Where Words Fail, Music Speaks

If you talk to a group of teenagers about music for a long enough period of time, chances are you’ll here someone say something along the lines of “I hate (insert popular musician here) because they only make songs to sell.”


This is one of the most immature, and unfounded opinions present in today’s youth. It is quite obvious that professional musicians will “make songs to sell”. They depend on their music to sell. The problem is that most people don’t take logic a step further and infer that “Well, good music sells. So that means they try and make good music”. The problem is that these people are of the opinion that their idea of good music is either

A)The majority
B)More “artistic and expressive”
C)Or better because of some similarity to older music



The problem with thinking you’re the majority is that the most popular (and selling) music is obviously the type the majority favors. The type of people that use argument B are usually not even educated in music or have some self-fabricated objective standards of art. Most of these people argue that art is about “expressing yourself” and that if a song doesn’t talk about some heart-breaking tragedy with lots of light melodic parts then it is not “self expressive” enough. The assertion that your music is better because of a similarity to older music is often false, and if not it is still pretentiously assuming that older music is better.


I’ve heard people say that older music is better because it is quiet and more mathematical, this is completely wrong. Most of those people assume that classical, Baroque-Era orchestra music is the only type of older music. Tons of music genres existed that were similar to the modern genres such as hip-hop. Just like in nightclubs today, people in bars and taverns would usually listen to upbeat music with fast, distinct, lead melodies and layers of supporting bass and percussion. Folk music is often very similar to hip-hop, with lots of faster, consistent beats and melodies.


The argument that art is about expressing your personality is completely wrong. Art, by denotation, is the “quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” – Dictionary.com, so by definition art does not have to be about expressing yourself. However even in an emotional sense art doesn’t have to express characteristics of the artist. Actors have to change the personality they’re portraying all the time, novelists make up characters that are utterly unlike they themselves. Art isn't about expressing yourself all the time; it’s about eliciting an emotion or series of emotions from the audience. Art is about manipulating the feelings of your audience to reach a desired effect that will provoke some kind of thought process or surge of emotion. Music doesn’t always have to mean something about the artist, as long as it means something to the audience, and that something can be a lot of different things.

Music isn’t always about telling a story, it’s about making you feel something.

“Where Words Fail, Music Speaks” ~ Hans Christian Anderson