Sunday, 13 March 2016

R-chord

Today I discovered an artist called R-chord while browsing YouTube, and I'm in love with his music already. I listened to a few songs, then purchased the entire album on iTunes because I realized I would be playing those songs over and over in the next while. 

The style of this artist is very different to the kind of music I usually listen to. I prefer ballad and lyrical stuff, but his songs remind me of the rebellious youth I've never had. I always wondered if I'd turn out to be the classic "bad boy" if I was allowed to do as I pleased in childhood. My discipline when I was young was heavily focused on sitting still and being quiet. I was endlessly praised for the fact that I could sit still for 2 hours or something... and I blame my current state of health on that. Sitting that long is really bad, yo. They say sitting is the new smoking, and man I wish it weren't so. 

I feel like I spend a lot of time lamenting my youth despite being only 21. Probably because my high school years were dog-shit, I was depressed without knowing I was depressed, and then college came and then I was stressed but happy at school and stressed and borderline suicidal at "home". I owe a lot of who I am and what I have achieved to my parents, but they definitely gave me enough mental illness to last a lifetime. Too bad they keep upping the ante every time I go visit them- as if then I'd grow into the child they wished I was.

I was talking to my friend the other day, about how sometimes I don't feel like I exist. I have no idea how I got where I am in life, and I have no idea how I keep on doing what I do. It's as if I'm looking at someone else. Then there's the whole thing where my parents don't actually see me as the person I am, they see me as who they want me to be--- and it's literally just NOT-ME. So I fought with them and fought with them, struggling to be seen, thinking that they were happier with their imagination, and that they imagined someone else to replace me. Then it hit that no, they were literally seeing what they wanted to see, there is no duplicate, there's just me, but they're like... superimposing all these attributes on me. I wasn't that, but they'd insist I was. 

I'm being really vague and confusing again, aren't I? I don't know how to elaborate without experiencing another episode of total heartbreak. It hurts, so excuse my vagueness, yeah?

Back to music- R-chord's "This Is the Last Time" is actually super emotive and hit me right in the feels. Apparently he wrote it when he was 16. Fuck when I was 16, all I did was write shitty, depressive poetry. I had a good friend at the time (who I regrettably no longer talk to), and we would share poems with each other and give each other themes to write about. We were so pretentious, heh. It was so good though, being able to vent in a really convoluted way, have him "analyze" my "poetry" and come to the conclusion of "oh, this is what's bothering you".

I've always liked to play those games. Some people hate it- they want the world to be straightforward without all the strange social rituals and sentences with multiple interpretations. I wish the same sometimes, too. Other times, I revel in our complexity, I thoroughly enjoy the fact that there are so many intricacies to social interactions and so many unspoken rules. It's a pain uncovering them all, and when you get hurt it feels super unfair, because you didn't even know what game you were playing, and someone tells you you've lost. 

That's probably why I like R-chord's songs so much. He seems to convey this feeling of "I don't care what these rules are, I'll break through them all. I don't understand the game, but I'm going to be me, and I'll take on the world that way". It's totally not my style and can seem quite reckless and dumb, but it's the sort of courage and spirit I sometimes I wish I had, and definitely admire.

No comments:

Post a Comment