counting backwards

a song that you used to love but now hate

You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home...

Tom Hanks (as Jim Lovell) in Apollo 13

I used to frequent a website called ruinedmusic.com, which was a reader submitted blog spotlighting those tunes that have been in some way marred by life and experience.

Music surrounds us. It envelopes us. It wafts through the window and penetrates our eardrums, and strokes our ear canals. It expresses and over-expresses things to us, and it alters our mood. And we can quickly own it. When we hear something that amazes and excites, much like a lost virginity of sorts, we put a mental post-it on everything about that situation, or the surrounding incidents. In some cases, an unraveling of said situation can forever alter future experience with that music.

Advertisers try to force their hand at this phenomenon, selling us Revolution in a bottle or The Turtles in a bowl of cereal. Movies do this with better results. It becomes the unfair idea of, I can barely hear x-y-z without thinking of a-b-c.

Break-ups are always the big ones with this concept. After my last one, I found myself again. Returned. I discovered myself while peeling back so many years of a different guise. Many of my choices, tastes, and self was pro-rated from fifteen years earlier, as if my life had diverted so far off-track. Who I was and who I really was had gotten muddled. My iPod makes a ton of sense to me, but a percentage of my iTunes started to not.

This isn't all bad. I'm not being a total downer about all of those years, but I do know that certain tunes, artists, and even genres have become un-listenable. Time and experience change all. I don't even think it's productive to post examples, because I suspect everyone who reads this knows that sensation. For me, it could be entire playlists, or anything that created a co-ownership, or in some cases a complete co-opt, and now it represents a person called not-me.