The story of my relationship with music starts with the fact that I did not have the most musical upbringing. Alas, it's impossible to not have some exposure to music; I was primarily exposed when I was younger to either the worst sort of music that my home country of Algeria has to offer, rai, a once noble traditional style of music now mutated beyond recognition from it's original, beautiful form that spoke to our culture, instead reflecting.. very little, in truth. It was a hard pill to swallow and something I did not get over in order to be able to appreciate my country's music at all for many years, something that forced me to go out of my way to dig and something that irritates me still on the day to day because the people around me seem to think what this music has become, a hedonistic joke of obnoxious high pitched synths combined nonsensically with percussion entirely unbefitting of it, singers who's singing is apparently so atrocious they need to be coated in seventeen layers of autotune just to be bearable and yet all it does is mutate them into robot AND NOT IN THE INTERESTING DAFT PUNK KIND OF WAY, is actually worth their time, which in turn often made me think that they weren't worth my time.
Alas, there was one saving grace, and that was my eldest brother. For the record, the man is not the most open-minded about music; his taste, while slightly more expansive than the other lot, was and is still quite irritatingly closed. Nevertheless, he was open to something a lot of others around me were not: rock music. He was my introduction specifically to a few bands: Pink Floyd, who I would eventually take on to a greater extent than he (or most people) ever did, System Of A Down, Linkin Park, Queen, Dire Straits. An odd combination for sure, but one that hardwired my brain towards greater appreciation that I would not have ever been capable of otherwise. Queen, in particular, played a big part for me early on, a band that I think everyone on some level likes, even if they are nowhere near as prolific in terms of the quality of their mainline studio records. What they were was a band that simultaneously had mass appeal and enough talent to pump out a good few one of a kind songs that were incredibly progressive for their time. It is rather disappointing to me that Queen, as time went on, found it difficult to fully embrace their more progressive side, as can be seen on songs such as Innuendo, but it was still very eye-opening for me, as Bohemian Rhapsody is for everyone who encounters it initially, I feel.
When I was 15 years old, I was rather lost. I did not know who I was in this world, having had a crisis of faith and still not having found my convictions. I was aching for some sort of way to make the world clearer. I always had a relationship with art on some level; my first love was probably video games in this regard, but I only got into music in partiuclar around that time. I had a friend who was very into indie and psychedleic primarily, to my knowledge at least at the time (he also was quite knowledgeable on jazz, but that's a story for later). One day, I asked him for music recommendations, and he pointed me specifically to Pink Floyd, and my attention especially was gripped on The Wall. It was the first album I ever listened to front to back, and later on I expanded out to that band's other work on my own terms, first their 70s records and in time everything they ever made, and I was well and truly hooked. To this day, Wish You Were Here remains a candidate for my favourite album of all time even though I've listened to Pink Floyd so much that much of the novelty has been a little lost and I find other things more interesting. Around a year later and some exposure to other bands (King Crimson who I grew a massive love for as well, Muse who's early work I still appreciate, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard also) I decided I wanted to full steam ahead into the world of music, wanting to find something greater than I'd been able to access prior, something transformational and that which I could both spend my time on and make my life better. Though many deeply unexpected developments have occured since then, I think it is rather inarguable that I got exactly what I wished for.
My preferences in music go to many places, but I have for years now held a very deep love of jazz which is a genre I identify with deeply and have sunk hundreds of hours into by now. Similar things can be said for classical and post-punk (more so on the gothic end.. I have a shrine dedicated specifically to Robert Smith in my house), and in time I got into many other things that I am sure I will elaborate on here. Japanese jazz in particular, the less known avant-garde side of it, has been a big point of interest for me for quite a while now, as are there very interesting things occuring in certain areas of contemporary classical music and also in the underground of rap, which with time is becoming less and less of an underground at all even with the very problematic label that that is (not so underground if you can just pull it up on a streaming platform or download it off the internet, is it?). I am not beyond the more popular indie stuff by any measure and I indulge in my fair share of it, I love Geese and Cameron Winter as much as the next guy.. more, actually. I have a very long love affair with soul and funk, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye having illuminated the darkest parts of my life in ways that are irrevocable in their beauty, for, to paraphrase Stevie, I am loved by somebody, and that is God.
Which leads me to another point.. The inherent spirituality of art, and in particular music. In the first chapter of Either/or, Søren Kierkegaard elaborates on a perceived quality of music, the fact that it is capable of accessing what he refers to as "the sensuous" more readily than other artforms. Now, this is a contentious claim and Kierkegaard's aesthetics (or rather, those of "A", the writer of the first part, the Either in Either/or) have many flaws, but I do think ther eis some merit to this idea on some level, that music in comparison to other mediums is itself more immediate, capable of evoking a more primal reaction to itself than certainly literature could in his day, though he did not live long enough to witness the advent of cinema for him to elaborate on it's connection to this. There is, at the core of music, a beating heart of immense love characterised in the visceral nature of the reaction of the listener; the way in which a song's progression may catch one off guard in incredible ways, the way in which groove can sway one to move to with the beat in frenzy, the way in which melody swells hearts and turns asunder the stability therein, the earthquake like nature. Music, in all of it's forms, taps into this, it's various expressions finding different ways of floating to the same existential truth, that art itself is capable of tapping in to the core of reality.
There is, on some level, some power, like that of Percy Shelley's Hymn To Intellectual Beauty, that which guides the rhythms of power and that which lightens the dark inside each and every last human soul. It is that power that I have invariably devoted myself to, that which is impossible to refute, that which lies at the core of all there is.. which I will elaborate on in great length elsewhere, more than likely.
Here, one will find the essays and ramblings I write about music in particular. Specific album reviews, thought pieces on certain genres or scenes or what have you about all things musical will go here, at the bottom.