How Do You Feel?

What an intriguing cluster of contradictions we humans are: intelligent but savage, curious, intrepid yet determinedly artistic. Our evolutionary origins as herd animals demanded a level of communication and so the ape’s howl developed into language. Yet despite functioning within the pack we remained individuals and nurtured a consciousness, a unique inner life. We evolved ‘feelings’ enabling each of us to respond to the world differently. But do we still?

This conundrum lurched across my addled mind recently in a conversation about music, a topic for which I travel with my own soapbox. Music relies entirely on our emotions to work its magic and how it does this has been a lifelong fascination, often at the expense of more important stuff, I confess. Back in my college years I amassed a gargantuan collection of vinyl LPs and would devote more time to studying a Melody Maker interview with the bass player from Jethro Tull than to my coursework. It was wonderful. But despite being little interested in pop music, the launch of the video channel

What’s the impact on the real ‘us’ when “YouTube Influencer” is an actual job?

MTV in the 1980s still struck me as significant. It saw the mutation of music from an aural treasure into a distracting visual medium, intimacy neutralised, its heartbeat stilled. Whether it’s Shostakovich or Taylor Swift, we each absorb music through the prism of our own feelings. Videos, it seemed to me, trashed that notion, barging us aside and insisting, “Never mind how personal these lyrics feel to you; forget where this sound transports your imagination – THIS AND THIS ALONE is what the song means”. No longer free to immerse themselves in the music, the listeners’ role was now simply to witness it. Don’t stray from the herd.

This hijacking of our personal space has become ubiquitous. I have a theory (of course I do) that our reactions to almost any given situation are now shaped by a lifetime’s exposure to TV and cinema. Vision will always override our other senses - think of those giant 3D cinemas which convince us we’re skiing down an Alp. Popular culture is image-driven so our response to a situation falls prey to the fictional portrayals of that same situation that we’ve watched a million times.

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

I’m convinced we’ve developed a sort of internal template of what people do in different circumstances, simply because we have seen actors doing it so often. Our behaviour, once natural and instinctive, becomes performative and self-regarding.

We are saturated by modern media at every turn. In place of actively living our lives, we fall to merely playing ourselves in the movie version; we subconsciously mirror responses we have witnessed countless times on screen. It’s unsettling, this notion of life as a continual rolling selfie.

An example…. Last year, back in the UK, I was having lunch with my son in Llandudno at a restaurant which had once, long ago, been a cake shop. I had a flashback of the 13-year-old me on his Saturday morning job, cycling around the town collecting supplies for a small hotel. I recalled myself, clutching my shopping list, in the very spot where we were sitting. It felt momentarily poignant until I realised there was nothing remotely sad about it. This was simply somewhere I’d been years ago and now was again. My imagination was painting the memory with a sepia tinge to turn it into something, I suppose, more cinematic. I was subconsciously creating how such a moment would have been presented on screen.

This warping of our natural behaviour is these days turbo-driven by social media (the herd rides again?). A tsunami of video clips instructing us how to deal with life’s hassles - with the obligatory (and mostly fake) “inspirational” quotescircumnavigating the globe at the speed of light. What’s the impact on the real ‘us’ when “YouTube Influencer” is an actual job? In navigating life’s day-to-day trials, can we still locate our own instincts to guide us? Or do we, when called upon, simply retrieve a response we already have ‘in stock’ for just such an occasion? How would we even know?

In his 1991 song “Walking In Memphis”, Marc Cohn referenced this paradox as he described his delight at being on the city’s hallowed Beale Street. In the last line of the chorus, he wonders if his euphoria is genuinely heart-felt or simply conjured up by what he believes is expected of him on such a visit. He poses the question which even Cher’s bombastic cover version couldn’t obliterate: “But do I really feel the way I feel?”

I wonder - do any of us? Ever?