Not waiting to exhale

Do you ever hear a piece of music so powerful that it sucks the wind out of you? I don\’t mean figuratively, like suddenly \”identifying\” with Everybody Hurts and coming within 2 and 1/4 miles of missing your exit. I mean literally, like when Isis fits all of their gear into the tiny Drunken Unicorn and they hit a chord that makes your diaphragm contract and your face lurch forward, mouth open, like a slow, comfortable punch in the stomach. I imagine I look like I\’m trying to fog a mirror that sits 12 inches in front of my face. I fucking love it when this happens.

I\’ve been to few rock shows recently, probably ten or less since we moved back to Atlanta two years ago, and, as such, I\’ve had scant few opportunities to have the air in my lungs forcibly removed. It used to happen all the time, partly because I was going to (and playing in) a lot of shows, and partly because it used to happen at Redcoats almost weekly. Those of you were there no doubt remember the power of Battle Hymn at the Tate Center. For those of you who have no idea what I\’m talking about, Battle Hymn is a slow, moving rendition of the Battle Hymn of The Republic of which I\’m sure you\’re familiar. The marching band would do a ceremonial performance of the tune before heading into the stadium at home games. As a drummer, I didn\’t play anything during Battle Hymn, so we got to listen each week. Towards the end of the song, it gets really loud, and, without fail, it made me breathe outward. It was hard to explain. I didn\’t start really following Georgia football until after I graduated, and I bear no sympathies whatsoever to the Confederate connotations conjured by The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Hearing Battle Hymn at the Stone Mountain laser show makes me roll my eyes, but hearing it at Georgia home games was something else altogether. I\’m convinced it has something to do with volume. The drumline was, and still is, almost always behind the band, so we rarely got to hear anything at full tits. At the Tate performance, however, the band was all around us, and it was always full tits. Three sentences, three uses of the word tits.

To be honest, I hadn\’t even acknowledged this personal phenomenon nor had I realized how long I had lapsed until I was teaching the high schoolers this fall. Early in the season, I had missed a few rehearsals, during which time the band had gotten the closer, Hey Jude by those, uh, guys from that island, onto the field. Their arrangement started the same way as the original, but out of nowhere there was this bitching trumpet rip. Despite the fact that I had never heard it before it triggered something and, you guessed it. At long last, it was mine again, if only for a little while. The problem was, I was standing directly in front of the trumpets when it happened and I wasn\’t wearing ear plugs, which I always try to wear when I\’m in front of the ensemble. It was so loud that I almost threw up on myself. Sweet musical glory, delivered full force by a bunch of high schoolers no less.

The preceding Redcoat mushiness is also intended as a loving sendoff to the Georgia theme. The theme was really only meant to counter Rusty\’s Vol digustingness, but Rusty\’s ambitious wagering ended up taking care of that for us for most of the season. Yes, I could probably wait until after the SEC championship to change themes, but I\’m really not sure when I will have another night to sit around and tinker with the theme. In closing, cram it.

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EXTMEME \’05:

Alenda Lux
Audacity
Being Amber Rhea
Blog This
Daily Dose of Dave
Drama Wench
Geester
Grabbing Sand
Monotonous
My Daily Struggle
Radical Georgia Moderate
So-called Profundity
Str8jacket
Zagursky