Bad Has Never Felt So Good

While working on a new painting tonight, casually listening to music through my earbuds, as is usual, I heard the first few notes of the song and immediately smiled with recognition. I know the song well and certainly the aesthetic weight it carries for me, so I felt no surprise when I immediately put the brush down, stepped away from the canvas in order to give this remarkable song the uninterrupted attention it deserved.

The song, ‘Bad’, is a U2 classic from their “The Unforgettable Fire” album and written about a friend of the band from their old neighborhood who was in the throes of heroin addiction, and is Bono’s sustained, impassioned plea to help. As a pop song, it’s an absolute anomaly, particularly when heard against the musical backdrop of the day. The way that I remember it, the musical landscape through most of the 80’s was hopelessly superficial across the board, for both Pop and Rock music alike. The production values at the time were enamored with a ‘big sound’, with heavily digitized drums, an overwhelming use of synthesizers, and chorus’ that often sounded like locker room singalongs, which when blended all together created a deeply processed and construed art form, at least to my ears. Fortunately, U2 weren’t into trends.

But the question that I’ve always ask myself when attempting to understand this otherworldly song, is where in the hell did it came from? Even positioned alongside the other yearning songs on the album, ‘Bad’ completely stood out above the rest. At its core, there is an existential thread coursing through it, that sounds an epic tone, not due to it lyrics, but rather to its unapologetic sincerity. There simply was nothing else like it anywhere in the musical landscape of the day. It was an apparition, even for U2, who were an apparition in and of themselves during this period. The song is heroic, and profoundly expressive. To my ears, it is the quintessential song that I would offer anyone wanting to hear the full weight of compassion, delivered straight up, without artifice, by a singer and a band, who cared deeply for such things.

But again, the question circles back; where did a song like this come from, creatively? Aesthetically? The only answer I have is that the members of the band were simply seeking answers to much larger questions than their peers, and due to the depth of their character and the earnestness of their pursuit, a song like ‘Bad’ was able to claw its way up from their collective depth.

But none of that came to mind tonight, for I thought I knew precisely what the song held for me. Once I heard those first few opening notes, my intuition snapped to attention, and I was effectively forced to stop painting and walk outside in order for this incredible song have its way with me.

Now before going any further, I need to set the scene, because it’s an important factor here. It was near midnight when I stepped outside, the sky was perfectly clear with a full array of stars sparkling overhead while a half-moon hovering just above the tree line, which draped the neighborhood in a soft lunar glow. Since it was so late, there wasn’t a hint of another soul around. I had the neighborhood to myself, a Kingdom of my own, which created a hypnotic calm that pervaded everything around me, and I simply gave myself to it. At the mixture of all the sublime elements, something gave way inside and I stood absolutely captivated by the moment. Oh, there may have been some drink involved.

As Bono began to sing, I instinctively turned up the volume while leaning against my car and fully aware of the cool evening air entering my lungs and just letting it all unfold. The moment was more than I could resist and in no time, I fully surrendered to it. That, in itself, would have been fine for a evenings enjoyment, but tonight the song apparently had other designs for me, because another agenda seemed to be unfolding. Without warning, the melody began to burrow deeper and deeper, seemingly down to the marrow in my bones.

Instinctively, I began slowly walking up my drive and intuitively closed my eyes after just a few steps, literally taking half a dozen steps with my eyes completely closed, just letting this song pour through me. I was in a near trance. Again, it was so late that I had the moment completely to myself. Opening my eyes slowly only reminded me just how pristine the moment was. Everything in my awareness was sublime.

As I stood there at the top of my driveway, letting the melody continue to burrow in, Bono reached the bridge, a section where he sings a series of ascending notes, which he delivers with a pleading urgency that sounds as if he’s begging the God’s for help. The futility of his lament was palatable, and the effect was that his voice pierced straight through all my resistance. A breach occurred, and a flood of raw emotion burst through and felt like a tidal wave of pure sensation cascading all across the surface of my mind. And I mean that quite literally. My mind felt as it were being physically tickled……I felt ‘goosebumps’ flow across the surface of my brain like a wave. Without warning, I found myself floating on a sea of ecstasy.

Yet the true beauty of the moment occurred because I wasn’t ‘thinking’, meaning there were no thoughts of any kind ricocheting around in my mind. All subjective concerns subsided, which allowed me to experience Bono’s vocals, not simply as a necessary artifice of the song, but rather as a sustained expression of his compassion. In a peculiar way, I was inside the melody itself, completely unbound and floating.

To add an additional ingredient to this aesthetic soup, Bono wrote this melody, as he did most of his songs during this period, as stream of conscious; meaning that he would allow his instincts to flow as a pure release of an emotion that was somehow locked inside. And due to this method of writing, the melody naturally and organically contained elements of himself and his character, his hopes and fears, his love for family and friends, his loyalties, and frustrations, and especially his innate sense of compassion. All of which seem to me like inscriptions scribbled on the walls of the melody, and it was there that I found myself walking next to him, in a sense, as he waded through what he felt for his friends dilemma.

As the song was nearing its conclusion, I slowly opened my eyes and held the moon once more in my sight, with the feeling of absolute astonishment washing over me, just then Bono belted out, at full bore, the closing promise to a friend in need.

“I’m wide awake, I’m wide awake, I’m wide awake …I’m not sleeping…..oh no”

Those simple words play a dual role in mind. By that I mean that my overriding passion for the past decade, and certainly these past few years, has focused on living fully engage in the present moment. To live with an awareness and openness to experience my life as it’s happening, in real time, and to gracefully accept without judgement the good, bad and the ugly, and to remain ‘wide awake’ to all of it. There is nothing that I can write here that will imbue anyone with the slightest understanding of just how deeply that feeling penetrated my whole being…..under that sky, hearing those words, sung by that voice, and being fully aware of it all.

Apparently, a profoundly intimate part of my mind that rarely exposes itself, took the bait on offer and was coaxed out into the open for a breath of fresh air. It occurred to me that I had just experienced something fairly astonishing, which is the interplay, or dance, if you will, between biology and spirituality, for what I experienced no doubt incorporated the science of neurophysiology, of a storm of neurons firing intensely in my brain causing a fairly massive dopamine release. That cannot be denied, yet that neurophysiology stood side by side with the contemplative inclinations of my personality. I don’t know how else to describe it. Even if the experience could be scientifically shown to be nothing more than a synaptic house party, beside it something else seemed to be present, a deeper, more penetrating awareness that pure biology has a difficult time defining.

The struggle to find the proper terminology is painfully obvious, but I believe there is a useful analogy that comes to mind that fits surprisingly well. There is a scene from ‘The Matrix’, in which the movies hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, began to see the perceived reality around him as pure software code (pictured below). Within the context of the movie, it revealed that he had reached the core level of the matrix, one that existed behind the apparent reality that he assumed was real. He reached a depth where an illusion melted away and pure code was left standing in its place.

What I experienced felt that penetrating, which apparently was the result of something truly remarkable; I hacked my brain, or more accurately, the song hacked it. Helped by a few glasses of wine, I somehow downshifted; slowed my mind down enough to allow the song do its work, and the result was that conscious thinking simply melted away and something far more expansive came on-line.

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As an addendum to this note, I want to bring up an article that I came across last year in the ‘Nashville Scene’, which detailed the work of several Vanderbilt scientists, one of which was a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry named David Zald. In the article, Zald explained the research that he was working on, which is basically how to hack our brains. The article summarizes Zald’s work by stating the following:

“Zald has devoted significant time to surveying research on how dopamine helps us appreciate music. In a lengthy 2011 monograph… Zald and co-author Robert Zatorre conclude that musical pleasure arises from an interaction between biologically ancient reward mechanisms and much more recently evolved cortical systems which are highly modifiable by individual experience and culture. In other words, we clever humans have developed a tool to hack our own brains, getting the cortical areas (the regions responsible for complex thinking) to engage in an effortless minuet with our deeper animal brains. That tool is music. Other animals have similar dopamine systems, the authors write — but only humans, with our executive and intellectual capacities, can experience the music-dopamine cascade in music, something that happens when music tickles our sense of anticipation and resolution.”

That is precisely how it works for me and has for several years now. The important phrase in that statement, the key phrase, in fact, is the ‘anticipation’ of what I know is approaching, which I use as a key to unlock the door to my proverbial Oz. It’s the anticipation that allows me to get my mind right; to properly prepare it for the approaching moment. There is a meditative attempt to clear the chatter and commentary of thought; to get my mind to shut up, relax, and let go.

When it happens, which is far from often, a single note can be enough to send me flying. I can literally drift off, completely untethered, and there I effectively become the notes that I’m hearing. The experience certainly doesn’t happen on cue, but when it does occur, it is one helluva a ride.