Free Associations

I listened with great appreciation to Bette Midler singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” at the Oscars Sunday night. I’m a little embarrassed at exposing my schlocky sentimental taste in music, but there you go – I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs out there. But I see many of you heading for the exits. Why?

Aside from some not sharing my taste in schlock, this song has been co-opted by funerals. When you get to a certain age, you go to more funerals than weddings, and there’s a much-better-than-even chance you will hear this song at a funeral service. Especially in the UK, where it’s said to be among the top five most-requested songs at memorial events. The usage was likely prompted by the movie “Beaches,” where it was the background at a cemetery scene.

Oddly enough, the word “death” doesn’t appear in the lyrics, and there’s really nothing about the words that would suggest it’s intended for funerals, but most of you are sick of this song because you’ve heard it too often, and, in this case, not on pleasant occasions.

I’d like to complain about this, except most songs seem to have associations with events. The associations can be personal or collective. War seems to have an especially collective associative quality, even when the lyrics don’t actually talk about war. “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places,” sang Vera Lynn. It’s the quintessential World War II ditty, but there’s nothing military about the words. The Vietnam War seemed to have a lot of these. Jim Morrison and the Doors lit our fire. Even the Gulf War – which we won, as I recall – seemed to have its own song, “From a Distance,” also sung by Ms. Midler -- though the lyrics of this one did concern war and peace. Curiously, Iraq and Afghanistan don’t seem to have signature songs, or am I missing something?

Individual associations, of course, vary widely. A friend who is a major Frank Sinatra fan could not stand Mr. S’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because it was played over the jarring scene in “The Execution of Private Slovik,” where Martin Sheen is felled by a firing squad. In a personal example, as a child I knew “Swan Lake” as the theme music to the 1931 version of the movie “Dracula” before I knew it was Tchaikovsky’s ballet classic. OK, well I was depraved on accounta I was deprived, as the delinquent teen says in “West Side Story.”

Most married couples have “their song,” but the most cheerful music can sometimes be ruined by a tragic association, like a fatal traffic accident or a devastating storm. That’s how we’re wired. It only takes a few bars, or the first notes from a particular voice, to transport us instantly back to our ”big events.”

Getting back to the starting point here, though, I wish there could be a moratorium on the funeral usage of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Some of you might actually get to like it again.