Music Begets Madness

For 2 years now, travelling the Orem-Lehi stretch of I-15 freeway---particularly at Pleasant Grove where it starts to smell like poo, and at American Fork where it morphs to the stink of skunk (from Lehi to Saratoga Springs, you can expect the musk of mink farm to linger longer in your unoffending and unsuspecting nostrils)---has been a time of pondering and contemplation. Mostly over typos in billboards and trying to decode the secret messages in drivers' personalized license plates, but contemplation nonetheless.

So it is fitting that I was driving northbound along this very same path to intellectual enlightenment on Friday when I conversed via cell with one of the brilliant minds of our time (nevermind that his initials are B. S.), bemoaning my fate that one of my favorite bands, The White Stripes (one of the last bands I really have to see before I die, or get married and my husband won't let me go to shows anymore, which would kind of be like dying), had just cancelled their tour due to the drummer's recent struggle with acute anxiety. To which he posed the burning philosophical question keeping us all awake at night: are musicians people with tendencies towards mental instability, or does musical obsession drive one to madness? It is not difficult to show correlation between the two, but to prove causation, well, let's see how close I can get to that through my ramblings.

Exhibit A: My Kingman side of ancestors is filled musicians, yet is beleaguered with mental illness (I'll spare you the details, supposedly my great-grandfather was so crazy that no one will even talk about him). My mom's Whitney-side contribution to the genepool is rock solid---almost to the point of boring---mental stability, but no mad music skills (forgive the pun).

I remember as a kid, if I were upset, I'd go play on the piano and vent out my frustration (probably getting caught exploiting my younger siblings as I was wont to do). Music was an easy escape from things in my life I found upsetting. However, in college, the pursuit of making beautiful music itself became upsetting and hard, stress and work. Definitely more tortured. It didn't help that the practice rooms were underground and had no windows.

Despite not having turned to a life of drugs and alcohol, I was thus considerably more insecure, neurotic and vitamin D-deprived after finishing my tour of duty in the HFAC (building for music, art and theatre students at BYU). I did love my course of study and the music making, but it was bittersweet; I swore that I would not get another degree in music (ha). Yet it was comforting to realize just how different I was from most of the other students that studied there. I found 2 other "normal" music major girls who liked working out and listening to hip-hop, and though we were ostracized a bit for NOT breaking forth publicly into song or soliloquy whenever the impulse hit us (oh, and was it ever hard to kick against those pricks!), we had a great time making fun of all of them while we were at our kickboxing class, extolling the virtues of A Tribe Called Quest and debating whether 2Pac really were alive or dead.

I remember the reactions I'd get when I told people I was a music major. There was definitely a social stigma attached to that, and not an entirely positive one: though people kinda admired you---for your talent, for your dedication to an art that would most likely not financially pay you back---they secretly thought you were slightly insane. (kind of similar to my friends who have to introduce themselves as therapists, they say there's one of two reactions: people clam up, or they launch into a confession of every dyfunctional thought they ever had about their mother.) Even now, when people ask me what I studied in college, and I tell them that I was a music major, after a short pause I often add, "Oh, but I was normal." And they laugh! They know that I know what they were thinking all along. Which brings up another point: are musicians crazy as part of some self-fulfilling prophecy that society has projected onto them?

There's a Seinfeld episode in which a reference is made to a musician who went crazy because he kept playing a certain note over and over. Actually, I'm pretty sure that that particular musician went loco from having untreated syphilis (I knew that masters degree would come in handy someday), but. . . I might be in trouble if the proposed hypothesis that repeated exposure to specific auditory stimuli drives one to lunacy happens to be correct. Do you know how many hundreds of times I have listened to certain songs, over and over and over again (i.e., Sigur Ros' Untitled #8, My Bloody Valentine's Sometimes, Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place and The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows)? It might also depend on if this composer liked this note and was obsessed with it, or if he couldn't stand it and it kept him singing all the way the the asylum. I, for one, happen to LOVE these songs, so if repeated listening happens to land me into a straight jacket and padded cell, at least I will be one happy loon.

Let's go back to The Stripes' drummer Meg White. Okay, the girl is a drummer. No melody. That could get perhaps get grating on the nerves after awhile. And though the girl may be cooler than cool and probably trying her darndest to do her best, she's no Neil Peart. And the problem is that everyone knows it. Not only to you have to live in the shadow of the amazing Jack White, you have to deal with the fact that everyone is always talking trash that you're a crappy drummer who can't keep a beat. Yeah, I might start to get a little anxious myself.

In conclusion, I've failed to prove anything. But since you're holding the gun to my head, I'll hop off the fence and take a side: I think music makes people crazy. It's this pursuit of beauty and perfection that you undertake and the closer you get to reaching it, the more you realize you can never attain it. Which, of course, leads to greater obsession, because nothing is more desirable to us than that which we cannot get. The pressure can be external, but I think the yearning for this music is largely an internal struggle and leads you along a disturbing path away from reality. I think I've escaped full blown craziness to a point because I have never let myself get fully immersed in the depths of artistic genius. I've walked up close to see my own distorted reflection in the pool and obviously didn't like it. And because of that, my music is probably not nearly as good, but people sure do enjoy being around me more and don't call me crazy. At least not to my face.