Popular Songs and My Life?

Thoughts as I walk home

Hello and welcome to another wonderful day to be alive! I say that exactly because the World is horrible at the moment. All of us at one time or another flirt and believe that politics, our party, our nation is the best and will serve us well or we should devotedly serve it. Humanity, it seems to me, is in chains everywhere to these thoughts. Where are the men and women from every nation and every walk of life, who want and crucially, live lives of Peace?

A world where differences are brought to the worlds own public square for recognition and acceptance and ways of mutual living are found. We are back, no, we are once again back to being proud to be advocating ideologies and nationalisms and cultural conflicts upon the world stage. It will not end well.

So I am thankful that I can at least keep a watch on my own soul and in the end rather surprisingly find an echo in the final words of Voltaires’ Candide:

“All that is very well…but let us cultivate our garden”

I will tend my garden in a neighbourly fashion with you my dear readers. What shall we plant and grow this week?

As it happens something has been on my mind since last weeks posting of the Imbolc poem on the Poesy Tab in Syre Byrds Word Emporium. I felt and wrote that Brighid as She comes to me was not reducible to a three minute pop song with it’s usual forensic on the now, the latest feeling or experience.

So I asked myself afterwards, are there popular songs I really like and admire? If you read these pages you will understand already my adoration and almost spiritual home is within instrumental classical music. Yet what of the 3 minute pop song?

The problem I identify with pop songs has always been an issue for me. That is not to say that I don't understand or like and listen to some! I do understand the urge that the target audience and consumers (young people mainly) have to sing and dance and experience life accompanied by their favourite track. I know they are understandably interested in relationship, love, sex, romance and self expression. In money and fashion. In how to handle personal relationships and identity. Most pop songs seem to fall into this category.

I too, have sung along with all the hopes and expectations of those in my day! I have felt the pull of the verses that fuse symbiotically with my feelings and that somehow my choices are not what my parents and grand parents could ever even understand or comprehend!

As you might say, “I bought the T shirt”. Or perhaps you might hear me say, “Been there, done that”. I am not writing from a perspective of disinterested investigation and purity of life. I am writing from the position of weakness and compromised morality as I reflect upon areas of my life. My love of musics has no free pass here either. Inputs are important for us as adults to take care and control of in our lives (as equally important in being active in intervening in our young ones lives for their happiness).

Pop songs represent and cater, perhaps pander, to the urges and instincts aforementioned really well. In fact, over represent these ideas and package them without moral anchors. Or as I increasingly see, directly attack any other values or principles that young people might find happiness and deep Joy in pursuing.

If for example you are my age and you still think fulfilment will only be found in that ‘special person’ or in the emotional high that ‘love’ can bring or that the act of sex is amoral and free of consequences for your mind and body: your deluded. It is time to grow up. Growing up is hard, I know, I'm trying to do it! Especially if your already in your fifties.

So I mused on this as I was walking home from School last week (takes 1 Hour and 10 mins to do so) I had time to ask myself what songs do I like? Can I find themes or reasons why I still choose to ask Siri to play me a track?

Looking for Stories

What song and genre did I choose as I examined my ideas in this area? Firstly the excellent song by Don McClean simply called “Vincent”. I love the fact that this song is an expression of a poet looking at both the life and art of Vincent Van Gogh and at themself as they gradually come to a position of singing, “Now I understand, what you were trying to say to me”.

The words are delivered perfectly. The ideas above are surprisingly interesting to me. Seeking through another’s art and life, an understanding of ones own art and life including the incredibly difficult topic of the way Vincent Van Gogh ended his own life. A topic not often ventured into. Of course the folk music genre,  it seems to me, has more room to talk about the varieties of life experiences and observations of them. I listen to Ralph McTell singing the song ‘‘Streets of London’’ as a follow up. I have seen each of the characters he sings about. Not just in London either.

You may well know the classic English folk song Scarborough Fayre. Another Singer song writer, incidentally coming with a background in heavy rock music, wrote another story in song where he imagines the spirit of the person explaining to him how the events of Scarborough Fayre originated. It was a tale of the disruption of the countryside and local Fayres of Yore in the clashing, earth shattering advance of the industrial revolution. A lost love and a lost opportunity and industrial progress are the reasons for the folk ballad we now have. A lovely, moving and imaginative story in itself. Damh the Bard hopefully proving that song stories are alive and kicking in “Iron from Stone”

Leaving folk music songs aside I then listened to a Rock Classic by Boston ‘‘More than a Feeling”. The reason I like this song is exactly because the song is about a past memory that a piece of music can suddenly bring again to your minds eye. Whenever, in the song, the singer hears a refrain, he once again is transported to a time where he sees his “Marianne walking away”.

Now I don't know any Mariannes! Yet I do know that experience of having music bring once again to my recollection a person, a situation or an event and simultaneously transport me back to, as if it were Carpenters style, “Yesterday Once more”. Seems this is a common human experience and it is only in my head that I imagine I am the only one experiencing this.

See also Nina Simone singing ‘’I got life’’; Billy Joel singing ‘’Always a Woman’’; Elvis Presley singing ‘‘In the Ghetto’’.

So what songs remind me of my loves and people that I have sojourned this life with? There are many. I could now go in to a biography illustrated with popular songs.

However dear reader, that will have to wait for another day! Today I'm interested in the fact that I'm in deeply moved by the stories we tell each other through our popular songs. Too many to actually recount here and from nearly every genre and subset. If there is no story I find that there will be no long lasting interest on my part. I don't think I had really thought that through before. I know I will be pondering it more in my coming walks home from school.

Perhaps a seed or two we have planted in your Garden today? What do you think? What songs do it for you?

Have good week!