Does anyone remember the way that music made them feel as a teenager? As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that the intense emotional attachment that stirred inside me as an adolescent boy is rarely incited by the new music I hear. Maybe, maybe my levels of appreciation are higher, but… maybe it’s the lack of insanity.
Even though it may offend the adolescent perspective, I currently hold the view that teenagers are a bunch of little crazy people – every social slight and offense that a normal adult takes as part of life is the height (or zenith) of overall life experience. Look, I get it, when things are NEW they seem amazing (like the first time I played Portal, and actually Portal is still amazing) and life changing, and so impossibly deep that HOW CAN ANYONE ELSE EVEN GET THIS THE WAY I GET IT???? This perspective might explain why songs spoke stirred me so emotionally as an adolescent, and now I can take, for lack of a better phrase, a higher level view of songs. Appreciation, you might call it.
However, I wonder if maybe some part of me has become deadened to those sentiments and emotional highs. Is my life better, calmer, more serene than those years? Dare I say it, is my life happier? I would argue yes. Maybe that’s what maturity is. Maybe that’s why some people’s parents listen to talk radio when they used to prefer Led Zeppelin. Maybe the need to rock out, to bang your fucking head and sing lessens as the years go on.
Thankfully, I got a quick reminder of that teenaged angst / emotional attachment while listening to the song “Lucky You” by the National (which I was secretly hoping to be a cover of the Deftones song, but oh well). For some reason, maybe it was the time and place, maybe just cause I was relaxing and not stressed about work or anyting else, I was transported back to being a 17 year old, tooling his white Pontiac Sunfire towards High School North and jamming out to Tool. It’s nice to know that somewhere inside my sometimes weary soul, challenged by the injustices and logical fallacies of adult life, there was that part of me that could just live off of the same raw emotions I did fifteen years ago.
