rusty_halo | I’ve realized that I judge music on the Beavis and Butthead scale

I'm giving Station to Station another chance. The title track snuck into my brain and ordered me to listen to it over and over, and now I love it. However, I am still struggling with the rest of the album. It's so... disco. It's all dance/pop/funk/soul. I know it's close-minded to reject entire genres by default, and I'm trying not to, honestly, just the fact that I'm listening to music that's not some variation on metal is progress!

But in analyzing my subconscious I've discovered that I seem to judge all music on what I can only assume is the Beavis and Butthead scale. As in, if Beavis and Butthead would say "This sucks; change it," I do. I'm well aware that this is not mature or healthy, and that as an adult I'd have a wider and more pleasant experience of the world if I moved beyond the tribal allegiances of my teen and pre-teen years.

It's hard, though. Music was such an identity defining thing when I was a kid, almost the only identity defining thing. What clothes you wore and what lunch table you sat at correlated directly to what music you listened to. Which sounds so limiting, I know, but it felt empowering at the time. And... it wasn't just what lunch table you sat at, you know? It was who you wanted to be, if you were going to be a housewife or some suit in an office, or if you were going to be something different, if you cared about art or activism or anything outside the norm.

And it was a revelation that I could choose who to be instead of going with the default without even thinking, like everyone else seemed to. And that instead of being an ugly loser who everyone picked on, I could be a scary goth chick that people were afraid of. It was following in a way, but it was following something I chose, and it was a protest to the bland conformity of the culture around me, and I was kind of leading in a way--there weren't really any goth kids in my grade until I started wearing black and dying my hair, and ambushed two of my guy friends into doing the same.

But rigidity is a trap, there's not one definition of weird, and anyway, with Station to Station, how much weirder can you get? Look at Wikipedia's description of the atmosphere in which this album was created:

According to biographer David Buckley, the Los Angeles-based Bowie, fueled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975–76 "in a state of psychic terror." Stories – mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone – circulated of the singer living in a house full of ancient-Egyptian artifacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page. Bowie would later say of L.A., "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".

My subconscious teenage goth self should eat this up! And yet I just hear "Eh, this music is boring, change it."

It's the Beavis and Butthead test. Which, you know, they were satire, and their judgments have a very ugly underlying racist, sexist, homophobic subtext, which is part of why I'm trying to get this attitude out of my head. There's this very sort of angry-white-straight-male sort of macho masculinity thing going on in the music that they approve of. Beavis and Butthead was this ridiculously exciting thing when I was eleven--we didn't have cable at home, so I'd stay up all night when we visited my grandparents in Indiana and watch their MTV. It was a window into a whole other world. And of course I was aware that it was satire and that I was meant to be laughing at them, but obviously some of their musical attitudes seeped through. (Not all. I liked the socially conscious 90s bands, not the cheesy 80s hair metal stuff.)

I get really insecure when I listen to music that doesn't have loud crunching guitars or at least a loud mess of angry industrial noise. Like I'm going to start wearing pink and marry a man and become a housewife and vote Republican. I know. Stop laughing. It was hard, trying to choose a different life when surrounded by bland suburban conformity, and music was a life-saver at the time. But I need to learn how to use it as a support without letting it limit my openness to new experiences, otherwise it just becomes another conformity trap.

Anyway. I think the anniversary of Columbine is getting to me. Stupid teenage issues. I'm too old for this, is the point.

Current Mood: anxious emoticon

anxious &

weird

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