Trying to Make Things Work- Gender, Music and the Experience of Time. by risa
Today, watching Madonna sing “like a prayer” i thought about how women age. (Because I hope I am as young and ridiculous and wise and passionate and fricken fit as she seems when I’m fifty). I thought about how women develop an early knowledge of time when life starts to get marked out as months passing by. And during some parts of life, those months feel short and at other times they drag out slow; and we have to feel the pain of both and know, wryly, that the feeling is wrong: that no matter what we felt or wanted, time has always been passing disinterestedly along.
I think this can make us feel desperate to be living well at each moment, to fill it up with good, or life, or at least survival. Like Martin Amis writes in London Fields: “all women want to be the bitch in the book.” And it’s true, sometimes I feel my gut aching to leave everything and somehow get deeper in there, whatever it is. And other times I feel like burying my life quietly behind someone else, not risking too much while this life is still known and fine.
Men feel time stretching long with no loud ticking body clock, and it could be speeding or still all the time. So, in a visceral way, the passing of time has no certainty. And it brings them to the same sets of intense emotions and strange relationships to time as we have.
Alternate routes, different bodies and abilities, and all we keep walking on and off of different people’s paths, repeating their bits of experience and learning. Giving each other advice as we head off together or on our own; and creating whole new patterns of these countless bits of code.
Louis Erdrich writes in “The Antelope Wife”:
“Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark. The first twin’s beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other twin’s beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter’s sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear. They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world. “
I think every individual is stringing there own beads into the net, as it were. We can dislike and be cynical of others’ prides and fears and failings and their lame jokes and boring stories, but beneath that superficial irritation of brushing up against eachother we know that these are little half-blind lives that are just like ours, just trying to make things work.
Watching musicians all day I thought how they write a little piece of that life into the most catchy, compelling piece of code they can, and when it works best it not only hooks into something we’ve already figured out and felt, but also opens a thought into the unknown thoughts and voices of experiences we hadn’t yet had to imagine. And these, as Elran pointed out, build into new status quos over generations. Tony Blair was at LiveAid 20 years ago, and my stepdad wonders what Live8 will make him remember.
Each of the 150 bands that played today speaks to a specific audience of their fans as well as to a wider, stranger group. They put their songs into this context where their words can take on new layers of meaning, and hand experiential knowledge and feeling across sub-cultural and cultural borders. Like Sting’s “we’ll be watching you” to the leaders of the 8, and Green Day’s performance of “we are the champions of the world,” and Madonna’s “music makes the people come together.” And whether they connect with us or not, they always connect with someone. In this way musicians play our emotions and can trigger the best of our desires, and when that voltage they make is supported by planning and infrastructure and a clear and informed message they can build something we can get behind, pick up, and wield. http://www.live8live.com
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