The songs that saved

[usernamenumber]

Oh man. So, a conversation about Henry Rollins led me to dig up this goofy-ass video on YouTube. This goofy-ass video saved me. No lie.

I don't think I've watched the actual video since I first saw it some time in middle school (after which I acquired the album asap), and it's hard to see it now without smirking at Henry's "I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU LIKE AN ANGRY GYM TEACHER ABOUT *FEELINGS*" thing, but at the time, it was exactly, _exactly_, what I needed.

I needed a model of masculinity that unapologetically had emotions, that yelled and screamed about them, and that told me it was going to be ok.

The post-guitar-solo pep talk (because that's a thing in Rollins Band music) at 3:30 still gets me, not because it doesn't seem silly and a bit too on-the-nose to me now, but because I still remember how 8th-grade me reacted to it. He was sitting on the living room floor crying at the TV. And he re-listened to that song a *lot*.

So now I'm wondering: if you have a song, one particular song, that did more than any other for you in your young life, what is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o28dyt7w3As

Comments

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Amanda Palmer's Oasis. (Trigger warning: rape, also for the rest of this comment).

I'm not a fan of Amanda Palmer as a person, but her music usually works for me and is nice to listen to in the background. This is not a background song. This is, as I describe it, "the happiest song about rape and abortion you'll ever hear".

I was lucky that my sexual abuse never got so far as to needing an abortion (sitting on the side of the tub with the plastic stick was scary enough), and unlucky that it wasn't a stranger who I could forget about and detangle from. But regardless of the dissimilarities between our stories, for the last nine years, when Amanda sings "and it isn't my fault that the barbarian raped me" I have _howled_ along.

It's the song that's picked me up and said "yep, this sucks donkies but omygod, did you see the photo I got from my favourite band? TOTALLY AWESOME RITE!" You have no idea¹ how scary it is to consider that I don't get to be a person anymore, that I'll forever be defined by my trauma.

My biggest fear in coming out was not that I wouldn't be believed. It was that I would stop being Kat and start being Kat-who-was-raped, and this song was here to tell me that it didn't matter, that I could still go to concerts and hang with my friends and have better days.

I'm not a fan of Amanda Palmer as a person, but I owe her a huge debt for how much she has helped me find my stability and regain my self. Two minutes of music has absolutely changed my life.

~Sor

1: Or maybe you do, at which point you have my sympathies.

((PostScript: Sorry that the comment's so depressing, but then, it's hard to be saved from something happy))

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about this. There have been a number of songs that have been important over the years, but the one I just thought of recently was The Eurythmics' I Need You. I think I listened to that at least once every day for months during one of the lowest periods of my single life. Looking back now, I think I was listening to it ironically, in that I could hear how completely broken this idea of relationships was and was rejecting that, but embracing the tone of desperation--when you're that lonely, even a cracked head can sound good.