I wonder if you’ll allow me to ramble a bit. I’m a rambling guy.
Once in awhile I’ll watch an episode of American Idol. Watched tonight to see & hear my homeboy, Taylor Hicks, perform Elton John/Bernie Taupin’s “Levon.” I thought it was moving. I thought to myself–A lot of people are in love with the idea of being “a star” or a famous singer or musician. This guy just LOVES MUSIC. Good for him.
Good for me, too. I really love music. I am blessed, I guess, with very eclectic tastes. Wildly eclectic. I don’t like much of the pop music played on the radio and haven’t for many years. I don’t like the slicker variety of country music. But, I’m game for just about anything else. At least for short periods.
Even though I’m always listening to nutty mish-mashes of music, I also tend to get obsessed with a genre for periods. In the 1980s, when the music being made wasn’t doing much for me, I listened obsessively to be-bop and the John Coltrane Quartet, among others. Took seven or eight years to get it out of my system. Now I listen to it and enjoy it, but it’s part of the mix. Same with Irish trad. Listened to tons of it between 1995 and, oh, about 2001, and then not so much.
The other sort of obsessive thing that happens to me is that some particular pieces of music will get absolutely under my skin. I wish I understood music theory enough to figure out what all these might have in common. Some examples: For, oh, 25 years or more I’ve been obsessed (off and on) with Brian Wilson’s song “Surf’s Up.” I’ll listen to it constantly for a few days and then let it go for a year or two, and then have another obsessive round with it. The Bach Goldberg Variations crop up like that with me now and then.
My current obsession, which has a couple of my friends secretly plotting to have me committed, is a CD called “Loveless” by the group My Bloody Valentine. I’ve got it in my MP3 player and I go to sleep listening to it about half the time. It’s an unlikely candidate for my obsessive focus. It’s probably the exemplar of a sub-genre of rock music called “shoegazing.” (The name comes, allegedly, from the typical guitarists of this genre, staring down at his guitar effect pedals while performing.) “Loveless” is, as Brian Eno put it, “the vaguest music to ever have been a hit.”
This CD consists of impossibly beautiful melodies, which are almost buried under blankets of distorted and weirdly engineered guitar sounds. There are vocals and lyrics, but they are almost impossible to decipher in the mix. (No one seems to know what the lyrics are. Fans try to make them out, but all the transcriptions include a lot of question marks in parentheses.) The mix, it is tempting to say, sounds as though the mixing engineer was on PCP. And deaf. But, there’s something captivating about it.
The first time I heard the CD, I just completely dismissed it as so much noise. Then, for some reason, I listened to it a second time and something in me went “wait a minute. What the hell is going on here?” And so, I’ll let you know in a couple of years when I’ve finally able to stop listening to it almost daily.
The CD came out in 1992 and the main guy in My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields, sort of went reclusive. He resurfaced to contribute to the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack. That movie prominently features the My Bloody Valetine song, “Sometimes.” That one, in particular is my new “Surf’s Up” for this decade. (For a slightly more accessible example of the band’s work, I recommend the song “Don’t Ask Why” on the EP “Glider.”)
Bye now.