The Use of Music

by ylewis
19 May 2006

I would like to start my relationship with you by quoting Dr. ROBERT SVOBODA, who, in the introduction to his book The Greatness of Saturn, encapsulates everything I’ve been feeling about music in the modern world, in a paragraph of pith and profundity. Quoth the doctor:

...the vast majority of modern people uncritically open themselves day after day to deleterious patho-myths, images which take on a perverted life within us and pursue their own agendas, unconcerned for our well-being. Legions of well-funded, well-engineered death-dealing pseudo-myths in our popular culture surround us like hungry vultures, waiting patiently to feed on the weak and impressionable.

These words resonated in my being as I recognized my younger self as one of the “weak and impressionable” who served as a tasty morsel for the hungry vulture-like death dealers who celebrate music as salvation. Music was a temporal portal out of the claustrophobic confines into which I arose as an adolescent. I sought to escape my alienation in the crowded concert hall, where I was dazzled by unprecedented sights and sounds; I would dive deep into my headphone-encased mind, exultant at the possibility of expression captured in a resonant note or lilting turn of phrase. In this world of artistic expression, I found my true identity. I was a musician and a champion of the magical world of sound.

But then something awful happened. I got older. And I started noticing unsettling things, pernicious patterns: new bands that said the same things and whose music sounded the same as ones that I already had heard; ‘alternative’ culture that had become mainstream; musicians who turned to substances to guarantee a felt sense of the here and now of rock and roll; the sickening stench of self-indulgence, which included my own—I found myself prioritizing the intensity of my own experience at the expense of other human beings. I realized that music was not providing me with anything authentic anymore; rather I was contriving the experience, subtly manipulating circumstance to fall in line with my idea of myself. Music was my myth. I was using music to fill the void that I had felt for as long as I could remember, yet I still felt empty.

I looked around with clear vision for the first time and saw a bunch of people who I didn’t want to be like at all—people who were sickly, self-obsessed, materialistic, anaesthetized, embittered, and exhausted. While it’s true that many may be well-intentioned while caught in the throes of their confusion, most musicians with a shred of self-reflection are honest about not having all of the answers. They’re just happy to get by, their personal development having been frozen by participating in the commodification of an art form that thrives on celebrating the struggling human.

I was tired of fighting with myself. Not just tired, but bored with it. I started to find that most music didn’t move me anymore. Fortunately, I saw that I did not have to depend on music for an identity at all. It was as if I had found the wizard behind the curtain. Even music that previously repulsed me became simply amusing and somewhat sad. I didn’t need the myth anymore—I had moved on.

And yet here I am. Because, godammit, I love music. Some of my most serene moments occur as my fingers move across the piano keys and, occasionally, with the dance of a softly sung melody escaping my scratchy pipes—they infuse the ephemerality of this world with a delicate taste of eternity. I still find sounds that I like—and dislike. And I have been trained to entertain with my opinions; while I no longer hold them as dear, I am impelled to share them in a climate where I rarely agree with anything I read about music.

It’s great that other people wrap themselves up in their insular worlds of sound. I just don’t need to do that anymore. I hope that my words find the minds of those who have an inclination to resist putting music, and its limited makers, on a pedestal, those who want more from sound than escape.

Filed under blog intro music industry