And by "happy" I don't mean "positive, upbeat and joyous." I mean brainless, repetitive and mechanical. I like a lot of happy music, although what I consider happy may not be anyone else's idea of happy. The Cocteau Twins' Heaven Or Las Vegas, Type O Negative's The Green Man, most everything ever recorded by Morphine...those are my happy songs, the ones that make me wish I had a private field of flowers to dance in, where nobody else can see me acting like a total girly swot.
But the happy songs only come out once every few months, when I'm in a rare upbeat mood. Not that I'm an embittered taciturn sourpuss 24/7, but... sigh - man, this is hard to explain. I know that most of you will get what I'm trying to say when I say that I'm "dark." I don't wallow around in graveyards all day, bemoaning my existence to an indifferent universe and wearing pessimism like perfume. I'm actually very friendly. My elderly patients at the day job love me for some reason - maybe because I talk to them like they're human beings and not burdens. I have a lot of friends, but very few of them have ever seen the real me, the one that sits in the shadows and paints Papier-mâché skulls, wraps christmas presents with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre playing in the background, watching documentaries on serial killers, complete with autopsy footage, whilst eating dinner. Morbid is very normal for me.
And yet, I've always been drawn to the darker aspects of life. Sorrow, melancholia, tragedy, despair, grief and death... these are the things that draw me. When I was five I was holding funerals for dead bugs, fashioning coffins out of chocolate sampler boxes and making popsicle crosses for the little grave. My backyard looked like an abandoned mini set for a Fulci film. I once took my teddy bear out into a rainstorm and tried to bring it to life like Victor Frankenstein. I'm not sure why my mother never took me to the doctor or had me committed, but thank god she didn't. She allowed me to be who I was and pursue my interests. If not for the safety valve, I may very well have exploded.
Anyway, the subject of music came up today. People who know me "In Real Life" are always shocked when they discover I'm a goth/metalhead. They think it's all ear-splitting guitars and garbage disposal vocals. When I tell them it really isn't, and that the majority of the music I listen to is actually quite beautiful, they look at me as if I've just told them that frogs are actually classified as vegetables, or that my favorite color is cheese. They just don't get it. And I just don't get how they can listen to an endless stream of bubblegum pop tunes that all sound exactly the same. That's depressing: the very idea that music can be mass produced, as if it were nothing more than muffin tins or litter boxes.
When I listen to music, I want it to make me feel something: anger, despair, kinship, something! Not empty disgust and weariness. In my humble (and prejudiced, and arrogant, and elitist) opinion, music that doesn't slap me across the face and wring out my soul like a dishrag isn't music at all: it's the sound equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts. And it can jolly well get stuffed.
Think all depressive/gothic/metal music is just noise?
Think again.
These are the songs I listen to when I want to be reminded of my mortality, my immortal soul and just how flawed human beings are...
Written in the 1930s and immortalized by Billie Holiday, this woeful ballad was years ahead of its time in capturing the graphic reality of racism, summed up in one brutal image: the corpse of a black man, swinging from a tree, rotting in the sun, plucked at by birds and left to sway in the wind.
Swedish prog metal band Opeth can most definitely slam and thrash and growl their way through an entire album of vicious hardcore ear-assaulting metal, but they can also weave the most complex melodies around forlorn vocals and end up with a tapestry of loss that's so beautiful it's absolutely devastating.
Addressing the suicide of his mother in the wake of the fatal overdose of his lover Xiola Blue, frontman Perry Farrell pleads for Blue to visit his mother in Heaven in a final chorus that made me burst into tears the first time I heard it, and still makes me weep like a jackass in remembering.
This is the song I turn to when the depression hits like a black tidal wave of mortal despair. It makes me feel as though I am attending my own funeral and hearing my own eulogy. I can grieve and suffer and finally recover, all without actually dying, by listening to this song on repeat.
Much like My Ashes, this song is a dirge for the person whose soul has suffered yet another death. It's misery incarnate, but it also not entirely unlike being comforted by someone who truly gives a shit about what you're going through, whispering: "It's okay" over and over until it finally seems like it really might be again someday.
For a song that has no lyrics, this conveys so much sorrow and grief it is almost physically painful to hear. It's wailing strings sound for all the world like the deepest cry of despair ever bellowed out of a set of human lungs. Every time I hear this song, it seems to be saying: "How can I be in so much pain when the world is so beautiful?"
I think the lyrics speak for themselves:
Don't let the dark into me
We killed the angels that warned us of you
Don't let the dark into me
We raised the tower of Babel for you
Don't let the dark into me
We let the children build temples for you
Don't let the dark into me
Don't let the vengeance of Heaven be you.
I will be forever grateful to my friend Jacob for gifting me with Anathema's entire musical library shortly after suffering the biggest heartbreak of my life thus far this past summer. I needed this music. The timing was perfect. It filled all of the hollow spaces within me until I could be whole again.
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