What Makes You Think You're The One
Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 01:54PM What makes you think you're the one
Who can laugh without crying?
What makes you think you're the one
Who can live without dying?– Fleetwood Mac
I've been going through a phase recently of listening to an obnoxious amount of music from the seventies. Not my usual Big Star or T Rex, but the stuff I never even really liked when I was a teenager, the stuff we ignored on the radio in the drive thru beer place, the stuff that our science teachers performed in the talent show when they were trying to relive their youth and we just thought they were being lame*. (My ever-growing Todd Rundgren record collection — now up to 9? — can be blamed, maybe the endless number of Carole King albums we inherited with the record player as well.) This, much to my surprise, and much to the dismay of my husband, has included a great deal of Fleetwood Mac.
I'm working my way through their back catalog, and today I'm up to Tusk. When "What Makes You Think You're The One" came on, my ears pricked up. This particular song is nowhere in the running to be a favorite (my, Mick Fleetwood, why so angry at Lindsey Buckingham?), but as I was listening, those lyrics hit me. A slap on the arm — listen up.
I'm guilty of those things. In so many ways. I deign to think I'm invincible. That I'm somehow immune to physics or depression or death.
But I'm not immune to any of it.
I know this is a breakup song. (I also know, thanks to my recent seventies research**, that pretty much every song Fleetwood Mac ever wrote was a breakup song.) But give me the benefit of a little free interpretation, because at this moment, to me, it means something entirely different.
And then the lyrics, in their strange repetitive Lindsey Buckingham way that I'm still trying to deconstruct, came to their point:
Everything you do has been done
And this won't last forever
Wow. Guys, Lindsey Buckingham is right.
These things we do, as innovative as we may think we're being, have all been done by someone else, whether we know it now or ten years from now. Even this realization has been had before, by someone else going through their own whatever, wherever, whenever. As hard as it can be to come to terms with it, I think we need to remember that everything is temporary, and not always as important as we sometimes make it out to be.
And most imporantly: the world does not revolve around us. ANY of us. Me me me included.
I've been thinking a lot (again) about the overcrowding of the internet, how so much of what's out there is just copy-and-paste, the same emotions thrown out by similar-minded people, with similar backgrounds, elbowing each other, all aching to be heard. And how I'm no better than the rest of them. While I'm the first to praise the internet for letting voices be heard, and acknowledging that there are many voices I'm so glad I've heard, I'm wondering if I'm becoming too reliant on needing to be heard, on making a sound when I fall in the woods. J has been good about reminding me before: sometimes it's okay to just live without documenting.
(I don't know why it took a lyric by Lindsey Buckingham to drive home what my husband has been telling me for years, but there you go.)
I'm not about to put duct-tape over my mouth, tear down this site and spend solitary, silent weeks at a monastery, but I am about to start thinking more carefully about what is necessary to put out there, reevaluating (again) what I'm adding to the conversation.*** Just slow it down a little bit. Because this won't last forever. This was a much-needed (curly-haired, bell-bottomed, gravelly-voiced) wake-up call.
And now I'm off to listen to "Gypsy" for the Way-Too-Many-nth time.
*And then years later we would have a beer with them and realize we were the ones being lame.
**Something else I've noticed is that the first comment on every YouTube video from the seventies is inevitably about how the music back then had so much more substance than what is out there today, how everyone today is talentless, how things were so much better then.
***Blogging about not blogging as much? Check.
© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.
writing
Reader Comments (5)
grrrrrr
Sometimes it's okay to just live without documenting - yes, yes, yes. Like I remind myself sometimes, put the camera down, go play.
You keep writing and we (the collective mostly faceless masses on the other side of your screen) will keep reading. Never second guess your personal perspective, that's one thing no one else can ever have.
Good point about personal perspective, BJB. I need to remember that too. I don't think I'll ever stop writing; it's more about what I decide to share publicly, making sure it represents my perspective and is worth putting out there in the world. As long as I'm not putting out more than people have a capacity (or need) to take in, I think we'll all be okay.
And now you're back to the Velvet Underground