She Chopin Broccoli! And other Musical Adventures.

It's a rare thing that I listen to "This American Life", for a two reasons. 

First, it's on at wierd times during the day here, and so I am never near the radio to listen to it.  I used to download on it my I-pod but found I got so interested in the stories that it really became a distraction.  Not as much of a distraction as Katie Morgan's "Having Sex with Katie Morgan", but a distraction nevertheless.

Second, David Sedaris sometimes features on "This American Life", and with all due respect to the man I really don't like his work.  The reason I don't like his work is that, honestly, with some practice and the proper training, I always feel I could do just as well.  Maybe not in the audio piece department, but certainly from a literary standpoint.  The fact that he is out there and I am in here just kind of grates on my nerves.  "This American Life" remindes me of this, and so I usually don't tune in. 

But one time I was actually listening to "This American Life", probably in the car, and I heard an absolutly brillaint piece by Starlee Kine on break-up songs and why they make us feel better (mostly becuase they make us feel worse), and after examining the different break-up songs realizes that the only way to really deal with her own pain after a failed relationship was to write a break-up song herself.  To do this, she contacts who she takes to be the undisputed king of the genre:  Phil Collins.  Really!  And if you doubt the claim, Google (should that be capitalized??) the lyrics to "Against all Odds" (you know, "take a look at me now?").  If you have suffered a recent romantic misadventure, well, grab the tissues before you click the link.  I dare you not to use them.

As for me, Phill Collins doesn't really cut it, becuase it (and other songs like it) are just a little too cheesy.  Now, Kine says we must embrace the cheesiness, give in to the cheesiness, be one with the cheesiness.  But it seems that the death of a relationship requires something a little more fitting. I mean, on Christmas Eve, do you want to listen to the guy in the first video, or the second?

 Nothing really wrong with the first, I suppose, but as a matter of personal taste, I'll pick Andrea over Andrew while I plan my Christmas party, thank you very much.

So if I was to select a break-up song that seems to fit the occasion, it would have to be Chopin's Nocturne in E flat (Opus 9 No. 2).  Muse fans may recognize it as the piano piece playing in the second half of "Eurasia / Collatoral Damage".

And I'll let you in on a little secret:  Yes, I seem like a snobbish culturued prig, with open disdain for David Sedaris, Phil Collins, and whoever wrote that first awful, AWFUL Christmas song.  But truth be told, I had never heard Chopin's famous Nocturne until I heard it on Muse's album "The Resistance", and I thought it had been written by Muse.  I was so entranced by it, I was going to see if I could buy sheet music from the album so that I could learn how to play it myself.  After several months of not knowing otherwise, I heard the actual piece on my local classical radio station and slapped myself in the head.  Chopin!  Of course.  I cursed my stupidity, but rejoiced in the fact that I already had the music in a compilation of piano works I own.  All this time, and it was already in the piano bench!  However, shortly thereafter I was dismayed to find that it is well beyond my technical abilities as a pianist. It would take me...oh...probably 5 years to learn.  After all, it took me three years to learn just the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, (just the second movement!), and I still haven't got it down. 

So anyway.  The Nocture, well, is just fantastic.  It just has that perfect bittersweet balance of melancholy and beauty.  It encapsulates so many different emotions, being at times incredibly fragile and delicate, at other times healthy, hopeful, robust.  It's depressing, yet redeeming.   Like the best works of art, the interpretation is open, the piece becoming a blank canvass which becomes awash in pain, longing, or the anticipation of a brighter day. 

But sometimes there is no room for hope.  If you are more into sitting around and watching your world burn around you, then might I suggest Barber's Adagio for Strings, arrnaged for a Choir? 

Try really, really hard to disassociate it from the movie "Platoon".  I know it's hard, but try.  This music is heavenly, ghostly, disconcerting, and at times when I listen to it, even if I am in a good mood, I just feel the bottom drop out of my heart.  And yet even then, there is something about the piece that says even in the midst of crisis there is something that can redeem us. 

Need more ideas?  Go back into the world of pop.  For pure pain, I find nothing answers like Nirvana.  I own a large chunk of Nirvana's catalog:  all three major albums, the unplugged album, their live album, their recently released box set, even one of the b-side albums.  I can't say the same of anyother band that I have ever listened to.  I would have bought the DVD of their show at Reading, but the whole thing is pretty much already on You Tube, so why waste the money?  Were Kurt Cobain alive today, I think he would approve.  Of course, that's not how his story ended. 

I won't toe the line for Nirvana and say they are the greatest rock band ever, but I do think that Kurt Cobain was probably one of the great musical artists of our time, painting painful abstractions with his songs, supported admirably with Novoselic's poppy bass lines and Dave Grohls fucking fantastic (sorry, no other words will do) drumming.  Nirvana is without a doubt the band I have listened to more than any other since I was 14.  That sentence probably says more about me than any other single sentence I have ever written. 

Still need more?  Why my dear reader than you must try the Ramones.  And it can't just be any old Ramones album (their studio albums, I find, suck royally).  No.  It must be the concert in London on New Year's Eve, 1977.  I find it answers for any mood, any situation, provided you are not about to get it on.

Christ, that was a long one.  This essay definetly lost its focus, which orginally was supposed to be mostly on Chopin and why I think he is superior to Phil Collins for the brokenhearted.  The answer, by the by, is that at least with Chopin (and even with Barber) there is something about the music that won't let you entirely drown in misery.  Be it the beauty of the pieces or the way they modulate emotion from despair to hope and back, there is something in them that won't let you go all the way down; they at least provide something, muscically, worth placing your bets on.  Far better than wallowing in the cheesiness.  The second two?  Nirvana is pure angst, but there is something defiant in their music, and "Against All Odds" is to defiance what France is to NASCAR: it ain't.  Even more defiant are the Ramones, who are a helluva lot more fun than Phil Collins.

So there is a conclusion for you.  We got here, even if it took a long time and a couple of line changes to do so, and we did not end up at the Met but rather piss-ass drunk in a smokey club on Bowery and Bleeker.  Maybe that's why I am not on "This American Life".  Ah, but at least I have in a roundabout way brought us back to the beginning again, at the death. 

I just may become a David Sedaris yet.