I have no idea why, but for the last week I have no motivation to listen to music. This is strange, I think, since I was one of those children--and then adults--that loved to sing. (One of my sisters sang before she could really speak.) I consider myself to be something of a musical person, but lately the idea of listening to music fills me with some dread.
This may be the consequence of raising critical children. If you're thinking, "I wonder where they got that from," you have point, but only just so. While not perfect, I think I did a pretty good job of not belittling their voices (which, to be fair, are lovely). I did not always get the same courtesy from them, let's just say.
I have also frequently felt like I wasn't allowed to sing by myself. When I was growing up, my mother would tag in almost immediately if it was a song she knew, and my children would do the same. This was not, I'm pretty sure, to cover my voice: I was cast in school choral solos, had the lead in a high school musical, and was a member of the chorus (well, it was kind of weird, but we'll call it that) in a college play. It's not that I can't sing, but that no one has wanted to let me sing on my own. I just bring the music, I guess, except now I worry about singing out and having someone either jump all over me and/or critique me.
So, yes, maybe I have a few issues around singing, but I think music is a human need akin to companionship. I'm not joking. And I have made it this far, struggling through my neuroses, still wanting to at least *listen*. What changed?
I'm a little sensitive about whether or not I'm listening to the stuff the cool kids like, or whether I'm listening to the stuff the anti-cool kids like, and then to what extent those are the same things...Whoa, excuse me, I just had a little flashback to "alternative music" in the late 1980s, and not feeling really seen until Cher Horowitz rolled her eyes at her stepbrother's Complaint Rock and declared "wah, wah, wah."
Anyway! Yes, I think about what my music says about who I am all the time, but I'm also an adult who can, on occasion, push past adolescent trauma and get stuff done in the present. Which, again, I have been able to do for decades when it comes to music. But I think what's started to make me more protective of my listening time is all of the shenanigans Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music (I mean, in theory; I don't do Amazon anything, but I know they're there), and all of the other streaming services--not to mention the radio--indulge in to drag the most profit out of art. And let's agree that the music is much more manufactured than it was when I started paying attention (although maybe not by a lot); the level of exploitation of the musicians, both while they're making music and while they're trying very hard to profit from it, has always been out of bounds. (You can read and listen to more about it from Cory Doctorow.) I can be as thrilled as the next person by music that makes me want to move and sing, but if I think about it too much, it makes me want to do those things just a little bit less. Or if I think about it long enough, I don't want to do it at all.
The music has been where it's been all along, and I can have it when I want it. Hurray for technology. But maybe the music should be somewhere else, in a place where the people who make it are as rewarded for it as the people who listen to it.
Deb in the City
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