In case you haven't noticed, I haven't
put much work into the blog. Real world obligations and a sci-fi
writing project have kind of taken up all of my time, and its just
been easier to throw off a couple Tweets about say, the artistic
masterpiece that is Streets of Fire instead of spending an entire
evening writing about it. I don't want to write something longer form
without having a topic worth discussing.
Today I do. In the process of writing
my mech opera first draft, I've been listening almost exclusively to
music from 1979-1987. This is for story reasons, but it generated an
interesting side effect: for the last seven months, my mood has been
dramatically better and more optimistic. It was quite by accident,
but curating my playlist to a mix of New Wave, Classic Rock, Golden
Age Power Metal, Prog Rock, Soul, Funk, Country, Pop, and even Disco
(there's quite a lot to say about Disco's awkward pulpy tendencies, but
that's for another time), got me thinking about an old post over on
Jon Del Arroz's blog about how Music is Mindset.
Its absolutely correct.
The self-torpedoing of the music
industry in the 90s isn't the point of this post, but look at most of
the big, highly promoted rock musicians of the 90s: Nirvana, Pearl
Jam, Radiohead, R.E.M., Beck, Alanis Morrisette, Rage Against the
Machine, Green Day, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails, Korn. They don't sing
about cool stuff. They don't sing about wizards and space ships and
successful courtship. They sing about the banality of existence and
the meaninglessness of trying. Relationships are doomed to failure,
and its either the fault of internalized self-loathing, or
externalized blame shifting. Its a downer. Its demoralizing.
If you listen to it all the time, how do you think its going to
affect your mood?
Beneath the outrageously morbid album art of
Iron Maiden beats a soul of high adventure. There's nothing of that in the bands I've
listed above.
This isn't to say that there weren't
great, optimistic bands in the 90s. There absolutely were, but they
got relegated to the B-list. I was the weird kid who absolutely hated
Nirvana as a kid, but listened to Blues Traveler constantly. Guess
who was pushed harder by the recording industry?
The
point of this isn't to point out that Duran Duran is a much better
band than Radiohead. I mean, they are
but the real point is that headspace affects everything about how you
approach the world. Its not a 1:1 comparison, but if you listen to
All-American Rejects sing about striking out with girls all the time
and being a loser nerd, that's going to affect how you interact with
people, even if its just remembering a snippet of lyrics at a
particular moment. Why would you want to sabotage yourself like that?
Who else would want you to sabotage yourself? Why bother with
listening to dudes with more money than you sing about failure when
you could fill your dreams with Van Halen's swaggering bravado?
I'm
not saying don't listen to anything made after 1990. What I
am saying is that if your entertainment doesn't reflect your values,
your values will end up reflecting your entertainment.
