Music and memory 1

"Ladies, join me and Stevie for some easy-going, soulful soprano sax. If you're good I'll let you touch the hair. Oh, what does Stevie play? That sexy, silky love machine called the oboe. Watch out."

Howdy...so now that I've peeled myself from the Gamecube (seriously, 'twas like a starfish to a clam, the Gamecube was becoming part of me) and re-committed to keeping this blog thing going, I've got to come up with something to say. I was bugging Stevie G about not writing anything in ages, not since his 'To See Live With Nickleback or Not To See Live With Nickleback' post, and he said "Man, I'm really busy right now---Kenny and I are going on tour and things are just too soulful and contemporary to write much right now. And Kenny's perm is, well, just perfect, you know?"

No, he didn't say that. But he did say that he didn't have anything to say. My immediate reaction was to think "So you've been mute since mid-December? Man, that's monastic." But then I thought, who am I to talk? The only things I've been able to say in the past two months have been Work, Busy, Merry Christmas, Nintendo. So here I am trying. ("I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try..." Words to live by.)

I think I own approximately 300 to 400 CDs. About half of those are at my family home in Cornwall, PEI, in a box, because Shauna, wily gal that she is, convinced me that I could rough it in Ontario without my copy of Dee-Lite's second album (post-Groove Is In The Heart) and Rammstein's Sehnsucht. She tried to convince me that because such albums rarely to never make it to the stereo, I should sell them or give them away. Ha. She clearly didn't understand my music collector ethic. I don't even give away the Moose Tracks CDs that used to come in cases of Moosehead Green Bottle (oh how I miss you). But the prospect of dragging box upon box of worldly goods to Ontario didn't appeal to me, so I did come around to the idea of trimming down to some essentials. Can't say it doesn't bother me, though---I can just picture my sister digging through the coveted box of goodies in my bedroom, cackling with glee upon finding Junkhouse's Strays, taking it out of the box, listening to it, putting it in some other CD case, leaving it sitting around in no case at all, lending it to one of her friends. CD faux pas I tell you. Julia, when I return to PEI sometime down the road, I expect to find each and every CD in its proper case, stacked in orderly fashion in the box, with not a scratch or thumbmark to be seen. I don't care if you rip them all onto your Mac, just please don't let anyone else touch them!

So I'm uptight about my music collection. In truth I think music is the only thing I do collect. I love music and can't go long without it. But it's not purely an aural pleasure; I've enjoyed watching the collection grow from a handful beside my little Audiovox shelf stereo that I bought in grade eleven (it still works and now fills the lesser but important role of bathroom stereo) to filling a brick-and-plywood shelf above the monitor on my desk, to maxing out the 250-CD capacity media tower I bought three or four years ago. Being denied the enjoyment of looking at my entire collection in one place has me in manageable but constant stress, like a mother with a child away at camp.

But who collects CDs just to fill wall space? People with a lot of money and the need to seem discerning without making the effort to do the discerning, that's who. The greatest joy of having a respectable collection is that I can fall in love with a new CD and play it to death for awhile, grow tired of it and shelve it for months or even a year, let new flings and flirtations come and go, and then, perhaps on some rainy, reflective day, stumble upon it in the rows, put it the stereo and presto, mentally step back into my life of some time ago. I believe it's simply playing frequency that makes most of my favourite albums conjure periods of time; some sort of neural connection is made, and if you play Nirvana In Utero I'm instantly back in the fall of grade ten. There doesn't have to be a signficant event within the period for the music to remind me of it; hook-ups, break-ups, moving, new jobs, new schools and so on sometimes feature, but not always. Frequently the most immediate memories are more abstract or less-obviously significant. When I play Coldplay's X&Y I think of the fat wet leaves overhanging our mini-parking lot on Scully St. last summer. No real reason, other than I played that album in the car a lot.

This memory evocation is almost always pleasant...I'm not sure why exactly. I think nostalgia can be a bit narcotic; it's especially easy to construct for yourself a rosy picture of the past if you don't feel smashingly about the present moment. Oh yes, you had troubles then, but they don't seem as bad as now, do they? It's pretty wonky reasoning, but it's easy to give in to. But while I vocalize the evils of nostalgia (it's a slippery slope, kids---next you'll get sentimental) in what better context is there than musical enjoyment to relax the rules of your thinking? Debatable point, perhaps...if you turn off thought you might find yourself grooving to Britney Sp---no, nevermind, that stuff is just soul-jarring, you don't even need a mind to cringe and experience the urge to stab yourself or anyone in the eye with the jagged shards of her snapped-in-two CD. But I find the rut of memory to be comfortable, almost all past/present circumstances aside. Perhaps it's the renewed intensity of the memory, just like the intensity of the emotion the song itself might produce. In silence you could recall the memory, or you could feel, say, sad, but the music is an intensifier. It is very, it is really, it is completely and it is even utterly sometimes.

Perhaps the only time I don't like the music-memory game is when the music is tied to something or someone unpleasant and not enough time has passed between then and now or them and me. Both Pearl Jam's No Code and Yield albums were unpalatable to me at different points because they reminded me of a couple of people I wasn't pleased with (sigh, ex-girlfriends). But enough time has passed and while I don't care to re-establish connection with these people, I can now listen to those albums and think about that time in my life, not just those people, and now I enjoy the music again.

At this point I wrote about several memorable albums of mine, but the post got very long and I don't expect people to pack a lunch before sitting down to read it. So I'll publish this much for now, and then in a few days I'll publish the rest.