Anxiety

There's no doubt, I worry too much. I have problems with migraines and high blood pressure, anxiety aggravates these. And then there's the part where anxiety makes me unhappy.

Today, not unusually, I worried all morning and into the afternoon about whether I would be able to perform certain errands. Then around 2:30 PM I suddenly realized with a start: nothing more to worry about there. I was done. I had performed all of those errands, and for the rest of the day I was free either to worry about other things, or not to worry at all.

And that, sadly, has made it a pretty typical day for me.

Naturally, we all have to be concerned about a number of things in order to lead more or less normal lives. But anxiety is concern which has become exaggerated and counter-productive. It doesn't help get anything done. It offers hinders me to a great extent. Besides feeling horrible, it is inefficient.

I don't know what most of the lyrics to "It Keeps You Runnin'" mean, or, for that matter, most of the lyrics to many other songs Michael McDonald has written or co-written: "What a Fool Believes," "Minute by Minute," "Takin' it to the Streets." ... I got no clue what the man is trying to say to us. I love all of the above-mentioned Doobie Brothers recordings with McDonald singing lead, but I don't really know what the man is talkin'. Well, gradually, over the course of decades, and over the course of thousands of re-listenings, I think I've picked up a few things. For example, I think that "Takin' it to the Streets" may have something to do with protesting in the streets for social justice. Something like that. I don't know.

Anyway, one line in "It Keeps You Runnin'" has always really stood out for me:

"Are you gonna worry for the rest of your life?"

I don't feel that the song in general really speaks to me. I think -- I'm not sure -- but I think it's about a relationship between a man and a woman, and the man, the singer, is trying to help the woman work through some of her stuff. I wonder whether maybe a big problem in this man/woman relationship is that most of the time the woman, although she realizes that the man means well, has no idea what he's talking about, and the man doesn't understand that she doesn't understand him.

Anyway, when I hear McDonald sing that one line about worrying, I ask myself whether I might benefit from relaxing more than just a bit. When I first heard the song, when I was 15 or 16 years old, being worried all the time was sort of my default position. And although the song and some other things made me aware that I was worried all the time and that I should change that, 39 or 40 years later, although I've made some improvement, I still worry too much.

Some time during the 1980's, I was listening to John Peel's BBC programme on US public radio, and quite abruptly, with no warning whatsoever, Peel said that the record he was going to play next was the best of the year, and as quickly as that he played it: a reggae record I'd never heard before and have never heard since, with a refrain where some backup vocalists harmonized with the lead singer in a request for the listener to "Lay your worries down the riverside."

Only heard it once in my life, but it helped as well. Googled "lay your worries down the riverside" just now, in quotes. No direct hits. Which may well mean that I'm quoting it wrong.

Still helped. It's still helping now.

Relax.

Rock Criticism

It may have been the overwhelmingly negative opinion of James Taylor among rock critics -- that is to say, among the rock critics at Rolling Stone, where I read most of the rock criticism I have read -- which caused me to begin to question the authority of their opinions and aesthetic sense. "Fire and Rain," "Your Smiling Face," "Mockingbird," "Shower the People" and other James Taylor singles -- well, I liked them, plain as that, even though the critics called them wimpy unbearable shit. "You've Got a Friend" was and is wimpy unbearable shit to me, but everybody slips now and then. Apart from that one song, it became more and more undeniably clear to me that I found the average James Taylor song on the radio to be more edifying and worthwhile than the average record review in Rolling Stone, or even the average above-average review in Rolling Stone.

It wasn't just James Taylor. Around the same time that Taylor began to be an unreconcilable point of contention between myself and the rock critics -- that is to say, in the 1970's -- I also came across a couple of remarks from great musicians: Frank Zappa calling rock criticism "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read," and Lou Reed complaining about working on an album for a year and a half only to have some asshole in the Village Voice (Robert Christgau) give it a B-.

And Christgau, most people would agree, is one of the best rock critics.

John Peel -- or Sir John Peel if you prefer, he was actually knighted -- was considered by many to be the very best rock critic in the world, and he didn't seem to think much of rock criticism, devoting more of his career to being a radio DJ.

 Mystery Train by Greil Marcus is probably the most highly-regarded book ever written by a rock critic. Like my growing and increasingly disturbing awareness that I simply couldn't accept the critical consensus regarding James Taylor, and Zappa's pithy dismissal of rock criticism in general and Reed's of Christgau, and Peel's disappearance from his rock-critic columns in favor of the DJ booth, Mystery Train is a product of the 1970's. I own a copy of it. I've never really known what to make of it. Marcus' description of how Little Richard disrupted an episode of the Dick Cavett Show when it was becoming quite pretentiously silly is well-written, and his interpretation of Richard's motives for the disruption -- because some other guests were beginning to pontificate in a very silly way about art, and he knew that he was the only artist on the stage at the time, and that he knew that his artistry was far more important and enduring than the fact that a couple of of those other people thought he was silly -- that analysis of the incident on Marcus' part is not entirely unconvincing. But other parts of the book, unfortunately, consist of unbearably silly pontification about art.

Part of the pointedness and venom of my current disdain for rock criticism (I realize that many other names for it may be preferred these days, but when I stopped being able to take it seriously that's what it was still called) is a deflection of my shame at having taken it so seriously for so long. But I was only a child! How was I to know?

But is there a point to all this vapid rambling? Well, no. And perhaps that's the point. And perhaps Duke Ellington said every single thing there ever was to say about any sort of music criticism when he answered the question, What is good music? thusly: "If it sounds good, it is good."

Indeed. Cazart. Believe your ears regarding music and do not let your reading eyes hand you any wooden nickles.