Woulda, coulda, shoulda

The music of Céline Deon

Screengrab of the official video for “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”

Poetry and music is a funny beast. It takes the common parlance, wraps it inside a bridge or verse, obscures it with a harmony, a chord, a punctuation mark, a phrasing and causes smilies, metaphors, even clichés to explode into emotions on several layers all at once.

That’s how I feel when I listen to and play Céline Deon’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” I cringed when it became a TikTok viral meme with gold curtains, confetti and a leaf blower starring a wannabe influencer and engineered by an accommodating partner and the familial entourage.

This isn’t a cynical commentary on the trend, just an observation. Some of the videos I found highly creative and entertaining. In the end, though, the videos were hard to watch when the “reveal” moment of the videos became more about the climax than the heart-breaking, bitter-sweet journey through anguish in the verses.

I think many TikTokers missed the meaning on the way to their destination.

I suppose that is an everyday occurrence; the rush to the destination while ignoring all the experience and feeling of the journey, causing a hollow climax… well, I suppose we could stop there lest I unwittingly give NSFW advice to my younger self or inadvertently write a commencement address.