It's Never Just Music
A couple of years ago and for a couple of years, I nearly forgot just how much music meant to me, how much I depended on it, how much I loved it, how much I wanted it. I was listening to the same things over and over, or not listening at all; I was not curious; I had stopped listening to THE FUCKING NATIONAL!! I’m not kidding. The National. My favorite band. I had stopped listening to my fucking favorite band.
Then, in January of last year, right before I had a surgery that would take a few weeks to recover from, someone made me a playlist of “songs to be miserable to” as I convalesced. It was full of songs I knew and loved already and songs I’d never heard before but loved instantly. It had my favorite, favorite song on it: “Sorrow” by The National. I listened to it on the bus in the days leading up to my surgery, asking myself why it was that I had stopped listening. Why had I cast these things, and myself, aside?
I started making playlists, which I had done obsessively since my teens, again after that. One after the other. I kept getting ideas for concepts or songs to build playlists around and not thinking about it very much, just doing it. I hadn’t really been flexing these muscles, hadn’t picked up my guitar, hadn’t really thought about music at length or depth or really at all in too long. It felt good to just noodle around.
Then came Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, out of seemingly thin air like the answer to a prayer I didn’t know I’d said.
I read it on the recommendation of someone to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude and found myself doing things like nearly throwing the book across the room in excitement (“I Have a Strange Relationship with Music,” pages 11 to 13), getting up and pacing around the room in circles (“When the Boss Went Moral: Bruce Springsteen’s Lost Album,” pages 63 to 65), and crying (“Between the Viaduct of Your Dreams: On Van Morrison,” page 131).
I felt like Hopper was handing myself back to me, giving me permission to care about these things again, even though I’d never needed it before. But I needed it then, and thank God I got it.
This week, I reviewed the new, expanded edition of The First Collection for Jacobin. I hope you’ll read it.