Feelin Dat

Songs always seem to me material in some way, with distinct shapes, densities, sizes -- and they come at me with the physical fullness of objects, grooved or grainy or melting slowly like ice in my throat and spreading into my arteries; they possess me.  Maybe then it sounds like I’m talking about music as a spiritual thing, something that “fills my soul,” but I mean more than that.  I mean it fills my physical body.  If it’s good music, I'm completely replaced by it: its backbeats replace my heartbeat, its harmonic flows replace my blood flow, my respiratory system is coordinated or disjunct to the exact degree the music is (un) measured.

I guess, if we're being really technical, music does have a sonar shape, actual vibrations that affect and are affected by objects -- thus qualifying music as a real part of the material realm.  But I think we tend to vastly underestimate music’s physical affectivities.  Like, most of the songs on Radiohead’s King of Limbs album can (without the aid of any drugs) exactly reproduce in you the experience of being high – that strange lightness of limbs, exhaustion in your diaphragm, red coals in your groin, that spiraling mind, fluidity of thought, the sense that you are a body both teeming and emptied, an easy jaw and cumbersome lips, loose and roving shoulders that you know belong somewhere.