A Love Affair with Music
She’s dead and now my world is a pair of headphones.
Years ago, I read a joke about a woman (a blonde, that’s the joke) at the hairdresser who refused to take her earbuds out so the stylist could cut her hair. When the stylist gets frustrated and pulls them out, the woman quickly falls to the floor, unconscious. Baffled, the stylist picks up the earbuds, wondering what could be so important about them. Through them comes a voice: “Breathe in, breathe out.”
Some days, that’s me.
Some days, the music in my headphones is the only thing that keeps me putting one foot in front of another, pulling air into my lungs and sighing it back out again, eyes fixed forward. If someone pulled my headphones off, I might collapse too.
Especially when I’m struggling, music is my lifeline.
I fight to find my headphones in the morning and pull them on. Only once the sounds sink in can I pull myself out of bed and face the morning ahead of me.
I turn it up when I leave my room and head out for breakfast.
I turn it up until I can’t hear anything else. Until the sounds of the lives all around me fade out, until I can’t see straight, until I start stumbling over my own feet as I go. I turn it up until the colors wash through my brain and whatever I can’t handle stops.
I turn it up until nothing else feels important.
The louder the music, the easier everything is.
It’s colder than I expected when I get outside.
Turn it up.
Head bent low, I trip over my own shoe as I walk down the sidewalk.
Turn it up.
Staring at the ground, I forget to say hello to a friend.
Turn it up.
Fuck hearing damage. I press pass the high volume warnings. They’re arbitrary, I tell myself. A well-intentioned friend trying to give me advice without knowing my life.
Every time something happens, my hand goes right to my shirt collar, feeling for that elusive wire, tracing just under my chin, my veins, my pulse, my volume control.
Up the street, ambulance lights.
Turn it up.
Turn it up.
Turn it up.
It doesn’t get loud enough.
I feel lucky to live in an age where free and inexpensive access to a wealth of diverse music has exploded. I can find the words, sounds, and colors I need with a few strokes of a keyboard.
According to a report by IFPI, streaming services grew by nearly 60% in the last year. Digital music revenues reached $7.8 billion worldwide.
But perhaps even more important than sheer volume of music available is the diversity of artists and genres. And I’m not alone in experiencing this wealth of options — Spotify finds that, in 2017, the average listener streamed around 40 artists per week. This diversity is what allows me and people like me to find comfort, solace, and strength in music. Now more than ever, I can seek out the kind of music that speaks to me with unprecedented ease.
That makes a world of difference.
Music keeps me going, but if I had to go out to a music store and search by hand for the words and sounds that spoke to me, I would probably never build a truly meaningful collection. The advent of digital streaming has given me a light in the darkness — the ability to reach meaningful music in mere moments.
But while access to music is expanding, I see around me a society still ambivalent about the importance of art. In its most traditional visual form, art is corralled into museums, where I can only experience it in isolation and on occasion. Although, to be sure, this is not even close to the totality of art, what does it say about our culture that we treat our valued works this way? What do our interactions with the visual arts say about how we view the “proper” role of art in our lives?
On the surface of it, art in a museum doesn’t seem practical. It’s not there for a physical, pragmatic purpose. It’s there for viewing, reflection, thought, perhaps education. But outside the most lofty and noble goals, what impact does it have on our day-to-days?
Music proves to me the true value of art. Art is inseparable from my life, and, it seems, from the lives of many others as well. Nielsen reports that 93% of Americans listen to music, and for on average 25 hours a week. We need music, and we need art, not just in museums, but woven into our realities.
Music is a form of expression, reflection, aesthetic pleasure, and awe-generation. But, even more than that, music never lets me down. When I need someone to say the words I don’t have, I turn to my favorite artists. When I need a familiar place of comfort, they’re there, always, whenever I need them.
That’s what artists do to hold our society together.
That’s why I’m in love with music.
Not everyone listens to music. But everyone has their anchors. A song, a poem, a painting, a quote, a speech, a palette of colors — something that ties us to our realities and remind us of the beauty of the world even when we start to doubt it. Essential to our wellbeing, they help us understand ourselves and our situations. They make our joys deeper and our pain more bearable.
My anchors help me find my way through uncertainty and adversity. Something to hold on to on my darkest days, something that I feel sure I won’t lose. A piece of stillness in the chaos, the center of the globe, where I stand still while everything spins faster and faster around me.
Some write it off as sentiment or superstition, an irrational clinging to something material which will never solve or stave off my problems.
They’re right that these anchors will never solve my problems. But they are dead wrong if they believe they are worthless.
My anchors are how I start to make meaning of a life that I struggle to understand. They give me the framework to look at myself and the world and start to make sense of it.
My anchors are the first piece in jigsaw puzzle, the one I go back to, compare to, fit the rest of my experiences into.
I reach for my headphones not just to tune out the world, but to tune into a different one. Some days it’s escapist, but most days I’m just trying to figure out how to understand.
Part of my grief is having to deal with the big questions — what matters in my life, why we are here, what we leave behind, and what the purpose of everything I do is in the face of the fact that we will all die.
When I need to find a way to start confronting those questions, I turn it up and search for the answers.
Looks like I have a lot more listening to do.
