The Sound of Music

This post has nothing to do with the movie of the same name. I remember seeing the movie as a kid, but I never really liked it too much. I could never get my head around musicals, and to this day if I ever end up watching one, I am always disappointed. 

Anyway, what I actually wanted to write about was music. Music is one of my greatest interests, and although I have absolutely zero talent when it comes to playing an instrument or singing, I love it when it comes to a past time, and I can spend hours on end listening to something from my playlist.

I believe music is one of the very rare entities that have a universal appeal. I am yet to come across anyone who has absolutely no interest in any form of music. Of course, just clubbing music into a single generic category is extremely unfair, as it is too broad and diverse a category in itself. I am not an expert but there are hundreds of genres and subgenres of music that are known and almost every artist that exists normally tries to create an individual and exclusive classification for their particular brand of music.

Music has existed for centuries and something that I did not know was that it is assumed to have existed for over 40,000 years based on discoveries that date back to the Palaeolithic age. Music has existed in different form across different cultures and has been mentioned in religious and ancient scriptures like the Vedas, the Bible and many other Greek and Chinese texts. Enough of the history lesson though.

One thing that I realised was that music, despite having a universal appeal is a very individualistic indulgence and everyone has their own specific tastes, choices and opinions on it. Trying to educate someone on music or telling them about how your choice is better than theirs is a wasted exercise. So, I am not going to try to convince anyone on what they should listen to, but I will talk about my particular choice of music.

My earliest memory of listening to music was the collection of my parents, which were the classics like Abba, Bee Gees, A-Ha and BoneyM. I remember growing up listening to, and in the process destroying many of the audio cassettes that my parents had. The chaos had started when I and my brother discovered the record button on our two-in-one. My family was never too interested in Hindi movies, so I never really got into Hindi music, and most of the popular songs of the 90s passed me by without leaving a mark.

I strongly believe that music is a constantly evolving interest, and just like evolution involves a few failures at the start, some of my early tastes in music were not what I am proud of when I think about them now. Unfortunately, I could not escape the pop revolution in totality. There was a phase when I was in school when I would love to listen to the popular songs that had a generous overdose of ‘Baby’ in their lyrics. I have to admit that a decent number of cassettes of these artists can be found lying in my room even to this date.

I grew up at a time when MTV wasn’t a Hindi music channel, and English songs would be played at a reasonably high frequency. When I was studying for my class 10 boards, my interest in music rose significantly and I developed the habit of listening to songs while studying. Even at that time, English music could be found on television in the late night shows which were a good activity whenever I took breaks while studying.

The pop phase of my life didn’t last too long as it was interspersed with a spattering of pop-rock by the likes of Bryan Adams and Bon-Jovi. These artists left a much deeper impact and I stall have their songs on my playlist, even though I almost never listen to them now. My first exposure to metal was when I heard Enter Sandman by Metallica. I ended up buying that album when I was in class 6, but I would listen to it once in a while for the first couple of years. I believe the turning point was when my brother bought an Iron Maiden album titled Best of the Beast a couple of years later. I always considered myself good at picking up the lyrics of the songs that I would listen to, even if I didn’t have a method of verifying if I was correct or not. There was a particular song in that album that forced me to go through the lyrics. It went:

“The White Man Came, Across the Seas,
He Brought us Pain and Misery,
He Killed our Tribe, He Killed our Creed,
He Took our Gain, For His own Needs,
We Fought him Hard, We Fought him Well,
Out on the Fields, We Gave him Hell,
But When it Came, Too Much to be,
Will we Ever, Be Supreme?“

Now, this was a British band, singing against colonisation. I was intrigued, and I decided to go through the lyrics of the rest of the songs on the album and it was a revelation to say the least. Iron Maiden is my favourite band, and the main reason for that is the lyric of their songs. Not long after that I bought their album "Brave New World" and my outlook on music changed forever. I can honestly say that I have not come across a better collection of music in my life. I cannot count the number of times I have heard every single song on that album. One particular song remained my ringtone for more than 4 years till the phone conked off. Me and my brother love to listen to music while driving, and whenever Brave New World would find its place in the car music system, it would stay in there for a couple of months before it got a break for a few days.

Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Megadeth and Anathema are all phenomenal bands with very meaningful songs that I love to listen to, but nothing comes close to Iron Maiden in my opinion. MP3s helped the cause much more as I was able to amass more songs during my final years in school. During my class 12 boards and subsequent competitive exams, I decided to listen to heavier music in an attempt to stay awake while studying. This failed miserably as I ended up memorising every single song and started falling asleep. My appreciation for Metallica grew as I paid attention to their lyrics as well. There are certain songs by some of these bands that just blew me away and forced me to sample more of their works.

In school, I was never able to find too many friends who shared a similar taste in music, but this changed during my engineering. My friendship with one of my closest friends kicked off when I heard him humming one of the Metallica tunes while we were sitting together in class. I read that in the US, Band T-Shirts are the best ice breakers for university students and I understood why it was that way.

I entered Engineering with a collection of 700 songs and left with a playlist of over 6000 songs. All of them were not rock/metal though. Some of my close friends used to listen to House/Trance and I developed a taste for it. I even started listening to instrumental songs of a completely different kind.

I strongly believe that music transcends the barriers of culture and language. I have songs in multiple languages like German, French, Italian and Spanish on my playlist and although I don’t know what they mean, the sound and the subsequent moods and emotions they induce ensure that words in some cases are quite meaningless. I don’t normally believe in different music for different moods, but I definitely feel that some songs induce certain emotions in me. Even the songs that lack words altogether can sometimes have a significant impact.

In my bucket list of things that I want to do in life, one thing that I was able to check off was attending a concert of one of my favourite bands. If I could, I would have picked Iron Maiden, and I actually got the chance to do that during the third year of engineering when I skipped college and went to Bangalore to watch them perform. The experience of watching a band perform amidst thousands of fans, chanting and singing along is unreal. The heat, sweat, congestion and inhuman discomfort just disappeared as the band performed amidst tens of thousands of screaming, chanting fans. This was the day that India lost to Bangladesh in the 2007 cricket world cup, but that became irrelevant for me at that point of time.

There are a lot of different genres of music that I never developed a taste for, but I am very happy with my current selection, as I believe is every individual. I like to appreciate the effort that goes into the songs, which is why I like rock bands, as you can actually see them perform with their instruments and not use computerised techniques for voice modulation or beats. One of the biggest advantages of music is that it gels perfectly with driving, enhancing my love for the automobile even further. There is one big risk with the power of music, which is that the first song that one listens to everyday gets stuck in your mind the whole day, which makes it an important decision at the start of the day, and for me a bad song can indicate a bad day.

I really regret not being able to play any musical instrument, especially the guitar, but I guess it goes with the entire package of not having any marketable skill. I cannot imagine a world without music and I shudder to think of how I would have travelled if I wasn’t able to carry my music along with me. I currently have over 7000 songs that can play non-stop without repetition for over 20 days, and I would love to get the opportunity to listen to them like that, but life doesn’t always work out that way. Till then, I will just keep listening to my playlist in a random order and take things as they come along.

mu·sic [myoo-zik]

–noun

1. An art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.

2. The tones or sounds employed, occurring in single line (melody) or multiple lines (harmony), and sounded or to be sounded by one or more voices or instruments, or both.

3. Musical  work or compositions for singing or playing.

4. The written or printed score of a musical  composition.

5. Such scores collectively.

6. Any sweet, pleasing, or harmonious sounds or sound: the music of the waves.

7. Appreciation of or responsiveness to musical  sounds or harmonies