Long before much of anything else, this blog was about music. I have about 743 other things I should be doing besides writing about music, but that's adulthood and this is my continued attempt to avoid it.
When I was young, I listened to a lot of different music. I think of The Smiths and The Cure and Kate Bush and Squeeze, but really, I listened to anything I could get into my ears. I think I might have been looking for home, looking for a place where I fit, or maybe looking for the words to say what I was feeling. The way we talk nowadays about the representation of women and people of color in the media and film, I was looking for something even more specific in music. It was a lot to ask out of songs, and most of the time, they fell short, but I think I wound up stitching them together into a mosaic, an endless mixtape to help me define myself.
There are songs that will always remain specific. I'll never hear Camper Van Beethoven and not be 15 again, in my friend JJ's car, breeze blowing into our hair as we blasted this song on our way to her parent's summer home, hollering about taking the skin heads bowling. I'll never listen to Edie Brickell's Circle without being 16 in my room, having one of my episodes (as I would later characterize them), feeling hopeless about everything. Chiquitita will always remind me of my masi and the way she sometimes wrapped her arm around me when I was probably 7 or 8, as if to say she was on my side when no one else was. I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I heard Public Enemy's Fight the Power, or saw Pearl Jam sing Alive, or heard Nirvana on the radio. Those are crystal clear, distilled down memories, little portals back in time.
But then there are all these songs, because I was listening to everything, songs that were background music, stitched into the fabric of pop culture and pervading into our collective conscience. Some are ever present- Michael Jackson and Prince are never going anywhere as far as I'm concerned. Some are stuck in the past- a beloved past, but the past nonetheless. And some songs are timeless, but time does change them.
I recently main-lined the final season of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, which is a mystifyingly beautiful show that smartly gave in to the power of the friendship between two women on the show. They were not romantically connected, and they were not even like-minded. They were both really smart, they both had their own talents. Their clashes were not about men, and what bound them together was not about that either. I think it may have been one of the few dramas ever produced in which these two women's entire dynamic rested on their work.
Maybe it does not resonate for everyone because a lot of people work to live. Work is the thing that allows some people to do the things they really want to do with their family, their loved ones, themselves. Work, to steal from Halt and Catch Fire itself, is "the thing that gets you to the thing." And if that's how you feel, then you would watch this show and wonder at the tragedy of two women wasting so much time and energy banging their head against various metaphorical brick walls.
But some of us live to work. For some of us, work is part of who we are. And the beauty of Halt and Catch Fire is that it does not go the Mad Men route of translating that to mean 'alone and unable to make any social connections.' One of the women is brilliant, a loner in some senses, but on the other hand holds those connections she does have so dearly that it hurts her moreso when she loses friends. The other woman is also brilliant, but is more pragmatic, and is the woman trying 'to have it all,' with a husband and children and a career, with predictably varying degrees of success. But what's great is that even though these two women work together and then don't work together, the show is aware that both of these women need their work. You just don't see this on television in a way that feels this unapologetic, this realistic.
If all of that had not been enough, the soundtrack to that last season was littered with all the songs of my youth, but none hit me as hard as the sneak attack of Dire Straits' So Far Away. It's played at a somber moment on the show, and it just took the first few bass notes to plunge a dagger deep into my heart. I wasn't a rabid Dire Straits fan, I didn't own all their records, I wasn't reading every bit of information on Mark Knopfler I could dig up. But their music was just ever present in my teenage years. I didn't even notice that it had taken up residence deep in my heart until that record started spinning on the show.
It's not always something you can put into words and maybe you shouldn't. The show uses Solsbury Hill later in the season to good effect, but it didn't pack the same punch, because, no offense to Peter Gabriel, but that song has been plastered across plenty of montages on television and film- like Leonard Cohen (and most memorably Jeff Buckley)'s Hallelujah, it's been used in ways that have made it harder to think of those songs in a personal way. Strangely enough, though, the use of So Far Away in this particular instance actually elevated the song beyond the show. The show uses it as people are packing. A character has died, but the song plays through the house while each person, alone, is in a separate place dealing with their demons
As the song played, my heart squeezed, thinking about life, thinking about when I first heard that song and how I hear it now. How alone I felt then, and how alone I feel now, but in such very different ways. The song is about missing someone, but because it was released in the 80s, there's this odd juxtaposition of Mark Knopfler's lamenting vocals and this light-hearted, catchy slide guitar and synth. When it was first released back in the 80s and when I was hearing it later as a teenager, I think it failed to light a spark in me because a teenager cannot understand that feeling, that kind of sadness that comes with a smile.
The song is about missing someone, being separated from them. Nowhere in the song does Knopfler propose doing anything about it. Which makes sense- he's a musician, writing from the road, undoubtedly. And you can't be Mark Knopfler and not live to work.
I'm writing all of this as I sit down to study for board exams, while juggling teaching, treating patients and conducting research. The ball that gets dropped, more often than not, in this situation is family, friends, loved ones. And it sucks, sometimes it really and truly does, and I wish I had more time to spend with the people I love and to cultivate new relationships. There are people I have lost in the process of pursuing my dreams and I miss them. More than once, I've wondered if it was worth it. It was not always one-sided; increasingly, in this world with all of its technology, we seem like we are in touch but are actually just friends on Facebook. We get older and get lost in our own little sphere of responsibilities and time constraints. There are so many reasons we're so far away from each other. But it doesn't mean we weren't connected together once. Maybe we will be again.
When I was young, I listened to a lot of different music. I think of The Smiths and The Cure and Kate Bush and Squeeze, but really, I listened to anything I could get into my ears. I think I might have been looking for home, looking for a place where I fit, or maybe looking for the words to say what I was feeling. The way we talk nowadays about the representation of women and people of color in the media and film, I was looking for something even more specific in music. It was a lot to ask out of songs, and most of the time, they fell short, but I think I wound up stitching them together into a mosaic, an endless mixtape to help me define myself.
There are songs that will always remain specific. I'll never hear Camper Van Beethoven and not be 15 again, in my friend JJ's car, breeze blowing into our hair as we blasted this song on our way to her parent's summer home, hollering about taking the skin heads bowling. I'll never listen to Edie Brickell's Circle without being 16 in my room, having one of my episodes (as I would later characterize them), feeling hopeless about everything. Chiquitita will always remind me of my masi and the way she sometimes wrapped her arm around me when I was probably 7 or 8, as if to say she was on my side when no one else was. I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I heard Public Enemy's Fight the Power, or saw Pearl Jam sing Alive, or heard Nirvana on the radio. Those are crystal clear, distilled down memories, little portals back in time.
But then there are all these songs, because I was listening to everything, songs that were background music, stitched into the fabric of pop culture and pervading into our collective conscience. Some are ever present- Michael Jackson and Prince are never going anywhere as far as I'm concerned. Some are stuck in the past- a beloved past, but the past nonetheless. And some songs are timeless, but time does change them.
I recently main-lined the final season of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, which is a mystifyingly beautiful show that smartly gave in to the power of the friendship between two women on the show. They were not romantically connected, and they were not even like-minded. They were both really smart, they both had their own talents. Their clashes were not about men, and what bound them together was not about that either. I think it may have been one of the few dramas ever produced in which these two women's entire dynamic rested on their work.
Maybe it does not resonate for everyone because a lot of people work to live. Work is the thing that allows some people to do the things they really want to do with their family, their loved ones, themselves. Work, to steal from Halt and Catch Fire itself, is "the thing that gets you to the thing." And if that's how you feel, then you would watch this show and wonder at the tragedy of two women wasting so much time and energy banging their head against various metaphorical brick walls.
But some of us live to work. For some of us, work is part of who we are. And the beauty of Halt and Catch Fire is that it does not go the Mad Men route of translating that to mean 'alone and unable to make any social connections.' One of the women is brilliant, a loner in some senses, but on the other hand holds those connections she does have so dearly that it hurts her moreso when she loses friends. The other woman is also brilliant, but is more pragmatic, and is the woman trying 'to have it all,' with a husband and children and a career, with predictably varying degrees of success. But what's great is that even though these two women work together and then don't work together, the show is aware that both of these women need their work. You just don't see this on television in a way that feels this unapologetic, this realistic.
If all of that had not been enough, the soundtrack to that last season was littered with all the songs of my youth, but none hit me as hard as the sneak attack of Dire Straits' So Far Away. It's played at a somber moment on the show, and it just took the first few bass notes to plunge a dagger deep into my heart. I wasn't a rabid Dire Straits fan, I didn't own all their records, I wasn't reading every bit of information on Mark Knopfler I could dig up. But their music was just ever present in my teenage years. I didn't even notice that it had taken up residence deep in my heart until that record started spinning on the show.
It's not always something you can put into words and maybe you shouldn't. The show uses Solsbury Hill later in the season to good effect, but it didn't pack the same punch, because, no offense to Peter Gabriel, but that song has been plastered across plenty of montages on television and film- like Leonard Cohen (and most memorably Jeff Buckley)'s Hallelujah, it's been used in ways that have made it harder to think of those songs in a personal way. Strangely enough, though, the use of So Far Away in this particular instance actually elevated the song beyond the show. The show uses it as people are packing. A character has died, but the song plays through the house while each person, alone, is in a separate place dealing with their demons
As the song played, my heart squeezed, thinking about life, thinking about when I first heard that song and how I hear it now. How alone I felt then, and how alone I feel now, but in such very different ways. The song is about missing someone, but because it was released in the 80s, there's this odd juxtaposition of Mark Knopfler's lamenting vocals and this light-hearted, catchy slide guitar and synth. When it was first released back in the 80s and when I was hearing it later as a teenager, I think it failed to light a spark in me because a teenager cannot understand that feeling, that kind of sadness that comes with a smile.
The song is about missing someone, being separated from them. Nowhere in the song does Knopfler propose doing anything about it. Which makes sense- he's a musician, writing from the road, undoubtedly. And you can't be Mark Knopfler and not live to work.
I'm writing all of this as I sit down to study for board exams, while juggling teaching, treating patients and conducting research. The ball that gets dropped, more often than not, in this situation is family, friends, loved ones. And it sucks, sometimes it really and truly does, and I wish I had more time to spend with the people I love and to cultivate new relationships. There are people I have lost in the process of pursuing my dreams and I miss them. More than once, I've wondered if it was worth it. It was not always one-sided; increasingly, in this world with all of its technology, we seem like we are in touch but are actually just friends on Facebook. We get older and get lost in our own little sphere of responsibilities and time constraints. There are so many reasons we're so far away from each other. But it doesn't mean we weren't connected together once. Maybe we will be again.
