I wish I understood music better. That lack of vocabulary or technical background feels like it renders senseless my faux-critic writing for this blog: I can't tell a middle fifth from a particular piano chord, but I know when a guitar solo kicks ass. But I can't tell you exactly what makes the music good. It's easier on my part to chart the emotional trajectories of the music, to map out the avenues of sentiment, to write, if paradoxically, about the ineffable. I suppose it's an oblique testimony to what's best about popular music: its ability to better articulate words that can't be said. (Which is why pop music is also responsible for the phenomenon of the crappy mixtape.)
But maybe the inarticulable reveals itself in other perhaps less welcome ways as well. There are parts of my waking and walking life where half-remembered lines, fragments of lyrics, as if I were guided by voices, burrow through my head in a series of non sequiturs. And I did not think the girl could be so cruel. But how strange the change from major to minor. The arc of a love affair, rainbows in the high desert air. I'm on the lawn with someone else's wife. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to. And your telephone's been ringing while you're dancing in the rain. Provided of course you're not dumb enough to actually try it.
Surely this aural affliction isn't just a result of my music geekery, a reminder that I don't consume music; it's the other way around. Being haunted by music is a wonderful thing.
And so, a musical exercise, or is it exorcism: pick an increasing number of favorite pop songs from each decade, maybe to nail down something definitive though inevitably mutable, as if a recitation would dispel these musical ghosts, an attempt to render into digital bits the swirl of words in the ether, or to intellectually justify making a list I would have made anyway. I've done different versions of this before, but this time it's even more restrictive: 5 from the '50s, 6 from the '60s, 7 from the '70s, and so on, with the net of choices widening in proportion to my familiarity with those years. (Granted, I could have picked from the '30s and '40s as well, but I just don't have that many songs. The lyrics cited above -- bonus points if you recognize them without googling! -- don't correspond with my choices either.)
There is no logic to the choices, really -- it's all emotion, with no consideration for historical significance or any of the criteria that musicologists deem important -- except that the songs show that I am clearly one big fucking sap. It's funny how most of these songs are somehow about longing -- I suppose it's what my research is about, in some ways -- but good lord, I'm clearly throwing out any ounce of indie cred I ever had with these selections. (I'd love to be able to boast that I was listening to the Dead Kennedys or the Minutemen or something when I was in high school, but no -- that's the Philippines for you. But true fact: I was the only one listening to Talking Heads in the entire school.)
While this is an essentially nostalgic endeavor, I still think about old friends who unplugged themselves from the radio after graduation, who never moved on musically, people who slipped quietly into a musical lassitude and pronounce, over their drinks, that they don't write 'em like they used to. But of course they do. Either that or they succumb to the sanitized, cheap embrace of Adult Contemporary. May I be struck down by lightning if this ever happens. But here I am, tempting lightning bolts to rain down on my head anyway.
(The first post in this 5-part series appears next week, and the rest -- who knows.)
Posted by the wily filipino at October 18, 2007 12:45 AM