When you are young, you hear some lyrics or note sequences and they strike such a resonant chord with your evolving spirit that you can't believe they could have the same effect on anyone else, anywhere. It was written for you alone.
In your adolescent isolation, you sense another human being reaching out to you down the copper wires saying, "There you are." When you connect with a song, you become a lightning rod and it changes you by pushing you out beyond the borders of your previous experiences. You will be forever grateful to those who shone searchlights in to your darkest recesses and discovered a new facet of you. Thereafter, you will perceive more deeply the magnificent, chaotic experience known as life.
You grow up and present yourself at your first concert. You vibrate with anticipation and excitement and you become aware, with much surprise and more than a little irritation that you were not the sole recipient of "The Message." At first, you are humbled by the seething masses of people but, as the concert finds its rhythm, the stamping, clapping, shouting, shoving and gentle, almost tender touches elevate you above solitary existence in to a group consciousness.
The pools of shadow, the burning lights, the noise, the whisperings, the sweat and close proximity to many others awakens ancestral memories. The group communes and reverts back to early hominids gathered around a fire.
You are compelled to move together and make noise, following the high priest, the clan leader, as you drive the predators, the demons and the nightmares back in to the darkness. Fears subside and the group becomes invincible, screaming their victory in to the night.
You converse with those nearby about your thoughts and feelings because, through your shared love of a song, you sense that they will understand you because they understand your music. For a short time, you may be more intimate with them than you will ever be with some of your family and friends.
You grow older still and you find songs that once set your world on fire have somehow transformed in to comfortable old shoes. They have walked a long and dusty road with you, riding on your memories. Silent partners through life, they experience the joys and sorrows with you, taking on new meanings, ever changing. They change because you have changed in your perceptions and responses to the world around you. Like an old friend, they become a safe harbour to shelter in when your life becomes turbulent and your future seems uncertain.
You grow yet older and the individuality you so desperately sought in your youth has become less important. You look less at what separates people and instead, you find comfort in the forces that bind them together. You have long since discovered that most connections between people are tenuous and temporary in nature. You know that permanent connections are precious and must be nurtured like rare orchids.
Like your relationships with other people, your relationship to music is not a passive experience either. You have tended it constantly, as if it were a small child about to run away if neglected. You have sung until your throat is raw, played guitar until your hands cramp, blister, bruise and split. You have discovered that one of your worst fears is that you will lose your special relationship with music as the necessary actions of day to day existence increase, distracting you from your creative and artistic needs.
More than any other music, 'Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' have enabled me to time travel, exist in multidimensions and jump bodies. I can exist in all the stages of my life simultaneously or, within minutes, race through my whole life from youth to maturity and back again. I can focus on a present event or bring the past in to sharp relief and sometimes, the future appears. 'Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' help me to gather chaotic memories, thoughts, feelings and sensations in to my conscious mind where I can examine and order them. When a song triggers a memory, I realise with relief that it hasn't just floated away in to the firmament in a cloud of atrophied neurons, faulty protein codes and electrical short-circuits.
The greatest accomplishment of 'Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' however, is their ability to pull you out of your own existence. Sometimes, the transition is traumatic because you have been unceremoniously stuffed in to the wrong shaped hole - wonderful!!!
At other times, the transition is so smooth and subtle that the division between yourself and the song character is imperceptible.
You are the serial killer on death row awaiting execution. You are a sideshow freak in a carnival. You are the maniac on the road. You are the revenge-fuelled card shark in the saloon. You are the naive young woman about to have her head bashed in with a rock by the man she loves. You are the psychiatric patient desperate to escape his overbearing nurse. You are the aging man going to ever-greater lengths in your desperation to get laid. You are frustrated because you have lost your direction. You are a heart-broken lover, hurt and crying to the night. You are singing a hymn to God and the angels to protect your lover from harm and leave them exactly as they are. You are bursting with new-found love and absolutely nothing can spoil your day. You worship the simplicity and aesthetic beauty of the natural world and when you are frightened or insecure, you crawl in to you lovers warm and tender embrace.
'Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' make the music of extremes - extreme darkness and extreme light. They are an enchanted pool hidden in a primeval forest of obsidian shadows and amber shafts of sunlight.
I float dreamily in sunwarmed shallows as a gleaming mist of balmy, golden melodies soothes my troubled spirit. Sometimes, I hear music resonating from the depths - dischordant, chaotic and wild. I have to go and see so I dive down beyond the reach of light, down to where strange, unknown creatures dart threateningly out of the blackness, attacking my senses. I am naked and alone and bleeding and out of the darkness, strong hands reach out and support me, preventing me from sinking in to the cold depths. I know I could drown but a sense of tranquility washes through me and I pray I will never break the surface again.
No comments:
Post a Comment