Symptoms: Songs from your childhood that make you want to die but aren't depressing in and of themselves

[Cornellius]

Okay, this is weird, but I have to get it off my chest.

 

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgs-TVd3LfVbhddZsX0DqB82EnzctWkTj&feature=mh_lolz

 

The linked playlist contains eleven songs that have sunk deep into my unconscious many years ago. The songs are monuments to the deepest depression I have ever felt when I was truly clenched in the talon of my family, helpless. Being between 5 years old and 15 years old. To me, they all sound like dying feels (I have come close to death once.) They give me a feeling of invisibility, just as I felt invisible to my family. The songs really are the encapsulation of bad memories. A section I don't remember won't depress me, and might even entertain me, but any section I do remember switches the switch back on.

 

Most of them played on my mother's stereo on and off for at least ten years. Some played in the car when the radio was on, and remind me of days of compulsory travel, dissociated boredom, and kept haunting me through the years as they remained very popular on the radio. Clearly I remember, the music marked the barrier between me and the adults towering above me. There was that world of strange love songs that I didn't understand, and I feel like the presence of the music in the house was more important to my parents than my presence was to them. What they warmed up to, left me cold...

 

The songs are in a specific order: the first song is the most depressing to me, the last one is the lesser of eleven evils. Reviews:

 

1. Can't get over you - Lionel Richie (Listen to the fakeness, the overall unpleasantness of the whole thing... listening to the song gives me bellyache. Lionel sounds like his "love" gives him just that, a bellyache. My mother preparing supper in an empty house, unwinding in her bubble which I try desperately to squeeze myself in, but I am unwelcome, I don't have my bitter adult fakeness skills down.)

 

2. Careless Whisper - George Michael (The saxophone riff starts, and I feel like reaching for a gun to shoot myself. When I was young, I didn't feel the subtleties of the playing or the production, I felt the melodies like someone condemning me to cry for eternity. Love is hell, my future is hell, and all relationships are a tragedy. I close myself and my parents want just that. I don't wanna hear about being jaded! I'm a child! Why can't you play The Cure or something tasteful?)

 

3. I Need to Know - Marc Anthony (Is there anything more unappealing than a sludge of latino music and 90s boy band screeching? Marc Anthony, you're really selfish. It sounds like you're having fun in the stereo, meanwhile I'm alone on a cloudy Sunday afternoon, my mother's passing the vacuum, and I don't feel anything. This is the ugliest song of the bunch.)

 

4. Simply Red - If You Don't Know Me Right Now ("Cos we only act like children! When we argue fuss and fight" Can you lift your asses and sort our family out instead of playing plodding songs on the stereo? What's so magestic about adult life anyway? It all seems so helplessly painful.)

 

5. Your Love is King - Sade (The song that defines my mother. She's playing her compilation album of Sade again? Oh, god damn it. Well, the music is kind of cute, so I'll try to absorb it the best I can and be loved. But she has a foreign accent, so I'm utterly consternated sometimes by the weirdness of the singing and I'm slightly terrified by my mother. So I take it that being mature is being ambiguous and alienating...)

 

6. Smooth Operator - Sade (I'll be more like my mother now. I actually stopped on my bike in front of a friend's house on my own as she was playing in the front yard with a friend, told her I was Mexican and "sung" the chorus to impress her, and biked off)

 

7. What's Love Got to Do With It - Tina Turner (Ok, this is kinda like soft Disco. Tina's voice is like a screeching gerbil in my ear. Please turn it off mom. Thank you.)

 

8. Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler (How do these 70s pop artists manage to sound more despondent than the most miserable track of any Brit new wave band? THE SONG STARTS OFF LIKE THE SOUNDTRACK TO A ROTTEN CORPSE, then the chorus is like a total betrayal of that. What the hell?!)

 

9. I Want to Know What Love Is - Foreigner (The song is more in my repertoire. It has quite an atmosphere to it and the verses sound ambitious, but the chorus sounds the same way a cold shower feels. They just couldn't help licking the hit radio audience's boots for a taste of success. It's a betrayal.)

 

10. What is Love - Haddaway (As a kid, I was very sensitive to landscapes, and when my family visited my grandparents in Québec city, I felt the experience deeply. I mean the song is interesting but to me it's the elevator music of being stuck in a car and stuck in a room with people I didn't particularly like but travelled 100 miles to meet, with an urban landscape of power lines and buildings slowly travelling from one side of my eye to the other.)

 

11. The Living Years - Mike and the Mechanics (More weird singing and dreadful choruses alienating me. The chorus has mentions of death and sounds like dying, yet it's supposed to be uplifting.)

 

I'm glad I survived that. Hot damn. I feel alienated now. I think I know now why I listen to so much music. I'm trying to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth. What's uplifting about music that sounds obsessive? Why pound emotions into the listener?

 

That's not art. That's not art. That's torture for children.

 

What is your experience of those songs? Have you had similar experiences with the music of your parents and your grandparents?

[MysterionMuffles]

Everything by Korn, but they ARE depressing anyway.

[_LiveFree_]

This is very fascinating. It's making me think about songs from my past. Can't really respond too much right now as my thoughts are not together. The one thing that I do know is that once you've gotten past whatever emotional hangup the music is attached to, you can once again enjoy the music. Case in point: Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. When my dad had me and my sister in the car after my parents divorced he literally played this on a cd player over and over the whole drive. It was awful. Now, it's one of my favorite pieces of music without any attachment to those times in my life. 

 

So on the one hand, these songs are like torturers. On the other, they are pointing you toward things you need to face which you may be avoiding. Just a thought.

[Cornellius]

Do you believe that to feel the horror and frustration of the past is to remain trapped in the past? What do you mean by getting past emotional hangups?

[_LiveFree_]

By facing and working through (with a therapist helps) whatever traumas are associated with that music. 

 

To fear the horror and frustration of the past is to remain trapped in the past. You'll always be able to feel what you've felt. This is actually healthy. But to fear what you feel is not. An emotional hangup is a place of fear. 

 

An instance that comes to mind for me,....

 

I liked this girl. I associated a song with liking this girl. The relationship didn't work out. I started to hate listening to the song because it reminded me of what I'd never have. Every time I'd hear the song I'd feel disgust. Once I faced what I feared, my role in the relationship not working out, the song was no longer associated with her. I can now listen to it and enjoy it. My fear was facing my own bad behavior; looking in the mirror to see what I did wrong. 

 

Likewise, once I realized that I had nothing to do with my parents' divorce, Adagio for Strings became enjoyable again. 

 

An emotional hangup, for me at least, is most likely the result of not looking at and examining a dark spot within yourself or the way you were treated by those in your past. It is a blot of fear unexamined. The music is a sign post telling you where to go to rid yourself of the fear. If you stare at the sign post, you'll never get where you need to go. But heeding it's instruction is beneficial.