Autobiographical ramblings, part whatever

 It may be an anthropological universal to be searching for meaning. The existentialist, basic problem of being: why are we even here? (That the answer, to anyone not subscribing to certain kinds of faith, has to be “find it for yourself”, we’ll just leave here at the door.) It is quite interesting that, in recent years, I increasingly often noticed myself thinking, “It would be nice to be sixteen again”—but not to be young again, but to be happily satisfied with playing videogames. Actually, I doubt I was ever happily satisfied with playing videogames: but my memory conveniently purged itself from all the moments of anxiety, boredom, and aimless searching that were bound to fill a lot of my time back then.

Now I am writing these lines while dedicating time to listen to music. Even worse, listening to music that I already know, I already often know very well: songs that I, at some point or another, told our new electronic overlords that I really like them. The question, of course, is: do I really like them now? It may be soul-searching. Curious what sticks.

In recent years—I’d not blame Covid but it curiously coincided—I lost the will to do music. I’m trying to find it again, and I don’t know how to find it without forcing myself to exposing, to listening, to trying.

Music is something that I “always” (whatever always means) cared about a lot—still, I started playing myself quite late, only at age 20, I believe. Amusingly, I mostly listened to videogame music during my teens: most of the music I should have listened to at my age I discovered later, and amusingly the music that most resonates with me actually was made from when I was about twelve to twenty-five. (Even if I didn’t listen to it until years later.)

With so many things, I consciously got into music (so much actually that I just decided to try playing) through “Japan.” It was 1999, the personal internet connection (33,6-dial up squad, drop me a thumbs up, thank you) and Napster suddenly were things, I was living with a friend in a sharehouse (“WG”) arrangement, and we decided to look for “goth rock from Japan.” Gackt kind of stuck out—and some random Oricon-charts downloads for the year 2000 quite quickly sorted out the rock bands for me: L’Arc en Ciel, Siam Shade, Luna Sea. Before that, I believe that I only consciously listened to Queen as far as rock was concerned. But the videogame music that really moved me? Xenogears’ soundtrack and FF6’s overworld theme (Tina’s Theme) would come to mind instantly: and, of course, the opening theme to Chrono Cross (even my mom liked that). But this is when I suddenly started wanting to actually play this kind of music, to express something. Maybe let all the loneliness, sadness, emptiness, just become something. And hopefully leave me in the process.

I’m not sure; I’m getting colored in my thought by the music playing, which for some mysterious reason has been tending towards the emotional, shoegaze-y, melancholic (and so on) vibe for the past thirty-or-so-minutes. But then, it may be because I’m going through my collection alphabetically from behind, and all the Japanese characters are stacked there. Most Japanese music I listened to the past decade that clicked was…not happy! (Okay, I may just be a little emo who grew old and never noticed he was emo, since really, I never listened to music dubbed “emo”! *laughs*) — throwing this in: some obscure band called シリカゲル (“Silica Gel”) playing right now, and ist one of the most absurdly wonderful albums I have heard in the past decade. But to my knowledge, they just made this one and went “poof.” As so often —

That being said, my journey with music is one of failure. Or, should I say, of trying to force something out of it? I do recall that for most of my time I spent inane amounts of time thinking about how I want to sound, how I want to write, trying to find “me” in listening and the sounds of others—instead of “being” and accepting whatever may come out of it. This is, in a large part, perhaps, why I never got somewhere with the whole music thing. (The other is my lack of a practice regime and simply getting gud [TM].) It also, in the beginning, offered convenient excuses: the early 2000s were still a time when it was possible to convince yourself that doing electronica stuff required some kind of arcane training. In the same way as my teen-self likely thought that playing an instrument by itself already required “talent”: the mythical quality we use to justify not doing things ourselves, that we use to nivellate the endless hours of real practice put in by writers, artists, musicians, scholars, and anyone else we’d secretly want to be ourselves, but don’t have the courage to try and become.

It doesn’t help that I always was under the impression of being quite open when it came to my taste in music: I was never a genre listener. This may be the result of being exposed to videogame music since an early age, which always was this eclectic mixture of rock, jazz(-fusion), Celtic, classical, and, when the 90s hit, various stylings of electronica. It may also not help that the only vocalist I know who I worked with (and who I, to be honest, still want to work with), has a very different background from myself: simply put, he’s not a shoegaze-person at all (and I’m not entirely one myself), but a classic rock vocalist!

Until today, I am wondering how to even fit this together. And I’m still clueless as to how find it out. Learning about how horrible my playing has become doesn’t help: but it also offers a convenient excuse to, again, not “do” something. As does my lack of any confidence in being able to write melodies—I do have some confidence in writing chord progressions, for sure. Although they are too complex for the sensibilities of 2022: I like storytelling, I like modulation, I like songs that have multiple colors, moods, that shift, and try to be more than “I love you” or “I hate you.” People are complicated, and the soundtrack to our lives should be too—although sometimes, the simple scream of your soul, the raw, undiluted emotion, is the right thing. But that shouldn’t take five minutes (and also not three, for that matter).

I’m not really sure why I wrote this, or what I wanted to say. Probably nothing specific: it sometimes helps to just write, to just try and externalize whatever is going on in your head. Also, if I want to take anything from this, yet again, autobiographical rambling, is that, perhaps I should start writing about music a bit more focused. Actually, just concern myself with music more.

This is one thing that I’ll say now in writing, although I have said it before in real conversations: one of my pet-peeves, an idea, perhaps a dream, that I do have, is write a book, a history of Japanese rock during the 1990s, with a focus on visual kei. The reason being two things: for one, I am indebted to Luna Sea for having made me care about music in a way different from before, and for another, having learned about rock music of “my time,” I am quite fascinated how grunge, whose heavy melancholia became the ubiquitous influence of “Western” rock music from the mid-90s onward was, apparently, a very minor influence in Japan. I’d like to know why that actually is the case. Part of why I’d like to have a doctoral title is, I fear, the authority that comes with one in order to actually being able to undertake this project.

Over and out, for today.