By Sheersho Zaman
Music is something that has been around almost as long as humanity itself. Since the early ages of Man, people have been fascinated by music and it has deeply rooted itself in every culture all over the world. As the years went on, and humanity made further developments and a long with it, music had its own evolution. Genre after genre bloomed; some more than others, as people continued to experiment with the limitations of music and everything seemed uphill from there.
Unfortunately, that is not entirely the case. Much like how people, their curiosity and sense for adventure lead to great things like Jazz, it has also managed to lead people astray, especially in recent times. Music, or mainstream music to be a bit more specific, is slowly but surely losing something very important to its core. It is losing its “meaning”. “Meaning” is a sort of vague way to put it, but that covers the gist of it. Think about it, what song is the most played and most popular right now? What songs are the radios blasting away like no tomorrow? A few months back, it was Nicki Minaj’s “Ananconda” and usually it is songs like that, with a catchy tune and “daring” lyrics, which are leading the charts. This is where it all goes awry.
Picture this: you are in your car with your family and suddenly, a song like that comes up. Your nine-year-old sister immediately recognizes it from all the other times she heard it and starts singing along, knowing all the vulgar words to the song. Imagine that for a second, a nine-year-old child singing along to the profanities all present in that song. An argument can be made that the child does not know what she or he is singing about, but does that really matter? It is just like how you would not want a child seeing something obscene. The principle remains the same.
It’s not just that, music has stopped talking about things that “matter.” Mainstream music is usually about drugs, money, or all other kinds of profanities. When was the last time you heard a song about oppression or about someone who has lived their entire lives on materialism, only to regret it on the later part of their lives? These things gave life to music. It is not that music in the past was not profane, but it is that the songs that were up there in people’s playlist were usually spiritually or philosophically engaging. They were songs to make you ponder on life, and not nod like brainless sheep and giggle every time there was some sexual innuendo. Music did more than just serve to entertain and play pretty sounds. It was a conversation with the soul; it was something where the words made you think. The fact that it rarely does anything of the sort anymore is very, very unfortunate.
Perhaps, Steven Wilson says it best in his Porcupine Tree song “The Sound of Muzak”:
“One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no-one cares
No-one cares enough”…