Last week, Guardian critics talked about the tracks of their tears. Then you lot joined in by listing the songs you play when you've been, you know, chopping onions ...
Add to our collaborative playlist
Last week, in the spirit of Nick Clegg's leaky-eyed relationship with music, we asked you to nominate songs that make you cry. More than a thousand readers suggested music that had them manning the emotional floodgates ? and what's interesting is the things you can learn about people when they tell you something so personal. Like, for one thing, reggae doesn't make Guardian readers cry.
A Spotify playlist was created so everyone who felt the urge could chuck their song into to this vast, bubbling broth of love and loss, hurt and exhilaration. Within this list was one solitary nomination ? for the brilliant Linton Kwesi Johnson track, Sonny's Lettah ? to cover half a century of dread-fuelled laments. Likewise, country music ? surely the most lachrymose musical genre ? was neglected, with only a couple of Emmylou Harris songs, Gram Parsons's $1,000 Wedding and a Dixie Chicks' track. What, no one nominated Gregory Isaacs's My Relationship, or the Stanley Brothers' White Dove? Well, no.
Of course, music needs an extra emotional connection to have a lasting effect. A sad song only becomes poignant when it reminds you of something, or someone, else. But when it does the effect can be uncomfortably real, like you've been physically struck.
SnoopDogStevens says, with a note of regret, that it's "horrible to daytrip in the genuine sadness at a close family friend's funeral but Olympian by Gene was like a punch in the solar plexus that day. RIP." Lunabell, writing about Abba's underrated 1982 blub-fest Slipping Through My Fingers, said: "The first time I heard it I was just about to give birth to my youngest child, and the lyrics punched me in the heart."
At other times that effect can make you angry. Adlad writes beautifully of a deeply loved uncle broken by drink and gambling and how he can't hear the Cars' Drive without remembering the man he worked with on Live Aid day. "The faux-emotional hit," he says, "forcing your deepest depths open without demanding anything from you that might equate to understanding or analysis, just the pornography of that pairing of bland soft-rock with that horror."
But for most people who contributed, those painful memories are among the best. So flatshare favourites Radiohead and super-goth Robert Smith (six for the Cure, one for his 80s side-project, the Glove) come in first, each having seven songs guaranteed to make someone well up. The benighted late-60s/early-70s troubadours (Neil, Joni, Jackson, Waits) all do well, while the National, Elbow, Bon Iver and LCD Soundsystem keep things current. Four Tet had more than the Four Tops and Cat Power had more than Cat Stevens, both of which bode well.
I would like to thank Swanriverdaisy for being the only reader to mention Red House Painters, a band who never fail to give activate my tearducts (though my money's on the song before yours on that album, Grace Cathedral Park).
And finally, to Raford0 who chose Deep Purple's When a Blind Man Cries? That really had better be an amazing story.
You can still add to our collaborative playlist here
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/11/guardian-readers-songs-cry
No comments:
Post a Comment