Is it Safe?

Recently I was asked if I could embed links to songs in these posts. The question prompted two thoughts.

The first involves copyright issues and the legality of song links.  Many opinions exist on "fair use" of copyrighted material, but nothing that unequivocally green-lights the embedding of song links.  Absent this, I refer readers to music websites such as Amazon or iTunes, or sites such as Grooveshark or Rhapsody where you hear the entire song rather than a shorter snippet.

My editors, Todd and Cyril, disagree with me.  They think that embedded music preserves the integrity of the blog post –– that the reader stays in the flow of interdependent text and music, versus leaving the cosy blog space for the mercantile flash of iTunes.  I think my editors are correct about this, hence the music links in this post.

The second, more midbrain thought –– following upon our decision to embed song links –– is that large men in trench coats are going to come to my house.  They'll have unpleasant dispositions and be muttering about music links.

While considering this I slip into a reverie about dangerous-situation songs.  Perhaps I'm preparing a soundtrack to accompany my incarceration, or maybe I just need to change the subject.  Anyhow, I find myself distracted, released from the murk of "fair use" interpretation into what is the remainder of this post.

So ... songs about threats to safety.  To begin with, and not surprisingly, several address love as a dangerous place.  After all, as Jerome K. Jerome put it in 1886:  "Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it." (See "Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart" [1966], by The Supremes, for an update on this sentiment.)

Here are some songs about love and danger:

   You've Got To Hide Your Love Away:
   The Beatles

"You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" (1965), by the Beatles, captures one such threat, the fear that emotion is hazardous and will lead to shame-ridden exposure.

     Here I stand head in hand
     Turn my face to the wall
     If she's gone I can't go on
     Feeling two feet small
  
     Everywhere people stare
     Each and every day
     I can see them laugh at me
     And I hear them say
  
     Hey, you've got to hide your love away!
     Hey, you've got to hide your love away!

Written and sung by John Lennon, "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" first appeared on the album Help!  Interestingly, Lennon, with musical support from Paul McCartney and George Harrison, produced a hit cover version by The Silkie that same year. Written and sung by John Lennon, "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" first appeared on the album Help!  Interestingly, Lennon, with musical support from Paul McCartney and George Harrison, produced a hit cover version by The Silkie that same year. 

   Running Away From Love:
   Coco Montoya

Alternatively, the lyrics in Coco Montoya's "Running Away From Love" (2002) suggest the singer won't have to hide his love away because he'll not get close enough
in the first place to risk need or disappointment: 
  
     She might shine just like a diamond
     She could be an angel sent from above        
     It's always been the same
     It's always me to blame
     I got a real bad habit of running away from love

   All My Ex's Live In Texas:
   George Strait

Then there is George Strait's "All My Ex's Live In Texas" (1987). Strait occupies the western-swing corner of country music.  As of
2010, he has recorded more #1 hit
singles (57) than any musician in any genre in history.  "All My Ex's Live In Texas" depicts the singer's hiding, not from painful feelings, nor from intimacy, but from an unspecified payback from former lovers. The refrain goes:

     All my ex's live in Texas   
     And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be   
     But all my ex's live in Texas   
     And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee

   One Way Out:
   The Allman Brothers

A final love-is-dangerous song depicts the "other man" in an affair hiding from retaliation from the woman's rightful partner, that song being "One Way Out" (1971) by the Allman Brothers.  Written by blues guitarist and singer-songwriter Elmore James, then revised by Sonny Boy Williamson II, it was widely popularized by the Allmans.  A staple of classic rock, blues, and Americana formats, its refrain goes:        
     Ain't but one way out baby, Lord I just can't go out the door
     Ain't but one way out baby, and Lord I just can't go out the door
     Cause there's a man down there, might be your man I don't know

Gregg Allman's ragged reading of "might be your man ... I don't know” is convincing.

   Werewolves Of London:
   Warren Zevon

Now let's visit danger-songs involving zones other than love.  Warren Zevon's "Werewolves Of London" (1978), for example, describes a werewolf, dapper and perfectly coiffed, who prowls the streets of London.  One verse tells us:    
     He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent   
     Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair   
     You better stay away from him   
     He'll rip your lungs out, Jim   
     Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor   
     Werewolves of London again

Zevon's songs are dry and sardonic.  He had friends who fit this style, among them David Letterman, Hunter S. Thompson, Carl Hiaasen. Zevon died of cancer in 2003 at age 56, giving his last public performance in 2002 on Late Night with David Letterman.  Asked by Letterman if he had any summative thoughts on life and death, Zevon said, "Enjoy every sandwich.”

   Run Through The Jungle:
   Creedence Clearwater Revival

Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through The Jungle" (1970) also describes an ominous landscape, but one with more immanent violence and a sense of pell-mell flight:   

     Thought I heard a rumbling’   
     Callin' to my name,   
     Two hundred million guns are loaded   
     Satan cries, "Take Aim!”   
     Better run through the jungle   
     Better run through the jungle   
     Better run through the jungle   
     Whoa, don't look back to see

Creedence Clearwater Revival were from California but they sounded like a southern band playing in a swamp, creating sonic atmospheres laden with humidity and moss.   Lead singer and guitarist John Fogerty wrote "Run Through The Jungle," and in a 1993 interview he said that the song was about America's culture of "gun happy" people and the proliferation of registered and unregistered guns.

We are nearing the end of our tour
of danger songs.  Before stopping, here are three songs about addiction and the irresponsibility of clouded consciousness: "Cocaine Blues," Dave Van Ronk (1962); "That Smell," Lynyrd Skynrd (1977); and "Methamphetamine," Old Crow Medicine Show (2008).  "Cocaine Blues" has deep roots and is well over a century old.  Dave Van Ronk learned it from the Reverend Gary Davis (1896 - 1972), who himself learned it from a carnival musician in 1905.

   People Are Strange:
   The Doors

Finally, we close with an arresting song of existential peril: "People Are Strange" (1967) by The Doors.  It's creepy, it gets under your skin.  In a few striking images, it evokes the dread that being itself is dangerous. Running is not an option, nor drugs, nor a Tennessee to hole up in, nor any workable avoidance maneuver:   

     People are strange when you're a stranger   
     Faces look ugly when you're alone   
     Women seem wicked when you're unwanted   
     Streets are uneven when you're down   
     When you're strange   
     Faces come out of the rain   
     When you're strange   
     No one remembers your name ...

Faces coming out of the rain –– a haiku-like image capturing the sense of being unmoored and bobbing in a sea of uncaring presences.  Yikes! that's unsettling, and worse than grim men in trenchcoats coming to my door.

Seaweeds

Music is a supportive background presence in my life, felt as an auditory backdrop to foreground activities.
Like air I seem to require it, though also like air I mostly don't notice this unless I am without it.  To borrow a distinction from Daniel Stern's The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004), I may be deeply experiencing music but not always deeply understanding it.

If air can be a simile for this supportive background presence, a better one may be water.  As water of a certain temperature and calmness holds and envelops me, so too does music.  At such times, I float in a medium with indistinct boundaries, merging with my surround while not overly aware of that surround, floating in it, not swimming through or against it.

Now sometimes while thusly afloat, a mysterious thing happens ... I have a spontaneous thought.  One moment I'm simply floating, "spread out" casually in sound, the next moment I am mentally concentrated.  A peculiar shift of gravity has occurred.  That which had been background has become foreground: no longer serenely floating in music, I find I am thinking about it.  A space has opened between me and it.  And equally mysterious is the sense that while my thought feels spontaneous, having just "come" to me, it nonetheless must have been called out by the music.  While drifting inattentively in a medium, I was simultaneously sparked by that medium.

Inattention is sometimes a germinating pre-attention then, and this speaks to the very nature of indistinct boundaries between self and a specific kind of background medium.  For me, the world of the arts provides such mediums, as when I am "lost" in a painting, song, or poem.  And immersion in these mediums can sometimes quietly incubate thought.

Implicit in this shift of gravity is the idea of separation.  A gap opens between myself and the song, between subject and object, and I am now more attentional.  This gap-space often can be lively, as when a song unexpectedly evokes memories, feelings, associations.  A feeling of spontaneous generativity obtains, and I am enlivened by the snap-crackle-pop of mind as it plays. (This is presumably one of the pleasures of oldies music.)

But these generative processes do not always enliven.  At times what is unexpectedly evoked is painful or at least sober –– on the side of nostalgia more than reminiscence.  Sober need not be unpleasant, however, and my desire is typically to "stay awake" at these times, not crawl back into my music bed.  Because even in these flatter moments, there is a subtle sense of being more pulled together.  When a song element gives or adds form –– say, to a remembered loss –– well there is no snap-crackle-pop but somehow I am more shaped up.  A memory of my father acquires more texture and body through its newly evoked linkages with song elements.

Many theories speak to experiential states that are quiescent, supportive, containing, that in addition have indistinct subject-object boundaries, and that are thought to be the ground for spontaneous creativity.  These theories reside in texts on infancy and child development, art and creativity, meditation and mindfulness, religion, therapeutic regression, and so on.  For my purposes, two authors worth citing are D.W. Winnicott and Michael Balint.

D.W. Winnicott

Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), an English pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, wrote chiefly in the decades prior to now commonplace notions of authenticity of being and self-expression.  His world was more circumscribed and circumspect than today's world of lifestyle multiplicities and instant electronic transmissions of self; and he thought that routine contacts with reality tended to be deadening, promoting compliance, conformity, and what he called a "false self."  Think here of a big chunk of the middle of the 20th century.  Think of the usual tyranny of the clock, dress requirements, social roles, poses, and then imagine it having been more pronounced in the 1950s.  It was in this context that Winnicott stressed the need to feel spontaneous, creative, real, and playfully alive.

How?  Winnicott (1951)* thought that people could find creative respite from "the task of reality-acceptance" through certain "transitional" states between subjective and objective reality –– an "intermediate area of experience" such as might be found in the arts and religion. Huh?  Put simply, I listen to a song (objective reality), perhaps floating serenely in its medium (commingling of subjective and objective reality).  The hard edges between myself and song are softened, and I am not strenuously attending to it.  Then maybe the mystery of creativity happens, a quickening of thinking both spontaneous and evoked.  Memories, feelings, associations play freely in my mind, and although the song is external to me I make it my own, invest it with meanings and resonances, feel that snap-crackle-pop of spontaneous association.  *(See "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis [1958].)

Note the freedom accompanying these spontaneous moments.  It is the opposite of what one feels when compelled by societal authority or convention toward "the task of reality-acceptance."  An example of that would be the difficulty one might have feeling "lost" in a song if one's listening were taking place in a music humanities exam in college.  Similarly, it might be hard, though not impossible, to be "carried away" associatively by "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a ballgame, where there is conventional pressure to simply stand and dutifully listen.

(I realize this is becoming a long post.  Many of you who came to hear about seaweeds may be wanting your time back.  So I will now turn to Michael Balint and seaweeds.)

Michael Balint

As did Winnicott, Michael Balint (1896-1970) wrote about the importance of a primary state of quiescent containment, which he called a "harmonious interpenetrating mix-up" (1968)*.  Say What?  For Balint, this was the initial intrauterine environment in which a pre-self floated easily and permeably in a world of yielding matter.  (In his 1959 book, Thrills and Regressions, Balint observed that the root meaning of matter is the Latin mater for mother.)  He used metaphors of a fish in water and a person's use of air to try to capture this sense of harmonious material mix-up.  Birth brought a jarring end to this mix-up and it signified a loss of paradise, the genesis of self occasioning the exodus from dual unity.  *(See Chapter 12, "Primary Love," in The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression.)

After birth and throughout life, people unconsciously yearned for relationships that would restore that dual unity, that would be tailored just for them.  Balint felt that vestiges of this "harmonious interpenetrating mix-up" survived in a person's casual relationships with "primary substances" (water, earth, air, fire) –– these substances being the natural constituents of mother earth, so to speak, the original matter supporting human life.  They were routinely taken for granted, just expected to be there.  In fact their essential requirements were that they were always there, that they were indestructible.

Josephine Klein (1987)* described this "harmonious interpenetrating mix-up" as "a state of mind in which self and other merge and drift apart like seaweeds in the sea ... .”   A perfect metaphor, it feels true to to the primary intrauterine environment.  The quiescent drifting, the fluid rhythm of fusion and apartness, the sense of containment, the feeling of being held and not falling –– these inhere in this image of lazily drifting seaweeds.  *(See Our Need for Others and Its Roots in Infancy, p. 114.)

This metaphor feels true to my experience with music, to the rhythm of being embedded in sound, then attentionally apart, then embedded, and so on. Music is one of my primary background substances, and it matters a great deal.