- and some lonely, broken ones.
They are all -- in their emotion, their history, their glory and misery -- contained in songs to come.
The video I posted is live; different from the song I know: which is, really, in keeping with all these changes. But if you'd like the exact version I listened to, ad infinitum, ten years ago: here. It's worth it.
*With endless thanks to my parents for supporting my English Lit education. <3
Something that profoundly bothers me, as a student/a teacher/a person, is this horribly misguided idea that there's ONE set interpretation.
"Oh sorry -- your emotional response to something artistic is wrong. You didn't fit your answer into one of the multiple choice options. Your approach isn't in vogue with the critical framework we're using right now. Your thesis doesn't quite align with my research, and I'm a Academic, so obviously I am more correct, kiddo, don't even try."
Creations and interpretations are graded for one reason and one reason alone: we wrongly assume they should be. We take subjectivity and violently smear attempts at objectivity all the fuck over it. We force students into these sad, frustrated boxes and tell them there is one meaning to this poem, and if you get it wrong, you get a zero.
You get a zero.
Okay hold the fuck up for a second.
In what universe ---- in what UNIVERSE ------ would a poet -- someone who is writing in a necessarily figurative style -- assume that there was ONE INTERPRETATION of their piece?!
It INFURIATES me.
It is the absolute fucking opposite of art's intention.
Every time a literature teacher tells a student there is one correct meaning, they are murdering -- yes, murdering: repeatedly, ignorantly -- the potential inherent in art.
Probably the best teacher I've ever had was at McGill. In a notably conservative university, in a very unchallenging faculty, this man refused to let his students sit by passively. He refused to let us, future or current teachers, continue to believe that we should tell our students what poems mean. Among oh so much else, he gave us concrete strategies, backed up by excellent research, for teaching poetry --- and absolutely none of it had the teacher at the front spouting bullshit about what they learned X years ago in their degree and haven't thought about since.
As a student, as a teacher, as a person: I was overwhelmed.
I'd never believed what I'd always been told: I never believed there was one side to an interpretation. Yes: essays need justification. Yes: some interpretations are way the hell off in left field. But no: there is not one way to explain an artpiece. Not when we bring so damn much of ourselves to the encounter.
Who, once they are out of school, writes essays about books? Or poems? Or songs?
But we sure as hell read them; listen to them. Feel them.
Why don't we talk about that?
I briefly used this song as an example, today, of how the author's intent is ultimately irrelevant.
"Okay so we all know that Taylor wrote this song about Harry Styles ---"
"Wait what miss? Oh my god that makes so much sense oh my god"
"...okay so most of us know that Taylor wrote this song about Harry Styles. But -- when we listen to the song, do we think exclusively of Taylor and Harry?"
Bunch of shaking heads.
We think of ourselves.
We relate to songs because they matter to us. Lyrically, sometimes; musically, others. There is context. There is connection. There is personal interpretation.
For all my frustration with Taylor Swift as an icon, I love 1989 -- and Style, when I hear it, splits in multiple directions.
I am walking to work, listening to this album for the first time; trying to distract myself from dark thoughts; somehow this pulls me out.
I am in a cab with one of my best friends and two of hers; midnight in Toronto; on our way; pretending we don't know the words until we realize we all know the words and scream them out onto the street.
I am frantically reading Fables, voraciously breathing it in.
I am exploding, with all of me, into roughly-cut shards.
All of that feeds into my interpretation.
This song is not about Taylor and Harry.
Every now and then, when I have a class I think can handle it, I teach poetry the way that professor taught us.
Today, I tried, and it ended powerfully ----- but it was hard.
They eyed me in disbelief; they thought I was lying. One student admitted he'd received 20% on a poetry exam the previous year because the teacher had wanted a specific analysis. That same student cut off another in the middle of her interpretation: "Where did you see any mention of sexuality?"
I intervened: There wasn't any specific mention of it. Doesn't mean it wasn't there.
He replied -- not confrontationally and blushing when he realized what he'd said -- "I was taught better."
I answered, more coolly than you'd imagine, "You were taught differently."
I've been replaying that class in my head all day. Wondering if it's worth it, to pull teeth, to encourage this kind of thought, especially given their next teacher may tell them the opposite.
But I won't be a hypocrite. And I won't compromise on this.
So it's mid-October, which means it's about that time to dance around my bedroom like a freaking maniac to Ladyhawke's self-titled album!!!!
I recently read Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy -- and liked very little of it. He had a hardon for classical music, to the exclusion of all else -- particularly lyrical music. Lyrics, god, that's just cheap poetry set to cheap tunes; how plebeian.
Jourdain: you suck. Case in point: the chorus to Ladyhawke's "Better Than Sunday."
I can't walk the line / I can't see the time I'm falling out of view I'm sinking into you I'm leaving Monday / it's better than Sunday I'm feeling younger / it's better than wiser
I mean come on. Come ON! Set to a pulsing, desperate beat; sung passionately; there is NOTHING ELSE like music and lyrics twining, inexorably, together. Sometimes one or the other sucks, sometimes they're both great but somehow don't mesh ---- but the great, the truly miraculous, moment in music is when they fucking COALESCE and you are taken.
I'm leaving Monday / it's better than Sunday
The amount of poetry in seven simple, simple words.
The amount of directions anyone could go with just this, let alone the rest of the chorus -----
It's fucking breathtaking.
Well apparently I'm not done talking about Third Eye Blind so let's keep at it!
Third Eye Blind, right?! Are they still together?! Who knew!!!!
I teach high school. I took a day off work to go to the show, and when I got back, my students were all curious about where I'd been. I like to share my media interests with....well, everyone, including the teenagers who populate my work day (well, those interests that are adolescent-appropriate, anyway). I particularly like going to shows and then reporting inappropriate behaviour back to them: "Guys, when you're at a music concert, DON'T TALK DURING THE ENTIRE SET, OKAY, it's annoying." I doubt it will sink in, but I've glared at enough shitty concert-goers to do my best at trying.
Anyway, my grade 9s asked what show I'd gone to see. I told them. Blank stares, except for one girl at the back whose eyes exploded in brightness: "Are you serious?! Third Eye Blind?!"
My sarcasm metre started dinging, but the reaction was too genuine to be faked. When she started going on about how jealous she was, I deferred, and we briefly fangirled. Admittedly: I was surprised. It's rare that I'll mention an old favourite and have students actually know who it is -- most of the music I listened to as a teenager has fallen far out of vogue.
But there's something about Third Eye Blind.
On the traffic-laden drive to the show, Linds and I listened to all five of their albums in order. Have you ever done that -- listened to an entire discography chronologically in one sitting? I hadn't; it was pretty eye-opening. You start picking up on patterns you likely wouldn't otherwise -- thematic, of course, but also musical, lyrical, and ineffable. Those kinds of patterns that you know are there but can't quite articulate -- either because you don't have the vocabulary, or because it's purely magic.
Third Eye Blind, as by-the-book catchy as their bigger hits are, has some magic.
It's hard to explain why you love a specific song. Context, of course, is everything: the memories and connotations attached to songs affect our experience of them. But sometimes we come across a good album -- like something you can say is just kind of objectively on point.
Third Eye Blind's an interesting case. I'd say their first album -- 1997's self-titled intensity -- was pretty objectively fantastic. Their second (1999's Blue) is by far my favourite. But apparently their fifth and most recent album, Dopamine, is their last. And if that's true, it's brilliant.
Yeah, okay, this is influenced by my having listened to the albums all in a row. But this is a fucking mature effort. Rock bands rarely grow up. They disband, or stop caring, or keep putting out unlistenable shit. But bands that actually grow up and create something that harks back to their earlier work, while taking in the current trends of their genre and conceptually evolving? Rare. Rare, guys. Third Eye Blind has done it. And the title track of Dopamine proves this beautifully.
Third Eye Blind does two things phenomenally well: songs about love and songs about intoxication. This is shit you think you leave behind when you grow up and get into a ~comfortable rut~. Netflix and chill being the meme of the moment, I mean come the fuck on: the internet, even, is growing up. The fears of the early 20s, realized: the most intoxicated most adults get is an extra glass of wine on a Saturday night; love has been relegated to a cheerful, relaxed kiss in front of the TV.
For the record: I appreciate not being hungover on weekdays like I was when I was 22, and the chaos of infatuation is certainly less romantic than the songs say. But then you get lyrics like this, in a song about taking hard drugs: "How do I get back there / to the place where I fell asleep inside you?"
'Semi-Charmed Life' was a masterpiece of its time.
But you can't talk about breathing the sky through your nose on meth forever.
So Dopamine drops, and 'Dopamine' starts with an intro more epic than you can imagine: sweeping synths and guitars -- oh you've definitely been paying attention to the past few years of electropop, guys -- gorgeous melody -- get out of my goddamn face.
But listen to those lyrics. Those are grownup lyrics and this is a grownup, natural drug -- but there's no Netflix and chill to be found, here. Love is still dark, even when you're a grownup; drugs are still potent, even if they're from your own brain.
All animal and engine / but I always fake the part
My side of the bed / I want to push you off the ledge
Cause I can't get you to feel it / till you're out there on the edge
Particularly if you're a 90s kid: please oh please, sit for an hour and listen to this album all the way through. Preferably a few times. It's gonna hurt -- perhaps more quietly than you're used to, but with oh so much intensity.
Cause this just an extra-glass-of-wine theory --- but I think they rewrote the songs from their first album as adults.
The show was seated. Linds and I were up on the balcony, dancing and hands in the air and watching everyone around us sit and sip their beer. As the second song finished, Linds turned to me and said, "Downstairs?"
Of course.
As we walked down red carpet stairs, to a red carpet aisle, past people standing gingerly in front of their seats, Third Eye Blind was blasting that epic intro to 'Dopamine' with all of themselves.
Imagine: one of your favourites dancing her way down the aisle in front of you, your hands in the air, lights flashing from the stage, that intro playing as you slide into the front row.
A few years ago, between songs, the lead singer of a band might make a snarky comment about everyone watching through a lens -- that is, on their phones. If you’ll allow me to paraphrase: “We’re up here, guys -- and if you’re too busy checking that you’ve got a good angle, you won’t get a single real thing out of this performance.”
That kind of comment has died down, against the waves of social media; the financial importance of an Instagram hashtag; the desperation to be relevant. Purveyors of culture can’t afford to deny progress anymore: whatever you think about it, watching through a lens is how most people consume media in 2015.
But there’s this new trend of the lead singer pausing. Looking up. Saying, almost pleadingly: “This night could be magic -- but we’re all so disconnected, don’t you think? We’re all afraid of what people are going to think, afraid of what happens if we let loose, afraid that if we don’t capture it online it didn’t happen in real life. Tonight, we’re going to change that, okay? I want you to turn to the person next to you and introduce yourself. Say hi. We’re all here together, and maybe if we get to know each other a little better, we won’t be so scared, and we can just enjoy the night and really let go.”
Paraphrased: “FOR ONE NIGHT, PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE TWO DAMN THINGS. There are real people next to you. And music is meant to be felt, not passively absorbed. PLEASE BE ACTIVE IN THIS."
This isn’t, like, a NEW~ comment -- but I’m starting to hear it at almost every show, and that’s what’s weird. This cry for genuine interaction, genuine enjoyment, genuine anything ----- it’s missing from live music these days -- or so you’d be led to think.
On Monday night, I fulfilled an old, old music dream: I saw Third Eye Blind live. Drove five hours into New England with one of my best, had a really killer Manhattan at The Tunnel Bar in Northampton, and danced like a fucking lunatic for two hours straight. TWO HOURS, man; two consistently fantastic hours. They killed it. But partway through their set, Stephan Jenkins paused. Looked up. Said, almost pleadingly: “ This night could be magic…” And I stopped myself from rolling my eyes, because you know what? Fair enough; they’ve earned it. I mean, these guys have been around since the 90s, right -- music was a qualitatively different experience, then.
Music was a qualitatively different experience, then.
Hm.
Standing there -- one of my teenage-favourite bands in front of me -- calling for people to connect to each other, to the music -- I got a little nostalgic. Felt a little intense. A bit too much.
And I’ve been realizing, over the past several years, that I don’t listen to music the way I used to. I mean, literally -- you don’t need to tape songs off the radio or buy CDs anymore; there’s an immediacy there didn’t used to be. In some ways, awesome -- music as a hobby is the easiest. You can download terabytes of any genre and click through songs without blinking, without stopping. It’s all at your fingertips, whenever you want it.
But what do we lose, with that immediacy?
I think we lose a lot, actually.
So I’m inspired, Third Eye Blind (and everyone else who said essentially the same thing in the past year): I’m going to start connecting -- perhaps with people, but definitely with music. I’ve participated in a music blog before, but this project is going to be a bit different. No structure. I’ll write what I want, when I want. Sometimes it’ll be about a song that’s blowing my mind; sometimes an artist I’m obsessed with; sometimes blabbing about cursorily related shit like whether Miley Cyrus is awesome or the worst (for the record: I think she’s pretty awesome, or at least getting there).
No bullshit.
If I like something, I’ll say it. If I don’t, I probably won’t write about it. I’m not down with reviews, either -- I’ll likely write more personal essays than you-should-listen-to-this-becauses. I want this to be a genuine reflection of my relationship with music, which is why I also have... No readership goals.
If you’re still reading, and you want to keep doing so, amazing. I would love to talk to anyone about music, anytime -- and I’ll probably post download links for the songs -- or at least playable audio. But this is for me -- a record, a safeplace, where I can write about all the musical feels & thoughts I don’t say out loud for fear of boring the shit out of everyone around me.
Only passion.
If I’m not feeling anything, for whatever reason, I won’t keep to a schedule of posting. Only when I genuinely feel there’s something worth writing will I actually do it.
The shape of this will change as I go. For now: a first song, with minor comment --- Wounded by Third Eye Blind. This song was everything to me 14 years ago -- and Monday night, blaring into my ecstatic 29-year-old ears, it was everything again.
May music never be so immediate it loses its diamond quality: may it always hit like a fucking exploding wave.
