Writing about music is very difficult. That’s a plain, vague, throw-away kind of sentence, hardly very evocative, and truly representative of most writing about music. Liking, which is to say, judging music is just too subjective. Asking people what kind of music they like is a fairly intimate question: asking them to name their favorite band or song is downright invasive. At least it can seem to be. Responses usually give no real insight into the person being asked. At best, they’ll tell you, “I like all kinds of music.”
Sitting here and writing about three songs that are important to me is going to be tough. Especially since my tastes run to songs without words, so there’s no interpreting what a song “says,” to me. Nor do I attach any kind of significance to life events and the music that accompanied them. (Why not? See above: subjectivity.) Seriously, you’re getting more about me from the fact that I’m writing this at all than you are from what it is I’m actually saying.
Three songs that are important to me, then: Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto no. 20,’ Tool’s ‘Right in Two,’ and ‘Zombie Harem’ by Daikaiju. I really don’t think I can tell you why they’re important. I just now that I need them to be available to me and they’ve become like old friends, songs I can count on if I need to count on anything at all.
The Mozart Piano Concerto no. 20 is in D minor, a key for brooding, but an active brooding, a stomping through darkened streets kind of brooding, heavy coat and fog and a frown turned sneer turned snarl. It starts off with the orchestra setting the main tone and theme, and then the piano comes in gentle and quiet, building to a fury and then backing off again. The second movement is like the coming of a storm, building and building and finally crashing down around you, only to calm down at the end and leaving you in sunlight. Sunlight, you see, the third movement, playing in D major, all of the D minor demons exorcised and the world bright once again.
Tool is a band from Los Angeles, and have been around for 20+ years. This is a band that defies description: call them “prog rock,” and the hard-rock fans shake their head, call them “hard rock”; and the math boys curl their upper lips. ‘Right in Two’ starts with just guitars and bass playing stunted arpeggios, in 3/4 time. 3/4 develop into 11/4, and as the song progresses, as the drums come in, the time signature continues to evolve. The song gets more complex, layers instrumentation on top of more time changes, until a final rush of tightly controlled fury. This is one of my favorite songs to listen to when I’m running.
Daikaiju is a surf-guitar band out of Huntsville Alabama. This is the new generation of surf-guitar, the hard-rock kind that takes the old reverb, cranks it way up, and runs around the stage, getting fans tangled up in the guitar cords. (That’s both an aural metaphor and literal description: their stage antics are as wild and crazy as their guitar licks). For all its craziness, ‘Zombie Harem’ more or less follows a kind of minuet format. Riff A, development, Riff B, repeat; middle section; repeat Riff A and B. As simple as it is, it nevertheless fills you up. It’s all energy. It’s sweat and thirst; you can’t help but play air guitar along with it. Which I do, pretty much everytime, even if I’m out running and it comes on my iPod, even if I’m three miles overdo for a stop—I have to run even faster when it comes on.
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As writing exercises go, let me say this: I wrote way more than I thought I would, here. And I feel like I wrote hardly anything at all. Ah well. At least I’m writing. Maybe that’s a take-away here: if music is just good because it simply is, then writing can just be as well.