Tangent Thoughts

I have decided that I need a structure to this blog and so I'll be writing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If I turn out to have less to say or one of those days ends up not working out, I'll change it, but for now that is the plan. Unfortunately for me, today is a Friday and that of course means I have to blog. But if I give up on the second day then I guess I'm not that serious about a career in writing about music. (Dream career: working for Rolling Stone or other music magazine.) But I am serious - I just have to prove it to myself this semester.

Fortunately for me and this blog, I have recently made several music discoveries. I won't discuss them all today, otherwise I'll probably run out of topics. But first, I'd like to give you a little bit more insight into what sort of music I like and what music means to me. (That kind of sounds like a 3rd grade essay: "What Music Means To Me." Oh well - the blog is kind of like an assignment, anyway.)

If you know me outside of this blog and you are not a random reader (which I assume you're not, actually, because I don't imagine that many others will stumble across this insignificant piece of arrogance) then you probably know that my all-time desert-island favorite movie is High Fidelity (John Cusack, Jack Black; a must-buy if you haven't seen it - don't even rent it, you will fall in love forever) because of its attitude toward music. It is based on the novel of same name by Nick Hornby, a British author who actually is coming out with a new music-themed book this September, to my ever-lasting joy. (Side note - I picked up several of his other books while in England; I highly recommend him, as well. He is extremely clever and funny.) Anyway, as much as I can't get enough of Hornby and as fantastic as the novel version of High Fidelity is, I have to say that John Cusack is what really gives the story a personality, or rather, makes Rob Gordon (the main character) come to life. He is a regular guy; he is that guy who sucks at love and relationships, which is pretty much every guy ever in my opinion. (Not that I can talk. Although I am a girl, if I haven't made that clear yet.)

But he also cares about music in a way that, until I saw this movie, I thought only I was capable of. (Not to be conceited, it's just that I have never met anyone who gets so into it.) I was unaware that there is this whole mass of people who will spend their afternoons tracking down old vinyl albums and still have record players and are into all that stuff. It's like they're tracking down lost memories, is what it sounds like to me. My dad has a record player that doesn't work and I want him to fix it. I think we sold most of our records at a garage sale like nine years ago, though, but I really like the idea from High Fidelity where Rob Gordon has shelves and shelves of records everywhere in his apartment. (I'm that way with books, though.) We also have a Victrola, which for those of you who don't know or are too young to know is the next step up from a gramaphone. It's this big wooden box that plays records just like a record player, though it only plays a certain kind. It won't play modern records. It's volume control are these two doors in front and the sound gets louder or softer depending whether you open them and how widely open them. Actually, I really hate the Victrola because the songs it plays are so, so old and tinny-sounding. But I think it's an interesting piece of musical history; without it, I wouldn't have my iPod. Besides, it's nearly a hundred years old and it still plays--I'll be lucky if my iPod makes it until next Christmas, and it's only two and a half years old.

Anyway, I'm getting severely off-topic. (Can you imagine if I was really trying to write for a professional music magazine and I lapsed off on a tangent about Victrolas? Fired much?) Back to High Fidelity. So Rob Gordon (John Cusack) is all about music. And I'm not going to give you a plot summary, you just really need to watch it and then watch it again because you might not fall in love with it the first time. I didn't, in fact, I can't even take credit for wanting to watch the movie of my own volition the first time I saw it. It was on some movie channel like TBS or AMC or something one day, and I only watched it because a friend once told me that it is a really excellent, really funny movie about relationships.

But to me, it is also more than that. Rob Gordon has this thing where he makes an all-time desert-island top-five list of everything--books, movies, songs, albums, artists, ex-girlfriends. Top-five break-ups, the ones that hurt the most. (I would so do that, if I had enough exes, which I don't. Although one of them would certainly be enough to fill all five spaces.) And his philosophy is that "it's not what you ARE like that matters, it's WHAT you like." I have to agree. Books, films, and music are really an excellent way to judge people in life. I'm not saying that's really all there is to it; obviously personality counts for a lot, too. But what if two people have ABSOLUTELY nothing in common? They're doomed, I think. But if they have ABSOLUTELY nothing in common EXCEPT a favorite band or book or film, then they could be saved. Maybe that one thing could hold them together. (I don't know from experience. But I like to think that it's true.) In High Fidelity, Rob and his girlfriend both love music, but his girlfriend starts to drift into the real world and become more focused on a "real job" as a lawyer. (Rob is the owner of a record store called Championship Vinyl. Did I mention that's another of my dream jobs?) But Rob says that their entire relationship is based on Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On." Personally, I think that would be really great if I was in a relationship based on a song or a love of the same band or book. It sounds dreamy and stupid to more practical people, I guess, but I never said I was practical.

Okay, back to topic—High Fidelity is pretty much my music Bible; it taught me that it’s okay to be an appreciator of music and not feel like a total poseur because I don’t play an instrument (although I have a Silvertone acoustic guitar that gets messed around on when the mood strikes) and I can’t read music and I haven’t even sung for an audience in over two years, and that was just for chorus in high school. High Fidelity made me realize that music can be a lifestyle without being your occupation. I am not going to be the next Jimi Hendrix or Joe Satriani and I don’t want to be—I’ll leave that to some of my very talented musician friends. Yes, I do dream sometimes of what it would be like to be able to play guitar on stage for a huge screaming audience, and it wouldn’t even be my own song, it would be something fun and upbeat from Bowling For Soup, or a great hit single that everyone loves, like Journey's “Don’t Stop Believing” or Blue Oyster Cult's "Burnin' For You" or—my biggest desire—something by my own desert-island all-time favorite band Coheed and Cambria. I could write several books on Coheed and never say all that I want to about how much I love them, so I’ll save them for another entry, or several other entries. Actually, they will probably crop up a lot in this entire blog, and if you don’t like them I hope that doesn’t turn you off this blog because I think that if anyone gave them a serious listen and delved deep into those songs you would fall in love with them, too, because they are all perfect. But more on that another time.

My point is, I know I will never live that dream of covering my favorite songs on guitar with a band in front of a huge audience at a concert. Even if I learn to actually play the guitar, I know deep down it is not my calling. I’m a writer, and that’s all I’ve ever been, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still be a music critic. Sure, I have a lot more to learn about it, and I don’t even pretend to be an expert. But I’d have an opinion and frankly, my idea of a soul mate is, on some level, someone like the character of Rob Gordon who I could discuss and argue music with from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep, and it wouldn’t even mean anything, because what do individual opinions matter in the grand scheme of things? But it would mean something to me, because all I really want to do is discuss music. So, instead, I’ll talk about it in this blog, and probably no one will ever see it except maybe my mom and a couple of friends. But it’s a project and that’s what I really need right now…so whatever.

I guess that’s all for now. I’m already getting LOTS of ideas for this, more than I’d originally anticipated. I kind of went off on a tangent that I didn’t intend to with High Fidelity, but at least that provided somewhat of a back story to this blog in general.

Ciao,
Emily Noel