An Oppositional Reading

"An Oppositional Reading." A term everyone uses quite a lot in my Media Studies class, meaning the consumer of a text has a completely different interpretation of the meaning behind the text that its producer intended (as opposed to the more obvious interpretation, the Preferred Reading). It's often because of religion, sexuality, lifestyle choices, or perhaps most importantly, personal experience.

The example of this I remember from class is two people having an argument about James Blunt's song "Goodbye My Lover". The first argues the Preferred Reading - "This song is about someone going through a breakup."
But the second says, "I know why you think that, but it's actually about somebody who stepped on an insect and they're really guilty about it."
Obviously "Goodbye My Lover" isn't about an insect at all, but this person has a really traumatic experience and they're so desperate to find something to relate it to that they grab at the nearest thing to find similarity and comfort in.

The insect thing is a really bad example, but this whole theory is really interesting to me, especially as a music fan and somebody who often tries to find things within the lyrics of a song. The problem with the example above is that it makes it seem as if any Oppositional Reading is obvious, obscure and insane, which isn't the case. Thinking about it, I realised people have them all the time.

A few months ago, my dad was starting to like Noah and the Whale, one of my favourite bands, and we would listen to them a lot when it was just him and me in the car, and his favourite song of theirs was "Tonight's the Kind of Night". I remember one of the first things he said about it was, "It's about a boy leaving home to go to university."

It made me smile. I can see where he's coming from, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" talks of a young boy getting on a bus to leave. "Tonight's the kind of night where everything could change." "He waves goodbye to the town he grew up him, he knows that he'll never go back." "Tonight he's not gonna come back home." "His heart is full of perfect joy, his eyes begin to flood." He's going away from where he's always lived, moving away from his parents and his family, and it's an adventure.

My dad grew up in Bolton, an area that was quite a tight-knit community, and left there at eighteen to go to university and from what I know I think he loved it there: he met some of his current best friends there, did really well in his degree, was in a band etc.

Him leaving to go and live in Coventry is easily relatable to "Tonight's the Kind of Night", because it's about a boy of age eighteen-ish leaving home, but if you think about it there's no reason he should think it's about going to university. It's either an easy assumption to make about somebody student-aged, or my dad just subconsciously applied this to himself and his memories.

I've done it myself, too. There's a song on Laura Marling's new record* called "The Beast". After I'd listened to it a few times I started to really focus on the lyrics, and I thought I'd found it and someone was finally talking about this thing that causes all of my guilt and rage. It's probably more complicated than that, it's difficult to explain because I don't understand it either - Poppy referred to this unexplainable negativity as my "monsters" before, and "The Beast" also seemed a good way to put at it. I really recognised the illustration of the guilt and dread as something that comes at night and lies beside you in bed, and that sometimes you submit to.

I've thought about it and she probably isn't referring to that, at least not specifically, and it's childish that the identification of what I thought was a common ground increased my love for Laura Marling's music. I think it's likely that "The Beast" is about similar feelings, but probably not that "snap!" exactness that I thought I'd found the first time around.

Does it mean we should stop listening to songs and applying them to our lives? Is an "Oppositional" reading any less of an interpretation? Of course not. That is one of the things music is for, a comfort blanket and a friend, a lifeline in the dark because somebody else has probably felt like this before.

I don't know who Imogen Heap wrote "Swoon" about, but I know who it will always have been about to me, the feelings it stirred in me, and for that I can give the song a name and a face. "The Beast" will still always be a description of someone having similar feelings to mine, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" makes my dad think of things that were happening to him when he was eighteen.

A song's story starts with the thing that happened or the person that it was written about, but once it's out in the world and provides a listener with emotion suddenly it's about them to and thousands of stories are unknowingly interlinked. I think that's an incredible representation of the music community. And that's why of course "Goodbye My Lover" by James Blunt is about a squashed insect.

*I hope nobody's counting how many times I've said "Laura Marling" in the past month...

Yoghurt and Tea

Three companies released major advertising campaigns in the UK this week.

You wouldn't think this would particularly have any effects on me, apart from seeing TV commcercials, but they have. More than TV ads have before I guess.

Six months ago, on my family skiing holiday I was sat with my parents and Sam eating pizza in a restaurant and my dad started talking about a new campaign and TV commercial that the yoghurt company he works for were releasing in October. I wasn't really interested until he said he'd had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which obviously made me want to know more.

My dad built this up over months, he kept telling me about billboards they'd bought and things but it turned out he hadn't and wouldn't see the advert until it's first airing during The X Factor last Saturday.

Poppy and Emily were round and we were eating Chinese food in the kitchen when my dad started squealing from the living room like a little girl. My mum was there too and we all gathered round the TV to watch this advert, which my dad's whole office had been excited for for months:-



There was a silence for a few seconds. A sort of "... Oh." Then we all sarcastically jumped up and down and hugged and then my friends and I left and finished our take-out food and my parents went back to to the movie they were watching.

Haha, read the Youtube comments.

I've seen it a few times since and I guess it's okay. I think they were aiming for one of those Cadbury gorilla style ads that's catchy but unrelated and it works. Maybe you could spin off from it. I understand about recognition and things. It's definitely creative, it just... doesn't make me want yoghurt.

Then, one day this week, my dad came home from work, mostly laughing about it, and said that everyone in his office was annoyed because another yoghurt company released a major TV advert that week. It includes a boy band of farmers and the song is avaliable on iTunes.



I don't really have much of an opinion about this. It wasn't as funny as I thought it was going to be.

I'm ridiculously passionate about it and the third TV commercial that was important for me this week was for tea, though it barely references tea at all. I'm reluctant to even call it an advert it's so beautiful, a film made up of crayon drawings. Poppy was singing the song from it all of Thursday (Charlene Soraia's cover of "Wherever You Will Go") and it's lovely.



It's so pretty and clean and every time I see it it affects me. I don't know if it makes me want Twinings or not. But the way it makes me feel is extraordinary, for a tea advert.

Illegible but Necessary Typewriter Blog

All Is Fleeting

I had a solid idea of what I wanted to write about today, but I'll save it because right now it seems very important that I share this with you:



Charlie Fink and Laura Marling play "Give A Little Love" and "Alas I Cannot Swim" together in the back of a taxi. I think she must have been around seventeen at this time.

I put "Give A Little Love" on before purely for the lyric all is fleeting. A while before that I'd read something on someone's tumblr post about the value of life, and it made me feel quite guilty because of how I'd been thinking lately.

I turned it off because it was brilliant but didn't seem quite right, and it was the same when I saw Noah and the Whale on Thursday and they opened with "Give A Little Love". They're an amazing band live, passionate and energetic and open, but the first time I heard "Give A Little Love" was this video, and because of that I think of it a little differently.

I've found that with the community of music involving Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale and Mumford and Sons, all of who's music has become a part of my life these last few months - everybody seems to think they know quite a lot about their lives, specifically love-lives, during a certain time. I go between thinking it's interesting to listen to a song and have an idea who or what it is about, to thinking that it's possibly interferring and unhealthy to feel like we have access to this, or have opinions about who should or shouldn't still be together, things like that. These aren't people we know and they don't know us and it doesn't seem quite right.

But I think seeing this, it's okay to watch it with the feeling that this isn't a concert or a performance, not really, but two people in love and in coversation. Music is a platform for connection, not necessarily just for artist to fan, and music is a communion in many different ways. Charlie and Laura. Years ago, looking at each other and singing about how they feel.

Dying Thoughts

There's something about being alone late at night that I think seems to loosen the limits of the imagination. You can start to think about something, like the fact that it's very important you learn to speak Japanese more than anything or that there's a serial killer outside, and for some reason the conscience just doesn't shush it. There's no "but there's other things that happen in my life" or "there's no reason there would be a serial killer outside" like usual. You seem to react much quicker to your thoughts, can scare or inspire or upset more easily than in clear, waking hours.

Having said that, last night I ninety percent convinced myself that I was going to die.

I want you to know that normally I'm not a hypochondriac or anything. But before I went to bed, I took a sleeping pill yesterday, for the first time. For some silly reason I was slightly nervous before, I think I just don't like the idea of putting nerve-altering substances inside me. Also I didn't read the packet clearly, therefore missed the "thirty minutes before going to bed", so I sort of sat on my bed, cross-legged, for a while after I swallowed it as if in exactly thirty minutes I would just click straight out of consciousness. And then all of a sudden I started to regret taking the sleeping pill and instead start to think, "Crap, I'm going to die."

It was completley irrational, and so I got up out of bed again and restarted my laptop, because it was the closest I could get to being surrounded by people I guess, it was late and I didn't want to call anyone. So I tweeted a few times sort of jokingly and then I shut the computer down again (I'm supposed to not use the internet an hour before I sleep, unsurprisingly I'm bad at that...) and I lay in bed and shut my eyes.

Then it really started. I obviously knew I wasn't going to die, but I was thinking "Just in case...". And in my head I started going through things I felt like I should summarize for myself before my untimely death, so I kind of forcefully pondered my friends and my family and this guy but then, as we do as we're falling asleep, my mind just started to wander.

Obviously I don't know the exact last thing I thought before I fell asleep. But I know the last thing I remember thinking about.

It was the fact that I'd tweeted before I went to bed, and this brief picture came into my head of the fact that my tweet count ended in 11.

That was an odd number and it wasn't a very neat way to leave things before I died.

*sigh* I am pathetic.

Obviously, my life is full of enough excitement and importance that Twitter and odd numbers was the last things I would've thought about. Before, y'know, I died from taking a herbal sleeping pill.

Room

I read a book this week called "Room", by Emma Donaghue. It's about a boy, named Jack, who is just turning five years old, and lives in an 11 by 11 ft room with his mother, where they are being held captive. They are looked after by "Old Nick", who takes out the trash after Jack has gone to bed, and brings them food and the things they ask for for Sundaytreat. Jack knows of nothing else, and has trouble understanding when his mother explains to him that there's an Outside World to Room.

I was talking about this book with my mum, and the way it was written - how Jack calls the different things in room as if by title, Table and Wardrobe and Rug are the centres of Jack's world.

I thought about it and we all live in a Room, I suppose. Maybe mine's broader - the places I constanly go between are Home and School and the Pool and Poppy's House. There's greater distance between them than in Jack's Room, of course, but it's the same - I've been in the same place for a long time and feel slightly like I'm growing out of it. A combination of an age thing and a dash of wanderlust.

I'm definitely not comparing life in a small town to being held captive as such but it seems to be like living any way for too long – whether in a village populated three hundred or in a huge city, we develop a routine and habits and it becomes our Room. It’s probably healthy, and natural instinct for us to surround ourselves with things that we know to feel safe. But I’m starting to feel too safe. I want to go Outside: maybe not forever, maybe just for a ten minute walk, but the trouble is I don’t know how and although reading “Room” it frustrated me, I’m definitely starting to understand how five-year-old Jack feels, of course in a very different way. But still; not sure whether it's better to be on the Inside, isolated and suffering, or on the Outside, lost and scared, overwhelmed and exposed.