You may have seen them. They’re two brothers, twins in fact. Their videos have millions of views on YouTube, featuring the pair reacting in real-time to their first hearing of classic and new songs alike: Robert Plant’s raw carnal yawp on Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”, Phil Collins’ cacophonous drum fill on “In the Air Tonight”, Dolly Parton’s painful pleading to that auburn-haired siren “Jolene”, the latest epic verse from Kendrick Lamar.
The twins often offer a passing comment or an affirming nod and an “okay, okay”. But every now and then, they are caught entirely off guard by a moment of sonic transformation. Their jaws drop and they look at one another in utter astonishment. It’s as if they have just tasted fresh honey from the comb or witnessed a humpback breach. It’s joyous, and as you watch, you begin to will these epiphanies upon them.
But this isn’t about the Twins. This is about you. It’s about me. Us. It’s about those moments when we experienced a work of art that left us breathless that first time we brushed up against it. It’s a song boring a hole right into your chest upon the inaugural listen, or that palpable feeling that an artist is staring right back through you from a painting tucked in the far corner of an exhibit.
For every ten thousand exposures to art - music, film, painting, literature, poetry, theater, dance - we may only feel it once. It’s all too rare, the snow leopard of daily experiences, and yet that’s what makes it so damned remarkable. It’s the lightning that dodges the bottle, the shooting star camouflaging amid the clouds. And when it happens, it’s hallelujah.
As much as art is intellectualized, this fresh experience is more primal in nature. We feel it in our bodies. Our spine shivers, our neck hair tingles, our chest hums. It’s as if our cellular makeup has just been given a good stirring. We are, we hope, forever altered by bearing witness to something breathtaking.
It’s the poem that brutalizes you, bringing a brief and holy solidity to your grief. It’s the aria that punches through the architecture of the temple, leaving no barrier between you and the Divine. It’s the millisecond when you see the world open up on the screen, presented in a way that you’d never considered before, stripped bare and fully seen.
To pass judgment on the quality of the work is superfluous, if not sacrilege. After all, one woman’s Rachmaninoff is another man’s REO Speedwagon. It’s beside the point. How we respond to art is a reflex too fast to catch with a critic’s net. Awe outraces appraisal every damn time. We can all malign the rollercoaster for a bumpy ride once we’ve climbed out of the seat, but for a moment, we were weightless, in flight, and we were rhapsodized by the sense that we were flying.
We can return to the work, trying to recapture that sense of discovery, but never again with the innocence of unalloyed eyes or ears. Like the ghoulish creature that pops out on the automated amusement park horror ride, it can really only seize you once. After that, you’re anticipating it, looking for the wires that hold it aloft, and measuring your response.
Every artist, I promise you, wants to know how you felt the first time you drank in her poem, sat with his song, got lost in their canvas. Not how you’ve studied it for weeks, stripping out the layers of presumed symbolism, but how close they came to a Cassius Clay knockout punch at the ringing of the bell in the first round. Did they knock you off your feet? Take the air from your lungs? Leave you on the mat, weakened and wounded by beauty or terror? Good, they would say. I did my job.
Over the years, it’s easy to stop seeking out first times. To quote a favorite song, “these days, there ain’t no more, now there’s just again.” But if we’re open to them, they’re still there, waiting to astonish us, inviting us to wonder. It may take a bit more effort, but that sense of being lifted up and carried away by something transformative, even for a moment, is worth the quest.
Because when it happens, it’s hallelujah.
First Time Hearing "Seven Nation Army" - The Twins