Background Noise
I was wondering today when I stopped listening to music. I started liking music when I was about eight or nine and even then I used to listen to it properly, but somewhere down the line I stopped, I think it was during the last 5 years. Today was a bit of a puk day, one of those days when nothing seemed to go right, everything was getting on my nerves and I kept feeling that I need to punch something. I couldn’t study after making dinner bc my powers of concentration had clearly abandoned me and that didn’t help my mood so I decided to do what I used to do when I was small. I Grabbed my Ipod and went into my room, cut the lights, put volume as high as I could, closed my eyes, and listened. It felt like I had come home after a long trip, that feeling of familiarity and comfort. I didn’t open my eyes for about an hour, I stopped thinking and I let myself drift.
I realised what I had been missing for so long. When I was younger, every evening I used to put my walkman on, get into a pair of shorts and go to the to the top of the road, sit down and listen to whatever cassette I had picked that day. I’d listen and let nothing else get in the way, no day-dreaming, just listening to the words, the way the instruments come together and blend in with the vocals, the story being told, I’d close my eyes and see the bass guitarist strumming his chords, the pianists’ fingers dancing to and fro and the drummer’s arms wave about creating a haze. Every now and then I’d hear something particularly powerful and I’d physically feel the music as a chill runs through my body leaving behind a trail of goosebumps. Later on when I was studying for my AL’s I used to kickback at the end of the day after dinner with a glass of iced tonic with lime, a nice armchair on my balcony and listen to the Late Late Request Show which I had recorded from the night before. I loved that chill in the air, the light breeze that somehow doesn’t disturb the stillness, and that solitude that is so precious.
Tonight I felt it all over again, the peace, the solitude, the goosebumps, everything. I made a promise to do that more often, just me and my music. It feels slightly criminal that music has just become background noise of late. I only seem to have some music on while working, while on the tube in an attempt to make the journey shorter and basically only while doing something else. As a result it feels like I’ve missed out on a lot, it’s sort of like reading an abridged version of a great piece of literature, you get the basic idea but miss the whole point, like 20-20 cricket. Here’s to the real thing and to the men and women that make it happen.
