Music, Youth and Beauty

LJ posted about his plans to attend the Radiohead concert in May where he’ll be surrounded by “today’s youth and all that that implies”, so I'll share my recent concert experience.

I’ve completely given up paying attention to current music, but a couple years ago my husband happened upon a band called The Dropkick Murphys, a sort-of-punk band that has a bagpipe player. They’re from Boston and have a working-class ethos to some of their lyrics, like this from "The Worker's Song" on the album Blackout:

Worker's Song (Handful of Earth), written by Ed Pickford
This one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain, to earn your pay
For centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead.

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with slide rule and stopwatch, our pride they have robbed

(chorus) We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie in the sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about.

And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given the gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth

And all of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plow since time first began
And always expected to carry the can.

We felt pretty hip that we could still fall in love with music that the kids are listening to. When the Murphys came to town a few months ago we went to see them. It was our first concert in, oh, 15-20 years. Sure, we were the only people older than 30 and the only people without tattoos, but I wasn’t fazed by that. We’re young at heart, after all. We enjoyed two warm-up bands, but then the Murphys started playing and I felt as old as I am. It was LOUD beyond any loud I’d ever heard at a concert before. Worse than the decibel level, though, was that it was undifferentiated unmitigated blaring noise with no hint of a melody or chords or even rhythm. I was surprised and disappointed because their recorded music has great melodies. We lasted through two “songs” before we gave up and left, laughing at ourselves for having been so mistaken.

But we did get a lot of pleasure out of the evening. I had a great time watching the kids. They were just so beautiful to me. They had that fabulous lightness of being of youth. Of course, the lightness is partly physical; they have yet to gain weight at the rate of one pound a year over decades. But the lightness is also spiritual; they don’t have responsibilities; they haven’t failed at anything big yet; they haven’t disappointed anyone in any significant way; they haven’t experienced much loss.

I had just had a conversation the day before the concert with someone who assessed beauty based on particular facial features or proportions, and I kept thinking as I watched the kids that you’d miss out on so much beauty if you were hunting through the crowd for those particular qualities.