In general, I tend to be curious about what people’s first experience with The Beatles was… as well as what mine was, since I surely don’t remember. I remember my first experience with Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica, the walk-in hollow-dome of tautly independent sounds each given independent visceral flourishing, and I remember the first time I heard Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury. But The Beatles? I was far from a music critic at six.
In fact, I remember the choruses and verses pulling, and pulling me, into these “Dionysian” realms, as Camille Paglia would put it… the music was something unstable, for which I had no taste, in my early childhood. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that pop music is a sort of antidote, a way of making sense of the schematics of things, how we humans are pitted against each other, from cradle to grave, within finite confines.
When you’re a kid you don’t realize this. Every experience is full of possibility. It would be nice if all of life were like this.
But I remember my first situation of interaction as being negative… actually I was probably about three or four, instead of six, and I realized at this point that life was essentially an unpleasant experience. It’s easy to see why violence propitiates, in light of this angle: the movements of other people are often, simply, offensive.
Now as I riff on my own thoughts, and form a sort of theoretical model on how I’ve lived my life, if I’m to gain popularity in any sector, I still have to appeal to culture. And culture is a part of society, and society quells violence, which is a natural, unavoidable reaction in people.
American culture takes steadfast rest upon male intellectual self-immolation. A feeble mind is a malleable puzzle piece, and we surely have to work together at all points in life. That is, that’s the way it is. Societal cooperation, it seems, is about the best we can do, and do we ever have it. The possibility of “freedom” as a positive enterprise is already nullified by the unavoidability of violence.
In light of this, me, standing up here and talking to you, is likewise illogical. For, why on earth would I have any desire to help you? My life has nothing to do with you. On my mind, right now, there are no thoughts whatever of helping starving kids in Africa. The humidity and mosquitoes, as well as the excessive sun, would lay nails to my tender caucasian frame. I don’t even like pop music, right now. It’s recorded by groups, subject to Freud’s herd mentality, and then packaged in a shiny interface, appealing to aesthetic tendencies in consumers, and shipped to a place entirely geographically disparate. I hear the music inside my own head. Why would I want to occlude this?
So if you see me, staring up at the golden dome or waiting in line for a sandwich at Penn Station, I hope that a miracle happens. I hope you become happy, by seeing me. My aura edifies you, my countenance warms you, and my habits instruct you… but this is not enough… I hope that the marketable sum total of my sociological image aligns with your occupational ambition, as well, and off of me you can take a shank of meat, right off your shoulder, to throw to the rabid dog known as your boss, when duty calls next time you clock in to all that buzzing: defeat.