Prager: "There is nothing that can change your mood so quickly as music."
Fifteen years ago my kids introduced me to the more modern forms of rock, especially Alternative. I hadn't listened much to rock since Three Dog Night destroyed it around 1970, and Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison died soon after that. Besides, I had formed a passion for classical music around 1968 and really didn't want to listen to rock any longer. It's a "competitive" genre ("I'm a better person than you because I know more about music (read: this kind of music) than you do.") and I was sick to death of having to recount to people just how many concerts I had been to or how many albums I owned. There was always someone who had more than I did.
Alternative, you may or may not know, is a form of rock that is a little more musical and a little kinder on the ears than the other forms. Other "gentle" genres would be techno and trance. I listen to most kinds of rock (the exception being anything with screaming for vocals) but almost always enjoy Alternative. I know, I'm not as good as you because I even admit to liking it, but so be it.
After a while listening to this genre, I realized something was bothering me. Almost every song sounded as if the singer and his band were trying to tell us he had a hole in his soul, that something very serious or very deep or very large was missing in his life, some great hole was eating up his heart. Every song had this characteristic. Whether he was singing about his lost love or an opportunity he had never seen or taken advantage of, his heart ached.
Country is infamous for this kind of lyric, and yet country never makes me sad the way alternative does. He's sad over his lost love, sure, but it doesn't seem to be reflected in this existential "hole in my soul" kind of aching and yearning to be whole again.
So I've been wondering: does anyone think that there might be a relation between the saddening, aching, longing, yearning, what's-wrong-with-my-life music that so many youth listen to, and the fact that so many kids commit suicide?
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