Saturday, May 25, 2019

Melancholia

It's funny how listening to music can trigger nostalgia to such a deep extent. I'm listening to Phoenix, a group whose music I first heard in Urban Outfitters (great music in there, and in New Look too).
Long time ago, and such a dreadful time in my life; but listening to music from another continent was a transcendent experience like a living dream or a self-administered drug, a powerful distraction and the trigger for a sense of hope.
I used to clutch at music to stop me from drowning, firstly music made by other artists and later, the songs that I wrote myself, that I didn't even realise where telling me things about my life that I was completely in denial of.
Almost everything in my life has been mapped by music, even the years of no-music when crying babies threw into relief the beauty of silence!
There is so much catching up to do, still; I missed most of the 1990s, and feel like I'm walking about with a radar helmet trying to detect what's going on all the time. And for the last three years, music has held me even more in its spell, pulling my entire soul into its world in a way that it used to when I went out dancing every night in my teenage years and twenties.
It's sound: it's adjustments in sound waves, pulses travelling through the air. Yet it's so much more than this... a relentless puzzle.
Maybe I've been doing too much reading. I am trying to shape the article on Oh Bondage! Up Yours, finding myself in s really different world to the reviewers back then who seem to absolutely detest music, relentlessly trying to slay it like St George killing the dragon.
Someone should have told them that the dragon always wins.

No comments: