What songs may come….music as it is and what it could be
Music as a belief system is something of a dream, an ideal you yearn for but which doesn’t exist in real life.
The heydays of music as ideology are said to exist firmly in the past- during the 1960s when rock n’roll was on the ascent and a lot of folks thought that tfour chords could change the world for good.
That belief apparently has been shattered- thanks to the absorption of rock- which started as rebel music among a fringe- by the mainstream(which essentially meant a handful of media companies).
Music as an ideal thus became music as commodity. And anything- when it becomes material, has materialistic value with very little spiritual significance.
My own relationship with the music revolution of the 50s and the 60s is admittedly shallow.
For one thing I was born three decades too late in a country far away from where Mick Jagger’s gyrations on-stage were met with the same enthusiasm as the free-associative style of writing pioneered by the likes of Burroughs.
But I did spend quite a bit of my youth fwowed by the mind-bending soundscapes crafted by Pink Floyd not to have experienced some sort of kinship with the ideology of music being The Savior. (It helped that I had by then given up practicing religion.)
The idea of commodification of music struck home with brute force- for me- once music streaming became ubiquitous with smartphones and apps.
This is a little strange — digitized music on these platforms are not material in the sense that you cannot touch or hold them in your hands, unlike a CD or vinyl.
And yet, every time a mood-based playlist is suggested on the Spotify app, I get the distinct sense that I am being sold something that could help me with my life. Nothing wrong with that, per se- in fact, that’s the entire idea upon which our economy works.
However, in such instances, the question inevitably comes up- is this all music is?: Something that helps you ‘set a mood’?
Religion is a framework which helps us regulate our emotions, helping us guide our thoughts along certain pathways according to our present external circumstances.
Superficially, music that helps us set the mood also does the same thing- it helps keep our emotions from straying too far from where we want them to be.
But to say that music is a kind of religion based solely on that aspect is undermining the value of religion.
For religion is not just used to regulate our emotions- in fact, it’s one of the minor effects of following a religion.
Also, there are times when we may have to suffer unsavory emotions precisely because we follow a religion- for religions often break us out of our comfort zones, asking us to do things that we wouldn’t do otherwise. For instance, the first instinct that arises in you when someone gives you an affront is probably not to forgive them. However, if you subscribe to certain worldviews, you would overcome the primal instinct and forgive the person, anyway.
The immediate emotion may not be all that delectable. However, in the long run, you would realize that such an act of forgiveness is better than carrying around hatred towards the other person for the rest of your life.
Music rarely offers such referential frameworks anymore. Yes, lip-services are made to such ideals in lyrics. But music that’s truly inspired by those ideals is rare, to say the least. Not necessarily because artists are not up to the task- far from it, but because the commercial mechanism which births most songs that the bulk of human beings listen to doesn’t really support such earnestness of expressions- it’s the same principle that prevents quality food from being produced in a junk food ecosystem: the attempt is to make people consume, not to make them healthy.
And such rarities show the bridge between what music is in the age of hyper-commercialization and what it could be.
