Thursday, December 8, 2016

Was it the end? Was it the boy?

To continue staving off my impending existential crisis (I'm a vegetarian social justice-oriented academic in the Trump/Carl's Jr. white house cabinet era) I've been listening to stuff that brings out the 20 year old in me (ironically, a time when I would have eaten at Carl's Jr.)

Quite often, I allow Google's music app to pick my music for me, based around some song that fits my mood.  More often than not, it picks the perfect songs.  Throw on the Jets to Brazil station, get Jawbreaker, Knapsack, Samiam.  Somehow, it knows just when I want to hear the punkier side of the band more than the folksy/classic rock side.  I wonder how much info on me Google uses to put that together (...as I write on my Google-blog.)

Anyhow, this one came up yesterday and I remembered how much I loved it:
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Yeah, it's completely ridiculous, but it's also a perfect song.  You can sing to it, it has a great melody, great harmony among all its parts.  It's catchy as fuck and it has guitars.  It has keyboard bleep bloops and some echoey moments.  It rocks hard when cranked up in the car.  Perfect song.

I try not to divest too much of my time to the past, but like most people, I like the emotionality of nostalgia when it relates to music.  Like a lot of music, this song isn't actually tied to some event or some emotional state, but more of a generic time in my life.  I think about listening to this album in my little Nissan, driving home at night from school or some show or some thing, music blaring.  Being 20, 22, 26, and having every song hit me in the guts, typically the impetus for dreaming about the future to escape the present.   I wish I'd been able to spend more of my 20s being happy, so my nostalgia would be more joyous.  If there's anything lost in getting older, it's that little seems "new" anymore, even the melancholy, so I'm happy to rediscover these songs now and again, to remind myself of bitter times.


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