Being the devoted music fan that she is, Amanda Marcotte put this piece up about the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind coming up next month. That record, nor any of Nirvana’s output ever really resonated with me the way it did with a lot of my peers, especially those a few years younger than me (like Amanda), for a number of reasons, but I must say that I really appreciate pieces of writing like this about music. Music really does tap into our brains at a visceral level; when a song means something to us, it connects inextricably with all sorts of memory threads such that hearing that piece of music even decades later can bring to the surface all sorts of memories, emotions, sounds, and even smells that we associate with the time in our lives when that music was special to us.

Once upon a time, I wrote a short essay that’s apparently been lost to the ages* about how when I was a having a really overwhelming, crappy sort of day at the office back when I was a worker drone instead of a computer guy, I managed to save my sanity that afternoon by popping River Songs into the CD player and being momentarily transported back in time to college in the spring of ’96, sunlight and a cool breeze streaming through my open dorm window as the semester wound down, surrounded by friends, freedom, and possibilities. It was a glorious revelation, and I really wish I could find those couple of paragraphs again (though I suspect they’re not as well-written as my hazy memories paint them).

Heck, just the act of recalling the memory of remembering the original thing is starting to conjure up phantom sensory input of the scent of the flowers in the yard near my dorm window and feeling of the sunlight streaming in, hitting my skin as I’m sitting at that desk watching people walking by on the path as they get ready for their weekend…

That’s why I love this kind of writing; even though I don’t know the writer (other than through reading her stuff and chatting with her for a few minutes at a book signing once), by reading her description of her experiences with a piece of music and the memories and experiences the music causes her to recall, makes me feel connected to her experience, and starts firing up related memory processes in my head; of my experiences with similar music; where I was when I heard of Cobain’s death and what was going on around me.**

And that’s why I love hearing people’s personal musical experiences; it’s a feeling of connection, a shared experience, even if the sharing parties aren’t in the same place (sometimes, given my particular nature, the geographic displacement is actually a feature!). I guess, in retrospect, it’s the kind of thing I’m trying tap into with all those record reviews I’ve been doing lately; tapping into those musical memories that I haven’t necessarily thought about in a long time, bringing them to the surface, and sharing with with the world (at least theoretically), and maybe getting to see what sort of memories they dredge up in others.

Of course, I could just have shitty musical taste and the theoretical world at large is collectively looking at me like I have three heads or something.

That’s probably it.

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* –Sometime between ’98 and ’01, before I had reliable archives for this site. I’m pretty sure it’s floating around in the archives of the Badlees yahoo group from that period. There may be a link to it in the archives of this site that I missed – in any case, actually having the piece isn’t as important as the idea of the piece.

** – Same college, different dorm room. For the record, I wasn’t particularly surprised he’d killed himself (I don’t think anyone was), but I wasn’t particularly devastated, as the music never had a huge effect on me (I was wrapping up my hair metal infatuation and moving into my awkward country phase. And as far as grunge was concerned, I liked Pearl Jam better anyway), but I had friends that were heartbroken at the time, and in the intervening years, life experience has brought me to develop more empathy for what the man must have been going through.