Angst, Time and Gothic Music

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Boy, that title could be rewritten so many different ways, with so many different combinations of words... suffering, youth, pain, torment, adolescent, new wave, headphones. The other night I did something unusual. A ritual from distant, deep memory -- I turned out the lights, put on some headphones and listened to an album straight through. Truth be told, I've done that countless times listening to my own albums, but usually as part of the process of analyzing, proofing, etc. Its been a much longer time since I put on one of those albums. You know the ones. The kind that pull you in to your heart-wrenched pain, providing catalyst for tears and release. In this case, it was Tones on Tail's Night Music. But there were others through the years. Roxy Music's Avalon, The Cure's Disintegration, any of the first three Smiths' albums. Ohh how the Brits are capable of concretizing the pangs of adolescence. The album itself is stunning. A masterwork anchored in the goth/new wave era, yet somehow completely untethered by the usual constraints of genre. It feels liberated from its time and place, which was an odd sensation, since its also how I felt, listening to it for the first time in perhaps 15 years. Liberated, because there were no painful tears, no gut-wrenching agonies that had been embedded in that music when I first heard it so long ago. They were gone, only to be replaced with the still regrets that time brings. The irony of adolescent angst is it's freedom. As teenagers, whether our suffering is real or imagined (which I must admit I was victim of both), the incongruity lies in how liberated we are to feel, regardless of how many of our emotions center around feeling trapped. We're teenagers -- having no control of our own destiny, assailed on all sides, tormented by a thousand different pangs. But we're free to feel these things. Never in one of those "late night with headphones" would I have conceived that the real feelings of being trapped would come later. Trapped by survival. The need to keep going, regardless of how you feel because life demands it. Work, love, money, pressure. In many ways I was relieved to find, listening to that exquisite album after such a long absence, that so many of my adolescent torments had long-since dissolved. But at the same time, I missed the catharsis that was so easy to come by in my youth. Instead, the feeling of dull, locked away caverns of regret and remorse, still with me but still inaccessible by the pressures of time. Maybe to be opened once again, if the emotional "liberation of youth" that I took for granted is allowed, by time, to make another grand entrance. As the album reached its end, there was no mourning for the last note, no tears to wipe from salty cheeks. Just an odd feeling for their absence and the lingering feeling that I should probably get to bed. To be prepared for the demands a new day would bring.