Month for Loki, Day 3: Pandoramancy
by beanalreasa
Today is a simple post.
It is about a few particular songs that have haunted me this past year — mostly through random television and radio commercials, and various ironic instances of radio pandoramancy.
The first instance featured Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway:
My husband and I were attending a three-day weekend fetish event that was held at a pretty swank hotel, and I awakened early one morning to the chorus of this song playing loudly — as the theme to a travel commercial.
All I could think was that the chorus of the song somehow jibed with the concept of ‘breaking away’ from the mundane world, since the chorus of —
I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly
I’ll do what it takes til’ I touch the sky
And I’ll make a wish
Take a chance
Make a change
And breakaway —
was set against a backdrop various highlights sponsored by the local tourist board – from pristine shores edged by serene blue ocean, to majestic blue-white mountains rising from lush carpets of evergreen trees, to the sophisticated glow and bustle of the theatre and shopping district of the capital city , all peopled by smiling faces of travelers enjoying themselves in the lovely state of ____, but I just noticed the tune of a song that I’d never heard before.
And the words of that chorus rang in my head:
make a wish
Take a chance
Make a change
And
break
away
and I looked blearily at the clock.
4:30AM.
I fished the remote out from beneath the pillow upon which my husband was sleeping soundly, and after several irritably clumsy attempts at jabbing random buttons in the dim light, I was finally able to mute the volume.
My husband never even stirred.
Then, I rolled over, and tried desperately to go back to sleep.
But sleep would not come.
I had that fucking song as an earworm for the rest of that event.
And I saw/heard that commercial at least six times in the next two days, though it was always when I was alone, and always when I was resolutely trying not to think about it being a specific nudge toward the inevitable.
Make a change
And break away….
(I ended up JFGI once I reached home, and was able to dislodge the earworm somewhat, but it shall forever remain a definitively Lokean earworm from that day forward, for the very reason for the awful realizations that I came to during that weekend…and what fresh hell of a twist came into my life not even two weeks later.)
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Cut to a few months later, there was Sara Bareilles’ ‘Brave’….
This song was used as a theme in a Microsoft Windows commercial…or maybe it was even for a cellphone that featured some sort of Microsoft technology.
I seem to remember arguing with V about our increasingly lack of connection, and our seeming inability to communicate as of late…and yet here was this fucking commercial suddenly blaring in the background, advertising some new aspect of communication technology.
Either way, the first time that I noticed the lyrics:
Say what you wanna say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave
With what you want to say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave
I was actually in half-hearing the commercial, and the irony of that moment so unsettled me that I stopped me in mid-sentence.
My husband didn’t even notice.
I’d wager that he thought that my sudden silence had meant that he’d won the argument.
And, like the previous song, I hadn’t actually come across the opportunity to hear the whole song, until I was sitting in a Wendy’s having lunch one day, almost a month later. ( I had to JFGI’d the above video, because I’d caught the tail-end of the song, because it ended just as I was sitting down to eat. Only then, did I realize, with increasing dismay, what a spectacularly Lokean sneaky ton of bricks message that song was in its entirety.)
And would it surprise you that the song that immediately followed Brave was Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul?
(Such an irrepressible flirt He is.)
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Hail Loki, Lord of Pandoramancy!