Janis Joplin: my absolute hero

Today I was going to write about something else, but on the train ride home my iPod shuffled onto 'Cry Baby' by Janis Joplin and all this nostalgia hit me all over my body with more force than the force it took me to 'break' (self diagnosis how ya doin') my toe on the coffee table last night.

This is a post honouring everything to do with Janis Joplin, who, as those who have known me from the year 2007 onwards, has been a hah-UGE part of my teenage years, from when I first started listening to her when I was like 14. I was clinically obsessed; you know One Direction fans? I sympathise with them. Really, I do. I once wrote a creative piece, in my FREE time, about meeting her at Woodstock and immediately becoming best friends. I drew pictures of her and put them up on my wall. I re-designed her biography book cover for an English assignment. I think I wrote a song about her.

Specifically I remember staying up really late one night, lying on my bedroom floor listening to I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (best album title award #1 always), when Maybe came on. It was like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out my heart; I remember realising that my tentative hormonal crushes were comparitively laughable, when put up next to the hurt and soul and humanity in every note Janis Joplin ever sung. I fell madly in love with her, harder than any crush I'd ever experienced before, every little part of her and her voice was something I wanted to know about because it seemed as though she knew everything about everything ever!

Listening through my (impressive) collection of Janis this afternoon all these feelings came rushing back - certainly tamer than they once were (don't expect any Janis Joplin-themed fanfictions any time soon) but still wildly, um, appreciative? Admiring? I don't know. She still makes me feel all the feelings. And it's funny, how I can appreciate the technicalities of the music so much more now that I know about things that I've been doing at uni. And what's even funnier, and weirder, is how I can only now see how she's filtered, ever so slightly, into my own performances...

Gee I hope you have a spare hour or two to get your head around these diamonds. One listen will not suffice.

“I’m a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. I read a lot. I guess you’d say I was pretty intellectual. It’s odd, I can’t remember when it changed. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn’t know what to do with it. But now I’ve learned how to make feeling work for me. I’m full of emotion and I want a release, and if you’re on stage and if it’s really working and you’ve got the audience with you, it’s a oneness you feel. I’m into me, plus they’re into me, and everything comes together..."

"...you’re full of it. I don’t know, I just want to feel as much as I can, it’s what ‘soul’ is all about.”