Any time my girlfriend has to look through my carefully curated music library, she says, “why do you have so many sad songs!” And since it would only worry her to say “because nihilism clings to me like spiderwebs to a particularly bug-filled forest tree”, I tell her it’s because I’m from the South, which is more or less the same thing. Though trees, on average, are less likely to vote against their interests. Jokes!
Anyway, I do have sad songs because I tend towards sadness as a person, I suppose, or at least I tend towards processing what sadness I do experience via media of some kind. America is an optimistic country, overall, or at least Cultural America is - Hollywood, Sony Records, and the like. Being a woman, too, is to feel pressure to present happiness to the world. A sad face and dim outlook, however justified, has a good chance of being met with, “smile!” or “what’s wrong with you?”
What’s wrong with me? Here is an expansive handwave. Look around and you’ll see the spot where a homeless guy peed, or the homeless guy himself, doomed to die of exposure or hop a bus to Austin so he can be robbed where it’s warmer. Over there is an exploited child, down the street is someone whose 27-year-old partner just died of cancer. I’d say ‘too early’, but that should be self-evident, shouldn’t it? And all death is too early, except for people who want to die, and even then it’s too early for their loved ones. Oh, also, my country is bombing people like, every day. Etc. The list goes on. We have the problem of evil and we have the problem of randomness: bad things happen to good people, but bad people happen to good people, too. And good people happen to good people, because ‘good’ is relative. You know.
What’s wrong with me: there’s a lot of bad shit out there, and I still think, if I verbalize it instead of reading Marilynne Robinson or going to church or watching CNN, I still think that maybe my articulation will change something within me. Maybe I’ll be the person to reach out my hand and catch the problem of evil and squeeze it, like Play-Doh, into something my simple human brain can understand.
Maybe.
I am not personally a pessimist, but it’s hard some days to be an optimist. It’s like being the sky: the sun might always be shining, but some days the clouds come anyway. Some days I am less optimistic than others. Some days I am hopeless and consumed by grief. And on those days, when turning on the TV would get me a barrage of everything-is-awesome style nonsense, when even leaving my house would necessitate seeing advertisements telling me life is great, or will be if I spend a bit more money, I turn on my sad music.
For me the saddest of them is Emmylou. She personifies catharsis. When you listen to Heaven Ain’t Ready For You Yet, or Red Dirt Girl, you won’t be given an optimistic hook or soothing ending. Emmylou spills the sadness on the floor and then she doesn’t mop it up. It seeps into you, a complete experience. Here, the songs say, is where we live. Here is the topography of grief. It encompasses anger and pain and resignation, and it doesn’t tell you that it’ll be okay afterwards. And ultimately, that’s what makes me feel like it maybe will be okay after all.
It’s great in theory to be reminded that the deep darkness of grief or depression will inevitably eventually lift, but every time I’ve been in those canyons, the last thing I want to hear is “eventually you won’t feel that way!” My treacherous brain immediately turns that into a waiting game, and an anxiety game. What if nothing changes? What if things get worse somehow? What if things get better but I don’t? Etc. Sad music doesn’t involve itself with those questions. Sad music says only, “girl. I know.” And sometimes, that’s what I need. An aural hug, or an aural glass of Knob Creek, whatever.