Press Play
Visit the Substack article here.
The human body is the original instrument and the one that we all have. We’re born with the capacity to practice it through the ringing of our voices, the percussion of tapping feet, the joy of clapping our hands.
Music lives within our bodies. We sense it in our eardrums, we feel it in our chests. I can’t count how many times I’ve been entranced at a DJ surrounded by fog and lasers thinking: wow, this bass slaps so hard I can feel it in my bloodstream.
Music lives everywhere, it gives us the strange and sublime knowledge that we belong to something larger than ourselves, our families and our friends; it unites us globally.
I have memories of my older brother playing the acoustic guitar while I would sing Beatles songs with him in perfect harmony. In the same era, we had discord driving each other nuts fighting over the cable modem.
Beyond childish fights, my siblings and I share a soundtrack from the backseat of my mom’s Lexus. Cassette tapes of Madonna’s Immaculate Collection , Best of Blondie , Thriller, and Queen’s Greatest Hits. These songs looped and were rewound until we knew each one by heart.
Pause, rewind, play again. The songs were memorized, not because we were especially devoted, but because we didn’t have Wi-Fi or streaming services giving us an infinite discography. We had Sam Goody, Best Buy, and Barnes & Noble. We had what we inherited from our parents and that limitation also made the music ours.
In this way, music writes our own autobiographies.
Music is magic in this way: humans figured out how to capture something unseen. We learned to translate sounds into symbols, recording it through musical notation and sheet music; scoring it, arranging and performing it.
We found a way to make what is invisible, stay.
There are so many mediums through which we experience it: FM radio, jukeboxes, fine needles following the grooves of vinyls, scratched CDs that distort the best part of the track, and mp3s.
Technology keeps changing but the impulse does not; we invent ingenious ways to carry it with us, it lives in our minds, histories, and now in our pockets as portable memories where we can instantly access random pieces of it.
We build mental timelines anchored to songs, albums, eras and the cultural identities that embody them.
I remember waiting for class dismissal in middle school staring at the second hand on an analog wall clock like in the Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time music video. We had a Backstreet Boy’s anthem making us feel Larger than Life even though we were still shopping in the juniors section of the department store.
Think about the song that played in your head when you kissed your high school crush (mine was Mariah Carey’s We Belong Together).
How about the one on heavy rotation during your first breakup while you were horizontal in bed, doing absolutely nothing except letting the song hurt while you were hurting?
That may be one of music’s extraordinary powers: the ability to preserve a moment while allowing us to change completely around it. We grow up and the song doesn’t change, but we do.
Music lives on in our bodies when language begins to disappear. For dementia patients music can be a powerful way of accessing and retrieving memories because it engages brain networks involving auditory processing, emotion, movement, attention, and memory.
Music is our personal time machine, and as much as music measures time, we now have the technology to transform an intensely subjective emotional experience into behavioral data points.
People look forward to Spotify Wrapped each December.
Music is communal resonance yet sometimes the progression manifests in the disruption of social norms. The impact of Black American creativity through Motown music in America deeply shaped the culture. Motown’s blend of blues, gospel, swing and pop captivates people of all different colors and helped bring Black music into the American mainstream.
There’s also how the popularity of genres or artists can be considered offensive and transformative in the way it is not bound by appropriateness. Kanye West is my favorite living artist and last weekend in Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium he showed how songs can make separate people behave like one organism with 70,000 people shouting the same words in unison; simultaneously intensely individual and radically collective.
During pregnancy the fetus is exposed to sounds from the outside world so these patterns are experienced in the womb. The original lullaby is the vibration of a mother’s voice, queuing our entrance into this material world.
Music has always been with us and understood before we were able to make sense of anything else; it started playing before we even knew what to name it. Before our conscious identities had been formed we knew it like we know our own beating hearts. It’s alive.
Then people chose to completely revolutionize music by adding words. Music is deeply felt, and with lyrics it becomes a story we’re told that spans the entire spectrum of human emotions:
I love you with all my heart.
I’m leaving, and I never want to see you again.
We will survive.
Go f**k yourself.
To the heavens we sing gospel: God is good!
In emo we cry out facing our inner monsters in existential crisis: What is the meaning of life?
It chants on and on…
Say you’re forever mine.
Get out of my frickin’ car.
Lyrics are narrative, poetry, confession, protest, prayer, seduction, and more.
But you know what?
Don’t even get me started on lyrics.
I could write about that one forever.
