Riff’s Story

             I believe in reincarnation.

            What would you come back as?

            A lion, I think.

            I'd come back as, like, a sweet guitar riff.

                                    —Overheard on a Toronto Subway

            My first song. A harpsichord. A man, pale skin and silvery hair, tapped keys with frenetic energy. He did not 'play' me, he worked. Introduced me to chords I would know well, and put me through paces fast and slow. His fingers handled me, not gently, but with an expertise I could trust. I sang my best, trying to give him what he wanted, but I lacked the precise beauty he sought. He moved on.

            I clung to reality, an echo in an old man's head. But his mind filled with endlessly fresh themes and rhythms. I could not remain long, and I passed into sleep.

            Emerging again, I took the rich voice of a stand-up bass. Fingers, skilled as the harpsichordist’s plucked strings, with a different energy, a sensuality. Playing me. I repeated, shifting and expanding, and before I grew accustomed to this voice, a trombonist took me over. Large lips brought me forth in a brassy, radiant sound. I slid easily up and down, exploring new semi-tones. I sang like I was meant to. I smashed ideas of stillness and order, defying reason with the energy of freedom. The whole room felt me, moving in raucous dance, or staring enthralled at the trombonist who wielded me as a weapon against all preconceived notions of music, art, humanity itself. Sweat, the heat of many bodies. The trombonist brought the entire room to a pitch. Then I passed on again.

            A pianist. More complex runs and chords. His treatment of me technical, almost surgical. Steady, professional hands let us reflect on what we had shared while experiencing it still. The freedom remained, a thought now, not a feeling.

            The concert ended, instruments returned to cases. But I lived on. I attached myself to the trombonist. I could feel in his lips and large, rough hands that he itched for me. He would play me again before he slept.

            But as the night ended someone else occupied his hand, and then his lips. I was no longer what burned in him. His apartment filled with joy and sound, but I wasn't part of it. When he lay still in bed, drifting towards sleep, I had lost him.

            He tried to bring me back. Playing, days later. I felt the call, but no need, just curiosity. He wanted to hear me again to see if he could use me. The desire to force me on an unprepared world had disappeared.

            I existed still, in the minds of a few audience members and musicians. I made several bids to be called forth, none successful. I might have faded completely, then the pianist called me again.

            Not in a bar or dancehall, but a small room, an odd, close space, yet it hummed with the memories of those who came before us. He filled in on songs lead by trumpet. He played cleanly, as written. I grew disinterested, and might have left him, until he began to improvise. Little touches of his own, riffs, syncopations, and fillers. I waited my chance and then sprung, singing again.

            His treatment of me was technically excellent as always. Rather than the unanswered demand that the trombonists had ended with, he found a satisfying conclusion, returning him smoothly to the melody. Some energy, yes. My call for freedom, but a polite call. I didn’t expect to be remembered. But something had changed.

            Tangibility, substance. For the first time I had physical form. Bumps on a disc of black wax. I did not sing, no one experienced me, yet I existed. Real, but not alive. The stillness didn’t last.

            No instrument, no musician played me. A needle passed across the disc. Other riffs, rhythms, melodies and lyrics jostled together in this small space. At my turn, I sang with all my might, but without a musician I simply repeated the performance of the pianist.

            New listeners. More interested in the quality of sound than the feeling. But satisfied with something, they printed more.

            Now I existed on dozens of discs. Sold to private collectors, bars, cafes. Nightclubs, where I was the music between the music. I sang to musicians, listeners, dancers who had just heard living music. A minor role in a larger piece, set in wax long before, now served as background before more living music.

            I preferred radio. The record, finally chosen, I sang in many places, some halfway across town. Minds drifting in, walking by a set. Others focused intently, sometimes even recognizing, anticipating me personally, humming along.

            A record shattered in an instant when it fell from a shelf. I learned that even physical form wasn’t eternal. More dangerous than breaking: being forgotten. New songs, higher quality recordings, new styles. Old deferred to new. I didn't sing in minds or hearts. I existed only as tiny lumps of wax tucked in sleeves. At times I cursed the discs. If I couldn’t sing, then surely I should be freed. But through one record, I found life again. Not the brief life of one replay, but truly singing.

            A teenager discovered a box of records, digging through his parents’ things. He liked music, had learned to play his uncle’s old guitar. What he found didn’t match his taste. Record after record, he stopped them before the chorus. I doubted I would even get a chance to sing. He let my record play, not seized by the music, just distracted reading the sleeve. But he reached the improvisations. A stylish little drum fill, an unexpected tinkle of keys, a tube of brass made to scream. The creativity within the order of rhythm and key did something he hadn't imagined music could. When my turn came, I sang with all I could. Of course, I came through the wax as I always did, but in his mind I performed as if newborn. He heard and understood me. He replaced the needle and listened again. I think he sat through the whole thing to get to me.

            He couldn’t recreate the pianist’s work. He didn’t have the same level of technical skill. But he had the feeling I'd given him lodged deep inside. Music became more than a hobby for him, it became a passion. He played for hours. Alone, with friends; chords and scales, or songs he heard; him and his old guitar, or playing along to recordings. Then writing. At first rearranging the chords he knew, singing nonsense or others' words. Then more complex melodies and riffs. He fell in with friends and they practiced together, learning from each other, rehearsing songs that spoke to them, and trying to create together. They performed at a couple places in their town, but soon he realized he had to leave them behind. I had a hand in that. They lacked his drive, the need I’d built in him since he first heard me.

            From his hometown to the city. He learned more about music and life in a few years there than he ever could have where he came from, and he found a group that worked. The singer especially shared his drive, his desire. One late night they stayed up talking. Music, dreams, the need to shake people out of everyday existence and remind them they longed to be free, wild, feral. That night they wrote The Song.

            I’m not the only piece of it. The drums, simple but earnest and powerful. The bassline grabs the guts, gets the body involved. I’d be useless without chords creating structure. The lyrics capture the urges that brought it into being. Without me, it would still probably be one of their better songs. But what we found together, the guitarist and I, neither of us has ever been better than in that song. We were born for it. I lead off from silence, smacking listeners across the face, demanding attention. I never relent, I change and grow, moving from chorus to verse. In the bridge I go wild, mocking any idea of order and reason. Showing listeners a reality that few are ready to acknowledge. At my lightest, freedom. At my darkest, chaos. I change The Song from a work created by modern society to a 2-minute-48-second-long dismantling of it, and I love it.

            Every time we performed was new. I plunged into my lowest notes like a harpoon launched into the sea after a whale. I soared to the heights like a winged man challenging the sun. Not because whale or sun came within my grasp, or because I could overpower either, but because all mighty things must be defied even with no hope of success.

            With the jazz recording, I had suddenly experienced existing in dozens of forms. But there were literally millions of copies of The Song. I sang in houses, in bars, restaurants and cafes, in the very streets. I filled the country with my voice and spread beyond its borders. I sang beyond the sea, I sang in communities with a single radio. Some people couldn't understand the lyrics, but everyone could understand me.

            I was a force. Altering attitudes, inspiring risks, even changing lives. For the guitarist certainly I changed everything. He had attained something he wanted since he found those old records in his parents’ house. He played for bigger and bigger crowds. Every time he unleashed me, he would bring some power undiscovered even by he and I until that moment. Being a hit is incredible, being everywhere, singing to everyone, being constantly performed by imitators or enthusiasts. Being living music while a hit is indescribable. A room, a hall, a stadium, a field of people all demanding you. And all of them having their expectations obliterated as the guitarist and I found new ways to push further, to call everyone to fight for what they’d always needed without knowing.

            Second only to being a living hit, I adored singing through the radios of cars. Resistance under the foot, leather in the hand, the exhilaration of speed, and me. I felt so understood flying down a highway, cranked up over the sound of wind. I became the road they drove down, and they yearned to travel further upon me, and wished the highway would never end.

            Maybe it never would have, but one thing always does end, the lives of humans. They still called on me to sing, indeed more than ever immediately after the guitarist’s death. Just when I wanted to mourn, I was constantly blasted around the world. I evoked strong feelings again, but not calls for freedom. The Song had changed from revolutionary anthem to dirge, and after the loss of my partner I didn't have the heart to fight it. So I sang of melancholy. I expressed yearning, not for a radical future, but for an idealistic past when we had all believed in the chance for change, before the listeners grew up, and before the guitarist died.

            Once the mourning-popularity ended, I began to fade. I wouldn’t completely disappear, but I had no aspirations to change the world anymore, just to enjoy my time in it. I still loved car radios. When someone blasted The Song as they drove through the countryside, I could sometimes forget what had happened and give it everything I had. Not for them, but for myself. I would draw echoes from mountains, deserts, forests and plains. In that way I found my own freedom from time to time.

            Once I sang in an office. Quiet intense listeners, repeated stops and starts, drawling discussion during pauses, not how I expected to be played. I realized they were pairing the song with images on a screen. A car rolled through beautiful countryside, such as I loved to do. But I didn't want this. This wasn't revolution, freedom or even escape. It was just those ideas used as a package with me as the bow on top. When they finally finished, I left with relief.

            Soon after, I found myself called to thousands of houses simultaneously, as if played on the radio, but across the country. Not radios, but televisions. My accompaniment the same images of driving from the office. It was mercifully brief, seconds only, but I felt used and uncomfortable afterwards. To my horror the experience repeated not half an hour later, and then again, and again.

            Wearying, humiliating, and angering. Replayed, only in part, repetitively. In the minds of listeners I didn’t demand rebellion. They briefly experienced some tame, light-hearted equivalent, and then only a desire to possess something. I tried to fight back, give my best performance, and break the listeners’ minds out of the pre-planned pattern, but I couldn't. Brevity worked against me, I didn't have time to root myself in the listeners. Soon I surrendered and participated joylessly. Misused over and over for the profit of those in the office.

            Finally, the campaign ended. Beaten, hopeless and embarrassed I crawled away. I found no joy in being played anymore. I was too associated with the ad. It put some people off me entirely. I understood. Worse were those who continued to listen, in spite of the connection. Even without the accompanying images and against my will, I still worked to sell people cars. Even my last refuge of freedom, playing in car radios was torture to me now. I couldn’t know if the listeners identified the driving experience with the commercial on some level, and I could never trust enough to enjoy it. I no longer challenged anyone to seek freedom. I didn't dare face those who remembered me as I had been. I sang spiritless and powerless whenever called, and my only longing was for silence.

            But silence didn’t come. Beyond the records, tapes, and plastic discs, there is an ephemeral space of pure magnetic information, and I exist there in more versions than I can count. The Song, live performances, videos of people attempting to play me as he once did, even the damned commercial, all of them eventually found their way there. I was tugged in many directions at once when all I sought was rest. Maybe listeners who recognized what had been once found me in that place. I didn’t care, I never entered their minds again. I sang when I was called, but I stayed floating in the cold, still, and passionless world of the web. Lonely, though never left alone, I sought what peace I could.

            Sometimes people cut up parts of me to use in other songs. I generally ignored the process. It was so far removed from being me as a living voice that I didn't need to pay it any attention at all. I was only vaguely aware that it happened, until she found me.

            She heard The Song. It sounded familiar. She didn't understand the language, the music wasn’t her style, but something spoke to her. When she began to play with the recording, I paid her no more attention than anyone else. But as she went further and further, I could ignore it no longer. She caused me a kind of pain. Not the horrid pain of embarrassment that the commercial had given me, or the pain of being played badly. This was different. I was stretched, compressed, pulled apart and stitched together, only to begin again. It reminded me of being made physical. A real, tangible pain, as if she was not editing a recording of me, but altering who I really was.

            She molded me like clay, shattered me like glass, splashed me around like paint, and folded me over and over, paper crushed into a form it cannot hold. My sounds were heightened to screams of electronic pain, lowered to a sound deep enough to be the collective voice of the online world, then crushed into such a repetitive fury that any listener would long for release. And still she’s not done.

            It’s a painful experience, but not done out of malice. She has no hatred for me. She seeks to destroy something, to build something new. She means to rip me away from the entire time, industry, and musical reality I emerged from. To drag me, willing or no, through all the horrors and delights of the new electronic world that she inhabits. Through the pain, I’ve started cheering for her. I’m certain that for her to complete her transformation I must be so completely destroyed that I’d lose this self. She can end this consciousness and bring me to silence at last.

            Nothingness. Silence. When it comes will I know it? Will I feel relief to become nothing? Or just feel nothing at all? Perhaps I’ll take another form, return as the voice of her new creation. Or not music at all, a different form entirely. I could enjoy living through life as a human. With human life comes certainty of ending. Now that I have found mine, I see it is both soothing and frightening. That fear is likely why I make up stories now of coming back. No, soon she will do it, and then I will be gone. Perhaps before I go, I could seek out one last car radio? No, that’s over. It’s time to rest.