Tunes

No. Not the ‘decond-class-dicket-to-Dottingham-please’, menthol impregnated, fruit flavoured boiled sweets. Musical (and maybe not so musical) tunes.

A question. Do I listen to sad, miserable music because I have a tendency towards sadness, depression and miserableness, or does listening to sad, miserable music make me sad, depressed and miserable? Is music the cause or the symptom? I asked this on Facebook the other day and got some interesting replies.

The reason why I ask? Well in the last year or so I have been listening to a very different music to usual and at the moment I seem to be ticking the ‘not depressed’ box quite a bit and the Deep Dark Pit™ is somewhere over that way, over there, near the horizon. Now I know it can’t be purely down to the music but surely it’s having some effect? Isn’t it? I’ll come back to that one soon as there are several other factors that I know are influencing where I am.

One is my new found status as a whistling Rock God® which isn’t doing me any harm whatsoever. My current enthusiasm for Morris Dancing, with all its concomitant socialising (alright!….drinking…….but not just drinking…..honest) and increased exercise benefits are….err, beneficial. Work is steady, not onerous, albeit a bit quiet. The year of psychotherapy has also done me good. I’ve mentioned previously that it ran for just one year (and one year only) but that year has done me more good than anticipated. That huge lurking monster; that whirl of emotion, fear, insecurity and vulnerability deep inside is, if not tamed, at least under some control. My (almost) daily bike ride and the rather sunshiney spring (hurrah and huzzah!) are all making for a rather grand time. A full diary stops the brooding as well, I can tell you. Dance outs, not just mid-week but weekends as well, music sessions and the usual social life make for a busy time.

And so to the music.

After I discovered a certain Mr. John Peel and music other than David Cassidy, The Nolans and Terry Jacks I immersed myself in rock, from great, riff driven stuff to the more complicated and twiddly stuff known as prog. My preference seemed to be for the brooding, deeper, darker and more introverted stuff. It just seemed to speak to me more than the lighter, upbeat, ‘fluffier’ end of things. It appeared to have more to say and I connected with it but was that because I was partial to more intelligent lyrics or because I was wired up to be a misanthrope? And one could hardly say that the lyrics of Yes were intelligent. In fact many of them were completely unintelligible.

Now, I’m tall and blond. The rest of my immediate family are shorter, darker, stockier. I always felt a little ‘apart’; a not quite total connection and that’s something that I can relate to, and has spilled over into, everything I have ever done, whether it was work, school, clubs, hobbies or relationships. So maybe I was hard wired from the beginning to feel music that had an otherness, a dark separateness, an element of loneliness, to the more commercial end of the market and it’s songs of love, belonging and gay abandon. Maybe listening to moody music has had an effect on the way I look at things. At the very least I think it has exacerbated what was already there.

For the last year or so I have been playing and listening to a much lighter form of music. Folk, basically. From 16^th Century Playford tunes right up to modern experimental bands like Lau, it’s around me a lot of the time, either at sessions, out at morris dances or via Spotify where I discover more. That doesn’t mean to say I’ve stopped listening to Pink Floyd, ELP, Joy Division, Nick Drake, Mahler and Shostakovich etc; I just don’t listen to it as much. My new position as a whistling Rock God® where I strut my stuff  (and there’s an image to conjour with) down at the pub with friends (or at least with very tolerant aquaintances) over a couple or so pints of Real Ale® has dragged me away from the Deep Dark Pit™. So playing with others is probably at least as, if not more important than, what music is actually played.

And those answers on Facebook?

Richard said ‘I have a tendency towards depression but mainly listen to uplifting music...I reckon it's down to taste’.

Quite possibly true, it certainly is for Richard but maybe my taste was in-built from the beginning, however subconsciously (Meh! psycho-babble…..but possibly true anyway.).

Pam said ‘The answer is... both.’

Also quite possibly true. My taste is for brooding stuff but maybe constant exposure has exacerbated the depth of and longevity of my stay in the Deep Dark Pit™. Certainly my lack of exposure to Doom Rock© and increased exposure to Folk has coincided with a distancing of myself from Major Grump™ (aka Marvin) and his Pit. I do admit that other circumstances have had a big hand in this too (see above).

Cris quoted Morrissey ‘I wear black on the outside, 'Cause black is how I feel on the inside’ (Unloveable, from the album Louder Than Bombs).

I know how he (that’s Morrissey, not Cris) feels but thankfully I feel less so recently.

And in conclusion………I think for my case Pam got it about right. The answer is -

‘Yes….Both’.