Buckdancer's Choice

One of those songs, #13

Occasionally I do posts on old songs and where they fit in my life. The first one was about the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” and then I did one about Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby The Rain Must Fall,”  then one about The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then one about “We Built This City,” and then one about The Who’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It/See Me Feel Me,” then “!aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er'yehT,” and then “Time” by Tom Waits and then “I Just Want to See His Face” by the Stones and then “Darkness of the Edge of Town” by Springsteen and next “Jole Blon” by Moon Mullican and then “Another You” by The Seekers and after that “The Blackboard of My Heart.”

Here’s another.

My wife and I both like a lot of different kinds of music, but we part company on rock, by which I mean post-Elvis guitar-driven music, possibly excluding the Beatles but certainly not the Stones, nor Led Zeppelin, nor the Ramones and so on. Whenever I enthuse about this sort of music, she tells me that she didn’t grow up in the United States and so has no affinity for or interest in it.

For a long time this puzzled and frankly offended me, as I took her to mean that I didn’t actually have any taste to speak of when it came to popular music, and only responded to cultural cues and social pressure like the dumb kids in Bye Bye Birdie or other derisive parodies of fandom. 

But over time I’ve come to understand that all our feelings about music have some of this element — not because my music or anyone else’s is only a shopworn totem signifying affiliations and anxieties, like stickers on a neurotic teenager’s notebook, but, on the contrary, because music is so pure that you can see straight through it into your feelings, just as sublime or as painful as they were when you first had them. Like Schopenhauer said, the other arts speak only of shadows, but music speaks of the thing itself.