(Warning:
Earworms.
This post contains multiple music links. I think they're to amusingly, entertainingly bad songs. I cannot be responsible for those who find that they're "earworms.")
I don't get blogger's block. Sometimes I get blogger's obsession, though. I've been reading a Christian book and my head's been full of Christian thoughts. This web site does specifically Christian posts on Sundays. So what to post on Friday morning? I went to Twitter to look for a topic, and found one.
What I found was a tweet about "growing up in the 1980s" in England. Out of twenty-some items on the Twit's list, two resonated with my memories of the 1980s in even the Eastern States. And the background music? "THAT is NOT eighties music!" It actually had a melody.
Actually, in the early 1980s, there was some interest in doing interesting things with melody. John McCutcheon's major album, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," came out in 1980. Mannheim Steamroller was selling well in the early 1980s. Sha La Vah was. Quirky instrumental arrangements of classic hymns and gospel songs were the new thing in the Christian music stores. Synthesizers were the new thing and some of us wanted to use them for more than bang and boom. But alllll you could ever find on the radio, except for NPR and a few university stations, was boom-bang, boom-bang.
I haaated that boom-bang sound that everyone agrees dominated 1980s pop music in the US.
I remember one Eighties song that made musical sense to me. I heard it in a bus station, changing Greyhounds in the middle of the night. It sounded burnt-out and depressed and angry all at once. It sounded like a dumped but unscrubbed ash tray in a bus station at three o'clock in the morning. But it didn't pretend to be about love; it's about a form of psychotherapy that encouraged sick, angry, depressed people to yell and pound on pillows.
It wasn't something I wanted to take home and listen to over and over, but it did sound...congruent. If all the other pop songs of the 1980s had been about pounding a pillow in a psychotherapist's clinic, I thought, they would at least have made sense.
Not surprisingly, in the 1980s most of my friends were other discontented melody-oriented musicians, many of whom I met at church groups or folk music clubs. I did attend a lot of classical and folk concerts, often in the company of teachers who were delighted that some young people weren't into "rock music."
Not that most of these older people knew what they even meant by what they said about "rock music." If they weren't paying attention to top-forty lists in each official marketing category, most of them would actually like some rock music, often the same songs and bands I liked. What they really didn't like was heavy metal. All genres of pop music in the 1980s had that boom-bang back-beat, but heavy metal was the one where the noise completely dominated any hint of a tune. Discontented young musicians and older church folk who had heard they were supposed to hate "rock music" could always agree that it was hard to tell whether you were listening to the latest heavy metal hit "song," or had been awakened by an insane garbage crew that were throwing garbage cans about while torturing dogs. Then if we slipped them a piece of rock music we liked, they'd probably agree that it was a nice bit of Anglo-folk or country-western or maybe blues, depending on the accent...A song like this one, which I remember identifying as the last good rock song, was actually enlightening, in its way, about the condition of the unsaved soul, we could get older people to agree. While sober.
It was not as if I wanted all songs to be soft or cheerful. I just thought it was obvious that the depressive, disturbing rock song linked immediately above is a song about someone who is feeling bad, whereas most Eighties songs, even if the words were about "love" or "parties," were just noise cranked out on machines by people who were probably going to succumb to brain tumors, drug overdoses, or both, probably within the year...
If for some reason I didn't want to sound like a judgmental musical misfit I'd tell people to blame my HSP hearing. I heard all the high and low notes on those heavy metal songs and hearing them all at the same time gave me a sick headache. My natural sister, who does not hear most of the high notes and has never been able to hear what most of humankind would agree the records she used to inflict on our parents actually sounded like, said being too close to any band made her ears hurt. That may have been true, too.
It was just one of so many little differences between the homes of my childhood and my natural sister's childhood. I grew up in a home that demanded complete conesnsus on every use of a valuable phonograph needle, whereas my sister grew up with desperately lonely empty-nest parents who put up with a lot worse noise than the typical Eighties parents were expected to endure.
I would probably have been forbidden to talk to any friends who had suggested that I ever listen to anything with that kind of language in it. Let alone that sound. But that's typical Eighties, I use the term advisedly, "music."
In addition to her loss of hearing my natural sister also had a certain lack of perspective. I had just dumped a guy who, well, seemed to like me more than I liked him anyway, because he got all grumpy about my lack of enthusiasm for the following song. Well, especially early in the morning, when some of his housemates were trying to sleep and I was trying to keep some sort of breakfast down.
The original Eighties version was, as I recall, louder. Also it was a few years into the present century before I found anything to like about Neil Young. Well for one thing I've heard some things about Justin Trudeau that I find disagreeable and insupportable, but it seems to me that if Canadians want to sing songs about his bad ideas they ought to be able to write their own, and if I were going to write a song about Justin Trudeau I would not address him as "Canadian Man" and thereby alienate any sympathetic listeners I might have had, all over the whole country.
So I had considered this song of glorification of violent hatecrimes against women by the Ungrateful Visitor Who Ought To Stay Home, and the breakfast, and the way this guy looked early in the morning, and I had decided that approximately two-thirds of the men in Washington were more attractive than he was. But I loved my baby sister and understood that she was not really hearing her records the way I heard them, so I very gently and tactfully suggested that she wait for me to start typing fast and then blast whatever she wanted to listen to, but not blast that Eighties sound at me while I was thinking about what to write...and she went into a full-blown Fragile-Southern-Belle Meltdown with threats of homicide and suicide and hitchhiking to California and who knows what-all.
There was something addictive about Eighties music. It was a sickness, I thought. As was shown by this red-faced screeching 150-pound child, from a decent home, who had to have remembered that when I was her age I didn't even mention it at home if I wanted to listen to Mozart because Dad didn't like "snob music" and we had to have a complete consensus.
Then the Nineties arrived, right on schedule, and I slept on my neck the wrong way after pulling a 12-hour shift in the chips factory (experience for the writer!) and woke up with 60% hearing loss on the left side, and after the panic subsided I realized that life was actually simpler that way. Now the music the slightly-younger crowd were blaring out of their blankin' bleepin' ghetto blasters still didn't sound like music, to me, but it no longer caused me pain. Now I still didn't want to get emotionally involved with any Neil Young fans, but if I were offered a really good job that involved sharing an office with one I could imagine being able to keep the job.
Now I...just about outgrew music, as the tinnitus didn't go anywhere. The composer Robert Schumann supposedly became profoundly depressed because his ears kept ringing the note A. My tinnitus never was a single clear, true note. Sometimes I've envied Schumann. It did not make me profoundly depressed but it did make me a great deal less music-oriented, as an adult.
I went through most of my adult life with this 60% hearing loss due to tinnitus on the left side. According to scientific tests my 60% hearing loss did not put me at much of a disadvantage relative to the average person, especially since it was only on one side. On the right side I still hear dog whistles.
But as noted on this web site, about two years ago, my left ear popped open and once again the world was full of painfully loud and irritating noise everywhere. The computer keyboard. I hadn't been thinking of it as clattering the way it does. The crackle of unfolding a newspaper. The faint whine solid-state electronics devices emit when they're left plugged into the wall...Dear little stapedius muscle, I thought to myself, can't you lock up to, maybe, say, about a 30% hearing loss?
Well, it did.
I ask people to repeat what they're saying less often than I did three years ago, unless I really want to try to call their attention to what they've said.
I hear electronics whine when they're plugged into the wall, again.
I can still hear myself and others singing, mostly on key, against a background of off-key dissonance ringing in my ears.
However, during the past two years, I've found myself hearing recorded music in what must be much closer to the way everyone else does.
Now when e-friends post Eighties music, I actually listen to it. It is not and will never be my favorite musical genre, but it no longer causes pain. I find it interesting to hear what probably sounds like what other people were hearing in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, a few Christians were actually earning their livings by travelling around, demonstrating how you could use special stereo devices to play certain 1970s songs backward and they'd sound like different songs, and they had (panic time!) BACK-MASKED LYRICS THAT EXPRESSED EVIL THOUGHTS.
This was true, by the way. It sounds like the stuff of which urban legends were made, but in fact some people were recording music with a track that sounded, well, amusing to somebody or other, when you played the whole thing backward. (Strangely, this fad did not sell any great number of special stereo devices that would play music backward.) The hidden message in one song was something like "Congratulations! You have discovered the secret message. Write to Box [whatever] to claim your prize." The phrase "the taste" sounds like "Satan" when played backwards, and a few people managed to write songs with back-masked tracks about Satan. Where the anti-backmasking lecturers tended to lose young people was this song.
You can hear "another one bites the dust" backward as "Decide to smoke marijuana" if you really work at it, but you can hear it as a lot of other things too. In any case, some of my friends were doing more stupid and self-destructive things, but nobody I knew did decide to smoke marijuana. So although many people I knew could agree that (1) that was a stupid song, and/or (2) Queen was a tacky band, and/or (3) "Another One Bites the Dust" might have been more popular if it had been backmasked, we had to ask: What was causing these older people to hate rock music so much?
We thought that age must cause intolerance.
Here I stand to testify that, in my cae, age has produced musical tolerance.
Enjoy your earworms, Nephews, and please use discretion about inflicting them on your various mothers, especially the one who was my darling baby sister. Though if you really want to torture her, you probably already know that most of the works of John Philip Sousa are availaboen line too...here's one that was memorable enough to be mentioned in a book you'll want to read when it is printed...
No comments:
Post a Comment