Thursday, August 16, 2007
Music
First the required Seinfeld reference. You remember the show where Elaine was dating a guy who would go into a fugue state when Desperado was played on the radio? He completely dissociated — it was his song. Like many of the themes in Seinfeld, it had a root truth. There is music that touches us, resonates with our internal rhythms maybe — it reaches deep without intercession. It sometimes can be a strange or comically inappropriate song for such a reaction — but we are still moved. It could be sentimental pap, a show tune, or some other commercially manipulated sound effluvia. Somehow it gets to you. Past the genre, past the lyrics often (but not always), the underlying melody insinuates.
I remember hearing a reporter say he went to The Lion King stage show. He said he had never done anything like that before, but the emotion he felt so overflowed, he began to weep. If you remember, the music from that show has a primitive driving trance beat — a Phil Spector wall of sound. It got to him — floating on the waves of existence at a stage show. Besides the next mention my all time favorite, stop me in my tracks: Mio Babbino Caro. Painfully, incredibly beautiful.
But the real subject of this post: Years ago NPR had a show called Roots of Reggae. It was a survey show which included songs that were native to the Jamaican genre. Among the songs played was a gospel style song called, as I remember, Saturday Night. They pronounced it “Sateeday Night”. It was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard. Although it seemed to be about, what else?, a weekend night, it was drenched in a yearning melancholic romanticism — a central tone in Western art, even if this piece wasn't directly of the traditions of the West. In its languorous falling rhythms the song embraced a heartfelt weariness borne of hard experience. I wrote NPR to ask where they got the song, or if it could be pulled from the track and purchased from them. Never heard back.
Saturday Night begins, ” Lord, what a night, what a night, what a Saturday night…”