i’m giving you a mixtape (part one)

this is a five part series.  check back every now and again to see if i’ve posted more.  i should have them all up by wednesday; fingers crossed for good luck.

Opening Monologue
from High Fidelity

What came first?  The music or the
misery?  People worry about kids
playing with guns and watching
violent videos, we’re scared that
some sort of culture of violence is
taking them over…

But nobody worries about kids
listening to thousands — literally
thousands — of songs about broken
hearts and rejection and pain and
misery and loss.

Did I listen to pop music because I
was miserable, or was I miserable
because I listened to pop music?

The simple truth from High Fidelity‘s opening monologue is that regardless of the answer to the closing question, we are miserable.  Here’s my top five for the A-side of my compilation; the deep cuts that commiserate misery.

1.  Bon Iver
“Re: Stacks”
[Self Released; 2007]

The band’s lead, Justin Vernon, knows a bit about misery.  Following the breakup of his former band, his longtime girlfriend, along with a battle with mono, Vernon retreated to northern Wisconsin to spend the winter in his father’s cabin in the woods.  In isolation, he began to process the year gone past, and without intending, ended up writing and recording For Emma, Forever Ago, a brilliant record.

For Emma reeks of melancholy, with no intention of exiting desolation. Vernon has learned a valuable lesson:  how to rest in pain, and to bring others into the fold.   Re: Stacks rests as the last track on the album, beginning our excavation of misery at its outset.

This my excavation and today is Kumran
Everything that happens is from now on

Vernon describes this opening couplet best in his interview with the “Drowned in Sound” blog,

“It’s referring to the excavations where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they found them it changed the whole course of Christianity, whether people wanted to know it or not. A lot of people chose to ignore it, a lot of people decided to run with it, and for many people it destroyed their faith, so I think I was just looking at it as a metaphor for whatever happens after that is new shit.”