Tough Bubbles

A certain Miss Poppins once suggested to an entire generation of children to add a spoon full of sugar to their bitter medicine, allowing easier passage and joy in the experience. If this notion were to be more specific, I think she would have actually said, “A songs volume corresponds to the brightness of your day!” She was singing it, after all.
There is a very unfortunate shame all too commonly cast upon the old and young alike for feeling fantastic. We forget for a precious while that life is more than grinding our teeth, but then quickly remind ourselves that there is work to do, mouths to feed, money to recount, and headlines to scan, dismissing our right to sing in the rain. The ugly mind of guilt rears its heavy head and punishes us for wanting more flavor than that of cardboard. The world is under too much pressure for one loose link flailing about in some lively sugar induced stupor.
I’ve always been a defender of pop and rock music, because I feel it does good things for people in the same way a trip to Disneyland does. There are some who belief that the Disney company is an evil suit with many faces that ruins lives and does nothing more. However, I would like to offer this less known bit of information: they also provide rollers coasters!
I’ve endured many an argument, usually about the Industry, the filthy lives these phony artists lead, and the terrifying notion that these people didn’t write the songs or have anything to do with their making, which are also entirely overproduced anyway. People love to throw this out, then go home and listen to Frank Sinatra like they’re saving the world by doing so. I understand where this aggression from a progressive society comes from, and I don’t feel it’s wrong or ignorant to question, but I do believe in a middle ground and judgment is easy to dish out, but comes hard to swallow when it makes its way back around. I’ll ride the rides, but I won’t drink the kool aid. Some see no difference in the two when looking at such megabusinesses, but I believe that enjoyment and overindulgence means the greatest difference in the world, especially to the people working so hard to make these material objects reality, whether their being paid top dollar, or half a penny a week. We have a lot of work to do, and to claim to be perfect is to lie. I've always been one to keep away from the Made In China label that is so difficult to escape, but I've also tried to save myself from drowning in extremism. We don’t need to buy everything, and usually don't need what we're in line to get, but some experiences are worth the cash, the time, the work, and the compromise.
Morrissey, current soloist and singer of the '80's band The Smiths who I discovered and fell in love with when I was eighteen, has been a life long animal rights activist but wears leather shoes. When asked why, he simply said, "I think if you ask people to do everything, they become so confused that they do absolutely nothing." There are of course faux-leather shoes, and shoes made from recycled material, and organics like bamboo and hemp. I generally wear what I feel my character would wear. This is the essence of style and wearability, and sometimes requires a bit of modesty with a sturdy self-righteous shell, if one feels so compelled.
There was a time when all I could think about was going home and playing my one and only CD, a rush I still have when I discover a particularly genius album or song. This time was somewhere around 1992. Being picked up from school, I would bounce in my car seat in anticipation of what was going to happen in about seven to fifteen minutes, depending on traffic. My jumper was restricting to my motions, so that was the first to go once I was in my room. The next step was releasing my hair from its ties, but I usually waited until the perfect moment in the song for this, usually around a milimoment before the chorus. After that, it was all improvised, the end result often including ruffled bedspreads and twisted space rugs from wild ten year old feet. All of this mayhem was due in full to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” which had been promoted at a local McDonalds. It was the one truly wonderful thing I ever got from eating there, and as far as I’m concerned, somewhere deep down, I kinda owe them one.
Listening to this album was a release for me after a long day at school. Time drags more when your young, because nothing taught at that age is ever as interesting as what you eventually do with the knowledge. I never had a lot of parental attention growing up, so homework usually went unchecked (and therefore undid), and I had things like Mtv and AOL 2.0 replacing private nannies. I was well taken care of, under the wings of late-night music videos and a variety of chat rooms, where strangers could meet anonymously and discuss their feelings about anything that two or more people found to be worth mentioning. My favorite topics were pet maintenance and pop music. I liked to give my piece about what I thought sounded good at the time, what inspired me in my youth, and how to take care of a golden retrievers cracked paw problem. I never knew what I was talking about, medically or professionally, but my reactions were consistently based upon what sounded right, because this was all I could trust, especially being in Catholic school. I can only hope now that my advice never caused any serious animal-related health problems.
Leaving behind my internet-based veterinary profession, I’ve now given up a great deal of myself to music of all flavors and colors, responding to the message a song or artist makes real effort to describe through voice, tempo, and a variety of decisions made in sound. From the small and timid folksy acoustic whispers to the massive and intimidating thunder of electronic heartbeats, there is much to give, and much to give back. It becomes a dialogue between track and listener, a language made of physical and musical movements. This is the involuntary miracle we call dancing; a critique that takes up more space than verbal description, and we’re all speaking in tongues while giving it. People worry about kids drinking or taking drugs because they may hurt themselves or do something out of the ordinary. However, the power of a song could cause even the most silent of rocks to shake itself into a frenzy of dusty rubble. We must use our judgment in the midst of vast musical terrain to determine what giveth life, and what taketh away.
I remember when I received a package of CDs I was to review in the fall of 2006 for a small publication in San Francisco, and I came across a new album by the Mountain Goats who I had been listening to off and on for a few years already. The new album was beautifully constructed, landing a few solid jaw drops along with the clarification of a direction that I wasn’t sure the artist had discovered previously. There was a song called “Dance Music” that I was immediately taken with, from the cute flirty tease of the piano to the happy pace of the song about his adolescence, which opens on a very dark and personal subject. He tells us in plain words of his childhood in San Louis Obispo, watching the Watergate hearings on TV, and running upstairs to escape his father chasing his mother around the living room in attempts to attack her. He makes a short statement to capture the entire song in one line: “…leaning close to my little record player on the floor. So this is what the volume knob’s for.” Music is certainly one of the more healthy methods of escape, whether making it or gaining from its creation. I call it “getting religious,” dancing wherever I may be in a wave of warm comfort, either created by the bodies around me generating sweat and heat, or the seemingly empty air in the room that has been touched by some electricity the music brings about. My favorite kinds of music are songs that make me feel compelled to dance, and ones that make me think, but when I find music that does both, it makes the list. This is a momentary database that hibernates in the folds of my brain, awakened by a moment of silence born from sound, and leaving my heart suspended in action while it ticks out information. It is created within seconds, made to decipher what I'm feeling, what it reminds me of, what it tastes and looks like, and how I'm going to respond. This list is invisible yes, but this does not discredit its validity to me. I just know it when I hear it.