Me whenever a 90s rock song I like comes on:

The bass comes in first, dumdumdumdumdum, and my heartbeat would match it in time. A voice pierces the…voicelessness. I don’t understand sung words until I read them, and so all that colors songs for me is how rough the sounds of words are, their shapes and their size. I realize this is me, in days before emotions, narrating my life to me.

This is me before the accident, me before The Thing That Will Rock My World, me before anger. I am cool. I feel cool. I am as unflappable as capybaras in an apocalypse.

The crescendo makes me nervous, my heart skip, my brain search for handholds—wait, hold on, what’s happening. This is me as the inevitable happens: a heartbreak, big or small, a nasty surprise, an offense, even an absence. It is happening, what is happening to me.

And then it’s the drums. Bam! It’s always Bam! Bam! the drums. Bam! Bam! Bam! “Loud” songs get me, not me me, the inside of me, literally, my innards and bloodstream and gut bacteria. They thrum not only in response but in recognition: release, release, it’s coming.

There’s a stretch of time that doesn’t feel like time actually touches it. I forget what happens in it, mostly, and as it should be, but I know that some sort of transformation happens every time I listen to a rock song with certain harmonies that I like. What hasn’t been allowed in the real world is okay to perform here: anger, revenge, the exasperation with the futility of life. Here, in the context of songs sung, it’s okay.

#

We arrive right on time. We are three girls in our early to late thirties. Two of us traveled from the Philippines to catch the Foo Fighters on their Singapore tour.

Still can’t believe they wouldn’t go to the Philippines: everyone would freak. Did they not know we were secretly American? Thank you, colonizers, we are brown middle-class workers who grew up on MTV. Did they not know we probably sang Foo Fighters songs in college, while slurping cup noodles, lounging around on mats in open fields and banging away on our giant calculators (I was an accounting major, surprise)?

Walang nagta-Tagalog. Southeast Asians speaking English (and Chinese) all around us. We are brown-skinned aliens in a somewhat familiar world. This is how badly we wanted to come see these white people who will likely spend their lives not knowing, with any intimacy, why we would show up in the first place.

But all that disappears fast.

We look at each other, unable to process how we arrived at this juncture. Then we smile (and take a selfie). We are gonna rock the shit out of this concert.

#

Dave introduces Taylor Hawkins as the love of his life.

https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/AcrobaticUnimportantGosling

 

#

The aisle is on my right. We are sitting in the middle section behind the large standing area in front of the stage.

A drop of something cold lands on my bare shoulder. I look up. A dude holding a glass of beer with his left hand is standing beside my seat, rocking it out to an early song.

Thoughts race.

Will he slip? Will he forget there is a person here? When I get into a fight over spilled beer will I win a round? Will he hit a girl or back away? Will he apologize? Will an apology be worth anything? Will beer on skin be sticky? Will this singular threat to my enjoyment of a concert I have crossed an ocean for be the one thing that spoils everything for me?

I look at the band up front and feel inspired to take control.

I stand up and raise my arms. I scream.

I imagine he spilled his beer on himself.

#

Run comes on.

Out of nowhere, I feel it. Why I’m here.

Wake up. Run for your life with me.

Wake up. Run for your life with me.

In another perfect life,

In another perfect light,

We run.

The Foo Fighters is not some fledgling band. They’re pretty old for a rock band. They’re me. They’ll sing about oral sex (All My Life) with the same energy and amusement as a meditation on life (Times Like These). They’ve been through shit. They’re done and not done figuring things out. They’re dads singing quite literally about the solar system with the anger of teenagers being told what they can or cannot sing.

#

I am crying by Walk. I remember being afraid to die, but also being happy to have lived.

Why do I know this song?

How does music decode buried memories this way?  I feel like I am back in my twenties. Oh, the things I’ve done.

Memories, maybe some not my own, bubble up. No rhyme, no reason. Flashes like those ViewMaster reels, one click, one memory.

• I am crying against a church pillar, softly. A fantasy had just shattered.

• I am lost among middle-aged blue-collar men claiming checks at the catering service headquarters, the one near the airport. I am in pang-harabas outfit but I am very, very out of place.

• I am yelling, on the top of my lungs, somewhere near Something Fishy. Mugs and cans all around. Somebody’s dinner reappears. We scream our secrets to the moon. People tolerate us. It is Friday.

• I may have died five times already, but I’m still here. Mt. Pulag. The final assault. In the arms of God, it feels like. We are too high, it is quiet. I have never met this silence before. There are no high winds, we are behind the mountain. When there is no sound, there is all sound. It is sublime.

• I am in bed with several, several others. A Pringles can has one chip left at the bottom but my arm has outgrown the tube. The sun is out. Someone is listening to the Asian food channel. There is laughter. We play a game.

• Night. Water hits every square inch of my body at once, but my head is in the clouds. I had just checked off four items off a bucket list I didn’t know I had. Someone skinny is devouring cake and chicken.

This is what living means.

They are not pure memories, no. They are those Inside-Out memories, once touched by Joy but now tinged with Sadness, through no fault of her own. Not pure sadness, no, just a wistfulness.

We have lived these lives. These glorious years.

And then we die.

You are old, Foo Fighters, but the real treasure is having grown up with you, and others like you. Thank you for the music, for holding my hand in the dark. For giving us words when we didn’t have any.

Oh, youth is wasted on the young.

#

Dave does not leave the stage! He performs a bit of the second set’s first song alone.

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At the concert grounds, after the concert, our ear drums hurting, we chant along to Best of You’s coda. It would start in small, isolated waves, then it would swell into this hair-raising one-ness.

Ah, there it is again, my old friend. Frisson.

#

I watch Back and Forth on Netflix based on /r/foofighters’ recommendation. I remember promising to write about the Foo Fighters’ concert in Singapore. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I want it to be right, I guess.

But haven’t I been waiting long enough? We all die in the end, what’s the hold up?

#

I see it now, how the pursuit of greatness, however well-intentioned, is likely to leave a path of wounded bodies. This hurts me; I’ve been spending years of my life actively trying not to bother anybody. I’m not exactly a doormat. I’m a sentient rag, ready to clean up bad spots so nobody fights, useful and useless, always at the ready.

Even good guy Dave Grohl had to tell his drummer that he had to leave. Twice.

#

I watch as Dave sets up his garage at home to record new songs some time after singing at the Wembley Stadium in London (their biggest venue ever, a milestone). I remember someone saying they missed the days when people just sat on stage and sang songs.

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Interviewer: “How does it feel like being one of the biggest rock stars in the world?”

Taylor Hawkins: “Fuck you. We’re musicians.”