NOTEWRTHY: Why Music Matters

Welcome back to NOTEWRTHY, where we hate The Grammy Awards because they almost never pick good stuff to be nominated.

But I’m not here to talk about the Grammy’s right now, I’m here to talk about music, more specifically, why it matters so much to keep music alive and thriving in our society.

Music is an amazing thing. It’s one of the most versatile creations humans have ever made. There is music for every situation you can think of, you just have to find it. Wanna relax on the beach with your family? There’s music to perfectly fit that mood. Feeling sad or confused and want to hear your emotions put into words you thought could never exist to describe how you feel? There’s music for that. My point is that music makes any situation that much better. It’s common for people to think that music is often just a distraction and that it has no place in certain scenarios, and I’m not here to deny that. Sometimes quiet and the absence of noise is necessary for the human brain to recuperate. Sometimes we simply need a break from constant the constant stimuli of everyday life. I’m not here to dispute that. What I’m here to say is that music can be so much more than just a fun collection of sounds, and can in fact be so much more.

Let’s take a look at an example from my personal life.

Up until about a year and a half ago, I listened to music, but I never listened to music. I had a hard time understanding why people had such strong feelings towards albums or even just singular songs. At this point, I started to understand it, but the full realization didn’t come until about 5 months after that.

I was sitting in my basement sitting at my computer and listening to Kid Cudi’s Man On The Moon: The End Of Day (2009). Suddenly I remembered that he had just released a documentary on Amazon Prime about his career in music. Being still relatively new to listening to Cudi and his work, but nonetheless enjoying it a lot, I decided to watch. When he was talking about his creative process and emotional state when he was writing, and about the very specific thoughts he was dealing with, but not being able to express them properly, that was when I understood. I finally understood the deep connection my friends had with music that they talked about. I understood in that moment that it wasn’t just about what you could literally hear, it was about what you could pick up on beyond that. And in that moment, everything clicked for me.

But this isn’t even when that story ends, it picks up in September of this year.

It was announced back in around the June/July area that Kid Cudi was going on tour. Fortunately, a friend of mine was able to get us tickets for the Chicago show (shoutout to Adam, you’re amazing). It was at this point that I understood that music could impact people in a massive way, but I still didn’t quite yet understand the scale of it. That is, until that concert.

When I tell you that you could feel the emotions of every single person in that place, I’m not lying in the slightest. I’ve never been in a moment where I could tell that nearly every person in a room, let alone the United Center, was having a really strong emotional moment to something, but this concert was different. Whether it was hype and excitement for the remix of “Pursuit of Happiness” or the deep and emotional lyrics of “love.,” you could tell that everyone there was feeling it, and that while we all had different experiences with the music beforehand, this was one that would be shared between all of us.

Music brings understanding. Not just of ourselves, but of humans in general. Music has the unique ability to allow for us to express our deepest and most complex inner workings of our brains that we think we will never be able to explain to people. It allows us to connect to one another on a much deeper level. It allows us to simply be us.

That. Is why music matters.