What came first, the music or the misery?

Some of my favorite songs: 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' by Neil Young; 'Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me' by the Smiths; 'Call Me' by Aretha Franklin; 'I Don't Want to Talk About It' by anybody. And then there's 'Love Hurts' and 'When Love Breaks Down' and 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart' and 'The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness' and 'She's Gone' and 'I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself 'and... some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

High Fidelity, c'est plutôt l'an passé que j'en citais des passages ici.

Et à vrai dire, je conservais cet extrait pour appuyer le schéma complexe du "conditionnement romantique négatif" extrait de la BD Pinkerton. (Sauf que voilà, le moment venu, j'ai oublié ^_^)

Definitive top five

I call Caroline the next morning. She's not there. I leave a message. She doesn't call back. I ring again. I leave another message. It's getting kind of embarrassing, but there's no way "Let's Get It On" isn't going in that top five. The third time I try I get through to her, and she sounds embarrassed but apologetic, and when she realizes that I'm only calling to change the list she relaxes.

'OK. Definitive top five. Number one, "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye. Number two, "This Is the House That Jack Built" by Aretha Franklin. Number three, "Back in the USA" by Chuck Berry. Number four, "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" by the Clash. And the last one, last but not least, ha ha, "So Tired of Being Alone" by Al Green.'

'I can't change it again, you know. That's it.'

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

When you're with someone permanently

De l'un des pièges de la vie commune :

Later [...], I see a woman on her own, Saturday-nightsmart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed . . . what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of thier way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

Writing my own autobiography

J'ai déjà évoqué dans ces colonnes (à travers Georges Perec et mon expérience propre) la problématique de l'ordre de classement d'une bibliothèque ou discothèque.

Cette problématique touche également Rob Gordon, dans High Fidelity :

Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don't know, Wham!, or somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met. Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen. I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there; and when I've finished, I'm flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am. I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to 'Sexual Healing' all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me — or, at the very least, a doctor of Flemingology — to know how to find any of them. If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don't really want to go into. Well, you don't know any of that, so you're knackered, really, aren't you? You'd have to ask me to dig it out for you, and for some reason I find this enormously comforting.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

John Peel en short

He thinks and talks in tens and fives

He talks a lot about music, but also a lot about books [...] and films, and women. [...]. But his conversation is simply enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too. And he makes us write lists as well, all the time: “OK, guys. Top five Dustin Hoffman films.” Or guitar solos, or records made by blind musicians, or Gerry and Sylvia Anderson shows (“I don’t believe you’ve got Captain Scarlet at number one, Dick. The guy was immortal! What’s fun about that?”), or sweets that come in jars (“If either of you have got Rhubarb and Custard in the top five, I’m resigning now.”).

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

A whole load of averageness

I'm OK-looking ; [...] I'm average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair. I keep myself clean, wear jeans and T-shirts and a leather jacket more or less all the time apart from in the summer, when I leave the leather jacket at home. I vote Labour. I have a pile of classic comedy videos — Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Cheers, and so on. I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones.

My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame. I'd say that there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don't do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)

Je n'avais jamais lu "High Fidelity". C'est chose faite, depuis le printemps dernier. Et ce sera le prochain livre que je couvrirai sur ce blog.