Being Overly Melodramatic

"Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Those are the words the character Rob Gordon speaks in the movie "High Fidelity", and I have quoted them often in my own use. Causation and correlation can be easy to confuse, and sometimes we are too close to a situation to be able to untangle the knot the thread of our lives becomes. We can see the beginning and the end, but the route taken to get there remains hidden in a clump of experiences the forge of life has melted together. In other words, for as much time as we might spend being introspective, we don't always know ourselves nearly as well as we would like to think.

I am a melodramatic sort. I know this about myself. I am prone to noir and passages of purple writing. That's just who I am. But the question is whether I happened to be that way, and then gravitated toward music that played into it, or if I was made that way by the music I was listening to.

It's difficult to parse the difference, since I don't have strong memories of either myself or the music I was exposed to prior to 1993. I have told the story many times about Meat Loaf's "Bat Out Of Hell II" being the record that turned me into a music fan. It is the embodiment of all the melodrama I am talking about, but it was hardly alone. Around that time, as I was settling into music being a focus of my attention, the other vivid experience I have memories of is watching the video for Guns N Roses' "November Rain" playing on MTV.

That song is wrought with just as much overblown drama and emotion, and it takes up the mantle of going over the top so you can see what's on the other side. How odd it is to think two of the first songs that I truly loved were both overly long ballads written by strange people who loved camp appeal and theatrical grandeur. Considering that a coincidence is a bit of a long shot, if I'm being perfectly honest. I don't believe the odds could support those songs being completely independent in their penetration of my mind. There was a shared opening they both stepped through, but how was it opened?

I have always described myself as a 'sucker for ballads'. As I got into heavier music, I would often hear people talk about albums, only to write off the ballad as the weakest song of the bunch, simply because it was slower and softer. That was precisely why I loved them so much. They were the songs that evoked something resembling an emotion, the songs that didn't feel like posturing about how hard and heavy you have to be to live up to expectations.

Without having access to old playlists from early 90s radio, I can't say whether I was the product of a stream of ballads poured into my brain or not. It could be that I heard "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" one too many time, or that REO Speedwagon and Journey gave me the wrong impression of what being a rock band meant. It could be that my memories are frozen in the amber of time, because they are all sappy. That terrible joke falls into the same category, but I'm not going to apologize for it.

Psychology is malleable, but only to a certain degree. There are pillars of our identity, and they can only be changed in the most extreme of circumstances. I have not experienced anything like that, in a musical sense, to convince me this is not the way I always was. My senses have always been attuned to drama and larger-than-life emotions, perhaps because I have felt those lacking in myself. I may have been using music to fill a reservoir so empty it had no water line to measure. The bigger the music, the easier the pantomime for an untrained and unskilled actor to understand, to recreate.

So which came first? I don't think either did. The music and I were always heading in the same direction, but it was only when I found my voice echoed in the songs that I was able to follow the tracks. We have run parallel ever since, trying to escape the same shadows. Those songs made it easier to find myself, but I don't think I would be a radically different person if the dial had been tuned to a different station. I can't believe my identity could be that dependent on chance.

Was it me or the music? It was both, it was neither, it was a combination. At the end of the day, we're all still enigmas to ourselves.