Tuesday, 20 May 2008
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Currently Listening
Motor Booty Affair
By Parliament
see relatedOh comely (some thoughts before I left for Nashville)
Oh comely. Tomorrow I see Radiohead in Charlotte, and Saturday I depart for Nashville to do some recording with my band. This will be our second EP, the first being tracked on my computer and is still currently unfinished. Starting with Merlefeast I have been to around six different shows in the last couple of weeks, the most recent being the likes of George Clinton with Parliament and Funkadelic. Music, hmm. It is difficult to try and place where in my life and to what degree of importance music plays in my unraveling strand. For a long time music has just been there. Yet as I reflect on my few years I can already see the various shifts and roles it has taken on at different points.
I look back to the Fifth grade when R.E.M. was my favorite band. They served to imbue me with such an energy, yet simultaneously with a penetrating melancholy, a sort of beautiful awareness of the ever-present sorrow in all things. All these sentiments I drew solely from Eponymous, which was a collection from their years on the I.R.S. label, and Green, which if I’m not mistaken is their major label debut. “This one goes out to the one I love, this one goes out to the one I’ve left behind, flyer.” There was something in the simplicity of that soaring chorus amidst the offset complimentary backing vocals that intensely struck a chord with me, reshaping my phenomena of living in this world. I’d picture myself with possible future loves, folding laundry in a small apartment and spontaneously embracing just at the climax of “Fall on me”. All kinds of amorous dreams were given to me by the songs on those two records. Listening to “You are the Everything” I would envisage scenes of my elderly days spent with an aged girl “in the backseat laying down the windows” and I’d “look at her and I see the beauty of the light of music, the voices talking somewhere in the house late spring and you’re drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth.”
Other songs were filled with unrelenting exuberance, like “Radio Free Europe” which had me singing at the top of my lungs “Calling out on the transit! Calling out on the transit!” Man, I was eleven years old and I memorized the lyrics to “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and I felt pretty cool about that. In fact, I felt pretty cool about my R.E.M. infatuation anyway because I was the only kid within my sphere of interaction that knew about them at the time. I suppose that brings us to another point; why is there such a mystique and sense of self-satisfaction that accompanies the discovery of an unheard of band? It makes you wonder why so many hipsters seem to hoard their gems either to themselves or their esoteric friends instead of bringing them into the light for all to see. I guess it says something about the pomo (an abbreviation for postmodern that I learned the other day and I’m choosing to flaunt now) world where individualism is valued exponentially more that the community. Not that I’m one to talk.
(Part Two of this blog will be published at a later date.)
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