The right vibrations
By Riley Park, Opinions Editor
Music is universally intimate. A person’s favorite band can tell you more about them than they themselves ever might be able to. It’s a window into the soul, in that completely corny and cliché lyrical way.
Music is memory embodied. The notes spark sights, sounds and smells of things you once experienced. The first song on the first album you bought that you listened to like it was a religious rite. That music you blasted loudly and sang along badly to with your friends that summer in high school. That band you got really interested in after your friend gave you a mixed CD with them on it.
But they’re not all good. The playlist you made, full of songs you carefully avoid like the eyes of the ex you made it for. That tune a loved one used to sing, whose melodies only make the ache of them feel emptier. The song you put on with the windows down in your car at 5 a.m. when you drove away from your best friend’s home for the very last time.
Every item in your library has a connotation. It’s there for a reason. More than your hairstyle or your grades or your voting preferences, it is a part of you. And it’s a curious thing, because if someone were to look through your musical collection they would see you, but they’d also see their own reflections. Songs don’t mean the same thing to everyone in the same way that words don’t mean the same thing in different contexts. There’s a language to our song choices that simultaneously reflects our own selves while showing us in others.
And it is that connection – that linked bond – which makes music so moving. When someone drops a link to a new song that just came out on your wall, when someone asks you to watch a YouTube video diary of their favorite band just messing around, when you and your friends start speculating about tour dates and locales and if it will be as good as the last show; that’s magic.
Music is something which we so easily take for granted, like the stars in the sky or the kindness of a friend. Our lives aren’t exactly a movie so they don’t exactly have a soundtrack, but who hasn’t wandered around with their headphones in pretending that they did? Who hasn’t compiled a list of artists they’d want for the soundtrack of their life?
It’s this shared experience of sound which reminds us of, well, us; us as people, us as individuals, but us also as a collective of many different musical preferences and experiences to go with them. Even if you’re not a singer, even if you’ve never played an instrument, even if your only experience with music has been your MP3 player and radio, you have favorite music. And it says something about you. And when it’s shared, when you let someone else see you go completely nuts over your favorite singer or when you just can’t stop talking about how great the Super Bowl halftime show was or when you get into an argument about how this genre sucks so badly compared to that genre… well, those little moments make life cool.
Stay frosty.
