A beautiful thing about being human is how music naturally wells up inside us. Rhythm, melody, verse, progression… No matter how many machines we build to develop sound, the basics remain inside us. They’re a inevitable secretion of our being. Even the least musical among us still identifies tunes with emotions, and the link is no less valid to them than it was for Beethoven.
However, as long as we’ve been making our own music, we’ve been appreciating and yearning to hear the music made by others. We hear their stories, we identify with their emotions, and bond as humans. Even when upon hearing a song, we miss the point entirely, we still link the music and the verse to our own experiences and lives.
Until lately, that is. One of the most emotionally vacant and problematic novelties in the distribution of music is the peppering of reality TV with subtitles, identifying the band and song being played over the emotional “moments” in the show.
MTV’s “True Life” is a product made better by the very people it caused to be so stupid. The MTV generation is a pack of superficial idiots confident that their opinions matter, no matter how little they know. Their predictable and self-created problems are fed back into the MTV food mill to be consumed by those entertained by wondering how it got so bad. So when self-indulgent MTV consumers become addicted, pregnant, infected, broke messes, MTV is there to show it to you… With a pre-selected and sellable soundtrack! Log on to MTV.com to hear more from this band.
This is the disconnect. Music is no longer about your story. Music is no longer an expressive tool to learn about yourself. Music is a 99 cent cheeseburger that you can eat… quick and easy, like the emotional vacuum you just saw suck up someone’s reality on TV.
Music shouldn’t be easy to find. Pre-Internet, you pretty much had to be involved in a community of your musical peers to know what others were appreciating and diving into. Now, when a Gossip Girl character characterized as the “Bad Girl” drinks a lot, and a “punk” song plays in the background, America’s daughters en masse think they understand the genre. Because the faux-drama came force-fed with track recommendations.
An individual’s music experience used to be revealed to them. A sound catches your ear… something about the music relates to your time in life, your place in the world, and your seat in society… You used to grow inside your music.
Now, mindless vignettes of lives we wouldn’t dream of living come with ready-made pop ditties.
Music used to be the item you carried in your hand.
Music is now your life’s wallpaper.