Sunday, December 04, 2005
It's brilliant, being depressed...
"It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like."Yes. Exactly. What genius!
- Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
I loved reading High Fidelity (by Nick Hornby). So funny, and so recognisable. A beautiful bite of witty pop that you can skip through effortlessly, although it could be deep if that's what you really wanted. Needless to say, I enjoyed it much more than the movie.
And it asks the questions I ought to be asking myself:
"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.Just recently, Phoenix and I were talking about how all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, we were both "down." Not depressed exactly, but certainly not happy. At first we thought maybe it was the planets or something equally esoteric.
Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
- Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
Then I mentioned that I had been listening to James Blunt almost exclusively for the past couple of weeks. "Me too!" says Phoneix. Although she has a better excuse than me, she works in retail and is forced to listen to whatever the company decides to indoctrinate consumers with, which is apparently James Blunt at the moment.
And so we got to thinking: were we miserable because of the music?
And then I read High Fidelity.
And then I took James Blunt out of my cd player and removed him from my playlists, replacing "High" with "Paradise City" and "Beautiful" with "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Goodbye My Lover" with "Ooh La La."
And then I felt better.
And then I felt bored.
// posted by suze @ 3:13 PM 
