Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (8 page)

Alas, my sloth. Transferring CDs to computer is not a particularly strenuous activity as compared with, say, harvesting potatoes. But it does require a degree of patience. There are decisions to be made. (Which albums to include? Which songs to include? How to classify and rate a particular song?) Heretofore, my collection had been predicated on
not
making such decisions. I was not so much a curator as a hoarder. To this day, less than 15 percent of my collection has made it onto the computer, and a good percentage of these songs are unidentifiable, because they were ripped from homemade discs and I was too “pressed for time” to type in the artist or track name. My own laziness saddens me.

But here’s the thing: even if I had the energy to create such a library, I wouldn’t have the room. I know this for a fact because my hard drive fried a couple of years back and I wound up paying a geek extortionist 1,300 smackers to get the thing running again, an operation that involved a new hard drive with “extra memory sticks” to accommodate the 8,500 songs in my library. And because my computer contains my entire creative life, I live in perpetual terror of doing anything to make it crash and so I’m terrified to add any more songs unless I remove an equivalent number, decisions over which I can easily fritter away, say, fourteen hours.

I assumed moving to a home three years ago would solve the storage crisis. Instead, owing to space issues associated with human breeding, my collection was stowed downstairs in what we call the Serial Killer Room, so called because it is dark and contains various menacing tools and stains on the concrete floor that are perhaps dried blood. The net effect of my digital revolution, in other words, is that I now have access to approximately a sixth of my collection.

The other eensy problem is how to play the music. In my old place,
I wound up rigging the computer to connect with my Bose boom box. In our new place, thanks to technological constraints far beyond my understanding, the Bose is no longer an option. So I wind up listening to music mostly on headphones plugged into my computer, or the computer speakers themselves, one of which recently blew. This is my fault, but I suspect there are a good number of you out there in the same bind. You’ve spent several thousand dollars to create an ultraconvenient digital library with the sound quality of a 1958 transistor radio.

To be clear: I don’t begrudge the kiddies their jukeboxes the size of postage stamps, their boundless online troves. I’m thrilled to see the record companies properly fucked by the fans they’ve been fucking for years. I’ve rather enjoyed seeing musical equity return to its origins: live performance, those ancient rituals of collective listening.

Still, I can’t help but view our sonic innovations as part of a massive techno-irony loop. Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I don’t want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it’s just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn’t going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence?

I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn’t at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and—horror of horrors—do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred. I miss the part of Fanaticism that involves unrequited longing, if that makes any sense.
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List #3        

Compiled in the full knowledge that rock stars are paid to be assholes.

What Songs Do

As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling. Every form has its merits and demerits. Paintings, for instance, work fast and require no moving parts, yet are hard to steal. Films are easy to watch and enveloping, but carry the risk you will see Philip Seymour Hoffman naked. The only thing wrong with music, as far as I’m concerned, is that you cannot eat it. From a purely emotional standpoint, it remains far more potent than any other artistic medium.

I remember the exact moment this dawned on me. I was watching
Late Night with David Letterman
. Willie Nelson was the guest. This was the watered-down Willie of the eighties, the stoner cowpoke in dusty pigtails. Dave was giving him a hard time. “Why don’t you sing something for us?” Dave said, almost tauntingly. Willie sat there for a few seconds. And then he opened his mouth and began to sing and the sound of his voice—that glorious, battered baritone—sucked every bit of irony out of that room. Letterman looked stunned.

This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect
of the human enterprise but its central purpose.
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They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I’m basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let’s get this McJihad started. I feel these things despite the fact that:

1. I am not Irish
   

2. The song actually advocates pacifism
   

3. I still wish U2 had eaten one another
   

The same thing happens with “Sweet Home Alabama.” I don’t exactly get psyched to join the Klan, but I do get this powerful desire to drink beer and drive a pickup truck and maybe shoot off some guns and most of all to not be looked down upon by some fucking overeducated, nigger-loving Yankee such as myself. Intellectually, I recognize that the song is shallow and racist, in that it advances the notion that former Alabama governor George Wallace—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—is an American hero. I also get that if all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were still alive, one or more of them would be members of the Republican
congressional leadership team. But I can’t help it: “Sweet Home Alabama” makes me feel a deep yearning for my home and my kin and the swampers in Muscle Shoals who pick me up when I’m feeling blue, even though these same swampers would possibly kick my Jew ass sideways if I ever sidled into one of their taverns and ordered me a Chablis.

Songs take us deeper into ourselves by taking us away from ourselves. They expand our empathic imaginations. When we listen to “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor we become empowered sisters showing our abusive exes the door, and when we listen to “Rocket Man” (or maybe, in your case, “Space Oddity”) we become astronauts blasted away from our loved ones into orbits of lonely obligation, and when we listen to “Jack & Diane” we become teenagers sucking on chili dogs and reveling in the fleeting ecstasies of green love. And God knows, we’re all homesick travelers when we hear “Homeward Bound,”
even when we’re at home
.

I’ve cherry-picked songs that most people know. But like any other Fanatic I’ve got an endless list of obscure songs that induce the same kind of weirdly gratifying identity crisis. “When I Was Drinking” by the band Hem makes me want to be an alcoholic. It makes me want to be an alcoholic involved with another alcoholic. It makes me pine for the perverse safety of all the self-defeating relationships I’ve ever been in. That’s how beautiful that fucking song is. (I’m fairly sure the heroine of “When I Was Drinking” used to date the guy in the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular,” though the songs were released two decades apart.) “Taj Mahal” by the Canadian band Sam Roberts has a nearly opposite effect. I listen to this organ-drenched ode and feel a completely unwarranted sense that love is a form of destiny impervious to time. “Listen Here” by Eddie Harris makes me so mellow I briefly become Buddhist.

When people complain about how crappy most commercial pop music is, what they’re really angry about is that particular songs don’t
take them anywhere. We may have some kind of involuntary limbic reaction to the tune and beat, but they stall out as emotional transport devices. Sometimes, this is because the listener is unwilling to give the song a chance. But often, it’s a matter of the aesthetic choices that have been made. They’re too easy, too obvious in their desire to manipulate our feelings.

I am thinking (without quite wanting to) of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a song I was forced to sing in my fifth-grade chorus and which I necessarily repudiated with many retching sounds in public, but which I also privately adored, often staring out the window of the room I shared with my brothers and softly imitating Debby’s dewy vibrato, even tearing up as she soared toward the climactic line,
It can’t be wrong when it feels so right
. The song was all I thought about for several months. It inflamed my desires. I wanted to devote myself to Christ and feel up Debby Boone, ideally at the same time. And then, just as suddenly, I began to hate the song, its sappy lyrics and synthesized strings, the confused yearning it revealed in me.