Why we need a ‘sacred context’ in order to engage with music meaningfully
Everyone has their favourite songs and artists, for many reasons: personal taste, because of moments in life when songs meant something to you, music that just makes you feel good or that you find energetic and catchy, moving, stimulating, maybe because of singers that you emulate or admire. But for many, there are certain pieces of music that are special to you not because you just ‘like’ it but because you encountered through it that thing that only music can do, that strange, inviting, transcendent otherness that we seem to encounter in the realm of music.
Commodification stifles this. In the absence of religion (for better or worse) music no longer possess any kind of ‘sacred context’, the encounters we have with it are fragmented and the industries who produce it are aimed at profit and spectacle. Combine this with the world of social media and what we have is a kind of ‘meme’ culture where things trend and sell for reasons that seem to have little to do with serious meaning or artistic valences. We are overwhelmed with glimmers of something that is swamped in the selling of celebrities as ‘artists’, many of whom are not, to say the least, entirely responsible for producing their own art.
The internet however also flings open the doors to consuming the profundity of music in…
