sacrificing music to temporary emotional distress - Music

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Gender: Female

Age: 40

I started writing this series where I look back at music I was listening to 5 years ago

https://ultradogme.com/2021/02/17/liste...r-5-years/

But this isn't just to self promote. In this article, I talk about something that I listened to in January 2016, and then abandoned pretty quickly after. I still think highly of it, but when I think about returning to it, I feel anxiousness and a lack of desire to start it up. My theory is that, at the time, I was stressed out about moving to a new apartment, and was using the music as a way to temporarily escape, block out the negative feelings. In doing so, I believe I created an association with the stress I was feeling at the time, and a version of the stress that the album allowed me to escape is what it provides me now.

So I'm curious, do any of you have that kind of experience? Where you sacrifice an album to get you through a rough patch, at the cost of the album carrying that rough patch in the future? I think it's sort of unfair to the artists, but it's one of the great things that music can offer a person. Though it does make it difficult to consider how the album stacks up, quality-wise.

Yann

Well, we all know that music is such a strong way to reminisce. Personally, entire decades of albums are happy mood associated. Other albums are associated with less happy times. For them I focus more on the musical quality. Sacrifice an album to a bad time? Not really. It's not that important. But I can tell how the quality of the present will impregnate the future memory I'll have of an album.

Streams

This is great! Following the blog for now but would appreciate a heads up whenever your new iterations publish.

While I think mood affects the listening experience, these aren't usually durable associations for me. During my darkest years yet I dug into a lot of the glitch, process music, slowcore, post rock, and free jazz that served as the foundation for my listening now. At the time, I consciously sought mostly non-lyrical music to feedback into my dissociative feelings; I still tend to avoid lyrics (sometimes even the voice) for the emotional baggage, but feel happy as a clam. A new low maybe. I still revisit a lot of that stuff but it has no negative associations for me today. But I do tend to avoid stuff like The Boxer and It's Blitz! because it reminds of an ex I'd rather not, for example.

I imagine the nature of these associations are more specific to the types of trauma and coping mechanisms of individuals. There's probably something at play with the fickleness of memory, our individual everchanging perception of palatability, and recordings (through which we usually engage music) as a lithified thing we can revisit in different states. Not to mention emotions are rarely so simple as pure terror or dismay.

Does this have anything to do with whether emotivity comes from the music, the listener, both, or neither?

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

I can't think of anything right now, but yeah there's definitely music that's great and has this odd negative emotion attached to it because of some memory it conjures. Typically it's a fleeting moment instead of "the album is now ruined" kinda thing.

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Gender: Female

Age: 40

Yann wrote:

Sacrifice an album to a bad time? Not really. It's not that important.

That's definitely fair, and honestly if I was aware I was doing it, I'd probably want to find a better way of handling my feelings. But I think it's way better than doing nothing, it was like I got a loan to tide me over until I could stand on my own two feet. I do think I would have had more of a struggle getting into the next stage of my life, had more stress through the process, without this kind of focused relief.

Streams wrote:

This is great! Following the blog for now but would appreciate a heads up whenever your new iterations publish.

Thanks! I'll be hopefully getting the next installments finalized a bit earlier in the month, will keep you posted.

Streams wrote:

While I think mood affects the listening experience, these aren't usually durable associations for me. During my darkest years yet I dug into a lot of the glitch, process music, slowcore, post rock, and free jazz that served as the foundation for my listening now. At the time, I consciously sought mostly non-lyrical music to feedback into my dissociative feelings; I still tend to avoid lyrics (sometimes even the voice) for the emotional baggage, but feel happy as a clam. A new low maybe. I still revisit a lot of that stuff but it has no negative associations for me today.

Definitely glad to hear that, I imagine there are a lot of gems there. A lot of my foundational musical experiences weren't exactly in the darkest times (nu-metal middle school years), but came after when I wasn't exactly out of the woods. But they also have none of the emotional baggage. Part of me think it has something to do with carrying them with me when I did get out, not relegating them solely to the rough times, so that they aren't subject to being colored by the feelings of a single place in my life. But also I'm thinking that the specific experience I'm talking about is a bit on the idiosyncratic side and highly related to habits developed with low dynamic range music in middle school times.

Streams wrote:

But I do tend to avoid stuff like The Boxer and It's Blitz! because it reminds of an ex I'd rather not, for example.

I do think this is like the same kind of brain activity, though much more reasonable. Like in the experience I describe I'm kind of avoiding something that I could in theory be dealing with, it's debatably foolish. But these connections to relationship, it's more tragic since there's nothing wrong with building this kind of association. Definitely unfortunate to see happen.

Streams wrote:

I imagine the nature of these associations are more specific to the types of trauma and coping mechanisms of individuals. There's probably something at play with the fickleness of memory, our individual everchanging perception of palatability, and recordings (through which we usually engage music) as a lithified thing we can revisit in different states. Not to mention emotions are rarely so simple as pure terror or dismay.

Does this have anything to do with whether emotivity comes from the music, the listener, both, or neither?

Yeah agreed on these issues making things a bit complicated. I think with this album, it was such a short window of assimilation, just the final 9 days of January, that it allows for the feelings associated with that time to take on qualities of a caricature.

And on that last question, my thoughts on that (that recorded music is a bucket that you pour your own feelings into, that the emotions the musician puts into their performance are significant in how the shape and are a major influence in what is reflected back to the listener, but at the end of the day it entirely depends on what the listener puts into the experience of listening) are connected to this kind of thinking, for sure. But I'm still not entirely sure how to make sense of it.

RoundTheBend wrote:

I can't think of anything right now, but yeah there's definitely music that's great and has this odd negative emotion attached to it because of some memory it conjures. Typically it's a fleeting moment instead of "the album is now ruined" kinda thing.

Oh yeah I can't think of too many that get this extreme, and a lot of the time it's more positive, like with Eric Copeland - Black Bubblegum, I have the memory of walking home from the bus in gorgeous weather when I was freshly moved into a new place, and the album can bring that feeling back to me but it's not something that dominates the listening experience.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Tap wrote:

Oh yeah I can't think of too many that get this extreme, and a lot of the time it's more positive, like with Eric Copeland - Black Bubblegum, I have the memory of walking home from the bus in gorgeous weather when I was freshly moved into a new place, and the album can bring that feeling back to me but it's not something that dominates the listening experience.

Yeah positive too for sure. Like Motown and a beautiful view of downtown LA after a rain (thank you old school KRTH, now forever ruined by Journey).

Or Vivaldi's Four Seasons... subway station in Munich and some college kids (but they were good!)

Weird... until I wrote it out, somehow both experiences that came to mind were some form of transportation combined with memorable moments.