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April 17, 2003
No Language, Just Sound Is All We Need Know
I love listening to music very, very loud, but only when I’m by myself. When other people are around it’s too distracting; I can’t focus on them or the music enough, and it’s really about somehow trying to be enveloped, surrounded by, somehow inside the song.
Lately I’ve been driving around listening to music from my adolescence loudly. Joy Division and the Cure have been in heavy rotation. I’m not nostalgiac and I’m not sad about being older or anything like that. It’s just that these songs affected me so deeply that there’s still something there that I don’t get from a lot of newer stuff I play.
I remember one time when I was getting a ride home from my friend Mark. He had a powder blue Ford Futura two-door. He loved Joy Division more than anyone I’ve ever known in my life. He was from my side of town, across the river, so we had lots of adventures, driving through fields and through farms, looking for anything we could find. It was on a spring day much like today, the sort that are uncommon in Texas — gray and hot and humid. I love them and miss them. We were driving the long stretch out to my dad’s house through the flood plains with both of the windows down and playing “Transmission” as loud as the little speakers would permit. I remember being genuinely moved, almost shaking, levitating, something very real. I was overcome, filled up with the song. I felt the way you are supposed to feel after taking Communion, very full of something Pure and Whole and Real.
It’s funny that the line that really hit me was “And we could dance, dance, dance dance to the radio,” because when I ask people what sort of music they listen to and they reply, “Oh, whatever’s on the radio,” I am always stunned.
Posted by pogo at April 17, 2003 01:22 PM
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Comments
I can’t tell you how many Friday nights we spent in high school cruising around Padre Island, “Digital” or “Transmission” blaring on the stereo, and us yelling along at the tops of our lungs. I quite emphatically miss that kind of experience.
Joy Division’s records were utterly perfect in form, content, and delivery — so visceral, immediate, and unironic. I can’t imagine more perfect music for adolescents, and it’s amazing that it has aged so well.
I wonder if the music would mean so much to me if I hadn’t listened to it as a teenager, and I think, yeah it would. I’m still occassionally bowled over by some new band or maybe some old band that I hadn’t heard before. But it’s harder to talk about that feeling now, because the likelihood of sharing some deep emotional connection to new music with another 28-year old — well, it’s pretty low. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; part of that has to be because we have much greater access to much more music now. We’re not trapped in our small towns, passing the same ten tapes among our little circle of outcasts. I may find a song now that I can’t stop listening to over and over, but someone else is just going to move on to the next download. It’s disheartening; you think that maybe music isn’t so fundamentally important to other folks, and you wonder what the hell is wrong with them. But of course, that’s not really the case, it’s just not *your* music that they need to hear. So it goes.
Sorry for rambling.
Posted by: jacob on April 17, 2003 04:55 PM
I like it when people ramble, you especially.
Posted by: tam on April 17, 2003 06:07 PM
i like it when jacob rumbles.
Posted by: chris on April 22, 2003 12:22 AM