Music thoughts and Rush then/now

[KennyLee]

An excerpt from Michael Robbins' essay on death metal, Norwegian and otherwise, in the May, 2014, issue of

Harper's:

 

"

But I do think it's a shame to spend your middle years listening to the same old Game Theory records. The summer I was twenty-three, stumbling around Europe, I listened to the Stones'

Exile on Main Street

on my Walkman at least once a day.

Those songs slide right off me now. They gave me everything they had in them, and I'm grateful.

 

I didn't get into metal until I was in my thirties, and only then because -- this is really embarrassing to admit, but as they say in A.A., we're only as sick as our secrets - I was flipping through some of Robert Christgau's old

Consumer Guide

collections and saw he'd given Slayer's

Reign in Blood

a B+. Every time I think I've got a handle on [metal], I turn up some unsuspected star chart that leads me off in search of ever more distant constellations. It's like being seventeen again, perusing the testimony of Christgau, scouring every record store in town for some out-of-print Adverts album I just had to hear.

 

Except, of course, it's not like being seventeen at all. That out-of-print record is a Google search away,

and music can't ever again be as important to me as it was when I was young.

[Ralph Waldo] Emerson wrote that "after thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death." This is -- how shall I put it - true.

Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can't anymore.

"

 

These words have resonated for the past few months. I don't want to really believe them, but he has a point. And while certain Rush tunes and parts thereof -- the ending of 'Subdivisions'; the bridge of 'Presto'; the sheer instrumental power of the intro to 'Xanadu'; the sheer power of 'Headlong Flight', among others -- will take much longer to slide off me, in many ways much of the rest of the catalog has given me everything it has. I'm grateful for it, but it slides, at some times more slowly than at others, and 2112 will never have the same emotional power (is there a German word for this? There should be) as it did for me 25 years ago. Neither will 'Tom Sawyer', neither will 'DEW'. And yet while I'll always remember the magic of hearing 'TSOR' for the first time with its sublime blend of guitar energy and atmospheric glockenspiel, I doubt I'll ever feel that same magic again.

 

 

Of course, there's always a Rush cd somewhere in the car, and the power of a Rush concert is a musical experience still unparalleled in my life. But in some ways we're trying to recapture that unabashed importance Rush meant to us when we were younger and first discovered them - and we never can. Echoes, even re-released and amplified, still decay.

 

 

On the 6th of July, I will be sixty. That's right. SIXTY. I have loved music as long as I can remember. Even as a very little girl, I loved it.

 

I can listen to an album today and it takes me right back to where I was when it first came out. Someone once put it very well: music has been and is the soundtrack of my life. Back then. And today.

 

Neil would probably be horrified ( :o ) if he knew that there was someone out there listening to his lyrics and taking them almost the opposite of how he meant them to be taken - or taking them in a spiritual sense (double horror for Neil :o :o ).

 

While it is true that music doesn't take front and center stage in my life as it once did, that is only because there are other things now that push it a bit to the side. But, if I could, I would make it once again front and center.

 

Music will always be important to me until the day I die.

 

 

I don't dispute the mnemonic power of music - second only to smell - but that memory is a pale fire to the original flame of experience and context.

 

And the original excerpt wasn't calling music unimportant; only that it didn't have the power it once had - consider the sway music had over the 17-year old you versus the 60 year old you. You listen with a more critical ear now; you have layers and layers of experience and comparison to use with new music; you, as you said, have other things that push music to the side.

 

I mean, I have a raging audiophile system downstairs and I still make time maybe once a week to do some serious listening. And even relegating listening to a basement hi-end audio system is something the 17-year old me would never have done.

 

Edit: Happy 59.11, Lorraine!

 

 

Well, yes. I am not a youth anymore with nary a care or responsibility in the world. Music has to take a back seat today.

 

Four more weeks to go of being able to say "fifty-nine" and then I will enter into sixty-ville.

 

 

 

60 is the new 59 1/2! Happy almost Birthday!

 

I'm only 43 and already the phrase, "You're only as old as you feel" is no longer comforting. I feel 70.

[Lorraine]

Yeah, I feel seventy too. More like eighty. I was thinking last night all I have gone through in my life and wondering how I did it and still have any sanity left (they say that one of the best signs of someone who is nuts is that they think they aren't, so maybe I am :o ).

[Segue Myles]

Yeah, I feel seventy too. More like eighty. I was thinking last night all I have gone through in my life and wondering how I did it and still have any sanity left (they say that one of the best signs of someone who is nuts is that they think they aren't, so maybe I am :o ).

 

Try being 23 with depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, knowing this is pretty much only the beginning of your adult life.

 

If this is how it starts,i fear how it will end!

 

*hugs*

[coventry]

An excerpt from Michael Robbins' essay on death metal, Norwegian and otherwise, in the May, 2014, issue of

Harper's:

 

"

But I do think it's a shame to spend your middle years listening to the same old Game Theory records. The summer I was twenty-three, stumbling around Europe, I listened to the Stones'

Exile on Main Street

on my Walkman at least once a day.

Those songs slide right off me now. They gave me everything they had in them, and I'm grateful.

 

I didn't get into metal until I was in my thirties, and only then because -- this is really embarrassing to admit, but as they say in A.A., we're only as sick as our secrets - I was flipping through some of Robert Christgau's old

Consumer Guide

collections and saw he'd given Slayer's

Reign in Blood

a B+. Every time I think I've got a handle on [metal], I turn up some unsuspected star chart that leads me off in search of ever more distant constellations. It's like being seventeen again, perusing the testimony of Christgau, scouring every record store in town for some out-of-print Adverts album I just had to hear.

 

Except, of course, it's not like being seventeen at all. That out-of-print record is a Google search away,

and music can't ever again be as important to me as it was when I was young.

[Ralph Waldo] Emerson wrote that "after thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death." This is -- how shall I put it - true.

Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can't anymore.

"

 

These words have resonated for the past few months. I don't want to really believe them, but he has a point. And while certain Rush tunes and parts thereof -- the ending of 'Subdivisions'; the bridge of 'Presto'; the sheer instrumental power of the intro to 'Xanadu'; the sheer power of 'Headlong Flight', among others -- will take much longer to slide off me, in many ways much of the rest of the catalog has given me everything it has. I'm grateful for it, but it slides, at some times more slowly than at others, and 2112 will never have the same emotional power (is there a German word for this? There should be) as it did for me 25 years ago. Neither will 'Tom Sawyer', neither will 'DEW'. And yet while I'll always remember the magic of hearing 'TSOR' for the first time with its sublime blend of guitar energy and atmospheric glockenspiel, I doubt I'll ever feel that same magic again.

 

 

Of course, there's always a Rush cd somewhere in the car, and the power of a Rush concert is a musical experience still unparalleled in my life. But in some ways we're trying to recapture that unabashed importance Rush meant to us when we were younger and first discovered them - and we never can. Echoes, even re-released and amplified, still decay.

 

 

On the 6th of July, I will be sixty. That's right. SIXTY. I have loved music as long as I can remember. Even as a very little girl, I loved it.

 

I can listen to an album today and it takes me right back to where I was when it first came out. Someone once put it very well: music has been and is the soundtrack of my life. Back then. And today.

 

Neil would probably be horrified ( :o ) if he knew that there was someone out there listening to his lyrics and taking them almost the opposite of how he meant them to be taken - or taking them in a spiritual sense (double horror for Neil :o :o ).

 

While it is true that music doesn't take front and center stage in my life as it once did, that is only because there are other things now that push it a bit to the side. But, if I could, I would make it once again front and center.

 

Music will always be important to me until the day I die.

 

 

I don't dispute the mnemonic power of music - second only to smell - but that memory is a pale fire to the original flame of experience and context.

 

And the original excerpt wasn't calling music unimportant; only that it didn't have the power it once had - consider the sway music had over the 17-year old you versus the 60 year old you. You listen with a more critical ear now; you have layers and layers of experience and comparison to use with new music; you, as you said, have other things that push music to the side.

 

I mean, I have a raging audiophile system downstairs and I still make time maybe once a week to do some serious listening. And even relegating listening to a basement hi-end audio system is something the 17-year old me would never have done.

 

Edit: Happy 59.11, Lorraine!

 

 

Well, yes. I am not a youth anymore with nary a care or responsibility in the world. Music has to take a back seat today.

 

Four more weeks to go of being able to say "fifty-nine" and then I will enter into sixty-ville.

 

 

 

60 is the new 59 1/2! Happy almost Birthday!

 

I'm only 43 and already the phrase, "You're only as old as you feel" is no longer comforting. I feel 70.

 

 

especially in the morning when walking down the stairs is much more painful then it used to be

[KennyLee]

An excerpt from Michael Robbins' essay on death metal, Norwegian and otherwise, in the May, 2014, issue of

Harper's:

 

"

But I do think it's a shame to spend your middle years listening to the same old Game Theory records. The summer I was twenty-three, stumbling around Europe, I listened to the Stones'

Exile on Main Street

on my Walkman at least once a day.

Those songs slide right off me now. They gave me everything they had in them, and I'm grateful.

 

I didn't get into metal until I was in my thirties, and only then because -- this is really embarrassing to admit, but as they say in A.A., we're only as sick as our secrets - I was flipping through some of Robert Christgau's old

Consumer Guide

collections and saw he'd given Slayer's

Reign in Blood

a B+. Every time I think I've got a handle on [metal], I turn up some unsuspected star chart that leads me off in search of ever more distant constellations. It's like being seventeen again, perusing the testimony of Christgau, scouring every record store in town for some out-of-print Adverts album I just had to hear.

 

Except, of course, it's not like being seventeen at all. That out-of-print record is a Google search away,

and music can't ever again be as important to me as it was when I was young.

[Ralph Waldo] Emerson wrote that "after thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death." This is -- how shall I put it - true.

Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can't anymore.

"

 

These words have resonated for the past few months. I don't want to really believe them, but he has a point. And while certain Rush tunes and parts thereof -- the ending of 'Subdivisions'; the bridge of 'Presto'; the sheer instrumental power of the intro to 'Xanadu'; the sheer power of 'Headlong Flight', among others -- will take much longer to slide off me, in many ways much of the rest of the catalog has given me everything it has. I'm grateful for it, but it slides, at some times more slowly than at others, and 2112 will never have the same emotional power (is there a German word for this? There should be) as it did for me 25 years ago. Neither will 'Tom Sawyer', neither will 'DEW'. And yet while I'll always remember the magic of hearing 'TSOR' for the first time with its sublime blend of guitar energy and atmospheric glockenspiel, I doubt I'll ever feel that same magic again.

 

 

Of course, there's always a Rush cd somewhere in the car, and the power of a Rush concert is a musical experience still unparalleled in my life. But in some ways we're trying to recapture that unabashed importance Rush meant to us when we were younger and first discovered them - and we never can. Echoes, even re-released and amplified, still decay.

 

 

On the 6th of July, I will be sixty. That's right. SIXTY. I have loved music as long as I can remember. Even as a very little girl, I loved it.

 

I can listen to an album today and it takes me right back to where I was when it first came out. Someone once put it very well: music has been and is the soundtrack of my life. Back then. And today.

 

Neil would probably be horrified ( :o ) if he knew that there was someone out there listening to his lyrics and taking them almost the opposite of how he meant them to be taken - or taking them in a spiritual sense (double horror for Neil :o :o ).

 

While it is true that music doesn't take front and center stage in my life as it once did, that is only because there are other things now that push it a bit to the side. But, if I could, I would make it once again front and center.

 

Music will always be important to me until the day I die.

 

 

I don't dispute the mnemonic power of music - second only to smell - but that memory is a pale fire to the original flame of experience and context.

 

And the original excerpt wasn't calling music unimportant; only that it didn't have the power it once had - consider the sway music had over the 17-year old you versus the 60 year old you. You listen with a more critical ear now; you have layers and layers of experience and comparison to use with new music; you, as you said, have other things that push music to the side.

 

I mean, I have a raging audiophile system downstairs and I still make time maybe once a week to do some serious listening. And even relegating listening to a basement hi-end audio system is something the 17-year old me would never have done.

 

Edit: Happy 59.11, Lorraine!

 

 

Well, yes. I am not a youth anymore with nary a care or responsibility in the world. Music has to take a back seat today.

 

Four more weeks to go of being able to say "fifty-nine" and then I will enter into sixty-ville.

 

 

 

60 is the new 59 1/2! Happy almost Birthday!

 

I'm only 43 and already the phrase, "You're only as old as you feel" is no longer comforting. I feel 70.

 

 

especially in the morning when walking down the stairs is much more painful then it used to be

 

 

I don't remember not being a little tired. It hurts just getting out of a chair some days.

[Lorraine]

Yeah, I feel seventy too. More like eighty. I was thinking last night all I have gone through in my life and wondering how I did it and still have any sanity left (they say that one of the best signs of someone who is nuts is that they think they aren't, so maybe I am :o ).

 

Try being 23 with depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, knowing this is pretty much only the beginning of your adult life.

 

If this is how it starts,i fear how it will end!

 

*hugs*

 

You will always always always always have your music. There may be times when you have no one and nothing else but music, but it will always be there for you.

[Segue Myles]

Yeah, I feel seventy too. More like eighty. I was thinking last night all I have gone through in my life and wondering how I did it and still have any sanity left (they say that one of the best signs of someone who is nuts is that they think they aren't, so maybe I am :o ).

 

Try being 23 with depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, knowing this is pretty much only the beginning of your adult life.

 

If this is how it starts,i fear how it will end!

 

*hugs*

 

You will always always always always have your music. There may be times when you have no one and nothing else but music, but it will always be there for you.

 

thanks i needed that!

[Slack jaw gaze]

Neil would probably be horrified ( :o ) if he knew that there was someone out there listening to his lyrics and taking them almost the opposite of how he meant them to be taken - or taking them in a spiritual sense (double horror for Neil :o :o ).

He is on record as saying he is especially pleased by that.

[Lorraine]

Neil would probably be horrified ( :o ) if he knew that there was someone out there listening to his lyrics and taking them almost the opposite of how he meant them to be taken - or taking them in a spiritual sense (double horror for Neil :o :o ).

He is on record as saying he is especially pleased by that.

 

Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember him saying that. Good. He's more open-minded than I gave him credit for.