Mood stabilizers without side effects
I’ve been living like a good Roman for a while. Control what you can control, don’t worry about the rest. Take life as it comes. Deal with the problem at hand, don’t worry about anger or blame. Focus on the next step, because, as the guardian of the mysterious temple in Baldur’s Gate 2 teaches, “it alone is my choice.”
“Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?”
Implicit in this is the idea that we should move on from the past. Some of this is down to the recognition that we cannot change the past, and some to the recognition that there are some things in our memories that she ought not waste time on. After World War II Winston Churchill said
There must be what Mr Gladstone many years ago called a “blessed act of oblivion”. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years to come hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.
Well, you say that, but as a life progresses the memories accumulate. If these are not faced or processed, they tend to emerge at inconvenient times. What’s done may be done, but as Aeschylus’ Prometheus observes, “time, as it ages, gives a hard lesson in everything.” I have not yet completed Volume 1 of my autobiography (working title: Oh How I Suffered) so there are still quite a few of these items awaiting attention.
Any regrets?
My subconscious mind has taken on the task. My dreams have taken on a backward.-looking character At five in the morning I find myself standing in the driveway of my first childhood home, on the alley where I used to play. Or walking through my old school, or sitting on the floor of my room. Sometimes my eyes snap open, my mind full of thoughts of my mother or father. One by one, my mind picks up these pieces of the puzzle and tries to fit them into a larger picture.
In my waking life dreams are not readily available, so the subconscious switches uses to music as the preferred mode of reflection. I often find, in a quiet moment, that my mind is turning over a chorus, a phrase, or a few words from an old song. Some view earworms as an affliction, but I don’t mind having a conversation with a song; I can certainly think of worse ways to spend an afternoon. Apparently this is normal-ish, and harmless. Dr. Laura Bicknell says that 92% of people experience earworms at one time or another. Psychologist Marty Nemko views them favorably, calling them “mood stabilizers without side effects.”
Danyel Smith recently wrote of the effect that Sade’s songs have had on her through her life.
Sade has meant everything to me in every decade of my adult life. And in my 20s, her key to my whole psyche was “When Am I Going to Make a Living.” Every single lyric spoke to me and for me. When she sings: “We’re hungry but we’re going to win”? That got me up out of my bed, and really up out of grimy situations, and helped keep me on track toward my dreams of being some type of writer. I hadn’t even started calling them “goals” yet. Yet Sade was pushing me along with no judgement and all love.
It is my good fortune that my subconscious mostly proposes tunes I like. I’ve not yet had to contend with earworms from Laura Branigan or Oingo Boingo, although I am given to understand that others genuinely suffer. Dr. Bicknell reports a case in which a person “reported to Radio 6 that she is ‘plagued’ by Bananarama's ‘Nathan Jones’ in moments of extreme stress.”
The songs I find most challenging, and which tend to end up here, are the ones that provoke some internal dissonance. Perhaps there is some odd memory association, or sometimes the lyrics are particularly apt to a life situation I’m experiencing.. The most difficult ones are those where the artistic merit is contestable. It’s one thing to have a “Freddie Freeloader” ear worm, quite another to find oneself ruminating over “Get Down Tonight”.
Somewhere in between are the guilty pleasure songs. These are usually catchy but flawed in some way, not respectable from an artistic standpoint, but not demonstrably bad, either. To paraphrase the great Bill Simmons: ARE WE SURE “Tainted Love” isn’t a great song? The pop and country & western genres are heavily represented on my list, tunes like “I’m Not in Love” by 10cc, of “Never Say Never” by Romeo Void, or even (dare I say) “Smooth Operator” by Sade.
In this vein, there is one song that arises persistently with me, particularly toward the end of a stressful period:
Everybody's high on consolation
Everybody's trying to tell me what is right for me,
My daddy tried to bore me with a sermon
But it's plain to see that they can't comfort me
(Been there, done that.)
Sorry, Charlie, for the imposition
I think I got it, I got the strength to carry on,
I need a drink and a quick decision
Now it's up to me, what will be…
And then, as big and soulful a chorus as you’ll ever hear on a pop record:
The tune was recorded and first releasted in 1973, but the promotion was bungled in various ways. It charted on the strength of the Philadelphia audience, but topped out at #60. It was re-released 1976, after the band had moved to RCA, and with proper exploitation became a major hit, reaching #7 on the Billboard charts.
Hall and Oates have been playing together, with minimal intramural drama, for 50 years, so there are plenty of performances to choose from. I like this live show from 1976, which discards some of the overproduction from the studio version:
The song is really about two breakups: Oates’ flameout with a woman he met in a soul food restaurant, and Hall’s painful divorce. As Oates tells it, when he took the tune to Hall, all he had was the chorus. As the two men filled in the rest, they both brought in their own experiences: the intensity of a brief affair, and the agony a dying marriage. It’s a pop song, but so well-done, and has so much emotional intensity, surely we can call it art as well.
But after you've said "She's Gone" is great - what more can you say? Hall and Oates have played it the same way for decades, and no one else performs it as well as they do. It's almost like a Japanese tea ceremony, where nothing spontaneous can happen and every detail has to be just right.
That's why this (recently discovered) 2009 John Oates performance at the New York Songwriter’s Circle was such a shock to me. He just knocks it out with some help from his friends, notably Phoebe Snow (to his right):