Matt hits on the important topic of songs that sound happy but are actually wretchedly depressing. I'm quite poor at picking lyrics out of songs, so this tends to be a problem for me. I was very surprised, for instance, to find that there's a raging debate over whether the Smashing Pumpkin's song "Disarm" is about Billy Corgan wanting to kill his parents or an abortion. I always thought it was about smiling at people. And I thought that despite being capable of singing along to the song -- the words had never actually penetrated.
Indeed, I have a much less acute, intense, piercing relationship with music than do, say, Chuck Klosterman or Amanda. I have songs that are resonant of a certain period in my life, but they tend to be songs I'm not even sure I like -- Incubus's "Make Yourself" reminds me of a high school girlfriend, and Eiffel 65's "Blue" remains the aural texture of the jog I did everyday of my Sophomore year. But these are incidental, rather than meaningful, connections for me. For that reason, I found Klosterman's insistence on pegging everything in his world to classic rock (the finale of the book is an extended comparison between the members of KISS and his past loves) quirky, charming, and mostly ignorable. To Amanda, it was pretty clearly a central point of the book. And Amanda's pretty clearly right.
Meanwhile, I just realized -- like, literally, right now -- that I occasionally use politics as a context for comprehending my personal life, and there's a family member who I understand almost entirely in terms of Bill Clinton's personality traits. And while thinking about the various metaphors we use to organize our worlds, it just occurred to me that sports appears to be how most everyone understand most everything; its metaphors are so common that we barely notice the societal obsession, and since I have no emotional or intellectual connection to athletics I'm not participating in, I'm sort of frozen out of that too. So I'm ending this post feeling rather alienated. Nuts.
