Bohemian Rhapsody
Occaisionally, i will listen to music to help me fall asleep. One night recently to this end, i put on Puccini's La Boheme which i have borrowed from the library. I was using a portable cd player that is new and still not fully familiar to me. I fumbled around the buttons to blindly adjust the volume as i listened to the first act. As i began to doze off, it seemed like this one song was going on forever. I wasn't following the story then, so i don't know what the song was about, but it seemed like a sad song; a little tragic. Not second act of Madame Butterfly tragic, just melancholy. As it turned out, i had accidentally hit the repeat button and had been listening to the same track for at least twenty minutes.
I remember as a freshman in college having a brief exchange with a music major about opera. (Not that i really knew anything about it then, or now.) I argued that a "sad" aria was more compelling than a "happy" one. He disagreed.
I suppose i just tend to prefer tragedy over comedy, and i like comedy to be, at least, sublime. I scoff at those who prefer Shakespeare's comedies to his tragedies. A Shakesperian comedy can be funny, but where are the important themes of the human experience? They seem to me to lack substance. I have difficulty appreciating literature, music, etc. that does not aspire to larger ideas. When i first heard the Jay-Z song "Girls, Girls, Girls" i thought it was intended to be ironic. It seemed to me, he was talking about a rather sad and lonely condition that he did not know how to escape from. Certainly, i must have been inclined to think this because it conformed to my own worldview. But over time i came to realize that it was not irony at all, but braggadocio and i, disappointed, decided never to countenance his music again. I realize that this is still an uniformed judgement, but for now i accept its convenience.
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