Unhealthy Relationships
April 28th, 2008, 9:16 am · Post a Comment · posted by Michael
The nearer I get to 30, the more I notice couples around me in unhealthy relationships.
You know the kind: They fight constantly over nothing at all, ruin social gatherings with unnecessary drama and seem bent only on destroying each others’ lives. Ah, love.
It’s best for outsiders to avoid these people (not invite them to get-togethers, decline their invitations, etc.) until they’ve fought it out for a few years and totally killed the other’s will to live. Only then, mission accomplished, will they end the relationship.
Most sane people would agree: it’s not worth the trouble.
I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid these kinds of self-destructive relationships with people, but not with music.
I have a long list of songs and artists whose music I have to be careful of becoming too close to. Yes, the songs are wonderful - many of them beautiful - but they will devastate me if I let my guard down. I just wallow in them too much.
I started noticing as a teenager that I was attracted to a gloomier side of pop music. Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails were never far from my Walkman (remember those?).
In college, I was so immersed in music that I never went anywhere without a CD player and headphones in my backpack, much to the chagrin of friends who would yell my name across the quad and wave until they were blue in the face trying to get my attention. Who knows how many good times I missed out on because of my love of the new Super Furry Animals album?
A good friend once told me, “I don’t think it’s that you like being depressed. I think it’s that you like music that can make you feel.”
The more I’ve thought about it, the more accurate that seems. And since then, I’ve tried to be careful about what I listen to and when.
Usually that means I follow what I call The Gremlins Rule:
1. Avoid direct exposure to sad, baritone-vocaled piano ballads (i.e., Nick Cave);
2. Don’t let spill any UK post-punk albums circa 1978-1984;
3. Absolutely no Aimee Mann after midnight.
Every so often I can break these rules and it’s fine. But sometimes, during late-night quests for new music on the internet or just popping in a record for background noise while I’m up reading, I’ll stumble upon a song that hits a nerve somewhere.
This happened last night.
It was about 11 p.m. when I decided to download the new Nada Surf album. It should have been harmless: Nada Surf are mostly known as a kitschy one-hit wonder from the mid-90s for “Popular,” an ironic diatribe on the rules of being liked in high school. During this decade, they’ve focused smartly on bittersweet, sunny power pop.
I went on my way, surfing through music news sites and chatting with friends until the second track and single, “Whose Authority,” came on.
Nothing on the surface warned me that this song was going to mess with my head. Sunny harmonies, incomprehensible mid-tempo verses, a nice defiant “on whose authority?/ I have none over me” chorus and then back into those harmonies I could listen to forever.
But in my messed-up head, something snapped. That chorus morphed into something creepy and anxious. Is the singer saying he has no self-control? Is the singer saying there’s no God? I had to listen again and find out.
Second listen. Still the same questions. So I put the song on repeat and let it play for an hour while I went about my work.
By the time I was ready for bed, my mind had circled and warped around this little song. I was filled with spirals of unexplainable dread about the future and life and the planet and other unhealthy thoughts.
This is what anti-depressants are for. And thank God I’m on them. Five years ago, this would have been catastrophic. I would have stayed up all night chain smoking and rocking back and forth like a catatonic.
Luckily I was able to turn out the light and close my eyes and only oversleep by four or five hours.
And now, I can get back to listening.
That’s the terrific bike-messenger video starring the older brother from Nickelodeon’s pinnacle, “The Adventures of Pete & Pete.”
