Some days ago I’ve been at an event organised at Berghs School of Communication by SheSays Sthlm. I really wanted to blog about it as I enjoyed the event a lot, and the concept behind SheSays, which is presented as the only global creative network for women, but then I remembered I don’t like motivational speeches. However, the ladies who talked to us there shared some really interesting stories, and there wasn’t one speaker that was like the other, they were so different that the only idea that is left in my head is that there is no universal recipe for success, or only one way to “get there”, you just have to do it your way. Funny enough, one of the speakers said that she has no idea what she is doing but she is doing it. Sounds like me when I decided to move to Sweden and here I am now, 2 years later…
Sitting in the main library of Stockholm University, a place where I could find some peace and quiet for the first time in days, perfect to focus on writing. I wish the library were open till late at night, I’d do a lot of writing here, as anywhere else I get distracted by other stuff. It’s like in that pic that’s online with a person who really wants to fall asleep, that has a text that goes like this: “One sheep, two sheep, cow, pig, Old McDonalds had a farm. Hey Macarena!”(Google it!) But I came here with the purpose of working on one thing and ended up working on something totally different because, well, the first thing I did after sitting down at the desk was to check on the news, and that drifted my focus.
But going back to what I should focus on: music. Listening to some radio on Spotify, the song below popped among the suggestions. The song itself is from 2001, which is about the time I started asking myself questions about music’s meaning, and develop my interest in the politics beyond its rhythm, or most of the times, beyond its guitar riffs. But I also remember that back in 2001 I went through a surgery that kept me calm for about 3 months. During those 3 months I had the medical permission to skip sports classes and I used to run home to watch TV for 45 minutes. This TV watching involved jumping from one music channel to the other. This song, along with “In Joy and Sorrow” by HIM, were the reasons why I was doing that, simply because back then the TV was my only source of music and music videos and because I loved both ballads up to the point of driving all my family/neighbours/friends crazy. Also funny enough, during that same time we were about 6 or 7 of us that went through the same surgery. But going back to the concept of the song and especially the video, the same narrative comes up in Francois Feldman’s video for “Les Valses de Vienne” which was shot in the same location as Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and linking all these together shows the way my brain works when music is involved and why sometimes I find it so hard to write about the message hidden behind a song. It’s there, it’s obvious, how do I put it on paper?
Spinning Words 