Sweet Screams Are Made of This*/These*

Who am I to disagree? Ok, I’m going to try and put this in the least ironic and sarcastic way possible. A lot of popular music is a test of endurance. And when I say popular music I’m not necessarily talking just about current or contemporary music. This is definitely NOT a case of “these kids today don’t know real music” kind of thing. Although those fuckers do get on my lawn every now and then. No, this could apply to any, let’s say post Glenn Miller era of music. Because the Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra era, while boring to me, was pretty chill and soothing for the most part.

And when I call the music a test of endurance, what I mean is that some of the instruments and voices can cause me genuine discomfort, if not actual pain. In fact there are some songs that when played, even at normal volume, can cause me to frantically jam my fingers in my ears. It’s the classic fight or flight instinct being activated.

It sucks because one of the few things I looked forward to in older age was the slight dulling of my hearing ability. Nope, I can hear and suffer through every second of some motherfucker screaming his or her tits off. And that’s the point. A lot of what passes for singing far more closely resembles what I would imagine as the victim of a brutal stabbing. Which is not unlike the sensation I get in my ears while listening.

It isn’t all bad though. The music and singing are extremely pleasurable. When they stop. It’s like a joke my grandfather used to tell me: I saw a man hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When I asked him why he was doing that he said, “Because it feels so good when I stop”.

I admit that I’m being a bit melodramatic about the whole thing but I am not exaggerating when I say that some music does cause me actual physical discomfort. There is an awful amount of yelling that passes for singing. For some “artists” it’s their whole thing. I enjoy that Titanic song as much as anybody. But you will never convince me that Celine Dion isn’t screaming her way through it. And most of her other songs for that matter. And that doesn’t even mean that I don’t like or enjoy some of her songs. The Titanic thing included.

I don’t automatically hate songs when the music is shrill and the singer is screaming as if being mauled by a wildebeest. I just think it’s just a little too much a little too often.

I have no way of knowing if my way of experiencing this is common. For all I know, I could be the only schlep who has to plug his ears when hearing some “music”. I do know that I have a slightly unusual sensitivity to certain sounds but it’s doubtful that it accounts for everything. It’s for sure that some singers ARE screaming. It’s for sure that some songs feature repetitive shrill sounds.

It comes back around to a subject that pops up all over the place. The need for attention. I’ve approached this from a bunch of different angles and once you start looking for it you can find it everywhere. Modern life has become an endless quest for most of us to seek a piece of the inherently limited supply of attention. After all, there is a set number of people with a formidable but capped capability to see, hear, and comprehend.

We live in an era where we are all constantly under assault by dozens of different forms of input and demands upon our attention. Tons of research has proven that this constant stimulation puts us all under a form of pressure that is constantly buzzing in the background. Technically speaking it induces your brain to produce the fight or flight hormone cortisol. That’s why most of us are feeling stressed out and exhausted. It’s just your brain and body trying to cope with noise, speech, and images that you are constantly exposed to. It’s not natural and it’s not something people had to deal with until fairly recently. Let’s say its been the last century or two.

It’s also true that a good bit of that input is false, or of dubious veracity, at best. This puts us under yet another form of stress as we struggle to sort out what is real and what is not. For the moment consider only the barrage of advertising we are exposed to on a daily basis. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are being lied to in one form or another from morning til night.

We also live in the first era where we have instant access to the whole of human knowledge and experience. We each carry a small device that holds the sum of every museum, university, and library on earth. And that’s not a complaint. As a nerd, having the ability to learn everything and anything at the click of a button still fills me with joy and wonder. It also, in a very real way, connects me with virtually every other person on earth. That too is wonderful, but it is also most certainly unnatural and adds to that base level of stress and exhaustion as humans slowly learn to cope with this new reality.

So we are flooded with input from social media, television, city noise, aircraft, radio, writing on the bathroom wall, and literally hundreds of other ways. And now we even have the chance to answer back. Social media gives every one of us a microphone to broadcast our own thoughts to the world. But somehow, this has somehow left most of us feeling even more isolated, lonelier, and even more in need of attention. It is as if having that microphone drives home just how small and silent our voices are. Our voice is just the tiniest drop of water in a vast and swirling ocean of content. This has created a culture of shamelessly and desperately grasping for attention in any form. We are all trying to shout loud enough to be heard over the constant noise.

It's not my imagination. People are talking louder, driving faster, and acting dickier than at any point I can recall in my lifetime. And I’m not making that statement lightly. I understand that as a human being it is in my nature to pine away for some flawed remembrance of the “good old days”. That’s what we do. That’s also why “Make America Great Again” rings so true with so many people. Something very basic to our being makes us all long for an idealized version of the past that was probably shit. Or at least as shitty as the present. Trust me on this. If you spend more than 4 seconds studying real human history you will want to do anything but repeat it.

But that isn’t what I’m doing here. People really are louder, more aggressive, and more desperate for attention than they were even just a decade ago. We are all, me included, desperate for attention in ways that are new and different than any time in the past. And it is really more than that. It’s almost as if a sizeable slice of people have become completely unaware that there are human beings around that aren’t them. It goes beyond ordinary traditional selfishness and falls squarely into complete and utter indifference to the concerns or needs of anyone who isn’t them. It’s like Trump’s relationship with truth. He knows truth. But the truth is irrelevant. He is indifferent to the truth. And while we are on Trump . . . .

Some of the blame for surging human indifference must go to Trump. In my mind at least that much should be obvious. Love him or hate him, he unquestionably unshackled our collective national id. Which is currently rampaging half naked across the great Pacific Northwest. I only picked that region because I thought it sounded good. But seriously, Trump made all kinds of outlandish, most would say stupid, behavior kinda cool again. Fuck it! Say the quiet parts out loud. It would not surprise me if he introduced his son-in-law at Mara Lago as “that Jewy Kid”, while assuring his guests, “he’s one of the good ones”.

Ok. I joke. I kid the president. But I think you know what I mean. He just says whatever the fuck he wants and gets away with it. And still is. No matter how many times we indict him. He’s still getting what he wants most. ATTENTION.

It doesn’t matter how stupid, racist, or crazy it might be. He will say anything to get attention. This is real. When he was booked he said he weighed 215 pounds. Yes, he said that. His twat lips weigh 215 pounds, each. Another real one: “I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals – they were like from a movie, better looking than Tom Cruise and stronger – and I had more generals than I’ve ever seen”. What? Did I hear you ask for just one more before I get to some sort of point or point-like, or maybe even pointish thing? As you wish. “I just want to find 11,780 votes”. That one is actually my favorite because with just a few words he completely undermines and disregards more than two centuries of democracy without a second thought.

So yes, I think it’s fair to blame a large amount of it on Trump. But at the same time I think it pre-dates him a bit. Who knows, maybe it’s cell phones. Maybe they make us forget that there are, in fact, other human beings sharing the planet, or sometimes an elevator, with us. Speaking of elevators, this is something that I never experienced until last year but has happened a dozen or more times since then. I’m in an elevator. It arrives at the floor. The doors open. And a person or persons immediately march onto the elevator and straight into those of us trying to get off. It’s as if it came as a complete shock to them that there might be other humans on the globe and that one of them might have the nerve to already be in their elevator.

I understand that these two symptoms might seem at odds with each other:

• Desperation for attention of any kind from anyone.

• Complete indifference to the needs and even existence of anyone but themselves.

But they are actually two sides of the same coin minted from pure narcissism.

With Trumps face on them.

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*Remember that asterisk all the way back in the title? Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is the formal title of the Eurythmics song. But to me (and maybe you) it always sounded like these, so I put both.