What I Hate About Music

For this blog post, I thought I’d go with the most predictable, least controversial topic I could think of. I considered calling this, “Why Music Sucks”, but of course, music doesn’t suck. Music is life. Music is everywhere. Stub your toe on a door frame? That dull thud and the resulting obscenities you scream, are music. That car beeping at you as you drive to work? Music. The neighbour mowing their lawn at 6AM on a Saturday? Music to your ears. If you hear it, it’s music. You don’t have to like a sound for it to be music. There’s plenty of music out there that isn’t to my taste, but it still counts. Look up some videos of noise musicians performing. They are literally making atonal, arrhythmic, harsh noise, and they probably have a crowd watching them. It all counts.

And I love it. I grew up in a family of musicians. It has been everywhere in my life for as long as I can remember, and over the years I’ve grown to be both a fan and creator of music. I went to school for film production, and the biggest lesson I took away from that, was that music was real my passion. The reason I’ve done the majority of my travelling over the years has been to see live music. In my 20’s, my rule was that if I wasn’t out playing on a weekend evening, I had to be going to see live music. I’m listening to music as I type this. I’ve purposefully made music a massive part of my life, and when you commit that much time to something, you will inevitably form a complicated relationship with it. I’ve developed opinions beyond just, “I love music,” and that is what I’d like to talk about.

Music is emotional. Strictly speaking, you have happy, or major key music, and you have sad, or minor key music. Everything else is a variation on that basic binary, and there are certainly a lot of variations that can be applied. But the point is that music, somehow, makes us feel emotions, even before any words are added. And interestingly, the emotions you feel are entirely dependant on context. A note on its own is neither happy nor sad. Play an A note on any instrument, and it’s just a tone. But then add a C#, the major third to A, and you have the basis of a major chord. Add a natural C to that A, and you have the basis of a minor chord. Those two notes together create an emotion, and it is literally just two tones being played at the same time. You can add more notes to the chord to reinforce that emotion, or you can add combinations of different notes to complicate it, maybe making it feel like more of a question, or giving it a vaguely ethnic vibe of one kind or another. You can create a huge variety of feeling from music, just by adjusting the context.

That emotion is the power of music, and sometimes, I hate it. Why? Because it’s manipulative. I find that this manipulative aspect of music is used most often in movies and TV, and it can be a real crutch for those art forms. So often I find myself cringing when a show plays a current pop song at the end of an episode, while we are shown a succession of the main characters, each where the show has left them respectively, looking pensive and emotional. Whether or not that emotion was earned by the episode, the music is telling us that it was. I’m thinking in particular of some older shows, like Sons of Anarchy and Lost, where this was done very often. I hate it because it’s exploitative. What’s the reason for this exploitation? To make us buy into the fake emotions being presented by the show, with the goal of having us watch the next episode.

If you look at old WW2 era propaganda films, be they the ones produced by the Nazis, or the news reels that would get played in movie theatres, music was a big part of getting people to buy into their messages, in conjunction with the images being shown. Just as it is with the single note becoming an emotion when a second note is added, sometimes a moving image is neutral until music is added to tell us how to feel. The same way laugh tracks on sit-coms tell us when to laugh. If I’m sticking to my guns on this, then I have to grudgingly admit that laugh tracks qualify as music. Ugh.

This happens even within music itself, when lyrics are added. How often have you heard lyrics in a pop song talking about feeling something in your bones, or someone being brought to their knees, or any number of other over-used, over-dramatic metaphors? This is done to add more emotion to that song, and to pull a listener in. These metaphors are purposefully vague, simple, and yet familiar, because the producers want as many people as possible to apply their own meaning to it, and to keep listening. Get those streams. Get that advertising revenue for the radio station. Keeping things as broad as possible is the best way to do this.

I’m not saying that pop music is bad, and I’m not saying that movies and TV shows shouldn’t be using music. Music can’t be objectively bad or good. It just exists, and your brain decides if it likes it or not. Music, by its nature, is emotional and that is not a bad thing. It’s a wonderful, powerful thing that can change the world. It has certainly changed my life, and continues to do so every day. That very power is also the problem. The manipulative possibilities of music are very real.

What do I hate about music? Why is it used to manipulate people? It’s the same thing I hate about everything.

Money.