Thursday, June 09, 2011

11:36 PM | The Music That Speaks For You

Ah, my life thus far. The universe does mix it up for you, doesn't it. It puts in a measure of melancholy even in times of triumphs. Maybe it's to remind you that life is really an orchestra of sorts -- it takes all kinds of instruments to make the music hum the way it should.

I use music as a metaphor here because it seems to be the best refuge of all: it speaks for you. Without overly sentimentalizing it, your favorite music does carry your hopes and your loves and your devastations and your anger quite efficiently, and amplifies for you the exquisite drama of it all -- your own soundtrack to a private psychoanalysis, so to speak.



Right now, I am sad and I am drowning the things around me with sound only I can hear and that seeps to my bones like a beautiful kind of anger. I'm listening to The Temper Trap's Conditions album. Their music telegraphs for me an urgency in their beat that underlines a kind of bittersweet knowing. "Drum Song," to cite a particular track, is majestic in its score -- an achingly danceable bit that somehow urges you to reach from deep down, from those recesses of sorrow, all that manic energy urging you to dance and dance and dance -- perhaps on your own, in the solo comforts of your own room -- until everything, all that pain, flings away from you, or gets reduced to a dull throbbing in your chest that you mistake for your heart, the sweat that you wipe away and the breathlessness that you feel being everything that constitute a vocabulary for some things you desperately want to say -- or shout. To shout out, for example, that you love him but he does not care.

But you don't shout.

You just dance and dance and dance instead, the music becomes your dervish, the pain something you tell yourself you will have to live with like the endless refrain of a stupid, marvelous song.

Labels: life, love, music

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