Wading in the Velvet Sea

And that’s a good thing, after all. I shouldn’t try to force my square peg of a life into the round hole of a melancholy pop tune. So I left my Microsoft Word file of quotes untouched for the better part of a week, not realizing that the entire problem I was having with the article lie in the last quote (shown above).

All too often, I (and many others) use pop quotes to substitute for real emotions. It’s just plain easier. Now, often these quotes can be successfully employed to give disparate people a common foothold on an issue. It’s not always a bad thing to use quotes to support an argument/emotion/thesis, but when the quotes become themselves the topic sentences, well, Houston, we’re got a problem.

It’s far too easy to make a one-to-one correlation between something you feel and something you hear. It’s almost as if the song’s done the work for you: you’re mopey, or you’re happy, or you’re, I dunno, constipated, and then you hear something and you say, “Yes…yes…THIS is what I am feeling! These are the words I myself couldn’t construct to explain the emotions inside me! Now where’s that toilet paper?” Or something akin to this.

And occasionally, this can happen, although it’s certainly the exception to the rule. More often, placing your emotional language in the words of another person is only doing you a disservice. The illusion of a symbiotic relationship between you and the rhyming couplet is usually just that: an illusion. This is not to say that pop lyrics can’t serve an important function. Far from it. But the lyric should be the start of the epiphany, not the end.

Lyrics become useful when they start to provide self-eloquence. They start the internal dialogue; they don’t complete it. They force you to take a new view of something and then it’s up to you to take it from there. Matthew Sweet’s “In Reverse” did not provide the script to my life one year ago, but Sweet certainly gave me a rough first draft of the eventual screenplay. It took his combination of music, lyrics, and song cycle to provide insight I couldn’t get on my own. He didn’t do the work for me. We both did it together, with me picking up the work he unknowingly started.

It’s really easy to let songs (or books or movies or television shows or whatever pop culture element you so choose) to simply do the work for us. Far easier, really, than doing the important emotional work ourselves. But it only takes one concert, and one experience of 5,000 people singing the same lyrics you thought described your life, to know that the song itself is only a stepping stone.

That all being said, for me, there’s no better stepping stone than a great pop song. It’s usually the cipher through which I can access half-formed thoughts previously out of reach. I listen to music nearly 14 hours a day; not only to get the simple aural pleasure of hearing a good tune, but to occasionally mine an emotional vein previously left untapped. I don’t go looking for these veins, but I don’t shy away once found, either.

And those veins can provide the slides mentioned by Travis earlier. These slides don’t show a devil’s haircut. They don’t show a wonderwall. What they show is ourselves, projected for us to finally see clearly. The songs aren’t the slides; they just allow us access to them. Whether or not we want to see them is, in the end, up to us.