You had to be there ...

[opprimo]

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Whenever I start getting down about life, I have a sort-of ace-in-the-hole to get my spirits back up.

When I was a teenager, I had this habit of recording music videos. I still have three boxes of video tapes in our attic back home. All marked with dates and channels. Absent-mindedly, I've kept one tape with me the whole time I've been moving around. It's simply marked, "Music Videos," no dates or no channels. It was recorded during the summer of 2000. I know this because I have a Natalie Merchant performance of "Life Is Sweet" from Conan O'Brien and the NBC logo has the Olympic rings beneath it. Clever.

The video starts with Lara Fabian's "I Will Love Again" and includes gems like Sting's "Desert Rose" [which, by the way, I still listen to everytime I drive home, through the high desert country of Northern Nevada] and a lot of Macy Gray, I forgot how big she really was back then, especially because everyone made fun of her voice.

Then, there's some live performances, talk shows mostly, and even Eurythmics when they were on their reunion Peace Tour, they performed acoustic versions of "Missionary Man," Annie Lennox's "Why" and "Here Comes the Rain Again." Then, there's a performance that just kind of makes me question every negative thing in life, believing only in the good, euphoric and ecstatic.

It's Moby's live performance of "Feeling So Real" at Pinkpop. The song itself is so fast and repititive that if you're not into electronica, it grates upon your soul a little bit. But it's targeted to festival goers and ravers hopped on all forms of drugs that it feels like a waltz. When I first watched it as it was recording, I even raised my hands like a born-again Christian at a revival.

I may have been born in a barn, but it wasn't yesterday.
I know half the people in the audience are drunk, high or both. And the video editing doesn't show that most of the people in the audience saw was probably just Moby jumping around on stage with a whole bunch of lasers and lights flashing about. And if you were in the back of the crowd, all you heard was a whole lot of noise and some light flashings, so it probably sucked. But the benefit for me is that it's put into a neat, little, visually uplifting package for me, like the Bible.

And that's what music is for me, it's like a religion. Strike that, it's not so much the religion itself as it is a Book of Psalms. There's a song for every joyous moment, every lamentation, every battle, every victory, every defeat and anything in between. "Feeling So Real" is a song of praise and a song of inspiration. It's only line is "I'm ... feeling so real," repeated over and over and over. What else can you say at a point of praise or inspiration, when you're locked into your humanity

Whatever works, right?