Play Me a Memory?

Favorite music, favorite music. I am not sure where to start. I cannot say I have a favorite band, at which I would jump at a chance to see in concert above every else. I am, for better lack of words, a creature of habit. I have the radio in my car, although I need to find myself a good Oldies Rock station. I have the music on my iPod, and I am too lazy to try and evolve that. I recently started using Spotify, and that has perhaps been the most useful to me in reaching all my musical tastes.

Music is my mood. I listen to what I listen too because I what I am doing and what I am feeling, and radio, internet or car, is always my first choice, because I love variety and there is very little I do not like. I propose two things for you this morning; a list of genres I listen to by mood, and an essay on the evolution of my personal music selection in the confines of a nonfiction essay. The second is to give you more depth if you so wish, and is from where the title of this post comes from. I do, though, have a favorite song, which I shall embed for you listening pleasure.

Music and my Mood (as I ungracefully list out moods and music for you reading pleasure):

Intense Work: Classical Music (I usually go for the classical music selections on internet radio)
Creative Work: I usually go for lyrical when I want to be creative. I have a playlist that includes songs by Adele, Florence & the Machine, Mumford & Sons, and One Republic. I am generally going for the softer tunes. I also love soundtracks. The Battlestar Galactica or Pirates of the Carribean (which has a good playlist on Spotify with all the selections from the four movies).
Driving: I like variety stations while driving, so anything that hits at least three decades. Or just plain old oldies rock. The 80s were the best.
Upbeat: This is when I hit the contemporary pop. Generally there is a lot of energy in today's songs, which gets your blood moving.
Uplifting: I hit the soundtracks again when I'm feeling down. Usually (as I said, currently PotC) some epic soundtrack music out there that will make you feel awesome.
Dancing: I am a sucker for a good beat. I love dancing to a little bit of techno or synthesized music.

I suppose the only things I don't enjoy are really heavy metal or pure rap. I do not listen to much country, but that's more that there is a lot for music I would rather listen to first. I know my whole list was not very specific, but there are very few artists that I listen to specifically, and I have a feeling some of them will the visited by other posters.

One suggestion if you are looking for new music, try looking for fanmixs of some of your favorite shows. You might find someone that has similar musical taste as you, and knows artists or songs you have never heard of. And now I shall leave you with my favorite song, and some words I wrote a year ago, when we were asked to examine ourselves and in relation a larger part of the world.

Music is Life.

            The statement rests on my poster for a band anime and decorates the flap of the bag I got from Hot Topic for donating a dollar to charity. It is sprawled across the internet, on images and photographs, filled with color or simply black and white. It speaks of everything and nothing; that life can be tied between chords and lyrics and the screaming of adoring fans.

            Melodies can reach deeper than words when language cannot describe this feeling and all that is left is the reaching for something indescribable.

            Music is change, constantly evolving with time and taste. It is an avenue for opinions, timeless reflections, yet it is balanced by the simplest of thought. Remember that one time on that one stage and how that one man represented us, how he spoke for all of us through song.

            My first concert was in ninth grade. I listened to alternative rock and the band was MCR. My Chemical Romance. I was fifteen and did not think my parents would allow me to go. I was fifteen and young and probably in their eyes the little girl who spent forever years listening to country music. 

            They didn’t care; my brother did.

            He was the one who protested, said MCR was filled with foul language and I shouldn’t be allowed to go. The boy who played violent video games protested to my choice of music. Did the music capture a part of me he did not want to think existed? Or could he not see that the quiet, almost innocent persona I radiated was not all there was when the layers were pealed back? Or perhaps I had angered him days earlier, though I cannot remember if that was true.

            The concert was one of the best nights of my life. The three of us, and the parent, stood on the lawn, courtesy of our cheap tickets. The stage looked small from our distance, but the screens we large and the music was loud and our ears still rang when we left. We were surrounded by the smell of beer and cigarettes and the energy that radiates off people when the music envelopes them whole.

            I loved it.

            It was during my middle school years that I stopped listening to country music. It had probably been inevitable longer than that; part of me never wanted the radio station changed from my brother’s rock to my country, but I still asked. I was afraid of what it would mean to stop listening to country, what it would say about me.

            These were the years that cemented my closest friendships, people who cannot believe that I ever loved country as much as I did, even if they were there. They were already into the music that I would soon come to love, yet I fought the change within myself. And it was a change, a shift inside me to something less innocent and more aware of the world. Though I doubt anyone could call today’s country music innocent, it was the way the music moved through my body and the way it felt in my head. The beat of the drums, the electric guitar, the raspy vocals that characterized rock were something different, something raw that spoke to the person I would become.

            The inevitable shift to rock was as gradual as my own personal growth. Eventually - and only a general time can be pinpointed - I no longer asked for the radio channel to change, even if my parents asked if I wanted to listen to country. Just as I cannot pinpoint my own personal change until years later when I recognize how I different was then from now. Growing up meant loving more than country, and as if I wanted to forget the child I was, I left country behind. I only return to its twang at the prompting others, never at my own initiative.

            Society inevitably judges one’s choice in music.

            There is just so much out there, that each little shift in style speaks to a different person. Each genre comes with a stereotype that tries to define the artist and the listener. But music cannot be compartmentalized; genre is only a continually bleeding line. Music breaks walls; it does not create them.

            Just as it is hard to pinpoint change, so is it hard to pinpoint music. How it affects us, how it envelopes us, how its beat can build us up and how its lyrics can break us down. The emotions music creates cannot be defined. They are instead passed along as the song is passed along; people sharing their emotional state through a single song.

            I have never been able to find a completely uplifting song. Even the happiest music is stained by the knowledge that one is listening to this because one do not want to feel sad. There is always melancholy, attempting to grasp at something that is lost. There is always a wistfulness that even the most cheerful sound cannot ignore. 

            I do not go to music to be uplifted; I go to feel the world, to try and become something beyond myself. To feel better afterwards is only a consequence. But that’s the funny thing; music does different things for different people. I do not claim absolute definition of what music should do. It is change and it is steadiness. It is all that we are and all that we want to be. It is the past, present, and future.

            When my best friend was going through hard times, I sent her Josh Groban’s “You are Loved” because I have never been good with those kind of words. Years later, she sent me Katie Perry’s “Firework.” The gesture meant more to me than the song.

            Music is impossible to discuss in only a single category. It has long since seeped into my life and tainted everything. Classical music is for reading, Billy Joel or soundtracks for when I want to write. When I don’t want to think, I put my iPod on alternative rock, so it can think for me. My radio shifts between calm and intense, depending on how I want my car ride to be. Classic rock is a comfort, reminding me of my father.

            When I first came to college I listened to radio stations online from home, like I was trying to capture something of what I was before I left. It was the station, not the songs that held the emotional comfort I was looking for. Music has often been my go to when I don’t actually want to talk.

            I wish I could make music feel lighter. It is not always a weight that defines every emotion in life. There is the laughter, the weightless dances and pathetic attempts at dancing. You cannot have a good party, after all, without good music.

            Anybody who has seen me dance will say that I have no skill at it, and I have long since agreed. But it is goofy; it is fun to move on a dance floor, eyes lighting up while you move with other friends, trying not to descend into giggles.

            Line dances are my favorite. There is something just great about a dance floor trying to move as one, half the people knowing what they are doing, the other half without a clue. Each misstep produces more laughter, never at the person but at the idea as a whole. The music is a connecting force bringing everyone together, through laughter and cheer and the knowledge of accomplishing something.

            There is a reason that the videos of people breaking out in dance at the airport, the train station, the city square are so popular. It is the idea of putting something together, of getting people to work together so completely, that makes them watch. One time my friends tried to put together a dance to perform in the hallways of one of our conventions. The dance was never completed, and I could never perform it; my inability to dance and move fluidly always getting in my way. But the act of trying, of thinking of the next step and just trying it out brought us together and was just plain fun. We keep on saying that we’ll put together a dance for real someday, and even though I know we won’t, the idea of doing so brings back the thoughts of just having fun. 

            Whenever I get asked what type of music I don’t like, I never know how to answer. There really isn’t any music that I would go out of my way to avoid. Sometimes I say it’s country, other times rap, and when I feel like being completely truthful I say that it depends on my mood. I’m so used to listening to whatever I feel like that I felt no surprise when one of my best friends started listening to Lady Gaga. It was only after another of my friends commented on it that I realized that the music was not something she would usually listen to. This was my friend who blasted metal and techno and anime, and I suppose Lady Gaga would be an odd choice. But perhaps I wasn’t surprised because I knew her, and somehow I always thought Lady Gaga would fit the tastes of my friend.

            I think it was a leap for her though, to discover that she did like that type of music. She found something that I had already seen in her, just as I found something new about myself when I discovered my liking for rock. Perhaps my friends saw that rock as something I should love because they saw something about myself I could not.

            Entering college, then, became another time when my musical tastes shifted. Before then I had avoided what is termed “Top 40s,” because I felt like I would fall into a mainstream trap if I did. Of course I was wrong in the end; instead I found music that I had never listened to before and liked. Once again music challenged me, and music won. My friends from home find it strange that I listen to “Top 40s” and my friends here find it strange that I never had before hand. I had evolved, just as my music choices have evolved to include a genre that wasn’t there before. I don’t know yet where the genre fits, it does not yet have a defined place; I listen to it when I feel like it, with no tasks or specific moods fit to it.

            Yet the music has not become an all-encompassing love, I did not drop another genre for my enjoyment of it. It is more like a door was opened, and another piece was added to the puzzle that is me. Music is a puzzle after all; why do some sounds, some notes strung together to form a chord affect us the way they do? I’m sure scientists could answer the question, but there is feeling there that cannot be all chemicals and reactions.

            My favorite song is “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. It is not country or alternative or modern pop but instead classic rock, perhaps the genre that has constantly been in my life like the steady rhythm of a drum. My dad loves classic rock; if he was in the car, we’d listen to classic rock. Some children hate what their parents force them to listen too, I loved it. There were melodies in classic rock that no other genre could give me. Here was the lyrical poetry that made me want to listen to what the singers sang instead of feel the beat against my chest.

Sing us a song, you’re the piano man

Sing us a song tonight

Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody

And you’ve got us feelin’ all right.

            It makes me want to be everything and more. The song will always remind me of my childhood and my father, but it also speaks to my future, of the way I want to spin words. And every person should have a song like that, because that is what music does, speak to ourselves and of ourselves and everything in between.

            But the chorus has never been my favorite set of lines; my second favorite perhaps, but that honor goes to another.

“He says, ‘Son, can you play me a memory

I’m not really sure how it goes

But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete

When I wore a younger man’s clothes.’”

            Whenever we drive to conventions, my two best friends and I, the iPod always ends up on the original Pokémon soundtrack. We are nineteen and eighteen, far too old to be listening to children’s cartoons. But we’ve done this so many times already that we know what motions to make and when we reach Team Rocket’s song we belt out our individual parts with both embarrassment and pride.

            We captured something in the private moment, viewable to anyone who looks in our car windows. We were untouched by the future and the world that we would someday have to enter. The past seeped through and we were young again. Not that we aren’t young now, but we were younger, when responsibility was far away. And for a weekend, that was good.

            As we danced as much as we could in a car on the highway, there were no worries and it was good. I look forward to those weekends, to those songs playing and the way we all know every word because we’ve sang them together so many times before.

            I would never want that to be every day. There is a reason my Pokémon soundtrack is never played unless our trio is together and there is a reason I only go to two conventions a year. The songs are special, perhaps more special than any other. Music been a transition into growing up, but it is also an escape to bring me back. But I need the former more than I need the later.

            To explore music is to explore ourselves.

            I can no more pinpoint it than I can pinpoint the ever expanding universe. Every new song reveals something new about the world, about myself. Who knew I would like that? It’s not as groundbreaking as people say. I must listen to that again! I suppose I shouldn’t laugh at this part, but I do. This reminds me of that one time we did that one thing.

            Music has led to change yet allows me to stand still.

            A great movie cannot exist without an equally great soundtrack. Music is intertwined within our lives, weaving in and out and leaving an impression in the oddest places. Ah, I remember that song, it was played on that very important day.

            On the inside of my shirt for the organization Write Love on Her Arms is the words for Paramore’s “We are Broken.” What is it about music that can explain so much about us? It is both personal and impersonal. It can be better than a picture or our own disjointed words. Is that why lyrics constantly appear on Facebook status’s, as a way to describe our feelings while saying little?

            Music means different things to different people. I can use to define who I am, because words of that nature often fail me. It is constantly changing yet the timelessness of so many songs keeps it still. New layers are constantly added, just as we add new layers to ourselves.

            Who knows what genre I will become obsessed with next, and who knows what that will say about me?