Black Dog Magazine

A Little Mood Music

Bill Uebbing

• March 1, 2016

Go listen to the song “Victoria”, by The Kinks off their LP, Arthur. I can wait. The rest of this article will still be here when you get back. Even if you know the song, you must do this! Go!

Now isn’t that nice? I dare you to not feel happier and more alive having listened to that for a little more than three minutes. Nothing else but music, roller coasters and sex put me in that kind of mood, and I’ve never managed to make the latter last the whole three minutes, (Bahdum!).

I have been so ho-hum this week and then, listening to the radio this morning I heard “Victoria”, a song I haven’t heard in awhile. It has totally changed my outlook on the day.

In this case, it’s not the lyric that I groove to. I am as removed from the emotions involved with waxing poetic about British colonial rule as one can be. After all, we settled that once-and-for-all in 1812, am I right?

Set to this music and its performance, the lyrics could talk about the virtues of eating frozen poop and I would feel no less enraptured. No drug has such a great euphoric effect for so cheap (free!) and so long. It’s been hours since I heard this track and I am still affected.

"If you want to find out whether your friends are worth keeping, ask them which of their five senses they would keep if they could only keep one. If they don’t answer with “hearing”, dump them summarily and without prejudice.

The Kinks have a lot of songs that move my needle. “Come Dancin’” is another one of their songs I will stay in my car to listen to after I have reached my destination. There is a certain kind of sadness to the chord progression that conveys melancholia mixed with wistful nostalgia. It is a simple and sweet story of the local dance housebeing torn down in the name of progress, which in reality is an allegory for growing up and losing that special magic that surrounds us when we are young but disappears into the firmament as we age.

I could never categorize or rate my favorite songs or even bands because the answer changes every day. I was at lunch a couple months ago in a local pub near my office and I swear the music selection was being picked directly from my brain. It was a satellite station. Maybe all the schizophrenics are correct; the satellites are reading our thoughts. If the magnificence of that set was any indication, the satellites can read my thoughts any day.

For people who truly love music, the music and the moment cannot be divorced. Each lends meaning and context to the other with the importance of either as inestimable as they are intertwined.

If you want to find out whether your friends are worth keeping, ask them which of their five senses they would keep if they could only keep one. If they don’t answer with “hearing”, dump them summarily and without prejudice. That person doesn’t understand the importance of music and will never understand why you sometimes need to listen to David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” on repeat for all three legs of your cross-country airplane trip. There is no use explaining it if they don’t get it. Stop wasting your time.

@adesholamakinde

Music can change the world!

0 retweets1 like12:00pm 13 May 2009

Some albums or playlists I go to consistently because they never fail to provide me the feeling I am looking for. Let’s face it, we can choose music that either validates our mood us or derails us and releases us from whatever rut in which we are held captive.

There are times to listen somberly, nodding your head to the familiar favorite passages, and times to use the remote control as a microphone and try like hell to make Freddy Mercury come out of your mouth, the end result being a lot of missed notes and a very sore throat. Maybe your favorite chair or car’s armrest is scarred from drumming along to your favorites reflexively.If you have just met someone and you’re thinking about hanging out with them, look for these telltale signs. Check out their music collection, (for some of you that means stealing their phones when they leave the room). Look for the drum marks on the furniture. Check for evidence of musical instruments, posters, concert ticket stubs - 200 bonus points for anyone with a working turntable and at least some vintage vinyl.If you believe the music makes the moment and the moment makes the music, you should do yourself a favor and find people like you. That way when your jam comes on, you don’t have to explain the emotion, they feel it, too.