There are two types of characters in this world, one that just enjoys the silence on the tram or train, one that fills their ears with a combination of both music and podcasts.
Is music really the soundtrack to your life?
Does it bring a deeper meaning to your every day mundane?
If you are a music lover can you really recall a moment in your life when you didn’t have your favourite playlist in your ears or blasting out of a speaker filling the landscape?
The question we have to ask ourselves is, which one are you? It’s not imperative to life but if your love for music exceeds the “normies”then perhaps you’d disagree.
Music has co existed with us throughout all of our lives, when we are children parents use lullabies or nursery rhymes to encourage us to do things such as fall asleep or as a tool for learning.
Since the beginning of history when people started to express themselves in a combination of both sound and dance. Each song or music piece told a story, mimicked animal sounds, was used in celebration or for commemorative reasons.
Creating songs and phrases as well as beats, taking inspiration from the natural world, sharing them for a sense of community as well as for rituals and ceremonies. The creation of drums from stretched animal skins, bells from shells and stones, carving sticks to make rain pipes. These were all tribalistic baselines for music today.
When we take our first breath and we cry some could argue that is evidence that we learn how to use our voices to tell a story just like others did before us in song.
Some could argue The Beatles sure helped set the foundations for rock music but what influenced them to start making something a bit different from the rest?
When life became faster paced, did this mean that music sped up too? When you think of today’s drum and bass, baseline, pop and compare it to the past there’s a difference in the speed, as well as how it turned in to something for self expression and then became a consumable money making outlet.
When you read about musicians of the past for some time only dabbled in one genre, classical music and excelled in their craft of instrumental ability. It was people like Mozart, Bach and others that pushed social expectations to its limit. Changing the pace from legato to staccato. This risk paid off and became an alternative leading a movement of rebellious musicians.
In terms of whether we could really exist without music? That’s the question, during the 1970s people literally chose their friendship groups or “tribes” based on the music that they listened to and the subculture that surrounded it.
Without this music how would you have even known where you belonged in society, how would you get rid of all your teenage angst, how would you rebel?
We commonly use music now to block out background noise, to use as a tool to avoid awkward small talk, for example at the gym we could use it for motivation but on public transport we use it mainly so people don’t speak to us.
We have our getting ready playlist, our travelling playlist, our destination playlist, we have them for everything! Using sound as a tool to get in to a head space to do something, relaxing bedtime playlists, a “going out out” playlist to transform your feelings and increase your heart rate to prepare for a sleepless night.
It’s engrained in to our society, our social construct. Popular songs are now automatically generated to be catchy and stay with you, a formula to make it trendy, is this dangerous? Could this damage the very core of what music is to us?
We return our original question do we use music for escapism?
We use it for a multitude of things but we draw from our experiences and the music is either an outlet or a companion. It guides us but also gets in to our very souls and creates a sense of longing to express and deliver. We may use it to escape our realities, but also use it as a tool to make our reality more bearable when we embellish it with sound.
What do you use music for?
Is it to escape a morbid sense of doom or because you just simply feel like it?
Opinion piece for Musik Magazine.
