Like a Virgin
The Art of Listening for the Very First Time
Do you remember what you felt the first time you heard Sweet Child O’ Mine ?
Your reaction today is tainted by the song having been played a million times on the radio, dreadful cover versions in bars around the globe and your co-worker’s drunken rockstar attempt during your end-of-year karaoke night.
The reality of the matter is that like with most precious things in life, we fail to preserve intact that initial magical moment and carry it with us fresh throughout future incidences of the experience. The cyclical nature of fashion, music and art in general is such precisely because time serves both as cure and disease for renewing our emotional connection to that source.
When music touches the very essence of who you are, it provides a connection that has the power to not only persist, but to remain true and valuable despite our natural growth and change throughout our lives.
Artists like The Beatles are so influential and relevant because they excel in effectively capturing and distributing magic in a bottle. It doesn’t matter if you first encountered Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds in 1967 when it was first released or during a recent performance of Cirque du Soleil’s Love on the Las Vegas strip. The experience is so emotionally charged that it is bound to remain a cherished haven to retreat to time and time again.
So, is it all about nostalgia ? The answer is a resounding NO. During the past 2 years I’ve been revisiting a lot of the music that was close to my heart at various stages of my life and that for reasons I can’t quite recognize, slipped into a dormant coma within my musical self. A profound revelation came in the form of having one of those truly special moments with a new and emerging artist.
On a cold and rainy night, I was driving through the narrow roads of a country still quite foreign to me. I suddenly grew exasperated by the monumental shitfest pouring out of my speakers and from every top 40 station preset by my radio. An accidental hit of the scan button became the catalyst for claiming back my soul from the pits of despair.
An earth shattering snare drum and the heaviest bass guitar I’d ever heard was all it took. Out of the Black the debut single from the UK’s heaviest duo Royal Blood swept me over like a tidal wave. I was in an utter state of disbelief once the song ended. It was unexpected, it was neccessary, it was divine. I quickly realized I had just experienced one of those moments that come but a few times in your lifetime. The feeling of being completely blown away, of recognizing a piece of art that connects with every fiber of your being and ultimately makes you tangibly aware of the feeling we associate with being alive.
Once my soul had been kickstarted back to life, I wondered why it had been such a long time since I felt that way. I immediately started to go through songs/artists that I recalled had produced a similar impact on me in the past:
It was incredible to not only rekindle my love for these amazing songs/artists, but to awaken my soul to identify and appreciate those special elements in both old and new music.
It is blissfully rewarding to condition your mind & soul to experience all music as if it were the first time you were listening to it. In doing so, the cumulative experiences from those songs just add up to provide greater meaning to you without detracting from the possibility of creating new connections from the same source.
I am currently equally excited about the prospect of encountering new musical discoveries in both my archive of greatest hits and the up & coming giants in the making.
Give yourself the freedom to listen to anything and everything. Do it over and over again. Remind yourself of why you love the things you love while remaining open to getting swept off your feet by a new affair. Guns N’ Roses crafted one of the most iconic and memorable songs in the history of rock and roll, and after a life changing first half of the song, the band invited us to ponder with them the uncertainty of what lies ahead. “Where do we go now ?”
…Let’s keep finding out.
Rock and Roll Will Save Your Soul,
@RockSoulLife
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