HIT ME WITH MUSIC
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
Music
was my refuge.
I could crawl into the space between the notes
and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou
we
play a symphony over and over again
. . . to get away from our own life
which we have not the courage to look at.
Marcel Proust
When
I hear music, I fear no danger.
I am invulnerable. I see no foe.
Henry David Thoreau
During
the past 75 years the verb “to hit” -- from the
Norse hitta ‘to come upon, to find,’ and
later in England ‘to strike’ -- has undergone radical
transformation in order to qualify the pleasurable effects of
music on the brain.
Prior
to music’s appropriation of the word, its associations
were mostly negative: to physically hit someone was to do 
him
harm; one can be hit hard by an economic downturn, a region
by bad weather, the loss of a close friend or loved one. In
sports the verb “to hit’ is used to illustrate and
quantify violent impact: a driver or baseball bat striking a
ball, a Mike Tyson right hand dropping an opponent.
Separating
the impact of the word from its common usage, heroin users were
among the first to change the valence of ‘hit’ from
negative to positive. A ‘hit’ or to ‘hit up’
identifies smack’s (slang for heroin) happy effects on
both mind and body. “I’ll take a hit of that”
now figuratively refers to anything that produces agreeable
effects – from drugs and alcohol to a splash of water
on a dry tongue.
In
consideration of music’s immediate impact on the brain,
and the often cozy relationship between drugs and creativity,
it became fashionable in the 1930s to designate a popular piece
of music as a ‘hit.’ In 1936 Billboard
magazine introduced its first Hit Parade listings, a ranking
of the most popular recordings on a given date. Once entered
into the vernacular, the positive recasting of the word, especially
in the context of culture and entertainment, quickly caught
on: journalists began characterizing a successful Broadway show,
art exhibition or television series as a ‘hit.’
An actor could be singled out as the ‘hit’ of the
show, or he/she the ‘hit’ of the party.
Prior
to the Internet, a number one hit was strictly determined by
sales and airplay. A chart buster typically appealed to a narrowly
defined segment of the population united by language and dispersed
over a large geographical area. In 1957 Elvis Presley’s
“I’m All Shook Up” topped the charts and sold
more than two million copies. But today, in the digital era
of high-speed dissemination and downloading of music, song popularity
is now measured in sales and Internet (youtube) views and must
appeal to a global audience – meaning it has to be sung
in the lingua franca of the world: English. Justin
Bieber’s “Baby” has been viewed over a billion
times. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” has registered
more than 700 hundred million plays while Rihanna’s “Diamonds
in the Sky” over 500 million – and still counting.
In
consideration of the above numbers and paying the rent, there
isn’t a songwriter alive who doesn’t dream of writing
a top-selling record, which on the surface seems easy since
most hits consist of no more than a few basic chords. But there
is probably nothing more difficult in all of music -- putting
together a sequence of notes that beguiles the brain in such
a way that millions around the world want to hear those notes
again and again, perhaps twenty times a day; not unlike a crack
user wants to light up all day long. In both examples, the ‘hit’
(the notes or the drug) pleasures the brain and sets in motion
a dopamine cycle that is its own reward and terminus.
Worldwide,
there are thousands of aspiring songwriters writing pop songs,
implicitly competing with each other, all trying to come up
with a sequence of notes that will appeal to and insinuate themselves,
and to a certain extent take over and empower minds everywhere
in the world. Since no more than three or four hit records are
produced every year, when they hit it is with tsunami like force
that unites millions of listeners who might otherwise have nothing
in common, for whom the ‘hit’ represents a transcendent
frontierless universal culture that constantly renews itself
with each succeeding hit, much like the form of the fountain
remains the same despite the constant replacement of water that
is being propelled. That a burqa clad teen in a Berber tent
is listening to the same music as a Beijing waitress is a civilizational
conjunction whose positive and negative implications are only
beginning to be understood.
Compared
to their future selves, teenagers are developmentally more receptive
to the immediate hit music provides because transitioning from
child to adult (becoming self-conscious) is necessarily a lengthy
and painful process that is marked by a tidal wave of anxieties
over body image, popularity and relationships. Besides bonding
around a preferred music, most teens quasi-obsessively seek
out the direct ‘hit’ embedded in their favourite
run of notes in order to feel good about themselves, to heal
their hurting, to vent their anger and frustration, and especially
to forget about everything but the moment in song. “There’s
a melody for every malady” writes the composer Stew in
his rock musical Passing Strange.
It’s
enough to make you believe in the pseudoscience of alchemy when
one considers both the degree and extent to which a minimal
line of music is able to transform and empower especially young
listeners, an observable fact that was dramatically brought
to my attention during the viewing of the 2014 French film Bande
de Filles (Girlhood) by Céline Sciamma,
which follows the hard scrabble life of four girls living in
the outskirts (the projects) of Paris. As a matter of course,
the girls decide to resort to petty crime to scratch up enough
coin for a hotel room where for a night only – free from
authority and the pressures of growing up fast – they
can live their dreams. In the film’s most remarkable
scene that takes your breath away, Rihanna’s
“Diamonds in the Sky” starts up and the girls bounce
off the bed and burst into dance, and for those brief two or
three minutes their fondest hopes for connection and happiness
are experienced as real, as they and the entire viewing audience
are magically transformed into the beautiful sparkle and shine
that are diamonds in the sky. The simple notes combined with
the lyric hit the brain so forcefully that the song doesn’t
even require a bridge: it’s the same notes repeating again
and again, simultaneously connecting millions of like minds
around the world, many for whom English is not a mother tongue.
Because
the ebb and flow of the world is constantly changing as an effect
of new technology, the new music will necessarily reflect the
latest changes while its mission remains the same: empower the
mind and dull the pain. A hit from the 1950s or 60s will not
resonate today because its sound, texture and rhythm speak a
different language which doesn’t speak to the present.
For a song to become a hit its very specific gravity has to
be able to attract young people from around the world in order
to lift them out of the deep and make them feel good about themselves
for as long as the song lasts. Of necessity the hit will be
both a reaction to the world as it turns and an escape to a
far better place.
Since
the passing of time and change are the two great constants in
life, it comes as no surprise to observe that as teenagers mature
and become settled in their ways they listen less frequently
to music, that the medicinal the notes dispensed is no longer
required.
From
my giddy heights looking down into the past as if through a
telescope in reverse, it has been decades since I’ve had
to listen to a particular sequence of music over and over. But
from time to time -- as if nostalgiac for the uncertainties
that used to plague and the music that allayed -- my brain gets
hooked onto a song. After hearing “Diamonds in the Sky”
for the first time in Girlhood, I was swept away and
couldn’t wait to hear it again. But after listening to
it once more, I couldn’t get through it a third time.
About six months ago, on Austin City Limits, I discovered Kat
Edmonson’s “Nobody
Knows That” (the piano solo), and played it everyday
for a while but since I’m a notorious ear-worm
sufferer I’m now afraid to listen to it
because I know the notes are going to repeat in my head for
two or three days afterwards. For almost a year now, I’ve
been listening to Eric
Scott Reed’s “Sun Out,” in
particular the sublime introduction that mysteriously defies
the laws of diminishing returns.
* * * * * * * * * *
As
eternity feeds on time, the hit record feeds on youth, meaning
as long as there are young people up in mid-air, the mega-hit,
as a multi-purpose delivery system, will continue to be a constant
in the world because it’s the one friend that will never
let you down, or, as sung by Bob Marley in “Trenchtown
Rock,” “one good thing about music when it hits
you feel no pain, hit me with music.”
And
like the river whose flow is continuous but shape never changes,
number one hits will come and go, but their essence will remain
the same as the upsurge of those privileged and yes, brilliantly
conceived sequences of notes that allow listeners to experience,
however temporarily, however implausibly, intimations of what
it feels like to be fully realized and integrated into the world.
Best
said by the late Mentor Williams,
Give
me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll
And drift away.
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