Music And Depression, Epilogue

Flavio, I hope you'll excuse me. It was impossible for me not to make this reference

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Music and Depression, Third and Final Part: Your Heart Will Break, No Matter What You Do

Sometimes you stumble upon music so simple it sounds primordial. It's always been a (beautiful) mystery to me, how that happens, but with Perfume Genius' Learning, there's no mistaking it: piano melodies bare and insistent enough to sound clunky, if it weren't for the haloed ring of struck chords filling the spaces, and for faint, wavering synthesizers holding everything together in a precarious haze of atmosphere; a soft, boyish voice — it reminded me of Sufjan Stevens' own angelic falsetto, in the slowest, saddest of his songs — buried under immemorial crackles; here and there, a sprinkle of discreet electronics. Not much else, and yet Learning, in under half an hour, carries more emotional power than any other album I've listened to this year.

In this sparse universe, the lyrics are often vague, but they haunt. "No one will answer your prayers, until you take off that dress; no one will hear all your crying, until you take your last breath. But you will learn to mind me, and you will learn to survive me.": cryptic first words that leave you wondering who exactly is being addressed, what it exactly means. Apart from "Mr. Peterson," the album's single and most explicit piece of writing (romance with a depressed and suicidal math teacher), the rest of the songs bask in the same sort of indeterminacy, calling, at various times, to different but equally remote characters (Mary, Perry, "you," "we," "him" and "her"). Regardless, in their slow, whispered march, these songs and their words carry emotions so self-evident they become utterly devastating. Sorrow and desolation hang heavy, suffocating, like the aftermath of a sad dream in a pitch-black bedroom.

But then so does empathy. Burdened by themes of loss, isolation, suicide, abuse, illness, each song still shimmers with the promise of an extended hand, of a warm lap into which to lay your head, of sweet-smelling fingers wiping the tears from your cheeks, of a reassuring presence stroking your hair as you watch the snow fall outside your window. Again, nothing is explicit: much remains ambiguous and fragile ("Mr. Peterson, I know you were ready to go. I hope there's room for you up above, or down below."), and no answers are given (except perhaps in the album's last and most frankly religious song). But Learning touches the soul and offers a bed, a blanket, a quiet and and intimate space to the heavy and weary heart.

It's extremely rare that an album makes me cry. It's even rarer that an album makes me cry every single time I listen to it. But Learning still does.

And I've been listening to it since mid-July.

Seattle's Perfume Genius

Music and Depression, Part II: How Do You Say You're Sorry, and There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of?

One thing that also works very, very well to make you (or me, please forgive the generalization here) happy is finding that a concert for which you had absurdly high expectations not only matches them, but flattens them completely. I've tried to describe that feeling to a number of people, but so far it's been difficult getting them to understand how and why that bubble starts to swell in your chest, uncontrollably, until you actually want to cry, tears of sheer… what? Joy? Pure, simple emotion? Beats me.

Fever Ray: I'm not even going to go into why an album that blends folk intimacy, gothic theatricality, hip-hop, smoked-out dub echoes, swampy, oppressive atmospherics and pristine, Ice-Queen electronics is perfect, because that would take way too long — and all you need to be convinced is a listen anyway. I will say , though, that I was **pretty psyched** when I bought tickets to her show at the Paris Olympia (where the concert was moved after a quick sellout at a smaller venue); I don't remember being that excited for live music since… at least a month and a half ago.

I got there just in time to see Zola Jesus start her set, which itself was a neat surprise: I'd been reading about her seemingly everywhere for a while, and had just got her album the day before. What a coincidence, I could've told myself, if her presence as an opener for Fever Ray wasn't so logical it was almost disturbing. I knew none of her songs, but prowling back and forth on the stage, she had the audience mesmerized. A fantastically gripping voice.

Then the lights went out again and the bubble started swelling almost instantly as rows of old, antique-looking lamps flickered onstage, in rhythm with crackling samples — creaking wood and running water, frozen generators in an empty street — and from that moment on, until the lights came on again, I (and, I think, the rest of the room) was hooked into a awestruck communion with weirdness, into a indescribable space in which cold and warmth, dawn and dusk, hopefulness and fear, were hard to distinguish.

Music and Depression, Part 1: Ode to a Wonderful Rainbow

Tuesday was a day of national strike, the kind we French seem to cherish.

Heavily affected, the metros and subways of Paris ran sporadically, forcing people to stand in tight rows along the platform, almost to its very edge, making them pack into wagons until one wondered whether there would be enough air, and causing fights to break out between disoriented commuters. Twice (on line 2, Nation-Porte Dauphine) I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket but could not free my arm to grab it; it was hot and wet and the air was suffocatingly foul.

Outside, it was gray, rainy, and cold enough to chill the sweat on my back.

Lucky for me, Tuesday was also my first day of work. I was unenthusiastic, to say the least — confused at first, later bored, but mostly anxious and unconfident throughout. And from the moment I stepped out of bed, I was sad. Where I was was certainly not where I wanted to be.

Picking out music for a day like that is a tough one, I know. I flipped through the 30-odd albums on my iPod at least a dozen times. I had almost given up, ready to resort to the Shuffle option, when the twitching blue highlight on the screen fell upon a Wonderful Rainbow. By that point I was already walking down the stairs into the neighborhood Métropolitain (line 12, Porte de la Chapelle-Mairie d'Issy) and stood a few feet from the turnstiles. What I then said to myself was: Fuck it. And everything about this day.

And that's how I came to make a truly fabulous discovery.

On the metro I found I did not mind the people, the smells, the heat, the contact with too many foreign body parts. I didn't worry about being late (and I wasn't). I felt indifferently calm, and even extended a quiet sort of sympathy towards the people suffering around me. I felt delightfully detached.

How? is what you surely ask yourself.

Believe it or not, it helped that my brain was being pummeled by frantic drums, far too fast for my heart to follow; slammed by over-muscular, frenzied guitars, climbing into hypnotic swirls of purely physical intensity, onto exhaustion and trance; assailed by a peculiar (and moderately disturbing) image — that of a bodybuilt speed freak violently humping a washing machine in the middle of a spin-drying cycle.

I closed my eyes and in my mind I proceeded to punch, kick, jump, hurl myself at the walls of the subway car, against the greasy metal poles, against the center seats and at the men, women and babies who occupied them. Then I imagined myself running, running away, until my lungs collapsed and I passed out somewhere on the Parisian asphalt.

I couldn't do any of that — couldn't move at all, that is — but a direct pathway had been established between the music and every nerve in my body. My anxious brain was subdued, or numbed, while sound and body became united in an triumphant mental spasm, an eruption of pure, gleeful energy into which my anger, my anxiety, my sadness flamed like pine needles in a forest fire. In other words, I no longer needed to be violent to myself and to others; the music channeled all of that for me.

So while everything around me throbbed and rocked erratically, loud and incandescent, I pictured people's heads bursting into funny pink geysers, and my body surged with excitement and certainty as my mind wrestled with blistering noise and reckless acceleration.

Thank you then, oh Wonderful Rainbow, for beating my brain, my heart, my breath into submission last Tuesday — at ten, at twelve, then again at two and five. Thank you for having stilled the anguish, pinned it to the floor and kept a strong knee on its slippery chest.

I — and you, faithful reader — now know: as a remedy against depression and defeatism, hardcorenoisepunkelectricchaosmusicviolencesonicmasochism works wonders. Try it sometime, and marvel. The Wonderful Rainbow will always be there to illuminate the darkest of times (housefires and explosions!).

+++++++++++ Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow (Load, 2003) +++++++++++++

Note1: Hypermagic Mountain is often prescribed in lieu of the Rainbow. Rest assured, it works just as well, if not better.

Note2: The money you save on psychotherapy and antidepressants will come in handy to pay for hearing aids when you turn 30.