My Problem with Fleetwood Mac

My problem with Fleetwood Mac is that they never arrive as background music. They arrive like a summons. You press play to listen to one of their songs, believing you're going to hear a classic, a beautiful melody, a handful of impeccable harmonies, and what you actually get is something else: an ambush. Not just any sentimental ambush, the kind that barely brushes against nostalgia and then leaves. No. What Fleetwood Mac drops on you is a stranger, more adult, more cruel burden. An existential burden. One of those that hit you head-on, without preamble, and leave you still, stunned, trying to understand where the slap came from. That's my problem with Fleetwood Mac: their songs don't accompany me, they interrogate me. They don't just play; they delve into inner rooms you didn't know you had. They touch chords that seemed buried, perhaps dead, perhaps dormant for years, and they awaken them with an elegance that is almost offensive. They do it without raising their voice. Without needing a speech. Without asking permission. They do it with a melody, with a phrase, with a harmony that seems to float and, suddenly, has already split you in two. There's music you listen to, and there's music that, in some dark way, listens to you. Fleetwood Mac belongs to that second species. If we're talking about Rumours, the problem becomes even more serious. Because Rumours isn't just an extraordinary album. It's an emotional civil war produced with an almost obscene precision. It's a group of human beings tearing themselves apart internally and, instead of choosing silence or collapse, they decide to lock themselves in a studio to respond to each other with songs. Not letters. Not insults. Not confessions. Songs. That's the beautiful monstrosity of it all. Buckingham sings to Nicks.Nicks responds to Buckingham.Christine McVie writes from her own crack.John McVie listens, endures, swallows the collapse.Mick Fleetwood goes through his particular hell while trying to hold together the skeleton of a band that is emotionally crumbling before the microphones. From that disaster, an album of eleven songs and barely thirty-nine minutes is born, which even today sounds as if it were recorded yesterday by sad, alcoholic, and furiously lucid gods. That's another one of my problems with Fleetwood Mac: they turn pain into such a clean form of beauty that you almost forget that what you're hearing was born from rupture, from spite, from wounded pride, from betrayal, from loss, and from that unbearable mix of love and resentment that usually leaves people shattered, not masterpieces. But there stands Rumours, humiliating the world. Because Dreams is not just a beautiful song: it's an elegant retreat that still cuts. Go Your Own Way is not just an anthem: it's a reproach with a guitar, a wound turned into a chorus. Never Going Back Again sounds light, almost fragile, and perhaps that's why it hurts more: because lightness sometimes isn't happiness, but the way the soul lightens when it has already lost too much. Songbird is something even more dangerous: a song that seems tender until you understand that tenderness, in certain contexts, is the most refined form of heartbreak. Then there's The Chain, which doesn't describe a broken relationship but something much worse: a broken relationship that still pulls at all its fragments as if the bond refused to completely die. That's Fleetwood Mac at their most lethal: evidence that some people can hate each other, miss each other, need each other, and tear each other apart at the same time, and still produce music of an almost supernatural beauty. That's where the matter ceases to be merely musical and becomes philosophical. Because the real scandal of Fleetwood Mac isn't their history. It's what their history demonstrates. It demonstrates that suffering, when it finds form, can become a muse of luminous violence. It demonstrates that agony doesn't always destroy; sometimes it sharpens. That intimate fracture, when filtered through talent, can stop being noise and become architecture. That there are moments of existence when darkness doesn't cancel lucidity, but exacerbates it. That makes one uncomfortable. Because it forces us to accept a truth we don't always want to face: that some of the most beautiful expressions of humanity are born not from peace, but from conflict. We like to repeat that art saves. What we almost never say is that many times it saves because it first wounds. Fleetwood Mac understood that all too well. So the problem, at least for me, is that when that kind of truth enters through the ear, it doesn't leave. It stays. It settles. It nests. Not like a catchy melody, but like a ghostly echo. There are songs of theirs that don't end when they finish: they continue in the walls, in memory, in the very breath. They return when you least expect them. They come back as if they knew exactly where to touch to reopen something. Landslide, for example, doesn't need to raise its voice to disarm you. It speaks of time, of aging, of change, and it does so with such a desolate sweetness that one ends up feeling that the song was not written to be sung, but to be endured. Rhiannon transforms the feminine into an enchanting, free, untamable apparition. Silver Springs is no longer even music: it's a beautiful curse, a promise of eternal memory cast upon someone who thought they could leave without paying the price of remembrance. Sara is almost an emotional haze, a form of desire that no longer knows if it's looking at the past, the body, or the ghost. Storms seems written from the exhaustion of loving too much and being unable to stop. Gypsy carries the nostalgia of someone who understands that identity is also lost and recovered in gusts. Little Lies and Everywhere, which might seem lighter on the surface, still breathe that same underlying truth: that desire, evasion, self-deception, and the need to be loved are part of the same emotional machinery that sooner or later exacts a price. That is, perhaps, the essential point: Fleetwood Mac doesn't just sing about love. They sing about what love does to identity, about how it makes us unstable, nostalgic, proud, ridiculous, sublime, and petty all at once. They sing about the way a person can continue to live inside another even after they've left. They sing about the inner theater that relationships leave behind when they are no longer there. For that very reason, they are not a band to be listened to without consequences. My problem with Fleetwood Mac is that they forced me to understand that music can do more than accompany an emotion: it can reveal it. It can name pains that one had not known how to articulate. It can put rhythm to a crack that one had been dragging for years without finding a language for it. It can reach areas of being where reflection alone is not enough. When that happens, the listener ceases to be a listener. They become an accomplice. Witness. Patient. Accused. Because there are albums that entertain, and there are albums that look you in the face and say: there's something of yours here too. Rumours does that. Other Fleetwood Mac songs do too. Not as a gesture of comfort, but as a form of truth. That's why I've never been able to have a light relationship with them. They're not the band you let play while you tidy the house, work, or drive without paying attention. Or, rather, they could play in those contexts, but it would be naive to assume they would stay in the background. Sooner or later they rise. Sooner or later they demand the center. Sooner or later they demand a pause from you. They force you to look inward. To recognize something. To admit that there are pains you haven't fully overcome, nostalgias that haven't faded, desires that continue to breathe in an area where practical life no longer rules. That's where true catharsis appears. Not a sought-after catharsis. Not voluntary therapy. Not a session of sentimentality. An involuntary, almost surgical catharsis. That's my problem with Fleetwood Mac: they don't let me listen from a distance. They drag me in. They make me feel things I would have preferred to leave in peace. They show me that suffering and existential agony, when well channeled, can become such a powerful form of art that you no longer know if you are admiring a work or enduring a revelation. Someone once told me that moments of greatest darkness are often also moments of greatest creative lucidity. At the time it sounded like a clever phrase, nothing more. Fleetwood Mac made me understand it was true. That sometimes collapse doesn't kill expression: it perfects it. That there are human beings capable of taking their ruin, putting it in a studio, and returning it transformed into melody, into harmony, into structure, into a beauty so sharp that it ends up resembling a higher truth. It's as if Fleetwood Mac didn't write songs, but small emotional detonation devices programmed to activate decades later in the right soul. That's my problem and conflict with Fleetwood Mac: they turned suffering into such a beautiful form of truth that after listening to them, you no longer know if you're hearing music... or listening to the echo of your own ruins.

My Problem with Fleetwood Mac

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