Or should I ask you a question?
…
Music is both a very personal and a very collective affair.
That's what I was thinking.
Depending on where you happened to be born, you get used to or love, or rather get used to loving other music, other songs, other rhythms, other sounds.
That's what I was thinking.
Every event that has marked us, is accompanied by a song that when you hear it instantly brings you back there, then, with them.
The music digs deep into you, damn it, and makes you feel easy.
It emphasizes it, provokes it, excuses it, justifies it, regenerates it or retracts it.
That's what I was thinking.
But I couldn't find my headphones at all.
From the time when I had a significant agoraphobia problem, where I thought that as soon as I walked through the door of my house, I would get dizzy, fall, pass out, have a heart attack right there in front of everyone, I would put on headphones and oops.
They made everything.
The isolation from the urban sound and at the same time the songs playing in my ears created a completely protected environment around me and made my going out manageable and almost enjoyable.
Headphones have remained my loyal companions over the years.
The interesting thing was that when I listened to music alone with headphones, I (almost) completely changed my repertoire from what I was listening to publicly.
Satanic?
The time was 6:30 in the morning.
At such a time, usually only those who work, those who have a dog, those who run and those who try to catch cheap flights.
The latter were nowhere to be seen.
In the past, those who came back full after a nice night used to walk around at this time.
Old.
As I walked for a few minutes and had found a rhythm, the girl running a few meters in front of me stops to tie her shoelace. By the time I realized she had stopped, you see it's still pitch black at this time, I finally found myself coming to a stop right next to her.
At that time, in order to stretch, she drags the cable of her earphone and disconnects it from the mobile phone, and my earphone falls out of the right ear.
In the stillness of the night, the girl's speaker begins to hear the orchestration of a big dance floor and a singer shouting excitedly "let's go".
The bouzouki starts playing and we look at each other awkwardly until we understand what has happened.
What I ask awkwardly smiling "what are you listening to?" he answers me, almost ashamedly, "Economopoulos" and adds "back in the day I used to dance on the tables with this song and now I'm running".
Laughs.
He looks at me a little apologetically and a little embarrassed and leaves, giving me a hint that I automatically returned.
Meanwhile, Sotria Belou was playing on my headphones.
I kept moving forward.
What a hypocrite I am! I always walked with a studied style and in my headphones I might be listening to "Light a cigarette give me fire", heavy rebetika, Epirotika, Saki Rouva or "Hi-5" (with the dance music playing in my head).
Every song that plays in my headphones creates an unlived life in my head, a parallel universe of dalka, party or extrovert in a way that doesn't exist anymore.
I remembered what the girl running told me.
"I used to dance on the tables when I heard them"
Could she also be imagining herself, her then self, now that she was listening to Oikonomopoulos at 6:30 in the morning while running?
A self that was more carefree, more carefree than today? Who had fun, who went out, who lived in a time when everything was fine and could go well.
There is no such time.
And if I think about it, I also secretly listen to two categories of songs in my headphones.
Folk songs, rebetika or cult pop. Songs that if I close my eyes I remember dancing happy and smiling not from a specific event but from a feeling that everything is as it should be.
And on the other hand, I hear heavy rebetika, epirotika or zeibeki that carry a collective dalka, a collective woe that leave me room to touch and a little mine.
Both versions are hidden.
Because the era of carefree happiness is over but the era of innocent acceptance of hardship, poverty and dystopia has not come. Of touching.
The songs come in stealth to fill the gap between train and dock, between past collective happiness and guilt-ridden admitted hardship.
Music undresses you. It reveals every side of you in a matter of seconds.
It becomes a tool. Judgment, criticism and categorization by others. Proof of prestige, culture and pseudo-education.
Yet another proof of who you should be, hiding what you are.
And if sometimes you find yourself with a few people after the big gathering, or if suddenly in a group a familiar melody is heard by chance and you find yourself like this without knowing it, closing your eyes, raising your head to the sky and unconsciously approaching each other singing "Ma I didn't remember the color of your eyes, nor did I remember the sound of your voice. And trying to remember something, I fell asleep.¨
Then you will know that you are not the only one hiding.
Well; what music do you listen to when no one is listening?
*Cover photo: Nikos Chatzikyriakos-Gikas and G. Faitakis (PG 8) Feast on the Beach II, (1970-1979). Tapestry, 1.96 x 2.68 m. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens