I have long said that I “like” all kinds of music. But all these years, I’m not sure I’ve been accurate in that assessment. I think a better description would be that I “appreciate” all types of music. Even if a certain category might not be my favorite, there are certain songs like I truly like, or even love. From Country to Rap.
Yet, my favorite genre is Indie. The Talking Heads, Modest Mouse, Regina Spektor, Vampire Weekend, and on. Music is grand. It can take you places. Music can lift you up, or bring you down, and it will inexplicably make your feet move, or cause you to stay incredibly still. It has magic.
Last weekend, I had to drive down to Kentucky to pick Mary up from the airport. It was a late flight. I had the stereo turned up and I was singing along, the entire way down. So much so, that I drove all the way to Hebron, before realizing I’d missed the airport completely. All because I was “On the catwalk, on the catwalk, and I do my little turn on the catwalk. On the catwalk…”
Right past the airport.
It was all okay. I got back in the nick of time. Or I might have been walking the plank, not the catwalk.
The only reason I mention this, is that music seems to be mostly a good thing in my opinion. So why on earth do we sometimes have to “face the music”? The phrase hit me the other day out of nowhere.
Or course, to face the music means to accept consequences. It is when we have to shake our heads and own up to the responsibility. Something we have created by our own actions. If I broke the priceless violin, I must face the music.
I looked into its origins. Face the music is an American idiom, and it seems to have originated in the New England area somewhere around the 1830s. But no one knows for sure how the phrase began. Or who first said it. There’s no paper trail on this one.
There is speculation on how it got started. One thought is that face the music was originally an “urging” to face one’s stage fright. You know, the band starts playing in the pit, the curtain opens, and there you are, facing the music, as you forget all your lines.
Another possible origin is the United States’ military. This happens when a disgraced soldier was ejected from the army. And there is a bit of a ceremony of “marching” him away from the rest of the troops. A certain drum cadence was played. Rrrrat, tat, tat. Rrrrat, tat, tat. So there he went, facing the music. Or, there is another suggestion, that it refers to a soldier going into battle and facing the “music” of the enemy guns.
Those are the “theories” about the origins, the ones I’ve found.
No matter how it got started, it translates into one word.
Accountability.
There seems to be a real shortage of accountability these days, especially in swirls of politics. There have been an unwieldy amount of pardons being handed out to highfaluting friends of the big men in power. They answer to no one. There is no responsibility, no liability, no blame. There is no music to face.
Perhaps if it were this way for everyone, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But it seems to be reserved for a very select few. They get away with acts of lying, deceit, and corruption. They waltz away into the night, without ever facing a single note.
All that aside.
There appears to be two types of music, I suppose. The “facing” kind, and the “listening” kind.
And when the world seems hard to face, we can always listen to that good music to ease our minds. Good music, that magic for our souls.
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“The price of greatness is responsibility.”
— Winston Churchill
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“To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.”
― Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
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“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
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