Music

Music plays an incredibly huge role in my life. I think that a love of music, whichever kind doesn't matter, is something that all humans share. I'm sure there's someone out there who could do without, but if you're anything like me you're listening to music every chance you get. I listen to music when I wake up and shower and brush my teeth, when I'm riding my bike to class, when I'm studying, when I'm hanging out with friends (this includes playing music), when I'm eating, and often when I'm falling asleep. I think some of this has to do with the ADD that I've always suspected I have, but it also has to do with how much music makes me think and feel, and with the fact that I just love that and cannot get enough of it. 

It may be weird to cite this, but last month I tweeted, "glad I listen to music in obsessive stints; every album has a clearly defined place in my memory timeline w/ moods, places, ppl, seasons". This couldn't be more true. As a tiny kid I remember the "classics" (Spice Girls, Destiny's Child, etc) that I would jam to, but more than those I remember artists that my mother introduced me to, including Joni Mitchell, Enya(!!!!!), Melanie Safka, Carol King, The Beatles, and Shlomo Carlebach. My middle school years brought obsessions with Dispatch, Tegan & Sara, more Joni Mitchell & The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Neutral Milk Hotel, Iron&Wine, Panic at the Disco(yup), and Modest Mouse. High school Sophie was still into that music, but was a bit more punk, a bit more experimental, a bit more influenced by the suggestions that would pop up on youtube, taking me on endless chases of that perfect new band. I worked at the local library all throughout high school, and every CD cover that caught my eye was one that I checked out and listened to. This exploded my musical horizon, and led to countless exciting discoveries that I still cherish today. Coming to college, I made friends with/started living with a lot of local musicians and poets and over the past three years have been going to loud DIY basement shows, so my taste in music has expanded even further into the realm of sometimes gritty, sometimes soft, sometimes repetitive, sometimes nuanced and complicated (but always genuine, thoughtful, and beautiful) homemade music.

Writing this post is almost bringing me to tears as I think about how music has changed me and helped me grow and learn and think and act over the course of my life. Similarly to how the internet opened up my eyes to a lot of things that other people think and feel that I thought were unique to my mind only, music (both before and after I began using the internet daily and discovering cool things there) gave me windows into the lives of other people that I would not have otherwise had. Things that I was/am unable to experience were sung about in the songs I listened to, and I gained wisdom, empathy, perspective, confidence, and curiosity by listening to the lyrics.

People are able to communicate their own stories through music, and having the opportunity to just switch on the radio or whatever and hear someone's personal story is an invaluable privilege we have today. This storytelling/sharing helps me learn about types of people and ways of life that I had never myself encountered, and I myself have written down parts of my own personal story, however cryptically, for others to listen to and learn from. One school of thought in nation-building discourse is that in order to nurture peace in a country you must establish trust within the population, especially in cases where ethnic divides have driven a stake between two groups of the citizenry. One way of doing this which has proven effective in several cases is by increasing non-political interaction between members of society, like having more economic integration between ethnic groups or like placing a playground directly in between two distinctly separate communities. Another way of going about creating trust within a population is by sharing personal stories and narratives, specifically through music, which is so deeply enjoyed universally by basically everyone. I don't think that music alone can bring together an entire country that was once at war, but I think that music is a crucial, inherently human, simple way of communicating complicated and often emotionally-charged thoughts and opinions in a way that everyone (even those with differing opinions) can wrap their heads around.