I remember E.R., and I remember why I liked it

Yes, I have the or probably a soundtrack from E.R.
This is another trip down my musical memory lane, so if you’re tired of it already, go and read someone’s insipid survey, you know, that will be different from the other million surveys you’ve already read.

In high-school there was a little crowd of people who watched E.R., and I was one of them. We loved it so much that when I chanced upon the soundtrack, from memory in a second-hand store, we all took turns listening to it on my CD Walkman. Listening to it last night, there was a good helping of high-tension music where it was easy to imagine an emergency patient crashing though the door on a gurney pushed by doctors, then the doctors and nurses frantically working to stabilise whatever their condition was.

I should also meniton that this soundtrack was the time I heard Duncan Sheik, with the amazing song Reasons for living appearing on this soundtrack. I bought his debut album and was totally blown away. Since then I’ve bought up to Phantom Moon which is to me his best, and nothing afterwards as he seems to have left his mellow roots behind.

As for the reason we watched E.R., when speaking to my closest friends about my youth, I’ve often spoken about how I yearned to be an adult, how unlike my peers who shied away from responsibility, that I actually strove towards responsibility and accountability, to truly be in control and responsible for my own life and actions. E.R. made us feel like this, made me feel like I was at least partially grown up. Each character, including the nurses, reflected a tiny piece of my own personality, and the aspects of character that I aspired to as a young adolescent. The show had such a great gravity, a level of seriousness that was absent from my own life, and as I think about it, such is the way with fiction that highlights great drama. In doing so though, it’s those little elements of personality that are revealed that we find so endearing I think. In many ways, we lived through the cast of E.R., at least for the few seasons we watched of it. I came in just after George Clooney left, and opted out probably two seasons after that.

I don’t own E.R. on DVD, it’s something I’ve left behind. In truth I don’t watch serial dramas anymore, I’ve just grown into a different person and my tastes are very different. Aside from a small sprinkling of HBO series’, I tend to watch films more now, with the exception of my most favoured anime series’ which are if not comedic, then tend to err on the side of the abstract.

Still though, the memories come easily when I listen to the often quiet and dramatic music of of E.R., and all the emotional roller-coasters we rode with the cast. It’s almost childish now when I think about it, but in a way still noble, a grand way of learning about emotions albeit in an over-dramatised and contrived way.