Nimesh Bastola
Sometimes I wonder on my situation, on my inability to comprehend this mechanism of life. I question myself that what I am really missing so hard and what would provide consolation to my suffering. At that time something vivid hope arises in my mind that how music would be a solace to this desolation which all I have been bearing.
I condemn myself that I know nothing about music. I mean, I know so much about music but at the very same I know nothing about music. I have been listening music since a long time and have a wide range of taste in it. I have listened most of the western music from Bob Dylan’s influencer Woody Guthrie to the contemporary teenager’s idol Taylor Swift. But the inadequacy is that I lack playing music, not able to sing and play any kind of musical instruments. This inability makes me feel that I know nothing about music.
There is a movie called ‘Almost Famous’, totally enriched with music which I have recently watched. The movie is about a fifteen years young rock journalist, an unabashed music fan who gets job in Rolling Stone, at a very renowned music magazine. His high and low experienced with the band Stillwater taught him many realities of music industry and about the life too. The life of the kid revolves around the very famous musicians of the century such as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, The Allman Brothers Band, Stillwater, Yes, Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, The Doors, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eagles and the master of the masters, The Beatles. But on the contrary, I was born and raised in different culture that made a moral integrity which did not allow me to think about the alternative of school. Those all make me pseudo, a charlatan who acts to be a melophile, a dilemma what I have been undergoing.
I was a very adroit student in school in the study which made me not to think on other things like music. My school blurred all the possibilities, all the higher living probabilities of my life. Now I lament my childhood about how they use me for their shake, luring with the grades. Now I imagine myself what would it be if I was introduced with music during my school days, with the music and the possible instruments. But what was happened that happened which could not be changed and my lamentation would be none other than a useless mind chattering, a restless anxiety.
Now I am slowly getting that why The Beatles had run to India. The west had been a place of drugs and depression that somehow music was saving them for a while. But the interesting and cataclysmic was that the music itself was caught upon those cheap catalysts. So they have to run away to the east in the hope of escaping shiny and stained lifestyle, being imposed self into the lap of Maharishi.
The pinnacle of music was all those fifty years from 1950 to end of twentieth century which had gained mainstream popularity. After that music have not been able to grasp its sprit, just become a chintzy source to eclipse the degrading filthy life. The first ten years of twentieth can be acknowledged but later 2010, new pop culture set about, actors of auto tune have leading the modern music industry.
I was introduced to the music in many ways, first I should appreciate my childhood in the village where I discovered folk songs and most of the appreciations go to the movies. There was a time when I used to watch one movie each night that provoked the musical interest in me. Hollywood does not create their own music but adopt from the fabulous artists using their fine aesthetic acclaimed music. I regret going to school but gratify myself for watching movies which taught me more than the school, introduced me to the world and to the universe of music.
While writing this piece, my ears are harkening an enchanting song, ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ by the band called ‘Yes’. This song reminds me prayer that used to be broadcast on the radio in every morning. This song has become a solace in my difficulties. I think it would be very less if I write even thousands of words about this song and equivalently injustice too to keep writing much due to my own inefficacy.
I have spent whole days and woke up all the nights listening songs. I distinctly remember how I used to listen Pearl Jam for twelve hours continuously, back to back all his albums. Pearl Jam is one of the unique band which inherits the incredible musician of the past. I was acquainted with Pearl Jam on my late teenage by the movie ‘Into The Wild’ directed by Sean Penn. The voice of Eddie Vedder, of a lead vocalist of the band is unparallel to the contemporary musician. His baritone vocal which sounds full of rage made him to be ranked seventh on a list of “Best Lead Singers of All Time,” based on a readers’ vote aggregated by Rolling Stone. Whoever has a wide range of taste in music, especially in western rock or if he ever had listened even one of his music like Daughter, Black, Even Flow, Alive, Last Kiss, Yellow Ledbetter, Release, The Long Road or solos like Society, Guaranteed, Hard Sun and Long Nights will instantly grasps what I am intending to say.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, for him, music was a source of escape from his suffering. To quote him- “Without music, life would be a mistake.” In 1887, he wrote “There has never been a philosopher who has been in his essence a musician to such an extent as I am.” For him, philosophy and music were inextricable.
Here are some quotes of Nietzsche on music:
“My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music.”
“I do not know how to make a distinction between tears and music.”
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Nietzsche believed that music is Dionysian, responsible for madness and chaos which gives birth to tragedy, essential to connect to our emotions in a deepest level. I think, for the equivalent to the Apollonian, for logic and clarity, music is inevitable. Hence to refine complexity of duality in an individual music is ineluctable.
Music has been reassurance to me on the unbearable weightiness of the complexity of life, consolation from this eternal suffering that man has to carry as a consequence of a thinking mind. On the other hand, music has become a nudge that reminds me the emptiness of my existence, incomprehensiveness of something which is dear to me.
We lack something because of we want something. Our acceptance of lacking something is the root of desire and the desire is the root of all the sufferings. The acceptance of this cycle of suffering binds all of us as a common entity, makes all of us inseparable from one another. Having all these, music is a source of consolation as well as melancholy to me, disease and medicine, factors of the eternal recurrence of human suffering.
