Day 2: I Don't Have the Music in Me
I do not understand music. I cannot argue, debate, or defend any aspect of music, including my own tastes. Music remains the only thing in this entire world that I feel uncomfortable discussing.
This is a problem for me, because according to my most recent CD purchases I have a weakness for women who can sing and play piano. Sometimes…even at the same time.
Oh, baby.
Now, I think we can all agree that women are a horrible vice. Frankly, no matter what your orientation is, those that make your tingly bits tingle are beings of great and terrible power, and it would make life infinitely easier if we could just sort of avoid them until we have become rich, famous, and tyrannical.
Alcohol and drugs make you do stupid shit, but that’s because they adjust your internal chemistry. Every single person reading this has done something stupid for the object of their lust completely sober, and in full possession of their faculties. You read a book you hated and said you liked. You bought a CD you did not want, from a musician you have never heard of, all so you’d have something to talk about. You jumped off something that needn’t be jumped off (almost certainly a guy). I cannot count the number of times I have gone out for a coffee with a girl, just to spend another fifteen minutes with her.
I detest coffee.
I have jumped off things.
But the one thing I have always avoided getting into, the only area I will always shy away from, is talking about music.
And what would, oh say, just for example, Alicia Keyes* want to talk about? Ah, that’d be music.
*It is my secret dream that a beautiful woman will sing “No One” to me on my birthday. Sometimes my friends are all there to see it. This is called a raging ego.
You see, my entirely fictional, never happen in a trillion years, “just how much time does this little fantasy eat up in your day,” problem.
It all comes down to the fact that I don’t understand music. I don’t get how to put it together, or why it works. My brain is simply not wired for it.
Due to this, I cannot speak intelligently about it. I feel lost, and out of my depth. It’s almost like there is a hidden font of musical knowledge and I’m afraid that asking for directions to said font will out me as ignorant. I don’t even like telling people about a new band I like for fear of having actually bought the wrong album, and their real best album was two releases ago.
The last time I announced my love for a band in a public setting was two or three weeks after I bought the Hold Steady’s “Boys and Girls in America,” during the summer of 2007. I figured they had a fulltime piano player, thus separating them from the herd, the lyrics were about being young, drunk, and aimless, which is how you know the lyrics are real, and that the singer was just nasally and off-beat enough to duck quietly under the mainstream radar.
Also, I had literally nine hundred eleventy thousand million bajillion beers. Literally.
I know that I like the Beatles, and I know it’s okay because everyone who, apparently, does understand music, says it’s okay. Those that don’t agree are just being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, which is really funny coming from me.
I know that I have to enjoy Lynard Skynard ironically, unless I’m from the South. And it had better be the Deep South.
When I was in high school, my favorite band was Blink-182. I probably spent more time talking about and listening to them more than any other five or six bands combined. Not counting the Beatles, since that was, you know, for a class. And I know that I’m supposed to roll my eyes whenever Blink-182 come up, then smile and shake my head, perhaps utter, “what was I thinking,” the same why I do when I think about the very first CD I bought was Tag Team’s “Whoomp! There It Is!*”
*In the title, doesn’t count toward my exclamation quota. Which has already been met.
Yet, I still like Blink-182. I can’t defend it, and some of my more understanding friends have given me a pass for nostalgia.
That’s bullshit. If you like something, no matter how dumb, you should be able to defend it, explain it, or do and say anything besides shrugging and offering, “it just hits my ear right.”
I’ve always felt guilty that there are bands out there I don’t understand. Everyone else likes them or hates them, and knows why, or why not these feelings should, NAY, must, be manifest.
Radiohead, for example.
I do not get Radiohead. Magazines dedicated to music extol their virtues. Some claim they will save music. I did not know it was endangered. Rock critics, professional rock critics, who have the ability to reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of readers, use up those precious paragraphs to communicate to the masses why they need to kneel at the altar of Thom Yorke.
The only reason I can even remotely appreciate them is because they wrote Creep, and when Cartman and Ned sing it for six seconds during the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” my shit absolutely gets cracked up.
Now, I don’t want to open this up to what bands are good, and why they are bad, and if understanding the difference makes me a better person.
I can understand how poetry works. Ditto for fiction, biography, books, comics, movies, and TV, I can appreciate the work and creativity that goes into something good. I can mourn a good idea utilized poorly. I grieve for the work put in by innocent, well-intentioned people for inherently shitty productions. I know how hard it is to build a building and design the architecture. I appreciate the lines in a sports car, or a classic automobile.
Music continues to elude me. Is it something you just get? Can I pick up a guitar, and learn the chords, or sit at a piano and learn all the notes, and will I then, at long last, be able to intelligently discuss music? Do I have to be able to create a thing, in order to understand it as a larger concept?
Or am I putting too much thought into what is, at its core, a truly primal concept?
Do I have to let go to get in?
I’m fairly certain that I cannot, repeat, CANNOT be a respectable 45 year-old whose 5-disc changer is filled exclusively with the Dropkick Murphys and the Clash.
Matt
EDIT: This was written after reading Warren Ellis for hours, which should account for a lot of the snark, as well as the casual dismissal of humanity, that I really don't mean, and deep down, I do believe in the nobility of humanity.