INTENSITY²
Start here => Games => Topic started by: Walkie on July 12, 2019, 08:22:17 AM
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An alternative to "What are you listening to" , based on the British radio program. Post tunes that are especially meaningful to you , along with some relevant biographical info. Do name the tune in the accompanying text, cos the music links often get broken eventually.
I'll kick off with "Listen"by Tears for Fears. This used to be on the perennial play list of my favourite coffee bar, back in the 80's, which i jokingly called "my office ". I spent ridiculous amounts of time there, initially looking for a quiet place to write and escape my disintegrating marriage, but increasingly to meet up with the rag-tag assortment of artists , poets, social wrecks and nutcases who made up my crowd - and the margins thereof- at the time. In most people's eyes, I passed for an extrovert, to my astonished amusement, but my profound attachment to this beautifully spacey song (amonst a zillion other things, if anybody cares to notice) belies that. It's utterly useless as "background music" around me: to this day, I will zone out to this song, wherever I am and whatever I'm supposed to be doing.
I was a bit disappointed when I eventually found the lyrics, because the repeated refain at the end sounded like "Reality will never look the same" to me. Still does. That's what it's saying in my head, and that observation is always relevant, IMO, not least during that especially turbulent period of my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY4va_mw3gk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY4va_mw3gk)
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Walkie, it does sound like they are saying 'the reality will never look the same'. Maybe the lyrics you looked up were actually wrong...
This song is called "Doctor My Eyes", by Jackson Browne. Its special to me because it reminds me of car rides with my father. It was also one of the first songs that I liked when I was old enough to first start understanding the dept of meaning behind lyrics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKGTaplzmV4
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https://youtu.be/XFkzRNyygfk
Love this song. Love the story behind the distortion effect. Love the lyrics. Love the story behind the lyrics and I can really relate to them.
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https://youtu.be/KRRzgV8CmAQ
This is a very recent hit. Very emotional. A bit whiney, but I guess a breakup anthem is supposed to be a bit whiney.
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Hey MOSW. I love Creep too :) but I don't think youve read the OP? This thread is supposed to be a tad different from "What are you listening to..."
:plus: to SG for doing it right!
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Hey MOSW. I love Creep too :) but I don't think youve read the OP? This thread is supposed to be a tad different from "What are you listening to..."
:plus: to SG for doing it right!
Bugger. I will add some personal history then to show why they are meaningful to me. Tomorrow.
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Does this mean I win the thread? :orly:
:P ;)
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Okay. For Creep the lyrics remind me of myself as a younger man:
"When you were here before, couldn't look you in the eye, you're just like an angel, your skin makes me cry, you float like a feather, in a beautiful world...".
To me, he is developing an interest in a girl but doing so in a way that keeps him safe from the idea that he might have to talk to her, get to know her, see if a mutual interest develops. He subconsciously chooses to become deeply infatuated with a girl he has elevated above human in his own mind.
That describes my young adult life to a T. I see it in Gen as well.
The other song, Let Her Go, affects me at an emotional level and I really don't know why because I literally never went through an unpleasant breakup. Only been through one breakup ever and it was over the phone and heartbreaking but nice. No cigarettes on the counter.
It just pulls emotions out of me, tearful goodbyes at airports, stuff like that. Relating back to Creep, at one of those goodbyes my ex handed me a printed copy of "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", a poem with similar themes to Creep. She thought I would relate to it. Duh!!! I said "I know that poem" and she said "you should read it again and tell me what you think, it's my favourite poem". I replied "no, I KNOW that poem: Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table...". I memorised the whole poem when i was in high school and could still remember it.
It was weird and a bit creepy. At a couple of levels at least.
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OK, MOSW, I see your Creep, and i raise you "Karma Police"
But first, gotta say, that was exactly what was called for, and I'm seriously impressed, not to mention delighted that you know Prufrock by heart. Soon as I learned about Asperger's (about 25 years after encountering the poem in school) I started calling that poem "'the Aspie Love Song". I can very much relate to it myself, in my own way, even signed my 200th attempt at writing a sort of love letter "J Alfreda Prufrock" (and actually sent that one, IIRC). Most people would never, ever guess that though cos i tend come across as uninhibited...until I fall in love, which rarely ever happens (like, once when I was about 15, and then once again , about 12 years later, through to present. (Oh! and with a very brief infatuation inbetween the two, which persuaded me that my feelings are NOT to be taken seriously, just in time to collide with the Big One *wince*, so i behaved at my most ridiculous around him, didn't I? ) Not with either of my one-time live-in partners, I hasten to add, one of whom was a good friend (and reverted to being a good friend after we split up) and the other the stupidest mistake of my life. Neither party touched me at a deep enough level to make me feel utterly tongue -tied, nor stir up my natural born idiocy, they just looked like half-way good ideas at the time.
Anyway, so here I am, just escaping the Stupidest Mistake of my Life, along with the six-year-old progeny of the same, when one of those arty-types from post #1 drifts back into my life and unhinges me. And one way in which this guy unhinges is by recording "OK Computer" for me, and copying all of the lyrics out for me in his beautiful hand writing. And I want to think that this means something, don't i? But hey! the guy is a heartbreaker, a sexual and emotional magnet, and even if I looked like one of his string of beautiful girlfriends (which i didn't) I'd be mad to think I meant that much to him, The odds were dead against it. That didn't stop me loving him though. Actually, I'd just spent seven years or so, trying very, very hard not to look out for him drifting back into my life
Anyway, Karma Police is the track that leaps out at me. The first verse even soun'ds very much like him...or is it it a description of me? In any case, i do not have a "Hitler hairdo ", and we cant both be the guy in the first verse, can we? That wouldn't work. Still. it strikes a shedload of chords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uYWYWPc9HU
PS. He also tacked "Creep"" on the end of the tape, which emboldened me to affectionately call him ""Creep" for a time. But then he started to think I was overconfident or something, which i decidedly wasn't, and his thinking this was bound to end in tears for...one of us. So i shut up ..in a sense (I can talk a storm whilst shutting up)
Mostly we talked about love , in the abstract, or metaphysics, which is always abstract, or maths, or poetry, or art (mostly abstract or surreal, of course) or our endless store of fucked-up past relationships, which were all-too- concrete in the main. We spent an awful lot of time doing all this, and i felt blessed, because the last time i'd fallen in love with anyone (at 15) well, we'd spent two years having an almost non-existent relationship, before the guy in question finished with me (which was the first time it ever came clear to me there was something to actually finish. Heck, that relationship was so thin, i didn't even have to try not to make any assumptions about it)
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Thanks Walkie, I will listen to Karma Police later. I have heard it before but it didn't grab me right away.
My almost-eidetic memory set me up for failure at higher study. I drifted through high school doing almost zero study but I got decent marks anyway because I remembered a lot of stuff without trying. In the final year of high school we were studying Prufrock and a few other TS Elliot poems, but primarily Prufrock, and I remember other kids would walk around for months with these lists of 3 or 4 short quotes that they were memorising to drop into their essays in the final exams and hopefully impress the marker. We got to a few weeks out from final exams and thought I'd better memorise some quotes as well, so over the course of a couple of days I memorised Prufrock end-to-end as well as a few tracts of Shakespeare and Emily Bronte and whatever else we were studying. It just seemed easier at the time than actually choosing which quotes to memorise. I guess over the years of having those words etched into my memory they came to be more meaningful to me as I found my life drifting inexorably in the same direction as Prufrock's.
These days Prufrock seems even more relevant in light of movements like the Incels. I have even heard it described as an Incel anthem.
Now I could not recite the poem word-perfect, it's been nearly 40 years and anyone who reads my posts here could tell you that my grey matter has gone more than a bit spongy. But give me 2 days to read it through a few times and I am sure that I could recite it again.
It's a bit like the time I started a job and I needed to look busy for a couple of weeks with nothing really to do. I memorised Pi to 120 decimal places just for something to do.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk_sAHh9s08
Enigma - Return to Innocence
This was the first track on the first "grown-up" CD that I had access to as a kid. In our house, the computer was in the basement in a room directly below the living room where the stereo was. At some point my dad drilled a hole in the floor and ran a wire through, so that there were speakers in the computer room controlled by the stereo above. My brother and I would run up and down the stairs to put on music, and we played this CD a lot while we were playing whatever computer game we were really into at the time. It brings me to a place of joy and discovery and productivity like you feel as a little kid exploring the computer.
In seventh grade we had to bring in our favorite song and play it for the class for some project. I brought this CD and was thoroughly mortified when I played it and the teacher said she owned the CD too and had a favorite track on it. Most of the kids had brought popular music. I remember the popular girls had all brought the same song, and then we had to keep listening to it when each of them presented their projects. My song, which sounded so grown-up and cool at home, sounded horribly weird in the class environment with the chanting sound, and I turned it off halfway through.
Young me thought the lyrics were really meaningful, all about being your natural emotional self, which was not a thing that was encouraged in my life at the time.
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I like that song Py. I was 28 years old when it was released. I never really listened to the lyrics until now and I agree that they are good.
Did you ever listen to Deep Forest? Their most well-known song would be Sweet Lullaby. Enigma reminds me a little of that style of music. Similar era, early 90s.
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I remember the Enigma CD well. I have it here somewhere.
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A good friend of mine committed suicide when we were 17. Return to Innocence by Enigma was played at his funeral along with his much-loved song Great Southern Land by Icehouse.
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I'm sorry for your loss, Ren. :(
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I must plus Pyraxis and Ren for their contributions.
I'm really liking the way this thread is shaping up, thus far with the same tunes turning out to be evocative for multiple people, so we're winding up with a patchwork of interwoven reminiscences, which is actually better than the radio show, IMO (which focusses on one person per episode, so you get a full life story, which is good, but then you don't get this interweaving).
And I'm liking the way it's sort of bringing out our sincerity :)
I almost went off on an Enigma tangent here (or should i say intensifying of the Enigma tapestry? ) but there were too many potential tangents beckoning and i eventually seized on this one:
Poor little Py! That reminded me of when I brought Pink Floyd's Echoes into music class, thinking it might interest the teacher in the light of recent lessons about Electronic music and symphonic structure. Actually, I was right, it did interest her; she eagerly seized it off me and immediately made the whole class to the whole 20 minutes from end to end; which was the moment i found out that I was only kid in whole 30-strong class who liked Pink Floyd *wince * . Even though they were already pretty close to attaining "superband" status, that didn't mean that yer average teenage girl liked them , or that they got much airplay on Radio 1 :LOL:
But damn! I still regard that track as the definitive track of my teenage years, and the recurring theme of the soundtrack to my life. Pretty sure I posted it before,in some other thread mind, My discovery of Pink Floyd in the early seventies (just as they were reaching their peak, IMO) was a total revelation to me. Wow! Somebody wrote music that sounded like the inside of my head! nothing had ever got so far inside me before. And, like the modern poetry we were studting in english Lit, it had the effect of making me feel less alone; very intimately (if oddly distantly) connected with other people.
Echoes offered me the perfect synthesis of lyrics and sound to express that strangely close, strangely distant connection:
Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine
And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?
And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun
Cloudless every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53N99Nim6WE
A year or so later, i fell in love with an older teenage boy from my town, who'd started at Uni already (though he was only 17, just two years older than myself. His school liked to fastrack the brightest ones) who also liked Pink Floyd, and who brought back a fascination with telepathy experiments from his first term away. I'd known him awhile (we had a mutual best friend) , but i didn't even like him until he tried those experiments on me; still didn't really like him, but that encounter engendered adesperate thirst to connect with him, and a stubborn determination to teach myself not to shrink back and throw up all manner of automatic defences. I was shocked by my own innate defensiveness.
So then, i had a very clear image, for a while, of whom i was calling to across the sky. The attraction was mutual, but distance and the old communication issues utterly defeated us. And my fate was eventually sealed by the arrival on the scene of a big breasted, self-assured blonde with immaculate fashion sense , who represented absolutely everything i wasn't. :bigcry: Story of my life.
To be fair to myself Pretty-but-Vacuous was no more capable of following Scarily-Intense-and-Socially Inept-but-Interesting than the latter was capable of competing with the former. She only lasted a few weeks, before she bored him to tears, but the downfrade from romance to friendship stuck.
Well, anyway, as a self-indulgent addendum, i'm gonna add my other favourite Floyd track, "'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun"., and i'm choosing the performance from the utterly wonderful movie "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii", which I actually saw at the cinema, along with a French college girl who was staying with my family over the summer, as part of some sort of not-exactly-exchange scheme . It was really unusual for me to go the cinema, because insofar as I had friends who shared my tastes, they were rarely available for one reason or another (mostly connected with them all being older than me, and having Lives of Their Own) and my liitle group of school friends were a mottley crew of miscellaneous weirdos, you know? the oddments left at the bottom of the box, having nothing in common, really, save for all being social outcasts of one description or another. And none of thém were the least bit intersted in seeing that movie. They'd sooner drag me along to a disco, *wince *. I once persuaded one of them to watch ""2001: a space odyssey" with me in exchange for my watching a James Bond movie with her, but there was only so much of that kind of exchange that either party could stand. Well, hey! it pretty much defeats the object of sharing an experience if one party is there under duress, doesn't it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RbXIMZmVv8
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Sorry for your loss ren.
Its interesting reading about people in this thread.
I might break the pattern with this one...for that I am sorry. I was considering whether to post about the beatles song "I want you", but I cannot think of much to say about it. Ah, what the heck... Here's the "story": My eldest brother went off to college and moved out when I was 12/13, so at some point I began moving into is room (which was the attic) and found a record player. One record I also found was a beatles album (not sure if I found that in his room or somewhere else). Well, when I came upon the song "I want you" I found the instrumental part of it so mesmerizing that I would sit there for hours repeating that part. This meant I was lifting the needle and replacing it again and again at a spot where the instrumental part began. I believe at that age I was in a bit of emotional turmoil- my mothers drug problem began getting worse, we were often home alone, puberty, I started having pro-drome schizo symptoms and very bad anxiety. All that said, something about the instrumental part, the chords perhaps, or the chaos, spoke succinctly to what I was feeling and it was healing in a way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAe2Q_LhY8g
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I'm sorry for your loss, Ren. :(
Thanks odeon and sg.
It was a long time ago but I can still imagine his voice. He was very scared about leaving high school and living up to his parents' expectations. That's why I think he did it.
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I'm sorry for your loss, Ren. :(
Thanks odeon and sg.
It was a long time ago but I can still imagine his voice. He was very scared about leaving high school and living up to his parents' expectations. That's why I think he did it.
:hug:
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Sorry for your loss ren.
Its interesting reading about people in this thread.
I might break the pattern with this one...for that I am sorry. I was considering whether to post about the beatles song "I want you", but I cannot think of much to say about it. Ah, what the heck... Here's the "story": My eldest brother went off to college and moved out when I was 12/13, so at some point I began moving into is room (which was the attic) and found a record player. One record I also found was a beatles album (not sure if I found that in his room or somewhere else). Well, when I came upon the song "I want you" I found the instrumental part of it so mesmerizing that I would sit there for hours repeating that part. This meant I was lifting the needle and replacing it again and again at a spot where the instrumental part began. I believe at that age I was in a bit of emotional turmoil- my mothers drug problem began getting worse, we were often home alone, puberty, I started having pro-drome schizo symptoms and very bad anxiety. All that said, something about the instrumental part, the chords perhaps, or the chaos, spoke succinctly to what I was feeling and it was healing in a way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAe2Q_LhY8g
Hey you! I wrote the rules out in the first para of post #1 , right? And did they mention anything about keeping to patterns? They did not. Therefore your post is perfectly fine. In fact , interesting, affecting, confiding and featuring a great piece of music. What more could we possibly ask for? Pattern be damned.
In short, don't be sorry, SG. I kinda get the impression that you've spent far too much of your life feeling sorry already :hug:
Thank you.
oh! on the subject of hugs, i'm feeing that l i kinda missed out on the group hug for Ren, by posting my hug as a karma comment, so here's me joining in on that one
:apondering: ----> :tigger: ----> :grouphug:
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SG, I think it's awesome that your favourite Beatles track is one I've never heard before and not Hey Jude or Yesterday.
Mine is Across The Universe.
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SG, I think it's awesome that your favourite Beatles track is one I've never heard before and not Hey Jude or Yesterday.
Mine is Across The Universe.
Good grief! if i had to select a favourite Beatles track, i'm pretty sure I'd go for the same, with Strawberry Fields a close-running second.
Sooooo...somebody really needs to post that one, together with associated memories. I vote you, MSOW, cos I've already posted more than my fair share :green:
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Jack's contribution is also the Beatles. The tune of Yellow Submarine has invaded my head space for not sure how long, but a very long time; maybe forever. Won't post the lyrics, because it's never the lyrics which come to mind, only the melody. Can't really say what meaning it holds, though it must serve some purpose since it doesn't bother me like other echolalic/palilaic intrusions often do. It's never occurred to me to analyze it. Odd thing, when this thread came up, couldn't summon it on my own and it's taken two days to remember what it is. What is that song I've internalized a million times? No clue. So that's weird, but there you go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L42mbJG_U0
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I barely remember The Beatles. I was 5 years old when they broke up. I remember asking my mother about it when you I saw it on TV, the whole idea of a band being as culturally significant as The Beatles was beyond me. A band was just some people playing music and singing, it didn't seem like something to get so upset about.
Anyway, no big story behind this one. I was laid off at the beginning of the GFC in late 2008. Working in banking software as an expat during the worst banking crisis in living memory wasn't the best place to to be. My daughter was a baby and My son was 3 years old. We were living in Thailand and there was no sign of any improvement, we saw the other expats having their farewell parties and all the empty hotels and we moved back to Jakarta where I had some hope of getting a job. I stayed there for more than a year and eventually moved back to Sydney where prospects were better and the economy was getting better. So my daughter learned to walk while we were in Jakarta and we owned a small apartment in a tower with a shopping mall downstairs and my daughter was like a tiny mall princess. She had lots of friends but her best friends were the girls who worked in Starbucks. They used to give me free coffee to encourage me to come down with my daughter and use the free internet to look for work. The Starbucks girls were all extroverts and it rubbed off on my daughter who is now 10 years old and still a people person.
And I remember sitting in Starbucks one day and Across The Universe came on the sound system and it just took me back to an era I barely remembered. Just transported me like other Beatles songs don't do, even as much as I enjoy them. So the song reminds me very much of that time in Jakarta when my daughter was a toddler and also of my earliest memories of the late 60s.
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Time to bump this up again , in hope of further contributions.
Talking Heads are one of the very bands that make me feel like dancing (though it's best to move all the furniture and people out of the way when I do) I think that's prolly because I can relate to the unusually intelligent lyics. Typically dumb pop-song lyrics tend to leave me cold. So, if only i was allowed. I'd take the whole soundtrack to Stop Making Sense , as well as the whole soundrack to True Stories, plus the studio album version of the same, plus.. well, OK I'll just pick one track for now . Or should we call it one and a half? I mean, both versions of Wild, Wild Life.
This very much takes me back to my mid-late twenties, when my life took a drastic shift in directuion (or non-direction) . Prior to that I was pouring heart and soul into my science and maths studies , having set my heart on doing Theoretical Physics at Uni. Yeah, I knew I was supposedly past my best already for that sort of thing, at that advanced age (as my interviewer at Durham Uni actually pointed out to me) but that's what i wanted to do. with a quasi-mystical passion. Then, not unsurprisingly, I utterly failed to get the predicted grade A's (for various reasons, not unconnected with dyslexia and PMS, I have always sucked at exams) . Rather than do something practical instead (I would suck as a lab tecnician even worse than I suck at exams, trust me) I decided to drop the whole thing and soak myself in my other passion, poetry instead, and explore actual mysticism and...well , i somehow went from being almost-a-hermit (alongside my husband, in our rapiddly disintegrating marriage) to developing quite a manic social life. Since my town lacked a performance poerty scene, I somehow wound up organising one, and MC-ing events, and performing; all of which had seemed inconceivable before. It's not like I confidently strode in, but more like, my efforts to persuade other people to take the reins kept falling flat, so i wound up saying OK I'll just have to do it myself. That I mostly wrote serious-minded literary stuff made it weirder still, but I found I could adapt some of my work and much of my persona to make myself entertaining. That I already had a strong streak of self-mockery in my make-up helped.
Oh yeah, and my marriage broke down simultaneously, and I first met the love-of-my -life , but i already mentioned all that. I was putting a brave face on a great deal of inner turmoil, but also very much enjoying myself.
Actuially, behind my manic facade, i was overconscientious, as usual. And a few years later , when my son (born shortly after my 30th bithday) was still small, I sat down and calculated how much time I was putting into sitting on various Arts Commitees, organising events, and otherwise doing all sorts of totally unpaid work in relation to the Arts. 80 hours per week. Good grief, no wonder it was wearing me out, trying to juggle all that with raising a young child ( I recall going to a meeting with the local Arts Officer, with -thankfully sleeping - son in a bably-sling). So I quit, and went back to being a hermit...insofar as motherhood permits, that is.
I used to wonder how the heck a typical Aspie manages to step out of the shadows and take centre stage? But then i got it. it's all about, essentially, being in control of the social interactions, You can do that by taking people one-at-a-time in very small doses, or you can do that by being the one member of a crowd that everybody else is looking to for direction; oh! and by having a hidey-hole where you can psyche yourself up before the event, and debrief yourself afterwards
So, anyway Wild Wild Life very much evokes that period of my life. I especially like the line that goes
Things fall apart, it's scientific
That really keys into my self-mocking streak and brings a grin to my face every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11q4P8WVXEA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tavYk0DOIU