Today I was thinking about music.  There are all sorts of ways I could go into talking about that deep ocean of art, but today in particular I was thinking about the way it changes, and the way it changes us. I tend to surround myself in music, and I never really think about how new that is. Like other arts, it's erupted as a staple of modern society - as well it should, it's pleasurable, personal, monetizable, frequently viral in nature: it fits almost idyllically into the ecosystem of commercial art as we forever try to glut ourselves on beauty.

One of the things I want to talk about is the interesting divergence between instrumentation and lyrics. I've heard it suggested before that lyrics are the successor to poetry, but where poetry is completely carried and shaped by words, lyrics take a back seat in music. They can certainly be moving and affecting, but a song's effect on a person is a synthesis of every different piece, and it's how a song makes someone feel that guides the internal experience. The lyrics act as a contextual placeholder, restricting a song to a given theme or loose narrative, but it's not usually the meaning of the words which guides the listener. The experience is much more sensory, shaped by the movement and intricacies of the instrument.  It's easy to see the malleability of the lyrics' role in a song when listening to the same song by different artists; change the method and manner of playing and you can entirely change the whole meaning of a song, without altering the lyrics once. This puts lyrics in a sort of symbolic limbo: less potent in and as themselves, but holding a potentiality that expresses itself with each listener in a different way. And that way will be influenced by each individual narrative and psyche, transforming the song as a collective experience into something more symbolically amorphous than what the original artist first created.

This is something that happens with all art, and it happens in a different way, with different variables, depending on the medium and format. I like it with music because of the intimacy of music - intimate both physiologically (the mechanics of sound and our ears) and subjectively. Music makes me feel things I would simply not be able to feel otherwise - unique as well, as all subjective experience, generated by elements that will be arranged in a combination that only I exist in, that only I can ever touch and feel.

You'd think the ease of access to such experiences would be difficult, and indeed it used to be, but the internet is overflowing with these things, little packages of power, all waiting to ride. Whether music is a drug or a virus or a natural harmonic expression of the resonance of the information flowing through our bodies, it continues to expand into our world and fill us and shape us, as we shape it in return.

I'm interested in this as a cultural phenomenon, of course, but I'm also interested in the economics of it as I mentioned above. You can expect more posts about this sort of thing in the future: the interplay of how any given content is experienced internally, collectively, and economically creates the patterns that guide our society, and this one is certainly in a state of flux.