These days, I'm lucky to get a new CD every two months or so, or rely on my friends to introduce me to new music (for which I'm eternally grateful.) Back in high school, that wasn't so much the case.
I was THAT guy. You know the one. The guy who had a CD case full of obscure bands, often with starkly modern cover art, containing music that was barely recognizable as music by most standards. But hey, true art is incomprehensible (he said, nose lifted high with disdain for the peons below, listening to their Coldplay and their Keith Urbans.) I thought I was better than people, because I thought I had taste.I thought I was smarter, funnier, and more absurdly interesting than anyone else on the school bus driving to the football games.
I took solace in my hubris back then. Sometimes I still do, but that has been beaten out of my by the humility that comes with minimum wage, not living off of Mom and Dad's paycheck. I enjoyed it, reveling in my feigned superiority back then, at least a bit. This realization of my prideful ways is something only seen in hindsight, because if you had asked me then why I liked those bands, I would have given you a very different answer.
I liked it because it was different.
Different from the stuff they played on the radio, and different from what other people listened to. It didn't sound like something they would package in a neat verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-breakdown-chorus format for mass consumption.
I liked it, because I felt like it was mine.
That sounds really selfish, but I actually thought that music was just for me. All my own. Those songs were lying deep within my soul from birth, and I just hadn't heard them yet, or at least understood them. Music from Beck, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Moby, Muse, Gorillaz, Straylight Run (yes, I liked THEM too), R.E.M. Dave Matthews Band, Fatboy Slim, and the list goes on. Some songs were actually on the radio, but most were not. It wasn't the singles that really spoke to me, it was the B-sides. The unknowns. The ones that would probably never get heard outside of the band's fan base. These were mine.
Songs like "Bankrupt on Selling" from Modest Mouse, with lyrics that bleed with cynicism stemming from rejection and damaged dreams. Like "Rockin' The Suburbs" from Ben Folds, comical, angry, and relentlessly goofy all at once. Like "The Chimbley Sweep" from the Decemberists, waltzing their way into my head with Dickensian ballads of mirth and melancholy.
I could go on. I really want to. But I'm not because I want to get to the point of this rant.
I like music, very much like I like a lot of things. I liked music then and I like music now because it revealed something to me. It could be new, or something that I knew a long time ago and I forgot. It could be something strikingly beautiful, or dimly lit and crying. It could be quirky, or angry, or (dare I say it) incomprehensible.
I look back on it now, and it feels very much like I feel about my faith now. There was always something new to explore, and a new idea, or a new sound. I'm sure that my musical leanings helped form my theology. But I'm also sure that I can't wait to hear a new song, because that's just one more piece of God I get to see.
