The very first album I bought when I got to Madison back in 2003—when Johnson Street was one long construction site and Grainger was still a modest, humble little building—was Rufus Wainwright's Want One. One of my first memories of Madison is walking right smack down the middle of Johnson—at that point a giant dirt road, really—and listening to Rufus.
I was trying to find my classes. My schedule said I had a class in WHITE. Rufus and I spent hours—no joke—looking for White Hall. We trudged up and down Bascom Hill (if there was a North Hall and a South Hall, why not a White Hall?), down Linden (Agriculture gets that big of a building?!), and up and down the lengths of both University and Johnson. I was stumped; Rufus was singing. When I finally worked up the courage to ask someone where this mystery building was, they, of course, gave me a look of pity—but mostly amusement—and told me that it was in Helen C. White; you know, the big library in the heart of campus?
So I sheepishly made my way to Helen C. and sat down on one of the benches out front. Rufus didn't sound sheepish on my headphones—I thought perhaps I should take a lesson from him: ""Don't be embarrassed, you just got here,"" he seemed to be saying to me. ""You'll find your way,"" he continued. ""Don't worry about it!""
Strings and banjos backed him up. And I felt better. Rufus' encouragement meant a lot to me. And as I sat there on the bench, watching people stream in and out of the building, I began to wonder: How is it that someone I've never met can make me feel better, and why did this album affect me as much as the flesh-and-blood person that made me feel like the knucklehead that I (admittedly) was?
There's a Far Side that I really like: Two baboons are talking, and one of them says to the other, ""You know, Sid, I really like bananas ... I mean, I know that's not profound or nothin' ... Heck, we all do ... But for me, I think it goes far beyond that."" And I think, for a certain type of people (perhaps those of us who really like Gary Larson), music is more than just background noise during a party, or a good beat for dancing. It has meaning and importance; it affects us.
I'm an English major, and anyone who is or knows an English major knows that the most frequently asked question we get is not about Shakespeare or post-structuralism; it is, without doubt, some variation of, ""What the hell can you do with that degree?"" My standard reply is ""Well, I can properly identify diphthongs,"" which usually gets a laugh, but there is a real answer to the question. It seems to me, at least, that most every branch of human knowledge is in pursuit of somehow advancing or preserving people. Med school, law school, accountant school—in some way, we're out to help people (while making a living, of course), be it through finding the cure to polio, getting a criminal off the street or filing a maddeningly confusing tax form. So why not have a field out there dedicated to studying the very thing we're trying to so hard to protect? That's what art does—it glorifies, criticizes, questions and provokes—and music is no exception. Great music is, for lack of a better comparison, great literature for our ears. It can do more than entertain or make us want to dance—through musical patterns or lyrics or any other number of aural tools, it can make us feel and make us think. It can make us feel like less of an idiot.
So what's the point of all this? Well, the release date for the new Rufus Wainwright just came out: May 15, 2007. It will be the last album I buy as a Madison undergrad. What can I say? I'm a sucker for symmetry.
