Cinematic Chillout is a playlist on the audio streaming service, Spotify. Spotify was founded in Sweden on the seventh of October 2008, and operates under what’s known as a freemium business model; meaning it provides DRM-protected music and podcasts for free as long as you’re happy to put up with advertisements breaking into your listening experience, with the option to upgrade to a paid subscription if you’re not. Before I tell you more about this playlist though, I first want to detail a little about my own relationship with music.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I received my first CD, but I do know where I was; a now all but non-existent music and DVD chain called Sanity, in my hometown of Traralgon. The CD in question? Simpsonic, Songs from The Simpsons. I remember looking at that CD, it’s front cover featuring the iconic yellow characters, and never wanting anything so badly in my life. I was full of that kind of want I rarely feel as an adult, but that as a child seemed to overtake me regularly. That intense desire that’s part exhilaration and part panic, where an answer from your parent to the question Can I have (blank)? is likely to tip the scales one way or the other. Perhaps it’s because I have money of my own now that this emotion is tempered by responsibility and an awareness of waste, I’m not sure, but what I was sure of was that I needed that CD.
My mum was in another shop, I want to say it was a clothing store, and I remember trying to figure out what my tactic would be to convince her to purchase me the greatest CD that must ever have existanted as I hunted her down. I started with a whiny, ‘Muuuuum,’ and likely didn’t improve from there. My mother though is a canny shopper, and so she made a bargain with me. She’d buy it, but it would be included as part of my upcoming birthday present. I readily agreed and all but skipped behind her as we returned to the shop called Sanity with the insane mission of buying a CD that only featured songs from The Simpsons. I waited with giddy anticipation as the days leading up to my birthday rolled by, and when I finally unwrapped that compact disk, to see its colourful cover featuring all my favourite characters, it was just as glorious as I remembered.
Now, let us be clear about something, the songs featured on The Simpsons are well written, often clever, and regularly funny. They are jaunty jingles that are likely to get stuck in your head to repeat for days; but they’re not the kind of music you just sit around and listen to. Young me with his new CD quickly realised this fact, when, after only a couple of listens, he was ready to press stop and then never press play again. But young me also had a strong moral code and no small amount of pride. He had begged his mother for this album, bargained and waited for it with the greatest anticipation; he couldn’t admit it had all been a terrible mistake. So, he did what to him was the only rational thing to do given the circumstances; played it on repeat until an appropriate amount of play time had been reached, then never listened to it again.
I would like to say my musical tastes improved from that point on, but I don’t believe I can make that claim, because I was soon to hit my teenage years. I’m just going to give the band’s name now and get it over with. Nickelback. I was a fan from the very first “This is how you remind me,” and would sing along without abandon or shame or any real understanding of what the song was about. This love for what would become one of the world’s most hated bands continued for years, paired with the likes of Three Doors Down, Creed, and Default; who all did variations of the same thing. I can’t even say what it was about this type of music that made me love it so, other than, for whatever reason, like most music does, it resonated with something inside. It made me feel things. Something between teenage-angst and teenage-anticipation, thanks to lyrics such as ‘I’ve been a loser all my life, I’m not about to change’ or ‘I like your pants around your feet.’ Lyrics that should only excite a fifteen year old boy. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the emotion being portrayed that hit a cord with the simplistic way I processed emotion at the time. Or maybe simplistic isn’t the word, but unrefined. There was no subtlety to what they sung about, no deeper meaning. They played songs about looking at photographs and remembering the good ol’ days, and while I had no good ol’ days to look back on, the emotion behind it was something I could grasp and understand and sing along with. So I did. And while these days I would get laughed at, and can laugh myself, at the trashy nature of their music (I even once went to one of their concerts where they threw open cups of beer into/at the crowd), the fact still remains that for a time I had a relationship with it, and that it influenced, for better or worse, part of my development. Beside, I think we all have musical skeletons in our closets, those are just mine.
Over the years the ways I consumed music changed. I’m old enough to remember recording songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, and listening to them on my walkman. My walkman changed to a discman as music left cassette tapes for compact disks, moving on from there to an mp3 player, then an ipod. Now we have streaming.
I have to admit I’m not a big one for streaming. Perhaps it’s the old man in me, or my distrust of the reliability of Australian internet, but I still prefer downloading my music onto my device so I have the confidence that I’ll be able to listen to it without fear of buffering. One exception however is the Cinematic Chillout Playlist on Spotify.
Truth be told, I don’t know a lot about the Cinematic Chillout playlist. I don’t know whose mind it was that put it together or named it. I don’t know when it was first created and made available. I don’t know how many listens it gets on the average day, or how many Spotify patrons have clicked on it since it began. I do know this, the Cinematic Chillout playlist is primarily composed of musical scores from various movies and television shows and that I stumbled across it when I was hosting a writing night and needed some music to play in the background. Usually I go for ambient music when I write, or occasionally movie scores, and so when I searched Spotify for such a playlist it presented me with Cinematic Chillout. It was the perfect choice for two reasons. One: It was exquisite writing music, providing a soothing yet engaging, without being too engaging, ambience to the room. Two: It elicited emotion.
My taste in music has changed over the years, altering to match the person I’ve become as well as the depth of emotion I now feel. Because music, to me, is primarily about eliciting emotion. Sometimes that emotion is anticipation followed by disappointment when purchasing Simpsonic, Songs from The Simpsons. Sometimes it’s the illicit thrill of imaging yourself as a trashy fifteen year old rock god. Most of the time however it’s the tragedy, the drama, the thrill, the joy, and the hopefulness of living. It’s the small moments and the big that music is able to tune into, remind us of, exaggerate and refine into a pure piece of emotion so that even when we’re sitting on the bus or washing the dishes we can be having an emotional experience beyond what that task would usually provide. To me, no piece of music does this as well as a musical score. It is designed to hide in the shadows, to stand present but not seen as it pulls the puppet strings to manipulate and control the emotions of an audience. Many of the pieces of music from the Cinematic Chillout playlist are from movies or television shows that I’d seen but whose score I would not recognise. But once these tracks were brought out of the shadows and shone a light on I’ve found that they are sweeping, beautiful pieces of music, masterful at doing that which music does best.
Elicit emotion.
Talk soon,
Damian
Damian Robb 