You know when you feel that teenage angst? The "no-understands me" phase? Teenagers/kids/young adults often relate themselves to music then. Often they say "I couldn't have expressed myself better than xyz".
And in most cases, that is how most people find their favorite bands. We related to their music, so we liked them. Well, then there are those who just like anything and everything, and that might be different.
But really, what I'm trying to say is that recently, I have related so much to the lyrics of my favorite songs, new and old. The fact that I find myself mirrored in a way by the artists I like, in many different ways. A German saying comes to mind though, "Was nicht passt, wird passend gemacht" (What doesn't fit, will be made to fit). I wonder occasionally whether I make those things fit, do I read too much or too little into the lyrics? Do I misinterpret? Or is that not possible.
Looking at poetry, that discussion could be had as well. We tend to over-analyze poetry in literary studies, be it school or university. I was lucky to study American literature under one of the best professors (in my opinion that is), Prof. Dr. Grünzweig. He let you be yourself, but only if you had to be the guts to do so. He rated every single essay of mine with full scores, he read them out to class. But when another professor got to grade one, it was a near fail! That said, I was challenging in my essays. I questioned myself, the author, the world.
He would be the kind of person to listen to ten different interpretations of a poem and applaud them all. I loved him.
That said, most people are not like him. At school I had a teacher in German, who would only let her interpretation and analyses count. Actually, most of my language teachers were like that..... worse than the Math department.
Back to my point though. We have these conventions on how to analyze. We have our perception of the world and that is how we interpret the writing of everyone. Looking at slave literature, we might take into consideration their hardship, or looking at Caribbean literature, we might pay a bit of mind to their different life. But we are usually too influenced by our culture and being, that to achieve a different perspective, we would have to really question ourselves.
Still, I'm drifting off a bit. And I am not here to question myself today. I am trying to justify the way I feel, by saying "look, he/she/they feel or felt just like me". I read The Yellow Wallpaper and think "hell yes, I know what you are going though, Gilman!".
Is it childish/teenagerish? An excuse? Probably, but it's what we do... we seek comfort in the words of others.
