are you listening to what you're listening to?

“… so I’ve got my sad music on today …”

May as well put that music degree to work.

I’ve been listening to a lot of fast, sweaty Latino music since I got back from Mexico. Call me basic, but I can’t help but love a song where the chorus is just ‘calor’ shouted repeatedly.

Don’t worry, this is going somewhere.

The other week my mate was casually banging out a world-class mix in my house. I’m used to it — he does it most weeks. But still. What a privilege. That man hides his light under a bush.

At around midnight, he put on some folk tunes. Girl from the North Country started playing — the Johnny Cash version with Dylan. I sat inside it for a minute, before someone else pulled me back into the room.

“Where’s the wine?” or something equally philosophical.

I’ve heard that song a million times. The reason it got me — despite the annoying outro — is that song explains an impossibly complex feeling with the simplest metaphor. This piece was half written, and for a few days, it made me never want to write again.

Then it became the knife.

Bob Dylan is a bit of a dick. His writing suggests he knows it.

But unlike Girl from the North Country, there’s an obsession that lives in algorithmic rock-pop land — music that exists purely to loop over a feeling rather than move through it. Think Coldplay or Snow Patrol, and playlists titled “late night thoughts”. Emotionally, it’s all so one-note.

It’s not sad in a cleansing way.
It’s sad in a ‘sit here and gently marinate’ way.

Also, it’s time to let go of the shuffle button. Unless you enjoy being ambushed by a tune from a grim moment in 2017.

When we were kids, we used to try to sneak Night by Benga & Coki on as many times as we could if the vibe at the party was dead. Legend has it they wrote that on a PS2. Either way, massively improved things.

The neuroscientists tell me that music rewires the same brain systems we use for pleasure, motivation, and reward. The same as eating food, having sex, and doing drugs.

Maybe that’s why we’re so careful — and sometimes so careless — about what we put on.

To be fair, sad music is enticing. I love it. I learned guitar because of it. The best tells a story, and stirs something uncomfortable in us that most of the happy-go-lucky shit never touches. It’s a bit like cocaine for feelings.

There’s this clip of a Vietnam veteran who turns up at John Lennon’s house. He tells John he thinks all his songs are about him. Lennon just sort of shrugs, and says they’re not. They’re just songs. He delivers it in that flat, deadpan way only a Scouser could. It’s kind of brutal.

Don’t worry, they made him lunch.

I think about that clip anytime I catch myself confusing a lyric with my personality.

I’ve always had a thing for Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground.

Waking up at my sister’s place in Dalston, prepping for another day running around the studio in Notting Hill. We’d put it on while making coffee on the stove in their disgusting kitchen. It has this almost sepulchral mood that suits moments like that.

I love how it doesn’t tell you what to feel.
It’s giving back-door cigs with your mate after the afters.

“What costume shall the poor girl wear,
to all tomorrows parties?”

Nico’s voice is just so detached in the best way.

It’s not woe-is-me sadness.
It’s look at us being sad sadness — a very different service.

You know what, screw it. They’re too cool to be sad. Lou Reed is smirking at you from the corner of the room, cigarette half-smoked, watching you realise something about yourself.

Same goes for Kate Bush. Some of her songs are deeply sad, but completely unembarrassed about how weird that feeling really is. People throwing themselves through windows in Victorian dresses??? That’s full commitment to the bit. I guess you can swap Kate Bush for Lana Del Rey if you must have a contemporary exmple.

What if grief… but make it camp, unhinged, and cinematic as hell?

You can only pull that off if you’ve got a four-octave range and Emily Brontë’s vision for romance.

Chris Martin wants a hug and a promise things will get better. Kate Bush is handing you a fog machine, a leotard, and a look that says: yes, this hurts — but it’s also kind of jokes, isn’t it?

That’s the difference.

Notes:

MJ Nebreda | ISLA DEL TERROR MIX
Outsource your will to live to a Venezuelan woman you’ll never meet

Shotty Jon’s Confronting Mixtapes
I should start selling tickets to my house parties

Music and activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion
Haha, nerd

John Lennon Clip
Slightly depressing, slightly relieving I guess