I mean, as much as I love sex, and anyone that knows me knows how much I love that ridiculous mix of humping, submission, domination and hilarity, I would still have to rank music just above it. I mean, music is great because the emotional and intellectual components are equally valid in the appreciation of it.
When I am listening to a song I love I just want the world to stop. I want nothing to interrupt it. It might be the only quality of mine that has remained constant from my teen years. I remember more than one argument with my mom stemming from her coming into my room while I was listening to music and talking to me. I'd always say, "Can't you wait for the album to be over? Or at least wait for the gap between songs?"
It always annoyed me that people might be hesitant to interrupt you if you are watching a movie, and wait for a commercial if you are watching TV, and might even apologize for the interruption if you are in the middle of reading a book, but listening to music? It seems to be rated very low in importance to people. It is often viewed as a background kind of thing. . . but not for me. I am boggled by people I see on the subway reading while they listen to their iPods. How can you concentrate on the music? Oh yeah, I forgot, most popular music these days does not have much depth to it musically or lyrically, and when it does it is easily ignored. We search for similarities and the replaying of patterns in all things, not for the uniqueness of it.
The thing with music for me is that I have this desperate need to try to share the experience that I cannot understand. When I listen to a particular song and I get a particular feeling or set of feelings from it, and when I can appreciate some musical aspect of it, or some set of aspects that intertwine in such a way to instigate that chemical rush of joy in my brain, I want someone else to listen to it and get that exact same feeling. In other words, I want an impossibility.
Example: One of my favorite songs lately has been David Byrne's "Glass, Concrete and Stone". When he sings, "So I'm puttin' on aftershave / nothin' is out of place / gonna be on my way / Try to pretend, it's not only / Glass and concrete and stone. . ." There is just something that resonates with me and how I see the world, or how I try to see the world when it does not overwhelm me. I feel like everyday I must force myself to pretend that this is not all just glass and concrete and stone, that the stuff people make has meaning and matters. And there is something about the timbre of his voice when he sings it, something plaintive and real that shakes me down deep inside with echoes of both joy and sadness.
And then there are songs that so tightly parallel my own mind that I can only feel envy that I did not write it myself. "Civilization", also from David Byrne's "Grown Backwards" album is an example of this. I mean, a song that questions what it means to be human/civilized and the rituals and customs we take for granted and examines them from a point of view that is both detached and intimately involved in terms of the "story" of the song (The narrator of the song is on a date at a restaurant) is not an easy thing to make work, and he makes it work so well, I cannot help but admire it, even as it melts me and steels me to the world at the same time. When he sings, "Part of me wants to jump and shout / Part of me wants to tear it down" I always smile, because I think the same thing about society every friggin' day.
But is not just about lyrics and singing. I can listen to a production of Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the Pastoral (my favorite) and the awe I feel is never diminished by the number of times I have listened. For me, the key to appreciating music on intellectual/technical level is being able to break apart a piece of music into its component elements mentally as you are listening to it and then slowly have your ear bring the individual parts together seeing how they fit, setting mood and theme, by means of becoming more than the sum of its parts. This is a skill I trained myself to have when I began listening to jazz in my late teens, and when I figured out that I could apply it to all kinds of music it was like a whole new world was opened up to me. I remember Zooey and I used to play this game where we'd be listening to music and challenge each other, "Listen to the bass line", or "Listen to the high hat", or "Just high hat and bass drum". The best part about doing this was discovering sounds seemly hidden in the melange of instruments. "What is that?" Or, "Wow. That third harmony sounds like was recorded down a long hallway. I wonder what made him record it that way?"And yet, these experiences and feelings of music (I guess, like all experiences and feelings) are unique to me and not really conveyable. In a way, it is a lot like a feeling I get in "serious" romantic relationships, an inability to feel like I can truly convey the depth of my feelings - a sense that expressions of feelings do not so much echo as they are swallowed into the abyss of human solitude never to return. And of course, I am an abyss as well. But that doesn't really matter much anymore as I feel all but a complete inability to love - so if that feeling ever returns I should be happy just to have it.
Just like I should just be happy to have songs and pieces of music that speak to me so profoundly, and not worry about how it makes anyone else feel.
But I guess we all want something or someone to legitimize our feelings. . .
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