(no subject)

oh god oh god the world is such a horrible place. some people are so horrible. how can anyone stand it?

but i'm doing my taxes and trying not to think about it.

now that I finished saving all my CDs as MP3 files, it occurred to me to do the same thing for my audio cassettes. maybe later somewhen.

(no subject)

maybe the people who made some of this music are horrible people. maybe if they were having a party and playing their music, they wouldn't want me there enjoying the music with them. maybe they'd want to rape me or stone me to death or keep me from going out in public without a male overseer and without being covered in a hijab. maybe they're the kind of people who torture animals for fun. maybe they're the kind of people who keep their dogs chained up in the backyard their whole lives.

maybe the slight aura of enjoyment that one gets into while listening to nice music is a fantasy. Yes, it is. the real people who made the music aren't necessarily anything like you vaguely imagine them to be while you're bopping along to the beat. the lyrics sometimes aren't even vaguely like you imagine them to be. it shouldn't make a difference though. there's nothing wrong with enjoying the music, as long as you can keep your vague enjoyment untouched by any unpleasant information.

it seems i'm procrastinating again. why does doing taxes always have this effect on me?

music and mental associations

Then there's the possibility that the people who made the music aren't horrible, but that they experienced horrible things themselves. The songs might even be about horrible things that they experienced, or which other people experienced.

I have one CD, Balkans without Borders, the profits of which were to benefit Doctors Without Borders. I've never been able to look at the CD cover without thinking about the Balkan wars and the atrocities that happened in those wars. Therefore I've never been able to enjoy the music on that CD much. Now that the songs are separate MP3 files mixed in with 4400 other songs from my collection, and where I might hear them play in shuffle mode without thinking about or realizing which CD it came from, I might be able to enjoy them.

I had another CD which I finally decided to get rid of. It had electronic music mixed with Jewish liturgical singing. But some of the songs also had voice overlays of people talking about the Holocaust. It's hard enough for me to hear traditional Jewish or Yiddish music (which I once enjoyed), without automatically thinking about the Holocaust. With that CD, there was no way I could enjoy the music.

When I was in high school, I sometimes listened to an Armenian radio show. I liked that music too. But they sometimes talked about the Armenian genocide, or maybe I read about that elsewhere, and later on it became hard for me to enjoy Armenian music, because it makes me think about genocide.