It’s funny that for me, talking about music feels almost shameful. For ANYONE to talk about music should never be shameful, let’s just say that. Sure, I don’t know the internal organs of music, the ‘musicology’ of it all how music looks beneath the skin or the lineage that brought it from birth to now. That’s a fact.
I just don’t know that stuff.
It doesn’t mean I don’t understand or appreciate music though.
The thought that you can’t talk about something because you use a different language or may not be as scholarly as someone else doesn’t mean you aren’t just as passionate or understanding of it.
It’s that sort of logic that keeps people from discussing books, movies, or art openly because they don’t want to seem stupid because they ‘just like it’.
They don’t JUST like it, they feel it, deeply, they just don’t know how to tell you.
They don’t know the words to use to convey their love for the thing and, I’d wager, they worry that they’ll sound stupid if they misspeak.
We’re a culture of gatekeepers holding one another out and away from speaking about the things we love lest we sound more like a fan than an authority.
That’s ignorant.
I have loved music since I was a kid.
My parents played records and my dad sang songs from Fiddler on the Roof from time to time. I grew up hearing crooners and music from generations past but am a child of the ‘80s and have come to love that era’s music despite hating it at the time.
And lord did I hate it.
I hated the pop songs.
I hated the music trends.
I didn’t get it.
Nostalgia softens the heart though and having heard these songs over and over and over again has given me a sort of musical Stockholm syndrome.
I didn’t start appreciating my own tastes until late in the 1980s but my first purchase was Quiet Riot’s 7” for Cum on Feel the Noize, something I listened to secretly as if I needed to hide my love for the song. One of two songs I ever cared for from the band, the other being Bang Your Head.
So even as a little dude, I seemed to know my attraction to heavy metal was yet to come.
My first tapes were Megadeth’s Rust in Peace with GWAR’s Scumdogs of the Universe coming close behind it and Led Zeppelin’s Coda after that. I loved the local rock station that mourned their loss when they turned into a pop station whose first song was Wild Wild West by The Escape Club.
When I got my first stereo with a CD player I was fascinated by CDs, the expensive discs with the long boxes, and often the stupid plastic safety cases that were rarely removed. I loved the long boxes that CDs came in, wasteful as they were, because they showed the full album art and gave you something to tape to a door or put on a wall. I remember getting told to turn my music down on more than one occasion, which I suppose made me a typical young adult. I still didn’t understand music, or what I needed from it, but I knew what I liked.
My first concert was Mr. Bungle and Grotus in 1992 when I was 18 and it still ranks as one of the best shows I ever went to. As soon as I turned 18 I started going to a LOT of concerts. I was finally driving and I was starting to have friends that were into the same music I was into. The influence of friends guided my path forward with music. Clued me into bands I had never heard before and to styles I had never experienced. This was when I got deep into heavy metal. I remember going to see GWAR a few days after I graduated from high school and then the next day seeing Iron Maiden and then having the band sign my CD at an aftershow music store event.
Music and movies were everything to me then.
They were the places I could retreat to in a world I didn’t quite understand.
As a teen, I began to develop severe depression and anxiety and retreated into myself. I had my writing and that helped as a coping mechanism but it was music and movies where I hid. Music seemed to speak to my heart the things I didn’t know how to tell the world and movies were the way to get away from those feelings. In the pain expressed through music, I found my own way to try to reckon with my own feelings of loneliness, self-loathing, and depression. Did I know what notes were played to achieve the sound of the music?
No.
Did I know the musical influences that informed the way the people played?
No.
What I knew was how it made me feel and that was valid.
That is valid.
So many of us internally roll our eyes when someone comes at things with a fan’s perspective and not one removed and reserved and with a critic’s eye or ear. We try to invalidate anyone who has an emotional connection with a thing when those mere ‘fans’ often feel things that you can’t if you are standing three feet away from it. The people going to Taylor Swift shows may not be able to tell you the technical aspects of how her music is made and how she writes and records but they can tell you where they were when they heard their favorite song or how it helped them get through a hard time in their life.
They can tell you why that music matters.
And there’s part of it, the casual disdain we have for the things we don’t love or hold dear. The disdain we hold so much art in if it isn’t important to us. You see reviews sometimes that sum up a thing, say an album as derivative and pandering and poorly written and on and on and these may be true things…to that person. It may also be true that someone else may listen and be transported to a new world, or just into themselves. They may hear the best song they have ever listened to. They may be saved. They may be inspired to create something themselves.
If history and the history of criticism teach anything it’s that tastes shift and that today’s bomb is tomorrow’s classic. Think IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or any number of other films that didn’t connect with people initially but found their fans later.
Music has been a part of me for more than half of my life. As I got older I was able to go to more concerts, was able to meet new people, and experience new music. I was able to find what I love challenge it and expand it and experiment.
I was able to give myself to music.
It is my release, it is my hymn, and it is my battle cry. It speaks in a language I cannot but which I still understand. Live music lets me connect directly to that sound and to the source, to feel it move and fill me and to experience it in a way I can’t otherwise. Music is the rage-filled primal scream I cannot voice. It is the miserable sob of sorrow I don’t know how to breathe life into. We spend too much time tearing down what we all love and not simply celebrating what we love. We get caught in the thorns of our opinions, thinking they are far weightier than those of others.
I may not love what you love, nor how you love, but I love.
That’s what matters.
That something moves me is what matters, not whether it’s a heavy metal song a country song or a rap song, or something else.
This world has enough pain without creating more for people and enough baggage without weaving more for ourselves to haul around.
We have become a culture of peeping toms more interested in what’s happening in a neighbor’s bedroom than we are in what happens in ours.
Maybe we all could use a love song right about now and a reminder to give yourself to the music of life.
…c…
I don’t sing but I do podcast.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 