The Intersection of Music and Misery

In the movie "Hi Fidelity" John Cusack opens the film by asking, "What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

I think it is one of those unanswerable questions. But below is my intersection of misery and pop music

Please call a doctor, I've been so depressed
That I think that I'm finally breaking
I can't quite explain, I can't feel any pain
But I know that this time I'm not faking

This is from "Permanent Waves" by The Kinks. I was 13 when I first heard this song and it struck an immediate chord. I was at the awkward age where I wanted more out of life but was completely ill equipped to put my finger on why I was so unhappy, much less express it to anyone who might have been able to help. My guesstimate as to how many times I played this song - 8,512.

This song came out in the late 70s and the solution to the problem was for our hero to go out and get a new hairdo or Permanent Waves. I never wanted to be the white kid with the afro, so I never tried it. But I would be lying if I said I never wondered if my life would have turned out different if I had.

When you take up a pencil and sharpen it up
When you're kicking the fence and still nothing will budge
When the words are immobile until you sit down
Never feel they're worth keeping, they're not easily found
Then you know in some strange, unexplainable way
You must really have something
Jumping, thumping, fighting, hiding away
Important to say!

This is from "Guitar and Pen" by The Who and it came out about the same time as "Permanent Waves". Most songs that came out (at least the ones I was aware of) that dealt about frustration were framed in the typical boy-girl way. But this song was about the frustration of writing and playing music. It still wasn't exactly what I had going on, but it spoke to me at a critical time.