The Paradox of Rock: A Decade of Ignorance and Bliss

by RDV

Anthony deCurtis said that a good single sounds familiar the first time you hear it and sounds brand new after hearing it for many years.Nearly 11 years ago my sisters and I pledged loyalty to a genre that none of us had any clear understanding of. When grunge music still made it on top of the charts and the mound of Kurt Cobain was still fresh, the oversized JVC boom box in our room rarely hit the switch off. If the music video of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ were realistic it wouldn’t have seemed over the top or funny when Caulkin turned the volume dial to ‘ARE YOU NUTS?’, the one that went after ‘very loud’. But we did that because we were nuts for ‘rock’ music back then. Nuts enough not to get enough of maximum volume that we would, three of us, literally stick one ear to the speaker so we could send the optimum audio waves through our eardrums, so it would travel thence to rest ultimately in the sanctuary of our think tank, so that many years later we would remember how good Van Halen sounded, not to mention how cool. Even if that meant another house rule wrangling with our mom.We discovered ‘rock’, in its minimal sense not through Metallica’s ‘Unforgiven’, not even through Rolling Stones despite my dad’s prejudice to them or the over the edge Beatles, but through Steve Tyler and Joe Perry and their 1994 single ‘Amazing.’ It was a single that would shame the whole lot of solo singers because of the powerful vocals; more importantly, it was one that obscured the demarcation between mellow and punk. Hence, a hi-breed that contains two conflicting genres sprinkled with an outstanding element of bravery. Doubtless it sounded familiar because of the high pitch and the well known voice and the intense instrumentals. But I was never sure whether it would sound new to me after long nostalgic years; and even ashamed to admit that I thought I could never be.People around here started to rumor about a petty habit; one they named The Last Song Syndrome, whatever that meant. It didn’t take long for me to discover that I always suffered from it; I would catch myself crooning in undertone the first stanza of ‘Selling the Drama’ over and over again to the point of running full circle with the lyrics, just as I did with ‘All I Want’, ‘Black Hole Sun’, ‘Not Enough Time’, ‘Champagne Supernova’, ‘Song 2’ and so on. It was the state of contamination with no serious effect whatsoever; I thought that I did that only because I love those singles, purely on that basis, that is; and without knowing that they could’ve been what critics claim to be ‘great singles’ like Aerosmith’s ‘Amazing’. Naturally, I learned that a subconscious love for the music wasn’t all there was to it.They likewise brought the familiarity one feels in a reunion which would overwhelm the uncertainty of a first time encounter. I sang their lines again and again because I found easiness in them and in the notes they follow through, because they were easy to remember, in other words unforgettable. It wasn’t because music channels and radio stations always aired them; didn’t the minority rock fans always complain of the scarcity of rock radio stations and the domination of pop music? They did; we did. But we continue to insist on our indulgence in rock by humming the music by ourselves because it is just that…always familiar to us, always hanging in the space inside our heads and finding their way to our throats to satiate what our undernourished ears are dying to hear, even if it’s the poor imitation of the melody.Up to now I am never rid of the infamous Last Song Syndrome and am never pissed off by it. 11 years have drifted since I heard ‘Amazing’, when my dad brought the album ‘Get a Grip’ from Diego Garcia. 11 years of Ignorance, of making my own various versions out of the great track, and of not knowing that the single, all this time, sounds not only familiar but also still fresh and new to us as a stolen first kiss is to a virgin. It is this touch of novelty that makes me want to sing it again and again even to the decades afterwards, without, mark me, ever getting tired of it. We want it because it is new, because we always want new things, and if we truly want it; we would instinctively make ourselves familiar to it by hook or by crook, though ironically, we can never spiritually get enough of it unlike the physical satisfaction one gets from delicacies; because a great single will go on sounding like a newfangled chime, unchanging and as immutable as the laws. Hence, the symptoms of LSS. Now I wonder, will I ever get sick of my own voice singing Aerosmith, Live, or Blind Melon? Nah. Nobody gets sick of something that is new, inimitable, and immortal like rock.