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Authors: Steve Almond
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can remember listening to KFRC for hours, waiting for my favorite song to come on, and how ecstatic I was when the DJ finally played “The Things We Do for Love,” or “Undercover Angel.” Playing the records myself never felt as special. See, what I loved was that I’d surrendered to fate, which made the songs, when they finally arrived, feel like gifts.
What Songs Do
As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling. Every form has its merits and demerits. Paintings, for instance, work fast and require no moving parts, yet are hard to steal. Films are easy to watch and enveloping, but carry the risk you will see Philip Seymour Hoffman naked. The only thing wrong with music, as far as I’m concerned, is that you cannot eat it. From a purely emotional standpoint, it remains far more potent than any other artistic medium.
I remember the exact moment this dawned on me. I was watching
Late Night with David Letterman
. Willie Nelson was the guest. This was the watered-down Willie of the eighties, the stoner cowpoke in dusty pigtails. Dave was giving him a hard time. “Why don’t you sing something for us?” Dave said, almost tauntingly. Willie sat there for a few seconds. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing and the sound of his voice—that glorious, battered baritone—sucked every bit of irony out of that room. Letterman looked stunned.
This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspectof the human enterprise but its central purpose. 6 They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I’m basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let’s get this McJihad started. I feel these things despite the fact that:
I am not Irish
The song actually advocates pacifism
I still wish U2 had eaten one another
The same thing happens with “Sweet Home Alabama.” I don’t exactly get psyched to join the Klan, but I do get this powerful desire to drink beer and drive a pickup truck and maybe shoot off some guns and most of all to not be looked down upon by some fucking overeducated, nigger-loving Yankee such as myself. Intellectually, I recognize that the song is shallow and racist, in that it advances the notion that former Alabama governor George Wallace—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—is an American hero. I also get that if all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were still alive, one or more of them would be members of the Republicancongressional leadership team. But I can’t help it: “Sweet Home Alabama” makes me feel a deep yearning for my home and my kin and the swampers in Muscle Shoals who pick me up when I’m feeling blue, even though these same swampers would possibly kick my Jew ass sideways if I ever sidled into one of their taverns and ordered me a Chablis.
Songs take us deeper into ourselves by taking us away from ourselves. They expand our empathic imaginations. When we listen to “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor we become empowered sisters showing our abusive exes the door, and when we listen to “Rocket Man” (or maybe, in your case, “Space Oddity”) we become astronauts blasted away from our loved ones into orbits of lonely obligation, and when we listen to “Jack & Diane” we become teenagers sucking on chili dogs and reveling in the fleeting ecstasies of green love. And God knows, we’re all homesick travelers when we hear “Homeward Bound,”
even when we’re at home
.
I’ve cherry-picked songs that most people know. But like any other Fanatic I’ve got an endless list of obscure songs that induce the same kind of
What Songs Do
As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling. Every form has its merits and demerits. Paintings, for instance, work fast and require no moving parts, yet are hard to steal. Films are easy to watch and enveloping, but carry the risk you will see Philip Seymour Hoffman naked. The only thing wrong with music, as far as I’m concerned, is that you cannot eat it. From a purely emotional standpoint, it remains far more potent than any other artistic medium.
I remember the exact moment this dawned on me. I was watching
Late Night with David Letterman
. Willie Nelson was the guest. This was the watered-down Willie of the eighties, the stoner cowpoke in dusty pigtails. Dave was giving him a hard time. “Why don’t you sing something for us?” Dave said, almost tauntingly. Willie sat there for a few seconds. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing and the sound of his voice—that glorious, battered baritone—sucked every bit of irony out of that room. Letterman looked stunned.
This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspectof the human enterprise but its central purpose. 6 They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I’m basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let’s get this McJihad started. I feel these things despite the fact that:
I am not Irish
The song actually advocates pacifism
I still wish U2 had eaten one another
The same thing happens with “Sweet Home Alabama.” I don’t exactly get psyched to join the Klan, but I do get this powerful desire to drink beer and drive a pickup truck and maybe shoot off some guns and most of all to not be looked down upon by some fucking overeducated, nigger-loving Yankee such as myself. Intellectually, I recognize that the song is shallow and racist, in that it advances the notion that former Alabama governor George Wallace—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—is an American hero. I also get that if all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were still alive, one or more of them would be members of the Republicancongressional leadership team. But I can’t help it: “Sweet Home Alabama” makes me feel a deep yearning for my home and my kin and the swampers in Muscle Shoals who pick me up when I’m feeling blue, even though these same swampers would possibly kick my Jew ass sideways if I ever sidled into one of their taverns and ordered me a Chablis.
Songs take us deeper into ourselves by taking us away from ourselves. They expand our empathic imaginations. When we listen to “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor we become empowered sisters showing our abusive exes the door, and when we listen to “Rocket Man” (or maybe, in your case, “Space Oddity”) we become astronauts blasted away from our loved ones into orbits of lonely obligation, and when we listen to “Jack & Diane” we become teenagers sucking on chili dogs and reveling in the fleeting ecstasies of green love. And God knows, we’re all homesick travelers when we hear “Homeward Bound,”
even when we’re at home
.
I’ve cherry-picked songs that most people know. But like any other Fanatic I’ve got an endless list of obscure songs that induce the same kind of
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