Sad Songs

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Where is the line between the music whose sadness you enjoy and the music whose sadness you don't?

What is the saddest song you can listen to? And the saddest song you can't?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Howdi?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

There are different sorts of sadness in music, really. When I did that 'saddest song you know' poll on my lj a lot of it was political and I think that's the stuff I find hardest to listen to. Other things, like 'He Brings Out The Whiskey In Me' by Amy Millan I find extremely hard to listen to because of connections to various people making me feel self-conscious but that's not really the song itself.

I find Alexis Strum's 'Nothing Good About This Goodbye' very changeable as to whether I can listen to it but I think again that's various personal connotations, not necessarily the song.

There's a lot of "grown up" sad songs that I can't listen to purely because I find them sad but also feel like I can't understand them and don't have a right to listen to them. I don't know whether that's the sort of inhibition you meant?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting inhibition - I was talking somewhere else about old wartime songs, which are sad when you think about the context behind them but as part of a generation who hasn't had to live through something so shattering I can't necessarily pick up immediately on the enormous unspoken background sadness that (eg) the possibility of death gives to a song (and which would have been, I dunno, vulgar to actually emote). Mind if I ask for examples of a grown-up sad song? (also where on yr LJ was that poll - I remember answering it!)

I think political songs are often very sad - I find frustration and the sense of wasted time a sad thing in songs anyway and of course in a political song those feelings are often magnified.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

After a quick bit of searching (and wondering why I do not use tags) it's here (http://piratemoggy.livejournal.com/248528.html).

I think sadness which is alien is the hardest to listen to, definitely. Where you feel you're prying into someone's life, unable to link it to your own.

Err, give me a second to wake up and find some examples.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Stan Rogers' "Lies" is the saddest song I can listen to, which makes it the saddest song I know. I don't think I have an upper limit, but I suppose that I start to process it as "boring" past a certain point.

The only song that I've found that I consider emotionally unpleasant to hear is "The Boiler", which I think is a Specials B-side, being basically the story of a date rape, concluding with over a minute of screaming.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Actually "When she loved me" from Toy Story 2 is up there as well for sadness.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't like self-satisfied sadness, the kind of stuff with the massive subtext of "oh look at me aren't I SENSITIVE"; and I find that there's a strain of sadness in pop which makes me want to snap "oh man up, ffs" at the singer.

I love overblown pop which wallows in its sadness (NO AIR); especially when it's of a really abject, undignified, here-is-my-heart-spilling-on-the-floor bent (eg Mariah Carey's 'We Belong Together'), because that's the kind of shit I don't even like to think to myself let alone say out loud, and there's something really brave and amazing in being that publicly abject. Songs which do this need to be quite dramatic to pull it off. I also like sadness which is disguised as something else - where it's not the overt focus of the song but it lurks beneath it; you get this in Kompakt-esque techno a lot, and also in complex, conflicted songs like Beyoncé's 'Irreplaceable'.

Also there's the really bleak, dark stuff like Portishead or Scott Walker, which I love and admire but can't listen to very often.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

wonder if the saddest songs are often the most spacious songs (not really including instrumental dance in this tho) too - that sense of there being almost nothing there, numbness etc.

esp. if you think of songs like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' where misery is evoked but never really felt by the listener (at least not in the sense intended) because of the defiant, euphoric release towards the end.

the saddest songs for me are ones that don't change much musically and probably don't offer any real glimpse of hope - but you can still enjoy that (as I do with a lot of Broadcast songs e.g. 'Lights Out').

sad rap songs? wu-tang's 'i can't get no sleep' maybe, but again it's kinda angry/defiant at the same time. i might take that to ILM to see what people suggest that's not particularly angry or just evokes melancholy with choice of samples (countless hip hop tracks do this).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think there's a LOT of rap which runs heartbreaking music against non-heartbreaking vocals -- and actually the sadness of the music is contextual almost (ie in its original context it was there for another emotional effect, but the effect once sample and placed in the rap story operates by reflective distance from what WAS MEANT TO BE vs what NOW IS)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha also props for noting the hiding-in-plain-sight misery in BoRhap!

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

'Bohemian Rhapsody' used to reduce me to tears when I was about 12, largely because the lines "I don't want to die/Sometimes wish I'd never been born at all" introduced me to all sorts of adolescent gloomy thoughts. See also 'King of pain' by The Police. I'm over it now...

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I can't listen to anything by Robert Wyatt because of extreme sadness. Other people tell me he is uplifting but i don't see it...

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I enjoy Wyatt sadness - probably because altho the tone of things like 'Shipbuilding' is otherwise beautifully judged I have trouble taking him srsly with that voice.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

There are certain Boards Of Canada tracks I still don't really enjoy listening to but that is as much the eerieness/creepiness as any sense sadness. 'Aquarius' is extraordinary but fitted into that category but there are lots of equally gloomy sounding BOC tracks I totally dig (esp. their older shonkier stuff) and I don't fully understand this yet. 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun' may be their most melancholic effort altho I always found that one a bit too dull.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's any kind of "too sad" line: I'm fine with self-pity and straight-out apocalyptic stuff. I urge anyone who hasn't heard it to seek out the version of Robert Fripp's arrangment of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood," which I find one of the most harrowing songs *ever*. Some of my favorite Elton John songs are from his late 70s self-pity and depression era.

I think I *don't* like the overblown stuff that Lex talks about - somehow Mariah scatting all over the place with that voice of hers strikes me as totally disengenuous, so that's probably a comment on Lex and I as much as the music.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I'm a huge fan of old soul and old country, so half of what I listen to is overtly sad, and I love it. Occasionally a song gets to me for personal reasons, which can make it hard to listen to, but that is always temporary in my experience.

One of the saddest songs ever in content, though not in style, is 'Die Alone Screaming' by UltraViolence. We get a very upset-sounding woman repeatedly saying "Hold me - I don't want to die alone" and an aggressive male voice yells "We all die alone!" and hardcore industrial techno bangs in.

Lots of rap numbers, including a few Wu tracks, are very sad, but this is often on the theme of remembrances of their childhoods, and lost parents or siblings. I don't hear that tone in tracks about current matters very much, though actually there is quite a bit on The Game's last album about his rift with Dre which would fit.

"Listen, does this sound familiar?..."

[koganbot]

--Sad song I adore: Shangri-Las "I Can Never Go Home Anymore." Just flat-out anguish that's beautiful to listen to
--Sad song I adore but really it's more for the aggressiveness than the sadness (even though I burst into tears when I first heard it in the Judy Collins version when I was 13): Leonard Cohen "Dress Rehearsel Rag"
--Sad song that makes me feel like I sucker and a sap when I cry to it, but I always do: Jason Michael Carroll "Alyssa Lies"
--Sad song that I liked once but I would hate if I had to hear it, like, three times (but that's more 'cause it's too much talk and not enough song): Red Sovine's "Teddy Bear"

(I'm sure there's lots of indie boy and grunge boy sadness that I cannot tolerate, though I can't think of any at the moment, and it would be interesting why I love the Shangri-La sadness and hate the indie boy sadness, or why I like the Leonard Cohen self-destructive aggressiveness but not its indie descendants.)

[cis.livejournal.com]

I think the music whose sadness I enjoy falls into two rough types:
1. music that's sad and uplifting, that hangs shining between extreme sadness and extreme joy (there's a lot of dance music that has this feel for me, though it is something that can require the right mood to strike. rex the dog's 'i look into mid air', which i'm sure feels like lightweight nostalgic pop-house to plenty of other people, used to regularly reduce me to tears even before i read that it was about a friend who'd died, somehow when it reached its hands-in-the-air crest everything just felt so unbearably sad*) (and there's the class of obvious-chord-sequence scintillating sad guitar rock that i sort of touched on back here (http://cis.livejournal.com/106892.html));
2. and then music that's sad and extreme, that takes sadness so far it's close to becoming a parody of sadness (like the bright eyes thing, which is sadness leavened with absurdity) (and like ballads, which i think lull you into a false sense of security, you think the obviousness of the bombast will protect you from the emotion but instead it distracts you enough for the emotion to worm its way in).
Often these are the same thing: the extremity can be the beauty.
There's also music which is simply melancholic, not exactly sad: alt.country does this well, for me, and some ambient.

The thing that I can't take, the sadness I can't deal with, is sadness unleavened by anything, sadness where there isn't a get-out clause of silliness or pompousness or extremity or mildness or aggressive beauty: sadness that doesn't admit the possibility of anything except sadness**, maybe. The Beatles' 'She's Leaving Home' remains my gold standard for this: it's just terribly, simply, inescapably sad, and it terrifies me.

* shades of the rave episode of Inspector Morse here?
** shades of kogan-on-country here?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

the saddest song that i can listen to is george jones he stopped loving her today. the saddest song that i cannot listen to is strange fruit by holiday.

(i almost wrote gloomy sunday, but it is so theatrical, that its artifice makes the sadness meditated, it is a work about sadness as much as it is sad itself) (in fact that line between theatricality and genuine emotion, the enjoying of craft so that emotion can be deftly avoided, is a mark of my favourite sad songs--from hank williams i'm so lonesome to the shangri las train from kansas city, a few dylan songs, a dozen leonard cohen tracks, scott walker's tilt, send in the clowns, and even kenny chesney's anyone but mine... (of course stephin meritt wrote a meta-song about this slippage--the amazing promises of enternity)

Young V Mitchell

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

For me it comes down to all of Blue versus Young's "Old Man." The former I can only handle when I'm already devastated and it's speaking for me - and the latter makes me sad, but I can listen to it any time. I think it's the difference between raw sadness, and just sensitive suffering.

[dawnage.livejournal.com]

I love the melancholy of Blur's '1992' and Smog's 'Cold Blooded Old Times'. I can't listen to Sinead O'Connor's 'Thank You For Hearing Me'.