The comic book series Phonogram, in which the basic concept is music-is-magic (and if you love music you really should check it out - start with The Singles Club, and use the glossary if you’re not familiar with mid 2000s British indie music), puts forward the idea of the Curse Song. The song that, no matter how chipper and upbeat it is, brings forth a memory that drops like a stone to the pit of your stomach and starts to kick its way out.
“It’s worth stressing that a curse record is a different thing to the true angry break-up obsessive record. Putting on anything by Nick Cave, drinking a lot of whiskey while scowling is actually a healing thing. Not nice for anyone else to be around you as you coat yourself with blood and sin, but actually a utilitarian thing for self-repair, an aesthetically-inversed version of white wine, smeared mascara and bawling “I Will Survive”. A curse record is the opposite. A curse song will, in a real way, open up old wounds, tearing the stitches you’re trying to make hold. A curse song should be avoided at all costs.
Lately I’ve been going through a pile of old mix CDs I made when I was younger. Some are labelled, some anonymous (the one labelled Best Of 2003 was a chuckle - I might stick it up on here for people to laugh at) but each CD has had at least one track that made me think “cor, I haven’t heard this in ages!” which promptly got stuck on a Spotify playlist created for the very purpose of nostalgia. Also, a surprisingly high amount of Evanescence considering I’ve scrobbled them on Last.fm nine times since 2005. It’s been an enjoyable jaunt down memory lane, until I stuck one on from the tail end of March 2004, forgetting exactly where I was in my life at that time.
Curse song? The whole damn disc was full of the fuckers.
That’s the thing about music. It’s time travel. An eight bar intro can rip you from the present day and hurl you, screaming, back to a time you’d left behind. Oh, you’d got over it. You’d moved on, after a long and difficult healing process. Built a life, found your ideal partner, created a new you. The happiness you have now? No barrier to the flood of memories.
Music can be magic, or it can be murder.
