Music and memory
Jul. 30th, 2009 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerAbout a week and a half ago, I bought a Zune, because it was on sale at Woot, and because I've been decluttering and the overloaded CD racks were getting to me, and because my tech enabler lediva has been bugging me that I should for a while. I'd been avoiding getting a portable music player for a long time mostly because --well, because I don't like earphones, mostly, and I don't like being tuned out from my environment. But I noted that Microsoft has done a pretty functional FM transmitter for it, and I noticed that I'd been taking long drives listening to my Sirius radio, not on the hundreds of stations available on it, but basically only on 4 stations: contemporary jazz, 80s, 90s, and kids.
I was pretty impressed with the organizational abilities of the Zune software, once I ripped a pile of what was on those overflowing CD racks. Then I went ahead and started the 2 week free trial of the Zune Pass, Microsoft's music rental service. I've been having fun downloading all this stuff that people have told me I should listen to but never have --Polyphonic Spree, Great Big Sea -- and finding out what some artists I liked a while ago have been doing for the last few years.
And suddenly, I'm all nostalgic, downloading all the stuff I had on vinyl before CD's existed. I downloaded a pile of Blondie. And I downloaded Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell.
Bat Out of Hell was the very first record I bought on my own, with my own money, when it came out in 1977, which means I was not quite ten years old. I don't recall at all why I bought it, whether I'd heard songs on the radio, or someone had told me about it, or whether the biker chick genes from my mother that I didn't realize I had yet were starting to surface, or if I just saw the album in the store and thought the name Meat Loaf was funny or something. But I do remember listening to it over and over on my little Peter Pan turntable in my bedroom, being fascinated by the images of love and relationships it presented, nodding my head to the drums, unaware of the level to which everything on there was really tongue in cheek. I imagined sitting in a car, Paradise By the Dashboard Light-like, and I think it was the first time I realized that boys were supposed to say yes, and girls were supposed to say no.
I played it for my son, in the car, while I drove him to camp yesterday. He told me that they shouldn't really say "ain't", and that it would be funny if they called it "Bats Out of the Summerlands". He loved the sound, and utterly missed anything about the lyrics entirely.
And now I'm playing "Heart of Glass", which a boy from the Catholic school down the road from where I went to school used to play for me over the phone, while I sat on my little bed and somehow wished I could be Debbie Harry. And it makes me feel like I've been around a while, and like that's a good thing.
lediva has been bugging me that I should for a while. I'd been avoiding getting a portable music player for a long time mostly because --well, because I don't like earphones, mostly, and I don't like being tuned out from my environment. But I noted that Microsoft has done a pretty functional FM transmitter for it, and I noticed that I'd been taking long drives listening to my Sirius radio, not on the hundreds of stations available on it, but basically only on 4 stations: contemporary jazz, 80s, 90s, and kids. I was pretty impressed with the organizational abilities of the Zune software, once I ripped a pile of what was on those overflowing CD racks. Then I went ahead and started the 2 week free trial of the Zune Pass, Microsoft's music rental service. I've been having fun downloading all this stuff that people have told me I should listen to but never have --Polyphonic Spree, Great Big Sea -- and finding out what some artists I liked a while ago have been doing for the last few years.
And suddenly, I'm all nostalgic, downloading all the stuff I had on vinyl before CD's existed. I downloaded a pile of Blondie. And I downloaded Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell.
Bat Out of Hell was the very first record I bought on my own, with my own money, when it came out in 1977, which means I was not quite ten years old. I don't recall at all why I bought it, whether I'd heard songs on the radio, or someone had told me about it, or whether the biker chick genes from my mother that I didn't realize I had yet were starting to surface, or if I just saw the album in the store and thought the name Meat Loaf was funny or something. But I do remember listening to it over and over on my little Peter Pan turntable in my bedroom, being fascinated by the images of love and relationships it presented, nodding my head to the drums, unaware of the level to which everything on there was really tongue in cheek. I imagined sitting in a car, Paradise By the Dashboard Light-like, and I think it was the first time I realized that boys were supposed to say yes, and girls were supposed to say no.
I played it for my son, in the car, while I drove him to camp yesterday. He told me that they shouldn't really say "ain't", and that it would be funny if they called it "Bats Out of the Summerlands". He loved the sound, and utterly missed anything about the lyrics entirely.
And now I'm playing "Heart of Glass", which a boy from the Catholic school down the road from where I went to school used to play for me over the phone, while I sat on my little bed and somehow wished I could be Debbie Harry. And it makes me feel like I've been around a while, and like that's a good thing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 03:59 pm (UTC)Enjoy your new Zune! They're cool.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 04:31 pm (UTC)Sheesh, when I saw Meat Loaf in concert, he and the female singer added an extended repartee near the end of "Paradise" with a bunch of bad "he-said-she-said" jokes that would have been cliched on a sitcom. Then I remembered that most of the audience was drunk. Really drunk. Then the repartee made sense.
So yeah, if you think the album was hammy, Meat Loaf really hams it up in his live shows. He began ours saying, "I'm going to say 'fuck' a lot. Is that all right?"
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 05:39 pm (UTC)Music is like externally stored emotion, and like emotion, it can color any scene according to its own logic; this is what I have just rediscovered, thirty years behind the curve. It's very strange and beautiful that we now routinely carry these vast *libraries of emotion* around with us. I'm sure it's having some effect on the human condition that we just can't perceive yet.
I've heard the arguments that it's alienating, that it exacerbates the social atomization that this culture suffers from, that it denotes a retreat from reality. Maybe so. But I think it also simply underlines a phenomenon that was already there: in a public place like a city street, everyone is already inhabiting their own little bubble reality, their own subjectivity. That's just the human condition. It's not like before Walkmen, strangers were exchanging deep emotional confidences with each other on street corners.
Looking further down the road, what with this whole "social media" thing blowing up, I can imagine a future where augmented reality lets people broadcast what they're listening to, so you could be listening to an obscure song on the street, and you see someone else is listening to the exact same song. And let's for a moment imagine that this person is someone you'd never think to talk to normally, but you can see each other listening to the same unusual song, so there's an opening for interaction, if you want. Would that actually happen, or would everyone just eyeball each other and keep walking?
Hmm, I seem to have meandered a bit. I swear I'm not posting under the influence.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 11:27 pm (UTC)I had a picture disc version. I think I may have sold that vinyl. I've got it on CD, though. And, of course, ripped to my iTunes.
I *still* put songs from it on mixes. "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" was the first track on the last breakup mix I made, not for the song itself, but for the spoken word intro. "I bet you say that to all the boys."
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 06:23 pm (UTC)This probably speaks volumes about who I am versus who you are.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 06:27 am (UTC)That's absolutely wonderful, you are doing an excellent job raising him.