Music to Manipulate the Soul

After blinking back the tears in a bathroom stall, I thought I had an OK persona on and ventured out. I bumped into a 17-year old client on the street, he put his arm around me and said "Miss--what's wrong?" Oy. Hopefully not a true breach of professional ethics, but not something that should become a precedent. I snapped out of it, blamed the sun in my eyes and put on a happy face. Even my blog seems melodramatic! But I need to do a better job with that happy face, and so I turned to music. So I've been reduced to listening to Bon Jovi.

Plato wanted to ban music in his ideal Republic because when the modes of music change, the laws of society must change to accommodate the underlying change of consciousness. "Shot in the heart and you're to blame. You give love a bad name." You'd think this would make me bitter. Angry. Instead, it tucks the hurt into a little manageable corner and let's me get on with my life.

Part of it is that when I listen to music, it seems to me, it takes me to who I was in the moment of my life that I first liked that music. Or, more accurately, each song starts with who I was then, but I can mature with songs I listen to regularly. Beethoven doesn't rush me back to my early 20s, when I first fell in love with him, because I've listened to him repeatedly. But Bon Jovi takes me back to my teens because I haven't listened to them consistently. Rock doesn't seem to do grief well. It does sexy very well. And it does a fake nonchalance, insouciance (I've never actually used that word before)--a 'fuck you, I don't need any of you, and I'll show you by being better than all of you." But it doesn't do grief. It doesn't do yearning. It keeps you more on the surface and avoids plumbing the depths of the soul.