I had originally hoped to share a 3speak video last night but it got stuck in the uploading process and I now I have something I want to talk about.
I occupied a very strange role in the social structure of my elementary, junior high and high school. Over the years, I had friends who were popular and I was very curious about people so I was definetly not an outcast in the traditional sense. I was called a “weirdo” quite often though.
I was bullied but only for a short time because eventually the other bullies turned on the bully in favor of me.
In some ways I fit the description of what bullies were looking for. I wasn’t all that interested in sports and my family wasn’t part of the rich circle that dominated school politics (and parent politics) but I had a rich inner world and it made people respect me to some degree.
I didn’t know anything about politics but I guess you could say I had alligned myself with enough different factions in school popularity politics that most people didn’t want to mess with me.
I had access to every group in school, from the jocks to the stoners to the band geeks to the punk rockers to the preppy good students. At some point I was part of almost every circle but I didn’t feel right in any of them and so I would jump around a lot.
Usually I was called a “weirdo” in a playful or loving way but it was often enough. I didn’t know what to make of it. What the hell was weird anyway?
Each group seemed to have a different definition and the only thing that felt consistent about it was that weird meant “different from us”.
I guess this set the tone for the rest of my life and is what caused me to want to explore different cultures eventually.
But the things I got called weird for were usually baffling to me. Some music I was into, or my takeaway from a movie being a bit different from others, the things I was curious about. Nothing extreme! That’s why it bothered me so much to be called weird. If I was into something extreme it might be justified.
I wasn’t asking to give my friends a foot rub for no reason, I wasn’t dressing in some daring way or stalking anyone or into some obscure hobby that no one around me had ever heard of or obsessed with anything.
But when people would ask my favorite song it was hard to answer. “What the hell is that?” “Never heard of it” followed with a look of disappointment. That’s why I was called weird
“Isn’t it weirder that your favorite song is something everyone else knows? There is so much music out there!”
That kind of response usually made people annoyed so I kept it to myself. “Why are you so difficult”. A lot of people thought I was just trying to be cool or something.
I was genuinely curious.
I made friends with some kids from a nearby town who had mohawks and nose piercings and when they came to visit me at my school my classmates were baffled. How could I hang out with the kids from choir and a few sports guys and these guys? What sense did that make?
Of course it did and does still make perfect sense to me. Connecting over shared values doesn’t mean we have to share every single value.
Some friends I like because they are loyal and make me laugh. Some friends I like because they are fascinating and passionate. Some share similar hobbies and so we have many things to talk about. Why should I chose one kind over another?
Each relationship is unique.
Each person is unique.
At some point I would refer to myself as strange, not because I actually thoguht I was strange but more as a disclaimer because the stuff I am into isn’t always popular or easy to understand. But all of it has substance.
Eventually I realized that even my boundaries were quite limited.
The most easily identifiable moment was when I first heard Tom Waits album Rain Dogs. “Who the fuck actually enjoys this” I thought. It sounded like an old man who has smoked too many cigarettes and is babbling nonsense in a drunken stupor.
But because of my curiosity and desire to understand things, I listened 3 times, put it down, still confused, and one week later I got a craving to listen and then I couldn’t put it down.
This is how it often goes with things that are new to you. They don’t make sense when you try to evaluate them through your current framework, but they make you feel things you haven’t felt before or force you to look at things you aren’t used to looking at.
Bjork opened my eyes to music as an artistic and experimental exploration , and Tom Waits introduced me to the joy of challenging myself to understand something new or “weird” to me:
It wasn’t them exclsuively. There were others whose albums I listened to and connected with just 2 or 3 songs while not fully understanding the bulk of their work until much later.
I remember laughing out loud when i first heard both Xiu Xiu and Animal Collective. But a desire to understand the appeal led to me actually falling in love with certain songs and appreciating even the stuff that didn’t hit.
This music was very very weird to me at first. Now, I merely recognize that it’s weird to some people. It doesn’t feel very weird to me at all. If anything I am impressed that they could discover such sounds when so few people were doing similar things, perhaps inheriting from New Wave and Psychedlia to some extent.
Eventually I found my tastes changing. I started to listen to less and less melodic, polished, perfect music because it often felt fake.
I still love a good melody, but I learned how to feel music in a more sensitive and sensual way than just getting songs stuck in my head.
A song getting stuck in your head is an attractive face or body. But there are songs and there are people who can change the course of your life or show you life’s secrets.
Do you just want to jerk off in your room or do you want to feel all the magic that life has to offer?
Sometimes it takes an acceptance and acknowledgement of one’s pain to experience deeper and more lasting joy.
Sometimes one sound repeating over and over can put you into a trance and allow you to notice every little detail of the sounds surrounding it.
Sometimes a simple little noise in the background will be a pleasant surprise thet you only notice if you are realy keep your ears open.
Sometimes you feel difficult emotions that help you to understand your place in the world or make sense of life.
Melody can tell a story. It’s not just lyrics thet speak to you. And the coolest things about music is that you can collaborate as you listen. You can interpret the song from different angles.
What was the artist saying?
What were they hinting at through the music but not saying directly?
What context are they comong from?
What universal themes might be lurking under the surface.
When Johnny Cash covered the Nine Inch Nails songs “Hurt” we all discovered a new depth to that song thet we never knew. The song originally explored a kind of self loathing and a desire to disappear, a very difficult emotion on it’s own.
And then Cash sang the same song at the end of his life and the song became exponentially more tragic. To feel such deep feelings of regret and disappointment nearing ones final days…at face value, it’s more tragic but it can completely change the way we experience the song.
The original song can bring up some of our deepest darkest feelings to face, while the cover feels more like calling for us to make the most of our time now so thet we don’t become like this.
This week I’ve been exploring the music of Kate Bush. I have a huge list in my mind of artists I want to understand better and she’s been on it for a while.
I listened to her most popular album “Hounds of Love” and a few songs hit the spot but most of it wasn’t my cup of tea. Still i could appreciate the artistry of her song arrangements and her experimental choices, how she found things that worked even though they shouldn’t and created harmonies out of dissonance in what could only be called pop music.
Finally I heard “The Sensual World” it had me in tears. I listened twice without paying any attention to lyrics, I usually don’t at first. I find that some of the hidden meanings of songs will be lost if you focus too much on the lyrics, though they usually an important ornament.
It’s almost as if the lyrics are the words and the music is body language. The way they play off each other to give a full picture is one of the aspects of enjoying music that I think is lost to most people.
At first I felt this song was something of a prayer to nature, as many of my favorite songs are, an expression of awe and appreciation at the very fact that we are alive, with a whiff of mystery to the meaning and mechanics of it all. And then I checked the lyrics.
It’s a song of seduction but one that is in no way contradictory to my original interpretation of the song. It’s a song about playful seduction on rhe surface, but it also seems to hint that life is playing this very same game with us, teasing us with our desires only to make us work for them and framing that as somethinf beautiful and almost sexual.
The whole album is full of sexual inuendos that are actually deep statments of appreciation of the beauty in every day life. The Sensual World is an expresion of the artists worldview.
Is it weird?
I don’t care!
Yes there are bagpipes playing what to me sounds almost like arabic / gaelic fusion in an 80’s electro pop song. I guess you could call that weird if you want, by why bother? It’s only weird if you think it’s weird.
Why let that judgement distract you from it’s beauty?