Music, and Other Reasons for Living

Well, boys and girls, I've returned. I hope you got the note from my mom. My computer really was very sick. SpyAxe had taken over my computer. If you ever get it on your computer, I pity you. However, with some help from the guys at Tech Guy Support Forums or at least me reading one of their help sessions w/ somebody else, a few freeware applications they linked to, and a little investigative process on my end (lasting, oh six or eight hours over two days!), I was able to kill it. The best part was using this little app called KillBox. With help from KillBox I got the extreme pleasure of ripping out its very guts, a little file located in my Windows directory. With normal spyware removal procedures, this file got ignored. It would then reinstall the problem. Well, thanks to the forum listed above, I got some good advice, and I could almost hear the little bugger scream its last as I told KillBox to delete it. It was a very good feeling. The rest, as they say, was a matter of time. Fuck you, Spy Axe. You were a tough opponent, but fuck you anyway. We met and you died.

Well, can you tell how much I enjoyed that whole ordeal? Off to other issues then.

Today, I wanted to talk about music a little bit. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I like to listen to music. I like it a lot. I also like to listen to new music all the time, though I also go through periods when I go back to the stuff I already have, get re-addicted, and do it to death for a while. I was on a kick for a while where I listened to Bad Religion, Bad Religion, and more Bad Religion, mixed with a healthy dose of NOFX. Which is why this is about education. It happened when Yours Truly was still in graduate school, working on the dissertation.

In a way, I think I could honestly say that I might have had a harder time with graduate school if I hadn't been a punker from way back. It wasn't too hard to see that my work was political. It also gave me an excuse to have sufficient intestinal fortitude to say what I needed to in order to get done. I had a lot of friends who just never finished, and I sometimes wondered if I was going to. In those time, music really helped me a lot. The dissertation even has pieces of two Bad Religion songs in it, and in the bibliography. It really was that important to me at the time, and spoke to me in a way my professors and friends and wife could not. When I listened to The New America (not BR's best album, but it's got some good tunes), it helped me a lot. The best way to say it, I suppose, is that it helped me to reach, mentally, a sort of messianic place. I was ready to stand up and testify to the congregation. I was ready to bear witness in the streets. I was ready to rip the educational establishment a new asshole. I remember something similar from when I was growing up. Some songs just got me going so much that I felt unstoppable.

Of course, I know, I was (and am) not really unstoppable, but I was filled with the spirit, so to speak. I can understand jihad. I know what's it's like to give yourself over to fate's whims. I sort of think of it as something akin to deindividuation or entrainment, as discussed in some of the literature on crowd behavior, cults, riots, flow, and so forth. One more or less is using the music as a level of oneself, performing the music as an element of your life in the world, at least in part. Another way to think about that is to think about music as a soundtrack for your life. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty prone to getting songs stuck in my head. I once had the Brian Boytano (sp.?) from the Southpark movie stuck in my head for five straight days, from the time I got up until the time I went to sleep. It got so bad that I more or less was coming up with my own lyrics for every verse, even actually applying them to my experiences of the day. Very weird. But I digress. I'm talking more about how sometimes I'll just be driving or walking around, or doing some work--basically living my life--and in my mind there's like a soundtrack, something like that. Not necessarily whole songs, mind you. More like fragments of songs that seem appropriate to the situation. Maybe I have a weird sense of congruence between my symbolic and my lived worlds. Maybe I'm also really attuned to the irony in a lot of situations that music helps me both to self-represent and to appreciate on some aesthetic level. Maybe I'm just fucking batshit insane.

Another idea here.

Can we think of schools and other organizations dealing with the public as having their own particular sorts of "music." That is, different organizations create an environment, a "vibe" that people are or are not hip to. Here's an example. My family is really laissez-faire with Christmas. We show up, we hang out, we eat, we drink, we open presents, and so forth. There's a plan, but not really The Plan. It's the vibe I'm used to. My wife's family, on the other hand, seem committed to scheduling, tight organization, general participation in every little thing, and so forth. It puts me on edge when I visit. On the one hand, yeah, I'm kind of being a dick for not dancing to their music. But on the other hand, their music sucks, and I can't dance to it. I ain't doin' the fucking Macarena, dammit! So, more or less, when we think about how a student in school might be moved by their music (in a broad sense encompassing both their self expression and their self representations of themselves and of the world to themselves), we must think also about how the music of the vibe of the school works with and against and parallel to and so on, with respect to the students' own various vibes. If they don't match particularly well, I can see the potential of a lot of ironic situations (in some student's view) or for the mental equivalent of students covering their ears, rolling their eyes, and saying, "God! This music totally sucks!"

Now I know this is a weird post, and relies pretty heavily upon the music metaphor to make a point. That metaphor is figurative, and it comes along with some baggage. It may ignore elements of human psychology and sociality. However, it is a useful tool for thinking about this with. In fact, that reminds me of something. Kenneth Burke said somewhere that literature is, "equipment for living." That is, since we cannot have experience directly sometimes, we turn representations of experience, in literature for example. It helps us to understand ourselves, the people around us, how the world works, and so forth. Starting in the fifties, but particularly since then, music and other mass and micro-mediated and marketed genres of popular culture have tended to supplant the forms of Burke's day. I think what he said still rings true, whether you're talking about literature, music, comic books, or whatever. These are the tools that we use to think with, to live with. I find it fascinating the extent to which this is so, and also the extent to which our understandings of human subjectivity tend to underrepresent these elements in the construction, maintenance, and dynamism of a person's interactions with the world around him or her.

Sela. Go now and reflect upon this.