“I just had a vision for a music video. Inspiration”
Now, this revelation might actually have to do with the lecture in Linguistics that day. We discussed “speech communities,” and “insiders vs. outsiders.” When people “code-switch”, or speak Spanglish, for instance, only the people who speak both fluently will accurately understand all that’s going on in the conversation. Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but it goes a little with my music video vision. “Inspiration” is a song I’ve wanted to write for a while, but every time I think about it (I’ve thought about it for a few years now), I’m only thinking of how to best visualize the music. In other words, I’ve just had visions of how the music video will go.
When I was in high school, I made a mental (and perhaps physical) list of people who inspired me. These people were mostly students from my school; certain multi-instrumentalists, or spontaneous individuals who I looked up to, or wanted to marry. Anyway, I had made a list, and in my music video vision, I pictured a person (me) encountering such people in little snapshot moments that defined their inspiration to me. For example, I know this guy who said he was working on a CD; he plays several instruments, and he is the reason I went through an electric bass guitar phase in junior year. Things like that.
So as I’m sitting in Linguistics, I consider a different route of inspiration. Something having to do with heartbreak and love, and all that mushy stuff. I envisioned a girl spending quality time with a boy, his charisma and humor inspiring her to take more chances, or maybe try skateboarding, I don’t know. As I’m writing about this now, I realize that the story is a little close to home, but screw it. So the girl is inspired by the boy she loves (or whatever), but here is my twist (kind of): Even after the girl’s heart is broken, and the guy leaves her and starts loving somebody else, the girl finds inspiration in the two bodies that walk away. She is inspired by the heartbreak that the dude has given her. Am I weird to say that?
That’s where the Linguistics lecture may have connected in. The girl becomes an outsider as she watches another happy couple, like an outsider in a speech community. I guess it could be like if I, an English only speaker, were to sit in on an entirely French conversation. I’d be an outsider, but I would be so inspired and soothed by the French language it wouldn’t matter (maybe that example was a stretch).
