Insane in the Membrane, Discord in the Chord
My friend Jane is mild-mannered enough though plagued with severe ME that she will do that insane Buddhist thing of having enough presence of mind in the midst of her problems to laugh at them. What the hell is that? But put a packet hair dye through your hair in Jane’s presence, however, and watch her turn into a banshee.
I’d not have been able to understand Jane’s reactions properly if I hadn’t had my own bouts of multiple chemical sensitivity when my own ME worsens. At my worst I've experienced a freshly washed load of washing like it’s a jungle tiger. Something in the washing powder comes rushing at me and stabs me with a bout of instant psychosis. I can’t explain it any better than that, which is no real explanation at all. It hits my nose and it feels like my whole inner circuitry goes haywire and I panic. I once had to go and sit in a freezing cold room with the window open, feeling like an absolute idiot, unable to stop crying for 10 minutes, because a new brand of washing powder started up this reaction I didn’t really understand and I couldn’t articulate except through crying. It’s nothing if not embarrassing.
I’ve had the same experience with sound too. One bad day when my system was fritzing, I heard a Cookie Monster death metal song which made me feel like Something Very Bad Would Happen if I had to keep listening to it. A deep dread clanged right through my body in such a way that if I had to keep hearing it, I would need to shove a fork in my eyes until I died. Overreaction much.
Thankfully, many of my symptoms are not as bad as they were then, (thanks, I presume, to CBD oil helping my body reach the homeostasis it craves, and which ME roadblocks).
Even though I don’t have the same nervous system response to Cookie Monster music lately, it’s still the genre that’s broken my track record. I don’t like it and I struggle to know why you do. I am biased against Cookie Monster death metal. There, said it. I guess I've always prided myself on feeling like a true appreciator of music. To not be able to listen to an entire genre makes me feel a little sad. I understood why the girls at my high school loved Prince, even if his funk schlock left me unmoved (and that cow-eyed thing he used to do left me squirming). No, I don’t like polka, I would never seek it out, but I sure like you liking it and if you, like, played it in my presence I would tap my foot but if you played Cookie Monster death metal I’d be suicidal in 10 minutes flat.
These descriptions make me feel vulnerable, like my body is getting hysterical, like a girl, letting me down in the same way as when I brake in the passenger seat while someone else is driving when my super-sensitive fight-or-flight sees doom that isn’t even there. My internally pristine musical tolerance has been sullied by a kneejerk reaction. But I can’t help it. This music is fucked and if you like it then you’re fucking fucked too.
(Not really but sort of).
The song I simply couldn’t bear hearing when I was feeling very unwell was called Before I Burn Down, by a Norwegian trio called Moe. They’re influenced by a range of musical styles, including art rock. But how would I know, because I didn't get even a quarter way through the song before defaulting to Twitter-high outrage. This song felt insulting. It felt threatening. It felt like italics. It felt like men's music.
It made me angry because it felt like an indulgence – unmusic that refuses to riff off anything but its own despair. Music for the nihilistically entitled. A soundtrack for the end of capitalism when capitalism won't fucking die but instead morphs into a global corporate fascist coup of human bodies. This song was one of the bad metals, like death metal or doom metal. Or at least, the first 10 seconds of the song were. Sodden, heavy, screeching-from-a-dungeon incomprehensible lyrics. Three minutes of someone putting a gun to their head and pulling the trigger over and over again.
Plenty of people love this kind of music. There is nothing threatening in it whatsoever for them. In fact, I suspect it is a positive experience, giving voice to whatever darkness or gloom or despair is affecting them. For me, it feels like the eye of Mordor has turned itself upon me. What accounts for such a difference?
It’s not like I don’t like depressing music. I’m all for drowning in minor chords and melancholy, for music to sob to on the toilet while your feet go cold on the floor. But this feels physiological.
I think it’s the discord. I think it’s ultimately just personal. This music feels like an outward manifestation of the inflammatory screech that goes on in my body. And so I take it as an insult. My body, broken its own banks. My brain, my spinal cord awash in fire and heavy fog, all at the same time. The fire in the spinal cord determines what level of discord I can tolerate in my music. Too much and it feels like the jangle drives itself right into each of my cells and dismantles any flaccid energy that’s there trying to recycle itself, crushes it under a steely black heel.
Moe feels ugly without respite to me when I’m inflamed, and I can barely accept that it is not ugly to everyone. Yet when classical music was a new genre, it was perceived by some the way Moe now appears to me.
“Art holds up a mirror to shifting attitudes,” says Gretchen E Henderson in Aeon:
Initial tags of ‘ugly’ sometimes get forgotten as once-derided subjects become valued. Impressionism of the 19th century – now featured in blockbuster exhibits – was initially compared to mushy food and rotting flesh. When Henri Matisse’s works showed in the US at the Armory Show of 1913, critics lambasted his art as ‘ugly’, while art students in Chicago burned an effigy of his Blue Nude in front of the Art Institute. The same institution mounted a major retrospective of his work a century later. Jazz and rock’n’roll were once considered ‘ugly’ music, threatening to corrupt entire generations.
In the face of ‘ugly’ slurs, some artists embraced the word. The painter Paul Gauguin called ugliness ‘the touchstone of our modern art’. The poet and translator Ezra Pound encouraged a ‘cult of ugliness’. The composer Charles H H Parry praised ugliness in music, without which ‘there would not be any progress in either social or artistic things’. The critic Clement Greenberg lauded Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism as ‘not afraid to look ugly – all profoundly original art looks ugly at first’.
I love this, from a political standpoint. Who hasn’t bemoaned the fact that as our institutions have crumbled we’ve just continued on relentlessly holding up the flaccid status quo, slidden now down into the mass psychosis it’s been so wonderful to experience without respite for two fucking years now? Humans don’t easily allow things to crash and burn and die. Which is understandable, really, in our culture — because what else could you expect from a people who’ve been raised on a steady tritone of life/death, when life done well seems to prefer a three-part melody of life/death/life as a danceable forward rhythm.
I think I feel so defensive about having found my musical rock bottom, the doorless room, because I don’t want to be thought of as an old person. Sure, I occasionally tune into my local 70’s, 80’s and today oldies radio station because I want to sing, like, Pilot of the Airwaves. But I’m not afraid of the dark. I especially like to poke and prod into the spaces at the back where things squirm and where people squirm in even acknowledging them in turn. I resent the New Age insistence upon the demonisation of the dark, on refusing to be where we are positioned right now. I want us to turn all the lights off at the end of every day so that the city can see the stars. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek without turning away, even though I felt the deep drop at the pit of my stomach, and rage at the violence of existence, when the frog was sucked dry by the beetle. I was emboldened by Dillard's refusal to look away and pretend it’s not there. I think it’s terribly important that we look. Not least because if there is anything after this deep death we are in the midst of (and I believe there is) it readies you to see the beginning of its turning.
So I don’t hate dark. I just hate the refusal of hope. I hate, I think the drowning rage, even the semi-tritone, that refuses the harmony. I do want some kind of happy ending. Not the infantilised and sterilised Disney version that discredits and demeans the dark that would teach us, that exists right in the gut of all of us. Growth happens in the dark. The most fertile time of the year for a tree is in winter, where fuck-all is going on that you can see. I know the dark. I know what it feels like for its hands to reach around your neck and squeeze.
On a day I’m feeling better, when my symptoms have died down, and whatever goes on in my body that triggers every trauma has retreated, so that I feel the space on the inside, I listen to Before I Burn Down again. This time, it doesn’t inspire the same level of doom that it did when I listened to it when I was much sicker. This time I just don’t like it, that’s all. It’s just not my bag. Maybe then this all says just as much about ME as it does about me or Moe. But still, even though my reaction is lessened, it has still only descended from hate down to distaste. This music still feels as though it’s stepped over a line from music to something else. I can’t reach in and differentiate between its components. It bars me from its own experience. It feels like a kind of music that shits in the street and doesn’t clean it up. It doesn’t owe you anything. It refuses to give you anything. It feels like pain without a safe word.
You know when you react to a certain kind of music in this ridiculously menopausal, stupidly overblown way that it’s not for you. "Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture," Robert Palmer famously said. It's a pleasurable thing to attempt, if you love the music you're dissecting and categorising. When fear of a song's perceived hopelessness drives you from it into your headspace for mad dissection, there was nowhere for you to stand in the first place. If love is what drives your curiosity to know a song better by examining its folds, the love of the whole will withstand your dissection. You might even add some extra flavour notes.
