Music, Songs, Lyrics and Personality
So Spotify recently released the much-awaited Spotify-Wrapped 2020, and after I saw my Wrapped 2020, one thing was pretty clear, 2020 really did something to me and my music taste. It was all over the place and at that very moment my curiosity hit me and I wanted to know why and this curiosity took me pretty deep.
All of us resorted to various means to get through these “tough times”, but one of them has got to be the most common one, and that is Music, Songs and Lyrics.
When I looked at my musical history of this year, I realized that there actually might be something more to the saying “Your music taste is who you are”, rather than just the description or basic judgement of an individual’s nature or personality. This year was a roller-coaster for my and even all of us’ individual story of lives. I shifted from one genre to another genre to another in a matter of weeks and discovered various new artists, which was 350 in my case, which is pretty high for me. Music has been linked to psychology multiple times, and playlist reading and checking is also considered to be one of the most used ways to know a person better. There are some basic but robust theories regarding the relation between a person’s music taste and their personality and psychology, which are for example aggressive people like heavy metal, clever people like jazz and classical, people in love might go for soft soothing romantic songs, and rebellious people like hip hop and rock.
Various researches conducted “all over the world” have shown that people listen to music in order to either improve their performance on certain tasks or chores or stimulate their intellectual curiosity and, most importantly manipulate or influence their own emotional states with the goal of achieving a desired mood state, such as happiness, excitement, or sadness. According to these researches, science says that just by knowing what a person is listening, we can literally know what the person is all about, what he or she has gone through, going through or has experienced in life.
But it can’t be this simple right? It shouldn’t be this simple, there has got to much much more than that, and I really think there is. Although the basic layer of our personality more or less stays the same, but the other layers keep on changing, quiet drastically sometimes. There might be various inside reasons that even we ourselves won’t know would relate to what we’re listening to at a given time.
This was a very weird year for me, a lot of things happened, and I think I changed a lot this year and took quiet lot of time figuring out things from career to friendships to relationships and during that phase, I found myself wobbling in various music streaming apps, specifically Spotify, because not only didn’t I know what I wanted in life, I didn’t even know what I liked to listen to, so as I felt lost about life and was trying to discover myself, the same thing happened with my music taste, it was lost, and was on the path of rediscovery itself.
As much as music, songs & lyrics tend to define our phases, psychology and personality, the basic beliefs and relations have also been misinterpreted and have mislead people to listen to some certain types of genres, artists and songs, just because it has been said that, “we listen to this when we’re feeling like this”, and such things have never helped me and neither can they ever help anyone else. The fact that “different people react to different situations, differently”, should be applied to their music tastes also, just because it’s said that Hip hop or rap is bound to make us feel better when we’re in a rough patch, doesn’t necessarily mean that its going help, as it sure didn’t help me, people tend to vent to such genres because it’s “said”, just makes them lose themselves even more and nothing else.
So there’s no denying the fact that our taste of music is the very shadow of our personality, but we just shouldn’t vent to something just because it’s common to, music is much more impactful than that, because each individual reacts differently to different things and same is the case with songs and lyrics. At last all I’d like to say is that as much as our life affects and changes our music, our music also affects and changes our life.
