Thursday, July 22, 2010

I go crazy

Bad mix of music I got going in my Itunes today. Currently Paul Davis- "I Go Crazy". Earlier Eric Carmen- "All By Myself". I've mixed a little Otis Redding, a little Al Green, some Cure - "Pictures of You". This truly is a masocistic musical cocktail I got going on here. Brutal! Speaking of cocktails, this is like making a liquid cocaine drink. Remember those? I remember a girl once told me the nickname for that drink was gut rot. Sounds delicious. I think it had rum, vodka, bacardi, goldschlager, and maybe even draino. It was a pretty awful drink. Music can consume us though. I know that even in my best mood a sad song will bring me back to some point or time in my life. It is pretty interesting how our brain links things like that. How years and years later we can be taken back somewhere to reminice even if it is not what we truly want. Our mind grasps for something else. Longs for it as if it was really a possibility in the first place. Of course it never was, it is just our mind playing tricks on us.

It seems to me at least the most beautiful songs are the sad ones. Happy songs make us feel good and maybe they sit with us for a while, but sad songs they can haunt your mind for days. Even a note from another song that is similar to the sadder one will almost change the music in your head. Ok, maybe I am just crazy. A lot of the great sad songs though are from one hit wonders. These guys are the truly saddest of them all. Their one claim to fame is a song that makes everyone miserable, ie. Eric Carmen, you bastard!

Time does pass us quickly though and music is great barometer of that. When I was in Rome the cab driver was playing the most upbeat Italian pop music. It was a sunny day, the streets were walled up with vehicles but the music made the ride back to the train station from the Collosseum a ride I'll never forget. It framed Rome for me. It wasn't this dangerous city with pick pocketers or thieves. Although the guys that dress like gladiators in front of the Collosseum are pretty scumbaggish. No, the music made the city feel incredibly alive. It was bustling with action. It was chaotic optimism. Where as Paris had the same amount of traffic (if not more) and is a beautiful city. It wasn't as vibrant to me as Rome. Again though, maybe it was the music.

I can still hear the song Big Poppa and it reminds me of this girl in high school, even though I never even went out with her. She was just a random crush and yet she gets her own song. I've been in long relationships and could not place them with one particular song. Some random girl who I never even knew very well gets immortalized in my mind by the music. It's strange how we do this.

Lately a lot of movies have been re-using the same music. Gone are the days when a song would remind you of a film. Now it may remind you of several of them. There was a cool song that was in the Invention of Lying, "Mr. Blue Sky" by Electric Light Orchestra and I also heard it in the new trailer for the Steve Carrell movie coming out. They literally came out six months apart from each other. There should be a rule against that. There are a million songs out there. Ressurect someone's career already film studios. There's this poor schmuck Eric Carmen who is all by his damn self and he needs some royalty checks.

No comments:

Post a Comment