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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (22433)	5/29/1998 11:11:00 AM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

Holly, re that "earsplitting stuff that some would call music." I'm with you! (I'm a classical freak, anyway.) My youngest son is a musician, and often plays in clubs. (That's how he met his bartending grad-student fiancee.) Once he invited me to hear him play. I went, with an old family friend in tow. We were given the seats of honor, right in front of the stage in what was really a very tiny room. Well! We were immediately overwhelmed by a relentlessly advancing wall of sound. You couldn't tell one note from another -- it was all just one big hideous ROAR. It was like being crushed by an enormous, heartless steamroller. My ears began to hurt, and the pain did not subside until the next morning. The friend was in even greater agony, and showed it by writhing and grimacing (which, as I later learned, distracted the band considerably). Afterwards, I complained to my son. I reminded him that, despite my aversion to rock and pop in general, I had really liked his band's CDs. There was a lot going on musically, a lot of very sophisticated interplay among the instruments, a lot of complex rhythms, etc. But, I said, we couldn't hear any of that in the club. All we heard was a lot of undiffentiated, aggressive noise. So what was the point, I asked, of all that electronic amplification in such a tiny club? Couldn't they turn the system down just a little? The answer was: no, the customers would object! They want to hear the music thumping and throbbing through their bodies. If it doesn't hit them right in the middle of the chest, they don't feel they're getting their money's worth. In other words, they don't really want to listen to music. They want to be Swedish-massaged by noise masquerading as music. My son, by the way, is already half-deaf himself -- the result, as he readily admits, of years of exposure to this high-decibel racket. Now, I know that Beethoven continued to compose after he went deaf -- but how many Beethovens are there out there? Needless to say, I haven't been invited back to the club. Nor has our mutual friend. jbe