Turn up, Tune out.
I wrote this as a free write assignment for Ap English. Random.
I want to be able to forget all aspects of time. I want to lose myself. I want to exist. I want to embody love. I want so much. All my dreams, memories, and experiences occupy my time, always yelling at me and demanding for attention. It is at concerts, through music, that one can completely forget everything and loose themselves in a melody of truth. As each cord of the bass guitar is plucked, my senses are heightened, my feet itching to increase their mileage, and I'm taking deep breaths. I'm ready to run.
A chorus of people pushes up towards the stage, body touching body. The crowd is one big wave of heat, colliding and crashing into me. I’m standing in a crowded room, seeing faces that will soon blur into colors when I look back and try to remember the event. I’m intimately close with people I don’t know, allowing them into my personal bubble- a space not even some of my closest friends are allowed to enter. Everything about concerts is one big contradiction. Though the tickets have been sold, and space has been maxed out, the lights go on, the drummer starts smashing wood unto plastic, and I am alone.
Blood is replaced by beats, and music starts pumping through my veins. The speakers lie to the left of my ear, two inches of air separating me from them. My insides begin to vibrate. The chorus is causing my stomach to shake and tremble as the reverberating harmony pushes at my rib cage, rattling my mind and causing my peripheral line of vision to blur. With each loud crash of symbols, and angst ridden line of the song is sung, thoughts are one by one replaced with the lead singer’s voice. This continues until I can no longer decipher my own memory from a poetic line.
The ground is wavering from the impact of thousands of feet swaying and stepping, making it appear the ground might fall from under my very feet. At this moment, I take flight. It’s not an illusion, oh no. It is truth. My mind defies gravity as it soars through thought after though, memory after memory and emotion after emotion until I can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Did that really happen? Does it matter? Times stops, the once seemingly importance of having life figured out leaves. I’m replaced with reassurance and hope whilst watching hand attack cord, lips open and close, and sweat bead down the bodies of those around me.
Music is not a form of entertainment. Music is a therapy. It is not about the genre, or who is singing it, but fairly, how it moves you. Music is meant to make you feel everything at once, and yet, nothing at all. It is like George Orwell’s interesting idea of doublethink. Doublethink is the talent of holding two contradictory thoughts in one’s mind at the same time. At concerts, through music, this is achieved. The stress of doing life right and being perfect melts away until I simply exist. Just exist. All expectation is gone and I am.
