Musical Moments #14

Not a concert summary? Oh man, I've actually gotta say something.

Today's rant:

"Mainstream" has got to be the single most useless attempt at a derogatory I've ever seen.
And I see it a lot. Everywhere. It's an excuse for people to hate bands, even hate -genres- of music.

But let's break it down, because mainstream has been applied to everything conceivable.
I've heard (in recent memory) Shinedown being called mainstream, In This Moment being called mainstream, Three Days Grace, Adele, Daughtry, Dream Theater (seriously?), and a whole host of others.
You know what they have in common? They play music. That's pretty much the sum of it.

Which means mainstream isn't in itself a genre, but rather a status. A status of being well-liked.
Which means in using the term as a derogatory, you are suggesting to me that you hate a band because other people like them.

Wait, what? Take your hipster trash elsewhere.

Isn't that what everyone wants for the music they enjoy? For it to be enjoyed by others?
Isn't that the whole point? To appreciate beauty?

I'll accept a laundry list of reasons not to like certain groups. Hell, just saying "I don't like them." is sufficient. I realize that taste is primarily - and if nothing else - subjective.

But refusing to give a band or an artist any credit because they are, at the absolute minimum, good at their jobs, is a sort of lunacy I can't really get behind.

I'm not saying there aren't "mainstream" bands that I don't like, mind you. But I don't like them because of their music, not their popularity. I thought - hoped - we'd get past garbage logic like that after graduating high school.

Disappointing to be wrong on that one.

Come on, people.

- C

I don't think I've really had a good grasp on what it means to have a clouded heart until now.
It isn't the recognition that you can't have what you want - that's base, simple, black and white...just wistfulness. A paralytic. Useless.
It's more the dawning of understanding that what you want might only exist inside your mind. Might not exist even there.

It never feels like burning too hot, but it amounts to that. Not in velocity, nor even in raw energy...just in intensity. Hues over-saturated, tones building into a cacophony, an intensity that makes even the barest glancing -real- touch a sensation so profound it borders on painful. Beautiful agony.

It's a quick lesson that the world frowns upon that. No one will outright say it. Ambition is celebrated like the fundamental vices of greed and hunger and lust and selflessness. But the pursuit of simplicity - not reductive, not in lieu of accepting reality, but in tandem with it - is misunderstood as...unrealistic expectation.

People want their flickering lights and shadows. Not sunlight and darkness, those are too direct. Too honest, perhaps, if only in what they reveal. They want their walls and segments of reality and reductions and illusory logic. They want to absorb their truths in palatable and perceptible pieces, and to share themselves only as much as the risk seems justified by the reward.

What they want is not my fantastical reality. It is not what I want.
What I have may not even be what I want, as most often anymore I just want to feel connection.

Communication is a means to an end, even elevated into an art form...it channels and narrows an otherwise unbearable insight into a bite-size piece that can be presented in prose or poetry or pretty little ditty or parody.

Ultimately it is a tool to reveal these truths, but they shy away from that even if you open the doors for them. Pull back the blinds and let the unspoken seep in like so much gorgeous starlight, and they only slink into the corners of the mind and ask you to cover their eyes. To go away. Leave me alone.

Alone is a thing people say without comprehension, a word too big for the conception adopted in collective consciousness. Alone is a fundamental fear. We sometimes desire to be separate in physical space, in mental space, but the average expression slanders the innate need to feel connected. Not even in those dark moments, but especially in the light ones.

What I want is to reveal your truths. Not just lay them bare but touch them and connect them to mine, in the pitiful and fleeting hope that where words have always failed a singular moment can occur where you see what I see without a lens. Without perceptual bias and mental filters and reductive reasoning and wasting words on whimsical exposition.

I want to bask in that moment and show you what spatial and temporal relativity means to the depths of the spirit. Perhaps so a piece of yourself, cut off and starved to death on a diet of lies and misleading facts, can remember what it felt like when a soul touched yours. Before your mind cracked under the strain of perceiving, before walls, before words, before thought.

I use the word want because I can exist without seeing the want fulfilled again. But I've felt it before, and want, as all words, falls short. I want it like you want water and oxygen and to believe that you are real. Do you want to believe that as much as I do? More?

I say this having learned that you are faceless and nameless and maybe a device invented by my own mind to restore a hope I strangled so I could survive. I say this for the sake of saying it, not suffering from the delusion that it matters only in the reading and understanding of it.

Truth is a form of art, a form of beauty, and like the two it requires no particular justification to exist. It is, as you and I are, as everything is, was, isn't, won't be.

Perhaps can't be.

As much as I've come to accept that my particular desires are eccentric and border on egotistical and hint at insane, as much as I feel like my reality is not the same one everyone else inhabits, I still wrestle with why I should want to bother trying to show you - whoever, anyone - something so precious.

Someone should have done it for me.

Seeing it alone isn't just a meaningless non-event, but a vacuum that inhales and consumes the meaning in everything until it all suffocates and withers away.
Seeing it and sharing it only to have it summarily rejected or misunderstood or run away from yet again is a failure, an unacceptable outcome whether the norm or not...a suffering complete to the degree that pain is preferable.

The probabilities are not favorable, and the options amount to satisfaction or irredeemable insanity.

It's all predicated on the premise that you are listening, really listening.
I'm not even clear anymore on whether or not you - the soft you, lurking beneath other identities and craving, maybe, what I crave - are even real.

It's altogether clouded. I'm altogether clouded.

Let's face it. You aren't going to save me.
You - real or imaginary - are too busy being afraid of yourself just the way I was afraid of myself and terrified of the possibility of you.

Unlike wistfulness, fear makes an excellent motivator.
If your walls are what mine were, if no one yet dared reach inside...or worse, if they did without understanding what it meant?
I thought my damage was irreparable.

I've yet to be convinced otherwise, but I'm starting to entertain the notion. You, my dearest fairy tale, have not likely had a reason to do the same.

If you're real, if I find you, if I break down those walls and somehow you don't find yourself out of love and into loathing...if, if, if.

If is hope.
Hope is the catalyst for joy, or for torturous suffering, I haven't yet decided which it prefers.

For now, luckily?
Expression is my catharsis.
I wonder, what is yours?

- C