shut up and play
I'm feeling bad right now, really trapped by my present life and not sure if there's a way out--or if there is, if I'd even be able to take it. Things are pretty adult around here these days--job, husband, caring for aging parents, being responsible and a good daughter--and I don't know if these things are gonna let up anytime soon. It makes me want to get on a bus and leave completely, just ditch it all and start over somewhere new. I don't believe I actually have the strength to do something like that; I just daydream about it when I'm feeling rotten.
I feel so angry, and I grope for angry music to help me feel and articulate things. I found myself listening to My Chemical Romance tonight in just this mood.
It was strange. So often, I encounter their music as a member of bandom: I'm looking for little clues and gestures that help in drawing characters or directing plot; I'm looking for intuitive connections between the music and stories I'm writing or envisioning, or noticing the resonances in stories I've read. Bandom is another whole world of characters, events, feelings, and relationships that is added to my encounter with the music. Mostly, I love that. That's why I participate in it. I love what bandom does--I mean, you know, some of it is crack and id-fic and fluff, but other parts are weighty and profoundly worthwhile (and some spans both category a and b).
But bandom is also an overlay that stands in between me and the music. First, it's a huge, multi-faceted world that is imagined beyond the music itself. Second (and importantly), that world is fictional. I am really careful in how I think of characters and stories vs. the Real Them, even as I comb through songs and interviews to find bits of dangerous, misleading, delicious verisimilitude to add to what I write.* I think most of us are like this--clear in our minds about what game we're playing, even as we walk this fine, weird line between truth and fiction.
Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, I feel like the whole enterprise puts me in a conflictual relationship with them, the band members--that's my experience of it, anyway. (Obviously, I have no actual experience of the Real Them except that once I went to an MCR show and I saw them on stage.) Every time I write, though, I have Ray Toro as my mental conversation partner, saying "Stop writing stories about us having sex with each other!"--from a quote on Wikipedia (page now taken down, no longer even in the cache, sorry).
As half of me is writing, the other half is apologizing, pleading: "I'm sorry, Ray. I'm so sorry. I know this must seem weird, it must seem like the most questionable activity in the ENTIRE WORLD. But [insert every other argument for why band-fic has a right to exist in this world]." And so on. And I keep writing, and reading, and participating in bandom the way I do because I believe it is legit and does have a right to exist.
But there's still that overlay--the world, the fiction, the feeling of conflict. Tonight, when I was listening to I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, I could feel all those things there, filtering my experience of the music. And I wondered, did I make a good trade? To exchange the unadulterated experience of their music for the world of bandom and the meta-experience it adds to loving a band?
Tonight, I wanted the Real Them, even if that was only what I can hear in the songs on an album--or, less directly, in what they say publicly about their music. I wanted to hear them say, "I want you to save your own life,"** and I was listening hard to the music to find it. As I'm not a teenager, or a 13 year old British "emo-cult" girl, I doubt they actually care what I do or don't do with my life. Still, I wanted to hear them say it. To me. I wanted to hear them say, "It’s OK to be messed up. There’s other people just like you. And if we stick together we’ll get through this."*** I wanted someone to say it to me and for it to be true somehow. I wanted the prospect of sticking together with someone to get through all this, even if it was just these band-guys in makeup whom I don't actually know.
I had to listen so hard. I had to spend so much time thinking about what's true and what isn't. Are our stories true? Is what they say in their songs true? Who's sticking with who here, anyway? Do they stick with us? We who have adopted them as vessels for things we can't say or feel any other way? We who are their most committed fans, who also write the crazy stuff, for our own crazy reasons, that makes them think we're crazy?
In the meantime, I kept listening. It was harder, more complicated, to listen to them than to other artists with whom I don't have a well-developed fannish relationship. Bullets and Black Parade didn't whisper directly into my ear tonight the way that Eminem, 2Pac, or Rage Against the Machine do, artists who exist for me only as the voice and the sound on the audio track. I had to dig to find that simplicity again, to sift through all the things I've just written about--and frankly, I could have wished for the experience to be easier than that.
Does that mean I should give up bandom? Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn't, I don't know--but I do know that I won't. It's a wicked game we play, but I'm already too far in. I'm not going to abandon the stories I'm writing. I find too much truth in them now to do that. I just hope that one day someone will read one and it will whisper something important directly in their ear, the way so many important bandom stories have done for me.
*Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven't posted any of it. You'll just have to trust me for now--that I do write fiction, with the intent of sharing it someday.
**cf. Frank Iero in 969 interview, 1:40 to end
***cf. Gerard Way in "We're Here to Fight Evil"
I feel so angry, and I grope for angry music to help me feel and articulate things. I found myself listening to My Chemical Romance tonight in just this mood.
It was strange. So often, I encounter their music as a member of bandom: I'm looking for little clues and gestures that help in drawing characters or directing plot; I'm looking for intuitive connections between the music and stories I'm writing or envisioning, or noticing the resonances in stories I've read. Bandom is another whole world of characters, events, feelings, and relationships that is added to my encounter with the music. Mostly, I love that. That's why I participate in it. I love what bandom does--I mean, you know, some of it is crack and id-fic and fluff, but other parts are weighty and profoundly worthwhile (and some spans both category a and b).
But bandom is also an overlay that stands in between me and the music. First, it's a huge, multi-faceted world that is imagined beyond the music itself. Second (and importantly), that world is fictional. I am really careful in how I think of characters and stories vs. the Real Them, even as I comb through songs and interviews to find bits of dangerous, misleading, delicious verisimilitude to add to what I write.* I think most of us are like this--clear in our minds about what game we're playing, even as we walk this fine, weird line between truth and fiction.
Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, I feel like the whole enterprise puts me in a conflictual relationship with them, the band members--that's my experience of it, anyway. (Obviously, I have no actual experience of the Real Them except that once I went to an MCR show and I saw them on stage.) Every time I write, though, I have Ray Toro as my mental conversation partner, saying "Stop writing stories about us having sex with each other!"--from a quote on Wikipedia (page now taken down, no longer even in the cache, sorry).
As half of me is writing, the other half is apologizing, pleading: "I'm sorry, Ray. I'm so sorry. I know this must seem weird, it must seem like the most questionable activity in the ENTIRE WORLD. But [insert every other argument for why band-fic has a right to exist in this world]." And so on. And I keep writing, and reading, and participating in bandom the way I do because I believe it is legit and does have a right to exist.
But there's still that overlay--the world, the fiction, the feeling of conflict. Tonight, when I was listening to I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, I could feel all those things there, filtering my experience of the music. And I wondered, did I make a good trade? To exchange the unadulterated experience of their music for the world of bandom and the meta-experience it adds to loving a band?
Tonight, I wanted the Real Them, even if that was only what I can hear in the songs on an album--or, less directly, in what they say publicly about their music. I wanted to hear them say, "I want you to save your own life,"** and I was listening hard to the music to find it. As I'm not a teenager, or a 13 year old British "emo-cult" girl, I doubt they actually care what I do or don't do with my life. Still, I wanted to hear them say it. To me. I wanted to hear them say, "It’s OK to be messed up. There’s other people just like you. And if we stick together we’ll get through this."*** I wanted someone to say it to me and for it to be true somehow. I wanted the prospect of sticking together with someone to get through all this, even if it was just these band-guys in makeup whom I don't actually know.
I had to listen so hard. I had to spend so much time thinking about what's true and what isn't. Are our stories true? Is what they say in their songs true? Who's sticking with who here, anyway? Do they stick with us? We who have adopted them as vessels for things we can't say or feel any other way? We who are their most committed fans, who also write the crazy stuff, for our own crazy reasons, that makes them think we're crazy?
In the meantime, I kept listening. It was harder, more complicated, to listen to them than to other artists with whom I don't have a well-developed fannish relationship. Bullets and Black Parade didn't whisper directly into my ear tonight the way that Eminem, 2Pac, or Rage Against the Machine do, artists who exist for me only as the voice and the sound on the audio track. I had to dig to find that simplicity again, to sift through all the things I've just written about--and frankly, I could have wished for the experience to be easier than that.
Does that mean I should give up bandom? Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn't, I don't know--but I do know that I won't. It's a wicked game we play, but I'm already too far in. I'm not going to abandon the stories I'm writing. I find too much truth in them now to do that. I just hope that one day someone will read one and it will whisper something important directly in their ear, the way so many important bandom stories have done for me.
*Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven't posted any of it. You'll just have to trust me for now--that I do write fiction, with the intent of sharing it someday.
**cf. Frank Iero in 969 interview, 1:40 to end
***cf. Gerard Way in "We're Here to Fight Evil"