And Now, Back to the Music

17 Nov, 2024

I’m not sure at what point it truly started happening, but somewhere within the last five years, Music—listening to it, following its composers and performers, performing it myself in any way—ceased to inhabit a crucial space in my existence—stopped being, in fact, a real part of my life. Entering college as a student of radio, television, and film, I distinctly remember an instructor stating that around age twenty-five, people stop listening to new music. Never, eighteen-year-old me thought, shoring up some disgusted determination not to sell myself out to the forces of cultural complacency.

And I did hold out for quite a while, rolling along with the competition to be more in the indie-scene know than any of the other cred-laden hipsters; I even outlasted the point in my early thirties when more recent surveys say people start giving up and sticking with what’s familiar.¹ Whatever the cause, though, where I’m concerned, something doesn’t fit with any age along the given spectrum, because I didn’t just start falling back to tunes of the past: I stopped listening, period. I’ve written before about how, during COVID, I was unable to bear any broadcast sound that contained words—meaning mostly news, but also including music; I’d keep the radio set on the classical station, but if opera or lieder popped up, I was out.² That terrible couple of years may have triggered this more drastic development, because even after we came out of the worst of it, I no longer found myself sitting and tuning in to anything and enjoying just being there.

I’ve never been able to listen to music, or anything else, while writing, reading, or concentrating on tasks requiring more focus than knitting a hat. And I’ve never enjoyed sticking anything into my ears that involves overwhelming all their little parts with amplified sound they weren’t designed to bear—a good preference, given the fact that whether on the train or just walking, I want to hear what’s around me. And it could just be that in a world starved for silence, whether literal or metaphorical, I’m trying to grab a slice of said stillness in any way I can.

In the last year or so, though, I’ve made a conscious effort to bring music back into my life—and so far, it’s been limited to post-workout stretching, just a few songs’ worth of whatever’s playing on NewSounds, KCRW, KEXP, WFUV, or GDS.FM. All of those stations are focused on eclectic combinations of new and old; whether the music stems from the present or before my bout of cold musical turkey, it’s never been about reverting back to what formed me as an adolescent and young adult, when, not having the words or the wisdom to even begin offering original expressions of what I felt or thought, I had to rely on someone else’s lyrics and style of performing them to serve as substitutes.

But a couple of days ago, Destroyer’s “It’s Gonna Take an Airplane” started forcing itself into my head—not only because I realized I’d better renew my passport now than wait any longer, but also due to a lingering connection to an email I sent to a friend abroad the day after the election. Its subject heading, “I can’t do this,” needed no elaboration. Already filled as I’d been for the past few years with low-grade anxiety, thanks to my country’s lack of social programs like healthcare and etc., the prospect of having to deal with, maybe even struggle to survive, the wave of mean-spirited insanity that awaits, my message was more or less a statement of drooping surrender to the place and time in which fate’s stuck me. The song in my head, though, seems to be shaping the best attempt I can make of acknowledging the situation—there’s no getting out of it—and trying to rouse myself out of something more helpful to self and others than self-protective numbness or cynicism. Witness this chorus:

It's gonna take an airplane
To get me off the ground
I don't blame anyone who isn't sticking around
Cause when you stick around (when you stick around!)
People like to put things in the ground³

I’d love to be in a more mature, sane, caring place than the one that’s always seemed to enjoy putting things—other countries, its own citizens, the natural world—in the ground. But renewed passport or no, I also realize no one’s going to welcome those of us not in possession of tons of money to take up residence in their land while my own makes it that much more difficult for the rest of the planet to go on. And the “this” I told my friend I can’t do unfortunately entails any number of tasks, including finding words, talking, doing what’s required to get through it with some sort of self-respect and connection to other people intact.

In then-Czechoslovakia, a rock band called Plastic People of the Universe was jailed for what the government deemed its danger to the regime.⁴ All the group’s discordance and clarinet shrieks were probably risky to listeners’ ears, but were very much part of what fueled the cultural and then, after their imprisonment, trial, and championing by Václav Havel, political needs of the underground world trying to eke out some form of bearable existence. They were voicing thoughts and feelings, even if not necessarily in words, that many people might not have had the ability or courage to formulate on their own. And I’ve thought more about the band’s shrill output in the past couple of days, as Destroyer’s been taking its mellow stroll through my head, than I have in the past fifteen years.

In the US, the newish national existential turn seems, among other things, to be in the direction of early, inarticulate adolescence—and so it’s fitting that I might be making my slow way back to music, to allow those who can express some accurate sense of place, time, spirit, and emotion—whether now or through the voice of past experience—to throw us a bone of sense. Much as I’d like to hole up among my books for the next four (or more) years and let the world undermine its own and others’ dignity and wellbeing, I’m very much going to have to “do” all those things I told my friend I just can’t. I’ve never believed music was some frivolous luxury, and I’ve especially missed making music with others, being with each other as we enjoy what we’re doing, even if not explicitly talking about the thing we’re engaged in, or anything else for that matter. I’ve no idea where I could find, say, a welcoming non-church-based choir these days, but I can at least start venturing into melodies and harmonies, simply listening again, and taking another look at the ways music might continue to be, or take on new ways of proving itself, essential.

Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!