HIT ME WITH MUSIC
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
Music
was my refuge.
I could crawl into the space between the notes
and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou
we
play a symphony over and over again
. . . to get away from our own life
which we have not the courage to look at.
Marcel Proust
When
I hear music, I fear no danger.
I am invulnerable. I see no foe.
Henry David Thoreau
During
the past 75 years the verb “to hit” -- from the Norse
hitta ‘to come upon, to find,’ and later
in England ‘to strike’ -- has undergone radical transformation
in order to qualify the pleasurable effects of music on the brain.
Prior
to music’s appropriation of the word, its associations were
mostly negative: to physically hit someone was to do him
harm; one can be hit hard by an economic downturn, a region by
bad weather, the loss of a close friend or loved one. In sports
the verb “to hit’ is used to illustrate and quantify
violent impact: a driver or baseball bat striking a ball, a Mike
Tyson right hand dropping an opponent.
Separating
the impact of the word from its common usage, heroin users were
among the first to change the valence of ‘hit’ from
negative to positive. A ‘hit’ or to ‘hit up’
identifies smack’s (slang for heroin) happy effects on both
mind and body. “I’ll take a hit of that” now
figuratively refers to anything that produces agreeable effects
– from drugs and alcohol to a splash of water on a dry tongue.
In consideration
of music’s immediate impact on the brain, and the often
cozy relationship between drugs and creativity, it became fashionable
in the 1930s to designate a popular piece of music as a ‘hit.’
In 1936 Billboard magazine introduced its first Hit Parade
listings, a ranking of the most popular recordings on a given
date. Once entered into the vernacular, the positive recasting
of the word, especially in the context of culture and entertainment,
quickly caught on: journalists began characterizing a successful
Broadway show, art exhibition or television series as a ‘hit.’
An actor could be singled out as the ‘hit’ of the
show, or he/she the ‘hit’ of the party.
Prior
to the Internet, a number one hit was strictly determined by sales
and airplay. A chart buster typically appealed to a narrowly defined
segment of the population united by language and dispersed over
a large geographical area. In 1957 Elvis Presley’s “I’m
All Shook Up” topped the charts and sold more than two million
copies. But today, in the digital era of high-speed dissemination
and downloading of music, song popularity is now measured in sales
and Internet (youtube) views and must appeal to a global audience
– meaning it has to be sung in the lingua franca
of the world: English. Justin Bieber’s “Baby”
has been viewed over a billion times. Adele’s “Rolling
in the Deep” has registered more than 700 hundred million
plays while Rihanna’s “Diamonds in the Sky”
over 500 million – and still counting.
In consideration
of the above numbers and paying the rent, there isn’t a
songwriter alive who doesn’t dream of writing a hit record,
which on the surface seems easy since most hits consist of no
more than a few basic chords. But there is probably nothing more
difficult in all of music -- putting together a sequence of notes
that beguiles the brain in such a way that millions around the
world want to hear those notes again and again, perhaps twenty
times a day, like a crack user wants to light up all day long.
In both examples, the ‘hit’ (the notes or the drug)
pleasures the brain and sets in motion a dopamine cycle that is
its own reward and terminus.
Worldwide,
there are thousands of aspiring songwriters writing pop songs,
implicitly competing with each other, all trying to come up with
a sequence of notes that will appeal to and insinuate themselves,
and to a certain extent take over and empower minds everywhere
in the world. Since no more than three or four hit records are
produced every year, when they hit it is with tsunami like force
that unites millions of listeners who might otherwise have nothing
in common, for whom the ‘hit’ represents a transcendent
frontierless universal culture that constantly renews itself with
each succeeding hit, much like the form of the fountain remains
the same despite the constant replacement of water that is being
propelled. That a burqa bound teen in a Berber tent is listening
to the same music as a Beijing waitress is a civilizational conjunction
whose positive and negative implications are only beginning to
be understood.
Compared
to their future selves, teenagers are developmentally more receptive
to the immediate hit music provides because transitioning from
child to adult (becoming self-conscious) is necessarily a lengthy
and painful process that is marked by a tidal wave of anxieties
over body image, popularity and relationships. Besides bonding
around a preferred music, most teens quasi-obsessively seek out
the direct ‘hit’ embedded in their favourite run of
notes in order to feel good about themselves, to assuage their
hurting, to vent their anger and frustration, and especially to
forget about everything but the moment in song. “There’s
a melody for every malady” writes the composer Stew in his
rock musical Passing Strange.
It’s
enough to make you believe in the pseudoscience of alchemy when
one considers both the degree and extent to which a minimal line
of music is able to transform and empower especially young listeners,
an observable fact that was dramatically brought to my attention
during the viewing of the 2014 French film Bande de Filles
(Girlhood) by Céline Sciamma, which follows the
hard scrabble life of four girls living in the depressed outskirts
of Paris. As a matter of course, the girls have to resort to petty
crime to scratch up enough coin for a hotel room where for a night
only – free from authority and the pressures of growing
up fast – they can live their dreams. In the film’s
most remarkable
scene that takes your breath away, Rihanna’s
“Diamonds in the Sky” starts up and the girls jump
off the bed and burst into dance, and for those brief two or three
minutes their fondest hopes are experienced as real and their
happiness is forever as they and the entire viewing audience are
magically transformed into the beautiful sparkle and shine that
are diamonds in the sky. The simple notes combined with the lyric
hit the brain so forcefully that the song doesn’t even require
a bridge: it’s the same notes repeating again and again,
simultaneously connecting millions of like minds around the world,
many for whom English is not a mother tongue.
Because
the ebb and flow of the world is constantly changing as an effect
of new technology, the new music will change accordingly while
its mission remains the same: empower the mind and dull the pain.
A hit from the 1950s or 60s will not resonate today because its
sound, texture and rhythm speaks a different language which doesn’t
speak to the present. For a song to become a hit its very specific
gravity has to be able to attract young people from around the
world in order to lift them out of the deep and make them feel
good about themselves for as long as the song lasts. Of necessity
the hit will be both a reaction to the world as it turns and an
escape to a far better place.
Since
the passing of time and change are the two great constants in
life, it comes as no surprise to observe that as teenagers mature
and become settled in their ways they listen less frequently to
music, that the medicinal the notes dispensed is no longer necessary.
From
my giddy heights looking down into the past as if through a telescope
in reverse, it has been decades since I’ve had to listen
to a particular sequence of music over and over. But from time
to time -- as if nostalgiac for the uncertainties that used to
plague and music that allayed -- my brain gets hooked onto a song.
After hearing “Diamonds in the Sky” for the first
time in Girlhood, I was swept away and couldn’t
wait to hear it again. But after listening to it once more, I
couldn’t get through it a third time. About six months ago,
on Austin City Limits, I discovered Kat Edmonson’s “Nobody
Knows That” (the piano solo), and played it everyday for
a while but since I’m a notorious ear-worm
sufferer I’m now afraid to listen to it
because I know the notes are going to repeat in my head for two
or three days afterwards. For almost a year now, I’ve been
listening to Eric Scott Reed’s “Sun Out,” in
particular the sublime introduction that mysteriously defies the
laws of diminishing returns.
* * * * * * * * * *
Just
as eternity feeds on time, the hit record feeds on youth, meaning
as long as there are young people up in mid-air, the mega-hit,
as a multi-purpose delivery system, will continue to be a constant
in the world because it’s the one friend that will never
let you down, or, as sung by Bob Marley in “Trenchtown Rock,”
“one good thing about music when it hits you feel no pain,
hit me with music.”
Like
the fountain whose flow is continuous but shape never changes,
number one hits come and go but their essence remains the same
as the upsurge of those privileged and yes, brilliantly conceived
sequences of notes that allow listeners to experience, however
temporarily, however implausibly, intimations of what it feels
like to be fully realized and integrated into the world.
Best
said by the late Mentor Williams,
Give
me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll
And drift away.