My Life in Music (and vice versa)

 

Music of my Life (and vice versa)

I took one of the Internet app tests that promises to tell you the one exact adjective that describes you perfectly. No I didn’t. I figured it out all by myself. And it’s none of the adjectives either my friends or detractors would have identified, because it is so simple, so reductive to essence. It’s not brilliant, brave, arrogant, messianic, creative, insightful, prescient, misanthropic, deluded, ferocious, cynical, virtuous, moral, narcissistic, cruel, idealistic, evil, patriotic, white, American, Scottish, Satanic, or Christian. 

It’s ‘insistent.’ That’s it. Not a philosophical thing. A rhythm thing. It’s a state of being that pushes. Constantly. Pushes itself, others, against tides and currents, against obstacles, against stillness, against everything that tries to stop or fall, against entropy. It just insists itself forward and through to some other state of being. 

An abstraction? No. Deeper than that. A force opposed to stasis and deviations from movement that only look or sound like movement. Music is perhaps the best way to perceive stark insistence. It’s taken me a long time to get here. I had to give up Mozart and the Stones as anything but diversions. Great and exciting diversions but not on point. There is a music of insistence that I have come to realize is the basis of my being. It conforms to no category of behavior, politics, or sex, unless and until any of those obstruct the state of insistence. 

Here is the music. You’ll see it crosses all boundaries and genres. The songs, the compositions, are about wholly different things from one another. The only attribute they share is that progression, that suspense, building on a line toward breakthrough or completion or death. It can be a whisper or a war cry or a romantic lament, but it is always moving, building, increasing momentum, with no real melodic distractions from its ends. Melody is in this music only a tool of movement. At times it may seem monotonic but it isn’t. Anymore than a wave or a tsunami is a flat force. Listen.

Heroes, Peter Gabriel

After the Storm, Mumford and Sons

Walking in the Rain, Ronnie Spector

Redemption Day, Johnny Cash

Ain’t Got No, Nina Simone

1916, Motörhead 

Sweet Jane, Cowboy Junkies

The Hours, Philip Glass

Red Rain, Peter Gabriel

Porcelain, Moby

Ulalume, Poe

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, 3rd Mvmt, Gorecki

Bringer of War, Holst

The Mission, Morricone

Soundtrack from Mary Shelley, Amelia Warner

Suo Gan, Welsh Boy’s Choir

I know you mostly won’t get it. I have a whole other unwritten post about ego, superego, and id. Consider ‘insistence’ my id. The most basic, basal, hard-wired part of me that just refuses to stop, ever, even though the higher parts of my conscious and subconscious know you’re all not worth a damn. Why I can no longer sleep, eat, or think without watching, hearing, and believing in the sanctity of this bit of digital prestidigitation. He’s older than I am, and I can only play, dully, with written words, while he can play, delightfully and intimately, with the music of the spheres. I don’t have time enough to catch up.

Look at him. All that’s left of him is insistence. He’s a still life photograph but for his fingers. And what comes welling from the depths of otherwise silence? Everything. Everything.

And just because… he’s perfect at this too.

The whole album is here. You just have to play with it a bit.