An entirely unoriginal essay about music

For many, the songs may be forgotten but the memories remain.   The firsts:  Kisses, break ups, losses and loves.   We remember them and lament their passing or smile with melting relief that they are gone.   Lips on lips, skin on skin, shallow shaky breaths taken, tears and rending cries or smiles and heartfelt sighs… we can’t leave out the jubilant laughter either, the happy times, the thrilling times, the tragic times and even though we can’t pinpoint the soundtrack to those events, it is there, playing in the background throughout our lives.  Music binds us, changes us, and acts like a file to dull the aches or like a needle to shoot meaning into our veins.   It is there and it is part of us.

I can recall it vividly, colorfully… because that was the moment when my black and white world got a splattering of soulful paint.    I was 13 years old, in the living room, kneeling on the shag carpet in front of a cheap cassette player.   In my memories, I am a proselyte in the temple kneeling before a 25 dollar altar. The sound was awful, crackly and tinny, but it was the greatest thing I had ever heard.   It was a battered copy of AC/DC’s “High Voltage” and it filled me with awe and wonder and terror.  It was like pornography.   It was just so good and just so wrong and yes, it had to be wrong to feel that good.    I was 13 and I was addicted, a junkie.    I didn’t know that Angus Young had been wearing his school boy outfit since before I was born or that the singer Bon Scott had been dead for years already.   To me it was brand new and it changed my meager life.

We all have these stories.   Tales of our musical awakenings are as common as the C major chord on a guitar.    Maybe it didn’t happen with one song or one album or over the course of one day, but it still happens.  Music is insidious and it is unstoppable.   It will worm its glorious way into our souls through a tidal wave or a slow trickle… either way we end up blissfully drowning.  

We all have a soundtrack to our lives.   Maybe its David Bowie’s “Changes” for our Graduation Day or maybe Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” tells the story of our first love.   We have our favorites and our most hated songs and bands.    For my dad, who despised all things Rock ‘n Roll, it was “Sing Sing Sing (with a swing)” by Benny Goodman and he cranked that song in the car just as loudly and as crassly as any Headbanger played Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”.   For my mother, it was the Italian Crooners: Sinatra, Dean Martin and her beloved Al Martino singing “Spanish Eyes”.    Music encompasses so much and I find myself agreeing with those who imagine a world that was created by music playing in the void.

If AC/DC was the first sip of beer, then Metallica, Megadeth and Guns ‘n Roses were my whiskey.   The music dictated that my hair be long and my jeans be ripped.   It went beyond the music and the emotions because birds of a feather mosh together and Heavy Metal made me part of a group.   Pantera, Biohazard and Slayer kept my social circle spinning and yet I had a dark secret that I told no one about.  Alone, in my room, with my headphones on and the volume turned down low were REM, The Police, Dire Straits, Steve Winwood.   I played Glenn Miller and Mozart and Miles Davis and I made a drunken confession that I liked Men Without Hats, which garnered me heaps of scorn but if they only knew!  If they only could hear the other bands too lame to mention, they would have judged me mercilessly.    Even with that sword of Damocles hanging over my head, I still listened and loved because even if I was caught out, I could deal with their laughter or took turns punching me in the arm because I couldn’t stop at one genre or deny myself all the new discoveries that were finally making their way into my Discman.

I suppose I grew up in the 90s.  I was almost 20 years late to the ball but when I found The Ramones and my life changed again.   The thunder of “ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!!!” before every song lead me to The Misfits and Black Flag and the rest of the East-coast hardcore scene.   Another clique called, those who would make CBGB’s into Mecca, but I refused to answer, because if I let my soul be sold to punk, then I couldn’t pogo my way over to the alt bands of the 1990’s.   To not be able to embrace mighty Nirvana and solemn Alice in Chains would have been too dire a punishment.   

As I gaze back on the road behind me, each phase of my life has songs attached to them.  I unrepentantly plagiarize a fellow writer and swear that the tunes played me.  Each chorus, each bridge, each note was like the ocean against the rocks and I was being sculpted and changed, bit by tiny bit.  If I couldn’t nod my head in rhythm to the Pixies, my very heart would have been robbed.   I wanted it all and like a spoiled kid, I wanted something new all the time. 

A seductive girl clicked play and said, “I want to make out to this…” and Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” played in my bedroom.   What kind of sad commentary is it that I can remember the name of the song but not the name of the girl?   I can write that off to youth and not-so-innocence because I wasn’t formed yet… music hadn’t bent me and shaped me yet.  I hadn’t held a vinyl record in a dusty record store or ran my gentle fingers across the cover of “Blonde on Blonde” by Bob Dylan.    Even though I could appreciate some of that lustful love, I never fell in and the hipsters siren cry was never answered by me.

Many, many, many people live for Albums.  They search for themes and connections like the amazing Alice Coopers or Pink Floyds of the world.   But despite being able to keep Radiohead’s “Pablo Honey” on repeat for 3 straight days, I was all about the songs.   I loved “Pinball Wizard” but couldn’t care less about the whole rock opera, “Tommy”.    In loving songs, I could adore the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Ain’t That Unusual” or even the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive” without having the burden of loving the bands.   I’m old enough to remember taping songs off the radio and young enough to get excited over a newfound bit torrent.   I’m a cheerful thief and a philosopher as well… music should belong to all of us. 

As a musical whore, I could go beyond the term “eclectic” and embrace a kind of musical schizophrenia where a Zydeco stomp from Queen Ida could be followed by a social commentary by The Kinks.   The Pogues singing, ”Waltzing Matilda” and Black Sabbath screaming about the devil have far too many similarities.  Bob Marley was a natural lead in to Rancid because how could a pasty white suburban teen have even known what reggae was without The Clash?   It’s all connected, in a weird way.   You can ask Jerry Only, who theorizes that his punk classics are close cousins to the sock hop songs from the 1950’s.   He’ll tell you straight up that it’s all music and it’s all good.

Even the manufactured bands like Milli Vanilli are valid.   The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and One Direction weren’t formed by friends in a garage but in a boardroom.   But are they any less valid than the Sex Pistols, who were essentially assembled by Malcolm McLaren?   On one hand we have “I want it that way.” and in the other we have “I am an antichrist and I am an anarchist!”  Same thing.  

Music is so powerful that it breeds royalty.   Elvis was the King of Rock n’ Roll, Michael Jackson the King of Pop, Robert Johnson the king of the Delta Blues and maybe you didn’t know it, but Clifton Chenier is considered the King of Cajun music.   So many kings to serve and that doesn’t even take into account the Boss, the Godfather and even Prince.   For the sake of gender equality, thank God for Aretha Franklin, a fitter Queen could never be.  How about Tupac or NWA?  Don’t they deserve a crown?  Gone but not forgotten and we can argue that age means nothing and time can be dismissed in word and gesture but it would all be a lie.   And it would be the cruelest of lies.   We should embrace what is and what will be and of course respect must be shown to what was.

I remember in ‘94 when Woodstock “celebrated” its 25^th year and it seemed like everyone bemoaned the commercialism and the message of peace and love was replaced with 5 dollar bottles of water.   But the kids danced in the mud all the same and I’m sure that more than a few dropped acid in a psychedelic tribute to the original festival.  The bands played and somehow, almost as if we forgot to look over our shoulders to check, that revival happened 20 years ago.   So in 5 years, when some promoter decides to throw a 50^th anniversary event, I hope that they do homage to Jimi Hendrix from 1969 but also to Green Day, who played the last one.   Time, as if we didn’t already know, marches on and it marches to beats ranging from Sousa to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

My adolescence is long gone but I still expect to be surprised by some new song by some new band.  I peek around each corner searching and demanding to be satisfied.   I crave the new but a lot of people embrace the old and once they find their band or their niche, they’re satisfied.  I know people who found their favorite band when they were 13 or 14 years old and still listen to them religiously.  Even me, who is always tapping his musical vein to prepare for my next fix will love going back in time with an old band or an almost forgotten song.  It makes one believe in time travel, in the spirit realm and if magic exists in this world, it comes with a good beat that you can dance to.   If spirits float among us, they carry harps and drum sticks and distortion pedals.   The human world spins like a record and that’s no coincidence.

Nietzsche said “Without music, life would be a mistake.”  You only have to watch a movie without its musical score to realize how dead and empty it is.   Or go a week without turning on your iPod or flicking the dial on the radio.    Something would be missing and that hole, that vacuum of immense proportions would scream out to be filled. 

On a lonely night, I scroll through the tens of thousands of songs that I have on my computer.   I can visit any part of my past through the click of a button.   I will forever be jealous of musicians for they hold magic wands in their hands.   They make magic and I envy them for it.  How wonderful they are, those people who can create a song that can whisper, speak and scream and yodel into your spirit!    How wonderful the songs are, that change our lives.  How wonderful the music is, for it plays for you and me.