CAN THE MUSIC SAVE YOUR MORTAL SOUL?

EddieSki -- Music, opinion, and bullshit...

Keep on keeping on until you're gone...

Friday, June 26, 2009

The following is from Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live. I absolutely love his writing. He's a semi-self-loathing, sarcastic, hilarious asshole. But he is extremely contemplative about life and music and he doesn't take himself too seriously. The book is about his journey across the United States to find a bunch of different places where musicians have died.

I was going to post a quote or two about the book at some point because its just so freakin' awesome, but now I think is a good time. I don't even think I need to go on and on explaining to you what it means because it speaks for itself. By all means let me know what you think because this is a great topic.

Here we go:

Death is a part of life. Generally, its the shortest part of life, usually occurring near the end. However, this is not necessarily true for rock stars; sometimes rock stars don't start living until they die. I want to understand why that is.

Dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance.

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If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.

Anytime I'm in a foreign place with lots of strangers who all share an identical (yet completely unrelated) purpose, I start to think I am in purgatory. For as long as I can remember, I've had this theory, because life on Earth seems to have all the purgatorial qualities that were once described to me by nuns.

It's almost like we're all Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but nobody on "earth" has figured it out yet, even though it will suddenly seem obvious in the end. Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence; for example, infants who die from SIDS were actually great people when they were alive "for real", so they get to go to heaven after a mere five minutes here in purgatory...

This becomes increasingly clear in an airport. It is like a warehouse full of dead people rushing around from gate to gate to gate that they will, if they are lucky, die in a plane crash and leave the purgatory hell that is the airport.

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It's normal for someone's death to change how we recall what a celebrity was like, but the situation with [Kurt] Cobain is more complex; this is a situation in which a celebrity died, and many private citizens -- including countless individuals who were wholly unconnected to Kurt or Seattle or grunge or even popular music -- suddenly chose to remember themselves in a completely different way. Kurt Cobain didn't need to die in order to get integrity, because he already had it. However, his dying seemed to give total strangers a sense of integrity they had never wanted while he was alive.

And to answer that question as well, because I do the same thing Chuck does when I'm on an airplane:

If I could choose the song I am listen to when I die (assuming I had the ability to choose what I was listening to and the time it would take for me to die would be precisely 3 minutes and 14 seconds) it would be "Santa Monica" by Everclear.

Labels: Everclear - Santa Monica, Gabe Dixon Band - Till You're Gone

Entry by EddieSki

Comments - 1

Since Friday, June 26, 2009

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CAN THE MUSIC SAVE YOUR MORTAL SOUL?

EddieSki -- Music, opinion, and bullshit...

Keep on keeping on until you're gone...

Friday, June 26, 2009

Comments - 1

Since Friday, June 26, 2009

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