Commentary

I was walking down the street, (concentrating on truckin’ right), when I put my hand in my pocket and discovered my brother’s iPod. My thoughts flashed back to the night before. Broken snapshots of a faded dream bubbled to the surface though the haze of a hangover. We’d been drinking.

Abandoning attempts at reasoning how I had come to be in possession of the anodized audiophony, I decided to take advantage of the situation, gave his headphones a cursory wipe upon my sleeve, shoved them in my ears and fired up the machine.

I like borrowing other people’s personal stereos. It’s like exchanging compilation tapes again. You get a most intimate insight into the musical emotions that someone else has chosen to immerse themselves in – and through this, you can garner a more complete understanding of that person. This can lead to further inward exploration, as you re-consider your relationship with the person in light of their musical choices. What does this song mean to them? What does this song mean to me? How can I reconcile the two – and what does that mean for the relationship between us?

I get on very well with my brother, and I often forget that he is nearly a decade older than me (until, that is, someone asks us who is older, at which point I tend to get a little upset). And so I often forget that his musical tastes tend to diverge from my own.

It’s easy to dismiss music of a style that you don’t normally listen to. And so it is with The Beautiful South. I’ve never been much of a fan, but in fairness, maybe I hadn’t given them much of a chance. I didn’t know my brother was a fan. There were no fewer than three Beautiful South albums on his playlist, so I gave them a go. Surprised by inventive pop/jazz orchestration combined with savagely disarming lyricism, beautiful and somehow hopeful in its dark cynicism, I missed my bus stop and decided to walk back from the next one.

I like being surprised by music. It never fails to confound my innate bitterness and spread a little smile across my face. I like to laugh at my arrogance when my presuppositions are proven wrong.

A heavenly host of prog followed. The underappreciated prog-folk of early Genesis. The sinfonia-type arrangement of Pendragon. The undisputed genius of Pink Floyd. The space-rock stylings of the Ozric Tentacles.

All in all, I forgot where I was going and found myself lost in music.

Lost in music, I found myself.

I urge each and every reader today to exchange MP3 players with a friend or relative. Let our music bring us together. Let us lay bare our souls and share our passions among us. Let our mutual love of music deepen our understanding of each other. Let our relationships blossom as the dialogue of music enhances our world.

Let us groove to a different beat.

Amen.