I step up onto the treadmill I bought when the stock was still worth something, um and when I still had stock, I place the boombox my ex-wife let me keep in front of it, and crank Bright's album Full Negative (Or Breaks) (November 2000, Ba Da Bing) as loud as it will go without distorting too much (pretty loud). The music washes over me like the best drug ever; I fucking love this record and I'm heading into these waves of angular, melodic, surging RAWK.
Some people meditate to the sound of silence. I prefer to stick my head inside a jet engine. Did you ever see My Bloody Valentine live? You know when they did that twenty-minute-plus sonic destroyer chaos noise thing during the middle of You Made Me Realize, the amps all turned past 12? The three times I saw them do that were three of the calmest times in my entire life and totally worth whatever hearing loss I endured.
I don't know what the words are to this song by Bright, since their own words are mumbled at the last minute by the band; theyre basically an instrumental act. But they have words. So, I make my own lyrics up to suit my current situation. The words that come out spur of the moment, tell more about what I'm really thinking than I thought I can think right now. My own indie-rock isolation tank! I should market this, I tell myself as I disembark fifty minutes later, sweaty and satisfied.
Glossalalic or obscure/indecipherable lyrics shouted, chanted and sung atop music that implies volume this is hopefully what rock and roll music sounded like the first time you heard it. I remember being transfixed as a nine-year old by the then-Top-40 song Black Betty by Ram Jam (a song with a curious history it was originally either a Leadbelly tune or an old African-American prison chant BUT upon its release in 1977 by 4 ugly and white rockers from Cincinatti it was boycotted by the NAACP for allegedly racist content). Something about the speed of the vocals (whooahhoahblackbettybambalam, whoooahoahblackbettybambalam) sounded alien and familiar at the same time, like 30-year-olds showing up to play kickball.
There are songs that will scar you for life because they just sounded so big and heavy and impenetrable at the time this is the kind of babble Patti Smith was going on about in her book Babel, no? My personal program of volume meditation is on some level about a profound loss of self, something that also occurs for wonderful durations during the best live music, and in almost any worthwhile movie or novel, and, of course, sex.
So, tell me do you like it LOUD???
Some people meditate to the sound of silence. I prefer to stick my head inside a jet engine. Did you ever see My Bloody Valentine live? You know when they did that twenty-minute-plus sonic destroyer chaos noise thing during the middle of You Made Me Realize, the amps all turned past 12? The three times I saw them do that were three of the calmest times in my entire life and totally worth whatever hearing loss I endured.
I don't know what the words are to this song by Bright, since their own words are mumbled at the last minute by the band; theyre basically an instrumental act. But they have words. So, I make my own lyrics up to suit my current situation. The words that come out spur of the moment, tell more about what I'm really thinking than I thought I can think right now. My own indie-rock isolation tank! I should market this, I tell myself as I disembark fifty minutes later, sweaty and satisfied.
Glossalalic or obscure/indecipherable lyrics shouted, chanted and sung atop music that implies volume this is hopefully what rock and roll music sounded like the first time you heard it. I remember being transfixed as a nine-year old by the then-Top-40 song Black Betty by Ram Jam (a song with a curious history it was originally either a Leadbelly tune or an old African-American prison chant BUT upon its release in 1977 by 4 ugly and white rockers from Cincinatti it was boycotted by the NAACP for allegedly racist content). Something about the speed of the vocals (whooahhoahblackbettybambalam, whoooahoahblackbettybambalam) sounded alien and familiar at the same time, like 30-year-olds showing up to play kickball.
There are songs that will scar you for life because they just sounded so big and heavy and impenetrable at the time this is the kind of babble Patti Smith was going on about in her book Babel, no? My personal program of volume meditation is on some level about a profound loss of self, something that also occurs for wonderful durations during the best live music, and in almost any worthwhile movie or novel, and, of course, sex.
So, tell me do you like it LOUD???
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
I haven't read BABEL yet..I have it tho...as well as THIS AINT NO DISCO, GO NOW, the Gary Valentine book....I did read Hell;s Hanuman books, the tiny little books. I even wrote him, pre email telling him how much I liked the books. He write me back and told me that if I sent him the books, he'd autograph them and he'd send them back to me ONLY if I included return postage. I did. I got them back autographed. Damn excited I was....nice guy.
I saw him do a reading for GO NOW and told him this and he looked at me like I told him that Tom Verlaine was better songwriter than him. I left quickly.