The Music or the Misery

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
-High Fidelity

I had a shitty day at work yesterday. Not the first and not the last, I'm sure. It was on a par with the kind of day that makes you feel really lost and angry and violent and hopeless all at once and nothing helped really to distract me for more than a few moments or hours, not yoga, not food. So when I got home I did what I did when I was a teenager, what I've done all my life. I holed up in my room and put on some music. In this case, my Pearl Jam Radio Station on Pandora. It turns out that all that dark, emo, Seattle based white boy rock was just what I needed. One song in particular by Soundgarden: "Black Days," really caught my attention the way it has hundreds of times before when I used to listen to the album as a younger person. But this time I was acutely aware of the fact that I not only felt exactly what Chris Cornell was saying but I finally knew why he was saying it. That's a difference in age. Age. I'm starting to feel my age more lately than I ever have. I'm 36, but just recently, I'm finally starting to feel like 30. Chris Cornell knew what the fuck was up when I was a teenager. And he knows what the fuck is up now. That's a very reassuring thing. Makes you feel like you have a friend who understands you, not matter how much you change.

It also got me thinking though about the effects of music on our developmental young minds, and the about how the music of our particular generations and our parents' generations shape us. I don't care for the movie "High Fidelity" based on the book by Nick Hornby but the quote I posted above was the only thing in that story that hit the mark for me. How different would my relationship to music have been had I been born in the hey day of bee bop, listening to Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday or Glen Miller. What's it like now for those youth coming of age listening to Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, or Justin Beiber? How will what is expressed there shape their own emotional lives when juxtaposed with their own daily realities given their race, class, sexual preference and economic status? How much does music do to spur on pre-existing feelings of joy, anger, depression, desire, elation, violence or and how much of it actually brings those feelings to the surface for the first time long before we really understand what they even mean?

Personally, by the time I'd listened to any piece of music that carried my imagination to a foreign but familiar emotional space for the first time I can remember, I was so wrapped up in owning that space or rather being able to identify with a new and interesting part of myself, I was so excited to see what came next that I never gave a thought to whether I would have ever felt that feeling without exposure to this medium.

I was raised with music, all kinds of music playing in my house all the time. If the "Beach Boys" asked me to go surfing, it was my understanding that this song expressed all the best things about what surfing was like. And if Michael Jackson said "You wanna be starting something, got to be starting something." I knew that "something" was a narrative involving a physical altercation that would end up making me want to dance. When Barbra Streisand sang that love was soft as an easy chair, I saw that easy chair and sank as deeply into it as her voice sank into my mind. I was a sponge. And yet I had never been surfing, never started anything with anyone and certainly had not ever been in love yet, not really. Did I think I had been in love because my feeling matched the description of falling in love that music had described for me? Or did I just want to fall in love because of music?