No matter what has ever happened to me or around me, I have listened to music. Music has been the way that I cope with feelings that I cannot express in any other way. I can listen to the words and the background sheltering those words and just think about what has happened, think about what could happen, or simply think of nothing. Music is more than just its beat, more than just the background the encompasses it. Music has repeated and structured words that are there to mean something individualized to every one of its listeners. Music has lyrics, and there are some that have jutted out reached for me over the years.
“It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate. It takes guts to be gentle and kind” — I know It’s Over by The Smiths
At some point in your life, you have felt anger so strong that you have wanted to hit something. Sadness so debilitating that you needed to cry. Happiness so intense that you felt like jumping up and down forever. At each emotion, I need to listen to music. I need to be in control of the feeling. If I do not gain control over the heaps of light and down the chasms of darkness, I will come to the fate of Icarus, flying too high or too low. Music keeps me at my center. Music is my calm, it is my way to express the way I feel without it gaining traction and causing me to creep out of my own head. It is so simple to act on impulse, to feel hatred and to then pursue hateful actions, for example. But to feel hatred, and to still pursue a calm action, to feel so passionate about something, yet you do nothing but listen, is the true challenge of maturity.
“Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key” — Werewolf by Fiona Apple
The ending of a song is excruciating. It reminds you that there is an end to the beauty that you face, that there will always be an end. We look towards endings with fear because they are inevitable, they can only be postponed. If you look towards an ending with question, though, when you look towards it with questions that cannot be provided with answers, is it really over? If you continue to go on with the questions, to ask questions about the answers to the previous inquiries, you have made a never-ending cycle. Being curious about the end of a song is the reason the song was enjoyable in the first place. If no one cared about the ending, then no one would care about the process. You are the one letting it end. The beginning would be just as pointless as every second it goes on until the desired ending shuts down the useless creation of words. But that is not what happens, is it? No, because the ending is placed in the back of our heads until we forget about it and it finally comes to stab us in the back. It is not our simple fate to be stabbed in the back, it is not our destiny. We control our own perspective.
“For a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself” – Karma Police by Radiohead
When you listen to a song too much, or maybe you just listen too little, only then will the lyrics get lost within the endless harmonies and drum lines and guitars and basses. And then, only after you have lost the meaning, drained the words of their importance, that being the one thing they truly have, will it come to you that maybe listening to those lyrics was important. Maybe I should have listened. Maybe I shouldn’t have. All of the maybes in the world can’t go back and change the song, for the song is beyond you and your jurisdiction, the song has already come and gone. It has already been created. Without you. But it is your job to listen, truly listen to the words. Comprehend them. Turn them into lessons, into meaning. Take the words in a song, and make them more than letters shoved into a closed box with a beat behind it. Make them real. Apply them. Feel them. Shed a tear, whether it be a tear of happiness or sadness or rage. What we lack is not emotion, but a connection between the emotion and its meaning. The bridge between feeling and using that feeling to grow. We lack the application of emotion for betterment. That can still be gained, but only with time. Time is forever moving, forever changing, and never once the same as it was before. It cannot get trapped, it cannot be constrained. And neither can words.
