Granting Access
“The most important records in music… are the ones that take you on a journey for miles and miles.” –Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk
Music, along with books, games and movies, has sometimes been a substitute for real experience for me. Like a character jacking in to the matrix of William Gibson’s early novels, these were things I could emotionally interface with completely, free of the weight of gender dysphoria that severely compromised all of my human interactions. Maybe these things saved my life. Maybe it’s also true that my relationship with them has been somewhat unhealthy at times.
There’s something a little dangerous about Random Access Memories. I don’t just want this album fragmented and mixed in with the rest of my collection to be shuffled up at random, like I normally experience music. This record is a world, and I want to live in it. But even as I lose myself in its soundscapes that take me back to my earliest memories of music, to the videos of MTV’s first few years and to the poster of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that was on the wall of my childhood bedroom, there’s something in it, a ghost in the musical machine, nudging me outward.
Track 02: The Game of Love
“This is a game of love
And it was you
The one that would be breaking my heart
When you decided to walk away
When I wanted you to stay”
–The Game of Love
These lyrics are almost archetypal in their sad-love-song simplicity, which may be why my mind associates them with the first song about one person leaving another that I ever loved, Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) by Phil Collins.
“How can I just let you walk away,
Just let you leave without a trace?
When I stand here taking every breath with you.
You’re the only one who really knew me at all.”
–Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)
I’ve never seen the film it’s from but I’ve seen the video dozens of times, and I only love it more as I get older. (That Jeff Bridges was once so young and beautiful. The clumsy way it makes the film’s love triangle explicit by literally superimposing images of the main characters along the sides of a triangle.) That song was hauled into the 21st century by The Postal Service, but it’s the emotion in Collins’ vocals that makes it a minor pop masterpiece for me. An enduring song, it’s taken on varying degrees of significance in the lives of numerous people I know in recent months.
Heartbreak has been a frequent visitor to people I care about lately, as people they love have decided to walk away. As for me, I haven’t even been playing the game of love for quite some time. My mind throws up objections constantly—At this point in transition, you can’t possibly be what another person needs, mentally, emotionally or physically…
—
Emotion Adventure: Level 12
Oops, you have fallen in love with someone who also has an interest in you. How would you like to proceed?
–PURSUE RELATIONSHIP.
Sorry, your empathy (EMP), confidence (CON), and really just your general ability to connect and interact with other human beings in anything remotely resembling a normal way (@!#?@!) are too low to successfully pursue a relationship at this time. How would you like to proceed?
–LOAD AN EARLIER SAVED GAME.
Sorry, this game does not support that feature.
—
…and yet, my heedless heart’s in the game, my mind’s objections be damned.
Track 03: Giorgio By Moroder:
“Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being “correct,” you can do whatever you want, so…nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.”
–Giorgio Moroder, Giorgio By Moroder
RAM is ultimately pretty concerned with freedom, both creatively and emotionally. Moroder’s words here serve as a kind of prologue for the sentiment expressed in the later track, Doin’ It Right.
Track 04: Within
Within. Where I begin.
“There are so many things
that I don’t understand.
There’s a world within me
that I cannot explain.
Many rooms to explore
but the doors look the same.
I am lost I can’t even remember my name.
I’ve been for sometime
Looking for someone
I need to know now
Please tell me who I am.”
–Within
Within is where I’ve spent most of my life. Cowering from the pain of gender dysphoria. Curled up into a ball. Wandering the landscapes inside me. But in such isolation, can you ever define yourself? Can you come to know who you are?
At the end of a conversation with a doctor I speak to regularly the other day, he raised the possibility of me, under new state law, filing a grievance with the Department of Managed Health Care to possibly get some things covered that aren’t currently covered under my employer’s plan. He mentioned this as something that he wants us to talk about next time; I don’t think he understands just how impatient I am to move forward with such things, just how desperately I need to escape from this world within me. I sometimes feel like I’m clawing at the walls.
Track 07: Touch
Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo has said that Touch is "like the core of the record, and the memories of the other tracks are revolving around it.”
With its emotional theatricality and cheesy crooner Paul Williams on vocals, Touch sounds to me like something out of a 1970s sci-fi-themed Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, but the images it conjures in my mind owe less to the stage and more to the original TRON, which forever changed the way I conceive of digital spaces when I first saw it at the impressionable age of five.
A frozen figure breaking out of the digital ice in which it’s long been encased.
“Kiss
Suddenly alive
Happiness arrive
Hunger like a storm
How do I begin
A room within a room
A door behind a door
Touch, where do you lead
I need something more”
–Touch
The references to doors and rooms recall the earlier track Within (“Many rooms to explore but the doors look the same”) but the kiss, a reminder that this consciousness is alive, awakens the need to escape, the need for something more. For me, after long periods—sometimes years—of emotional flatness, an absence of any real sense of connection or romance or love or hope—that initial touch, that moment of awakening, is intense. It brings with it a voracious yearning for more. Hunger like a storm.
And then the song lights up like a carnival. But is this real? There’s a melancholy undercurrent to it that makes me think it seems real on the surface but is just as hollow as one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties.
And then the chorus, digital yet human.
“If love is the answer you’re home.”
Of course love is the answer.
And it’s close, it’s close, it’s so close that you can touch it.
And then it’s gone, in an instant. No, you’re not ready yet. You can’t do it. You’re not capable of that kind of connection.
And then the anger in Williams’ voice when he says “You’ve almost convinced me I’m real.” An anger I know all too well; I start to feel warm and alive and human and real again, and then it fades away.
But this time I won’t let it.
Touch ends with Williams saying “I need something more,” and it is no mistake that the album then shifts into…
Track 08: Get Lucky
“Getting lucky is not just sleeping with (someone) but meeting someone for the first time and it just clicking. There’s no better fortune in this existence to me.” –Pharrell Williams on Get Lucky
“Like the legend of the Phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planets spinning
The force from the beginning
We’ve come too far
To give up who we are
So let’s raise the bar
And our cups to the stars”
–Get Lucky
So the end of Touch brings us to the beginning of something new, to the place where we’re open again to the possibility of connection, and though connection and touch often coexist, connection with touch is something so much more than touch without connection.
Track 09: Beyond
“There’s no such thing as competition
To find our way we lose control
Remember love’s our only mission
This is a journey of the soul”
–Beyond
Beyond works as a sort of sequel to Within. After the awakening of Touch and the openness to real connection of Get Lucky, we’re now ready to start focusing more outward.
–
It’s not the technology itself. It’s the way I find you in it.
Days when I don’t talk to you don’t feel like proper days.
To be heading in this direction when you’re in that one feels wrong.
–
The gift and the challenge of love and connection. It pulls me out of my own world, but also demands of me that I try to remain in the shared one, when sometimes my instinct is to flee back into the shadows inside me.
Track 12: Doin’ It Right
“Everybody will be dancing
And be doin’ it right
If you lose your way tonight
That’s how you know the magic’s right”
–Doin’ It Right
Yesterday I saw Frances Ha. Though she isn’t the most graceful person in the world, Greta Gerwig’s Frances is a dancer. After one open-hearted and awkward and lovely dance routine she choreographed, she says something like “I like things that look like mistakes.” Her life is full of them. So is mine.
The difference is that she embraces them, seemingly almost fearless. I try to avoid them as much as I can, mortified at the thought of the true extent of my goofiness, my awkwardness, my social ineptitude being made apparent.
You’re not wearing those clothes right.
You’re not interacting with people right.
You’re not doing anything right.
With regard to living my life, I don’t often have that sense of freedom Giorgio Moroder talked about having in creating his music. Always I’m being told what to do and what not to do, even if it’s just by the voices in my head that think they’re trying to protect me. To me, this song is about finally achieving freedom from those voices and the fear they represent. I think it may be only when you feel free to be yourself that you can really connect with others. This is the most important step from Within to the possibility of real, lasting Contact.
More often than not, I still stick to the safe, narrow pathways of interaction I’ve carved for myself. When real emotion rises up, I typically bite my tongue. But lately there have been times when I’ve ventured so far away from what was normal or comfortable for me in expressing my affection for others that I literally felt, in the moment of expression, the terrifying sense that I was falling, like when a roller coaster starts to take its first huge dive and your stomach takes a moment to catch up.
But each time, I survived. A little more alive than i was before. I’m still here. I can do this.
Track 13: Contact
Contact—real contact–can’t happen when we are living in fear, or too caught up in our own pain to see past ourselves.
There’s audio here of Eugene Cernan from the Apollo 17 mission, but the journey into space is a metaphor for the journey from the internal space (“Within”) into the shared space we create when connecting with others.
The music strains and strains and strains and strains and strains to take us there. In its attempt to take us there, the music ultimately destroys itself. It is incapable of transporting us to this place. Only we can.
I don’t want to wander these internal landscapes alone anymore.
I want to walk with you.
Notes
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jervo reblogged this from agameofme and added:
Caro says she can’t write about music, but I wish I could write about music even half as well as she writes about the...
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boogiebeard reblogged this from agameofme and added:
Great read about Daft Punk’s latest album, Random Access Memories.
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Beautiful words like these are what inspire me to create and to put my full love into the creations of others. I thought...
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