July 9, 2010: Buck 65 - Phil

Buck 65 - Phil: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuBxKsKswI4

This song used to make me cry. It still does, but for different reasons.

My brother Colin used to drive me from our apartment to school even though we lived a 10 minute walk away. He always had a way of forcing music on me as long as he was driving and I was in the car; he introduced me to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon one night as we drove through the woods, through the black, and it remains one of the most terrifying and rewarding experiences of my life. And so during this time when he was driving me to school near every day he would put Buck 65’s Square on the CD player.

I hated it. It was dark and boring and foolish and I hated it. I would ask him to put something else on and he would tell me to give it a chance. Anyway, I suddenly realize this isn’t so much about my induction into Buck 65’s music - I at some point had a change and loved it. I find that with anything that wins me over to love I’m won over for life. Colin’s insistence on “giving it a chance,” a separate friend listening to Square at a party and seeing Buck 65 perform live combined to win me over.

So I learned to love. And then I heard “Phil” and it broke my heart.

I’m most always interested in the bildungsroman. And I use that term to denote all story forms, not just the novel. I tend to associate with characters whose existence always seems new and strange, who seem to be moving toward something great though they may not know what it is they’re moving toward, who are covered in flaw and wear it rightfully. This has to do, I’m sure, with growing up in a small town and having no interest in the factory. It comes from reading Beowulf at too young an age. It comes from meeting beautiful Jewish girls at 13 who cry because everyone at school calls them kikes. It comes from the CN Tower and the Atlantic Ocean. It's a constant state of dissatisfaction with everything around you while simultaneously seeing its beauty and purpose.

I feel my thoughts scatter in these statements. I might have explained why the particular idea of “Phil” touches me, but the fact still remains that the song “Phil,” in particular, still makes me cry. Focus. Put in context, Buck 65 should not have ever garnered any attention at all. He falls in with an artist like Leonard Cohen who, despite questionably little talent, possesses passion strongly and a firm grasp of sensual language. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible despite the inherent insult. I, as one who associates himself as an artist, feel that I have access to small stores of talent but have focused intensely on language to make up for this lack. And so every word of this song rings true; I am small but full of fire. And the narrator speaks from the other side, saying it’s worth the struggle so beautifully.

And I don’t mean to make this song exclusively about the formation of myself as an artist, but as a person fully, as one who loves and desires love. I’ve tried to explain to others that I hold more sorrow than joy and that this is a good thing, that it propels me to love and forgiveness and understanding, but am often misunderstood. I’m no Lady of Shalott, I’m not “half sick of shadows.” The best I’ve been able to find to elucidate all of this is in the form of the duende. In my study of this phenomena I’ve come to this understanding: Duende is a joyful sorrow. Duende is a Spanish word that has no equal in English, is difficult to explain as it is not so much a concept as a feeling and a power; it is that moment when explosions in the sky overcome with quiet wonder, when everything stops and the world goes quiet and a wave of feeling fills you full. Duende is knowing that our universe contains a myriad of things beyond our comprehension, that it existed for billions of years before us and will continue so until it implodes upon itself, that we exist within it as simultaneously a speck of nothing and the culmination of everything. This is duende. It is, as Frederico Garcia Lorca aptly describes it (or, rather, as Manuel Torres apparently stated to him), “Whatever has black sounds has duende.”

So, I feel I’ve gone too far into the objective, into philosophising and abstract to explain why this song makes me cry, still. But maybe I can’t put into words exactly what it is. I once played this song for a friend who said, “I don’t get it. Because he’s alone?,” which has exactly nothing to do with anything. It has more to do with everything than with nothing.