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innerspace #4
The Train of Thought's Mysterious Melody
by Carol Wade - caw39@columbia.eduThis month's column is going to be my first honest-to-goodness ramble. I encountered the idea on the subway home this evening, after the usual four weeks of chopping away at the mental lumber which occupies the vast, tumultuous landscape in my head, attempting to hone a topic. As I mused upon the prospect of sending in a mere peregrination through the musical melee of my mind, the #5 Express chuggered along, bobbing and tossing hapless, sour, sleepy-faced passengers up and down the aisles.
As I'm often wont to do, I aurally observed the rhythm of the steel wheels against the track, clacking in a repetitive tone, both hypnotically and monotonously, on the long stretch under the river from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Before long, I'd assimilated and transformed the pure sound (with a little alteration in tempo, perhaps) into the Giant Storehouse at the back of my Tumultuous Cranial Landscape. So greatly did the sound disappear, that, like the little plastic orb on a roulette wheel, the spiraling "clackety-clack" slotted itself, fairly comfortably, into one of the hundreds of thousands of songs I have lodged away in those dusty little rooms.
When I'd hummed enough of the tune, quizzically, stealthily, and masked by the roar and screech of the train as it lumbered into the Borough Hall station, I finally figured what song it was. I was dumbstruck with embarrassment, though not surprised. It was none other than the lyrically nonsensical, shamelessly New-Romantic, blippy, smarmy love ballad, "Save a Prayer", by none other than Britain's well-haired, Reagan era Bad Boys, Duran Duran. The mechanical noise of the wheels on track had somehow managed to mimic the sound of the synthesizer in the song, which itself makes a gesture at some sort of overwrought, pan-flute-sounding thing.
Like I said, I wasn't surprised. After having listened to Steely Dan's brilliantly acerb genre-twisting 1976 masterpiece, "The Royal Scam", nearly eight times a day for the past two weeks, last Sunday morning, the Sun broke through the green peacock tapestry, which hangs lazily and badly-arrayed over my bedroom window, and brightly exclaimed, "It's too early for the DAN!". I winced, and hobbled weakly over to my CDs. Browsing hazily, then giving up, I seized my towel and headed for the shower.
Much vapor, soap in eye, and wobbly morning mindlessness later, I stomped into my room with a vengeance. There was a long period (which, thankfully, ended recently) during which music had succeed in baffling me so thunderously, that my CD and tape collection went virtually ignored. Subsequently, new purchases and acquisitions came fewer and further between, and their storage area grew dusty.
However, there is a point when one comes to understand that no matter how seldom one listens to music, if one has EVER listened to it for a long time (or at all, I daresay), it will have already fused itself to one's mind like a barnacle. It's no wonder the aliens in /Close Encounters of the Third Kind/ "got it". Our "message" to them was pure tonality, a happy little "How's it going?" (to whit they replied, "Nothing much...now give us the little fuzzy and sarcastic, crazy dude, who made the mashed-potato mountain"). Who, in any galaxy, actual or fictional, could resist? Hum it today, to any REAL-LIFE human that saw the film 22 years ago, and they will know it immediately...either from the Spielberg gem, or the ensuing disco-fied rendition...
I slipped a finger into the fray, extracted and cracked open the jewel case, turned on the 5-disc changer, and popped the tray. Plopping in the iridescent disc, I hit "Play", and heard an innocent crescendo of wing-dingy synthified cosmic pulsation grow louder and louder, exploding into a bombastic post-disco strut, culminating in the yeasty gurgle of Duran Duran's frontman, Simon LeBon.
"Look now, look all around...there's no sign of life! Voices and other sounds...can you hear me now-ooooooh? This is Planet Earth...you're...looking at Planet Earth...!"
I howled along in unison, executing the best Molly Ringwald shimmy I could muster. I am incriminating myself as an unabashed Child of the 80's, I know, but what's so wrong with that? By way of the advent of every recording and retrieval innovation from clumpy old 8-tracks to DATs, I am a child of ANY musical creature, from blue whales to Wilson Pickett. Duran Duran's quirky beats, meaningless, purely aesthetic semantics, "concept-hair", inanely fashionable and brightly hue-spattered videos, crisp as a minute ago on my internal video-screen, the lyrics "You're about as easy as a NUCLEAR WAR!" raising a post-Carter shudder of horror on my neck's nape...it's all ground into my being as equally as the similarly quirky, jerky (yet consummately more rump-shaky) synth twiddle of, say, Parliament Funkadelic's "Mothership Connection", which my father played for my brother and I, to doubtlessly attempt to fry our tiny virgin synapses as very small children.
Do we ever really fuse with music, or is it in us before we ever come to be? Is it characteristically human, like a DNA code? Or is it more like a cord which slithers through, like the image of a passing streetlight etched on the retina, in the dark, while gazing from a train? Is it like the ancient hand-print found in a dark, stony niche by the anonymous youngster in Steely Dan's "Caves of Altamira", the ages-old, archetypal embodiment of a time when there were no commuter trains, nor the idea of commuting itself, other than to harvest the evening's provisions, and a good, dry stick for tapping out the backbeat for a day's tales, related to the family tribe, gathered close in a hoop 'round the hearth?
Over time, the obvious becomes not-so, and the merely enjoyable has the power to become embarrassing. Some of us have gotten pretty elitist about the mere pleasure of expression. Ahh, this is Planet Earth, indeed. And if there are aliens among us, it is they who will lead us back to the hollows and hidey-holes, where the vehicles of memory transport us to where the marrow of our being dwells, as clear as the thump of the bloody muscle within...
Carol A. Wade is a perpetually poverty-stricken plebian goddess, who ranges the streets of NYC in a garbage bag (with her laptop in tow, of course)! She sends sincerest holiday blessings! Contact her at caw39@columbia.edu
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