Music Junkie

This train of thought is difficult to describe. After picking up my copy of Blake’s Watercolors for the Poems of Thomas Grey, I started to read “Ode for Music” in the original form (Meek Newton’s felf bends from his ftate fublime, / And nods his hoary head, and liftens to the / rhyme.). I decided to look for an easier to read normalized version online, but typed “Ode to Music” into the search engine by mistake. I found William Collins' The Passions: An Ode to Music instead. It rocks:

First Fear his hand, its skill to try,
Amid the chords bewilder'd laid,
And back recoil'd, he knew not why,
Ev'n at the sound himself had made.

Next Anger rush'd; his eyes, on fire,
In lightnings own'd his secret stings;
In one rude clash he struck the lyre,
And swept with hurried hand the strings.

With woful measures wan Despair
Low sullen sounds his grief beguil'd;
A solemn, strange, and mingled air;
'Twas sad by fits, by starts 'twas wild.

Of course the thought occured to me that Both of these mid-eighteenth century guys were responding in part to Milton's At a Solemn Music. Of course, the allusions in Milton lead to Plato’s Republic, and into the music of the spheres. The motion of the heavens creates music.

Watching a program about the blues tonight on Bravo, Bill Wyman described his reaction to first hearing Elmore James: “It was as if the world had shifted on it’s axis, and things were never the same for me again.” He later described the first meeting of Mick and Keith and Brian Jones in the same terms. Brian Jones was playing an Elmore James song, and the earth shifted for the guys that later became the Rolling Stones. Wyman also suggested that the blues had a sort of leveling aspect, where the world somehow became more bearable while listening to it. An axis shift? Perhaps.

So what does this have to do with Plato? Plato’s view of the universe was of eight concentric whorls, each containing a siren singing a note. Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos (past, present, and future) spin these whorls producing the chord of celestial music. Still with me? The axis on which these whorls spin is necessity. One might interpret the shift in perception produced by truly moving music as a change in necessity. What was once important, is not so important anymore, hence music has the power to make us feel better not by removing emotion (catharsis) but by adjusting necessity!

What has troubled me the longest about Milton’s poem is the distinction of “two sirens” compared to Plato’s eight— Milton calls them Voice and Vers. Lyrics and music perhaps? I’m still puzzling over it. Milton sees true “heavenly music” as music that unites the two in harmony. It’s not about which one is more important; it’s about the way they work together. They are, in my mind at least, inseparable.

Sometimes music has literally turned my world on its ear: Hendrix, for example. I started collecting his music at age eleven, and it took me until I was 21 before I could say I had all his albums. Of course these times were confusing near the end of that span, and you could always ask “Was it the drugs, or was it the music?”

Other times, it’s taken some nudges before I fall into out and out obsession. I remember the first time I heard Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits. It was just plain jarring; I liked it, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why. I suspect the attraction was primarily to the lyrics. I let it lie, until I saw Waits do “Going Out West” on TV around ten years later. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It just snapped the axis of what was turning inside my head. As I went through his back catalogue, three or four albums at a time until I had them all, the world I lived in changed fundamentally. I suppose it’s the experience of having music seriously change the world you live in that makes a person become a music junkie. Music is perhaps the most seriously addicting drug around.

But like most drugs, getting that rush of discovery takes more and more as time goes by. Okay, so I just watched the Strokes on Conan. The earth didn’t spin off it’s axis like it did when I heard Axis Bold as Love by Jimi Hendrix, or even Exploring the Axis by Thin White Rope. A decent rock band, I suppose. It seems like my friend Badger and the folks on the Mike Watt mailing list were right. Good, not great. In my scarred veins, it just sounded like the next New York generation. But it didn’t have the intensity of Television’s Marquee Moon or the spine-tingling quality of Lou Reed’s Blue Mask. Just old and jaded I guess. But still looking for that next fix. At least they appear to be a rock band, which is more than I can say for most of what gets hyped.