Disclaimer: I am a very happy, content person with a lot of wonderful friends and a terrific family. This specific blog is NOT directed at any of them. This is meant to be taken as an idea rather than a recommended state of mind.
I am a cynical, jaded, sarcastic 24 year old writer. It's just the truth. I don't trust the government, stupid people annoy me and I have a low threshold for BS. I wear a smile, its true. That smile is the equivalent of a knowing wink. I'm smiling to keep from losing my mind. I'm also smiling at other cynical people who are "in" on the joke. We're a dying breed and we find solace in acknowledging one another's presence. We don't have to converse. We just nod in that wonderful gesture of silent truth. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not a manic. I'm not a depressed or angry person, not by any means. I'm just not a huge fan of humanity. I think people are rude, greedy and apathetic to a fault. I didn't come to that conclusion lightly. Plus, I'm human and its not hard to admit how selfishness finds its way into even the best of us. I'm just as guilty on occasion. But alas, I view this cruel, crazy beautiful world through such a lens. I don't think I'm alone. You can't work at a sub par amusement park in a boring suburban town for six years and listen to the idiots we pass off as customers and not want to blow your brains on the wall sometimes.
The only way I get through the day without strangling random people at Walmart is music, glorious music. It's my buffer between average cynic and Patty Hearst. Specifically, I found a few years ago this incredible kinship with the songs of Randy Newman. I think when we think of musical structure, we inherently think of limitations, the limits of three chords and melody and what any one person can say in three or four minutes. With Randy, those sort of limitations are null and void. I think with him, there is this sense of how many layers one song can have? You can hear one his songs one time and you get this basic idea. Then you listen again and there's a whole opposite idea right under the surface. Half the time, with Newman, that second idea is just a clue in the pantheon of greater ideas floating around in the song. So there's this wonderful well of intrigue with his lyrics, these usually scholarly sentences spoken not from a protagonists standpoint, but often from the antagonist and written in such a way that we see this person as human and flawed and not necessarily evil through and through, just lost in a world that doesn't make sense to them.
I relate to that as a cynical person, not as a criminal or a villain. But I think you have to realize that society creates antagonism. It almost literally conceives and then births this idea of rebellion and dissatisfaction. For me, that's a truth worth examining. It doesn't mean we condone evil. It doesn't mean we glorify it. But, its imperative to comprehend what makes a person evil or bad. I don't think that my brand of cynicism is the base level for villainy. If it were, we'd be overrun. However, I'm also aware that most criminals began as apathetic human beings. I'm talking about people disenfranchised and hurt by a greater system. I'm not talking about liberal or conservative issues either. I'm talking about a system that, one way or the other, has been designed to control peoples lives. That system creates antagonism which then can lead to criminality.
Randy Newman's music is a terrific and accurate reflection of that antagonism and how it comes about. Listening to songs that deal with racism and anger and sexual frustration from a sort of unreliable point of view have the potential to show us where we've gone wrong. So its music that is always teaching me to recognize my part in the creation of bad ideas and bad people. What part do I have in that? And what part do you have in that?
I think that's what Newman is getting across. I really do. This blog was meant to be a rant and a recommendation. If you too suffer from being a cynic, I recommend taking the load off with any one of Newman's records. It's medicine for the soul.
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