The beat goes awnnnn...

Melody and I have been doing some serious wrestling lately. Last night some things came out that she got upset by (mostly that I distrust her reliance on homeopathic medicine) and we had a long talk that ended in me having to hang up on her, lest I say things that I really didn't mean. Frustration does that to me. I am starting to probe her limits of "understand what I mean, not what I say." Having that skill, or lacking it, has been the critical element in every successful relationship I've ever had. My ex-wife tended to be able to hear past the lame words I used and hear what I meant, unless she chose not to and chose to focus on the actual words. Sometimes, Penny focused way too much on the words and didn't hear what I meant. My long-ago housemate/onetime fiancee, Lynne, was actually quite good at hearing what I meant.

Melody's skills at this are... uncertain right now. I want for her to understand without my having to always find precisely the right word, for sometimes the right word escapes my grip and rolls under the far side of the bed, where I can't reach it.

Melody can sometimes, without meaning to, be an incredible musical snob. Having been a classical musician for a very large portion of my life, I've seen more than a few of these sorts of people, and they've always appalled me with their certainty that classical music -- and often, only the music they themselves prefer -- has The One True Meaning, and all else is crap.

I stopped being like that in 1980. I was 17. Stopped listening only to classical music (which I had never truly done anyway -- the first three LPs I ever bought were the New York Philharmonic recording of "An American In Paris," the Chad Mitchell Trio's 1961 LP Mighty Day On Campus, and the soundtrack to West Side Story) and started listening to... everything. The Doors. Pink Floyd. Fifties cool jazz. Hardcore Chicago electric blues.

Melody... doesn't. Her CD collection contains a predictable mix of operas she likes, inoffensive new-age stuff, and a few sort of middlin' CDs by people like Billy Joel. We were out driving the other day and during the 45 minutes I wanted to listen to a broadcast on WAMU of old-time country and honky-tonk sort of music (real country, doesn't sound much like the bulk of Nashville stuff now) she was putting off waves that said, "I'm tolerating this."

On a given day, I'll listen to spoken-word recordings of Henry Rollins, listen to Tool, listen to Woody Herman and Lenny Tristano, then turn around and pull out old Patsy Cline and Bill Anderson stuff and top it off with Above The Law and some old-skool rappers like Cool J. And I don't try to compare or rationalize or excuse any of it. I like any music that's good. And my definition of "good" has almost no preconceived limits, except one: it needs to be personal, connected to a person. Some human putting themselves out there on the groove.

Much classical music is way too much about trying to interpret the wishes of someone long-dead, who was saying things that have been said much more recently and in much more personal ways.