BY ISMAIL AYDIN
ismail.aydin@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Hello music lovers – this will be a story told not with regular love, but with passionate love. What I mean by “music memoir” is associating music with the deepest experiences of life, and you may find some surprising resemblances waiting around the corner, or even feel like you’ve written this piece yourself.
Okay, after this introduction, we’re going to go back in time and see some galaxies; we’ll go to the negative universe if it exists, and if not, we’ll go to the sun. We’re also going to back to the day when someone named Sam was born – which happens to be the day when “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base was at the top of the UK Billboard chart. Yeah, this was before the Britpop era; the young Kurt Cobain’s grunge music was reverberating around the world, although the artist himself was in kind of a depression at the time. (Maybe?) To this day, Sam believes that Kurt Cobain’s soul came back to the world the day he, Sam, was born. So much energy connected to a day!
Anyway, Sam was born, and that newly born infant’s world started with music. The lullabies were the best. Since there was no Winamp player that could shut down the computer after you fell asleep, lullabies were really useful. The perfect sleep that would give him what it took for walking and growing – he had to get it. When our Sam connected that perfect sleep with the beautiful lullabies, these first melodies that came to him from the outside world began to rule his own little world.
As the years passed, the melodies he heard played an even greater role in Sam’s world. The first time he learned that music has its downside, too, he was horrified. Sam learned this the hard way – which was from Freddy Taif’s songs, with their deep cries. But he lived: what didn’t kill him, made him stronger. He was the weird kid who watched music channels instead of cartoons and had arguments with his friends. MTV USA was being illegally broadcast on some local frequencies; he had to watch. Sam played the best air guitar of any kid in the neighborhood, even though his vocals were terrible. Simple, huh? Simple, but he also tried to impress the girl next door with his recorder-playing skills. He was only able to play “Tachka Ways,” which was not that great a skill. He also had a friend named Elpierren, who communicated with girls through mainstream pop lyrics. It was weird, Sam now admits, but he still enjoys those moments. Sam was a male in a house that had lots of women around. However, he could not give Elpierren better advice than “Chocolate Love.”
At last the day came. Sam, poor boy, fell for a girl for the first time. For the first time, he thought that his heart was going to explode. Every stare, every gesture had a deep meaning. Every smile was a way to show feelings, and no look meant anything bad. Everyone says that a person’s age has a major influence on the music that he/she listens to. I disagree. At the age of 13, Sam was literally living with guitar riffs. So he was moaning beautiful rock melodies while thinking about this girl. She went to a different school, which was the main problem. But he lived. And he did what Paul McCartney advised, in his words to John Lennon’s son: “You have found her, now go and get her.”
Having gotten the girl, Sam felt like a man, instead of a boy, for the first time. He was really the man of a woman. Everything was fine until the break-up – the break-up, which made him listen to sad ballads by pop singers. Rock wasn’t enough for him now. Because he didn’t feel like destroying things; he was really sad. But he found a very substantial vein of songs in mainstream pop that corresponded with his feelings. No, even this cruel blow couldn’t take him down. He lived.
Here, I need to discuss Sam’s friends. I didn’t do it before because Sam really wasn’t aware of their significance until his first break-up. Friends had always been around, but they just came and went, he had thought. The support that awakened him to the importance of friendship and also rescued him from mainstream pop came from his best friend Fiero [sponsored by Fiero, in Bilkent’s A Building (not really)].
They laughed about the break-up. It was the best solution; a few jokes about girls were the remedy for his war wounds. His friend’s support revived him, and he survived until high school, when the music all went wrong. The lyrics, oh my God, the lyrics were in another language, and they were really fast.
Yeah, it’s time for Sam to watch the movie “8 Mile” (which he noted as a life-changing moment). Hat over hat over headphones, he was now listening to Eminem. “Till I Collapse” was just the thing for a destructive mood and “Mockingbird” was for grief. “Hey, it’s easy to record and create,” he thought blissfully, and ignorantly. This gave him the impetus to become an artist. He recorded his first rap songs; he even had a “featuring” appearance in a release by a rapper overseas. Beats from a friend, recording in a friend’s house and support from his best friend – and yes, our boy was singing. Creating songs and writing stuff impressed him, but he wanted to do more. He wanted to play the music, too. The piano, the mighty piano thus entered his world. He was listening to “American Idiot” by Green Day, as were all teenagers at the time; he also had friends who were listening to My Chemical Romance, so the first songs he tried playing were “Restless Heart Syndrome” and “Cancer.” Then the man changed his perspective on music. A new friend named Silas was there, teaching him Coldplay riffs – Coldplay before it was cool. “Viva la Vida” was the reasong* he made peace with his best friend Muerto.
And then the day came again. Love knocked on this teenager’s door, and this time he made a move with hope, not fear. He succeeded – as in “Nailed It” by Hank Moody – and then he lost out again – as in “So Long (As We Are Together)” by Atticus Fetch. But this chapter in his life really belonged to another friend: Ned. Music was all Sam had, and the burden of being left was too much to carry on his own two shoulders, so Ned lent him one. He taught him lots of new songs and lots of new ways to fail. He taught him that “all men must cry,” and that “rivers are flowing into the seas.” He gave Sam a playlist to listen to along the road of life and provided him with the essentials to survive at university; and Sam’s old mentor got him out of his comfort zone and forced him to stand on his own two feet. It was music that introduced Ned to Sam; and the “best music listener of the year” Grammy Award strengthened their connection. [“Rocket Man” by Elton John plays softly in background as Ned scene ends.]
It was while he was at university that Sam learned there exists a genre even worse than mainstream pop music: the electronic stuff, i.e., what some call techno or dubstep or whatever. Parties were given, and the songs played there were not his cup of tea. But the surroundings can affect a Grammy-winning listener, too. So he got into electronic music and was always having a laugh with his friends about songs that had oriental melodies and interesting vocals sung in an unknown language. Muerto was Sam’s main influence at this time. He danced like a ballet dancer and moved his head so rhythmically to the music, feeling all the vibe. But no matter how many EDM songs were popular back then, Sam wanted to express himself in the way that John Lennon found best: rock ’n’ roll. Like everyone who follows a particular cultural concept, he set out the meaning of rock ’n’ roll in his own mind, and wrote songs just to tell about himself and get the confidence he needed. That was the best way for him. Pop singer Sam Smith wasn’t enough for the world. So our Sam sailed for the port of Rock ’n’ Roll.
He lost friends, he was afraid of death, he missed the girl he loved – and he also felt like a superhero. It was the vibes of rock ’n’ roll that made him feel like that. I’m talking about a man who remembered his ex-girlfriends with songs, so music did a lot for him. Now, dear reader who has come this far, the reason I’ve told you this story is that music is revolution, and music is love, and music is the soundtrack of life – and music is also a lot of other things. If you’ve had friends like Sam, you’re lucky; if you still have them, you’re the luckiest.
In loving memory of a Friend…
*reasong: if the reason for something is a song, it’s called a “reasong.”
Note: The characters mentioned in this article are named after real people.