Sing.

 

Another day, another free-writing challenge, this time inspired by three stellar pieces of music that my ears were most certainly seized by…

 

David Bowie – Magic Dance

Sitting against a sofa of worn orange corduroy. I’m looking into Mr Bowie’s mismatched eyes and feeling a chilled flurry envelop me. Having just seconds ago metamorphosed from a snowy owl with feathers that were the purest of white, his bleached mullet wasn’t one of hilarity, it was a monochrome menace as much as the vampire like front teeth and the pale face. Jareth the Goblin King.

Radiohead – Talk Show Host

Plucked strings. The sands are flooded with a golden tinge. Leonardo sits in blue with a smoking cigarette in his hand, soft blonde hair trailing into those cobalt blues. Teenage crush. Teenage angst. Driving in the rays of the English summer. Closing my eyes and my head tripping backwards. Laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. Gazing out the car window, pretending to be somewhere else. The spirit being sucked from my chest as it lifts towards the sky and my body drags it back down again with a weighty thud. We hope that you choke. Do not choke.

Alexandre Desplat – Courtyard Apocalypse

One the outside they are gritty soldiers. On the inside, they are trembling. We are sneaking through the darkness, overcome. Can we drink it in? Trying not to sob, we are overwhelmed. Finding a place at the pinnacle. They’re seizing my insides, behind the eyes, in the chest, deep in the stomach, and they’re not letting go. The breathing of many on the head of only one. This is the epitome of sadness.

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Generation ‘Car Window Music Video’-ers.

My thoughts took a nostalgic turn last week as I stumbled across Eli GarMont’s confession that he was a fully inaugurated member of the Spice Boy patrol over the era that Girl Power reigned supreme. This prompted my mourning over the nineties soundtrack that accompanied my early years. It did indeed include the Spice Girls, Take That and the Backstreet Boys, but it also featured the dulcet tones of Radiohead, Oasis and Blur once I’d begun to strive for elements of self conscious cool in my early teens.

This lead me to lament the loss of the days where I would sit in the backseat of my parents’ car, headphones in my ears, watching the rushing world go by as backdrop to my faint reflection in the window. I would pretend I was the latest Radio One flavour of the month and this was my music video.

In adulthood I have kept these make believe moments a shameful secret, until I confessed it to the boy and realised that perhaps we were all an MTV generation of music video pretenders. Not only did he also like to fantasize of fame whilst he window gazed, but he caught a friend doing the same on the train to a Limp Bizkit gig. We are all music stars at heart.