Read Online Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steve Almond
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weirdly gratifying identity crisis. “When I Was Drinking” by the band Hem makes me want to be an alcoholic. It makes me want to be an alcoholic involved with another alcoholic. It makes me pine for the perverse safety of all the self-defeating relationships I’ve ever been in. That’s how beautiful that fucking song is. (I’m fairly sure the heroine of “When I Was Drinking” used to date the guy in the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular,” though the songs were released two decades apart.) “Taj Mahal” by the Canadian band Sam Roberts has a nearly opposite effect. I listen to this organ-drenched ode and feel a completely unwarranted sense that love is a form of destiny impervious to time. “Listen Here” by Eddie Harris makes me so mellow I briefly become Buddhist.
When people complain about how crappy most commercial pop music is, what they’re really angry about is that particular songs don’ttake them anywhere. We may have some kind of involuntary limbic reaction to the tune and beat, but they stall out as emotional transport devices. Sometimes, this is because the listener is unwilling to give the song a chance. But often, it’s a matter of the aesthetic choices that have been made. They’re too easy, too obvious in their desire to manipulate our feelings.
I am thinking (without quite wanting to) of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a song I was forced to sing in my fifth-grade chorus and which I necessarily repudiated with many retching sounds in public, but which I also privately adored, often staring out the window of the room I shared with my brothers and softly imitating Debby’s dewy vibrato, even tearing up as she soared toward the climactic line,
It can’t be wrong when it feels so right
. The song was all I thought about for several months. It inflamed my desires. I wanted to devote myself to Christ and feel up Debby Boone, ideally at the same time. And then, just as suddenly, I began to hate the song, its sappy lyrics and synthesized strings, the confused yearning it revealed in me.
We all do this, of course. We develop brief, blinding crushes on songs like “You Light Up My Life” (or “Candle in the Wind” or “Say You, Say Me” 7 or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”). Then those crushes end and the musical artifacts we took to be genuinely inspiring and heartfelt and even redemptive reveal themselves as repetitive and crass, a kind of emotional propaganda, and we feel like suckers.
No Depression-or, Actually, Check That, Fuckloads of Depression
And that’s fine. That’s
okay
. For the Drooling Fanatic, life is littered with these vulgar infatuations, because of our sensitivity to the dramaticcapacities of music. We’re ready to fall in love, one song at a time. This is something I failed to note earlier, when I was talking about the pedigree of our breed. And it’s maybe the most important indicator of DF tendencies, which is that
we’re chronically emotional people who have trouble accessing our emotions
.
In my own case—though I suspect this is broadly true—repression was our family religion. I didn’t admit to anyone else that I was feeling sad or frightened or angry because I saw little hope of being regarded or soothed, and a good chance of being mocked. And so I started to hide these feelings from myself; they burrowed inward and took cover under a sarcastic bravado. When I wanted to numb myself out, I watched TV. But songs had the opposite effect. They became a secret passageway to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself.
The earliest example I can offer takes place in the summer of 1971, when, at age four, my twin brother and I were transplanted from the suburbs to a commune in the rolling hills of Ukiah. 8 My folks were hoping for a rural utopia. What they found was an unsupervised summer camp. The tenor of those feverish months is best captured by the episode in which a man known as Big John wound
When people complain about how crappy most commercial pop music is, what they’re really angry about is that particular songs don’ttake them anywhere. We may have some kind of involuntary limbic reaction to the tune and beat, but they stall out as emotional transport devices. Sometimes, this is because the listener is unwilling to give the song a chance. But often, it’s a matter of the aesthetic choices that have been made. They’re too easy, too obvious in their desire to manipulate our feelings.
I am thinking (without quite wanting to) of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a song I was forced to sing in my fifth-grade chorus and which I necessarily repudiated with many retching sounds in public, but which I also privately adored, often staring out the window of the room I shared with my brothers and softly imitating Debby’s dewy vibrato, even tearing up as she soared toward the climactic line,
It can’t be wrong when it feels so right
. The song was all I thought about for several months. It inflamed my desires. I wanted to devote myself to Christ and feel up Debby Boone, ideally at the same time. And then, just as suddenly, I began to hate the song, its sappy lyrics and synthesized strings, the confused yearning it revealed in me.
We all do this, of course. We develop brief, blinding crushes on songs like “You Light Up My Life” (or “Candle in the Wind” or “Say You, Say Me” 7 or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”). Then those crushes end and the musical artifacts we took to be genuinely inspiring and heartfelt and even redemptive reveal themselves as repetitive and crass, a kind of emotional propaganda, and we feel like suckers.
No Depression-or, Actually, Check That, Fuckloads of Depression
And that’s fine. That’s
okay
. For the Drooling Fanatic, life is littered with these vulgar infatuations, because of our sensitivity to the dramaticcapacities of music. We’re ready to fall in love, one song at a time. This is something I failed to note earlier, when I was talking about the pedigree of our breed. And it’s maybe the most important indicator of DF tendencies, which is that
we’re chronically emotional people who have trouble accessing our emotions
.
In my own case—though I suspect this is broadly true—repression was our family religion. I didn’t admit to anyone else that I was feeling sad or frightened or angry because I saw little hope of being regarded or soothed, and a good chance of being mocked. And so I started to hide these feelings from myself; they burrowed inward and took cover under a sarcastic bravado. When I wanted to numb myself out, I watched TV. But songs had the opposite effect. They became a secret passageway to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself.
The earliest example I can offer takes place in the summer of 1971, when, at age four, my twin brother and I were transplanted from the suburbs to a commune in the rolling hills of Ukiah. 8 My folks were hoping for a rural utopia. What they found was an unsupervised summer camp. The tenor of those feverish months is best captured by the episode in which a man known as Big John wound
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