je(ssi) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bamboozled) wrote2022-10-07 11:30 pm
bamboozled) wrote2022-10-07 11:30 pm
(no subject)
I wrote this a few years ago while in graduate school. It's what's called an affect journal. Thanks for reading.
INTRO.
Kathleen Stewart defines ordinary affects as “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2). This idea is particularly resonant with me in terms of music. Not only listening to music privately, but attending concerts or performances. Concerts represent spaces with shared experiences, where bodies meet with one another and where emotions tangle together. Why is it that people are able to connect so well over music? What is it about concerts that bring people together? Why are we able to recall a specific feeling or place when listening to the same song over and over again, and how does this shape our understanding of time and emotions? These are questions I find myself asking every time I go to a concert or become particularly emotional at a song.
Music is present television advertisements, radio ads, but also is something we encounter when walking down the street. It adds to the “structure of feeling” (Grossberg 313) and “territorializing” (313) that Lawrence Grossberg speaks about in his interview with Seigworth and Gregg. Because music is situated within our lives, we have complicated ties to it. A bad experience sound-tracked by a song can lead us to create a negative connotation with that song, which can last for any amount of time. Depending on how negative the experience is, we never get over the association. On the other hand, a positive association with a song can last just as long. These associations can also change over time. A positive one can become negative very quickly. For example, a beloved family member dies and they play one of your favorite songs at the funeral. You then associate this song with the death of a loved one, which turns the association into something bittersweet. We also feel particularly protective of songs or music that represent happy times in our lives. These associations with music help us build our feelings structures, and contribute to how we define the world around us and our own place in it.
People have very strong opinions on what constitutes “good” music or “bad” music, most of which is tied up in who makes the music, who it’s made for and how it makes you feel. The Grossberg interview appropriately points out that the study of affect has long been ignored because of the associations of emotions (and everything surrounding emotions) with women (317). This glaring discrepancy points to a clear bias in the system – one that has always existed and ever-so slowly improves – and connects to music in the same way. Genres associated with teenage girls – pop music, boy bands, etc – are looked down upon as lesser forms of art than music made by white men, for other white men. Classical music is seen as a pinnacle of art, because access to its truest form (live performance) is directly dependent on how much money someone has to spend, and how much free time they have to attend an hours-long performance. However, these lines of thought are arbitrary, as the purpose of music is to tell a story or to inspire feeling within the audience. To rate something that varies from person to person on a vague “good” to “bad” scale is pointless; there will never be common ground.
Sara Ahmed claims that “to be affected by something is to evaluate it” (31). We do this constantly with music. The types of music we rate as “good” or “bad” depend largely on who the music is marketed toward, and that is then tied up in how the music makes you feel. Bubblegum pop annoys punk and hard rock fans. Rap is low-brow and has no value to those who listen only to classical music. Affect is then related to how much we like or dislike something – how much we can or cannot connect to it. If “[e]motion is the ideological attempt to make sense of some affective productions” (316), like Grossberg claims, then how do these feelings connect to our evaluations of music both societally and personally? I do not know that I have these answers. This is what I wish to explore.
Affects are particularly difficult to define and quantify. As Stewart says, “[t]hey are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of analysis” (3). Affects then become something undefinable. Their very definition lies in the fact that they cannot be sufficiently described, because to put a name to an affect is to define and give it status as an emotion. Music is a vehicle for this in that it represents “a tangle of potential connections” (Stewart 4). Just as chords and rhythm come together to create a song, so do different people’s histories, lives and backgrounds come together to create a shared experience.
How do we connect all of this together? Does it connect? Again, I do not know. I only know my own experience, and how music and affects present themselves in my life. Affects, for me, represent the in-between. The moment before an emotion can be categorized and exists only as a feeling. Affect plucks us out of time and we hang, suspended, knowing this has happened before and will happen again. Affects remind us that time is not a straight, easy line from point A to B, but rather a reliving of feelings and events that others have felt and experienced and that we now share with them.
I.
The room is dark and you lay in bed, alone, in your apartment in 2017. Your podcast won’t load so you’ve resulted to a playlist on low volume to try to lull you to sleep. You haven’t had to do this since you were a teenager. Your bed creaks loudly as you turn over to grab your phone. You’d worry about your roommate waking up, but she sleeps like the dead. Or she’s not home. You can’t remember which. It doesn’t really matter.
You grapple in the dark for a moment, pillows blocking your vision, but it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s dark in your room, because it’s night. Your fingers connect with hard plastic and you’re blinded when the screen lights up while you try to pick your playlist.
A Death Cab for Cutie song comes on and you’re in your best friend’s dad’s SVU, you’re walking a mile in the September heat to Zilker park, you’re sitting on dry, crunchy grass with a pair of ostentatious sunglasses on that you call “Elton John glasses.” You’re surrounded by people’s legs, by dust, by the sound of a band you don’t know filtering through bodies.
You have a disposable camera; digital ones are still too expensive and only the newest phones have cameras on them. You look through the viewfinder at your friend and she looks up, smiles, and you press the shutter. The picture, when it comes out, is tinged yellow – from the dust, from the sun, maybe from both. You remember the day as golden.
II.
Boston is colder than Texas, but that’s to be expected. September heat means the low 70s and a chance of rain. It’s okay; you stuffed a jacket with a hood into your backpack along with a toiletry bag and a change of clothes. You’re only here for one night, two technically, but does night really count if you don’t sleep in the airport?
A cab takes you from Logan International to your friend-from-college’s house in Somerville. It’s a restored Victorian, cream or beige but sea green in the light of the fluorescent street lamp. It reminds you of The Exorcist, but that might just be because it’s the middle of the night and the street is empty.
Your bag breaks in the T station. The strap snaps off like it’s nothing, like the industrial machine’s needle didn’t pierce through all the way or like the thread holding it together just can’t anymore. It’s too weak to do its job. Too tired.
You left work early to fly here.
The stadium is smaller than you thought it’d be. It looks smaller on television when the Patriots or Packers or whoever play there, but that must be a trick of angles somehow. The grandeur of television. The low 70s isn’t so cold, even when the sun goes down, but you still wear your hoodie. It’s supposed to rain.
A man comes out onstage, small, and sits at a piano that dwarfs him even more. He plays a chord, and then another. The girls behind you start to scream.
“Is this the song?” you ask. “Yeah!!!” They reply.
You turn back around and look at him. He plays a chord you recognize in context of all the others.
“She said, ‘I think I’ll go to Boston,’” he sings. You sing it back.
III.
You’re two Irish ciders deep when you go to the bar. You order a double vodka cranberry anyway, because none of your friends are around you and people think you’re weird when you try to talk to them. The bartender in the pub sounds like he’s from Ireland, but he says he’s German when you ask him. The manager or owner is Irish, and you talk over the group of people you’re with about hurling. They ignore you. He leaves because he’s working and you’re alone again. The bartender at the venue is balding, has a beard, and doesn’t look excited to be here.
“You never know,” you tell him, “you might end up liking it.”
“Maybe if I were fifteen years younger,” he says, and you’re glad for the dark as you roll your eyes at him.
The opening act plays “Edge of Seventeen” and it’s your favorite Fleetwood Mac song. You dance, drink in your hand, eyes closed, to your favorite song by a band that’s not there but has been where you are, singing to people who might now be dead and will die. They exist again in that moment, like a snapshot, like a picture of something that may have happened and may never happen again.
A pink floral curtain falls, obscuring the stage. If you walked to the side, you’d be able to see them setting up for the main act, but it’s not important, not really. You like the intrigue.
The crowd starts screaming as his silhouette appears against the curtain. A shadow, the shape of a guitar, long legs, a pouf of hair. He could be anyone, anywhere, but he is who he is and he’s here. You’re here in the same moment. You count yourself lucky.
IV.
Italy is hot.
It’s August, so that’s to be expected, and it’s not as hot as Texas, but you still slather on sunscreen that you bought for nine euro at a grocery store in Ireland.
Street performers are common in Europe. They’re probably common in the States, too, but you don’t notice them because you’re in your own head when you walk down the street. You have earbuds in as you make your way to the subway. You drive around the city in your car, blasting your own music.
That’s not really an option here.
Your friend is a few steps ahead of you, her long legs taking her farther and farther with each step. You walk toward the Colosseum. It’s strange; one moment you’re in Rome, the next you’re in Ancient Rome, surrounded by ruins and the ghosts of gladiators.
You walk by construction to get there. A large, plastic, neon orange wall blocks off one side of the sidewalk, so you’re forced to the other in a long line of tourists. Old men sell hats, and you put a hand up and say no as forcefully and politely as you can manage. The construction creates a strange, tunnel-like path to the Colosseum. It’s big, bigger than you expected but somehow just exactly what you expected.
The sound of a saxophone grows louder the closer you get.
There’s a young man positioned almost exactly at the halfway point between where the construction tunnel begins and ends, playing his instrument. It sounds familiar. It takes a few more bars, but you finally recognize the song. “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.
It’s your mom’s favorite song.
You stop and wait for the man to finish playing, smiling to yourself as he does. Your mom would love this. She would hate walking around and the heat, but she would love this.
You dig through your purse and give him all the coins you have. It’s about fifty cents (or the European equivalent), but he says Grazie, anyway.
No, thank you, you want to say. You keep walking.
V.
The Alamodome is covered and there are sixty-nine thousand people stuffed inside of it. This isn’t something you considered before you came. You don’t have ear plugs.
Does it get this loud for basketball games?
The crowd is a constant buzz, never completely silent save for the moment of a collective breath, when the lights dim and the stage lights flash and the opening chords of the dumb intro video begin to play.
“No pushing or shoving,” it tells you. “No standing on chairs.”
It doesn’t matter. The screaming has already begun.
The music somehow is louder than the screams. The band are tiny pinpricks of people on a stage a basketball court length from you, a sea of people separating you. You cannot make out anyone’s face. There are ponytails everywhere, glowing inflatable sticks, arms and hands obstructing your view but only for a moment. You’re singing, you think. Or screaming. It’s hard to tell.
You can’t hear correctly for three days afterward.
VI.
There is a moment, right before the screaming begins. The house lights go dark and, for a moment, it is completely silent. It’s no longer than a split-second, just enough time to take a breath, to prepare yourself, to become one with the people around you.
For just a moment, between when the lights go dark and when the screaming starts, you do not exist. You could be anywhere, anytime, surrounded by anyone. The dark hides you, protects you, takes you from one moment to the next.
The stage lights flash and you release your breath.
INTRO.
Kathleen Stewart defines ordinary affects as “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2). This idea is particularly resonant with me in terms of music. Not only listening to music privately, but attending concerts or performances. Concerts represent spaces with shared experiences, where bodies meet with one another and where emotions tangle together. Why is it that people are able to connect so well over music? What is it about concerts that bring people together? Why are we able to recall a specific feeling or place when listening to the same song over and over again, and how does this shape our understanding of time and emotions? These are questions I find myself asking every time I go to a concert or become particularly emotional at a song.
Music is present television advertisements, radio ads, but also is something we encounter when walking down the street. It adds to the “structure of feeling” (Grossberg 313) and “territorializing” (313) that Lawrence Grossberg speaks about in his interview with Seigworth and Gregg. Because music is situated within our lives, we have complicated ties to it. A bad experience sound-tracked by a song can lead us to create a negative connotation with that song, which can last for any amount of time. Depending on how negative the experience is, we never get over the association. On the other hand, a positive association with a song can last just as long. These associations can also change over time. A positive one can become negative very quickly. For example, a beloved family member dies and they play one of your favorite songs at the funeral. You then associate this song with the death of a loved one, which turns the association into something bittersweet. We also feel particularly protective of songs or music that represent happy times in our lives. These associations with music help us build our feelings structures, and contribute to how we define the world around us and our own place in it.
People have very strong opinions on what constitutes “good” music or “bad” music, most of which is tied up in who makes the music, who it’s made for and how it makes you feel. The Grossberg interview appropriately points out that the study of affect has long been ignored because of the associations of emotions (and everything surrounding emotions) with women (317). This glaring discrepancy points to a clear bias in the system – one that has always existed and ever-so slowly improves – and connects to music in the same way. Genres associated with teenage girls – pop music, boy bands, etc – are looked down upon as lesser forms of art than music made by white men, for other white men. Classical music is seen as a pinnacle of art, because access to its truest form (live performance) is directly dependent on how much money someone has to spend, and how much free time they have to attend an hours-long performance. However, these lines of thought are arbitrary, as the purpose of music is to tell a story or to inspire feeling within the audience. To rate something that varies from person to person on a vague “good” to “bad” scale is pointless; there will never be common ground.
Sara Ahmed claims that “to be affected by something is to evaluate it” (31). We do this constantly with music. The types of music we rate as “good” or “bad” depend largely on who the music is marketed toward, and that is then tied up in how the music makes you feel. Bubblegum pop annoys punk and hard rock fans. Rap is low-brow and has no value to those who listen only to classical music. Affect is then related to how much we like or dislike something – how much we can or cannot connect to it. If “[e]motion is the ideological attempt to make sense of some affective productions” (316), like Grossberg claims, then how do these feelings connect to our evaluations of music both societally and personally? I do not know that I have these answers. This is what I wish to explore.
Affects are particularly difficult to define and quantify. As Stewart says, “[t]hey are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of analysis” (3). Affects then become something undefinable. Their very definition lies in the fact that they cannot be sufficiently described, because to put a name to an affect is to define and give it status as an emotion. Music is a vehicle for this in that it represents “a tangle of potential connections” (Stewart 4). Just as chords and rhythm come together to create a song, so do different people’s histories, lives and backgrounds come together to create a shared experience.
How do we connect all of this together? Does it connect? Again, I do not know. I only know my own experience, and how music and affects present themselves in my life. Affects, for me, represent the in-between. The moment before an emotion can be categorized and exists only as a feeling. Affect plucks us out of time and we hang, suspended, knowing this has happened before and will happen again. Affects remind us that time is not a straight, easy line from point A to B, but rather a reliving of feelings and events that others have felt and experienced and that we now share with them.
I.
The room is dark and you lay in bed, alone, in your apartment in 2017. Your podcast won’t load so you’ve resulted to a playlist on low volume to try to lull you to sleep. You haven’t had to do this since you were a teenager. Your bed creaks loudly as you turn over to grab your phone. You’d worry about your roommate waking up, but she sleeps like the dead. Or she’s not home. You can’t remember which. It doesn’t really matter.
You grapple in the dark for a moment, pillows blocking your vision, but it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s dark in your room, because it’s night. Your fingers connect with hard plastic and you’re blinded when the screen lights up while you try to pick your playlist.
A Death Cab for Cutie song comes on and you’re in your best friend’s dad’s SVU, you’re walking a mile in the September heat to Zilker park, you’re sitting on dry, crunchy grass with a pair of ostentatious sunglasses on that you call “Elton John glasses.” You’re surrounded by people’s legs, by dust, by the sound of a band you don’t know filtering through bodies.
You have a disposable camera; digital ones are still too expensive and only the newest phones have cameras on them. You look through the viewfinder at your friend and she looks up, smiles, and you press the shutter. The picture, when it comes out, is tinged yellow – from the dust, from the sun, maybe from both. You remember the day as golden.
II.
Boston is colder than Texas, but that’s to be expected. September heat means the low 70s and a chance of rain. It’s okay; you stuffed a jacket with a hood into your backpack along with a toiletry bag and a change of clothes. You’re only here for one night, two technically, but does night really count if you don’t sleep in the airport?
A cab takes you from Logan International to your friend-from-college’s house in Somerville. It’s a restored Victorian, cream or beige but sea green in the light of the fluorescent street lamp. It reminds you of The Exorcist, but that might just be because it’s the middle of the night and the street is empty.
Your bag breaks in the T station. The strap snaps off like it’s nothing, like the industrial machine’s needle didn’t pierce through all the way or like the thread holding it together just can’t anymore. It’s too weak to do its job. Too tired.
You left work early to fly here.
The stadium is smaller than you thought it’d be. It looks smaller on television when the Patriots or Packers or whoever play there, but that must be a trick of angles somehow. The grandeur of television. The low 70s isn’t so cold, even when the sun goes down, but you still wear your hoodie. It’s supposed to rain.
A man comes out onstage, small, and sits at a piano that dwarfs him even more. He plays a chord, and then another. The girls behind you start to scream.
“Is this the song?” you ask. “Yeah!!!” They reply.
You turn back around and look at him. He plays a chord you recognize in context of all the others.
“She said, ‘I think I’ll go to Boston,’” he sings. You sing it back.
III.
You’re two Irish ciders deep when you go to the bar. You order a double vodka cranberry anyway, because none of your friends are around you and people think you’re weird when you try to talk to them. The bartender in the pub sounds like he’s from Ireland, but he says he’s German when you ask him. The manager or owner is Irish, and you talk over the group of people you’re with about hurling. They ignore you. He leaves because he’s working and you’re alone again. The bartender at the venue is balding, has a beard, and doesn’t look excited to be here.
“You never know,” you tell him, “you might end up liking it.”
“Maybe if I were fifteen years younger,” he says, and you’re glad for the dark as you roll your eyes at him.
The opening act plays “Edge of Seventeen” and it’s your favorite Fleetwood Mac song. You dance, drink in your hand, eyes closed, to your favorite song by a band that’s not there but has been where you are, singing to people who might now be dead and will die. They exist again in that moment, like a snapshot, like a picture of something that may have happened and may never happen again.
A pink floral curtain falls, obscuring the stage. If you walked to the side, you’d be able to see them setting up for the main act, but it’s not important, not really. You like the intrigue.
The crowd starts screaming as his silhouette appears against the curtain. A shadow, the shape of a guitar, long legs, a pouf of hair. He could be anyone, anywhere, but he is who he is and he’s here. You’re here in the same moment. You count yourself lucky.
IV.
Italy is hot.
It’s August, so that’s to be expected, and it’s not as hot as Texas, but you still slather on sunscreen that you bought for nine euro at a grocery store in Ireland.
Street performers are common in Europe. They’re probably common in the States, too, but you don’t notice them because you’re in your own head when you walk down the street. You have earbuds in as you make your way to the subway. You drive around the city in your car, blasting your own music.
That’s not really an option here.
Your friend is a few steps ahead of you, her long legs taking her farther and farther with each step. You walk toward the Colosseum. It’s strange; one moment you’re in Rome, the next you’re in Ancient Rome, surrounded by ruins and the ghosts of gladiators.
You walk by construction to get there. A large, plastic, neon orange wall blocks off one side of the sidewalk, so you’re forced to the other in a long line of tourists. Old men sell hats, and you put a hand up and say no as forcefully and politely as you can manage. The construction creates a strange, tunnel-like path to the Colosseum. It’s big, bigger than you expected but somehow just exactly what you expected.
The sound of a saxophone grows louder the closer you get.
There’s a young man positioned almost exactly at the halfway point between where the construction tunnel begins and ends, playing his instrument. It sounds familiar. It takes a few more bars, but you finally recognize the song. “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.
It’s your mom’s favorite song.
You stop and wait for the man to finish playing, smiling to yourself as he does. Your mom would love this. She would hate walking around and the heat, but she would love this.
You dig through your purse and give him all the coins you have. It’s about fifty cents (or the European equivalent), but he says Grazie, anyway.
No, thank you, you want to say. You keep walking.
V.
The Alamodome is covered and there are sixty-nine thousand people stuffed inside of it. This isn’t something you considered before you came. You don’t have ear plugs.
Does it get this loud for basketball games?
The crowd is a constant buzz, never completely silent save for the moment of a collective breath, when the lights dim and the stage lights flash and the opening chords of the dumb intro video begin to play.
“No pushing or shoving,” it tells you. “No standing on chairs.”
It doesn’t matter. The screaming has already begun.
The music somehow is louder than the screams. The band are tiny pinpricks of people on a stage a basketball court length from you, a sea of people separating you. You cannot make out anyone’s face. There are ponytails everywhere, glowing inflatable sticks, arms and hands obstructing your view but only for a moment. You’re singing, you think. Or screaming. It’s hard to tell.
You can’t hear correctly for three days afterward.
VI.
There is a moment, right before the screaming begins. The house lights go dark and, for a moment, it is completely silent. It’s no longer than a split-second, just enough time to take a breath, to prepare yourself, to become one with the people around you.
For just a moment, between when the lights go dark and when the screaming starts, you do not exist. You could be anywhere, anytime, surrounded by anyone. The dark hides you, protects you, takes you from one moment to the next.
The stage lights flash and you release your breath.