#33: Existential Crises of My Music Fandom
Music and a Longing for Misery
The kind of picture I took in high school (photo my own, February 2005)
When I was a little boy, I was torn between my desire to be a little blonde girl and my desperation to be the Christian singer Michael W. Smith. I lamented that I hadn’t been born a girl, and I thought longingly about what my life would be like if I were a female. While listening to Christian rock music worshipping the Lord, I pictured myself running around on the playground with long hair that I could put into ponytails and pigtails or that would simply fall gracefully on my shoulders. When I thought of Britney, the girl at school I loved in second grade, I liked to imagine sometimes that I actually was Britney, and that I had her beautiful long curly black hair flowing down my back. Sitting listening to music in the rocking chair, I often alternated, according to whatever CD my parents were blasting, between Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, and I imagined myself as each of them, unable to decide whether I wanted to be a female Christian singer or a male Christian singer. I liked to switch between both worlds, one in which I was Amy and one in which I was Michael, although Amy’s POV seemed more enticing. Whether I was a girl or a boy, however, I knew I was saved from Hell because I was a Christian, and at a Michael W. Smith concert (my earliest memory of live music in a large venue), I raised my hands to the sky in praise of my Lord and Savior. I knew, of course, that Christians were a persecuted group in America, but I tried to be proud.
Later in elementary school, Hanson seemed for a moment like a compromise between the two contradictory fantasies. Here was a group of boys who weren’t ashamed to wear their hair long and smooth like girls might. I soon took to daydreaming that I was one of them, although I was never able to keep the differences between them straight. Perhaps that is because I strove at school, for fear of an even more dreaded kind of persecution than that awaiting the Jesus Freaks, to keep secret my fandom of a band whose following seemed overwhelmingly female. In the privacy of my home, however, under the watchful eye of the parental censors, I was able to sit beside my sisters while they openly enjoyed the Hanson music videos which I feigned among boys to despise. Hanson was my second concert, and when I reported to another little boy from church that I had gone, his eyes widened in shock. “You went to a Hanson concert?” I explained, with a few fumbles, that I had to go for my sister’s sake, or something like that; I didn’t really like Hanson. Uneasily, he seemed to detect my lie. His countenance shifted from disturbed to inspired. “I like them too,” he admitted.
But years later my music-listening tendencies engendered my first minor crisis of faith. As a fifth-grader who could neither sing any songs nor play any instruments, I now found it difficult to choose between a career in Christian rock music and a career as the lead in a boy band. Music, I knew, should serve the Lord. This was the purpose ultimately of all art, and there had been no tension when the dispute was over simply whether I would glorify God as a woman or as a man. With that mindset, DC Talk’s hit song “Jesus Freak” seemed like the type of art which God had chosen me to create. I pictured myself up on stage, tears streaming from my eyes as I held up my hands in praise of the Lord, and thousands of hot babes in the audience were crippled by their love for Jesus and for me. My eleven-year-old mind soon discovered, however, that there were more effective paths to orgies with college girls.
The elders in my home had looked into Justin Timberlake, and they said he seemed like a sincere follower of Christ in his interviews. Without guilt, I was able to listen to *NSYNC songs on repeat on my discman. In my mind, I was Justin Timberlake and Justin Timberlake was me. I had written those songs just like he had. DC Talk, whose books included biographical sketches of Christian martyrs murdered by the Romans, had posed the agonizing question in their songs of what people might do to them when they discovered they were Jesus Freaks. We live, after all, in a fallen and sinful nation. And yet I found in the case of Justin Timberlake that following the Lord need not involve any real sacrifice. The only danger I incurred with *NSYNC was that someone at school might call me gay (or worse) for liking Justin, which seemed more risky than liking Jesus, but my fandom was easy to keep hidden. Soon, my censors permitted entry into our home for CDs by Britney Spears (the easiest), Avril Lavigne (more questions were raised), Christina Aguilera (only after I made clear that I knew it was wrong to rub her bottle unless we were married), and the Backstreet Boys (I got their album for Christmas). They, too, were all apparently Christians, just like my secret hero Justin Timberlake, and I eagerly stared at Britney Spears’ legs on the cover of her album while listening to “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”
But there would be far greater temptations than Britney as I continued through middle school. As a twelve-year-old, I not only joined a band devoted to writing songs about sex. (It wasn’t clear what else I might contribute to the band, being, as I said, unable to either sing or play any instruments). Those same little heathen boys from the neighborhood also introduced me to the kind of music which I knew could never freely circulate in my household. “You gotta listen to the station 89x,” a guy at school told me, and I was soon listening to artists like Limp Bizkit and Eminem on the radio next to my bed. These people were definitely not Christians, and I began smuggling their albums into my house by writing the names of devout artists like Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant on the burned CDs. This way the censors, should they ever investigate my beloved stash of musical contraband, would believe I was still listening to the wholesome Christian worship songs I was raised to love. It was all going fine until my dad found some lyrics I had written about the things I wanted to do to some theoretical chicks. He was horrified, demanding to know whether I had created these horrors. Not wanting him to think I wasn’t saved, I claimed the other little boys had concocted this monstrosity. Then he surprised me; instead of even observing the awful ungodliness of the enterprise, which in retrospect had nothing to do with the immortality of it, he condemned it as disrespectful and degrading to women, and he told me that was not how I should talk about girls.
Christian music in general faded into the background during the rest of middle school. I simply couldn’t get enough of Blink 182, *NSYNC, and Avril Lavigne. The most mainstream popular music dominated my tastes, and I sat for hours listening to such songs on repeat on my Discman. There were some very sad pieces, like “Adam’s Song” by Blink 182, which deeply appealed to the first signs of adolescent turmoil within me, although these horrified my parents the few times they heard them. Over time, however, the hit music became ever-less adequate for satisfying the mysteriously sad and undefined emotions which were steadily emerging inside me.
As I approached my teenage years, I perceived the existence of great dramas and tragedies occurring every day around me; they seemed essential to the human experience, yet I had been missing out on them all this time, and while I wanted to be immersed in them, I hardly knew what it would actually mean to journey through those terrible romantic storylines. I possessed only a diminished sense for this newly seen reality, and I knew that my media inputs were not even approximating the intensity of emotions these dramas contained. Artificially manufactured declarations of love by Justin Timberlake took on an increasingly knock-off feel. Glimmers of that world passed to me through romantic comedies I pretended not to like. But while the movies felt more true than the pop songs, the perfection of their endings betrayed their cheapness. They wiped away sorrow and sadness in favor of the mythical “happily ever after.” What I couldn’t find in music and movies, I also failed to find in the actualization of my own feelings. Many of my friends melodramatically assured me that they had fallen so madly in love with other kids that they would die for them, and I repeated the same about various girls. Yet I knew I would take off running the moment their lives were threatened, and that I would never be able to find truly tragic romance with them. I began to attempt to fall in love with successions of girls in my classes, usually pre-screening them to ensure they were Christians, but I knew it was horse shit every time I claimed a desire to marry them. I still could not find an object to inspire the intensity of feeling which my body was demanding I seek.
I craved a release for the passion growing inside me. Taking the stage of tragedy with a central role, as a character who would fall in love and lose it, was my most animating ambition, but its realization eluded me, and would surely still have been out of reach even had I secured a date to the eighth grade dance. I sought solace in new kinds of music which I hoped would awaken in me more genuine shadows of misery and heartbreak. Pop music seemed to either describe totally perfect romance or utterly devastating breakups in such generic and repeated ways that it was rapidly ceasing to be effective. It fell flat on my soul, and I needed something that would stir me, some kind of music that would inject me with the real stuff of sorrow, anger, love, and hate.
For my eighth- and ninth-grade mind, that first meant Dashboard Confessional, a foundation for all the emo stuff I would listen to in high school. When I heard the alternations between joy and sadness in Dashboard Confessional songs like “Hands Down” and “Screaming Infidelities,” I was jealous of the writers not only for having found love but also for having lost it. Their tragic stories were accounts to which I could not yet relate, and yet I knew I wanted to be able to tell the same myths about myself one day. I began to dream not about life as a Christian rock star or boyband lead, but rather about romances that would eviscerate my soul. My thirteen-year-old mind, which had never known much adventure beyond the bland world of video games and Bible stories, wanted to pass through adventures of ecstasy and despair, and I craved the day when I would be able to truly relate to the misery of this music.
Being able to more genuinely feel the sensations of the music itself was central to the project. Since sadness was central to the songs, sadness was the feeling I wanted most of all. “Happily ever after” was not something for which I hoped. Such an outcome seemed to place too strong a limit on the spectrum of emotions I might experience; it was too narrow. The purpose of romantic love was not to find eternal satisfaction; it was to build up as much happiness as possible, but only so that I would be able to pass through the heartbreak described in these songs and then be able to sit down listening to those songs while genuinely relating to their messages and stories. The music itself seemed to convey emotions I could not fully experience when hearing it. So to enhance the music experience, what I needed was my own story of misery.
The intensity of tragedy was appealing to me as an essential part of what it meant to be in love, so that my mind began seeking out increasingly sad and depressing music. When I sought clumsily to fall in love with girls at school, it was with the aim of bringing both myself and them closer to despair, so that the undefined sadness I was beginning to feel as a teenager might have some meaningful story behind it. One day, I hoped to be able to listen to the most miserable lyrics and look back with a mix of nostalgia, regret, and depression upon the epic ruins of my life. Music describing collapsing relationships and the ensuing despair became blueprints for me to follow. That was the future I craved. I wanted to be depressed, but I wanted my hopelessness to flow from a grand adventure. I hoped to reach my twenties with a long line of shattered relationships behind me that I could write about and listen to music; I hoped even to sing about the pain, the tears, the early days of perfect love and the ruthlessness to follow. But while sad songs increasingly seduced me and while sorrow might eternally tempt me, my continued inability to truly relate to the music frustrated me as I proceeded into high school The music surged into me all kinds of previously unknown emotions, and yet I knew that these feelings, however strong they seemed, were still not the real thing being described in the songs. They were mere trifles compared to the actual happiness and misery I needed once I achieved my dream of being loved and then abandoned. All I had was the faint echo of tragedy.
In the absence of a relationship to destroy, bands like Something Corporate, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Matchbook Romance, Bright Eyes, Finch, and Yellowcard helped me dimly approximate the explosive sadness which I wanted to overtake me. It all left me dreaming of the end of friendships, the demise of relationships, and the rush of betraying and being betrayed. Being an emo kid seemed ideal to me, but I was too afraid to take the step of changing all my fashion in that direction. I was still searching for real heartbreak when my friends introduced me to Death Cab for Cutie’s album Transatlanticism in tenth grade, and this would endure for a decade as my favorite album of all time, only recently eclipsed. The song “Transatlanticism” itself seemed to express exactly the level of intensity I wanted but could not find. It was long and epic, evoking the immense distance of the Atlantic Ocean separating two people in love, with a sense of both needing the other yet knowing it would all be severed and maybe already had been severed, and I wonder sometimes if that song is the real reason why I would go on to spend so much time in Europe over the years.
Those lyrics, it seems, were one of the most potent forces behind my original impetus toward solo travel, which has often served just as much to disconnect me from what I love as to connect me with something new. Traveling alone and far away, with broken and irregular communications to the homeland (a near impossibility now), generated back then the coveted blend of happiness and sadness, at least to some degree. Solo travel proved nutritious soil for the seeds of homesickness, yearning, and raw possibility which would enable me to feel the adventure, passion, and sorrow I wanted so badly, and it was the fantasy of all the emotions I might feel that compelled me to spend my junior year of college in Germany without visiting home. I did not just want to experience something new; I wanted to have the difficulties of being far away from home during holidays and special occasions. Both losing out and adventuring on my own appealed to me. My objective was to really miss something like Ben Gibbard does when singing “Transatlanticism.” I wanted to relate to “Transatlanticism” in such a way that the song would hit me much harder and substantially more literally. Shaping my most important life decisions was thus a desire to simply act out the scenarios I imagined while listening to sad music for hours alone in my childhood bedroom, all so I could come back to that same song and relate to it in a deeper way.
In the fulfillment of a wish I would take back, the album Transatlanticism became a conduit of an extreme pain which has only recently begun to fade away. The album was to be inextricably wound up with my first genuine experience of completely self-induced loss. That sadness was enough to make me feel the sharp regret which I had not properly accounted for as a thirteen-year-old fantasizing about the romance of misery. From roughly the middle of tenth grade until the middle of eleventh grade, I passed through a fundamentalist Christian episode that precipitated the end of my first real relationship (I would not leave her alone for being an atheist) and the temporary demise of literally all my high school friendships. Although they made numerous attempts to soften my extremism and seduce me back into their group, I refused to spend any time with them, because I was concerned I would be “unequally yoked,” as the Bible warns, to nonbelievers, and that they would drag me down into sin by exposing me to their ungodly music and banter. Through my deep fear of Hell, I became the elder censor whom once I had feared, banning myself from listening to all the music with which I was just beginning to fall in love. During that time, Death Cab for Cutie was off limits, and I listened to nothing but Christian worship music, most especially the band Mercy Me. When I did listen to Something Corporate, it was merely as a representation of the miserable sinner I had been before I found the Lord. In the spirit of the melodramatic dreams that had consumed me while listening to sad music, I pretended that now I was happy to have Jesus as my best and only friend, when in truth I was still sneaking in some Something Corporate because I was now actually experiencing the misery I thought I wanted. I was beginning, in other words, to actually relate to the saddest songs.
One warm night that summer, when I was so deep in my fundamentalism that I pressured my whole family into going to a new church because I deemed our old one to be too liberal, I was sitting alone in the basement reading the Bible and listening to Mercy Me. My friends, including the atheist girl who had suffered so much from my fanaticism, were texting me and calling me relentlessly, trying to get me to just drop all this Christian shit and come spend time with them. It seemed that to be a Jesus Freak was not to be persecuted, but rather to be loved by the heathens against my will. I wanted so badly to give in and join them, but I was terrified that doing so would lead me down a road filled with blasphemy and sin. Being around them might put ideas into my mind that could call into question the teachings of the Lord, jeopardizing my soul for all of eternity, just like if I gave in and listened to Bright Eyes. As Jesus commanded, I needed to stay on the straight and narrow path to salvation, and with the immense sadness of a sacred duty I ignored their many entreaties. But they came to my house anyway, bringing me as a gift an apple pie from McDonald’s. My mom, who seemed concerned about me, told me they were there at the door, and I told her to send them away. She tossed the apple pie down to me, and I threw it in the garbage before returning, with suppressed tears, to my Mercy Me music and the Bible passages which I read deep into an unnecessarily lonely summer night.
I would find out later that during many of those warm nights when they wanted me to join them, they had been driving around in the suburbs with the windows down listening to Transatlanticism. The album would end up being connected with so many memories for me, but among the most important were the ones I had lost out on. The song, “Passenger Seat,” about sitting in the car while looking up at the sky in the night and being with someone close to you, was the song of their summer, a summer I could have been a part of had it not been for my fear of Hell. The song itself evoked emotions for them which I had missed out on, and so I began listening to the song with a particular kind of sadness that stemmed from its communication of a world I could have had but didn’t have. Even now when I hear that song, I shudder at the relationships which I almost lost forever, and I am so grateful that the very same atheist girl who did not give up on me would go on to be my witness at my wedding. Both joy and pain, then, are tied up with those songs for me, just as I had aspired to experience, but I find sometimes that the unanticipated emotions of immense regret and relief are even stronger. I attained my dreams of self-induced loss, then, and I succeeded in achieving my desire to be able to get an even more intense emotional hit from the sound of a song by virtue of having passed through an actual tragedy related to its lyrics. I achieved the longed-for outcome of being able to listen to a song with a sense of genuine pain because of what that song represents to me, but I am left wishing that those same lyrics would instead evoke within me the immense happiness and cheerful nostalgia which they have given for so many years to my old friends.