Can you quantify how much you love music? Or at least say how you love it?

This is probably why it takes someone I really, really like to get me to go to a concert: when I'm really enjoying music, I want to write, which was a bit tough at the House of Blues or Howlin Wolf.

http://www.mid-stream.org/images/I-Love-You-This-Much.jpg

Of course I can't quantify it, but there is nothing else like it that is available to me whenever I want. To take an example chosen because it's a Ronan thread, the moment on the Everything Everything album where after several minutes of wonderful but routine beats we hear that first chord of Born Slippy feels so miraculous, so completely glorious and thrilling, that I can't imagine not loving it completely, not wanting it any time. There are loads of moments so great in Underworld's output alone, and hundreds and thousands more all over the place. I couldn't do without it.

... I lost my thread. : (

To maybe tie this in to music writing, one of the prime examples of the kind of record I understand you to be talking about above, Ronan, is, for me, probably Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" which for a long time was able, or I thought, or I bought into it's own personal mythology, to transport me from the dark rooms I ritually listened to it in. But trying to write that love, trying to understand *that* kind of love in the context of my ordinary lifeless world always came out gauche because for the most part 'the spirituality' of the record was mostly projected or felt, intensely personal and hardly useful as a part of an efficient interpretative strategy. Whereas, one look at Michael Daddino's mini-essay on the album (in short: all the world's sounds are here, in VM's voice) is a lot more useful I think and more interesting, something less dippy and concrete, negotiable.

I don't know to what extent I've answered your question but I hope I've said at least one interesting / useful thing.

What I'm asking is, what is the difference between loving music and dancing to it and talking about it, and the other level of connection I'm talking about. How do you suddenly gain the ability to experience both levels?

How much can music do for you? To what extent can it drag you through times where you don't have massive emotional connections with anything else? Is that what makes it a spiritual thing?

I've discussed rave and dance music ad infinitum but let me make this thread more general.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000005FPK.01._PE_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Music - whether you're tapping into mystical primordial energies or trying to get your head together or accompany integral moments of your life or just shake what your momma gave ya - it's all you'll ever really need.

Honestly there have been times in my life where I've not eaten for days and spent my last $10 on a CD, and felt like I had made the right choice. God I love music.

That reminds me a bit of when Tom said before that listening to certain music was bad for him (am I misquoting or misremembering), I always thought it was an interesting area. (no pressure to expand if you don't want to, either of you)

As I say, how possible is it for the music you listen to to lead you in a direction rather than your direction in life dictating what music you listen to? I guess the truth is it's usually a mash up of the two.

Or is it?

But I could not do without music. I don't know where I'd be without it. I am a Music Fan, whether any of you think I'm entitled to call myself that or not.

As I say, how possible is it for the music you listen to to lead you in a direction rather than your direction in life dictating what music you listen to?

I think that becoming fascinated with Arabic music helped bring me out a period of depression (worse than any I've had since, though I certainly am not permanently free of seriously dark moods). Partly I guess it was just the becoming fascinated that did it, so that maybe it wouldn't have had to be music. Musically, though, the extremely peppy "New Sound" dance music (mostly out of Egypt), seemed to cheer me up with its childish upbeatness. And almost as soon as I started listening to the peppy clap-clap music (as I sometimes called it), I also started enjoying some very mournful-sounding things, which I felt reflected what I had been feeling. Anyway, I did have the sense that this music was helping me out of a particular not-so-happy state that I had gotten myself into. Maybe the whole phenomenon of Arabic song often being sad, and yet reaching for some sort of ecstasy in the performance, suggested a way through.

I get different sorts of things out the music now. I think I've learned a lot about what to listen to in it (not necessarily at a level I can verbalize), but much of it still hits me very emotionally. When I listen to the end of Oum Kalthoum singing "Ana Fe Entezarak," that music grabs my attention and redirects it in some way--not as extreme as going into a trance, but it is suggestive of some sort of altered state. (I strongly suspect that she and her musicians were well on the way there in this particular recording.) I think one reason for my initially somewhat evangelistic feeling about Arabic music (which you've all really only seen in residual form here), was the result of its importance to me on a very immediate level.

At the moment, my overall relationship to music is less needy than it was at the time I started out describing. I didn't mean to put it that way: "less needy," since it sounds judgmental of my own past neediness, when I don't mean it to be. But right now there's a quieter sense of sifting through the areas of music I've discovered.

I don't even want to try to answer the more general question, but my relationship to music has definitely changed through different periods; and there have been other periods when music has helped me get through things, emotionally. I remember that the one time I met Steve Reich (before a great performance--maybe it was partly the acoustics--at Swarthmore College), I said something to him about how I felt his music had done that for me. I have sometimes wondered if that was an odd thing to say, but I really meant it.

*

Also, there have been times when I've felt that music is as close as to something "spiritual" or otherworldly as anything I've experienced. You can see how easily it could be considered something magical.

Exactly. And people wonder why I like stuff like Beyonce now.

I guess what I'm saying is that the Smiths also nearly ruined my life.

I wasn't exactly blaming them but they are a band that I associate with that kind of music.

Then again, I tend towards the belief that there's no one formula about 'embracing life' -- the sliding scale between complete isolation and complete and total action without stopping for breath is near infinite and as many people find themselves in 'the wrong place' as they do exactly where they want to be or perhaps more to the point NEED to be, and those soundtracks chosen do not strike me as a necessary one-to-one corollary for those spots on the scale. Personally I can be in an incredibly cheery mood and have Louder Than Bombs on or an extremely down one and be listening to a collection of peppy garage or hip-hop mp3s from Fred or Tim or the like.

I suppose it all could come down to whether you treat music as a drug addiction that you need to break (or change) or as something that's there and enjoyable which passes your time. For me, at least, the change wasn't to change what I was listening to but to change my listening habits near completely no matter WHAT I was hearing. I think that's a more radical step.

(Well, this is a bit crossposted now but hopefully the points still hold.)

Yeah, that's one of the things I didn't make clear because my writing is pretty meh.

haha I'm lucky if i listen to half an hour during weekdays. I actually go days without listening to a note of the stuff.

I think from the time i started listening to recs, from age 13-20 i would have just said: yes i love it i love it blah blah.

I often wonder what sort of mental state I would have been in if i hadn't started listening to music, what other things i would be doing or if I would have had more friends? would i have been more 'sociable'?

since i haven't gone through any tough periods (maybe i would have had them if i wasn't listening to music). bad days we all have but and i would prob put something on and that would take my mind off things. gigs do that.

but if it wasn't music it would have been something else: books, film. I wouldn't have a 'spiritual' connection with anything.

I wouldn't say i love it now. but the interest is still there and talking abt it is what keeps it alive as well.

The stuff I was listening to have much less well-defined 'lifestyle' qualities but it certainly had them. Obviously though that wasn't the only reason I loved music or I wouldn't bother at all now.

Have you had a horrible accident or are you just wanking again?

Honestly, I have yet to check out Five for Fighting! I've been on this huge electroclash and British folk rock kick over the last few years, so anything not falling in those boundaries gets ignored by me. I'll check out the thread in question, though. And I'll check out the band.

This is interesting because I guess I never really think of music in those exact terms and never have. To take your Goth example -- the period in which I completely and totally got into Zer Classics of the Genre (Siouxsie, Cure, Bauhaus, etc.) did NOT coincide with me doing everything from reading Huysmans to hanging around graves or whatever. In fact I still remember startling someone at UCLA's radio station when I was playing an hour long Bauhaus set -- he said, "But you don't LOOK like a Goth" (or apparently act like one either). Hearing older songs from my past (either loved or hated) don't make me think of a state of mind I was in so much as it does whether I still like the song or not. So I dunno -- it's all intriguing to me what you and Nicole and Rockist are all saying, but at the same time I can't entirely relate to it, it's not in my experience.

Oddly enough, that might be a good thing in some ways, though I can't say exactly why. Or maybe I can if it's a logical extension of my whole take on radical subjectivism cross-cutting all the way so that there's never any exact association of elements in a subculture (or subcultures crossing over) as there is simply endless rearrangement and play -- which IS the case but humanity seems dedicated to not realizing that. I think we're actually agreeing on that from different directions, though.

your comparative lack of interest in lyrics is of course relevant here

To be sure, though perhaps it's less that and more a lack of interest (or any sort of drive) in, to paraphrase Tom, finding something -- whether in lyrics or poetry or fiction or whatever -- to fit into a mood or a lifestyle or whatever. It's an intellectual or emotional shoehorning into a size or style that just won't fit.

First post (waves at the crowd).. That used to happen to me when I went to raves a couple of years back, before I got into drugs at all. My tastes have changed since then (cheesy Eurotrance no longer gives me that kind of energy), and so have my music habits... but there are plenty of instances where listening to music literally takes me somewhere else. Minimal German dubby techno seems to be best at doing this, but it is not at all limited to electronic.

Not sure... I think, more often than not, the lifestyle arises from the taste in music rather than vice-versa. But then, I don't believe that, deep down, anyone actually goes off music they once liked (with the possible exception of music given deeply unpleasant/heartbreaking associations). Obviously repeated playing can dull a song's impact, but I think that the essential kernel of what appeals to you about a song always will do, regardless of how many self-conscious "oh, but that's not really me any more" secondary responses you put in place.

1. You love something - it's increased your utility permanently and you love life a little more.

2. You like something - you gained something from it (that's more than the opportunity cost, i.e. it was better than listening to Blood on the Tracks again) - even if it only lasts as long as you're listening.

3. You dislike something - this merely means you failed to gain anything from it (and have thus wasted time on it you could've spent elsewhere).

4. You hate something - it's possible that you've suffered a loss of utility in that you now hate the world a little more. More likely it's just that you like hating things and gain utility that way.

Of course it's legitimate to jump from one to the other, though you should be careful that you've had a change of mind and not just a change of degree - it's quite possible that you merely failed to gain utility that you expected to.

Ironically, the Smiths thing was already a derailment of this thread -- is that right?

I think break-ups are possibly a red herring from a Smithsian point of view. From that POV, there are no break-ups because there are no relationships. Break-ups are a luxury - the luxury of those pampered by love and life.

One that spilled milk for the local cows to cry over.

I think you're pretty much spot on! I'm not sure #2 isn't an oversimplification, though; does what a subculture promotes really have any necessary ties to the experience of living in a world post/shaped by that subculture? Wouldn't you expect the opposite?

Maybe a question is not whether listening to X makes you alone, or want to be alone, but whether it makes you feel alone (which can totally lead to the opposite!). One of the things I've noticed since my pop apostacy is that liking eg. the JC Chavez record, which went in at like #26, generates a feeling of worldwide community totally disproportionate to it's (indie-appropriate) sales figures - is it the Ewingism abt imagined vs real communities again?

It's funny how easy the Smiths are to abuse, in one way or the other.