posted
I don't just love music. I need it like the body needs vitamins. Like I need oxygen or water. IF i'm not listening to it most of the day I'll make up songs with ridiculous lyrics like-
Baby you can wear your labcoat anytime that you want just make sure it's sterolized and you know I like intellectual babes and i want you with your glasses on
or the hit song Your @$$ is so nice...
Your @$$ is so nice i want to look at it and grab it and touch it and feel it
well, you get the point.
When I was a little kid I used to make up songs all the time and walk down the street humming them. Having been mostly raised by my grandmother I grew up on a steady diet of instrumental songs and religious songs that were slow and had pretty music. I read books like bible reading for the home and part of the medical book without the icky diseases. I mostly wondered why there were no red keys on the piano when I saw that colour in music so much, like in various TV theme shows. Everything from the theme to Who's the Boss to a show I think was called Finders of Lost Love or something, or at least that was what they sang in the theme song. Red wasn't the only colour I saw dreamlike in my mind. There was the mild as milk C major and the grey of D minor and so many others. I was a weird child growing up. I never felt like I completely fit in. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the times I spent in the hospital from the age of 2-5 because of the tumor on my hand. I don't remember much about it. Just the strange lump there and being told not to spin around because I might burst it in MS or ending up back in NY with the smell of goldenseal as my hand was bathed in it. There was the nausea and throwing up from the chemo and the smell of bandages and my mothers faded shirt with the peeled letters as I was taken into the operating room and the almost magical way my hand would change. From being covered completely in dark brown to just this little spot. My hand is small but it looks cheerful. When I was a kid I was constantly being asked about it and my uncle told me to just say I had an operation. Many of the kids would react like this-"ewwwwwww" But I like my left hand. It's unique. I lived in my own world mostly made out of stories and imaginary companions. I was shy and had very few friends. I was a lot more religious back then, even though I wondered where the dinosaurs went. But all the interesting changes took place when I became an adolescent and realized several things- That this thing I did involving music was really cool and unique. And also that my religion was getting a bit too tight for me like an old skin. I grew up Seventh Day Adventist and hearing about the end of the world. It was frightening. The thought of the sea turning into blood, and being covered with boils, deadly plagues, the Whore of Babylon and the fall of Civilization. My grandmother mostly when to church when we went to New Jersey. She did not like the Haitians and Jamaicans that went to the nearby churches so we stayed home on Saturday and listened to religious music and I read these books with their fascinating pictures. I had a love affair with the library. A terrible one that lead to me taking out 50 books and becoming deliquent. My father got me my first library card. I'd devour Choose Your Own Adventure books and folktales and so many others. Back in the seventh grade, finally no longer deliquent on my library card I took out two very interesting books at different times. Wise Child and The Seventh Son. These books would change my paradigm along with Madeline L'engel's A Wrinkle in Time, Wind in the Door and Swiftly Tilting Planet. These books told me that there was another way to think about things... about my place in the world. Also I ended up with this weird sense of smell after reading a Swiftly Tilting Planet. Associating smells with songs and also with people and even with books. I spent adolesence reading about paganism and witch craft, loving the holistic approach, the idea that everything is interconnected. Then one day I discovered Rumi. Who could resist lines like- I would love to kiss you The price of kissing is your life
Now my loving is running towards my life screaming What a bargain, let's buy it.
It was Coleman Bark reading his versions of the poems over the backdrop of soft music. To me it was a taste of heaven, like dark chocolate melting in my mouth. Sometimes a person can almost feel themselves change. Tucking into a crysalis and emmerging with brand new wings. It was hard to know what I was... It's too large to just put into words. Rumi describes it best in his poem Only Human. This metamorphosis lead to many interesting fights at Thanksgiving time. And then I got into rock and roll At first I hated it. I thought rock and roll wsa nothing but a bunch of long haired men singing about girls and making horrible noises like they were tormenting cats. But when I heard Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana, sitting downstairs a day after Thanksgiving and trying to sneak in a bit of television before I'd have to turn it off... It changed my life, the sounds of the guitars and Kurt's rough but passionate voice. Before then I had mostly been listening to acoustic jazz like Acoustic Alchemy and the Rippingtons and opera. My music tastes were a bit embarassing Most of the other kids like R and B and rap. I hated rap. IT was countermelodic and noisy and had waaaay too many cuss words in it. The lyrics would make me cringe in horror. I also listened to a lot of Anita Baker after I moved back to New York after living with my mother for 2 years. But this... the raging drums, the feedback, the shocking (To me!) lyrics was like nothing else I'd heard before. I discovered Pearl Jam and fell in love with their music. It became the soundtrack of my high school through college years I was shedding the old skin. I started to believe that race really doesn't exist and neither does sexuality when you think about it... As I was almost completely asexual myself. I read so many different books everything from Stranger at the Gate to Sandman. I was becoming a shapeshifter. Soon I went to college, listening to Pearl Jam's album No Code as I rode the bus alone, staring outside at the full moon. College would be another life changing experience.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Thanks, Syn. I'm glad I got to see your landmark, finally. Does the story go on, or will we have to wait for another 1000 posts?
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
ok... i'll probably do that sometime later as there are so many musicians (such as Dir en grey) that i worship. Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I don't see colors when I experience music, but I do sense motion. Not metaphorically, but in a real, almost physical sense. I wonder how unusual that is.
posted
Yes. I want to play piano, but my fingers don't reach all the keys on my left hand and I'd like to eventually learn to play saxaphone but until then there is singing to consider.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Ever thought of learning some theory? Even if your hands can't play the music, you can write it and have it heard. Granted, today's music is so simple as to not require being put to staff, but if you want to make the most vivid music, using as much range (and thus, knowing as much theory) would be quite useful.
Posts: 779 | Registered: Dec 2003
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