Know what I mean? I mean, obviously bad music is painful. But really good music is painful too. In a very different way.
Maybe I'm just predisposed to thinking that everything is painful its own special way. But I notice that when a really great, deeply affecting song comes on, I tend to wince. It's as if it depicts some powerful emotion so completely ... but in the end it's still secondhand. It's still vicarious. You're hearing someone else experiencing this perfect moment, and you're with him or her a hundred percent, but deep down you know you're still not really experiencing it yourself, and you know you never truly will. It's like how you feel after being transfixed by a gorgeous movie star and then coming to the sudden realization that man oh man in the real world she would never look at me twice, would she.
I sense that I'm not making much sense here. OK, take a truly great song, one that channels the ineffable kernel of the human soul ... let's say 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny." From the first few bars you are transported by this Platonic ideal of extremely stupid people feeling horny ... OK, I'm undercutting my real point here by being silly. I can't help it. It's just that true, honest emotion makes me feel bashful.
Maybe that's part of the problem. I'm too much in my own head and stuck within my own folds of irony to really feel strong emotions genuinely. I feel "pretty good" emotions often. But when I do, I'm usually simultaneously thinking "this will make a great memory someday." Bah! What is that? I'm already remembering wistfully what I'm still experiencing. That's crap!
Sigh ... well, I guess there are worse fates. After all, I'm happily married, gainfully employed ... wait, there I go again. Undercutting the emotion. It may be spoiled and irrational to be angry that music seems somehow incomplete, but hell, why can't I be irrationally, stupidly, ungratefully sad/angry?
Can I drop some over-analytical ballistics on y'all? What if we all become so self-aware and self-conscious that we can't be stupidly genuine any more? What if everything becomes a snarky comment on something that happened before, so that no one can ever feel license to pour out their souls without stifling themsleves with restraint over the probable resulting ridicule? Wouldn't that be awful?
Luckily, we're pretty far from that. There seems to be no shortage of genuine and stupid people out there wanting to pour out their souls.
At this point I'm reminded of a TV ad for a recent Mariah Carey album. You see her in the studio doing her typical thing, stretching one poor, hapless word beyond its breaking point, forcing it into 43 syllables in 55 different registers, and her voice-over says "This is the album that really captures my soul." Then you hear what she's singing, and it's "OOH, TOUCH MY BOOOOODY!"
So apparently Mariah Carey's soul, when captured, says "OOH, TOUCH MY BODY!" That is perhaps the least interesting soul in the universe.
On the other hand, you have Radiohead. Radiohead, in its own way, is just as genuinely soul-baring as Mariah Carey. Radiohead has no self-effacing irony. They have no sense of humor. They're not here to do winking, post-modern cleverness, i.e., the stuff I usually go for. But every time Thom Yorke sings "I'm not here ... this isn't happening ..." in Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely," I want to cry but I can't.
I've felt that, Thom! Just like that! But ... wait, no, I haven't, not really. Not like that. Not that truly, not that genuinely. All I ever did was feel like I wanted to disappear. Radiohead caps it off and makes it complete. They make it what it it's supposed to be.
So what am I saying? I guess that people who can express something deeply honest are very rare. And of those people, those whose deep, honest expressions communicate something worth hearing constitute a very, very small group. But that little group -- wow. They are somehow separate from the rest of us, the sorry ones among us who can only settle for listening, commenting, and appreciating ... all second-hand.
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4 comments:
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, Ed. I don't think it's only artists, musicians, and stupid people who get to experience unalloyed emotions. They describe or convey them better, but we all feel them, which is why we can relate to the sculpture/song/act of stupidness in the first place. If large numbers of people didn't feel that way, then we'd never have the Voice of Our Generation - you know, people like Joan Baez, Thom Radiohead, or Right Said Fred. These are the people who can express just how we feel.
Now, pure emotions like joy or yearning or anything else don't last too long. I guarantee that our friend Thom (who really ought to spell his name "Tom", by the way) doesn't walk around in a constant state of anomie. Even when he's singing (or composing) a song, he's bound to lose the total immersion in the emotion. On the seventeenth stop of a thirty-one city tour, he's probably thinking about ooh, that was the wrong chord there for a second, or did I leave my Grammys locked when I left the house, or I wonder what you call that little groove between your nose and your mouth.
Meanwhile, tha crazed fans in the audience in Dubuque are like, wow, now there's a person feeling some authentic anomie. Kinda makes me feel the same way, you know?
I'm not saying that I don't have the same experience you're talking about. Sometimes I'll be listening to or playing some awesome piece, and I'll be like, wow, that's an awesome emotion. And of course by the time you say something like that, you're no longer fully in that emotion. But you had to have been there in the first place. So when you think you go straight to wistful, there actually had to have been a first stop at the emotion/experience.
Don't know if that's exactly what you were talking about in the post. But in any event, I had a great time writing this comment. I'll always treasure the emotions I felt while I was writing it; indeed, as I write this very sentence I feel full of wist.
Write more posts!
Pettigrj, (whoever you REALLY are), you are, like, so wrong! All that I already said, whatever it was, was right. You are wrong. QED.
Emily, now I feel bad that people are checking in to see if I have written. Even if it's only two people. Is there a way to RSS feed this thing so you can just look and see on the rare occasion taht it's updated?
there is, but I avoid my RSS feeds because they tell me about all sorts of science articles that I should be reading.
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