Notes on music (and other natural disasters)

There’s nothing like listening to stuff like Beethoven’s Third Symphony or perhaps any piece by Richard Wagner during a storm. Especially a terrible one. It certainly is effective in making us feel much more important than we really are, in control not only of one’s manifest destiny but of the elements as well. If we cannot control anything else in life, at least we can score the film to fit our own narratives. Even with the absence of a fiddle, we might feel the need to play Nero as we survey the destruction outside.

Of course, that’s stupid. But how many people have done stupid things, even atrocities, after hearing “that tune” one too many times? Ian Curtis hung himself while listening to Iggy Pop’s “The Idiot” while Kurt Cobain quoted Neil Young in his suicide letter. Charles Manson claimed to receive orders listening to the Beatles’ “White Album.” And Hitler apparently liked to hum the themes of Wagner’s Meistersinger as he daydreamed of the Fatherland (or while he did the dishes). Ferdinand Marcos sang off-key in Ilocano after his tryst with movie starlet Dovie Beams.

Or, reading the entries on the website, textsfromlastnight.com, we wonder what inane pop ditty or track from the Cure’s “Pornography” LP might’ve been playing when messages like, “i don’t know where i am. i made bad decisions. i think this guy is dead” or “I think I’ve hugged the toilet more times than I’ve hugged my own family members” were sent. (Another entry reads: “it’s great music for shaving your balls.”) This leads us also to wonder which of either the lyrics or the music of Charlene’s Never Been to Me came first? Or did all that new age sitar music cause Deepak Chopra to declare: “I used to be atheist until I realized that I was God”?

(Surveying the titles that fill the shelves in the self-help section of the third floor of Fully Booked at the Fort is like hearing an infernal jukebox.)

The German philosopher Schopenhauer once wrote: “Music, since it passes over the Ideas, is… quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts.” Of course, being dead for several centuries, he had never heard Callalily.

Whatever crimes it may have inspired, music remains indispensable to us. At the very least, it can ease the pain of trying to write a coherent column in the office while a male intern is trying his best chat-up lines on the new Korean graphic artist. (Admittedly, without the benefit of headphones, though, The Strokes or Jay-Z can only do so much.) Even the worst music is sometimes better than the sound of everyone else — or the silence before the approaching storm.

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This column is dedicated to Denise Mallabo and France Pinzon.