Freethink Media’s Dan Hayes tweeted about a great NPR article about a lasting ambivalence inherent in modern music:
Six years ago, Glenn Schellenberg decided to do an experiment. …
“Happy-sounding songs typically tend to be in a major key, and they tend to be fast, [with] more beats per minute,” he says. “Conversely, sad-sounding songs tend to be slow in tempo, and they also tend to be in a minor key.” …
But while the grad student had no trouble finding fast, happy-sounding music in a major key when he looked at older musical eras — from the classical period up through the 1960s — it got a lot harder when it came to contemporary pop music.
There were plenty of fast-tempo songs, but almost all of the songs he found were in a minor key, and didn’t sound unambiguously happy; they were more emotionally complicated than that. …
The question, of course, is why? Why would consumers connect more to conflict and sadness now than they did in the ’60s and ’70s? Schellenberg says he doesn’t think it’s because people today are any sadder.
“I think that people like to think that they’re smart,” he says. “And unambiguously happy-sounding music has become, over time, to sound more like a cliche. If you think of children’s music like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ or ‘The Wheels on the Bus,’ those are all fast and major, and so there’s a sense in which unambiguously happy-sounding songs sound childish to contemporary ears. I think there’s a sense in which something that sounds purely happy, in particular, has a connotation of naivete.”
Personally, that’s an understandable but unsatisfying explanation.
The pace and focus of life has radically changed. We’re more connected now than ever before. This fundamentally changes our instincts regarding self-awareness, and our self-centered conception of the world.
Today’s society is intensely self-aware. Therapy and mind-altering medications from adderall to xanax are all widely accepted, and we have creative outlets for all of our internal thoughts, down to the most inconsequential tweets and instragram photos.
At the same time, we’re intensely connected, through many of the same avenues. In real time you have access to most anything you could imagine, be it art or politics, a favorite comedian’s best joke, and what your co-workers are having for lunch.
It’s no wonder we approach emotional messages with a higher degree of sophistication than prior generations. We’re more aware of our own reactions to these inputs, while also being more aware of outsiders perception of our reactions. Emotionally complex inputs allow us some measure of psychic guardedness. It becomes more and more difficult for others to completely or definitively interpret our inner state. It gives our emotional state a protective ambiguity, which is part of what John Cusack discusses in High Fidelity.
In writing this, I thought about art that mean something to me, and what they’re trying to say. The stuff that I cherish most, like The Avett Brothers, Laura Marling, and Mumford & Sons, are all freighted with questions and ideas that are complex, and I think, important. Songs like The Once and Future Carpenter or Timshel ask questions about what it means to be good, to be happy, or fulfilled. I feel these ways only occasionally, and I frequently churn these questions over and over. So maybe it’s just basic solipsism; we listen to the music that makes us most comfortable in our heads?
I don’t think the comfort contention is necessarily true, because I know very smart people who regularly deal with heavy thoughts, but also enjoy emphatically vapid songs like Party Rock or Call Me, Maybe. It could be escapism, or a vehicle for aspirational emotional states, that is, the opposite of John Cusack’s question. I listen to the Black Keys to make me happy.
The Black Keys – Gold On The Ceiling (Official… by Warner-Music
Buy The Avett Brothers The Carpenter
Buy Mumford & Sons Sigh No More
Buy The Black Keys El Camino
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