Thursday, June 24, 2004
(10:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Heidegger avec Coltrane
I have a bad habit of listening to music in the background, and so I had already kind of listened to Wilco's A Ghost is Born thrice before reading Brey's review. After listening to it twice during my round-trip to Chicago tonight, I must admit that I have far fewer reservations about the album than Brey does. To begin, I only started listening to Wilco a month or so ago, and then I only listened to Summerteeth. The place of A Ghost is Born in the complete career arc of Wilco (which sounds suspiciously parallel to that of Radiohead, on an album-by-album basis, particularly if Kid A and Amnesiac are counted as one double album) is of no particular concern to me. The influences that they incorporate do not interest me in the slightest. What does interest me is that "I'm a Wheel" not only sounds like a Foo Fighters song, but that many of the chords he uses in the chorus sound like the kind my dad instinctively tends toward when he's improvising on the guitar. I think "Company in My Back" is beautiful. I think a lot of the songs are beautiful, and I think the darker songs are among them -- I relish dark music.
If I were to rearrange my music collection, it would be autobiographically. Right now I'm listening to John Coltrane's Giant Steps. One of the cuts off that album was on NPR when I took out the Wilco album in my car. If I were placing that, it would be in the part of my music collection where I had access to Mark Miller's vast jazz collection and went through it somewhat haphazardly. I had moved into our University Place apartment a couple weeks before the semester started due to some controversy at home, and during that time, I read so much -- so wonderful. I wish I could do that again. I read Being and Time that week. I read other things as well -- some Voeglin, even. I read Of Grammatology, hanging over the edge of the couch, perilously close to the door. And there was jazz going in the background. I had "my own apartment" for the first time, with that novelty of novelties: extra space. I tried to figure out where to put the book I was reading. I had music going all the time, civilized music that didn't come out of Seattle in the 1990s. Wonderful. John Coltrane is forever entwined with Martin Heidegger in my mind, in a way that an academic paper could never capture.
That was the year I finally decided to stop going home for breaks, my senior year. I had always delayed going home, at least ever since I met Kristin (who was a towny) -- trying to steal some time when I could have her all to myself -- and I did even see Kristin this particular break I'm thinking of. The main thing, though, was that I read White Noise and listened to Amnesiac a million times. Whenever I walked into my apartment after a meal or after going to visit a friend, Amnesiac was still going, on repeat. I was reading White Noise for my senior thesis, and thanks to that intense reading experience, it got a positive assessment, even though it objectively failed to meet my (somewhat embarrassing, in retrospect) criteria for a "good" novel.
I could dig a little further into that same year -- Coldplay and Risk, Tenacious D, listening to Muse on the way to visit Jen Hatton in D.C. (sadly, no background music accompanied Gavin's refusal of Mrs. Miller's lasagna: "I just don't eat lasagna. Could I have something else?"). I could recall how Eels' Daisies of the Galaxy and Beck's Mutations and Schoenberg's choral works together defined the first summer home from college, when I worked mowing lawns -- looking out the window of a house not my own, into a neighborhood with no trees, trying desparately to keep in contact with the two girls I had left behind through voluminous e-mail correspondance. Selmasongs defined the winter break before I went to Oxford; Dancer in the Dark helped assuage the awkwardness when I came home that summer and saw my high school girlfriend after such a long time. I had made a mix CD for her in high school, when music was even more intense an experience and when my opinions were even less well-founded -- and I've made mix CDs since, sometimes as a sign of love, sometimes not, and sometimes the ambiguity was in the individual copies of that CD, distributed widely so that it wouldn't be so conspicuous when it hit its intended target. Badly Drawn Boy represents to me my previous summer, when all my friends seemed to leave me every weekend -- it's happy, upbeat music, but I still feel vaguely upset when I listen to it, because it's not enough, it's not filling this hole I feel, or that I once felt and now feel again because of the music.
Muse's Absolution and Godspeed's ...like tiny fists... are my first semester at CTS, driving to Chicago twice a week. Smashing Pumpkins' Adore and Rachmaninoff's greatest hits are the summer before I went to Olivet, when my house was being emptied. And then there are the "mp3 songs" from when I had first discovered illegal music downloads but had not yet discovered Napster -- the few awkward songs that were available and that I listened to incessantly, "Personal Jesus," "Brown-Eyed Girl," "Mutherfucker," etc.
It's all too many memories that I can't share. Every track of every CD is just too much for me, but I love music too much to cut it out of my life -- so I play it in the background.
