I don't hate music, it hates me · 4:21am Feb 11th, 2013
Greetings, citizens!
Before I spill my feelings of self-reproach towards music in general, I wish to say that this is an entry best thought of as 'personal'. I never really wanted to use the 'blog' function this way - assuming that other people cared what I thought was high and mighty, and I stuck my nose up at it for the longest time - but to hell with any apologies. Expressing my feelings has always been a complex exercise for me, and this has been the case ever since I was a small child, so perhaps a blog post is for the best.
And besides, maybe you can relate to this little problem I have. Maybe it'll stir a thought or two. Who knows.
These feelings that I have over life and socializing and everything in general (the product of adolescence, no doubt, even though I am twenty and by many standards 'over the hump' of it) are often regretful. Socializing and even talking to other humans is the one source of eternal consternation in my life; I can never seem to get it right - I dwell on nearly every mistake incessantly and with horrendous shame, and I am absolutely positive that you could not care less.
But it does give me a lovely metaphor to begin with, because the anguish that comes from this is quite common to many of you - and it is absolutely nothing compared to my deepest loathing of music.
"Music is the deepest of arts, and deep beneath all arts."
-E.M. Forster, author of 'A Room With A View' and 'Passage To India'
Let me make it clear from the outset: I do not hate music. If diving into a clear lake in Switzerland and feeling the water surge about my limbs like an icy shock, and then looking up to see the glistening sunlight and kicking legs of paddlers above me is as close as I will ever get to physically flying, then music is so much more then that.
It is a heightened language for your mind, a doorway that you can slip through as if it were a shower-curtain before the glorious, hot wave of warmth always found within the shower-cubicle hits you - a light barrier that separates the coldness of your bathroom from the utter delight of having hot water seep into your skin. I love it in absolutely every way conceivable.
I don't know how many of you have ever bothered with illicit drugs, but I have been to Amsterdam before. Sampling the local produce was an activity that was both top of the order for me and highly desirable, if not for the pleasure of the experience itself, then for the sheer delight at the recklessness of trying all of these strange things so shunned by English-speaking society. Say what you may about that - I am a scientific soul, and as I tried them, the doors of my perception swung wide. I realised later that that is the same sensation that music allows me - that same, lilting jump of delight as your heart ripples in response to a beautiful trill of notes arranged just so.
In the dreary light offered to me by a single bedroom lamp, my computer screen and a jam sandwich, this is undoubtedly a very stupid metaphor. But I believe you take my meaning nonetheless. Drugs reveal the essence of things, as it were. LSD reveals the sudden glassiness of glass, the stoniness of stone, the woodness of wood - "They [drugs] reveal the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing." (Stephen Fry said that).
That is precisely what music can do to me - except without the exorbitant cost, or the silly giggling and sudden awe at almost everything that arises when one has imbibed too much of a certain substance.
Other forms of art cannot and will not do this for me. I stare at paintings with casual indifference. I have been to Paris twice now, for a period of four days and three days respectively, and on neither occasion did I bother to go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. I am told it is disappointing.
Similiarly, I find sculptures to be strangely alien-like representations of man and animal. I have not even an appreciation for anything less than the classical work depicting Romans or Greeks or Great Generals on their horses - I am a philistine, and everything an art critic might find joy in, I laugh and call names.
But I guess that these two forms of art are limited by their material. Art and Sculpturing is real; touchable; actual. It obeys physics, and is limited in expression by its very design. Similiarly, words (while now part of a substantial edifice of my life) I find to be at times unhelpful. They are definitively undefinitive, and no sentence will ever come to me in the perfect arrangement that will allow me to express exactly how I feel. (Sigh).
You can be close, I'm sure. I have tried my hand at poetry and writing and felt somewhat satisfied in either instance. I assume that experience and practice makes perfect, and that I have not scratched the surface or art or sculpture, but music does this to me without effort. What does that say for our other three arts? Paint is real. Sculpture is real. Even words are real.
But music - music is surreal, and it escapes the bonds and laws of art into an utterly unparalleled dimension of its own. Music is the sort of stuff that can make me write this meandering, pathetic drivel without even a hint of embarrassment.
AND I CAN'T FUCKING DO IT
I can't so even hum the tune to the national anthem without wailing off key. I'm not getting anywhere close to the rhythm of 'Three Blind Mice' without speeding up. I simply cannot fucking do it.
Mozart can piss off for doing it correctly. So can Salieri, who once whined petulantly that it was pain to only make music just a little well, but not as well as he'd like to. I'd love to know if this was actually the case, but I can't find out. Because I can't fucking do it at all.
It's lovely to have friends to get drunk with and holler songs at the top of your lungs with in the privacy of your room/backyard/local park/sports events/music events. "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel, "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, even a whole bunch of old artsy stuff from my theatre-group friends like "Anything goes", even bloody rugby anthems - "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and "Jerusalem" spring to mind. "Waltzing Matilda" and "We Are Australian" for when I have my home jersey on. In a church that I attend infrequently: "Jerusalem" (again), "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "O Come All Ye Faithful". On a tour bus around europe with a bunch of people: "Yellow Submarine," "American Pie," even most modern pop songs - which by extension are half-rap and, as such, mostly talking into a microphone - it doesn't fucking matter what song it is.
I CAN'T FUCKING JOIN IN
I get embarrassed when everyone sings Happy Birthday. I mean, holy shit. I have to mime unless I'm one of the few people in the room and people will notice, in which case I just sort of half-sing and half-stumble over the words.
I'm not dumb with music. Aged six, I could sight read for piano after a mere month of playing. I was (and still am) a precocious little snob of every variety, intellectual and musical and god knows what else. The tunes of the song are still there in my head. I can even think of them as I write:
Take-me-by-the-tongue-And-I'll-know-you, Kiss-me-til-you're-drunk-and-I'll-show-you all the moves, like Jagger, I've got them-moves, like Jagger, I've got them Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oves like Jag-ger.
Even things which have no words, or words in other languages that I don't understand as anything more than appealing noises. They are all there, absolutely perfect to the utter last beat of the last bar in the last stanza of the last page of music. "The Marriage of Figaro," by Mozart, "Habanera" by Bizet, "The Blue Danube," by Strauss, even bloody "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Tchaikovsky, or however the shit you spell his name. "O Fortuna," "Hungarian Dance No. 5", "Fur Elise". I know all these songs in my head.
Not just the tunes, mind you, but the accompanying back orchestra as well, all the harmonies and the rhythmic patterns, everything. I am surely not tone deaf.
But still, every now and again, someone will say to a group at large, "Oh, how does that one part of that song by Taylor Swift go?" and everyone will sit there racking their brains for five minutes trying to think of it.
I can hear it. I can hear the entire song in my head, as clear as if it was being played in my ear by a recently revived Bach who has picked up a penchant for DJ'ing, in accompaniment with the Vienna Philharmonic.
"Well, go on, Jake. Hum a bit," they say, looking at me with abject surprise that I have any knowledge of music whatsoever. (That doesn't help).
I try. I really try. But I hate doing it, because it's impossible. You're asking me to do something that cannot be done. Do you not understand this? I couldn't sooner build an empire state building out of Spaghetti. If I push myself to do it, people will stare at me as if I have announced my intention to embark on a filthy weekend in the Caribbean with their girlfriend/sister/mother/significant female other.
The same applies for dancing. No matter how much alcohol or other substance I imbibe, I always will be a terrible dancer. I will make the gangliest, silliest, stupidest-looking youth feel like he's just won Australia's got talent in an upset after slipping on dog shit during his own performance. I loathe myself for it.
But I fear there is absolutely no way for me to express myself appropriately without sounding like a pretentious, self-indulgent prat. I'm not in love with classical music like a snob. In fact, don't like or hate it any more then any other genre. I'm not devoted to musicals or stage numbers either. I don't hate pop music for the sake of it being new and I don't hate indie music for being hipster trash. I like music because it sounds good. But for some reason, the lord hath smote me over the years, and I will never understand why I cannot even express the most basic of musical sounds without making people run for the bathroom vomiting, hands clapped over their bleeding ears, or peform even the most basic of dance steps without making people cough up a lung in laughter.
"I'd love to be able to dance and sing. Not professionally. Just when everyone else does."
-Stephen Fry
None of this really is pertinent to anything. But I feel like it has a lot to do with why I've always felt apart. I have expectations of myself. Dancing? Singing? How horribly embarrassing that you cannot do these things, Jake. It represents a greater feeling why I have always felt totally, entirely unable to let go of anxiety, why I have always felt like an 'other' to the crowd - why I have always poked fun at those who are brave enough to do it from the sidelines (and here I cast an errant look at you, dear reader).
And it's not even because of my appearance. I couldn't give a damn about the way I look. My hair is summer-short and a dark blonde, my eyes are blue (not dreamily so, but it matters not), my stubble is trimmed and I don't try to grow ridiculous facial hair that is both out of my reach and age. I weigh about a hundred and seventy pounds (75kg to Australians), wihout being skinny and while seeming to retain most of the litheness that marks me out as 'attractive' to some poor, unfortunate girls. I don't have a public speaking phobia, either. No doubt I would be the envy of many with image problems, and no doubt some of you shake your heads in disbelief at my rediculous-ness, if I might use such a word.
Self-consciousness. What an awful thing to give a young man.
And to hell with music too. Lovely, awful, terrific, terrible, superb stuff.
But it's not all bad. That apartness - that desperate physical shame and self-loathing - it's not entirely awful. Without it, I would have never found the ability to joke - the precision technique of language that inspires happiness. I wouldn't have ever wrote, either. I wouldn't even have lived through a quarter of the stupid, mad, dumb experiences that have created me as I am. You need not pity me, only relate to me.
We return to our lovely metaphor. The anguish of messing up socially. Perhaps you can all relate to this one, if not my long-winded song and dance about song and dance.
Terrible? Yes. Unwarranted? Yes. Difficult, yes. Not even akin to my deepest anxiety with music, yes. Necessary to develop us as people?
Positively.
Postal Secret: Rarity has the right idea about how to tackle things that aren't 'your style'.
Also: this blog is 1 minute off from unintentional greatness.
Damnit.
Long blog post is long...
So essentially you're hating something because you cannot participate in it.
The logic is gone from your mind i'm afraid.
816215 Two thousand, two hundred and fourty-one words.
And you will not skim any of it.
Or else.
t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQw-mVfR0RbR_J2zWM-q7wGIrwMZEhTMTfTce7On7pi3zTrD61E
816224
Did you even read this?
I don't get this. I spend fifty percent of the words talking about how fucking -amazing- music is.
Unless you simply did not read it, in which case I urge you to do so.
816301 It's hard to tell because all you did was contradict yourself the entire wall of text.
"I love it"
"I hate it"
"I love it"
"Hate it."
etc.
816304
I changed the title.
Satisfied?
Furthermore; I only said I hated it in the last half. It was a concise train of thought, I didn't flip-flop like a fish out of water.
OMC lol I understand you perfectly. I too can not even sing Happy Birthday. Even though I've collected thousands and thousands of songs, and more every day, I can not sing. The only therapy I have is once in a while I take a long drive alone and sing as much as I want. I find that being alone and concentrating on something else both gives me the pleasure of singing and also not being able to tell how badly I'm doing. This, however, is what gives me the courage to once in a while attempt to sing in front of others. Mostly I get odd stares and stop immediately, but like I said, the therapy works.
Meh. I can't really do any of the shit I think is cool. Anytime anyone appreciates something I do it's like my birthday.
816355
I can hum the lyrics and pretend not to hear myself, though.
Oh god, I can't even sing to myself in the car without quailing off in fear that someone will hear me.
iPods are the greatest. You put in your headphones, listen to them, shout as loud as you want, think you're in tune and totally not be. But you can't hear yourself, so it's all good.
816566
Dude no way. If I was wearing earphones I'd be completely paranoid about someone hearing me. I'd be checking over both shoulders every minute.
Writer, I just have one thing to say in this. I do music for my parish and school. And honestly it comes down to this:
If you enjoy it, revel in it. DON'T beat yourself up about keys, melodies and rhythms. Let it ring out and let it move in you. Just because you think it's bad singing or rhythm doesn't truly mean it is.(If I sound preachy or sappy, I apologize). DON'T stop enjoying and partaking in music, revel in your unique way you interpret and perform music. Art and writing isn't my strong point but I still partake on occasion (Seriously, look at my rubbish /on my DA page(sorry if this looks like a plug)).
Let the music take hold, ignore the so called 'issue' of off tempos and bad keys. Just sing out and have fun.
Sincerely,
Alovard
The way I've tried to explain it to my loved ones is this:
Imagine that before all organisms are conceived, they exist in a dimension where they must enter a specific door to be born into a specific species. I was supposed to have opened the blue jay, pterodactyl, bacterium or something door, but I screwed up and walked through the human door by mistake.
Also it seems that the majority of my fellow humans must have been born with an instructional manual on how to be human. But I never got the manual. So this has been an exercise in furious note taking.
817229
BUT I CAN'T ;_;